Why Do We Educate: Renewing the Conversation (107th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Volume I)

WHY DO WE EDUCATE? RENEWING THE CONVERSATION

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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WHY DO WE EDUCATE? RENEWING THE CONVERSATION

107th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education

Editors For Volume One:

david l. coulter john r. wiens Series Editor:

gary d fenstermacher

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Distributed by blackwell publishing malden, massachusetts

National Society for the Study of Education The National Society for the Study of Education was founded in 1901 as successor to the National Herbart Society. It publishes an annual two-volume Yearbook, each volume dealing with a separate topic of concern to educators. The Society’s yearbook series, now in its one hundred and sixth year, presents articles by scholars and practitioners who are noted for their significant work in critical areas of education. The Society welcomes as members all individuals who wish to receive its publications and take part in Society activities. Current membership includes educators in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere throughout the world—professors and graduate students in colleges and universities; teachers, administrators, supervisors, and curriculum specialists in elementary and secondary schools; policymakers and researchers at all levels; and any others with an interest in teaching and learning. Members of the Society elect a Board of Directors. The Board’s responsibilities include reviewing proposals for Yearbooks and authorizing their preparation based on accepted proposals, along with guiding the other activities of the Society, including presentations and forums. Current dues (for 2008) are a modest $40 ($35 for retired members and for students in their first year of membership; $45 for international membership). Members whose dues are paid for the current calendar year receive the Society’s Yearbook and are eligible for election to the Board of Directors. Each year the Society arranges for meetings to be held in conjunction with the annual conferences of one or more of the national educational organizations. All members are urged to attend these meetings, at which the current Yearbook is presented and critiqued. Members are encouraged to submit proposals for future Yearbooks. Why Do We Educate? Renewing the Conversation is Volume One of the 107th Yearbook. Volume Two is Why Do We Educate? Voices from the Conversation. For further information, write to the Secretary, NSSE, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education M/C 147, 1040 W. Harrison St., Chicago, Illinois 60607-7133 or see http://www.nsse-chicago.org

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Board of Directors of the National Society for the Study of Education (Term of office expires in the year indicated.)

Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2009) Mary M. Brabeck, New York University (2009) Mary Hatwood Futrell, George Washington University (2009) David Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University (2008) David Imig, University of Maryland, College Park (2008) Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin, Madison (2008) Mark A. Smylie, Interim Secretary-Treasurer

Sponsoring Institutions New York University, Steinhardt School of Education, New York, NY Teachers College Columbia University, New York, NY The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development, Washington, DC University of Florida Gainesville College of Education, Gainesville, FL University of Maryland College of Education, College Park, MD University of North Carolina School of Education, Chapel Hill, NC University of Oklahoma College of Education, Norman, OK Trinity University, San Antonio, TX Vanderbilt University, Peabody College of Education, Nashville, TN

Contributors to the Yearbook Kwame Anthony Appiah, Princeton University Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan Ray Barnhardt, University of Alaska Fairbanks Hyman Bass, University of Michigan Seyla Benhabib, Yale University Harry Brighouse, University of Wisconsin Eamonn Callan, Stanford University David L. Coulter, University of British Columbia Joseph Dunne, St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University Gary Fenstermacher, University of Michigan v

Ursula M. Franklin, University of Toronto Joannie Halas, University of Manitoba Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, University of Alaska Fairbanks Jeanne Kentel, Leeds Metropolitan University Janice Kinghorn, Antioch College Lars Løvlie, University of Oslo Randall Nielsen, Kettering Foundation Sonia Nieto, University of Massachusetts Nel Noddings, Stanford University Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago Ken Osborne, University of Manitoba Diane Ravitch, New York University John R. Wiens, University of Manitoba Ian Winchester, University of Calgary and Oxford University

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Table of Contents chapter

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series editor’s foreword, Gary D Fenstermacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1. prologue: renewing the conversation, David Coulter & John R. Wiens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part One joining the conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2. education and schooling: a relationship that can never be taken for granted, Ken Osborne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3. education and democracy: the united states of america as a historical case study, Diane Ravitch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4. education for a flourishing life, Harry Brighouse . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part Two creating common and uncommon worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5. american democracy, education, and utopianism, Eamonn Callan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6. education for global citizenship, Kwame Anthony Appiah . . . . . .

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7. l’affaire du foulard (the scarf affair), Seyla Benhabib. . . . . . . . .

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8. deliberative democracy and civic education, Lars Løvlie . . . . . .

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Part Three horizons of significance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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9. culture and education, Sonia Nieto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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10. democratic citizenship and the narrative imagination, Martha C. Nussbaum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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11. teaching natural science in the twenty-first century: opportunities and dangers, Ian Winchester . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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12. the role of mathematics in education for democracy, Deborah Loewenberg Ball & Hyman Bass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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13. spirituality and religion in public schooling, Nel Noddings . . .

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14. education and economic development, Randall Nielsen & Janice Kinghorn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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15. giving the body its due: autobiographical reflections and utopian imaginings, Joannie Halas & Jeanne Adele Kentel . . . .

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16. indigenous knowledge systems and education, Ray Barnhardt & Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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17. educating at the interface of biosphere and bitsphere, Ursula M. Franklin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part Four imagining and becoming: education as lifelong and lifewide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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18. education and childhood, Joseph Dunne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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19. educating adolescents, Kieran Egan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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20. some educational implications of adulthood, Gary D Fenstermacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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21. epilogue: democratic eruptions, John R. Wiens & David Coulter .

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Series Editor’s Foreword These are challenging times for education, as well as for educators. Just as I was reviewing the last of the manuscripts for this volume, Garrison Keillor’s weekly column appeared in our local paper. Keillor, as anyone who listens to National Public Radio in the United States knows, is the master of ceremonies for the very popular program A Prairie Home Companion. Usually writing with a decided bias toward the Democratic Party and liberal causes, this particular column is a defense of educational policies emanating more from the right side of the political spectrum. In addition to defending several provisions of President Bush’s signature domestic education legislation, known as No Child Left Behind, Keillor says this about those who educate: Face it, the schools are not run by Republican oligarchs in top hats and spats but by perfectly nice, caring, sharing people with a smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/ mojo/mantra, folks like my old confreres. Nice people are failing these kids, but when they are called on it, they get very huffy. When the grand poobah Ph.D.s of education stand up and blow, they speak with great confidence about theories of teaching, and considering the test results, the bums ought to be thrown out. (Arizona Daily Star, January 30, 2008, p. A11)

Ouch! That hurts. Not just because I’m one of the poobahs, but because so is every other contributor to this volume. If, in fact, we do make educational policy, and if, in fact, we are directly responsible for what goes on in U.S. schools, then perhaps we should be tossed out on the street. But Garrison Keillor notwithstanding, most of us have very little to do with the way reading is taught, or math, or history, or with the test scores that students achieve on standardized examinations. The truth is, we are no more happy with the schooling taking place in our nation (and many other economically advanced nations of the world) than is Keillor. Our concerns, however, are very, very different from his. Our concerns are that too many public discussions of education are dominated by too few ideas. These discussions are far too few in number, and when they do occur, they are frequently dominated by the strident voices of special interests. Too often they take place in legislative chambers and court rooms that are far away from the parents and children who must accept their consequences. And sadly, they all too 1

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frequently focus on notions of human potential that are neither compelling nor imaginative. This volume is an effort to address these faults and, we hope, repair a number of them. This volume is the first in a set of two to be published as the NSSE yearbook for 2008. Planning for the volumes began more than five years ago, when the Society’s Board of Directors expressed an interest in taking steps to encourage a more expansive, robust, and inclusive dialogue about education in democratic societies. Many of the Society’s previous yearbooks have been remarkably accessible to lay audiences, but focused on particular specialties or topics within the field of professional education. The Board wondered whether it would be possible to prepare a set of books that would appeal to a broad cross-section of readers, ranging from school teachers to school board members, from parents to policymakers, from journalists to jurists. These ruminations eventually resolved into an exploration of the foundational reasons for education and its essential importance in democratic nations. Hence the main title for both volumes, Why Do We Educate? This first volume carries the subtitle Renewing the Conversation, while the second volume is subtitled Voices from the Conversation. Volume II, Voices from the Conversation, collects contemporary and historical commentary, speeches, and short essays on education and schooling. The purpose of that volume is to illustrate the conversation, in its multiple and complex dimensions. We did not believe it would be helpful to prepare a volume designed to aid persons to contribute to the conversation without also offering extensive examples of the conversation itself. Volume II presents the voices—some powerful, some humorous, some light-hearted, some angry, some favoring one perspective or ideology with others favoring the opposite. Our intent is to illustrate the conversation that has been going on for centuries, to reinvigorate that conversation in these times, and to make it as popular (in the best sense of the term) and as public as it can possibly be. The present volume, Volume I, is an invitation to all who are interested in education to enter the dialogue about its purposes and its processes. It is intended to serve as a kind of handbook for those who enter the conversation, or who have been part of it for some time. The essays that follow are designed to open pathways of inquiry into the foundational purposes of education in democratic societies. They are designed to assist, to provoke, and to advance the vitally important discourse about education. The editors for this volume and I sought out the work of distinguished scholars—poobahs all—and asked that they set forth their best thinking in ways that could readily be accessed by

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informed lay persons. We asked, too, for writing that would assist the reader in making substantial contributions to the conversation about education in free societies. We believe the authors have met these challenges, and have done so with distinction. We hope you agree. Gary D Fenstermacher Editor for the Series

Acknowledgments The staff and directors of NSSE, and the editors of this volume, gratefully acknowledge the support of the Spencer Foundation. A grant from the Foundation provided funds for planning this year’s twovolume set and for a number of editorial activities. In addition, the editors express their appreciation to Lori Kroeger for her tireless assistance in bringing this volume to fruition. Ms. Kroeger, an administrative assistant to one of the volume editors, spent many volunteer hours corresponding with authors, keeping the editors on track, and assisting with manuscripts. Moreover, we wish to acknowledge Debra Miretzky, Executive Director of NSSE, for her invaluable assistance in bringing this volume to publication. We are in her debt. We also wish to thank Dianne Coulter, Virginia Richardson, and Alvina Wiens for their support, patience, and encouragement. Last but far from least, we express our gratitude to the authors appearing in this volume. They are, one and all, scholars of considerable distinction who labored mightily to respond to our desire that their writing be profound, engaging, and accessible. That is a tall order for most academic writers, yet they managed to exceed our specifications. Thank you.

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Prologue: Renewing the Conversation David Coulter joined the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in 1995 after working in Quebec and Manitoba schools for more than 25 years. At various times in his career, he has been a classroom teacher in both elementary and secondary schools, a consultant, a school principal, and a superintendent. He is an associate professor of educational studies at UBC and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Teacher Education. His research interests focus on understanding and fostering educational judgment. His writing has been published in both scholarly journals (e.g., Educational Researcher and Handbook of Research on Teaching) and professional publications (e.g., Education Canada). John R. Wiens is currently professor and dean in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, following a career as teacher, counselor, principal, and superintendent in the public school system. He is president elect of the Canadian Association of Deans of Education and has served as president of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society, the Canadian Education Association, the Manitoba Educational Research Council, and Manitoba Educators for Social Responsibility. He is a past director of the National Society for the Study of Education, the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, the Manitoba Board of Teacher Education and Certification, and the Manitoba Association of School Superintendents. His academic interests are democracy and education, educational leadership, and teacher education.

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Prologue: Renewing the Conversation david coulter and john r. wiens Why do we educate? has preoccupied us for much of our careers as educators working in schools and universities over the last forty years. Long ago we accepted the privilege—and the accompanying responsibility—of contributing to the lives of other people, but have consistently grappled with understanding the nature and assessing the goodness of that contribution. We have benefited enormously by reading the work of scholars in various disciplines who have thought carefully about what it means to educate (and have included some of the most articulate contemporary thinkers in this volume), but we have also talked with a wide range of people in diverse settings over a number of years about what counts as education. To help us begin what is usually a fascinating and rich conversation, fifteen years ago we created an activity that seems to allow people to explore their beliefs about education without resorting to slogans: the Educated Person Exercise. Often working with large audiences, we begin by dividing participants into groups of five or six and asking each person to think of someone they know personally who they believe to be an educated person. For almost everyone, someone quickly jumps to mind; we invite you to imagine your own response. We then ask participants to tell stories introducing their “educated person” to the other members of their group, stressing the importance of staying with the stories to ground the discussion in people’s experience. We solicit volunteers to share stories. Responses from audiences of students, parents, teachers, administrators, business people, and others from different parts of the world vary in detail, but have common themes: people create powerful portraits of people who take charge of their lives and attempt to make a difference in the lives of others. Three examples follow. A University Professor: The person I chose as my example of an “educated person” was my father, Joe, even though he only had Grade 3. Until he was nineteen he spoke only Low German, but he learned to speak, read and write English very well when he began to homestead on his own in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon community. There are several things which I remember as if they happened yesterday—today I would call them life lessons.

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As a subsistence farmer his life was driven by necessity—hard work, long hours and uncertainty—but he never complained about his lot and he enjoyed life. As my father he assumed it was his responsibility to see us “brought up” properly, a task he took on joyfully. He made a public vow that all of his five boys would graduate from high school. It was his way of expressing the importance and the value of education. But he also taught us as valuable life lessons on the farm as we ever learned in school. For example, the animals had to be fed and cared for before we ate: “They are totally dependent on you for their health and, therefore, it’s your job to look after them first.” I was the one usually stuck with the barnyard chores because I could be “trusted” to look after them. A second lesson which has guided me throughout life: “If there is something that needs to be done and you happen to be there, look after it—on a farm everything is everybody’s responsibility.” Third, “If something needs to be done and you don’t know how, learn how and do it—that’s why God gave you a brain.” But perhaps the most important lesson was that you kept your word no matter what—if my father said he believed in something, or that something needed to be done, he acted accordingly—you didn’t have to guess what he stood for, his life showed it. I saw him confront his brothers (my uncles who were also farmers) on their behavior toward animals. I saw him deliver lambs, piglets, calves, foals, kids—“because it had to be done.” I saw him go out in the worst winter storms to look for a lost horse or sheep. It seemed he knew every one of our 200-plus animals, and knew immediately if one was missing. I saw him answer the door in the middle of the night to go help a neighbor, and work the next day as if he had received a full night’s rest. I saw him poring over anatomy books so he could figure out how to operate on an “alfalfa-bloated” cow and then saw him carefully do it. I saw him put baby animals near the wood stove in the kitchen to give them a chance at life, and I saw him mourn when they did not survive. I saw him take those same attitudes into the church and the community and every aspect of his life. I think that’s what it means to be educated—to be thankful, to care, and to act on both as responsibly and honestly as you can. I try to be like him. A High School Student: My “educated person” is my neighbor, Susan—well actually, my best friend’s sister. She’s in Korea right

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now teaching English as a second language; if she was my sister I would go and see her to see how she lives there. I know I could even though I’m not her sister. What I especially like about her is that, even though she’s five years older than us, she never talks down to us and was never too busy to answer our questions. She makes us feel big and important and she knows so much about the world because she’s traveled everywhere—to Europe, Egypt, Ecuador and now Korea. She told us that, even though people look different, they’re more the same than different. The difference is that we in North America have more stuff, better food, more choice about jobs—but in spite of that we’re not happier. She loves meeting new people and figuring out how they live, what they believe in and what they think of her and our country, and she says that other people want to know what the world outside their countries or communities is like too. They think we live in an amazing place and she’s never met anyone who wouldn’t like to come here to visit. I remember asking her if she wasn’t afraid when she visited a new country or had to spend time with different people. She said, “Of course, but if you don’t just do it, you never will.” I don’t know if I could be like that but I’d like to—to go anywhere in the world, learn and see new things and tell others about them—and help others the way she does. The other amazing thing about her is that she’s just an ordinary person—you wouldn’t know just by seeing her that she’s so awesome. Even though she knows so much she’s humble, generous with her time, has a great sense of humour—she never acts as if she’s smarter or better than anyone else—and everybody who meets her likes her. She’s just fun to be with. A University Student: My “educated person” is my grandmother, Ella. All my life—for as long as I can remember—she has been the person I go to when I need advice, help or just a shoulder to cry on. All this seems very strange in some ways because she only has a Grade 8 education, speaks very little English, and doesn’t go out much except to church, but she’s so proud of the fact that I’m in university. Grandma has the neatest way about her—no matter when I show up, whether she knows I’m coming or not she is delighted to see me—she hangs on to every word I say, and acts like everything I do is special. When I’m with her I feel I have her total attention. The interesting thing is that my other three sisters feel the same way—each of us is her favorite

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granddaughter. In that way she reminds me of my Grade 2 teacher. Another thing I like about her is that she is non-judgmental— she trusts me to make my own decisions and clean up my own messes. And that’s not just with me—she sees the best in everyone, always looking for an explanation which helps me see others at their best, giving me and them the benefit of the doubt regarding our intentions. Oh, she’ll share stories about things in her life, and I’ll figure out later that she was giving me advice in a kind, gentle way, but she doesn’t expect me to acknowledge that or thank her for it. But her stories are amazing. She immigrated to Canada when she was eight years old, she looked after her younger siblings, she cooked and cleaned—it seemed she did all kinds of adult things from a very early age— she’s still a great cook and she makes the best bread and desserts, all without recipes. None of her life experiences seem to have been wasted on her. And she has so many friends even though she doesn’t get out much—she loves to talk, laugh and listen—she seems to enjoy everyone’s achievements just as much as they do. And her house is never too small for everyone who wants to be there. Even though she lives in a tiny house all by herself all are welcome, especially people who came from other countries. Maybe that’s why she knows so much about people and the world. Her mind is as open as her door, and her home as safe as a grandmother’s arms. I hope when I’m a grandmother I will be like her—singing with my grandchildren, reading and telling them life stories, and just enjoying all of what life hands me. Our audiences describe people like Joe, Susan, and Ella, who wonder about the world they inhabit. Many are voracious readers who devour books, magazines, and newspapers. For some the Internet is indeed a worldwide web connecting them with others; they use it to ask serious questions of themselves and others. They are deeply curious, continuously striving to learn about what they believe matters, and as a result they know and understand something about a great deal and a great deal about some things. They tell stories about people who have confronted tragedy with dignity and resolve, who insist on caring for others, often to their own detriment. They embody respect for others; indeed, like Ella, many of the people described seem to believe that respect is owed to others, not something to be earned. We often hear about people who are

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unimpressed with their own achievements and enjoy being with others and whose energy is contagious. We hear stories about people who, like Joe, may have few material resources, but who are community leaders. They marshal what they can, join and start formal and informal groups. Sometimes they launch businesses or community organizations; sometimes their educational efforts focus on their family; sometimes they impact many people and sometimes only a few. Occupations vary: some of the educated people are professors, doctors, and scientists; others are farmers, plumbers, and clerks. After the stories have been shared with the larger audience, we invite the groups to look beneath the narratives. What, for example, are the common characteristics of the people they deem educated? This is the part of the activity that continues to surprise us: very different groups generate very similar criteria. Some of the characteristics are predictable: educated people know things; breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding are always concerns. The kind of knowledge and how it is held and employed vary, however. Some groups emphasize the traditional knowledge of the academic world; others emphasize the knowledge of other domains, e.g., business or technology. Often the way knowledge is acquired is highlighted: like Susan, most groups believe that worthwhile knowledge must be acquired at least partly through actual engagement with other people in the world, that is, via experience, and often their educated people are well traveled. Our audiences describe people who are deeply curious about the world and challenge their own and others’ understandings, that is, people who think critically. All groups include—indeed, emphasize—a set of criteria that are perhaps unexpected given current public discourse. The educated people our audiences describe attempt to make a difference in the lives of others: they use their knowledge and understanding in their engagements with other citizens, listen respectfully and thoughtfully, and act with honesty and diplomacy. In other words, they exhibit certain traits of character. A word we frequently heard is “caring,” but other virtues regularly listed include courage, integrity, and passion. Often groups describe people who possess what seem like contradictory qualities: people, for example, who are intensely passionate and invested in something, yet humble about their own understandings and accomplishments. Indeed, one commonly mentioned characteristic, a sense of humor, puzzled us for a long time until we linked it to another trait: humility. Many of our audiences seemed to believe that educated people

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have a sense of their own fallibility and do not hold on to certainties, including their own, too tightly (or seriously). Finally, we are struck by a glaring omission: formal schooling. None of our audiences included a graduate degree, or undergraduate degree, or even a high school diploma as a requirement for being an educated person. Indeed, many of the people they describe as educated, like Joe and Ella, have minimal formal schooling, yet prepared themselves in a variety of ways to become particular kinds of people. Some educated people have a great deal of formal schooling; others do not. This omission may seem surprising given the close link between education and schooling in Western societies. The two are often synonymous; education is often expressed as schooling attainment in grades, diplomas, and degrees. One definition of education in the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, is “systematic instruction, schooling or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life.”1 Schools are, of course, institutions intended to further education, but conflating schooling and education risks confusing means and ends. Our audiences consistently separate the two: not only were educated people not necessarily well schooled, but well-schooled people were not always deemed to be educated. In the Educated Person Exercise people seem to be drawing on different understandings of education, meanings also included in the Oxford English Dictionary but largely absent from current public discussion; that is, education as involving both the acquisition of knowledge and understanding and the formation of character in order to live a good life in concert with other human beings. This much older definition taps into why we educate children in the first place. All human societies necessarily aim to rear the young so that they will become adults with particular characteristics (no society would survive otherwise). Parents generally want their children to grow up to be happy, fulfilled adults. Indeed, education’s Latin root, educare, that is, to lead out, captures the responsibility of piloting children from the private world of the family into the public adult world. Determining the character of that public world and figuring how, when, and whether to help children contribute to it is the very stuff of education. While this conversation is as old as humanity, we access it only with the invention of writing systems. The recorded Western conversation begins with the ancient Greeks and is in many important ways still framed by debates started by and involving the first great teacher we know about in the West, Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato’s student, Aristotle. We believe that a brief detour through ancient Greek philosophy can help

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explain the disjunction between the public rhetoric about education and what we hear from people in the Educated Person Exercise.

Education for a Good and Worthwhile Life Living in the small ancient city-state that was Athens, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle knew their dialogical partners, an advantage exaggerated by excluding most other people from the conversation—that is, all those who were not male citizens, including slaves, foreigners, and women. They also agreed about the subject matter: education as promoting eudaimonia, a concept that has no precise modern equivalent in English. Usually translated as happiness, other renditions include wellbeing and human flourishing. Each brings different contemporary baggage. “Happiness,” for example, is often linked to hedonism, a connection also common in ancient Athens, but one that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle directly challenge. Our own preference is to translate eudaimonia as a good and worthwhile life (we insert “worthwhile” to distinguish this translation from “the good life” as demonstrated by the acquisition of material goods). The Educated Person Exercise seems to tap into this understanding of education. Not surprisingly, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle substantively agree about what constitutes a good and worthwhile life—the life they were attempting to lead as philosophers. Dramatically oversimplified, Socrates and Plato emphasize the role of knowledge and understanding in guiding human action. Socrates argues, for example, that with such understanding “none of the wise men holds that any human being willingly errs or willingly carries out any shameful or bad deeds.”2 In The Republic (perhaps the first private school prospectus), Plato designs an elaborate curriculum based on the mastery of increasingly powerful and abstract knowledge that aims to provide secure purchase on human experience. He proposes selecting appropriate candidates and initiating them into appropriate disciplines so that they would know what was true and right, eventually preparing them to become the philosopher kings who could decide for those who lacked such knowledge. Aristotle agrees with his mentors that the ultimate good human life involves contemplation of the good and true, but is less confident about the power of abstract knowledge to guide human action. A practicing physician and son of a physician, Aristotle worries that Plato’s reliance on knowledge privileges the general over the particular—theory over practice—in ways that ignore the richness and breadth of human

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experience. Indeed, Aristotle concludes the Nicomachean Ethics with a passage in which he describes the limitations of study for medical practice: For it doesn’t appear that people become medical experts, either, from written texts. It is certainly true that these texts try to say not only what the forms of treatment are, but even how patients might be cured, and how one should treat each type of patient, distinguishing the various conditions; and these texts are thought to be beneficial to those with experience, but useless to those without expert knowledge . . . . [T]here won’t be good discrimination, unless of course by accident.3

What Aristotle means by “good discrimination” signals a dramatic shift in how he understands education and is captured by his distinguishing two words for wisdom, sophia and phronesis, that Plato used interchangeably. For Aristotle, people with sophia attempt to contemplate and understand the universal and sublime—they were, after all, philosophers or lovers (philos) of wisdom (sophia). Such people know a great deal—are learned—but may be incapable of acting on their knowledge, that is, unable to cure patients. They lack a different kind of wisdom, phronesis, or practical wisdom, which involves a kind of discernment that requires both knowing the right thing to do in particular circumstances and acting accordingly. Education for phronesis involves a kind of knowing of particulars that is only possible by being in the world with others (that is, experience) and the requisite virtues consistent with right character, partly acquired by being around people who model those dispositions. Nussbaum summarizes: The person of practical wisdom is a person of good character; that is to say, a person who has internalized through early training certain ethical values and a certain conception of the good human life as the more harmonious pursuit of these. He or she will be concerned about friendship, justice, courage, moderation, generosity.4

People with phronesis do the right thing the right way for the right reasons at the right time. Joe, Susan, and Ella are people attempting to be phronemos, or “practically wise” people. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all hoped to foster people who led good and worthwhile lives, understood what was true and right, and acted on that understanding, but they differed about how such a life could be fostered, that is, they disagreed about what counted as education—a dispute that all Western societies have inherited. Much

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contemporary educational discourse emphasizes the acquisition of abstract knowledge to cultivate theoretical wisdom, usually to the neglect of the type of wisdom that involves acting in the world. In the West, Plato seems to have trumped Aristotle publicly, while Aristotle’s ideas remain alive if only in private. In the last fifty years or so, however, many scholars have begun to rehabilitate and reconceive Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom for a different context,5 creating an especially exciting conversation in ethics and political philosophy. Education in a Plural World Given the difficulty Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had in agreeing about education in the restricted context of ancient Athens, it should be no surprise that large pluralist societies struggle to decide what counts as education—especially if they are liberal in the sense of allowing people the freedom to determine for themselves their own good and worthwhile lives. Multiple conceptions of the good life compete at different levels. In North America, for example, an indigenous Anishinabe interpretation of education would integrate bimaadziwin (the good life) with particular concerns for the traditional knowledge and spirituality of First Nations people;6 an Islamic education might focus on tawhid or oneness “where all aspects of life whether spiritual or temporal are consolidated into a harmonious whole”;7 and a Confucian education would aim to contribute to the formation of the exemplary person or junzi “who has shaped his or her basic character or disposition through the practice of appropriate conduct and ritual propriety.”8 Differing cultural frameworks engender tensions, sometimes exacerbated by conflicts within a dominant educational framework. Egan, for example, shows how prevailing Western conceptions of education are based on contradictory ideas. We simultaneously seek to socialize people into various existing communities, develop their unique talents, and teach them to challenge the status quo.9 In other words, we want people to fit in, be different, and think critically. Education, so understood, is necessarily difficult and contentious. Finally, if this is not confusing enough, all of the above must be interpreted for different people, in particular circumstances, at various times. No “best practices” can guarantee success (as any parent—and particularly those with more than one child—can testify). Conflict is endemic to education and can only be avoided when everyone agrees about what constitutes a good and worthwhile life for everyone at all times in all circumstances—

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and then how to foster such a life . . . not likely. Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political philosopher, summarizes: Education is always cast as the means whereby some, or all, citizens of a particular society get their bearings and learn to live with one another. Education always reflects a society’s views of what is excellent, worthy, necessary. The reflections are not cast in concrete, like so many foundation stances; rather they are ongoing, refracted and reshaped as definitions, meanings and purposes change.10

Given the above, we are more than a little puzzled by the certainty of much educational discourse that presumes that we have agreed about what counts as education and focuses on its attainment. The most pervasive example is the emergence of “learning” as a synonym for education over the last two decades. “Lifelong learning,” “learning organizations,” “professional learning communities,” “learning departments,” and even “learning countries” (e.g., Wales) are some current iterations. Glossed over in these examples is any specification, let alone justification, of the nature of the learning at stake. Discussions of learning can be trite: quite simply, human beings are distinguished by the capacity to learn. Children’s learning in school, for example, can range from the mundane (how to appear attentive when bored), to dangerous (how to be a gang member), to educative (how to make sense of the world). Deciding what counts as educational learning, that is, learning that contributes to leading a good life, involves addressing questions such as “What kind of learning?” “For whom?” “Who decides?” and “On what basis?” Using learning and education as synonyms risks smuggling answers to these questions beneath a disguise of objectivity or neutrality. Education always involves concerns for “what is excellent, worthy, necessary.” To be fair to those who use the learning vocabulary, some advocates find it useful to mitigate the pervasive conflation of education and schooling. People who work with adults, for example, are concerned to find a language that acknowledges that crucial learning occurs outside schools and throughout people’s lives. Our response is to attempt to reclaim a language of education as distinct from both schooling and learning, an effort that inevitably leads us to connect “education” with another word with a range of modern usages, “democracy.” Deciding Education Deciding what counts as education is a political problem in that such a decision depends on determining how people live with one another

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both now and in the future. The challenges are myriad, but important educational questions include: What are the forms of a good and worthwhile life that a society wishes to promote collectively? What scope do people have to determine the direction of their own lives? Which aspects are best left to individuals, families, groups, communities, and governments (however construed)? Many strategies continue to be employed by various societies to address these questions, including having a single person decide (e.g., monarchies, dictatorships), having a few people decide (e.g., aristocracies, theocracies), having all decide collectively (democracies), and having all decide individually (anarchies). Western societies generally aim to be democratic, a choice that presents special educational opportunities and responsibilities. Societies interpret and institutionalize democracy in various ways. Some decisions that must be regularly confronted include: Do people decide directly or elect representatives who decide? Who is eligible to participate and who is not? What limitations are placed on subject matters to be decided? What happens when people cannot agree? What constitutes “agreement?” If majority rule is the deciding principle, what safeguards are available for minority views? Underneath all these questions, however, is the assumption that somehow people (demos) will rule (kratos), that is, decide how they will live together by talking with one another. Democracies depend on dialogue. John Dewey, for example, explains: “The means by which a majority becomes a majority . . . [involves] antecedent debates, modification of views to meet the opinions of minorities . . . . The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion.”11 Addressing this essential need is an educational problem. In democratic societies, education and democracy are symbiotic concepts: deciding what might count as educational is a democratic problem; preparing people to resolve important concerns is an educational problem. So understood, education for democracy involves more than teaching people the history and structures of government, urging them to vote regularly, and exhorting them to abide by laws passed by elected legislatures. The central educational responsibility becomes preparing people to engage with their equals in deciding how they will live together . . . no easy task. Indeed, democracy and education both depend on cycles of provoking, understanding, nurturing, and sometimes temporarily resolving differences among people who often have very different perspectives on the world: “Democracy is precisely an institutional, cultural, habitual way of acknowledging the pervasiveness

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of conflict and the fact that our loyalties are not one, our wills are not single, our opinions are not cut from the same cloth.”12 The educational challenge becomes helping more people become like Joe, Susan, and Ella, that is, people with the character, knowledge, and understanding to listen carefully to others and figure out how to create a common world together. The first step in such an effort is to recognize that the conversation is needed. The topic has to emerge. We are reminded of how the anthropologist Robert Redfield described education more than fifty years ago: “If I should choose a few words to describe the endless act of creation that is education, I should choose these: Education is conversation about the meaning of life, as each sees some part of it, on behalf of everyone.”13 Why Do We Educate? Renewing the Conversation aims to provoke just this discussion. To help us begin and sustain such a dialogue we have recruited some extraordinary educators from various disciplines who, like Socrates, will attempt to be alternately stingray, gadfly, and midwife, challenging our taken-for-granted assumptions about education, provoking us to think in new (and perhaps better) ways, and helping us create our own new understandings of education. This volume is organized with a Prologue (this chapter), four sections, and an Epilogue, each of which raises and debates various aspects of what it means to be educated in a democratic society. The first section (Chapters 2–4) aims to provide background for the conversation. Ken Osborne, Diane Ravitch, and Harry Brighouse develop some of the themes we have attempted to introduce, including the relationship between education and schooling; education, schooling, and democracy; and education for a flourishing life. Chapters in the second section, “Creating Common and Uncommon Worlds,” investigate aspects of the relationship between private and public life, both of which are essential to forging a good and worthwhile life—and both enormously complicated by the opportunities and challenges of large, pluralist democratic societies. Making a life, moreover, necessarily involves being initiated into some of the traditions available to help people make sense of their lives in its various dimensions. Accordingly, the authors in our third section, “Horizons of Significance,” look at some of the familiar—and less familiar—forms of knowledge that may assist people to create meaning in their lives. These explorations are not meant to be comprehensive, but illustrative. Making meaning, of course, is both an individual and collective educative achievement influenced by context, and the fourth section, “Imagining and Becoming: Education as Lifelong and Lifewide,” examines some of the implications of life stage for

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education. Children, for example, bring different perspectives and talents to making a life than adults do. In our Epilogue, we aim to build on the previous work to grapple with that most essential of educational questions, “So what?” Given the perspectives and understandings of education juxtaposed in this volume, what steps follow? How might we respond to the implied challenge of our chapter title and volume subtitle, that is, begin to renew the educational conversation? NOTES 1. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “education.” 2. Plato’s Protagoras and Meno, trans. R. C. Bartlett (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 345d. 3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. with historical introduction Christopher Rowe, introduction and commentary Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), X, 9, 1181b2–11. 4. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 306. 5. See, e.g., Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 6. Pamela Rose Toulouse, “Bimaadziwin (The Goodlife): Sharing the Living Teachings of the People of the Sagamok Anishnawbek. Implications for Education” (PhD diss., The University of British Columbia, 2001). 7. B. Cook, “Islamic versus Western Conceptions of Education,” International Review of Education 45, nos. 3–4 (1999): 339–57. 8. Charles Ess, “Can Socratic Virtue (Arete¯) and Confucius’ Exemplary Person (Junzi) Be Taught Online?” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 2, no. 2 (2003): 122. 9. Kieran Egan, “Why Education Is So Difficult and Contentious,” Teachers College Record 103, no. 6 (2001): 923–41. 10. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1993), 82. 11. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), 207–08. 12. Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, 114. 13. Robert Redfield, The Redfield Lectures (Pasadena, CA: The Fund for Adult Education, 1955), 59.

Part One Joining the Conversation Education, properly speaking, is initiation into the skill and partnership of conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance.1 Some of us will continue to search for certainty. I think that those who hope to find it and those who do not are together in so far as they ask questions about the ends of life. That has always been the human quest. Education is part of that pursuit. When we talk to each other in the course of the pursuit, we help each other in the common effort.2

The above quotes deal with the central topics of Section One. Education in pluralist, democratic societies inevitably involves contention about what constitutes educational learning. Indeed, the absence of disagreement about education usually signals one of three possibilities: everyone agrees about what is a good and worthwhile life and how it is fostered; not everyone agrees, but some people get to decide and others agree to follow; or what counts as education is a taken-for-granted by all involved and they set about getting on with it (whatever “it” is). None of these is consistent with education in a democratic society, yet each is all too common in our experience. A contributing factor may be difficulty in finding democratic forums in which we can disagree with one another without the discussion becoming a contest in which the last person standing wins. It is not easy to find spaces where we can recognize other voices and test our ideas with the aim of enlarging our collective understanding. The chapters in this section seek to contribute to a democraticeducational conversation by uncovering some of the taken-for-granted ideas involved in linking education and schooling (Chapter Two); democracy and education (Chapter Three); and education and a good and worthwhile or flourishing life (Chapter Four). Our hope is to renew a conversation in which we help one another to understand. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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NOTES 1. Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Rationalism and Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), 197–98. 2. Robert Redfield, The Redfield Lectures (Pasadena, CA: The Fund for Adult Education, 1955), 57.

chapter 2

Education and Schooling: A Relationship That Can Never Be Taken For Granted In the hope of facilitating the kind of educational conversation that Redfield and Oakeshott describe, we provide a brief introduction to each chapter, attempting to link its contribution to our ongoing dialogue. Throughout this volume you will encounter authors making a distinction between education and schooling. Schools are places, whereas education is an activity and an idea (as well as an ideal). As places, schools are recognizable by their architectural features (e.g., distinct entrances, fenced playgrounds), population density (see, e.g., almost any high school during class change time) and indigenous population (children). They are ostensibly charged with fostering education; that is, helping parents teach young people what they need to learn in order to grow up to be adults who lead good lives as individuals and community members. Like other modern institutions, however, schools serve competing agendas, each of which affects the educational responsibility. In this chapter noted Canadian historian Ken Osborne asks the question: To what extent, if at all, does our schooling contribute to our education? Education, he contends, can easily be neglected in the quest to fulfill other, often important, mandates. Indeed, “the whole process of what should be education can be too easily obstructed by the organizational and institutional imperatives of school.” Not content with persuading us of the accuracy of his diagnosis, however, Osborne also explores instances of the eruption of education in schooling, that is, examples of how education can introduce us to “worlds we might otherwise never encounter thereby reshaping our vision of the world we think we know.” Educated at the Universities of Oxford, Birmingham, and Manitoba, Ken Osborne is now Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Manitoba. After completing military service in Britain, he moved to Canada in 1961. Through the 1960s he was a high school history teacher in Winnipeg, joining the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Education in 1972. His main academic interest is history education and he has worked closely with schools and teachers, contributed to a variety of curriculum projects, and written extensively on the teaching of history and on citizenship education in Canada. He retired from the University of Manitoba in 1997. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Education and Schooling: A Relationship That Can Never Be Taken For Granted ken osborne Schooling and Education: A Troubled Relationship Winston Churchill, perhaps drawing on a similar observation made by Mark Twain, once remarked that his education was interrupted by his schooling. As with all good aphorisms, Churchill’s (or Twain’s) quip retains the power to startle. Most of us, most of the time, make no distinction between education and schooling. School is where we went to get, or at least begin, an education. We send our children to school, and are compelled to do so by law, in order that they become educated. The Oxford English Dictionary gives “[to] provide schooling for” as one definition of “educate.” A few American states retain the nineteenth century term “public instruction,” but most governments around the world today contain departments or ministries, not of schooling, but of education. Teacher training institutions no longer describe themselves as “normal schools” but as faculties or colleges of education. In part this is a reflection of the continuing inflation of the word “education,” so that today we speak of driver education, consumer education, physical education, teacher education, and the like, where once we would have described such activities as “training.” In part also it is a reflection of our everyday equation of schooling with education, as when we describe someone with impressive academic credentials as “well educated.” However, though Churchill’s jibe still has the power to pull us up short, we do not find it difficult to understand his point. It is self-evident that much of what we think of as our education takes place outside of school. Almost anything we experience in life can be educational whether it be serious misfortune or undiluted triumph. It is often the case that personal experience, whether of success or failure, is more directly felt than anything we learn in school. The nineteenth century British novelist Wilkie Collins observed in later life that in the two years he spent in Italy in his early teens he learned “more which has been of use to me, among the pictures, the scenery, and the people, than I ever learnt at school.”1 Indeed, when we think back to our schooldays many of us recognize that we have never had occasion to use many of the things we were taught in school. Since leaving high school more than fifty years ago, for example, I have never once had occasion to

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solve a quadratic equation, conjugate a Latin verb, recite the terms of the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, or distinguish between a dactyl and a spondee . . . which is perhaps what the Canadian historian George Wrong was driving at in 1924 when he observed that “Our education is what is left when we may have forgotten most of the facts which we have learned.”2 Moreover, for all those people who disliked school, or remember it as a generally unpleasant experience, schooling was presumably anything but educational. The working class girls described by Angela McRobbie in Britain or Julie Bettie in California, like the British “lads” studied by Paul Willis and their Texan counterparts as described by Douglas Foley, were not at all enamored of their schooling, and their education came mostly from non-school sources. At best they saw school as a necessary evil, something to be tolerated as an unavoidable step on the road to adulthood and the world of work.3 The 15- and 16-year-old boys and girls interviewed by Cedric Cullingford similarly found little positive to say about their schooling, leading Cullingford to draw the depressing conclusion from his interview data that for most students most of the time the experience of school is “generally unpleasant.” In the United States, Theodore Sizer found students more accepting of their schooling but eloquently described what he saw as the lack of intellectual challenge and the general docility of American high schools. Learning to cope with what Cullingford describes as “the general monotonous reality” and Sizer as “the waste of most people’s time” that they see as characterizing schooling is, perhaps, education of a sort, but it is a far cry from what we conventionally think of as education.4 So, Churchill’s witticism is more than a mild joke at his school’s expense. It raises a serious question: Are schooling and education in fact one and the same? To pose the question slightly differently: to what extent, if at all, does our schooling, especially as it is organized today, contribute to our education? There is obviously very little that is educational in the schools described by such commentators as Jonathan Kozol in the United States, Peter McLaren in Canada, and their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Indeed, Kozol, McLaren, and others alert us to the possibility (some might say the certainty) that schools are not vehicles of education at all but rather instruments of “compulsory miseducation” as Paul Goodman charged some fifty years ago, or “factories for failure” to use the term used by the American anthropologist Ray Rist to describe the urban schools he studied.5 Ever since the beginnings of compulsory public schooling in the nineteenth century there have been those who doubted the schools’

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capacity to educate the young. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such varied observers as Locke and Rousseau (and many others) were agreed on one thing: school was the last place parents should send their children if they wanted them to be educated. In the nineteenth century, liberals were divided over the question of compulsory public schooling supported and supervised by the state. There were plenty of school promoters who had no difficulty with the idea but liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer were more sceptical. Writing in 1859, Mill argued that the most that could be conceded to the state was the power to compel parents to educate their children. What the state must not be allowed to do, according to Mill, was to dictate what that education should be. For Mill, who saw the greatest danger to liberty in the existence of a homogenized public opinion, “A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”6 Sounding more like a Marxist than a liberal, Mill believed that “Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority.”7 Or as Marx more succinctly put it, the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of its ruling class (though this did not stop him and Engels including a demand for compulsory schooling in The Communist Manifesto). Schooling and the State In some ways, though certainly not in all, Mill, Marx, and other such critics were prescient in their warnings. As historians of education have shown us, the creation of compulsory public schooling in which students followed an officially prescribed curriculum, using officially authorized textbooks, taught by officially licensed teachers, and supervised by officially appointed inspectors, had little to do with education in any real sense of that word, but much to do with the socialization and training of the young, and especially of the children of the working classes and in North America of immigrants, the so-called “dangerous classes” who could not be trusted to respect prevailing social norms. As Charles Dickens had the ghost of Christmas Present point out to Scrooge in his A Christmas Carol, when revealing two young waifs (“yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish”): “This boy is Ignorance.

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This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”8 And the cure for ignorance, of course, was schooling. As a Canadian policymaker put it in 1916, when defending the introduction of compulsory public schooling in the province of Manitoba, “Boys and girls, the citizens of the future, must be qualified to discharge the duties of citizenship.”9 The duties of citizenship included the willingness to work and support oneself; the internalization of a sense of national identity and, better yet, of patriotic spirit; and a commitment to the maintenance and smooth functioning of the established system of government. As a Canadian Royal Commission observed in 1925, “From the point of view of self-preservation alone, society recognizes that the best form of state insurance against anarchy and bolshevism is an efficient system of public education.”10 Nineteenth century governments in the industrializing world increasingly found themselves facing unprecedented problems. They ruled in what one contemporary observer described as an age of uncertainty and destruction, “an age of visible transition—an age of disquietude and doubt—of the removal of timeworn landmarks, and the breaking up of the hereditary elements of society—old opinions, feelings—ancestral customs and institutions are crumbling away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds are darkened by the shadow of change.”11 The Industrial Revolution disrupted existing social patterns, bringing new social classes into existence, challenging established hierarchies and authorities, and calling into question established norms and values, while also requiring a new kind of labor force that would work according to the relentless rhythms of clock and machine. At the same time, the growth of cities created new problems of public health, transportation, social discipline, and policing, all of which drew attention to the desirability of shaping the behavior of the newly emerging working class. Industrialization, however, was not the only problem facing governments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, religious belief was under increasing challenge from the forces of secularism, prompting the poet (and school inspector) Matthew Arnold in 1851 to compare the “sea of faith” which once had girdled the world to the receding ocean tide with its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” with the result that the men and women of his time were like people “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.”12 According to some historians nationalism came to take the place of

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religion, providing the social cohesion and communal discipline that seemed to be threatened by the decline of religious faith. The growing salience of nationalism as a political force prompted governments to explore ways of creating, shaping, and harnessing the growing national sentiments of their peoples. In the words of the historian Eugen Weber, peasants in France, with their local patois and regional loyalties, had to be transformed into Frenchmen (and women, presumably) who defined themselves as national citizens, united in loyalty to “la patrie.” What was true of France was equally true of other countries. As one Italian nationalist put it in the 1870s, “We have created Italy; now we must create Italians.”13 Nationalism entailed more than identification with a defined national group and geographic space; it also entailed a set of political allegiances, a commitment to prescribed ideological preferences, preferred political institutions, and the like. Equally problematic for ruling elites, the American and French Revolutions had not only established the principle that the people should rule themselves but had shown that they could actually do so successfully. All that was left was to universalize the principle of government by the people and to decide just who the people comprised— property owning males, all males of a certain race, men and women alike regardless of wealth or property, and so on—and just how selfgovernment might best be translated into viable institutions. Even regimes that resisted the progress of democratization, such as Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia, found it necessary to establish representative assemblies, albeit with limited powers. This advance of the principle of popular representation presented governments with a new problem: how best to ensure that the people, now newly defined as citizens, used their new powers wisely. In the words of a Harvard political scientist, writing in 1924, “Until men and women are able to read their ballots and understand what they are voting for, until they have at least a minimum of education, it is dangerous to place the suffrage in their hands.”14 All these problems—industrialization, secularization, nationalism, and democratization—had a common solution: compulsory public schooling. It was in schools, following officially approved curricula and using prescribed textbooks, that the young would be taught the skills and values required by the new social forms that were emerging. It was in schools that they would learn industrial work habits. It was in schools that they would learn the basic tenets of religion or, if not, their secular equivalent. It was in schools that they would imbibe patriotism. It was in schools that they would learn to define themselves as national citizens

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and acquire the knowledge, skills, and values to make government by the people a reality. There was, of course, nothing especially novel about the idea that the maintenance of any political regime or social order would be facilitated by an appropriately organized system of schooling. In The Republic, Plato had made the point crystal clear. In the nineteenth century the example of Sparta was well known to and usually admired by anyone claiming to be educated, which included most of the policymakers who shaped public schooling in its formative years. In the European religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestants and Roman Catholics alike dreamed of creating systems of schools to protect and entrench their particular beliefs and went some way toward solidifying the age-graded, curriculum-centered approach to schooling that we now largely take for granted. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did governments acquire the administrative and bureaucratic capacity to establish, maintain, and supervise nationwide systems of schools. Schooling was one of the many extensions of state power that were a feature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taking its place alongside the creation of public health systems, state pension and insurance schemes, professionalized police forces, publicly owned and operated transportation, communications and power services, and all the other manifestations of what the British sometimes called “gas and water socialism,” whether at the local or the national level. In other words, public schooling was designed more as a tool of social policy than as an instrument of universal education. As more than one school promoter insisted, it was cheaper to send children to school than to send unschooled adults to prison. Schools, and especially elementary schools, were designed to socialize, train, and even indoctrinate the young, to induct them into the societies in which they would spend their adult lives as citizens, not to expand their intellectual horizons, sharpen their minds, and enlarge their capacity for thought and reflection, which are surely the three defining characteristics of any education worth the name. In his 1891 novel, The Wonderful Visit, H.G. Wells nicely described the purpose of the newly created elementary schools that English children were now compelled to attend, when the “philosophical tramp” explained the purpose of a village school to a visiting angel: “They take ’em young into that school, and they says to them ‘come in ’ere and we’ll improve your minds,’ they says, and in the little kiddies go as good as gold. And they begins shovin’ it into them. Bit by bit and ’ard and dry, shovin’ out the nice juicy brains. Dates and

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lists and things. Out they comes, no brains in their ’eads, and wound up nice and tight, ready to touch their ’ats to anyone who looks at them. Why! One touched ’is ’at to me yesterday. And they runs about spry and does all the dirty work, and feels thankful they’re allowed to live. They take a positive pride in ’ard work for its own sake.” Teachers, said the tramp, were like vivisectionists: “They takes a frog and they cuts his brains out and they shoves a bit of pith in the place of ’em. That’s a pithed frog. Well—that there village is full of pithed human beings. . . . Every one of them ’as ’ad their brains cut out and chunks of rotten touchwood put in the place of it.” And the school? “That’s where they piths ’em.”15 Creating Educational Space in Schools In fact, public schooling offered something to everyone, regardless of political persuasion. Conservatives hoped that a little knowledge would prove to be not a dangerous thing, but a stabilizing force, teaching children that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Liberals hoped that schooling might create that liberal utopia, a society where everyone could pursue their own interests without trespassing on the rights of others. Socialists thought that schools might show students the way the world really worked, dissolving the false consciousness that prevented the working class from defining its real interests and creating the conditions for social reform and even revolution. Child advocates applauded the fact that children would now be protected from exploitation. Christians of various sorts wanted the schools to teach the truths of revealed religion as they defined them, while secularists hoped that schooling would undermine the foundations of religious faith. Feminists decried the gendered biases of schooling. Internationalists and pacifists criticized the schools’ emphasis on patriotism and war, though nationalists of course saw things differently. Educationists urged teachers to abandon overly didactic recitation methods and instead embrace the new studentcentred “paidocentric” approaches to teaching. In short, anyone with a cause saw in the public schools a means of disseminating their ideas. As a result, what schools taught, and how they taught it, became subjects of public and often political debate and controversy. Schooling became a Pandora’s Box and once the lid was opened there was no way to control what came out of it, including the tendency for schooling to turn into education. Designed to train students to take their allotted place in actually existing society, schools

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could and sometimes did open their eyes to the world as it might be. As one Canadian normal school principal put it in 1932, perhaps inspired by George Counts’ appeal for schools to build a new social order, “The only hope for curing the ills of the world is that young people may picture a better one and strive to realize it. To frame this picture and to cultivate this ambition is the greatest duty of the school.”16 In some ways the shift from schooling to education was implicit, and sometimes quite explicit, in the very creation of public schooling. When governments instituted compulsory public schooling, they did not do so in a historical vacuum. There was an educational tradition stretching back to Greece and Rome that shaped the thinking of many of the founders and administrators of the new public school systems. Try as they might (and not all of them tried), they could not shake off the classical view that education consisted of the development of intellect, character, and personal style, rooted in the internalization of classical values and the acquisition of an informed intellectual autonomy. In addition, the institution of public schooling led to the professionalization of teaching and so created a wide and interlinked network of training institutions, laboratory schools, research projects, journals, and conferences that made schooling a subject of intense professional and academic debate. And many of the new breed of educationists and teachers were not content to socialize children; they wanted to educate them, to extend their intellectual horizons, to teach them to think, to introduce them to what Matthew Arnold famously called “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” To take one example from among many, the influential American educationist and teacher educator Charles McMurry recommended in the early 1900s that “complete translations” of the Iliad and the Odyssey be used in Grade 4, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome be used in Grade 5, and so on. In the same spirit, and at the same time, the University of Nebraska historian, Fred Morrow Fling, hoped that his sourcebook of Ancient Greek history would lead high school students to feel the “old Greek masters” speaking to them “out of poem or speech, statue or temple.” According to Fling, writing in 1907, “If the work is properly done, it may not be difficult to read a play of Sophocles, the whole of the Iliad, a book or two of Herodotus, the whole of Thucydides, several speeches of Demosthenes, some of the Lives of Plutarch, and even the Apology of Plato, in place of less valuable reading.”17 The 1890s and early 1900s witnessed something of an international movement to transform history from an “information” into an “education” subject by teaching with primary sources rather than textbooks so that students would go far

