Bring Back the Sophists!

In the late 1920's and early 1930's the founder of the influential Human Relations School at Harvard, Elton Mayo, conducted several studies of workers in the Western Electric Company (WEC) in Hawthorne Illinois.These WEC studies marked a shift in people management 'science' from a concern with the worker's body (understood as an extension of the factory machine), to a concern with the worker's mind or psychology.A shift which allowed workers' collective dissatisfaction with working conditions to be framed in terms of individual "emotional reactions" (Wrenn, 2022, p. 155).This in turn was a way to limit collective action and to halt the democratization of the workplace that WWI had begun (O'Connor, 1999).Pathologizing social dissatisfaction as a way to limit democracy became a key motif of a number of institutions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.For Carl Anders Sfstrm, it is seen in the difference between what he terms education-founded on the fundamental democratic principle of equality-and schooling-the formation of obedient subjects who fit into a fixed hierarchical system.In Education for Everyday Life (2023), Sfstrm argues that we need to bring back education as practice rather than schooling as moulding if we want to liberate students and teachers alike from group think, the rat race, and the rising inequality that threatens democracy.Sfstrm draws on the work of a number of thinkers, some of whom I discuss below; but key here is that these figures do not appear as mere sources patchworked together in summaries, rather, Sfstrm develops the ideas of these thinkers as raw material from which to create a powerful and original diagnosis of, and cure for, contemporary educational discourse.It is always dangerous to begin with reductive phrases like 'the central claim of the book' but I will nonetheless offer a kind of summary of some-by default not all-of the book's key arguments.Those arguments come to light in relief against what Sfstrm sees as a Platonic-Aristotelian view of education.Under this model, also understood as the aristocratic model