ekonomi pendidikan

Philosophy of Education and Economics:

A Case for Closer Engagement

STEPHEN GOUGH

Relatively little contemporary philosophy of educationemploys economic concepts directly. Even where issues suchas marketisation of education are discussed there may be littleclarification of underlying concepts. The paper argues thatwhile much contemporary economic thinking on educationmay be philosophically naive, it is also the case thatphilosophy of education can productively engage withparticular economic insights and perspectives. The paperexamines particular conceptualisations of ‘economics’ and‘the market’, drawing upon these to consider aspects of anissue that is significant for the philosophy of education: humanbecoming. An example, the notion of ‘wellbeing’ is brieflydiscussed.

INTRODUCTION

First thoughts about this paper were triggered by two personal experiences,both of which occurred at philosophy of education conferences. First, at theannual conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain in2004 a keynote speaker referred frequently to ‘market values’. It should besaid that the keynote paper itself was well received, that the audience appearedto know exactly what the speaker meant, and that wider discourse wouldsuffer considerably if the use of shorthand phases such as this were to besubject to over-close policing. Nevertheless, it also seems important to registerthe objection that, in fact, markets do not, and cannot, have values. Peoplehave values. They may attach some of their values to particular markets, or tothe idea of a market in general. More or less certainly, they will express theirvalues, at particular places and times, through their participation in markets.But there is no value that is intrinsic to markets, other than perhaps, asAmartya Sen (1999) points out, a propensity to engage in exchange that isinherent in any credible account of what it is to live as a human being.

Secondly, at the European Conference on Educational Research in 2006I decided to attend a session of the Educational Economics Network. Thenumber of those present was very small compared both to the sessions ofthe parallel Philosophy of Education Network, and to the size of the

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2009

r 2009 The AuthorJournal compilation r 2009 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

conference as a whole. Those individuals who had come along wereconsidering whether their network should continue or fold. However, thisin no way indicated that they had somehow resigned themselves to theirrelevance of economics to education in the modern world. Rather, theywere asking themselves whether it made sense to attend educationconferences—within which their thinking, perhaps most particularly inrelation to markets, was clearly of marginal interest—when they mightjust as well attend economics conferences, at which their assumptions andmethodologies would be accepted as mainstream, and through which theirarguments and findings might ultimately be significantly more influential.

In response to these experiences, this paper considers relationshipsbetween some aspects of economic thinking and some aspects ofphilosophy of education. It is necessarily selective, and often necessarilysummary in its treatment of long-standing, widely discussed andmeticulously argued traditions of thought. Its purpose is to suggest thatthese disciplines have something to offer each other in relation to some oftheir established intellectual concerns. Of course, to say that economicsand philosophy are interrelated is uncontroversial, but the literature thatdiscusses the relationship also identifies particular difficulties. Forexample, Julian Le Grand notes: ‘A striking imbalance between, in thecase of the philosophers, the depth of philosophical argument and thecursory treatment of its practical implications, and, in the case of theeconomists, the sophistication of the economic analysis and theshallowness of its philosophical base’ (Le Grand, 1991, p. 3). GeoffreyHodgson makes a very similar point:

Things go awfully wrong for science when:

(1) unwarranted policy claims are made for theoretical analysis(2) a jump is made from the theoretical to the normative without

adequate consideration of questions of feasibility and mechanismsof implementation (Hodgson, 2006, p. 6).

A particular concern of this paper, therefore, is that of simultaneouslyattending to both the ‘philosophical base’ and ‘practical implications’ ofeducational activity.

WHAT IS ECONOMICS?

The above suggests that a philosopher of education might want to engagewith economic ideas as a way of considering the practicalities of aparticular philosophical position, or as a way of assisting economists inconceptualising their work. A second, more straightforward possibility isthat some work in economics touches directly upon the concerns ofphilosophy of education, though, quite clearly, much of it does not.

