The ‘feverish’ society and the aims of education

Marianna Papastephanou

Department of Education, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

Abstract

Borrowing the Platonic metaphor of a ‘feverish’ society, this article discusses the argument that a critical stance toward our contemporary realities makes a revisiting of educational aims more urgent. The article begins with how aims have been tackled in educational philosophy. The head-on educational-philosophical engagement with aims-talk has been diminishing. There have been socio-political developments unfavourable to aims-talk, related to hegemonic, neoliberal mindsets. Neoliberalism discourages the theorization of educational aims that challenges its conventional ‘wisdom’. There have also been philosophical reasons for the decline in the frequency of aims-talk, related to some postmodern positions that combat modern assumptions of ‘ultimate’ aims and register the possibility of an ‘education without aims’. Against the tendency to under-theorize educational aims, the article critically explores why our contemporary societies may be described as ‘feverish’ and what this entails for theorizing educational aims. My main claim is that the educational aims-talk should be reinvigorated and the related fault lines rethought from a more enlarged viewpoint.

Keywords

Neoliberalism; postmodernism; instrumentalism; normativity; ultimate aims; Plato

Introduction

The study of the aims of education, ‘especially its ultimate aims, is a primary and challenging topic in the philosophy of education’ (Haji & Cuypers, 2011, p. 543). In the years since R. S. Peters’ acclaimed discussions of the aims of education (e.g., Peters, 1973) several educational-philosophical theories have tackled this topic. Diverse normative notions have been recommended as main or ultimate educational aims. Among other normative notions, autonomy (Winch, 1996), well-being (Marples, 1999), wisdom (Ozoliņš, 2015), growth (promoted especially by a pragmatist, Deweyan strand), critical thinking (Hare, 1999) and phronetic judgment (Curren, 2014) have been major candidates for the highly esteemed position of the ultimate educational aim(s). Related debates are marked by tensions and complexities. For instance, many such debates revolve around whether educational aims are intrinsic or extrinsic to schooling, context-dependent or overarching and individualized or all-encompassing. Overall, the educational aims-talk has been characterized as perennial, inconclusive and replete with intricacies.

However, some developments in recent decades have diminished the interest in the aims of education. Among these developments is the socio-political one of the growing marketization and reification of education that is unfavourable to aims-talk. Hegemonic, neoliberal interpretations of education and society do not promote the thematization of educational aims (Noddings, 2013). Another development that will be discussed in this article as one deterring from aims-talk is philosophical: the utilization of postmodern sensibilities against rigid rational planning, fixed ends and fundamental purposes. The related approach challenges the modern talk about ‘ultimate’ or ‘overriding’ aims and explores even the possibility of an education without aims (Standish, 1999), or, as I interpret Paul Standish, the possibility, perhaps necessity, of letting educational aims operate in non-systematized, ‘opaque, negative and oblique ways’ (Standish, 1999, p. 47). While acknowledging the value of Standish’s points that initially encouraged that development, I will argue that one-sided adherence to this development, at the expense of aims-talk, leads educational philosophers unwittingly to making common cause with neoliberals.

The present article singles out only these two developments that have affected the current educational-philosophical status of aims-talk. Then, by using the Platonic metaphor of a ‘feverish’ society,^[1] I deploy the argument that, though aims-talk is important for any place and era, contemporary realities within a ‘feverish’ world make a broader critical discussion of educational aims all the more pressing. However, I am using Plato’s ‘feverish society’ metaphor only as a socio-political diagnostic, and not as a rhetorical power mechanism for justifying any of the non-democratic Platonic normative guidelines about the direction of needed changes of the existing society. That is, my debt to Plato is limited to this interesting medical metaphor that heightens our sense of what is wrong with consumerism; it is not extended to the solutions he offers. I will argue that it is precisely the current condition of the global society that, as a wake-up call, invites an urgent revisiting of the aims that have guided education and have made it subservient to the feverish society. Nevertheless, the article suggests caution concerning how medical metaphors (and ‘feverish’ is one such metaphor) operate in discourses and what responsiveness to contemporary challenges might be more appropriate. The article concludes with some thoughts on some presuppositions and lines along which aims-talk could be reinvigorated and couched in different, less polarizing terms.

Aims and the philosophy of education

Education operates with aims as its organizing principles. Educational aims do not just reflect ‘the specific espoused intentions’ (Devine, 2017, p. 96) of those who make decisions on educational policy issues. As Nesta Devine’s (2017) Foucauldian argument goes, educational aims also reflect ‘the ideas that suffuse a society at any one point in time’ (p. 96). Furthermore, they reflect, as I see it, what a discourse approves and praises as the ‘good thing to do’, regardless of whether this discourse truly advances this ‘good’ or just uses it nominally or as a power mechanism. At any rate, because education has a normative character (Haji & Cuypers, 2011; Katz, 2010) it is teleological, that is, aims-directed. Education involves teleological rather than merely communicative action.^[2] It is oriented not only to mutual understanding but also to shaping people, societies and realities along specific ideal, directive and regulative lines. Any attempt to redefine education as ateleological would de-politicize education. It would overlook education’s inherently political and interventionist character. It would mystify the role of education in distributions of power within societies and the political visions for a future world that education harbours and serves implicitly or explicitly. Any such attempt would miss that an aim-less education would only be a façade, a rhetorical smokescreen that obscures educational operations in any real world and renders education crypto-normative (Papastephanou, 2021b).

