Abstract
The aim of the article is to posit the question whether, or under what conditions ‘instrumentalism’ can be seen as a viable target of the philosophical critique of education. Firstly, I will briefly review and compare three critical conceptions in modern philosophy that interpreted Western civilization as a form of instrumentalism, yet, at the same time, used the concept perhaps too sweepingly: Adorno and Horkheimer (instrumental reason), Heidegger (calculative thinking) and Arendt (means-ends logic in politics). Secondly, I will discuss the exact sweeping moment in those thinkers’ ways of pursuing their critiques of instrumentalism and the way it can, in fact, weaken the pedagogical impact of their analyses. We face a paradox here: if we consistently follow Heidegger and Adorno (Arendt as well, but the situation looks much better with her, as usual), we are prone to ignore the actual perils for freedom in, for example, subsuming education to the global market economy, because it appears to be only a contingent or occasional (ontic) phenomenon that has its ontological roots as early as Homer or Plato. Conversely, if we ignore their analyses, we endanger our critique with inevitable shallowness, i.e. with a tendency to moan about the obvious circumstances without a real understanding of their ontological, historical and cultural backgrounds. This paradox can be translated as a general paradox of the relationship between philosophy and education. To conclude, I will illustrate this by referring to the leading question of this volume: ‘what (is education) for?’, or, to put it differently, to the problem of the purpose of education. If we assume that within the problem itself instrumentalism is inscribed (as all the three philosophers would), we still face the pedagogical and concrete problem of discerning different types of instrumentality. This problem corresponds with the various ways we describe our educational aims and goals.
Introduction
In this article I posit the question how and to what extent philosophically understood ‘instrumentalism’ can still be seen as a viable target of the philosophical critique of education. Firstly, I will briefly review and compare three critical conceptions in modern philosophy that treated instrumentality very seriously: Theodor W. Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s account of Enlightenment, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of thinking and Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics. All three identified instrumentalism as a fundamental feature of Western civilization, and then made it an object of comprehensive and profound critique. Although they referred to instrumentalism under different names, such as instrumental reason (Adorno and Horkheimer), calculative thinking (Heidegger) and means-ends logic in politics (Arendt), their critiques have a common denominator: all of them are general assessments of civilization and, at the same time, all three used the concept of instrumentalism in a rather sweeping manner. Secondly, I will discuss the exact sweeping moment in those thinkers’ ways of pursuing the critique and reconsider the appropriateness of this philosophical general critique to the challenges of modern, technologized education.
I have deliberately chosen and analysed philosophers who often serve as a critical background for anti-instrumentalism in pedagogical thought. It is known that the Frankfurt School in general, and Adorno and Horkheimer in particular, informed the project of critical pedagogy. A good example could be Henry A. Giroux’s attempt to conceptualize and criticize education monopolized and privatized by the market economy. In the background of Giroux’s analyses we can find critical theory together with Hannah Arendt’s plea for the re-establishing of the ‘world’ or the public sphere in privatized social systems (he is often following Arendt, by referring to her phrase ‘dark times’ Giroux, 2011, 2014).
Similarly, there are many pedagogical applications of Heidegger’s work. Good examples in our context are Iain Thomson’s Heidegger on Ontotheology (2005) and Michael Peters’ Heidegger, Education and Modernity (2002). An important part of Thomson’s multidimensional and complex account is devoted to the Heideggerian-inspired deconstruction of higher education. Following Heidegger’s critique of technology as the last epoch in Western metaphysics, Thomson reveals the symptoms of ‘enframing education’, for example education where ‘teachers and scholars are reduced to ‘online content providers’’ (Thomson 2005: 150), or to put it more generally, modern subjects are captured in the logics of ‘human resources’, which reduces their ontological status to being ‘standing reserves’ of the instrumental order. Thomson looks for the remedy to this ontological misery also in the Heideggerian sources: a return to Plato’s cave interpreted through Heidegger’s lens towards a new recognition of ‘ontological education’ as a wholesome transformation of the human soul. This attempt to ‘de-technologize’ education through Heidegger is also common to several contributors to Michael Peters’ book: David E. Cooper, Bert Lambeir, Patrick Fitzimons and Michael Bonnett.
