Education's Nonautonomy: The One-Dimensional, De-Sublimated Wrecking Ball of Technocratic Schooling

• In Event: Education's Autonomy

Abstract

1. Objective/Purpose
The purpose of this presentation is to properly configure the relation of both education and schooling to autonomy to illustrate how schooling currently fails at education because technocratic imperatives dominate schooling practices. We then propose how schooling could serve education if we wanted it to.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Using Fritzell’s (1987) examination of relative autonomy of schools, we show that ideological domination of schooling by technocratic interests structurally and functionally defines school. This subordination takes the form of technocratic (Habermas, 1971; Carr & Kemmis, 1986) operationalization of education concepts and schooling practices (Bridgman, 1968), resulting in the de-sublimation of the inevitably connected term, education (Marcuse, 1964). We conclude that re-sublimation of teaching and learning is required in order to restore the possibility of education’s autonomy, within or without schooling.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Philosophic and language-analytic theoretical inquiry; conceptual clarification.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
• Central concepts (in common parlance and in examined definitions): education, schooling, and autonomy.
• Structural and functional frameworks for analyzing autonomy in relation to schooling and via Fritzell (1987).
• Philosophic/Analytic framework for defining understanding and human application of concepts using Habermas’s (1971) knowledge constitutive interests, Bridgman’s (1968) critique of operationalization, and Marcuse’s (1964) conception of sublimation and desublimation.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Absolute autonomy is impossible in schooling and even the concept of relative autonomy is unlikely to save it. The cause is technocratic ideology that permeates schooling and reduces it to an expression and indoctrination of that ideology. If education is to gain its full meaning as autonomous, it is an experience-driven, holistic self-construction of a person. This has to be facilitated in individually determined relationship with others, using personal, informed, and knowledgeable judgment. We must imagine, accept, and act with an understanding that education could be something that we can facilitate but never quantify, and schools must be functionally autonomous to do this.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
We show that schooling is not mutually exclusive from, nor does it preclude, education, but as currently constructed and considered, the instruction, training, socialization, and indoctrination in schooling—as guided by technocratic imperatives— strips education of autonomy, undermining the central purpose of the endeavor. Education must be a concept that we understand on its own and employ as the goal of any schooling that we design.
Such an education requires a reimagined schooling that possesses some relative autonomy. However, that requires a repudiation of schooling-as-technology and the recognition that technologized elements are only options among many others to help individuals pursue their education. Education must be fully cognizant of the ways in which its autonomy can and will be challenged, and it must resist with the force of its own imperatives—through the re-sublimation of teaching practices— rather than bow to narrow ideologically technocratic constrained distortions guided by operationalized constructs from technocratically conceived educational research. Only then is it possible for genuine education to occur.

Authors

• Matthew J. Hayden, Drake University

• William Harman, Lewis-Clark State College