Deceptively difficult education: a case for a lifetime of impact

The suggestion that education might not follow empirical rules of cause and effect is not a stance welcomed in a world where measurable educational outcomes are publicly reported in local, national and global competitive league tables. In England, at least, this process now starts with ‘baseline’ assessments of four to five-year-old children in Reception classes, continuing into higher education when the ‘destination of leavers’ metric is used to report on ‘teaching quality’ measured by employment type and salary.

The view of education offered here rejects this approach, along with other similar neoliberal technologies as acts of anti-educational violence (Bainbridge et al . 2018). I seek
to expose this sham by casting an imaginative hypothetical net far and wide, across space and time, to catch a glimpse of educational processes encountered from our human ancestral past up to the present. This archeological exploration of the human mind (Lent 2017) offers novel ways of imagining why humans engage in education and what outcomes might emerge from considering an expansive ecology of human experience.