Conference theme
Enlightenment, Creativity, and Education:
polities, politics, performances
- the World in Europe and Europe in the World -
The traditions of comparative education as a field of study orient us towards assisting with the formulation and implementation of educational policy. The motif of the question ‘how far may we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign educational systems?’ orients us to acting upon the world. Thus in the contemporary rush to reform, there is a massive amount of work for us to do.
Maybe. But before we rush to participate, there is an earlier and prior question: what kind of world would we be constructing? Before we act, we might use another motif within the history of CESE. What, as academics, do we think?
The rhetorics and policies of ‘the knowledge economy’ apparently point us forward to a defined future and a confident future. That future has been rigorously deduced from a definition of the nature of the new global economy which defines the kind of political wisdom needed for survival and the information and creativities and applied knowledge needed for economic success. This future is among the most discontinuous of recent Utopian visions of progress: the proposed break is sharp to the point of cultural violence. Older notions of society, polity, wisdom, and good knowledge are not of obvious relevance; and indeed may be obstructionist. The challenge to educationists to invent such a future, to write the educational small print, is strong; the political and professional demands are urgent in schools and colleges and universities; and, as is well known, the crisis is acute.
Is it? Are there no continuities? Is all lost or to be discarded, to be deliberately deconstructed, in a utopian and determinist vision of the ‘necessary nature’ of high modern societies and the fact that almost all societies will, for reasons well known to some contemporary social scientists and politicians, become the same? Presumably not. That is, presumably we are in the presence of an ‘unwisdom’ expressed in contemporary and very visible discourses about what must happen. Presumably the future cannot so arrogantly be deduced from first principles.
But, if the future is not to be deduced from first principles (primarily visions of a new kind of world economy) a vision uninformed by the longue durée, uninformed by any sense of the differences between cultures, uninformed by any sharp sense of the range of cultural, religious, national and sub-national and classed and gendered identities through which a wide range of polities reconstitute social identity and cohesion – if, instead, so much is apparently an exercise in deduction from first economic principles - then how may we, alternatively and comparatively, think about our varied pasts and flexible futures? They are our pasts and our futures.
This Conference thus returns to some classic, permanent, comparative and educational questions: what are our existing ‘rules of order’ – our visions of knowledge, our views about wisdom, our sense of the changing nature of States in last couple of hundred years and our sense of new state formations (which are not merely or only ‘knowledge States’)?
To what extent does our older confidence about knowledge and wisdom and originality and creativity need cancellation – have we entered, indeed are we already in, the future? And a future of such clarity that the earlier agendas of universities and schools and teachers and teaching and innovation and scholarship and research should now be cancelled?
And if the answer is ‘no’ or ‘almost certainly not’ or ‘definitely not’... then the analytical task is to re-think. We should ask, comparatively and sociologically and historically, what discontinuities with this ‘known and determined’ future should and must be created – and on the basis of what principles? In other words, on the basis of our comparative thinking and our range of scholarship as academics, have we formed views about the nature of educated identity, rapid social change and good politics and social cohesion? What is the struggle (is there one?) which should be fought over the apparently urgent but ideologically-loaded advocacies of skill-formation and lifelong learning so strenuously marked in ‘inter-national’ discourses?
The Working Groups, which in the CESE tradition run continuously as rolling seminars for the whole time of the Conference, make space for such themes. The Working Groups are the places for scholarly papers which reflect, reflect on, and analyse issues of such importance, against the background motif of: what, for the twenty-first century will or should count as a good education, in so far as this thematic may be grasped by comparative analysis and reflection?
Are we of the view – as many academics as well as some economists and politicians would seem to believe - that the Enlightenment and universities and schools in their traditional forms are not only dying but should be despatched toward their social deaths more rapidly? What then should be the nature of the new creativity – infinitely post-modern, infinitely personalised, and flexible? And are the new forms of creativity now apparently necessary for regional survival also necessary to keep societies fluid, inventive, innovative – the social Darwinist challenge through which social systems survive and change?
We invite papers on ‘the Enlightenment’ and ‘enlightenment’ – in a range of cultural forms. We invite papers on the ways in which state formations relate to contemporary educational ideologies. We hope that some colleagues will chose to write papers on the ways in which ‘identities’ are changing in a variety of political and social contexts and we suggest that we ought to puzzle out loud about the relationship between creativities and competences – especially as these are framed by educational systems governed and inspected and ‘quality assured’ in an amazingly limited range of ways, with teachers who are exposed to some strong incentives – and severe restraints - which vary comparatively in striking ways.
So the Conference will ask: what are the contemporary and emergent nature of polities, and the politics of the future – and who says so? Against the agenda of competences and performativities, what in our vision of the future should be the performances we expect in schools and universities and teacher education systems, and what are the delicate or forceful patterns of educational governance and supervision and assessment which will encourage those performances?
What – in comparative perspective – are the huge historical forces and sociological and economic structures which are influencing our ideas and assumptions about identity and wisdom and the future of polities and economies? Are there indeed educational ideas and professional views which provide an alternative definition to concepts of identities as economic, and knowledge as skill-acquisition?
Perhaps there is something which may be quietly said by educationists amid the thunderous acoustic of globalisation, knowledge economy, skill formation and innovation - the Wagnerian tragedy of an international discourse of contemporaneity that redefines not merely schooling and university systems, but the very concept of education itself and which - at least implicitly – cancels several thousand years of educational and cultural wisdom.