The differentiation of desire

Just in the way that someone’s desire to alleviate their thirst will typically constitute their motivation for taking a drink, so too desire plays a role in each student’s engagement, or re-engagement, with learning. The strategies of educational institutions are not therefore merely impressed upon individuals whose minds are akin to tabula rasa. When the college at which I undertook fieldwork says in its prospectus “Let (us) change your life!” it is clear that no such change can be achieved without a willingness on the part of students to accept and adapt to that change. It is obvious, too, that each student’s desires and motivations in respect to their education, both in advance of and during their engagement with it, are crucial to the success of the enterprise upon which they, their fellow students, and their teachers are collectively embarked. Indeed, Usher and Edwards identify the same relationship between desire and education when they exhort us to “recognize the place of desire in the learning event”.[i]

 

In conversations throughout my research, I enquired regarding my informants’ motivations and desires in returning to education. What I heard resonated consistently with my own motivations in returning to learning. However, I quickly became aware that my informants’ accounts were difficult to accommodate in terms of the discussions of students’ motivations in much of the literature with which I am familiar; a literature that is pervaded by the instrumentalist / intellectualist binary. Yet, as the student’s remarks illustrate, this is not to dispute that the engagement with learning must be seen as a directed and intentional act that is aimed at the satisfaction of some or other desire. It became clear, however, that individuals’ motivations and desires cannot be starkly differentiated along instrumentalist / intellectualist lines.

 

My informants time and again offer justifications for choosing their particular program of study that at first flush, and taken in isolation, appear to fall into one or the other of these binary categories. A distinction of this sort is apparent in the remarks of those whose early inclinations were towards the study of a topic of personal interest, ‘for its own sake’, but who ultimately chose to pursue another academic route for reasons associated, most commonly, with a perceived greater potential for financial reward and for enhanced employment prospects. One such student is Anthony, who is studying information technology (IT):

“I actually started a psychology course, it was a correspondence course, a few years ago. Because it was something that always interested me… There’s a fair amount of things in this (unit of study) that are things I’ve already looked at myself in books I’ve read… The part of it that deals with philosophy, and Descartes… These are the sorts of modules that interest me more than sitting in front of a computer… I did consider doing social sciences when I came here, but because I wanted to go into engineering, I couldn’t. But, given the choice, I would have done social science…”

George offers a similar account of also choosing to study information technology:

“To choose the IT course? When I first set off, I was interested in the social sciences course more than anything, and then the prospectus came back and it said ‘Information Technology’ and I thought ‘That’s the way the world’s going, and that’s where the bucks are going to be made in the future.  Why not?’”

 

Others seemingly never entertained any such reservations over whether to go down an overtly ‘instrumental’ route in their choice of program. Smiler, for instance, had always known that information technology was where his interests lay, although his instrumentalist disposition and the uses to which he intends to put his education beyond college crystallized during his studies:

“I came into college as a direct result of a teacher I had when I did my NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) course. She sort of inspired me and I thought ‘Well, I can do that’. I came in thinking that ultimately I wanted to teach adults in the same sort of environment; taking them in off the streets. I’m a bit betwixt and between at the moment, because I’ve still got the same ideals, but I’m also thinking ‘Well, hang on a minute, what about me?’…  Basically, I know damn well that I can come out at the end of this degree course and earn a hell of a lot of money…”

 

It is interesting, though, that not all of the students who speak instrumentally of articulating their education to longer term objectives and career ambitions are confined to those subject areas or programs in which we might most readily expect a discourse concerning career prospects and enhanced economic value. For example, although Anthony and George rejected the social sciences pathway as being insufficiently ‘instrumental’, several students on this program remark on its vocational relevance and consequent appeal to them. Two such are Wen and Lorna, who both speak of their desire to secure professional qualifications in social work in order to realize their aims of working with underprivileged children. David, another social sciences student, comments in a similar vein concerning his long-term career aspirations:

“The plan is the same as it was going back a few years, which is the idea of becoming a social worker as a professional qualification to base things on and to allow me to earn a reasonable amount of money… and carry on working with teenagers…”

Whilst El Salvador, a Namibian student who has taken a sabbatical year from his work as a police officer to study at the college, speaks of his desire for an enhanced understanding of social processes, yet recognizes that this knowledge will simultaneously enhance his career opportunities:

“My reason to choose social science? I find these topics of interest to me, like sociology, social problems, psychology. It means, if I finish this course and then I come (sic) back to my country and continue with my job as a police officer, I can work very easily because you learn social in general… The police are not working just to other police, they are working in a community. You find you are going to attend all problems. That’s my reason.”

