Friday 7 February 2014

Presenting at the "State of Education" conference, March 1st

I will be presenting at the one day "State of Education" conference on March 1st 2014 at Oxford House, Bethnal Green.

To Book: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/state-of-education-conference-1-march-2014-tickets-10238604943
Programme Details: http://stateofeducation2014.wordpress.com

I will be running an interactive session, The Trend Away from Freedom, on contrasting Enlightenment ideas of Liberty and how they relate to participants' practical experience. It will ask participants to consider what autonomy for teachers and students really amounts to today.

The rest of the programme looks great too, with workshops on alternatives to school, arts education and the place of trade unions in the sector. I am delighted to be involved.

See some of you there, perhaps.

Saturday 1 February 2014

The Empiricist and the Philosopher: a modern unromance

It has lately come to my notice that a lot of people are distinguished (if that is the right word) by an inability to differentiate between these two types of academic work: Philosophical and Empirical. I thought I would try and do everyone a favour by drawing some dividing lines here, before anyone else says anything embarrassing.

Before I start it is fairly axiomatic to me that the truly scientific outlook is indispensable if we are going to survive then next thousand year plus on this planet or indeed any other. If you at any point think you detect me neglecting the principles of repeatability of result, basis of belief in evidence, the separation of matters of faith from matters of knowledge then please, point out to me where I have misstepped and send me an email. I will be really happy to reply.

Secondly, and unhelpfully in my profession (education) as in every other there is the question of certain words acquiring meaning that they do not have outside if that field. One such example is "differentiation". Over time "to differentiate" has come to mean something we do with our plans, resources and delivery in order to make those with specific barriers to learning better able to access the work. Its non specialist meaning is simply to draw a line between, rather as I am doing with this piece of writing. This does not mean that either of these meanings is incorrect: rather it means that we are dependent on the context to work out what reading we are supposed to infer. Of course even then this is language, so nothing is foolproof. Write to me if you need anything clarified, please.

And so to the matter at hand:

The recent controversy sparked by the theoretical piece from Andrew Davis, written as a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (of which I may as well say I am a member) caused a great deal of confusion. I was struck in discussion with perfectly pleasant individuals by the great confusion about a number of points. Three main ones:

The claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed
The claim the pamphlet did not contain empirical data
The (related) claim the pamphlet was mere speculation

All of these claims seem to me reruns of the same kind of claims which were made when Michael Hand (in fact the general editor of this series) ran his own pamphlet about patriotism and whether it should be taught in schools. Please do keep the word "should" in mind, it will be important.

In a piece in Philosophy Today, Professor Hand reflected on the fallout from writing that article and the fact that, for all the media hoo-ha thus caused he at no point found a newspaper willing to take the fact that a theoretical piece or work had been written seriously on its own merits. That, it was claimed, was mere Opinion. Did he not have some facts, some data, a graph? Something for the headline writers to latch on to.

Now you may sympathise! What right after all does this man have to put out (Profess) his opinion? And this is the situation that Davis found himself in with the publication of his own pamphlet "To read or not to read".  His central claim, to my mind, was that if we are teaching students to do something which has no meaning outside the educational context then we are not teaching them at all. This definition of the limits of the category called "teaching" seemed to some, however, ludicrous. Hence the claims made above.

To claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed was objectively wrong. The editorial team connected to the publication comprised 11 academics with many years experience between them including eight Professors and advisors to governments past and present. What lies behind this claim is a deep suspicion of theoretical work which amounts to  a virulent anti intellectual positivism which currently blights the sciences.

The second claim, that the pamphlet does not contain substantially new empirical data is true. However, empirical and philosophical questions have important differences between them which are the subject of this essay. Andrew Davis is a philosopher. The type and scope of his research is defined by the limits of his discipline. This is also my response to the third objection: he is a philosopher, this work is theory. Therefore, it is not "speculative" to write what one thinks because in this field what one thinks is precisely the research itself. When Davis says what he has written is the result of three years' work we have no reason to doubt him unless we believe that mental work is not meaningful or real, and if we believe that then quite frankly we should never be anywhere near a classroom.

