Hello world, I’m Tony McKenzie. What I’m interested in is looking for an educational antidote to the malaise of our times. The term ‘malaise of our times’ may irritate people who don’t like colourful language, preferring language that has a more direct correlation with observable reality, but in my headspace, given my worldview and meaning making style, metaphor can be a powerful way of conveying reality-as-experienced.
Things don't look too good
In this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, ‘malaise’ is a label that seems to nicely capture the state of the world. In a recent thought piece I suggested that we are living in an epoch ‘when so much seems to be turning apocalyptically sour for Earth and its life forms’ (McKenzie, 2014a). As the curtains closed on 2014 there was much for us to grieve about – ideology-fuelled slaughtering of our fellow humans, Grim Reaper Ebola in Africa, a full passenger plane blown out of the sky over the Ukraine, lack of consensus on how governments should respond to global warming, and many other triggers to despair, public and private.
I am not alone in my reading of the signs; others are also experiencing a sourness of taste when contemplating the human phenomenon. Here are extracts from several commentators from the vaults of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First, Peter Owen, a lawyer connected to The Wilderness Society, in conversation with Robyn Williams.
Williams asked Peter Owen what state the planet is in environmentally.
The state we’re in, wow. The population is going up at about 200,000 people per day, that’s 80,000,000 per year; greenhouse gasses have increased by 60% since 1990; vegetation clearance on the planet … we’ve probably cleared about half the planet; in Australia since European settlement [we’ve cleared about 30% of vegetation in the East], so habitat loss is pretty serious. Now, on top of that we have a fairly rapidly changing climate which is largely driven by a factor of all those things. We now have governments in place at state and Federal levels that are looking at winding back a lot of the environmental legislation that’s evolved over the last 20-30 years fairly rapidly so we can continue on our merry way of digging up as much as we can and cutting down as much as we can, rolling back World Heritage agreements, massively expanding the fossil fuel industry – doubling it in fact, or more; while Australia is, I agree, internationally only a fairly small domestic emitter, if you include our exports of coal you can quadruple the size of that, and then if you consider the expansions to the export coal industry that are currently being pushed through you can double or triple that again. Australia is the biggest exporter of coal in the world. We have to stop digging this stuff up, otherwise there is very little hope I think in dealing with the issues we’re now facing. We have to very quickly wean ourselves off this old technology and capitalise on the opportunities there in terms of renewables. I mean this is a big thing for us to do: so much of our economy is geared around past structures and the maintenance of the status quo, but we don’t have that privilege now; we actually have to change … You can go around poo-pooing what our leading experts in the world are saying but at the end of the day they are the best people to listen to. They’re saying that these are the key issues that we need to address now and into the future. We have to do this. There is no alternative (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2014a).
Eve Ensler, campaigner against violence on women, appeared on Radio National with Margaret Throsby. Throsby asked Eve Ensler how she sees violence against women relating to patriarchal societies. In her free-flowing, ad-lib reply Ensler drew an analogy between cancer cells in the human body and the growing manifestation of self-destruction within the human phenomenon …
What I understand about matriarchal societies is there wasn’t a lot of violence. [Violence] is the mechanism through which patriarchy is sustained. If you didn’t have violence you couldn’t oppress women … [Getting rid of violence] is the mother issue. Once you get rid of violence then you get rid of bringing up men to believe that they should have no feelings, should be disconnected from their hearts, they should never cry, they should pretend to know everything when they don’t know everything, that this tyranny of patriarchy has absolutely robbed men of their hearts and souls, and I think it has been much worse for men than it has been [for] women. You know, we bring up women so that they can be free, they’re open, so that this amazing resource called women gets to thrive and be born and do what it’s meant to do which is bring about life.
[Throsby] You’d think it was against the idea of Darwinian evolution for violence to be perpetrated against women because women after all are the ones that bear the children, so to render them unable to through violence seems to go against that idea.
[Ensler] I’ve been thinking about the nature of human beings and their trajectory. I think there’s a profound suicidal impulse, and it’s really at large right now. If you look for example at how we treated the Earth which is what feeds us and nurtures us and sustains us, if you look at the fact that its unfettered greed and capitalism, where 1% of the people have everything and the rest are living in squalor, if you look at the destruction of the female being across the planet – the place where we come from, where the future is literally held – I think we are in a very suicidal [mood?]; If you look at cancer […] cancer’s really an interesting phenomenon because we actually hold cancer cells in our bodies, so our own suicide can happen at any time. What brings about the activation of cancer cells is the environment. So if you have a toxic environment or a stressful environment, you will activate these sleeping suicidal cells; and I think we’ve now created a world where … how many people have cancer … we’ve destroyed the Earth, we’re destroying women; I think really where we are right now is on a precipice of either making a decision that we will self-destruct as a human species, or we will go in another direction (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2014b).
