The Need For Esoteric Realism In Educational Thought

I was told by Y to read the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick because he has a notion of esoteric action and she said that that's important. So I did and she was right. It is. So hat's off to Y and Henry is what I say.

What follows is an argument for a position that will appear, at first sight, politically deflationary and theoretically ungenerous. It is neither. It is a position that arises from taking metaphysics seriously in a period when educational institutions are increasingly saturated by managerial, technological, and political pressures that distort the grounds of the very values they publicly proclaim. The claim is not that justice, anti racism, anti sexism, democracy, emancipation, or flourishing are unimportant. It is that attempts to import them into contemporary schooling as stable, system level commitments systematically fail because the grounds required to make them what they are cannot be sustained within existing institutional structures. What remains viable, I argue, is an esoteric realism: a disciplined practice of locally instantiating fragile goods whose full grounding is unavailable at scale, knowing that such instantiations are incompossible with the dominant order and liable to collapse, yet real while they last.

The essay has 3 parts. Part one introduces the metaphysical apparatus of esoteric realism. Part 2 discusses it and implications and contemporary context in more detail. Part 3 takes decolonisation in education as a case study.

The first part proceeds in five movements. First, I clarify the metaphysical apparatus, drawing on Ruth Barcan Marcus, Timothy Williamson, and especially Kit Fine, for readers unfamiliar with this terrain. Second, I sketch the contemporary institutional backdrop, focusing on surveillance, metric governance, ideological polarisation, and managerial control. Third, I show how comprehensive leftist frameworks such as Marxist, Habermasian, Hegelian, pragmatist, and even activist anti racist and anti sexist pedagogies, presuppose grounds that contemporary institutions do not supply. Fourth, I articulate the esoteric realist stance as a metaphysically lucid response. Fifth, I answer predictable objections that this stance is politically evasive or normatively thin. In the second part of the essay I then cash out some of these ideas in more detail.

Metaphysics is often treated in philosophy of education as a luxury appended to normative theory, or else ignored completely. Here it does heavy work. The key concepts are domain, modality, essence, grounding, compossibility, and concreteness.

Ruth Barcan Marcus’s work in quantified modal logic made it impossible to ignore the interaction between quantification and modality. The so called Barcan formulas express principles about how modal operators such as “necessarily” and “possibly” interact with quantifiers such as “for all” and “there exists.” One version, simplified, says that if possibly something has a property, then there is something that possibly has that property. The formal details are technical, but the philosophical upshot is not. Once we allow quantification across possible situations, we are making commitments about what there is across those situations. Marcus’s work forced philosophers to confront the metaphysical consequences of their logical choices.

Timothy Williamson extends this confrontation by defending a strong quantified modal logic in which the domain of objects is constant across possible worlds. His necessitism states that necessarily everything exists. This does not mean everything is concrete everywhere. It means that if something exists in any possible world, it exists, in the thin logical sense, in all possible worlds. Concreteness, location, and causal efficacy can vary. The lesson is that there is a distinction between existence in the domain of discourse and concreteness in a given world. This distinction is crucial for education. An ethical ideal can exist in the thin logical sense, it can be coherent, nameable, discussable, and yet fail to be concretisable within our institutional world. Coherence does not entail instantiation.

Kit Fine pushes further by arguing that modality is often grounded in essence. To say that something is necessarily F is, in many cases, to say that it is F in virtue of what it is. Essence answers the question, what is this thing, in virtue of what is it this thing. Grounding answers the question, in virtue of what does this fact hold. Grounding is a relation of metaphysical dependence. If a fact holds because of more fundamental facts, the latter ground the former.

Fine also distinguishes between extensional equivalence and hyperintensional difference. Two practices can look the same extensionally, they can have the same outward features, and yet differ in what makes them what they are. The difference lies in their grounds. Finally, compossibility concerns whether a set of states of affairs can be jointly realised. Two individually coherent commitments may be incompossible, they cannot be jointly instantiated in one world because the grounds required for each conflict.

These tools allow us to ask hard questions of educational theory. When a programme declares that it is implementing democratic education, anti racist pedagogy, or virtue formation, we can ask: in virtue of what is this practice democratic, anti racist, virtuous? Are the grounds that would make it such present? Are the commitments being combined compossible within the institutional world in which they are embedded? Is the ideal merely coherent, or can it be made concrete?

II Our Actual (Rather than the Fantasy) Contemporary Context

The contemporary backdrop is not a neutral container. Across liberal democracies and more centralised regimes alike, schooling is entangled with surveillance technologies, data analytics, audit cultures, and political oversight. Performance metrics structure teacher evaluation. Standardised assessments structure student experience. Digital platforms track engagement. Curriculum content is increasingly politicised. Institutional reputations are managed through measurable outputs. These features are not superficial. They alter the grounds of practice.

When intellectual courage becomes a measured competency, it is incentivised in specific, legible forms. When critical thinking becomes an assessment criterion, it is routinised and standardised. When inclusion becomes a compliance requirement, it is translated into procedural checklists. None of this is necessarily malign. But it changes what makes practices what they are. The grounds shift from relational recognition and shared inquiry to accountability and risk management. The same applies to politically urgent projects such as anti racism and anti sexism. These movements rightly aim to challenge structural injustice and transform institutional norms. Yet within schooling they are often operationalised through policy frameworks, training modules, reporting mechanisms, and reputational commitments. The grounds of anti racist practice may shift from solidarity and structural transformation to compliance with institutional expectations and avoidance of sanction. Extensionally similar practices can differ hyperintensionally.

