Personal, Relational and Beautiful: education, technologies and John
Macmurray’s philosophy
Keri Facer, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol
In preparation for the Special Issue on John Macmurray for the Oxford Review of Education
Keri Facer
Graduate School of Education
University of Bristol
35 Berkeley Square
Bristol
BS8 1JA
kerileefacer@gmail.com
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Personal, relational and beautiful: Education, technologies and John
Macmurray’s philosophy
Abstract
Fifty years ago, the philosopher John Macmurray responded to calls for education to
redesign itself around the exigencies of international competition with a robust rebuttal of
such instrumentalism. He argued instead that the purpose of education was ‘learning to be
human’. This paper explores how Macmurray’s ideas might be applied to contemporary use
of technology in education. In so doing, it argues that the use of technologies in education
should be guided by the aspiration to create socio-technical practices that are personal
(located with the person), relational (a resource for friendship and collaboration) and
beautiful (designed to promote reflection and contemplation).
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Personal, relational and beautiful: Education, technologies and John
Macmurray’s philosophy
Introduction
Fifty years ago, John Macmurray, the subject of this Special Issue, responded to calls for
education to redesign itself around the exigencies of international competition with a robust
rebuttal of instrumentalism. Addressing the government (at that time demanding that
universities teach sciences rather than the arts because ‘this is what Russia is doing’)
Macmurray made the case in his 1958 Moray House Public Lecture that the purpose of
education was ‘from the standpoint of its victims, learning to be human’ (Macmurray, 1958,
1).
As European leaders increasingly justify domestic Education legislation with reference to
PISA scores and international comparisons (Grek, 2009; Martens, 2007), Macmurray’s
insistence that education’s purpose is instead to enable young people to ‘learn to be human’
seems increasingly radical. Indeed, Macmurray’s concept of the embodied, interdependent,
Self as Agent provides a potentially disruptive counter-point to the ‘unfinished cosmopolitan’
of global education policy discourses (Popkewitz, 2008). This possibility is what inspires
much of the writing in this Special Issue and what has informed Fielding’s use of Macmurray
to shape the powerful concept of the person-centred school (Fielding, 2007).
Contemporary analyses of education that draw on Macmurray, however, are often
characterised by a principled resistance to the perceived dehumanising tendencies of digital
contemporary cultures, which leads to a silence on the question of socio-technical change
(see, for example, Fielding & Moss, 2011). This silence risks leaving important gaps in our
analysis of the conditions of contemporary schooling and risks positioning Macmurray’s
contribution to the education debate as a nostalgic desire to return to another era rather
than a challenging voice adequate to grappling with contemporary conditions.
In this paper, therefore, I want to explore whether Macmurray’s ideas can be put into
dialogue with contemporary debates surrounding the use of technology in education today.
The socio-technical in education, however, is a rich and complex field encompassing
everything from MRI scanners to CCTV cameras, from biometrics to learning analytics, all of
which raise profound questions about humanity and identity. I focus therefore in this paper,
on two broad areas of socio-technical practice: the use of data technologies to facilitate
performance measurement and rankings and the use of mobile phones by young people.
Clearly the boundaries between these technologies are porous – mobile devices, for
example, can easily be used to gather data for performance purposes. Both sets of
technologies, however, engender what Illich calls ‘symbolic fallout’ (Illich in Cayley, 1992),
namely, they function not only as tools for changing social practices, but also as metaphors
that can be used as justification for a changing way of life. Such metaphors facilitate certain
patterns of thought about social relationships, identity and meaning and as a consequence
act as sites of significant social and political contention. While these technologies are not
necessarily bounded, then, their ‘symbolic fallout’ tends to be treated separately in the
research literature. Data systems, for example, are a focus of research attention primarily in
education policy, governance and sociology (e.g. Grek & Ozga, 2010; Martens, 2007; Ball,
2003); while Mobile technology use is a focus of research attention primarily in relation to
children’s health, learning sciences and youth cultures (e.g. Katz, 2003; Stald, 2009; Naismith
et al, 2004). If researchers using Macmurray are interested in ‘learning to be human’, then,
these are two important terrains in which that struggle needs to be examined.