Hannah Arendt also provided a prolific background for multifarious educational interpretations of her thought. Here, the context of instrumentalism is much less dominant than in the educational interpretations of the Frankfurt School and Heidegger. It is because – as we will see in what follows – Arendt’s work is far more heterogeneous and detail-oriented in comparison to those thinkers. Nevertheless, apart from the aforementioned references in Giroux, the contributors to Mordechai Gordon’s Hannah Arendt and Education (2001) have to be mentioned (in this context mostly Eduardo Duarte’s critique of co-operative learning as an eclipse of thinking and Peter Euben’s plea for recovering the rich semantics of political vocabulary through higher education).
The aim of this article is not to polemicize with these particular educational authors. Firstly, because they are referred to more as examples of educational applications of philosophical thought rather than as representative accounts of the whole range of these applications. Secondly, because I find those applications interesting and fruitful and have made my own humble contribution to them. It is more like a critical analysis of the critical tool, checking its weakest points, or, if one prefers so, acting in the role of devil’s advocate in order to strengthen the opposite.
Now, I will depict and examine the three philosophical critiques of instrumentalism.
Adorno and Horkheimer
In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, written during the Second World War in exile, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed not only a total, but also a radical critique of Western civilization. The main idea of their analysis is based on a dialectical premise that seemingly opposed concepts or phenomena actually interpenetrate and condition each other, remaining in a mutual dependence. The pair of concepts Adorno and Horkheimer chose for their radical critique of culture are ‘enlightenment’ and ‘myth’. Traditionally, enlightenment and myth are opposed. The Enlightenment, in its own self-understanding, was supposed to overcome the rudiments of mythical thinking and transform it into a mature rationality, being a breakthrough for human emancipation, ‘man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’ (Kant, 2013: 2).
Adorno and Horkheimer crushed this self-understanding of the Enlightenment. In their view, Enlightenment ignored this urge for critique and self-critique of thinking to which Kant appealed. By doing so, it instead developed the urge for knowledge which is not supported by reflection. And un-reflected, un-examined knowledge automatically orients itself towards domination over nature. Science objectifies nature and translates it into measurable quantitative relations in order to be able to analyse and repeat the natural processes in the artificial circumstances of experiments. But this progress in control is also a regress in complexity of human thinking, which gradually reduces itself to be an instrumental means of domination over nature. Thus, having ignored the postulate of self-critique, thinking relapsed into a mythical way of thinking by repetition of the same: ‘Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 19). But it is not a simple, one-way regress that can be reversed by a more critical and self-conscious way of thinking: for myth is not the simple opposite of ‘enlightened’ thinking, it is its first source. In fact, the relationship between myth and enlightenment is not only dialectical, it is also circular. Myths that the Enlightenment is trying to overcome are themselves the products of the Enlightenment. But it is mythology itself that started the never-ending process of enlightenment, that in its turn, regresses to mythology.
The paradigm of this dialectical interdependence is for Adorno and Horkheimer Homer’s Odyssey. The adventures of Odysseus, the nostos coming back home from the Trojan War, are at the same time a story about the emergence of instrumental reason. Odysseus is an ambiguous figure: being himself still a mythical hero, he develops new ways of interaction with reality which release him from purely mythical circumstances; as a result, he actually uses the mythical powers as means of his development towards mastering the inner and outer reality. Odysseus’ cleverness and adroitness help him to overcome the overwhelming powers of nature, which he meets disguised in allegorical forms. One of the two most significant moments of the epos is the XII song, where Odysseus achieves what could have never been achieved by any mortal: he is able to listen to the heavenly beautiful and seductive singing of the Sirens and not annihilate himself by forgetting who he is and where he is going. But his victory is expensive. First, he has to violently dominate his companions and then himself, sacrificing happiness. The second significant moment occurs in Polyphemus the Cyclops’ cave where Odysseus cunningly presents himself as ‘No-one’ (Utis), preventing Polyphemus’ companions from helping him when he summons them after being injured by Odysseus. The cunningness of Odysseus breaks mythical thinking by making a difference between the word and its meaning. Language becomes a tool of instrumental reason and, from now on, it will serve as a measure to master external reality. But again, Odysseus can survive only by negating himself: ‘The power of the system over human beings increases with every step they take away from the power of nature’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 30–31).
‘Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 9). A human being can master reality and himself only at the costs of an outrage of his own nature. The nostos has to constantly restrain himself for the sake of his survival. He, so to say, internalizes the sacrifice and sacrifices himself and reduces freedom to the act of self-preservation. The path of civilization strives to reduce fear by knowledge. But knowledge means that nothing can be external anymore because the image of the external is already the source of fear. Hence the sheer immanence of instrumental reason. This means that the Enlightenment is nothing but a radical, mythical fear: ‘The world as a gigantic analytical judgment, the only surviving dream of science, is of the same kind as the cosmic myth which linked the alternation of spring and autumn to the abduction of Persephone’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 20).