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beyond memorizing names and dates and instead would learn to think historically.18 At the same time, the new normal schools of the late nineteenth century and beyond revealed to teachers alternative ways of teaching, different ways of conceptualizing schooling, and new theories of education, with the result that to a considerable extent schooling slipped out of the control of the governments that sought to direct it. School inspectors, for example, far from being officious minions of government, often encouraged innovation in the classroom, as I learned early in my Canadian teaching career when a visiting inspector observed that though I was teaching the right subject (British history), I was not following the official curriculum. He seemed perfectly satisfied with my explanation of why I thought my approach made more sense and gave me a very favourable report. Such, indeed, was my experience with most school inspectors and principals in the 1960s and beyond. They were only too happy to see what they thought was good teaching, whether or not it was in line with official policy, with which they themselves were often at odds anyway.19 Mill and Marx and others like them had a point when they voiced their fears that public schooling would simply entrench the existing distribution of social and political forces, but they overestimated the power and cohesiveness of the state and underestimated the ability of those at whom schooling was directed to shape it to their own purposes. In the 1924 words of a Canadian labour activist, “Education, even present-day education, with all its defects, tends to stimulate the imagination and sharpen the perceptions of those who receive it; and under adverse circumstances they begin to question the fitness of things.”20 To use Gramscian language, public schooling became not a smoothrunning agency for the top-down imposition of social control, but an attempt to impose a form of state hegemony which had to be negotiated and was often resisted or redirected by those at whom it was aimed. Schooling became (as it remains) a contested arena in which different political, ideological, and social groupings struggled for influence and control. The subsequent controversies and debates, sometimes professional, sometimes public, sometimes political, sometimes all three, opened a door through which education could enter the classroom and serve as something of a counterweight to the prevailing forces of socialization and training. In these circumstances governments found it impossible to maintain a watertight division between schooling as a preparation for life in society as it existed and education as the ability to reflect on what exists, how it came to be, and how it might be

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transformed into something different. After all, as conservatives were well aware, once children had been taught to read there was no way to control what they actually read, especially at a time when the very creation of schooling resulted in a mass readership for news and views of all kinds that enterprising journalists, authors, and publishers were only too happy to satisfy. Schooling, Education and Democratic Citizenship Probably the most potent single factor in this opening up of the educational potential of schooling in the twentieth century was the advancing democratization of social and political life. There is universal agreement that democracy makes particular demands on citizens and that democratic citizenship in turn makes particular demands on schooling. Most of us accept in general terms, though we can disagree on its specific applications, Dewey’s contention that democracy is a way of living, not simply a set of political institutions or a form of government. Most of us also find no fault with Dewey’s dictum that democracy has to be created afresh with each new generation. We realize that democratic citizens are not born, but have to be made, that the personal qualities and social norms that underlie democracy need to be taught, and that schools are potentially one of the best places for teaching them. Democracy is inherently dialogical and, if citizens are to participate fully in the debates that confront them, they need the range and depth of knowledge, the awareness of alternatives and choices, the willingness to engage with differing views, and the capacity to translate opinion into action that education provides. In addition, the health of democracy depends on many things, and not the least of them is a shared sense of community with fellow citizens who do not necessarily share our values or agree with our beliefs. We will never know or even meet most of them but we are prepared to take their ideas and opinions into account and even to make sacrifices on their behalf precisely because they are fellow citizens. In today’s world the dominant form of the community of citizens is, of course, the nation-state (or increasingly the multinational state) and one of the crucial roles of public schooling is to foster in the young that sense of community that makes national existence possible while also providing them with the knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions upon which democratic nationhood depends. After two world wars, the Holocaust, and other atrocities, few of us need reminding of the horrors to which nationalist extremism can lead, both within and beyond the borders of

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the nation-state. In the 1920s and 1930s this led H.G. Wells to mount an international campaign for world government, of which the reform of schooling and especially of history teaching was a crucial component. Today, internationalists and cosmopolitans of various stripes make a similar case. However, the nation-state is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and the task of schooling is to produce national citizens who understand that their nation co-exists with others in a world of nations and who are committed to democratic principles. This is why education, which by definition draws on the totality of the human heritage regardless of national or cultural affiliation, not just schooling, which is in essence national and even nationalistic, is crucially important. Democratic citizenship in an increasingly interdependent world, in which some of the most important challenges we face increasingly transcend national borders and call into question national sovereignties, demands more than socialization to what exists, training in useful skills, and indoctrination in the conventional wisdom of the day. This might have been adequate in the early days of compulsory schooling, but today the questions facing democratic citizens demand a range of knowledge, a capacity for thought and reflection, an ability to listen and debate, a respect for reason and justice, a reasoned (though not unconditional) respect for the beliefs and values of others, a disposition to participate in public life, and the skills needed to apply these principles to specific cases and to live with the ambiguities and contradictions that may arise. In short, democratic citizenship demands that citizens be not merely schooled but educated. Liberal Education and the Schools This is why what we have conventionally thought of as a liberal education, widened beyond its purely European origins, should be at the heart of schooling. It is in school that most of us—and only in school that many of us—stand a chance of being introduced to a vision of education and what it can do for us and the society in which we live. The purpose of education is not to confirm us in some existing version of identity or culture, but to enable us to step outside of it, to view it with fresh eyes, and thus to enrich our experience and enlarge our range of choice. Education introduces us to worlds we might otherwise never encounter, thereby reshaping our vision of the world we think we know. In my own case, for example, as a working class scholarship boy in an English grammar school in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I was well

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aware that I was being introduced to a world that would otherwise have remained closed to me. Growing up in a working class neighbourhood I knew very well that the world was divided into “them” who gave the orders and “us” who were supposed to obey them. At school it quickly became obvious that I came from the second group but was being groomed for membership in the first. The result was that going to school was like visiting a foreign but friendly country that hoped to recruit me as a citizen. I encountered many new customs, only some of which I adopted but many of which shone a new light on what I otherwise took for granted. I did not see why I could not have dual citizenship with freedom to move between the cultures of home and school and even to create a hybrid of the two. My schooling did not erase my identity or my culture but enlarged and enriched them. It is true that liberal education as traditionally defined has fallen into some disrepute in recent years. Postmodernists, feminists, postcolonialists, and others have exposed its biases and assumptions. However, this is not, or should not be, an argument for banishing liberal education from the schools, but rather one for enlarging our view of it. To argue for a liberal education is not to call for persuading students that Bach is superior to the Rolling Stones or that Thelonious Monk is superior to Kiss, though it will certainly require exploration of such questions. Rather it entails looking at music in all its variety as a vital form of human expression; and as with music, so with literature, art, and all other manifestations of human experience. The goal is to stretch students’ horizons, to introduce them to aspects of human behavior they might otherwise never encounter. It is one thing to reject the so-called canon, but quite another not to know that it even exists or never to have sampled any part of it. As Martha Nussbaum, Robert Orrill, Deborah Meier, Theodore Sizer, and others have shown, liberal education can be organized and taught in many different and often innovative ways.21 To call for a truly liberal education is not to advocate stuffing the so-called great books down the throats of unwilling students or marching them through some Plato to NATO digest of the history of Western civilization. Liberal education entails introducing students to the never-ending conversation about what it means to be human and to live together with other human beings on a finite planet. No liberal education worthy of the name can content itself simply with the transmission of information from teachers to students. It demands a pedagogy of dialogue and inquiry, of teaching with students rather than at them. And, to extend an argument advanced by Gerald Graff, one can hardly teach anything, be it a historical event, a poem, a scientific discovery, or

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anything else, without introducing students to the controversies and debates that surround it. It is sometimes forgotten that when Matthew Arnold argued for teaching what he called the best that has been thought and written he did so, not for any spurious reasons of status or prestige, but because he saw this as the best way to combat the “stock of received notions” that otherwise govern our lives.22 A curriculum, however, is only one piece of the puzzle. Researchers have shown time and again that there can be a substantial difference between the curriculum-as-prescribed, the curriculum-as-taught, and the curriculum-as-experienced by students. I once asked a Grade 8 student what he was learning in history class. He told me that he was learning to copy notes from the overhead projector screen. The teacher believed he was teaching the class about the Protestant Reformation but this particular student saw it differently and more accurately since the class in fact spent most of its time copying the teacher’s prepared notes. In reality, the student was learning even more than he realized, since he was learning to perform a task in which he saw little point and did not enjoy, and to do so competently and without overt complaint. These are no doubt useful workplace skills but they are a long way removed from the study of history. What should have been an educational experience, the study of religious protest and social change and an acquaintance with an important chapter in human history, was reduced to an exercise in socialization and training. In other words, the extent to which schools educate their students depends not simply on the curriculum but very much on teachers, who need not only to be familiar with their subjects, but to have their own conceptions of education and what it means to be educated and to know how they will help their students obtain the education in which they, as teachers, believe. This is more than a matter of teacher training (or teacher education for that matter), at least as conventionally understood. To become committed to education in any meaningful sense is not something that can be picked up in a university course or an in-service workshop. Nor is it a matter of acquiring some special skill or learning some prescribed knowledge. It entails a willingness to tune into the never-ending conversation about what it means to be human. It means that a university degree must become more than an accumulation of course credits, only tenuously related to each other. It also demands a much closer integration than commonly exists between university faculties of education and other discipline-based faculties so that students’ total university experience is conceived, designed, and experienced as a preparation for teaching, not in any specialized pedagogical sense but as a commitment

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to make teaching an initiation into education. In fact, even this kind of integration might achieve only limited results. What David Tyack has called the “grammar” of schooling is not easily dislodged.23 So-called traditional methods of teaching—chalk and talk, recitation, textbook review, prepared notes, and the rest—have survived, despite all the assaults launched against them over the last hundred years or so, because they serve a useful purpose. They ensure coverage of prescribed content; they help to maintain order and control and a sense of purpose while also guaranteeing a certain predictability in the classroom; they prepare students for tests and examinations; they make lesson planning and delivery manageable. Above all, they offer teachers a way of coping with adverse working conditions, characterized by large classes, lack of preparation time, inadequate resources, increasingly tight accountability measures, and a variety of other pressures. Teachers have long faced something of a dilemma. Ever since the late nineteenth century they have been urged to adopt what might be called a developmental or tutorial method of teaching in which they are supposed to adapt curricula to students’ needs and interests, abandon textbooks in favour of multiple resources, and use the progress of each individual student as the measure of pedagogical success. In reality, however, they typically find themselves working in schools that, despite a variety of more or less cosmetic programmatic or organizational changes, were initially created and continue to operate on what can only be described as factory lines, with students assigned to age-specific grade levels and processed along a curricular conveyor belt whose efficacy is measured by the results of predetermined tests and examinations. If we want teachers truly to educate their students, to put them in a position where they can engage them in the continuing conversation about the nature of the good life and the good society, we have to rethink teacher education and improve teachers’ working conditions. As things stand, teachers have to do many things: they train, they socialize, they indoctrinate, they instruct and mentor, they discipline and control, they certify and select, they organize and administer, they counsel and advise, they warn and encourage (not to mention collect lunch money, prepare report cards, and a thousand other mundane chores), and on and on. When one considers the many tasks facing teachers during a typical school day, it is a minor miracle that there is any time or energy left to educate, even if they choose to do so. It was not only Churchill’s education that was interrupted by his schooling; the whole process of what should be education can be too easily obstructed by the organizational and institutional imperatives of school. One American teacher,

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recently reflecting on his first year of teaching in a tough urban school, found to his surprise that a class of special needs students was much easier to teach than his usual class, mainly because, since the class was small, he could devote more attention to each individual student.24 Today schools around the world find themselves increasingly driven to outdo each other in the pursuit of prescribed standards. International comparisons pit national school systems against each other as policymakers pledge to improve their schools’ standing in the international surveys. At the local level departments of education publish so-called league tables of school performance and schools find themselves under increasingly competitive pressures as understandably anxious parents use test scores to search out the best possible schools for their children. Meanwhile, standing in the wings are all those advocates of charter schools, home schooling, de-schooling, and market-driven competitiveness who are only too willing to pick up the pieces should people lose confidence in the public school system. In the classroom the result has been that teachers find themselves under increasing pressure to conform to measures of accountability, usually expressed in terms of officially approved pedagogies, students’ test scores, prescribed lesson plans, and in some jurisdictions even the appearance and organization of bulletin boards. (In case this last point seems far-fetched, it is worth considering the observations of one American teacher, “Bulletin boards must have signs indicating what educational standard is being illustrated. After one of our state reviews, we are to add a sign stating the board’s purpose. One teacher had to redo her ‘purpose’ sign three times. The teacher assigned to checking bulletin boards thinks it has too many words. . . . In fact, the principal goes around the school ripping down bulletin boards without consulting the teachers who made them. They do them over again. It is no joking matter. Teachers are threatened with a ‘U’ in their permanent file if their bulletin board is not up to snuff.”25) As Linda McNeil has persuasively shown, accountability measures of this type defeat their own declared purpose, serving to de-skill and demoralize teachers and turning schooling into more of an exercise in training and socialization than it already is, thereby further diminishing its potential for genuine education.26 Not surprisingly, these pressures for accountability which convert curricula into lists of so-called “outcomes,” measure students’ learning in terms of test results, and often mandate the deployment of specified teaching strategies have an impact on students, as indeed they are designed to do. Most notably, they ensure that students’ experience of learning becomes little more than preparation for the kinds of tests and

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examinations mandated by whatever accountability measures are in place, whether No Child Left Behind in the United States, attainment targets in the United Kingdom, or their equivalents in other jurisdictions. As an American fifth grader told Linda Perlstein, “I’m not really sure why they need to test us so much.”27 Since such measures disproportionately affect lower-achieving schools, this paradoxically means that the very students who most deserve a truly liberal education are the least likely to receive it. What Is to Be Done? In these circumstances, and given all the pressures surrounding them, it is urgent that teachers take advantage of whatever opportunities they find (and such opportunities do exist) to widen their students’ base of knowledge, to reflect on what they learn, to gain some appreciation of the human heritage of thought and achievement (not to mention puzzlement and despair), and to begin to think about the perennial questions surrounding the nature of the good life and the good society, which together comprise the essence of education. We too easily teach our various subjects in terms of impersonal causes and results, abstract laws and concepts, discrete skills, and blocks of factual knowledge, reducing literature to the analysis of theme, character, and plot; history to a summary of causes, results, and events, perhaps enlivened by an anecdote or two; science to the enumeration of laws and formulas; mathematics to the application of algorithms; and so on. In doing so, we lose sight of the reality that school subjects, like the intellectual disciplines on which they are based, are in essence records of human agency, depictions of human beings struggling to understand, explain, and shape their lives and the world in which they live. Properly taught, school subjects are not things to be covered or memorized, but vehicles by which students might come to see themselves as heirs to a legacy of human striving that connects past, present, and future. An example drawn from my own discipline, history, and from my own teaching experience might make these generalities more tangible. I take the example from the kind of world history courses that form part of the school curriculum in many American states and Canadian provinces. It describes teaching Grade 8 students about the city-states of Ancient Greece, with particular reference to Athens and Sparta. In teaching this (and indeed any other) topic I wanted to do more than simply transmit a mass of historical information to students. I certainly

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wanted them to end up knowing something about Ancient Greece but I also wanted them to use this knowledge to help them think more reflectively about the world in which they lived. I wanted to use the Greek city-state in ways that would draw on what students already knew, help them extend and reflect on their knowledge, and connect them with some important and enduring aspects of the human experience in ways that would link past and present, and even extend into the future. Too often, when we teach history, or indeed any subject, we disempower students by devaluing what they already know. The implicit message of schooling is that what students have learned in the course of their daily experience does not really matter and is certainly less important than what school has to teach them. Any curriculum carries the unwritten message that it contains a body of important knowledge that students do not yet possess but need to learn. In teaching about the Greek city-state, as indeed in teaching history generally, my solution to this problem of curricular disempowerment was to find a “big question” that would connect past and present, and perhaps even have implications for the future, that would strike students as interesting, and that would draw on their knowledge and experience. I found it in the related concepts of community and citizenship. It was not difficult to engage Grade 8 students in collaborative discussion of such questions as why most people prefer to live in groups, what turns a group into a community, how communities sustain themselves, what are the benefits and drawbacks of living in some form of community, whether the classroom or the school or the local neighbourhood constituted a community, what are and should be the entitlements and obligations of citizenship, and on and on. Exploration of such questions gave students a chance to show what they knew, to build on and challenge each other’s ideas, to formulate questions that had not previously occurred to them. It also put everyone on a broadly equal footing, regardless of gender, skill level, learning style, or previous knowledge. And, of course, it provided a useful foundation, and indeed a studentgenerated study-guide, for research into Athens and Sparta as examples of human communities in the past, while also providing a platform for the exploration of that distinctively historical question: How do we know what we think we know about the past and how reliable is our knowledge? Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the battle of Marathon, the trial and execution of Socrates, the Persian Wars, and all other such set-pieces of Greek history came to life because they were placed in a particular context and illuminated a question of continuing interest and importance that also had considerable bearing on students’ lives: what is

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or should be the relationship of individuals to the wider community in which they live and to what extent should that community direct the lives of its members? This question was a way of concretizing the abstract concepts of community and citizenship while also providing a link connecting all the topics in the world history course. In the process, students learned a good deal of history, used their knowledge to connect past and present, and discovered that they were not empty vessels waiting to be filled up by their teacher, but that they knew a lot more than they realized. This is not to suggest that a reformed pedagogy will somehow solve all the problems facing teachers today, many of which originate outside the school and cannot be solved simply though schooling alone. As Theodore Sizer observes, “Children who come to school hungry, frightened, neglected, and abused are unlikely to settle down readily to Coleridge and calculus.”28 As important as they are, teaching strategies are only one part of the complex task of teaching. Nor is there space here to describe how this kind of teaching might be used in all subjects at all grade levels, even were I competent to do so. I am convinced, however, that it can be done. The pedagogical literature is full of appropriate examples and over the years I have worked with colleagues and watched a variety of teachers who in their different ways have done it. Even in these assessment-driven days of No Child Left Behind, attainment targets, learning outcomes, exit profiles, reliance on testing, and the whole panoply of accountability measures, this kind of teaching, though certainly made more difficult to accomplish, is still possible. The more that we adopt it, the more we will ensure that students’ experience of schooling is truly educational.

NOTES 1. Cited in Lyn Pykett, Wilkie Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4. 2. George Wrong, “The Teaching of the History and Geography of the British Empire,” Canadian Historical Review 5 (1924): 306. 3. The references are to Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000); Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race and Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1976); and Douglas E. Foley, Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 4. Cedric Cullingford, The Best Years of Their Lives? Pupils Experiences of School (London: Kogan Page, 2002), 192; Theodore R. Sizer, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), x.

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5. The references here are to Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005); Peter McLaren, Cries from the Corridor (Toronto: Methuen, 1980); Paul Goodman, Compulsory Miseducation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Raymond C. Rist, The Urban School: Factory for Failure (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973). 6. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Representative Government (London: Dent Everyman’s Library, 1910), 161. 7. Ibid., 170. 8. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave Three, last page. 9. Cited in Richard Henley and John Pampallis, “The Campaign for Compulsory Education in Manitoba,” Canadian Journal of Education 7 (1982): 81. 10. J. H. Putman and G. M. Weir, Survey of the School System (Victoria, British Columbia: King’s Printer, 1925), 57. 11. Edward Bulwer Lytton, England and the English, vol. I (New York: Harper, 1833), 108. 12. The quotations are from Arnold’s poems “Dover Beach” and “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” in Matthew Arnold: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Miriam Allott and Robert Super (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 136 and 161. 13. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870– 1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 44. 14. William B. Munro, Current Problems in Citizenship (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 426. 15. H. G. Wells, The Wonderful Visit (London: Dent Wayfarer’s Library, n.d.), 143– 44. 16. William A. McIntyre (Principal of the Manitoba Normal School), “The School Preparing for Life,” The Western School Journal 27 (1932): 44–45. 17. Charles McMurry, Elements of General Method (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 143; Fred Morrow Fling, A Source Book of Greek History (Boston: Heath, 1907), iv. 18. Ken Osborne, “Fred Morrow Fling and the Source-Method of Teaching History,” Theory and Research in Social Education 31 (2003): 466–501. 19. For the record of one such Canadian school inspector in the early 1900s, see Alex Lord’s British Columbia: Recollections of a Rural School Inspector, 1915–1936, ed. John Calam (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1991). 20. Cited in Jean Barman, “ ‘Knowledge Is Essential for Universal Progress but Fatal to Class Privilege’: Working People and the Schools in Vancouver in the 1920s,” Labour/Le Travail 22 (1988): 25. 21. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Robert Orrill, ed., Education and Democracy: Re-Imagining Liberal Learning in America (New York: College Entrance Board, 1997); Robert E. Proctor, Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition can Improve our Schools with a Curriculum for Today’s Students (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Alan Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997); Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Theodore R. Sizer, Horace’s School: Redesigning the American High School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). For a persuasive attempt to enlist Matthew Arnold in the cause of social and educational reform, see Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 89–99.

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22. Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992). 23. D. Tyack and W. Tobin, “The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change?” American Educational Research Journal 31 (1994): 453–79. Also relevant is Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890– 1980 (New York: Longman, 1984). 24. Dan Brown, The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle (New York: Arcade, 2007), reviewed in the New York Times Education Life supplement, April 21, 2007, 35. 25. For bulletin boards, see Jacqueline Kingon, “A View from the Trenches,” New York Times Education Life supplement, April 8, 2001, 30–33, 37–38. The quotation is from p. 33. 26. Linda M. McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (New York: Routledge, 2000). 27. Linda Perlstein, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade (New York: Holt, 2007), 99. 28. Theodore R. Sizer, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), x.

chapter 3

Education and Democracy: The United States of America as a Historical Case Study Schools in democratic nations have multiple purposes, some of which conflict with one another. Moreover, not all purposes serve democratic ends equally well. In this chapter, noted historian Diane Ravitch looks at the historical evolution of educational aims in the United States. Ravitch contrasts educational aims that are primarily social in content and character with those that are primarily individual. In the case of the former, schools are viewed as places to ready the young for productive contributions to the society they will inherit, whether this be as laborers, managers, or professionals. In the latter case, the activities of school are designed to equip individual students to seek a life that advances their welfare (in some instances), the welfare of others (in some instances), or the nation’s or world’s welfare (in some instances). As Ravitch makes clear, each of these overarching aims can lead to quite different programs and practices. For example, aims intended to benefit the individual might be manifested in the form of leading a well-adjusted, prototypical middle class life, or in the form of a questioning, analytical person incessantly searching for a better life. Aims that focus more on social goods might lead to simply “plugging” students into a nation’s needed job “slots,” or to nurturing strong communitarian interests that honor certain customs, traditions, and texts. As she concludes her chapter, Ravitch leaves little doubt about what she believes are proper educational aims for a democracy and where she believes the schools should be headed. Consider her a partner to your conversation, and ask how you would respond to her position. Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. She is a historian of education and author of many books, including The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (2003) and Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (2000). She is a graduate of Wellesley College, earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University, and is the recipient of eight honorary degrees. She has extensive experience in the realm of educational policy, having served as assistant secretary of education with the U.S. government and is holder of the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Education and Democracy: The United States of America as a Historical Case Study diane ravitch Over the course of American history, there has been no shortage of reflection about the purposes of education. In 1787, Noah Webster wrote that the subject of education had already been “exhausted by the ablest writers, both among the ancients and moderns.” He doubted that he had anything to add to the speculations of those who had preceded him, but add he did to that “exhausted” subject, and at great length.1 What attracted his attention and has continued to capture the attention of countless writers and thinkers since then was the idea that education could shape tender minds, and even more important, that education could be consciously employed to shape society. Throughout U.S. history, educators, public officials, pressure groups, and concerned citizens have struggled for the power to decide what children in school should learn and how they should be taught. Sometimes they struggled because they were sincerely interested in improving education, but often the combatants in education politics have had an overarching political goal: they fought for their vision of schooling because it embodied their ideology and their goals for the future of society. From the earliest days of the American nation, educational theorists have contended that their ideas were best suited for future citizens in a democracy. As befits a democracy, no one had a monopoly on wisdom or on the conversation itself. Nor is the discussion confined to the past. We continue to argue about what our schools should be teaching, who should be teaching, which methods are best, how schools should be controlled, and whether they should be public or private or some mixture thereof. These days, little time goes by without the release of a new report or study about the schools, each with its own remedies, each with its own assumptions about the purposes of education in a democracy. Let me then trace at least the rudiments of this discussion over the past two centuries. This will not be an exhaustive survey, but it will suggest some of the main lines of dispute.

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An Emerging Tension in the Purposes of Education Noah Webster was the first educator who saw the potential in schooling and textbooks as instruments to create a new American society. Although there were no public schools in the postRevolutionary era, Webster was most certainly a founding father of American public education; he clearly saw the value to the state in using schools and textbooks to promote a strong sense of national identity. The education of youth, he advised, was more consequential to the state than making laws or preaching the gospel. He believed that the new nation needed, above all, a common language; he advanced the cause of cultural nationalism by writing schoolbooks and a dictionary of the English language with its own distinctive American pronunciations. Webster’s famous blue-backed speller sold in the tens of millions (always keen about his royalties, Webster was the father of copyright law in America). Form the child, Webster urged, and you will ultimately form the nation, its government, and the character of its civil society. As a relentless booster of popular education, Webster contributed mightily to the American experiment in democracy, even though he became a bitter foe of democratic rule and universal suffrage as he grew older. While Webster was writing textbooks for the nation’s rudimentary schools, his contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, submitted legislation in 1779 to create a public school system in Virginia; his proposals were not passed. By today’s standards, Jefferson’s proposals were timid indeed; his state system would not have included all children, certainly not black children, and its intent was meritocratic. Yet, for his time, he was far in advance of popular thinking because he saw the need for a governmentfunded system of schooling. Jefferson saw education as self-protection for individual citizens. He believed that those in power were likely to succumb to the temptation to become tyrants and that the best safeguard against tyranny was mass education. Jefferson wrote, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”2 He was especially keen for young people to study history, because if they knew the experience of other ages, they would be “enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes . . .”3 The success of democratic government, he believed, depended on an informed public, which could protect its rights against those who might usurp them.

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Clearly, Webster and Jefferson held quite different views about the role of education in a democratic society. Webster wanted to educate youth to determine the future character of the state; Jefferson wanted to educate youth so that the people could protect their freedoms against the potential intrusions of the state. Over time, both ideas became merged in the ideology of American public schooling. Theorists of education were drawn to Webster’s idea that the schools could be used as a tool for social planning, but at the same time, they never lost sight of the possibility that education would enhance the powers of individuals. Policymakers were drawn to Webster’s belief that they could shape society by shaping education policy. At the same time, parents, education leaders, religious groups, and other actors in civil society gravitated toward Jefferson’s pluralistic view, which recognized that education empowered individuals and groups in a democratic society to make choices and that a democratic society became more democratic as more people became empowered to determine their own fates.

The Founding of the Common, Public School Horace Mann was an intermediate figure who tried to harmonize both individual purposes and social goals in his vision of education. Like Webster, Mann believed that the training of the schoolroom would eventually ripen into the “institutions and fortunes” of the state.4 Mann became secretary of the Massachusetts state board of education in 1837, where for twelve years he argued that popular education was integrally connected to freedom and democratic government. The schools, he maintained, must distribute intelligence broadly throughout the population. Mann understood the value of investing in human capital. As people gained knowledge, he argued, they would gain the power to develop their talents and to advance the frontiers of science, law, and the arts. As knowledge was more equably diffused, the entire society and economy would grow. Intellectual education, he said, would remove the causes of poverty and spread abundance. Mann had a powerful vision of public education as a lever that would uplift society, build a stronger economy, and develop individual creativity and intelligence. Mann today is best known as the father of the American common school, that is, the idea that the state should maintain free public schools in every community, to which all children are sent to learn together, presumably obliterating differences of class and social condition. Less well known is Mann’s acknowledgment that parents who were

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dissatisfied with the quality of their local public schools were “bound by the highest obligations, to provide surer and better means for the education of their children.”5 Only recently has there been close attention to the anti-democratic aspects of some partisans of the common school movement, especially those who were passionately opposed to Catholicism.6 Mann’s nonsectarianism, we now recognize, was nondenominational Protestantism. He did not object to the Bible in the schools, nor to other religious practices, so long as they did not represent a specific religion. Those who did not wish to have the principles of nondenominational Protestantism inculcated in their children by the state objected to Mann’s common school. Other prominent leaders of the common school movement, some of them state superintendents in the Midwest and South, were outspoken in their bigotry towards Catholics. Critics of the common school movement claimed that it was not democratic to compel parents to send their children to schools that rejected their parents’ values; and that democracy implied not centralization, but a greater diversity of educational agencies. Despite its critics, the common school movement was propelled forward by a great sense of moral and political purpose, and it scored victories in state after state in the mid-nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had a popular public school system, with free, nearly universal elementary education and with high schools available to a steadily increasing percentage of young people. By 1900, public education was well established as a fundamental element in the American democratic tradition. At the opening of the twentieth century, it was generally accepted that public education should be provided by the state at public expense, and that the purposes of democracy were served best by offering a common academic education to children for as long as they were willing and able to stay in school. Mann’s idea that intellectual education was the foundation of democratic education seemed firmly established; most youngsters, for example, studied a foreign language, even when they were not required to do so, and Latin was a staple of the high school curriculum in big cities, small towns, and even rural areas. Schools as Instruments of Social Policy The early years of the twentieth century, however, saw a redefinition of the relationship between education and democracy. A new class of educational experts, associated with the recently established schools of

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pedagogy, advocated a sociological analysis of education. Working in tandem with social workers, progressive school reformers decreed that the highest goal for a democratic school system was social efficiency. This goal was aligned with Webster’s thought, rather than Jefferson’s or Mann’s. It seems to me that Jefferson would have been repelled by the tenets of social efficiency, of fitting people into their likely roles in society; and Mann would have adamantly insisted on the necessity of a common academic program for all, rather than the narrow programs of vocational and industrial education that began to appear in urban schools early in the century. Although schooling in the nineteenth century had been characterized by a great deal of organizational diversity, the line between public and private education grew sharper in the early years of the twentieth century. Ellwood P. Cubberley, the profession’s leading historian of education for many years, taught generations of teachers and administrators that government control of schooling was a sure indicator of a nation’s democratic character. He treated disparagingly the various forms of non-public and quasi-public schooling that had characterized American education in the nineteenth century. In his histories of education, Cubberley asserted that a nation’s educational progress could be measured by the extent to which control of its schools had passed from church to state, from private to public, and from laymen to professionals. The most highly evolved nations, he suggested, were those in which there was “state control of the whole range of education, to enable the State to promote intellectual and moral and social progress along lines useful to the State . . .” Like Noah Webster, Cubberley envisaged the school system as an engine of social control, an agency that could plan social progress and could assign children to their future roles.7 In Cubberley’s model, which was promoted in the textbooks of the new pedagogical profession, a democratic school system was one in which the state, acting through its expert professional staff, exercised complete control over the schools. Progressive reformers in the early decades of the twentieth century supported industrial education as the best means to achieve social efficiency and economic development. The industrial education movement achieved an important victory with the report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education in 1906. This report recommended industrial and vocational education in the public schools, as well as industrial schools that were completely separate from the regular school system. The experts said that industrial education would benefit children, who would be ready for work; employers, who

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would have a ready supply of trained labor; and the nation, which would enjoy prosperity. The commission concluded that the vast majority of children did not need a liberal education, but training for jobs. In that same year, 1906, the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education was formed to lobby for the cause. So popular was industrial education that one educator likened its spread to a “mental epidemic,” not unlike religious revivals or Klondike gold fever. A historian wrote later of this period that “Bankers, businessmen, industrialists, philanthropists, social workers, educators, all jumped on the bandwagon. Few movements in the history of American education have taken so sudden and so powerful a hold on the minds of school reformers.”8 Advocates of industrial education insisted that it was wasteful to expose most children to an academic education. They believed that schools should train students for the work that they would eventually do as adults. Since most children would grow up to become farmers, laborers, industrial workers, and housewives, schools should train them for these roles. In the first two decades of the century, the industrial education movement lobbied successfully at the state and federal levels to get vocational programs into the curriculum and to assure that students were “guided” into practical programs as early as the seventh or eighth grade. The industrial education movement persuaded the U.S. Congress to pass the first major piece of federal legislation for the schools, the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 for vocational and industrial education. The most important triumph for the industrial education movement was the general acceptance of curricular differentiation, beginning in junior high schools. Indeed, the junior high school was established to facilitate differentiation of children into distinct tracks, based on predictions about their future prospects for higher education or careers. School reformers insisted that the academic curriculum was not appropriate for all children, because most children—especially the children of immigrants and of African Americans—lacked the intellectual capacity or the need to study subjects like algebra and chemistry. Some of the efficiency experts, like John Franklin Bobbitt, argued that girls should not study such subjects because, as future housewives, they had no need or use for them. In a democracy, the school reformers said, students should get the curriculum that was suited to the needs of society, in line with their own individual capacities. To meet this goal, many districts offered several different curricula, intended to train workers for agriculture, business, clerical jobs, domestic service, industrial work, and household

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management. The standard academic curriculum, once considered appropriate for anyone who advanced to high school, was redefined as the college-preparatory curriculum, suitable only for the small minority of students who intended to go to college. This was an important and dramatic change of goals in American education. Reformers rejected the once traditional idea that all students should get an intellectual education to prepare them for citizenship in a democratic society, claiming that this notion was not only antiquated but anti-democratic. They insisted that a democratic society needed men and women who were equipped to perform their vocational roles; the mission of the public schools in a democratic society, they said, was to train students to perform their expected roles. In that way, society would function efficiently, and the schools would not waste resources by overeducating young people who were likely to be barbers, clerks, factory workers, manual laborers, laundresses, housewives, or farmers. Dewey’s Attempt to Harmonize Competing Purposes It was just about the time that the industrial education movement was reaching its apogee that the eminent philosopher John Dewey published his landmark book, Democracy and Education, in 1916. Dewey was quite critical of the zeal for industrial education that was then popular. He pointed out that any effort to train youngsters for a specific occupation was bound to be self-defeating, because as new industries emerged and old ones disappeared, individuals who had been trained for a specific trade would be left behind with obsolete skills. He saw too that industrial and vocational education was likely to represent an acceptance of the status quo, merely perpetuating existing inequities in society. Dewey’s warnings about the likely negative consequences of industrial and vocational education had little effect. The movement had so much momentum that it could not be stopped or even slowed. For most reformers, industrial and vocational education seemed like natural alternatives to the academic curriculum, which they viewed as arid, bookish, elitist, and sterile. While reformers ignored Dewey’s views about industrial and vocational education, they nonetheless paid lip service to his ideas about democracy and education. Presumably they did not understand that their willingness to sort children into early career paths was antithetical to Dewey’s ideas about democracy. Dewey wrote that “A

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democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”9 As he defined it, the more individuals participate in shared interests, the more that they must refer their actions to that of others, the more numerous and more varied are their contacts with others who are different from themselves, the more democratic is society. The widening of interests, Dewey said, was the result of the development of travel, commerce, manufacture, and new means of communication. These changes produced exchanges that inevitably must break down the barriers of class, race, and nationality. In Dewey’s conception of democracy, then, the particularities of neighborhood, region, religion, ethnicity, race, and other distinctive features of communal life are isolating factors, all of which may be expected to dissolve as individuals interact and share their concerns. Dewey’s conception of democracy was at odds with those of philosopher Horace Kallen.10 Kallen reacted against the coercive assimilationist policies of his era, preferring instead that public policy encourage distinctive cultural groups; he called for “a democracy of nationalities.” He wanted America to become a nation of nations and suggested the metaphor of an orchestra composed of many different groups, each playing its own instrument. Dewey, however, did not admire groups that had interests of their own, suggesting that they became too selfish, too devoted to protecting their own interests. He was fearful of “the antisocial spirit” of any group that had “interests ‘of its own’ which shut it out from full interaction with other groups . . .” Such a spirit, he worried, promoted “isolation and exclusiveness,” which tended to preserve past customs rather than stimulating the sort of exchanges that broke down selfishness and discouraged traditional customs. Educators could quite reasonably conclude after reading Dewey that any schools serving a particular group—such as parochial schools or single-sex schools—were undemocratic because of their isolating effects. Dewey’s definition of democracy, on the other hand, was quite supportive of the comprehensive school, a school that incorporates all kinds of programs and curricula under one roof. Since these views gained currency when many cities were undertaking school construction programs in the 1920s, they lent support to the creation of multipurpose schools with multiple programs. But what should schools do to advance democratic society, aside from trying to bring everyone under a single administrative umbrella? What should their educational program be? This was far more difficult

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for the conscientious educator to discern, for it was easier to understand what Dewey was against rather than what he favored. Certainly his view of democracy implied that individuals should join in shared activities to the greatest extent possible. Beyond that, his followers understood that life is growth, education is growth, and growth is its own justification. Dewey believed that students should engage in “orderly and ordered activity,” but he was eclectic or at least “catholic” with a small “c” about what they should study.11 He wrote, for example, that it was absurd for educators to try to establish what they believed to be the proper objects of education, just as it would be absurd for the farmer “to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of conditions.”12 Whether farming or educating, both were responsible for carrying out certain activities from minute to minute and hour to hour, rather than accepting aims imposed from without by external authority. Dewey claimed that “education as such has no aims.”13 Yet the comparison between education and farming was not a good choice, as it tended to confuse educators about the relation between their methods and their purposes. Farmers must know in advance what they intend to grow; if they wish to be successful, they must pay heed to agricultural science. They must plan ahead, based on their goals, and use the methods likeliest to advance those goals. When their crops are ready, the farmers must carefully measure their results to know which seeds and methods were most productive. Any farmer who did not know what crop he wanted to grow, under what conditions it was likely to grow, and which methods were most successful would surely be a poor farmer. And certainly farming has clear aims; no one says that people farm to improve their personality or to get exercise or to commune with nature. They farm to grow crops; if they don’t achieve this aim, they won’t achieve any of the others, and they won’t even be farmers. Why then must education be without aims? Ultimately, Dewey believed that anything might be studied in ways that made it valuable, especially if students understood its social significance. He wrote that it was not possible “to establish a hierarchy of values among studies. It is futile to attempt to arrange them in an order, beginning with one having least worth and going on to that of maximum value . . . Since education is not a means to living, but is identical with the operation of living a life which is fruitful and inherently significant, the only ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living itself.”14 This view led Dewey to conclude that there was no reason to favor a course in zoology over a course in laundry

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work; he said that either could be narrow and confining, and either could be a source of understanding and illumination about social relationships. This was true in theory. In practice, however, the children who were studying zoology were learning about the principles of science, while the children in the laundry work course were learning to wash and press clothes.15 Because he believed that no subject was of intrinsic value, Dewey’s ideas were used by advocates of social efficiency to undermine the academic curriculum. If every subject was of equal value, whether zoology or laundry work, whether geometry or sewing, then why struggle to preserve equal access to algebra, chemistry, foreign language, and other subjects? The work of creating new curriculum tracks and assigning students to them was facilitated by the invention of the group IQ test during World War I. At that time, the nation’s most prominent educational psychologists offered their services to the military; as part of their effort they devised group intelligence tests that made it possible to determine quickly which recruits were officer material and which were not. The tests were used with apparent success to assign nearly two million men. When the war was over, the psychologists turned their skills to developing group IQ tests for the schools. By the early 1920s, intelligence testing was a regular feature in American public education. Psychologists of education hailed the new mental tests, which they believed provided a sure and scientific basis for curricular differentiation. The test developers assured the public that intelligence was innate and fixed; the aura of scientific certainty with which the testers advanced their work persuaded teachers and principals that the tests were a reliable scientific tool that would enable them to guide their students into the proper curriculum. No longer would these decisions be based on guesswork. The tests allowed the schools to decide quickly which students should be in the college track, which should be directed to technical careers, and which should be directed into a program that would limit their opportunity for further education or technical vocations. All of this was considered a socially efficient approach to the problem of mass education in a democratic society. Educators believed that they were using the most scientific tools to achieve the most democratic results: an education fitted to the needs of each individual and the needs of society. The best minds in education recommended curricular differentiation based on IQ testing.

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Objections to Doctrines of Social Efficiency There were not many dissenters, but there were a few. William Chandler Bagley of Teachers College, Columbia University spoke out vigorously against both curricular differentiation and IQ testing. He saw them as decidedly undemocratic, and he argued during the 1920s and 1930s for a common academic curriculum and higher standards for all students. Bagley gained little more than professional opprobrium for his contrarian views. Isaac Kandel, an internationally renowned scholar who was also at Teachers College, complained in 1934 that the lower schools had adopted social promotion as the norm and the high schools had reduced their standards to the lowest kind of pabulum.16 Under these intellectually debilitating conditions, Kandel noted, the high school seemed to have embraced the cult of mediocrity. Bagley and Kandel believed that schools in a democratic society must improve the intelligence of their pupils through the systematic study of certain disciplines. Both were sharply critical of the reformers who wanted to abolish subject matter or reduce standards to the vanishing point. They agreed with Dewey that a democratic society needs a certain fund of common values and ideas, so that it could function as a community of shared purpose; but they did not believe this fund of shared values would arise without instruction and purpose. Another dissenter from the educational ideology that had become commonplace by mid-century was Robert Hutchins. Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, achieved a large popular following in the late 1930s because of his eloquent advocacy of the great books. During the next two decades, Hutchins was one of the most prominent critics of American education. Hutchins identified four ideas that were responsible for the emptiness of education.17 First was the doctrine of adjustment, the idea that the purpose of education is to adjust or adapt young people to fit into their society. This was wrong, he said, because society changes with such rapidity that the student would be educated for the past, not the future. Vocational training, he charged, not only failed to prepare young people for work but failed to educate them. The second misguided idea, according to Hutchins, was the doctrine of immediate needs, the idea that students should study only what interests them at the moment. This, he insisted, had produced a curriculum of ad hoc courses, a reliance on marketing and sales techniques to find needs and fill them, and once again, a withdrawal from the responsibility to educate young people. This doctrine of immediate needs, he said,

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had disintegrated the curriculum of both the schools and the universities, as they vainly sought to offer courses on every imaginable need and want. The third of these misleading doctrines he called the doctrine of social reform. This was the idea that educators could use the schools to promote social reform. The problem here, said Hutchins, was that the only reforms that a school can preach are the ones that the public already wants to do. It can’t be the leading edge of an unpopular reform, so it must reflect society, rather than change society. The danger of this course of action is that once the schools are seen as vehicles for reforms, they may be converted into battlegrounds for competing political programs and become vehicles for dubious agendas. The fourth of the wrong doctrines, which he found most abhorrent, was the doctrine of no doctrine at all. This is the curriculumless curriculum, the school that meets all needs, the program of infinite variety, lacking any ideals, any sense of good and bad or better and worse. This doctrine guarantees that there can be no common intellectual life, no basis for communication among Americans about anything other than sports. What underlies all these doctrines, Hutchins asserted, was the belief that everybody has a right to an education but that not everyone is capable of being educated. The tension between these two beliefs, he argued, produces an adulterated education of low quality. Hutchins believed that the true doctrine of education requires us to recognize that we improve society by educating the individuals who compose it. Education, he wrote, deals with the development of the intellectual powers of people. In a democracy, where the government is based on self-rule, every person is a ruler and all need the education that rulers should have. They should have, in other words, a liberal education, because that is the education appropriate to free men. A liberal education is one that gives young people the skills, knowledge, habits, ideals, and values to continue to educate themselves for the rest of their lives. Everyone, whether a bank president or a ditch-digger, must be educated, Hutchins asserted. “The liberally educated man,” he wrote, “must know how to read, write, and figure. He must know and understand the ideas that have animated mankind. He must comprehend the tradition in which he lives. Citizens in a democracy must be educated to exercise their intelligence, to think and discuss, to debate and reflect. . . . Perhaps the greatest idea that America has given the world,” said Hutchins, “is the idea of education for all. The world is entitled to know whether this idea

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means that everybody can be educated, or only that everybody must go to school.”18 Where Should American Education Be Headed? From Noah Webster to Thomas Jefferson to Horace Mann to John Dewey to William Chandler Bagley and Isaac Kandel to Robert Hutchins, American education has been offered many definitions of the ways in which education and democracy are connected, the ways in which one might promote the other. Well ahead of his time, Webster understood that education could be used to shape society. Jefferson saw education as a valuable means to preserve one’s freedom and rights against the depredations of the powerful. Mann believed that education would allow people to develop their talents and the national economy at the same time. Dewey envisioned education as a lever to reform society by expanding the contacts among different people and reducing the exclusiveness of groups. Bagley, Kandel, and Hutchins insisted that education would improve democratic society by improving individuals and teaching them to use their minds well. My own estimation of these thinkers reflects, unsurprisingly, my own values and beliefs. In Webster, one sees the beginnings of an ideology that saw students as instruments who might be formed to serve the purposes of the state. This is the root of social engineering. One sees this ideology in full flower with the rise of the industrial education movement, whose proponents discussed among themselves what to do with other people’s children, to whom they would give an education that the planners would not choose for their own children. Jefferson continues to appeal to those who are unwilling to surrender their fate to social planners and other wielders of governmental and corporate power. He recognized that education should foster the critical intelligence of the citizenry, so that each person might understand and defend their rights. . . . Horace Mann articulated an appealing concept of education as a mechanism for social and economic development, based on intellectual development. Mann was a great proponent of public education, because he believed that the government had a responsibility to see that all of its people were educated and productive. Dewey remains a powerful voice on behalf of democracy, even to the present. His view of democracy as associated life is a profound idea, though it is not without problems and contradictions. He was in many respects a prophet of contemporary American life, forecasting as he did an age in which everyone is engaged in sharing purposes with everyone

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else, everyone is communicating with everyone else (through the Internet), and cultural life is both homogenized and polarized as more and more people search for new identities or lost group identities. Bagley, Kandel, and Hutchins, it seems to me, had it right. They understood that the education of citizens is a first priority for the schools of a democracy. They understood that a democracy’s goal must be not just universal enrollment but universal education. They understood, at a time when others were content with their mediocre intellectual caliber, that the schools were far from meeting their responsibility for universal education. Democratic education, they knew, meant that everyone must be educated as if they were children of the most advantaged members of society. They wanted everyone to have a liberal education and to be able to communicate intelligently through reading, writing, and speaking. They understood that a democracy depends on the intelligence and resourcefulness and character of its citizens. These accomplishments, they knew, could not be left to chance. Now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the survival of American democracy cannot be taken for granted. The schools must teach youngsters about our history, our civic institutions, and our Constitution. More, they must give students the intellectual tools to comprehend science, mathematics, language, the arts, literature, and history. Democratic habits and values must be taught and communicated through the daily life of our society, our legal institutions, our press, our religious life, our private associations, and the many other agencies that allow citizens to interact with each other and to have a sense of efficacy. The best protection for a democratic society remains well-educated citizens. NOTES 1. Noah Webster, “Education,” American Magazine (December 1787): 23. 2. Gordon C. Lee, “Learning and Liberty: The Jeffersonian Tradition in Education,” in Crusade Against Ignorance: Thomas Jefferson on Education, ed. Lawrence A. Cremin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1961), 17. 3. Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” in Cremin, Crusade Against Ignorance, 883. 4. Horace Mann, “Twelfth Annual Report to the Massachusetts State Board of Education,” in The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men, ed. Lawrence A. Cremin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1957), 80. 5. Horace Mann, First Annual Report, in Cremin, The Republic and the School, 33. 6. See Lloyd P. Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 1825–1925 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1987).

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7. Ellwood P. Cubberley, The History of Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 578, 673; also, Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 120–21. 8. Sol Cohen, “The Industrial Education Movement, 1906–17,” American Quarterly (Spring 1968): 96. 9. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 101. 10. Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot: A Study of American Nationality,” The Nation (February, 1915). 11. Democracy and Education, 119. 12. Ibid., 125. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 281. 15. John Dewey, The Way Out of Educational Confusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 21. 16. Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), Ch. 8. 17. Robert M. Hutchins, The Democratic Dilemma (Uppsala, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1951). 18. Hutchins, The Democratic Dilemma, 29, 51.

chapter 4

Education for a Flourishing Life One of the more striking features of Western schooling in the last fifty years is the increasing focus of schools on preparing people to contribute to the national economy, often reducing the attention given to other educational aims. Many educational thinkers demonize the former as “training” and valorize the latter as “education.” In this chapter Harry Brighouse takes a different tack. Although he expresses concern for the increasing attention to the economic ends of schooling, he does not voice outright opposition to the connection between economics and schooling. Acknowledging that people do need to earn a living and that economic stability is a worthy national goal, he goes on to ask whether these are sufficient ends for schooling. Brighouse’s answer is, in effect, that the economic agenda is necessary, but not sufficient. He draws on income studies to show that economic prosperity affects people’s well-being—but only to a certain threshold. After that level, money has no significant impact on people’s happiness. Indeed, happiness research itself points to other important factors, including family relationships, community and friends, personal freedom, and personal values. While distinguishing between happiness and human flourishing, Brighouse draws out both the educational and schooling implications for taking human happiness seriously. In particular, he shows how significant relationships with other people are essential for a happy—and flourishing—life, as well as how schools can help children learn some of the requisite knowledge, attitudes, and dispositions. Harry Brighouse grew up in the United Kingdom, but has spent most of his adult life in the United States. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of School Choice and Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 2000), On Education (Routledge 2006), and, with Adam Swift, of Family Values (Princeton, forthcoming). He is co-director, with Michael McPherson, of the Spencer Foundation’s Initiative for Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice.

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Education for a Flourishing Life1 harry brighouse Since the end of the Cold War a new consensus seems to have emerged among Western governments that education provides the key to growth and competitiveness. The idea is that since labor is a major factor of production, better labor will be more productive, and what makes for better labor is education and training. Just as a better screwdriver enables you to be more productive (if your job involves screwdrivers), so more skilled workers makes the economy more productive. A pamphlet produced by the British Labour Party just before it won the 1997 election expresses the idea well: “If we are to face the challenge of creating a high tech, high added value and high wage economy, we can only do so by skilling our people.”2 The central purpose of public involvement in education is to drive the economy forward, by “skilling” future workers. I disagree. Economic stability is important, and economic growth is sometimes important. But they are only important insofar as they promote full human flourishing. The economic standard of living should matter to governments only because it provides opportunities for citizens to lead flourishing lives in multiple dimensions. The relationship between standard of living and quality of life is complex at best. Consider the evidence from studies that track what psychologists call “subjective well-being” over time. These find that, within developed economies, there has been no increase in average subjective wellbeing once growth gets beyond a certain point. Between 1972 and 1991 real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita grew in the United States, at a more or less steady rate, by 39%. The percentage of poll respondents reporting themselves as “very happy” barely increased at all during the same period, and the kinks in that curve bear no relationship to the steady rise in the growth curve.3 In Japan GNP per capita grew steadily from 1960 to 1987 by a total of 300%; the average reported level of well-being as reported by respondents to surveys changed barely at all year to year, hovering around 6 (out of 10).4 Robert Frank summarizes the evidence as follows: One of the central findings in the large scientific literature on subjective well being is that once income levels surpass a minimal absolute threshold, average satisfaction levels within a given country tend to be highly stable over time, even in the face of significant economic growth.5

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It is not that wealth has no bearing on well being. In fact in both the United Kingdom and the United States, the proportions of people describing themselves as “very happy” or “happy” rise, consistently, with material growth, until about the mid-1950s. But after that there is no gain. The well-being/income studies, similarly, find that once annual income exceeds a certain level, levels of subjective well being are unaffected by income. In the United States, for example, subjective wellbeing grows with income up to a (quite high) annual household income of about $200,000 a year, and after that it stops. And we cannot increase subjective well-being just by raising everyone’s incomes to at least $200,000, because the evidence strongly suggests that as long as the economic pie is big enough (as it is in the rich countries of the world today) one’s relative place in the distribution of the existing pie matters a great deal more for one’s level of subjective well-being than one’s absolute level of material well-being. Only once one has achieved a very high place in the distribution, and the material security and control over one’s work and social environment that accompanies that, does the relative effect disappear. If quality of life is the reason that economic stability and growth matter, and growth does not systematically improve quality of life, then education should be guided not solely or primarily by economic considerations, but directly by the value of human flourishing. It should aim to improve children’s prospects for leading flourishing lives. In this chapter I want to elucidate this claim, explaining what is meant by human flourishing and pointing to some specific ways in which schooling does or could promote it. What Promotes Flourishing? We have a good deal of evidence about what makes people happy and what does not make them happy. We also know that children have certain tendencies that make it very difficult for their families, even if they are well-willed and good judges of their children’s interests, to fully prepare them for a flourishing life. Finally, we know that in our society there are certain quite specific barriers to living a happy and flourishing life which many of our children will have to negotiate, and that we cannot anticipate accurately which children will encounter, or be particularly vulnerable to, which barriers. Summarizing the now extensive research, Richard Layard enumerates the central factors influencing our levels of happiness as the “Big

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Seven”: Financial Situation, Family Relationships, Work, Community and Friends, Health, Personal Freedom, and Personal Values.6 We know that people are made happy neither by materialism nor by the wealth that materialism brings. Poverty makes people unhappy, and considerably restricts their ability to flourish, even when poverty is conceived as a relative rather than as an absolute concept. The low status and stress that accompany relative poverty, and the lack of control over one’s conditions of life, diminish people’s ability to flourish. But once people have achieved a reasonable level of financial security, additional income and wealth do not make them happier, especially if premised on the need to spend more hours at work and away from family and friends. The income from remunerated labor helps people to have more control over their lives, and more security, to some extent, but it does not help much beyond a certain point. We also know that people are happier when they are connected in social networks. Close connections to and successful relations with family and friends correlate closely with reports of subjective well-being. Being able to spend time with and relate intimately to other people is a tremendously important precondition of flourishing for most of us. Another important source of flourishing is the exercise of skills which are difficult to master. Those people who are lucky enough to have interesting jobs which suit their personalities and talents derive a great deal of flourishing from the exercise of those talents. But it is also common for people to enjoy activities in which they do not, by any absolute criteria, excel, but which make the appropriate demands on them; sometimes at work, and frequently outside of their jobs. Someone may find writing doggerel a challenge and find great satisfaction in producing ditties that just make his children, or his friends, laugh; or might enjoy playing cricket as well as he can on a weekend team, not just for the companionship, but also for the sense of stretching his limited capacities. For many people, although it is important for them to be employed, or at least not to be involuntarily unemployed, it is in their leisure time that they will find the meaning in their life. The above evidence concerns happiness; it tells us within broad outlines what factors contribute to people having happy rather than unhappy lives. Happiness and flourishing are not, however, identical. We often think of someone as flourishing when they accomplish something of value, even if we do not think that they are, personally, happy. An artist might be thought of as flourishing if she succeeds in producing great art, despite unhappiness in her personal life, and we might think that even if we think that the unhappiness produces the greatness.

