Barnett, Ronald. (2008) A Will To Learn. Reviewed by Anita Pincas, University of London

Barnett, Ronald. (2008) A Will To Learn. London: Open University Press, McGraw Hill Education Pp. 200         ISBN 9780335223800 Reviewed by Anita Pincas University of London September 10, 2008 This book – the fifteenth since 1991 in the author’s examination of the many facets of The University and its role in the post-modern world - is a lyrical academic paean to intellectually riding the free air. It alludes subtly to Hopkins’ sonnet to the windhover where the poet’s unique verse rhythm conveys how the windhover can sweep and glide through the air, suddenly remaining still, in ecstasy, as if on an invisible swing; and he sighs at “the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!” (Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) The Windhover. Hopkins is not referenced, but the windhover appears briefly in the coda. The book’s recurrent metaphor is a more modern one, that of bungee jumping, though the fronticepiece links it to a more ancient illustration of the practice.) So also does Barnett convey in his ringing enthusiasm for inspiration, spirit, esprit de corps, inspired students, inspiring teachers, airy mental spaces, and spirituality in learning. This is song that happens to be couched as an argument. Barnett does what he urges on others: “hang onto a language of delight, wonder, care, excitement, fun, engagement and love – the language in which a student in caught and even entranced”. The book can be seen as a companion to Barnett’s earlier Higher Education, a Critical Business. But, whereas that work offered a critical analysis of what it means to develop criticality in The University, this one turns the question “Why do students fail?” into “How is it that students persist?” Free air and the will to learn then become the dynamics of the book. The core of Barnett’s call to allow inspiration back into universities is that this is what gives students the will to learn. The book rolls his argument out in three parts. Being and becoming is about the student, and it sketches what familiar readers will know is Barnett’s essential philosophy. In a genuine higher education, the student not merely undergoes a devel­opmental process, but undergoes a continuing process of becoming. This becoming is marked by the student's becoming authentic and coming into herself, which are two depictions of the same phenomenon. In this coming into herself, the student finds for herself a clearing that is hers. …. She discovers her own voice, is able to articulate it and deploy it to effect. She brings to bear not just her own intentionalities, but her own will. She not just is carried forward, but carries herself forward. However, this being for-itself is grounded; grounded in rea­son. Our student can furnish reasons for her claims and her actions. … However, this is a becoming that is never finished. … Here we see an ontology in the making, but it is continually in the making. (p. 62) The second part, Being a student, broadens his explanation of the student’s “self-becoming” which “will only happen if accompanied by a movement into authenti­city.” It is not so much that the self becomes a new self; in a sense - at least, this is the claim and the promise of a higher education - the self finds itself truly for the first time. This is so through the moment of authenticity that the student reaches, and that is so, in turn, because the student now has reached a position of being able to form understandings of the world and with (more or less) sound warrant. That, to repeat, is particular to higher education, insofar as it is rooted in research and scholarship. [Reviewer’s bold highlight.] In such an environment, the student moves epistemologically onto firmer ground, in that she has grounds for her understandings and claims. Even in an uncertain world, the ground holds for a moment. That this ground may open up and give way at any moment is not a problem here, for the student's authenticity is founded on her newly found ability to take up a position with some authority, even if there is provisionality now always attach­ing to that authority. (p. 69) Part three moves to Being a teacher, an inspiring teacher. Barnett does not speak of teaching methods, but couches his references in terms that illuminate his vision. For instance he thinks of the teacher as making connection with the student through how she affects the immediate pedagogic relationships, and how she may arrange the curricular experiences so that they are likely to inspire students. Part of the essential relationship the inspiring teacher establishes with her students is that of nurturing their learning, and having a solicitude for their well-being in that process of learning. Four essential points about pedagogy underlie the case: 1. A pedagogy for inspir­ation is important because it looks to break the bounds of conventions, whether those of disciplines or systems or even curricula. The idea of spirit looks to freedom, self-assertion and ultimately authenticity. Without spirit there can be no authenticity … 2. A pedagogy for inspiration is important in higher education because the idea of higher education looks to promote each student as a unique person, and her own powers and personal integrity. It looks to the student gaining her own air. 3. A pedagogy for inspiration is important at the present time because the contemporary world threatens to deny air, spirit and inspiration. In higher education, the bureaucratic structures - in, for instance, their insistence that learning outcomes be stated in advance - implicitly repudiate spirit. … The individualization called for is often that of the marketplace…. 4.There are no quick fixes when it comes to inspiration: there can be no technology of inspiration. What is required instead is a continuing and patient effort to so configure the total pedagogical environment, such that students come into spaces of their own. The tiniest gesture can go far in creating such a space. In coming to such a space, it just may be that the students - some of them at any rate - will catch fire and be inspired. (p. 125) This is a philosophical work, not a manual. It does not do more than hint at a strategy for changing the university in the ways that it so eloquently persuades the reader of. One is left to wonder if this is a necessary consequence of an acceptance of uncertainty, as a consequence of which there is no “resting place”, since “it will always hence be thus” (p. 127). There is much about striving in this book – the teacher’s striving to inspire, the student’s striving to learn, be and become an authentic person. But Barnett is not aiming here to guide academics in how to strive for betterment in The University. Some of us hope that the next book will deal in his unique way with the bureaucratic structures in point 3 above. The work ends with a Coda that returns to two puzzles set at the outset and only answered by implication thus far. These are, first, whether “the will to learn is particular or