Review - Unlearning or 'How NOT to Be Governed?'
by Nader N Chokr
Imprint Academic, 2009
Review by Ben Saunders, D.Phil
Jul 21st 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 30)

In this polemical essay, Nader Chokr sets out to challenge many prevailing orthodoxies, opposing himself to the prevalence of 'bullshit' in both the Enlightenment Tradition of Philosophy and the ideology of representative democracy-cum-capitalism. Central to this ambitious project, he argues, is educational reform. In the radical 'democracy to come' that he envisions, citizens will need to be able to question, challenge and reject what they hear. This requires a capacity he calls 'unlearning' -- an ability to break free of the shackles of conventional thought -- instilled through a new form of education-as-paideia, which focuses on the development of the whole person, rather than simply the transmission of knowledge.

While I share a sympathy with many of Chokr's starting points, for example the "fundamental assumption... that education is connected in an intrinsic way with politics insofar as the very meaning of education is assumed to be defined by the prevailing meaning of politics" (p. 21), the problem with the whole is that it's not really clear what his positive proposal is. The over-riding message is that things as they are fundamentally broken and should be changed; but what to is couched in vague terms such as 'democracy to come' that are never clearly explained. It seems at times that the author simply borrows a number of buzzwords and ideas, such as Sen's capabilities approach and Foucault's notion of 'governmentality,' simply to make his work seem more engaged, yet name-dropping such terms does little to help the reader or clarify the message.

Nor is it clear how radical the rejection of the status quo is. The idea that education is not simply about transmitting knowledge into the heads of children goes back -- as Chokr notes, in a rather persuasive deconstruction of the Republic's Cave Analogy -- to Plato. Many educators would share the belief that the goal of education is to help students acquire the ability to learn for themselves and to critically question what they are told. Unfortunately, Chokr doesn't appear to engage with current pedagogical literature on matters such as deep and surface learning. Indeed, he hardly even connects with other discussions of advocating paideia, either from advocates such as Mortimer J. Adler or critics like Nel Noddings, leaving it unclear how similar his own proposals are to those of others.

While I ultimately continue to share some sympathies with Chokr's argument, that an emancipatory education is a condition of truly free and autonomous citizens, and thus a genuinely democratic society, I found this book frustrating. There are some good points, for instance I found the dissection of the etymological roots of 'education' informative, the stress on the need for ethical rather than logical justifications appealing, and the reading of Plato persuasive. Nonetheless, most of these are hardly original, and the author's own contributions tend to be either mere assertions, banal trivialities, and/or vague.

Perhaps those more receptive to postmodern critiques of the Philosophical Tradition will have more patience for such argument, but those looking for a rigorous, analytic demonstration of these claims will be disappointed. No doubt this reflects disagreement over precisely the kind of bullshit that needs to be filtered from the Philosophical Tradition, but it is not clear how to resolve the issue of what needs to be unlearned.

© 2009 Ben Saunders

Dr Ben Saunders, Departmental Lecturer in Philosophy, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.