Students protesting on the streets about climate change, demanding action here and now, and the responses they have provoked, have given a bracing shock to the education system, for so long stifled in the grip of neoliberalism. A grip that has reduced education to an exercise in management and technical practice, focused obsessively on performance in standardised tests, and has turned schools into businesses competing in an education market. Struggling briefly free, these young protesters remind us that education is a political practice, confronting us with political questions – most urgently, what is the purpose of education in the face of catastrophic climate change.
The right questions to ask
It’s a wake-up call. A left government must reclaim education as, first and foremost, a political practice. In the words of the great Italian educator Loris Malaguzzi (1920-1994), education is “always a political discourse whether we know it or not…[it] means working with political choices”. Political choices require us to ask political questions, which are, Chantal Mouffe says, “not mere technical issues to be solved by experts...[but questions that] always involve decisions which require us to make choices between conflicting alternatives”.
What sort of questions? A good place to start, echoing sociologist Karl Mannheim, is to ask, “what is the diagnosis of our time?” What are the major ills confronting our societies today? The calamitous state of the environment, democracy and social justice are obvious political choices for the left. On the other side of the coin, what do we want for our children, here and now and in the future? Other questions follow. What are the fundamental values and ethics of education? How do we understand ‘knowledge’, ‘learning’ and ‘education’? Not to forget that question of purpose and aims: What is education for?