Finally, a short excerpt from an article by futurist, Richard Slaughter, on the ABC Radio National website. Slaughter writes:
We live in contradictory times. The human species dominates planet Earth. Yet an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear pervades. We know, at some level, that something is wrong, but find it hard to say 'what' or 'why' …
In Victorian times the future seemed bright. But after two World Wars, the emergence of nuclear weapons and the environmental crisis, collective confidence declined. Science and technology promised to liberate humanity, but can also destroy it. Downbeat Dystopian futures proliferated and seemed to mock earlier Utopian dreams.
The most widespread response to this loss of confidence in the future has been to turn away and distract ourselves with the cornucopia of consumer goods and experiences. One word for this process is 'cocooning'. Yet it's arguably based on strategies that, frankly, don't work very well: denial, avoidance and repression. Honed in the quest to cope with the prospect of our own personal demise they're readily available to insulate us from the wider realities of a threatened world. They help us not to see our real situation and therefore to avoid the burdens of having to deal with it …
My final point is this. We are challenged, as never before, to understand how, by not paying attention, we have steadily become more vulnerable to a variety of social and environmental hazards. But here's the key: instead of responding conventionally and merely finding this outlook depressing, we can go one step further and uncover quite new or renewed sources of human motivation. It is these that offer us pathways beyond Dystopian, overshoot and collapse, futures (Slaughter, 2006).
What are we to make of all this?
The perspective I wish to share today is the fruit of years of contemplating what all this means. This is a hugely significant question for me as an educator and education theorist because it encapsulates what I see as our unique and common human problem – our need to understand, to appreciate the bigger picture. For me a defining feature of humankind is the fulfilment we gain from growth in understanding (McKenzie, 1996, p. 102). As we achieve new understanding, somehow we feel more complete. I want to propose that an educational theory adequate for these times will be one that takes our appetite and need for integrating understanding seriously. We need an educational theory of meaning making, one that accommodates, takes account of what I call ‘the human phenomenon’ (McKenzie, 2014a) in its widest geo-temporal landscape. I take ‘human phenomenon’ to be a catch-all that spans everything we know about ourselves and the world. It is as broad as humankind’s entire opus of artefacts, knowledge and lived experience. It is our collective inheritance and all our private and shared hopes and aspirations, as refracted in our texts, our art and our lives (McKenzie, 2014b). An educational theory of meaning making needs to confront the human phenomenon, warts and all – its violence and barbarity, environmental stresses, our not-uncommon existential angst and insolubly inconsolable dark nights of the soul, as well as all the things that make being human so … wondrous. In an increasingly interconnected world, growth in understanding will increasingly involve acceptance of our connectedness and interdependency. From my perspective, informed by a philosophical hermeneutic mindset, education theory that acknowledges and draws vigour from humanity’s embedment in the world is more likely to engender teaching that helps learners ponder what ‘all this’ means, and get on with it, than theory that puts ‘all that’ beyond the scope of its reach. It is a view that emanates from a more generic logical principle – that theory has explanatory and predictive value to the extent that it provides a satisfying account of the phenomenon it describes. The phenomenon in question here is the human phenomenon in situ. The adequate educational theory I say we need will be one that prepares learners for fulsome, meaningful engagement in the human phenomenon in an epoch where the future of that phenomenon is, for many of us, seriously in question. Civilisation has evolved hunting and gathering into rapacious planetary denudation in the interests of the fewer and fewer. An adequate education theory in these times will be one that enables learners to help raise our species’ consciousness of the need to spurn our mindless, dehumanising, resource-depleting lifestyle, and rediscover what it means to be part of nature.
So let me pose the question: where can we find an education theory that acknowledges and draws vigour from humanity’s embedment in the world? For me, ‘hermeneutic consciousness’, a fundamental construct in the philosophical hermeneutic literature, when applied to educational thought, particularly to curriculum theory and practice, provides just such a way forward. Nicholas Davey’s Unquiet understanding: Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics (Davey, 2006) elaborates and extends Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutic consciousness. Drawing on that discourse, I have proposed the idealistic idea that life is a hermeneutic journey, a journey to understanding, potentially the progressive realisation of hermeneutic consciousness in our everyday lives. Reconceptualising teaching for understanding as cultivating hermeneutic consciousness takes this term beyond its traditional usage, but this is just a further example of the way hermeneutic theory has extended its reach in the last two hundred years. If education is centrally concerned with teaching for understanding, it seems entirely appropriate for philosophical hermeneutics, ‘the philosophy of learning and becoming (Bildungsphilosophie)’ (Davey, 2006, p. 5), to be drawn into education theory.
