Connect/Eddie HoltThe "consumers" of education featured prominently this week. The Minister for Education, Noel Dempsey, told the ASTI's annual conference that the consumers will be consulted as part of his plan to frame a new agenda for the education system.
Dempsey added that his initiative intends to give a new voice to parents and disadvantaged people. It was no longer good enough, he reportedly said, to have an education system where the most powerful have the greatest clout. He said this even though he knows he has the greatest clout because he is the most powerful person in the entire system.
There was no indication, however, that he included himself among those he disparaged.
Anyway, back to the "consumers". Dempsey, a former careers guidance teacher, seems a reasonable man. Yet, not so long ago, "education" would not be spoken of in such bluntly commercial terms. "Consume" also means "eat or drink", "use up", even "destroy". If everybody is to be a consumer of education, who are to be the producers of the stuff?
To educate used to mean to give intellectual and moral training, to bring up, to cultivate, to discipline the mind or, Latinately literally, to lead out. It was a process more than a product. It involved human values. Now, in an age of mass- consumption, with all its positive and negative aspects, even the complex process of education is being framed as a plain consumer transaction.
Along with say, spuds and spaghetti, education is to be consumed. Older notions of what education meant - all that cultivation through systematic instruction and guidance - can be dismissed as consumers (even "customers") are to be encouraged to gobble it up and lash it down. Devour it. Get that education into you.
Before the feast of consumption intensifies, it might be useful to consider the aims of education. Before we can have any definite opinions as to the education we consider best, it's surely vital to have some concept of the kind of person education wishes to produce. Even then, it's sure, in many cases, to produce results other than those at which we may have aimed.
The language of this latest "vision" seems deeply inappropriate, and that's telling. It's not as if there's no consumption element to formal education. Many people, after all, pay hefty fees to buy the kind of brand-name education they consider likely to be of most benefit to their children. But that, in itself, consolidating divisions and encouraging class nepotism, is arguably anti-educational.
That is an ideological viewpoint, of course. It is, however, no more ideological than the vision which speaks of "education consumers". Certainly, if the kind of person we wish our education system to produce is to be an accomplished consumer, then the formal framing of education as a primarily (even exclusively) consumerist transaction is an ideal preparation.
It may even be inescapable. But real education is more than that. The most desirable result, surely, is to produce people who can think, fairly and critically, for themselves; citizens, not mere consumers. For some, this may indeed be a simple matter of consuming even such tasty morsels as moral guidance. But real education must allow for those being educated to reject the limitations of any particular model.
The argument is not merely semantic or pedantic. Education itself is in danger of being consumed by the imposition of this visionary consumerist model. The mould is limiting because the language of the market - appropriate to food or manufactured goods, say - reduces a complex and fraught process to a form of barter.
There is a semantic totalitarianism about the proposed model. Are religion, with its spiritual nuances, or healthcare, wherein the kind word can be crucially healing, to be similarly "consumed"? How about genuine altruism, when people selflessly do their best for others simply for the sake of doing that? Is that to be consumed too as just another ingredient in the package on offer?
Dempsey is right to want to give a voice to parents and disadvantaged people. He is not right, however, to limit people's ideals by framing his initiative in the language of the market. Disadvantaged people are those who, by definition, do not prosper under the prevailing market ideology. An alternative, not more of the same, is required to meet their most pressing needs.
At a time when many schools are disgracefully under-funded and ramshackle, to reduce education to just another commodity compounds the problem. As in any consumerist society, it emphasises, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, the sheer inequality in Irish education. Some "consumers" can afford a Mercedes of an education; others will have to make do with the bar of a bike.
That, at least, has been the consumer model in every situation in which it has been applied. Some eat caviar while others must make do with chips. What passes as education becomes reduced to ideological justifications for the maintenance of privilege. A hugely important area of life - determining of people's prospects in so many ways - is thus debased.
Education is not something to be merely consumed. Knowledge, cultivation and the search for wisdom - not just power and position, though these matter too - ought to be its goals. Dempsey was right to say it's not good enough to have an education system in which the most powerful have the greatest clout. The pity is that they have - and he clearly intends to keep it that way.