Education as Transformation: Formalism, Moralism and the Substantivist Alternative

The term 'transformation' and its cognates can be found appended to almost every key term in the contemporary educational lexicon. In educational psychology, teachers are urged to adopt the methods of 'transformational teaching'. In adult education, the theory of 'transformative learning' defines the current research paradigm. Social justice educators regularly couch their consciousness-raising efforts in terms of 'transformative pedagogy'. And in philosophy of education, pragmatists, phenomenologists, neo-Aristotelians and postmodernists alike point to the special transformative quality of education, both in the Anglo-American as well as the German-language discourses. In this essay, we argue that these various conceptions of transformative education can be organised under two theoretical categories, each with its own distinctive understanding of and approach to creating transformative educational experiences: formalism and moralism. In the first two sections, we discuss the characteristic qualities of these two approaches and point to several problems that arise within them. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of language and moral psychology, we then advance a 'substantivist' alternative to the formalistic and moralistic approaches, which characterises the transformative experience as a process of renarrativation with two experiential moments: articulation and aspiration. Substantivism is an attractive approach to transformative education, we argue in the final section, because it avoids the problems that arise in the formalistic and moralistic conceptions while providing resources for capturing what is essential to transformative experience in the educational process.