I need to clarify my position. Doesn’t the nightly television news disprove the rose-coloured view that richer understanding is a core goal of humankind? Slaughter’s (2006) suggestion that so much of contemporary life expresses our tendency to cocoon our lives with ‘stuff’ rings so true. Where, we might ask, are all these people whose goal is to grow in understanding? For me, however, there is another way of construing the matter. I discern it as I reflect on my own nature. I am like a nation divided. Part of me, my higher self, aspires to the Good, while another part of me is resolutely mean-spirited and self-absorbed; and I sense that we all share something of that split identity. What seems to be needed from educators then is an approach to curriculum, a theory of curriculum that addresses the good in us all, however well camouflaged that ‘better self’ might be. I want a blueprint that will foster teaching as though a major human goal in life is growth in understanding, to see how that expectation colours and transforms my engagements with my learners. Yes, teaching for understanding involves curriculum design, but it also involves the dispositions and personal philosophies and assumptions, articulated or tacit, that teachers and learners all bring to the learning process. While proponents of critical theory tend to emphasise the impediments to thinking outside the box of one’s inherited worldview, many educators appreciate that perspective transformation in learners – a fundamental construct in adult education; see Mezirow (1978), Mezirow & Associates (2000) – is a valid and viable teaching goal.
In my 2014 monograph – Meaning making: A university curriculum framework for the twenty-first century – I put a case for embedding a meaning making, hermeneutic consciousness-raising philosophy in teaching practice. My case is expressed as a theory of a curriculum of becoming. As I proposed,
… to realise our individual potential as persons of substance we need to develop our capacity to engage meaningfully in the world, which requires that we strive for growth in understanding of the longer-time-frame kind – what I am calling ‘global understanding’ [or, as mentioned earlier in this blog post, ‘integrating understanding’] … growth in global understanding is the progressive realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world. Such growth is the outcome of approaching life as a hermeneutic journey. (McKenzie, 2014c, p. 11)
Herein lies the potentially transformative kernel of the theory – a new conceptualisation of ‘meaning making’. There are at least two layers of innovation. First, my account of the development of global, integrating understanding looks beyond a meaning maker’s cognitive achievement, assessed according to one’s preferred criteria, to focus on her/his conscious awareness in the continuous present, an animal capability that underpins and lies at the heart of our human reflexive lived experience. The proposal here is that one’s primal awareness of self and surroundings starts to be illuminated by one’s accumulated understanding of self and world at the moment of reflexive thought; indeed, there may be no time delay separating primal awareness from reflexivity.
Global or holistic or integrating understanding is ‘a hypothetical and tacit agglomeration or synthesis of all one’s discreet understandings (plural)’ (McKenzie, 2014c, p. 11), but also ‘the holistic conception of the connectedness of all things’ (McKenzie, 2014c, p. 1). By placing these two not entirely reconcilable descriptions of global understanding side by side, curriculum of becoming theory engages in the philosophical hermeneutic practice of affirming ‘an Ontology of the In-between’, which is Nicholas Davey’s Thesis 8 on Philosophical Hermeneutics (Davey, 2006, pp. 15-17). Such juxtaposition places me as text composer and you as text interpreter in a bind – how to hold both conceptions as viable aspects of a single, if complex idea. ‘Hermeneutics is based upon a polarity of familiarity and strangeness […] the true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 295). Hermeneutic encounters involve the interaction between ‘two negotiating subjects’. The ‘in-between’ space is not geo-temporal but what Davey calls ‘the disclosive space of the hermeneutic encounter itself. It is this space which subjectivizes [grounds and personalises] the participating individuals’ (Davey, 2006, p. 15).