I have just used Habermasian conceptual tools to argue that education comprises, and largely relies on, teleological action. However, educational aims-talk, being a deliberative effort to reach understanding, largely relies on communicative action. Therefore, education always has aims of a kind, and educational aims-talk itself aims to thematize and critique the aims that guide education. Any education has, from antiquity (Greek or other) to the present, aimed at something and has had a set of implicit or explicit aims. Educational philosophy has, also since antiquity, grappled with normative issues of paideia and with what aims a good paideia should advance. Education involves teleological action and educational aims-talk involves communicative action. The two kinds of action connect on the question about what aims would serve an optimal normative status of education as a worthwhile thing. In this section, I will show that neoliberal agendas neglect this connection and postmodern educational-philosophical agendas avoid it.^[3]

Mapping the whole philosophical terrain concerning educational aims is certainly beyond the scope and confines of this article. Thus, in what follows, let us see some main views, tensions and developments that have affected the educational aims-talk. One view about educational aims, highly influential until the eighties, is the progressivist, ‘child-centred’ theory that ‘education aims at the pupil’s “self-realisation” or “growth”’ (White, 1978, p. 5). This view is, to a degree, compatible, I maintain, with a humanist education aiming at the fullest possible development of the pupil’s potentialities. Another major view, equally influential in previous decades, has been that which expects from education to foster ‘the pupil’s rationality or knowledge or intellect, not primarily for the sake of any extrinsic purpose, but for its own sake’ (White, 1978, p. 5). For many years, tensions have been investigated concerning whether: education should serve the pupil’s or the society’s interests; educational aims can be internalized by the pupil; and economic aims are external to pupil-centred aims or compatible with the nurturing of the pupil’s moral autonomy (Brown, 1983, p. 56). For example, educating with an eye toward making the life of the child better for the child is different from ‘educating with an eye toward making some world intrinsically better’ (Haji & Cuypers, 2011, p. 554). This is because ‘a life that is highly valuable in itself for the one who lives it may have very little to do with the overall intrinsic value of a world; it may have low extrinsic value” (p. 554). A more recent and general tension concerns whether education should be treated as an intrinsic good, instead of being instrumentalized. This tension is noticeable in much current philosophy of education (e.g., Todd, 2022), although its relevance to educational aims is not head-on addressed.

Thought through to their implications, such tensions show that not all educational aims (even very worthy ones if examined separately) are compatible with one another or of equal normative value if seen from an overall prism. Thus, aims may need to be hierarchized and prioritized (this is per se a very difficult operation, carrying its own risks and problems). Some may merit priority or treatment as overriding or ultimate aims. ‘Overriding’ is the aim whose normative standard is deemed most important; namely, ‘of all the normative prescriptions or “oughts”’, the ‘ought’ of the overriding aim ‘takes precedence’ (Haji & Cuypers, 2011, p. 548). When one aim does not resonate well with another, ‘when its “ought” requirements conflict with the requirements of other “oughts”’, the ‘”ought” requirements’ of the overriding aim ‘are most weighty’ (p. 548).

However, in reality, the aims which become overriding do not always reflect a clearly defensible normative priority; often, the prioritized normative standards are reified, economic and profit-making. Since ‘the educational system that we created at the turn of the 20th century to accommodate industrialisation and urbanisation has acquired a life of its own’ (Katz, 2010, p. 106), it is no wonder that economic aims remain regrettably overriding and supported by the system’s consistent resistance to change. The reduction of educational aims ‘to training and skilling individuals to perform needed functions in the workforce is simplistic and ignores the complexity of human needs and aspiration’ (Ozoliņš, 2015, p. 872). Furthermore, precisely by ignoring such complexities, the education that is thus produced perpetuates, in a vicious circle, the global reliance on reductive and simplistic educational normativity. For instance, as Michael Katz (2010) remarks, in the U.S., education largely aims ‘to do what it has done so well for the past century: namely, to socialise students to schooling, to sort them by their differing educational achievements, and to assign them to their appropriate slots within a given social structure’ (p. 106). Evidently, for such an educational culture and policy, any aims-talk is expendable because what education should strive for is answered once and for all. Reopening the discussion about aims would risk the predominance of the already settled economic priorities and the neoliberal ideality that has intensified them from the mid-eighties onwards.

Until recently, however, as Nel Noddings (2013) reminds us, the ‘aims-talk figured prominently in educational theory, and most education systems prefaced their curriculum documents with statements of their aims’ (p. 331). ‘Looking at contemporary educational policymaking’ in our neoliberal^[4] world one realizes that the aims-talk ‘might be considered a missing dimension in the educational conversation’ (p. 331). This may seem paradoxical, since neoliberals are often obsessed with regulation, fixed ends, rigid goal-setting and audits monitoring the implementation of pre-set goals.^[5] Consistency on neoliberals’ part would entail their being also obsessed with the thematization of aims. Neoliberals fail to see this inconsistency in their position. Yet, I think, this arguably paradoxical neoliberal stance may indicate a deep-down anti-democratic and anti-deliberative dogmatism. As Regina Queiroz (2018, p. 231) sums up the relevant criticisms, neoliberalism is considered anti-democratic; inter alia, it rules out any opposition to those neoliberal tenets that chime with (presumably) inevitable market realities and with the unrestrictive promotion of ‘selfish personal interest’ (p. 232). In line with the more general and inherent assumption of neoliberalism that there is no alternative (TINA) (Queiroz, 2018) to the status-quo, neoliberals assume that alternative visions will only worsen the world. Thus, neoliberals predictably consider educational aims settled along neoliberal mindsets. They avoid the thematization of aims because it would challenge their conventional construal of what makes an education worthwhile and what kind of social and public life should be educationally sustained. In other words, neoliberals assume that the ‘worthy’ aims of education are inevitable and unquestionably compatible with the neoliberal worldview; hence, any thematization of aims would only be toward controversializing and contesting the neoliberal tenets about the purpose of education. Therefore, instead of re-opening theoretical debates over aims, the neoliberal worldview prefers the practical intrusion and anchoring of its systemic administrative and economic logics in the educational sphere. Even if one assumes that there is no neoliberal paradox but only dogmatism, still the neoliberal view is highly problematic and even contradictory (since it valorizes purposive rationality and simultaneously disregards purposes).

