Opening up to education as modal

Education is a plurality of possibilities. Yet, amazingly, at a deep conceptual and structural level this idea seems currently not yet to be in place. Some say education has even been foreclosed; that we exist enframed by a dominant and dominating discourse, deeply anti-democratic in its nature and perhaps irredeemably so (Flint and Peim, 2012; Peim, 2013). How do we know if education does lack structural, conceptual diversity? Because major end users of educational services – parents – do not yet have the idea or the concept of education as modal. Modal refers to education as a model or models. There can be many modes; each made of valid differing methods, theories and practices. That there are many also signifies that they are iterative: open to development but also flexible to various openings, closures, changes, challenges, morphing and blending. They represent – in a Derridean sense of permanent possibility – what is to come, rather than what is programmed and already given (Lees and Peim, 2013). Educationists are, I believe, professionals of educational research and practice charged with informing parents (as an end product of their activities as thinkers, researchers, practitioners) about such flexibility in the educational landscape and the options it would open up.

Yet, educationists themselves – teachers and researchers at every level from the school to the university – struggle to comprehend how diverse education can be. Many even struggle to be interested. Educationists conflate education with schooling on a regular basis: they forget about modal diversity; they do not demarcate strong differences (Lees, 2012). Has a mainstream schooling mentality strangled the science of education? Is it totalising and shutting down the educational imagination? What hope for parents then to be aware of options? Yet, education is modal. It can function in different worlds which each have their own coherent accounts of theory and practice, working harmoniously and homologously. There is a point of transition between these modes: a switch moment. This will be seen in the data presented later. On account of the movement from one world of education to another that we see in that data, we know that there is more than one mode.