So, the distinction between the Empirical and the Theoretic then, finally is something like this.

To simplify greatly, scientists produce data based on studies which are repeatable. This data is based on the measure of what we know is measurable. It does not, of course, step into the field of unknown unknowns because nothing does, at least consciously. However, a tree that falls in the forest with no one around to hear it isn't even a Subject so somebody actually has to analyse that stuff. If you show me a bunch of numbers being spat out of an electron microscope or an FMRI scanner I am going to shrug and go "uh?" So it must be admitted that we need analysis.

Now, analysis of data cannot of course be done by laypersons. Various problems will prevail, such as lack of knowledge of terminology, prevalence of personal prejudice, lack of common Lexis to debate findings with and so on.

Partly what Davis was doing was trying to rework the definition of "teach" to prevent abuse of the term. Once the term is abused then it becomes easy misuse it to abuse people. We could think of the bullying cry of "I am just teaching him a lesson" here. One student tried to excuse slapping another in the back of the neck to me recently by saying "I do it every time he makes a mistake...I am helping him become the best version of himself." This appeal to the notion of teaching was supposed to get me on side, but precisely because I do not regard that as teaching or learning I was not vulnerable to the sophistry. This, in very practical terms, is one way to use philosophy in education.

When we discipline ourselves within institutions to improve our theoretical instruments we are doing Philosophy. We owe a debt to that discipline and its contribution to understanding not of what is but of terminology which is meaningful and conceptions of what is ethical, thinkable and non contradictory. These I would placr under the heading of Meaning. An example: I think the nihilism of any view which says that "Numbers go up" is synonymous with progress, not to mention the magical thinking that goes along with it, should be obvious. A philosopher wants to ask "Numbers of what? What's the distribution? What categories are you using? Is there reason to believe this source? What prejudices operate commonly in this area?" Their specialist training invites them to suspend judgement and pass the data through transformative steps so as to view all the currently thinkable possibilities (ideally). Yet people persist in asking philosophers to provide evidence or "prove it". Headline writers want things boiled down. Busy ministers want the "key points". But these are not statements which can be cramped and offered into inspirational quotes for your Facebook wall. Rather they are systems of thought which, once inducted into them, we have historically found to be useful when it comes to reading and making sense out of evidence. It is a dirty trick to try and ask someone to justify themselves with evidence when, for example, they are discussing ethics. If you are in Rwanda during a genocide and somebody asks you to show what evidence you can find that the genocide should stop you are going to be stumped. There is only evidence of genocide! As Hume observed though, no is implies an ought. Theoretical work continually asks what we should do, what we should say, how we should interpret the world. It is a naturalistic fallacy to expect the way of the world to always tell us everything we need to know.

Of course if theory never links up with data then that is a terrible shame, but it is a failure which damages both the facts and the ideas. "So much the worse for the facts", as Vygotsky writes.

In education right now test data is produced at a very impressive rate which computers only serve to speed up. There is an absence of high quality public analysis precisely because the production of data has become the objective, rather than the synthesis of the two disciplines of theory and practice: Philosophy and Evidence Gathering. Computers can't do theory, so it is impossible to expect analysis to keep pace with data. This means certain key areas of professional and public life need to slow down if we are going to make sense of what is happening. That very modern phenomenon, the "man in a hurry" is going to have to learn that some things don't come in ticker tape, news feed form.

And this must happen, if we believe in a future. We cannot expect progress in human knowledge and understanding without the proper marriage of evidence and analysis. It is to everyone's detriment if our suspicion of "mere" opinion is allowed to stifle public reason, the selfsame public reason the exercise of which has, for some*, been synonymous with Freedom

*Kant

Debts to: Jan Derry, Vygotsky, Hume, Kant, Michael Hand, Andrew Davis