Delegating Education to Children

Author(s):

Ditte Storck Christensen(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

ERG SES H 10, Transition and Education

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

11:00-12:30

Room:

334. [Main]

Chair:

Pauline Taylor

Contribution

In this paper, I explore the concept of transition from the perspective of psychoanalyst Robert Pfaller as presented in his book Die Illusionen der Anderen: über das Lustprinzip in der Kultur (2009).

I introduce the notion of “transition” as the adult society’s way of relating to the norms of our culture by means of delegating education to children. Instead of doing mathematical exercises that will improve our reasoning, or being engaged with the molecular structures of water, we let children do it for us and instead of us. My contribution is critical in the explicit sense that it addresses the functioning of schooling as a mean to both commit and escape the demand to undergo education and be educated i.e. creative, flexible, reflexive and active.

Transitioning is a core aspect of schooling. No matter what our position, critical, progressive, pragmatic, or what school subject we are committed to, we end up talking about the student or pupil’s transition from child to citizen by means of education. I divide positions pertaining to this matter roughly into two categories, one “positive” and one “negative”. Both are progressive, stressing the need for education in order for children to enter into society as citizens. They are represented by the European Commission (COM, 2002, 2005), but you also find this defence of education in the works of educational researchers such as Biesta (2014).

From another viewpoint, school is addressed as a matter of establishing social hierarchies and not about reaching the educational targets, articulated in EU documents and by educators. This “negative” view on the role of education rejects explanations of school that retrieves the meaning of education from the set of core of values to which citizenship and reflexivity belongs, and replaces these with for example theories of reproduction (Broady, 2011). However, I will refrain from placing myself in either one of these corner sides. What I present is an analysis of the function of school that departs from the field of psychoanalysis.

Starting from the economics of the libido I follow the rule that 1 +1 = 2. In the context of Pfaller’s theory, this means that strong positive feelings towards something taken together with strong feelings against it will cause feelings of ambivalence twice as strong as either one of the initial emotional states. The ambivalence arises when we are both for and against something: agreeing to it but not willing to endure the consequences.

When reflecting on the cultural phenomenon “School” and the education discourse surrounding it, it can be noticed that the values expressed are not in any observable way performed by adults themselves. The values are communicated to all citizens, while the acting out them is delegated to children. Thus,Iintroduce a concept of “transition” that commits us to understand educational transition as adults delegating education to children instead of partaking in education themselves.

Method

The methodological framework is structured by Robert Pfaller’s theory on the economics of the libido (2009). This idea pertains to the precarious state of the psyche, when having to deal with ambiguous emotions caused by the commitment to norms that we do not enjoy to live by. Working from Pfaller’s examples and his explanation of human strategies for coping with ambivalence, I investigate the modes of schooling. This implies detecting similarities between modes of school and modes of dealing with ambiguous feelings. I gather my examples from compulsory school and they denote the most common activities that we recognize as school activities i.e. calculating, writing, doing homework etc. I detect indicators and symptoms of ambivalence, that is, I observe discrepancies between values verbally expressed and the operational environment (Rappaport, 1999) that embeds the discourse. I interpret these discrepancies as acts of displacement (Pfaller 2009, Winnicott, 1971). It means that the form of the act can vary while the meaning is constant. To illustrate the point, think about prayer wheels as a way of acting out the virtue of praying. According to Pfaller, acts of displacement occur as a third possibility when torn between doing and not doing that which you are supposed to do (2009). In order to follow through the displacement act you will need to replace you own act by delegating it to an object. This way, the replacement act relieve you from the burden of ambivalence. In the case of the praying, the task of praying is undertaken by a wheel. People put written prayers into the wheel and it spins in the wind. While the believers are off doing other things, the machine is doing the praying for them (this, off course, is not something that they consciously reflect upon). In the works of Winnicott (1971), Lacan (1957) and Pfaller (2009) the transitional object is brought to the front as a central aspect of culture. In different ways, these analysts present the transitional object as a replacement for the “real thing” (in this case, actually reading praying or undergoing a process of education). In my analysis of the delegation of educational tasks to pupils, I present children as the transitional objects of adult society.

Expected Outcomes

The anthropological-psychoanalytic model of interpretation allows for new question pertaining to the transitional role of education, to arise. Identifying discrepancies between what, by adults, is said to be good and the performance of adults i.e. observing how adults perform the good, bring about questions pertaining to the inversion of the subject-object status of pupils. Is education actually about inventing transitional objects and not about the formation of the subject i.e. citizen? Other question pertain to the idea of lifelong learning – are we subjecting ourselves to cultural ideals, making ourselves into objects of some invisible super entity that commits us to be personally engaged in education i.e. are we supressing ourselves? Yet other questions addresses the critique of mechanical learning – is it really so bad being a “prayer wheel”? According to Rappaport, Winnicott and Pfaller playing is both a matter of relief and of coping with the harsh reality. Play owns the properties of ritual (think here of soccer, chess, watching television). It does not effect mundane life only it forms a cult(ure) and you can think of it as “time out” (Pfaller, 2009) or “time out of time” (Rappport, 1999). In the case of education, adult refrain from playing, properly because it is no fun to sit still all day doing calculation upon calculation. Instead, we demand that the children “play” the boring game needed in order to develop mathematical thinking. If relived from educational ideas of knowledge formation as something realizable, would it then be possible for pupils to play fun games? Can children go to school for other reason than to form mathematical thinking, entrepreneurial attitudes and so on? I would like to discuss these possible outcomes based on my perspective, and more.

References

Biesta, Gert. The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2014. “The Future of Teacher Education: Evidence, Competence or Wisdom?” Research on Steiner Education, 2011. Broady, Donald. "Skolan, medelklassen och statsprogressivismen" Kritisk utbildningstidskrift no.142-44, 2011. European Commission. Detailed work programme on the follow-up of the objectives of education and training systems in Europe, 2002. Lacan, Jacques. The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book IV. The relation of the object and the Freudian structures (unpublished), 1957. Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence : An Anthropology of the Moderns, Harvard University Press, 2013. OECD.The Definition and Selection of Key Competences. Executive Summary, 2005. Pfaller, Robert. Die Illusionen der anderen: über das Lustprinzip in der Kultur. Suhrkamp, 2002. Rappaport, Roy. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. Winnicott, Donald, Playing and Reality (1971), Routledge, 2005.

Author Information

Ditte Storck Christensen (presenting / submitting)

Aarhus university

Gothenburg

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