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“I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” ¹

John Keats

Martin Luther King Jr argued that education should have two intentional purposes; utilitarian and moral. Underlying these purposes is an obligation to teach people freedom.

Freedom is often explained as a connection between thought and action. Simone Weil “defined liberty as being neither absence of constraint nor a relationship between desire and satisfaction, but as a relationship between thought and action.”²

“True action, not that which emanates from the passions, from the unbridled imagination but action that conforms to geometry, that is to say which is brought into being through knowledge of the world that is gained by moving progressively from one simple idea to another. It is through work that reason seizes hold of the world.”³

Simone Weil

Michael Oakeshott argues that ‘freedom’ is inherent in the human condition and it is not gratuitous, it is found and maintained through effort, that is it is paid for in responsibility. “It has been viewed with misgivings and even counted a misery to be escaped, if only escape were possible. How much less burdensome to be incapable of error, of stupidity, of hatred and of wrongdoing, even if this meant the surrender of truth, wisdom, love and virtue. But it is impossible.”⁴

This freedom is purposeful, it is the essence of labour and reveals labours purpose that is true joy that comes in truth, wisdom, love and virtue. In this way moving progressively from one simple idea to another moves adjacent to action and reflection.

Freedom includes the ability to pay attention for this is the essential practice that enables us to connect thought and true action. To teach paying attention requires a different ontological assumption than what we currently have; it requires one of temporality and impersonalism. Paul Freire highlights a dehumanization in our current ontological assumption in education that comes from both the conquering of static concepts and the objectification of students and teachers in the teacher student relationship. Paulo Freire says that as long as people live in the duality in which to be is to be like and to be like is to be like the oppressor a contribution to liberation is impossible.

“The goal will no longer be to eliminate the risks of temporality by clutching to guaranteed space but rather to temporalize space. The universe is revealed to me not as space imposing a massive presence to which I can but adapt but as a scope, a domain which takes place as a shape as I act upon it. By thus denying temporality, it denies itself as well.” ⁵

Paulo Freire

In Weil’s personalism we are able to move from the ‘we’ to the ‘I’ and from the ‘I’ to the impersonal, however we cannot move from the ‘we’ to the impersonal; that is to say that immersed in the collective we are incapable of impersonal experiences of true attention. What is the collective but the objectification of persons to ‘student’, ‘teacher’, ‘girl’, ‘boy’, ‘poor’, ‘wealthy’.

“There is no such thing as ‘social learning’ or ‘collective understanding’”⁶

Michael Oakeshott

Freire says the “form of action people adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teachers student and the students teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.”⁷

“The freedom of a human being inheres in his thoughts and his emotions having had to be learned; for learning is something which each of us must do and can only do for ourselves.”⁸

Michael Oakeshott

We must strengthen the relationship to ourselves from the beginning and as a part of essential education and the teacher must strengthen their relationship with themselves to adopt this into the practice of educating. That is to be a participant in the role of student as well as educator and the student must learn to participate in a dialogical relationship whereby a teacher learns from them, as opposed to the memorization of information as narrated by the teacher.

This means an ability to say ‘I’, to transcend the ‘we’ that turns people into a static idea. This is an ongoing labour that “brings into the world this new being, no longer oppressor, no longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.”⁹ This can be replaced with ‘no longer teacher, no longer student’ or ‘no longer boy no longer girl’ and the process of achieving freedom replaces your being a teacher or a girl, you go from existing as an oppositional idea confined and limited and you become the process and this unveils infinity.

“People are unable to transcend the limit situation to discover that beyond these situations and in contradiction to them lies an untested feasibility. In some limit situations implies the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations and of those who are negated and curved by them. Once the latter come to perceive these situations as the frontier between being and being more human rather than the frontier between being and nothingness”¹⁰

Paulo Freire

Confusion is a companion in learning and we must not fix a goal to end it. To end confusion is to cease to learn and settle into the comfort of knowing which is a form of isolation. Without a suitable ontological framework, confusion causes tension between the teacher and student, between students and between the student and what they are being taught.

Confusion as a companion rather than an enemy, as something to accept and be at peace with as you make your way through unknown creative attention. This is an essential part of the ontological framework we must integrate into systematic education. Teach children how to be in the discomfort of unknowing.

1. Oakeshott, M. and Fuller, T. (2001). The voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund. p.127 ↩︎
2. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. p.18 ↩︎
3. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. p.10 ↩︎
4. Oakeshott, M. and Fuller, T. (2001). The voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund. p.20 ↩︎
5. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ↩︎
6. Oakeshott, M. and Fuller, T. (2001). The voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund. p.25 ↩︎
7. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. p.64 ↩︎
8. Oakeshott, M. and Fuller, T. (2001). The voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund. p.20 ↩︎
9. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. p.31 ↩︎
10. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ↩︎