The implicit rationale of many who avoid aims-talk is that the issue of educational aims is already resolved by the (neo-)liberal philosophical anthropology that underpins the ‘public-choice’ approach to education: the human is a rational egoist. This approach ‘propounds that the market will always find the optimal solution, including in education, and that education itself is simply a competitive market for student performance, or specific marketable forms of knowledge’ (Devine, 2017, p. 100). The underlying assumption is that ‘there is no specific “aim”’ of education; for, the aim ‘is always that of the individual as they enter the market, so the aims are potentially multiple’. However, this pluralist open-endedness of aims is only a façade: because the individual is thought to be ‘always characterised by self-interest and rationality the aim will always reflect the rational self-interest of that person’ (p. 100). The assumption that there is no specific aim obscures the normative character of education and the fact that, even if one denies them, aims continue to ground education and one’s talk about education. Keeping one’s normative outlook invisible, encrypted so to speak, does not make one’s claims non-normative; it makes them crypto-normative (Papastephanou, 2021b). Betty Sichel (1969) revealed this educational crypto-normativity most tellingly when she criticized educational philosophers’ giving priority to ‘short range ends’ and to method-talk over aims-talk: ‘though this recent focusing on means and method has proved worthwhile and even provocative, there does seem to be implicit in all of these educational philosophical writings a common thread of generalized aims for education’ (p. 18). ‘The fact that these various philosophers deny the presence of an ultimate aim is of minimal importance’ because ‘mere verbal denial is rather hollow if the actual writing is infused with the very concept denied’ (p. 18). Importantly, Sichel’s objection is valid not only concerning philosophers’ claims but any person’s or group’s claim.

Such crypto-normativity ends up serving anti-democratic, anti-deliberative dogmatism. Niclas Rönnström (2016) has pertinently discussed how, within the globalist, economic or New Public Management agenda, democratic communicative rationality is translated into market rationality. Neoliberal voices diminish communicative reason or collective agency. Such is, for instance, the implication of neoliberal positions like Michael Wohlgemuth’s (2005) that market transactions can effectively cover the ground of communicative engagement in the public sphere. Wohlgemuth reduces or translates deliberative-democratic normativity into functionally analogous economic operations.^[6] His thesis is that ‘market competition is more “deliberative” than politics’ because ‘the market process generates more information about available social problem solutions and their comparative performance and about people’s preferences, ideas, and expectations when that information is spontaneously created, disseminated, and tested’ (p. 84). Instead of maintaining the time-honoured economist opposition of ‘commutative action’ and ‘communicative action’, Wohlgemuth (p. 84) posits that the former contains the latter; in this way, however, communicative action is usurped, appropriated and simultaneously reified by the market worldview. Thought through, this entails disregarding aims-talk as ineffective in the light of market mechanisms, economic arrangements and customer orientations. The rationale is: why aims-talk if we can use other coordination mechanisms and technology?

The widespread ‘neoliberal ethos’ which is ‘reproductive of the existing social order’ (Petrovic & Kuntz, 2018, p. 958) encourages the treatment of the marketization of education as an uncontroversial and good thing, that is, as a normative given beyond deliberation. Some, perhaps many, people in the public sphere endorse neoliberal ideologies or take the neoliberal ‘present context in which we are currently immersed’ (Petrovic & Kuntz, 2018, p. 958) as acceptable or inevitable. Thus, they ignore, rather than worry about, the crypto-normative reliance on aims that obscures how aims underpin, and guide, education. Unsurprisingly, then, ‘some people object to wasting time on aims-talk’ (Noddings, 2013, p. 332). They think that we should ‘avoid such useless talk and get on with the practical business of educating children’ (p. 332). This tendency is growing and becomes pervasive: ‘even teachers talk this way and seem to have little patience for conversations that do not culminate with something useful for tomorrow’s lessons’ (p. 332). One striking and dangerous consequence of promulgated neoliberal educational ideologies is therefore this escalating hostility to aims-talk. Related policies and practices ‘make having a serious, informed discussion on the aims of education less likely to occur’ (Katz, 2010, p. 107). Ironically, it is precisely due to this development that we must thematize aims perhaps more than before. ‘Now more than ever, we need vigorous a dialogue about the aims of education so that we might subject present educational policies to critical scrutiny’ (p. 107).

The decline of the interest in aims-talk, which has affected even educational philosophy, has been noticed much earlier than current theory acknowledges. As early as 1969, Sichel (1969) remarked that educational philosophers ‘seem to be moving towards problems which concern “manner”, “means”, “style”, “method”, while simultaneously seeming to ignore or deprecate aims, whether aims relate to fairly broad concrete aims or to highly generalized, possibly ultimate aims” (p. 17). Even when aims were mentioned, they were ‘never the all-encompassing, glorious aims which permeated so much of previous educational writings’ (p. 17). They were rather ‘short range ends’ (p. 17). Yet, in the seventies, eighties and nineties, the analytic strand of educational philosophy revived the aims-talk, albeit with modern aspirations of producing disinterested scientific educational goal-setting. Outside of educational philosophy, the rise of policy discourses of school effectiveness and performativity tackled the aims of education in reified and instrumental ways.