Among mainstream economists there are many today who woulddescribe their discipline as ‘the science of choice’. Given that this is so itis unsurprising if, as already noted, non-economists tend to identifyeconomics with markets, and markets, in turn, with the underlying

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r 2009 The AuthorJournal compilation r 2009 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

assumptions about the nature of human beings that mainstream economiststypically make. While I will argue in what follows that there may beinstances in which philosophers of education might usefully engage witheconomic thinking of even this narrow type, we should note that thisdefinition of the discipline is rejected by a number of eminent economists.For example, Hodgson (2004) notes a tendency on the part of mainstreameconomists simply to dismiss any approach not based on personal utilitymaximisation as ‘not economics’. This has the effect of excluding not onlythe work of Friedrich Hayek and Amartya Sen—both of whom are furtherdiscussed below—but also Marx, Malthus, and at least some aspects ofthat of the ancestor of neoclassical economics himself, David Ricardo(Hodgson, 2006). Also from within the discipline Blaug (1997) hascomplained that mainstream economics has developed in ways that renderit little more than an intellectual game, with no grip on the realimplications of analysis. We should note therefore, in the context of thepresent discussion, and notwithstanding the remarks of Le Grand (1991)above, that the power of economics to assist in engaging philosophicalunderstandings with practical applications cannot always and everywherebe taken for granted. By way of further examples: 2008 Nobel Laureate inEconomics Paul Krugman (1994, in a chapter wittily entitled In the LongRun Keynes is Still Alive) proposes the heterodox notion that perfectrationality is itself economically irrational; 2001 Nobel Laureate JosephStiglitz (2002) has famously challenged conventional economic wisdom inrelation to globalisation; and, more recently, economists such as WilliamJackson (2007) have built on the work of Hodgson and others to theorisethe social structures that underlie markets.

For the purposes of this paper ‘economics’ is defined inclusively,following Hodgson: ‘Sciences should not be defined by their methods orassumptions, but by their objects of analysis. Economics should thus bethe science of the economy’ (Hodgson, 2006, p. 1). This might be taken tomean that economics is the study of how human beings survive throughproductive interaction with their environment.

However, there is an irony here. To say that mainstream economics isincomplete is not to say that it can explain nothing. On the contrary, it isoften very good at explaining things—current prices for example—thatmatter a great deal in the here and now. In Banquo’s words it may:

Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’sIn deepest consequence (Macbeth, 1.3.132).

One thing that neoclassical economics explains very well is its owntendency—noted above by Hodgson—to exclude all other economicperspectives from the canon of ‘economics’. Controlling entry to aprofession is an ancient and effective way of raising the earnings andstatus of those within it or, in economic terminology, of obtainingeconomic rent.

In this section we have noted that economics, at least in the definitionhere preferred, may properly concern itself with non-market-focused

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matters. Nevertheless, much economics is in fact focused on markets, andmarkets have featured prominently in recent debates about education. It istherefore to a consideration of markets that the paper now turns.

THE CONCEPT OF THE MARKET

According to Robert Nozick, ‘The market is an institutional processwhereby individual actions and plans are coordinated’ (Nozick, 2001, p.284). This definition uncovers the apparently simple heart of the concept,and also points in a salutary way to the reason why markets are soubiquitous. Coordinating individual actions and plans turns out to be a taskof almost unimaginable complexity, even in relation to apparently simplegoods. For example, when I buy a shirt, its price, relative not only to theprices of other shirts but also to prices of other goods or services I mightbuy instead of a shirt, summarises information about the preferences ofother people relative to my own, global raw material and capital-goodsprices, international wage levels, international regulation of productionand its enforcement at the local level, transport costs, the relative prices ofother goods that might be produced using the same inputs, taxationstructures and levels in different countries, and more besides.

