I wanted to call this post ‘why does education suffer from guru-ism’? But I prefer its current name. Still, that is major part of what I am asking here.
Historians try to explain the past through many lenses. From time-to-time some have been taken by what some call the ‘Great Man’ (and it was usually men curiously) view of the past. In this view, it is the will and ingenuity of ubermensch (‘overmen’ or ‘supermen’) that have mattered most to changing the world.
In one sense, it is easy to see how this might be a seductive view. Who could argue that Caesar, Martin Luther, Napoleon or, dare I say it, Mark Zuckerberg, changed the world? It just seems common sense.
Not only does the Great Man view often collapse quickly into a misogynistic view of the world, it also misses the importance of too many factors in explaining the past: political movements, economic forces, social and cultural developments, the role of ideas and more.
Nevertheless, a version of this still seems attractive. Just look at any biography section in a bookstore or ask what a local dad got for fathers’ day last year. Books about towering figures are popular.
Maybe this is why in education we see individuals bubble to the surface every now and then who cast a long shadow over education: Socrates, John Dewey, Carol Tomlinson and John Hattie come to mind. Perhaps John Sweller will be next.
Maybe education suffers from guru-ism because individuals do really make genuine and powerful contributions to the world, and it just makes sense to honour that with a pedestal.
It’s possible, but I suspect there may be more going on.
Education Anxiety
It is difficult to observe modern, mass education and not quickly spot collective anxiety. There is a deep unease across the media, across the titles of books and across the rapid proliferation of edu-accoutrements that education is in crisis. No wait, in multiple crises.
There is the teacher shortage, falling PISA results, claims that schools are factories killing creativity, no one is preparing the kids for 2072, woke teachers going rogue, scandals, lack of funding, no parking space if you arrive just a bit too late on Tuesday morning and someone left their dirty teaspoon in the sink again.
Crisis merchants are everywhere. Curiously most also tend to be selling something but let’s leave that to one side for a minute.
Worse yet, we then get voices claiming that none of the above are true. There is no real shortage, PISA results may not be as big a problem as they first appear, scandals may only be isolated and not systemic some say and so on.
How could a teacher jump in the car in the morning and not feel a little overwhelmed by all the whirling commentary about the crises we are or are not in? No wonder many feel exhausted and under-appreciated. There is a lot of talking about teachers, but less genuine talking to and with them it would seem. Sorry, but surveys are not really a conversation.
It seems to me that one factor explaining the strain of guru-ism in education many of us notice might be that some, not all, tap into the anxiety and try to sell us a solution. To the extent that they succeed in this, they might become gurus. Best to sell a crisis before you market a remedy, I suppose.
Even if that is part of the story, it cannot be the whole. It is also too simplistic.
It seems reasonable though, and I wonder if there is a way to circumvent at least that part of the issue if it really is a feature.
The Courage to be a Teacher
You would have to be much braver than I am to think that you have found a way to cut through all that anxious noise I have described. Where on earth could you even begin?
Perhaps the German-American existentialist Paul Tillich has a clue.
In his well-known book The Courage to Be (1950), Tillich argued that, the prevailing mood among urbanised humans in modernity (let’s just call that the period after the Second World War for the sake of ease) was anxiety. Echoing another German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, he suggested that life had become so much more abstract and complicated in industrialised living that it was hard to find one’s bearings. We had killed God Nietzsche told us and we had subsequently experienced two horrific world wars. Not only that, we had begun to build modern mass societies saturated in media that lacked clear or strong enough narratives to hold larger and more technical societies together. As individuals, he suggested, we had become anxious from a lack of meaning.
Though it sounds depressing (or basically a normal day if you are me), Tillich had a gently hopeful message. What if we stare the meaningless in the face? What if we say: ‘yes, there really may be no ultimate answer to the god question’ or ‘if I choose the wrong career I really may regret it and I really may be judged as stupid for it’.
So do we pack up and go home? Absolutely not. Courage, said Tillich, was key and this was the ability to live bravely, intelligently and determinedly amidst this near-overpowering confusion, doubt and uncertainty. Facing our deepest anxieties, he pointed out, might take the heat out of them a little. By facing our anxious fear, the background noise of modern life, we see that errors of judgment are common and we can live through them. We see that ultimate answers may not ever arrive, but we can still enjoy the cricket, love our kids, read great literature, help someone in need and work a satisfying job – remember he is talking about people living in modern industrialised nations (like Germany and the United States) and he may have changed the suggestion if he were writing to a different audience.
Education is dead
Maybe we are facing a (very) roughly similar moment to Tillich when he wrote The Courage to Be in the 1950s. As teachers we feel overwhelmed by the crisis merchants, and we find it hard to see a way forward. Maybe education is dead.
Before you fire up the complaint letters, what I mean by ‘education is dead’ is not that we should give up and shut it down. Far from it. It is a twist on Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’ in which he meant the idea of an ultimate answer to the god-question was dead, not that he/she/they was literally gone (though I think he thought that too).
Maybe, I am asking us to consider, there is no ideal education world where all the parts fit comfortably in the whole and there are no real problems to solve. Is it possible that we sometimes frustrate ourselves dreaming too much of a day in the future when all the pieces will align, and education will do everything at once: be cheap, efficient, exciting, productive, inspiring, fair and uncontentious.
I am not at all suggesting that we should then give up on the challenges we face, just that we might see them a little differently and that this may (big may) pull the rug from underneath the carpet of the crisis merchants.
What I am suggesting as a possible start, is to have the Courage to be a Teacher. To be committed to an imperfect idea and reality of education and move forward trying to contribute as we can knowing full well that we will probably never arrive at a utopia.
Though I disagree with elements of the book, what Brian Moon recently wrote at the end of The History of Popular Schooling (2023) seems sensible:
History suggests that schooling is less dangerous than critics assert and less grandly heroic than defenders proclaim. It is, more humbly, an improvised response to complex social needs. [1]
Maybe if we stare our anxieties about education down a bit more, we might not feel the need for so many solutions, remedies, revolutions or gurus after all.
Endnotes
[1] Brian Moon, The History of Popular Schooling: Introductory Lectures for Teacher Education, Manning: Moonwell Press, 2023, p. 122