Hattatsu suru jiko no kyokō (The Fiction of the Developing Self - Reviewing the Concepts that Make Education Possible)

You are searching for a job and are told to take a personality test. You answer all the questions on the form and at the end you are told emphatically that, “This is the kind of person you are.” You are further instructed to reflect on and analyze your life in terms of this outcome which you are required to accept without question, and to explain yourself to your examiners in this context. Finally, the examiners evaluate you on the basis of this presentation.
 
In our society, it is assumed that the self is a constant that connects the past to the present and the present to the future. No one is allowed to question this self because to do so is to question the very foundations of the society in which we exist, the society that defines our awareness of self. The result is that we are trapped in this self that is defined by society and unable to escape.
 
Furthermore, the fusion of brain science and artificial intelligence in recent years to enable early diagnosis, personalized and early treatment and has created a social system that acts as a powerful external force compelling us to maintain this socially-constructed self in order to adapt to society.
 
People have become accustomed to having and living the life of a self that is determined by others. In our society, it is too painful to question oneself; much easier to surrender our psyche to others and live as the fictional self that those others have defined for us. But that is not our true innate nature. Underlying the easier choice to maintain our fictional self is our tormented real self, struggling and forever questioning our own existence. And this is further aggravated by society’s obsession that we must analyze who we are and how we differ from others by expressing an individuality that is based on a fictional, filtered self-image.
 
We are hampered by this fictional self, forced to adapt to a society that at the same time compels us to explain how we differ from others. In the midst of this contradiction, we are prisoners of our past, trapped in a closed cycle of regression and trauma. And the consistent adherence to this self trapped in its closed cycle is the fiction of “development.”
 
The intensification of the fictional self that gives rise to fictional development forces us to remain trapped within that fictional self. This system of a compelled dependence on others is the societal system in which we live, and that system is reinforced by our schools.
 
This book re-examines the twofold fiction of self and development that defines our existence, and looks for a foothold that will enable us to escape. Put another way, this book is an examination of school education that questions the fiction of the educability, or manipulability, that is created by the two-fold fiction of the developing self.
 

(Written by MAKINO Atsushi, Professor, Graduate School of Education / 2023)