This extraordinary power of markets to coordinate individual actionsand plans deserves serious recognition. However, at least three distinct(though frequently confused) issues arise. The first is whether the marketcan be trusted to perform this coordinating function properly. Might there,for example, be instances of inefficient transmission of information,exercise of monopoly power or plain criminality within the supply chainfor (some) shirts? Questions of this sort invoke the well-known concept of‘market failure’. However, it is one thing to agree on the existence ofmarket failure in a particular case, and quite another to decide what shouldbe done about it. Depending on our disposition we might decide: that wewant nothing whatever to do with markets; that the market is failing onlybecause it contains certain imperfections that can and should be removed;that the market should have a limited role and be subject to some kind ofcorrection; that the market enables us to make the best of a bad job: or,that while the job might not be perfect it is actually rather good all thesame. So, for example, we find disagreement between James Tooley(2003) and Harry Brighouse (2004) over (among other things) whetherequality of opportunity in education would be best served by increasingmarketisation or restricting it.

The second issue for markets-as-coordinators-of-plans is more funda-mental. Is it really safe to assume that all the relevant ‘plans and actions’are individual ones? And even if we can confidently answer this in theaffirmative in relation to the production of shirts, can we extend thatconfidence to the provision of education? Many think not. For example,Geoff Whitty warns against approaches that ’define education as a privategood rather than a public issue and make education decision-making amatter of consumer choice rather than citizen rights’ (Whitty, 2002, p. 47).

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Yet at the same time we should note that commentators as differing intheir perspectives as Tooley and Brighouse share a view that marketsshould not be wholly excluded from educational provision because theyprovide protection against the treatment of individuals simply as means tocollective ends (Tooley, 2003). There are questions of both a practical anda philosophical nature concerning individual and collective participationin society as this occurs through markets.

In respect of both the foregoing issues, it is clear that any finaljudgement requires an appeal to deeper issues that underlie the operationof markets. In both cases, the economics of the market leads us tophilosophical questions. The third issue is rather different. Returningbriefly once more to the market in shirts, we may say that even if thereis general agreement that individual actions and plans are beingappropriately coordinated, this cannot automatically be taken to meanthat shirt production is happening in ways consistent with the nationalinterest, environmental conservation, poverty eradication, human rightsin the workplace, the enhancement of human wellbeing, or any number ofother aspirational goals that might seem to be significantly moreimportant, in the absolute, than whether I myself have a shirt to wear atall. This is partly a further consequence of the existence of collectiveactions and plans. However, it is also because such aspirations require usto accept the possibility that human actions and plans might in futurebecome different from, and qualitatively better than, the ones wecommonly exhibit at present. We might see this as simply a widerexample of a well-established educational problem: that of bringinglearners to acceptance of a new way of thinking when all they haveavailable to them to evaluate it is the old way of thinking (Schwab, 1978;Reid, 1999). In what follows it is assumed that, in the modern world,education of all kinds is likely to be (at least) frequently associated withqualitative aspirations for educators and learners that go beyond thestraightforward substitution of one generation of social actors by the next.Therefore, and for example, we may wish to educate young people aboutthe evils of the sweatshops that make cheap shirts possible. We may wishfurther to promote a wider vision of a better, more egalitarian future.Doing so (and, let me say, I believe we should do so) raises a number ofinteresting questions. One of these—not necessarily the most important—concerns the likely actual impacts through markets of changing under-standings in this way. It cannot be regarded as a matter of completeirrelevance to the educational case if former sweatshop workerssubsequently starve as production is shifted elsewhere, or consumersfund the extra cost of shirts through reductions in charitable giving, orparents transfer their children to private education to correct for perceivedinappropriateness in the curriculum. An understanding of the short-termworkings of markets is likely to be helpful if more philosophicaljudgements are to bear educational fruit.

However, a fuller, more sophisticated account of economic processeswould be still more useful, and it is therefore surprising that the narrowversion is dominant. I now turn to a discussion of possible reasons for this.



HOW PEOPLE ARE: HOW THEY MIGHT BECOME

Taking a broad view (for there are exceptions to, and quibbles about,almost any general claim one might make in this regard) neoclassicaleconomics has achieved a status as the most influential social scientificdiscipline in policy terms through application of a particular model.Central to this model is the belief that rational free choice in the marketleads to Pareto optimality—that is (again broadly speaking, for there are anumber of variations on this theme), a situation in which no reallocationcan make anyone better off without making someone else worse off.Neoclassical approaches depart from the ‘classical’ economics of, say,Adam Smith in two key respects that are both of some significance for ourcontinuing discussion of education. One is their emphasis on utility as thebasis of value. The other is their focus on marginal, rather than absolute,valuations as the basis of choice.