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Conversely, if we believe that someone’s happiness is simply the result of artificial stimulants, or is conditioned on ignorance about what is really happening around them, we do not usually think of them as flourishing; think, for example, of someone who is happy only because she does not know that her “friends” secretly despise her. Flourishing is a richer property than happiness, sensitive to many more features of a person’s life than just her inner states. Flourishing involves people making meaning, making sense, of important aspects of their lives and the totality of their life. Any theory of flourishing is, furthermore, inevitably controversial: some readers will even disagree with me that happiness and flourishing are not the same thing, while others will think of flourishing in a variety of religious terms, and others still in terms of the exercise of particular capacities or virtues. How much of a problem is this? We have no direct evidence concerning what makes people flourish, both because flourishing is controversial, and because on any particular (controversial) theory, it will be hard to observe the causes of flourishing directly. It is interesting, though, that Layard’s “big seven” factors in happiness correspond closely to elements in numerous religious and philosophical accounts of flourishing. They also allow for a great deal of diversity in the ways that people achieve happiness: acknowledging that people achieve flourishing through their engagement in friendship and family life, for example, leaves open numerous kinds of friendship and forms of family. I think, therefore, that it is fair to assume that the evidence of what makes people happy in the real world is related to what makes them flourish.7 Impediments to Flourishing How can the evidence about what makes people happy guide education? If we concentrate on the importance of friendship and family life, for example, we renew a very old conversation: Socrates, for one, argues consistently for the role of human relationships in a flourishing life. Learning how to create and maintain significant relationships with others in many contemporary Western societies, however, is increasingly complicated by the instability of family life itself. Almost 50% of marriages end in divorce, and a very high proportion of those divorces occur while children are still in the home. This means that most children who themselves marry will be in a relationship in which one partner has parents who are not married to each other. Furthermore, most divorced parents remarry, or re-enter a relevantly marriage-like relationship. So, as adults managing their own lives, they will have to engage with at least

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three, rather than the previously normal two, parental households. The time, energy, and emotional demands on a remarried parent are greater than those on an un-divorced parent; the child of a remarried parent is not only negotiating with more households, but has more competition for the attention and interest of her parent.8 All of this is compounded by dramatically increased geographic mobility, which weakens the connections among adults within families. Parents, adult children, and adult siblings are less ready courses of mutual support and care when they live at great geographic distances from one another, so that even intact families are frequently less connected to one another in adulthood than was an expectation even 30 years ago. This weakening of the bonds between kin is accompanied by the intrusion of values that undermine the family unit itself. A striking phenomenon of modern society is the increased power of commercial influences over public and private culture. Television has become a pervasive influence, and in the United States television’s content is almost entirely driven by commercial imperatives. In the U.S. marketers spent approximately $15 billion trying to reach children alone in 2004.9 In the United Kingdom commercialism is less pervasive, but still incredibly powerful, especially since the rise of cable and satellite provision, so that the public service broadcast networks are under heavy pressure to compete for audiences with commercial channels. The striking feature of commercialism in cultures is that not only are the values that commercial interests promote not good values, but in addition, the people promoting these values do not believe them to be good. Consider Juliet Schor’s encounter with the marketing industry: Children are being exposed to plenty of glamour, fashion, style, irony, and popular music, that is, sex. Even the family-friendly Disney Channel is full of sexually suggestive outfits and dancing. One Radio Disney employee explained to me that the company keeps a careful watch on the lyrics, but is hands-off with the other stuff. . . . Emma Gilding of Ogilvy and Mather recounted an experience she had during an in-home videotaping. The little girl was doing a Britney Spears imitation, with flirting and sexual grinding. Asked by Gilding what she wanted to be when she grew up, the three year old answered, “a sexy shirt girl”. . . . Mary Prescott [an industry professional] who is more deeply immersed [than other interviewees] in the world of tweening, confessed that “I am doing the most horrible thing in the world. We are targeting kids too young with too many inappropriate things. . . . It’s not worth the almighty buck.”10

The measure of a marketing strategy’s success is the sale of a product. Contrast this with the political, religious, and intellectual

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movements that shaped the public cultures of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Victorian age. Proponents of values generally believed that the values they propounded were good, not only for themselves but for others. Of course, in many cases, they were wrong, and no doubt hypocrisy was not uncommon. But the cultural environment most of us inhabit now is one in which the most powerful forces attempting to shape the culture are driven by the desire to make large profits. In the United States, in particular, the spaces that are commercial-free are increasingly those which are largely uninhabited. It is hard to attend a public event, and almost impossible to attend a charitable event, which is not plastered in commercial, profitseeking messages. These messages are designed, always, to target the acquisitiveness latent in most of us; and yet there is ample evidence that many of the things we acquire do not make us happy, or help us flourish, and also that fostering our acquisitive traits makes us unhappy.11 Schools Promoting Flourishing What can and should the education system do in response to the above observations, in pursuit of its obligation to prepare children to live flourishing lives? The Formal Curriculum Think first about the academic curriculum. It’s tempting to divide it up into the “vocational” on the one hand and the “life-preparing” on the other. We have the traditional academic curriculum—English, mathematics, languages, science, etc.—which prepares children for success in the labor market. Then we have subjects like health and social education, alcohol and drug programs, parenting, religious education, and social studies, and these subjects prepare children for life. And, perhaps, there are some subjects like art, music, cooking, and physical education which are in a grey area. Why shouldn’t we conceive of the curriculum as divided up in this way? Consider this: many of the traditional academic subjects themselves present opportunities that are relevant to the child’s long-term flourishing and are not merely preparation for the world of work. Some children come to a lifelong love of Jane Austen or Shakespeare or Rimbaud outside the school gates, but most of us who develop those enthusiasms do so only because we have studied these (or similar) authors in a classroom environment in which we have been manipulated

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or straightforwardly coerced to put in the effort it takes to read and appreciate their work. Children who are raised in a monolingual home within a society where their home language predominates cannot usually learn a second language unless they are forced to—usually by their school. Some children will love the language they learn and some will deploy it in their paid work; but for many more it will be the gateway to learning about and engaging with a culture other than that of their own society or subculture. More technical subjects such as mathematics and the sciences are perhaps even more rarely encountered outside the school in ways that facilitate lasting enthusiasm. But for some children an enthusiasm for some aspect of mathematics, physics, or biology infuses their lives just as much as an enthusiasm for literature or music infects the lives of others. This is the insight that underlies many justifications of the standard academic curriculum as promoting liberal education. The idea is that children have an interest—entirely independent of whatever interest they have in being equipped with job-related skills—in being acquainted with the greatest cultural goods that our civilization has produced, goods that can help them lead fully flourishing human lives in multiple dimensions, not just economic. However, many defenses of the traditional school curriculum concentrate on Western culture, a focus that today seems somewhat quaint. Non-Western societies have produced great cultural goods and there would be every reason to acquaint Western children with some of these even if Western societies were not now, as they are, populated in significant part by people who see their cultural roots as belonging partly in non-Western societies. The case for cultural diversity in education does not depend on the understanding that our society is diverse; it is only strengthened by that fact. English, for example, is not only learning to read and write well enough to get and keep a job; it is accessing the insights of powerful literary artists who help us understand ourselves and others. Novelists like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Gustav Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky provide crucial insights into the human condition. For myself, it was the school-approved “children’s authors” of my youth—such as Geoffrey Trease, John Rowe Townsend, Peter Dickinson, and Penelope Lively—who taught me about social class and social injustice, friendship across the sexes, and the importance of place. Similarly, history, mathematics, and the sciences are great cultural achievements, and there are good “life”-related reasons for including them in the curriculum.

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Is the call for education for flourishing absurdly utopian in an environment in which business interests dominate the political debate and in which advantaged parents, who exercise a good deal of political voice, are deeply concerned with gaining competitive advantage for their children? There are, in fact, stirrings in surprising places. In the United Kingdom, for example, Anthony Seldon, the Master of Wellington College, a respected and elite private school, recently introduced “skills for well being” classes for all 14–16-year-olds, a curriculum devised in response to the most up-to-date happiness research.12 The Wellington College website announces the curriculum thusly: The approach is founded on the principle of studying lives that go particularly well, and then using that knowledge to develop and apply strategies and skills that promote all-round progress in a person’s psychological, physical and social life. Importantly, the curriculum takes a rounded approach to the subject of life development. . . . Special programmes in other schools have tended to target “youngsters at risk,” or children rather than teenagers, or specific maladies such as depression rather than life in general, so the great majority of interventions have been remedial, trying to get youngsters from below average up to average. Our curriculum is aimed at helping everyone to make progress, no matter what the individual’s starting point. The lesson themes are structured around a student’s relationship with life, including: • • • • •

The The The The The

relationship between mind and body relationship between their conscious and subconscious relationships with people around them relationship with their past, present, future and fantasy lives relationship with the natural world13

The emphasis on personal relationships here is striking—a central lesson from the happiness research, which is congruent with the teachings of most major religions, is that emotional integrity and the ability to establish and maintain close personal relationships are key contributors to happiness. The “touchy-feely” sound of this insight exposes educators who want to act on it to risk of ridicule, yet the imprimatur of an eminent educationalist in the elite private sector has reduced that risk considerably. A recent report by a think tank led by a former right-wing leader of the Conservative Party has strongly endorsed experimentation with the approach.14 This has, in turn, enabled Labour Party ministers

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to increase funding for the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning program in state schools. At the time of writing the Minister for Children, Families, and Schools in the U.K. has announced a thorough review of the school curriculum, including a study of the effect of advertisements on children, as well as the mental health of children. Most schools, and most governments, have some political space within which to experiment, and with committed leadership and competent execution there is no reason why this space should not grow. Of, course, a natural worry about incorporating life-skills issues into the formal curriculum is that teachers will sometimes inappropriately bring their own biases and experiences into the classroom. Few people worry about bias in cooking classes, but in others, such as when the issues being taught about concern marriage and family life, sex education, or alcohol-and-drug-related education, this concern might be quite serious. I accept that it is impossible to ensure that teachers will always succeed in treating their own biases with appropriate skepticism and distance. But I don’t see why it is more serious here than in English, or in religious education or social studies. The Informal Curriculum The formal curriculum is only part of school life. All schools have informal or extra-curricular activities. Given that we force children to attend school for a very substantial part of their waking lives, we have an obligation to make school a congenial environment, in which they can, among other things, enjoy themselves in the moment. A substantial part of the motivation for providing extra-curricular activities should be to enable children to enjoy themselves. But school managers also recognize that for many children extra-curricular activities present opportunities to encounter, sample, and make judgments about activities that they otherwise would never know much about. Most of the children in the debating club probably participate in it because they enjoy disputation. But many of the children who act or sing in the school play or choir, or who participate in the 16th Century Music group, Free Tibet Club, or Young Gardeners Club probably participate initially out of curiosity, or out of having been infected by the enthusiasm of a teacher or a friend. At least as much as the formal curriculum, the experiences in the informal curriculum can give rise to lasting enthusiasms and long-term goals.15 Is there a rule of thumb for what kinds of extra-curricular activities to make available in a school? Obviously, the expertise and enthusiasm of the teachers will be a substantial consideration, and rightly so: it is

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hard for someone overseeing an activity to present it meaningfully to participants if that person believes it not, fundamentally, to be worthwhile. But three considerations are worth bearing in mind. Children vary enormously in their basic constitutions and in the kinds of activity they will find to be rewarding. Second, numerous activities are readily available outside the school. So when the school replicates those activities it is at best wasting an opportunity to broaden the perspective of some of its students, and at worst reinforcing the impression that those activities are the only ones available. Third, sometimes the school is the only location for a particular opportunity, because only the school adopts that role. For example, it is quite unlikely that if U.S. high schools withdrew from organizing American football that activity would be unavailable outside the school; compare this with the debating club. The Hidden Curriculum What, finally, about the ethos of the school? Every school has a hidden curriculum, sometimes so hidden that the school officials themselves do not discern it. The ethos of a school is this hidden curriculum; it is constituted by the interaction between a combination of factors, including the self-conception, and diversity, of the teachers; the composition of the student body; the school mission statement; the curriculum and extra-curriculum; the physical appearance of the school; the choices managers make about what kinds of activities to single out for praise and illumination; etc. The ethos affects not only how smoothly the school works from day to day, but also how children interpret their experience in the school. So school leaders in U.S. high schools, for example, will often decide to shorten an academic school day in order to facilitate, or in some cases force, the whole school to attend a pep rally for the football team, thus giving special endorsement to the activities involved. Teachers adopt teaching personas, and in that capacity they will make decisions about how much of their interest in and awareness of commercial popular culture to reveal to the children, and also, how many and which of their own non-mainstream interests to reveal, and how. A school ethos which strongly identifies with mainstream popular culture, and, for example, places special emphasis on prowess in mainstream professional sports, thereby tilts the experience of the children toward the interests that they would be likely to encounter and become enthusiastic about outside the school anyway. But a school with an ethos that is not exactly counter-cultural, but perhaps extra-popular-cultural, would deliberately valorize numerous different kinds of activity not

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readily promoted outside the school, on the principle that in doing so it would be widening the array of realistic opportunities for leisureenhancing pursuits for children. Even something as simple as the length of breaks for meals, the kinds of meals available, and the seating arrangements comprise part of the ethos of a school. I’m struck by the contrast between my children’s lunch experiences and my own as a student. My own primary school (in the 1970s) had 90 minutes for lunch, enough time for a 45-minute lunch sitting and 45 minutes of playtime. We were served a lunch that we had no choice about, reflecting the idea that choosing every component of what we would eat was not fundamentally important. We sat in prescribed places, in age-diverse and sex-diverse groups, pressing us to make relationships outside our comfort zone, and establishing a presumption that the older children took responsibility for the younger children. None of us were aware that we were being taught, but we were learning lessons about the place of food in social life and social intercourse. Contrast this with the lessons learned in my own daughter’s school, where the lunch break lasts 40 minutes, with only 20 minutes in which to eat, and fast food only is served, cafeteria-style. Many 7-year-olds cannot eat a reasonable lunch in that time, because they are excited about talking to their friends, and many eat slowly anyway; so teachers spend the afternoons trying to teach distracted, hungry children, whose state is not due to lack of food but to lack of time. A prohibition on talking to one’s friends helped to get more food consumed, but at the cost of displacing the chatter into the classroom. Again, the children are not aware that they are learning, but the lessons are clear. We choose our food and whom to sit with. We eat fast, rather than with appreciation. Food is just a punctuation of the hard working day, not an occasion for socializing and relaxation. That you eat, and eat quickly, seems to matter more than what you eat. The contrasting arrangements evince different attitudes toward eating and socializing, as well as encouraging self-segregation among the children. Think now about the stance of the school toward commercial culture. Of course, there is no doubt that the culture of the school has to be sufficiently connected to the culture of the rest of the child’s environment so that the child can recognize and relate to it. But an ethos that embraces commercial culture risks jeopardizing the children’s prospects for flourishing. Consider the standard practice of middle school libraries subscribing to Teen People and Seventeen Magazine. These magazines promote celebrity worship and materialistic

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aspirations, neither of which anyone argues will benefit the children, and the latter of which we know to be harmful. I am not arguing that no librarian should subscribe to those magazines, but that no librarian should do so unthinkingly, just responding to demand. A school with a healthy ethos directed toward lifelong flourishing will be one in which such decisions are taken thoughtfully and with regard to the effect of such subscriptions on the children, and on the way that the life of the school goes (do the values promoted by the magazine, for example, run counter to the values that underpin the school’s dress code?). Or consider a more personal story. Shortly after my elder daughter started attending the local elementary school, she brought home a free glossy magazine called Sports Illustrated for Kids. It consisted of 32 pages of full-color pictures of contemporary American sporting heroes, with a little text on each page about how brave, hardworking, and admirable these characters were. The personality on the front cover, and to whom more space was devoted than any other, was Kobe Bryant, a basketball player who was at that time facing a very public indictment on a rape charge. His defense, before the case collapsed, was that the sexual intercourse, which took place in a hotel room with a woman he said he did not know, was consensual. This behavior contradicted the very carefully crafted public image he had previously projected of himself as a faithful family man. I took the infraction to be the result of a teacher being given free materials and having insufficient time to scrutinize them. But the point is that the publishers of Sports Illustrated for Kids and the teacher who gave the magazine to her students are complicit in promoting a certain set of values. The ethos of the school influences what choices are made, and an ethos which regards corporatesponsored “free” materials with suspicion is one in which the teacher would have presumed against distributing the glossy magazine without scrutiny. Important as the academic offerings and the extra-curricular activities are, the ethos of the school lies at the center of school life. The ethos is not a matter of the mission statement, but of the shared understandings among the responsible adults in the school of the values and purposes of their institution. What may seem like fairly trivial and “administrative” decisions about the life of the school do contribute to the ethos of the school which, in turn, affects its ability to live up to its values and fulfill its purposes—the central purpose being to promote the long-term prospects for the flourishing of the children in its charge.

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Conclusion Schools face a good deal of pressure to conform the children they teach to the needs of the economy. Businesses want good workers, markets want enthusiastic consumers, parents want their children to be economically competitive. It is inevitable that these forces will have some influence. But understanding that the ultimate goal of education must be to facilitate the flourishing of the children in their care and understanding the available science about what this takes can help policymakers, administrators, and teachers to resist these forces to some extent, and to promote an ethos, adopt a curriculum, and manage the day-to-day pace of school life better, to serve the children under their care. NOTES 1. I’m grateful to David Coulter for valuable editorial comments; my thoughts about flourishing in general were developed in part after conversations with Christine Sypnowich about her in-progress book Equality Renewed, and I’m grateful to her for that stimulus. 2. Labour Party, The Skills Revolution (1996), quoted in Alison Wolf, Does Education Matter? (London: Penguin, 2002), 13. 3. Robert Frank, Luxury Fever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 72. 4. Ibid., 73. 5. Ibid., 72. 6. Richard Layard, Happiness (London: Penguin, 2005), 62–70. 7. This is obvious to songwriters and comedians, if philosophers have a hard time with it; as Ken Dodd says, “When you go to measuring a man’s success, don’t count money, count happiness.” 8. See Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (New York: Broadway Books, 2001). 9. Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004), 21. 10. Ibid., 57. 11. See Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), for summaries of the evidence. 12. For a brief description see Wellington College’s website at http:// www.wellingtoncollege.org.uk/page.aspx?id=31. 13. http://www.wellington-college.berks.sch.uk/page.aspx?id=595. 14. See Breakthrough Britain (London: Centre for Social Justice, 2007). 15. If, that is, the experiences are not poisoned by response to the perverse incentives built into the college admissions process, as in the United States where colleges put considerable weight on demonstrating that one is a high-level participant in extracurricular activities.

Part Two Creating Common and Uncommon Worlds Education is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.1

Earlier we claimed that education and democracy are symbiotic concepts. Indeed, in democratic societies, the two ideas are inextricably enmeshed: we cannot legitimately talk about one idea without implying the other (although many people make the attempt). Deciding what will count as education requires democratic debate and some form of resolution (albeit temporary); any other course begs questions of legitimacy. Making democracy possible depends on the formation of people who have the requisite knowledge, understanding, and character to exercise the office of “citizen.” Chapters in Section Two open conversations on important aspects of the enormously complicated relationship between these two ideals. Indeed, perhaps the most important characteristic that education and democracy share is their status as ideals. We may finish our schooling, but we will never complete our education; we may attempt to resolve our differences in perfect democratic dialogue with all involved, but we will usually have to fall back on some forms of provisional decision making such as voting. Education and democracy are something like “. . . North Stars. They are orienting devices; they offer us a sense of direction. They guide our journey to a destination. But they are not the destination; they are not the objective or the goal.”2 While we can never finally reach either perfect education or democracy, abandoning the quest can lead to losing our way entirely. Part of finding our way toward education and democracy involves wrestling with concepts of private and public. The effort to become an educated adult and a democratic citizen requires preparation for an appearance in a public world alongside one’s peers and determining collectively how to live together. Deciding the character and membership of a public world is a key concern for both democracy and Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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education. Ironically, however, the movement from the private world of the home to the public world of civil society is also reversible: the public world impacts the private in important ways. As Charles Taylor reminds us: “My discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others. . . . My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others.”3 We invite you to engage in a dialogue with the authors in this section, followed by continued discussion with family, friends, and colleagues. NOTES 1. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 196. 2. Gary D. Fenstermacher, “What Is the Difference between the North Star and Northfield? How Educational Goals and Ideals Become Confused” (invited address, Summer Institute for Superintendents on Probing National Issues in Education, Mackinac Island, Michigan, July, 2000), 2. 3. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1991), 47–48.

chapter 5

American Democracy, Education, and Utopianism In this chapter Eamonn Callan updates the conversation about American civic education begun by Diane Ravitch in chapter three. Ravitch described the centuries-old struggle for civic education between those who wished to educate youth for their appropriate role in a democratic state (e.g., Webster) and those who aimed to foster a citizenry that could exercise their civic freedom and decide their own individual and collective futures (e.g., Jefferson). Drawing on recent empirical research, Callan describes a contemporary voting public bereft of fundamental political knowledge—and lacking in motivation to remedy their ignorance. Indeed, many people seem to believe that the “common good” is so obvious to all that the public arena is simply a space where private interests compete for the spoils of power. The resulting political vacuum is consequently vulnerable to being filled by a political elite, deciding for a deferential citizenry whose role is reduced to “ensuring through elections an orderly transfer of power among rival groups among the elite.” Callan worries both about the unwarranted trust in the capacity of elites to protect democracy and the abandonment of hope in the capacity of citizens. He argues instead for “rational social hope” as an alternative to either utopianism or cynicism and shows how teachers can educate in ways that mitigate civic vice and promote civic virtue. If one accepts Callan’s position, it appears that in twenty-first century America Webster has trumped Jefferson. Regardless of whether you agree, the differences in view remain fundamentally important to our talk about education. Eamonn Callan is Pigott Family Professor in the School of Education at Stanford University. He is a graduate of the National University of Ireland and the University of Alberta. He taught for many years at the University of Alberta before moving to Stanford in 1999. He is the author of Autonomy and Schooling (1988) and Creating Citizens (1997). He is a philosopher whose interests include multiculturalism, civic education, and immigration.

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American Democracy, Education, and Utopianism1 eamonn callan Citizens must be politically informed and engaged if they are to have stable and just democratic government. Although American political institutions may be stable, they are still far from being either sufficiently just or democratic, and the political ignorance and passivity of the American citizenry is a huge obstacle to improving its political institutions. These are controversial but widely shared beliefs, and for those who share them, the idea that civic education must be a major engine of social progress exerts a powerful attraction. For if Americans are to become more enlightened and active citizens, they must learn to be so, which is but another way of saying that better citizenship requires better political education in its broadest sense. But the argument just sketched does not mean that high hopes for democratic progress through education in contemporary America are any better than utopian fantasies. Realistic hope would seem to require that the distance between the object of hope and the real world of contemporary citizenship not be too great. Unfortunately, the distance between them, in this case, is vast. Are such hopes then merely utopian? That is the question I want to pursue here. The Real World of American Citizenship The idea that ordinary citizens are politically incompetent, perhaps irrevocably so, is as old as democracy itself. But the idea was given strong empirical impetus with the publication of Phillips Converse’s seminal essay, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” in 1964. Converse showed that only a tiny fraction of the American electorate (4%) could reliably explain their policy preferences in terms of the abstract ideas, such as liberalism and conservatism, which structured debate among political parties. Almost half of the electorate evaluated parties and candidates simply on the basis of the favorable or unfavorable treatment they expected in the event that a particular candidate or party were elected, though these expectations were often grounded in nothing that could be called evidence. Nearly 17% comprised “those respondents whose evaluations of the political scene had no shred of policy significance whatever.”2

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Converse’s portrait of the American electorate was based on data from the 1950s, one of the more ideologically quiescent decades in recent American history. But the portrait has proved remarkably durable in subsequent investigation. Surveying four decades of research since Converse’s path-breaking work, Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter note the following: “Many of the facts known by relatively small percentages of the public seem critical to understanding—let alone effectively acting in—the political world: fundamental rules of the game; classic civil liberties; key concepts of political economy; the names of key political representatives; many important policy positions of political candidates or the political parties; basic social indicators and significant public policies.”3 Donald Kinder’s verdict on the same body of research is, if anything, even more blunt and damning: “when it comes to politics, most citizens are ideologically innocent: indifferent to standard ideological concepts, lacking a consistent outlook on public policy, in possession of genuine opinions on only a few issues, and knowing damn little.”4 The propensity to know damn little extends to even the most important current affairs. Consider some facts about the magnitude of American political ignorance in the 2004 Presidential election. A Harris poll published just a month before the elections showed some alarming results: 41% believed that Saddam Hussein helped to plan and support the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001; 38% believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction when Iraq was invaded; 37% believed that several of the hijackers were Iraqis; 62% believed that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al-Qaeda.5 A charitable explanation is arguably available for the last of these wildly false beliefs. After all, since 9/11 the President and other senior officials had repeatedly asserted that there was a strong link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. But the number is still shockingly high, because in August of the same year the final report of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission had stated unequivocally that no evidence existed of operational links between Saddam’s regime and Al-Qaeda.6 The final report received massive publicity throughout the nation. A reasonable inference is that the 62% who continued to believe otherwise were either ignoring news that had a crucial bearing on the merits of the original decision to go to war or were utterly credulous when it comes to the word of senior government officials. One cannot be so flattering about the sizable minorities who adhered to one or more of the other three surprising beliefs that the Harris poll disclosed. At the very end of September 2004, immediately

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before the poll was conducted, the Iraq Survey Group report was published with much fanfare, and it declared that Saddam’s WMD program had been essentially destroyed in 1991.7 By then even the most avid supporters of the war in the government and media were citing other reasons for its justification. But over 40% of the American electorate had not caught up with reality. As for those who believed that Saddam was directly implicated in the 9/11 attacks or that Iraqis were among the attackers, no possible source for their beliefs that has the slightest intellectual respectability was ever available. The mass media in America is no doubt shot through with partisan bias, and reckless speculation may often pass for established fact, but no credible source of news would have endorsed such beliefs in the fall of 2004 or earlier. A final irony deserves emphasis. Many of these Americans who preferred urban tales to readily accessible facts in figuring out why their country was at war in 2004 were Kerry rather than Bush supporters. Twenty-three percent of Kerry’s supporters believed that Saddam planned and supported the Al-Qaeda attacks, and 31% believed that some of the bombers were Iraqis.8 But that is perhaps not surprising. In an electorate as radically detached from reality as this one, maybe many Kerry supporters thought they were supporting a more fervent warmonger than his opponent. Almost a third of Americans do not like to learn about politics,9 and some curious but very widespread beliefs may help to explain some of this antipathy. A particularly provocative recent study claims that American citizens generally tend to assume that the common good is transparently clear, so that widespread public deliberation is unnecessary; that political conflict is a sign of selfish interests impeding the common good; and that compromise and accommodation in lawmaking attest to unprincipled bargaining and corruption.10 These beliefs form a coherent package. For there can be nothing worth learning about politics once its object, the common good, is simply there for all of us to see without any serious cognitive effort. And if I believe that what government should do is so easily grasped, then I am primed to think that those who disagree with me about politics are morally obtuse, liars, or both. The inevitable give and take of the legislative process must appear to be a sordid means of dividing the spoils of power if I assume that all could agree on how power should be used if they only looked beyond their own petty sectional interests. We may like to take some solace in the fact that increased education correlates with greater political knowledge and engagement. Delli Carpini and Keeter, for example, are anxious to reject the claim that the

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masses cannot be politically enlightened. Yet even they are unsettled by how durable American political ignorance has proven notwithstanding big strides in average educational attainment since the 1950s: “In spite of [these strides], aggregate levels of political knowledge are about the same today as they were forty or fifty years ago.”11 Of course, educational attainment is not the same as achievement, and with better quality educational provision, America would doubtless have a more enlightened electorate than it currently does. Delli Carpini and Keeter may also be right that educational progress has partly offset the effects of social trends that would otherwise have led to an even more spectacularly incompetent citizenry.12 But where there is room for optimistic, though reasonable, speculation about the prospects of democratic improvement, a reasonable pessimism is equally available. And that pessimism is the breeding ground of democratic elitism. Democratic Elitism Converse did not draw any implications from his study about how political institutions in the United States might be revised. But his portrait of a thoughtless, almost absurdly ill-informed electorate is no great distance from the derogatory depiction of the masses that had been the centerpiece of arguments for elite democracy famously championed earlier in the century by Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter. For both Lippmann and Schumpeter, the only way to fortify government against populist subversion was through institutions that severely constrained opportunities for participation and left wide latitude for expert decision making.13 In 1928, the eminent American journalist Walter Lippmann made the following observation about the need to confine the role of ordinary citizens in a democracy: “The public must be put in its place so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”14 The same metaphor of sub-human impulsivity would echo some years later in Joseph Schumpeter’s claim that “the electoral mass is incapable of acting other than as a stampede.”15 For both Lippmann and Schumpeter, the democratic herd had to be tamed and shepherded by a political elite to whom the herd must learn to show an appropriate deference. There are differences in Lippmann’s and Schumpeter’s conceptions of elite democratic rule, but their common ground is the endorsement of a vast asymmetry of power between an insular political elite and a deferential citizenry whose role is confined to ensuring through

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elections the orderly transfer of power among rival groups within the elite. As Schumpeter noted, “voters . . . must not withdraw confidence too easily between elections and they must understand that, once they have elected an individual, political action is his business and not theirs. This means they must refrain from instructing him about what he is to do. . . .”16 According to Schumpeter, a citizenry vigilant in protecting its rights and alert to the possible abuse of power is a threat to stable government. Political back-seat driving is the besetting sin of such citizens: “All that matters here is that successful practice in great and complicated societies has invariably been hostile to political back-seat driving—to the point of resorting to secret diplomacy and lying about intentions and commitments—and that it takes a lot of self-control on the part of ordinary citizens to refrain from it.”17 The educational implications of the argument here are striking. The democratic herd is susceptible to political back-seat driving, perhaps especially when elites wisely dupe them through secrecy and outright lies. But the herd must be taught to suppress any propensity to criticize their betters on such occasions by practicing an arduous self-control. The elite is to be trusted, not the herd’s own untutored thoughts about the value of candor and transparency in government. At this point, we should worry that the elite are better placed to be wolves to the herd instead of its benign shepherds. For it surely requires a very reckless faith in the incorruptibility of elites to suppose that they will rule in the interests of the herd when the sheer ignorance and docility of the latter make them such easy prey. The fatal problem with elitist conceptions of democracy is not so much that they are extravagantly pessimistic about the possibilities of civic education for the masses but that their optimism about the virtue of elites is utterly reckless. Yet if elitism is not a viable means of securing democracy against the incompetence of ordinary citizens, it does not follow that they really are competent after all, or that feasible educational intervention could make them so. And therefore the charge of utopianism against proponents of civic education remains, even though exponents of elitist democracy who might press the charge have no credible alternative to democratic regimes that enable widespread participation. We confront a dilemma. An ignorant and politically apathetic electorate is unsuited to the responsibilities of a democracy that requires extensive participation, and it is uncertain that educational progress can create an electorate equal to those requirements. That uncertainty casts grave doubt on the standard view of civic education as the engine of democratic progress. On the

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other hand, institutional reforms that would narrow the scope of participation to forestall the dangers of mass incompetence merely intensify the vulnerability of ordinary citizens to the abuse of power by elites. Social Hope and Utopianism I want briefly to argue that we should grasp the first horn of the dilemma. The educational aspirations that a strong commitment to universal civic education implies are best understood as a matter of rational social hope, and to act on such hope is not to run afoul of utopianism. I said earlier that realistic social hopes would seem to require that the distance between the object of hope and the world in which it is to be pursued not be too great. The truth in this is easy to see. Excessive hopes easily give way to a self-defeating passivity and cynicism when the world disappoints us, as it almost inevitably will, or they engross us in the pursuit of unattainable goods when we would be better occupied with worthwhile goals that are closer to hand. The need to avoid these evils gives the charge of utopianism its moral force. But their avoidance does not mean that all distant ends or ideals are to be condemned. Ambitious ends can usefully mark a horizon of aspiration, even when the horizon remains distant from our best efforts. A medical researcher might see finding a cure for some particular cancer as her very raison d’être. She fails. But she relieves some suffering along the way, and she helps to pave the way for other scientists who may succeed where she has failed. Would her life have been better had she set her goals more modestly so that her hopes and accomplishments converged? A positive answer might seem right if we found her near the end of her life wracked with despair at her failure to achieve all she had hoped for. But even that might not be a decisive reason to regret the reach of her hopes. Perhaps she needed high hopes to motivate her work, and maybe those hopes gave her life a sense of zest and adventure it would otherwise have lacked. Consider now the practice of a social studies teacher in high school who believes that citizens should be expected to think critically about the decisions they face, to strive for mutual understanding in dialogue with those who disagree with them, and to maintain their moral independence against the pressures of tribal conformity. Unfortunately, the students she teaches already think about politics, to the little extent that they do so at all, in the manner of the smugly ignorant median voter

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depressingly described by American political science. Does that make her educational values utopian? Not at all. The chasm between her educational values and the political attitudes of her students certainly makes a huge difference to what she might rationally expect to accomplish in her class. But it makes no necessary difference to the ends that she might hope her teaching will serve. Perhaps she should see her most urgent purpose as the mitigation of vice rather than the cultivation of virtue. Thus she might find it necessary to put much effort into disturbing her students’ political complacency by revealing its dangers in a society where the workings of the state profoundly affect all our lives. The decision to go to war (or to forgo war in the face of aggression) might lead to the death of people they love or even their own death. But she might also sensibly worry that efforts to mitigate civic vice without any appeal to opposing virtues or ideals are unlikely to yield much durable good. And so she might try to communicate to students some sense of what a democracy worthy of their pride and allegiance might look like. I doubt that she could get far in doing so without helping them to achieve at least some rudimentary grasp of the disparate range of moral values that sound political judgment must encompass, the possibility of reasonable disagreement among citizens who balance such values differently, and an appreciation of the terrible evil that may follow from the careless use of great power. The teacher I have described acts in the hope that civic education will conduce to a more just and democratic America, even if the current practice of citizenship is generally appalling. That is to say, she hopes that the collective efforts of teachers, journalists, political activists, and the like will in the future suffice to create a citizenry whose self-government is adequately grounded in relevant information, understanding, and civic virtue. Of course, her hopes may well be disappointed. But the value of the ideal to which she tries to contribute, and the more immediate good of what her students actually learn because her pedagogy is motivated by that ideal, make it more plausible to regard the hope as a virtue rather than as a disabling fantasy. NOTES 1. Many thanks to Corinne Callan for helping me to make my argument intelligible. 2. Phillip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (London: Collier Macmillan, 1965), 216–62, at 217. 3. Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 101–02. 4. Donald R. Kinder, “Belief Systems Today,” Critical Review 18 (2006): 199.

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5. The Harris Poll® #79. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index. asp?PID=508 (accessed September 14, 2007). 6. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), 66. 7. The report was available on September 14, 2007 at http://www.globalsecurity.org/ wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/. 8. The Harris Poll® #79. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index. asp?PID=508 (accessed September 14, 2007). 9. The Harris Poll® #81, August 15, 2007. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/ harris_poll/index.asp?PID=797 (accessed September 14, 2007). 10. John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss Morse, Stealth Democracy: America’s Beliefs about How Government Should Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 11. Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know, 199. 12. Ibid. 13. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1925); Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976). 14. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, 155. 15. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, 283. 16. Ibid., 295. 17. Ibid.

chapter 6

Education for Global Citizenship In this chapter Kwame Anthony Appiah moves the discussion of civic education from a national to a global context. He demonstrates that the idea of global citizenship is older than written history—and certainly not uniquely a Western idea—and challenges some recent methods of fostering “citizens of the world.” Global civic education takes on a particular urgency in today’s world in which “each of us can realistically imagine contacting any other of our seven billion fellow humans and send that person something worth having,” or conversely “things that will cause harm.” His response is to advocate education to foster a cosmopolitan spirit. Appiah notes that educating the hearts and minds of both young and old requires a strong sense that we are all on the same planet together and that each person matters, making today’s leanings toward unilateralism and fundamentalism particularly difficult to accept. He anticipates the themes of the next chapters: Benhabib’s exploration of the impact of the global on national citizenship and Løvlie’s focus on finding opportunities for civic education in the everyday concerns of all people. Appiah explains that “cosmopolitanism is universality plus difference,” a matter of huge import for how we relate and behave toward each other in the worldwide web which is the human world. Kwame Anthony Appiah is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His books include In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), Color Conscious: The Morality of Race (with Amy Gutmann) (1996), Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (2003), The Ethics of Identity (2005), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), and Experiments in Ethics (2008), as well as three novels, the first of which is Avenging Angel (1991). He is a much sought after visiting scholar and lecturer on the philosophical foundations of liberalism and reviews regularly for the New York Review of Books.

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Education for Global Citizenship kwame anthony appiah My mother was born in the West of England, on the edge of the Cotswold Hills, to a family that could trace its ancestry within a fifty mile radius back to the Norman period, nearly a millennium earlier. My father was born in the capital of the Ashanti region of Ghana, in a city where he could trace his ancestry to before the beginnings of the Asante kingdom at the turn of the eighteenth century. So when these two people, born so far apart, married in the 1950s in England, many people warned them that a mixed marriage was going to be difficult. And my parents agreed. You see, my father was a Methodist and my mother an Anglican. And that was a real challenge. After all, as Anglicans like to point out, John Wesley, founding father of Methodism, once said, rather pointedly, “If the Methodists leave the Church of England, I fear that God will leave the Methodists.” At all events, therefore, I am the product of a mixed marriage. Baptized a Methodist, educated at Anglican schools, I went to Sunday school at a non-denominational church of which my mother was a member. St. George’s was my mother’s church; she was a member and an elder of it for more than fifty years. But her funeral was celebrated at the Methodist Cathedral, of which my father and grandfather were elders, though the minister of St. George’s and the Catholic Archbishop were among the officiating clergy. This was my mother’s choice. And if you had asked her what denomination she belonged to all those years, she would have told you that she belonged to the church of Christ, and that the rest was so many indifferent details. So much for the challenge of mixed marriages, at least in Ghana. I am a child of my mother and of St. George’s. I learned Christianity and its moral ideas first of all from them. But I also learned something else from both my parents, something they exemplified when they decided to become man and wife. And that was a kind of openness to people and cultures beyond the ones they were raised in. My mother learned this, I think, from her parents, who had friends in many continents at a time when many English people were extremely provincial. My father learned it, I think, from Kumasi, which, like many old capital cities is a polyglot, multi-cultural place, open to the world. But he learned it, too, from his schooling. Like many of those who had the rare opportunity to get a secondary school education in the far-flung

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reaches of the British Empire, he was educated in the classics. He loved Latin. (He would have been delighted that he’s had two grandsons who studied classics at Cambridge and another studying it at Oxford now.) By his bedside he kept not only his Bible but the works of Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, followers both of the sort of Stoicism that was central to the intellectual and moral life of the Roman elite by the first century, when Christianity was beginning to spread through the Hellenistic world of the Eastern empire. In his spiritual testament to us, his children, he told us that we should always remember that we were “citizens of the world”—he used those exact words, words that Marcus Aurelius would have recognized and agreed with. Marcus Aurelius, after all, wrote: “how close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of the spirit.” A Citizen of the World I want to explore one of those Stoic philosophical ideals, one expression of that being openness to others, that I learned first from my family; and, more particularly, about its significance for education in our present age. It is an ideal that’s particularly useful when we are faced with the sorts of conflicts, grounded in religious, ethnic, racial, and national identities, which pervade our world. And as it happens, it is an ideal whose very name comes to us from the classical West. For its etymology is Greek, even though the man who coined the term came, like so much in the traditions of the West, from Asia Minor. Though I shall be tracing its Western roots, we can be confident, however, that this ideal, or something very like it, was independently invented in other continents at other times. The ideal I have in mind is cosmopolitanism; and the earliest figure whom we know of who said he was a citizen of the world—a kosmou polites in Greek, which is where, of course, our word “cosmopolitan” comes from—was a man called Diogenes. Diogenes was a philosopher and the founder of the philosophical movement later called “Cynicism.” He was born some time in the late fifth century in Sinope, on the Southern coast of the Black Sea, in what is now Turkey. The Cynics rejected tradition and local loyalty and generally opposed what everybody else thought of as “civilized” behavior. Diogenes himself lived naked, tradition reports, in a large terracotta pot. It is said that he did what my English nanny would have called “his business” in public. He also did what Hugh Hefner would probably call his business in public, too. He was, in short, a sort of fourth

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century BCE performance artist. And he was called a Cynic—kuon in Greek means “dog”—presumably because he lived like a dog: the Cynics are just the doggy philosophers. No wonder they kicked him out of Sinope. But, as I say, for better or worse, Diogenes is also the first person who’s reported to have said he was a “citizen of the world.” Now this is a metaphor, of course. Because citizens share a state and there was no world state—no kosmopolis—for Diogenes to be a citizen of. So, like anyone who adopts this metaphor, he had to decide what to mean by it. One thing that Diogenes didn’t mean was that he favored a single world government. He once met someone who did: Alexander of Macedon, Alexander the Great, who favored, as you know, government of the world by Alexander of Macedon. The story goes that Alexander came across Diogenes one sunny day, this time not in his terracotta pot but in a hole in the ground. The Macedonian world conqueror, who as Aristotle’s student had been brought up to respect philosophers, asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him. “Sure,” Diogenes said, “you can get out of my light.” Diogenes was clearly not a fan of Alexander or, we may suppose, of his project of global domination. (This must have upset Alexander, who is supposed to have said: “If I had not been Alexander, I should have liked to have been Diogenes.”) And that’s the first thing I’d like to take from Diogenes in interpreting the metaphor of global citizenship: no world government, not even by a student of Aristotle’s. We can think of ourselves, Diogenes wanted to say, as fellow citizens, even if we aren’t—and don’t want to be—members of a single political community, subject to a single government. A second idea we can take from Diogenes is that we should care about the fate of all our fellow human beings, not just the ones in our own political community. Just as within your community, you should care about every one of your fellow citizens, so in the world as a whole you should care for your fellow world-citizens, your fellow humans. And, furthermore—this is a third idea from Diogenes—we can borrow good ideas from all over the world, not just from within our own society. It’s worth listening to others because they may have something to teach us; it’s worth their listening to us, because they may have something to learn. We don’t have any writings from Diogenes, partly, I suspect, because, like Socrates, he believed that conversation—which goes both ways and in which you can learn as well as teach—was a better way of communicating than writing messages to people who couldn’t answer back. That’s a final thing I want to borrow from him: the value of

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dialogue, conversation as a fundamental mode of human communication. These three ideas, then, I, a twenty-first American citizen of Anglo-Ghanaian ancestry, want to borrow from a citizen of Sinope who dreamed of global citizenship twenty four centuries ago: (1) we don’t need a single world government, but (2) we must care for the fate of all human beings, inside and outside our own societies, and (3) we have much to gain from conversation with one another across differences. The Idea of Cosmopolitanism Globalization has made this ancient ideal relevant, which it wasn’t really in Diogenes’ or Aurelius’ day. You see, there are two obvious conditions on making citizenship real: knowledge about the lives of other citizens, on the one hand, and the power to affect them, on the other. And Diogenes didn’t know about most people—in China and Japan, in South America, in equatorial Africa, even in Western or Northern Europe—and nothing he did was likely to have much impact on them (at least so far as he knew) either. The fact is you can’t give real meaning to the idea that we’re all fellow citizens if you can’t affect each other and you don’t know about each other. But, as I say, we don’t live in Diogenes’ world. Only in the last few centuries, as every human community has gradually been drawn into a single web of trade and a global network of information, have we come to a point where each of us can realistically imagine contacting any other of our seven billion fellow humans and sending that person something worth having: a radio, an antibiotic, a good idea. Unfortunately, we can now also send, through negligence as easily as malice, things that will cause harm: a virus, an airborne pollutant, a bad idea. And the possibilities of good and of ill are multiplied beyond all measure when it comes to policies carried out by governments in our name. Together, we can ruin poor farmers by dumping our subsidized grain into their markets, cripple industries by punitive tariffs, deliver weapons that will kill thousands upon thousands. Together, we can raise standards of living by adopting new policies on trade and aid, prevent or treat diseases with vaccines and pharmaceuticals, take measures against global climate change, encourage resistance to tyranny and a concern for the worth of each human life. In short: the existence of global media means we can now know about one another; and global interconnections—economic, political, military, ecological—mean we

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can (indeed we inevitably will) affect one other. So now we really need a cosmopolitan spirit. That spirit thinks of us all as bound together across the species but also accepts that we will make different choices—within and across nations—about how to make our lives. Notice that the cosmopolitan values cultural diversity because of what it makes possible for people. At the heart of modern cosmopolitanism is respect for diversity of culture, not because cultures matter in themselves, but because people matter, and culture matters to people. So where culture is bad for people— individual men, women, and children—the cosmopolitan doesn’t have to be tolerant of it. We don’t need to treat genocide or human rights abuses as just another part of the quaint diversity of the species, a local taste that some totalitarians just happen to have. And, of course, the worldwide web of information—radio, television, telephones, the Internet—means not only that we can affect lives everywhere but that we can learn about life anywhere, too. Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality. The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become. And that means shaping hearts and minds for our life together on this planet, beginning, of course, with the education of the young. Part of what we need there is, of course, to do with the content of schooling: curriculum for a global age. I’ll get back to that issue at the end. But I want to begin by thinking about education more broadly conceived than the learning of information, however essential information is. Education for the Global Community Aristotle—Alexander’s teacher—thought of ethics as a field with a practical payoff. Its aim was to think about what was good for us humans; what it is to have and to be and to do what is good. Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was the doctor of Amyntas, Alexander’s grandfather, which explains both why Aristotle got an aristocratic education— doctors to the powerful, then as now, were rich—and why Philip, Alexander’s father, chose him to be his son’s tutor. So it’s not surprising that he took the process of developing children into well-behaved adults very seriously. Central to his Nicomachean Ethics, for example, is an account of character as something we develop in the course of a life.

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Central, too, is the idea of the community, the polis, as the context in which and for which we develop. The organized community should aim to shape the citizens to their common life. You play a role, too, of course, in your own development. Your community shapes you; you help shape others; you help shape yourself. Now this all seems roughly right to me—barring some worries about Aristotle’s understanding of character, to which I’ll return.1 But taking Aristotle’s project seriously, while accepting the idea that we live in many overlapping communities—not just a single polis—requires us to think of education, in our present world, as a matter of shaping people for the global community as well as more local ones. It leads us to ask about the global community and its institutions the question Aristotle asked, in effect, about the polis: How can the community be organized to make its members ready for a life in common? Formal education, of course, is controlled by local communities: nations, states, counties, cities, families. Above the nation there are no institutions that have real power over the shaping of schools and what goes on in them. So it may be that there is little or nothing that the global community can do through global institutions to shape people for our global life in common. But once we recognize that one community we participate in is the cosmos, we can ask, at each of the levels where we manage education, how we should take account of that level of community in thinking how we should prepare young people for life in the world. Now in focusing on what we—we together and we singly—do deliberately, there’s a risk of overstating the role of the planned and the deliberate in this process. Education—the intentional transmission of culture from one generation to the next—is only a small part of socialization—the process by which our society shapes our ideas, our habits, our practices. And we are prone to exaggerate the role, even in education, of teaching, as opposed to the sort of learning that occurs when nothing is deliberately being taught. Take language: speak around children and they will learn. They will learn faster if you do some of the things that we spontaneously do around children, like talking baby-talk, which turns out to help the infant brain individuate phonemes; but even if you just sat a baby in a chair at dinner every night, she’d figure it out. Now the exposure to language, to people speaking and responding, is obviously necessary. But what we naturally do with children works to transmit language to them without our having any theoretical appreciation of how. Of course many people have had theories about how language acquisition works, but until recently, they have usually been badly wrong. (Recall

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Augustine’s account of how he learned to speak, which Wittgenstein criticizes in the Philosophical Investigations.) We do it without knowing how we do it. In the last century or so, it is true, we have begun to understand what we are doing. And that makes it possible for us to help with the language learning of children with cognitive disabilities and to accelerate, if we want to, language acquisition in normal children. But most people still pick up most languages in the old ways. Similar things can be said about the complex set of beliefs, emotions, and habits of response that are required for social life in general and for what we call “morality” in particular. People develop, in the right contexts, much of what we want them to have for adult life: language, sociability, a moral sense. Part of the reason for this has been known for ages. We are natural imitators. As John Locke put it in Some Thoughts on Education (1692): Having under consideration how great the influence of company is, and how prone we are all, especially children, to imitation, I must here take the liberty to mind parents of this one thing, viz. That he that will have his son have a respect for him and his orders, must himself have a great reverence for his son. Maxima debetur pueris reverentia. You must do nothing before him, which you would not have him imitate.2

But Locke also thought, famously, that the minds of children were more malleable than they actually are: “I imagine the minds of children as easily turn’d this or that way, as water it self . . . ,”3 he says, at the start of the second paragraph of Some Thoughts on Education. And that is a metaphor which, at the very least, risks misleading. Impact of Context and Community on Children First of all, in the sense in which this is true, it strikes me that it is not just true of children. Our minds are fantastically sensitive to an odd array of environmental features that make a huge difference in how we behave, and in ways of which we are normally completely unaware. This is the message of many decades of psychological research. Back in 1972, Alice M. Isen and Paula Levin had found that, if you dropped your papers outside a phone booth in a shopping mall, you were far more likely to be helped by someone who had just had the good fortune of finding a dime waiting for them in the return slot. A year later, John Darley and Daniel Batson discovered that Princeton seminary students, even those who had just been reflecting on the Gospel account of the Good Samaritan, were much less likely to stop to help someone

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“slumped in a doorway, apparently in some sort of distress” if they’d been told that they were late for an appointment. In a 1975 study, people were much less likely to help someone who “accidentally” dropped a pile of papers when the ambient noise level was 85 decibels than when it was 65 decibels. More recently, Robert Baron and Jill Thomley showed that you were more likely to get change for a dollar outside a fragrant bakery shop than standing near a “neutral-smelling dry-goods store.”4 Many of these effects are extremely powerful: huge differences in behavior flow from differences in circumstances that seem of little or no normative consequence. Putting the dime in the slot in that shopping mall raised the proportion of those who helped pick up the papers from 1 out of 25 to 6 out of 7; that is, from almost no one to almost everyone. Seminarians in a hurry are six times less likely to stop like a Good Samaritan.5 Knowing what I’ve just told you, you should surely be a little less confident that “she’s helpful” is a good explanation next time someone stops to assist you in picking up your papers (especially if you’re outside a bakery!). This is the source of my skepticism about Aristotle’s talk of character. But, second, there are also many habits of mind, natural to children, which are remarkably resistant to channeling away from their present courses. Some children just don’t like some foods; and you can force them to eat them only at the cost of unacceptable cruelty. These are idiosyncratic ways in which children are hard to channel. There are also more tendencies of mind that are hard to eradicate or induce in anyone. Sometimes the water runs in channels of our nature too swift and deep for diversion. Still there are things we have now learned about shaping the human heart. It is pretty clear, for example, that bigotry toward members of one’s own community is something that can be both created and destroyed by the circumstances in which people are raised. Long ago in the history of social psychology, Gordon Allport argued for what is called the Contact Hypothesis. Roughly, it says that contact between individuals of different groups makes hostility and prejudice less likely if it occurs in a framework that meets a few important conditions: crucially, it must be on terms of equality and it must be in an activity where shared goals are pursued in contexts of mutual dependency. This is one reason that our integrated military produces people who are less racist, on average, when they leave than when they arrive. It is one reason, I suspect, why straight soldiers who have worked together with gay comrades in Holland or Israel or Britain are less homophobic than many

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American soldiers. It is why white football and basketball players are more relaxed around black people and more engaged with racial justice than some of their peers. (Consider Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley: two politicians at opposite ends of our political spectrum who share exactly two things, experience as sportsmen in mixed-race sports and a concern in their political careers—often to their political disadvantage—to do the right thing racially.) It is this that makes the segregation of communities within a single society potentially so disastrous; for segregation makes it unlikely that children will meet and collaborate, acquiring the experience of mutual reliance on terms of rough equality. We can do something about this, in principle, within the nation, by desegregating our communities and our schools. But what can we do across nations, since nations are, by definition, communities of people segregated from other nations? The answer, I think, is simple enough. We should be doing, so far as we can, what schools and colleges have increasingly been doing: encouraging young people to go abroad and work and study with young people in other nations, and inviting young people of other nations to study here. Cross-national educational projects—whether pursued in the virtual common space of the Internet or the literal common space of the semester abroad—are absolutely crucial, if this is right, to a cosmopolitan education—an education for a global age. And the good that it brings is a matter of practical habit more than theoretical conviction.

