Education - an Impossible Practice?

Abstract

The starting point for this article was a chance bit of reading, which has stuck with Freud had written that education, like psychoanalysis and politics, is an impossible profession. His argument was that this was the case because none of them could produce predictable outcomes, mandate and thereby master the future. In other words the outcomes of actions are different from what is intended. At one level, this is trivial and trite. There may be educational trajectories framed by class, gender, race, etc, but they are not mandated. This incapacity to mandate is often the impetus for irritation among those trying to introduce changes in education. It is also a constant experience of teachers that students will take up learning in unexpected ways. However, the desire to mandate the future continues to infuse the practices of education, not least in the realms of education policy. Education is constantly invoked as the way to address this or that economic or social condition. Competitiveness, productivity, equity, inclusion all vie for space as central to the policy purposes of education. And this entails a desire for a form of mastery. To mandate is to attempt to master. Thus the frustration of those doing this invoking at the impossibility of that which they attempt and their continuing efforts to master through standards, accountability and audit (Strathern 2000)