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This paper therefore comprises three sections. First, I explore the features of Macmurray’s
‘Self as Agent’ that are important in understanding his view of education as ‘learning to be
human’. In so doing I draw in particular upon his 1958 Moray House Annual Public Lecture
and upon his 1961 book Persons in Relation. I also draw on Fielding’s (2007) use of
Macmurray in his conceptualisation of the person-centred school. In the second section, I
explore how these ideas might be used to examine the use of data and mobile technologies
in education. Finally, the paper concludes with a more speculative section that asks how
Macmurray’s concept of ‘learning to be human’ might help us to think carefully about how
education might respond to the growing convergence of mobile and data technologies.
1. Learning to be Human as the development of the Self as Agent
John Macmurray’s idea of the human being was born out of the horrors of the first and
second world wars and in response to the rising totalitarianism in Russia and growing
consumerism in the West; he (for it usually is a he, notwithstanding Macmurray’s embryonic
critique of ‘natural’ sex roles in some papers) is also defined against the Rational and
Romantic philosophical traditions of the self (Fielding, 2007). Macmurray’s idea of the
human, then, takes shape between the extremisms of blind obedience to traditional roles,
the atomised individual of the consumer-subject, and the wholly subjugated self of the
organic ‘society’. Before exploring how this idea confronts the conditions of digital
modernity, however, I want to explore the three elements of Macmurray’s idea of humanity
in more detail: embodiment, interdependence and agency.
1.1 Embodiment
Macmurray’s writing on the body is lyrical, displaying a practical affection and a reverent
respect for the role of the senses.
We can use our eyes for the sake of seeing; our ears for the joy of hearing; we can look and we
can listen, not merely see and hear, and we can do so without any arrière pensée, without any
notion of making something from it. This, I believe, is what the Greek philosophers meant by
‘contemplation’ and it is a distinct and important part of ‘being human’. (Macmurray, 1958:7)
For Macmurray, the body is the means by which we generate the data that allows us to
identify repeated patterns, to generate information and ‘facts’ about the world. This means
that the body is the precondition for scientific knowledge. Perhaps more important,
however, is the role of the body in enabling reflection. It is through the senses, Macmurray
argues, that we come to reflect on the world outside ourselves. And it is only through such
contemplation that it is possible to counteract egocentricity and to allow us to perceive the
Other as Other, as unique and different from us:
‘Contemplation … centres our emotional capacities upon the object in a search for its
uniqueness and reality’ (Macmurray, 1958:8).
Without such contemplation of the Other as unique and different from ourselves,
Macmurray argues, the person, the Self, would not exist. Finally, the body is also essential to
Macmurray’s idea of the person as an active agent in the world. The body is understood as
the ‘means to action. It is, for example, an instrument or tool, like the poker with which we
stir the fire’ (Macmurray, 1961, 82). The body then, is precondition for the Self – it is means
of knowing the world, recognizing the other and acting in and on the world.
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1.2 Interdependence
Second, Macmurray’s concept of the Self is fundamentally relational. The Self, for
Macmurray, is produced only through relations of both dependence upon and resistance
from others, only through relations of love for and fear of the other. Without
interdependence with others it is simply not possible to live:
‘We need one another to be ourselves. This complete and unlimited dependence of each of us
upon the others is the central and crucial fact of personal existence…Here is the basic fact of
our human condition’ (Macmurray, 1933, 137)
At the same time, without the resistance of other people, without the recognition of others
as distinct agents separate from ourselves and with motives potentially different from our
own, it is not possible to come to know oneself as a person. The Self, for Macmurray then, is
produced in relations through and with others.
In particular, Macmurray’s ‘Self’ is produced through a distinctive idea of friendship which
assumes relations of freedom and equality between people, which assumes relations of care
for each other and which allows individuals to take risks to reveal themselves even while
knowing they depend on the other. Learning to be human, Macmurray argues, is coming to
know the fear and love that comes from this intertwined relationship of dependence and
resistance, of freedom and equality through friendship.
1.3 Agency
Finally, at the heart of Macmurray’s analysis of what it means to be human is his emphasis
on Agency, which he uses to distinguish between Persons and Objects. To make sense of this,
it is useful to explore his arguments about knowledge.
He argues that there are two types of knowledge of people: Objective knowledge and
Personal knowledge. Objective knowledge can be understood as ‘information about’ the
Other, treating the other as Object. In contrast, Personal knowledge is an understanding that
can only be gained by encounter and engagement with the other as a Person; it is the
knowledge of the Others’ intentions and motives, which can only be attained by coming to
know that person. For Macmurray, such personal knowledge is at the heart of friendship.