 

Furthermore, and very significantly, the recounting of individual motivations for the choice of a particular program of study is also couched in the instrumentalist idiom by those who do not significantly articulate a discourse concerning employability, economic advancement, or progress beyond their immediate education at all, and who would typically be perceived as ‘intellectualists’. Elizabeth, a student of the combined humanities program, provides an example of this sort:

“I actually chose to leave work for a change of direction… I just decided I really wanted a change of direction. I wasn’t happy with what I was doing, I wasn’t getting anything out of it, and I felt it was well worth it, on reflection…  I do know, now, what I don’t want…

“(I have chosen to study combined humanities) mainly because I am sort of interested in the idea of the classics, humanities, and also because I didn’t really have a positive notion of where I wanted it to go, even really when I first came here it wasn’t necessarily a step forwards to university. It was just to find out about where I was going…”

 

Joe, another student of the combined humanities program, speaks in similar terms. Joe has secured a nine-month sabbatical from his job as a hygiene worker to return to education and develop his understanding of social philosophy. This he regards as crucial to an appreciation of the political and structural position of the working class. He is, however, uncertain as to his future beyond college:

“So it’s reached the point where I’m fed-up with my job…

“I didn’t want to give up my job on the basis of I’d have nothing to go back to, because this might blow up in my face, basically. I’m very realistic about what my potential was when I came here. I thought about what I was getting into… Basically, I just don’t want to work, or work in that environment…”

 

What emerges out of students‘ collective remarks is that the instrumentalist / intellectualist binary cannot be at all clearly sustained when applied to individuals’ accounts of their motivations in returning to learning. Indeed, it is clear that the instrumentalist idiom is univocal, although nuanced from person to person. Adult students of all programs, whether of the overtly more ‘instrumental’ and vocational ones such as information technology, or more traditional ‘intellectualist’ subjects such as the humanities, speak of their decisions to undertake their studies in broadly instrumental terms, namely in terms which construe the engagement with education as the means to the satisfaction of some or other desire that extends beyond the learning experience itself. We are continually confronted by justifications for decisions to return to education and take particular programs of study that are couched in the language of facilitating some or other change, or of achieving this or that goal. This is also precisely the experience that I recount when discussing my own return to learning.

 

Nonetheless, it is easy to see why many analysts persist in construing education, and the motivations of individuals engaging with it, in terms that are essentially either instrumentalist or intellectualist. In part, this is rooted in the ancient and pervasive tradition of distinguishing between two ideas of ‘what education is for’, namely the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘practical’ purposes. It is also, I suspect, related to the increasing tendency in contemporary (political) discourse to construe education in terms of its instrumental role within political economy. Similarly, one need only consult the pages of the recent UK educational press to encounter a proliferation of examples of education described as a commodity or service, in which ‘customers’ have certain expectations and entitlements, and for which in turn they are increasingly expected to pay. Nor is this sort of talk confined only to the UK. Steven Ostovich notes that much reformist educational discourse in the United States “centers on assessable goals and the ‘cash value’ of the academy in society”.[ii]

 

i Usher R. & Edwards R, ‘Liberal adult education and the postmodern movement’

in Liberal adult education: the end of an era? 1990, Wallis J. (ed.),

Continuing Education Press, University of Nottingham, 39-60, 57

ii Steven T. Ostovich  ‘Dewey, Habermas, and the university in society’, in

Educational theory, Fall 1995, Vol. 45, No.4