How can education create social progress? When you bring together a dozen educationalists from universities around the world to attempt to answer it, the complexities of this question soon throw up more questions.
What do we mean by education, and what’s it for? What do we mean by social progress? Which comes first? Do all countries share the same goals for social progress and the same understandings of education’s role in it? What are the conditions under which education’s potential for contributing to social progress can be maximised? Are the solutions to be found in policies, governance structures, the agency of education personnel or the daily life of classrooms?
As one of the lead authors of the education chapter of the report of the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP), I was privileged to experience first-hand the debates that these questions raised. I was part a fascinating but daunting task to collate, interpret and present the evidence around them.
The IPSP is modelled on the International Panel on Climate Change and brought together more than 300 social scientists to synthesise available knowledge on how societies work and evolve, and how people can flourish.
It has aimed to create a blueprint - or at least start an ongoing debate - on how to construct societies that are more inclusive and just. In the context of current global challenges, including uneven development, conflict, displacement and rapid social change, the report is timely.
Shared conviction
As well as the Scottish contingent of one, the education team included academics from Austria, Brazil, Germany, India, Israel, South Africa and the US, to boot. To add to the diversity of perspectives, this group of educationalists included psychologists, sociologists, economists, higher education specialists, a political scientist, a philosopher and a comparativist (me).
Needless to say, we did not agree on everything. However, we did share the conviction that education could lead to social progress (although it doesn’t necessarily do so and it can be part of the problem, as well as the solution). We also agreed that solutions lay not in single silver bullets, but in multifaceted approaches, including the macro level of policy and governance through to the micro level of classroom processes and individual engagement.
Education is a highly contested space
We met each other for the first time in Istanbul in August 2015, and then again in Vienna in February this year, with our next meeting scheduled for January in Lisbon. In between these meetings, there have been lengthy email exchanges, as we work on our assigned sections, and review and debate each other’s work. The draft chapter is now available online for public comment, before being finalised in 2017.
Some of the contents will be contentious; what is likely to be especially controversial is what is not in the chapter.
We had about 20,000 words to “solve” the relationship between education and social progress. In doing so, we tried to cover most of the range of formal education, from early childhood through university, but omissions were inevitable.
Wherever we drew the lines - in leaving out non-formal or adult education, the needs of particular groups of learners or examples from every part of the world - I am sure that there would be dissenting views on those decisions. Education is a highly contested space.
The risk in consulting widely and trying to include every perspective is that only the blandest and safest statements will survive (“Education is good”, “Social justice is good”, “We need both but they are not easy”). We have tried to be innovative, while respecting evidence and diversity, and will have to respond to the consultation feedback with those imperatives in mind.
What’s the purpose of school?
We started our chapter by asking what the actual purposes of education are. We argue that its economic purpose is given disproportionate emphasis in policy attention, compared with its civic, humanistic and equity-promoting functions. The chapter then presents a broad view of education in the world today, showing how formal education has expanded in the past few decades and emphasising how it relates to citizenship, growing opportunities for social mobility, economic development and equity.
We then consider what needs to happen to strengthen the relationship between education and social progress. We discuss a range of facilitators and barriers to education as a means for social progress, including the role of education governance and actors at all levels of the system, curricular content and pedagogical processes.
There is something special about education in Scotland
What might this chapter mean for Scotland? As a comparativist who has called several countries home over the years, I can honestly say that there is something special about education in Scotland, not least its historical and contemporary attention to how education can promote individual opportunity and collective progress.
Curriculum for Excellence is an exemplary document in its treatment of education’s full range of purposes, and in its respect for teachers and learners; the recent policy focus on closing the attainment gap is guided by principles of inclusion and equality. This chapter could help to set these agendas in a global context of evidence and theory from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and provide food for thought to policymakers, academics and practitioners.
The full first-draft report, including the chapter on education, is available for both reading and criticism at comment.ipsp.org until 15 December. Please do send in your views - the more the better.
Michele Schweisfurth is a professor of comparative and international education at the University of Glasgow
