Education For Uncivillisation Slides

8/9/2019 Education For Uncivillisation Slides

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Education for Uncivillisation

Benjamin Major


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Children... Start off in the position of the barbarian

outside the gates. The problem is to get them inside

the citadel of civillisation so that they will understand

and love what they see when they get there.

R.S. Peters, 1965


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Education is not learning to do this or thatmore

proficiently, it is acquiring in some measure an

understanding of a human condition in which the fact

of life is continuously illuminated by a quality of life. It

is learning how to be at once an autonomous and a

civilized subscriber to human life...

Michael Oakeshott, 1971


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We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as Gods steward,

then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of

reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure

destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for

civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws

because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly

and bites down hard as it recordsthis is the project wemust embark on now. This is the challenge for writingfor

artto meet. This is what we are here for.

Uncivillisation: The DarkMountain Manifesto(2009)

www.dark-mountain.net

A thought experiment: What would an education for

uncivillsation look like?


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Barbarian is a term for an uncivilized person, often used

pejoratively, either in a general reference to a member of anation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban

civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble

savage The term originates in the ancient Greek civilization,

meaning anyone who is not Greek.

Wikipedia


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Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It furnishes original

stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources. Civilization is theprogressive mastery of its varied energies

From the standpoint ofhuman experience, and hence of

educational endeavour, any distinction between which can be

justly made between nature and man is a distinction between

the conditions whichhave to be reckoned with in the formation

and execution of our practical aims, and the aims themselves.

Joh

n Dewey (1916)


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On the environment in education:

In the west, particularly with the growth of post-Enlightenment

humanism, the dominant stance has been uncompromisingly

anthropocentric, placing a certain largely economic-materialistic

conception ofhuman welfare as the underlying goal of our

everyday intercourse with, and explorations of, the natural

world.

Michael Bonnett (2004)


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Heidegger and Enframing

Enframing is employed by Heidegger in an unfamiliar way to

refer to the particular mode of revelation ofBeing in our

modern epoch in the form of modern technology which

gathers men thither to order the self-revealing as standing-

reserve...

The direction of technological practices that flow from such an

Enframing is towards order for its own sake as everywhere

everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand,

indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a furtherordering.

Fitzsimons (2002)


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What next?

- Sustainable development and the question of nature?

- Disciplines and the loss of the primitive sense of being within the whole.

- On feeling at home versus feeling estranged- What would an uncivillised education look like?

"I must feed my body and arrange my house in order to

receive the foreigner knocking at my door; ifI posses a home,

it is not for me alone."

"To realize my responsibility for the Other, I myself must be

free and independent; but the sense of my selfhood is my

being-for-the-Other... it is the needs of the Other who, as a

foreigner, disrupts my being at home with myself."

A. Peperzak, after Emmanuel Levinas (1993)


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What next?

- Sustainable development and the question of nature?

- Disciplines and the loss of the primitive sense of being within the whole.

- On feeling at home versus feeling estranged- What would an uncivillised education look like?

Levinas and the critique of philosophy as odyssey:

"Although it recognises to a certain extent that philosophy is a

journey abroad or 'from here to there', on which one is

surprised by strange and unsuspected events, the

interpretation of philosophy as the conquest of autonomous

knowledge sees it as an odyssey: by the integration of all his

adventures, the traveler comes back to his point of departure.He has enriched himself but has not changed radically. The

truth he found was already there from the outset. In

opposition to Abraham, who went out to 'unknown lands',

Ulysses remained the same"

A. Peperzak (1993)

Should we instead be aiming for philosophy (and education) as

exodus? A journey into the unknown?...


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Teacher as artist?

Poets, storytellers and other artists have traditionally

been the ones who have gestured towards the ineffable

and drawn it out of the darkness. But there is a sense in

which everyone can be an artist in what he or she does.

Perhaps there is something to be gained from thinkingof the teacher as artist who gestures towards the

ineffable, but not in a way that delivers it to us for

consumption or exploitation. Rather, such an artist

would sing the earth in a way which allows us only to

catch a glimmer, a mesmerizing flicker, of this hidden

beauty and truth.


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What would an education for uncivillisation look like?

It would not be judged purely in terms of its efficiency,

output and contribution to economic prosperity or good

citizenship

It would decentre us and help us reconsider what it

means to be human

It would give us opportunities to walk on the earth and to

experience place first hand as much as possible

It would have its origins in place and in storytelling

Yet it would also look beyond this, as it would foster a

real responsiveness and appreciation towards other

human and nonhuman worlds


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There must always remain a degree of

ineffability in what we teach and learn. We can

no longer labour under the vain illusion that we

can master everything. To do so, we need not

dispense with the ideas of humanism,

civilisation and being at home completely. But itmay be that we have to put some work into re-

thinking what being human means, to dig deep

and reconsider the idea of civilisation and to

open up the concept of home along the

Heideggarian and Levinasian lines I have begunto trace here.

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Education For Uncivillisation Slides