We should note that the status of individual utility seems to be aninteresting issue (at the very least) within the work of pro-marketisationcommentators such as Tooley, who writes:

Real education businesses—the sort I will defend here—do exist ‘to servethe best interests of schoolchildren’ and their families, as well as theirshareholders. If they are not serving the interests of children then they willgo out of business. The only way they can make profits for their owners isif they provide high-quality educational services (Tooley, 2000, p. 19).

On this account the ‘best interests of schoolchildren’ collectively equate to theaggregate of individual best interests as expressed through the market. Debateon this point has been engaged within the philosophy of education, notably inthe debate between Tooley and Brighouse already mentioned. I do not wish tocomment further upon it, except to reiterate that this is not the only relevantform in which economic considerations may manifest themselves.

With regard to the second distinguishing feature of neoclassicismidentified above, the emphasis on choice-making at the margin providesone compelling explanation of the success of neoclassical approaches. It ispowerful as a descriptive and predictive tool because it recognises thathuman choice normally occurs in relation to incremental gains or lossesrather than the absolute value of things. Most famously perhaps, thisexplains why water is often cheap and diamonds are pretty-much-alwaysexpensive, though the former is clearly absolutely more valuable than anyquantity of the latter. It also explains, for example, why pupil absenteeismin English schools rises at the ends of terms, since this reflects not anabsolute valuation of skiing (say) above education, but a preference for arelatively large increment of fun over what may be perceived as arelatively small addition to learning. Given this, and also that—whateverone thinks of utilitarianism—people do quite often do things (as opposedto stating intentions, attitudes, moral principles or, even, academicarguments) consistent with a fairly narrow account of their own self-interest, we might suggest that the success of (particularly neoclassical)

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economics in the social policy marketplace derives substantially from itsfocus on how people are in particular circumstances, rather than on howthey could or should be in general.

One consequence of this focus on the actual and the particular is that thedistinction between needs and wants becomes analytically redundant.People’s choices reflect their reality. For philosophy of education, andeducational theory more widely, things can never be this simple, it seems.Richard Pring has written:

No wonder there is suspicion of researchers when there is an appeal to‘the social construction of knowledge’ or to ‘the multiple rationalities ofthe learner’ or to ‘subjective meaning of the learners’ or to ‘the personalconstruct of truth’. So much flies in the face of common senseunderstandings of the problem and its solution. And as the researchersembrace with enthusiasm and uncritically the latest ‘ism’ (such as‘postmodernism’) so the gulf between researcher and teacher is even moreunbridgeable (Pring, 2000, p. 6).

I myself have worked with teachers who found the concept ofpostmodernism useful, but even so we may say that, by and large,economists have a head start to the extent that they begin from theproblems that people believe themselves to have. This same point isstrengthened by the existence in economics (not only neoclassicaleconomics) of a further basic concept, the implications of which canonly be ignored in an applied area such as education at the cost ofcomplete (if sometimes unwitting) loss of sense. This is ‘opportunity cost’,which tells us that nothing is free. Rather, anything we might do has costsin terms of foregone alternatives. Decisions about the future have costs inthe present, and these will be evaluated in the present. Hence, educationalcommitments proposed by education academics and policy-makers with aview to bringing about long-term changes in social values, aspirations orbehaviours will be judged against the alternatives by those personstargeted, in the present, in the light of their existing values, aspirations andbehaviours. Economics provides a sophisticated set of tools for makingsuch judgements with rigour. Whatever the ultimate philosophical, or eventhe long-term economic, reality of the case there will be a tendency forcontemporary economic analysis smoothly to align with contemporary‘common sense’, while educational philosophy may sometimes appearuncomfortably at odds with it.