Reacting to the meta-narrative perspective (within and outside of educational philosophy) that favoured fixed market-based aims or alternative, yet systematized, aims, the postmodern educational-philosophical strand problematized aims-talk per se. Paul Standish’s question is revealing: ‘But must there be aims? The assumption that there must be accords with the principles of rational planning which in many respects characterise the modern world’ (Standish, 1999, p. 40). His answer shows awareness of the risks that a negative response would entail: ‘when education is undertaken on a large, systematic scale—which is, of course, likely to be the case in the late twentieth century—scepticism about the giving of aims may seem like a kind of political irresponsibility’ (p. 40). Chris Winch (1996) indicates why as follows: ‘there is a danger that covert aims’ (p. 33) will then determine education. They ‘will be set by the most influential groups operating both within and outside the system’ (p. 33); ‘because there will have been little or no public debate about aims, it is likely that the interests of some will receive scant attention and may even be harmed’ (p. 33). Winch detects this danger when ‘the major aims of education are not clearly agreed upon’ (p. 33); I detect this danger also when the aims are clearly or crypto-normatively agreed upon and all aims-talk has been terminated.

Standish (1999) grants that ‘surely there must be aims’ (p. 40), but also notes risks in unqualified affirmative responses. He detects inter alia scientism, technicism and prescriptivism in systematic efforts to pin down educational aims. Standish questions the ‘overconfidence that can be generated through excessive faith in such stipulations of aims’ (Yun, 2014, p. 279). Occasionally, educational aims should be inexplicit or even absent; or talk about them may seem inappropriate (Standish, 1999, p. 41).^[7] As I interpret Standish, his exploring the possibility of no aims should not be generalized, ossified and turned into a prescription of avoiding all aims-talk. It combats very specific risks of aims-talk. Yet, Standish’s caution does not characterize the whole trend of which his essay is representative. Though the postmodern trend has offered important insights, it has contributed to the decline of the interest in aims-talk via negativa, that is, by avoiding direct engagement with the aims-talk. With the exception of Devine’s (2017) article that discusses aims head-on from a Foucauldian prism, too little has been written on aims by educational philosophers whose sensibilities are of the postmodern lineage, though, certainly, many of their insights have bearing on aims-talk. Ironically, given that Standish’s problematization of aims-talk meant to combat precisely the then ascending neoliberal fascination with performativity, the postmodern strand ended up making common cause with the neoliberal suppression of aims-talk and the perniciously crypto-normative stance toward educational goal-setting. The ‘failure to engage in vigorous discussion of educational aims has marked the movement toward standardization and high-stakes testing’ (Noddings, 2013, p. 334). It has also marked the hegemonization of the postmodern educational-philosophical discourse. The spectre of neo-conservatism (Habermas, 1990) is again present, though this time not due to relativist conclusions of postmodern orthodoxy but due to a dangerous proximity to the conservative neoliberal outlook on aims and to the very ideology that the postmodern educational-philosophical trend has often combated.

Certainly, the lightheaded attitude toward educational aims may also be due to developments other than those indicated here. Regardless of causality, the point remains that we still live in ‘a society which concentrates on improving educational means and techniques and where educational aims are regarded as metaphysical nonsense and imagery’ (Rosenow, 1976, p. 287). An additional challenge for educational philosophy then is to discuss the ‘meaning of the phenomenon that no serious consideration is given to them [aims]’ (p. 288). Going crypto-normative, namely, ‘eliminating such a discussion does not mean that education has no aims’ (p. 288). It means rather that it is wrongly assumed that these aims are better off not-being discussed at all. As Rosenow^[8] pertinently claims, ‘not only educational aims, but also their absence, is transformed into material power once it takes hold of the masses’ (p. 288).

The ‘feverish’ society

By not being debated, official aims are left intact continuously to operate. One problem of this lack of aims reformulation is ‘that current official aims for education are inadequate to the needs of students in a rapidly changing world’ (Devine, 2017, p. 96). For Noddings (2013) too, the reopening of aims-talk is a response to change: ‘without continual, reflective discussion of aims, education may become a poor substitute for its best vision’ (p. 332). And, ‘just as freedom takes on newer and richer meanings as times change, so must the aims of education change’ (p. 332). Even when aims are ‘stated in fairly constant general terms’, the meaning of such terms takes on ‘new coloring as conditions change’ (p. 332). This responsiveness to change has its own risks (Papastephanou, 2023), one of them being one’s adopting, instead of transforming, the new Zeitgeist. Such answerability to the world of today nevertheless points up the need to rethink educational aims vis-à-vis the contemporary societies. In what follows, borrowing a Platonic metaphor, I describe our contemporary societies as ‘feverish’ and explore what this entails for theorizing educational aims.

In his Republic (372e), Plato contrasts a healthy city marked by a life of simplicity to a ‘feverish city’ (phlegmainousan polis) where luxury and greed reign. The healthy city is not consumerist. Its citizens consume only what is necessary. Material basic needs for shelter, food and clothing are covered through collaborative work. In the early, Golden Age version of the self-sufficient and small-scale city, the citizens’ post-material needs for pleasure and happiness are covered by sociality rather than by luxuries or technology. The addition of luxuries and new technologies to the healthy city turn it into a feverish one. The increased greed for possessions as the city grows bigger raises problems of sustainability and justice, which, if badly managed, will lead to poverty, antagonism, instability and war^[9] with neighbouring cities. To obtain Lebensraum (more land to exploit) the feverish community will seize some of the neighbours’ land, or the neighbours will do so, if they too have surrendered to the ‘endless acquisition of money and overstepped the limit of their necessary desires’ (Stone, 2018, p. 109).

