Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

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186 I. Munday in numerals. This might be due to the fact that the number is somewhat inexact. However, there seems to something obscene about using numerals in this instance that goes beyond their relation to reality, something disgusting about the equation of numbers with such horror. One might even go further and say that writing 6,000,000 out in words sutures over the horror of the Holocaust and that there is something unethical about humanising it in this way. What I am trying to touch on here is that bleakness accompanies numbers/statistics, whether they appear as words or numerals. This perhaps explains why policies designed to boost the stats are given names like ‘Every Child Matters’ (a British invention) and ‘No child left behind’. Both these phrases have become slogans. ‘Every Child Matters’ need not mean (and from a humanist perspective should not mean) ‘every child must gain added value on their minimum target grade’. There is a sense in which the phrase ‘every child matters’ in its internal linking carries a humanist quality to it. In contrast ‘no child left behind’ has a rather more forced quality to it that shows up its’ sloganeering – the phrase is adapted from military imagery of leaving no man behind on the battlefield (though there is also perhaps a hint of Hansel and Gretel about it). In at least two respects, these slogans have a suturing effect in that (1) they hide what they are about and (2) they become mantras – they dissolve into the public body. However, importantly, slogans are more vulnerable than statistics even when (or perhaps particularly when) they are married to them. This is due to the iterability of language mentioned earlier – for a slogan to be a slogan it has to be repeated. It will draw on words that have a rich history. Consider the fact that both slogans include the word ‘child’. Much of the recent discourse in British schooling had abandoned this word due to its progressive connotations and replaced it with ‘student’. Policy makers and politicians were presumably unaware of this word’s origins: ‘A student, let us remember, is originally a lover (Latin, studere – to love)’ (Standish, 2005, p. 60). What we are bearing witness to here is the aforementioned ‘iterability’ of language. I am going to tell a story to reinforce what is perhaps at stake here. I recently gave a lecture to teacher trainees on ‘behaviour for learning’. Prior to this lecture I was asked to refer to the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda, as Ofsted inspectors would check that the students had been repeatedly introduced to it. I did not feel too happy about this and grudgingly referred to it in passing. The ‘phrase’ elicited a groan from an audience who are still quite new to sloganeering. Suddenly I found myself defending the notion that every child matters with a discussion of the fact that when many of the students come across a certain kind of ‘child’ and that individual will bear little resemblance to the sorts of human being (civil, non-violent, articulate) that they would previously have encountered (many of the students are privately schooled Cambridge graduates), resisting the temptation to write that child off will require considerable mental and emotional strength. Putting things this way introduces the term ‘every child matters’ into a context that is neither technical nor humanist (in any sentimental sense). Perhaps, in certain respects, this story exemplifies Derrida’s account of professing.
12 Performativity, Statistics and Bloody Words 187 Derrida explores ways in which the idea of profession requires something tantamount to a pledge, to the freely accepted responsibility to profess the truth. The professor enacts this performative continually in her work: what she says is testimony to the truth; as work it is necessarily an orientation to a to-come. The academic work of professing must then be something more than the (purely constative) statement of how things are. (Standish, 2001, p. 18) Here Derrida’s argument is subtle: professing the truth is about orientating one’s audience towards something that neither professor nor student (these terms should perhaps be seen treated in a rather abstract way) can necessarily predict in which the constative (the truth) will always be performed as the to-come (an aspect of the future) rather than a statement of that which is secure or originary. To take the truth for granted is to ignore the performative aspects of language that are bound up with its iterability (language’s otherness to itself). There is therefore both an active and passive dimension to professing that is both backward and forward looking. We cannot speak from nowhere, but where we ‘are’ will undergo transformation – we are at home and not at home. The somewhere that we speak from must in some way reveal the mark of the past and the future. There is an ethical dimension to this orientation to the ‘to-come’ which goes beyond a simple celebration of openness. ‘Presence’ makes other ways of seeing invisible. To be open to what is ‘to come’ is ‘to do justice to the “other” of presence’. This shows that ‘the point of deconstruction is not negative or destructive but first and foremost affirmative ... It is an affirmation of what is excluded and forgotten; an affirmation of what is other’ (Biesta,2009, p. 395). The emergence of this otherness, what Derrida calls ‘the arrivant’ is unforeseeable and ‘impossible’: ‘For Derrida “the impossible” is not what is impossible but what cannot be foreseen as a possibility’ (ibid). We are called on to show ‘hospitality’ towards the impossible other that waits at the door. If we ignore this, communication can only be viewed as a ‘strictly mechanical, a strictly calculable and predictable process’ (Biesta, 2009, p. 399), which is exactly what performativity encourages us to see it as. 12.7 Conclusion Some readers may feel that what has been left out of the account, as it is presented, is direct engagement with the ways in which statistics are generated. After all, statistics only create the ‘impression’ that they operate in accordance with a false metaphysics of signification. What statistics stand in for or ‘signify’ is open to the rich iterable processes of language. Though carrying out research in to the mechanism of statistics creation is a worthwhile task, what I have tried to show is that the performative aesthetic force of statistics encourages us to refrain from looking below the surface – statistics are something we ‘show’. This is because what we encounter with statistics is a ‘surface’ in which depth is not always already inscribed. This is true of all numbers.
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Educational Research: The Ethics an
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Paul Smeyers · Marc Depaepe Editor
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Earlier Volumes in this Series Educ
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viii Contents 10 The Good, the Beau
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Chapter 2 The Lure of Statistics fo
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2 The Lure of Statistics for Educat
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28 M. Depaepe of the Leuven Catholi
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30 M. Depaepe Tan’s final verdict
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32 M. Depaepe of methodological bot
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34 M. Depaepe tapping other sources
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36 M. Depaepe In the context of dem
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38 M. Depaepe combination. Moreover
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40 M. Depaepe 4. See Pelleriaux (19
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42 M. Depaepe Schneider, J. (2010).
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44 J.J.H. Dekker (see Section 4.4).
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46 J.J.H. Dekker from their own par
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48 J.J.H. Dekker a cohort study tha
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8 European Citizenship and Evidence
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Page 212 and 213: 202 R. Smith self-esteem, happiness
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Page 226 and 227: 216 About the Authors co-editor-in-
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Page 232 and 233: 222 Author Index Silverman, J. G.,
Page 234: 224 Subject Index I Inequality, 29-
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