Educational Value: Contingency and the Learning 'Subject': Educational Value: Contingency and the Learning 'Subject'

From value 'added' to value 'free', from liberal values to performative values, education has a vested interest in value. Whilst wary of setting up a false dichotomy between instrumental and non-instrumental values, I would be remiss to speak of educational value without alluding briefly to the shift of emphasis from liberal to performative values. Arguments against the resulting instrumental forms of education that resonate with, and work to achieve, the extrinsic values of performance perfection and the illusory forms of accountability that accompany them have been well documented in various educational quarters. Jean-Francois Lyotard's concern was that imposed cultural and political instrumental values are always underpinned by a 'central... performative' value which has not only come to dominate education but determines its meaning. This is of course as true of liberal values as it is of performative values, for they too are culturally and politically determined values imposed to ensure that certain educational aims are met and that particular meanings are achieved and/or maintained. I argue here for a philosophical notion of education that calls into question the integrity of imposed values which, as external means to ends, remain separated from the learning 'subject' whilst validating the worth or otherwise of his/her education. Questioning the integrity of imposed, contingent values which fail to recognise themselves as such, the arguments that follow seek an alternative way of thinking about educational value in relation to the learning 'subject' who is also a contingent 'subject'.