The Politics of Education or the Education of Politics?: Milbank on 'paideia'

There's got to be more to education than merely:

1. A way to get some paper qualifications to get a job to get $$$ (whether for ourselves or for the "prosperity of our country"...etc)


2. A way of teaching obedience (how to be "good citizens")


3. A place to keep people off the streets ("what else would they do if they weren't here?")

Rather, the practice of educating is very important to the proper functioning of a just social order. Education should therefore be a process of (a) imparting a craft and (b) opening up possibilities for its use for the common good - all in anticipation of the Kingdom of God.

So the idea that education teaches discrete skills to individuals who then choose what they want to do with those skills is, in my mind, misleading. The dominant capitalist [meta]narrative exerts disproportionate power over "choices" and the people making them.

Critical pedagogy is thus an act of love formed by a vision of a community anchored in justice and peace - a place quite different from the current conceptions of 'Liberal Democracy' that we're bombing around the world. It's more like a "democracy to come", glimpses here and there but always still arriving (Derrida).

Milbank makes an excellent point:

"...democracy will collapse into sophistic manipulation as Plato taught, if it is not balanced by the element of ‘education in time’ which requires a certain constantly self-cancelling hierarchy.


The hierarchies of liberalism are in fact absolute spatial hierarchies of fixed power: one can climb up the ladder of power but only to displace someone else. The purpose of control here is simply utiltity and not the sharing of excellence.


By contrast, the genuine spiritual hierarchy is a hierarchy that for human spiritual beings is endemic to time: in which pupil may overtake master and yet there should be no jealousy by the hierarch of the potential of the temporarily subordinate, because excellence is intrinsically shareable.


Today, especially in Britain, all education is being subordinated to politics and economics. But a Catholic view should teach just the reverse: all politics and economics should be only for the sake of paideia."

John Milbank, 'Liberality and Liberalism'