However, a focus on the issue of how people might become in the futureleads us to ask what scope there might be, within a neoclassical account ofeducation-as-market-good, for the development of the learner. Since theinformation-set best able to inform rational choice within this frameworkmust be that already possessed by the child (or parent), the potential wouldappear to be quite limited. This will not do, because learners do develop.This brings us to the question of how they do so.



THE PLACE OF THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT: INDIVIDUAL

RATIONALITY

As soon as economics is freed from narrow, exclusive neoclassicaldefinitions, and our wider definition adopted, engagement with philoso-phical questions becomes more common. The reason for this seems to beparticularly linked to the question of human becoming, and so toeducation or, at least, to learning. For mainstream economists, it is apowerful and useful—if limiting—working assumption that the structureof human preferences remains constant. For educationalists andphilosophers it is usually really rather important that such preferencesare to some degree malleable.

In fact, at any particular moment in time both these assumptions will betrue. Particular values or behaviours may be so entrenched as to beinescapable axioms of today’s policy decisions; and yet, at the same time,all the evidence tells us that even these most unquestioned andunquestionable features of the social landscape mutate over time. Thatsocial dispositions will change is one of the few things of which we can beabsolutely certain. How they change matters for our future selves, and forour children: but it also matters now because we want to believe that ourlives have lasting results. One possible perspective on this situation is thatof Amartya Sen.

Sen rejects mainstream (i.e. predominantly neoclassical) economictheory specifically on the grounds that it associates rational choice witheither internal consistency of choice, the maximisation of self-interest ormaximisation in general. The first of these he finds inadequate on thegrounds that it permits quite contradictory schemes of choice to besimultaneously equally rational. Of the other two, he writes: ‘Rationalitycannot be just an instrumental requirement for the pursuit of some given—and unscrutinized—set of objectives and values’ (Sen, 2002, p. 39).Rather, the primary deployment of rationality in human affairs must be anormative one. Rational choice will seek to favour what is better andbanish what is worse. However, it should not be imagined that thisprescription will necessarily help us to predict the choices people actuallymake. Nor should we suppose that rational choice will necessarily beovertly public-spirited rather than self-interested, or collaborative ratherthan competitive. All that rationality on these terms requires is that theperson doing the choosing subjects their choices to self-scrutiny.Opportunities to choose, not only by selecting from a set of availableoptions, but also by developing ‘metarankings’ (p. 12)—that is,preferences about what to prefer—are essential to freedom, and soultimately to the ‘capability approach’ that Sen advocates. Hence,freedom, rationality and capability are conjoined by a process—iterativereflection on the worth of things—that might reasonably be described aslearning, and could conceivably be serviced by particular forms ofeducation. However, such reflection is an individual matter.

How individual lives might be improved through education is a properconcern of philosophy of education, even if it is reached, as in this case,

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from a starting point in economics. Coming from this starting pointreminds us that change starts with a given learner, embedded in aparticular context characterised by its own peculiar opportunities andconstraints. For a given teacher-pupil relationship this seems likely to bevaluable. Within philosophy of education the possible implications ofSen’s overall approach have been carefully explored by Saito, whoconcludes: ‘the kind of education that best articulates the concept of Sen’scapability approach seems to be the one that makes people autonomousand, at the same time, develops people’s judgement about capabilities andtheir exercise’ (Saito, 2003, p. 29).

It should not concern us too much that this prescription is capable ofsitting quite happily within a neoclassical utility-maximising framework,since as Hodgson (2006) demonstrates, at its most fundamental such aframework is inherently non-falsifiable. More significantly, however, itreturns us to our earlier question about the possible importance ofcollective actions and plans.

