Enough

In ENOUGH: A PEDAGOGIC SPECULATION, Robbie McClintock criticizes education and culture and searches out, not the predictable, but the possible. To open the sense of possibility, McClintock postulates a distant future in which people have a collective trust in personal autonomy. They prize, not change, but stability, not the market, but the commons, and not more, but enough -- neither too little nor too much. From this future vantage, McClintock looks back on a basic question: Why have people confused education with the practice of schooling?

This question leads to a full analysis of modernity, for the global practice of compulsory schooling uses the same principles as other ubiquitous parts of modern life -- industrial corporations, sovereign nation-states, global commerce, and the bureaucratization of medicine, the military, and social life. What principles are essential to contemporary life?

In response, McClintock addresses important topics -- how we think about experience; how we understand the acting self; how we represent life in time and space; how we judge value in material, political, and cultural life; what we choose as our controlling purposes; and how we shape and situate our educational effort. With lucid examples from everyday experience, McClintock clearly contrasts the principles of life in the modern era with ones that may characterize a postmodern time.

ENOUGH offers neither policies nor predictions. It asks all, as persons reflecting on how they want to conduct their lives, to consider possibilities. It encourages aspiration based, not on probability, but on hope -- on desire for what a person judges to have significant human worth. The autonomous pursuit of possibility enables each person to add, in a vital, historical sense, to the drama of human achievement, to the self-creation of life itself. Each person, each seeking unique possibilities, interacts to conduct a personal life, lived through a vastly complicated network of reciprocal interactions, stretching from the intimate to the all-inclusive. Education -- each of us self-organizing our emergent capacities for conducting life in all its complexity -- unfolds as each of us works to control what takes place in life, as best each can.