It is the most radical of many critiques of culture. The instrumentality of thinking begins as early as language and concept (i.e. within myth itself, which is a form of linguistic narration). From this point of view, we could never even think of ‘non-instrumental thinking’ as long as we think in language. That is why, for Adorno and Horkheimer thinking is already organization and management and the difference between the ‘artful Odysseus’ and the modern ‘artless chairmen of the board’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 28) is inessential. This is what I identify below as the sweeping moment in their critique of culture.
Heidegger
When ‘later’ Heidegger is trying to characterize the essence of thinking, he always does so in opposition to ‘calculative thinking’ or ‘calculative-representational thinking’: ‘There are, then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking’ (Heidegger, 1966: 46). For Heidegger, calculative-representational thinking is the only kind of thinking known to the West since Plato. It is also a principle of the two major realms of the Western world: philosophy (metaphysics) and science, being the consequence of metaphysics. Metaphysics began, according to Heidegger, along with Plato, who identified truth with the presence of idea and launched forgetting truth as aletheia. It is Plato who made the first step towards the correspondence theory of truth lying underneath metaphysics and science. It came to its full appearance and at the same time end with Nietzsche’s will to power and his ‘reversal of Platonism’. 1 Heidegger’s earlier deconstructional works exposed this tradition as a ‘metaphysics of [objective] presence’, 2 which enabled modern philosophy to objectify entities. The end of metaphysics does not mean the end of its essence: it is fulfilled in modern science and technology. Calculative thinking in science is an implication of metaphysical representational thinking: ‘The end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and so of the social order proper to this world’ (Heidegger, 2008: 435).
Thus, philosophy since Plato had forgotten Being, and placed it in the objective (timeless) presence of entities. Science takes advantage of this objectification and additionally calculate entities and subjects them to technological processing. Western philosophy and technology stem from one root: it is the forgetfulness of Being, forgetfulness of the truth as aletheia, forgetfulness of thinking which does not re-present, enframe and calculate, which does not work at services of enframing and will-to-power. Therefore, the famous dictum of Heidegger: ‘science itself does not think’ (Heidegger, 2004: 8) refers also to metaphysics, although Heidegger puts it mildly: ‘Philosophy knows nothing of the clearing’ (Heidegger, 2008: 443).
That is why Heidegger sought traces of non-calculative thinking beyond the Western intellectual tradition, beyond science and beyond philosophy. He sought a first ‘possibility of thinking … that can be neither metaphysics nor science’ (Heidegger, 2008: 435–436). The true testimonies of this ‘first possibility’ can be found only in thinkers who remained beyond the influence of the Western intellectual tradition: Pre-Socratics and poets. It is they who bestowed us with traces of thinking of Being.
In What is Called Thinking? Heidegger detects these testimonies in Hölderlin and Parmenides. With the quote of Hölderlin (‘We are a sign that is not read’) Heidegger tries to grasp the elusive and evasive character of thinking: ‘As he draws toward what withdraws, man is a sign. But since this sign points toward what draws away, it points, not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal. The sign stays without interpretation’ (Heidegger, 2004: 9–10). Man is haunted by thinking even when he does not think; it is he who opens access to Being. Nevertheless, Heidegger never shows the factual boundary between thinking and poetry. This knowledge is restricted to those who already think and Heidegger states authoritatively: ‘we are still not thinking’ (Heidegger, 2004: 6). But the question to what end and with what right, upon what ground and within what limits our attempt to think allows itself to get involved in a dialogue with poesy, let alone with the poetry of this poet – this question, which is inescapable, we can discuss only after we ourselves have taken the path of thinking (Heidegger, 2004: 18).
An excerpt from Parmenides of Elea: ‘One should both say and think that Being is’ functions differently. Here Heidegger analyses the sentence thoroughly, tracking back the original meanings of the words and recovering sense from the traditional interpretations (2004: 168). He shows the dynamics of the formula ‘Being is’ referring to the ontological difference; he demonstrates the relationship between thinking and speaking, and the identity between thinking and Being. He shows how philosophy from Plato to Kant is actually a reformulation of Parmenides’ saying. But doing so, he comes back to the traditional themes of his earlier philosophy: the ontological difference and the deconstruction of metaphysics.