general”, and, second, "how it is that in relation to learning, ontology trumps epistemology" (p. 6). His answer to the first is that the search for knowledge is always particular in higher education, always strongly tied to specific fields of enquiry. On the other hand, the student's being is integral to her and she carries it with her in general life. Ontology is both specific in The University and general beyond it. This also links back to the metaphor of the bungee jumper, propelling himself into a (dangerous) void; being and action are united as "epistemological courage" and "ontological courage". (p. 166) in relation to learning, ontology trumps epistemology”. (p. 6). His answer to the first is that the search for knowledge is always particular in higher education, always strongly tied to specific fields of enquiry. On the other hand, the student’s being is integral to her and she carries it with her in general life. Ontology is both specific in The University and general beyond it. This also links back to the metaphor of the bungee jumper, propelling himself into a (dangerous) void; being and action are united as “epistemological courage” and “ontological courage”. (p. 166.) Where, then, does this leave the academic or the administrator reader whom Barnett has inspired by this book? What now? Where to start one’s own bungee jump? Barnett writes of adding inspiration as a fourth factor in the teacher/student/subject alignment, though he sometimes specifies this more prosaically as allowing students to take responsibility for their own learning by engaging problem-based or collaborative learning. But he warns that, even though the enthusiastic teacher can inspire a student also to become enthusiastic, there is “an irredeemable gap – a pedagogic gap - between any set of efforts on the part of the educator and the student actually being inspired.” (p. 118). Techniques and manipulations of the learning environment will not do. Barnett is calling for the teacher’s spirit to be caught by the student who is then inspirited/inspired to proceed with her own learning, and uses terms like “pedagogical enthusiasm” or “a pedagogical experience” (ibid). In other words, the student becomes like the teacher, though in this case her own teacher. The section on pedagogy raises a well-worn controversy that has in other places been called the dilemma about teaching as art or technique. Does the teacher have to be genuine? Can she act the enthusiast, can it be contrived? [“Assume a virtue if you have it not.” (Rev.)] If it can, then it could presumably be taught, and this obviously goes against the grain. In fact, as he acknowledges, it is not either necessary or sufficient for the teacher to be enthusiastic. Not necessary, because many students do find inspiration in a subject itself, or the curriculum, or the shared activities with fellow students when they are challenged by their learning experiences and take on an esprit de corps, a“collective air”. In more common language, this is co-constructivist learning, perhaps in communities of practice, but it can be fostered by the teacher. Not sufficient because, however inspiring a teacher may be, factors in the individual student’s circumstances can prevent her own development of such drives to learn. What drives Barnett is the control, the danger of a lack of freedom in universities today, because the “context of a set of threats and closures and of self censure […] is upon us. The closure comes through risk aversion in an era of accountability, consumerism and litigiousness. Accountability – in the assurance regime (admittedly now giving way to a much lighter regime); consumerism arises as students – now fee-paying – redefine their relationships with their institution; and litigiousness arises in a heightened pedagogical climate of consumer “rights” (pp.168-9). He is scathing of “foredisclosed outcomes” as possibly playing any role in the research climate of higher education, or what it should ideally be. The call and the arguments all rely on a belief that a person is in some philosophical and psychological sense one being. Barnett will not, apparently, accept that people can be divided, for instance compliant and unadventurous within higher education, yet rebellious and free thinking outside it. Or, is he saying that unless they are inspired to learn boldly, they will not “truly” learn? One may find this contentious, since learning at the university is not a finished process; the learning spills over into the students’ lives, and may not take effect until well into the future, perhaps even in students who appeared dull at the time. Yet Barnett seems to start from the premise that few university students feel like this one: “You get excited… it makes you want to know, say, if it’s about a particular topic, then you want to go and know more about it, you want to find more… ” (p.117). Some of us may be more optimistic about students. The institutional contrivance that works towards speed and efficiency in learning only complements the natural learning that occurs in the course of every life. Are we really turning out dull graduates who never reach the fulfilment of independent discovery? Perhaps we should have more faith in human beings’ own ability to make something of The University as well as of the learning opportunities outside it? Or should we read the book as a desire for inspiration to come to all and every one, and to come sooner? Barnett treats The University as a whole; he does not consider different areas of knowledge. His vision could be seen as limited to the kind of knowledge where challenge is supremely desirable, and facts are supremely contentious, roughly bracketed as social science. Without doubt, free and open thought is also essential outside these brackets, but there we have the additional pressure of many considerably less contested facts, where one might put a brake on the learner’s flight into open air. Yet Barnett links this book with his earlier Higher Education, a Critical Business (Barnett 1997) when he writes that the “challenge of criticality is the design of spaces into which the student can move and experience the world in new ways, {and} the pedagogical challenge is that of prompting the student to take up such a disposition” (pp. 156-157). It is not a matter only of being inspired to learn, but to learn critically. Again, there are grounds for being more optimistic about human criticality, as was eloquently argued in Donaldson (1978). Barnett takes a position and then dissects it with finesse in lucid, persuasive prose. Often, his metaphors are the true key to his meanings. Yet it remains a position. There is no attempt to model strategies for following through. It is challenging and tantalising. References Barnett, R. (1997) Higher Education, a Critical Business. London: Open University Press Donaldson, M. (1978) Children’s Minds London: Fontana Press. About the Reviewer Anita Pincas, Senior Lecturer, Department of Continuing and Professional Education Institute of Education, Room 707, 20 Bedford Way University of London