Unlearning to become: After Faure’s Universal Man

• In Event: UNESCO’s "Faure report" – 50 years on

Proposal

It is rare in contemporary times to read policy visions for learning that speak of discoveries, inventions, creativities and what it means to be in the world, such as we encounter in Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow, also known as the 1972 Faure report. The idealistic approach adopted by Faure and his co-authors gave governments, scholars, educational actors of many kinds, a map to an educational future complete with navigational concepts that resonate today: lifelong learning, the learning society, mobilities, solidarity (Elfert, 2018). The Faure Report imagines a ‘new” mode of learning empowered by endlessly innovative technologies and the efficiencies they promise: a commitment to reason over emotion, to science over story, to “concrete realities” over testing regimes abstracted from everyday life. It even imagined new potential for human-machinic dialogue and new cognitive relations (p. 126).
In this, the Faure Report set out a utopian vision for learning-as-being, steeped in the dream of an ever growing, ever more powerful humanity. But this ‘new’ humanity is still tethered to the old binaries and supremacies of Enlightenment knowledge, the home of Universal Man as “the measure of all things” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 3), where some are empowered to “describe, predict, and control the world and engineer the future, [enacting] erasure of other value systems and ways of knowing, and the suppression of epistemic uncertainties and contradictions” (Andreotti et al, 2019, p. 20).

In the proposed presentation, I unfold the argument that the suppression of differences, the brazen writing of the future that is the Faure Report is the very practice of (hu)man exceptionalisms and anthropocentrism that has brought us to the brink of ecological collapse and technological dystopia. If we are to learn our way out, then it must be through “a politics of living beyond humanisms” (Mbembe, 2019, p. 2), that are more tentative, uncertain and humble. The 2022 CIES conference has framed the problems: What would education look like if we took risks and dared to dream? How do we nurture our idealism into reality? I address these with problems of my own: Who is “we” and what would policy and learning look like that is not in “the service of man himself” (Faure, et al. 1972, p.146)? How might we re-imagine the apparatus of policy scholarship in which ‘others’ are not objects of erasure or unfulfilled potential? What would learning look like if we were to reject techno-determinist dreams and take seriously machinic agencies and the ‘de/humanizing’ effects (Braidotti, 2013; 2019) of techno-capital exploitation including those embedded in the apparatus of ‘lifelong learning’? In contemplating these questions I hope to accomplish humility, uncertainty, small, tentative, realist dreams.

Author

• Suzanne Smythe, Simon Fraser University