Knowledge of the other that precludes knowledge of them as a person is merely functional,
treating the Other not as agent, but as means to an end.
A second key distinction between Objective and Personal knowledge for Macmurray is in
relation to temporality. Objective knowledge is understood as historic, while Personal
knowledge is always future-facing, dealing with the Other as agent:
The distinction we have drawn between a personal and an ‘objective’ knowledge of
one another rests upon this, that all objective knowledge is knowledge of matter of
fact only and necessarily excludes any knowledge of what is matter of intention. […] In
general this means, for our present purpose, that an objective knowledge of other
persons cannot treat them as agents, but only as determinate objects, that is, as
continuants. (Macmurray, 1961: 39)
This foregrounds a key element of Macmurray’s idea of the human being, namely, that a
person is not simply a product of her past, but is person with motives and intentions that
drive her action in the world. She is a source and subject of change in the world. This
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understanding brings with it implications for personal relations; in other words, it implies
that personal relations are only personal when they recognise the freedom of the person to
change in ways shaped by their intentions and motives:
If one person treats another person impersonally, he treats him as if he were an object
and not a person. He negates the personal character of the other, then, that is to say,
his freedom as an agent, and treats him as completely conditioned in his behaviour, as
if he were not free but determined. (Macmurray, 1961: 34)
Friendship, for Macmurray, is the relationship through which people come to know each
other as agents, as beings with aspirations, dreams and motives that may be distinct from
their own. Importantly, however, this agency is not the agency of late consumer culture, the
‘just do it’ of Nike capitalism or the constant self-reproduction of the lifelong learner.
Instead, it is essentially produced in relation with the Other through seeking knowledge of
the Other as a person, and through recognising interdependence with that person through
friendship. Recognising that the self only comes into being through relations with the Other,
this concept of agency is profoundly relational, it is heterocentric, it directs attention away
from the self towards an attempt to recognise and value the agency of the Other, and
through that recognition, to build one’s own agency in relation. Or, as Macmurray put it
more simply: ‘we are our relations’ (Macmurray, 1961)
2. The different fates of data and mobile technologies in education
Having outlined the key contours of Macmurray’s idea of what it might mean to ‘learn to be
human’ through friendship, the body and agency, I now turn to the question of the changing
socio-technical landscape to which this paper seeks to apply his ideas. In particular, to the
recent uses of data and mobile technologies in education.
Over the last decade, data technologies have come to provide the infrastructure that
underpins a new global education discourse of international metrics, comparisons and
performance assessment (Novoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003; Martens, 2007; Grek, 2009; Grek &
Ozga, 2010; Grek, 2012; Ozga, 2012). Such technologies are the carrier mechanisms of what
Levin (1998) calls the ‘epidemic’ of education reform.
While the gathering of data about young people and teachers has been a part of education
for years, the intensification of such processes and their internationalisation has been
significantly facilitated by data technologies (Ball, 2003). These tools facilitate micro-level
record keeping, they allow the rapid collation and analysis of massive amounts of data, they
allow modeling and projection of ‘ideal’ trajectories and they allow comparisons between
schools, students and countries, all on an ongoing basis. Without networked data
technologies, the system of international performance management, scrutiny and microsurveillance would arguably be impossible in schools. What is noticeable is that such
technologies have, today, become so pervasive as to be almost invisible in schools, they are
banal, unremarkable, the subject of no newspaper articles or press releases in themselves.
In contrast, young people’s use of mobile technologies is regarded with profound mistrust in
most schools, policies are established to prevent their introduction into the classroom and
legislation changed to allow teachers to eradicate data kept on the phone. Indeed, the
mobile phone is regarded with such hostility that the 2011 Education Act, following hot on
the heels of the UK’s summer riots, explicitly allows teachers to confiscate and delete
information held on phones (education Act, 2011).
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These two areas of socio-technical practice in education are subject of significant debate in
education policy studies, youth studies and learning sciences where questions range from
implications for governance to strategies for mathematics teaching. Working with
Macmurray, however, encourages the researcher to ask different questions about these
socio-technical changes: If education is concerned with ‘learning to be human’, what
happens to embodiment when these tools are used routinely? What happens to friendship
in an age of data and mobile technologies? How is young people’s agency constructed
through the social practices that grow up around these tools? It is to these questions that I
now turn to explore whether they bring distinctive perspectives to the current debates.
