What is a ‘concept’ of education in the first place

What is a ‘concept’ of education in the first place and there is no better place to start answering this question than to start with by reading the definitive work on concepts of education from the 1960’s by R.S.Peters. In his work ‘The Concept of Education’ Peters suggests in his introduction of his work that, ‘education is not very close to the ground’? This translates by Peters as; ‘By this I mean that it is not a concept like ‘red’ which picks out a simple quality, like ‘horse’ which picks out an object, or like ‘running’ or ‘smiling’ which pick out observable occurrences. We do not ask ‘Are you instructing him in algebra or are you educating him in algebra?’ as if these were two alternative processes. But we might ask ‘Are you educating him by instructing him in algebra?’ ‘Education’, in other words refers to no particular process; rather it encapsulates criteria to which any one of a family of processes must conform. In this respect it is rather like ‘reform’. ‘Reform’ picks out no particular process. People can be reformed, perhaps, by preventive detention, by reading the Bible, or by the devotion of a loving wife. In a similar way people can be educated by reading books, by exploring their environment, by travel and conversation—even by talk and chalk in a classroom. The concepts of ‘reform’ and ‘education’ have proper application if these processes satisfy certain criteria. ‘Education’ and ‘reform’ are not part of the furniture of the earth or mind; they are more like stamps of approval issued by ‘Good Housekeeping’ pro claiming that furniture has come up to certain standards’.(Peters 1965, p.1)

In Peters work he looks at the concept of learning very deeply and this is something I want to focus in my essay what is the concept of learning. Peters further suggest in his work that Aristotle made a good point in relation to performance such as ‘learning’ and ‘inferring, that the end is built into the concepts’. He goes on further to explain that, ‘a man who is educated is a man who has succeeded in relation to certain tasks on which he and his teacher have been engaged for a considerable period of time’. He then summarises with the point that becoming educated is the achievement relative to a family of tasks which we call the processes of education. The processes of education can be further broken down into every piece we create to establish the learning journey for the student the concepts can take many forms and these can manifest themselves in various ways. Peters also cites Ryle in his work on concepts of education, Ryle states that, ‘to start with ‘education’ like ‘teaching’ can be used as both a task and an achievement verb. Teachers can work away at teaching without success, and still be teaching; but there is a sense, also, in which teaching someone something implies success. (Peters 1965, p.2)

Peters makes some very good points here and he establishes some very good ways in the beginning of his work to start to be critical about the concepts of education. However a concept in education is something very intrinsically hard to determine because of various factors pertaining to the actual concept itself. This concept can be viewed through various lenses so whilst one particular concept such as learning another language like Latin might improve the education of one person the learning of Latin to another person might seem completely and utterly ridiculous. So what is the basis for defining the concept of learning Latin in the first place? Conceptually Latin is perceived as a classical scholarly activity to some and others a complete waste of time in this day and age. What was once a preferred communication concept of the medieval elite the whole process of learning Latin has no value unless you are that very same Latin scholar and the concept of learning applies wholeheartedly. We can start to look at concepts of learning say Latin within the designed constructs of neo liberalism and neo conservatism. Both these approaches based on various socio-economic drivers all one to see the essence of why a concept such as Latin should be delivered in an educational setting and in other respects why it should not depending on the camp that you sit yourself in? And to understand why Latin would be taught in education you have to understand the two view points. Neoliberals these days are of a rather conservative clique that believe that what is private is good and what is public is always bad. (Burbules et al, 2000. P.59) whereas neoconservatives are usually guided by a strong state. (Burbules et al, 2000. P.67) It is these two apparent groups that can dictate what concepts of education can be defined and delivered in today’s education marketplace. This wasn’t always the case as in ‘Amity Shales’ penultimate work on the US depression in the 1930’s, ‘The Forgotten Man’, she finds that the neoliberals of the 1930’s derived from the singular liberal philanthropist at the time wanted education reform on the basis of new educational concepts being introduced into the education system that would benefit all mankind rather than continue in the stoic fashion of the past and continue with the three R’s.

