Education in radical uncertainty: transgression in theory and method

Comparative international education is a complex field that has been defined/described in several different ways. Some scholars (e.g., Getao, 1996) propose that comparative education strives to understand the differences and similarities among educational systems, often with the aim of improving a specific system. Other scholars (e.g., Bentley, 1998) emphasize that studies of an educational system must consider the factors that characterize the society in which it exists.

More recently, we have seen an emphasis in some counties on viewing education in economic terms owing to data showing a link between national education performance and economic performance. Correspondingly, performance on the OECD’s PISA test is monitored closely by policymakers and education leaders as they gauge the effect of school performance on their individual national economies. Stated simply, the commodification of education globally has increased since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when various countries––particularly England and the United States––shifted to what Crouch (2011) called ‘privatized Keynesianism.’

In this context that we find Stephen Carney and Ulla Ambrosius Madsen’s Education in Radical Uncertainty. The authors state in the foreword that ‘This is a book about young people, schooling and the world, and the possibilities and limits of educational research’ (p. 1). The problem is that it is not.

The authors provide a warning that potential readers should take seriously: ‘While a growing number of scholars explore the changing nature of space and place and its role in education, we have not followed the dominant policy analysis approach that, for better and worse, carries the mark of modern science and thus complicates matters further’ (p. 2). A more accurate statement, however, is that the book takes a hostile stance against science, the scientific method, and all those who employ the scientific method to investigate education, whether international or otherwise.

Education in Radical Uncertainty has very little to say about actual education. It primarily is a review of philosophy and philosophers from the 17^th century through the 20th. The authors begin with a series of questions that resonate throughout the text:

If we avoid the impulse to do “science” that serves the reality principle on which it is based, what new ways of seeing become possible? If we reject the imperative to capture “culture,” how can we reimagine place, context, and lived experience? (p. 7).

These questions, whether we consider them pertinent to education or not, are never answered, which should trouble every reader. The questions do, however, initiate the authors’ strong anti-empirical approach to education and set the scene for what is primarily a discussion of various philosophers, many of whom have only a marginal relation to education. In their own words, ‘Our starting point was to question the coherence of contemporary meaning systems in education’ (p. 8).

Carney and Ambrosius Madsen add to this problem by calling empiricism an ‘obscenity’ and the people of the northern hemisphere (i.e., all those of European descent) a ‘tiny minority’ (p. 36) who are imposing their world view and educational standards on everyone else. The authors suggest that comparative education is merely another form -of colonialism.

As an alternative to empiricism, the authors argue that philosophy can save education and society itself from the evils of hard data. But philosophy is often very far from clear, allowing readers to construe words and ideas however they choose. This reality may explain why the authors often misread or misunderstand the philosophers they reference.

The authors strongly resent the ‘westernization’ of nonwestern societies not only in regard to education but also in regard to culture, even when some features of Western education work better than what they replace. Few scenarios illustrate this more forcefully than what has happened in Afghanistan after the Taliban regained power in 2021. Is the old way really preferable because it prevents girls from obtaining an education? Or was the ‘new’ way preferable because it allowed females to be part of the educational system? Would it be preferrable for China to return to the Four Books and Five Classics of the Xia dynasty? These are not trivial issues, but the implications of the authors’ argument suggest that they are.

The authors’ emphasis on cultural differences seems highly exaggerated. Anthropologists point out that we humans are what is called a ‘uniform species.’ Graeber and Wengrow (2021), for example, urge us to ‘Consider the first direct evidence of what we’d now call complex symbolic human behavior, or simply “culture.” Currently, it dates back no more than 100,000 years’ (p. 83). Culture is fairly uniform, and most of the evidence points to evolutionary factors that make it so.

Carney and Ambrosius Madsen never address this reality. Indeed, they have very little to say directly about education or culture, choosing instead to focus on their analysis of philosophers. Among the many referenced, some figure more significantly than others. All of Chapter 3, ‘Into the Darkness,’ for example, is devoted to philosophy, and the authors sample some of the greats: Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Nietzsche, Habermas, Foucault, and Baudrillard. The authors tell us that the ‘philosophies of modernity’ offer “a way to understand subjectivity, the ‘real’ and ‘truth’, helping us dissolve ‘(blind) faith in reason’ (p. 71).

There is an obvious irony here. Although the authors criticize the Northern influence on Southern education for its homogenization of cultures, they nevertheless rely on Northern philosophers as their guides for cultural preservation. Kant, for example, expressed his racist views until the 1790s, when his writing adopted a more cosmopolitan view. Hegel argued that black and indigenous people across the globe were inferior savages. Schelling’s segregation model argued that racism is intrinsic. As for Nietzsche, he not only was an outspoken racist but viewed the inferiority of nonwhites as justification for slavery and colonialism. Indeed, one can easily argue that racism is intrinsic to the very structure of dialectical philosophy. And this is what the authors draw on to replace empiricism. Amazing.

Many readers are likely to find the writing and organization of the book confusing and disjointed. The chapters tend to stand alone, without the continuity that generally characterizes a book. Moreover, the individual chapters themselves lack continuity, some consisting of unconnected paragraphs that have little or no linkage to one another. Chapter 4, for example, ends with ‘In Extremis,’ which is merely a list of the rejection notices that the authors have received over the years from reviewers of their funding applications. It’s a long list.

Chapter 3 stands out because it fully illustrates the disconnectedness of the book. The authors delve deep into the positions of several philosophers and their work. They end Chapter 3 with a strange re-orientation of the word ‘culture,’ arguing that it is a force ‘spreading mass deception as part of an apparatus of conformity’ (p. 89). Thoughtful readers are likely to question this claim. Anthropologists have concluded that humans are very similar, regardless of location and time. We see only minor differences between modern painting and the painting of Neanderthals in La Paiega or Ardales in Spain that were produced about 65,000 and 50,000 years ago, respectively. Oral literature has existed for millennia and still exists today. Music? Again, we find it among the Neanderthals. The oldest musical instrument in the world was discovered in the Divje Babe cave near Cerkno, Slovenia. It is a 60,000-year-old flute.

So what, then, do Carney and Ambrosius Madsen consider ‘culture’? They never quite tell us. They want to preserve it on the one hand and block it on the other. If it is a force ‘spreading mass deception as part of an apparatus of conformity’ (p. 89), then it has been with us since we became ‘human.’ One might even argue that we can’t separate ‘human’ from ‘culture,’ and if that proposition is correct, the authors have things backward. It isn’t culture that leads to conformity––it is the conformity of being human that creates culture.

Jean Baudrillard’s work is referenced most often throughout Education in Radical Uncertainty––cited 38 times. It threads its way through most of the book’s chapters, and those of us who admire Baudrillard’s analyses of the modern world understand how some of his writing can resonate in discussions of education. The authors, however, focus on Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993), which seems an odd choice because this work covers a variety of topics, but not one of them is readily relatable to education: Marxism, fashion, sex, the body, the increasingly problematic economic issues associated with death.

But Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society (2016) and Simulacra and Simulation (1994) are especially relevant today owning to the commodification of education over the last few decades. He saw that education has become a business, with students the inventory that must be processed with expediency so as to rotate the ‘stock’ quickly. Since 1980, the United States has seen college tuition at many schools increase by 2000% while standards have plummeted. As of the 3^rd quarter of 2021, student loan debt had reached a staggering $1.9 trillion even as up to 75% of recent college graduates in fields like psychology, English literature, and criminal justice were unable to find work in their fields. But the authors fail to mention any of these issues.