2.1 What happens to the body of the learner in an era of data and mobile technologies?
What does a database do to the body of the child in education? Arguably, nothing. Unlike
wireless and mobile devices, there are no risks of radiation to create news headlines. Rather,
it is in the discursive and symbolic domain that such data technologies begin to do
something to the body of the child. The technology of the database, through its instantiation
in league tables and school information management systems, radically fragments the body
of the student and seeks, in fact, to eradicate it. The student becomes visible to the school
manager increasingly through the units of data that are captured about her and, in turn, the
student becomes known through these tools as a collation of these discrete interconnected
fragments; in them she is the red mark on the spreadsheet, the ‘borderline case’ in the C/D
boundary. While such data has always been gathered about children in schools, these tools
allow now for the statistical comparison of the individual child to their ideal fictional Other
in similar schools or different locations. This comparator is now, no longer, their colleague in
the classroom, but an international standardised globalised schoolchild, the PISA-victorious
Finnish, Singaporean or Canadian child (Grek, 2012; Grek, 2009).
The symbolic fallout of these data technologies is to reconstruct the student as a system
made up of discrete functioning parts – capacities in science, capacities in maths, capacities
in English at ages 11,14,16. The child is no longer an embodied person, but a cybernetic
system that results from inputs (teaching strategies/school factors) and which generates
outputs (results). In the development field, Illich argues, the symbolic fallout from such
technologies of measurement and comparison has resulted in the analysis of the person as
set of disaggregated requirements (the person as system) (Illich, 1992: 168). As a
consequence, the primary problematic for the field shifts from a concern with the hungry
person to a concern with ‘providing sufficient calories’. In education, we might see a parallel
shift away from the education of the human being, to the ‘raising of standards’, a context in
which the development of the person becomes of less importance than the technical
challenge of closing a disembodied ‘attainment gap’.
This construction of the child as system of inputs and outputs, notably, is emerging at the
same time as the pharmaceutical industry is recasting mental ill health as a disorder of
neurotransmitters amenable to pharmaceutical intervention (Rose, 2004). Such cooccurance of cybernetic child in education with psychopharmacological society begins to lay
the groundwork for the treatment of the child’s body, in particular the child’s brain, as the
site for targeted interventions, or what Lee (2013) calls ‘tweaks’, to correct and nudge
results back into the right figure for international comparison. The discursive and symbolic
fallout from the proliferation of data technologies may then, in time, come to have material
and biological implications for the child’s body.
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The implications of mobile technologies for the body, in contrast, are manifold. While the
jury is still out on the effects of electromagnetic radiation on children’s brains (Aydin et al,
2012) the more subtle changes that mobile use encourages in perception of person/machine
boundaries is well documented. For the last decade, researchers studying children and
young people’s use of mobile phones have observed the blurring of human-machine
boundaries that characterises responses to and uses of these devices. As one researcher
described them, these are ‘machines that become us’ (Katz, 2003). Stald (2009) for example,
describes how, for the young people she studied, the phone became a form of ‘digital
double’ that extended, reflected and held their identity. For them, it was a place of storage
of personal records and a place for performance of identities. For these young people, the
phone became a ‘shell’, a means of incorporating a whole range of experiences and
relationships as part of a new framing of the body.
Finnish researchers have described the ways in which some young people
anthropomorphise their mobile devices, seeing them as almost human, apologising to the
devices for ‘hurting them’, and seeing them as representing their friends and family. They
describe how children saw the device almost as another ‘body part’ (Oksman and
Rautiainen, 2003). And indeed, the mobile phone can now be understood as a radical
augmentation of the senses. At its most basic level, it acts as a recording device, capturing
images, movement, geographical location and sounds. Increasingly, it can be used as a way
of ‘seeing’ information encoded in the environment that the un-augmented body cannot
read. Consider common phone applications such as Shazam, a system for ‘listening’ to any
piece of music, which then automatically tells you the name of the musician and title of the
piece.
The use of data and mobile technologies does strange things to the body; it explodes the
symbolic body of the child into micro-representations on screens and comparisons on
spreadsheets, it extends the body into devices with new capabilities.
