It may seem crazy that we are beginning with discussions of such abstract and philosophical topics as ‘discourse’ and ‘justice’ when material needs like security and food or housing and healthcare are so much more pressing. This line of thinking will make perfect sense to readers familiar with psychologist Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs.’ He proposed a ranking of what human beings require. The first and most basic group of these are physiological needs (what you need to stay alive and be well in the most immediate ways – air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, protection from imminent threats to your body); at the pinnacle lie needs for self-actualization, with a number of other groups of needs intervening (feelings of security, love and connection, respect and freedom.) The idea of this hierarchy is that, if you do not have the most fundamental needs met first, you’ll be incapable of feeling any ‘upper-level’ needs. By the same token, once your more basic needs are met, you’ll begin to yearn and feel a need for the items in the higher tiers.
After all, if you’re in a state of danger or deprivation, you will hardly have the interest or inclination in a conversation about the best forms of government or how to pursue technological development. No; quite reasonably, you’ll be more concerned with finding answers to questions like “how can I protect myself and my loved ones?” and “how can I get something to eat?” and “where can I go to find shelter from the elements or other threats to my wellbeing?” or “what do I do about this racking cough that doesn’t seem to be clearing up?” And you’ll want to find answers to these questions and solutions to these problems as quickly as possible.
This is ‘triage thinking.’ It’s what we engage in when we find ourselves faced with emergencies, when we’re in a crisis. It is necessary thinking when we’re overwhelmed by the fact of necessities – needs that must be met in order for us to survive. After we’re safe, sheltered, fed, and healthy, then maybe we’ll find it important or interesting to think about how to educate the youth or develop the economy.
But ‘triage thinking’ is not our best thinking.
That is to say, what is of the greatest material urgency is not what is of conceptual primacy. When we are in a crisis, our bodies – including our brains — are almost literally hijacked by stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Our ability to focus narrows or disappears, and we go into ‘survival mode,’ typically by moving into one of three postures: fight, flight, or freeze.
These work well enough in a pinch – well enough to get us through or out of a clear and present danger. In other words, we avert catastrophe in the moment, but when we do this at the level of policy-creation, we often end up opting for reactive short-term ‘solutions’ that create more serious problems for the future. And these only cause further incidents of crisis and emergency to which we will have to respond or, more likely, react, and often in the same short-sighted ways that, during the past crisis, created the problems we’re dealing with in the present one. When we use triage thinking, we find ourselves constantly running around putting out fires, not realizing that our triage thinking is what lights these fires – or, at least, adds fuel to the flames.
The cause of this is the fact that concepts are not organized into the same hierarchy as needs; the principle that orders them is not material urgency or immediacy but logical progression. As an example, you cannot expect to solve a complex real-world-application mathematical problem (at least not with much accuracy or alacrity) until you have a solid grasp of mathematical principles. Without the latter, what you’re left with is a frustrating system of trial and error – and we tend strongly towards error when survival-level stress takes over. On the other hand, it is possible for our minds, in the midst of the stress and pressure of a crisis, to “fall back on training” if we’ve had the right sort of training and had enough practice in it. This is why you are very likely to know and remember that 2+2=4 or that gravity works, even in the midst of a stressful emergency situation in which your life depended upon your knowing those things.

Not only do we need to work on knowing concepts before stress takes over for the sake of our accuracy and efficacy in taking action during crises, we also need if we want to have a good chance of acting ethically in emergencies. That is to say, in fully exploring our understandings of concepts, we are also becoming more acquainted with our ethical values that relate to those concepts – interrogating, fine-tuning, and reinforcing the values we deem good or potentially exchanging those values we find dubious for better ones. If we want to give ourselves the best chance of acting ethically, effectively, and sustainably in taking actions and making decisions about our most fundamental needs, then we need to begin with the most foundational concepts.

There have been numerous ways of conceptualizing justice and ordering human relations in the public sphere throughout recorded history, but within the U.S., we typically think of justice in terms of principles of “fairness” and “rights,” and with strong reference also to principles of equality and liberty. Almost all of us have intuitions and sensibilities about what is and is not “fair,” but what we lack are rigorous and broad-based ways of fully exploring and forming consensus about what all of these principles exactly are and how they might all fit together in practice. This is what is necessary if we are to create policies in any domain at all that will tend towards producing a good and just (as opposed to a bad and unjust) order of relations among human persons in particular, and between us and all the other inhabitants of the earth more generally.

We often think of education as a broad “umbrella” term that covers a wide variety of things related to teaching and learning, and we can all think of many different things that we want to learn ourselves or that we want others to learn. This is because there are many different ideas about the purposes of education, both currently and historically. But our word “education” comes from the Latin word educere, which means “to lead out.” When we think about teaching and learning, who is it that we envision being “led out” and by whom? Out of what are they being led, and into or towards what? Contemplating these questions together opens our eyes more fully to the full panoply of activities that constitute “teaching and learning” and provides us with a basic framework in which to think about the goals and goods of education so that we can create effective policies.