Utilitarian view of education must be denied

WHAT IS education for? It's probably enough to get my Teaching Council registration revoked, but it occurred to me that I would consider any 20-something who could sit through Terrence Malick's film Tree of Life,grapple with the questions it poses and discuss them later to be reasonably well-educated.

Tree of Lifehas been described as being more of a cinematic meditation than a film. It implies that a small-town 1950s American family is somehow intimately connected to, and as significant as, the whole sweep of creation (or evolution, if you prefer).

Its stunning images linger long after the viewing – a huge butterfly alighting on the mother’s hand, a leaf skittering along, the endless questions in a 12-year-old’s eyes.

It is not linear or conventional. It features the lives of three boys, and the children playing them were never given a script, only an outline of what was going on. Some of the most arresting parts emerged from spontaneous reactions during filming.

For example, the love and jealousy experienced by a toddler with the arrival of a new baby are captured perfectly with scarcely a word spoken.

The soundtrack featuring Bach, Berlioz, Smetena, Mahler, Holst, Górecki, Tavener and an original score by Desplat is as important as the images.

The mother, played by Jessica Chastain, is both a real mother and a metaphor for grace. In a voiceover, she contrasts the “way of nature” and the “way of grace”.

“Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”

In contrast, the father, played by Brad Pitt, is authoritarian and focused on worldly success, but also genuinely loving towards his three sons. The eldest son both hates and wants to be like him. They all have to face the death of the second son at 19, and whether the “way of grace” can respond to intolerable suffering – or is existence ultimately meaningless?

Of course I am being a little whimsical in saying being able to respond to this film would indicate a worthwhile education, but only a little. Being able to stick with a film with nary a fart joke, explosion, alien, or love triangle without declaring oneself bored is an achievement. The young seem to fear boredom more than virtually anything else.

They have been conditioned to believe anything that is not immediately easy is threatening. No wonder third-level lecturers often complain about the calibre of thinking among students these days. (The quality of teaching at third level could do with a shake-up, too.)

Would being able to appreciate a film like this render you a better employment prospect? Probably not. But the ability to memorise material pre-digested for you by someone else probably doesn’t help much, either.

The ability to reflect, make connections, analyse, appreciate and wonder surely constitute the heart of education. Naturally, you need basic skills like the ability to sustain attention and focus before you can do that.

This vision of education will seem to some elitist, unrealistic and irrelevant with regard to young people facing recession, unemployment and emigration. But maybe the utilitarian vision of education that saw its primary purpose as providing docile workforces for multinationals was unrealistic, too.

The young already face a world that would have been the stuff of science fiction for their parents. Unimaginable challenges in the shape of peak oil and climate change are looming. Education matters more than ever. However, an educational system that is prisoner to every passing fad is not educational.

In an era where we face larger class sizes, the possible demise of transition year and reduction in subject choices, it is even more important to reject a purely utilitarian view of education.

We are assured the proposal to ditch transition year was not a kite-flying exercise. If it was, it is profoundly depressing. Transition year allows students to develop strengths in areas they might never have considered.

At times of crisis, education becomes even more important. The young people looting in London were predominantly, though not only, what are dubbed NEETs – not in education, employment or training.

Short-term cuts in education lead to long-term issues. Children with special needs and children from disadvantaged backgrounds will suffer greatly from bigger class sizes and the lack of special needs assistants.

Education is not a luxury to be dumped when money is tight.

Living in a new world does not mean abandoning all the insights of older generations. To even attempt to do so would be ridiculous. Just because someone cannot operate an iPhone does not mean they do not have deep and penetrating insights into what it means to be human.

As Hannah Arendt said about the need to balance wisdom and innovation, “And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

I think she would have liked Tree of Life.