For Plato, ‘the only possible cure for this self-perpetuating fever, which has spread around the world, and made our species generally insane and unjust’ (Novak, 2020, p. 801), lies in the possibility of kings becoming philosophers or vice versa. Much like our current medicalizing patterns of thought (Papastephanou, 2021c), which aspire to find cures for our own feverish society but usually fail in their diagnoses and prescriptions, Plato’s also failed in its recommended remedy (philosophers’ kingdom). his diagnoses hardly suffice to cover the complex causality of socio-political problems.

Moreover, Plato’s metaphor invites questions^[10] about who has the power to dictate what society we should live in. In Plato, philosopher-kings should have the power to drive the city away from feverish and luxurious lifestyles; in our times, global élites, entrepreneurs and established hegemonies push societies toward feverish modes of being. The anti-democratic effects of this become evident if we consider that ‘a deliberative democratic process’, and not market transactions and concomitant authoritarian voices of élites, should ‘be the medium through which utterances and their reasons are evaluated and determined acceptable by the force of the better argument’ (Roth, 2009, p. 51). Contemporary ‘leaders’ of the authoritarian kind monopolize the power to define what should count as a desirable world, and this indeed continues to be a feverish one.^[11] So, my use of Plato’s ‘feverish society’ metaphor neither subscribes to his ‘philosopher-kings’ logic nor does it aspire to introduce a new socio-theoretical explanatory tool. Still, his elaboration on the ‘fever’ helps notice the interesting homologies of the feverish society with the contemporary world. If we cast the philosopher-kings cure aside, we see that important insights might be extracted from Plato’s outlook on humanity and justice as revealed by this metaphor.

The feverish society competes with other such societies, embraces the endless/limitless (apeiron) acquisition of money (chremata) and transgresses (hypervainontes) the limit (oron) of necessary desires (Plato, Republic, 373d). On its part, ‘the globally feverish totalitarian economic neoliberalism of our times, which now is thoughtlessly burning up both the human soul and the earth on which it has flourished’ (Novak, 2020, p. 802) embraces similar priorities and expects education to advance competitive capitalism. It endorses an expansionist philosophical anthropology that interprets greed as a rational stance of selfhood and an inevitable response to constructed and ever-growing needs. The corresponding ideology (and research) typically ‘identifies people with what the world has made of them’, and fails to ‘transcend social reality’ (Rosenow, 1976, p. 284). The corresponding education promotes ‘human capital and a nation’s ability to stand up to global competition’ (Rönnström, 2016, p. 124). Matching all the traits that Plato chastises, the neoliberal politics and governance are not only an expression of the feverish society; they are even promoted as the way to govern in such a society.^[12]

Against the feverish anthropology of competitiveness and limitlessness, of glorifying a borderless world where any limit or boundary is considered just an obstacle, Plato raises ‘walls and laws’ (Papastephanou, 2011).^[13] To determine what is necessary in a healthy society Plato sketches a philosophical anthropology that is radically different from that of the feverish society. It also differs from the neoliberal, and now dominant, homo economicus anthropology. For Plato, ‘rational’ egoistic, optimal and maximized gain is not the human being’s self-evident and justified pursuit, as it is in much current anthropology of our Zeitgeist; on the contrary, it is the outcome of the irrational appetite for more possessions. Insatiable appetites are not essential and unchangeable properties of the rational being. They characterize the irrational cultural existence. Thus, for instance, ‘the unnecessary foods are those that are unhealthy for body and soul [since, for obtaining them, one commits injustices], and the appetite for these foods if restrained and educated from an early age can for the most part be eliminated’ (Stone, 2018, p. 110). By contrast, our currently hegemonic educational aims, which operate at cross-purposes even to our politically correct declarations of environmental sensibilities, support, instead of combating, the consumerist appetitive society. ‘At the beginning of the twenty-first century, educational discussion is dominated by talk of standards, and the reason given for this emphasis is almost always economic’ (Noddings, 2013, p. 337). It is thus ignored that ‘there is more to individual life and the life of a nation than economic superiority’ (p. 338). Regrettably, the feverish society has become normalized and normativized to the point of its perpetuation becoming the ultimate, implicit or explicit, educational aim.

For Plato, the creation of technologies in the healthy city is authorized by the extent to which the new craft, techne or artefact remedies a deficiency that ought to be remedied. ‘For example, the craft of medicine exists in order to heal diseases of the body. A sick body needs something’ (Stone, 2018, p. 110). In our feverish societies, however, more funding and support is obtained by smart bomb technologies or research that produce profitable hi-tech than that obtained by medical efforts to cure, for instance, rare neurodegenerative illnesses.^[14] Contra our own Zeitgeist, new technologies appear in Plato’s healthy city on grounds of true utility and the purposes that they may serve. They are not authorized because they are merely profit-making, achievable or, worse, affirmative of theogenic aspirations of the ‘omnipotent’ human, as we notice from modernity onwards. As Stone convincingly shows, in the Republic, Plato goes beyond the early self-sufficient and isolated state of the healthy society and fashions a possible healthy city (rather than a lost idyllic city) that engages in peaceful commerce with its neighbours and may grow irenically and justly. Indicatively, as the city grows, ‘the same moderation that its citizen s exercise in their consumption of food and other goods’ they apply to all their desires and limit them ‘to what their land can support with the addition of trade’ (Stone, 2018, p. 111). Politically, its justice is apragmosyne, namely, avoiding expansionist meddling in the affairs of other cities (Papastephanou, 2016). Ecologically, the citizens ‘live their lives in relationship to a natural world of which they are a part. Nature provides not only the resources necessary for their well-being, but also establishes the proper limits to their cityʼs growth’ (Stone, 2018, p. 111).

