Dewey Lectures on Education Tim Ingold
Rennes, 8-11 February 2016
Education is not knowledge transfer
Standard models describe education as the intergenerational transfer of an already settled and authorised corpus of knowledge. The corpus is already complete before education begins, and education is complete once the corpus has been transferred. I argue that this model does not adequately capture the ways in which people come to know what they do. Wisdom lies not in having more representations packed inside your head but in the ability to respond to environmental cues with sensitivity, judgement and precision.
Education and attention
Attention is about stretching ourselves, or reaching out for things. But it is also about waiting on them. In this lecture I contrast the ideas of two authors who have described education as a process of attention: James Gibson and Jan Masschelein. For Gibson, the education of attention leads to skilled mastery. But for Masschelein, attention is a form of submission. I argue that both mastery and submission are present in every action. The question is: which leads and which follows? I argue that action is attentive in so far as it leads by submission.
Education in the minor key
Here I draw on recent writing by Erin Manning to propose a notion of education as an exploration of the middle ground, a continual variation on experience that has no point of origin or destination, no milestones or levels of attainment, but that continually overflows the limits of conceptualisation.
Education in this minor mode opens us up to the reality of the world so that we can learn from it, rather than about it. As such, it persistently unsettles the certainties of the major. Without it, however, life would be forever imprisoned within the limitations of our own knowledge of it.
Education as correspondence
We are accustomed to thinking of education as a process of interaction that goes on in face-to-face relations between teachers and students. But bodies positioned face to face cannot move without colliding. The interactive model thus separates knowledge from movement. I suggest that we should rather think of education as a ‘leading-out’, along lines that carry on together while continually answering to one another, as in musical polyphony. I characterise this going along together as correspondence. In this last lecture I consider the meaning of education as a process of correspondence.