Cosmopolitan Ideals Nevertheless, theory is important, too. And we should communicate the cosmopolitan ideals as ideas as well as through the experience of working together across nations. And so I want to end, as I promised, by discussing how to articulate cosmopolitanism as a theory to be considered by anyone wishing to introduce cosmopolitan ideas as part of the school curriculum. We should begin by insisting that cosmopolitanism is a doublestranded tradition: in a slogan, it is universality plus difference. I have already hinted at why cosmopolitans accept, indeed celebrate, the wide range of legitimate human diversity. But I want to be more explicit about this. Why, after all, should we not do, in the name of universal concern, what missionaries of many faiths have done? Why shouldn’t we go out into the world guided by the truth and help others to live by it, too?

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One reason is that cosmopolitans inherit from our Greek forebears a recognition of the fallibility of human knowledge. Cosmopolitanism begins with the philosophical doctrine of fallibilism—the recognition that we may be mistaken, even when we have looked carefully at the evidence and applied our highest mental capacities. A fallibilist knows that he or she is likely to make mistakes about things. We have views, and we take our own views seriously. But we are always open to the possibility that it may turn out that we’re wrong. To put it simply: if I’m wrong about something, maybe I can learn from others, even if they are wrong about something else. But there’s a second reason, one whose roots are found in a more modern idea: the idea that each human individual is charged with ultimate responsibility for his or her own life. The dignity of each human being resides, in part, exactly in his or her capacity for and right to self-management. Because of this, it’s important that human beings live by standards they themselves believe in, even if those standards are wrong. As John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty, some one and a half centuries ago: “If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.”6 It’s best, that is, when people live by ideals they themselves believe in. If I force a man to do what I take to be right when he doesn’t think it is right—or stop a woman from doing what I take to be wrong, when she doesn’t agree that it’s wrong—there’s a sense in which I am not making their lives better, even if what I take to be right or wrong really is right or wrong. Of course, if the wrong someone is doing harms others, I may have to stop her anyway, because the universal concern that underlies cosmopolitanism means that it matters to me that every human life should go well. But if she is of sound mind and the wrong she is planning to do affects only her own fate, then the right way to express my concern for her is not to force her to do the right thing, but to try to persuade her she is mistaken. Still, because cosmopolitanism is fallibilist, cosmopolitan conversation across cultural and political and social and economic and religious boundaries is not about wholesale conversion: it’s about learning as well as teaching; it’s about listening as well as talking. Even when I am trying to persuade someone that what they see as right is wrong, I am also hearing arguments that what I think is wrong is right. Now global conversation is a metaphor; it needs interpretation, just as the metaphor of global citizenship needed interpreting.

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Because, of course, you and I can’t literally converse with the other seven billion or so strangers who inhabit the planet. But a global community of cosmopolitans will consist of people who want to learn about other ways of life, through anthropology and history, novels, movies, news stories in newspapers, on radio, and television. Indeed, let me make my first entirely concrete practical proposal—practical for anyone with a Netflix account, at least. Do what people all around the world are already doing with American movies: see at least one movie with subtitles a month. Objections to Cosmopolitanism Perhaps all this seems to you entirely uncontroversial, banal even. But there are certainly enemies of cosmopolitanism all around. Cosmopolitanism is universality plus difference, I said, and that means that cosmopolitans have two kinds of enemies: those who deny the legitimacy of universality and those who deny the legitimacy of difference. The first kind of enemy often rejects the demand for universality in the name of the nation: “Cosmopolitanism as an ethical commitment strains to extend our concrete realities to include some distant and generalized ‘others’ who, we are told, are our global neighbours,” a Canadian commentator once wrote. “The idea might give you the warm-and-fuzzies, but it’s nothing for which you’d be willing to go to war.”7 But that supposes that universal concern requires us to be constantly risking our lives for strangers around the world just as—the nationalist supposes—we are willing to risk our lives for our literal fellow citizens. This objection misunderstands what cosmopolitanism is saying. For cosmopolitans recognize that our own nations make more demands of us than does the human community, just as our families make more demands on us than our nations. To say that every human matters is not to deny that some people matter more to each of us than others. Some American Christians send money to suffering fellow Christians in southern Sudan; writers, through PEN International, campaign for the freedom of other writers, imprisoned around the world; women in Sweden work for women’s rights in South Asia; Indians in the Punjab worry about the fate of Punjabis in Canada and Britain. To insist on universality is only to say that every human being has certain minimum entitlements—many of them expressed in the vocabulary of human rights; and that it is also the obligation of every human

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being to do his or her fair share in making sure that everybody gets what they are entitled to. It is, of course, not easy in practice to say what that fair share is. But the cosmopolitan insists that each of us has to ask him or herself: Am I doing my fair share to make sure everyone has the chance at the dignified human existence that we are all entitled to? A patriot will want to do more than this minimum for her fellow countryman. The cosmopolitan is only insisting that she cannot do less than this for the rest of humankind. But there is another kind of enemy that we need to respond to: these objectors share our belief in universality, but they do not care, as cosmopolitans do, for difference. The Fundamentalist Challenge I want to discuss one such breed of counter-cosmopolitan: the new fundamentalists who pose one of the most serious threats to cosmopolitan cohabitation today. For we must accept that they believe in the universality of their faith: nothing would make them happier than the conversion of all of humanity. As the French scholar Olivier Roy writes in his superb account of the phenomenon, Globalized Islam: Of course, by definition Islam is universal, but after the time of the Prophet and his companions (the Salaf) it has always been embedded in given cultures. These cultures seem now a mere product of history and the results of many influences and idiosyncrasies. For fundamentalists (and also for some liberals) there is nothing in these cultures to be proud of, because they have altered the pristine message of Islam. Globalization is a good opportunity to dissociate Islam from any given culture and to provide a model that could work beyond any culture.8

So how, in principle, should we distinguish benign and malign forms of universalism? You could try an appeal to tolerance. Yet there are plenty of things that the heroes of radical Islam are happy to tolerate. They don’t care if you eat kebabs or meatballs or kung pao chicken, as long as the meat is halal; your hijab can be silk or linen or viscose. On the other hand, there are limits to cosmopolitan tolerance. We will sometimes want to intervene in other places, because what is going on there violates our fundamental principles so deeply. We, too, can see moral error. And when it is serious enough—genocide is the uncontroversial case—we will not stop with conversation. Tolerance doesn’t mean that you find nothing intolerable. Then, as I said at the start, we cosmopolitans believe in universal truth, too, though we are less certain that we have it all already. It is not

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skepticism about the very idea of truth that guides us; it is realism about how hard the truth is to find. One truth we hold to, however, is that every human being has obligations to every other. Everybody matters: that is our central idea. And it sharply limits the scope of our tolerance. To say what, in principle, distinguishes the cosmopolitan from the counter-cosmopolitan, we plainly need to go beyond talk of truth and tolerance. One distinctively cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism. Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values. (But they have to be values worth living by.) And of course our fallibilism means that, unlike the fundamentalist, we accept that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence. The neo-fundamentalist conception of a global ummah, by contrast, admits to local variations—but only in matters that don’t matter. These counter-cosmopolitans, like many Christian fundamentalists, do think that there is one right way for all human beings to live; that all the differences must be in the details. If your concern is global homogeneity, this utopia, not the world that capitalism is producing, is the one that you should worry about. Still, the universalisms in the name of religion are hardly the only ones that invert the cosmopolitan creed. In the name of universal humanity, you can be the kind of Marxist, like Pol Pot, who wants to eradicate all religion, just as easily as you can be the Grand Inquisitor supervising an auto-da-fé. All of these men want everyone on their side, so we can share with them their vision. “Indeed, I’m a trustworthy adviser to you,” Osama bin Laden said in a 2002 “message to the American people.” “I invite you to the happiness of this world and the hereafter and to escape your dry, miserable, materialistic life that is without soul. I invite you to Islam, that calls to follow of the path of Allah alone, who has no partners, the path which calls for justice and forbids oppression and crimes.” Join us, the counter-cosmopolitans say, and we will all be sisters and brothers. But each of them plans to trample on our differences—to trample us to death, if necessary—if we will not join them. Their motto might as well be that sardonic German saying: Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, So schlag’ ich Dir den Schädel ein. (If you don’t want to be my brother, Then I’ll smash your skull in.)

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For the counter-cosmopolitans, then, universalism issues in uniformity. The cosmopolitan may be happy to abide by the Golden Rule about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. But cosmopolitans care if those others don’t want to be done unto as I would be done unto. It’s not necessarily the end of the matter, but it’s something we think we need to take account of. Our understanding of toleration means interacting on terms of respect with those who see the world differently. We cosmopolitans think we might learn something even from those we disagree with. We think people have a right to their own lives. It is crucial to insist, at a moment when we are most conscious of Muslims who hate cosmopolitanism, that there are now, and there have always been, cosmopolitan proponents of Islam. Over the last two centuries, one can identify distinguished Islamic scholars who have engaged seriously with ideas from outside Islam. In the nineteenth century, Sayyid Ahmad Khan in India and Muhammad ‘Adbuh in Egypt both sought to develop Muslim visions of modernity. More recently, Mahmud Muhammad Taha in Sudan, Tariq Ramadan in Europe, and Khaled Abou El-Fadl in the United States have all developed their views in dialogue with the non-Muslim world. These Muslim thinkers are wildly different, but each of them challenges—and with a far more extensive grounding in the corpus of earlier Muslim scholarship than al-Zawahiri—the fundamentalist conceptions of sharia.9 Ahmed al-Tayeb, president of Al-Azhar, the world’s oldest Muslim university (in fact, the oldest university, period), has invited the archbishop of Canterbury to speak from his pulpit. And he has said, “God created diverse peoples. Had He wanted to create a single ummah, He would have, but He chose to make them different until the day of resurrection. Every Muslim must fully understand this principle. A relationship based on conflict is futile.”10 Insofar as they think there is something to discuss, al-Zawahiri’s syllogism decrees all these men to be “disbelievers.” It is pointless, I think, for those of us who are not Muslims to say what is true and what is false in Islam; just as it would be inane for al-Zawahiri to weigh in on whether, say, contraception or capital punishment is consistent with Christianity. It is up to those who want to sail under the flags of Christianity or of Islam to determine (and explain, if they wish to) what their banners mean. That is their fight. But among those who call themselves Muslims, there are more tolerant exponents and there have been more tolerant times. We can observe the historical fact that there have been societies that called themselves Muslim and

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practiced toleration (including, in the earliest period, under the command of the Prophet himself). So it is heartening, at least for a cosmopolitan, that there are now many Muslim voices speaking for religious toleration and arguing for it from within the interpretative traditions of Islam. Modern religious fundamentalism—whether Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu—is exactly that: modern. And each of these world traditions has extremely anti-cosmopolitan versions, as, indeed, does Marxism, the great modern secular ideology. But all have existed in cosmopolitan forms: fallibilist, pluralist, committed to conversation across differences, recognizing the ultimate responsibility of individuals for their own lives. That Islam, in particular, is compatible with cosmopolitanism is no more surprising than that Christianity should be. Both, after all, draw on the same philosophical and religious roots, and as I said at the start, Christianity begins as a cosmopolitan religion, in part because of its Stoic inheritance. Equally obvious is the role of Greek philosophical traditions in shaping the philosophical traditions of Islam. But as I also said, there is no reason to think that the impulse to cosmopolitanism comes solely from the Hellenistic world or out of the West; after all, as Amartya Sen’s recent work has reminded us, one of history’s most cosmopolitan leaders was the sixteenth century Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, a descendant both of Timur (or Tamburlane), the fourteenth century Lord of Central Asia, and (it is said) of Genghis Khan, the twelfth to thirteenth century Mongolian Emperor. Cosmopolitanism, so it seems to me, is a temperament that is to be found on every continent. . . . I learned it, as I said, not in England or America, but growing up in Ghana. NOTES 1. For these worries, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), Chapter 2, “The Case Against Character.” See also the remarks on social psychology below. 2. John Locke, Some Thoughts on Education, The Harvard Classics, vol. 37 (1) (New York: P. F. Collier and Son Company, 1909–1914), Section 71. 3. Ibid., Section 2. 4. A. M. Isen and P. F. Levin, “The Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 384–88; J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson, “ ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–108; K. E. Matthews and L. K. Cannon, “Environmental Noise Level as a Determinant of Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975): 571–77; R. A. Baron and J. Thomley, “A Whiff of Reality: Positive Affect as a Potential Mediator

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of the Effects of Pleasant Fragrances on Task Performance and Helping,” Environment and Behavior 26 (1994): 766–84. All are cited in John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30–34, 181. 5. And people are about one-tenth as likely to help someone behind a curtain who has had what sounds like an accident, if there’s someone else standing by who does nothing. B. Latane and J. Rodin, “A Lady in Distress: Inhibiting Effects of Friends and Strangers on Bystander Intervention,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 5 (1969): 189–202. As cited in Doris, Lack of Character. 6. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 3, para 14. 7. Robert Sibley, “Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life,” Canadian Review of Books 28, no.8/9 (Winter 2000). 8. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 25. Though published in the United States, the book uses (mostly) British spelling. I have silently Americanized it for the convenience of the reader. 9. For Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Taha see the essays (respectively) by Javed Majeed and Mohamed Mahmoud in Islam and Modernity: Muslim Intellectuals Respond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000) (there are references to Muhammad ‘Abduh throughout the book); Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Khaled Abou El-Fadl, The Place of Tolerance in Islam (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 10. See the interview by Rania Al Malky in Egypt Today 26, no. 2 (February 2005).

chapter 7

L’Affaire du Foulard (The Scarf Affair) Our conversation about democratic civic education in the twentyfirst century continues with Seyla Benhabib’s case study exploring the special challenges and opportunities afforded for citizenship education by increasing globalization in democratic societies. She analyzes the Scarf Affair, which began in France in 1989 and continues into the current century, tracing the events initiated by three Muslim high school students whose insistence on wearing headscarves to school put them into conflict first with their school and eventually the French state and judiciary. Wearing the scarves was seen as a direct challenge to the French educational system’s fundamental principle of laïcité, that is, a kind of institutional neutrality. Benhabib shows how the French state interpreted the girls’ actions as contesting the boundaries between what should be private and what should be public by intruding a private religious symbol into the public space. The affair came to exemplify the dilemmas of French national identity in an age of globalization and multiculturalism. Ironically, however, throughout the entire affair the girls themselves were excluded from the discussions; had they been included, they would certainly have complicated the public understanding of their actions. “Unfortunately, the voices of those whose interests were most vitally affected . . . were silenced. They were not permitted to appear in the public sphere,” she writes. An important opportunity for democratic dialogue and education was missed. Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. She is the author of many books including The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996; reissued in 2002), The Claims of Culture:. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002), and Another Cosmopolitanism (2006). Her work has been translated into eleven languages. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1996 and has presented a number of distinguished lectures including the John Seeley Memorial Lectures (Cambridge, 2002) and the Tanner Lectures (Berkeley, 2004).

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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L’Affaire du Foulard (The Scarf Affair) seyla benhabib Schools in democratic societies have the special responsibility to prepare the young for citizenship, which, in essence, involves the capacity to engage others about how they will live together. Elshtain, for example, describes democracy as “an institutional, cultural, habitual way of acknowledging the pervasiveness of conflict and the fact that our loyalties are not one, our wills are not single, our opinions are not uniform, our ideals are not cut from the same cloth.”1 Grappling with conflict democratically entails both developing democratic institutions (a political concern) and preparing people to participate in those institutions (an educational concern). Educators have always struggled to understand and fulfill the citizenship mandate, efforts that have been complicated in the twenty-first century by the changing character of democratic citizenship. If globalization brings with it the ever-rapid movement of peoples and goods, information and fashion, germs and news across state boundaries, one consequence of these trends is their multidirectionality. Globalization does not simply mean the spread of multinational (usually American-, British-, or Japanese-run) corporations around the globe. Benjamin Barber’s phrase “Jihad vs. McWorld” certainly captures a truth.2 There is also the phenomenon of “reverse globalization,” through which the peoples of the poorer regions of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia flock to global cities such as London and Paris, Toronto and Rome, Madrid and Amsterdam. These groups, a good number of whom originally came to Western countries as guest workers and immigrants, have seen their numbers multiply in the last decades through their children, born in migration, as well as though the entry of refugees and asylum seekers from other regions of the world. The most spectacular examples of multicultural conflict that have recently occupied public consciousness—such as the Salman Rushdie affair in Great Britain, the affair over the “foulard” (head scarf) in French schools, and scandals around the practice of female circumcision—have concerned new

Adapted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. from Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, with Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka, ed. Robert Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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ethno-cultural groups, as they have sought to adapt their religious and cultural beliefs to the legal and cultural environment of secular but mostly Protestant, Catholic, or Anglican liberal democratic states. Each of these conflicts serves to illustrate not only the new topics that have emerged as a consequence of the clash between different cultures in pluralist democratic states, but also the complex relationship the democratic public sphere has with various private spheres. I want to use the headscarf controversy in France to understand this emerging relationship and the educational implications that follow. In my analysis I draw on the work of the political thinker Hannah Arendt, whose own experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany influenced her thinking about democratic citizenship. For Arendt, the public arena is not only a place where ideas are debated and perspectives exchanged, but also a space of appearance in which individuals and groups appear to one another, in the process creating their identities. In effect, to be a person is to be present to others, to be perceived by them, to be in communication with them. Arendt explains that the common space aspect of the democratic public depends on the prior possibility of people being able to appear to one another; she writes: “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action and therefore precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized.”3 Both features of the public sphere play important roles in the headscarf controversy. “L’affaire du foulard”4 originally began with a long and drawn-out set of public confrontations in France in 1989 with the expulsion from their school in Creil (Oise) of three scarf-wearing Muslim girls. Seven years later, the mass exclusion of twenty-three Muslim girls from their schools in November 1996 on the decision of the Conseile d’Etat took place. Throughout the late 1990s and well into the first couple of years of the twenty-first century confrontations between school authorities and young Muslim girls and women continued. The affair, referred to as a “national drama”5 or even a “national trauma,”6 occurred in the wake of France’s celebration of the second centennial of the French Revolution and seemed to question the foundations of the French educational system and its philosophical principle, laïcité. This concept is hard to translate with terms such as the “separation of church and state” or even “secularization”; at its best, it can be understood as the public and manifest neutrality of the state toward all kinds of religious practices, institutionalized through a vigilant removal of sectarian religious symbols, signs, icons, and items of clothing from

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official public spheres. Yet within the French Republic the balance between respecting the individual’s right to freedom of conscience and religion, on the one hand, and maintaining a public sphere devoid of all religious symbolisms, on the other, was so fragile that it took the actions of a handful of teenagers to expose this fragility. The ensuing debate went far beyond the original dispute and touched on the selfunderstanding of French republicanism for the left as well as the right, on the meaning of social and sexual equality, and on liberalism versus republicanism versus multiculturalism in French life. The affair began on October 19, 1989, when M. Ernest Chenière, headmaster of the college Gabriel-Havez of Creil, forbade three girls— Fatima, Leila, and Samira—to attend classes with their heads covered. The three had appeared in class that morning wearing their scarves, despite a compromise reached between their headmasters and their parents encouraging them to go unscarved. The three girls had apparently decided to wear the scarf once more on the advice of M. Daniel Youssuf Leclerq, the head of an organization called Integrité and the ex-president of the National Federation of Muslims in France (FNMF). Although hardly noted in the press, the fact that the girls had been in touch with M. Leclerq indicates that wearing the scarf was a conscious political gesture on their part, a complex act of identification and defiance. In doing so, Fatima, Leila, and Samira, on the one hand, claimed to exercise their freedom of religion as French citizens; on the other hand, they exhibited their Muslim and North African origins in a context that sought to envelop them within an egalitarian, secularist ideal of republican citizenship as students of the nation. In the years to come, the girls and their followers and supporters forced what the French state wanted to view as a private symbol—an individual item of clothing—into the shared public sphere, thus challenging the boundaries between the public and the private. Ironically they used the freedom given to them by French society and French political traditions, not the least of which is the availability of free and compulsory public education for all children on French soil, to transpose an aspect of their private identity into the public sphere. They problematized the school as well as the home. They no longer treated the school as a neutral space of French acculturation but brought their cultural and religious differences into open manifestation. They used the symbol of the home to gain entry into the public sphere by retaining the modesty required of them by Islam in covering their heads; yet, at the same time, they left the home to become public actors in a civil public space in which they defied the state. Those who saw in the girls’

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actions simply an indication of their oppression were just as blind to the symbolic meaning of their deeds as those who defended their rights simply on the basis of freedom of religion. The French sociologists Gaspard and Khosrokhavar capture this set of complex symbolic negotiations as follows: [The veil] mirrors in the eyes of the parents and the grandparents the illusions of continuity whereas it is a factor of discontinuity; it makes possible the transition to otherness (modernity), under the pretext of identity (tradition); it creates the sentiment of identity with the society of origin whereas its meaning is inscribed within the dynamic of relations with the receiving society. . . . It is the vehicle of the passage to modernity within a promiscuity which confounds traditional distinctions, of an access to the public sphere which was forbidden to traditional women as a space of action and the constitution of individual autonomy.7

The complexity of the social and cultural negotiations hidden behind the simple act of veiling elicited an equally ambiguous and complex decision by the French Conseil d’Etat. On November 4, 1989, the French minister of education, Lionel Jospin, took the matter to the Conseil d’Etat. The Conseil responded by citing France’s adherence to constitutional and legislative texts and to international conventions and invoked from the outset the necessity of doing justice to two principles: that the laïcité and neutrality of the state be retained in the rendering of public services and that the liberty of conscience of the students be respected. All discrimination based on the religious convictions or beliefs of the students would be inadmissible. The Conseil then concluded that . . . the wearing by students, in the schools, of signs whereby they believe to be manifesting their adherence to one religion is itself not incompatible with the principle of laïcité, since it constitutes the exercise of their liberty of expression and manifestation of their religious beliefs, but this liberty does not permit students to exhibit [d’arborer] signs of religious belonging which, by their nature, by the conditions under which they are worn individually or collectively, or by their ostentatious or combative [revindicatif] character, would constitute an act of pressure, provocation, proselytizing or propaganda, threatening to the dignity or liberty of the student or to the other members of the educational community, compromising their health or their security, disturbing the continuation of instructional activities or the educational role of the instructors, in short, [that] would disturb proper order in the establishment or the normal functioning of public service.8

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This Solomonic judgment attempted to balance the principles of laïcité and freedom of religion and conscience. Yet, instead of articulating some clear guidelines, the Conseil left the proper interpretation of the meaning of wearing these signs up to the judgment of the school authorities. Not the individual students’ own beliefs about what a religious scarf, or for that matter a yarmulke (skull cap worn by observant Jews), meant to them, but its interpretation by the school authorities and whether or not such articles could be seen as signs of provocation, confrontation, or remonstration became the decisive factors in curtailing the students’ freedom of religion. It is not difficult to see why this judgment encouraged both sides to the conflict to pursue their goals further and led to further repression through the promulgation on September 10, 1994, of the Bayrou Guidelines, issued by Minister of Education Francois Bayrou. Lamenting the ambiguities of the judgment of the Conseil for conveying an impression of “weakness” vis-à-vis Islamicist movements, the minister declared that students had the right to wear discreet religious symbols, but that the veil was not among them.9 “L’affaire du foulard” eventually came to stand for all dilemmas of French national identity in the age of globalization and multiculturalism: How is it possible to retain French traditions of laïcité, republican equality, and democratic citizenship in view of France’s integration into the European Union, on the one hand, and the pressures of multiculturalism generated through the presence of second- and thirdgeneration immigrants from Muslim countries on French soil, on the other hand? Would the practices and institutions of French citizenship be flexible and generous enough to encompass multicultural differences within an ideal of republican equality? As European integration and multiculturalist pressures continue, France will have to discover new models of legal, pedagogical, social and cultural institutions to deal with the dual imperatives of liberal democracies to preserve freedom of religious expression and the principles of secularism. We appear to have a paradoxical situation here in which the French state intervenes to dictate more autonomy and egalitarianism in the public sphere than the girls themselves wearing the headscarves seem to wish for.10 But what exactly is the meaning of the girls’ actions? Is this an act of religious observance and subversion, or one of cultural defiance, or of adolescent acting out to gain attention and prominence? Are the girls acting out of fear, out of conviction, or out of narcissism? It is not hard to imagine that their actions may involve all these elements and motives. The girls’ voices are not heard in this heated debate; although there was a genuine public discourse in the French public sphere and a

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soul searching on the questions of democracy and differences in a multicultural society, as the sociologists Gaspard and Khosrokhavar pointed out, until they carried out their interviews the girls’ own perspectives were hardly listened to. Had their voices been heard and listened to,11 it would have become clear that the meaning of wearing the scarf itself was changing from being a religious act to one of cultural defiance and increasing politicization. Ironically, it was the very egalitarian norms of the French public educational system that brought these girls out of the patriarcharal structures of the home and into the French public sphere, and gave them the confidence and the ability to resignify the wearing of the scarf. Instead of penalizing and criminalizing the activities, would it not have been more plausible to ask these girls to account for their actions at least to their school communities, and to encourage discourses among the youth about what it means to be a Muslim citizen in a laic French Republic? Unfortunately, the voices of those whose interests were most vitally affected by the norms prohibiting the wearing of the scarf under certain conditions were silenced. They were not permitted to appear in the public sphere. I am not suggesting that legal norms should originate through collective discursive processes and outside the framework of legal institutions: the legitimacy of the law is not at stake in this example; rather, it is the democratic legitimacy of a lawful, but in my view unwise and unfair, decision that is at stake. It would have been both more democratic and fairer if the meaning of their actions were not simply dictated to these girls by their school authorities, and if they were given more of a public say in the interpretation of their own actions. Would or should this have changed the Conseil d’Etat’s decision? Maybe not, but the clause which permitted the prohibition of “ostentatiously” and “demonstratively” displayed religious symbols should have been reconsidered. There is sufficient evidence in the sociological literature that in many parts of the world Muslim women are using the veil as well as the chador to cover up the paradoxes of their own emancipation from tradition.12 To assume that their intentions were purely the religious defiance of the secular state constrains these women’s own capacity to write the meaning of their own actions, that is, to appear in public, and, ironically, re-imprisons them within the walls of patriarchal meaning from which they are trying to escape. Learning processes would have to take place on the part of the Muslim girls as well: whereas the larger French society would have to learn not to stigmatize and stereotype as “backward and oppressed creatures” all those who accept to wear what appears at first glance to be

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a religiously mandated piece of clothing, the girls themselves and their supporters, in the Muslim community and elsewhere, have to learn to give justification of their actions with “good reasons in the public sphere.” In claiming respect and equal treatment for their religious beliefs, they have to clarify how they intend to treat the beliefs of others from different religions, and how, in effect, they would institutionalize the separation of religion and the state within Islamic tradition. Despite the harshness of the recent legislation banning the scarf by the French National Assembly, there are many efforts to integrate Islam into mainstream French society. On April 14, 2003, the New York Times reported the formation of an official Muslim Council to represent the five million Muslims of France. Among other issues, the Council will deal with the rights of Muslim women in the workplace. Thus, Karima Debza, an Algerian-born mother of three, is reported as saying, “I cannot find work here because of my head scarf. . . . But my head scarf is part of me. I won’t take it off. We have to educate the state about why the scarf is so important,” and she added, “and why there should be no fear of it.”13 What Debza is asking for is the chance to appear in public, to be present to others, to be perceived by them and to be in communication with them. Although she is urging her French co-citizens to reconsider the strict doctrine of laicism, which precludes her from appearing in public places with a symbol that bears religious meaning, she herself is resignifying the wearing of the scarf in terms that some have called a “Protestantization” of Islam. The covering of one’s head, which in Islam as well as Judaism is an aspect of women’s modesty and also, more darkly, an aspect of the repression of female sexuality that is viewed as threatening, is now reinterpreted as a private act of faith and conscience rather than as a communal act of faith and belonging. In presenting the wearing of the scarf as an aspect of her identity and her selfunderstanding as a Muslim, Mrs. Debza is transforming these traditional connotations and is pleading for reciprocal recognition from others of her right to wear the scarf, as long as doing so does not infringe on the rights of others. “Because my wearing the scarf,” Mrs. Debza is saying, “is so fundamental to who I am” (her own words are “it is a part of me”), “you should respect it as long as it does not infringe on your rights and liberties.” The wearing of the scarf is resignified as expressing an act of conscience and moral freedom. Her point can be summarized thus: the protection of the equal right to religious freedom of all citizens and residents of France (a right also upheld by the European Convention for the Protection of Human

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Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) should be considered more fundamental—in Ronald Dworkin’s terms, should “trump”—the clause concerning the specific separation of religion and state that France practices, namely laicism. In this process, Debza states, “we have to educate the state not to fear us”—a marvelous thought coming from an immigrant Muslim woman vis-à-vis the daunting traditions of French republicanism! The challenge posed to French traditions of laïcité cannot be underestimated and, clearly, the Stasi report as well as the decision of the French National Assembly to ban the wearing of all religious symbols, except those that are very small and hardly visible publicly, signal the firm resolve of French authorities and legislators to keep public spaces “laic” by emptying them of any sectarian symbols. But the clause of the separation of religion and state, while being a cornerstone of liberal democracies, also permits significant democratic variation. Thus, the United Kingdom has a Church of England, whereas Germany subsidizes the three officially recognized denominations—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—through an indirect “church tax” known as “Kirchensteuer.” It would be no exaggeration to add that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution concerning the separation of church and state has been periodically contested and democratically reiterated since its ratification in 1791. Its significance is never frozen in time; rather, it is repeatedly the site of intense public battles. By contrast, emerging out of the historical experience of intense anticlericalism and antagonism toward the institutions of the Catholic Church, the French republican tradition finds itself faced today with an unprecedented challenge: how to accommodate demands for religious diversity in the context of global trends toward increasingly multicultural and multifaith societies? Is the republican public sphere, cherished by French traditions, really defaced when individuals of different races, colors, and faiths want to function in this very public carrying the signs and symbols of their private faiths and identities? Should their selfpresentation through their particular identities to be viewed as a threat to French understandings of citizenship? In an explicit acknowledgment of the “changing face of France,” both in the literal and figurative senses, during August 2003, thirteen women, eight of them of North African Muslim origin and the rest African immigrants or the children of immigrants, were chosen to represent “Marianne,” the icon of the Revolution, painted in 1830 by Eugene Delacroix, bare-chested and storming the barricades. Continuing the contentious national dialogue about the separation of church

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and state, these women wore the ancient Phrygian cap, a symbol of the French Revolution, rather than the Islamic veil or other ethnic or national headdress.14 Yet paradoxically, the political body that has decided to honor these women as a counter-symbol to others like Mrs. Debza who insist on wearing the headscarf also has empowered them to challenge the overwhelmingly white, male, and middle-aged French Assembly, only 12% of whose members are women. One of the new Mariannes is quoted as saying: “These Mariannes have made visible something that has been the reality of the last twenty years. Look at the National Assembly. It’s all white, rich, male and well educated. Now we have entered their space. We exist.”15 There is a dialectic between constitutional essentials and the actual politics of political liberalism. Rights, and other principles of the liberal democratic state, need to be periodically challenged and rearticulated in the public sphere in order to retain and enrich their original meaning. It is only when new groups claim that they belong within the circles of addressees of a right from which they have been excluded in its initial articulations that we come to understand the fundamental limitedness of every rights claim within a constitutional tradition as well as its context-transcending validity. The democratic dialogue, as well as the legal hermeneutic one, are enhanced through the repositioning and rearticulation of rights in the public spheres of liberal democracies. The law sometimes can guide this process, in that legal reform may run ahead of popular consciousness and may raise popular consciousness to the level of the constitution; the law also may lag behind popular consciousness and may need to be prodded along to adjust itself to it. In a vibrant liberal multicultural democracy, cultural-political conflict and learning through conflict should not be stifled through legal maneuvers. The democratic citizens themselves have to learn the art of separation by testing the limits of their overlapping consensus. Although the intervention of French authorities to ban the wearing of the veil in the schools at first seemed like the attempt of a progressive state bureaucracy to modernize the “backward-looking” customs of a group, this intervention cascaded into a series of democratic iterations. These ranged from the intense debate among the French public about the meaning of wearing the scarf, to the self-defense of the girls involved and the rearticulation of the meaning of their actions, to the encouragement of other immigrant women to wear their headscarves into the workplace, and finally to the very public act of resignifying the face of “Marianne,” via having immigrant women from Arab countries as well as Africa represent her.

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Culture matters; cultural evaluations are deeply bound up with interpretations of our needs, our visions of the good life, and our dreams for the future. Because these evaluations run so deep, as citizens of liberal democratic polities, we have to learn to live with what Michael Walzer has called “liberalism and the art of separation.”16 We have to learn to live with the otherness of others whose ways of being may be deeply threatening to our own. How else can moral and political learning take place, except through such encounters in civil society? Preparing people to participate in a democratic civil society, however, is an educational responsibility that sometimes schools get right and sometimes, as in l’affaire du foulard, not so right. The cultivation of a democratic citizenry is no simple challenge. On the one hand, schools must help people articulate who they are, who they want to be, and how they want to live with others. On the other hand, schools must help people learn to take the standpoint of others into account, to reverse perspectives and see the world through different eyes. The former requires preparing people to appear in the world; the latter involves helping people learn to let others appear. In l’affaire du foulard both responsibilities are neglected. NOTES 1. J. B. Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1993), 114. 2. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995). 3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199. 4. A note of terminological clarification first: the practice of veiling among Muslim women is a complex institution that exhibits great variety across many Muslim countries. The terms chador, hijab, niqab, and foulard refer to distinct items of clothing that are worn by Muslim women coming from different Muslim communities: for example, the chador is essentially Iranian and refers to the long black robe and headscarf worn in a rectangular manner around the face; the niqab is a veil that covers the eyes and the mouth and only leaves the nose exposed; it may or may not be worn in conjunction with the chador. Most Muslim women from Turkey are likely to wear either long overcoats and a foulard (a headscarf) or a carsaf (a black garment that most resembles the chador). These items of clothing have a symbolic function within the Muslim community itself: women coming from different countries signal to one another their ethnic and national origins through their clothing, as well as signifying their distance from or proximity to tradition in doing so. The brighter the colors of their overcoats and scarves—bright blue, green, beige, lilac as opposed to brown, gray, navy, and, of course, black—and the more fashionable their cuts and material by Western standards, the greater the distance from Islamic orthodoxy of the women who wear them. Seen from the outside, however, this complex semiotic of dress codes gets reduced to one or two items of clothing that then assume the function of crucial symbols in the complex negotiation among Muslim religious and cultural identities and Western cultures. 5. François Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le Foulard et la République (Paris: Decouverte, 1995), 11 (my translation).

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6. Marianne Brun-Rovet, “A Perspective on the Multiculturalism Debate: L’Affaire Foulard and Laïcité in France, 1989–1999” (on file with the author), 2. 7. Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, Le Foulard et la République, 44–45 (my translation). 8. Ruling of the Conseile d’Etat, November 27, 1989. 9. Le Monde, September 12, 1994, 10. 10. Law 2004-228 banning “conspicuous religious symbols” took effect September 2004. It passed the National Assembly by a vote of 494 for, 36 against, with 31 abstentions. According to the Ministry of Education, in September 2003 1200 girls reported to school wearing headscarves; in September 2004, 70; in September 2005, 12 (Le Monde September 9, 2004, September 30, 2005). 11. A recent publication tries precisely to let the girls speak for themselves. See Veronique Girard and Yves Sintomer, Alma et Lila Levy: Des Filles comme les autres: Au-delà du Foulard (Paris: La Decouverte, 2004). 12. Nilufer Gole, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 13. Elaine Sciolino, “French Islam Wins Officially Recognized Voice,” New York Times, April 14, 2003, A4. 14. Elaine Sciolino, “Paris Journal; Back to the Barricades: Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood,” New York Times, August 1, 2003, A4. 15. Ibid. 16. Michael Walzer, “Liberalism and the Art of Separation,” Political Theory 12 (August 1984): 315–30.

chapter 8

Deliberative Democracy and Civic Education In this chapter Lars Løvlie develops a view of the kind of public conversations that Callan and Benhabib lament as missing from existing democracies in the United States and France. Løvlie contends that civic education requires that we pay more attention to teaching people how they might talk with one another and to deciding what to talk about. Democratic practice involves many problem-solving methods, especially discussion or deliberation. Løvlie distinguishes between moderate deliberation, which is embedded within existing practices and assumptions, and strong deliberation, which directly challenges both. In deciding what is good and true, the former works within a local framework and the latter aims at a broader, more universal horizon. Both are required for full democratic citizenship. While much citizenship education deals with topics like law and government, ordinary political discourse actually focuses on common concerns or topoi that all humans must confront, including freedom and justice, love and friendship, tolerance and solidarity. These existential topics examine situations inherent to the human condition and require the kind of special attention that Løvlie recommends in describing strong deliberation. Absent considerations of democratic topoi, Løvlie argues, education for democratic citizenship can be formal and empty. Lars Løvlie is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute for Educational Research at the University of Oslo, Norway, and recently Visiting Professor in the Department of Education at Örebro University, Sweden. In the last several years he has renewed his interest in the theory and practice of political education, especially in the Nordic countries. His general interests have been in the history and paradoxes of educational thinking, as witnessed in the co-edited Educating Humanity: Building in Postmodernity (2003) and developed in articles on moral education, aesthetics, and digital technology, several of them written and published in English.

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Deliberative Democracy and Civic Education1 lars løvlie Two radical political events serve as background for today’s civic education. One prepared the ground for the European Union and a new future for Europe; the other led to the failed invasion of Iraq. The first was the spectacular fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, recalled in the pictures of triumphant youths from East and West Germany standing on top of it—pictures that came to symbolize the fall of the Soviet empire. I travelled to Berlin the next spring to experience the demise of the German Democratic Republic and the calm and even reserved political anticipations of people on both sides of a border that faded away early that memorable autumn. I went up to the wall not far from Checkpoint Charlie and collected some pieces of the gray, hardened concrete that had been chipped away. The pieces had the rough touch of a history at its end and set my thoughts on what at that time seemed a brighter future for democracy. The next radical event was the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001. The first news of the cataclysm came to me and my wife in Paris in the early afternoon, from an American woman. I could hardly believe what we later watched on French television and could not dream of the aftermath: the United States trying to impose democracy on Iraq at gunpoint, against the protest of many thousands of people marching in the streets of capital cities across Europe. An education for liberal democracy cannot fail to take these events into consideration, if only because they show how fragile democracy is in the uneasy balance between arguable success and abject failure. These two events call for an education that prepares people to participate more fully in democratic public life. In particular, I propose two components for civic education: (1) cultivation of the capacity for the kind of rational discourse needed for collective democratic deliberation and (2) concern for ongoing analysis of existential topoi or recurring topics endemic to the human condition.2 “Deliberative,” a term that dates to the eighteenth century European Enlightenment,3 is a key democratic concern that relates to a spirit of rational criticism, to a constitutional liberal-democratic government, and to the political institutions that assure democratic principles of freedom and justice. Indeed, the link between deliberation and political education has been a major concern of many twentieth century thinkers who follow John Dewey in understanding the state as a “political

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public” created by “associated activity” and “articulated” by its political representatives.4 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, however, scholars like Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, largely motivated by the spectre of the Holocaust, have shifted attention from preparing people to participate in a democratic society to understanding and critiquing the basis for democratic participation. Indeed, as I contend below, what is at issue between Dewey and Habermas is partly the difference between moderate and strong versions of democratic deliberation. Often given short shrift in accounts of democratic participation and deliberation, however, is consideration of subject matter, that is, what are people talking about? Much current democratic scholarship is concerned with distinctions such as liberal-communitarian, norms-values, public-private—all important matters for debate. These discussions, however, bypass a roster of ethical and political topoi, or common topics, that all humans must confront, including, for example, freedom and justice, love and friendship, tolerance and solidarity. These topoi are found in analyses of the human condition by scholars like Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Martha Nussbaum and by novelists like Knut Hamsun, Toni Morrison, and José Saramago. Consider love as a topos. Love is neither a rational procedure for problem solving, like inquiry, negotiation, or argumentation; nor a personal virtue like courage, compassion, or humility, important as these are in themselves. Love is part of common human experience rather than an individual personality trait or disposition. What I call existential topics range across genre boundaries and are indeed often better described in novels and poems than in philosophical tracts. Topoi describe the “places” where persons meet and events happen, the emotions they stir, the actions they instigate, and the stories they engender. They are not personal in the sense of belonging uniquely to you or me. Topoi are expressed in the stories we like to tell rather than in the methods we are likely to use; they involve reflection and discretion rather than conclusions and decisions. Deliberation and the Educational Point of View What is the educational point of view? Some would say that as long as there is learning, that is, as long as interaction leads to changes of mind and habit, we are generally within the ken of the educational. This cannot, however, mean that any kind of process that makes a change in someone’s cognitive repertoire or social habits is educational. I may

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certainly learn something from stumbling on the stairs or getting stuck in the rush hour traffic, but that does not necessarily make my learning educational. Better candidates are the intentional learning of complex skills like reading and writing, adding and multiplying, and mastering the Internet. In addition to imparting competences and skills, the general task of education is to inculcate those lasting imprints of tradition that make young people grow up acting and thinking like us. Traditionalists see education as initiation into the bourgeois mores— getting the barbarians inside the citadel of civilisation, as R.S. Peters once had it.5 More liberal thinkers take a more explicit stand for fostering autonomy and critique. They want to impart political insight and reflection and to make students aware of the subtle—or not so subtle— power mechanisms in democratic society, and to improve their political judgment and habits. They try to sustain the ideas of democratic thinkers from Kant to Habermas, that citizens should be able to recognize their best moral intentions in the political institutions they create and transform. Democratic civic education pursues democratic ideals in the making of the curriculum, and in the ongoing interaction between teachers and students from the very first school years. When the curriculum and the textbook are not assigned absolute authority, the teacher is free to fashion authority in her ongoing work with students. And since there can be no legitimate final authorization of a canon of educational texts in a democratic society, she and her colleagues are free to discuss the paradox, “There is no canon, thus we need to make one!” and thereby question established opinion. When local authorities lessen control by statutes and regulations, teachers and students are free to discipline themselves in inquiry and cooperation. When individuals are seen in their double description as defined and indefinable, and as unique spirits, the teacher can appreciate the fine balance between giving her verdict and withholding it, between accepting the rhetoric of authority and acknowledging a common fallible future. The ideal of mature responsibility therefore cannot be taken for granted, but must be nurtured over years of cooperative practice between teachers and students. This is the educational point of view, and the starting point for a full discussion of deliberative democracy as an educational enterprise. Deliberation—the Moderate Version Democratic practice is a mix of problem-solving methods including discussion, negotiation, bargaining and voting. Many everyday conflicts are solved by discussions, often involving elements of negotiation, and

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they may reach a final decision only by casting a vote or flipping a coin. Participants in moderate deliberation require many skills, including the dispositions that we appreciate and even admire in people who are good at discussions, whether they take place in the schoolroom, at work, on the radio or on television, as long as the rules of fair discussion and negotiation are obeyed. Examples of such skills include turn-taking, listening carefully to others, respectful language, and getting to the point. Moderate deliberation is embedded within a practice and does not necessarily challenge that practice, that is, it seeks the good rather than the true. The good is assumed to be embedded in local traditions and everyday common sense; indeed, the good citizen is someone who is able to make good judgments in the midst of the nitty-gritty details of everyday life. The context is typically the community or nation in its local settings. Within moderate deliberation the fears and hopes, the curiosity and optimism of young people have their place and range. A common example is the negotiation of class rules between teachers and students at the beginning of a school year. Typically the teacher poses a challenge to create the norms that the students will abide by during the school day and sometimes the recourses available to settle disputes or violations of those norms. What is seldom negotiated are ways to deal with the power imbalances, the need for rules or how or whether the rules will apply to teachers as well as students. At the school level, discussions about attendance policies in secondary schools are usually about the promptness and behaviour of students; seldom is the behaviour of teachers or administrators up for public debate. The assumptions of the school are taken for granted by (almost) all. Linking the descriptions of the two recent epic political events that I describe in my opening paragraph is certainty about what constitutes “democracy” and how people relate to one another in that democracy. The East German government was, after all, the “German Democratic Republic,” and all deliberation was constrained by a version of democracy consistent with a socialist communism. The Bush administration was equally confident it was providing true democracy to the people of Iraq. In neither case were challenges to foundational assumptions welcomed; that would require a different, stronger version of deliberation. What, then, are the implications for civic education? Some seek to foster moderate deliberation about the topics covered in the prescribed textbook about the founding fathers and the democratic institutions they helped to create, and to initiate discussions in the classroom on current political issues—on immigration, discrimination, or some local

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conflicts. Others want students to take part in school-related practices, like representing one’s fellow students on the school council or local student or school board or, as is tried out in Norway, acting as an “ombudsman” for students who have complaints against education authorities. Such practices may be helpful in developing political knowledge, civic virtues, and deliberative skills, but they may fall short of the ultimate aim of deliberative education, which is the rational justification of moral and political claims. The answer to the question: “Do we need all this fuss about truth and justice in our schools?” is “Yes,” provided that the link to the democratic political tradition is made clear and that we see rational discursive practices in the wider educative settings. Digging underneath everyday assumptions is to probe into the repressed and undisclosed and requires a stronger version of deliberation. Deliberation—the Strong Version Strong deliberation involves the very matters assumed in moderate deliberation: rights and norms. It requires rational discussion with all affected and aims at achieving agreement about what is true and just. The formal constraints for strong deliberation include respect for all others, the right for all to speak, adherence to the facts of the case, and the need for justification—whether you want to dispute a fact, press a political view, or persuade the other of the qualities of the last film you watched. In short, the aim of such discourse is to establish the validity of normative statements by rational debate within a universal, rather than local, horizon.6 The benefits of strong deliberation include more than determining the ways that people will live with one another, however. The discipline of this form of dialogue can create personal bonding that goes beyond cognitive skills and leaves a residue of mutual goodwill, which is the formative effect of practices like UN modeling or community work. We respect others because they think and act according to principles, that is, they stand for something we believe is important. Assessing norms according to rational principles engenders, in the best of cases, reliability and trust in a common pursuit. Strong deliberation has its preferred domains. Its principles seem perfectly appropriate when we address human rights in general, or argue for free speech, religious freedom, and the right to a fair trial on the national level. They also work on the institutional level, as when university professors defend their right to free research, or when secondary school students protest that national test results be made public on Internet school leagues. Educating for strong deliberation aims at

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helping people learn to interact in the inquiring attitude, to treat claims as hypotheses to be tested, and to see the results of debate as preliminary and open to further discussion. Strong discourse requires skills like expressing a problem, picking out its salient features, laying out its scope, formulating one’s claim, arguing one’s case, respecting the other’s right to disagree, working toward a possible agreement and accepting the final verdict even if it goes counter to one’s own cherished beliefs. What have we learned at the end of the day from entering into a strong discourse? In everyday life we are confronted with situations of doubt and disagreement and we can choose to seek resolutions beyond those of coercion or seduction, violence and repression. Argumentation offers itself as a civilizing means of resolving conflicts in a highly differentiated society because it is based not on local values, habits, and traditions, but on taking the perspective of all into account. For the early teenager whom we try to nudge into democratic thinking, this abstractness is still a tall order, because she is wont to relate socially and emotionally to particular others. It seems of little avail to imagine her in the position of an objective judge wielding general principles. For her the emotional openness towards the other’s predicament, however, can prepare the road to sympathy and moral understanding. It seems the only thing a wise teacher could reasonably ask of the student is to forgo her own inclinations, interests, and prejudices for the moment, and identify with others including, for example, immigrants, homosexuals, and single mothers. Let us, however, pursue the impartial point of view a bit further. Impartiality means that we are asked, in particular situations, to take a universal perspective. The abstraction from both personal prejudice and conventional public opinion makes way for the point of view of all possible participants in discourse, even if the setting for the discussion is local and the persons affected are, for all practical purposes, you and your fellow citizens. Universality is a valid ideal even if the participation of all is factually limited by class, talent, and luck. The opposition between real and ideal does not, as we shall see, scorn real discourse but rather belongs to it as a motivating force. Just to take an example: Despite the fact that nationality, class, family, and access to education systematically exclude some people from taking part in political discourse, we may include them in principle—the ideal of inclusion has, after all, been a main political motive in the effort to spread democracy to the poor and underprivileged in Western social democracies in the twentieth century.

