ABSTRACT
“The most important demand placed upon all education is that Auschwitz [does] not happen again” – these are the words of philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno, a German who gave a famous radio talk in 1966. This chapter presents and updates this important discussion with reference to selected recent global events and offers a discussion of ressentiment. I argue that in educational practice, it is important to understand what ressentiment is and how to teach about it as the learning of the unsociable-social and its counterpart, non-ressentiment, and the sociable-social.
A simple question is asked in this chapter: what is the meaning of education? On the one hand, this is a question that, if left too general, lacks connection with the lives in which we live. To counter this, I will reflect upon the meaning of education in the wake of two particular events, by no means unique to our times: the terrible massacre carried out by a lone gunman in Norway on 22 July 2011 and the terrible massacre carried out by a lone gunman in New Zealand on 15 March 2019. We might, on the other hand, turn to the other extreme and answer with reference to the detail of curriculum or carefully selected cross-curricula skills, such as cooperative learning in teams. This narrowing would mean we might lose the ability to move between multi-level explanations drawing upon socio-political, educational, historical, cultural, and psychological explanations.
In answering this question, I am also conscious of how the nature of knowledge seems to be in flux now more than ever before. For some, such 156as those inspired by Siemens’ (2005) seminal paper, knowledge is distributed widely in different networks, some conceptual — carried in our heads — and some external in books or on the Internet, and it raises the important questions of where, how, and what knowledge is to be trusted, taught, acquired and in what settings. He proposed we turn to the concept of connectivism to address these concerns and wrote:
“The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.”
Siemens’ point is simple,1 education will increasingly be about teaching and learning that is able to connect together different sources and networks of knowledge, residing in particular places and repositories – sometimes in the heads of others, sometimes recorded elsewhere. What we need is actionable knowledge where critical thinking is still vital but of the character required to select and evaluate the pipe and the contents of the pipe. Such knowledge adds to the epistemological view that knowledge is not merely about “know this” and “know how”, but it also entails “know where” and “know how it feels”. The last mentioned is essential, ensuring that knowledge is embraced as comfortable and meets our expectations and shared norms of acceptability.
For this reason, in this chapter, I remain wedded to the ideas of connectivism and multi-level explanation but draw upon narrative knowledge that connects knowledge with lived experience communicated in the form of narratives. The turn to stories and storytelling is not uncommon in the social sciences and it represents the attempt to understand how knowledge can take many forms that can be valid and trustworthy. It is not the case that only natural science holds the golden key to truth. As Ricoeur (1984: 3) put it:
“Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organised after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence.”
157This phenomenological understanding is circular, as life and narrative mirror each other in a creative mimesis. It also places an emphasis on the necessity of the narrative revealing the ordering of the events in what is basically a linear temporal “causal sequence” (Ricoeur, 1984: 41). However, Ricoeur ignores postmodern and hypertext-inspired conceptions of narratives that break with the temporal organization of the plot in a diachronic beginning-middle-end and disrupt the direction of causality (Boje, 2001). In my work with refugees, I found instances of narratives where a single narrative beginning was unclear, or an authorship could not be traced to a single origin. Instead narratives were multi-punctual in origin and multi-accented because of the polyphonic presence of several voices (Dobson, 2004: 131–134). It is worth noting that in such cases, causality was not necessarily absent but multi-accented and/or multi-directional. A multi-directional narrative can be defined as a narrative that proceeds forward as well as backwards in search of an origin. This reversal of the causality means that it is not cause to effect, but an effect or several effects in search of a cause and this becomes the focal point of the narrative moving backwards.
Accordingly, to understand the meaning of education in a time scared by violence, I shall tell three connected stories in this chapter.
The story of Norway and New Zealand in old and new; that is, before and after these atrocities.
The most important demand placed on all education, where I recall Adorno’s rightly famous essay, originally given as a radio talk with an openly multi-level approach to explanation.
Ressentiment,2 moral, and values-based education; covering different cultural and transcultural understandings of education in a time of global hatred.
Broadly speaking, the first story considers what happened, the second why, and the last, how might we avoid that it happens again through education. All good narratives contain the how, the why, and the what if, with a clear line of connection drawing them together.3
