LLL and the Learning Society as a Useful Utopia

The chapter I am summarizing today is entitled “Utopia deferred”

Jarvis begins by saying that humanity has always been concerned with why we do not have a perfect society. Much of this is related to the problem of

How free individuals with individual interests can live together peacefully?

Or

How society can remain united when individuals seek to advance their own interests?

 Before the Enlightenment, religious myths provided answers in the form of Utopias.  These Utopias were located outside of history, before and beyond human experience.  Two examples are the Garden of Eden and the City of God. 

After the Enlightenment a “multitude” (p. 180) of Utopian beliefs emerged, especially among the poor, to address this same problem.  These too were beyond history and one example is the City of Man. 

Jarvis posits that one can ask several questions about Utopias:

·         Are they a futile hope or a political aspiration?

·         Are they rooted in the community or the individual?

·         What is the role of education/learning in the road to Utopia?

This chapter aims to explore the latter question by first exploring the concept of Utopia and then reviewing political ideas about Utopias and educators’ Utopian ideas.

The Concept of Utopia

Utopia is a vision of the good society

·         It varies with culture

o   This plurality itself negates dominant Western ideals and implies a criticism of modernity

o   Communist, US Imperialist, GC cultures all envision different Utopias

·         Can be totalising under political power

o   I think perhaps Jarvis would suggest totality under extreme economic power too.

o   Soviet communism, US Imperialism, GC can/have been totalizing

Political Visions of Utopia

1.      Plato’s Republic

Even Plato appreciated that it wasn’t realizable.

Individuals would seek private property and it would collapse the Utopia

2.      Marx

A class-less society outside the bounds of time

3.      Rawls

Recognized Utopian vision as that which “extends what are ordinarily thought of as the limits to practical political possibility” (1999, p. 6) (p. 182)

His hope was that his vision (of justice as fairness) would “transcend the unrealistic…and offer a realistic model…” (p. 182).

Justice as conceived by Rawls and rooted in US liberalism cannot be universalized as a moral good.  Seeking to export it as universalizable is unwise.

The political myth of Utopia is unachievable.  But it may provide a vision for aspirations.

Fatal Flaws in Modern Economic Thought

·         Humans do not behave rationally all (most?) of the time.

o   Aspirations depending on rational action are not realizable

·         Economic rationality has produced its own Utopias

o   McTopia and other food-based visions of the “land of milk and honey”

·         Contemporary economics has not lead to Utopia

o   The wealthiest 1% control 24% of the wealth in Britain (Hunt, 2007).

o   Hunt suggests the UK is approaching Victorian levels of inequality.

o   The rich seldom “see” the poor since much poverty is international and those who are poor locally are clustering in areas not frequented by the rich.

I will add a personal anecdote.  Born of working-class Canadian parents, I never thought of myself as rich, and perhaps that is why I never thought much about the poor.  My ignorant-comfort was also protected by my pride in Canada.  I thought we were a rich country and surely didn’t have a poverty problem.   Then I moved to Vancouver, BC.  My first months kept me close to the University, so I saw a rich Canada still.  One day, I was taken on a drive by a fellow student into ‘the lower east side.’  I noticed the throngs of people standing around on the streets.  It looks like perhaps a concert was set to begin and people were waiting to get in.  And yet, there didn’t seem to be any order to their organization and there seemed to be no clear venue to which they were destined.  I asked the ignorant question:  “Why are all these people on the street?”  To this, my friend replied, “Where else can they go?”  It was only then that I realized that these were the homeless of Vancouver.  This was the poverty that was so rampant, even in my rich country, that was segregated out of my view.  I felt ill. 

Jarvis suggests that such underdevelopment and poverty are the result of GC and neo-liberal economics.  Seager (2007) says that globalization has reduced the bargaining power of unskilled workers to the point that even the OECD (a very neo-liberal organization) is recommending that governments have social safety nets for low-skilled workers.    A billion people live on less than a dollar a day (no reference given).  These people are redundant to the GC world.  GC is not working for everyone. 