The institutional context also mirrors broader political tendencies. In some systems, centralised control over curriculum content tightens. In others, market competition intensifies. In both, teachers operate under pressures that constrain what can be stably institutionalised.

Comprehensive global frameworks typically respond by insisting on systemic global transformation. Marxist educational theory interprets schooling as a site of ideological reproduction and calls for structural change. Habermasian approaches emphasise communicative rationality and the need for discursive legitimacy. Hegelian approaches see ethical life as embodied in institutions and seek reconciliation at the level of the whole. Pragmatists advocate experimental reconstruction within democratic communities. Etc. Etc. Each framework presupposes that a coherent normative order can, at least in principle, be realised at the institutional level. They differ on diagnosis and strategy, but they share the ambition of systemic consistency.

From a Finean perspective, this ambition must be tested against grounding conditions. If the institutional structures of schooling are grounded in imperatives that conflict with the goods these frameworks champion, then the frameworks’ system level prescriptions may be incompossible with those structures. Consider Marxism. Its critical edge lies in exposing how ideological forms mask material relations. Yet when anti racist or anti sexist initiatives are absorbed into institutional branding and compliance mechanisms, they risk becoming ideological in Marx’s own sense. The grounds of practice shift from solidarity and structural challenge to reputational management. The Marxist can reply that this shows the need for deeper transformation. But in the meantime, the teacher working within existing institutions cannot suspend her practice until revolution arrives. She must operate within compromised grounds.

Habermasian theory posits communicative rationality as a regulative ideal. Yet communicative spaces within schooling are increasingly mediated by surveillance and polarisation. Teachers may find that open dialogue on contentious issues triggers administrative scrutiny or public backlash. The ideal remains coherent, but its concreteness is undermined by institutional risk management. Pragmatism emphasises flexibility and reconstruction. But pragmatism often assumes that democratic communities can stabilise norms through inquiry. When political polarisation and managerial control constrain inquiry, this assumption falters.

The metaphysical point is not that these frameworks are false or don't exist. It is that their systemic ambitions presuppose grounds that contemporary institutions do not reliably supply. Their commitments may be individually coherent but jointly incompossible with existing structures.

Esoteric realism emerges from this recognition. It begins with a modest but exacting claim: educational goods must be instantiated in virtue of their grounds, not merely named. If the full grounds cannot be sustained at scale, then large scale proclamations of value risk equivocation. The teacher must therefore focus on creating local conditions in which sufficient grounds are present to instantiate goods, however temporarily.

The term “esoteric” signals that such instantiations may need to avoid full public codification. Sidgwick’s notion of esoteric morality suggested that publicity can undermine the conditions of the good. In schooling, publicly codified virtues are easily captured by audit mechanisms. When care becomes a metric, it becomes routinised. When criticality becomes a rubric, it becomes performative. To preserve grounding, some practices must remain embedded in lived relations rather than translated into policy.

Esoteric realism is realist because it does not deny structural constraint. It does not imagine that local instantiations can accumulate into systemic transformation without political change beyond the classroom. It acknowledges fragility. It anticipates collapse. But it treats collapse not as moral failure - not as failure at all - but as evidence of incompossibility. The teacher in this stance is neither a heroic revolutionary nor a passive functionary. She is a maker of temporary worlds. In a particular lesson, she may create a space of genuine intellectual risk, grounded in trust and mutual recognition. That space may be incompossible with the broader performance culture, but it can exist for a time because it is insulated, ambiguous, or small enough to avoid capture. She may reframe mandated content to open inquiry rather than indoctrination. She may translate institutional language into richer disciplinary initiation.

These practices are not system level solutions. They are local instantiations whose grounds are carefully cultivated and guarded. They are often esoteric in the sense that their full rationale is not publicly declared, because declaration invites translation into institutional metrics that would alter their grounds.

V Is This Evasive And Other Questions?

The strongest objection is that this stance is politically evasive. It seems to retreat from systemic critique and collective struggle. It may appear to privatise moral action and leave structures intact. The metaphysical response is twofold. First, systemic critique and collective struggle may be necessary but are not sufficient for the daily work of teaching. The existence of structural injustice does not suspend the need to instantiate goods here and now. If systemic transformation is not immediately forthcoming, and if institutional grounds remain hostile, the teacher must still act. Esoteric realism provides a disciplined way to do so without self deception about what is being achieved.

Second, local instantiation is not apolitical. It preserves goods that would otherwise disappear entirely from concrete existence. Williamson’s distinction between coherence and concreteness reminds us that an ideal that exists only in theory is not yet real in the world. Local practices make it real, however temporarily. Fine’s grounding analysis shows that if the grounds are not present, the value is not instantiated at all. Esoteric realism focuses on securing grounds where possible.

The objection from anti racist and anti sexist activism is more pointed. These movements rightly insist on public naming of injustice and institutional accountability. Does esoteric realism undermine that insistence by retreating into covert practice? The answer is that esoteric realism is not a substitute for activism. It is a complement under constraint. In contexts where overt activism is possible and effective, systemic change should be pursued. In contexts where overt activism is constrained or co opted, local instantiation may be the only way to preserve the integrity of practice. Moreover, even activist programmes risk equivocation when absorbed into institutional compliance regimes. Esoteric realism offers a way to guard against that absorption by attending to grounding.

For example, anti racist pedagogy grounded in solidarity and structural critique differs hyperintensionally from anti racist training grounded in reputational risk management. The former may be incompossible with institutional priorities. The latter may be institutionally rewarded. The teacher must discern which grounds are operative and act accordingly.

