“Belinksy was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum” Demons (Dostoevsky, 2008)

Abstract:

This short article discusses an ontological concept of student agency within K-12 schooling. It is argued that ontologically, student agency does not exist because it cannot be separated from, a) the stages of the development of a child, b) the null curriculum, c) the self-awareness of adult individuals and other actors who impose a curriculum on young minds, d) the special character and traditions of a school, e) a values based education model.

These are the elephants in the room that those who promote the notion and concept of student agency, cannot see. The article concludes by asserting that in a K-12 institutional school environment, student agency isn’t possible, because significant other variables assert themselves on the child’s character and personality. These variables undermine the child’s ability to influence and control their own learning pathways, because the process of schooling prohibits them from fully exercising agentic notions of will and power (Klemenčič’, 2020). Like Plato’s ideal world of thought and imagination, the educational construct of student agency, only exists in the mind (Plato, 2007).

1. What is Ontology and an Ontological Concept of student agency?

In this article, ontology is defined as the fundamental nature of being and existence. It is used to explicate psychological theories on the stages of development of a child, and to illustrate the constant variables (external forces) imposed on an individual child through structural (societal and cultural) rules and regulations, and environmental (family, parenting, education) values and expectations. Klemenčič’s base definition of student agency as agentic orientation (will) and agentic possibility (power) (Klemenčič’, 2020) is used to define the concept of student agency when applied in a K-12 schooling context.

2. Will and Power:

Klemenčič’s understanding of will and power implies that a child’s innate drive is to manipulate circumstances so they may be able to choose in what way they grow and develop, and exercise control over external factors which may run counter to, or align with their desires:

“The notions of agentic possibility and orientation are temporally embedded, implying that they are shaped through considerations of past habits of mind and action, present judgments of alternatives for action and projections of the future. They are also intrinsically relational and social, and situated in structural, cultural and socio-economic-political contexts of action” (Klemenčič’, 2020).

The idea of an individual channeling inner forces, desires, and their subjective understandings towards their own end isn’t new. The 19^th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued in “The Will to Power” that subconscious emotions and irrational thoughts may be channeled toward different ends. (Nietzsche, 2017). Freud argued that the human mind consists of a conscious awareness of life’s experiences and understanding, a pre-conscious or latent mind that when triggered by experience allowed feelings and emotions to arise to conscious awareness, and a deeper subconscious of irrational forces and desires, that are the actual drivers of human behavior, unbeknown to the individual (Freud, 2005). Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis suggests, like Nietzsche’s arguments in “The Will to Power” (Nietzsche, 2017), that an individual may be able to learn about, and understand their unconscious desires and channel them for the purposes of a healthy physical and mental life (Freud, 1989). However, two key questions arise. To what extent are they able to do so, and what barriers and obstacles may prevent them from doing so?

3. Psychological Development:

Erikson identified eight binary stages of psycho-social development in a human being.  Each stage is simplified through juxtaposing key moral and social values. For example in infancy trust or mistrust of others may emerge depending on the treatment of the infant by older siblings, children, parents and adults. The same is evident in early childhood where the moral and social values of autonomy, shame and doubt may emerge. In the preschool years, when the child is experimenting with their own initiatives and ingenuities, guilt may be the consequences of imposed, family, social, educative, or religious moral regulations. By the time the early school years arrive, a child’s character has been shaped by these external forces in the formative years from ages 0-5. They may enter this period of social and moral regulation through schooling either enthused to be industrious and productive, or suffering from an inferiority complex, low self-esteem and exhibiting emerging mental health issues, including ADD, ADHD, and OCD[1].

The psycho-social development of the child becomes even more complex as they reach puberty and move through adolescence.  Self-worth, self-identity along with biological changes are seldom navigated without a degree of fear, uncertainty and confusion. The extent to which this critical period of biological and psychosocial development is navigated in a healthy and supportive way will determine outcomes in young adulthood, where intimacy or isolation may typify a person’s full integration into society. Middle age is another key transition point in life, and when a personal or professional crisis befalls a person it is often referred to colloquially as a’ mid-life crisis’. Career success, ambition and productivity may be lost to life’s struggle and disappointments. The onset of old age, brings with it, either a sense of accomplishments, or despair and disillusionment. Such feelings may dominate the final years of life (Erikson, 1993).

The nature of being and existence through the lenses of psychoanalysis suggests that throughout the psychosocial and biological journey of a human being, agentic will and power may be brutally and ruthlessly compromised (Freud, An Outline of Psycho-analysis, 1989). An individual  becomes compliant and obedient, yielding to the moral and social rules and regulations of society. For the young child and adolescent, student agency isn’t possible, because significant other psycho-social and biological variables as described above have compromised the child’s character and personality development.

