Alasdair MacIntyre's Alternative to Educational KPIs: What Books Do Your Graduates Read?

This week, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre passed away. I came across his work as an undergrad student, but it wasn’t until much later, after a spirited discussion in which his thought was wielded as the philosophical cudgel, that I really engaged with his work as I needed to understand the heft and force of the weapon being used.

Fending off the blows took me in a variety of directions, and his work has influenced what I talk to students about, especially the concept of necessary fallibility: the recognition that we are not omniscient beings and there are some things we will fail at, no matter our will and skill. The humanity and resilience in this idea is something I have shared with students time and time again, that human flourishing requires that we know we have limits even as we strive for excellence.

The news of his death led me to engage with a dialogue he had with Joseph Dunne from 2002 where MacIntyre reemphasises his belief that education is a moral enterprise and not a technical, instrumental one: when the telos of education becomes performance, he warns, it ceases to be a moral practice. Teachers help students become initiated into traditions through shared inquiry and the teacher-student relationship is of vital importance because of the relation and moral aspect of education. This shared journey cannot be captured by metrics or examination results.

In the same dialogue, MacIntyre identifies two major threats to education, the lack of resources and the focus on the productivity of education. On this latter point, one of the things that has occupied my spare time of late is thinking about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Reading MacIntyre has reminded me that KPIs should never be the focus of a good education, as they are means, not an end.

However, MacIntyre cannot resist offering a KPI of his own:

One test of a school or college or university is to ask what books its former students are reading five, ten and twenty years after they have graduated. By this standard the educational institutions of advanced modernity do not do well. By and large only that in their education that nourishes their professionalised and specialised working life remains with those graduates. The rest of education has become something to be left behind, so that we have highly-educated individuals and groups who nonetheless lack the common ground of an educated public, individuals much of whose knowledge of the world is provided by sound-bites of information from the media. (p.17-18).

This is a KPI that we should certainly make room for. In the situation many educators find themselves in now, and the wider world experienced by our students and their families, MacIntyre’s KPI offers a way to help us remember that our engagement with the world does not end with a job.

Reference

Alasdair Macintyre, Joseph Dunne, Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 36, Issue 1, February 2002, Pages 1–19