What educates?

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In asking What educates?, we do not begin with the overworked question, What is education? To ask for a definition of education would throw us into a realm of abstract speculation. Asking what educates has numerous consequences, which we note here with pointers to their fuller discussion.

• Asking what educates excludes nothing, for it is possible that anything and everything educates in one way or another. On StudyPlace we jumble up all sorts of educative experience.

• In StudyPlace, let us ground discussion in experience, not simply research, which is often too narrow and disembodied in relation to my life and my circumstances, to the life of each and the circumstances of each.

• Each person has experiences that can ground responses to our question, What educates? Through peer production, let us share and attend to our experience, the better to understand it, the fuller to develop through it.

• Asking what educates excludes nobody, for educative experience is universal and the peer in peer production means an equal before the law, in this case the process of reasoning together.

• Asking what educates invites attention to what miseducates. As atmospheric pollution harms respiration and health, so pedagogical pollution corrupts education and culture. How the cultivation of fear for political advantage and the legitimation of extreme inequalities of wealth and power pervert human aspiration and self-cultivation need analysis and counter-action in the digital commons.

• StudyPlace is not a place for specialist pretensions. Peer in peer review denotes a member of an exclusive rank, those who recognize themselves as sharing a defined set of specialized credentials. The peers in peer production differ from those in peer review.

• We do not engage in the terminal quest for certainty, but in the perennial urge to make sense in uncertainty. Through learning, we do not acquire knowledge; we shift the boundaries of our ignorance.