Education for Uncivillisation

It has frequently been asserted that to be educated is, in essence, to become

civilised. Children, according to this view, begin their lives outside the walls of
the citadel. They are the barbarians behind the gates, in need of our careful but
authoritative hand to take theirs and initiate them into everything that is good
and beautiful and advantageous about civilisation. The aim of education, it is
further argued, is to guide us towards becoming fully human. This startlingly
anthropocentric understanding of what education is runs deep. But given the
age of collapse which we now stare in the face, it seems a good time to ask the
fundamental question: Is being a barbarian really all that bad? Would it hurt us
to take a long walk outside of the gates, amble amidst the uncultivated, and feel
our bare feet upon the earth?

The heady aims of education detailed above have become somewhat diluted in
our times. Education, like so much of our civilisation, is now running on empty
and a gaping sense of meaningless and aimlessness permeates most
educational talk. The ideal of education as the cultivation of humanness has
largely given way to a number of subsidiary aims such as ‘education for
responsible citizenship’ or ‘education for sustainable development’. An
emphasis on performance, skills and the meeting of targets still dominates.
Education is, once again, a central electoral issue in the UK. Yet, no matter
which party you turn to, education is valued primarily in so far as it can
contribute to economic prosperity. That is, so far as it can continue to initiate
children into the ways of seeing, doing and thinking that predominate.

Let us take the widely touted idea of ‘education for sustainable development’, an
aim that is now firmly embedded within the National Curriculum. Talk about
sustainable development carries with it the assumption that we can, bar a few
lifestyle changes, keep calm and carry on as normal in the face of impending
ecological devastation. Furthermore, it implicitly conveys the notion that we
ought to, and indeed would be insane not to want to, carry on in this manner.
Thanks to science and innovative thinking, we are told, we can fix our way out
of this mess. This is the culture of ‘solutions’ and it is as present in school as
anywhere else. You can almost hear the flailing, dying gasp of civilisation
behind such talk. If the time has come for new stories, then they are needed
above all, in the school.

Sustainable development is but the latest in a long line of stories that we keep
telling ourselves, to reassure us that we can make ourselves fully at home in
the world. But what kind of home-maker perpetuates the kind of wholesale
destruction of that very home to which recent centuries have borne witness? To
be a barbarian is to be a stranger, a foreigner, and we must come to realise that
we are all truly barbarians in this sense. For despite all our attempts to classify
and order and account for the world, there is always an excess from which we
are estranged and that remains partly concealed and hidden from our gaze.
Poets, storytellers and other artists have traditionally been the ones who have
gestured towards the ineffable and drawn it out of the darkness. But not in a
way that delivers it to us for consumption or exploitation. Rather, poets and
storytellers sing the earth in a way which allows us only to catch a glimmer, a
mesmerizing flicker, of this hidden beauty and truth.

What would an education for uncivillisation look like? It would not, I imagine,
be judged in terms of its efficiency, output and contribution to economic
prosperity or good citizenship. Rather, it would have to speak to the barbarian
in us. It would decentre us; help us reconsider what it means to be human, and
to look outwards beyond the city walls. No, it would have to do more than make
us merely look. We would have to scale those walls and tread on the bare earth;
cast away the urbane illusion of being safely at home, and to sing the wild
places. Upon this earth we are a bit like strangers sojourning at an inn, yet we
have come to treat it as unscrupulous landlords. An uncivilised education
would disclose the world to us in a way that fostered responsiveness and
appreciation towards what is other.

At this time in which once seemingly permanent edifices are breaking down
before our eyes, we need new stories in schools, not ‘functional skills’. A myriad
of well meaning but clumsy and disjointed government initiatives only manage
to cloud the elemental underlying question. This is nothing more or less than
the question of how we should henceforth dwell on this Earth. Are we going to
insist on sending our children along the crumbling precipice of progress, to
cling onto the shattering walls of the citadel for dear life? Or are we going to
encourage them to look down? It may be well for storytelling to be at the heart
of education; storytelling that has origins in place, in the day to day geography
of the child. This does not preclude global learning. But what I would say is
this: how can we understand the story of another until we have come to
understand our own?

There must also 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. A less conceited kind of education is needed, one in which we are
daring enough to go beyond the gates and be prepared to stand still in awe and
incomprehensibility at what we meet and then to keep that sense of awe alive in
language. This is an education in and of place. It is an education rooted in
storytelling. It is an education for uncivilisation.