4. Student Agency, Schooling and Education:

There is a difference between schooling and education. The former is characterized through the historical traditions of specific school institutions, the social-economic status of the student and parent body, and the social control and moral regulation of student behavior according to the secular or religious affiliation of the school. Education is the acquisition of specific knowledge, skills and competencies, often determined by the State through a national curriculum, to ensure it develops a fully literate and skilled population, who in turn will contribute to the success of society. At the same time an agentic response from learners must comply with the implementation and practices, learning outcomes, and a student’s success in the measured assessments integrated within a national curriculum.

There is a long history of educational theories and practices, some aligned with the stages of child development, and some not. Piaget, Vygotsky, Steiner, Montessori for example, are child-centered pedagogies (Murray, 2019), while Skinner’s brutal behaviorist system of rewards and punishments would not be considered child centered at all, when compared with the above. (Skinner, 2011). Yet, Skinner’s theory often predominates in the eco-system of schools to manage and manipulate student behavior. Moreover, the kinds of ‘student agency’ adapted to the institutional school environment, and grafted onto curricula and pedagogical practice is behaviorist in its desired outcomes. It “develops the micro-foundations of student behavior “ (Klemenčič’, 2020).

The International Baccalaureate Organization states that “Student Agency is the power to take meaningful and intentional action, and acknowledges the rights and responsibilities of the individual, supporting voice, choice and ownership…” (2021) however, this is conditional. Voice, choice and ownership are conditional on accepting and embracing the terms and conditions of the IBO’s curricula, its content knowledge, its approaches to teaching and learning, its mandated teacher professional development programs, and its philosophy of assessment practices and principles, and its interpretation of what are valid and reliable assessments for students to undertake within the three IBO programs of study (PYP, MYP and IBDp). In other words, a whole ideology of education underpins the IBO’s interpretation of student learner agency whereby the will and power of a powerful organization are pitted against the will and power of a child. In principle their concept of student agency may read well, but in practice it is a deeply flawed concept and negates any kind of agentic response from a learner in an institutionalized school environment.

Generally, there is much confusion and misunderstanding around the concept of student agency as defined by organizations and educationalists. The OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills, state that

“…the concept of student agency, as understood in the context of the OECD Learning Compass 2030, is rooted in the principle that students have the ability and the will to positively influence their own lives and the world around them. Student agency is thus defined as the capacity to set a goal, reflect and act responsibly to effect change. It is about acting rather than being acted upon; shaping rather than being shaped; and making responsible decisions and choices rather than accepting those determined by others” (OECD Directorate for Education & Skills, 2021).

Regardless of the fact that they have consulted widely with youth prior to articulating their definition two problems emerge. Firstly, it may well be that “students have the ability and will to positively influence their lives”; but, this is conditional, not only for the reasons cited above, and in relation to the IBO’s definition of student learner agency, also because it is subject to socio-economic conditions, politics, religion and other cultural conditions, including rituals, protocols and restrictions. In addition it does not take into account the plight of the over quarter of a billion children and young people who cannot go to school, and are excluded from any education. Secondly, the overall definition assumes, a priori, that all students across the world have the “capacity to set a goal, reflect and act responsibly to effect change”. To claim and promote such an idea in an unequal, socially unjust, politically oppressive and divided world is an absurdity. It is self-evident that for the most of their lives many of the world’s children and youth are acted upon, shaped and cajoled into choices and decisions other than their own.

The New Zealand Curriculum Online takes a more granular and cultural approach to the concept of Student Agency, illustrating the idea through a Whakataukī:[2]

 Kia ngātahi Te waihoe                                                   Paddle as one

Tahuri Te kei o tō waka,            Turn the front of the canoe into the waves

Whatiwhati ngaru                                               and push through them

Haere ki tua, papapounamu Te moana           because past the waves the ocean is flat 

E topa, e rere ki uta.                                         And we will speed off into the distance.

(New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2019)

On the one hand it promotes a collective Maori approach to student agency through controlling external forces and events; while on the other hand it suggests that student agency is embedded (whatever that means) in the key competencies of the New Zealand national curriculum (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2019). Wentworth argues that “one way of thinking of learner agency is when learners have the ‘power to act’. When learners move from being passive recipients to being much more active in the learning process, and actively involved in the decisions about the learning, then they have greater agency” (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2019). But is this student agency? Do they demonstrate agentic response through will and power? The answer is no, if considered in the light of the above arguments, and also because It is very difficult to transcribe and understand in any logical way what “actively involved in decisions about the learning” might mean, and the extent to which students feel empowered to do so, or potentially to do so, or intrinsically motivated to do so, through exercising their will to do so.

