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Selves are not rational abstractions, they are historic personalities, they are among the components of this world of human achievements; and there is no other way for a human being to make the most of himself than by learning to recognize himself in the mirror of this inheritance.¹

Michael Oakeshott

Experience begs the question of freedom. I find myself overwhelmed by an all consuming belief that I have something to say but I increasingly doubt it. There is something that I feel, correlated with passing phenomena of the conscious experience, which is different from having something to say, it does not inherently equate to words. The existence of a notion is not inherently the existence of a sentence or something reasonable at all, it may lead to such things with work but the expectation of them being the same is false and therefore leads me to suffering. This work must be taught.

A collectivity has its roots in the past. It constitutes the sole agency for preserving the spiritual treasures accumulated by the dead, the sole transmitting agency by means of which the dead can speak to the living. And the sole earthly reality which is directly connected with the eternal destiny of Man is the irradiating light of those who have managed to become more fully conscious of this destiny, transmitted from generation to generation.²

Simone Weil

If the collective aim of education is to achieve unity and have each person contribute to society then we must not ignore the individual experience through which the world is made. Each bit of knowledge placed in a curriculum came from a person who, from a passing wave of the phenomena of consciousness, went through the process of turning notion to knowledge.

This historical inheritance is always concerned with practical skills, moral conduct and large intellectual enterprises.

A fisherman must learn to catch fish and he learns to do so well or ill and with a variety of techniques, the engineers who designed and built the Boulder Dam were equipped with something more than a biological urge, and to breed sheep for meat or wool is an art that has to be learned.” … “The inventor and the user of these skills and practices is not Man or Society; each is the discovery or invention of assignable men, a Prometheus, a Vulcan, a Bessemer or an Edison. It is not Man or some abstraction called ‘medical science’ which cures the sick; it is an individual doctor who has himself learned his art from some assignable teachers.³

Michael Oakeshott

There is an oppression of self inherent in the ontological foundation of education which means we are not required to learn this work; the work of self-understanding through which culture and the world is found. This is an oppression of freedom and has collective repercussions.

The task of the teacher is to cognize an object in preparation of a lesson and then narrate to the students what they’ve prepared. The students are called upon to memorize about the object what is narrated to them by the teacher. In this transaction the knowledge of the object is the property of the teacher. The student should not practice any act of cognition, that is interaction with (and so alteration to) the information about the object that the teacher has given them; part of which is an understanding of the world and an understanding of culture.

If knowledge is finite than the self can be tackled in the same way that the history of Australia is, that is through a process of memorizing the story about it; weaving together chunks of what is known about it, that which has gone through the production line of reason, and then told to us by a teacher or leader. This knowledge is held onto like a fence railing in the night keeping us from getting lost. I think that the aim of education shouldn’t just be to show the fence that has been built but to teach students how to build and to teach them how to get lost.

In schools, we’re operating on an ontology that knowledge is finite and that which is known are building blocks making up a whole, these blocks are the natural truth and are permanent. This ontology is formed by the omission of certain facts about humans; that we are beings that are in the process of becoming, always unfinished and uncompleted in a likewise unfinished reality.

An omission of this fact of the experience of relating to the world in the educational framework creates veils between people and the world, isolating consciousness from the world and thereby oppressing the self as a part of the process of educating people.

Oppression interferes with mans ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human.⁴

Paulo Freire

A person must create their own life and if all they are taught are absolutes and abstract entities then they do so by reference to these empty “myths and monsters”.

Our lives are lived, in fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly by related either to one another or to any concrete facts.⁵

Simone Weil

To link thought to utterance is a precursor to true action. Without learning this we get nothing more than free will. Oakeshott asks if human actions and utterances are ‘free’ because they are willed, that is because they are the outcomes of desires and understandable only in terms of wants, “then we are left with the question in virtue of what must desiring be considered necessarily to be a ‘free’ activity?”⁶

Weil talks about this idea of free will when she talks about action that emanates from the passions, “from the unbridled imagination”. The will we have can be directed toward freedom, that is used to practice effort to follow truth but we are not willing freedom when we heedlessly follow desire, that is disconnected, without awareness of the consciousness that makes us human. From this we will toward subservience to a desire for a constant quick and cheap joy and we cease to practice freedom. Weil says that true action “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.”⁷

Without skill the impersonal phenomena rolling on and on as consciousness is provocative and we are at the mercy of unskilled emotions – afflictive emotions or unwholesome emotions. Without skill we live reactionary and in opposition to this experience which becomes the only option we have to experience by.

1. Oakeshott, M. (2019). Voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. ↩︎
2. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. P.111 ↩︎
3. Oakeshott, M. (2019). Voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. P.25 ↩︎
4. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ↩︎
5. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. P.242 ↩︎
6. Oakeshott, M. (2019). Voice of liberal learning. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.  ↩︎
7. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