The unquantifiable as a measure of good education

Abstract

This paper develops a dialogue on value and measurement in education that began at a special symposium at ECER in September 2015. The paper seeks to continue the dialogue by commenting on the main respondent’s contribution from Network 9. We hope to clarify how different sides of the assessment debate can be misunderstood by others. What emerges in our paper is suggestive but nonetheless points to how thinking in opposing camps can limit our understanding of assessment as a human activity. Taking up key points made by the respondent to the symposium, we focus on the comparison between the requirements of design in technological problem-solving situations and those that arise when we take seriously the requirements of assessment and valuing as a human activity. This discussion sets up a wider analysis of the problem of ethics across the sciences and humanities historically. While remaining tentative, the discussion points to a particular problem related to our ability to defend practical rationality against the dominance of technical rationality in modern European society. As a way of counteracting the preponderance of more technical measures, the paper concludes by offering a heuristic metaphor for understanding an unquantifiable living practice like education.

Keywords:

• Production
• ethics
• the unquantifiable
• a living practice
• the good of education
• dialogue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This quote is taken from an essay by Isaiah Berlin in a collection entitled Russian Thinkers, and is attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. Explaining its use and application to the literature and to two pervasive kinds of literary personalities, Berlin says ‘… there exists a great chasm between those who, on one side, relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think, and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle … The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes’. London: Penguin Books, 18.

2. The authors were struck by the comments made by the Director of PISA in a newspaper article in 2014 (Irish Times, 18 November 2014). Responding to the following sentence quoted from the Open Letter by academics, ‘No reform of any consequence should be based on a single narrow measure of quality’, the Director responded, ‘I know of no reform that is based on a single metric….’ The response is quoted in full in Pádraig Hogan’s Introduction, and deserves a fuller examination in its own right. However, the reason we have focused on the first part of the response is to draw attention to the ‘slip’ between the use of one term in the question, namely ‘measure’, and the use of another, namely ‘metrics’, in the response. If we were to admit that metrics are themselves a narrow measure, then, based on this exchange alone, we would have to say that the analysis of the comment in the Open Letter is true and accurate. But it seems the challenge for understanding the difference between measure and metrics is great.

3. The full quote is as Follows: ‘If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’ The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956.

4. Both these points were clarified in a follow-up email conversation and we remain grateful to Professor Gonzalez for his generosity in clarifying his initial response.

5. For our purposes here, Gadamer’s notion of a ‘fusion of horizons’ is central to the act of understanding a text or a tradition as it is to reading and evaluating situations in practice. The unity at work in such experiences is one which Dunne, who views it through Aristotle’s conception of change or kinēsis, argues is ‘difficult to describe because it is realised as a movement’ (Dunne 1997, 121).

6. The following quote by Iain McGilchrist gets at our understanding of metaphor and its use: ‘A metaphor a common life that is experienced in the body of the one who makes it and the separation is only present at the linguistic level. Our sense of the commonality of the two ideas, perceptions or entities does not lie in a post hoc derivation of something abstracted from each of them, which is found on subsequent comparison to be similar, or even one and the same thing.: but rather on a single concrete, kinaesthetic experience more fundamental than either, and from which they in turn are derived’, 117.

7. Sharon Todd’s and Michael Apple’s papers had two quite different accounts of the ends of education and while both were critical of PISA, they were critical from the perspectives of a philosopher and a social scientist. With a somewhat weary nod to Marx, we might say one was concerned with understanding the world and the other with changing it. As with the need to accommodate both hedgehogs and foxes, we do a service to education when we see these perspectives as mutually supportive.