Paulo Freire; Tony Blair

When I joined DACE, Lalage Bown was Head of Department. I was interested to locate myself in this new environment and thought I might go along to the Wednesday afternoon seminars in the Centre for Science Education. Lalage boycotted this, however, and insisted I sit in on a course in Principles and Theories of Adult Education that was being held at the same time. It took me a long time to digest some of what I heard there but Lalage was right; those were important ideas to hear about at the start of an adult education career - and conversations I had with the Director of the Centre for Science Education, Alex Johnstone, were probably just as useful as the seminars would have been.

Many years later I'm finally reading a book I heard about in that course: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. The academic discussion of adult education lacks paradigms, drawing on a wide range of ideas from across the Arts and Social Sciences, but Freire's ideas are one of the few common points of reference. Here's his Wikipedia page.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed expounds an approach to adult education that seeks to avoid perpetuating existing power structures and oppressive relationships, instead serving the ends of revolution, liberation, human development, "the awakening of critical consciousness". Inevitably he also has a lot to say about those oppressive structures. I will probably come back to the ideas in that book. Just now I thought I'd share this snippet:

In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a "quick return to power", forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to form an organisation, and strays into an impossible "dialogue" with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls into an elitist game, which it calls "realism".

Is it just me or do these words, conceived in exile and published in 1970, nonetheless provide a concise history of the rise and fall of New Labour in the UK a couple of decades later?

An unforgiveable sin

Luke 12:10 says, "And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven." Humans are imperfect. All will sin at some point. Most sins can be forgiven but for a very special category there is no remedy: those that deny the nature of what is being sinned against.

In the modern, neoliberal university, it's easy to commit an unforgiveable sin, a sin against the true, essential nature of the organisation. The university no longer thinks of itself in terms of research, scholarship, value to society, etc; just as the fish has no regard for the primordial soup. The University is now a ding an sich. Its reality is composed of metrics: REF, TEF, NSS, league tables, income. Once you represent some activity that has not been codified in this way, does not contribute to any of the existing metrics, then you deny the university's true nature. This is an unforgiveable sin. No penance will suffice. Move on to some other field of endeavour and you may be allowed to survive; but you are fallen.

How do we rescue continuing education, say, in modern higher education, which serves a great range of aims for many people, but doesn't fall neatly into the ambit of any one of those metrics? Only by action where the metrics get defined, at the political level. In heaven.