Nevertheless, the basic question of thinking of being beyond the tradition of thought remains unanswered. And here, I believe, is the fundamental ambivalence of the Heideggerian description: as long as he is trying to say negatively what thinking is not, he delivers controversial, yet very interesting insights into science, technology and philosophy (such as ‘Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences; Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom; Thinking solves no cosmic riddles; Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act’; Heidegger, 2004: 159). But when he tries to say positively what thinking is, then there is a twist in his description. Then, instead of a description of phenomenon we encounter sentences such as these: ‘Only when we are so inclined toward what in itself is to be thought about, only then are we capable of thinking” (2004: 4); one more, ‘Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking’ (2004: 17); and another one, ‘Thinking is the essential telling’ (2004: 128); and yet another, Reflection ‘is calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy of questioning’ (1977: 180).
Looking for thinking outside the borders of the accessible intellectual world brings about the result that thinking has to be condemned to the elusiveness of Being that has no support in concrete reality anymore. If we want to learn from Heidegger what is called thinking, the best answer we get is not when he is trying to grasp thinking itself, but where he testifies his own thinking: in the analyses of understanding of Being in philosophy and metaphysics. But where Heidegger is trying to escape from philosophy and detach thinking from the familiar world of thought, there the description of thinking turns into incantations. It is not accidental that in these contexts thinking relapses into mystical-religious language. In this way Heidegger avoids the positive question of the meaning of thinking for our lives, replacing it with the question of the mysterious and elusive power we need to obey. Thinking, along with Being, is detached from human experience and the human world. Thinking that we do not think but that thinks us becomes at the same time very elitist: ‘The involvement with thought is in itself a rare thing, reserved for few people’ (Heidegger, 2004: 126). Either I am called for thinking or not, either I am in the clearing or not. Being appears in thinking as an epiphany. This is the price of the attempt to release thinking not only from technology, but also from its essence which begins together with the Western conceptual tradition.
Arendt
For Hannah Arendt, as for Martin Heidegger, Plato’s thought is an important caesura in the West. While in Heidegger Plato launches Western metaphysics, in Arendt it is Plato who begins the tradition of political thought. The transition from truth as aletheia to truth as idea has not only metaphysical, but also political consequences: it results in the instrumentalization of politics. For Arendt, the beginning of political philosophy is the moment in which politics, historically through the tragic death of Socrates, falls in conflict with philosophy. When philosophers (in order to protect philosophy from politics) start to describe politics, the original political perspective of action and freedom is subordinated to the heterogeneous rules of contemplation: the first testimony is Plato’s allegory of the cave. The idea of good, that Plato refers to, stems not from the political experience, praxis, but from the sphere of craftsmanship, poiesis. Its conceptual source is eidos (image) of the thing to be manufactured. Introducing ideas into politics inscribes action into instrumental categories. Action and speech are, from now on, measured with an external absolute norm. Thus, Plato identifies political action with fabrication. The ideal state becomes a pattern for political action, which now belongs to techne. Since Plato we have had the tradition of the philosophical misunderstanding of politics.
Just as Heidegger sought traces of true, non-metaphysical thinking in Pre-Socratic sources, Arendt sought the traces of the original political thought in authors who were not philosophers (rather poets and historians) and were able to grasp the intrinsic political point of view. Arendt adapts the Heideggerian strategy of deconstruction: since our tradition of political thought is not only the forgetfulness of Being, it is also the forgetfulness of praxis, we need to reveal the pre-philosophic Greek political experience, to rescue it from beneath traditional ontological prejudices. In other words: we need to recover the phenomenal differences within active life, foremostly the difference between poiesis and praxis. This is the main theme of Arendt’s The Human Condition. The instrumental model of understanding human affairs haunts not only Plato, but also Aristotle and the whole philosophical tradition that followed, Heidegger included. Philosophical thinking, by nature, is incapable of grasping the specifics of action: ‘The reason for this predilection in philosophy [to fabrication] is … that contemplation and fabrication (theoria and poiesis) have an inner affinity’ (Arendt, 1998: 301).
