In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

99 CHAPTER SEVEN Who Is a Mediumist Educator? Most of this book has been focused on explaining why we should be concerned with existence and what that concern would imply, particularly for how we may conceive of a culture of modernism. In this concluding chapter, I would like to return to the central role played in this culture by educators. That modernism is essentially educational could sound obvious: what else could it be? one might be tempted to retort. The claim’s significance, therefore, depends in large measure on what we construe by education. If the term is merely synonymous for “the communication of something imporant,” one might be excused for thinking it platitudinous. Evidently, I find more there than that. Christopher Higgins has worked out an insightful and useful way of defining education.1 He suggests that rather than tackling the term head on and trying to grasp the abstract noun behind concrete practices and texts, we should come at it obliquely from the question, what is educative? This would have the virtue of making clear that we are interested above all in certain adjectival qualities, wherever they might reside. Higgins volunteers that “something is educative if it facilitates human flourishing.”2 He quickly acknowledges this is likely to seem wanting. It substitutes for “educative” three terms that are no less problematic: “facilitates,” “human,” and “flourishing.” What would count as facilitation here? What would it mean to be human? And flourishing, in what sense and by what measure are we supposed to determine that? Higgins’s formulation appears to leave the educative just as vague, just as open to competing interpretations, as it was when it was in the hands of informal common sense. It turns out, though, that the definition was never intended to unify our intuitions about what is educative. Higgins is rather interested in illuminating and mapping the assumptions behind them in the hope that if we can stay on top of these assumptions, we will put ourselves in a better position to resolve eventually some of the debates about these intuitions. He aims to articulate the formal conditions for anything to be even considered educative. These turn out to be threefold: the thing must explicitly or implicitly address the questions 100 Mediumism of what it means to be human, what it means for human beings to flourish, and what it means for something to facilitate or move us closer to this state of human flourishing. Our different notions of what is educative will thus yield correspondingly different answers to these questions. Many of these answers and notions are patently reconcilable with each other; for instance, the claim that humans as embodied beings would do well to maintain physical fitness by a regime of regular exercise is ordinarily compatible with the claim that humans as economic beings would do well to secure their livelihood by mastering a useful trade. However, some of these notions are bound to conflict, and in any case, there is the philosophical interest in developing more and more comprehensive visions of the educative. Higgins’s overarching, formal definition helps us to analyze these conflicts and parts in terms of positions taken with respect to the trio of interrelated questions, and thus to make more precise, critical judgments about those positions (e.g., to determine that this view of our humanness is too narrow, or that view of how to facilitate human flourishing does not follow from what such flourishing is supposed to be). We may still wonder whether this mapping system is truly capable of capturing everything we intuitively think could be educative; specifically, we may be uncertain whether these three questions necessarily apply. Although there is need to test it further against refractory cases, I am provisionally convinced that Higgins’s triangular diagram presented below in Figure 1 keeps in view a crucial range of concerns involved in education. It enables us to see in particular that our concern about pedagogy, often amounting to one about how to transfer information and skills in the most efficient way possible, can by no means stand for the educational question as a whole. Such a concern is literally meaningless unless it is essentially tied, if only implicitly, to the philosophical-anthropological question of our human nature, on the one hand, and to the ethical or political question, depending on whether we are thinking (Question of pedagogy) What facilitates the good for humans? What is human? What...

Share