The Role of Education in Addressing the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century

05 Ireland 19/09/2017 11:16 Page 84 The role of education in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century L ouise R ichaRdson n thinking about my talk today i realized immediately that my title was iway too ambitious. There are a great many challenges of the twentieth century and most of them are likely to be revealed as the century progresses. My expertise, moreover, is limited to university education and that will be my focus today. a more accurate title therefore might have been: ‘The role of universities in addressing some of the challenges evident at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. in speaking on this subject, i will be relying on the work of some of my oxford colleagues, especially diego Gambetta and senia Paseta. chaLLenGes 1916, 2016, 2116 What are these challenges? My list is by no means exhaustive but i would suggest: political violence, inequality, climate change, globalization and technological change, and i will focus on the first two. it is perhaps worth noting that each one of these challenges transcends national borders. From the vantage point of 1916, these challenges looked very different. The priority then was political violence, as europe was subsumed in an orgy of mass slaughter as the powers fought for dominance. From the vantage point of 2116, i expect the priority will be climate change. i predict that our successors will look back on us today and wonder how we could have sat on our hands while evidence of the calamitous consequences of climate change mounted monthly. in 1916 the political leaders in London were preoccupied by political violence, engaged as they were in the war to end all wars. Two years after the start of the war and months before the slaughter at the somme, the allies had already lost several hundred thousand men. The savage costs of the war greatly exceeded all their expectations. They perceived the easter Rising as a treacherous stab in the back of a nation fighting for its very survival against the German army. They had more pressing demands upon their attention than the social inequality rampant across Britain. The leaders of the Rising in dublin were interested in establishing rather than transcending national 05 Ireland 19/09/2017 11:16 Page 85 Role of education in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century borders. They had a very different perspective on political violence. Perceiving Britain’s difficulty as ireland’s opportunity, they saw their attempt at political violence as a noble means of securing irish freedom, succeeding where six previous attempts had failed. some, followers of James connolly were motivated by a desire to address social inequality in dublin, but for most the commitment to equality was more abstract. The 1916 declaration of independence spoke of ‘cherishing all the children of the nation equally’ of ‘equal rights and equal opportunities to all citizens’ and of ‘suffrages of all her men and women’. The priority, however, was physical force to achieve irish freedom: ‘the right of the people of ireland to the ownership of ireland, and to the unfettered control of irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible’. They sought equality for the irish nation among the recognized governments of the world rather than social equality for the irish population. Like most revolutionaries, they were vague on what precisely this freedom would entail. i expect that the vast majority of the population of both Britain and ireland were primarily concerned, then as now, with their own and their families’ security and well-being. While late-nineteenth-century advances in transportation and tele - communications had increased trade and cultural diffusion among, especially, Western nations, the term ‘globalization’ was unknown in 1916 and the phenomenon was certainly not considered a threat or even a challenge. indeed, many in Britain, influenced by norman angell’s The grand illusion , naively thought increased trade across europe made a world war impossible. 1 in fact, angell’s argument was that economic interdependence made war futile, a more plausible claim. in 2016 we are witnessing a popular revolt against globalization. electorates across europe and america, mobilized by populist – and often unscrupulous – politicians, are voting against the proponents of globalization, insisting that they are losing their jobs and their livelihoods as a result, either, because of outsourcing to countries with lower labour costs, or, to the importation of immigrants willing to accept lower wages. support for Brexit in the united Kingdom and for Trump in the us are only two of the most visible exemplars of this trend. it is impossible to foresee the vantage point of 2116, but it is hard to imagine that the clock can be turned back on globalization. We can only hope that governments will make more concerted efforts to ensure that the benefits of globalization are more broadly distributed. n. angell, The grand illusion (new York, 1910). 05 Ireland 19/09/2017 11:16 Page 86 6 Louise Richardson Technological change is a constant. Warfare has long served as a catalyst for technological innovation. The 191–1 war witnessed a transformation in weaponry with the introduction of tanks, machine guns, poison gas, submarines, flamethrowers and even air reconnaissance. The transport of troops by railway also transformed the conduct of war. The vast scale of the casualties – estimated at an unimaginable 3 million – was in part due to the introduction of these military innovations and delays in adapting defensive tactics. The pace of technological change has accelerated as the century has progressed and we can be confident that it will continue to do so into the future, to the point where it is hard to imagine how a gathering such as this conference might be conducted, and how we might all travel to it, in 2116. having briefly sketched the five challenges i will address, let me now turn to the question of education, and universities in particular. at a time when only a tiny percentage of the population was university-educated, three of the seven signatories on the 1916 declaration of independence were educators: Patrick Pearse, Joseph Mary Plunkett and Thomas Macdonagh. all three were teachers in the school founded by Pearse and Macdonagh, st enda’s. Two other teachers in the school, William Pearse and con colbert, were also among those executed in the wake of the Rising. Pearse cared passionately about education and founded st enda’s in 190. The school was bilingual, with an unashamedly celtic and nationalist ethos, teaching valour and heroism refracted through a fascination with mythology. But Pearse was also influenced by the philosophy of Maria Montessori and sought to create a child centred environment focused on personal development, creativity, imagination and intellectual freedom. drawing on the ancient celtic tradition of fostering, he saw the role of teachers as fostering the personal development of each individual child. These were radical ideas at the time. in his 191 polemic, The murder machine , he railed against the irish teaching system which, he argued, perceived and practiced education as a ‘manufacturing process’. he wrote: our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for english civil service and the so-called liberal profession. 2 P.h. Pearse, The murder machine (dublin, 1916), p. 12. 05 Ireland 19/09/2017 11:16 Page 87 Role of education in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century ever the visionary, he sought to replace this system with one inspired by ancient celtic traditions, literature and heroic legends that would develop a generation of gallant Gaelic-speaking individuals to fight for the new ireland. Few proponents of political violence have been as vocal on the subject of education as Pearse. Most are more focused on the evils of the adversary and the tactics required to prevail against them. it is nevertheless difficult to escape the comparison with latter-day conservative madrasas. The educational philosophy of st enda’s, with its focus on the individual development of the child, could hardly be more different from the harsh discipline and rote learning of some madrasas, producing graduates unschooled in any of the skills required for success in the modern world. Where st enda’s attracted the children of the dublin middle and professional classes, some madrasas attract the children of families who can ill afford to feed much less educate them. nevertheless, the idea of inculcating the next generation in the ideology of those wishing to overthrow the state and revert to an earlier mythical and halcyon past, is a shared feature. PoLiTicaL vioLence What then of the relationship between education, or universities, and political violence? i think it fair to assume that political violence will remain a challenge for the twenty-first century. as an educator, and one who has spent my career trying to understand the motives of those who resort to terrorism, it is very tempting to see education, and universities in particular, as the antidote to terrorism. if only it were that simple. By terrorism here i mean, simply, the deliberate targeting of non-combatants for a political purpose by a sub-state group. When i had time to study terrorists i discovered that one attribute they invariably shared was a highly over-simplified view of the world. They tend to see the world in Manichean terms, black and white, good and evil. it goes without saying that they see themselves as good and their opponents as evil.

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