Finally, the charge of normativity thinness must be addressed. Esoteric realism does not abandon norms. It abandons the fantasy of stable system level instantiation under hostile conditions. It retains strong commitments to disciplinary integrity, intellectual honesty, and justice, but recognises that their full realisation may not be compossible with current structures. It therefore locates their instantiation locally rather than globally. This stance is demanding. It requires metaphysical literacy, political awareness, and professional courage. It offers no guarantees of stability. It may feel unsatisfactory to those who prefer the clarity of comprehensive systems. But in a period when institutions mirror authoritarian and managerial tendencies, and when value language is easily captured by audit and ideology, esoteric realism may be the most honest and concrete form of resistance available. It asks teachers to think in terms of grounding rather than slogans, concreteness rather than coherence, and compossibility rather than aspiration. It recognises that impossible worlds, in the sense of locally sustained but structurally fragile constellations of practice, can exist for a time and do real work. And it refuses to confuse the public declaration of values with their actual instantiation.

A great deal of contemporary philosophy of education trades in entities that “exist” in a thin sense, they are coherent, nameable, inferentially well behaved, even theoretically fruitful, but they are non concrete in exactly the way Williamson’s necessitism makes salient. They sit in the domain of discourse, they can be quantified over, they can do explanatory work in a theory, and yet they do not become real in the world teachers inhabit, because the grounding relations that would have to obtain for them to be concretised are not available, or are available only locally and briefly.

“Impossible worlds” are ways things could not be, not merely ways things are not. They are useful whenever we need to model inconsistency, failure of closure under consequence, or counterpossible reasoning, reasoning about what would follow if an impossibility were the case. The technical point is not simply that we can talk loosely about contradictions, it is that we can regiment such talk without collapsing everything into triviality. Fine is especially interested in the idea that possible worlds semantics often blurs fine structure, because it identifies contents with sets of worlds, and sets of worlds cannot distinguish between many hyperintensionally different but extensionally equivalent claims. His preferred strategy is to shift attention from worlds to truthmakers, grounding, and essence, so that what matters is not just which worlds make a statement true, but what in virtue of what it is true, or would be true.

You see this in his wider programme on grounding, where he explicitly extends grounding beyond the actual to the non actual, via “non factual” grounding, the idea that statements can ground others in a non actual way, by possibly grounding them factively. This matters for education because a teacher’s practice often has the structure of a locally sustained “as if” world. The teacher acts as if certain relations obtain, trust, intellectual risk, shared inquiry, disciplinary seriousness, mutual recognition, even when the wider institution is structured in a way that tends to dissolve those relations.

The “as if” is not merely psychological. It is metaphysical in Fine’s sense once you take grounding seriously. The teacher is trying to bring into being a local grounding structure that is not supported by the global grounding structure of the school system. This is why the practice is fragile. It is not just that people might disagree, it is that the wider grounds are pulling against it.

Now add Fine’s notion of compossibility. You can have two values, two practices, two institutional commitments, each of which is coherent in isolation, yet they are incompossible, they cannot be jointly realised because the grounds of one undermine the grounds of the other. This is the deep structure behind the experience teachers report all the time: “We are told to cultivate critical thinking and independent judgement, but we are also required to teach to the test under constant monitoring, and our survival depends on measurable outputs.”

It is tempting to treat that as solely a political complaint. It is that, but it is also a metaphysical diagnosis: the grounding relations required for genuine critical judgement are undermined by the grounding relations of audit and surveillance. When a theorist writes as if the two can be harmonised at scale by better policy language, they are effectively postulating a compossible set that is not compossible in the actual institutional world.

This is where Williamson’s apparatus is unexpectedly clarifying. Necessitism, in its headline form, says necessarily everything exists. That sounds mad until you register what “exists” is doing. For Williamson, the quantified modal logic is simplest and strongest when the domain is constant across worlds, which pushes you toward the view that things that are possible are in the domain everywhere, even if they are non concrete in many worlds. That opens the conceptual space for a distinction that philosophy of education routinely needs but rarely makes explicit: existence in theory is cheap, concreteness in practice is expensive. In Williamson’s setting, the knife that could have been made from this blade and that handle can be in the domain as a non concrete object even if it never becomes a concrete knife.

That is the shape of many educational ideals. They can be there, in the theoretical domain, while remaining non concrete given prevailing social and institutional conditions. Debates around necessitism and contingently non concrete objects make this contrast vivid. Once you see that distinction, you start noticing how often philosophers of education get bewitched by consistency at the level of the “space of reasons” or any other grand theory. Take the Sellars McDowell tradition, where education is framed as initiation into the space of reasons, the domain of justification and rational assessment rather than mere causal conditioning. This is a powerful picture, and it has been explicitly developed within philosophy of education. But it is very easy for this picture to float above the ground. It offers a clean account of what rationality is, how judgement differs from causation, and why education is normative through and through. Yet it can remain non concrete in the Williamsonian sense if it does not specify the institutional and material grounds without which “initiation” becomes either a slogan or a ritualised simulacrum. A teacher in a high surveillance school can be asked to “teach reasoning” while the conditions of reason giving are structurally disincentivised. The concept exists, the theory exists, its inferential role is stable, but it is non concrete where the grounds for uptake and risk are missing. The consistency of the theoretical space, its internal elegance, can hide the fact that it is being run as a non concretised object.