2.2. What place is there for friendship in data and mobile technologies?
The gathering of performance data and its re-presentation in performance management
systems and league tables has little to do with friendship produced through relationships of
interdependence. Rather, these processes tend to atomise the individual, extracting them
from their relationships to the extent that researchers and policy makers now have to try to
‘add back in’ such information through remedial strategies such as ‘value-added’ test scores
designed to make visible various indices of human relationships (Goldstein, 2001). The
database presents the student as an autonomous figure, as separate from rather than as
fundamentally dependent upon and interdependent with the other students and people
that surround her.
Indeed, these technologies encourage the child to ignore the externalities which might
shape them and encourage them instead to inhabit the description of themselves offered by
the spreadsheet. As Reay and Wiliam have documented, the child comes to know
themselves as a ‘six’ or a ‘nothing’ (Reay and Wiliam, 1999). As currently used in education,
data technologies could at best be seen as blind to relations of friendship and
interdependence, at worst, they might be seen as hostile to notions of the Self as produced
in relation with others.
Mobile technologies bring more ambiguous implications for interdependence and friendship.
The last decade of research in this area documents the evident fact that young people are
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using these phones for maintaining and managing relationships with each other and with
family. Green (2003), Ying and Littri (2001) and Skelton (1989) describe how phones can be
used to support communication between friends; while Gillard et al (1998) show how
phones enable relationships to be played out across private and public spaces.
Other studies also describes the intricate processes by which social relationships are
negotiated through the use of the phone: this includes the use of social networking sites and
contacts lists as reassuring evidence of ongoing connection with others; the use of pilaris or
‘no call-calls’ as a means of flagging ongoing attention; the use of the phone to share news,
support friendship, build an archive of shared experiences (Stald, 2009). Mobile phones are
used by young people as tools for exploring, developing and negotiating their relationships
with each other. It is a key contemporary mechanism for managing acceptance and rejection,
support and autonomy (Oksman & Rautiainen, 2003; Green 2003).
The phone’s promise of constant connectivity, support and reassurance, however, is
balanced by its function as a source of interruption, anxiety and the need to manage
multiple conflicting demands and places at the same time. The mobile phone might
therefore be understood as an important contemporary site through which young people
are learning to manage the tensions of interdependence, to confront the resistance of
others and the support of others, which Macmurray describes as critical to the formation of
the Self.
More recently, however, Turkle has argued that this process of managing interdependence
via the mediation of these technologies is ossifying in ways that limit encounters with others.
The phone as ‘shell’ is seen by Turkle as a shield, a defence against interaction with others.
She describes how mobile devices are used to dip in and out of social settings, to extract
oneself from encounters that one wants to avoid. She describes how older adults, herself
included, are using mobile devices to avoid the difficulties of the voice, of the conversation.
In phrases reminiscent of Macmurray she articulates the loss that such erosion of
conversation might bring:
‘connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and
knowing one another. In conversations we tend to one another. (The word itself is
kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move together.) We can attend to tone
and nuance, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view. […] And
we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight
from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection.
(Turkle, 2012b)
Where Turkle sees diminished chances to learn ‘skills of self-reflection’, Macmurray might
argue for diminishing opportunities to create and know the Self at all. For without the
reciprocity and mutuality of conversation and of friendship undertaken in the spirit of care
for, rather than defence against, the Other, he might argue, the chances of developing the
Self are diminished entirely.
2.3 Data technologies, mobiles and Self as Agent
When thinking about the relationship between digital technologies and Macmurray’s
concept of the Self as Agent, it is helpful to return to his distinction between objective and
personal knowledge of the Other. Objective knowledge, he argues, is knowledge which
treats the person as object, is always historical and is concerned with facts and observable
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information. Personal knowledge, in contrast, is concerned with coming to know the
person’s motivations, intentions and anticipations. In theory then, an education that is
concerned with ‘learning to be human’, would be an education that is concerned with
building not only Objective but also Personal knowledge of and between young people.
In this context, it is not possible to conceive of contemporary data technologies and their
cluster of associated practices of performance management and international comparison
as providing anything other than the knowledge that constitutes the student as object rather
than person. The purpose of data collection is egocentric, the data is gathered for the
purposes of telling schools and national education systems about themselves, to promote
schools in the marketplace and to manage teacher conduct (Ozga, 2012; Ball, 2003). The
search for such knowledge is not heterocentric; it does not have as its purpose the desire to
engage with students on their own terms and to understand their own trajectories and
aspirations. However much data such technologies provide about each student, therefore,
their current use must be understood as inadequate for supporting and sustaining the
development of the young person as a future-facing Agent.