Arendt was not only suspicious of the essence of technology, as Heidegger was, but also of its roots in the Greek poiesis. The infinity of means-end chains, the fact that the end becomes the means to other ends, confirms the utility of instrumental processes, but not their meaningfulness. Fabrication has no internal meaning: it always refers to some external ‘what-for’. Meaningful can only be action that refers to nothing. The meaning of action is in action itself, not in its purposefulness. Freedom is present only in meaningful action, not in instrumental fabrication. ‘The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action’ (Arendt, 2006: 145). ‘Action, to be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as a predictable effect on the other’ (Arendt, 2006: 150). That is why Arendt focuses so much on the power of beginning something new (archein) as the fundamental meaning of action. Freedom of action excludes Plato’s idea as it excludes Aristotle’s telos (good life).
The paradigm of the Greek, pre-philosophic concept of action is for Arendt Homer and Thucydides, foremostly Pericles’ Funeral Oration: What is outstandingly clear in Pericles’ formulation – and, incidentally, no less transparent in Homer’s poems – is that the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse (Arendt, 1998: 205).
The sweeping moment
Arendt, Heidegger and Adorno and Horkheimer all draw from the sort of critique of culture as it was launched by Nietzsche with his suspicion towards the cultural domination of reason and cognition (which, according to Nietzsche, emerged with Socrates). Arendt’s approach is the least radical, as her critique refers to one aspect of the Western tradition of thought and she is able to find testimonies of true political thinking within this tradition: it is not only Greeks, but also historians and theoreticians of modern times (e.g. Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Herder). Heidegger’s critique is more overwhelming: at some point in his intellectual biography he generalizes his critical approach towards Western metaphysics and tends to spread it over almost all human intellectual history with some very early, almost pre-historic, exceptions. Nevertheless, we encounter the most radical critique of culture in the representatives of the Frankfurt School. The fall of reason into instrumentality began with ancient myth, much earlier than Western philosophy. Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer, unlike Heidegger and Arendt, seem to reject Western culture totally, or at least they cannot point to a rescue or escape within it. It seems, paradoxically, that the more total or radical the critique is, the weaker its power for understanding concrete cultural and civilizational phenomena. This weakness lies, I suggest, in a specific tendency inscribed in radical and total critiques: the tendency of making phenomenal distinctions diminish proportionally to the extent of the radicalism and totality of critique. While Arendt was still capable of these distinctions, they seem to be blurred in Heidegger, and practically non-existent in Adorno and Horkheimer.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is perhaps the most expressive example as well as testimony of an uncompromised attempt at understanding historical events by Arendt (1985). The book is a quest for a description of a series of precedents that led to the catastrophe of totalitarianism. Arendt does her best to avoid the trap of philosophers: the reduction of new phenomena to old categories and known terms. For her, totalitarianism is not simply the result of Enlightenment and its deification of reason, or the logical consequence of the development of Western metaphysics. Neither is it a modern version of old authoritarianisms, tyrannies or despotisms. Instead of reducing totalitarianism to one idea or factor known from the past, she constructs a complex account of the weave of circumstances and events that led to the emergence of the Third Reich and Soviet Russia. Their genesis is comprised of many motifs, stemming from different dimensions of reality, like economic facts, historical events, ideas shared by groups of people, changes in social structure, etc. As a result, we get a very fine sketch of multifarious streams reinforcing the flood of totalitarian movements and, at the same time not stripped of the power of synthesis, that is finding the common denominator of seemingly opposite phenomena, like Soviet communism and Nazism. By the same, she avoids Heidegger’s trap of overgeneralization: seeing all modern phenomena as an actualization of an inauthentic understanding of being. In the post-war addresses of Heidegger, the being as will-to-power and later the technological mastering of being (enframing) are the ontological common denominators of all worldly events and universal patterns of their description. As a result, his political judgements can be read as an extension of his inspirational, yet unspecific and obscure remarks on thinking, as cited above. He goes so deeply into the ontological roots of reality that from this point of observation, for example, the Soviet Union, the Third Reich and the United States of America all look the same: ‘Today everything stands in this historical reality, no matter whether it is called communism, or fascism, or world democracy’ (Heidegger, 1985: 485). Things look even less distinct in Adorno and Horkheimer: one can without much exaggeration say that whole mass of capitalist production, the crisis of modern culture or even the tragedy of totalitarianism began when Odysseus tricked Polyphemus and the Sirens. Odysseus is a prehistoric, archaic and mythical figure, but a figure who launched the malevolent process of domination that comes to fulfilment when at dawn of mature modernity, in the middle of the 20th century, ‘the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphal calamity’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 1).
