1.2 What challenges do we face?
So what challenges do we face in leading ourselves and others to change our ways to be more inclusive?
Activity 2: A philosopher’s perspective
Read the following extract from: MacIntyre, A. and Dunne, J., (2002) ‘Alasdair MacIntyre on education: in dialogue with Joseph Dunne [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] ’, Journal of philosophy of education, 36(1), pp.1–19. (The Open University is not responsible for external content.) Open the link in a new tab or window.
Begin reading from the middle of the last paragraph on page 1 where it begins ‘What the system requires of teachers is the production…’. Then stop reading at the end of third paragraph on page 3 where it ends ‘Some may even become schoolteachers.’
As you are reading make notes about:
- The three areas that MacIntyre believes a successful education should make people ask questions about.
- Whether you have asked yourself these questions or discussed questions of this sort with others.
- The challenge these questions present for a formal social institution.
- How a social institution could encourage people to ask these questions.
When you have finished reading this you may want to have a discussion with friends or colleagues.
Discussion
A key challenge which MacIntyre seems to be setting before us is how education can transform itself through itself. As the psychologist Bruner (2001) suggested this is much more than a discussion about ‘conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing’ (pp ix). This touches upon what society wants to achieve through educating its young, how it conceives of itself and its wider aims. Bruner makes the point that education is a reflection of societal ambitions, not merely that school should deliver what society wants. He asks his reader to consider cultural aims. Later in his book, Bruner makes it clear that a prime cultural aim of education should be transformative and moral:
Nobody doubts that it would be desirable for us to compete in world markets, and that being first in one [international academic results] would help us to be first in the other [competing in world markets]. But what does it mean to be ‘first’ if we do not address the countervailing ideal of developing human potential as fully as we can? And how does it speak to the sense of socioeconomic jeopardy into which families feel they have been put by the increasingly unjust distribution of wealth in the broader community? If the broader culture took on the challenge of becoming a mutual community, perhaps our boasts about our future prowess might be accompanied by the guarantee that making the country richer by working hard in school would not just make the rich richer and the poor poorer, but would result in a new pattern of distributing the national wealth more equitably. In a word, we would not simply be trying to reproduce the culture as it has been. (Bruner, 2001, pp. 82–83)
As you read this, you may think that responding to the issues discussed by Bruner and MacIntyre is beyond the control of practitioners. You may feel we just have to work with what we have got and do the best we can. You may see the curriculum and school goals within which you operate as our best means of delivering change in individual pupils’ lives at this point in time. This would exemplify the competing views which exist in our school systems of course, but it would also bring us back to the key problem with which these philosophical ideas are grappling. A very simple practical problem. If we exist in a system full of complex, contradictory values, creating exclusionary experiences and we see inclusive education as the means to transform that system, how do we work through that system to create greater inclusion?
In the next section you will explore further the complexity that practitioners are faced with and the nature of the spaces in which you are working.