What the education debate teaches volunteerism
| April 11th, 2010This video based on audio recordings of philosopher Alan Watts is a great step into this debate about the role of education in society. It’s a passionate topic of conversation that’s been around certainly since the times of Aristotle (another interesting link here) and the other Greek thinkers.
As Watts so neatly demonstrates; when we focus on education as a means to something else, we can lose sight of the bigger picture. It’s a profound tension between needing a purpose to provide us with meaning, and having the means to achieve our chosen purpose. Or to paraphrase Watts, life is like music- we’re supposed to dance and sing as the music plays, not wait for the final movement of the symphony.
I’m interested in how this debate in education can help us to think more about accepting volunteering programmes as a means to an end (specifically helping to achieve the organisation’s mission), and balancing it with the approach that enjoys volunteering for what it is for the volunteer- not just what it facilitates for the organisation.
There are many parallels between education and volunteering which justify studying the education debate. The primary one is how education, like volunteering, taps into deeper social values that make us who we are.
Social values
Deeper social values play a role joining us as individuals with us as members of a society. Getting back to Aristotle:
There remains to be discussed the question whether the happiness of the individual is the same as that of the state, or different. Here again there can be no doubt — no one denies that they are the same. [Aristotle, Politics (Book 7)]
In other words, there’s a fundamental link between the happiness or wellbeing of the individual and that of the polis or state. Paul Gibbs in his article ‘Isn’t higher education employability?‘ (PDF) provides a clear example of developing what the implications of Aristotle’s thoughts mean for the debate on education today. Gibbs argues that:
Employability is not the end of education, but a competency of the skilled authentic social agent. I see no difficulty in employability skills being incorporated within a more general set of aims for higher education, but I am concerned that we might instrumentalise our education system to such an extent that employability becomes the prime purpose of higher education, satisfying only often ill-informed and morally base notions of what is an adequate education by reference to a measurable return on financial investment.
Paul Gibbs takes us through why the purpose of education is more than just boosting the employability of students. In fact, he’s got reservations about employability as a concept: it’s (i) a relative term weighted towards employers, (ii) generally poorly understood, and (iii) presupposes a single ideology that takes its justification from the economic. Gibbs suggests a more balanced approach to understanding education as mercantile, civic and contemplative, to satisfy the moral and economic needs of the community.
Reflecting on this, volunteering has been put under similar pressures. Frequently employability is cited as a particular outcome that volunteering programmes aim to meet. Perhaps it would be as well to ponder on some of Gibbs’ reservations and how relevant they are. For example, do employers carry more weight than volunteer managers or the volunteers themselves?
Martha Nussbaum made one of the strongest defences in recent years of this kind of liberal approach to education evoked by Gibbs above, in her 1997 book ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education‘. She argues that the purpose of liberal education is to cultivate humanity. According to Nussbaum, humanity can be cultivated in three ways:
- The first is the capacity for critical self-examination and critical thinking about one’s own culture and traditions.
- The second is the capacity to see oneself as a human being who is bound to all humans with ties of concern.
- The third is the capacity for narrative imagination – the ability to empathize with others and to put oneself in another’s place.
Clearly many volunteering roles meet these different capacities needed for cultivating humanity cited by Nussbaum and volunteering itself, comes within this conception of liberal education. Volunteering through hands on activities with others with different cultures and traditions enables volunteers to develop their critical thinking about their own culture. Volunteering is built on achieving social impacts and meeting identified needs in society so enabling volunteers to understand how they are practically ‘bound to all humans with ties of concern’. Finally, volunteering brings volunteers in contact with others in society they might not ordinarily meet, and in a specific context or narrative determined by the group or organisation they are volunteering with.
Often opposition to this approach to liberal education comes from vocationalism. To a certain extent, this started with the writings of philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey. In 1916 he wrote in Democracy and Education about the place of vocational aims in education:
A calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for information and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth… The vocation acts as both magnet to attract and as glue to hold. Such organization of knowledge is vital, because it has reference to needs; it is so expressed and readjusted in action that it never becomes stagnant. No classification, no selection and arrangement of facts, which is consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever compare in solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of an occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal, superficial, and cold.
Dewey spoke a lot about occupations in a broad sense, including both professional and amateur pursuits, and also other parts of life such as being a parent. Applying vocations to education, rather than constraining education in arbitrary and narrow ways, Dewey argued that it brought education to life by making it relevant for life.
In more recent times, this vocationalist argument has resurfaced in different guises. In particular in the debate over the workings of publicly-financed schools. This argument sees much of the education system as irrelevant and impractical. It does not equip students with the technical skills and experience they require in the world today. At a time of high costs and competition for resources, the case for why education needs to be efficient and practical is clearly a persuasive argument to make. But it’s a view, as Robert Sherman explains, that sees business, industry and technology as the primary forces changing society. Educating students in specific careers, risks feeding these particular forces, rather than enabling students to cope with them.
As we debate further the role of education, we discover that this debate is clearly linked to the discussion on the meaning of work itself. David Corson in the first chapter of the book ‘Education for Work‘ cites different trends affecting the family and the home, that have opened up a gap between them and the world of work.
the workplace has become separated from the home; occupational roles have become distinct from kin based roles and relationships; labor market values have penetrated into family decisions about the future of offspring; parents have come to see that children’s job prospects are far removed from any form of socialization that they can possibly receive within the family and parents are not usually placed to make the social connections necessary to put their children in touch with work that might suit and satisfy their wants and talents.
These are trends that have profound implications for education, but they also would seem to have implications for volunteering. For example, this argument could be used to suggest that these forces separating work from home and the family, has been the basis for the growth in formal volunteering over the same period. For example, as people have learnt to rely less on family and home to make social connections, so people have become more used or habituated to relying on, both as a provider of opportunities to do social good and as a provider of services from the voluntary sector. Giving activities have moved from the home and the family, to more formal settings such as established not-for-profit organisations.
Corson suggests a distinction between ‘occupational work’ and ‘recreational work’. Work is a means to an end, while recreation is an end in itself. Work is a “purposeful activity performed by people in producing goods or services of value, whether for remuneration or not” (Dimensions of Work- Nels Anderson- 1964).
Work becomes a means to an end when it is performed in an occupational role as the work activity of a job. Occupational work is that variety of work that is instrumental to some other goal (usually the remuneration of workers or the survival of themselves and their societies). Recreation work is ‘voluntary in every respect, for it is of the nature of recreation that it ceases to exist for people compelled to pursue it’.
This simple distinction between two types of work from the 1960′s explains one fundamental tension in understanding volunteering today. That is volunteering fits into both camps: at times it’s closer to occupational work and becomes a means to an end, and at other times it’s closer to recreational work and is an end in itself.
This very brief tour then of the debate on the role of education, is never far removed from the parallel debates on the role of volunteering and on the role of work.
A couple of weeks ago now I was at the Volunteer Management Conference organised by Volunteering England at Warwick University. I remember Mark Goldring, Chief Executive of Mencap, explaining how it was important to ensure that volunteers and staff understood how they together contribute to furthering the organisation’s mission. This is a key insight into how a clearly articulated mission communicated and owned across an organisation can be a point of unity between paid staff and volunteers. But the message here is also that this route to unity clearly puts volunteering in the ‘occupational work’ camp.
One question this and the general debate of education poses volunteering is: whether unity is possible between paid staff and volunteers, whether professionalisation of those responsible for an organisation’s volunteer management is possible, if we insist that volunteering is also recreational, not just occupational, and that volunteering is not just a means to an end, but also an end in itself?