You see a similar phenomenon in critical pedagogy and its descendants. The critical pedagogue is often theorised as resisting neoliberalising institutions, cultivating relational, hopeful, transformational education from within. That ambition is admirable, but the theory’s public vocabulary is easily captured by institutions. “Criticality” becomes a graduate attribute, “inclusion” becomes a compliance item, “student voice” becomes a managed feedback channel. At that point the practice may remain extensionally similar, there are still discussions, still reflective journals, still named commitments, but hyperintensionally different. The grounds are no longer emancipatory solidarity or structural critique, but institutional legitimacy and risk management. Fine’s hyperintensional lens is precisely what is needed to diagnose this slide, because it insists that what a practice is depends on what grounds it, not just on the pattern of outward behaviour.

When educational theorists do not track this, teachers feel abandoned in a very specific way. They are told that if they comply with the system they are mere tools of domination, while the theorist offers an image of resistance that presupposes freedoms the teacher does not have. Teachers are blamed for not instantiating ideals whose grounds are institutionally foreclosed. This is the moralising gesture, the one where practitioners are shamed either as collaborators or as insufficiently radical, while no serious account is given of how one operates under constraint without either capitulating or indulging in performative “radicality” that is safe because it is already institutionalised. I attended a seminar a few weeks ago where three "Lacanians" indulged themselves in exactly this sort of gesture and had even written a book.

Yet the Fine/ Williamson frame lets you say something sharper than “teachers are constrained.” It lets you say that many theorists are trading in non concrete entities without admitting it. Their ideals “exist,” in the sense that they can be quantified over and deployed in arguments, but they are not concretised, and the theory often refuses to specify the grounding conditions of concreteness. That refusal is not a small omission. It is the central evasion.

This connects directly to a global versus local distinction, which has to be kept metaphysically clean. Global solutions are attempts to alter the grounding structure itself, so that the institutional world becomes a world in which the relevant goods are compossible. Local solutions are attempts to carve out temporary substructures that instantiate goods even though the global ground is hostile. The mistake, common on both left and right, is to slide between these levels. If you treat local instantiations as if they were global solutions, you turn them into alibis for the system. If you treat global projects as if they were immediately action guiding for teachers, you turn them into fantasies and then condemn teachers for failing to live inside them.

Esoteric realism is a local strategy, but it must not become the sole option. Metaphysically, that means we should keep two claims apart. One claim is that, given current structures, many goods are incompossible with the dominant institutional grounding, so only local instantiations are available in the near term. The other claim is that global change is impossible or undesirable. The second does not follow from the first. Fine’s apparatus actually helps here because it allows you to say, with precision, that a world in which the goods are globally sustained is a different possible world, one with different grounds. We can aim at it, argue for it, and act politically toward it, while still acknowledging that our current instantiations are non stable and local.

There is a lazy pseudo revolutionary posture where structural critique is used to sneer at reforms and local ameliorations as mere “patches.” Marx himself undermines that posture, even though some Marxists refuse to heed his lesson. In Value, Price and Profit he explicitly says that trade unions work well as centres of resistance against capital’s encroachments, even while criticising them for limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against effects rather than using organised forces as a lever for final emancipation. The structure is exactly what you want: local resistance and amelioration are real goods under present conditions, and they are not betrayed by the insistence that deeper structural change is needed. The point is that Marx is refusing to let the desire for a different global grounding structure become an excuse for refusing local grounding work now. We need to be more aggressive towards current “global solutions” talk under oppressive conditions. Much contemporary educational theory speaks as if declaring the right framework, anti racism, decolonisation, critical pedagogy, deliberative democracy, virtue formation, will itself begin to reground practice. But if the institutional substrate is surveillance capitalism plus managerial audit plus political polarisation, then these declarations often function as non concrete overlays. They can even become ideological decorations that stabilise the very structure they claim to oppose, because they provide moral legitimation without altering grounds.

A useful way to put the point, in Fine’s idiom, is that theorists often confuse consistency in a representational space with compossibility in a grounded world. The “space of reasons” can be perfectly consistent as a theory while being incompossible with the causal and institutional constraints that govern what can be concretised in classrooms. The same is true of any comprehensive framework. The bewitchment is the feeling that because the theory is internally coherent, it must be practically available.

What is often not explicitly recognised is that many educational “worlds” are locally sustained constructions that are not closed under the consequences of the wider system’s rules. They are genuine impossible worlds. All that means is that in standard possible worlds semantics, a world is often treated as closed under logical consequence. But in impossible worlds semantics, one can model worlds that are not closed, or that contain inconsistencies without explosion.

That is close to the phenomenology of the classroom teacher. A teacher can sustain, for forty minutes, a classroom world where students speak candidly and take intellectual risks, even though the wider system would punish candidness if it were made legible. The local world is “open” in the technical sense, it does not inherit all the implications of the global system because some implications are blocked by opacity, discretion, and small scale relational trust. That is a structural feature of how local practice can exist at all.

It also explains why theorists so often seem to abandon teachers. The theorist insists on closure. She wants the moral and political story to be globally consistent, fully public, fully codified, fully accountable. The teacher knows that closure is precisely what would destroy the practice. Public codification invites capture. Full legibility invites metric governance. The teacher therefore works in a partially esoteric register, not because she is cynical, but because she is trying to keep local grounds intact.

We end up with existing but non-concrete entities in educational thought. So the rationality initiation programme, where initiation into reason giving is invoked as the central telos of education exists but the institutional design questions are left underspecified. The theory talks as if the normative space will simply be entered, but it rarely confronts audit culture, performance pressures, and fear of sanction as grounding disruptors. Another is the post critical or post human turn, where the rhetoric becomes grand, the critique of critique, the manifesto tone, the call for new attunements, but the teacher’s constraint set is often treated as a secondary implementation detail. The result is a flourishing of conceptual entities with little concreteness under current governance regimes.