The concept of delivering Latin as subject into and education framework is therefore ultimately based on how you see the educational setting. Is it to be a setting that promotes the advancement of new and private enterprise that doesn’t see any value in learning Latin or does it live with the neoconservatism viewpoint that sees us return to the concept of learning Latin as it gives us stability and it harks back to the days when we empirically controlled everything through our knowledge of such elitist concepts. After all Latin was used widely by the Catholic Church as a language to control and dominate the poor citizens of most counties that practised that form of religion in the past so you have to want at least in part to hark back to those elysian fields of the past and have that concept and ethos to play with in some kind of hegemonic fashion.

Inclusion is the main educational concept I would like to critique further to my introduction. Unlike the hegemonic language tool of Latin used to dominate the poor in the middle ages inclusion by its very nature wants to included people in the processes of communication so that everyone can be equal. Well that is the theory but in practice in an educational setting that is always not the case due to various factors including various boundaries of such a socio-economic scale that it is an impossible task. I am directly inferring the use of such an educational concept in the poor neighbourhoods of the USA and amongst the poor black communities in these areas. In fact the lack of role models in these districts due to the fathers of most of the children being imprisoned is one factor in the social and economic make-up of these areas that hold inclusion back. As Martin Luther King used to say, you cannot be called a diner unless you are invited to dine’. The fact that the USA practices apartheid in these communities on a scale not seen in any other country in the world with any other population then trying to use the concept of inclusion in these areas in and educational setting  is nigh on impossible. The same can be said for any poor community around the world that has social and economic problems in the area including those in Great Britain. Success and self esteem are what is bred by doing well in an educational setting and those with none throughout their life’s or schooling cannot claim to have these intrinsic qualities. Again by that definition how can we practise any inclusion strategy when the balance to start with is so against the poor in these areas? Neoconservative policies continue to dog education and its delivery by the romanticised notion that by not changing the curriculum or its delivery and sticking with the classics then the education system will not fail. In the book ‘Global and Educational Critical Perspectives’ the authors mention the fact that neoconservatives see teachers in a distrustful way and that pollution of the curriculum can occur, this the authors argue is a highly racialised understanding of the world. They go further to introspect the book, ‘The Bell Curve’ this work sold hundreds of thousands of copies and the authors argued for ‘genetic determinism’ to occur based around race and in some cases gender? There conclusion that this book has since entrenched a lot of thought around race and actually promoted racial stereotyping and profiling that occur today and in the west when it comes to dealing with multicultural communities. So whilst the government of the day would like the policy of ‘every child to matter’ in reality there is no such thing if you are black or any other ethnic denomination living in poverty and attending an educational establishment. This concept of ‘inclusive apartheid’ is nothing new as we can see if neoconservatives base their policies on ‘The Bell Curve’ and its romantic notions of how education should be delivered then there cannot be anything other than some form of apartheid occurring in the educational system somewhere down the line and especially in poor and impoverished communities. Why should we as the authors of the book describe give, ‘false hopes, to the poor and the less intelligent, most of whom will be black’. (Burbules 2000, p.71) Going back the great Civil Rights activist in the 1960’s Martin Luther King how can we be called equal or how can we all be included in education if we are not all equally dining off the same table? How can inclusive practices ever be anything but rhetoric to support neoliberal and neoconservative agenda setting? The semiotics in the whole inclusive education movement in the UK are completely flawed by the very nature of the educational setting being so diverse no policy on inclusion or inclusive practice technique could be designed or put in place to ‘make all things equal’, for all those lucky enough to have a private school education that translates as, ‘omnia aequalia facere’.

