who/what does education have a relationship with? – member

Picking up on Roger’s point in the comments to the last post:

…But if the experience is so unique, can even one other person [the coach] help the putative leader find his or her own way? Is trial and error not the only viable path to leadership, and to hell with the collateral damage? Well, the obverse of that coin may be better that we all share some simple sense-making tools than that we all lay waste to those around us as we learn hopw to lead them…which would be a bit like wanting to be a proficient torturer and expecting your friends to allow you to practice your techniques on them…

 For executivezen, Roger’s point just strengthens the view of executive education as a wholly artificial construct. I agree with him that is it unrealistic expectation that an exec.ed. intervention designed and “sieved through the preconceptions, ambitions, hopes and fears of the customer” could ever be sufficient for any one individual, depending on what constitutes sufficiency in this case. I’d like to draw educationalists attention to the tendency of educational decisions to attempt to erase their traces of power, force, will and contingency by naturalizing or essentializing their contents: a tendency that attempts to make invisible the choice of an ‘educational’ intervention by reference to natural and beneficial qualities invested into education, and to hide the political forces marshaled by the customer and educational supplier.

One possible way acknowledging the political contingencies of exec.ed. is to consider the consuming agency as a member of the educational process. Membership connotes both a peripheral relationship with the membership-granting body – in this case the educational institution or process – as well as an enfolding and entitling relationship that distinguishes members from non-members. Non-members are the condition of possibility of membership and establish a difference that is instantiated by particular entitlements and privileged status. It would seem possible that a customer of exec.ed. could qualify for membership status to the educational club, just as much as a consumer can enjoy similar privilege. The only difference is the type of entitlement to which these two sub-categories of member qualify. There is no doubt that consumers and customers of exec.ed. are part of an elite membership, by virtue of the investments they are able to make towards that membership.