A school of fish who doubt the sea

We have all had some experience of being 'educated' in school. That our unique experiences of 'education' will be different will be due in part to the ethos of the schools we attended. In light of their own experience, it is possible that psychologists now working in or with schools may have some concerns about the effects of schools. We might be concerned about the growing numbers of children and young people who are excluded from schools (and that amongst these young people are disproportionately many from certain demographic groups); we might think we should be concerned about the growing number of children who are persistently absent from school, and wonder if this is because they are worried about what might happen to them at school, because attending certain lessons causes them great anxiety or harms their mental health or, perhaps, because they can see no point in going to school – 'education' doesn't motivate or enthuse them. We might also be concerned by the difficulty many schools have in attracting or retaining good, qualified teachers. We might then think that any of these issues should imply a need for reform of schools and the curriculum for 'education'. In their book Against School Stephen Ball and Jordi Collet-Sabé take a more radical position.

Ball and Collet-Sabé suggest that enmeshed by the intricacies of our daily roles, duties and tasks we may be blind to the futility of our notions of change, enthralled with naïve possibilities for reform. They provide a vital and urgent reminder of the dead-end that much thinking about education may represent, especially when viewed in the global context of conflict and climate change. In fact, their book is not just a treatise against schools as they are, and 'education' as it is; this is a text about the world as it is, fatally wounded and dangerous, and the role of schools in perpetuating harm. There is much 'food for thought' in this that all (psychologists, educators and others) who try to work within the parameters of 'education' and 'schools' (notions may themselves be category errors) might heed.

The authors employ historical and sociological perspectives (much of it grounded in the work of Foucault) to exemplify the epistemes of present times (kronos) and times past (kairos) and critique the current idealisation and subjectification of the notional individual. They contrast this with the episteme of the 'commons' in which property was not individualised and exclusive, lands were not enclosed, and education hardly formalised or contained in schools. This approach might strike some readers as a risky romance; but the authors are too fleet of foot and determined to be snared in that way. Their explicit purpose is, instead, to interrupt and question our present delusions about education, admitting that to do so is as difficult as 'it is for fish to doubt the sea' (p.52) or for us to problematise the problems in schools as we see them. Thus, their narrative is psychological as well as sociological and renders it important, critical reading for a wider readership.

What Ball and Collet-Sabé propose is a 'fundamental reimagining of education without the school, beginning from the episteme of commoning, that is, an ethical and political activity of the care of the self, others, community, and the planet.' (p.100)

Although this may seem idealistic, some will agree that given the state of schools and our systems of education that are inhospitable (are actively hostile) for so many children and young people, there is no sensible alternative that might be achieved by any revision of schools. As Ball and Collet-Sabé insist, in contrast to contemporary modes of education that provide 'the hegemonic tool' that guarantees 'multiple crises in terms of mental health and well being; lack of care; unequal treatment; motivation and relevance; teacher recruitment and retention; etc' (p.118),we must ask what it would mean to be educated 'differently'? 

For these authors the urgency of their work is above all else due to concerns about planetary extinction and what they describe as the 'ethics of extinction'; and while the space between now and that future cannot be easily or fully comprehended, and it is, as Ball and Collet-Sabé recognise, hard to think beyond our customs, and if we don't, we are doomed. The revolutionary space created for thinking that is generated here is one we might seek to visit and, if possible, inhabit. Ball and Collet-Sabé are clear that the 'lessons' to be learned need to be different and in the final chapters they offer some suggestions about what we might do to gain from them. Ball and Collet-Sabé present a powerful and important argument that only a complete and radical rethink of 'education' without the encumbrances of schools and 'schooling' is needed. They present us with a problem of parallel visions, therefore. On one hand, Ball's and Collet-Sabé's convincing case for a revolution; on the other hand, the reality of children's conveyor-like progression through schools. In Euclidian geometry parallels only meet in infinity (i.e. never) so another geometry is needed for the conceptualisation of 'education'. For young people in schools now can we envisage pressing a 'pause' button while we radically redesign education? 

Perhaps, as Ball and Collet-Sabé indicate, we (in democratic societies) need to first agree what the purpose of education might be – and part of that must itself be to demonstrate the importance of democracy. Ethically it seems to wrong to imprison children and young people in a system of schools; in 'education' that might seem to serve some very well by reifying notions of innate ability / intelligence (and proving this with academic tests), while failing to give others any valuable, meaningful experience, experiences of 'education' that provide no understanding of themselves and others, no worthwhile knowledge or skills, and explicitly tells many young people that in fact they do not fit and are, therefore, excluded from any system of education or schooling. 

I suggest there is a challenge here for applied psychologists. How can we help redesign and support the implementation of education in ways that have no recourse to any current or past ideas about 'schools' or 'schooling'? 

At the outset the authors ask:

'you as reader to think with us, against, beyond, and without the school and its paraphernalia. That is, to start by thinking 'education' rather than schooling, and what kind of education is relevant to and needed now in the complex, difficult, and dangerous world that we live in. Thus, our arguments are not free-floating and abstract, they are concrete and situated. Situated in the world as it is now, the world of poly-crisis.' (p.2)

I agree with the authors that this might most likely, and, in view of possible futures, most properly depend on considering first how we can learn about – and with – each other. To do that, it seems to me, we need to place human relationships at the centre of the curriculum and locate other matters in what follows. I don't think that is an impossible task.

• Reviewed by Simon Gibbs, Emeritus Professor of Inclusive Educational Psychology and Philosophy, Newcastle University         

Against School: Thinking Education Differently by Stephen J. Ball & Jordi Collet-Sabé is published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. ISBN 978-3-031-80414-4.