A second layer of innovation in the theory adds complexity to the substance of the meaning making idea. My hybrid conception of meaning making holds making meaning (reaching for understanding) and finding meaning or personal fulfilment in the one conceptual space (McKenzie, 2014c, p. 223) – held together as we ponder them to see whether they support each other and how. In my doctoral research, the challenge I set myself was ‘to explore our common human need to make meaning and find meaning or purpose, even as each passing day sheds new light on the problematics of existence, asking us to reconsider the beliefs and understandings that satisfied us previously’ (McKenzie, 2014c, p. 1). There is something quintessentially human about our attraction to live meaningful lives, as this reflection illustrates:
Like most people I live my life according to my understanding – or sometimes my untested assumptions – about how things ‘work’ and hold together. Most of the activities that I have some control over, and that manifest my presence in the world, are undertaken either habitually, or volitionally, or somewhere between these poles. I live and act in the tacit belief that I am playing a meaningful (worthwhile) part in a meaningful (worthwhile) universe. We play a number of social roles, we cultivate our various public and private personas, not just as expressions of an innate survival instinct: for most of us, most of the time, we don’t question the belief that civilisation, the planet, are worth the trouble, what you keep getting up for in the morning. At least that’s what human being feels like to me. It all … means … something. (McKenzie, 2014c, pp. 6-7)
Once we allow that human individuals are umbilically part of the remarkable human phenomenon, then self-actualisation, one’s personal journey of becoming, takes on a larger evolutionary significance; and for the individual, self-actualisation becomes the context that gives meaning to particular areas of individual human development. Growth in understanding is important because it is part of a deeper, wider becoming. Cognition serves ontology (McKenzie, Higgs, & Simpson, 2013).
An educational antidote to the malaise of our times?
Does curriculum of becoming theory, with its endorsement of the philosophical hermeneutics-inspired idea that life is a hermeneutic journey, offer a way for educators to respond to the malaise of our times? It does in the sense that hermeneutic consciousness, a central outcome of a curriculum of becoming, fosters a holistic conception of the connectedness of all things. The state of the world is the state of our world. Its precariousness is our precariousness. Perspective transformation in a curriculum of becoming is a cognitive-existential, ultimately spiritual transformation, and is often experienced as a continuous unfolding. We seek an antidote within.
Curriculum of becoming theory locates cognitive development inside personal development and sees cultivation of learners’ selfhood and agency – teaching for growth in understanding and self-actualisation – as part of our species’ collective response to the precarious state of the remarkable human phenomenon. It challenges educators to teach as if their learners’ meaning making journey is about realising an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world. Ever more fulsome embrace of my and our embedment in the world is our species’ most promising approach to rediscovering what it means to be part of nature, because we are integral to each other and to nature, and because we are the only ones who can make it all work.
Theory has explanatory and predictive value to the extent that it provides a satisfying account of the phenomenon it describes. Where to now, everyone? To reconfigure Neil Armstrong’s famous one-liner, I have creative discretion over my every next small step for humankind, for the world, as we all do. Let’s do it.
References
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2014a). Australian biodiversity shows signs of stress, in The Science Show program, Radio National, broadcast December 27, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/australian-biodiversity-shows-signs-of-stress/5987422.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2014b). Eve Ensler – Playwright, performer and activist, in Midday program, Radio National, broadcast December 18, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2014/12/18/4144506.htm.
Davey, N. (2006). Unquiet understanding: Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1989). Truth and method. London: Sheed and Ward.
McKenzie, A. (2014a). Changing course: The human phenomenon, deep aligning, living meaningfully. Thought piece. Available here.
McKenzie, A. (2014b). Human becoming reconceived: An educator’s dream-wish for the planet. Transcript of screencast. Available here. View screencast here.
McKenzie, A. (2014c). Meaning making: A university curriculum framework for the twenty-first century. Saarbrucken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. ISBN 978-3-659-52667-1. Available from https://www.morebooks.de/store/gb/book/meaning-making:-a-university-curriculum-framework-for-the-21st-century/isbn/978-3-659-52667-1.
McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. (2013). A university curriculum of becoming: A 'fit-for-greater-purpose' education for the professions. Presentation transcript. 6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI), Seville, Spain, 18-20 November. Retrieved from http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/edfa60_4f736956ab3b4be2a700141e06a9cff6.pdf .
McKenzie, A. (1996). Improving the effectiveness of distance education for farmers. (Unpublished master's thesis), University of Western Sydney, Richmond, NSW, Australia.
Mezirow, J. (1978). Perspective transformation. Adult Education Quarterly, 28(2), 100-110.
Mezirow, J., & Associates. (2000). Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Slaughter, R. (2006). A society responsive to futures. Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National Perspective program first broadcast on 14 March 2006. Supporting information retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/perspective/richard-slaughter/3304718.
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