Faculty of Education - Theses

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Author: Stevens, Kay Maree × End date: 1999 × Start date: 1999 × Type: PhD thesis ×

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    Democracy in the distance: a philosophical reconstruction of distance education
    Stevens, Kay Maree ( 1999)
    Distance education is an education of difference, it is democratic education. It makes a promise of openness that challenges the policies and practices of traditional elite higher education. In a late modern and globalised society, distance education is also the epitome of educational modernity. It provides the means for economic and social reconstruction and for efficiency and commodifiability in university higher education. Policies of massification and marketisation and practices of innovative pedagogy and production support this revolutionary progressiveness. These practices and policies are justified according to democratic values as well as pluralist needs – they are justified according to an ideology of openness. However, the ideology of openness is purposive and strategic. It conceals modernist rationalisations and postmodernist ‘anti-rationalisations’ that are operationalised through technology, politics and economics. These purposive and strategic rationalisations of liberalism and capitalism place distance education students, academics and institutions in crisis. Crisis of identity, motivation and legitimation, occur when economic and bureaucratic system values conflict with values of education – with values of the cultural lifeworld of distance education. These crises, in turn, undermine the theory and practice of distance education as democratic education. This thesis philosophically reconstructs the theory and practice of university distance education. It describes the narratives and contexts of its political, industrial and educational lifeworlds. Critical hermeneutics is employed to interpret these constructs as substantive values of modernity. This interpretation forms an immanent critique that demonstrates the influences of conservatism upon distance education. An ideological critique follows, based on Habermasian social theory: this identifies the mystifying and distorting effects that result from the purposive and strategic rationalisations that occur in the lifeworld of distance education. Through critique, the emancipatory intents of distance education are revealed as representations of difference. Differences in pedagogy, production and provision are identified in terms of the democratic and pluralist needs of modernist and postmodernist non-contiguous student. Democratic and pluralist needs ground the emancipatory intents of distance education in a rationality of communicative action that constitutes its social practice as ethical and liberating education.