The Challenge of Community and Dialogue in a Rational Education

Abstract

The growth of formal organizations and technical reason over the last few centuries has given schools and academic institutions their contemporary form. They operate, in principle, as technically rational institutions, with explicit goals and processes designed to attain them. The knowledge which they claim to teach is based on naturalism and reason, unlike most older institutions of learning. However, they are now facing growing challenges from multiple directions. Critical theorists, for instance, have pointed to the importance of ethics and aesthetics in human life. Feminist theory, Post-Structuralism, Dalit theory and Decolonial theory have pointed to the culturally embedded character of reason and institutional processes, which while claiming universal validity, actually come from a particular group’s standpoint and are imposed upon all others. A variety of national and cultural movements around the world have taken up their language to oppose knowledges which emerged out of science, reason and realism. Faced by these challenges it is tempting to give up the pursuit of finding ethical or empirically-based principles that possess at least some degree of inter-subjective validity. But it would be unwise to do so. This project remains important since it can help us navigate between contending positions to either choose between them or to synthesize them into what their respective bearers will together agree is a better principle or interpretation. If education is not to lock different communities into separate water-tight compartments, then it must teach ways of talking across boundaries. This may often call for us to balance out the distorting effects of power over truth. The direction forward may be to eschew final truths and instead to recognize different cultural positions, and to engage in dialogues between them. The process of knowing in education cannot be seen as a monocultural project but has to necessarily include the process of dialogue and be seen as a multicultural project.