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I have started reading Gert Biesta’s book, Good Education in an Age of Measurement. In the first chapter, he puts forward the case of three key arguments for a ‘good education‘: qualification, socialization and subjectification.
Qualification is defined as:
The qualification function is without doubt one of the major functions of organized education and constitutes an important rationale for having state-funded education in the first place.
Socialization as:
Through its socializing function education inserts individuals into existing ways of doing and being. In this way education plays an important role in the continuation of culture and tradition—both with regard to its desirable and its undesirable aspects.
And subjectification as:
The subjectification function might perhaps best be understood as the opposite of the socialization function. It is precisely not about the insertion of “newcomers” into existing orders, but about ways of being that hint at independence from such orders, ways of being in which the individual is not simply a “specimen” of a more encompassing order.
These, Biesta argues, are not to simply be considered in isolation, but in how they interact:
The three functions of education can therefore best be represented in the form of a Venn diagram, i.e., as three partly overlapping areas, and the more interesting and important questions are actually about the intersections between the areas rather than the individual areas per se.
This focus on purpose is in contrast to what Biesta describes as the ‘learnification’ of education. This is where the sole concern becomes the individualistic process of learning, rather than the intent that is actually associated with this.
This discussion of purpose made me wonder about things like learning walks and annual review processes. What if the success or failure of something like a learning walk was decided before anyone even enters the room? What happens if a coach considers qualification as being the primary purpose of education and inadvertently applies this lens to what they see. Yet the teacher in question’s primary concern is socialization?
I am wondering if it is for this reason that we need something more than a set of standards to improve education. We need a holistic approach, like the Modern Learning Canvas, that incorporates all the different facets.
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What about you? What tools and techniques have you used to capture a rich picture of practice? As always, comments welcome.
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Learnification and the Purpose of Education by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A big issue is even if we wanted to train entrepreneurs the skill set is not there for teachers to direct 100+ small enterprises.
Wagner has a point that can’t be argued away with fact it would entrench disadvantage even if that may be true in current implementation
The key is change but I’m talking slow & steady: evolution rather than revolution. Help discover entrepreneurial qualities useful to all.
This was a great read Virginia. I really liked your point about how on the one hand we prize the piece of artwork, but fail to recognise mathematical results. Yet when it comes to funding and priorities, we are told something totally different.
It reminds me of Gert Biesta’s discussion of the interaction of qualification, socialization and subjectification in the creation of a good education.
In response to the latest release of PISA results, Yong Zhao highlights some of the problems associated with the program. This includes concern about what is measured and the purpose of education. For more on the representation of PISA, read Aspa Baroutsis and Bob Lingard.
In addition to this piece, Zhao also wrote a series of pieces exploring some of the pecularities within the data, including why a growth mindset does not work for Chinese students, the problems with culture-free results, and the relationship between fear based learning and student results.
Naomi Fisher pushes back on the ‘what works’ mantra and instead argues that how and why matter just as much. For example, she explains that if our focus is on developing critical thinkers, then drilling children with facts and figures will not necessarily get us there.
This reminds me of Gert Biesta’s three key arguments for a ‘good education‘: qualification, socialization and subjectification