5. Student Agency and the null curriculum:

As previously argued, schooling and education are distinctly different. By virtue of their history, traditions and customs, schools often negate the multiple identities of students, and are tasked to create a new one. This is most evident in ‘special character ‘schools (religious), and values based education models where specific values and character traits are framed within a ‘leaner profile. In addition, schools which rigidly enforce a dress code, either through a uniform (most extreme) to a secular or civil dress code (less extreme), and the medium of instruction is other than the first language of the student, or where a limited choice of foreign languages are taught, are in effect engaging in social engineering.

Eliot Eisner (Eisner, 1994) argued that selective knowledge through the explicit curriculum, is the ‘right’ knowledge the State, the school, and other actors deem suitable for students, regardless of their own self-awareness and self-understanding. The explicit curriculum is imposed on nations, societies and their communities. Much is hidden from the student, because the values and expectations of the State, the school, and other actors are implicit to the continued success of the process of schooling as we know it today (Eisner, 1994). The messages students receive about socio-economic status, advanced capitalism, the ‘benefits” of consumerism, technology, AI, social media platforms, gender, race, colonialism, wars, general history, and so on, must not disrupt the status quo.

There are many areas of knowledge and information that students do not have the opportunity to learn. Eisner calls this the null curriculum (Eisner, 1994). For example, it could be as unassuming as understanding the biological cycle of life and death, and the stages of human development, biologically and psycho-socially. It may be about the exclusion of historical figures across all areas of subject knowledge, based upon their race or sexual orientation, or the exclusion or banning of literature, which may challenge or question social norms and expectations around family and relationships; and the censoring or banning of knowledge and information which may be perceived as immoral or offending secular or religious sentiments in any society. However, as Eisner argues, what is excluded from the curriculum, is always present to the student through what they are not learning; especially in an age of instant access to knowledge and information online. The irony here is that rather than embrace the institutional fantasy version of student agency, students exercise their own innate drives of will and power by accessing excluded and prohibited content.

Conclusion:

Plato’s idea of a perfect world existed beyond the realms of the physical world. He argues that it exists a priori in our minds (Plato, 2007). So it is with the education construct of student agency. It only exists in our minds. Student agency as an educational construct is an erroneous and false concept. It does not exist in the real world of childhood and adolescence. Neither does it exist ontologically, because the child and young person is not free to exercise will and power in any agentic sense as described by Klemenčič.

Student agency isn’t possible, because significant other variables assert themselves on the child’s developing character and personality (Erikson, 1993) (Freud, 2005), causing actions and behaviors which often last a life time. Like the elephants in the room, these powerful variables undermine the child’s ability to influence and control their own learning pathways, because the process of schooling prohibits them from fully exercising Klemenčič’s agentic notions of will and power (2020). The developing child and adolescent has been subject to myriad external forces and events that limit their ability to self-reflect, and to fully comprehend how to behave freely through the exercising of will and power, with intentional action and interaction within their environment.

References:

Dostoevsky, F. (2008). Demons. New York: Penguin Classics.

Eisner, E. W. (1994). The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. New York: Macmillan.

Erikson, E. (1993). Childhood and Society. New York: W. W Norton & Company.

Freud, S. (1989). An Outline of Psycho-analysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Freud, S. (2005). The Unconscious. London: Penguin Classics.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2021, September 15). Primary Years Programme: The Learner. Retrieved from International Baccalaureate Organization: https://ibo.org/programmes/primary-years-programme/curriculum/the-learner/

Klemenčič’, M. (2020). What is student agency? An ontological exploration in the context of research on student engagement. In M. Klemenčič’s, R. RIMOŽIČ,, & S. Bergan, Student engagement in Europe: society, higher education and student governance (pp. 11-29). Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.

Murray, J. (2019). Early Childhood Pedagogies: Creating Spaces for Young Children to Flourish. London: Routledge.

New Zealand Ministry of Education. (2019, June 5). New Zealand Curriculum Online. Retrieved from Ministry of Education: https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources/Spotlights/Learner-agency

Nietzsche, F. (2017). The Will to Power. New York: Penguin Classics.

OECD Directorate for Education & Skills. (2021, September 16). Student Agency for 2020_Concept Note. Retrieved from OECD Future of Education & Skills 2030: https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/student-agency/Student_Agency_for_2030_concept_note.pdf

Plato. (2007). The Republic. London: Penguin Classics.

Skinner, B. (2011). About Behaviorism. New York: Vintage Press.

[1] Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a term used for people who have excessive difficulties with concentration without the presence of other ADHD symptoms such as excessive impulsiveness or hyperactivity. The official term from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV is “ADHD of the predominantly inattentive type. OCD is a mental condition in which a person experiences persistent, intrusive thoughts that cause distress and performs repetitive physical or mental acts in order to prevent or counteract the thoughts and relieve the distress.

[2] Whakatauki are short stories, proverbs told in metaphor to illustrate another way to look and understand an issue or event in life.