There has long been discussion about the dominant Western model of education, which is based on the European Enlightenment era’s episteme. This way of knowing, in turn, is based on Christianity-inspired understanding of existence, which is predicated upon a permanently bad/good dichotomy (e.g. holy and profane, heaven and earth/heaven and hell, God and man) and hierarchy (e.g., notion of lordship and kingship attributed to God, servanthood as proof of religious devotion/goodness). These conceptions of permanent dichotomy and hierarchy, while advantageous for Europe’s religious and/or secular dominant classes, were also beneficial to Europe’s imperialist exploits abroad, as ideas of dominance, unholiness, and divinely-ordained inferiority were quite useful for a people who needed explanations for their own acts of genocide, enslavement, and barbarism. Over time, European educational institutions — namely, the academy — supported these imperialist endeavors by constructing a body of knowledge that took the inferiority of non-Europeans for granted and human dominance over the natural world as a given. Influenced by the historically colonialist academy, which understands both humans and the natural world as dominable and separate things, today’s dominant Western educative practices are based on a way of thought that erroneously understands humans as beings we are not — as eternally growing and never dying, as potentially omnipotent despite our fallibility, as subject to no other boundaries other than the ones we place on ourselves. And, despite centuries of this type of education, our sociocultural, political, and environmental plights make it clear that, perhaps, we are educating ourselves/have been educated in the wrong direction.
And while we are currently existing under Western conceptualizations of dominance, the idea of human supremacy have never solely been the domain of Europe: history abounds with constantly-shifting patterns of dominance and peaceful living around the world. Both oral and written documentations of human history reflect atrocities and oppression systemically perpetrated by those who had never even heard of Europeans. The empire-based culture that we are living under now, then — a culture based on human dominance, imbalance, and supremacy — is simply a successor of similarly destructive cultures over time. And while the peculiarities and specific outrages committed by empire change, we recognize the effects of human-supremacist practices over time and often feel inwardly resistant to them. No matter what or how we are taught, we know they are not right, even if we benefit from their effects. Across the span of human existence, human beings have resisted practices that seek to impose dominance over our and others’ inherent freedom, that discredit rather than bolster our community and environment-based knowledges and wisdom, and to squeeze us into an existence that does not answer or honor our inward and mysterious calling. While this is often done in schooling institutions, such oppressive practices show up throughout our institutions and communities, expanding the work of empire-based education beyond schooling and into society itself. Everything about an oppressive society teaches us, not just school. To live beyond supremacist-based practices and their deleterious effects in general, including the present ones, then, we can first broaden our discussion of improving education from changing our schools to changing our world. It’s all connected.
If we want a new world, then – a world beyond one informed by concepts of separation of/from the earth, our communities, and ourselves; beyond one informed by a rationalism that simultaneously condones enlightenment and genocide – we need different ways of knowing.
I’ve written about these different ways of knowing in the past, from questioning academic practice as a settler-colonial construct, to considering Black, Indigenous, and Islamic ways of knowing and perspectives as guides for moving beyond this era of White-supremacist and imperialist settler colonialism in particular, and beyond the wider, millennia-long age of empire. With these theoretical investigations as my point of departure, I explore future ways of knowing, what existence beyond this era could look like. This exploration will not take the shape of many post-’s, though, which tend to define themselves in terms of the very subject they purport to have moved beyond. This exploration is instead informed by two three basic human truths, truths that dominant ways of knowing often refute or ignore, but whose veracity extends before and beyond the current dominant structure:
- The human experience is finite.
- Two hallmarks of the human experience are dependence and consciousness.
- This finiteness, dependence, and consciousness must be eventually based on and informed by things not similarly finite, dependent, or conscious — things we can understand if we try as well as things we do not yet understand.
An exploration and likely assimilation of ways of knowing based on these truths is education, in that the assimilation of any way of knowledge is an education. And just as one’s type of education is based on the way of knowledge (epistemology) being assimilated, an assimilation of knowledge based on the three above truths is also a particular is its own type, which I call contingence education. The phrase contingence education is inspired by the philosophical concept of contingent beings. Though a philosophical concept that some say proves the existence of God (in that it argues for a necessary being, something that could have never not existed), that discussion is not the point here. In fact, I think that grappling over the existence of God gives us an excuse to ignore the other, irrefutable aspects of the contingence concept – that human beings are the opposite of necessary beings in and of themselves. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, we are contingent beings, completely dependent upon elements, entities, and within systems whose intricacies, in their totality, we still have yet to fully understand, regardless of our knowledge tradition. Our beginnings and endings in this world may hinge upon things within our influence but are outside of our complete understanding. Regardless of how intelligent we believe we are (or how powerful or how autonomous), each of our existences (as we understand it) will end, in its own way, and keep on going, in its own way. The human experience is at once predictable and mysterious, and any forward-thinking educational practice must take this into account.
I believe that these aspects of the human experience – its limitedness and reliance, as well as its mysterious and timeless natures – are important considerations for any educative practice that will move us beyond our current oppressive and destructive ways of being. I assert that our goal should be to better understand how/who we should be as humans in this larger universe that we may never fully understand as limited, finite beings simultaneously engaged with our own awareness, mysteries and age-old questions. Contingence education’s guiding question is How we can best be human – limited, mysterious, dependent, thinking – on a planet that does not require us for its existence, though we require it?
There is not one way of contingence education, nor do I single out any particular way. The idea of humans’ existing in tune with the environment on which they depend is nothing new, nor is the awareness of humanity’s inherent limitations and consciousness; indeed, these understandings have kept humanity going this long. And in the same ways that there are many variations of existing as dependent and conscious human beings, there are numerous educative practices and traditions that inform those variations. What my current exploration does, then, is investigate educative practices that, though varied, are all grounded in understandings of human contingence. I hope that this exploration will lead to increased knowledge of practices that move humanity away from mental, physical, and spiritual self-destruction and toward wholeness and healing in its many varieties.
This site features my explorations toward and of contingence education, from my theoretical examinations of U.S. American systems of oppression to marginalized people’s examples of resistance and resilience, even within my own family. Please note that, in cases where works are subject to copyright laws, each piece’s publication information and abstract will be provided. All other works are subject to use agreements as indicated.
Let's talk about contingence. 