This is what I call the sweeping moment in the philosophical critiques of culture: the price for revealing the ontological roots of instrumentalism, for the profundity of analysis, is its power of making distinctions, sort of, so to say, ‘the resolving power of thought’. This ability to retain distinctions is important insofar as it protects us from subsuming too many altogether different phenomena under one idea. Although such a subsumption can be revealing, and it surely was in its original version of Heidegger’s or The Frankfurt School’s analyses, at the same time these general ideas often function as what Arendt called ‘banisters’ for thinking (although, as we know, even she sometimes relied on them). Such banisters are concepts and ideas that are ready to be applied when we encounter something that we do not understand. Once we assume the perspective of, in this case, the Heideggerian fall from authentic understanding of being or of Adornian and Horkheimerian instrumentality, we may feel released from the obligation and effort of insightful interpretation of concrete and different historical or social circumstances (cultural, political, educational and so on), because they simply fit too neatly into the philosophical general pattern. Perhaps, this applies even more to commentators and epigones than to the authors of these concepts themselves.
Instrumentalism in education: the concluding questions
In this philosophical context, let me briefly return to the question ‘what for’ in education, that is to the problem of (educational aims and goals). Inevitably, some questions for the philosophy of education emerge here: if we resent means-ends logic in general (Arendt), the question arises, do we want to get rid of goals and objectives and reduce our pedagogical action to sheer performativity? If educational enframing is a result of the modern understanding of being as will-to-power (Heidegger), how are we supposed to grasp the particular problem of, for example, intellectual achievements in the humanities being assessed by the technical quantitative measures of natural science (such as application or economic impact)? If Homer and Plato already thought in a calculative way (Adorno, Horkheimer and Heidegger), how are we supposed to tackle the empirical problem of instrumentalism in contemporary education?
Helpful here might be what I earlier called ‘the resolving power’ in the understanding of the aims and goals of education. Defining educational goals always introduces us to a certain version of instrumental educational reason, or ‘enframing education’, since it structures our educational action into means-ends logic, where we need to find ways leading to the given aims, goals or objectives. Nevertheless, this logic, although formally instrumental, can differ according to the mode in which we define or describe our goals. Therefore, we still might want to discern between different types of goals or, in other words, ‘be mindful of how multifarious educational aims and purposes are’ (Harðarson, 2017: 59). A good example of this can be a brief juxtaposition of the traditional educational ideals or aims that are consciously formulated to be general and elusive, with more specific and concrete objectives, such as so called ‘learning outcomes’ in our curricula, which are supposed to be demonstrable and measurable.
Our tradition of philosophy of education from Plato through Rousseau to modern diverse philosophical-educational authors (as, for instance, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers or Paul Tillich) is full of examples of educational ideals of the first type. In this context, I would like to refer to Wilhelm von Humboldt, since his idea of Bildung is still alive in modern conceptualizations of university education and somehow still competes with the agenda of demonstrable outcomes. Humboldt’s Theorie der Bildung des Menschen (‘Theory of Human Education’), which was written about 1793, provides us with a perfect illustration of an open educational goal: ‘the ultimate task of our existence is to give the fullest possible content to the concept of humanity in our own person … through the impact of actions in our own lives’ (Humboldt, 1960: 235–236, translation mine). The more specific, less idealistic, and still traditional version of an ‘indefinite goal’ can be education oriented towards teaching content. Both ways of defining our goals since the beginning of behavioural psychology and its impact on education have been criticized, mostly in elementary and secondary education, as too vague and not sufficiently ‘student (learner) oriented’. But in higher education such general ideals became the target of a similar critique only after the establishment of the Bologna Process, that is for the last 20 years.
The Bologna Process is the name for the continuous international co-operation within European Higher Education Area (EHEA). It was launched in 1999 by the signing of the Bologna Declaration by 29 European states; in 2020 it already has 48 members, not only within the borders of the EU, but also the European continent and covering vast parts of Eurasia (Russia and Kazakhstan) and the Near East (Turkey). The idea of co-operation was to ensure the comparable standards and structure of higher education within EHEA where priority was set on economic competition with the USA and Asia. To facilitate this, specific vocabulary was assumed: ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘knowledge society’, ‘employability’, ‘lifelong learning’, ‘quality assurance’, ‘competency’ and so on. The Bologna Declaration set six common objectives 3 for the signatory countries whose common denominator was comparability, commensurability and compatibility of higher education systems within EHEA. The initial Declaration developed towards cyclic conferences of member countries every two years. Already in 2008, Pauline Ravinet showed in her study how, step by step, free, flexible and non-binding membership developed towards a more and more obligatory co-ordination machine with much pressure over its members, through ‘structuralisation and formalisation of the follow-up mechanism’ (Ravinet, 2008: 365).
