This is not a criticism of informal education. Informal education is a good thing. ‘Elitist’ has bad connotations in our society but what I mean can be explained quite easily if one understands the basic idea of virtue ethics. This idea is that our purpose in life is to become excellent human beings and that this requires certain excellences and skills, called virtues. The combination of these gives us practical wisdom. So people who have a large number of these skills and excellences, such as insight, ability to think through consequences, courage, honesty, humility, love, etc (different groups have different lists), are better at being human beings than people without such skills and excellences. That’s right. It sounds somehow wrong or bad to say it in a liberal society but that’s the theory and I think it’s true. It doesn’t mean some people’s lives are worth more than others. It doesn’t mean that some people deserve more help or wealth or anything than others. It just means that they’re making a better go of the project of being a human person than some other people. So when I say informal education is elitist, I mean that it assumes the educators are doing a better job of being humans than the people they are educating.
This is in fact a vital presupposition for informal education to take place. Informal education assumes at least the following: a) some people are oppressed (and usually that they don’t realise it); b) the informal educator is not in this position, at the very least because they do know what is going on. That is why the informal educator has the crucial task of raising consciousness, conscientization. But usually the informal educator has skills and excellences that the people they are educating do not have. This means they are better people than those whom they are educating. Of course, part of the point of such education is to enable the educatees to learn those skills and excellences and become independent and aware. All I am really saying is that the initial difference should be acknowledged because it’s there and because it has at least one effect.
The effect is to do with people’s freedom. Freedom is often thought of as lack of constraint, which is an important part of freedom, but not all of it. People also need certain skills and the ability to exercise them in order to be fully free. For instance, if one is unable to control one’s temper, and can fly off the handle at various times, then one does not have full self-control and is at the mercy of their emotions. This is not to be fully free. That’s just one example, but I think that we should therefore acknowledge that not everyone is equally free in reality, even though they are defined as such by the law. If not everyone is equally free, it is important that they are not expected to take responsibility for too much too soon. Of course, no-one can take responsibility for someone else in one sense, but people often need long term support to develop their full freedom and responsibility. Anyone involved in informal education will know this already, but I think all the talk about democracy in informal education can occasionally obscure the above ideas.
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