Critical social and political theory has challenged the rise in the temperature of the 20^th century feverish society. For instance, ‘some of the pertinent criticisms of capitalist society in sociological and political theory’ have been re-iterated in the educational philosophy that considered ‘the making of the morally autonomous person within a democratic, participative society’ a central educational aim (Brown, 1983, p. 60). Meanwhile, the appetitive and competitive society’s fever has become a chronic symptom. ‘The crass economic instrumentalism that Peters did not fear’ brings us ‘almost to despair’ (Katz, 2010, p. 107). Instrumentalism has entrenched the idea that ‘schooling’s central purpose is to promote economic competitiveness through the production of skilled workers’ (p. 107). Practically, it has led to ‘the view that teachers and administrators cannot be trusted to perform their educational tasks well but must be critically evaluated through only one mechanism: the performance of their students on high stakes tests’ (p. 107). Our feverish societies ignore ‘analyses of PISA survey results’ that show how and why ‘externally imposed standards do not lead to better results’ (Harðarson, 2018, p. 539). They also ignore that ‘centralised control of school curricula, through imposition of standards and aims’, along with ‘managerialism and policies of distrust’, erode teachers’ professionalism (p. 539).

The feverish condition of society makes a reconsideration of hegemonic educational aims and a re-opening of aims-talk all the more urgent. We must acknowledge that we ‘do not have the luxury to remain silent on educational curricula’ (Haji & Cuypers, 2011, p. 556). Arguing that the ‘policy we have followed for the past two decades…is likely to prove ruinous’, Noddings (2013) regards one’s simply accepting the state and the system as it is and ‘merely pushing it to perform its perceived function more vigorously’ as ‘a dangerous (and lazy) strategy’ (p. 333). Over a decade before the special issue to which the present article contributes, Katz (2010) asked: ‘Why is such dialogue so critical today?’ He gave a straightforward reason: ‘the cultural realities that we confront—increased threats to our environment, global economic interdependency, increasing cultural diversity, rapid technological change, and widespread international terrorism—are serious’ (p. 106). In the years’ hindsight, we see this reason intensifying as the temperatures of our societies and of the planet rise. Katz’s powerful and predictive Zeitdiagnosen (time diagnostics) detected not only the above, glaring ‘ills’ but also subtler pathologies: the world that the future students will inherit will be a world of ‘too much information and too little time to use it well’; in this world, ‘widespread indoctrination may still impede the likelihood of informed political judgment’, and ‘disparities between the rich and poor will threaten the well-being of many groups’ (p. 108).

In the feverish society, when aims-talk is not absent, it is fraught with recurrent uses of the metaphor of health: ‘Since educational change is likely to affect the whole or a large part of a society’, it should be more than ‘just a technical matter for a few experts in education to determine’; ‘if the change is going to be a healthy one’, discussion over it should ‘involve the representatives of all those affected’ (Winch, 1996, p. 34). Also, ‘a healthy education system should have a variety of aims’ suited to implementing ‘different, but not mutually incompatible, goals’ (p. 43). Apart from raising issues of excluding productive tension in favour of compatibility of aims, such medical metaphors also raise concerns about moralist connotations of the binarism of ‘healthy’ versus ‘ill’ and the sickness of the body-politic, connotations that should better be avoided.

However, there is no guarantee that, especially in a feverish society, a dialogue on educational aims will avoid moralistic uses of the ‘health’ metaphor. Moralism underlies aspirations to find the ‘ill’ of the society, identify glaring ‘ills’ and provide the ‘cure’. Educational aims in a feverish society reflect a moralistically medicalized and medicalizing logic. Consider, for instance, the following problem of aims-talk of otherwise well-intentioned thinkers who are critical of the feverish society. ‘The educational aims described by educational philosophers rarely embrace the full range of differences’ that children exhibit (Taylor, 2018, p. 265). ‘Envisioned educational aims have significant consequences for how educational practices, pedagogy, and curricula are conceptualized’; therefore, ‘a particular ability-biased social and epistemic context in which theorizing about educational aims takes place’ (p. 265) will have undesirable consequences well beyond the aims-talk within such a context. In my opinion, the ability-b(i)ased aims-talk perpetuates a prognostic, biologistic and medicalized conception of aims that makes them dependent on outcomes: ability-biased aim-talk relies on ‘predicting the likelihood that a student will benefit from a particular type of education’ (p. 277). It presumes ‘that we have some reliable way to measure and predict who can and who cannot perform learning functions consistent with particular educational aims’ (p. 277). Consequently, this ability-b(i)ased educational goal-setting regulates one’s belonging to an ‘able’ group or not and allocates potential and power accordingly.

Peters argued ‘that education is unlike medicine where there is broad consensus about what it means to be “cured”; no such consensus exists about what constitutes “being educated”’ (Katz, 2010, p. 106). Even if we doubt the extent to which consensus in medicine is as broad as Peters assumed, the point remains that educational problems do not always get resolved by reaching consensus. Pushing this further, I clarify that understanding our world as a feverish one in need of revitalizing aims-talk should not be presented unambiguously as a cure; aims-talk may even end up exacerbating the problems, especially when the aim of dialogue is predetermined as that of pinning down and systematizing aims. The very cures for the ‘fever’, the cures that education will be expected to administer, may prove deleterious rather than remedial. My plea for a different reinvigoration of aims-talk below presupposes and further unpacks this clarification.