A third is the contemporary moral and character education enthusiasm, where virtues are listed, rubrics built, outcomes specified, and schools are asked to deliver flourishing through programmes. But the grounding relations that made virtue formation intelligible in older forms of life are absent, or actively opposed, when schooling is treated as a human capital production system. This does not make virtue talk meaningless, but it changes its metaphysical profile. It is no longer virtue in virtue of a shared ethical life, it is a measurable proxy for employability and compliance. The word stays, the ground changes.

All this means that teachers are left either demonised as system tools or romanticised as revolutionaries, with little serious attention to the metaphysics of constrained practice. The Fine Williamson frame helps because it denies both caricatures. It allows you to say that under present conditions, many of the goods theorists want are not globally compossible with the institutional world, and so the teacher’s realistic agency will often take the form of locally constructing and maintaining open, fragile, partially esoteric worlds that do real work while they last. At the same time, it allows you to be ruthless about global solution talk that functions as mere existence claims, the ideals exist in the discourse, but they are not concretised, and the theory declines to account for the missing grounds.

This is not an argument against global projects. It is an argument against confusing global aspiration with present instantiation, and against making teachers bear the moral cost of that confusion. If you keep the metaphysical levels separate, you can say, simultaneously, that we need political struggle to alter the grounding structure of schooling and society, and that in the meantime teachers should be supported in local, fragile instantiations rather than condemned for not realising an incompossible set of demands. That is a tougher, less consoling, more adult picture of educational resistance than most theory currently offers, and it is exactly why it deserves to be said plainly.

Decolonisation debates in philosophy of education are now caught in a recurring tragedy. The tragedy is not that the animating aims are misguided. Many are morally and intellectually compelling - the refusal of epistemic hierarchy, the exposure of curricular canons as historically produced artefacts of empire, the reparation of silenced traditions, the critique of “universal” knowledge claims that were in fact local to European modernity. The tragedy is that these aims are repeatedly formulated as if they were immediately available as global institutional possibilities, and then they are enacted inside institutions whose governing structures make them incompossible with the very conditions of their implementation.

The result is capture. The language of decolonisation becomes a managerial resource, a reputational instrument, a compliance regime, sometimes even an ideological legitimation of the university or school as it currently exists, rather than a transformation of what it is in virtue of what it is.

You can see the pattern in the way “decolonisation” oscillates between a maximal, unsettling demand and a minimal, administratively actionable programme. When, as for example Tuck and Yang do, we insist that decolonisation is not a metaphor we might benefit from understanding that as being, among other things, a warning about semantic drift under institutional pressure: the easier it is to adopt the term, the more likely it is that the term has been domesticated into something else.

In parallel, critiques of “decolonisation” as a management led ideology in elite Anglo American institutions argue that the discourse can be used to legitimise the neoliberal university rather than to threaten it. In the education specific literature, Abu Moghli’s analysis of decolonising initiatives “beyond the surge” is explicit about how the movement can be folded into institutional routines and thus drained of force. If you want a philosophical education case that asks bluntly about possibility, Heilbronn’s recent paper is framed exactly around that worry, whether decolonising the curriculum is possible, and what “possible” could mean in this context.

The metaphysical diagnosis I have been pressing makes this tragedy intelligible in a way that much debate does not. It forces us to distinguish at least three levels that current decolonisation talk slides between: existence in discourse, concreteness in institutions, and grounding relations that make a practice what it is.

Williamson is useful here even for readers who reject necessitism. His core distinction between what is in the domain of quantification and what is concrete in a given world gives you a clean way to talk about how “decolonisation” can be fully available as a theoretical entity while remaining non concrete as a social reality. In Williamson’s idiom, a thing can exist without being concrete. Translated into curriculum politics, a norm or programme can exist, be coherent, be argued over, be embedded in policy texts, while failing to become concrete in the lived world of teachers and students. You then stop treating the gap as mere hypocrisy or lack of will, and you start treating it as a modal and institutional fact: the world as structured does not supply the conditions under which this entity could become concrete.

Barcan Marcus helps with the next step: she forces attention to the way quantification and modality interact. In plain language, once you begin talking about what could be the case, and you quantify over “something we could do” or “a curriculum we could have,” you are already making assumptions about the domain in which those possibilities live. The decolonisation literature often speaks as if there is a straightforward move from “possibly, curricula could be decolonised” to “there exists a decolonised curriculum programme to implement.” That slide is precisely the sort of slide that the Barcan style issues sensitise you to, the thought that possibility talk licences existence claims without careful attention to domain, scope, and what counts as an admissible object of institutional action.

In educational terms, it is the slide from a normative possibility to an administratively specifiable deliverable. Once you see that slide, you see how quickly decolonisation becomes a list - diversify the reading list, add global South authors, redesign assessments, establish working groups, measure progress etc. etc. Those are not worthless, but the metaphysical point is that the deliverable can exist as an institutional object while the intended transformation remains non concrete.

Fine does the hardest work because he forces the grounding question. When a university announces a decolonised curriculum initiative, in virtue of what is it decolonial rather than a rebranding of an unchanged structure? The answer cannot be “because it has the right content additions.” That is an extensional answer, a description of surface features. Fine’s hyperintensional lesson is that two practices can be extensionally similar and yet be different in what they are, because they differ in what makes them what they are. The same seminar reading Frantz Fanon can be grounded in a student consumer satisfaction logic, a reputational risk management logic, or a genuine attempt to reorganise the distribution of epistemic authority and the experience of what counts as knowledge. Those are different groundings, and therefore different practices, even if the reading list looks identical.