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The Transcendental Wager and Existential Topoi The relationship between the real and ideal is, of course, an enduring theme in Western thought and has been a critical democratic consideration beginning with Kant, who explains that “human reason has the peculiar fate . . . that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the very nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.”7 Kant finds in human reason and imagination important tools to help humans make sense of their lives—and exercise their democratic freedom and responsibility to do so—but with the proviso that we can never be completely successful. To presume that we are capable of understanding ourselves and the natural and social worlds is hubris, yet we cannot help but take our lives seriously. We must attempt to transcend our finitude, our mortality, with the realization that we can never completely succeed. Democracy depends on this transcendental wager. Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, more recent democratic theorists, build on the real-ideal relationship in their efforts to create more democratic societies, but with opposite orientations. Habermas is concerned to use the ideal to measure the real: Actual discourses can be assessed by how close they approximate the “ideal speech situation,” where all are included and consensus is the ultimate goal. Derrida, in contrast, wants to emphasize the incompleteness and distortions of attempts to approach the ideal. He is concerned to uncover forgotten displacements, hidden power imbalances, and contradictions, and is always suspicious of “agreement.”8 I contend that both orientations are required for democratic politics. Indeed, Habermas and Derrida each contribute insights to understanding 9/11. Habermas emphasizes the failure to approach or respect democratic ideals. Political injustice can, according to Habermas, be explained by distorted communication, that is, by “misunderstanding and incomprehension, from insincerity and deception.”9 On this thinking the flouting of international conventions is a case of illegitimate politics, to be set right by appeal to human rights, national legislation, rational argumentation, and political responsibility. Teaching the truth of matters political, instilling the virtue of sincerity in public life, educating students in rational discourse procedures, and strengthening the democratic governance of schools and universities would be among his educational remedies. Derrida, on the other hand, stresses the inadequacy of any final comprehension of 9/11; he says that “. . . what remains ‘infinite’ in this

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wound, is that we do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify or even name it.”10 On the face of it this seems rather dodgy, since the world still reels under the footage and the analyses of what followed the Twin Towers catastrophe. But Derrida’s point lies elsewhere, in the impossibility of a final understanding or closure of what took place in New York on that September morning. Derrida reminds us that injustice is not only carried out in the name of justice, but is rather part of it. He points to ongoing contradictions within efforts to achieve justice—to the fact, for example, that refugees, asylum seekers, and alien residents find themselves on the fringes of national legislation and are seldom heard. Derrida reminds us that we can never achieve perfect justice; instead we must continuously strive to construct and reconstruct the political and existential conditions to approach justice, using what Seyla Benhabib wants to call “democratic iteration.”11 Similarly, since we can never fully implement democracy, we have to put our hope in the “democracy to come,” putting “faith in the possibility of this impossibility . . . from the point of view of knowledge, science, and conscience that must govern all our decisions.”12 Existential Topoi Much democratic education focuses on topics like some of the ones we have just mentioned: law, democracy, and nationhood and on equipping people with the requisite knowledge and skills needed to fulfill the office of citizen. Ironically, social reality—the very stuff of people’s everyday existence—is not up for discussion. Here I want to argue for the inclusion of the ordinary in political education, that is, I wish to add concerns for existential topics or topoi. Topoi are existential rather than personal, that is, they belong to the human condition in the inexhaustible variety of its local and personal expression. Consider C.S. Lewis’s account of affection, friendship, eros, and charity in The Four Loves. Each is woven into the author’s narrative and conversation with the reader, but none could be mistaken for a personal virtue.13 Topoi range from the commonplaces in weeklies and journals to the conversations between teachers and students in the classroom. They are recurrent life themes or topics that we keep on talking about in private and public, and they latch the private on to a wider variety of common concerns. Topoi can have non-linguistic features. Embedded in the rhyme and rhythms of poetry they colour our relations with others; embodied in the pains and passions of dancing they furnish the choreography of our thoughts and actions.

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An example of the exploration of a democratic topos might help, albeit one explored in a very sophisticated manner. In Philosophy in a Time of Terror, Giovanni Borradori discusses tolerance with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Both refer to the conditionality of tolerance: that it depends on one person’s or group’s power over another, that tolerance is a favor given and withheld or withdrawn at will. Habermas discusses the problem of tolerance-intolerance within the constitutional state by referring to the rights conferred on citizens by the constitution. Universalism plays a role here, but the most important feature, according to him, is “. . . the peculiar character of reflexivity that constitutional principles enjoy”;14 that is, the possibility of self-critique inherent in democratic institutions. Habermas perceives tolerance as a lopsided relationship that constitutional thinking and action can put right. Derrida follows a somewhat different path. Asked whether tolerance can be the condition of hospitality, he flatly answers that it is the opposite of hospitality: Tolerance “is a conditional, circumspect, careful hospitality. Or at least its limit,” he insists.15 A person invited into someone’s home enjoys hospitality on the condition that she behaves according to the local, unspoken, rules of decorum; inadequate behaviour exposes the limitation of hospitality. The invitation of a stranger can turn hospitality into hostility.16 Derrida plays on hospes-hostis (hospitality-hostility) as the etymological root of hospitality, and thus sheds light on the basic inclusion-exclusion practices in modern democracy. For Derrida tolerance nourishes intolerance, as witnessed by the exclusion of the outsider who does not conform to the conditions of tolerance. The relevance of this analysis for our understanding of attitudes toward immigrants and outsiders seems obvious—with the stranger as the limit case par excellence. Pure hospitality is, Derrida says, “practically impossible to live.” It cannot be defined or organized, it has no legal or political status, and it seems to be beyond our powers and altogether of no practical significance. Yet, he continues, “. . . without this pure and unconditional hospitality . . . we would have no concept of hospitality in general.”17 Actual hospitality survives because we imply pure hospitality in our interaction with the other, that is, make it part of the practice of hospitality. Situated in this topos we are bound to “reinscribe” the pure into our everyday life. Educators, that is, both parents and teachers, are familiar with the challenges of teaching tolerance. From an early age, for example, children need to accept the presence of others in the world, often beginning with learning to share toys and play peacefully with other children.

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Teachers of young children consistently help children learn to abide by a version of Kant’s categorical imperative, that is, act as if your actions would be a rule for all, usually cast as a version of “How would you feel if. . . .?” Older children often learn to include others in their sense of identity—sometimes at the cost of the exclusion of those who are different. Teaching tolerance becomes a matter of helping people learn to discriminate among the differences that do not matter from those that do matter—while retaining the flexibility and humility necessary to avoid rigid categories. Teaching adolescents how to be community members, for example, involves a continuum from helping some learn to form any kind of association to assisting others understand how to withdraw from harmful associations (e.g., being a member of a perhaps soon-to-be-criminal gang). Topoi for Democratic Education Absent consideration of democratic topoi, schooling for democratic citizenship can be formal and empty. The irony of current efforts to improve education by pressing for accountability using certain testing schemes, for example, is that such regimes may hinder or even prevent educational teaching. While educational teaching needs methods, method cannot take the form of algorithms or prescribed “best practices.” Topoi require interpretation for particular people in specific contexts rather than generic application; they are essential to a flourishing or self-examined life. The topoi mentioned previously—and the list is easily prolonged—describe everyday situations within given cultural horizons, that is, “places” where thinking dwells. Topoi are embedded in commonplace stories that cannot be appropriated by dogma or scientific theories, or configured into local mores or canonized or solved. They cannot because they describe experiences endemic to the human condition that require unique responses to new and always emerging questions. Topoi are made for wondering, exploring, and looking for new insights. These points of view pose challenges to an education for deliberative democracy. The first challenge to education issues from the force of “pure” topoi, that is, for example, pure hospitality; it is met by interrogating its double-faced character, its tension of ideal and real. The second challenge issues from knowledge moulded by the finite-infinite relation; it is met by paying attention to the subtle and indefinable particular experiences that characterize our relations to nature, literature and the arts—“a sense sublime of something far more deeply

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interfused,” as William Wordsworth once had it. The third challenge is to jettison the narrow parochial perspectives of civic education practised under the guise of “objective” teaching; it is met by the courage to go beyond local traditions and prejudices towards a world-wide human commitment, realised in a cosmopolitan education. The fourth challenge is to resist the senseless twaddle that often follows from accepting any whims and fancies of teachers and students as relevant in political discussions; it is met by a regime of rational discourse that establishes reasonable common rules for arriving at defensible political judgment and action. The fifth challenge is to exploit the possibilities of the Internet in looking up the facts, collecting diverse arguments, and creating new arenas for interaction and learning; it is met by implementing the innovations of the Web in the schoolroom by going beyond “learning platforms” to blogging and to the exploration of life in virtual communities.18 Democracy is molded by geopolitical events, as shown by the destructions of the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers and their aftermaths. Since there is no neutral ground in politics, there is no neutral ground for a civic education. That is where education for deliberative democracy using the topoi has its beginning. Finally, perhaps the most appropriate topos for civic education is education itself. Education is a contradictory process; the very struggles at the heart of education defy closure. These struggles bear witness to a life of restlessness as well as of promise and hope. In this context authenticity and autonomy as the “rights” that modernity has bestowed on its citizens become fragile political goods that are transformed and never finalized through history. Yet, in the face of disappointments and defeat we never stop presenting self-realization and freedom as the hope and aim of education. We cope with fragility because the alternative to the paradoxical freedom inherent in aims that cannot materialize means stagnation and the repetition of the same. We cope because perfect knowledge means the death of wisdom, perfect self-realization the death of self, and perfect education the death of education. So our most cherished aims had better remain, in Derrida’s words, parts of “impure” processes that are never finalized and thus leave us free to explore our finitude. In this sense Derrida gives us the gist of a different education, by saying that “The self, the autos of legitimating and legitimated self-foundation, is still to come, not as a future reality but as that which will always retain the essential structure of promise and as that which can only arrive as such, as to come.”19 To teach for a definite future is to take the future away from the student, to teach for an infinite future is to take the future back.

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NOTES 1. I wish to thank Joseph Dunne and David Coulter for valuable comments on the text. 2. I will briefly mention a third component, namely democratic virtues, which I regard as interpersonal rather than purely personal. 3. “Deliberation,” for example, is implicit in Kant’s idea of “publicity” and explicit in Burke’s idea of the parliament as a “deliberative assembly” and in Mill’s idea of “government by discussion.” 4. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1927), 67. 5. R. S. Peters, “Education as Initiation,” in Philosophical Analysis and Education, ed. R. D. Archibald (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 107; also in R. S. Peters, Authority, Responsibility, and Education (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973). By this metaphor Peters deconstructs his own idea of a rational liberal education. Children do not, of course, start off as barbarians, and Peters’ metaphor is thus rather uncivilized. 6. See Lotte Rahbek Schou, “Kan retfærdighed læres?” (“Can Justice Be Taught?),” in Pædagogikkens filosofi, ed. Anne-Marie Eggert Olsen (Roskilde: Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 2004), 148ff. For a very relevant discussion, see Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, with Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka, ed. Robert Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99. 8. See especially Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 9. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 35. 10. Ibid., 94. 11. See Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, for fine-tuned analyses of this question. 12. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 115. 13. I am grateful to Maria G. Amilburu for commending Lewis’s book to me. 14. Boradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 41. 15. Ibid., 129. 16. See John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 109ff. 17. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 129. 18. I am thinking particularly of exploration and participation in virtual worlds, like Second Life. I have explored the creative force of the Internet in Lars Løvlie, “Technocultural education” (2006), http://www.seminar.net/volume-2-issue-1-2006/. 19. Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 22.

Part Three Horizons of Significance Things take on importance against a background of intelligibility. Let us call this a horizon. It follows that one of the things we can’t do, if we are to define ourselves significantly, is suppress or deny the horizons against which things take on significance for us.1

One of the most obvious and least discussed aspects of human life is its end, that is, mortality. Quite simply, humans have limited life spans, during which we struggle to make meaning of ourselves, our relationships with others, and our physical environment. We bring little with us to confront this overwhelming challenge except our capacity to learn, to make sense. Fortunately, we are extraordinarily well equipped. For example, Kant makes a powerful case for the human capacity to understand by employing cognitive principles or tools, most notably the imagination. He explains that it is only by means of the “imagination that even the affinity of appearances . . . and consequently experience itself, become possible.”2 In effect, our imagination allows us to organize the particular stuff of daily life into general patterns that provide meaning or purpose: from the mundane tasks of perceiving and classifying objects as tables and chairs, to organizing a meal or crossing the street, to the complexity of forging and maintaining human relationships and communities, to the challenges of exploring the universe. “Synthesis in general is . . . the mere effect of the imagination.”3 Understanding so conceived is a dialectic of fusing the particular to create the general and using the general to perceive the particular. Fortunately—and unfortunately—we initiate newcomers into the general patterns that human beings have already created to organize their experience in its manifold dimensions. Some of these ways of thinking have been incorporated into the formal curriculum of schooling as distinct subjects or disciplines. In Section Three our contributors attempt to reopen the conversation about the various horizons that help us make sense of our lives, beginning with the often taken-for-granted assumptions of culture (Chapter 9). Other chapters explore some of the traditions available to help us understand ourselves, our relationships with others and our physical surroundings. The intent of this section is Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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to renew two kinds of conversations: among the various horizons (e.g., How does this discipline contribute to leading a good and worthwhile life?) and within various horizons (e.g., What are some of the ongoing debates within this tradition?). NOTES 1. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1991), 37. 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 240. 3. Ibid., 211.

chapter 9

Culture and Education By this point in the volume, the need for dialogue in public spaces may seem obvious. But having this conversation occur in shared, respectful, and productive ways is not easy in diverse, pluralistic settings. It may be even more difficult in those settings where differences in race, gender, sexual orientation, and language are awarded pride of place or position. In this chapter Sonia Nieto advances the conversation about the educational implications of some of the ideas we grappled with in Part Two: if democracy involves people creating common and uncommon worlds in order to define themselves and live together, what are some of the horizons of significance available for this kind of education? Nieto captures the challenge as how to live together and thrive amidst what seems inevitable interracial misunderstanding and conflict explained by differences in ethnicity, color, language—often referred to as cultural differences. Nieto reminds us that culture is not a given, but a human creation, dependent on particular geographical, temporal, and sociopolitical contexts and therefore vulnerable to issues of power and control. She unpacks some of the features that follow from this understanding—culture as dynamic, multifaceted, embedded in context, influenced by social, economic, and political factors, socially constructed, learned, and dialectical—often drawing on her personal experience to illustrate her points. Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture in the School of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her books include Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (5th edition, 2008, with Patty Bode), What Keeps Teachers Going? (2003), and the edited volumes Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), Why We Teach (Teachers College Press, 2005), and Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare Teach (Paradigm Publishers, 2008). She has taught at the elementary grades through graduate school and continues to speak and write on multicultural education, teacher preparation, and the education of Latinos and other culturally and linguistically diverse student populations.

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Culture and Education1 sonia nieto [We] are not simply bearers of cultures, languages, and histories, with a duty to reproduce them. We are the products of linguistic-cultural circumstances, actors with a capacity to resynthesize what we have been socialized into and to solve new and emerging problems of existence. We are not duty-bound to conserve ancestral characteristics which are not structurally useful. We are both socially determined and creators of human futures.2

The term culture can be problematic because it can mean different things to different people in different contexts. For instance, culture is sometimes used as if it pertained only to those with formal education and privileged social status, implying activities such as attending the opera once a month. In the present day, it generally is acknowledged that culture is not just what an elite group of people may do in their spare time, but there are still various and conflicting ideas of what it actually means in everyday life. Among many Whites in the United States, for instance, culture is thought to be held exclusively by those different from them. As a consequence, it is not unusual to hear people, especially those of European background, lament that they do not “have” culture in the same way that African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, or other groups visibly different from the dominant group “have” it. In other cases, culture is used interchangeably with ethnicity as if both simply were passed down constant and eternal from one generation to the next. At still other times, culture can mean the traditions one celebrates within the family, in which case it is reduced to foods, dances, and holidays. Less often is culture thought of as the values one holds dear, or the way one looks at and interacts with the world. In this chapter, I will explore the complex relationship between culture and education. First, I will define culture through a number of interrelated characteristics that make it clear that culture is more than artifacts, rituals, and traditions. In fact, it is becoming increasingly indisputable that culture and cultural differences, including language, play a discernible role in power relationships and how children identify Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. From Sonia Nieto, The Light In Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities, New York: Teachers College Press, © 1999 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

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with their schools. I will consider how culture and language influence the quest for culturally democratic learning environments by looking at some of the cultural discontinuities between school and home expectations of students from various backgrounds. Defining Culture Previously, I have defined culture as “the ever-changing values, traditions, social and political relationships, and worldview created, shared, and transformed by a group of people bound together by a combination of factors that can include a common history, geographic location, language, social class, and religion.” As is clear from this definition, culture is complex and intricate; it includes content or product (the what of culture), process (how it is created and transformed), and the agents of culture (who is responsible for creating and changing it). Culture cannot be reduced to holidays, foods, or dances, although these are, of course, elements of culture. This definition also makes it clear that everyone has a culture, because all people participate in the world through social and political relationships informed by history as well as by race, ethnicity, language, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and other circumstances related to identity and experience. At least two issues need to be kept in mind if culture is to have any meaning for educators who want to understand how it is related to learning. First, culture needs to be thought of in an unsentimental way. Otherwise, it is sometimes little more than a yearning for a past that never existed, or an idealized, sanitized version of what exists in reality. The result may be an unadulterated, essentialized “culture on a pedestal” that bears little resemblance to the messy and contradictory culture of real life. The problem of viewing some aspects of culture as indispensable attributes that must be shared by all people within a particular group springs from a romanticized and uncritical understanding of culture. For instance, I have heard the argument that poetry cannot be considered Puerto Rican unless it is written in Spanish. Thus, the Spanish language becomes a constitutive characteristic of being Puerto Rican. While there is no argument that speaking Spanish is an important and even major aspect of Puerto Rican culture, it is by no means a prerequisite for Puerto Ricanness. There are hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who identify themselves first and foremost as Puerto Rican but who do not speak Spanish due to the historical conditions in which they have lived.

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The second consideration to be kept in mind is that the sociopolitical context of culture needs to be acknowledged. That is, cultures do not exist in a vacuum, but rather are situated in particular historical, social, political, and economic conditions, and therefore they are influenced by issues of power. The claim of Whites that they do not have a culture is a case in point. Whites frequently do not experience their culture as a culture because as the officially sanctioned and high-status culture, it “just is.” Therefore, when Whites say that they do not “have” a culture, they in effect relegate culture to no more than quaint customs or colorful traditions. This stance is disingenuous at best because it fails to observe that Whites as a group participate disproportionately in a culture of power3 based simply on their race; access to this power is not available to those who are not White (nor, it should be stressed, is it shared equally among Whites). In what follows, I describe a set of attributes that are key to understanding how culture is implicated in learning, and how these notions of culture complicate a facile approach to multicultural education. These characteristics are complementary and interconnected, so much so that it is difficult to disentangle them from one another. I do so here only for purposes of clarity, not to suggest that they exist in isolation. The characteristics I review here include culture as dynamic; multifaceted; embedded in context; influenced by social, economic, and political factors; created and socially constructed; learned; and dialectical. Culture Is Dynamic Culture does not exist outside of human beings. This means that cultures are not static relics, stagnant behaviors, or sterile values. Steven Arvizu’s wonderful description of culture as a verb rather than a noun captures this essence of culture beautifully.4 That is, culture is dynamic, active, changing, always on the move. Even within their native contexts, cultures are always changing as a result of political, social, and other modifications in the immediate environment. When people with different backgrounds come in contact with one another, such change is to be expected even more. But cultural change is not simply a one-way process. The popular conception of cultural change is that it is much like a transfusion: As one culture is emptied out of a person, a new one is poured in. In this conception, each culture is inert and permanent and human beings do not influence the process to any significant degree. But the reality is that cultures are always hybrids, and people select and reject particular elements of culture as suitable or not for particular contexts. Cultural

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values are not gotten rid of as easily as blood. Nor are new ones simply infused. For instance, there is ample ethnographic evidence that in spite of the enormous political, social, and economic changes among Native Americans in the past one hundred years, their child-rearing practices, although they have, of course, changed, have also remained quite stable.5 Likewise, among immigrants to the United States, there are indications that ethnic values and identities are preserved to some extent for many generations.6 In some ways, we can think of culture as having both surface and deep structure, to borrow a concept from linguistics (Chomsky 1965).7 For instance, in previous research,8 when interviewing young people of diverse backgrounds I was initially surprised by the seeming homogeneity of the youth culture they manifested. That is, regardless of racial, ethnic, or linguistic background, or time in the United States— but usually intimately connected to a shared urban culture and social class—the youths often expressed strikingly similar tastes in music, food, clothes, television viewing habits, and so on. Yet, when I probed more deeply, I also found evidence of deeply held values from their ethnic heritage. For example, Marisol, a young Puerto Rican woman, loved hip hop and rap music, pizza, and lasagna. She never mentioned Puerto Rican food, and Puerto Rican music to her was just the “oldfashioned” and boring music her parents listened to. Nonetheless, in her everyday interactions with her parents and siblings, and in the answers she gave to my interview questions, she reflected deep aspects of Puerto Rican culture such as respect for elders, a profound kinship with and devotion to family, and a desire to uphold important traditions such as staying with family rather than going out with friends on important holidays. Just as there is no such thing as a “pure race,” there is likewise no “pure culture.” That is, cultures influence one another, and even minority cultures and those with less status have an impact on majority cultures, sometimes in dramatic ways. Rap music, with its accompanying style of talk, dress, and movement, is a notable example among young people of diverse backgrounds in urban areas. In terms of schooling, the problem with thinking of culture as static is that curriculum and pedagogy are designed as if culture indeed were unchanging. This issue was well expressed by Frederick Erickson, who has argued that when culture is thought of as fixed, or simply as an aesthetic, the educational practice derived from it supports the status quo. This is because reality itself can then be perceived as inherently static. Erickson goes on to say, “When we think of culture and

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social identity in more fluid terms, however, we can find a foundation for educational practice that is transformative.”9 The view of culture as dynamic rather than fixed is unquestionably more befitting a conception of multicultural education as liberating pedagogy based on social justice. Culture Is Multifaceted Closely related to the dynamic nature of culture is that cultural identifications are multiple, eclectic, mixed, and heterogeneous. This means, for one thing, that culture cannot be conflated with just ethnicity or race. As an example, Mexican or Mexican-American culture may be familiar to us because it concerns an identity based primarily on ethnicity, the best-known site of culture. But one also can speak, for instance, of a lesbian culture because, as a group, lesbians share a history and identity, along with particular social and political relationships. Thus, one can be culturally Mexican American and a lesbian at the same time. But having multiple cultural identities does not imply that each identity is claimed or manifested equally. A wealthy light-skinned Mexican-American lesbian and a working-class Mexican-American lesbian may have little in common other than their ethnic heritage and sexual orientation and the oppression that comes along with these identities. People create their identities in different ways: While one Mexican-American lesbian may identify herself first and foremost ethnically, another may identify herself as a lesbian, a third as both, and a fourth primarily as a member of the working class. Because culture is not simply ethnicity, even among specific cultural groups there are many and often conflicting cultural identities. Skin color, time of arrival in the United States, language use, level of education, family dynamics, place of residence, and many other differences within groups may influence how one interprets or “lives” a culture. Further, the intersection of ethnicity and social class, or what Milton Gordon (1964) termed ethclass,10 is a key factor in defining culture. For instance, as a young girl I was surprised to meet middle-class Puerto Ricans when I spent a summer in Puerto Rico. Given my experiences until that time as a member of an urban U.S. Puerto Rican family that could best be described as working poor, I had thought that only Whites could be middle-class. Although I spoke Spanish fairly well and thought of myself as Puerto Rican, I discovered that in some ways I had more in common with my African-American peers in my Brooklyn neighborhood and school than with the middle-class Puerto Ricans I met on the island. I began to see that my Puerto Rican culture was in fact quite

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different from Puerto Rican culture as defined on the island. Years later I understood that these differences had to do with location, experience, and social class. Another important aspect of identity has to do with how interactions with people of other cultural groups may influence culture and identity. This is certainly the case in urban areas, where the identities of young people of many diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds defy easy categorization. Shirley Brice Heath has suggested that young urban dwellers in the United States are creating new cultural categories based on shared experiences because, according to her, these young people “think of themselves as a who and not a what.”11 They engage not only in border crossings, but also in what Heath called “crossings and crisscrossings.”12 Given the growing presence of people in the United States who claim a biracial, multiracial, or multiethnic identity, ethnicity alone is unable to fully define culture. The multiple identities of youths have important and far-reaching implications for the development and implementation of multicultural education: It is evident that simplistic and bounded conceptions that focus just on specific racial or ethnic groupings fail to capture the realities of many urban youths who live with complicated and heterogeneous realities. Culture Is Embedded in Context To say that culture is embedded in context is to say that it invariably is influenced by the environment in which it exists. The culture of Japanese students in Japan is of necessity different from that of Japanese immigrant students in the United States or of Japanese immigrant students in Peru or Brazil. When culture is presented to students as if it were context-free, they learn to think of it as quite separate from the lives that people lead every day. It is what Frederick Erickson (1990) has described as the fragmenting of people’s lives “as we freeze them outside time, outside a world of struggle in concrete history.”13 Culture is commonly decontextualized. In the United States, decontextualization typically occurs in the school curriculum and in media images outside of school. A notable case is that of Native Americans, who customarily have been removed from their cultural and historical rootedness through images that eternalize them as either noble heroes or uncivilized savages, and typically as a combination of both.14 On the other hand, the history of oppression, dehumanization, resistance, and struggle of the many Indigenous Nations rarely is studied in schools. If there is any doubt about the image of Native Americans held by most non-Indian children in the United States, ask even six-year-olds and

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they will provide in precise detail the most stereotypical and ahistorical portrait of Indians, as Erickson noted, “outside time.”15 If these children happen to live in a geographic region where there are no reservations or large concentrations of Native Americans, they often are shocked to learn that Native Americans are still around today and that they are teachers, or truck drivers, or artists. Even when Native Americans are included in the curriculum as existing in the present, the idyllic images of them tend to reinforce common stereotypes. For instance, while we may be happy to show students pictures of powwows, we are less likely to discuss how reservations have been used as toxic dumping sites. A further example of how culture is influenced by context will suffice. Puerto Ricans generally eat a great deal of rice in many different manifestations. Rice is a primary Puerto Rican staple. There is even a saying that demonstrates how common it is: “Puertorriqueños somos como el arroz blanco: Estamos por todas partes” (Puerto Ricans are like white rice: We are everywhere), an adage that says as much about rice as it does about the diaspora of the Puerto Rican people, over half of whom live outside the island. As a rule, Puerto Ricans eat short-grained rice, but I prefer long-grained rice, and other Puerto Ricans often made me feel practically like a cultural traitor when I admitted it. I remember my amazement when a fellow academic, a renowned Puerto Rican historian, explained the real reason behind the preference for short-grained rice. This preference did not grow out of the blue, nor does any particular quality of the rice make it inherently better. On the contrary, the predilection for short-grained rice was influenced by the historical context of Puerto Ricans as a colonized people. It seems that near the beginning of the twentieth century when Puerto Rico was first taken over by the United States among the spoils of the Spanish-American War, there was a surplus of short-grained rice in the United States. Colonies frequently have been the destination for unwanted or surplus goods from the metropolis, so Puerto Rico became the dumping ground for short-grained rice, which had lower status than long-grained rice in the United States. After this, of course, the preference for short-grained rice became part of the culture. As is true of all cultural values, however, this particular taste was influenced by history, economics, and power, which will be further elaborated in what follows. Culture Is Influenced by Social, Economic, and Political Factors As is evident from the above, intimately related to the fact that culture is bound to a particular context is that it is greatly influenced by the political, historical, and economic conditions in which it is found. It

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exists not in isolation but through concrete relationships characterized by differential access to power. As a result dominant social groups in a society often determine what counts as culture. This is why, for example, a dominant cultural group unabashedly can designate itself as “the norm” and others as “culturally deprived.”16 Those who are so designated may not necessarily see themselves in this way, but naming by others takes on great power; eventually many of those who are designated as “culturally deprived” may learn to believe it. Yet “culturally deprived” actually means simply that the group in question does not share in the culture—and consequently in the power—of the dominant group. The paradox of this stance is that while many Whites see themselves as culturally neutral or “cultureless,” at the same time they insist, through constant messages in the dominant ideology, that theirs is the valued and valuable culture. The theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu are significant here. According to him, it is not simply money, or economic capital, that determines one’s standing in the social structure; equally important are what he has termed social capital and cultural capital. Social capital is made up of social obligations and networks that are convertible into economic capital. Cultural capital, which is more immediately important to us here, can be defined as the acquired tastes, values, languages and dialects, or the educational qualifications that mark a person as belonging to a privileged social and cultural class. Just as in the case of learning one’s native culture and language, cultural capital is acquired in the absence of any deliberate or explicit teaching; it is therefore unconsciously learned. The initial accumulation of cultural capital, in the words of Bourdieu, is “the best hidden form of hereditary transmission of capital.”17 In essence, then, culture is deeply entangled with economic and political privilege. That is, the tastes, values, languages, and dialects that have the greatest status are associated with the dominant social class not because these tastes, values, languages, or dialects are inherently better but because they have higher social prestige as determined by the group with the greatest power. As a case in point, for many years linguists have proposed that Black English is a rich and creative variety of English, as logical and appropriate as standard English for purposes of communication.18 Yet the conventional wisdom still common among teachers is that Black English is simply “bad English.” Thus, rather than building on students’ native discourse—what has been termed additive bilingualism19—most teachers simply attempt to eradicate Black English and replace it with standard English, a subtractive form of bilingualism. On the other hand, when expressions from Black English make their way into standard

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English because they are used by middle-class Whites, they immediately take on a higher social status and thus become acceptable. The example of Black English underscores the impact that culture may have on learning and academic achievement. Most schools are organized to reflect and support the cultural capital of privileged social and cultural groups; in the United States, that group is middle class, or upper class, English-speaking Whites. As a result of their identity and upbringing, some children arrive at the schoolhouse door with a built-in privilege because they have learned this cultural capital primarily in the same way as they have learned to walk, that is, unconsciously and effortlessly. Their culture, in this case, the variety of English that they speak, seems both natural and correct. Yet as suggested by Carol Lee and Diana Slaughter-Defoe, because of the low prestige of Black English, “the influences of language on learning for African Americans are both complex and problematic.”20 This example also places in bold relief the arbitrary nature of cultural capital. Paulo Freire captured the frivolous essence of such designations when he asked, “When did a certain form of grammar become ‘correct’? Who named the language of the elite as ‘correct,’ as the standard?” He answered his own question by stating, “They did, of course. But, why not call it ‘upper-class dominating English’ instead of ‘Standard English?’ That authentic naming would reveal, instead of obscure, the politics of power and language in society.”21 Further on, in discussing the same topic, he added, “This so-called ‘standard’ is a deeply ideological concept, but it is necessary to teach correct usage while also criticizing its political implications.”22 One could envision another, quite different, scenario. If, for instance, through some extraordinary turn of events, working-class African Americans were to become the esteemed social group in the United States, Black English probably would become the new standard. In turn, schools would make certain that the curriculum, texts, and other materials would reflect this new form of cultural capital; in addition, only those teachers who were intimately familiar with Black English and who considered it an innately superior variety of English would be hired. Accordingly, the children of working-class African-American homes would enter school with a built-in advantage compared with other children, who would be considered “culturally deprived” because they did not have the cultural capital of Black English. As far-fetched as this scenario is, given current economic and political realities in the United States, it serves as a graphic example of the capricious nature of determining whose culture becomes highly valued.

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Culture Is Created and Socially Constructed As discussed previously, culture often is thought of as a product-inplace, and as something handed down that must be kept the way it is. Not only does this result in a static view of culture, but it also implies that culture is already finished. As we have seen, culture is constantly evolving, and the reason that it evolves is because human beings change it. The action of people on culture takes place in big ways and small, by everyday people and by those who have power. When Jonathan Kozol went to Cuba in the mid-1970s to research the successful massive literacy campaign that had just taken place, he spoke with young people in schools, many of whom had been the teachers of the peasants who learned to read. He was awed by the young people’s responses when he asked them what was meant by history. He recounted that when he had asked that same question of students in Schenectady, New York, the answers had been fairly uniform: “History is everything that happened in the past and is now over. . . . History is what is done by serious and important people.”23 In contrast, when he asked young people in Cuba the same question, their answers were starkly different: “It is the past, but there are things that we do now which will be part of history someday.”24 These young people saw that history was not just what was written in history books, or the actions of “important people” in conquest, war, or politics. What they had done in the literacy campaign was also history. In the same way, culture is what we do every day. Cultures change as a result of the decisions that we, as cultural agents, make about our traditions, attitudes, behaviors, and values. Were it not so, we would forever be mere pawns or victims of the actions of others. Sometimes, of course, cultural values develop as a result of victimization. The previous example of short-grained rice is a case in point. But even here, people took what they were given and made it a positive value. Without such valuing, short-grained rice would not have become part of the culture. The cuisine of poor people throughout the world is another illustration of how culture is created. Poor people often get nothing but leftovers, the parts of animals or plants that nobody else wants. What they have done with these remains has sometimes been nothing short of extraordinary. This is cultural creation in action. Put another way, in the words of Frederick Erickson: “Culture can be thought of as a construction—it constructs us and we construct it.”25 Culture, then, is not a passive legacy, but an active operation that takes place through contact and interactions with others. Culture is a social construction because it cannot exist outside of social contact and collaboration.

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Culture Is Learned Closely related to the fact that culture is created and socially constructed is the fact that it is learned. That is, culture is not handed down through our genes, nor is it inherited. This is very clear to see, for example, when children from a particular ethnic group (for instance, Korean) are adopted by families from another ethnic group (usually European American). Although the children may still be considered ethnically and racially Korean, they will in all likelihood be culturally European American, unless their parents made a conscious and determined effort to teach them the culture and history of their heritage while raising them, or the children themselves later decide to educate themselves. Culture, especially ethnic and religious culture, is learned through interactions with families and communities. It usually is not consciously taught, or consciously learned. That is why it seems so natural and effortless. Although this process does not hold true of all cultures—for example, deaf or gay culture—we predictably learn culture while sitting on our mothers’ or grandmothers’ laps, standing by our fathers, listening to the conversations of family members around us, and modeling our behavior on theirs. In fact, most people do not even think about their culture unless it is in a subordinate position to another culture or—if they belong to a majority culture—until they leave the confines of home and are no longer part of the cultural norm. That culture is learned is also apparent in the very concept of biculturalism. Bilingual education, for instance, very often is called bilingual/bicultural education because it is based on the principle that one can learn two languages and two cultural systems in order to function and even to succeed in different linguistic and cultural contexts. This point was made in research by Gloria Ladson-Billings.26 Of the eight teachers she identified as successful with African-American youths, three were White, and of them, one had a White culture of reference, another a bicultural culture of reference, and the third an AfricanAmerican culture of reference. However, becoming bicultural is not as simple as discarding one set of clothes for another. Because culture is complex, “learning” a culture that is not one’s native culture is an exceedingly difficult task, one accomplished only through direct, sustained, and profound involvement with it. Because most teachers in the United States have not been through this process, it can be difficult for them to understand how excruciating the process is for their students. Furthermore, it is difficult to become bicultural in an untroubled sense

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because it means internalizing two cultural systems whose inherent values may be diametrically opposed. In the United States, it is generally only students from dominated cultures who need to become bicultural as a requirement for academic and societal success. That they do so is a testament to great strength and resiliency. The fact that these newcomers, in spite of being young, feeling isolated, and facing what can be terrifying situations in unfamiliar environments, nonetheless can incorporate the cultural motifs of disparate values and behaviors says a great deal about human tenacity. What they accomplish might best be thought of as critical biculturalism, a biculturalism that is neither facile nor uncomplicated, but full of inconsistencies and challenges. Culture Is Dialectical Culture often is thought of as a seamless web of interrelated and mutually supportive values and behaviors, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Because they are complex systems that are created by people and influenced by social, economic, and political factors, cultures are also dialectical, conflicted, and full of inherent tensions. A culture is neither “good” nor “bad” in general, but rather embodies values that have grown out of historical and social conditions and necessities. As individuals, we may find elements of our own or others’ cultures uplifting or repugnant. That culture is dialectical does not mean that we need to embrace all of its contradictory manifestations in order to be “authentic” members of the culture. Young people whose cultures are disparaged by society sometimes feel that they have to accept either one culture or the other wholly and uncritically. This was found to be the case, for instance, among Romani (Gypsy) youth in research carried out in Hungary (Forray and Hegedus 1989).27 Prevalent gender expectations of Romani boys and girls tend to be fairly fixed and stereotypical. Yet because the family is often the only place where culturally dominated young people can positively strengthen their self-image, Romani girls may correctly perceive that breaking free of even limited expectations of their future life options also results in giving up their ethnic identity and abandoning their families. Through questionnaires collected from elementary school teachers of Romani children, it became clear that teachers’ negative attitudes and behaviors concerning the fixed gender roles in the Romani culture were at least partly responsible for strengthening the expected gender-based behavior among girls in school. Had teachers been able to develop a more culturally balanced and sensitive approach, it is

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conceivable that the Romani girls might have felt safe to explore other options without feeling that they were cultural traitors. That culture is dialectical also leads to an awareness that there is no special virtue in preserving particular elements of culture as if they existed outside of social, political, and historical spaces. Mary Kalantzis and her colleagues have described this contradiction eloquently: Preserving “communities” is not a good for its own sake, as if peoples should be preserved as museum pieces, so that they are not lost to posterity. “Communities” are always mixed, contradictory, conflict-ridden and by no means socially isolated entities. Active cultural re-creation, if people so wish, might involve consciously dropping one language in preference for another or abandoning some cultural tradition or other—such as sexism.28

The work of the Puerto Rican sociologist Rafael Ramirez is particularly relevant here. Ramirez has suggested that we can think of every culture as a coin that has two contradictory faces or subsystems. He calls these the culture of survival and the culture of liberation, and each is important in defining the complexity of culture. The culture of survival embodies those attitudes, values, traditions, and behaviors that are developed in response to political, economic, or social forces, some of which may be interpreted as a threat to the survival of the culture in some way. They can either limit (e.g., the unequal treatment of women) or expand (i.e., mutual cooperation) people’s perspectives within a particular culture. In the case of the role of women, values and behaviors of both males and females grew out of the necessity to view women, because of their unique biology, as primary caregivers. The need to survive is thus manifested in many cultures in perfectly understandable although not always ethical or equitable ways, given the history of the species. According to Ramirez: The culture of survival is characterized mainly by the contradiction that it sustains, affirms, and provides certain power but, at the same time, does not confront or alter the oppressive elements and institutions nor affect the structure of political and economic power that controls the system.29

Ramirez has defined the culture of liberation as the values, attitudes, traditions, and behaviors that embody liberatory aspects of culture. This face of culture, according to Ramirez, is part of the process of decolonization, and of questioning unjust structures and values, and it comprises those elements that promote a new social order in which the “democratization of the sociopolitical institutions, economic equality,

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and cooperation and solidarity in interpersonal relations predominate.”30 In this way, Ramirez says, authoritarianism is contrasted with democracy, racism with consciousness of racial and ethnic identity, and sexism with gender equality. Human rights that are generally accepted by most societies can be included in the framework of the culture of liberation. To that end, understanding the contradictory nature of culture is important if students and teachers are to develop a critical, instead of a romantic, perspective of their own and other people’s cultures. What we do to educate our children and young people says a great deal about what we stand for and who we are as a people. The challenge is to educate all people so that everyone will benefit as articulated, not by Horace Mann or John Dewey, but by John Amos Comenius in The Great Didactic: The education that I propose includes all that is proper for all men and it is one which all . . . who are born into this world should share. . . . Our first wish is that all . . . be educated fully into full humanity, not any one individual, not a few, not even many, but all . . . together and singly, young and old, rich and poor, of high and lowly birth, men and women—in a world whose fate it is to be born human beings, so that at least the whole of the human race become educated men of all ages, all conditions, all sexes and all nations.

NOTES 1. Adapted from The Light in Their Eyes (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999). 2. M. Kalantis, B. Cope, and D. Slade, Minority Languages (London: Falmer Press, 1989). 3. L. D. Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” Harvard Educational Review 58 (1999): 280–98. 4. S. F. Arvizu, “Building Bridges for the Future: Anthropological Contributions to Diversity and Classroom Practice,” in Cultural Diversity in Schools: From Rhetoric to Reality, ed. R. A. DeVillar, C. J. Faltis, and J. P. Cummins (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 75–97. 5. D. Deyhle and K. Swisher, “Research in American Indian and Alaskan Native Education: From Assimilation to Self-Determination,” in Review of Research in Education 22, ed. M. Apple (Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association, 1997), 113–94. 6. P. M. Greenfield, “Independence and Interdependence as Developmental Scripts: Implications for Theory, Research and Practice,” in Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, ed. P. M. Greenfield and R. R. Cockind (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994), 1–37; M. McColdrick, J. K. Pearce, and J. Giordano, eds., Ethnicity and Family Therapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1982). 7. N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).

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8. S. Nieto, Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education, 2nd ed. (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996). 9. F. Erickson, “Culture, Politics and Educational Practice,” Educational Foundations 4, no. 2 (1990): 22. 10. M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 11. Shirley Brice Heath, “Race, Ethnicity, and the Defiance of Categories,” in Toward a Common Destiny: Improving Race and Ethnic Relations in America, ed. W. D. Hawley and A. W. Jackson (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 45. 12. Ibid., 48. 13. Erickson, “Culture, Politics and Educational Practice,” 34. 14. W. Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians, ed. M. A. Jaimes (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1992). 15. Erickson, “Culture, Politics and Educational Practice,” 34. 16. O. Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1965); F. Reissman, The Culturally Deprived Child (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 17. P. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 246. 18. W. Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); G. Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977). 19. W. E. Lambert, “Culture and Language as Factors in Learning and Education,” in Education of Immigrant Students, ed. A. Wolfgang (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1975), 55–83. 20. C. Lee and D. Slaughter-Defoe, “Historical and Sociocultural Influences on African American Education,” in Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, ed. J. A. Banks and C. A. M. Banks (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 357. 21. I. Shor and P. Freire, A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1987), 45. 22. Ibid., 71. 23. J. Kozol, Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), 176. 24. Ibid., 176. 25. F. Erickson, “Culture in Society and in Educational Practices,” in Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, 3rd ed., ed. J. A. Banks and C. A. M. Banks (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997), 39. 26. G. Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994). 27. K. R. Forray and A. T. Hegedüs, “Differences in the Upbringing and Behavior of Romani Boys and Girls, As Seen by Teachers,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 10, no. 6 (1989): 515–28. 28. Kalantzis, Cope, & Slade, Minority Languages, 12. 29. R. Ramírez, “Culture of Liberation and the Liberation of Culture,” in Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Taller de Cultura: Cuaderno 6, Conferencia de Historiografía (New York: City University of New York, Puerto Rican Studies Research Center, 1974), 86. 30. Ibid., 88.

chapter 10

Democratic Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination If democratic citizenship involves learning to live with and alongside other people, then an appropriate civic education must foster the capacity to understand people who may act from very different understandings, motives, and capacities. In this chapter, Martha Nussbaum makes an argument for the vital role of the arts, and particularly literature, in cultivating the powers of the imagination which, in turn, contribute to the kind of judgment and sensitivity needed by responsible citizens. She begins her argument by considering two very different literary works: Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, showing how the former concerns the proper treatment of a citizen who has become an outcast and the latter the refusal to recognize a fellow citizen. Both works allow us “to see how circumstances shape the lives of those who share with us some general goals and projects.” Nussbaum explores how the imagination contributes to moral-political development in various ways, using examples from the most democratic of all literary forms, the modern novel. She contends that literature allows us to understand our common humanity, wresting “from our frequently obtuse and blunted imaginations an acknowledgement of those who are other than ourselves, both in concrete circumstances and even in thought and emotion.” Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School. She has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford Universities and was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, part of the United Nations University. She has received many awards, including honorary degrees from thirty-two colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Asia, and Europe. Among her many publications are The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986, updated edition 2000), Love’s Knowledge (1990), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), and Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (2008). Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Democratic Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination martha c. nussbaum [There] are many forms of thought and expression within the range of human communications from which the voter derives the knowledge, intelligence, sensitivity to human values: the capacity for sane and objective judgement which, so far as possible, a ballot should express. [The] people do need novels and dramas and paintings and poems, “because they will be called upon to vote.” Alexander Meiklejohn, “The First Amendment Is an Absolute”

The world citizen needs knowledge of history and social fact.1 But people who know many facts about lives other than their own are still not fully equipped for citizenship. As Heraclitus said 2,500 years ago, “Learning about many things does not produce understanding.” Marcus Aurelius insisted that to become world citizens we must not simply amass knowledge; we must also cultivate in ourselves a capacity for sympathetic imagination that will enable us to comprehend the motives and choices of people different from ourselves, seeing them not as forbiddingly alien and other, but as sharing many problems and possibilities with us. Differences of religion, gender, race, class, and national origin make the task of understanding harder, since these differences shape not only the practical choices people face but also their “insides”: their desires, thoughts, and ways of looking at the world. Here the arts play a vital role, cultivating powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship. As Alexander Meiklejohn, the distinguished constitutional scholar and theorist of “deliberative democracy” put it more than fifty years ago, arguing against an opponent who had denied the political relevance of art, the people of the United States need the arts precisely because they will be called upon to vote. That is not the only reason why the arts are important, but it is one significant reason. The arts cultivate capacities of judgment and sensitivity that can and should be expressed in the choices a citizen makes. To some extent this is true of all the arts. Music, dance, painting and sculpture, Reprinted by permission of the publisher from CULTIVATING HUMANITY: A CLASSICAL DEFENSE OF REFORM IN LIBERAL EDUCATION by Martha C. Nussbaum, pp. 85–97, 111–112, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright ©1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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architecture—all have a role in shaping our understanding of the people around us. But in a curriculum for world citizenship, literature, with its ability to represent the specific circumstances and problems of people of many different sorts, makes an especially rich contribution. As Aristotle said in chapter 9 of The Poetics, literature shows us “not something that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen.” This knowledge of possibilities is an especially valuable resource in the political life. To begin to understand how literature can develop a citizen’s imagination, let us consider two literary works widely separated in place and time. In both cases, the literary work refers to its own distinctive capacity to promote adequate civic perception. Sophocles’ Philoctetes, produced in 409 B.C. during a crisis in the Athenian democracy, concerns the proper treatment of a citizen who has become an outcast, crippled by a disfiguring illness. On his way to Troy to fight with the Greeks in the Trojan War, Philoctetes stepped by mistake into a sacred shrine. His foot, bitten by the serpent guarding the shrine, began to ooze with an ulcerous sore, and his cries of pain disrupted the army’s religious festivals. So the commanders abandoned him on the deserted island of Lemnos, with no companions and no resources but his bow and arrows. Ten years later, learning that they cannot win the war without his magical bow, they return, determined to ensnare him by a series of lies into participating in the war. The commander Odysseus shows no interest in Philoctetes as a person; he speaks of him only as a tool of public ends. The chorus of common soldiers has a different response (lines 169–176): For my part, I have compassion for him. Think how with no human company or care, no sight of a friendly face, wretched, always alone, he wastes away with that savage disease, with no way of meeting his daily needs. How, how in the world, does the poor man survive?

Unlike their leader, the men of the chorus vividly and sympathetically imagine the life of a man whom they have never seen, picturing his loneliness, his pain, his struggle for survival. In the process they stand in for, and allude to, the imaginative work of the audience, who are invited by the play as a whole to imagine the sort of needy, homeless life to which prosperous people rarely direct their attention. The drama as a whole, then, cultivates the type of sympathetic vision of which its characters speak. In the play, this kind of vivid imagining prompts a

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political decision against using Philoctetes as a means, and the audience is led to believe this to be a politically and morally valuable result. In this way, by showing the public benefits of the very sort of sympathy it is currently awakening in its spectators, the drama commends its own resources as valuable for the formation of decent citizenship and informed public choice. Although the good of the whole should not be neglected, that good will not be well served if human beings are seen simply as instruments of one another’s purposes. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) develops this tradition of reflection about our failures of perception and recognition. Its hero describes himself as “invisible” because throughout the novel he is seen by those he encounters as a vehicle for various race-inflected stereotypes: the poor, humiliated black boy who snatches like an animal at the coins that lie on an electrified mat; the good student trusted to chauffeur a wealthy patron; the listening ear to whom this same patron unburdens his guilt and anxiety; the rabble-rousing activist who energizes an urban revolutionary movement; the violent rapist who gratifies the sexual imagination of a woman brought up on racially charged sexual images—always he is cast in a drama of someone else’s making, “never more loved and appreciated” than when he plays his assigned role. The “others,” meanwhile, are all “lost in a dream world”—in which they see only what their own minds have created, never the reality of the person who stands before them. “You go along for years knowing something is wrong, then suddenly you discover that you’re as transparent as air.” Invisibility is “a matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”2 Ellison’s grotesque, surreal world is very unlike the classical world of Sophocles’ play. Its concerns, however, are closely linked: social stratification and injustice, manipulation and use, and above all invisibility and the condition of being transparent to and for one’s fellow citizens. Like Sophocles’ drama, it explores and savagely excoriates these refusals to see. Like that drama, it invites its readers to know and see more than the unseeing characters. “Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through?”3 In this way, it works upon the inner eyes of the very readers whose moral failures it castigates, although it refuses the easy notion that mutual visibility can be achieved in one heartfelt leap of brotherhood. Ellison explicitly linked the novelist’s art to the possibility of democracy. By representing both visibility and its evasions, both equality and

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its refusal, a novel, he wrote in an introduction, “could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic idea.” This is not, he continued, the only goal for fiction; but it is one proper and urgent goal. For a democracy requires not only institutions and procedures; it also requires a particular quality of vision, in order “to defeat this national tendency to deny the common humanity shared by my character and those who might happen to read of his experience.”4 The novel’s mordantly satirical treatment of stereotypes, its fantastic use of image and symbol (in, for example, the bizarre dreamlike sequence in the white paint factory), and its poignant moments of disappointed hope all contribute to this end. As Ellison says, forming the civic imagination is not the only role for literature, but it is one salient role. Narrative art has the power to make us see the lives of the different with more than a casual tourist’s interest—with involvement and sympathetic understanding, with anger at our society’s refusals of visibility. We come to see how circumstances shape the lives of those who share with us some general goals and projects; and we see that circumstances shape not only people’s possibilities for action, but also their aspirations and desires, hopes and fears. All of this seems highly pertinent to decisions we must make as citizens. Understanding, for example, how a history of racial stereotyping can affect self-esteem, achievement, and love enables us to make more informed judgments on issues relating to affirmative action and education. Education should develop students’ awareness of literature in many different ways. But literature does play a vital role in educating citizens of the world. It makes sense, then, to ask how it can perform this function as well as possible—what sorts of literary works, and what sort of teaching of those works, our academic institutions should promote in order to foster an informed and compassionate vision of the different. Fancy and Wonder When a child and a parent begin to tell stories together, the child is acquiring essential moral capacities. Even a simple nursery rhyme such as “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are” leads children to feel wonder—a sense of mystery that mingles curiosity with awe.5 Children wonder about the little star; in so doing they learn to imagine that a mere shape in the heavens has an inner world, in some

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ways mysterious, in some ways like their own. They learn to attribute life, emotion, and thought to a form whose insides are hidden. As time goes on, they do this in an increasingly sophisticated way, learning to hear and tell stories about animals and humans. These stories interact with their own attempts to explain the world and their own actions in it. A child deprived of stories is deprived, as well, of certain ways of viewing other people. For the insides of people, like the insides of stars, are not open to view. They must be wondered about. And the conclusion that this set of limbs in front of me has emotions and feelings and thoughts of the sort I attribute to myself will not be reached without the training of the imagination that storytelling promotes. Narrative play does teach children to view a personlike shape as a house for hope and fear and love and anger, all of which they have known themselves. But the wonder involved in storytelling also makes evident the limits of each person’s access to every other. “How I wonder what you are,” goes the rhyme. In that simple expression is an acknowledgment of the lack of completeness in one’s own grasp of the fear, the love, the sympathy, the anger, of the little star or of any other creature or person. In fact the child adept at storytelling soon learns that people in stories are frequently easier to know than people in real life, who, as Proust puts it in The Past Recaptured, frequently offer “a dead weight that our sensitivity cannot remove,” a closed exterior that cannot be penetrated even by a sensitive imagination. The child, wondering about its parents, soon learns about these obstacles, just as it also learns that its parents need not know everything that goes on in its own mind. The habits of wonder promoted by storytelling thus define the other person as spacious and deep, with qualitative differences from oneself as well as hidden places worthy of respect. In these various ways, narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction. Habits of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain form of community: one that cultivates a sympathetic responsiveness to another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shape those needs, while respecting separateness and privacy. This is so because of the way in which literary imagining both inspires intense concern with the fate of characters and defines those characters as containing a rich inner life, not all of which is open to view; in the process, the reader learns to have respect for the hidden contents of that inner world, seeing its importance in defining a creature as fully human. It is this respect for the inner life of consciousness that literary theorist Lionel Trilling describes when he calls the imagination of the novel-reader a

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“liberal imagination”6—meaning by this that the novel-reader is led to attribute importance to the material conditions of happiness while respecting human freedom. As children grow older, the moral and social aspects of these literary scenarios become increasingly complex and full of distinctions, so that they gradually learn how to ascribe to others, and recognize in themselves, not only hope and fear, happiness and distress—attitudes that are ubiquitous, and comprehensible without extensive experience—but also more complex traits such as courage, self-restraint, dignity, perseverance, and fairness. These notions might be defined for the child in an abstract way; but to grasp their full meaning in one’s own selfdevelopment and in social interactions with others requires learning their dynamics in narrative settings. As children grasp such complex facts in imagination, they become capable of compassion. Compassion involves the recognition that another person, in some ways similar to oneself, has suffered some significant pain or misfortune in a way for which that person is not, or not fully, to blame. As many moral traditions emphasize—the analysis of compassion is remarkably constant in both Western and non-Western philosophy—it requires estimating the significance of the misfortune as accurately as one can, usually in agreement with the sufferer, but sometimes in ways that depart from that person’s own judgment. Adam Smith points out that people who lose their mental faculties are the objects of our compassion even though they themselves are not aware of this loss: what is significant is the magnitude of the loss, as the onlooker estimates its role in the life of the loser. This requires, in turn, a highly complex set of moral abilities, including the ability to imagine what it is like to be in that person’s place (what we usually call empathy), and also the ability to stand back and ask whether the person’s own judgment has taken the full measure of what has happened. Compassion requires one thing more: a sense of one’s own vulnerability to misfortune. To respond with compassion, I must be willing to entertain the thought that this suffering person might be me. And this I will be unlikely to do if I am convinced that I am above the ordinary lot and no ill can befall me. There are exceptions to this, in some religious traditions’ portrayals of the compassion of God; but philosophers such as Aristotle and Rousseau have plausibly claimed that imperfect human beings need the belief that their own possibilities are similar to those of the suffering person, if they are to respond with compassion to another’s plight. This recognition, as they see it, helps explain why compassion so frequently leads to generous support for the needs of

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others: one thinks, “That might have been me, and that is how I should want to be treated.” Compassion, so understood, promotes an accurate awareness of our common vulnerability. It is true that human beings are needy, incomplete creatures who are in many ways dependent on circumstances beyond their control for the possibility of well being. As Rousseau argues in Emile, people do not fully grasp that fact until they can imagine suffering vividly themselves and feel pain at the imagining. In a compassionate response to the suffering of another, one comprehends that being prosperous or powerful does not remove one from the ranks of needy humanity. Such reminders, the tradition argues, are likely to lead to a more beneficent treatment of the weak. Philoctetes, in Sophocles’ play, asks for aid by reminding the soldiers that they themselves might suffer what he has suffered. They accept because they are able to imagine his predicament. It seems, then, to be beneficial for members of a society to see themselves as bound to one another by similar weaknesses and needs, as well as by similar capacities for achievement. As Aristotle argues in chapter 9 of The Poetics, literature is “more philosophical than history”—by which he means more conducive to general human understanding—precisely because it acquaints us with “the kind of thing that might happen,” general forms of possibility and their impact on human lives. Compassion requires demarcations: Which creatures am I to count as my fellow creatures, sharing possibilities with me? One may be a person of refined feeling and still treat many people in one’s world as invisible, their prospects as unrelated to one’s own. Rousseau argues that a good education, which acquaints one with all the usual vicissitudes of fortune, will make it difficult to refuse acknowledgment to the poor or the sick, or slaves, or members of lower classes. It is easy to see that any one of those might really have been me, given a change of circumstances. Boundaries of nationality can similarly be transcended in thought, for example by the recognition that one of the frequent hazards of wartime is to lose one’s nation. Boundaries of race, of gender, and of sexual orientation prove, historically, more recalcitrant: for there might appear to be little real-life possibility of a man’s becoming a woman, a white person’s becoming black, or even ( pace earlier psychiatry) a straight person’s becoming gay or lesbian. In these cases, then, it is all the more urgent to cultivate the basis for compassion through the fictional exercise of imagination—for if one cannot in fact change one’s race, one can imagine what it is like to inhabit a race different from one’s

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own, and by becoming close to a person of different race or sexual orientation, one can imagine what it would be like for someone one loves to have such a life. Rousseau thought that people differed only in circumstances: underneath, their desires, aims, and emotions were the same. But in fact one of the things imagining reveals to us is that we are not all brothers under the skin, that circumstances of oppression form desire and emotion and aspiration. Some characters feel like us, and some repel easy identification. But such failures to identify can also be sources of understanding. Both by identification and by its absence, we learn what life has done to people. A society that wants to foster the just treatment of all its members has strong reasons to foster an exercise of the compassionate imagination that crosses social boundaries, or tries to. And this means caring about literature. Literature and the Compassionate Imagination The basis for civic imagining must be laid in early life. As children explore stories, rhymes, and songs—especially in the company of the adults they love—they are led to notice the sufferings of other living creatures with a new keenness. At this point, stories can then begin to confront children more plainly with the uneven fortunes of life, convincing them emotionally of their urgency and importance. “Let him see, let him feel the human calamities,” Rousseau writes of his imaginary pupil. “Unsettle and frighten his imagination with the perils by which every human being is constantly surrounded. Let him see around him all these abysses, and, hearing you describe them, hold on to you for fear of falling into them.”7 For older children and young adults, more complex literary works now should be added. It was in connection with the moral education of young adults that ancient Athenian culture ascribed enormous importance to tragic drama. Going to a tragedy was not understood to be an “aesthetic experience,” if that means an experience detached from civic and political concerns. The tragic festivals of the fifth century B.C. were civic festivals during which every other civic function stopped, and all citizens gathered together. Dramas were routinely assessed as much for their moral and political content as for their other characteristics. Indeed, as the literary criticism preserved in Aristophanes’ Frogs makes plain, it was well understood that formal devices of meter, vocabulary, and verse form conveyed, themselves, a moral content. What, then, was the civic education that tragedies were intended to promote?

