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Frank Furedi:
passages uit zijn bijdrage: No Patrimony. Why adulthood depends on the
authority of the past
Over: the inability
of contemporary society to educate young people in the values of the past
Most of the explanations that are used to account for the
emotional fragility of university students blame new social and economic
factors such as the rapid pace of change or economic insecurity faced by
undergraduates. Such accounts overlook one of the main drivers of the
infantilization of young people, one that transcends social and economic
conditions: the inability of contemporary society to educate young people in
the values of the past.
Education needs to conserve the past. Political philosopher
Hannah Arendt was unequivocal on this point. To avoid misunderstanding: it
seems to me that conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence
of the educational activity, she argued.
Arendts objective was to conserve not for the sake of
nostalgia but because the conservation of the old provided the foundation for
renewal and innovation. Indeed, she went so far as to argue that education
must be conservative in order to create the conditions wherein children can
feel secure to reform and improve their world. It is only in relation to the
world as it has been preserved that young people develop their potential for
creating something new.
The characterization of conservation as the essence of
educational activity can be easily misunderstood as a backward or reactionary
political agenda. But the argument for conservation is based on the
understanding that, in a generational transaction, adults must assume
responsibility for the world as it is and pass on its cultural and intellectual
legacy to young people. An attitude of conservation is called for specifically
in the context of intergenerational transmission.
Until recently, leading thinkers from across the
ideological divide understood the significance of transmitting the knowledge
and the values of the past to young people.
Writing from a conservative perspective, the English
philosopher Michael Oakeshott concluded that education in its most general
significance may be recognised as a specific transaction which may go on
between the generations of human beings in which newcomers to the scene are
initiated into the world they inhabit. Oakeshott went on to call it a moral
transaction, one upon which a recognizably human life depends for its
continuance.
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist thinker, wrote in one
of his Prison Notebooks, It is imagined that the childs mind is like a ball
of string which the teacher helps to unwind. In reality each generation
educates the new generation, that is, forms it. He assumed that young peoples
experience of life is insufficient to grasp the workings of the world. They
require the assistance of the older generations to gain their bearings.
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