From the perspective of our topic the most important aspect is of course that of quality co-ordination, since it is within this agenda that the new-old rhetorics of learning outcomes experiences its renaissance: Learning outcome as a concept has emerged in European educational policy documents since the Bologna Declaration 1999 as an attractive tool to increase transparency of higher education programmes. The concept has been taken into use without much discussion about its earlier use in the behaviourist era … Defining, describing and assessing learning outcomes had soon become one of the main focuses of European higher education institutions in quality assurance (Murtonen et al., 2017: 115).
In order to illustrate the dilemma of this way of defining educational aims and goals, let us refer to an example. While teaching content defines interpretation of the seventh book of Plato’s Republic as a goal, learning outcome has to be more specific: it has to demand that, for example, a ‘student is able to enlist the stages of ascent from the cave’. The criticized or simply abandoned ‘teaching content’ is still an open goal, that is, it does not describe what is to happen between the content and the student. In this way it leaves a space for freedom crucial for every formation process (Bildung). ‘Learning outcome’, as opposed to ‘teaching content’, which is culture-oriented, is indeed ‘student-centred’, but it is focused on a student not as a free subject of formation and self-formation. Instead, the student is here understood more as material (or, if one prefers, as a standing reserve) that is to be shaped or conditioned according to expected ‘outcomes’. The whole process clearly embodies the ideal of fabrication. This ideal is disguised under ‘student-centred’ rhetoric or mollified by it. In this way, it can easily compromise the technological agenda with ‘humanistic’ and ‘individualistic’ metaphors. 5 The proper ‘teaching outcome’ has to be defined in a technological and measurable mode, where certain words are forbidden as non-operational (e.g. ‘understanding’ or ‘thinking’). In this way, it becomes closed and far more oppressive than traditional open goals. In this logic, the student is not seen as a participant and a possible contributor to the world culture, but as an end product of a fabrication process, not as a free human being, which is a condition of possibility of all liberal university education. If, to return to my example, a student disagrees that enlisting stages is the best access to interpretation of Plato’s Republic and is keen on delivering their own understanding, he fails the outcome. There is no need to add that the logic of ‘outcomes’ fits much better than ideals and undefined goals into the marketplace logic of measurable profit.
The goal of this article is not to contribute to the extensive and polyphonic discussion on the Bologna Process. I use it only as an example in my argument to show that maybe we should not be that much concerned with instrumentalism per se, as it seems to be intrinsic in our civilization (Arendt argued that even Aristotle’s phronesis, which in education is often referred to as an escape from the instrumental, is encaptured in means-end logic; Arendt, 2003: 563). From the purely philosophical point of view both Humboldt’s ideals of Bildung and ‘learning outcomes’ of the Bologna Process are versions of instrumentalism. Instead, perhaps we should be more concerned with a certain type of instrumentalism which leads to the technologization of higher education, usually hidden under humanistic and individualistic rhetoric.
One thing must be emphasized though. The philosophical narratives of Western instrumentalism are eye-opening and informative. If it had not been for them, we would probably not be able to see the problem of instrumental logic in contemporary education. If we simply ignore the philosophical critiques of instrumentalism, we close ourselves off from an access to deep scrutiny of the fundamentals of our civilization and risk cutting our critique of instrumentalism in education from the wider cultural perspectives it is inevitably intertwined with. Then our criticism is in danger of becoming shallow and banal. With no deeper access to ontological dimension of our actions, we would become helpless against the manifold of ontic, empirical phenomena. Nevertheless, being aware of the ontological dimension in the critique of culture does not automatically mean that we have to become so all-encompassing in our embrace of the critique of instrumentalism that we become blinded to different levels on which instrumentalism can work, especially since it is in identifying these levels that we might find some space of resistance to the very real power of instrumental-technological measures in education in the present historical moment.
Thus, the problem of instrumentalism shows a deeper tension between philosophy and education: let’s provisionally name its dilemma as overgeneralization v. shallowness. This article is, of course, not able to deliver the proper philosophical measure between profundity and educational concreteness, but its goal is to shed some light on the problem and open it up for further discussion.
Footnotes
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The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
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