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Tragedies acquaint the young citizen with the bad things that may happen in a human life, long before life itself does so. In the process they make the significance of suffering, and the losses that inspire it, unmistakably plain to the spectator; this is one way in which the poetic and visual resources of the drama have moral weight. By inviting the spectators to identify with the tragic hero, at the same time portraying the hero as a relatively good person whose distress does not stem from deliberate wickedness, the drama makes compassion for suffering seize the imagination. This emotion is built into the dramatic form. The sympathies of the spectator are broadened in the process, through the notion of risks that are common to all human beings. Tragedies are obsessed with the possibilities and weaknesses of human life as such, and with the contrast between human life and other, less limited lives, belonging to gods and demigods. In the process they move their spectator, in imagination, from the male world of war to the female world of the household. They ask the future male citizen of ancient Athens to identify himself not only with those he might in actual fact become—beggars, exiles, generals, slaves—but also with many who in some sense he can never be, such as Trojans and Persians and Africans, such as wives and daughters and mothers. Through such devices the drama explores both similarity and difference. Identifying with a woman in a drama, a young male spectator would find that he can in some sense remain himself, that is to say, a reasoning human being with moral virtues and commitments. On the other hand, he discovers through this identification much that is not his own lot: the possibility, for example, of being raped and being forced to bear the enemy’s child; the possibility of witnessing the deaths of children whom one has nursed; the possibility of being abandoned by one’s husband and in consequence totally without social support. He is brought up against the fact that people as articulate and able as he face disaster and shame in some ways that males do not; and he is asked to think about this as something relevant to himself. So far from being “great books” without a political agenda, these dramas were directly pertinent to democratic debates about the treatment of captured peoples in wartime. With their efforts to overcome socially shaped invisibilities, they participated actively in those debates. Literature does not transform society single-handedly; we know that these powerful and in some sense radical dramatic experiences took place in a society that was highly repressive of women, even by the standards of its own era. Certain ideas about others may be grasped for a time and yet not be acted upon, so powerful are the forces of habit and

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the entrenched structures of privilege and convention. Nonetheless, the artistic form makes its spectator perceive, for a time, the invisible people of their world—at least a beginning of social justice. The tragic form asks its spectators to cross cultural and national boundaries. On the other hand, in its universality and abstractness it omits much of the fabric of daily civic life, with its concrete distinctions of rank and power and wealth and the associated ways of thinking and speaking. For such reasons, later democratic thinkers interested in literature as a vehicle of citizenship came to take a particular interest in the novel—a genre whose rise coincided with, and supported, the rise of modern democracy.8 In reading a realist novel with active participation, readers do all that tragic spectators do—and something more. They embrace the ordinary. They care not only about kings and children of kings, but about David Copperfield, painfully working in a factory, or walking the twenty-six miles from London to Canterbury without food. Such concrete realities of a life of poverty are brought home to them with a textured vividness unavailable in tragic poetry. Again, the reader’s learning involves both sameness and difference. Reading a novel of class difference (for example, a novel of Dickens), one is aware, on the one hand, of many links to the lives of the characters and their aspirations, hopes, and sufferings. There are many ways, however, in which circumstances have made the lives of the poorer characters very different from those of middle-class readers. Such readers assess those differences, thinking of their consequence for aspirations to a rich and fulfilling life. They also notice differences in the inner world, seeing the delicate interplay between common human goals and the foreignness that can be created by circumstances. Differences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and national origin all shape people’s possibilities, and their psychology with them. Ellison’s “invisible man,” for example, repels the easy and facile sympathy that says “we are all brothers” because his inner world strikes the reader as dark and frightening, as the secure child of a loving home gradually takes on more savage and pessimistic sentiments. In this way we start to see how deeply racism penetrates the mind and emotions. Consider, for example, the scene in which the narrator buys a yam from a Harlem street vendor. His emotions of homesickness, delight, and recognition are in one sense familiar; but the struggle with shame, as he decides not to hide his pleasure in something he has been taught to see as a sign of negritude, will be unfamiliar to the white middle-class reader, who probably will not be able to identify with such an experience. Such a failure of sympathy, however, prompts a deeper and more pertinent kind

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of sympathy, as one sees that a human being who initially might have grown up free from the deforming experience of racism has been irrevocably shaped by that experience; and one does come to see that experience of being formed by oppression as a thing “such as might happen” to oneself or someone one loves. This complex interpretive art is what the Stoics required when they asked the world citizen to gain empathic understanding of people who are different.9 This idea, however, needs to be developed in a specifically democratic way, as an essential part of thinking and judging well in a pluralistic democratic society that is part of an even more complex world. One literary figure from our own tradition who gives us particular help in this task is Walt Whitman, who saw the literary artist as an irreplaceably valuable educator of democratic citizens. “Their Presidents,” he wrote, “shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.”10 He went on to argue that literary art develops capacities for perception and judgment that are at the very heart of democracy, prominently including the ability to “see eternity in men and women,” understanding their aspirations and the complexity of their inner world, rather than to “see men and women as dreams or dots,” as mere statistics or numbers. Whitman makes it clear that his idea of a democratic poetry is his own translation of the ancient Athenian idea to the situation of modern America: in “Song of the Exposition” he imagines the Muse of ancient Greek poetry migrating to the New World and inspiring his poetry, “undeterr’d” by America’s mixture of peoples and its surprising love of machinery. The poet’s ability to “see eternity,” Whitman holds, is especially important when we are dealing with groups whose humanity has not always been respected in our society: women and racial minorities, homosexuals, the poor and the powerless. A major part of the social role of the literary artist, as he saw it, was to promote our sympathetic understanding of all outcast or oppressed people, by giving their strivings voice. “I am he attesting sympathy,” the poet announces (Song of Myself 22.461–24.5): Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, ... Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d . . .

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Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

The poet in effect becomes the voice of silenced people, sending their speech out of himself as a kind of light for the democracy. Like Ellison much later, Whitman focuses on our failures to see the flesh and blood of those with whom we live; his poems, like Ellison’s novel, portray themselves as devices of recognition and inclusion. The imagining he demands promotes a respect for the voices and the rights of others, reminding us that the other has both agency and complexity, is neither a mere object nor a passive recipient of benefits and satisfactions. At the same time, it promotes a vivid awareness of need and disadvantage, and in that sense gives substance to the abstract desire for justice. As in Athens, so in America: the fact that sympathy inspired by literary imagining does not immediately effect political change should not make us deny its moral worth. If we follow Whitman’s idea, we will conclude that it is essential to put the study of literature at the heart of a curriculum for citizenship, because it develops arts of interpretation that are essential for civic participation and awareness. Marcus Aurelius made a further claim on behalf of the narrative imagination: he argued that it contributes to undoing retributive anger. He means that when we are able to imagine why someone has come to act in a way that might generally provoke an angry response, we will be less inclined to demonize the person, to think of him or her as purely evil and alien. Even if we never fully understand the action, the very activity of asking the question and trying to depict the person’s psychology to ourselves in the manner of a good novelist is an antidote to self-centered rage. It is easy to see how this psychological mechanism operates in our personal lives, where the ability to tell ourselves the story of a parent or a lover or a child who has angered us can often help us avoid selfish vindictiveness. In our political lives, this ability has an equally prominent role—especially when we are dealing with people different from ourselves, whom it would be all too easy to treat as alien objects without the sort of psychological and historical complexity we habitually impute to ourselves. This point is itself repeatedly dramatized in literary works dealing with characters against whom society has directed its anger. The reader of Richard Wright’s Native Son contrasts the demonized version of criminal defendant Bigger Thomas, in the novel’s account of the press coverage of his trial, with the complicated person she has come to know.

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The reader of E.M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice in a similar way contrasts the demonizing stereotypes of the homosexual purveyed by most characters in the novel with the inner world of Maurice himself, as the reader has come to know it, his dreams of companionship and his intense longing for love. As Whitman insists, literary understanding is a form of imaginative and emotional receptivity that can seem profoundly threatening to the sort of person who would demonize a group. To allow inside one’s mind people who seem alien and frightening is to show a capacity for openness and responsiveness that goes against the grain of many cultural stereotypes of self-sufficiency. *

*

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Imagining a Common Humanity Literary interpretation is, however, superficial if it preaches the simplistic message that we are all alike under the skin. Experience and culture shape many aspects of what is “under the skin,” as we can easily see if we reflect and read. It is for this reason that literature is so urgently important for the citizen, as an expansion of sympathies that real life cannot cultivate sufficiently. It is the political promise of literature that it can transport us, while remaining ourselves, into the life of another, revealing similarities but also profound differences between the life and thought of that other and myself and making them comprehensible, or at least more nearly comprehensible. Any stance toward criticism that denies that possibility seems to deny the very possibility of literary experience as a human social good. We should energetically oppose these views wherever they are found, insisting on the world-citizen, rather than the identity-politics form of multiculturalism as the basis for our curricular efforts. Literature makes many contributions to human life. But the great contribution literature has to make to the life of the citizen is its ability to wrest from our frequently obtuse and blunted imaginations an acknowledgment of those who are other than ourselves, both in concrete circumstances and even in thought and emotion. As Ellison put it, a work of fiction may contribute “to defeat this national tendency to deny the common humanity shared by my character and those who might happen to read of his experience.”11 This contribution makes it a key element in education.

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We are now trying to build inclusive schools that will overcome defects of vision and receptivity that marred the schools of earlier eras, places in which no group will be invisible in Ellison’s sense. That is in its way a radical political agenda; it is always radical, in any society, to insist on the equal worth of all human beings, and people find all sorts of ways to avoid the claim of that ideal, much though they may pay it lip service. This agenda is radical in the way that Stoic world citizenship was radical in a Rome built on hierarchy and rank, in the way that the Christian idea of love of one’s neighbor was and is radical, in a world anxious to deny our common membership in the kingdom of ends or the kingdom of heaven. We should defend that radical agenda as the only one worthy of our conception of democracy and worthy of guiding its future. NOTES 1. The issues of this chapter are treated at greater length in Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination in Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1992), 563, 566, 3. 3. Ibid., 572. 4. Ibid., xxiv–xxv, xxvi. 5. See Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, for Dickens’s discussion of this case. 6. See Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Scribner’s, 1953). 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 224. 8. On this phenomenon, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); also Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 9. The original Stoics were critical of most literature of their time, since they believed that it usually exaggerated the importance of circumstances for human well-being. But this aspect of their view is logically independent of their interest in sympathetic perception, which naturally led them to take an interest in cultivating the imagination. 10. Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore.” 11. Ellison, Invisible Man, xxvi.

chapter 11

Teaching Natural Science in the Twenty-First Century: Opportunities and Dangers Perhaps the most distinctive achievement of Western civilization is its advancement of and reliance on the disciplines of natural science, allowing humans an unprecedented understanding—and influence—over their environment. This capacity to organize certain kinds of experience has succeeded spectacularly, sometimes beyond human control and sometimes to the exclusion of other ways of understanding. Here Ian Winchester contrasts science’s focus on regularities with history’s concerns with understanding the individual events, thoughts, and actions of particular people (including scientists). He explores how current scientific thinking came to be so dominant by tracing its development over three key historical periods. Winchester is especially concerned that responsible education involves both maximizing the technological benefits of science and mitigating possible dangers to human and other life. Too much current science education, he contends, aims at inculcating already determined answers at the expense of the kind of humble questioning so fundamental to scientific thinking. Finally, he argues that science’s focus on generalities and history’s on particularities “should be combined with their natural ethical interests.” Both scientists and citizens need to be equipped to debate the ethical issues that science provokes. Ian Winchester was originally a physicist who (falsely) thought, after the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, that physics was intrinsically wicked and so decided to study medicine. Medicine, however, led to computing science and computing science led to philosophy, which, in turn, led to Oxford where he did his doctoral study. After Oxford he was hired at the University of Toronto to teach philosophy and to run the Canadian Social History Project. Later nominated for Dean of Education at the University of Calgary, Winchester was offered the job of turning that Faculty upside down, which he did. He has been the editor of Interchange: A Quarterly Journal of Education for the last 25 years and The Journal of Educational Thought for the last ten. He is presently back in Oxford with his wife working on reissuing The Idea of Nature by R.G. Collingwood for the Collingwood Society and the Oxford University Press.

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Teaching Natural Science in the Twenty-First Century: Opportunities and Dangers ian winchester Natural science may be both our greatest human achievement and our greatest human possession. It can be argued that the kind of thinking involved in scientific work, thinking well about the regularities of the world, is our most important kind of thought. It is exactly this kind of thinking that has enabled us to banish hunger in many parts of the earth, produce drinkable water for many, combat infectious disease that has been the scourge of our species for millions of years, and transport ourselves easily and well over the surface of our planet, to the moon, and soon beyond. Useful technology now and in the past has always presupposed good thinking about regularities. When these regularities are understood and codified as natural science, as they are in our own time, we are in a powerful technological position unimagined by previous generations. However, our experiences of the world are not just about regularities, and we must also think well about the matters that our scientific understanding leaves out or bypasses. In particular, we must also think well about the individual and the unique events or things in the world, especially those related to human reason, thought, and action. It is in this realm that our personal, political, and ethical thinking occurs. And thinking well about the unique is primarily historical thinking. While the world as thought about and described in natural science is a world of regularity, the thoughts and the doings of natural scientists themselves form not the body of science but the body of the history of science, the body of individual events, thoughts, and actions of particular human beings. And the history of science, while enormously important, is only one tiny part of the history of our species on this planet. Nevertheless, as I shall argue below, it is also a necessary discipline for thinking well about the regularities that we study in natural science. By example, it is scientific knowledge that a uranium atom of a suitable kind can be split into two parts by bombarding it with neutrons, the result being an enormous outburst of energy. It is historical knowledge that we have used such scientific knowledge to make nuclear reactors from which we derive hot water and, subsequently, electricity. It is also historical knowledge that we have used such scientific knowledge to make atom bombs that can obliterate at a whiff a large human city full

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of millions of people. It is through finding out what happened in the past and why—that is, in understanding human motivations and actions—that we provide data for our ethical thought. Humanity without science is helpless. But science untempered by historical thought is ethically unbound, and the primary data for ethical thought is historical thought embodied in the discipline of history. Today, early in the twenty-first century, we are all forced to think well about the great arc of biological discovery that has rushed upon us since Watson and Crick suggested correctly the form of the DNA molecule. The possible applications of our knowledge of plant, animal, and especially the human genome are immense, and fraught with dangers comparable to that of our knowledge of nuclear fission. An understanding of cloning, of the dedifferentiation of human adult cells, of embryonic cells, has immense positive potential for the human condition. But the ethical dilemmas that face us regarding the use of such knowledge are equally immense. We may soon be able, for example, to clone a duplicate of anyone from a single adult cell of theirs, and so produce a source for all their body parts. But what of the cloned duplicate? Is he or she a co-equal human being? Or is she or he simply a storage device to provide body parts for the original? Such dilemmas can now be multiplied a millionfold. Three Historical Scientific Periods In his influential book, The Idea of Nature, R.G. Collingwood suggests that there have been only three historical periods in which scientific activity has been a dominant activity of our species and in which the idea of “nature” was under discussion. The first period is associated with the Greeks somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago. Of particular interest are Thales, Anaxagoras, and Anaximander. These Greek physicists concerned themselves with trying to understand how the world could be in some sense a unity and yet possess the diversity it obviously does. Thales, for example, was considered a very great man by his contemporaries for suggesting that everything was, in the end, water. This strikes us as odd but in its time it was a remarkable suggestion, as water indeed can be liquid, gaseous, and solid and appears to be necessary for life—human, other animal, and plant. The second period is the post-Renaissance (late sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries) burst of activity in Europe associated with Descartes, Galileo, and, above all, Newton. During this period the Greek notion that mind was everywhere and in everything—mind being the principle underlying

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movement and change of all kinds—was abandoned. Matter of the kind treated by Galileo and Newton was conceived as lifeless, and either naturally in motion or dependent upon the movement of some other external matter already in movement. The third period has been the twentieth century with its effects continuing into the present. In this period we have extended the Newtonian picture of the world to encompass motion near the speed of light and, in so doing, have been offered an entirely new picture of gravitation by Albert Einstein. We have also gained some understanding of the very small in the realm of quantum mechanics but these two pictures, the gravitational and the quantum mechanical, have resisted a unified picture so far. There are hints of similar interests in nature in other civilizations, especially those of India and China. However, although scientific technique and its applications have now spread more or less to the entire planet in our own time, the great scientific achievements and the widespread understanding of science in these three periods are characteristic of the West. We don’t really understand much about the conditions that permitted and encouraged such deep and effective interest in the natural order of things represented by these three periods, although part of the story must surely be about the picture of nature held by us at various times. The important, but limited, scientific achievements of the Greeks were accomplished in a world in which nature was, as mentioned earlier, viewed as full of mind. The movements of the Sun, the planets, and the stars were conceived of as moving according to the innate mental capacities of these things. Thus, for the Greeks a science could only be conceived in a world which “appeared” as “rational.” A science of the regular movements of the planets was considered possible, but not a science of the so-called “violent” movements (collisions, explosions, and the like). Of course, it was exactly those motions that the seventeenth century studied with success and, in so doing, transformed our concept of nature to one in which mind, in general, played no role. The removal of mind from the study of nature was accomplished by the removal by Galileo and Newton of the so-called “secondary qualities” from consideration in the construction of their scientific characterizations of the natural world. These were qualities like how something looked from a particular perspective, how it felt, how it smelled, what color or texture it had, and the like. All of the secondary qualities had the defect from the point of view of the construction of a systematic science that they appeared different to different observers and even to a single observer at different times. Emphasis was, instead, placed on the common

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properties of things about which all observers could agree, or on properties made common by standard measurements using devices such as thermometers, standard measuring rods, or clocks. The development of the seventeenth century picture took a long time and resulted in a major change in our idea of nature. In particular, for most movements of the kind where balls roll down inclined planes or where the motions of the planets were concerned, we came to conceive of some movements as simply “natural.” That is, they were seen as movements that happened of themselves, for which no causal explanation was needed. We ceased to see mind, even God’s mind, embedded in all motion, and saw natural motion as motion requiring no explanation. It was just seen as regular brute fact. In our own day, all of the kinds of movements treated by physics are seen as uncaused movements, movements that simply follow a strict and regular pattern according to mathematical laws. It is true that in physiology and in neurobiology we are at a bit of a crossroads in this regard, for some movements must still be described as voluntary and require reference to thought or mind. And while evolutionary biology offers us processes that proceed blindly to blind results (connected with random variations and a selection process, conducted by nature so to speak, the only result of which is to maintain those individuals and species that are best able to thrive in their local conditions and survive long enough to reproduce), there are now suggestions afoot that our own species, at least, does not pass on merely genes but also “memes“ (a notion suggested by the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene). “Memes” are the products of thought that determine our essential nature and character; that like genes remain fixed throughout many generations of transmission. So in a sense mind, at least for ourselves, has been reintroduced in a central way into our scientific thinking. This is a happy thought. Our present dilemmas surrounding global warming and climate change, by all accounts due to our own excessive human activities, will in all probability require both important collective thought and new “memes.” As for the puzzle of how the seventeenth century transformation began, one appealing explanation by the English philosopher, archaeologist, historian of Roman Britain, and historian of science R.G. Collingwood in his book An Essay on Metaphysics appears to have particular merit. He suggests that the natural science of the seventeenth century developed out of religious presuppositions forged by the Christian church in the middle ages, particularly the belief in the unity and regularity of the world consistent with the Christian picture

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of creation on the one hand and the doctrine of the trinity on the other. Perhaps the Christian emphasis on logic and truth at that time also played a role. It is certainly true that nothing like the science of the seventeenth century developed anywhere else on earth before or since, although it appears that anybody can learn to engage in such activity, whatever their religious background, once the traditions of natural science have been established. The variety of origins of the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first) Nobel Prize winners attest to this, as does the fact that the Dalai Lama has encouraged all Buddhist schools to teach natural science. This is made all the more interesting because Buddhism does not have a theistic underpinning to its thought, although it probably does assume something like the unity and uniformity of the world and has always thought strict reasoning important. Nevertheless, natural science, whatever its ultimate origins and however great a human achievement, also has its dangers, especially where it permits and encourages particular predictable technical applications. While natural science may be our greatest human achievement to date, it is equally arguable that our greatest potential horrors are associated with natural science as applied to everyday human problems and tasks. To consider some obvious examples, the annual slaughter on our roads is the result of our being able to use the internal combustion engine with complete predictability to hurtle masses of organized steel at great speeds over the surface of the earth. Undoubtedly the horse and the ox cart also took an accidental toll on human life, but such accidental deaths obviously pale in comparison to what we have achieved with the internal combustion of gasoline. An unpredictable side effect of our success at burning fossil fuels to the increasing degree that we do appears to be the rapid and potentially uncontrollable warming of our planet because of the residual gases expelled in the process of our industrial activities and their subsequent technological uses. While generating useful heat, light, electricity, and locomotion, global warming demonstrates the excesses made possible by our own scientific and technological prowess. A quite predictable side effect of our understanding of nuclear processes is the widespread development not only of nuclear reactors that generate hot water and therefore electricity but also the uranium by-products that are capable of producing nuclear bombs as well as endangering plant and animal life that merely come in contact with them. And the planet now has enough nuclear bombs to exterminate all of us, and perhaps all or nearly all life on earth, many times over.

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Today we are into an era in which our understanding of biological activity and biological organization is increasing exponentially. We have, to use a biblical metaphor, successfully eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the middle of the Garden of Eden, but we are now in danger of being cast out of the Garden for the way we use that very knowledge. The processes developed to grow microorganisms that are harmful to our species can also be used to develop microorganisms as weapons against some, or perhaps all, members of our species. As in the case of nuclear knowledge, biochemical and biological knowledge can in theory be used to eliminate our species entirely. Our knowledge of the natural order of things can be for good and for evil. But our understanding of both potential good and potential evil remains in a relatively primitive state compared to our natural scientific knowledge. One of the results of the great success of natural science in the last three centuries or so, and especially of the applications we have made of it, is a counter-reaction to science and the teaching of science. This reaction began in earnest in the nineteenth century among a number of thinkers in Germany and England, Dilthey in Germany and Bradley in England being perhaps the most prominent. This movement began simply as a movement that claimed that scientific thinking and scientific knowledge were not the only kinds of thinking, and therefore not the only kinds of knowledge, possible or needed by our species. As it developed, the movement tended to develop an anti-scientific flavor, a kind of intellectual Luddism. There is even today a tendency among some neo-Marxists and feminists to engage in a similar kind of Luddism with respect to science and its subsequent technologies. Similarly, in Departments of English and in Faculties of Education in many universities there are powerful lobbies for hermeneutic thought that tends to emphasize the importance of methods other than the scientific, many of which are inspired by the German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer and his book Truth and Method, for studying and understanding human action, intention, and thought generally. One way of characterizing this movement is that it is an attempt at the replacement of the interrogation of nature by the interrogation of mankind as the dominant research activity. If such a development were actually to occur we might find ourselves losing interest in science and the technology it makes possible. And were this to happen we would just as surely die out as a species, though perhaps more slowly, than if our scientifically based technology were to get out of hand.

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Today’s Scientific Imperatives It seems, therefore, important to consider both why we teach natural science in our time and how we ought to go about doing so. It seems equally important that science, if taught, ought to be taught in such a way that those who will become scientists—those who will apply it in everyday life and equally the many who will both use its technological benefits and accept its dangers as responsible citizens—learn about it in such a way that its benefits will be emphasized and maximized and, where possible, the dangers to human and other life on our planet reduced and eliminated. In what follows I shall argue that it is crucially important to teach science in the sense of conveying what scientific thinking is actually like. And I shall also suggest that it is equally important, for control against the unfavorable uses of science, that we learn to think historically—not only about science but also about human thought and action generally. Thinking scientifically and thinking historically are, of course, not everywhere distinct, but a friendly reminder can be worthwhile. Scientific thinking is thinking well about the regularities of the world, and so learning scientific thinking is learning to think well about the regularities that we find in the natural world. Historical thinking is thinking well about the unique happenings and events in the world, especially about the events and happenings that are due to human beings. It is thinking well about our own thoughts and actions and the thoughts and actions of others. To some degree our interest in ourselves, in human beings, is significantly part of both scientific and historical thinking. For we are biological creatures composed of cells and organ systems that are in their turn composed of chemicals and activated by chemical processes. But we are also creatures of thought and action, creatures that live conscious lives in moral, social, and political contexts. And while there are sometimes regularities even in these activities, as for example our economic activities taken in a large framework, most of our doings are individual and unique. Sometimes these unique and individual activities have great consequences. Of course, insofar as we are individually scientists, we are engaged in thinking and acting uniquely, and the history of science is part of our understanding of the nature of natural science itself. So part of our historical thinking is thinking about our scientific activities and thoughts and the scientific thoughts of others. In most countries where schooling is now universal, part of that schooling is devoted to natural science. In the United States, Canada,

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Europe, Australia, the Scandinavian countries, Russia, and in Japan and Korea, this has been true since the late nineteenth century or at least since the First World War. Recently India and China have made scientific study an important part of the curriculum for those actually able to attend school. Science instruction in most of these places usually begins in the early grades and is of a very elementary fashion—the “environment” is studied or discussed, or plants are collected, or small animals are kept by a class. It is unlikely that anything very experimental is attempted in the early grades, and observation is the main means of transmitting a sense of things in the natural world. The attempt to control and interrogate nature suggested first by Francis Bacon, if it ever occurs, occurs quite late in the curriculum. It is usually held by governments, by industry, and by the public in general that teaching natural science is a good thing. This is a remarkable change. Even a hundred years ago to teach natural science in schools was a rare thing. But why, if it is a good thing, is it a good thing? It seems to me that on this point we are often confused in our aims and objectives. Television quiz shows leave the impression that what is wanted is a younger generation quick at answering factual scientific questions. For example, contestants are asked to provide the distance of Alpha Centauri from the earth, the atomic weight of mercury, the four bases to be found in a DNA molecule and the like. Or perhaps they are asked to define esoteric terminology associated with natural science, terms like quark, amygdaloidal basalt, abductor pollicis longis. . . . In a variation on the theme of predetermined answers, children might be expected to solve a wide variety of problems quickly and accurately. Thus we seem to presuppose that the main reason for teaching science is to add the ornament of lots of scientific facts to a child’s knowledge on the one hand, and to further ornament her or him with standard solutions to standard problems in the natural world on the other. Both of these aims, if aims they are, are easily lost through lack of application or fading memory. I suggested earlier that the main reason we teach natural science is to privilege a way of thinking. We teach natural science so that our children and young people will achieve broad knowledge about the regularities of the natural world in order to answer everyday questions of importance to all of us. However, our usual approaches to the teaching of science are often flawed. I think we frequently make the same mistakes in the teaching of natural science that we do in mathematics. We often teach mathematics as if the required thinking has already been

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done once and for all, and we simply have to force our children to mimic the thoughts of earlier thinkers rather than having mathematical thoughts of their own. Perhaps this is the root of the lack of interest many children seemingly show in mathematics and natural science as they experience them in school. Certainly this is how it often is with our teaching of science. Just as our mathematics is often potted mathematics, our natural science is often potted science. The challenge, simply put, is, if natural science is how to think well about the natural world, how can it be taught to foster a questioning attitude? Put another way, how can the young learn to interrogate the natural world and sustain their ability to do so, and their interest in doing so, throughout their lives? Perhaps I can best illustrate what I mean by taking an example from geometry, one of the very first successful natural sciences. Indeed, while we think of geometry as essentially mathematical today it is, in fact, the science of the “measurement of the earth” (geo [earth] metry [measurement]), and the first historical illustration of how mathematics can be used to help us think well about natural regularities. Geometry illustrates how the observational, the experimental, and the mathematically regular can be combined. As an example, the right angled triangle, a geometric mainstay, is a central notion in most of physical science. At one time we believed there was only one geometry, Euclidian geometry. For perhaps 2,500 years, geometry was not only an exemplary mathematical activity but also the first of our genuine natural sciences. It was a static science in that it described in a rigorous way our measurements and re-measurements of the surface of the earth. It was also a science that permitted us to estimate with precision such measurements as the distances of the sun and the moon from the earth, distances for which no direct measurement was possible. Unfortunately, it was taught for 2,500 years as a fixed and complete entity. So children learning it as a discipline had mainly to memorize Euclid’s compilation as the best of Greek thinking about geometry; geometry was rarely used to encourage children to think for themselves. Considering that nearly all of physical science and engineering involves knowledge of the right angled triangle in particular and of Euclidian geometry in general, such thinking is centrally important. The same is true, of course, for elementary arithmetic. Much of what we need to know in natural science involves elementary counting, and the elementary operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. And again our usual method is to teach memorization and type problems.

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Sometimes, of course, memorization and type problems are exactly what are needed. One cannot get on without some initial knowledge. But the kind of thinking characteristic of natural science involves students thinking for themselves, first about elementary things and later about more complicated things. For example, let us suppose that we wish a child to be able to do addition easily and well and have some insight into what is involved. After a child has mastered counting easily, say up to 100, addition is a simple related procedure. For example, let us suppose that we wish a child to be able to add 37 and 4. This is traditionally taught by giving rules for setting up 37 plus 4 and finding the memorized sum of the unit place numbers 7 plus 4, which is 11. Then we teach the children to carry the 1 to the tens place and add the 1 to the 3 already in the tens place, yielding a total of 41. But it is more natural and certainly closer to elementary understanding if the child merely adds 37 +1 +1 +1 +1 in the form of counting upward 37, 38, 39, 40, and 41 and, in that way, arriving at the answer. This can be done for many such sums and when children have found the answer any way they can, we can later introduce such shortcuts as the memorization of certain sums and the carrying operations. Insight, if possible, should precede efficiency. The same is true of the geometrical situation. When we first pose questions to a child in geometry we should encourage them to get the answer any way they can, rather than through set problems and set proofs. We are after insight and understanding first and efficiency of technique only later. In actual scientific work the scientist or scientists have no idea in advance what the answer they are looking for in response to their questions is. Nature does not reveal its secrets in advance in a whisper. Children ought to get used to the idea, early on, that natural science involves a research technique in which one needs to know a lot of things before one begins, but that the process of searching for an answer to any question is not simply a logical deduction from that which is already known. Suppose one wishes children to have some insight into the fact that if one base of a right angled triangle is extended then the angle formed by the extended base and the near side of the triangle is equal to the sum of the two remaining interior angles of the triangle. If a child knows that a straight line is, say 180 degrees (or two right angles), and that the interior angles of a triangle are defined as also adding up to 180 degrees, one might ask the child to find out, any way she can, given the actual interior angle, what the remaining two angles in the triangle are respectively if one is given the external angle. Certainly a recipe can be given

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for this. But children should be free to find this out on their own, using, if necessary, a protractor or reasoning or both. There is little that one needs absolutely to know. But for the many possible processes of finding out something unknown it is crucial to have opportunities to imagine freely and widely. Thus it is important that children have practice, without stress, at discovering many ways of learning something as yet unknown to them. In the same vein I would argue that, for understanding elementary physics, elementary chemistry, and elementary biology, we need to proceed in a similar fashion. Whatever questions are posed, children should be free, individually or with their friends, to try to find their own answers and to answer as best they can. They may succeed or they may fail, but they will gain insight into the procedures necessary to interrogate nature. That does not mean that certain facts or certain standard procedures should be ignored in a curriculum. But it does mean that the emphasis should be on the struggle of the interrogation of nature, not the memorization of type problems and their answers. If in the process of interrogating nature children record what they do, their plans, their hopes, their actual actions, their measurements and the like, what they have done is record the date of the history of their own thinking. And insofar as they have done so, they are in a position to reconstruct from that date the stories of their own attempts to find the answers to scientific questions either constructed by themselves or posed to them by others. In this way they should be able to gain insight both into scientific thinking itself and into the historical thinking that is closely allied to scientific thought. For, in picking up one’s laboratory or observational notes and proceeding to a next step, a student is already thinking historically. As children progress in their scientific thinking and achievement there will come times when their work begins to broach human questions of conduct, danger, and ethical concern for the rest of our species. At this point their developing expertise, both in the realm of scientific thinking (thinking well about regularities) and historical thinking (thinking well about unique events by individuals and about individual thoughts and actions), should be combined with their natural ethical interests. It is just as much a part of the necessary trappings of a scientist as of an informed citizen about science, that they think well about the ethical issues that relate our scientific understanding to our species and its possible futures. For example, let us suppose that the questions on which children in school are working relate to the physiology of a frog,

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and that the student’s scientific work is to be done using a living frog. Frogs are assumed to be conscious, living creatures, often invoking elementary humane considerations in children. But suppose that a child is working on single-celled animals instead. Similar ethical concerns might equally arise. Now it becomes clear that we usually treat singlecelled animals with much less care ethically than we treat frogs, or cats or dogs or mice. What an opportunity to discuss ethical matters with young scientists or young democratic citizens, however we wish to envision them! Their thinking will be challenged to extend beyond their present abilities to think generally and about individuals, to their thoughts, their feelings, and their fears, their pain and their sorrow, their hopes and their rights. One can, in principle, trace such considerations back to the initial historical work of the student of science. The recording of data involves ethical considerations from the beginning. Just this measurement or observation was taken or made at just this time in this place by just this person. Just this thought, and no other, was entertained by just this person, at just this time in answer to just this question. Any falsification, any deviation from the honest course—from historical truth—is part of the ethical side of learning to engage in the interrogation of nature. In this way the ethical, the historical, and the natural scientific are intrinsically connected. If the learning of natural science in our time does not have all these dimensions, dimensions necessary to build skills both for serious and responsible citizenship and for serious scientific achievement, we are likely not to prevail as a species for very long.

chapter 12

The Role of Mathematics in Education for Democracy Mathematics enables us to fly to the moon, track our genetic codes, create beautiful music, design our cars, build our houses, and contact others around the world almost instantaneously. However, mathematics, that abstract language which helps us to access the relationships in our physical universe(s), is rarely invoked in the service of preparing young people for democratic participation. Deborah Ball and Hyman Bass take on the challenge of situating the highly revered, somewhat mystical discipline of mathematics as a key contributor to concepts of democracy. Ball and Bass address one of the enduring concerns in schooling— how to relate meaningful classroom experiences to greater public purposes, specifically in mathematics classrooms. They hint at how analytical tools can be used to critique public policies and social problems and reveal how the historical development of mathematical thought can contribute to cultural and intercultural understanding. However, their key insight is that mathematics instruction can embrace, uphold, and promote the norms, skills, and dispositions of democracy. Using a classroom discussion as example, they imagine how young people might develop competence (and joy) in problem solving, democratic dialogue, and consensus building. They conclude, optimistically, that teaching and teachers can change the ways we perceive and use the resources mathematics offers to enrich our democratic reasoning. Deborah Loewenberg Ball is Dean of the School of Education and the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of mathematics education and teacher education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Drawing directly and indirectly on her experience as a classroom teacher, Ball’s work focuses on studies of instruction and of the processes of learning to teach, efforts to improve teaching through policy, reform initiatives, and teacher education. Hyman Bass is the Roger Lyndon Collegiate Professor of mathematics and mathematics education at the University of Michigan. His mathematical research publications cover broad areas of algebra, with connections to geometry, topology, and number theory. Bass is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work in education focuses on the nature, measurement, and instruction of the mathematical knowledge needed for teaching mathematics. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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The Role of Mathematics in Education for Democracy1 deborah loewenberg ball and hyman bass In this chapter, we argue that mathematics—and mathematics instruction—has a special role to play in education for democracy. This is an argument apart from, although not at odds with, the importance of mathematical literacy for all students. It is different from but compatible with the urgent need to redress serious inequities and disparities in both opportunity and achievement. It is abundantly clear that efforts are needed to improve every student’s access to and development of usable mathematical literacy, including the skills for everyday life, preparation for the increasing mathematical demands of even relatively nontechnical workplaces, and resources for continued mathematical study. Indeed, the need for collective commitment to this goal has never been greater.2 In addition, however, we claim that mathematics has a special role to play in educating young people for participation in a pluralistic democratic society. Making it possible for mathematics to play this role in a democratic education depends on how it is taught. Needed is instruction that uses the special resources that mathematics itself holds for reaching these broader societal aims. One way in which mathematics teaching can help to build the resources for a pluralistic society is through the development of tools for analysis and social change.3 Mathematics offers tools to examine and analyze critically the deep economic, political, and social inequalities in our society, for studying crucial societal problems, and for considering a host of issues that can be understood and critiqued using quantitative tools. For example, who voted in the last election and why? How does the Electoral College shape whose votes count most in a presidential election? How do our income and inheritance tax laws shape the distribution of wealth and access to fundamental resources? How does our system of school funding shape the quality of education that different children in our country receive? Developing and using the mathematical skills that enable young people to engage in social analysis and improvement is one way in which mathematics can contribute to the development of a diverse democracy. A second way in which mathematics teaching can play a role in education for democracy is as a setting for developing cultural knowledge and appreciation, important resources for constructive

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participation in a diverse society. Mathematics represents an ancient and remarkable set of cultural achievements and engagements. As such, the historical development of mathematical ideas and methods offers a medium for studying history and culture and their intersections in domains of human activity as diverse as architecture, art, music, science, and religion. Mathematics, because of its universality, offers opportunities for young people to learn about their own cultural heritage and that of others. For example, what systems of counting and recording were developed and used by different peoples? How does sophisticated mathematics manifest itself in the craft of artisans? Such learning is crucial for developing the understanding and appreciation of diverse traditions, values, and contributions, and for ways to notice, respond to, and use them. Such learning is also crucial for developing a sense of one’s own cultural identity and membership, both for oneself and as a participant in the broader cultural milieu. But a third way that mathematics teaching can support the development of democratic goals—the one on which we focus here—is through the skills and norms of mathematical practice itself. In other words, we argue that it is not just the content and history of mathematics and its tools that contributes to democratic goals, but the very nature of mathematical work. Mathematics instruction, we claim, can offer a special kind of shared experience, a facility with productive collective work that is so essential to the realization of democratic ideals. How so? Consider that mathematics is centrally about problem solving, and about discovering and proving what is true. As a discipline, mathematics offers powerful tools for abstracting and generalizing from particularities, hence offering a special experience in collective action out of diverse experience. Mathematics offers a singular context where everyone is working in a new space and where diversity is not an obstacle but a resource. Reasoning about the parity of numbers does not depend on resources that advantage the more privileged. Producing a number line representation or explaining the equation for a circle takes place in a universal mathematical context, not a context that advantages some and excludes others. Still, diverse perspectives are crucial for leveraging work: Alternative interpretations and representations of a problem can often serve to open a path to its solution; sometimes a novel metaphor, diagram, or context can crack a difficult part of a problem. At the same time, diversity is structured and supported by common disciplinary language, norms, and practices. The rules for operating in that context can be made transparent and explicit, usable by all. Terms must be precisely defined and used in commonly understood

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ways. Disagreements are resolved not by shouting or by plurality, but by reasoned arguments calling on skills that can be taught and learned. Decisions such as whether 0 is even or odd, how to interpret the meaning of 3/4, whether 5/5 is greater or less than 4/4, or whether a solution to a particular problem is valid are subject to mathematical reasoning, not governed by simple desire or power. Thus mathematics is a context in which conflict is both common and rationally resolved, with allegiance only to the ideas. Moreover, mathematical reasoning is a powerful practice that can be learned; it is not an innate talent. How Can Mathematics Contribute to Education for Democracy? A Visit to a Classroom To make our argument concrete, we turn now to an example from an elementary classroom.4 This is a third grade class in which norms of mathematical reasoning and respect for others’ ideas have been cultivated. In addition, these eight- and nine-year-old pupils have been taught specific mathematical and relational skills needed for the work in which we see them engaged. The problem on which they are working is to figure out how many crayons are in three-quarters of a box of a dozen crayons. From a mathematical perspective, this question is designed to focus the students’ attention on the unit (in this case, one dozen crayons) and on the meaning of the quantity three-fourths. Learning fractions is one of the more challenging topics of the elementary curriculum, and one that is crucial for pupils’ later success in algebra. Students must make a major shift from the domain of whole numbers where the unit is clear (52 means fifty-two of something) to fractions, which are inherently multiplicative and where the unit must be established. This is a major shift for students, and learning fractions often presents significant challenges. For students to figure out how many crayons are in three-quarters of a box of a dozen crayons demands that they reason about three-fourths of twelve. The children are discussing the size of the groups when 12 is divided into fourths. The teacher calls on Sean,5 who begins the discussion by showing how he got four as the answer. Midway through his explanation, however, he “revises” what he is saying and instead shows how he arrived at three as the answer. Other students agree and several observe that the “bottom number” signifies “how many groups you have to make.” In other words, three-fourths means to divide the unit (in this case, 12) into four equal parts. At this point in the discussion, a girl named Riba asks, “Shouldn’t one fourth have four in it?” (i.e., rather

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than three). Rather than reply to her query, the teacher tells the class that this is a good question and asks them what they think about this. Sean volunteers to explain and draws lines on the board:

1 3

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Pointing at his diagram, he says, “This is one group of four. There’d be—there’s only three groups, so one of those groups makes it, uh—a third—and then these groups each are four. There’s four groups, and—

1 4

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one of these groups would be a fourth.” The teacher asks Riba if she is following Sean’s explanation. He makes a second try. This time he draws a rectangle and divides it into four equal parts and shades in one part. “This would be a fourth.” Then he draws a second, similar, rectangle, and divides it into three equal parts. “One of these would be a third.” Riba and the other children are watching. After a few moments Riba says, “I still disagree because this one fourth, I’m just—I’m not—well, I’m not sure that I really disagree. I’m saying, um, if you call it one fourth, could you—be four in a group?” The teacher directs Riba to Sean’s explanation, and asks her to restate what he is saying. Riba: Teacher: Teacher: Riba: Teacher: Riba: Teacher: Keith: Teacher: Keith:

He’s saying one fourth is—um, four groups. If you cut something into four groups and one of them is one fourth. And he showed you two different pictures of fourths. Can you find the two pictures? Where’s one? Okay. Where are the fourths? Right here. There’s one. Where’s his other picture of fourths? Right there. Okay. And both times he cut something into four parts and called one of them one-fourth. What about other people in the class? Keith? Um, I, I think Riba disagrees because she think like—she thinks one—the reason why she thinks one-fourth should have four, um, crayons in it because—because of the four in the um—um— In the bottom number? Yeah.

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When she look—when Riba looks at the four, she thinks . . . thinks this is telling her how many to put in a group. And Sean is thinking it means how many groups to make. Now let’s think about this for a minute.

In the next few minutes, the teacher gets the students to consider a familiar fraction—one-half—and to use their familiarity with it to leverage a more general sense of the meaning of three-fourths. Riba announces that she wants to explain what she is thinking. “Three fourths is like three groups of four.” Another student, Ofala, nods. At this point, Sean raises his hand, and asks, “Can we vote?” This is a critical moment in the discussion. Up to this point, the students have been focusing on the ideas. What does the 4 in 3/4 mean? How are one-third and one-fourth different? Using mathematical tools—drawings, language, argument—these young learners are working to arrive at common understanding. Mathematics rests on shared definitions, meanings, and ways of establishing conclusions. In this way, mathematics differs from arenas of human activity where individuals are free—even encouraged—to develop their own ideas, interpretations, and ways of working. The importance of the collective in mathematics is a special educational resource. This confusing problem they are debating is one on which they must agree. They must move from their different perspectives to a common one, and they must do so using the rules and tools of mathematical practice rather than personal or idiosyncratic ones whose effectiveness would depend on power or personal persuasion. Mathematics both requires and depends on common ideas and practices; it does not submit to individual domination or privilege. Sean, our third-grade protagonist, does recognize this need for common meanings in mathematics. His suggestion that the class vote shows just how clearly he appreciates this. What he has yet to learn, however, is the proper means for establishing general agreement. The teacher asks Sean to explain how voting would help to resolve the disagreement about the different interpretations of one-fourth. “Well, I just wanted to see how many people . . . will think that my answer is correct, raise their hand, and how many people think Riba’s answer is correct, raise their hand.” The teacher probes further: “What would that do if we saw that?” Sean explains: A majority vote would prove which answer is wrong. Sean’s proposal about voting surprises his classmates, several of whom are shaking their heads vigorously. The teacher asks Keith to explain what he is thinking, and he says, firmly, “Just because, like—just

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because somebody agrees more with one person, doesn’t mean that they’re right.” Many other students have their hands up. Teacher: Tembe: Teacher:

Other people want to comment on that—about voting and deciding what’s right? Tembe, what do you think? I agree with Keith because if we voted, maybe the, the answer might be wrong, and the people who didn’t vote—less people who voted—might be right. Hmm. Daniel?

Daniel, a student who is just learning English, is emphatic: “Yeah, I agree because—um—like—when some people say what’s one plus one, and one person might say two and most of the persons might say three, and . . . [so] I—I agree with Keith.” The teacher asks whether anyone thinks that voting would settle the question of which answer was correct. Hearing a chorus of “no” she presses: “Then if voting doesn’t help, then how can you tell if something’s right?” she asks the class. Tori: Teacher: Sheena:

Figure it out. Sheena, how can we tell something’s right, if voting doesn’t work? Well, all you have to do is try and figure it out yourself, and if you think you got the right answer, then maybe you should, um, discuss it with somebody, and maybe they might be able to change your mind if the answer’s wrong.