THE PLACE OF THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT: COLLECTIVE

RATIONALITY VERSUS THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS

Proposals for social improvement through education frequently emphasisetheir commitment to, and indeed their exemplification of, rationality (see,for example, Kemmis and Fitzclarence, 1986; Brown and Lauder, 2001).This version of rationality is similar to that proposed at the level of theindividual by Sen to the extent that it embraces a normative basis.However, and as we have seen, for Sen determination of the nature of thatnormative basis is itself a matter properly entrusted to the rationalindividual, while for much socially-focused educational writing acommitment to the achievement of social justice forms the only possibleunderpinning of rational, progressive action. We might ask, again usingeconomic ideas, whether societies are in fact amenable to rationalplanning of this kind.

Pennington (2008) discusses the implications of Hayekian economicand philosophical thinking for one instance of such planning, what aims toproduce ‘sustainable development’. Sustainable development is a conceptthat has implications for education and is typically understood by itsadvocates to bring together issues of both environmental conservation andsocial justice (Scott and Gough, 2003). Pennington writes that, for Hayek:

If social wholes are indeed more than the sum of their individual partsthen it follows logically that none of the constituent elements even whenacting in an organised group via institutions such as the state can evercomprehend all of the factors that contribute to the advance of the whole. . . a reliance on spontaneous order is preferable precisely because itfacilitates a higher level of rationality at the macro-social level thanwould be possible were the process of societal development to becontrolled by a designing mind or group . . . For Hayek, incrementalchange via competitive testing of alternate practices is able to draw on a



much wider division of knowledge than socialist attempts to ‘reconstruct’cultural practices, whole cloth (Pennington, 2008, p. 97).

A number of important points arise from this analysis. We can see thatHayek’s overall focus is social progress. To this extent, he shares theperspectives of not only socialist planners but also of all those who wouldseek to use government fiscal and regulatory interventions to ‘correctmarket failures’. However, beyond this point Hayek is as much at oddswith mainstream neoclassical economics as he is with socialist centralplanning, since these both typically claim to be able to determine ‘right’ or‘best’ allocative arrangements, and this presupposes: firstly, that someonehas, or can acquire the knowledge to do so, and; secondly, that there existssome optimum equilibrium position to serve as a target. In fact, Hayekargues, knowledge is both diffuse and dynamic. Individuals are embeddedin an overall social context that is constantly changing and of which theycan only ever comprehend a small part—whomsoever they may be, andeven if they collaborate with others. There is plenty of scope for learning,and perhaps very little, beyond the straightforward transmission ofknowledge and skills, for education.

However, an alternative way of thinking about the collective goals ofsocieties, and the possible place of education in achieving morallysatisfactory, practically operable change within them, is offered by some‘institutional’ economists (Hodgson, 2002, 2004, 2006). This is a traditionthat is firmly located within pragmatist philosophical thought. Itacknowledges a direct descent from Thorstein Veblen and a debt to JohnDewey. It is consistent, in its explicitly Darwinian stance, with thephilosophy of, for example, Richard Rorty (1999). Pragmatism continuesto be influential in the philosophy of education, for example in the recentwork of Andrew Stables (2005).

Crucial to the institutionalist position is the recognition of emergentproperties at ontologically distinct levels. Hence, it is possible, and indeednormal, for institutions to be reconstitutive of individuals, since they aremore than the sum of the individuals that comprise them. In this respect,Hodgson (2004, p. 328) quotes Frank Knight as follows:

Wants are usually treated as the fundamental data, the ultimate drivingforce in economic activity, and in the short-run view of problems this isscientifically legitimate. But in the long run it is just as clear that wantsare dependent variables, that they are largely caused and formed byeconomic activity. The case is somewhat like that of a river and itschannel; for the time being the channel locates the river, but in the longrun it is the other way round (Knight, 1924, pp. 262–3).

Here we have, in the most brutally brief of summaries, a developedeconomic view of the individual in society, not as an original andunexplained determining force, but as an emergent, active intellect alreadyengaged with ongoing events. Education is not only possible, but alsounavoidable, as individual learners are inducted into shared social

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traditions and habits. At the same time they retain the potential for rationalcritique of these traditions and habits. My point is not that all philosophyof education should concern itself with these possibilities, or with theapparent Hayekian lack of them, but simply that these are matters to whichany complete philosophy of education might want to attend.

