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ISSN number: 1746-4757

  

Feature essay: IT Education and Democratic Practice

Drew Whitworth, University of Leeds

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The previous page outlined problems at the level of the individual with prevailing models of IT education. However democracy is, by definition, a collective endeavour. Why should these problems translate into potential democratic deficits? This page begins to address that question through brief consideration of some social and political theory.

The work of the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas is important here. Habermas is far from an easy read, even for those with some prior knowledge of political theory. Nor are his theories immune from criticism [7]. However, two important ideas drawn from his work will help illuminate our argument.

The first is that of the the public sphere. This is basically used to describe arenas in which political and social debate takes place amongst the "general public". Newspapers, community organisations, neighbourhoods, even public houses are included within the public sphere. The ideal is of active citizens using the informational resources of the public sphere to formulate individual and collective opinions and, in turn, acting as a democratic counterweight to the more formal policy-making of governments.

However, in his book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (published in English in 1989), Habermas describes how an active public sphere, through which individuals could freely debate political issues, is transformed into a "manipulated public sphere in which states and corporations use 'publicity' in the modern sense of the word to secure for themselves a kind of plebiscitary acclamation". [8]. Advertising, public relations, "spin doctoring", the transformation of broadcast and news media into big business; all retard the public sphere's ability to act as a genuine conduit for (undistorted) "public opinion".

These processes form part of the public sphere's colonisation by large bureaucratic organisations in the state and corporate spheres. Colonisation is the second important idea to be drawn from Habermas's work [9]. Ideally, all human beings are involved in a continuous process of production and reproduction of the lifeworld (which for our purposes here can be treated as a similar, although broader and more sophisticated, version of the public sphere - although this is a great simplification of Habermas's work). We do this by continually creating and adapting values and beliefs, coming to understandings, participating in social networks and freely forming our own identities and outlooks on life. These all bolster our more direct political involvement in public spheres.

However, colonisation involves the wielding of money and power to overtly influence or steer these processes towards strategic, self-interested goals. Although the increasing complexity of society requires a certain level of administration in order to function, Habermas believes this has gone too far. The manipulative practices already mentioned are actively removing the "general public"'s ability to self-determine the conditions under which their present and future lives will be lived. Examples of colonisation could include:

  • the enmeshing of political parties with corporate interests, and the way large cash donations are more likely to influence party policy than "public debate"
  • attempts by government to restrict policy-making influence to the "proper channels" (the parliamentary committee, the "focus group") while at the same time restricting the ability of potentially "disruptive" elements to access these
  • rampant privatisation, which represents an abdication by government of responsibility for certain areas of public concern (such as education, the health service, public utilities or even security); private companies being less accountable to their customers [10]
  • the imposition of unified, national (or transnational) standards in areas such as local government or education, invariably determined by small, closed policy-making groups "from above", rather than being mutually constructed by the general public "from below". As Welton writes [11]:
"Our economic and political elites think that most issues are beyond citizen competence. Their specialised knowledge requires our silence; self-directing citizen action is deemed impossible or dangerous.... It is only when citizens ask the power holders to engage in justificatory dialogues -- What reasons can you provide us with that justify our exclusion from dialogue? How can you justify your claim to have a superior conception of the good? -- that possibilities for developmental citizenship open up."

Education is an important means through which the lifeworld/public spheres are continually reproduced. If the needs of money and power are too strongly applied to education this risks turning it away from its ideal aim (to provoke enlightenment and understanding) and wholly orienting it towards pragmatic concerns such as the "needs" of industry. Learning for its own sake becomes devalued. This is totally against the vision of educators such as Eduard Lindeman who argued that the main, indeed, only justifiable purpose of education was to teach critical thinking. This would hardly be done by standardised curricula imposed by the very institutions (government, business) against which most critical thinking would be directed. Rather, it could only come from the bottom, by people working out for themselves what they wanted educating about.

Realistically, most educational practice is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Educators should not ignore the pragmatic needs of students who wish to acquire skills relevant to future careers - nor should one fall into the trap of seeing all such skills as somehow "undesirable" from a democratic point of view. This kind of simplistic argument does more harm than good. But IT education has problems even approaching the sort of educational practice suggested by Lindeman and others [12]. The next page of this article discusses why this might be and what the consequences are.

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Footnotes

7. For a relevant review see chapter 7 of Webster, Frank (2002): Theories of the Information Society, 2nd ed, London, Routledge. [return].

8. Outhwaite, W. (ed.) (1996): The Habermas Reader, Cambridge, Polity Press, p. 7. [return].

9. See Habermas, Jürgen (1987): The Theory of Communicative Action volume 2: Lifeworld and System - A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Cambridge, Polity Press. [return].

10. Though "shareholder activism" takes place, its successes so far have been limited. It should be noted that most shares in PLCs are owned by "institutional shareholders" such as pensions funds, which are interested only in returns on investments and have little interest in potentially damaging such returns by concentrating on, say, environmental or ethical lapses by a particular company. As accountability for one's actions is an important aspect of democracy, privatisation is thus an element in the intermingled processes which constitute colonisation. [return]

11. Welton, Michael, ed. (1995): In Defense of the Lifeworld: Critical Perspectives on Adult Learning, Albany, SUNY Press, p. 5. [return]

12. Welton's collection (see previous reference) is an excellent starting point here.