Dangerous Liaisons: Metonymic Effects Between School/ing and Education

• In Event: The Spaces of Pedagogy: Reticulations of Participation, Engagement, and Action

Abstract

This paper considers the ways in which the words “school/ing” and “education” are conflated in the social imaginary, and what the effects of this conflation in meaning and purpose are both theoretically and in practice. It is not difficult to see the ways in which these two terms are used almost synonymously, and uncritically, from everything ranging from TED talks (under the topic of “Education” on the TED website, the guiding question is “How do we reinvent education? These TED Talks explore the latest thinking — from teachers, parents, kids — on how to build a better school”) to the title of Secretary of Education (a position that is exclusively concerned with schools). Hamilton and Zafiaurre (2013) explain the ways in which “school” and “education” operate in a double-bind, as both interchangeable in meaning while simultaneously opposed to each other (in that education is often defined as a traditional process, which school is a formal, updated structuring of that process).
Yet, as these two terms are largely used metaphorically in that their comparison assumes that they signify mutually applicable meanings, they operate instead as metonyms (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Here I argue that “education” stands in for “school/ing,” and not the other way around, in that education is taken as an attribute of school/ing, but the reverse is not true.
The danger therefore lies in the collapsing of meaning within these terms, both from a philosophical and practical perspective. That is, what happens to “education” when it becomes synonymous with “school” in contexts where schooling is an historical imposition? What are the effects on indigenous ways of knowing when they are reduced to schooling content and constricted by the totalizing impact of metonymy? I begin to answer these questions through an analysis of a course I wrote and taught on education in the Pacific Islands, and in which I deliberately question the metonymic uses of these terms in order to legitimize conceptions of “education” that are otherwise unattainable.
It is not my intention here to redefine either school/ing or education, nor to suggest that they in fact operate within the frame of Lyotard’s (1988) differend, in which we wrong one in favor of the other by way of a process of translating or defining one according to the rules of the other. Rather, what seems necessary is to invert the differend, in a way, and invoke instead a paralogical distinction (Haber, 1994), one that will allow us to encounter these terms not as referential absolutes but rather as terms of transcendence. As Smeyers and Masschelein (2000) remind us, “The transcendent provides the possibility of something that is radically new” (p. 154). It is this newness that a reticulation of this terminology affords, so that we may diagnose – and see – the effects of these words on our understanding as well as consider how we may reinvent them, and thereby put them to different post-foundational uses, uses that do not assume a metonymic set of meanings.

Author

• David W. Kupferman, University of Hawaii West Oahu