Conclusion: Aims of education and aims-talk viewed differently

The aim of this article has not been to specify how the school’s goals could show a path to a ‘healthy’ society. My aim has been meta-critically to defend the need for philosophical and public deliberation on aims without ignoring risks in medical metaphors of ‘healthiness’ and ‘fever’. I have argued that aims-talk should be reinvigorated, especially in light of a critical and cautious discussion of contemporary realities as feverish and of their symptoms. ‘The flight to an entirely instrumental education’ where ‘any mention of the intrinsic value of anything which might be learned is studiously avoided, is symptomatic of a reductionist conception of education in which only measurable utilitarian ends are taken seriously’ (Ozoliņš, 2015, p. 873). Many thinkers unite in supporting the view that some aim of education (a set of aims or diverse and disparate aims) should combat the neoliberal emphasis on profit, skills and information. But consensus on this hardly suffices to specify what education can escape the confines of neoliberal socio-political concordance. This constitutes one more reason to reinvigorate the aims dialogue, yet without unsubstantiated expectations that such invigoration will lead by itself to what we hope for. Still, it is an increasingly common feeling that ‘no such serious dialogue seems to be occurring among educators, legislators, policy makers and other informed citizens’ (Katz, 2010, p. 107). Instead of encouraging a serious dialogue, ‘the economic mindset and the concomitant views of assessment and accountability reinforce an uncritical taken-for-granted view, namely that schooling has as its central purpose the creation of skilled workers’ (p. 107). Therefore, this ‘feverish’ context places an additional burden on educational philosophy to think differently about educational aims and supply the lifeworld with meta-critical, self-reflective questions such as this: ‘what functions have been served by aims-talk, and what have we lost (if anything) by ceasing to engage in it? What has taken its place?’ (Noddings, 2013, p. 331).

Living in feverish societies compels that we stop neglecting, diminishing or disqualifying aims-talk. Existing aims should not be left to operate crypto-normatively and raise the current world’s ‘fever’. We must not concede this communicative terrain to the institutional power that homo economicus worldviews have obtained. However, medical metaphors (especially Plato’s) have their risks,^[15] which make us aware of the spectrality of ambiguities that should not be overlooked. Ironically, because of these risks rather than despite them, the feverish society is an apt description of today’s world and compels a resuscitation of educational aims-talk. ‘If education has a role to play in the alleviation of the crises facing the world, then there is some urgency in reflecting on what kind of education is needed’ for tackling ‘these many crises’ (Ozoliņš, 2015, p. 871). True, yet, we must enlarge our perspective (and enrich our dialogue on aims) beyond crises. Educational normativity should not be crisis-dependent and rethought only when crises as bouts of fever and wake-up calls alarm us.^[16] Aims are justificatory, motivating and affective reasons for continuous effort and engagement, in the face of, but also despite, adversities, or even when adversities subside and give way to daily normalcy.

Another cautionary remark which would propel us to view aims-talk differently concerns the following risk: sometimes the plea is for a momentarily re-opened aims-talk that will soon fulfil its purpose by providing the proper aims. Apart from blocking further dialogue, this plea may also echo modernist, prudentializing ideals of control and transparency: ‘if a society does not have clear and agreed aims for its education system’, it will ‘fail to have a healthy system that is respected and functions well’; it will suffer from the ‘widespread and damaging discontent among those groups whose interests are not well served’ (Winch, 1996, p. 33). Just as with the risks in medicalizing undertones of the ‘feverish society’ metaphor, the likely risks of the ‘healthy system’ metaphor should make us vigilant. We must not treat aims-talk as cure. Besides, talks may be carried out just to legitimize existing aims and give them more credibility. If most of all those affected by the possible dialogue (that is, not only policy-makers but even parents and teachers) have, as Noddings shows, been converted to the neoliberal preaching, then their aims-talk will reflect neoliberal sensibilities and comfort zones rather than any thought-enlarging aspirations.

Re-opening aims-talk requires that we remember that, ‘as learners, we cannot have an external view of our entire progress. Some of our aims are, therefore, not predefined but discovered on the way’ (Harðarson, 2018, p. 538). The model of aims-talk that Atli Harðarson critiques ‘assumes that school education can be organised from above as work towards predefined aims or learning outcomes’ (p. 538). This kind of aims-talk has, in recent years, shaped, for instance, the ‘type of curriculum thinking’ that has increasingly ‘affected higher education in Europe’ (p. 538). To avoid the straits of either abandoning aims-talk or ossifying and reifying it we must not just ‘continually reflect upon, discuss, and evaluate what we are doing to see if our objectives and procedures are compatible with our aims’ (Noddings, 2013, p. 334) but also recurrently reflect upon the aims themselves. Recurrent reflection on aims is a task for both kinds of aims-talk, the more specialized educational sciences-related (e.g., educational-philosophical) dialogue and the general, public sphere-related debates on aims. The former, scientific discourse should enrich the lifeworld that hosts the latter. However, both kinds of aims-talk should be mutually corrective and re-directive.

On the need recurrently to reflect on education, the analytic and the postmodern strands converge. Peters emphasized that ‘we need to justify the content of education not once and for all time, but over and over again with each new generation’ (Katz, 2010, p. 106). For an emblematic figure of the analytic persuasion such as Peters, the aims of education are indeterminate. They are ‘matters of emphasis at a given time’ that ‘must be made relevant to each historical period’ (Katz, 2010, p. 106). From Devine’s (2017) postmodern, Foucauldian perspective, educational aims invite constant reconsideration because they “vary according to the context of the times in which they are enunciated and the political position of the enunciator(s)” (p. 97). Yet, the analytic and the continental-postmodern strands also diverge greatly, and the latter’s transfer to educational philosophy has contributed to the decline of aims-talk in the field. This is no place to adjudicate issues between the analytic and the continental/postmodern. It is more important to suggest that we rethink aims and aims-talk in philosophically more inclusive and co-operative ways that accommodate fruitful osmosis, exchange and productive tension. The current version of the feverish society that we experience compels that aims-talk should not be surrendered to camps and persuasion battlefields.

