5th Global Conference
Thursday 8th May - Saturday 10th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary
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Session 1: Education and Ignorance
Chair: Tom Claes
Why Should We Go to School?
Iva Apostolova
Department of Philosophy University of Ottawa, Canada
Why should we go to school? I will examine the question of what motivates us, in the first place, to go to school (it applies to both secondary and post-secondary school), and then, what motivates us, as parents, to send our children to school. In order to answer this question I will first look at issues such as what place the institution of school has in our society, and what possibilities there are of it becoming a more informal rather than formal way of education. Our first encounter with adults that have post-secondary education is at the level of daycare. In daycare children play according to certain, not necessarily firmly fixed, rules. All the adults in daycare are representatives and guardians of the social rules and order. To ensure that the adults in daycare will play their roles successfully, they need to go through a special training. The post-secondary pedagogical early childhood education emphasizes not only the rational side of the process of teaching and learning but also its emotional side.
It seems that we need to go to school (understood both as secondary and post-secondary education) in order to understand how society functions and teach those rules to the young. Since ultimately, we are social animals, understanding how society functions is what brings us together. In other words, schooling in the sense of being educated according to rules, has an impact on us from a very early age.
The trouble is that the traditional education system passed on from daycare through middle and high school until university level of education faces a number of problems such as keeping the students waiting to enter the 'real life' which comes after school while memorizing approved by an authority knowledge. An alternative is offered by the program A Philosophy for Children. The first goal of philosophy for children program is to find a solution to a given problem, using the tools of philosophy. And philosophy is understood as acting, rather than contemplating. The tools that philosophy has to offer are countless. In a philosophical discussion we use arguments, and concepts; we clarify definitions; we explain and create theories.
Ignorant Artists/Ignorant Teachers
Gary Peters
Department of Visual Culture, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom
The aim of this paper is simple: to apply Jacques Ranciére’s notion of the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ (as outlined in his book of that name) to art education.
At a time when ‘knowledge exchange’ (Howard Newby) is being promoted so vigorously, and where art/media/design practice is seen as playing a central role in this re-conceptualisation of research culture based upon ‘exchange-value’, it might be useful to clarify art’s relationship to both knowledge and exchange.
Book 10 of Plato’s Republic begins by describing knowledge as the ‘antidote’ to art and goes on, famously, to castigate artists and those who take pleasure in art as ignorant. As a consequence, and in spite of the ‘sweet influence’ of art, the aesthetic cannot form the basis of a genuine education. There can be no Homeric pedagogy because there is no knowledge to be exchanged.
Prior to the permanent exile of the artists, however, Plato offers them a chance to mount a defence of the aesthetic based upon its ‘use-value’ to the State. Interestingly, as part of this offer he also encourages non-artists (those who ‘write in prose’) an opportunity to make a case for art and artists thus instigating the age-old debate/dialogue between theory and practice still at the heart of art education and still serving the State.
The continuing desire/necessity to legitimate art practice in the eyes of the State has resulted in a very useful model of art being promoted whereby aesthetic exchange-value is measured against degrees of professionalism that can be taught by those in the know. Thus, within art education today the word is that only artists can and should teach artists; only the knowledge of one practitioner can be exemplary for another practitioner. The thought of a teacher ignorant of production and reception, unconcerned with explication, evaluation and negation is as unimaginable as it is insulting to the student and the institution alike: this is what makes it so attractive!
This is by no means a new idea, as Jacques Ranciére’s brilliant account of Joseph Jacotot’s pedagogical adventures in the early 19th Century make outrageously clear. Certainly, much that Ranciére has to say in his account and development of Jacotot’s ‘panecastic’ educational principles are relevant to this discussion but there is one key issue raised that will be discussed in this paper: the attempt to break the assumed link between education and knowledge.
By countering the dominant model of education based upon explication and truth, with a model that promotes instead ‘attention’, ‘will’, ‘improvisation’ and the ‘intelligence of the work’, Ranciére attempts to break with a set of pedagogical assumptions that can be traced back to the dialogism encountered in Socrates: the origin of exchange-value the enemy of ‘emancipatory education’.
Countering the ignorant ignorance of the artists with the knowing ignorance of the Socratic, Socrates might appear to be identical to the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’, but this is not the case. While dialogics claims to enable students to learn for themselves, in reality Socrates’ role is much more invasive. As Ranciére reveals, Socrates uses irony to lead the student to knowledge thanks to a secret mastery of ‘explication’ that draws the teacher and student together into what Ranciére describes as the ‘stultification’ of such an educational model:
In the act of teaching and learning there are two wills and two intelligences. We call their coincidence stultification. In the experimental situation Jacotot created, the student was linked to a will, Jacotot’s, and to an intelligence, the book’s––the two entirely distinct. We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations––the act of intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will––emancipation.
This paper will suggest then that the first step for art education to be ‘emancipatory’ would be to emancipate itself from itself, through the productive ignorance that is the very life-blood of the aesthetic and the death-knell of ‘knowledge exchange’.