Mathematics as a Context for Learning to Reconcile Differences In this episode, the children confront a fundamental disagreement within the content and have an opportunity to learn how such a disagreement can be resolved. Because mathematics has agreed-upon practices for reaching consensus, in particular for certifying knowledge, mathematics instruction can deliberately help young people learn the value of others’ perspectives and ideas, as well as how to engage in and reconcile disagreements. Mathematics instruction can be designed to help students learn that differences can be valuable in joint work, and that diversity in experience, language, and culture can enrich and strengthen collective capacity and effectiveness. Students can also learn that mathematics is not an arena in which differences are resolved by voting. There are legitimate areas of social life in which differences are managed in this way, but the study of mathematics is not among them. In a democratic society, how disagreements are reconciled is crucial. But mathematics offers one set of experiences and norms for doing so, and other academic studies and experiences provide others. In literature, differences of interpretation need not be reconciled. In mathematics,

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consensus matters. In this way, mathematics contributes to young people’s capacity for participation in a diverse society in which conflicts are not only an inescapable part of life, but their resolution, in disciplined ways, is a major source of growing new knowledge and practice. The Role of Instruction in Using Mathematics for Democratic Education Our readers may be skeptical. Thinking back to their own days with school mathematics, readers may remember experiences in which the book or the teacher carried the authority for knowledge, and students simply accepted ideas proffered by those regarded as “smart.” The democratically rich technology of mathematics—the practices and tools of mathematical reasoning—remained mostly invisible and untaught except for some often ritualized processes practiced in high school geometry. Mathematical reasoning comprises a set of practices and norms that are collective, not merely individual or idiosyncratic, and rooted in the discipline. Making mathematics reasonable entails making it subject to, and the result of, such reasoning. That an idea makes sense to you is not the same as reasoning toward knowledge that is common, shared by others. Our argument in this chapter is based on a mathematical perspective on classroom learning. Much has been written about constructivist theories of learning and their implications for instruction. Indeed, “constructivism” has been one of the most dominant—and most multiply interpreted—theories in mathematics education. Our research analyzes classroom mathematics learning and teaching in light of ideas about the construction of knowledge that are rooted in mathematics as a discipline. When students are at work in a mathematics class, we see them as constructing mathematical knowledge.6 Looking at the development of students’ knowledge in this way highlights the fundamentally mathematical nature of their work.7 As students explore problems, make and inspect claims, and seek to prove their validity, we see that even young children engage in substantial forms of mathematical reasoning and make use of mathematical resources. In addition, our conception of teaching is founded on three specific guiding principles: (1) the integrity of the discipline; (2) the centrality of taking student thinking seriously; and (3) the classroom collective as an intellectual community.8 First is the principle of drawing from mathematics as a discipline in intellectually sound and honest ways.9 Second is that teaching demands a sensitivity to and responsiveness to students’

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ideas, interests, lives, and trajectories. Teachers must strive to hear their students, to work with them as they investigate and interpret their worlds. Respecting students means attending to who they are, and what they bring, as well as helping them grow beyond their present capabilities, interests, and aspirations. Finally, the teaching in which we are interested aims to create a classroom community in which differences are valued, in which students learn to care about and respect one another, in which intellectual consensus is negotiated using mathematical norms, and in which commitments to a just, democratic, and rational society are embodied and learned.10 Care and respect for others includes listening, hearing, and being able to represent others’ ideas, even those with which you disagree. Respect also means taking others’ ideas seriously, appraising them critically and evaluating their validity. In this essay, as we consider the role of mathematics in education for democracy, we consider mathematical reasoning as being about producing more than individual conviction: it is about how mathematical knowledge comes to be public and usable by the collective. So then, specifically, how might instruction be designed to serve both mathematical and democratic ends? Three components are involved. One component lies in what students are asked to work on, a second in how the work is conducted, and a third with the teacher as a model of the collective attitude and reasoned practice of mathematics as a discipline. Consider first what students work on: the mathematical tasks designed or selected. Tasks that serve to develop common skills, language, and practices offer ways that can help to build the common skills needed for class work on mathematics. Also useful are tasks that yield to alternative representations or approaches, so that students’ understanding of the material is deepened through the different ways in which their classmates see the ideas. Although it is valuable to use mathematical tasks that profit from others’ interpretations, such tasks should not, however, depend unfairly on unevenly distributed cultural experience or knowledge. Take, for example, two different tasks, each designed to help students develop an understanding of fractions as numbers. The first task asks students to compare the numbers 4/4 and 4/8; the second asks, “Mr. Good offers you 4/4 of one pizza or 4/8 of a second one. Which would you rather have?” In the first case, students can use many different methods to resolve the question—diagrams, the number line, pictures. In the second, students may bring views about actual pizza, or their own preferences or norms about sharing, that will bring out other extra-mathematical considerations. Discussion of the “correct” answer

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to the second problem would be uneven because reasons other than mathematical ones are clearly legitimate. For example, it is acceptable for students to argue that their decision about which pizza to select would depend on what kind each one is (cheese, pepperoni, etc.). It is acceptable to answer that they do not like to be selfish and so would choose 4/8 of a pizza; it is also possible to choose on the basis of whether or not one likes pizza. None of these is subject to the explicit structures of mathematical reasoning that provide the opportunity for civilized resolution of disagreement. Teaching matters, too. How mathematical tasks are used is crucial for whether or not their potential is realized in classrooms. If not carefully structured and guided, cognitively complex tasks can degrade to simple routine problems, and problems ripe with opportunity for reasoning and representation can become procedural.11 Similar vigilance is needed in order for tasks to serve as contexts for the development of democratic skills and dispositions. Such vigilance is centered on cultivating attention to and respect for others’ mathematical ideas. Students would need to develop a consistent stance of civility with one another, a stance based on intellectual interest and respect, not mere social politeness or “niceness.” This would require learning to listen carefully to others’ ideas, and checking for understanding before disagreeing. Other skills, norms, and practices of collective mathematical work include giving credit to others’ ideas—referring to ideas by their authors’ names, for example—and critiquing ideas, not people, using the tools and practices of the discipline. Students would work to seek agreement on meanings and solutions, drawing on past shared experiences, definitions, ideas, and agreements about meaning, and they would use and contribute to one another’s ideas in a collective effort to solve and understand the mathematics and the problems on which they are working. Important to our argument is that the skills and practices that are central to mathematical work are ones that can contribute to the cultivation of skills, habits, and dispositions for participation in a diverse democracy. This requires doing mathematics in public, where practice in democratic discourse is possible. Making mathematical ideas public in useful ways entails moving individuals’ ideas into the collective space. When individual students offer ideas or solutions, these can often become no more than a collection of bilateral exchanges between one student and the teacher. We mean something different. For students to take note of and use one another’s ideas requires deliberate effort. First, students’ contributions must be comprehensible to their peers. This requires that students

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speak loudly enough to be heard and that students learn to listen closely to others’ talk. Teachers may simply direct students to “speak up” and tell others to listen closely. But teachers may also have to assist students to articulate their ideas in ways that are both audible and understandable. They may have to ask individual students to repeat what they have said, or ask them questions about what they are saying. They may need to do this to help make what individual students are saying more explicit, so their contributions do not remain private, vague, halfdeveloped, and weakly articulated statements to which others cannot usefully respond. Making ideas public entails helping make them accessible for others’ consideration. Once ideas are more clearly expressed, teachers can ask students to respond directly to another student’s point, may ask students to explain what a classmate has said, or may ask them whether they can articulate how a classmate reached a conclusion. As students’ ideas become regular sources of the class’s work, students will both speak more clearly and ask one another to speak more audibly. Teachers also play an important role in modeling the use of others’ ideas and of public mathematical knowledge, of using language carefully. Teachers can make references to “Lucy’s method” or remark on uses of established ideas: “How is this related to Sean’s conjecture?” They can expect connections to public knowledge by asking questions like “Are you using the definition that we agreed on for even numbers?” or “How does what we figured out about multiplying by 10 or 100 or 1,000 help with this problem?” For mathematics instruction to contribute to the building of a socially just and diverse democracy, more than care with curriculum and teaching is required—more even than committed teachers, however sensitive to and skillful in working toward these aims they may be. Accomplishing this end would require significant change in teachers’ education and professional development—no small task. Responsible for helping prepare young people for life in society, teachers must be comfortable with the discipline of mathematical practice. The instruction they provide must be able to take advantage of its fundamentally democratic toolkit for using and mediating differences of view. On the one hand, these differences are crucial to solving problems, as people with different perspectives or ideas bring various resources to the task. For this to work in school, teachers must be skillful at teaching students to be respectful of and interested in others’ perspectives, and show them how to use those perspectives in the service of collective problem solving. In the episode above, Sheena was aware that “conferring” with other people could help her solve problems. And the teacher was

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guiding the students to consider Riba’s question in order to get clearer about the meaning of the 3 and the 4 in 3/4. On the other hand, since consensus matters, the tools of mathematical practice—for instance, defining, representing, comparing, and reconciling—provide structure for resolving discrepancies. Teachers oriented to this task can use mathematics to teach norms of civilized and respectful disagreement, regulated by mathematical principles rather than personal will. In this third grade class, the teacher helped students understand that voting was not a vehicle for deciding how to interpret 3/4. Instead, the number 3/4 has a meaning derived from shared knowledge and language and norms about precision and interpretation. Common ground in mathematics is reached not by plurality but by building on prior established knowledge, careful use of language, and disciplinary practices of reasoning. What Does Mathematical Practice Offer Education for Democracy? Our argument is this: Mathematics, with its commitment to common ground and its welcoming of diverse and imaginative perspectives, together with its extensive set of tools for establishing consensus, can help to develop the skills and dispositions and values crucial to the development of a diverse democracy. Using mathematics education to advance democratic capacities would expand the educational resources that formal schooling can deploy. More experiences with efforts to solve complex problems, for which diverse perspectives and ideas were crucial, could provide graduates of our schools with systematic training in listening closely to others’ contributions and studying others’ diagrams or models. More opportunities to resolve disagreements using the tools of mathematical argument could develop the capacity for reasoned debate and an appreciation of its value. On one hand, of course, many crucial social issues depend on quantitative reasoning and evidence. Rational, respectful argument is more possible when the capacity for quantitative claims and the norms for the inspection of the reasonableness of such claims are shared. On the other hand—and this is our central argument—the experience of disciplined argument not based on personal privilege, power, or majority rule can help build the skills needed for managing disagreement in fair and disciplined ways. Experience with the value of diverse perspectives and the habit of attending to, critiquing, and learning from others’ ideas is also a crucial resource for life in a diverse democracy. Mathematics is special in the opportunities it can provide for young people to develop the orientations, values, and skills necessary for democracy. Adults who

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had experienced these sorts of mathematics learning might be better prepared for community deliberations and decision making, better oriented to respectful attention to others’ ideas, and more open to the power of disciplined argument. Realizing the potential of mathematics to achieve these educational ends depends on instructional practices that draw on the practice of mathematics itself and that deliberately develop the skills and environment for such work by children in school. Making mathematics a resource for democracy will require learning. These practices are not natural in our society or our schools. They are not ones that teachers or their students can do simply because it is suggested that they do so. If students are to experience mathematics through disciplined practices of reasoning, then teachers must have opportunities to develop the knowledge and practice necessary to make mathematics reasonable in school and to make it a force and a resource in educating young people for participation in a democratic society. NOTES 1. This paper draws on an earlier related paper: D. L. Ball, I. M. Goffney, and H. Bass, “The Role of Mathematics Instruction in Building a Socially Just and Diverse Democracy,” The Mathematics Educator 15, no. 1 (2005): 2–6. 2. C. E. Malloy, “Democratic Access to Mathematics through Democratic Education,” in Handbook of International Research in Mathematics Education, ed. L. D. English (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 17–25; R. Moses and C. Cobb Jr., Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). 3. R. Gutiérrez, “(Re)Defining Equity: The Importance of a Critical Perspective,” in Diversity, Equity, and Access to Mathematical Ideas, ed. P. Cobb and N. Nasir (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007), 37–59; E. Gutstein, “ ‘And That’s Just How It Starts’: Teaching Mathematics and Developing Student Agency,” Teachers College Record 109 (2007): 420–48; V. Walkerdine, The Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality (London: Routledge, 1988). 4. This episode is drawn from data collected over an entire school year in a third grade class during 1989–90 under a National Science Foundation grant to the first author and Magdalene Lampert. Daily records were made of Ball’s third grade (and Lampert’s fifth grade) mathematics classes, including videotapes and audiotapes of lessons, photocopies of students’ work, teacher’s journals and plans, tests, quizzes, and homework, and the mathematics problems and tasks on which the students worked. 5. All names are pseudonyms, standardized across published analyses of these data, and selected to be culturally similar to the children’s real names. For example, Riba was from Egypt, and her pseudonym was selected from among similar Egyptian girls’ names. 6. Magdalene Lampert has written about similar resonances between the practices of knowing mathematics in school and in the discipline: See M. Lampert, “When the Problem is Not the Question and the Answer is Not the Solution,” American Educational Research Journal 27 (1990): 29–63; M. Lampert, “Practice and Problems in Teaching Authentic Mathematics,” in Effective and Responsible Teaching: The New Synthesis, ed. F. Oser, D. Andreas, and J. Patry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), 295–314.

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7. D. L. Ball, J. Lewis, and M. Thames, “Making Mathematics Work,” A Study of Teaching: Multiple Lenses, Multiple Views, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education (Monograph Series No. 18), ed. A. Schoenfeld (Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2008). D.L. Ball and H. Bass, “Making Mathematics Reasonable in School.” In Research Compendium for the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, ed. G. Martin (Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2003), 3–14. 8. D. L. Ball and H. Bass, “Making Believe: The Collective Construction of Public Mathematical Knowledge in the Elementary Classroom,” in Constructivism in Education: Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, ed. D. C. Phillips (Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education, 2000), 193–224. 9. D. L. Ball, “With an Eye on the Mathematical Horizon: Dilemmas of Teaching Elementary School Mathematics,” Elementary School Journal 9, no. 4 (1993): 373–97; D. L. Ball and H. Bass, “Interweaving Content and Pedagogy in Teaching and Learning to Teach: Knowing and Using Mathematics,” in Multiple Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics, ed. J. Boaler (Westport, CT: Ablex, 2000), 83–104; D. L. Ball and H. Bass, “Making Believe,” 193–224; J. Bruner, The Process of Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); M. Lampert, “When the Problem Is Not the Question and the Answer Is Not the Solution,” 295–314; M. Lampert, “Practice and Problems in Teaching Authentic Mathematics,” 295–314; M. Lampert, Teaching Problems (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 10. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916); J. J. Schwab, “Education and the State: Learning Community,” in Great Ideas Today (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1976), 234–71. 11. M. K. Stein, B. Grover, and M. Henningsen, “Building Student Capacity for Mathematical Thinking and Reasoning: An Analysis of Mathematical Tasks Used in Reform Classrooms,” American Educational Research Journal 33 (1996): 455–88.

chapter 13

Spirituality and Religion in Public Schooling Given human fallibility and mortality, it is striking how Western society generally deals with issues of spirituality and religion: The Scarf Affair described in Chapter Seven exemplifies the efforts of Western democracies to confine such matters to the private realm. Such a strategy, Nel Noddings writes, “reduces contention (and interest) in the classroom and protects schools from . . . complaints. . . . However, it also protects ignorance.” Education for a truly flourishing human life, she argues, must directly confront questions of meaning and worth, not deny them. Noddings herself begins by exploring questions of language, especially “spirituality” and “religion” and the relationship between them. Indeed, she contends that it is possible to discuss spiritual experience without promoting or undermining religion. She also argues that religion can be taught in schools without proselytizing; she maintains, for example, that a high school course on world religions may advance religious tolerance (or at least reduce ignorance) and points out that, contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. Constitution does not forbid religious discussion, but instead aims at protecting freedom of religion. Noddings believes that education in spirituality and religion can help students “see the possibility of a full human life. . . . This means building, not destroying, real hope.” Nel Noddings is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education Emerita at Stanford University. She is a past president of the National Academy of Education, the Philosophy of Education Society, and the John Dewey Society. In addition to sixteen books—among them Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Women and Evil, The Challenge to Care in Schools, Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief, and Philosophy of Education—she is the author of more than 200 articles and chapters on various topics ranging from the ethics of care to mathematical problem solving. Her latest books are Happiness and Education, Educating Citizens for Global Awareness, Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach, and most recently When School Reform Goes Wrong.

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Spirituality and Religion in Public Schooling nel noddings In the United States today, we hear a lot from two opposing positions on religion: Christian fundamentalism and outspoken atheism. The first would like to restore God to our classrooms. The second deplores “the failure of our schools to announce the death of God in a way that each generation can understand.”1 In addition to these extreme positions, there are religious moderates and others who claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” What, if anything, can public schools do to help students understand and evaluate these views? It is important for young people to gain some appreciation for the range of religious and spiritual experience in their own society and in the larger world. Not only should they learn tolerance for others’ beliefs, but also, in a democratic society, they should be equipped to use critical thinking on matters of religion. One aim of critical religious education is to reduce both physical and psychological violence in the world. Another is to encourage the development of critical thinking as part of self-understanding. And still another is to open minds to the intellectual and emotional possibilities in religion and spirituality.

Spiritual But Not Religious Spiritual has several meanings. One meaning is virtually synonymous with religious. Another refers to experiences involving God but without a connection to institutional religion. Philosophical theists, for example, might use the word spiritual to describe their outlook on the universe. Deists and even secular humanists, with no mention at all of God, might also use the word, or they might prefer numinous or mysterious. Many of us use the word to describe a powerful affective response to everyday happenings or cognitive activity. Perhaps it is easiest to start with the last—what might be called everyday spirituality. A feeling response to certain features of everyday life can contribute significantly to spiritual life and happiness. Many writers have described the rising of spirit felt on watching a beautiful sunrise and the thrill of excitement induced by a stormy, restless ocean.2 That feeling—that soaring of spirit—may occur as we notice a particular pattern of light or as we uncover seedlings in the spring garden. It

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may sweep over us as we listen to a Beethoven piano concerto, as we read a poem, as we hold a newborn infant, or as we look at a star-filled sky. The feeling is aptly captured by Martin Gardner, a philosophical theist: The sense of the numinous is compounded by feelings expressed by such words as awe, terror, dread, mystery, fascination, astonishment, wonder. If one is a theist, the emotion combines with strong feelings of humility, of the littleness of one’s self, of holiness, of gratitude for the privilege of existing.3

Gardner believes “that the degree to which a person feels such emotions is roughly proportional to the strength of that person’s faith in God.”4 This is highly questionable. For example, Sam Harris, confessed atheist, writes: Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. . . . No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation.5

Many atheists are wary of the rapture induced by religious beauty, but they do not deny it. Indeed, they may share it without succumbing to belief. Daniel Dennett writes of the “cornucopia of beauty” supplied by religious traditions. He writes: You don’t have to be a believer to be entranced by Buddhist, Hindu, and Shinto temples of surreal intricacy and sublime proportion. Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion and Handel’s Messiah and those miniature marvels the Christmas carols are among the most rapturous love songs ever composed . . .6

But Dennett, recognizing the spiritual rapture in these experiences, still wants to press logical questions about belief. Since he—despite rejecting religious belief—shares in the spiritual ecstasy, those feelings cannot in themselves justify belief. E. O. Wilson, biologist and secular humanist, directs his remarks on religion to a Baptist pastor: For you, the glory of an unseen divinity; for me, the glory of the universe revealed at last. For you, belief in God made flesh to save mankind; for me, the belief in Promethean fire seized to set men free. You have found your final truth; I am still searching.7

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It is this searching for enlightenment and transcendent truth that many associate with the expression “spiritual but not religious.” In his study of American teenagers’ religious beliefs and experiences, Christian Smith found only a few teenagers who qualified as seekers. Most of them had never heard the expression “spiritual but not religious.”8 Moreover, the vast majority of teenagers knew very little about religion—even their own. For many, the interviews with Smith and his assistants were the first time any adult had talked with them (without preaching) about religion. Such ignorance should dismay educators. How can we claim to educate when our students remain ignorant about matters central to human life? It should be possible to discuss spiritual experience in schools without promoting or undermining religion. What kinds of encounter produce the soaring feelings associated with spirituality? How do these feelings differ from pleasure, although they may be pleasurable? Reading and discussion may suggest a major difference. Pleasure is confined to the moment, whereas occasions of spiritual feeling seem somehow to go beyond the moment, beyond ourselves. They may connect us with what is felt to be a great mystery. They are marked by wonder. For example, our favorite pieces of music may consistently give us sensory delight; that is why we listen to them. But now and then the music sweeps over us in a fashion that carries us beyond our present time and place. Past and present blend together. Powerful memories of events, together with their sensory accompaniments—fragrances, sounds, sights—are evoked. We may feel connected to a realm beyond ourselves. We are transported out of ourselves. This sort of experience goes far beyond sensory delight and may rightly be called spiritual. Many people are open to spiritual experience, and some actively seek it. Some use religious rituals or prayer to achieve a form of spiritual ecstasy. Some use drugs. Some adopt Eastern rituals of special physical postures and meditation. Many use fasting or other forms of physical deprivation. For most seekers, solitude is necessary. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, for example, warned women that their spirits might go dry if they continued to throw themselves “indiscriminately into committees and causes. Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distractions.”9 Lindbergh advised us to claim intervals of solitude in which sensory delight and perhaps spiritual experience might arise. But she also recognized that these moments are temporary, fleeting, and they should be treasured for their very evanescence. We must let the moments come, not try to force them. She wrote, “It is fear that makes

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one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next.”10 Some seekers recommend longer periods of silence and ritual. Kathleen Norris has described the feelings of spiritual renewal she experiences in prolonged visits to a Benedictine monastery. Not a Catholic, she is nevertheless welcomed there and finds spiritual comfort and inspiration in the monastery’s quiet, its ritual, music, and the poetry of prayer. The renewal supports her life in North Dakota where the place itself also contributes to her spiritual life. “I must live here,” she writes, “because of the quiet,”11 and she continues, “it is the sunrises and sunsets here that ground me in the present.”12 One might be entirely detached from institutional religion and yet experience something like spiritual ecstasy in nature or in the daily events of ordinary life. We have already noted the attitude of Sam Harris, an atheist, toward an awe-inspiring universe filled with mystery. Others experience a sense of transcendence through religious rituals, human love, and the inter-species love we share with pets.13 High school students can profit from hearing such accounts, and we can share these accounts in schools without either promoting or denigrating religion. Transcendent experience can be discussed in the study of literature and poetry, in music, and in art. It can also be recognized in mathematics through an appreciation of mathematical beauty and in science by introducing spiritually sensitive comments from great scientists. The possibilities are enormous, but to make them real, teachers must escape the current emphasis on stuffing students with facts and open their eyes to the wonders of both natural and intellectual life. The work of William James can help us understand the variety of ways in which people approach the spiritual. It should be made clear that unbelievers can be deeply moved spiritually. But so can the religious, and for some the beauty of religious buildings, words, and rituals provide a richness that stimulates spirituality. James acknowledges the aesthetic value of religious texts, sermons, words: It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ or old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. . . . Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others richness is the supreme imaginative requirement.14

Religion As James pointed out, there is a difference between religious experience (which is what he studied) and religious content. It may be

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difficult to read about and discuss spiritual or religious experience in our schools, but it can be done. However, the study of religious content presents major difficulties, especially if we insist that its study be critical, that it should demand logical examination and reflective thinking. Some secondary schools in the United States already offer courses in world religions, and a few provide courses in biblical literature. These courses rarely demand critical thinking, however. Indeed, it might be argued that they are offered on the understanding that critical thinking will not be encouraged. The Bible Literacy Project, for example, has produced an aesthetically pleasing volume purporting to present the Bible as literature. In its preface, it informs readers: “Your knowledge of the Bible can be a key to unlocking other subjects for you—especially literature, art, music, and the social sciences.”15 This is an important point, one with which Richard Dawkins, an atheist, agrees. He deplores the biblical ignorance of Americans and reminds us “that an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, out of our education.”16 We may agree with the Bible Literacy Project and Dawkins on the importance of the Bible as literature, but there is something worrisome here. If we examine The Bible and Its Influence carefully, we see that most of the stories involving the Old Testament God at his worst are omitted. The books of Leviticus and Numbers are given scant attention, and students would be hard put to say why Dawkins refers to the Old Testament God as arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.17

I am certainly not suggesting that a course on Bible literacy portray God as Dawkins describes him, but a good course should enable students to find the stories and passages that Dawkins must have used to compose his devastating description. It is reasonable to choose only a few such passages for criticism, but to omit them entirely raises a question as to whether the Bible literacy thus offered is not in fact a promotion of religion. The Old Testament accounts are marvels of storytelling, but students should hear that many biblical scholars have found them lacking in historical accuracy. Others, while recognizing that there has been much fictional embellishment, offer evidence that many of the stories have some basis in history. James Kugel, for example, admits that there

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is no archaeological evidence for the exodus, but he finds etymological evidence that something like the exodus (on a much smaller scale) has roots in historical reality.18 Respectful discussion of the historicity of religious stories would also have the beneficial effect of helping students to understand the power of myths. Too often, teenagers (and adults too) suppose that myths are mere falsehoods, whereas myths actually are enormously powerful stories that can be interpreted and re-interpreted for the benefit of (or harm to) people over a lengthy period of time. A course in world religions may have a positive effect on religious tolerance. Members of one of the three great monotheisms may gain an appreciation of the other two. But such courses rarely give attention to unbelief—to atheism, agnosticism, deism, and the contributions of secular humanism to ethics and human understanding. It is probably true that, at the present time, a confessed atheist could not be elected president of the United States. Unbelief is regarded by many as a character flaw, and one objective of a course on religion should be to dispel this misunderstanding.19 The current distrust of unbelief should suggest another task for religious education in the twenty-first century. Schools do not need to add a course on religion to get a start on bringing history instruction into line with reality. A recent poll disclosed that almost 60% of American adults believe that the U.S. Constitution is based on Christian principles. But George Washington explicitly stated that the government of the United States was in no sense founded on the Christian religion. This does not mean that the United States was founded on anti-Christian principles or that its constitution is incompatible with Christianity, but students should learn that several of America’s most eminent founders were deists (people who believe in a creator or creative force but not in a personal God); among them, Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and probably John Adams. Several of the deist-founders continued to be members of Christian churches—no doubt a way of keeping up appearances—but their letters and private papers make it clear that they did not believe in a personal God. Students should learn also that the motto “In God We Trust” appeared first on a two-cent coin in 1864, a time of great suffering because of the Civil War, and on all coins in 1865. It was not there “from the start.” They should hear the facts about the Pledge of Allegiance and the addition of “under God” in 1954 at the height of the McCarthy era. The pledge, written by a Christian Socialist, Francis Bellamy, was invited by the National Education Association and

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inspired in part by the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892. Bellamy, a strong believer in the separation of church and state, would almost certainly have objected to the later addition of “under God” to the pledge. One purpose of teaching this material is to help students understand that the pledge and mottoes were not “there from the start” but were motivated by political events as well as religious sentiments. The important principle of separation of church and state has been immersed in controversy. Designed both to protect the individual’s freedom of religion and the government against religious intrusion, it has been the focus of years of litigation. If this principle has been reasonably effective in its role of dual protection, it might be argued that it has also inadvertently protected religious irrationality from the critical inspection it should receive in schools. Because so many people think that the Constitution forbids the discussion of religion in schools (it does not), the vast majority of school children never have an opportunity to discuss religion thoughtfully. Much can be done in social studies classes to bring religion and historical fact together. Almost all students hear about Thomas Paine and his Common Sense; he is honored as a hero of the revolution. However, few students are aware that Paine was reviled for his book, The Age of Reason. Students should be asked to consider: Why was he reviled? Why has the secularist contribution to the founding of the nation been denied? Another example of our squeamishness with respect to religion is the usual treatment of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As Paine was celebrated for Common Sense and condemned for The Age of Reason, Stanton is recognized for her heroic efforts in behalf of women’s suffrage, but her commitment to give women a fair hearing in religion—her Woman’s Bible—is rarely mentioned.20 Problems such as these can be remedied within existing courses. The evolution-creation debate can also be handled in existing courses, but we make it difficult to do so. It is not only the fear of transgressing against the separation of church and state that works against critical discussion, but also the traditional organization of the curriculum into discrete disciplines. There are people who argue against teaching the evolution-creation debate in science classes on the grounds that the debate is a social issue and should be treated in social studies, if it is treated at all. In science, we teach science; that is, we teach evolution, not the debates that it has triggered.

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But real life is not so easily compartmentalized. When the topic of evolution is presented, students are likely to have many questions. Those questions should be addressed, even invited, and they should be discussed in some depth. Early in the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead advocated a closely connected curriculum that would bring school studies into line with significant real-world themes. He wanted schools to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.21

More recently, Edward O. Wilson has made a similar argument. He notes that biology has “expanded to the borders of the social sciences and humanities” and that the epistemological divide between disciplines has given way to something far more interesting—“a wide middle domain of mostly unexplored phenomena.” It is a rapidly growing domain. Moreover, Wilson writes: It addresses issues in which students . . . are most interested: the nature and origin of life, the meaning of sex, the basis of human nature, the origin and evolution of life, why we must die, the origins of religion and ethics, the causes of aesthetic response, the role of environment in human genetic and cultural evolution.22

It is educationally irresponsible to omit discussion of religion from our classrooms when the topic at hand begs for such discussion. What purpose does the omission serve? It reduces contention (and interest) in the classroom, and it protects schools from the complaints and outraged reactions of some religious groups. However, it also protects ignorance. Whereas affluent students often go on to liberal arts colleges where these matters are discussed freely, the majority of our high school graduates never have an opportunity to engage in such discussion. The result is widespread ignorance on religion, politics, history, and economics.23 Students should understand that acceptance of evolution does not necessitate rejection of all religion. Simon Conway Morris, a paleobiologist and theist, warns readers at the beginning of his book: If you happen to be a “creation scientist” (or something of the kind) . . . may I politely suggest that you put this book back on the shelf. It will do you no good. Evolution is true, it happens, it is the way the world is, and we too are one of its products.24

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But Conway Morris sees metaphysical implications in evolution as he describes it. His emphasis on adaptation and convergence excites fierce scientific debate. Evolution is a fact but, in the view of Conway Morris and some other scientists, there seems to be something like purposiveness in random mutations. Students should also come away from the discussions with a clearer understanding of why the debate has frightened so many. Philip Kitcher, in a very sensitive essay, notes that for many people the loss of Genesis signals the loss of beliefs and practices that sustain them: To resist Darwin, or the enlightenment case that looms behind him, is hardly unreasonable if what you would be left with is a drab, painful, and impoverished life. [For economically and politically impoverished] people . . . who find in their church a supportive community, above all for people who hope their lives mean something, that their lives matter, the secular onslaught threatens to demolish almost everything.25

It is with this sort of sensitivity that religious education must proceed. It is the responsibility of educators to reduce ignorance, but it is also the responsibility of educators in a democratic society to help students see the possibility of a full human life in both personal and occupational domains. This means building, not destroying, real hope. It means expanding our curriculum beyond the discrete disciplines. It also means expanding it beyond preparation for college. Rather, it means encouraging interests in essential work that does not require a college education and teaching for a Whitman-esque respect for the wide range of work needed in an interdependent society.26 We should not replace ignorance with despair.

Conclusion We can and should teach something about spiritual experience in our schools. We should also include religion in our history classes, and the material should be historically accurate. In dispelling misunderstandings and challenging misunderstandings, we should be sensitive to the role religion plays in many lives. And we should make clear that both believers and unbelievers may share in spiritual life. It was Darwin who said of evolution: There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has

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gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.27

NOTES 1. Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 91. 2. See Nel Noddings, Happiness and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3. Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (New York: Quill, 1983), 331. 4. Ibid. 5. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 227. 6. Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell (New York: Viking, 2006), 252. 7. Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 4. 8. Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 9. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (New York: Random House, 1955), 52. 10. Ibid., 105. 11. Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 349. 12. Ibid., 351. 13. See the essays in Ruth E. Groenhout and Marya Bower, eds., Philosophy, Feminism, and Faith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 14. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1929 [1902]), 448–49. 15. Cullen Schippe and Chuck Stetson, eds., The Bible and Its Influence (New York: Bible Literacy Project, 2006), Preface. 16. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 344. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible (New York: Free Press, 2007). 19. See Nel Noddings, Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993). 20. See Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). 21. Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: Free Press, 1929 [1967]), 6–7. 22. Wilson, The Creation, 136. 23. For accounts of this ignorance, see Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus (New York: Crown, 2007); also Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). 24. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xv. 25. Philip Kitcher, Living with Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 160. 26. See the chapter on occupations in Nel Noddings, Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 27. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 490.

chapter 14

Education and Economic Development No discipline has had the impact on Western education in the last fifty years that economics has. Not only have the aims of education been narrowed to focus more on preparing people for their economic role, but the schooling system itself has been reorganized to reflect this way of thinking about the world. Economists Randall Nielsen and Janice Kinghorn here provide an immanent critique; that is, they challenge the above from within, more particularly from within the field of economic development. They explain that the assumptions of growth accounting that created earlier models of economic development (and current schooling) have generally failed on their own terms: their thin conceptualizations were inadequate to deal with exchange relationships in complex social and political environments. Economics has dramatically changed in the last several decades and economic development has become increasingly (and ironically) education-based. Current assistance efforts attempt to recognize that “the educational characteristics of the interactions among citizens are what make a community—and collective action—possible.” Neilsen and Kinghorn illustrate their argument with rich examples and then call for renewing the relationship between education and schooling, but with a very different—and as yet unclaimed—role for education. Randall Nielsen is a program officer at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, an operating research foundation that explores the ways democracy can be strengthened through innovation in political practices emphasizing citizen self-rule. His current research explores political institutions and economic change, and the ways that citizens, civic associations, and schools can organize themselves to engage the shared challenge of public education. Nielsen holds a Ph.D. in economics from Washington University in St. Louis. Janice Rye Kinghorn is an associate professor of economics at Antioch College, an institution with a long history of experimental education. Her current research explores ideas of civic engagement, transitional experiences, and integrated learning within the higher education landscape. Kinghorn holds a Ph.D. in economics from Washington University in St. Louis.

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Education and Economic Development randall nielsen and janice kinghorn What does economics have to say about why we educate? For those tired of seeing education reduced to the handmaid of economic growth the answer may be, “the less the better.” In order to lure readers to our argument that something more can indeed be usefully said, we feel obligated to offer an advance indication of the contribution we make. We begin with a brief history of the way the evolution of thought and practice in economic development has helped to shape the modern concept of education. We review evidence that the framework that became the conventional basis for understanding development has not been successful, neither as a guide to development aid nor to understanding education. We argue that it has failed because it has taken too narrow an account of the role of learning in the process of economic change, and thus provides no way of understanding the fundamental place of education in development. We then discuss some alternative research perspectives into economic change and development that emphasize invention, innovation, and organizational virtuosity as the key attributes of vital human society. We argue that the explicit emphasis on change—and thus the role of learning—brings the challenges of education to the fore in ways that have implications for why we educate as well as how we educate. Economic Development as Growth Accounting As a professional field of practice, economic development is a relative infant. It emerged in response to the challenge of the reindustrialization of Europe and Japan after the Second World War. In 1944 the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference (better known as Bretton Woods because of its location at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire) began the establishment of a cooperative international economic system, which included the creation of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now part of the World Bank group), chartered primarily to organize the financing of the reconstruction. The reconstruction efforts were not explicitly guided by a theory of economic development. These countries had been among the highest performing economies prior to the war—they were developed countries. However, the success of the efforts, as well as similar projects being engaged across Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union, did provide

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support to an approach to development assistance that became generally accepted. It was based on a stylized story of economic growth, which emphasized the transfer of labor from the traditional low-productivity agricultural sector to the modern manufacturing sector. An implication was that a low-income economy could be jump-started through aid in the finance and administration of capital investment projects, especially in certain critical leading industries. In the 1950s the World Bank began to finance national infrastructure projects in developing countries around the world. It was clear, however, that the administration of a capital investment project in Africa or Latin America posed a different sort of challenge than a similar project in Western Europe. A critical difference was in the capacities of people to meet the demands of post-transition employment. While Europe and Japan had well-established schooling systems, other countries had to develop a similar educational infrastructure. Investments in education, or “human capital,” became a complementary element of development aid strategy. To clarify the relationships among the factors, analysts devised a framework to account for economic growth. Growth accounting models an economy as a technical production function, where potential output is derived from the combination of three variable factors: the existing stocks of natural resources, physical capital (factories, equipment and infrastructure), and human capital (the availability and quality of labor). The parameters of the production function—which define the possibilities for combining those resources into output—are determined by the existing technology or “stock of knowledge.” Growth accounting provided an objective means to assess the needs of an underperforming place, identify strategic ways to fill those needs with targeted aid, and measure the outcomes. Thus by the mid-1950s the challenges to economic development could effectively be seen as technical problems amenable to centralized strategic planning. As it happened, many of the post-war challenges were well-suited to that approach. In the late twentieth century professionally administered programs built affordable housing, cleaned water supplies, constructed schools and hospitals, and stabilized financial institutions. They created national highway systems and virtually eliminated many lifethreatening communicable diseases. The programs were so successful that their administrative protocols for analyzing, planning, and evaluating were widely adopted by a rapidly growing industry of aid providers—government-funded donor agencies, domestic and transnational philanthropic donors, university extension programs—

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attempting to encourage the development of impoverished regions around the world. The protocols of technical strategic planning were assimilated into the practices of local public administration as well. For regional officials attempting to promote economic development the implied options became something of a professional mantra. A place lacking natural resources could invest in transport links to areas rich in supplies. Inadequate stocks of physical capital could be reinforced through investment grants to existing local firms, or through tax and loan incentives to attract outside firms to move to the region. The productivity of the labor force could be improved through investments in education. Growth accounting allowed the impact of education to be explicitly derived from a model of economic growth, which, by treating people as a form of capital input, allowed administrative protocols for the evaluation of investments to be applied. Investment in schools became the primary vehicle, and schools became more explicitly seen as means to transmit “an authoritative, structured body of principles, rules, and knowledge.”1 The image of a student as a receptacle of knowledge filled by a teacher became the dominant model for the administration and evaluation of schools in the twentieth century, and, as seen in the recent standards and accountability movement in the United States, remains so today. The emphasis on instruction in primary skills and test-based accountability reflects a perception of education well suited to the conventional stylized vision of the determinants of economic growth.

The Failure of Development Assistance As a guide to economic development, however, that stylized vision has floundered from the beginning. Only a few of what were called Third World nations in the 1950s can be seen today as having set upon a course of sustained economic development. While the focus on physical capital and technical training made pragmatic sense in post-war reconstruction efforts, it was not supported by any coherent theory of the development of economic systems. Throughout the sixty-year experiment in development assistance researchers have noted its thin conceptual basis. Indeed it was inconsistent with insights gained from the work of economic historians who, since Adam Smith, had understood development not as a technical challenge, but as a complex evolution of exchange relationships within constraining social and political environments.2

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William Easterly, who was a senior research economist at the World Bank for sixteen years, recently published a review of the practice and outcomes of the international aid industry, which he estimates has, in sixty years, spent some 2.3 trillion dollars.3 While many grand projects have resulted, they have had little effect on the conditions of poverty suffered by so many around the world. In a tone of dismal irony, Easterly notes how similar the Western means of organizing aid to the poor has been to the mechanics and underlying philosophy of change of the Soviet-era five-year plans. He contrasts planners, who think of poverty as a technical engineering problem, with searchers, who recognize that “poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors.” Development, Easterly argues, is ongoing search. The argument complements Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s vision of the challenge of development as an educational enterprise, for the people and institutions of a place and for the providers of development assistance.4 Change—for better or worse— results from what is learned from the efforts of people struggling to find ways of organizing themselves to deal with shared concerns. Easterly argues that until ways are found to support the learning and the learning opportunities provided by researchers in impoverished regions, increasing the level of aid will be useless at best. Perhaps the most daunting difficulty in making that change is in the resistance of the aid organizations, who themselves need to shift from protocols based on strategic planning to those based on an educational mission. It is clear, however, that the pressure to produce quick and easily measurable outcomes—a challenge that should resonate with professional educators—is a critical obstacle to the ability of aid organizations to move toward a practical focus on the educational role of their efforts. Ramon Daubón, Vice President for Programs at the Inter-American Foundation, has also witnessed the effects of traditional third-party development assistance on the educational factors that sustained development is built upon. He writes that traditional development practices tend to rush to design a “fundable project” based on the perceptions of the few capable to write proposals. Development assistance has thus discouraged the emergence of spontaneous public leadership, of concerting for the discovery of shared interests among strangers and for shared action requiring reliable mediating mechanisms and institutions.5

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Traditional practices of development aid assistance may be worse than simply wastes of resources; they can stifle productive indigenous forms of education and replace them with practices that weaken the capacity for ongoing learning and development. The miseducation that characterizes aid efforts has also been recognized in studies of efforts to promote regional and urban development in the United States. John McKnight has been remarkably eloquent on this point.6 He reviews the professionalization of challenges that were once seen as the purview of citizens and civic associations as a modern tragedy. McKnight argues that the problem is that the protocols of what have become “service delivery industries” are based on the needs and deficiencies of people and their communities. He shows how even well-intentioned and well-planned professional efforts can reinforce rather than alleviate the underlying problem of struggling communities—people are taught to define themselves and their communities by their needs and deficiencies rather than their assets and capacities. The approach has a negative educational impact, but that impact—what people learn—goes generally unrecognized because of the professional focus on instrumental problem solving. Even in cases where programs do provide for particular needs, the long-term result is the antithesis of development. People learn to be clients of professional services, and are left with a reduced sense of their capacity to act on shared concerns. Education-Based Development Assistance International and domestic aid organizations, while slow to change in practice, have begun to take note. Recent self-evaluations by the World Bank have acknowledged the disappointing results of development efforts it has funded. In the last decade its researchers have provided innovative studies of the impact of civic participation in local development efforts, and the practical implications of the concept of social capital.7 There is also a growing recognition of the potential for negative impacts of the endeavors they fund. The question of how they can at least “do no harm” to existing civic practices and relationships is now being asked, which is a remarkable retreat from the visions that guided the founding of the development organizations after the Second World War. In evaluating development assistance the issue is no longer the quality of the planning or the administrative efficiency of the donor agency or administrative office. Indeed the instrumental outcomes of a

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particular project are no longer the unit of analysis. If sustained prosperity depends on the ongoing ability of the people who reside in a place to recognize and deal with issues as they emerge, then an intervention to promote development can be judged a success only when it results in more effective networks of public interaction and communication, within which invention, innovation, and trials of new ideas can more effectively take place. Those networks of interaction can emerge and be strengthened over time only as a result of the learning that results from the educational experience of working together on shared concerns. Understanding economic development therefore requires an understanding of the practices that support learning from reflection on experiences with public choice and action. David Ellerman thus argues that development assistance needs to be seen through a lens of “social learning.”8 Here social learning refers to change in the state of local knowledge or beliefs about the possibilities, and the means available, for dealing with shared concerns. The learning lens implies that development initiatives be evaluated for their educational effects. An intervention that helps some particular people in some particular place to do something better, but results in no new shared insights into the power— the capacity and potential—to act in the future, is merely useful. If it does not result in stronger forms of practice that remain over time it has had no impact on development. Learning is the dynamic link between efforts to deal with immediate issues and the change in collective capacity to deal with such challenges in the future. As McKnight’s research shows, the learning that results from experience with aid providers can result in an increased or decreased capacity for future action. A useful theory of economic development needs to include a theory of change based on an understanding of the ways that educational experiences result in productive learning. Research by sociologist Vaughn Grisham into the economic history of Tupelo, Mississippi, provides a revealing insight into the idea of economic development as an ongoing educational challenge.9 Its timeline provides an intriguing contrast to the history of conventional economic development practices. In the early 1940s Tupelo was a poor town in the poorest county in the poorest state in the nation. Located in rural Lee County, the town and region had few natural advantages: no rivers or lakes, no nearby metropolitan center, and no big-budget government offices. Until 1980, there was no interstate highway within 75 miles. Grisham explores how, in a few decades, the local area came to attract international notice for its remarkable economic performance and for the means by which that regeneration was achieved.

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It was not done through external grants or large-scale aid programs. Grisham, and many in Tupelo, point to an early recognition by people in Tupelo that commitment to a learning community is a necessary condition for the development of sustained economic prosperity. What gave Tupelo its advantage was that the citizens of Lee County learned to work together, and have continued to deal with a constantly changing environment. Grisham shows how the educational characteristics of the interactions among citizens are what make a community—and collective action—possible. Constructive interaction was promoted through informal small group discussions that gradually expanded to bring in greater numbers of people, civic associations, and public officials. Umbrella organizations, particularly what Grisham calls multi-interest coordinating organizations, provided overlapping networks of discourse, which attended to the interests of the community as a whole. They also provided deliberate opportunities for reflecting on what was being learned, both from the outcomes of distinct efforts and from the ways the work was organized. Today, those networks and the learning opportunities they provoke and support are widely seen to be key educational resources in the community. The results have been gradual but consistent. Over the past sixty years the region has, in response to changes in external market opportunities, had to transform its economic focus a number of times. However, by 2003 the per capita income in Lee County was second in Mississippi only to Madison County, where the offices of the state government fuel the economy. During one 13-year period Lee County added more than a thousand new industrial jobs per year, in addition to those in service positions. The public schools are rated among the best in the region, in large part because they are complemented by varieties of other civic educational resources. A program to strengthen reading at the first grade level in the rural areas of the county presents an illuminating example of the way civic actors complement schools in education. The program originated with a grant of one million dollars from the local newspaper. The paper saw the development of reading skills as an important part of economic development (not to mention the future demand for the newspaper). When challenged by the Internal Revenue Service for claiming the cost as a business expense, the paper was able to argue that it was not a charitable donation, but a long-term investment.10 Tupelo has become an iconic story of a town that transformed itself, in large part through the development of the widely shared conclusion

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that the educational characteristics of the community—its citizenry, their civic associations and ways of interacting, and the resulting ability to collectively recognize and deal with changing opportunities— constituted an economic resource. That shared insight, and the ongoing efforts to put the implications to practical use, are the civic outcomes of learning that have resulted from deliberate efforts to provide continual public-building educational experiences. Where do those insights leave practitioners attempting to deliberately encourage development? We suggest that efforts to put “assetbased” community development into play are examples of a learningbased approach.11 The approach is based on the fundamental insight that any intervention will be an opportunity for learning. It emphasizes local civic practices that can generate wider knowledge of the variety of assets that exist, even in the most impoverished communities. The uncovering of assets occurs inductively through interviews and stories of past community endeavors. The result is an inventory of assets that emphasizes the attributes of individuals and civic associations and organizations, as well as those of the more conventional natural and physical capital endowments. The affirmation of those assets, especially the recognition of civic associations as public assets, plays a key role in strengthening a widespread sense of capacity and purpose. A number of grant-making foundations are attempting to bring these insights into their work.12 The foundations are motivated by the growing recognition that the ways philanthropy worked “had actually exacerbated public cynicism and mistrust by pursuing its own ideas about advancing the common good without cultivating a genuine dialogue with the communities it was bent on serving.”13 They are attempting to shift the focus from discrete problem solving to more deliberate attempts to strengthen the civic capacity in the communities they serve. Consistent with the asset-based development research, these foundations recognize that, whether intentional or not, their interventions provide learning opportunities. When done heedlessly, what is learned can be inconsistent with the goal of development. Grant-makers are now exploring how a better understanding of what makes communities work as dynamic learning networks of people can lead to ways to align their professional practices with the practices through which people learn together.14 A variety of experiments have resulted, all sharing the hypothesis that the qualities of the educational experiences that are created by a donor initiative will be

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critical to both the instrumental outcomes as well as the sustained development of civic capabilities. The reports from these efforts have provided tentative, but promising, insights about the ways that development assistance can be based on an educational foundation of shared learning. Why and How We Educate Healthy economies depend on education, but in ways that directly challenge the modern tendency to reduce education to distinct forms of training. This is not a new insight. In early nineteenth century America Tocqueville saw that vital societies are places of intensive, constant, and consistent learning, and that a critical locus of much of that learning was in the associational life of people. If education results from interactions among the people who reside in a place, then an analysis of education needs to include an explicit recognition of the qualities of those interactions. In addition to capital investments in schools, efforts to encourage education need to encourage the development of the transformational capacities of those networks of interaction. Ongoing research into the impacts of efforts to practically locate the educational basis of community and economic development is promising. However, it has not yet resulted in a clear, pragmatic understanding of how such practices can be encouraged. Further progress will require practical guides to aid organizations, donors, and others who seek to promote learning-based development. It would seem that professional educators should have a lot to say about the challenge. They will do so only if they can shift their frame of reference, from schools and school administration, to learning and education in communities. The concept of education as something done to people by professionals was part of a larger twentieth century movement. Many of the challenges people once saw themselves and their fellow citizens responsible for—health, individual and social security, community organizing, the gathering and sharing of news, economic development and education—came to be seen, by professionals and citizens alike, as the singular purview of experts and institutions. We are in the midst of the undoing of that movement. It will not go easily, but democracy requires it to go. An ongoing public conversation about education needs to play a lead role in determining the way it goes. Indeed, if it is correct to say that

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education is the cornerstone of the challenge of democracy, then the deliberate focus on education needs to be the foundation of any theory of change. It is not simply that we need education. We all need to educate and be continually educated. Our health, security, and economic prosperity depend on it. So does our ongoing experiment in democratic self-rule. NOTES 1. Sue E. Berryman and Thomas R. Bailey, The Double Helix of Education and the Economy (New York: The Institute on Education and the Economy, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1992), 50. 2. Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States 1790–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1966). 3. William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden (New York: Penguin, 2006). 4. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). 5. Ramón E. Daubón, “The Challenge: Connecting Economics and Politics,” (unpublished report to the Kettering Foundation, Dayton, OH, Fall 2005). Also see Ramón E. Daubón, A Civil Investing Strategy for Putting Communities in Charge (Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, 2007). 6. John McKnight, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Also see John McKnight, “Professionalized Services: Disabling Help for Communities and Citizens,” in The Essential Civil Society Reader, ed. D. Eberly (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 7. See the database of research on social capital organized by the World Bank: http://www1.worldbank.org/prem/poverty/scapital/index.htm. 8. David Ellerman, “Hirschmanian Themes of Social Learning and Change” (Policy Research Working Paper 2591, World Bank, Washington, DC). 9. Vaughn L. Grisham, Tupelo: The Evolution of a Community (Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press, 1999). 10. Susan Willey, Bitter Roots and Sweet Fruits: Tupelo Conversations and Memories (Dayton, OH: Charles F. Kettering Foundation, 1999), 27. 11. J. McKnight, N. Turner, and J. P. Kretzmann, A Guide to Mapping and Mobilizing the Associations in Local Neighborhoods (Chicago: ACTA Publications, 1999). 12. David Mathews, “Can Philanthropy Strengthen Democracy? The Case of the Civil Investing Initiative” (Paper presented at the Waldemar A. Nielsen Issues in Philanthropy Seminar Series, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, February 1, 2002. http://cpnl.georgetown.edu/doc_pool/Nielsen0105Mathews.pdf). Also see Daubón, A Civil Investing Strategy. 13. Scott London, Investing in Public Life (Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, 2005), 1. 14. Kettering Foundation, Learning About Civil Society: A Graphic Record of the Civil Investing Seminars (Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, March 1999).

chapter 15

Giving the Body Its Due: Autobiographical Reflections and Utopian Imaginings Many conversations that link education and the body make the argument that people have to be healthy in order to get on with the real learning of school or work or life in general. In contrast, Joannie Halas and Jeanne Adele Kentel argue that the physical is integral to a good and worthwhile life per se, and not as a means to achieve some other better end. In other words, they directly challenge the mind-body split so endemic to modern Western thought. Part of their argument is that we comprehend ourselves and the world through our body, and the neglect of the physical impoverishes our understanding in fundamental ways. The body, mind, heart, and spirit are never discrete. Even more crucial to their case, however, is an exploration of the complex, intimate, and ephemeral relationship we have with our own bodies. Kentel writes, for example: “Running taught me about selfdiscipline, goal setting, achievement, success, and defeat. Most of all, running gave me the gift of love for movement.” They illustrate their ideas by detailing instances of their own past relationships with their bodies and by imagining a future in which the body is educationally important. Joannie Halas is a professor in the faculty of kinesiology and recreation management at the University of Manitoba. A former public school physical education teacher, her teaching, research, and service is in the area of culturally relevant physical education, as well as access to post-secondary education for aboriginal and racial minority groups. She has conducted a number of community-based research projects that involve the design and delivery of meaningful and relevant physical activity/education programs for marginalized youth populations, including a recent multiage aboriginal youth-driven mentor program. Jeanne Adele Kentel is currently posted at the Carnegie Faculty of Sport and Education at Leeds Metropolitan University. After completing her doctorate in curriculum studies at the University of Alberta, she taught in teacher education programs in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario. Her research focuses upon critical media pedagogies, ecological imagination, and bodily ways of knowing.

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Giving the Body Its Due: Autobiographical Reflections and Utopian Imaginings joannie halas and jeanne adele kentel

Body Dues A few years ago I was sitting in an all-day meeting at work, and, unsure of when it would be my turn to speak, I turned to a colleague beside me and asked: “Do you think it’s okay if I run out now to the washroom, I really have to go . . . ?” My colleague replied: “Never deny the body.” To this day, those four words have stayed with me. As simple as they are, they hold much wisdom. They are a constant reminder of our need to pay attention to our bodies; to listen to the messages they send, not only about our physical well-being, but about our emotional, mental, and spiritual engagement with the world. It is a reminder that as a society, we need to create the conditions of possibility whereby our physical selves can thrive.