This is why capture is not an accidental side effect, it is structurally predictable. Management led decolonisation initiatives typically operate through audit friendly forms, training modules, measurable targets, and visible outputs. Doyle’s critique makes this point bluntly in relation to audit cultures and the political economy of the modern university: the form of implementation is already shaped by the institution’s governing rationality. Moghli similarly notes how initiatives can be absorbed by the neoliberal machinery of the university, where “action” is permitted only in forms compatible with institutional reproduction. Once implementation is grounded in audit, the identity of the practice shifts. It becomes, in Fine’s terms, something else.

At this point the Finean notion of impossible worlds becomes more than a technical curiosity. Impossible worlds semantics, at a high level, lets you model worlds that are not closed under the consequences of their own rules, worlds that can contain inconsistencies without triviality. That sounds abstract until you map it onto the classroom. Much of what teachers do to realise decolonial goods has the structure of a locally sustained world that is not closed under the institutional consequences that would normally follow. A teacher creates a space where students can speak candidly about empire and race without the conversation being immediately converted into a disciplinary incident, a social media controversy, or a reputational crisis. That local space persists partly because it is small, relationally grounded, and to a degree opaque to the institution’s surveillance and audit apparatus. It is, in effect, a local “world” whose existence depends on a selective blocking of the wider system’s consequences. That is exactly the kind of phenomenon impossible worlds machinery was built to represent.

There's a global South dimension issue that shouldn't be omitted when discussing decolonisation, because global south education systems relentlessly face the pressure to compose curricula such that they “join up” with first world systems. Here the incompossibilities become brutally explicit. Global benchmarking regimes and transnational policy circuits exert real gravitational force. The OECD’s PISA apparatus is not merely a measurement tool, it has normative impact on national reforms, which the OECD itself documents in policy terms. Hughson’s decolonial analysis of the OECD’s policy framework makes the epistemic colonisation issue direct: the framework carries assumptions about knowledge, comparison, and governance that can reproduce colonial relations under the banner of improvement. PISA for Development, designed to extend PISA style governance logics into low and middle income contexts, has been analysed as part of the same circuitry. Alongside this, World Bank driven reform diffusion has its own history and mechanisms, including long arcs of policy travel and conditionality.

Under these conditions, “decolonising the curriculum” is often asked to do two things at once that are not compossible at scale. It is asked to re ground knowledge in local histories, languages, and epistemic priorities, while simultaneously ensuring compatibility with external credential systems, international standards, and mobility pathways into global North higher education and labour markets. This is not a merely practical tension, it is a metaphysical one. The grounds of the first aim are local authority, local need, reparative epistemic justice. The grounds of the second aim are comparability, standardisation, legibility to external institutions, and alignment with transnational measurement regimes.

Where the second aim is dominant, the first is often permitted only as ornament, a local content layer atop an unchanged framework. Where the first aim is pursued seriously, the second aim becomes fragile, and students can pay costs in mobility and credential recognition. Those are the horns of a real dilemma, and treating them as if they can be harmonised by “integrating perspectives” is precisely the global theorist’s bewitchment by coherence.

This is why esoteric realism is not a retreat from decolonisation’s aims but a way of securing its goods under hostile grounding conditions. The core move is to stop speaking as if decolonisation is an institution wide programme that can be rolled out through audit compatible mechanisms, and to instead treat it as a set of goods that must be locally grounded if they are to be instantiated at all. The goods might include epistemic humility in relation to the canon, a redistribution of authority in classroom dialogue, an ability to see how curricula encode power, genuine engagement with local knowledge traditions without treating them as museum pieces, and solidaristic forms of inquiry that resist the conversion of knowledge into mere credential currency.

An esoteric realist implementation would look different from the current fashionable global talk in at least four ways. First, it would treat grounding as the primary design variable. Instead of asking, “Have we diversified the reading list?” it asks, “What is it in virtue of which students encounter these materials as authoritative or not, as living or not, as risky or not, as relevant or not?” A decolonial text taught under a regime of assessment that rewards formulaic reproduction will be grounded in compliance. The same text taught in a space where students can take interpretive risks without punitive grading is grounded differently. The work is not content first, it is grounding first.

Second, it would embrace the local not as a compromise but as the proper site of concreteness. It would explicitly accept that many decolonial goods are incompossible with system wide audit and surveillance. Therefore it would aim to build protected micro environments, particular modules, particular classroom routines, particular teacher student trust relations, where the goods can be realised. These are not marketing visible wins. They are real instantiations. They may be temporary and fragile, but they exist in the world rather than merely in policy documents.

Third, it would use discretion to avoid capture. This is where the Sidgwick like “esoteric” aspect matters. The point is not secrecy as such. It is the recognition that full institutional legibility often changes the nature of the practice by altering its grounds. When decolonisation becomes a KPI, it becomes a target to be satisfied and displayed, which invites superficial compliance and reputational gaming. Esoteric realism would often prefer practices that remain embedded in teaching relations rather than translated into managerial objects.

Fourth, it would keep global and local levels metaphysically separate. This is crucial to avoid turning esoteric realism into a counsel of despair. Global struggle, policy contestation, and institutional redesign remain desirable. The claim is not that global change is impossible, it is that under current conditions global decolonisation programmes are frequently non concrete, and when institutionalised they are frequently captured. Therefore the teacher needs a local strategy that can instantiate goods now, while broader political work aims to alter the global grounding structure.