I am reflecting on Jarvis’ apparent positioning as neo-liberalism as having been a utopian vision.  It seems to me from my reading that he is trying to say that the utopia of Neo-liberalism has not and cannot be realized. He seems to be assuming that neo-liberalism advanced because people thought it would prove to provide a better society.  But I wonder (and I admit my lack of understanding of the history behind this economic model) if neo-liberalism ever made that promise.  Prior to neo-liberalism being dominant, did anyone ever believe that neo-liberalism ought to be embraced for the purposes of improving society?  Did anyone ever make that argument a priori?  It seems to me more likely that economic rationalism is a positive feed-back loop that perpetuates and strengthens itself.  Without mechanisms to regulate it, we were almost bound to end up in the neo-liberal GC society that we have.  Those who are most likely to survive economically, will survive economically, and will support systems that support the economic survival of entities with similar characteristics. Rather Darwinian (please don’t read Darwinian to imply a teleology toward ‘better’), I have to admit.  It’s rather a form of natural selection, where selection in no way suggests selection of the morally ‘better’.  Once we have an upper-class that is doing well in neo-liberal GC culture, they of course will then find ways to justify the continuation of the program, and may do so by developing utopian visions from a (selective) neo-liberal palette.  But I am not sure that neo-liberalism started out as a strategy to move toward a Utopia of any kind, and that seems to be what Jarvis is suggesting.

Jarvis says that when finite resources make it clear that unlimited growth is not possible, the utopian visions of global capitalism will collapse. 

Not only has GC culture not lived up to values of good outside of its own paradigm (health, community, family, happiness, environmental) but it has also failed to live up to the one and only value within its paradigm:   wealth.  People are not economically (as a collective). 

One of Jarvis’ concerns is that when poverty hits a critical level and a critical mass, there is rebellion by violent means.  He describes that it is happening today in pockets, and when it does, the poor who rebel are being labelled as terrorists. 

Jarvis positions education and educators in an important political position because of the focus on LLL in GC culture but laments that

…there have been few voices in education that have protested at the social conditions that global capitalism has produced:  education has in many cases either been colonised by the sub-structure or it has sold out to it” (p. 186).

Ouch.

Although I admit new and limited exposure to academia in education, I have to say that so far my experiences within the University of British Columbia do not support this sentiment.  But I do agree that it is important for educators to be aware and involved.

Education’s Utopia:  The Learning Society

GC interests are involving itself in the provision of education.

But industry is also providing some education on its own as well.

Historically, there was liberal adult education and critical adult education.  Both had utopian ideas and held humanitarian ideals.

Contemporary LLL emerged more as an extension of schooling and has largely replaced liberal adult education.

“…a great deal of the education of adults in the West at the start of the twenty-first century can only be decried as an extension of global capitalism and learning is something demanded by the system and, as such it has no independent ideology—it merely reflects the demands of global capitalism.” (p. 186)

But the LLL and the learning society as a Utopia is still around with contemporary LLL which Jarvis has called a new social movement (p. 188). Jarvis sees LLL and the learning society as Utopian visions

·         It tells us that what we have isn’t good enough

·         It points us toward a better, although unachievable, future

but when formulated on the foundations of modernity, it is morally and socially undesirable.

The Education of Desire

Whereas education to desire more and bigger consumer goods is not favourable to Jarvis, he proposes that education to desire a different and better society is, er, uh, well, desirable.  

Utopias give us that desire.

Education has always had a role in socializing individuals into society to preserve society.

But education should also instil a desire to keep learning, not necessarily a desire for a Utopia.

Conclusion

Utopias are always unachievable and beyond history, but they have a valid role in directing us toward something better. 

Whereas a Utopia fashioned of neo-liberal values is flawed, one based on agapism (the concern for the other) is more universalizable and more robust in its possibilities of a better world.

We need to educate students to love learning, and only in that can we develop toward a utopia learning society rooted in morally acceptable values.

The next chapter entitled “ Back to the Beginning?” promises us some paradoxes.

Jarvis asks, if the Enlightenment is flawed, what do we do now?