‘…the good society – and the reimagining of education for the ‘good society’ – is no longer a utopian ideal but a necessary condition of our human survival.’
Jon Nixon (Hans-Georg Gadamer: The Hermeneutical Imagination)
The late education theorist, Jon Nixon, drawing on the work of thinkers through the ages, notably the 20th Century German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, offers a modern manifesto for the “conditions for understanding” that are necessary if we are to learn how to solve the problems of our increasingly interconnected and fractured world:
‘To seek to understand is to acknowledge that – for all our differences – we inhabit a shared world. And to acknowledge that we inhabit such a world is to recognise ourselves as ethical beings who bear moral responsibility for one another.’
I am indebted to Nixon, who wrote widely on education as a common good, for his contribution to educational theory and practice. My hope for a reinvented Fordyce Academy is that it might become a focus for those who, traversing the same terrain from different directions to different destinations, are thinking about what they should make of themselves, and how they should make something, too, of their own lives:
‘the prime ethical concern is…to become ourselves within the conditions we inherit and, in so doing, to shape those conditions for the following generations.’
With this purpose for the school, my intention is to promote a hermeneutic stance, to create a place where the “questioners and interpreters”, who are needed today as never before, can engage in “philosophical reflection and humanistic dialogue” that transcends subject divides, disciplinary boundaries and methodological frameworks; that gives credence to modes of reasoning other than scientific rationality; and that involves the voices of both the living and the dead, for, as Gadamer teaches us, we are all born into an ongoing history of understanding (a ‘tradition’) which enables us to interpret the world in the here-and-now and, in so doing, to change it, whereupon we become active agents in the continuing formation of our historically-constructed consciousness.
‘Hermeneutics [is] concerned with how we understand one another and how – on the basis of that understanding – we open up the possibility of agreement based on the mutuality of respect…And this is what transforms us.’
A hermeneutic stance acknowledges that understanding is always “understanding-not-yet-finished: it is not so much an achieved state as an ongoing process of extending and deepening”. Fordyce Academy must, therefore, provide spaces for discussion, for creative collaboration, and improvisatory talk in which “dialogical beings” can exercise the discipline of inquiring so that they can feel their way towards understanding within a larger whole, recontextualise half-formed ideas and arguments in the current state of the world, and risk being misunderstood or only partially understood.
And because understanding is always “beyond the Self”, the school must also offer structures for relatedness, structures of respect based on a recognition of, and attentiveness towards, others. Such structures are necessary to enable participants in a conversation to trust that all those involved have examined the values and assumptions that have shaped their personal perspectives so they can listen to, and acknowledge the justice and truth of, others’ positions. These structures are also necessary to enable those who are ‘held’ in them to summon the courage to express their own thoughts, form independent judgements, think against the grain of received opinion, speak truth to power, and follow their thinking through into action even when the consequences of doing so may be costly.
In service of this ongoing process of aligning and realigning different perspectives, of gathering resources of the past into the present and carrying them forward into the future, Fordyce Academy must encourage all participants to be both learners and teachers.
And, finally, in this to-ing-and-fro-ing - this interplay - of the move and countermove of discursive and collaborative ways of working, it must ensure that seriousness and enjoyment are complementary!
During the late 1800s, the education provided at Fordyce Academy was defined through the Latin term educare, meaning ‘to train’ or ‘to mold’, as the former pupils’ recollections of the punishing and rewarding rigours of its curriculum illustrate. In its reinvented state, it must be committed to the ideals of the term educere, meaning ‘to draw out’, or ‘to lead forth’.
Dr Kate Cowie
Director of Fordyce Academy