This separation also lets you be intellectually honest about the role of revolutionary politics. Revolutionary change might well be necessary for full decolonisation in Tuck and Yang’s unsettling sense, and their warning should not be domesticated. But if one treats revolution as a precondition for any meaningful decolonial practice, one ends up condemning teachers and students to wait inside the very structures one criticises.

This is exactly where my Marx example mentioned earlier has bite. Marx didn't prefer immiseration to amelioration. He supported concrete fights against the worsening of conditions even while insisting that deeper transformation was required. That is, he did not treat structural critique as a reason to refuse local gains. Esoteric realism is the pedagogical analogue: local instantiations are not betrayals of global aims, they are the only way many goods become concrete at all under present constraints.

The sharpest criticism, then, is directed not at the decolonial aims but at a prevalent style of theorising that repeatedly fails the metaphysical test. It speaks globally because global speech is rhetorically powerful and professionally rewarding. It proposes institution wide programmes because programmes are fundable, measurable, publishable. It is then shocked when the programme is captured by audit culture, or when decolonisation becomes a branding device, or when global South curricular “decolonisation” is silently subordinated to international comparability and mobility. The tragedy is that the failure is predictable once you distinguish existence from concreteness and once you treat grounding as constitutive rather than decorative.

If we take Fine seriously, we should say something tougher. Many contemporary decolonisation proposals function as non concrete objects in a Williamsonian domain: they exist in theory, they are extensively discussed, they can be quantified over in institutional discourse, but they do not become real in the world because the grounding relations required are unavailable. When they are forced into reality through institutional channels, they become something else, a compliance regime, a reputational technology, an audit object or even an appeasement tool to prevent revolutionary concrete implementation.

Doyle’s analysis of “decolonisation” as neoliberal ideology names this outcome directly in the university setting. Moghli and others describe the same dynamics in curriculum initiatives. The OECD and World Bank dimensions show how global governance infrastructures reproduce epistemic colonisation while offering the rhetoric of improvement and development.

So the esoteric realist conclusion is bleak but clarifying. Under current oppressive conditions, especially where surveillance and audit logics dominate, the most reliable route to real decolonial goods is local instantiation protected from capture, even when broader global struggle remains necessary. The teacher’s task is not to pretend that the institution has become decolonial because a policy says so. It is to create, repeatedly, fragile pockets of grounded practice where the goods can exist concretely, and to recognise, without self deception, that these pockets may be incompossible with the surrounding order and therefore liable to collapse. That is a metaphysical realism about what becomes real when the global grounding structure is hostile. Decolonisation that remains globally declared but locally ungrounded is a domain object that never becomes concrete, and decolonisation that becomes institutionally legible without changing grounds is a captured object that becomes something else. The only way to avoid both fates, absent larger political transformation, is an esoteric realism that treats grounding, opacity, and local compossibility as the primary conditions of success.

The late 1980s GCSE moment matters because of a specific, easily forgotten design feature: for English, assessment was initially conceived in a way that made a portfolio of work central, and, crucially, did not bind teachers tightly to a nationally prescribed list of texts. In the first wave of GCSE English, a large proportion of syllabuses were effectively coursework only, and portfolio based, and, by the early 1990s, around two thirds of candidates were on English syllabuses with no examination, that is, 100 percent coursework.

The English and Media Centre’s historical overview captures the practical upshot well, English GCSE as portfolio work across different kinds of writing and response, rather than a narrow exam driven diet of set texts. Cambridge Assessment’s retrospective account of 16 plus English assessment also emphasises how the GCSE criteria were seen at the time as flexible and as encouraging a wider range of work, especially through coursework requirements. If we translate this into the metaphysical vocabulary we have been using, it gave teachers a local modality space with an unusually wide domain of admissible curricular objects. Teachers could, without declaring war on the canon, bring in texts that spoke to race, empire, migration, class, gender, popular culture, local speech forms, media, and contemporary politics, because the system did not make one narrow conception of “English” concrete through a mandatory national list.

This is why it is reasonable to call it decolonial in spirit before the term was fashionable. It did not need to announce itself as decolonial. It did not need to produce institutional slogans or branded initiatives. Its openness was structural.

That is the esoteric part. It is easy to think that a radical curricular shift must involve explicit rejection of canonical texts, or a public moral narrative about what the canon is guilty of. But the NEAB and similar syllabuses achieved something more politically durable for a time precisely because they did not require that explicit confrontation. The radical work could happen as selection, juxtaposition, and reorientation, rather than as denunciation. In Fine’s terms, the practice could be hyperintensionally radical while remaining extensionally ordinary. It looked like English teaching. It was not immediately legible as an ideological provocation. That lowered its capture risk.

When an assessment regime permits wide quantification over admissible texts and tasks, you are, in effect, expanding the domain over which curricular choices can range without triggering a failure of legitimacy. It becomes straightforwardly true, in the practical sense, that there exists an assessment compliant curriculum object which includes radical texts, because the domain has been widened by the syllabus design. Under later regimes with prescribed set texts, the same claim becomes false for most teachers, not because the ideal is incoherent, but because the domain is narrowed by institutional constraint. This is the Barcan Marcus difference between possibility talk that merely asserts “we could diversify” and a system that actually makes diversification available as an implementable object.

Williamson’s distinction between existence and concreteness then clarifies something else that teachers sensed. Under the open coursework portfolio regime, the decolonial goods were not just discussable, they were concretisable. They could be made real in classroom time and in assessed work. Later, once central prescription and high stakes external assessment returned, those goods continued to exist in discourse, as ideals, as professional commitments, as policy rhetoric, but they became non concrete for many teachers.