THE FUTURE IS ANOTHER COUNTRY . . .

As we have seen, one way of thinking about the relationship between howpeople are now and how they might become in the future, while retainingkey economic insights, is to modify (or abandon) the assumptions of aneoclassical approach in one way or another. An alternative is to retain thecore assumptions of such an approach along with the analytical powerthey confer, but to detach them philosophically from long-term socialdecision-making processes so that they become, in effect, a vehicle for theconduct of social thought-experiments. The results of such experimentscan then be considered in the fuller context of normative policyconsiderations. An example will serve to illustrate this possibility.

Le Grand (2003) considers changing preferences over time in the contextof individual savings and insurance decisions. In common with educationaimed at personal and social development, both savings and insurancerequire a cost-bearing commitment in the present in order to generate animproved range of options under future circumstances that cannot be fullypredicted. This is simply to say that current education takes place in acontext of expectations, hopes and (sometimes) fears for the future; and thatthe future, when it arrives and for better or worse, will be partly formedfrom educational consequences. There should be no confusion here, onterminological grounds, with Freire’s concept of ‘banking education’.

Drawing on the work of Derek Parfit (1984) and John Broome (1985),Le Grand develops a case that persons in the present may be said to treattheir future selves as though they were different people. Further, thisbehaviour cannot be said to be irrational, since what connects the identityof a person aged nine to the identity of that same person when aged ninetyis a set of psychological links that become increasingly attenuated as theage gap increases. Hence, present decisions cannot be expected to takeproper, rational account of future potentialities. Le Grand writes:

This in turn means that there is a possibility of market failure. For there isnow a group of people who are not participating in the market but who areaffected by the decisions made by those who are participating in it. Anindividual’s future self is a person who is directly affected by thatperson’s current decisions in the marketplace. A 65-year-old may be poorbecause of myopic decisions taken by her 25-year-old self. Hence the 25-year-old is imposing costs on the 65-year-old through her decisions; butthe 65-year-old has no say in those decisions (Le Grand, 2003, p. 90).

Hence, argues Le Grand, there is a straightforward economic case forcorrective intervention by the state. Such action might or might not have



educational components, but it certainly has educational implications, sincethe form of education indicated for young people who have been to someextent relieved of direct responsibility for their future selves would seem tobe necessarily quite different from that indicated by the assumptions ofSen’s individual rationality, Hayek’s ‘spontaneous order’, or Hodgson’saccount of institutions and habit-formation. In short, there are questionshere that are at once educational, philosophical and economic.

CONCLUSION: CO-EVOLUTIONARY GRIDLOCK AND HUMAN

WELLBEING

All the approaches discussed above engage in one way or another with afundamental difficulty noted earlier: that future potentialities can onlypossibly be evaluated in the light of (somebody’s) current knowledge anddispositions.

An analogous difficulty—itself not without possible implications foreducation—has been identified in relation to human societies andenvironmental change by Richard Norgaard (1984, 1994). Readers willrecall that it was suggested earlier that economics might be thought of asthe study of how human beings survive through productive interactionwith their environment.

Norgaard proposes that the relationship between a society and itsenvironment is a ‘co-evolutionary’ one in which each element iterativelyshapes the other. Human actions over time bring about changes in thephysical surroundings that people inhabit, that is, in the environment.These new surroundings call forth adjustments in social arrangements andmeanings, which prompt actions resulting in further environmentaladaptation; and so on. We should note two points in passing. Firstly,while this view attaches great significance to the social meanings that areattached to the natural world, it is neither anti-realist nor anti-scientific.When changes occur they do so in obedience to natural scientific laws,both known and unknown. However, since our knowledge of the workingsof both the natural and social worlds is objectively incomplete, co-evolutionary changes in both the environment and society are unlikely tobe fully predictable. Secondly, there is no prospect of an equilibrium orfinal state. Norgaard’s account of the core problem this situation creates isas follows:

The coevolutionary perspective explains why options are disturbinglylimited in the short run; culture has determined environment andenvironment has determined culture. At each point in time there is anear gridlock of coevolved knowledge, values, technologies, socialorganization, and natural environment. Yet over the longer run weapproach an equally disturbing situation of nothing determining anything,that all will change in unpredictable ways. Where we will be in the futureis determined by neither today’s culture nor environment alone but bythese and a host of unpredictable future factors. Yet come the future, neargridlock will prevail (Norgaard, 1994, p. 46).

