44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World by Zymunt Bauman

Author:Zymunt Bauman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

24

The world inhospitable to education?

(part two)

In our volatile world of instant and erratic change, those ultimate objectives of orthodox education such as settled habits, solid cognitive frames and stable value preferences become handicaps. At least they have been cast as such by the knowledge market, to which (as to all markets for all commodities) loyalty, unbreakable bonds and long-term commitments are anathema: they are viewed as so many hindrances to be forced out of the way, and treated accordingly. We have moved from the immutable and frozen maze modelled by behaviourists, and the uniform and monotonous routine modelled by Pavlov, into an open marketplace where anything can happen at any time yet nothing can be done once and for all, and where successful steps are matters of luck and in no way guarantee another success if they are repeated. And the point to remember and appreciate in all its consequences is that in our times the market and the mappa mundi et vitae overlap.

As Dany-Robert Dufour has observed, capitalism dreams not only of pushing to the limits of the globe the territory on whose surface every object is a commodity (think of water rights, genome rights, living species, babies, human organs), but also of expanding it downwards to dig up and make available for commercial (profitable) use what were previously private affairs, once left in the charge of the individual (think of subjectivity, sexuality), recycling them into objects of merchandise. And so we all, most of the time and whatever our momentary preoccupations, share the plight of Konrad Lorenz’s laboratory sticklebacks exposed to conflicting and confusing signals. The bizarre behaviour of the male sticklebacks, unsure of the boundaries separating contradictory behavioural patterns, is fast turning into the most common conduct of male and female human beings. Responses tend to be as confused as the signals are confusing.

The trouble is that little, if anything, can be done about all that by a reform of educational strategies alone, however ingenious, elaborate and thorough it may be. Neither the commonality of the stickleback’s plight nor the sudden attraction of Don Giovanni’s life strategy (of finishing quickly and starting from scratch) can be laid at the door of educators and blamed on their faults or neglect alone. It is the world outside the school buildings that has grown quite different from the kind of world for which classical schools, as described for instance by Jaeger, used to prepare their students.

In this new world, humans are expected to seek private solutions to socially generated troubles, instead of looking for socially generated solutions to private troubles. During the ‘solid’ phase of modern history, let me repeat, the setting for human actions was construed or forced, expected and wished to emulate, as far as possible, the pattern of the behaviourists’ maze, in which the distinction between right and wrong itineraries was clear-cut and permanent, so that those who missed or abandoned the right track were invariably punished on the spot, while those who followed it obediently and staunchly were rewarded.

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