As a fault line, the issue of isolated perspectives on educational normativity should be rethought. Perhaps a more inclusive, stereoscopic optic (Papastephanou, 2021a) might be needed on aims, one that explores how the interconnectivity, synergy and tensions of various perspectives inform an enriched dialogue beyond needless polemics of ideological camps and exclusivist promotion of one ‘ultimate’ aim over all else. Contributors to this special issue have pertinently revealed the educational value of aims such as dignity (Bahizi), solidarity (Murphy), moral perfection (Klas), self-control (Harðarson), etc. A stereoscopic optic would consider them together to make more visible their interconnectivity. Even if one concedes that there can be a ‘broadly important, culminating aim of education’ such as ‘good judgment’ (Curren, 2014, p. 37) the question remains: ‘how is the promotion of good judgment related to other educational aims, such as the fulfilment of potential, facilitation of autonomy, and acquisition of knowledge?’ (p. 37). Perhaps we need ‘more diverse educational aims’; the assumption ‘of a generic aim or set of aims for Education may itself no longer be feasible’ (Devine, 2017, p. 106). However, diversity should not be absolutized either. Precisely because, as Devine argues, ‘the aims of education are context-dependent’, and, ‘as that context changes, the aims of education should also change’, the dichotomy of ‘diverse aims versus ultimate aims’ (p. 96) should be overcome. Occasionally, one aim may deserve priority in a specific context, even if it may be optimized only through the synergy of other aims. A more attentive study of the interconnectivity and tensions of aims may illuminate this context-sensitivity and phronetic flexibility.

Notes

[1] It is also worth noting that the ‘feverish society’ metaphor has been used in diverse ways and for answering questions different from mine by other theorists. See, for instance, DeWeese-Boyd and & DeWeese‐Boyd (2007); Howland (2010); and de Lara (2018).

[2] On the concept of communicative action and related terms that are the subtext of this section, see Habermas (1984).

[3] Both agendas are crypto-normative (that is, they hide or keep their normative assumptions implicit) for different reasons, as it will be evident later on in this section.

[4] For more on neoliberalism, its main tenets and main theorists, see Queiroz (2018); and for more on how various neoliberal views converge on tenets that affect education detrimentally, see Petrovic and Kuntz (2018).

[5] I am indebted to Niclas Rönnström for pointing out to me the possibility of paradox lying beneath the neoliberal stance.

[6] For a more thorough critique of Wohlgemuth’s globalist position than the limits of this article allow, see Rönnström (2016).

[7] Elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2021b) I have also argued that crypto-normativity is sometimes valuable. This, however, is not always the case.

[8] Rosenow adapts Adorno’s paraphrase of Marx: ‘Paraphrasing Marx, Adorno comments that “not only theory but also its absence becomes material power once it has taken hold of the masses”’ (Rosenow, 1976, p. 284).

[9] Certainly, not all wars are reducible to this archetypical, symbolic and simple causality. As societies become more complex and more feverish, both the causality and the rationalization of aggression become also more complex.

[10] For this cautionary remark, I am indebted to Klas Roth who has raised such questions in personal communication with me.

[11] Although this point constitutes fertile ground for critiquing contemporary allocations of power, it remains outside the scope of this article for reasons of focus on educational aims.

[12] I owe the latter point to Rönnström (personal communication).

[13] Elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2011), I have, without associating ‘walls and laws’ with Plato, explained why we need a more nuanced and cautious treatment of the limit and the border. Hence, I will not cover this ground here.

[14] Being most of them rare, neurodegenerative illnesses that require new medication are in an unfavourable position also compared to other medical challenges. New medicines for such illnesses cannot be pharmaceutically as profitable as, say, globally promulgated new vaccines. Research on new medicines that would prolong the life of patients suffering from rare illnesses requires much funding that big companies are unwilling to spend. Also, organizations such as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) interestingly delay more to approve new medication for such illnesses than to approve Covid-19 vaccines (even if the rare disease medication has come from clinical trials that have checked safety more repeatedly and have taken much longer than those of profitable vaccines). Why this discrepancy? Although the devastating effects on patients’ health and the bad prognoses of rare illnesses are incomparably higher than those of Covid-19, and time in the former cases is of absolute essence for patients’ survival, neither European organizations feel obliged to explain this discrepancy publicly, nor do European publics ask any pressing questions about it. A case in point is the new, sodium phenylbutyrate/taurursodiol treatment for ALS that FDA has approved whilst the EMA has, at least to date, failed to approve.

[15] Some such risks I have discussed in Papastephanou (2020) and (2021c).

[16] On ‘crisis’ as such being a medical metaphor in its original, Greek meaning, see Papastephanou (2021c).

Notes on contributor

Marianna Papastephanou has studied in Crete (Greece), Cardiff (UK) and Berlin (Germany). She teaches Philosophy of Education in the Department of Education at the University of Cyprus. She has written articles on ‘modernism versus postmodernism’, utopia, the Frankfurt School and various educational issues. She is the author and editor of books on related topics.

ORCID

Marianna Papastephanou https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7304-9249

References

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