“Practice”: A Central Educational Concept

Abstract

EDUCATION AND PRACTICES The more or less “traditional” way to conceive of education has been to think of it as an initiation into practices. In the Enlightenment tradition, for instance, the learner is initiated into forms of thought and understanding that are part of a critical cultural heritage. These forms are public but as yet beyond the child’s understanding; he or she must therefore be lured in and skillfully initiated into the knowledge, sentiment, and inherently valuable activities and practices of civilized life. But this classical formulation in terms of a prerequisite for the “conversation of mankind” has long been under pressure due to its so-called conservative tendency of encouraging an unquestioning stance toward the particular content into which one is initiated. Thus society, it is loudly proclaimed, reproduces existing inequalities, such as the distribution of wealth and power. Though such an education generates, even cultivates, some of youth’s critical potential, many see it as too much of a stabilizing factor for the predominant way of living together, giving further advantage to those born into the right kind of families, subcultures, and even societies. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the many child-centered educators who followed him, the adult world, far from representing reason, is essentially corrupt. On this view, the child, as a product of nature, is essentially good and will, if allowed to, learn all he or she needs to know from experience. Others in this lineage have applauded the ethical concern of child-centered education with respecting the vulnerability and individuality of the child, but have questioned its noninterventionist claims. They maintain that, far from being generated spontaneously by the child’s contact with the physical world, much of what the future adult needs to learn is of a conceptual nature and therefore social, not to say traditional, in origin. Hence, even here the concept of “practice” remains in one way or another present in the background. For epistemological reasons, though no less for ethical ones, it seems that we cannot do without it.