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This notion of ‘co-evolutionary gridlock’ seems useful in thinking aboutthe relationship between philosophy of education and economics. This canbe seen by reference to a particular issue—human wellbeing—that is ofestablished interest to philosophers of education (White, 2007), philoso-phers more widely (Seel, 1997), economists and others (Sumner, 2006). Itsmost commonly used measure at present is economic, but this is subject tochallenge (McGillivray and Clarke, 2006).

In contemporary policy discourse this notion of ‘wellbeing’ occupies aplace somewhat similar to that of environmental protection. Neitherconcept has a conclusively determined set of parameters. Both are subjectto repeated definition and re-definition of basic terminology, are treatedvery differently by different disciplinary specialisms, and sometimes giverise to demands (of one sort or another) for educational change. Wellbeingis clearly the larger concept of the two, however, since any meaningfulconception of wellbeing cannot be located within a catastrophicallydegraded environment, whereas there is no obvious reason in principlewhy the environment might not flourish—in terms of biodiversity, forexample—under circumstances in which human wellbeing was severelyattenuated.

White elaborates the concept of wellbeing, and the role of education andthe philosophy of education within it, in the following terms:

Wellbeing is not to be understood in terms of individual desire-satisfaction, even where the desires are both informed and of majorsignificance in a person’s life. If it is not a subjective matter in this sense,neither is it an objective matter of deriving it from features of our humannature. The truth is more subtle. Wellbeing is still desire-dependent, butthe desires in question are not those of an individual, but of a loosecollection of people (White, 2007, p. 25).

White goes on to characterise the role of education in wellbeing as thefacilitation, between individual members of society, of conversations andother forms of communication that have the effect of developing thoseshared ‘desires’ while enhancing and extending participation in that ‘loosecollection of people’. Education’s unique contribution is central to awellbeing project that is developmental, inclusive and democratic. Thisproject values people for what they are, but also is ambitious about whatthey might become. As we have seen, there is a tension here that can betheorised in a number of ways.

However, the notion of co-evolutionary gridlock—which we might seeas a broad description of the problem these theorisations address—reminds us that our current state of wellbeing is a product of our currentknowledge, understandings and practices, and will be understood,evaluated and challenged in the light of these. And yet, over time,everything will change—even perhaps, in time, those values we presentlyhold most dear. Broadly speaking, the economics of the market providesparticular insights into how things are. Philosophy requires us to considerhow we would like things to become, and here the philosophy of education



has particular significance in respect of matters such as human wellbeingwhere, as in White’s characterisation, education and learning are central tothe process of change. However, co-evolution also suggests that anynotion of an ideal end-state is a chimera. Education can, therefore, onlyultimately be about supporting a journey; about travelling hopefully, neverarriving. Wider accounts from economics will sometimes be helpful inmanaging progress, so responding to Le Grand’s already-mentionedcomplaint that philosophers pay too little attention to ‘practicalimplications’ with an acknowledgement that each and every ‘next step’will have consequences in the here-and-now.

White’s notion of a philosophy of education that facilitates thedevelopment of shared desires is suggestive and positive: but the pursuitof desires—even shared ones—impacts differently upon the circumstancesof different individuals, and changes, over time, the parameters withinwhich desires are formulated and the means of achieving them devised.For this reason, philosophers of education are also likely to find anengagement with alternative conceptions of the origins of economicbehaviour worthwhile, even as they maintain their critiques of thenarrowness of much contemporary educational-economic modelling.

Correspondence: Stephen Gough, Department of Education, University ofBath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

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