The use of mobile technologies as resources for building the Self as Agent is potentially less
clear-cut. Notwithstanding Turkle’s analysis, there is evidence that mobile technologies can
and are being used to underpin relations of friendship and mutual concern that enable
young people to navigate educational experiences (Green, 2003; Stald, 2009). Intertwined
with social media tools, they are used to help navigate the complexities of what it means to
be a student today (Selwyn, 2009). They are now one part of the suite of tools that can be
used for participation in and with others in constructing their identities and their societies
(Jenkins, et al 2007; Carrington & Marsh, 2009). Used in this way, they are potentially
powerful resources through which young people can learn about each others’ motivations,
aspirations and ideas and share their own with others.
As mobile technologies converge with data technologies, however, the potential for such
tools to be used as simply another means of gathering data for performance and
management purposes significantly increases. Indeed, these tools which have the potential
to support the interdependent, contemplative and participative relationships of friendship in
action, can become potentially a means by which young people can become active
participants in their own objectification.
Consider, for example, the range of ways in which personal mobile devices are becoming
tools for monitoring and surveillance of the self. First, the body itself is being transformed
into a site of ‘data collection’. There are now commercially available ‘tracking devices’ in the
form of bracelets that keep a record of individual’s sleep patterns, movement, activity, pulse,
heart-rate, sweat responses and so forth.1 Second, commercial and academic research
organisations are working hard to develop means of documenting daily lives in ever more
detail, from people’s energy consumption to their social media use, to their interactions in
the home.2 Third, we are seeing the development of sensor technologies that begin to make
it practically feasible to gather rich biological and environmental data on an ongoing basis.3
At the same time sensors embedded in city streets are already beginning gather information
1
http://jawbone.com/up, http://replaymyday.info/
http://www.homenetworks.ac.uk/, http://wegov-project.eu/,
http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html
3 http://www.bodymedia.com/ http://www.media.mit.edu/galvactivator/
2
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on everything from levels of particulates in the atmosphere to the movement of mobile
phones around the city4
This massive proliferation of biological, ambient environmental data gathered about the
person is being seen, in the words of the World Economic Forum (2011) as a new ‘economic
asset class’ that will open up new forms of social and economic analysis, and new
possibilities for targeted delivery of services and goods. This level of interest suggests that,
over the next few years, there will be significant funding going into ensuring that gathering
and analyzing rich data becomes an integral part of contemporary life. What might this
mean for an education conceived as learning to be human?
Rose’s analysis of a growing pharmacological culture in developed nations sounds an
important note of caution. He describes how the combination of pharmaceutical company
investment in research and development and product marketing, combined with a new
availability of ‘targeted’ pharmaceuticals, has created a psychopharmacological culture in
which practices of constant self-observation are encouraged (Rose, 2007, 27). The
development of personal digital sensor tools to enable constant bodily and environmental
self-scrutiny potentially allows for the radical amplification of this process. In this context,
agency risks being conceived as the ability to constantly monitor, tweak and work on the self
to adapt to changing conditions and comply with the latest standards. The young learner
becomes Popkewitz’s ‘unfinished cosmopolitan’ with bio-digital bells on, constantly
scrutinising the self for changes and seeking digital and bio-augmentations to competitively
adapt to the environment.
3. Macmurray and the machines: alternative futures
Feminist and actor network theory from Butler (1990), Haraway (2000) and Latour (1993)
onwards has explored changing conceptions of identity and agency when the mind and body
is extended into digital tools. In these analyses, agency is understood as distributed across
assemblages of biological, social and technological actors, and diffused in a constant
performance of myriad, shifting identities.
Macmurray’s work may predate post structuralism and actor network theory by decades,
and yet he was in many ways beginning to struggle with similar questions. Indeed, he was
working at a time when atomic theory was challenging our assumptions about rationality
and the body far more than the recent neuro-scientific analyses of brain flow. For example,
he describes the challenge of thinking about what it means to be embodied in a system
made up of ‘automatic activities of our own for which we disclaim all personal responsibility.
They are and yet they are not our own. […] So we saddle our bodies with the responsibility
that we disown’ (1961, 83)
In looking at the complexities of personhood in the age of the microscope, however,
Macmurray reaches very different conclusions about humanity from the actor network
theorists. He refuses the dissolution of agency and argues instead that the defining feature
of personhood and humanity should be understood as residing in the capacity to care for
others (1961, 84). This capacity to care, premised upon contemplation of the Other and
recognition of their difference in relations of friendship is, in Macmurray’s analysis, the
source for all Agency.
