15315-wolbert

Chapter 1 4 Why this interest in human flourishing as an ideal, overarching aim of education? One reason may be that a widely shared discontent with current aims of education in schools stimulates thinking about other, larger, and more ideal(istic) aims. 9 A much heard objection is for instance that these goals focus too much on efficiency and effectivity, meaning that education is too much seized by an economic (technocratic) language of input and output, and even described in terms of profit and loss. 10 A ‘good’ school for example is in this discourse a school that has the most children passing their exams. One of the effects of this technocratic emphasis is an interest in ‘evidence- based’ education; education that is proven to be ‘effective’. Gert Biesta points out that ‘effectiveness’ is an instrumental value; it says nothing about which effect is desired. 11 ‘This means, among other things, that it is meaningless to talk about effective teaching or effective schooling; the question that always needs to be asked is effective for what?’. 12 As also White argues, the most important question to ask about schools is ‘what are they for?’ Why is our curriculum the way it is today? 13 The purpose of learning biology is surely not merely to pass the biology exam, but children learn biology, because we think that with such knowledge they are better able to do well in the world. 14 White argues that education these days lacks such a rationale, an overarching aim of education. Or to be more precise, it lacks an overarching aim that is not an ‘add-on’ but gives actual direction to educational policy and the curriculum. White calls for making explicit that schools are to equip children to be able to do well in the world. And above that, it is questionable whether education can be captured in a technological, causal model at all. In chapter 4 it will be argued that due to the inherent risks of education, it cannot. That education is re-evaluated particularly in the light of the overarching, ideal aim of human flourishing, is in part influenced by the revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle asks what would be the most complete aim of life one can think of; that which everything in life is aimed at. He argues that this must be eudaimonia (a good ( eu ) spirit or soul ( daimon ). Eudaimonia is traditionally translated as ‘happiness’, but recently ‘human flourishing’ has become a favoured translation. 15 The most obvious reason for translating eudaimonia with human flourishing instead of happiness is that nowadays happiness seems to refer primarily 9 I am focusing here on education in Western Europe and the USA, or more generally in the Western world. The literature that is used throughout this dissertation, unless explicitly specified otherwise, tends to focus on Western Europe and America as well. 10 See Wolbert 2018. 11 Biesta 2007. 12 Ibid., p. 8. 13 White 2007. 14 See Terwel, Rodrigues, Van De Koot-Dees 2011, p. 21. 15 For example Sir David Ross, who translated the Nicomachean Ethics in 1925, translates eudaimonia with happiness, but Martin Seligman (2011) explains in his book Flourish: A new understanding of happiness, well-being – and how to achieve them why he chooses flourishing instead of happiness as a translation of Aristotelian eudaimonia to express his ideas on positive psychology.