Instrumentalism: A worthwhile critical concept for philosophy of education?

Abstract

The aim of the article is to posit the question whether, or under what conditions ‘instrumentalism’ can be seen as a viable target of the philosophical critique of education. Firstly, I will briefly review and compare three critical conceptions in modern philosophy that interpreted Western civilization as a form of instrumentalism, yet, at the same time, used the concept perhaps too sweepingly: Adorno and Horkheimer (instrumental reason), Heidegger (calculative thinking) and Arendt (means-ends logic in politics). Secondly, I will discuss the exact sweeping moment in those thinkers’ ways of pursuing their critiques of instrumentalism and the way it can, in fact, weaken the pedagogical impact of their analyses. We face a paradox here: if we consistently follow Heidegger and Adorno (Arendt as well, but the situation looks much better with her, as usual), we are prone to ignore the actual perils for freedom in, for example, subsuming education to the global market economy, because it appears to be only a contingent or occasional (ontic) phenomenon that has its ontological roots as early as Homer or Plato. Conversely, if we ignore their analyses, we endanger our critique with inevitable shallowness, i.e. with a tendency to moan about the obvious circumstances without a real understanding of their ontological, historical and cultural backgrounds. This paradox can be translated as a general paradox of the relationship between philosophy and education. To conclude, I will illustrate this by referring to the leading question of this volume: ‘what (is education) for?’, or, to put it differently, to the problem of the purpose of education. If we assume that within the problem itself instrumentalism is inscribed (as all the three philosophers would), we still face the pedagogical and concrete problem of discerning different types of instrumentality. This problem corresponds with the various ways we describe our educational aims and goals.