4http://www.sensaris.com/smartcities/
http://cityware.ac.uk
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I want to conclude, then, with a reflection on where such an analysis of what it means to be
human in the age of biological machines might take education, and how it might impact on
the ways in which education appropriates or resists the new mobile and data technologies
increasingly at its disposal.
Fielding’s use of Macmurray in his analysis of the person-centred school provides a useful
precedent for such an approach. In his analysis, he argues for a rethinking of the relationship
between functional and personal relations. He argues that functional relations (those which,
if you like, allow people to ‘get things done’ by treating others as objects and which produce
knowledge of others as objects) are important in education but should not be pre-eminent.
Personal relations, those which produce the person as agent and which enable people to
learn to live in community, need instead to take precedence. But the functional remains
critical in support of this; objective knowledge is a necessary precondition for personal
knowledge. The challenge then, as Fielding puts it, is twofold. First, to restate the primacy of
the personal and resist the dominance of the functional/objective. And second, to explore
how the functional – the way of doing things – might in fact become expressive of the
personal. Consider Fielding’s description of the expressive mode of schools as personcentred learning communities. He argues that the ‘organisational architecture’ of such
schools ‘is informed by manifest interpersonal intentions’ (Fielding, 2007, 403).
The question that might be asked, then, is how might the increasing convergence of mobile
and data technologies in education be reimagined in ways that are expressive of human
relations defined by the capacity to contemplate and care for the other? How might they be
reconfigured in ways that would be ‘informed by manifest interpersonal intentions’? How, in
other words, might the socio-technical organisation of education be reimagined in ways that
are expressive of the aim of learning to be human? Such questions offer very different
avenues for inquiry and practice from much of the work that has recognised the distribution
of the self across multiple artefacts and which has, instead, focused primarily on the
distribution of cognition across people and machines (e.g. Salomon, 1990)
These questions suggest, perhaps, that for data technologies to become expressive of the
personal and the relational rather than the functional, it would be important to find ways for
data to become a site of contemplation, reflection and perception of the Other. The world of
rich and personal data might be reconceived as the development of a new ‘sense’ to enable
a new form of sensibility, a new way of looking at the world. In other words, it might be
possible to find ways to make data and the contemplation of data, beautiful; to draw
attention to the beauty, specificity and difference of the Other:
Contemplation it is, and not the intellectual manipulation of facts, which gives us our direct and
personal knowledge of the world. But to learn to live in our senses is to learn to enjoy both our
seeing and hearing and what we see and hear’ (Macmurray, 1958)
The aesthetics of data are therefore a critical consideration if it is to become a resource for
contemplation, for personal expression, for friendship and for the cultivation of sensibility.
Such a pleasurable contemplation of the rich data environment would act as a powerful
bulwark against the reduction of data to mere information and regulation of the person, or
to a new ‘economic asset class’ that can be strip-mined by the corporations of the
knowledge economy.
Experiments in this area are already proliferating as the challenges and beauty of living with
rich data are becoming visible. These range from the growth of information visualisation as
an academic discipline to data visualisation as an expressive and artistic practice. Web artist
12
Jonathan Harris is doing more than most to show how ambient ongoing data collection
might be reimagined as a source for looking afresh at the world, at ourselves and at each
other. Consider, for example, his beautiful project Whale Hunt5 which through 3,214
photographs taken at 5 minute intervals or more offers myriad perspectives for exploring at
this traditional activity. Or his project, WeFeelFine.org, which harvests data from millions
blogs and represents them in ways that allow the user to explore how people around the
globe say they are feeling at different times, places, weather conditions. Such artworks
provoke attention to both common experiences and to the unique and distinctive voices of
individuals.
In themselves, such experiments are not adequate as an educational resource for learning to
be human in an era of rich data. They do, however, begin to offer alternatives to the
deadening world of the spreadsheet and gant chart and outline possibilities for transforming
the way young people might gather and represent data on a daily basis through their own
recording tools and experiences.