That is exactly what you see today in the decolonisation debate. Institutions can say decolonisation exists, it appears in strategy documents, training, public statements, but classroom reality is governed by exam board set texts, marking schemes, and accountability measures that make many of the intended goods non concrete. The collapse is also structurally legible. Once the political centre decided to reduce local curricular autonomy and impose a more uniform conception of standards, it altered the grounding relations of English teaching. It did not merely change what could be taught, it changed what teaching was in virtue of what it was.

A salient QCA report notes a decisive shift, after a change to subject criteria, coursework was reduced to 40 percent in GCSE English, a dramatic rebalancing away from the portfolio model. This was not an incidental tweak. It is the kind of change that re grounds practice. When high stakes external exams dominate, what becomes salient is what is legible to external marking and standardisation. The local space for curricular improvisation narrows, and the teacher’s capacity to create protected micro worlds shrinks.

You can connect that shift quite directly to the Conservative education politics of the period, including a wider attack on progressive pedagogy and a preference for centralised control over curriculum and standards. Stephen Ball’s early 1990s analysis of Major era education policy and the “curriculum of the dead” explicitly situates Kenneth Clarke’s period as an assault on progressive educational ideas and a push toward a different conception of schooling and knowledge. The structural description is relevant: centralised reform is not just a change of content, it is a change in the institutional metaphysics, a change in what can be sustained as a stable practice within the system.

This makes the NEAB window a particularly clean instance of fragile esoteric realism. It was local because it operated through teacher choice and local interpretation of broad criteria. It was esoteric because it did not announce itself as a revolutionary project, it simply took a minimal view of what must be taught and assessed, and it let the rest be open. It was fragile because it depended on a permissive policy settlement that could be reversed by a change in criteria, a change in accountability expectations, and a shift in political ideology. The collapse was not a matter of teachers losing nerve. It was a change in the grounds. Our contemporary moment is a continuation of that change.

If one lesson emerges from the metaphysical detour through Barcan Marcus, Williamson, and Fine, it is this: the success of a theory in discourse does not guarantee its concreteness in practice. A value, an ethical programme, a decolonial framework, a virtue-theoretic reconstruction of education, can exist as a coherent object of thought. It can be quantified over, debated, codified in policy documents, institutionalised in strategy statements. In Williamson’s sense, it can exist in the domain. But it does not thereby become concrete. Concreteness depends on grounding. It depends on the institutional, relational, and material conditions in virtue of which a practice is what it is. And grounding is not secured by declaration.

Fine’s insistence that what something is depends on what grounds it provides the decisive criterion. Two curricular reforms may look identical in content while being different in identity because they are grounded differently. A decolonised reading list grounded in audit culture and reputational management is not the same thing as a decolonised curriculum grounded in transformed epistemic authority and reconfigured teacher–student relations. A virtue education programme grounded in character metrics is not the same as a practice grounded in shared forms of life. A commitment to rational deliberation grounded in compliance routines is not the same as one grounded in genuine intellectual risk. Hyperintensional differences matter because they determine what the practice actually is.

Global educational theories can work. There are historical moments when the wider social and political order supplies the grounding conditions required for a comprehensive normative framework to become concrete at scale. There have been settlements in which democratic education, plural curricular experimentation, and teacher autonomy were compossible with institutional survival. In those moments, global theory and institutional structure align. The possible becomes concrete because the grounds are present.

The contemporary moment is not such a settlement. Surveillance infrastructures, audit regimes, centralised prescription, market logics, geopolitical benchmarking, and ideological polarisation structure the educational world in ways that render many ambitious global programmes incompossible with the very conditions of their implementation. The result is predictable: either the programme remains non-concrete, existing only as rhetoric, or it becomes captured, re-grounded in managerial or ideological rationalities that alter its identity.

Under such conditions, insisting on global coherence as the primary mode of educational action becomes metaphysically naive. It confuses existence in discourse with concreteness in the world. It mistakes internal consistency for compossibility. It demands from teachers the instantiation of ideals whose grounding relations are institutionally unavailable. That is why teachers so often experience abandonment by theory. The theory describes a world whose grounds are absent, and then criticises practitioners for failing to inhabit it.

Esoteric realism is not a retreat from ambition. It is a recalibration of scale and a discipline of attention to grounding. It recognises that where global grounding structures are hostile, the only reliable way to instantiate educational goods is locally, provisionally, and sometimes partially opaquely. It treats classrooms, modules, relationships, and small institutional niches as sites where alternative grounding relations can be temporarily established. It accepts fragility as a structural feature rather than a moral failure. It refuses both the cynicism that collapses into compliance and the purism that refuses all compromise.

Crucially, esoteric realism does not deny the desirability of global transformation. It simply refuses to conflate aspiration with availability. It keeps levels separate. It allows one to say, simultaneously, that broader political and institutional change is necessary for full realisation of many educational ideals, and that, in the absence of such change, local instantiations are not betrayals but the only sites of concreteness available.

The final metaphysical claim is therefore simple and severe. Only when the grounding conditions are right can global educational theories become real rather than rhetorical. When the grounds are misaligned, theory either floats free or is absorbed into the very structures it opposes. In our present conjuncture, the latter risk is acute. Under such circumstances, esoteric realism, the disciplined creation of locally grounded, fragile, revisable forms of educational good, is not merely a strategy among others. It is the only approach that takes modality, grounding, and institutional constraint seriously enough to deserve the name realism.

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