Record: Harriet Pattison, “How To Desire Differently: Home Education as a Heterotopia” in Journal of Philosophy of Education 49, no. 4 (November 2015): 619-637 [Available Here]
Summary: Pattison, many of whose other works have been reviewed on this blog, here offers a more philosophical and less empirical defense of informal learning than is usual for her. She begins with a brief orientation to home education in the U.K., noting especially the infamous Badman review and the controversies it precipitated. From there she focuses in on one particular type of home education–what we in the States often call “unschooling,” but is frequently called in the U.K. “autonomous education.” She traces its roots to John Holt, who combined the child-centered, activity-oriented pedagogy of Rousseau and Dewey with a more pessimistic view of adult oversight of children.
Parents and advocates who celebrate children’s autonomous approach to learning often have difficulty being understood by outsiders, especially government officials, who have a different philosophy of education. Pattison’s article here is an attempt to explain the philosophical distinctives of autonomous education in the hopes that doing so will increase public understanding of and tolerance for the practice. She especially wants to get beyond debates about which approach, home education or institutional schooling, is “better,” hoping that we can instead understand that the two are just “different,” not really capable of being compared.
Pattison spends a good bit of time deconstructing this “better” discourse. Its origin is understandable, as parents and the broader society want to do what is best for children. Efforts to figure out what that is has led to the current regime of standardized testing, in which home education advocates are sometimes caught up, claiming legitimacy for the practice based on test scores of home educated children. But making this move is bad for home education, thinks Pattison, because it takes the curriculum and values of the school and makes them normative for home education as well. She wants instead an abandonment of “all the benchmarks, hallmarks, and ultimately conceptions and discourse of schooling.” (p. 625)
Rather than better, Pattison wants us to think of home education as different. She here draws on Michel Foucault’s notion of a “heterotopia.” The concept seeks not a single greatest possible civilization (a “utopia’), but delights in many different kinds of practices. Pattison in particular thinks three aspects of Foucault’s “heterotopia” concept apply to autonomous home education.
First, unlike utopias, which don’t exist, heterotopias can and do. Home education may not take place in a recognized building, but the communities and learning experiences associated with home education are alive and well. Especially for autonomous educators, deviation from the institutional standard can lead to charges of truancy or other attacks by the dominant discourse. Heterotopias, being actual, can be perceived as threats.
A second aspect of Foucauldian heterotopias that home education often exhibits is an association with life crises. Very frequently families who home educate have chosen this path because of a traumatic or otherwise critical experience faced by a child in the institutional school. The home becomes an “elsewhere,” providing sanctuary from the domain of trauma.
Finally, and most controversially, heterotopias often possess alternate regimes of truth to those of the dominant society. Germany forbids home education for this very reason, notes Pattison. Home education can and does allow heterodox views to be passed on in relative isolation from those of the social mainstream. Pattison recognizes that this may be more than the broader society, for all its lip service paid to tolerance, is willing to bear.
After laying all of this out Pattison engages in a more theoretical discussion of how heterotopian rhetoric must often spend a great deal of effort trying to deconstruct the dominant discourse. The dominant regime of truth is often so thick and pervasive that it is simply assumed as definitional, making practices that are outside of it seem incoherent or even demented. Those who might want to deconstruct this oppressive dominant paradigm must use the categories of that paradigm to even attempt a challenge! So for home education, attempts to legitimize the practice cannot but try to do so by tacitly adopting the very standards and definitions of institutional schooling, which is something Pattison does not wish to do. She recognizes, however, that there is no alternative. She ends up recommending borrowing terms and concepts but redefining them according to autonomous education’s principles: “education which seeks to locate itself on the trajectory of difference has no choice but to acknowledge its common starting point with the mainstream and to move strategically away from that point.” (p. 634)
Pattison ends with an impassioned and eloquent plea that the mainstream give home educators the time and space to construct their heterotopia. She reminds readers that institutional schooling faces many problems, for at least a few of which home education might eventually offer some plausible solutions. But for that to happen those in charge of the educational ecosphere must keep in check their desire for order and allow for freedom and diversity. Similarly, educational philosophy and educational research ought to tolerate different answers to questions like “how should education be measured” and “what is a good education?” Tolerance for diversity today could lead to innovative breakthroughs tomorrow.
Appraisal: I enjoyed reading this unique contribution from Harriet Pattison. Her usual rhetorical flair and clarity shine through. I am somewhat surprised that a philosophy journal would publish it in its current form, for it doesn’t really contain a lot of actual philosophy. Pattison does a great job setting up the philosophical issue–the problem for alternative forms of education of speaking about what they do in ways that don’t undermine their own integrity by using language created in other contexts for other, even contradictory aims. Great set up. But the solution was, for my tastes at least, expressed too simplistically. The insight that words and concepts originally created in one context can take on new meanings is great. A scholarly example or two, perhaps taken from the history of education, perhaps not, would have been appropriate. I think, for example, of the way a word like “dean” has been transformed over the centuries from its origins in the Roman military, to its extension to Catholic and later some Protestant church hierarchies, to its current use in colleges and universities today. If Pattison is going to delve into Derridian lingustics, I’d like to see some Derridian erudition and wordplay!
A second, empirical point. Pattison (and her longtime collaborator Alan Thomas) clearly prefers the more radical home education pedagogies. I wonder if her descriptive distinction in this article between “better” and “different” is perhaps too much informed by her own normative commitments. Rather than pitting school-like homeschoolers against unschool-like autonomous educators, would it not be more accurate to think of the ecology of home education in the U.K. and elsewhere as more of a continuum between those two extremes, with many if not most families existing somewhere in between? If we want to really do justice to the difference that is home education it seems to me that we should never reduce the differences among homeschoolers to a false binary. I’m sure Pattison would agree with me, for in other work she is very clear about the diversity within the homeschooling world. In this text, however, she pretty clearly think that her side, the side of difference, is better than the school-like homeschoolers.
Milton Gaither
Messiah College