We're in this together?!

In the midst of global efforts to reform education and to respond to different kinds of emergencies, this talk challenges educators to attend to fundamental questions of education. These questions include the purpose of education and what it means to share life in and through education. In this talk, I explore responses to these questions using the notions of insideness, outsideness, and alongsideness by drawing on philosophical insights of authors such as Gert Biesta, Parker J. Palmer, and Mikhail Bakhtin and the thoughtful reflections of students of education. Through this talk, I hope to provoke and inspire further reflections and conversations on what it means to be ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ education and the need to come alongside as a pedagogical act.

Flow of Meaning 

The idea of 'seeing together' has been a part of human consciousness right from the time of recorded history. Dialogue for us is a doorway to seeing together and generating a 'flow of meaning' among its participants. In this talk, we will explore the nature of dialogue and how dialogue can become central to education in all its aspects. 

Peacetime Education

You might have heard of catastrophe theory. It is a mathematical concept that has been applied to a range of situations, from collapsing bridges to mob violence to global warming. 

Here is the definition from Britannica:

A simple example of the behavior studied by catastrophe theory is the change in the shape of an arched bridge as the load on it gradually increases. The bridge deforms in a relatively uniform manner until the load reaches a critical value, at which point the shape of the bridge changes suddenly—it collapses. 

The headlines in the news provide us with an unending list of catastrophes—today it is the war crimes in Ukraine, the collapse of Sri Lanka, and more variants of COVID-19. My theory of why these things happen is a version of catastrophe theory. These horrific events have immediate precedents—the dry market in Wuhan, for example—and more distant precedents such as shrinking space for wildlife—and still more distant precedents such as the human tendency to separate the self from the world. This separation of self seems to me to be at the heart of several catastrophes in the world. I cannot merely blame Russian leaders; I must look at the divisive nature of the human mind, the predilection to look at the world in terms of ‘me’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. 

The school where I work was founded on this principle: that the heart of the social, psychological, and economic crisis is to be found in our human nature. Without a deeper understanding of these forces in oneself, any attempts to fix the outer world will be limited. Education seemed like the perfect place to begin—not an education where the adults have figured it all out and will proceed to mold the children, but one where both teacher and student are learning about their psychological movements in the context of daily life and relationships. This exploration at our school can be a joyous one, not to judge but merely to observe and understand, and see if it is possible to live differently, in a way that responsibility and care flow easily, not forced from above or outside.