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Personal, relational and beautiful:education, technologies and JohnMacmurray’s philosophyKeri Facer aa University of Bristol , UKPublished online: 07 Dec 2012.

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Personal, relational and beautiful:

education, technologies and John

Macmurray’s philosophy

Keri Facer*University of Bristol, UK

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).

Keywords: technology: future; ethics; philosophy; data; visualisation; mobile

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, p. 1).

As European leaders increasingly justify domestic Education legislation with

reference to PISA scores and international comparisons (Martens, 2007; Grek,

2009), 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

*Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA.

Email: kerileefacer@gmail.com

Oxford Review of Education

Vol. 38, No. 6, December 2012, pp. 709–725

ISSN 0305-4985 (print)/ISSN 1465-3915 (online)/12/060709–17

� 2012 Taylor & Francis

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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 rela-

tionships, 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. Ball, 2003; Martens,

2007; Grek & Ozga, 2010); 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; Naismith et al., 2004; Stald, 2009). 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.

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 per-

son-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

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‘learning to be human’ might help us to think carefully about how education might

respond to the growing convergence of mobile and data technologies.

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.

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 arriere pensee,

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, p. 7)

For Macmurray, the body is the means by which we generate the data that allow

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, p. 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, p. 82). The

body then, is precondition for the Self——it is a means of knowing the world,

recognising the other and acting in and on the world.

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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, p. 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.

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

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cannot treat them as agents, but only as determinate objects, that is, as continuants.

(Macmurray, 1961, p. 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 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, p. 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).

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, compari-

sons 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 modelling and

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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

micro-surveillance 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 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 Edu-

cation 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).

These two areas of socio-technical practice in education are subjects of signifi-

cant 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 dif-

ferent 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.

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 tech-

nologies begin to do something to the body of the child. The technology of the

database, through its instantiation in league tables and school information manage-

ment 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 have 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, 2009, 2012).

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

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in mathematics, capacities in English at ages 11, 14 or 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 a set

of disaggregated requirements (the person as system) (Cayley, 1992, p. 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 co-occurance 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 interven-

tions, or what Lee & Motzkau (2013) call ‘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.

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 & Rautiainen, 2003). And indeed, the mobile phone can now be under-

stood 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

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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.

What place is there for friendship in data and mobile technologies?

The gathering of performance data and its re-presentation in performance manage-

ment systems and league tables has little to do with friendship produced through

relationships of interdependence. Rather, these processes tend to atomise the indi-

vidual, 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 & 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 using these phones for maintaining and managing relation-

ships with each other and with family. Green (2003), Ling & Yttri (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 describe 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 and 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 (Green, 2003; Oksman & Rautiainen, 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

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through which young people are learning to manage the tensions of interdepen-

dence, 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 interde-

pendence 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, 2011)

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.

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 objec-

tive 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 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 interna-

tional 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 are gathered for the purposes of telling schools and national

education systems about themselves, to promote schools in the marketplace and to

manage teacher conduct (Ball, 2003; Ozga, 2012). 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,

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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, 2008). 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 participa-

tion 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 are 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 individ-

ual’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 to

gather information on everything from levels of particulates in the atmosphere to

the movement of mobile phones around the city.4

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 analysing 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

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created a psychopharmacological culture in which practices of constant self-

observation are encouraged (Rose, 2004, p. 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.

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 are 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, p. 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, p. 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.

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

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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 person-centred learning communities. He argues

that the ‘organisational architecture’ of such schools ‘is informed by manifest

interpersonal intentions’ (Fielding, 2007, p. 403).

The question that might be asked, then, is how might the increasing conver-

gence 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 is therefore a critical consideration if they are 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 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

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taken at five-minute intervals or more, offers myriad perspectives for exploring this

traditional activity. Or his project, WeFeelFine.org, which harvests data from

millions of blogs and re-presents them in ways that allow the user to explore how

people around the globe say they are feeling at different times, places or 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 & Biesta (2010) have

observed in their learning lives research and Fielding & Kirby (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, p. 6)

Reciprocal revelation might mean challenging the precepts which underpin how

data are currently used in education——in other words, which assigns the capacity

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to look across different sources only to educators, to those defined in the words of

data legislation as ‘data 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 appropria-

tions 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

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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.

Notes

1. http://jawbone.com/up, http://replaymyday.info/

2. 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/

4. http://www.sensaris.com/smartcities/ http://cityware.ac.uk

5. www.number27.org/whalehunt.html

Notes on contributor

Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of

Bristol and Leadership Fellow for the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Connected Communities Programme. She works in particular on

understanding the relationship between formal educational institutions and

wider society in relation to technological, social and environmental disruption.

Her most recent book is Learning futures: education, technology and social change

(Routledge, 2011).

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