I have talked with length about inclusion for the last few years with eminent educationalist Geoffrey Petty who like me is charged in the same respects with showing teachers the light in-regards to inclusive practices via our work. In all cases and even with Geoff attending as many schools as he can in the UK and preaching his active differentiation techniques to hundreds of teachers the fact remains that even active differentiation is so difficult to implement and get right in some schools due to various social and economic constraints faced by the teachers in the form of their learners life situations. (Petty 2005) At what point do you level out the practice of inclusion to include all? Whilst Geoff can show teachers how to manage this in practice the variables can be so outlandish the chance of getting learners to follow action plans, ILP’s or any other form of tool in a teachers arsenal is virtually impossible. Just to contextualise this somewhat from my experiences of inclusion I was charged by my local LEA to work with hard to reach kids in impoverished areas and schools in the city. Most of the learners had gone through school sideways since entering mainstream education and had one year to try and turn around their grades I was their last hope of achieving any kind of inclusion in the system to interact with educational processes like other learners in the school. Faced with a near impossible task of turning these learners around my policy was to award them an ‘A Star’ for every project they completed with me. Whilst the parameters of the metrics compared to the school system was a little over prescribed on my part my critical criterion for awarding such as merit was to allow the learners to realise success in their projects and work. The reaction was always very positive with the learners exclaiming always that they have never had an ‘A Star’ before and how proud they felt. Subsequently this assisted inclusion by raising the learners self esteem, nothing remarkably clever about my policy but it was one that worked. The feedback from teachers in all the schools I worked with was what have you done to these learners the work they are now producing in their Maths and English classes is spot on their focus is now 100%. Again going back to my Martin Luther King analogy the learners involved had been invited to the table and they had been allowed to dine, it’s not rocket science but what it is, is inclusion in the true sense of the word. Until we understand the concept of including everyone in education in a way that benefits their self worth and esteem then we do not have an educational system that is fit for purpose rather a performance driven empirical environment that does not perceive learners as learners but as a statistic within some ‘Big’ data. Through this work and the fact that I was responsible over my contract to deliver thousands of GCSE qualifications to the cities learners I was asked to consult on my success with the hard to reach and disaffected learners in poor communities in the city. My synopsis was very simply delivered and it included the words, ‘self’ and ‘esteem’, as well as it benefiting ‘inclusion’. Not shortly after my work had finished in the city the government further to all the learners achieving in these areas then introduced a policy that previous scoring relating qualifications such as I was delivering should be abolished as they didn’t count the Maths and English qualifications. This overnight derailed the inclusion of many state school learners in the city as the vehicle they had been travelling in was suddenly halted? Whilst we can quantify success through league tables the very things that can create inclusion amongst learners in poor and impoverished areas can suddenly be taken away from them as if to further expand on that neoconservative policy of putting people back in their place. To conclude this piece I would just like to mention the recent ‘Progress 8’ results key findings in 2016 from a first ever national release of such data. (Whittaker et al, 2017) In the governments GCSE results data it shows for the very first time a national analysis of the ‘Progress 8’ scores it was very fitting after analysing each table that at section six of the release faith schools had outperformed all other schools in the results. In particular Muslim run faith schools had a massive percentage of success of 0.79 compared to the Church of England Schools of 0.02. This is a remarkable result from a series of schools in the country with an ethos that predisposes itself to segregation of its learners into genders. Again Muslim schools are not practicing ‘inclusion’ in any respect or adhering to the ‘Equality and Diversity Act 2010’ yet its learners are achieving higher results than all the other schools in the country yet the current government in the UK has lambasted the same faith schools in recent years for not conforming to its governments standards? What this result does possibly show that has been overlooked is that whilst the segregation of learners in genders is not acceptable to most in society today what is occurring is that the learners are feeling valued are allowed to succeed and irrespective of their polarised learning environments they are succeeding when other educational strategies in non faith schools are failing. In faith schools it seems every child does matter and is a focus of some attention that allows the learners to perform unrestricted by other ‘norms’ and through other distractions to feel included in the educational process and succeed. It will be interesting to see over time how the neoliberal and neoconservative alliances fair with the concept of inclusion in or multicultural society in the UK and if by the next release of ‘Progress 8’ results there hasn’t been a shift in the numbers favouring faith schools as the anomaly that surely it must be if we believe those highly paid authors of, The Bell Curve ‘Herrnstein and Murray’.

Reading and Research links:

Peters,R.S. (1965) The Concept of Education https://www.imd.inder.cu/adjuntos/article/595/The%20Concept%20of%20Education.pdf [Internet] Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd [Date Accessed 12th October 2016]

Burbules, C.N. and Torres, C.A. (2000) Globalisation and Education – Critical Perspectives, New York, Routledge.

Herrnstein, R. and Murray, C.A. (1994) The Bell Curve, New York, Free Press.

Whittaker,F and Dickens,J. (2017) https://schoolsweek.co.uk/progress-8-results-2016-key-findings-from-the-first-national-data-release/?utm_content=buffer23276&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer [Internet] Schools Week Website [Date accessed 13th October 2016]

Equality Act 2010. (2016) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents [Internet] [Date accessed 13th October 2016]