The second way by which functional socio-technical practices might become expressive of
personal relations, is to turn the ownership of data in education on its head. At present, as I
have already discussed, data collection is conceived as an institutional responsibility,
gathering information for the egocentric purposes of the institution. Instead, it might be
possible to see data collection as a personal activity, held by the person, and revealed by
the person as appropriate to different people and institutions. Turning the use of data on its
head in education, starting from the assumption of young people as authors of rich
accounts of themselves, would bring a new onus on educators to work with young people
to discuss patterns in their data trails, explore alternative narratives, construct different
descriptions of themselves, explore how individual narratives relate to those of other
people or other periods. Such a process, as Goodson et al (2010) have observed in their
learning lives research and Kirby & Fielding (2009) in their work on student-led reviews in
special schools have demonstrated, may be important in enabling young people to narrate
their experiences in ways that enable critical reflection upon the conditions in which they
find themselves.
This relates, finally, to the third point, which is that if learning to be human is about
developing relations of reciprocity and care in conditions of friendship, then the use of tools
for communication and gathering of information need to be reimagined in ways that support
conversation and dialogue. The proliferation of personal data risks becoming, as Turkle and
Rose both warn, a narcissistic means of selective self-monitoring and self-representation as
well as a bulwark against personal interaction. The challenge, therefore, is to explore how
the convergence of personal and data technologies can become the basis not for egocentric
self-reflection, but for conversation and for reciprocal revelation within conditions of
friendship. As Macmurray argues:
‘communal knowledge … involves a characteristic mutuality. It is necessarily reciprocal. If Peter
knows Paul, then Paul knows Peter. This reciprocity is necessary because this kind of knowledge
is by revelation. One can know another person, in this sense, only so far as he reveals himself’
(Macmurray, 1965: 6)
Reciprocal revelation might mean challenging the precepts which underpin how data is
currently used in education – in other words, which assigns the capacity to look across
different sources only to educators, to those defined in the words of data legislation as ‘data
5
www.number27.org/whalehunt.html
13
managers’. Instead, it might mean creating the conditions in which rich data trails were
understood as part of the many resources that young people would have at their disposal to
represent themselves to and with others. Such ideas commonly take poor form today in
tools such as ‘learning portfolios’. Increasingly, however, the capacity to represent and
analyse data in increasingly rich modalities may begin to create a much more sophisticated
set of resources by which young people can choose to reveal themselves to friends, to
educators, to families in conditions of mutual trust and exchange. Imagine, for example, the
child who is able to explain the day to day lived reality of caring for an ill parent, or the
passionate experience of playing with an orchestra, as part of the conversations they are
able to have with their friends and educators.
The development of relations of trust and reciprocity, however, will never be a product of
particular technologies alone. Rather, they will emerge from choices about how to use these
tools. Even before the era of rich data recording and data analytics emerges, then, it may
make sense for educators to work with young people to understand how and when the ways
in which they record, communicate and share ideas about their lives through existing mobile
devices support relations of mutuality, care and respect. This would suggest that, rather
than banning mobile devices and giving teachers free reign to delete data held on them, the
tensions surrounding their use need to be brought out of the shadows and made the subject
of critical, reflective conversation in schools.
Conclusion
Macmurray’s concept of the embodied, interdependent self as agent provides a radical
challenge to the ‘unfinished cosmopolitan’ identified by Popkewitz as the ideal citizen of
much contemporary education discourse. Macmurray’s emphasis upon embodiment,
interdependence and friendship as at the heart of learning to be human, disrupts
educational discourses that take the autonomous self-monitoring individual as their lodestar.
Such an emphasis, however, might be dismissed as nostalgia for a safer, smaller, more
intimate world if it is not put into dialogue with the lived experience of contemporary
conditions. In this paper, I have attempted to do so. I have described how Macmurray’s idea
of the human can act as a lens through which to ask questions about how contemporary
educational appropriations of digital technologies are reshaping the bodies, friendship and
agency of the child in education. I have also argued that Macmurray’s educational
philosophy can be used as a framework for thinking about future possibilities and for
mapping out potential routes for the design of new educational technologies.
In particular, I have argued that if education is to be concerned with learning to be human,
the challenge remains to reimagine socio-technical practices in education in ways that can
be expressive of relations of friendship and mutuality, relations that are premised upon
heterocentric contemplation of and care for others. Such reimagination, I would suggest,
may be facilitated by demanding the use of some old words for new technologies; by
exploring how the convergence of mobile and data technologies might be reimagined as
resources for the personal, the relational and the beautiful.
14
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