Beyond the Performance Principle: A Contribution to a Liberatory Educational Scenario for the Future

Abstract This paper examines the heuristic of three educational scenarios for the future formulated by Michael F. D. Young and Johan Muller through Herbert Marcuse’s Freudian civilization theory. The original heuristics outlines two scenarios characterizing existing educational trends. They represent a dichotomy between a classical modern knowledge-centered and a late modern learner-centered schoolwork. The third scenario is an attempt to envisage future education that can overcome this dichotomy by turning the focus back toward knowledge but by emphasizing its liberatory potential for the learners. However, as Young has argued, focusing solely on knowledge is insufficient; the conditions for teaching and studying knowledge are equally important. Placing the three scenarios within Marcuse’s interpretation of Freud’s theory of civilization allows for an exploration of the social psychological conditions for learning within these scenarios. In a Marcusean reading, the first scenario appears as schooling based on direct repression, the second scenario as a shift to indirect repression, and the third as schooling that reduces unnecessary repression generated by an advanced capitalist society. A central concept in this paper is the performance principle, which Marcuse uses to describe human behavior in a society characterized by intensifying competition. This paper analyzes how the different forms of repression limit the potential liberatory powers of knowledge. The third scenario, characterized by the principle of hopeful cynicism, is schooling that is distanced from the prevailing society operating under the performance principle, which seems to be unsustainable not only from an ecological but also from a psychological point of view.