When we think of the relationships we have had over the course of our lifetimes, is there any that is more intimate, if not important, than the relationship we have with our own bodies? In asking this question, we do not mean to suggest that our bodies are somehow separate from ourselves as human beings, or that we experience them as objects. Rather, we use the term “relationship” as a means to draw attention to the importance of our physical selves as intrinsically connected to the totality of who we are as individuals. Borrowing from the cultural traditions of many indigenous peoples,1 we see the body as interconnected with the mind, heart and spirit. The physical is intrinsically connected with our thinking, feeling, and being in the world.2 In order to understand what often appears to be a deliberate neglect of the body in much of our daily lives, it is helpful to explore the body’s meaning, as well as the meaning of movement, from this type of holistic perspective. Yet even when a holistic stance is assumed, it is human nature to think about mind, body, heart, and spirit as separate entities. They are both four and one and both one and four.

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When we speak about the body it is not something separate in being, yet the ways we attend to the world from our bodies are distinctive. In considering the uniqueness of the body, Michael Polanyi observes how “ . . . we rely on our tacit knowledge of impacts made by the world on our body and the complex responses of our body to these impacts.”3 Be it our intuitions—that capacity to immediately understand something without conscious reasoning—or our conscious actions, our moving bodies help us to understand the world. And it is in understanding the meaning of movement that we can begin to comprehend the place of our “bodies” in education.4 As Fishburne notes, while movement is often viewed as essential to life it is rarely at the forefront of educational priorities.5 Within this chapter, we endeavor to make room for different priorities, if only a little. In the discussion to follow, we dare to step into what Cote, Day, and de Peuter refer to as “utopian pedagogy,” where utopia is not a place we might reach; rather, it’s an “ongoing process of becoming.”6 Given the challenges we all face in our day-to-day efforts to live well, we introduce a series of “imaginings” as a thought experiment that prompts us to consider ways that we might reclaim and affirm the relationship we have with our own bodies, such that the possibilities of our being and becoming in the world are transformed. We also intersect personal stories of our own childhood and youth experiences in coming to understand our physical selves as connected with the wholeness of who we are.7 The notions of the “body” and somatic understanding are very personal. By sharing examples of how it was through the body in both good times and bad that our engagement with the world has been defined, we speak of both our potential and the obstacles we face when we attempt to honor the physical in our lives. By connecting these stories with the “imaginings” of the more utopian scenario with which our physical selves are attended across the life span, our goal is to envision a cultural orientation that, in a word, gives the body, as inextricably bound to the mind, the emotions, and the spirit, “its due.” After all, if education is about imagining a better world, then this narrative should be read as an effort to reclaim the significance of our physical selves as holistically connected to our desires for a better world. Early Life Retrospectives Imagine birth. A mass of billions of microscopic human cells. Somatic understanding begins as the infant body is cradled in protective arms that

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gently rock back and forth in lullaby rhythms that awaken the senses to the external world. Each gentle touch creates new possibilities: legs stretch out to curl up toes, arms reach out, fingers unfold to touch a nose. In an engaged, responsive environment, the infant body grows, its movements nurtured in ways that keeps the singular baby from falling, from movements too drastic or extreme. Bodies of all shapes, sizes, and colors cuddled, hugged, turned upside down and round back again, smiled at and spoken to, each manipulation stimulating neural pathways that produce ways by which we understand and relate to the world. Movement is indeed basic to all life. Life exists because of movement. We begin moving before birth. In fact, one of the first tangible indicators of life itself is the detection of movement.8 Observes Bruce, “movement is the first means a child has of conveying needs and feelings and it remains a way in which the human being expresses” (p. 7).9 From the first breaths we take as newborn infants, our senses inform us about the world around us; through sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, our body is “necessarily involved in all perception.”10 During these early months and years, our complete dependence on caring elders begins to shift as we take our first steps on our own. Raised in loving environments that nurture our growth, our bodies receive the attention required for healthy development. While the need to awaken, develop, and cultivate the child’s inherent sense of movement seems evident,11 our attention to the toddler’s moving body appears to wane as the school years approach: Before a child is born, we refer to his or her movement whenever s/he kicks. Once the baby is born, reference is made as to how the child moves his/her head, holds head up, turns to sound, sits by themselves, creeps, crawls, pulls self up, walks around furniture, stands alone, takes steps, walks, runs, jumps, and plays. . . . From this point on references are usually made to the child’s oral language and later the written language so that once children enter school we are dealing with them almost strictly on an academic level.12

As young bodies step out into the world beyond their families, they need continued opportunities to explore how their bodies move. Imagine a group of toddlers, running and laughing, tumbling and hanging, rotating upside down and round again, in play environments designed to excite the imagination. Moving freely, they begin to acquire the basic movement competencies that enable them to mindfully explore the limits and potentials of their growing bodies. As developing bodies awkwardly run, slide, dash, glide, dart and dodge, stop, start, singularly or in groups, children learn to move safely at different

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speeds, in different directions, often applying different actions. Over time and many trials, their bodies learn not to fall, but to run freely without bumping into others, to jump off heights, to experience vertigo, to balance on one leg, without fear of the pain and tears that sometimes come but can as quickly go away. Imagine how the pleasure of activity is imprinted so deeply that these children can’t wait for their next “playtime.” Imagine girls and boys playing together in an environment where there are no signs of culturally normalized “boys” games and “girls” activities. There is just play, for play’s sake. In a poignant description of a childhood movement experience, van Manen offers a beautiful illustration of one’s longing to reclaim lost childhood moments: I see a child skipping rope in the street, and I pause and smile. I see a youthful bounce, the commanding rhythm of a rope—and perhaps a memory. I recognize this rhyme . . . When the child stops, I still feel the snap against my feet. Regret fills me. I wish I could revisit my old school playground. . . . I turn away from that child and resume my walk. I saw a child, a rope, a game. Sight and sound collaborated to make me feel the rope against my feet. Then I saw regret.13

When we think about movement, in particular playful movement, we are immediately drawn to stories of childhood. The regret that van Manen speaks about is somehow a regret we all encounter. We lose sight of our bodily selves. While the value of play originates in the playing itself, the health benefits of physical activity have been substantiated across the life span.14 Despite these benefits, the marginalization of the body and the body’s access to movement begins early. We are made to sit at desks at much too young an age and as we grow older we know not what else to do. As a society, we can potentially shift this way of being so that we do not experience the degree of loss encountered when movement disappears from our daily ways of being. In the following sections we share our childhood narratives and connect them to the current childhood milieu with an aim to give the moving body presence and note its value in education. Adrenaline (Joannie) My earliest childhood memories are dominated by images of me following my older brother Joe, everywhere. Although separated by three and a half years in age, by size and maturity, and by the contingencies of gender, the consequences of which I didn’t fully understand until much later, there was

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little to keep me from emulating his every movement. Joe went out to play, I followed behind, chasing after the ball with excitement that far exceeded my ability to keep up. Joe built a snow fort, I was right beside him as his trusted assistant, responding to every instruction with a determined will to do my part. As with indigenous approaches to life and learning, mine was “look, listen and learn”; I’d watch his body moving and follow behind, practicing what I thought was the proper way to kick the ball, lift the boulder, climb the tree. As our repertoire of play expanded to include cousins, neighbors, and friends, being outside to play became my modus operandi in life. We’d wake to make plans for the day, and our play was adventuresome and physical. It was flexible, not rigid, as our minds imagined new ways to have fun, each day building on yesterday’s escapades. As idyllic as it sounds, that is how I remember it. We learned our limits through physical experimentation that challenged us to confront our fears. It was the adrenaline rush of childhood, and I’m sure we thought it would never end. Adolescent Retrospectives By contrast to the above narrative, we think of today’s children, many of whom have little opportunity to engage in physical play. We see cities without playgrounds and playgrounds without children, as fear for their personal safety keeps them indoors. We see toddlers, raised by watching videos, who are now heading into adolescence with their bodies firmly entrenched behind the game boy, computer screen, or television. Ironically referred to as the “playstation generation” because their play is so stationary, it is as though they have moved so little that their bodies just get stuck. These young people, particularly boys, can be found everywhere in front of some kind of plug-in machine. As a consequence, many are not plugged into their bodies, which are responding in kind. According to the latest health indicators, our children are not physically active enough for healthy development.15 Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are examples of historically adult conditions now affecting childhood. Imagine these same children engaging in free play without winners defeating losers, where they excitedly encounter open doors to carefully constructed wonderlands of tasks and challenges designed to enhance their physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development. Imagine groups of girls and boys, despite their widely variable physical and social maturity levels, guided by older adults to play well together, cooperate fairly, communicate respectfully. Their play experiences leave them with smiles on their faces and physically satiated bodies

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that are more receptive to quieter surroundings, their spirits settling into concentration. The Race (Jeanne) On your marks. I was tense, my heart pounding, the uncertainty overwhelming. I jumped into the air a couple of times to relieve some of the tension. I lowered myself to the ground hands first for a brief moment of solemnity before I raced, a small request to do my best. I placed my left leg in the lead starting block that I had previously measured ever so precisely. I placed my fingers along the starting line and lowered my head as I took my last deep breath. Set. I raised my body out of the blocks leaning forward, supremely tensed, completely focused on the finish line. Bang! A sudden burst of energy caused me to fall forward slightly as the gun fired. I paused for a moment waiting for the second call back shot, but it never came. As the other runners had a few steps on me I knew I would have to push hard to make up the difference. I flew. I recall accelerating on the curve, something my faithful coach had trained me to execute just inside the white lane line. I usually experienced difficulty breathing, often wheezing when I ran, but not this time. I pushed the hardest I ever had, looking only straight ahead. As I neared the finish line I plunged forward, shoulders first, knowing I had won. I was completely elated and exhausted. I gasped for breath as I returned to the finish line in my lane awaiting the official results. I was declared the winner but what was most uplifting to me was my time; it was my personal best. I was so excited it was unbelievable. So why was this action, this sense of being, so important to me? It wasn’t the winning, the trophies, the ribbons; the extrinsic rewards. It was what transpired in the struggle, the challenge, the personal victory, even the defeat. Namely, the beauty dwelled in the love of running. It was personal. Although my achievements were small in comparison to those of some, I am convinced the taste was just as sweet. Running taught me about self-discipline, goal setting, achievement, success, and defeat. Most of all, running gave me the gift of love for movement. In reflecting on our early movement experiences, we become aware of how often we took this gift we had for granted. In our childhoods we were able to move, able to move fast, creatively, and freely, but did we realize then how utterly precious movement is? Did we understand its power, its contribution, its neglect, its purpose, its meaning? How a tired body, sore muscles, bruises from a dive for the ball are indicators of effort expended? How, as a young 13-year-old explained after a physical education class, it feels good to expend energy “cause then you feel all calm and relaxed like half an hour later.”16 Do we also consider

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how painful it can be when we hold young people back from the movement their bodies crave, particularly in schools? How we pathologize the bodies of those who have difficulty conforming to class management protocols in order to “fix them” with Ritalin and other pharmaceutical remedies?17 It is possible to envisage movement as a valued entity in education and not merely as a supplementary activity to be done only when the gym schedule allows, or when it does not interfere with assemblies, classroom behavior, and timetabling. Movement education could occur across the curriculum because bodily presence is required for all elements of learning. In a study that investigated the meaning of movement in education, Anne, a research participant, identified a dilemma in how learning is defined: Learning has been seen as single, solitary, very quiet, not an activity that involves movement. . . . Moving is the natural mode . . . especially for little kids and yet we have brought them into grade one and defined learning as an activity that essentially does not involve movement . . . We’ve defined learning as exclusive of movement essentially.18

An integrated movement focus is accepted by some educators. But do we fully recognize how significant a role the body plays in the whole thought process?19 That the origins of knowledge are in bodily experience?20 Imagine neighborhoods filled with kids moving about on front lawns and back yards, jumping off steps, throwing footballs, playing catch, creating new rules for old games, sprinting home excitedly in that last round of hide and seek, hearts readied with anticipation as they await the precise moment to rev their bodies’ engines out of invisibility; each weight-bearing step adding crucial bone mass for a strong body. Imagine everybody’s favorite “Auntie Jane” or “Uncle Pete,” the older neighbor loved by all the kids because she or he spends time with them on the baseball field, laughing, teasing, and cajoling even the most physically awkward to playfully engage. Imagine families who turn the computer off, who move the television to the garage, who regulate the amount of virtual violence allowed to permeate the minds of their children. Imagine children and youth watching a Hollywood DVD where sexual relations are about relationships; where safe and protected is a common body value irrespective of religion, gender, class or culture; where effeminate, butch, bi and transgendered bodies are accepted, not feared.

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[Nun]sense (Joannie) Like many adolescents, my teenage years offered an unpredictable blend of calm days interspersed with the turbulence of the outside world. Six years of private Catholic school had taught me many lessons about my own body. While the Bible stories talked of the body as a “sacred temple,” the everyday teachings communicated by the nuns left me suspicious about my own and others’ bodies. When one of my female classmates’ bodies matured earlier than the rest of us, we made whispered comments about how she was somehow “sinful” for wearing a bra. We giggled as we self-righteously ran a finger down each other’s backs to confirm that those of us without breasts were still “pure.” When we undressed and dressed for swimming lessons at the local Y, we craftily learned to hide within the closed doors of the narrow steel lockers, lest the nuns walk by and see our naked bodies. I guess you can say I became ashamed of my body without realizing it. In those days, I wasn’t alone. Shame for our bodies can start at a young age when older, more experienced, therefore stronger adults tell younger, inexperienced, therefore weaker children things like: Quit crying, quit acting like a baby (who cries, laughs, grins, farts, burps, etc. without much ado about what the mind thinks) . . . stop laughing . . . pay attention, take that smile off your face, etc.

But it didn’t stop at that: Churches said, “Bodies are sinful,” and stopped talking about them. Schools said, “Bodies are secondary,” and stopped educating them. Parents said, “Bodies are dirty,” and stopped touching them. Friends said, “Bodies are to be ridiculed,” and started laughing at them. Products said, “Bodies are for work,” and added slogans like “no pain, no gain.”

So people in modern times grew up not talking about, educating, or touching their bodies and they learned to believe that their bodies were ridiculous and, if anything, they were to be used only for work. Little girls and women were told that in order to be worthwhile little girls and women, their bodies must be beautiful. And they were given all kinds of pictures and images and descriptions and criteria of what a beautiful body should look like.

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No one told them that all bodies are beautiful. Little boys and men were told that in order to be worthwhile little boys and men, their bodies must not express themselves. And they said to them, “Real men don’t cry.” No one told them that the body’s expression is beautiful. Imagine, as young bodies do get picked on by those who would make fun of their size, shape, color, or “uniqueness” . . . a vigilant, sensitive, caring adult steps in to stop the assault, be it on the body, mind or spirit. Just imagine if everyone’s body was affirmed, period. Beauty and the Beast (Joannie) By Junior High, I had two seminal experiences as a young teenager; one was very positive, another negative. In the first, I made the Grade 8 basketball team, even though my five-foot-eight frame left me feeling so uncoordinated that I feared I would trip over the basketball lines painted on the gym floor as I walked. Despite my awkwardly growing body, the physical competence of my childhood days was reaffirmed on that basketball court. I had just moved to a large junior high school, and making the team connected me to the school in ways that transcended the shyness that overcame me when I left the safer confines of my smaller Catholic school. A second experience, however, impacted me in equally negative ways. During one basketball practice, as I ran to the locker room which was located just outside the gym doors, I encountered an older white boy who was walking by me. When I stopped to push open the change room door, he looked up at me and said, “are you ever fucking ugly.” The shock of his words registered like an unexpected seismic eruption: rather than dismiss what he said as baseless, I allowed his words to shift every insecurity I held about my developing body to the forefront. Hadn’t my cousin recently said I had a big nose? Who could ignore the pimples on my face? My mother wants me to see an orthodontist about the two “vampire” teeth that have recently emerged in what I thought was an otherwise normal mouth. Five words, and that boy, a stranger to me and someone I never saw again, knocked me down with a blow that I let register for years to come. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I felt comfortable enough to look in the mirror at my face without shutting my “good eye,” the one that if open would reinforce everything that the boy had said to me that winter day. In the aforementioned narrative, two competing body experiences shape the adolescent’s relationship with one’s body. One affirms, the other injures and deflates. Both are examples of the ways in which our bodies lay down strong roots, as Hutchison writes in reminding us how bodies can change much faster than body images.21 Crucial to this

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change, Hutchison notes, is the support of our social world and, in particular, our families, who raise and socialize us according to prevailing standards and cultural values. We know, for example, that young people can resist the negative stereotyping of their bodies; that young women, including those from marginalized youth populations, can interpret the complexities of their own body experiences in relation to dominant media representations of the “ideal body image” in ways that are not always unhealthy.22 [Ass]hamed (Jeanne) As a young adolescent I loved to run and in particular race others. I ran for the sheer pleasure of it and often challenged boys as well as girls. It was not until my teen years that the boys could outsprint me. Due to a primarily mesomorphic somatype I was given the nickname “legs.” While I took pride in what my legs could do, namely run fast and jump high, as I grew older I began to realize the pet name made reference to how my legs “looked.” In a way I got off easy, that is, I was not one of the pretty-faced girls who endured incessant remarks. I will always recall my middle school version of sexual health education when the male science teacher had the prettiest girl in the class stand up on a desk while he used a yardstick to point out her genitalia and other body parts. Many of the boys found it amusing while the girls empathized with the agony of our shy and embarrassed friend. I called up this moment years later when a colleague told me I had a nice ass. I was not impressed by such a remark. In fact I was offended enough to do something about it—the very thing I should have done as a young teen when my friend stood ridiculed on top of a desk. She did not feel pretty in that moment. Yet pretty she was. I was not complimented by being told I had a nice ass. In fact I was ashamed. Ashamed, thinking I must have done something to invite such a comment. Was he ashamed? Was my science teacher ashamed? What does it mean when one is insulted by one’s own beauty? Why is a reference to one’s body parts or “looks” considered a compliment or insult? Appearance, after all, is primarily genetic despite what mass media would have us believe. I have always found it quite odd that as a female I view my body through a man’s eyes. Throughout my lifetime I have moved from being extremely thin, to muscularly machismo, to voluptuous, to extremely overweight, to battling the bulges . . . never quite satisfied. I suppose I am much more impressed with what my body can do than with how it looks. Yet how my body looks to another and even to myself is predominantly problematic. Media images of airbrushed, nutritionally deprived actors, rockers, and models only add to our perceptions of self through the peripheral body.

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Oddly we tend to focus on that peripheral body, on that which we can see. Less regard is given to the heart . . . the part of us that reacts when told our bodies simply do not fit in. They are too thin or too fat. Too ugly or too beautiful. Too gentle or too strong. Always too something and rarely just fine. Imagine an existence where one lives and works for the health of the body and not its appearance. Imagine that children with flabby, uncoordinated, stilted, or uptight bodies are welcomed, encouraged, and provided opportunities unique to their needs. They aren’t seen as odd and they are never left out. Each one has multiple venues to be physically active each day, be it at school, at home, or in the community. Imagine everything beautiful and denigration the beast. Imagine maturing adolescents raised in communal environments where peers experience the joy of helping each other; where young ones who fall behind are nurtured by indigenous values that communicate “lack of competence isn’t bad, it’s an opportunity to learn.”23 Imagine that all youth have opportunities to be active. To play organized sport. Imagine young people learning that those movement skills they acquired in early life can now be applied to all kinds of dance, sports, and activities, expanding their repertoire of movement that enables a diversely colorful vista of healthy leisure opportunity. Here is an example of how the imagined came close to realization. It involves a young woman with a visual impairment in a physical education class. Despite being nearly blind from birth, she was so comfortable in her body that when it was time to demonstrate a particular gymnastics routine on the balance beam, she voluntarily climbed up and performed in front of her watchful peers. She had body knowledge that was appreciated by her teachers and classmates, which she willingly shared. Knowledge comes from the body, Kwant suggests, which on an intellectual level is somewhat inexplicable: Of course the player has had some kind of theoretical training, but he “knows” more and better with his legs, with his hands, and with his entire body than he knows in theory. . . . He adjusts the entire posture of his body to the approaching ball, without knowing in theory how this came about.24

As the example of the gymnast illustrates, one’s physical performance shows the coming together of the body, mind, and senses. The Wheelchair (Jeanne) It was not until recently that I became aware of the mobility of the wheelchair. Years ago when I was teaching school I had a class one year that

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many educators would shy away from. In the group there were several students with special needs. One young man had multiple challenges bejeweled with too many labels to recall, but the short of it was that he required a wheelchair to move about and could not speak. At the time, inclusive education was the buzz term for what should be naturally occurring sound pedagogy. While we found ways to allow him to be in physical education (both in and out of his wheelchair) the day I asked him if he wanted to play basketball was the most memorable for me. I brought in a modified hoop from home that my children had outgrown and there we were, he and I, taking shots, rebounding, even keeping score. The concentration was evident upon his face as he aimed at the hoop. I will always recall how his bright smile lit up the room when I told him he was a basketball superstar. He was indeed; passing, shooting, rebounding, scoring, celebrating, recovering, challenging, and practicing. In that moment I saw his heart. It was this that allowed him to move. The wheelchair permits mobility, but it is the heart that moves the body. As our own autobiographical examples show, there are multiple and diverse ways that people experience their bodies; these embodied experiences interact to shape identities that are formed over time and within specific contexts.25 We need to support the healthy development of these young bodies, particularly those that are easily marginalized. Yet we know that this is not always easy to accomplish, as our societies tend to value the “able” body over the “dis”/abled, the thin over the fat, the heterosexual over a diversity of orientations, the white body above all others. For it remains that in many places bodies are ranked by color: white trumps yellow trumps red trumps brown trumps black . . . and entire economic systems are organized around colors of bodies. Bodies are so taught to believe in hierarchical rankings that they don’t even know how influential these beliefs are. No one told them that all bodies are beautiful, without rank. Even if they were told, who could believe it after all those years of learning all those rankings that were reinforced by all those body economies? In a discussion of Michel Foucault’s contributions to our understanding of the body as a social construction, Butler notes that “the body is a site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves.”26 As such, bodies are also sites of resistance, and this resistance takes many shapes and forms. Situated historically in cultural worlds where white privilege exists, all bodies, not just racial minority bodies, are affected by racial hierarchies. When we are conscious of racial inequities, we can affirm the cultural and historical identities of racial minority groups27 while at the same time recognize, interrupt, and subvert the unearned privileges

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of white skin color28 that are so often unseen and taken for granted by those with white bodies. Adult Projectives Imagine young adults, whether at work, play, school, or home, who interrupt their days regularly to be active. To nurture their bodies not because some advertisement told them to do so, but because they know how good it makes them feel. Imagine a society free of illnesses, enabled by physical inactivity. Fewer cases of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, or cancer. Imagine all of us encouraged to feel good about our bodies because our bodies feel good. Imagine the work place with a health living space. A gym, dance, or yoga studio, where employees and employers alike can shake out the day’s stress without worrying that the job will somehow suffer. Imagine the productivity of a work environment that provides regular seminars on wellness, and how to care for the body. And so, as we exit our adolescent years and move into adulthood, is it not worth imagining a scenario whereby the remembrances of our body, coupled with the present day rigors of daily life, enable us to stay connected, to keep moving, to be active? Do we not need to keep listening to our bodies, to attend to the intuitions we receive, and to make time for movement away from that which constrains us, such as the computer screen at work, our desks, our chesterfields, and others who would do us harm? In closing, we leave one final set of imaginings. It is a utopian image of what might be; one where we create a culture that enables us to stay fully connected with our bodies as much as possible. Of course, we could go on, but it is time to step away from the keyboard and give the body its due. It is body time. Imagine that this workplace, through its employee relations, encourages workers to look after their bodies. To stay home when their bodies are ill. To come to work feeling rested and ready. To live through, with, and because of their bodies. Imagine our middle age arrives and we have the energy to do new things. To step into new adventures. To travel by foot. The strength to carry our own backpacks. Imagine no pills, just nutritious food, lots of regular full body activity, and clean water. Imagine a body that is nurtured and what that can do for the mind and spirit. Imagine the 84-year-old who suffers a heart attack, survives, and takes the doctor’s advice to join a wellness centre for rehab. With guidance from a health professional, the aging body slowly lets go of the patient’s gown and steps onto

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the walking track, not looking back, only forward. One step. Then two, then twenty. Soon a mile, then two. Then everything else starts to fall back in place: shopping, visiting, gardening. Life. A longing for living well. If you can imagine that at 84 years of age, just think what can be done at 70, 60, 50, 40, and so on. Imagine, just imagine . . . what a world we might create if our bodies were doing well. If we saw all bodies without prejudice. If we learned to hold for life the play patterns of our early childhood, when our teachers/mentors/parents/ siblings and older adults encouraged our every move and taught us that when we learned to play well together, it was so much fun. That when we fell, we needed to stand back up. That when we failed, that was just information to be used for the next round. Imagine we learn to love our bodies. To pay attention to them, to educate them, to touch them in healthy ways, to nurture them with healthy foods, to appreciate them in all they can do. Imagine as old people, we still play because we were taught to play when we were kids. To climb trees. To scrape our knees. To dance. To make love. Imagine how difficult it might be to hate another if we were so healthy we could stay awake to the injustices in our world. To march against those who would dare to rate and rank our bodies, to discriminate, to send us off to wars where we do irreparable violence to the bodies of others as well as our own. Imagine, if you will, that our technically modern times embrace the body. Educate and nurture the physical. Reclaim the indigenous teachings that recognize the interconnectedness of the personal with the social; of our cultures, economies and . . . as difficult as it may be in today’s day and age to honor the significance of our bodies, it is something we must do, not only for ourselves, but for the common good of our communities and society.

NOTES 1. See J. L. Reading, A. Kmetic, and V. Gideon, “First Nations Wholistic Policy and Planning Model” (AFN Discussion Paper for World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health, April, 2007): http://www.afn.ca/cmslib/general/07-0528_AFN_Paper_to_WHO_Commission_on_Social_Determinants_of_Health.pdf (accessed January 11, 2008). 2. B. Redfern, Introducing Laban Art of Movement (London: MacDonald & Evans, 1965). 3. M. Polanyi, Knowing and Being (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 147. 4. Jeanne Kentel, “Movement and Ordinary Language Thought: Teachers’ Reflections on Movement Meanings in Education” (Master’s thesis, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1993). 5. G. Fishburne, “Is Reading More Important than Physical Education?” Elements: A Journal for Elementary Education 15, no. 1 (1983): 3–5.

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6. M. Cote, R. J. F. Day, and G. de Peuter, “Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy?” in Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization, ed. M. Cote, R. J. F. Day, and G. de Peuter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 3–19. 7. In sharing our personal narratives, we wish to acknowledge that our positions as white, able-bodied women indicate both privileges and blind spots with regard to the stories we tell. 8. J. A. Kentel and S. Leppard, “A Journey into the Meaning of Movement” (unpublished manuscript, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1991). 9. V. Bruce, Dance and Dance Drama in Education (London: Pergamon, 1965), 7. 10. Edmund Husserl quoted in M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). 11. Redfern, Introducing Laban Art of Movement. 12. David Sande in Kentel, “Movement and Ordinary Language Thought.” 13. Max van Manen, The Tone of Teaching (New York: Scholastic, 1986), 16. 14. L. Lambert, M. Barrett, and P. Grube, “Reconceiving Physical Education: Helping Students Become Responsible for their Physical Activity,” Physical Educator 45, no. 3 (1988): 114–19. 15. Statistics Canada, “Health Indicators 82-221-XIE,” 2004, no. 1. http:// www.statcan.ca/English/freepub/82-221-XIE/00604/toc.htm (accessed August 2004). 16. J. Halas, “Playtime at the Treatment Center: How Physical Activity Helps Troubled Youth,” AVANTE 7, no. 1:7 (2001). 17. J. Halas and L. Hanson, “Pathologizing Billy: Enabling and Constraining the Body of the Condemned,” Sociology of Sport Journal 18, no. 1 (2001): 115–26. 18. Kentel, “Movement and Ordinary Language Thought,” 76. 19. Ibid. 20. M. Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 21. M. Hutchinson, Transforming Body Image: Learning to Love the Body You Have (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1985). 22. T. Orchard, J. Halas, and J. Stark, “Minimizing the Maxim Model? Interpreting the Sexual Body Rhetoric of Teenage Moms Through Physical Education,” in Sport, Rhetoric, and Gender: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations, ed. L. K. Fuller (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 131–42. 23. L. Brendtro and M. Brokenleg, “Beyond the Curriculum of Control: Reclaiming Children and Youth,” JEB-P, Winter (1993): 5–11. 24. R. Kwant in P. Arnold, Meaning in Movement, Sport and Physical Education (London: Heinemann, 1979), 109. 25. A. Sparkes, “Exploring Body Narratives,” Sport, Education and Society 4, no. 1 (1999): 17–30. 26. Judith Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscription,” in The Body, ed. D. Welton (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 307–13. 27. B. D. Tatum, “Color Blind or Color Conscious,” The School Administrator 56, no. 5 (1999): 28–30. 28. P. McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom, July–August (1989): 10–12.

chapter 16

Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Education Up until now, the chapters in Part Three have advanced conversations among and within some of the horizons that are employed in Western cultures to make sense of human experience. Many competing traditions are omitted. Here we include one which reminds us how all traditions help us comprehend in certain ways—and miss other legitimate ways of understanding. Ray Barnhart and Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley challenge perhaps the most entrenched and powerful Western tradition, natural science, by showing how the focus on regularities often leads to the neglect of the meaning that can be discovered in the particular. Long and direct involvement with their environment has helped Alaska Native people acquire knowledge that is both general and specific at the same time. Repeated hunting trips on the frozen ocean, for example, helped them develop an elaborate classification of snow and ice conditions—and thirty-seven different words for ice in the Yupiaq language. More fundamental, however, is a basic respect for nature and the recognition of the need for ecological balance and sustainability—an approach that Western societies are now struggling to learn. Ray Barnhardt is a professor of cross-cultural studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he has been involved in teaching and research related to Native education issues since 1970. He has served as the director of the Cross-Cultural Education Development Program, the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, and the Alaska Native Knowledge Network. His research interests include indigenous education, rural education, and place-based education. Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley was born at Mamterilleq, now known as Bethel, Alaska, where he was raised by a grandmother who encouraged his obtaining a Western education, along with the education he received as a Yupiaq child in the camps along the rivers of Southwest Alaska. Although this created conflicting values and caused confusion for him for many years, he feels he has come full circle and is now researching ways in which his Yupiaq people’s language and culture can be used in the classroom to meld the modern ways to the Yupiaq thought world. Along the way, he has completed four university degrees, including a Ph.D at the University of British Columbia. He recently retired as an associate professor of education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Education1 ray barnhardt and angayuqaq oscar kawagley A few years ago, a group of Alaska Native elders and educators assembled to identify ways to more effectively utilize the traditional knowledge systems and ways of knowing embedded in the Native communities, to enrich the school curriculum, and to enliven the learning experiences of the students. After listening for two days to lengthy discussions of topics such as indigenous world views, Native ways of knowing, cultural and intellectual property rights, and traditional ecological knowledge, an Inupiaq elder stood up and explained through an interpreter that he was going to describe how he and his brother were taught to hunt caribou by their father, before guns were commonplace in the upper Kobuk River area of northern Alaska. The elder described how his father had been a highly respected hunter who always brought food home when he went out on hunting trips and shared it with others in the village. One day, at the time when he and his brother were coming of age, their father told them to prepare to go with him to check out a herd of caribou that was migrating through a valley a few miles away. They eagerly assembled their clothing and equipment and joined their father for their first caribou hunt. When they reached a ridge overlooking the nearby valley, they could see a large herd grazing and moving slowly across a grassy plain below. Their father told his sons to lie quietly up on the ridge and watch as he went down with his bow and arrows to intercept the caribou. The boys watched in anticipation as their father proceeded to walk directly toward the caribou herd, which as he approached began to move away from him in a file behind the lead bulls. Yet he just kept walking openly toward them. This had the two brothers scratching their heads wondering why their father was chasing the caribou away. Once the father reached the area where the caribou had been grazing, he stopped and put his bow and arrows down on the ground. As the (now) elder told the story, he demonstrated how his father then got into a crouching position and slowly began to move his arms up and down, slapping them against his legs as though he was mimicking a giant bird about to take off. The two brothers watched intently as the lead bulls in the caribou heard stopped and looked back curiously at their father’s movements. Slowly at first, the caribou began to circle back in a wide arc watching the figure flapping its wings out on the tundra, and then they

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began running, encircling the man in a narrowing spiral until eventually they were close enough that the boys’ father reached down, picked up his bow and arrows and methodically culled out the choice caribou one at a time until he had what he needed. He then motioned for his sons to come down and help prepare the meat to be taken back to the village. As the elder finished the story of how he and his brother were taught the accrued knowledge associated with hunting caribou, he explained that in those days the relationship between the hunter and the hunted was much more intimate than it is now. With the intervention of modern forms of technology, the knowledge associated with that symbiotic relationship is slowly being eroded. But for the elder, the lessons he and his brother had learned from their father out on the tundra that day were just as vivid when he shared them with us as they had been the day he learned them, and he would have little difficulty passing a graduation qualifying exam on the subject seventy years later. The knowledge, skills, and standards of attainment required to be a successful hunter were self-evident, and what a young hunter needed to know and be able to do was both implicit and explicit in the lesson the father provided. The insights conveyed to us by the Inupiaq elder drawing on his childhood experience also have relevance to educators today as we seek ways to make education meaningful in the twenty-first century. It is to explicating such relevance that the remainder of this article will be directed through a close examination of common features that indigenous knowledge systems share around the world. Indigenous peoples have sustained their unique world-views and related knowledge systems for millennia, even while undergoing major social upheavals as a result of transformative forces beyond their control. Many of the core values, beliefs and practices associated with those world-views have survived and are finding relevance for today’s generations just as they did for generations past. The depth of knowledge rooted in the long inhabitation of a particular place offers lessons that can benefit everyone, from educator to scientist, as we search for a more satisfying and sustainable way to live on this planet. Actions currently being taken by indigenous people in communities throughout the world clearly demonstrate that a significant “paradigm shift” is under way in which indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing are beginning to be recognized as consisting of complex knowledge systems with an adaptive integrity of their own.2 As this shift evolves, it is not only indigenous people who are the beneficiaries, since the issues that are being addressed are of equal significance in non-indigenous

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contexts. Many of the problems that are manifested under conditions of marginalization have gravitated from the periphery to the center of industrial societies, so the new (but old) insights that are emerging from indigenous societies may be of equal benefit to the broader educational community. The tendency in the earlier literature on indigenous education, most of which was written from a non-indigenous perspective, was to focus on how to get Native people to acquire the appurtenances of the Western/scientific view of the world.3 Until recently there was very little literature that addressed how to get Western educators to understand Native world-views and ways of knowing as constituting knowledge systems in their own right, and even less on what it means for participants when such divergent systems coexist in the same person, organization, or community. It is imperative, therefore, that we come at these issues on a two-way street, rather than view them as a one-way challenge to get Native people to buy into the Western system. Native people may need to understand Western society, but not at the expense of what they already know and the way they have come to know it. Non-Native people also need to recognize the coexistence of multiple world-views and knowledge systems, and find ways to understand and relate to the world in its multiple dimensions and varied perspectives. Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Cultural Well-being In 2003 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a comprehensive report titled, A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country, in which the following conclusion was drawn with regard to education of Native American students: As a group, Native American students are not afforded educational opportunities equal to other American students. They routinely face deteriorating school facilities, underpaid teachers, weak curricula, discriminatory treatment, and outdated learning tools. In addition, the cultural histories and practices of Native students are rarely incorporated in the learning environment. As a result, achievement gaps persist with Native American students scoring lower than any other racial/ethnic group in basic levels of reading, math, and history. Native American students are also less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to drop out in earlier grades.4

Students in indigenous societies around the world have, for the most part, demonstrated a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the experience of schooling in its conventional form—an aversion that is most often

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attributable to an alien institutional culture, rather than any lack of innate intelligence, ingenuity, or problem-solving skills on the part of the students.5 The curricula, teaching methodologies, and assessment strategies associated with mainstream schooling are based on a worldview that does not adequately recognize or appreciate indigenous notions of an interdependent universe and the importance of place in their societies.6 Indigenous people have had their own ways of looking at and relating to the world, the universe, and to each other.7 Their traditional education practices were carefully constructed around observing natural processes, adapting modes of survival, obtaining sustenance from the plant and animal world, and using natural materials to make their tools and implements. All of this was made understandable through demonstration and observation accompanied by thoughtful stories in which the lessons were embedded.8 However, indigenous views of the world and approaches to education have been brought into jeopardy with the spread of Western social structures and institutionalized forms of cultural transmission.9 The encroachment of Western civilization in the indigenous world changed a people that did not seek changing. Indigenous peoples’ systems of education, governance, spirituality, economy, being, and behavior were very much in conformity with their philosophy of life. The Alaska Native people in general were sufficiently content with their lifestyle that they did not readily accept Eurocentric education and religions when the first envoys of the dominant society set foot in their land. It was not Western technological might that brought the Alaska Native people to compliance—rather it was the incomprehensible diseases that came with Eurocentric intrusions that decimated the people.10 A great number of elders, mothers and fathers, shamans and children succumbed to these new diseases. Whole villages were wiped out. Missionaries began to open orphanages and schools for the newly dislocated exiles in their own land. The Federal Bureau of Education entered into contracts with religious organizations whereby money was paid to establish schools and hire the missionary teachers. The children were taught a foreign language (English) along with new knowledge and skills to become servants to the newcomers’ needs and laborers for newly established businesses. The Compulsory School Attendance Law was enacted, requiring families to remain in one location for many months of the year so their children could attend school, thus ending the Native peoples’ practice of moving from place to place according to the seasons and animal migration patterns. This greatly reduced the

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freedom of people to be who they were, to learn traditional values and to live in harmony with their environment. It meant that the families and children no longer experienced the freedom of earlier times. Today the schools still do not require that the Native children learn their own languages and lifeways, but they are still expected to learn a new language and the related humanities and sciences. The majority of teachers are from the outside world and have little or no knowledge of the people with whom they are working. To the original people of the land, these are an immigrant people with a different way of being, thinking, behaving, and doing. Few teachers recognize that the indigenous people are not like other European immigrant groups, such as the Irish, French, or Italians who chose to leave their homeland. By not teaching the indigenous youngsters their own language and ways of doings things, the classroom teachers are signaling that the traditional language, knowledge, and skills are of little importance. The students begin to think of themselves as being less than other people. After all, they are expected to learn through a language other than their own, to learn values that are often in conflict with their own, and to learn a “better” way of seeing and doing things. They are taught the “American Dream,” which in their case is largely unattainable without leaving behind who they are. The messages from the school, the media, and other manifestations of Eurocentric society convey an inaccurate picture of the outside world to the Native students, as well as a distorted view of their own, which leads to a great deal of confusion over who they are and where they fit in the world. This loss of identity leads to guilt and shame at being Yupiaq or Athabascan or Tlingit. The resultant feelings of hurt, grief, and pain are locked in the mind to emerge as depression and apathy, which is further reinforced by the fear of failure in school, by ridicule from non-Natives, and by the loss of their spirituality. These are a few of the contributing factors as to why Native children do not excel in school. Recently, however, many indigenous as well as non-indigenous people have begun to recognize the limitations of a monocultural education system, and new approaches have begun to emerge that are contributing to a better understanding of the relationship between indigenous ways of knowing and those associated with Western society and formal education.11 Our challenge now is to devise a system of education for all people that respects the diverse epistemological and pedagogical foundations provided by both indigenous and Western societies, as well as those of other cultural traditions. While the

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examples used here will be drawn primarily from the Alaska Native context, they are intended to be illustrative of the issues that emerge in any indigenous context where efforts are under way to reconnect education to a sense of place and its attendant subsistence practices and cultural manifestations.

When the Earth’s Crust Was Thin Alaska Native education in its customary forms was deeply rooted in the complexities and interactions associated with one’s place in an interconnected universe, as illustrated by the following traditional Yupiaq story: In Distant Time, when the earth’s crust was thin, a crane is flying around looking for a likely place to eat. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, the tundra is warming. The crane decides to check out the weather. He begins to fly in a circle. Each time he completes the circle, he gains altitude. He looks at earth from a very high altitude. He then decides to descend and look for food. He flies over a river and sights a skin boat with people in it slowly paddling down the river. He continues his flight and sees a lake. He flies to it, and finds many kinds of berries. He is very hungry. He lands on the river bank. He contemplates going back to the tundra to eat berries, but his mind cannot forget the people coming down the river. He knows that he could be hunted. He must think of a way to warn himself when the people approach. He sits there and thinks. He finally decides that he will use his eyes as sentries. He removes his eyes and puts them on a log. He instructs the eyes by telling them, “Now when you see people coming down the river, you warn me. I will come down and get you and fly off.” After telling them so, he goes back to the tundra and starts to eat berries. Soon he hears his eyes shout, “Crane, crane, there are people coming down the river!” He hurries down, finds his eyes, and puts them back into the sockets. He looks. There is only a log drifting down the river. The branches must have resembled people. He gets upset and says to his eyes, “Now you be very careful and make sure they are people before you call for me.” He goes back to the tundra and eats. Soon, he hears his eyes calling him, “Crane, crane, there is a boat with people in it coming down the river. Come quick!” He hurries down to the log and picks up his eyes and looks. There is only a chunk of tundra drifting down. Tufts of grass move up and down with movements of the clump of tundra. “Now, look eyes you have made a second mistake. Look very carefully before you call for me. I’m going back to eat some more berries.”

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Soon afterward, the eyes call, “Crane, crane, people are coming down the river in a boat.” This time the crane does not heed the call. He is thinking, “Well, I suppose they see something else that might resemble a boat and people. This time I won’t respond.” He continues to eat. Soon the eyes call, “Crane, crane, the people are almost upon us. Come quick.” He does not answer. Some time elapses, then he hears the eyes calling from a distance, “Crane, crane, the people have us, and they’re taking us down the river.” The crane runs down to the riverbank and finds the log. He feels around, but there are no eyes. He sits down and thinks, “What am I going to do for eyes?” After much thought and consternation at not being able to see, he ambles back to the tundra. A thought occurs to him, “Why not try berries for eyes?” With that he finds blackberries. He plops them into his eye sockets. Lo and behold, he sees, but the world is different shades of black and grey. This can’t be, so he disposes of the blackberries. He finds salmonberries, and tries them. But the world is orange with its color variations and does not look right. So he gets rid of them. He tries cranberries, but again the world is not the right color. It shows a place of red hues. Finally, he tries blueberries. This time, the skies are blue, the tundra is green and varied in color, the clouds are white. Whew, these are to be his eyes. And that is how the crane got blue eyes.12

Stories and myths such as these abound from Distant Time when the earth’s crust was thin, when it was easy for people and animals to communicate or transform from one to the other. So, the story of how the crane got blue eyes must be understood within the Yupiaq frames of reference. The myth is an analogical way of relating to one’s environment. It reflects the human mind’s interpretation of the natural world and it has to do with conveying insights as well as relationships. The Yupiaq people accepted these stories on faith because of the need to know how to make a life for themselves. If people hold to a world-view that includes a language, an epistemology, and a metaphysic all contingent on nature, their understanding is naturally derived from their everyday interaction with the world around them. The Yupiaq child listened not only with the ears but with the mind and heart, all of which were essential to recognize the patterns and events from which natural laws were derived and on which survival was dependent—the sun will rise and descend on a reliable schedule each day, the seasons will maintain their annual cycle, the spruce seeds will germinate under the right conditions, and the caribou will behave in predictable ways.

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These observations are illustrated in the story by the description of the crane flying in circles and ascending. The Yupiaq know that the tundra warms under the sun. This becomes visible as one looks out across the tundra and sees heat waves rising. They know the scientific principle that hot air rises. This is the principle that the crane is using to rise high into the air to look around. The scientific laws of nature merely describe what physicists, astronomers, astrophysicists and others have observed. The Native creative mythology deals with the whole physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual aspects of these inner and outer ecologies. The Native person realizes that he or she is a microcosm of the whole in the universe. Native people needed to take the lives of animals to live. To exhibit honor, respect, dignity, and reciprocation with the animals whose lives were taken, the people conceived and put into practice many rituals and ceremonies to communicate with the animals as spiritual beings. These are corroborated through the mythologies which are manifestations of fundamental organizing principles that exist within the cosmos affecting all our lives. It behooves the Yupiaq person to leave something behind, such as a piece of dry fish, when getting mouse food from the tundra. The mouse food is gathered in the early fall so that the mouse and its family will have the opportunity to collect more food for the winter. The seal when caught is given a drink of water so that its spirit will not be thirsty when it travels to the animal spirit kingdom. This is done to show respect to the animal for having shared and given its life to the hunter. Medicinal plants are gathered respectfully knowing full well their power to heal, recognizing that these were given freely by nature, and therefore they should be shared freely. The Alaska Native person is aware that if one does not use these gifts of Nature regularly, mindfully and respectfully, they will begin to diminish through disuse or misuse. Earth, air, water, fire, and spirit must always be in balance. All the elements and creatures have an important niche in the ecological system.13 In the Western system natural resources are often approached in a fragmentary way such that an expert on harbor seals does not know what the expert on herring fish is doing. This type of research lends itself to measuring and objectifying the species studied, but it is not sufficient for sustaining balance in Mother Earth. The question now is: How do we counteract the depression, hopelessness, and despair that derive from the unfulfilled promises of the modern world, and what role can schooling and education play in this effort? To address this question, it will be necessary to take a closer look at how traditional education fits into the lives of indigenous people.

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Learning from Nature It is through direct interaction with the environment that Alaska Native people learn most naturally. What they learn is mediated by their cultural cognitive map. The map consists of those understandings that have been learned over a long period of time. As Native people interact with nature, they carefully observe to find patterns or order where there might otherwise appear to be chaos. This empirical knowledge of their environment has to be general and specific at the same time. During their hunting trips into the tundra or on the ocean in the winter, they must have precise knowledge of the snow and ice conditions, so over many years of experience and observation they have classified snow and ice with terms having very specific meanings. For example, there are at least thirty-seven terms for ice in the Yupiaq language, having to do with seasons, weather conditions, solar energy transformations, currents, and rapid changes on wind direction and velocity. To the Yupiaq people, it is a matter of survival. This knowledge is passed down from generation to generation by example, by showing, and by telling with stories to reinforce the importance of knowing about the varying conditions. This comprises the rational side of the indigenous people. The rational mind has the ability to see and store many bits of observed information, which can then be mulled over and shared with others for more ideas of what they may mean. This may evolve into a tentative assumption of how and why something is the way it is. Being self-aware through the subconscious and intuition, they let it play in their minds until a direction or answer evolves. They observe nature’s indicators and come to a tentative supposition, followed by testing with further observation of variables that may affect the conclusion. They know that nature is dynamic and they have to change with it. Thus their conduct of life changes with nature. They pass on the truths to the next generation, knowing full well that changes in interpretation will occur, but that certain of their values, such as caring, sharing, cooperation, harmony, and interconnectedness with the created whole of their environment will continue. This then validates and gives dignity to their existence. One cannot be conscious of the world without first being aware of oneself. To know who you are, what your place in the world is, and that you are to strive to seek life is what self-awareness is all about. It is the highest level of human knowledge, to know oneself so intimately that you are not afraid to tell others of life, and to help those that need help with compassion without being dragged down by the troubles of those

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being helped. Knowledge of oneself is power, and you acquire it by looking into yourself to see what strengths and weaknesses you have. You accomplish this through looking at your own reactions to everyday situations, both good and bad. To achieve a secure sense of oneself involves meditation, visualization, intuition, and tempering of all thoughts and actions with the “heart,” which is on an equal plane with knowledge of the mind. “Heart” can best be explained by giving examples: to give freely of oneself to help a person with personal problems; to bring a little bird with a broken leg home and care for it to restore its health; to come upon a moose mired in soft snow and shovel the snow away to free it; to be motivated by kindness and care—these all involve the exercise of heart. You can recognize people with heart by the respect shown them by others through kind words, inclusion in community activities, and acceptance as a stable and commonsensical member of the community. The Yupiaq people’s careful and acute observational ability taught them many years ago the presence of a Creative Force. They saw birth and death in the human and in nature. This Creative Force flowed through everything—the years, months, days, rivers, lightning and thunder, plants, animals, and earth. They studied, they connected, and nature became their metaphysic. It gave them empirical knowledge. Products of nature extended to them ideas for developing their technology. The spider web provided the idea for the net; the snowshoe hare’s feet and tracks, their snowshoes; the mouse’s chamber lined with grass, their houses; the moon’s phases, their calendar; the Big Dipper and the North Star, their timepiece at night; wind directions, their indicators of weather; flint and slate, their cutlery. Certain plants and herbs gave them their healing powers and they discovered that certain living things were adapted to live in certain areas, while others were able to make physical adjustments through changes in coloration, forming a heavier coat for winter, hibernation, estivation, etc., all under trying conditions. They noticed change across time and conditions, and they recognized that they too would have to change with time and conditions to survive. Their wisdom transcended the quantification of things to recognize a qualitative level at which the spiritual, natural, and human worlds were inextricably interconnected. This was accomplished through the Creative Force having endowed all earthly things with spirits, which meant that they would have to deal with all things being alive and aware. Having a Raven as creator of man and woman and everything else ensured that humans would never be superior to the other elements of

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creation. Each being endowed with a spirit signified that it possessed innate survival skills. It had the will to live, propagate, and care for itself, thus the need to respect everything and to have taboos, rituals, and ceremonies to keep the three realms in balance. Nature’s indicators and voices give much knowledge for making a living, but the intuitive and spiritual knowledge gives wisdom to make a life. Therein lies the strength and tenacity with which indigenous people continue to maintain their identity, despite assaults on the philosophical, epistemological, ontological, economic, and technological fronts. Their template has certainly eroded, but the continuity of their ways to comfort and create harmony persists. As long as the indigenous peoples’ spirituality is intact, they will persevere. Indigenous Knowledge and Western Schooling Converge As illustrated previously, while Western education tends to emphasize compartmentalized knowledge that is often de-contextualized and taught in the detached setting of a classroom or laboratory, indigenous people have traditionally acquired their knowledge through direct experience in the natural world. For them, the particulars come to be understood in relation to the whole, and the “laws” are continually tested in the context of everyday survival. Western thought also differs from indigenous thought in its notion of competency. In Western terms, competency is often assessed based on predetermined ideas of what a person should know, which are then measured indirectly through various forms of “objective” tests. Such an approach does not address whether that person is actually capable of putting that knowledge into practice. In the traditional Native sense, competency has an unequivocal relationship to survival or extinction—if you fail as a caribou hunter, your whole family may be in jeopardy. You either have it, or you don’t, and it is tested in a real-world context.14 The American Association for the Advancement of Science has begun to recognize the potential contributions that indigenous people can make to our understanding of the world around us.15 In addition to sponsoring a series of symposia on “Native Science” at recent annual meetings, AAAS has published a Handbook on Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property to guide traditional knowledge holders in protecting their intellectual property and maintaining biological diversity.16 In the handbook, AAAS defines traditional knowledge as follows: Traditional knowledge is the information that people in a given community, based on experience and adaptation to a local culture and environment, have

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developed over time, and continue to develop. This knowledge is used to sustain the community and its culture and to maintain the genetic resources necessary for the continued survival of the community.17

Indigenous people do a form of “science” when they are involved in the annual cycle of subsistence activities. They have studied and know a great deal about flora and fauna, and they have their own classification systems and versions of meteorology, physics, chemistry, earth science, astronomy, botany, pharmacology, psychology, and the sacred.18 For a Native student imbued with an indigenous, experientially grounded, holistic world view, typical approaches to schooling can present an impediment to learning, to the extent that they focus on compartmentalized knowledge with little regard for how academic subjects relate to one another or to the surrounding universe. To bring significance to learning in indigenous settings, the explanations of natural phenomena are best understood by students if they are cast first in indigenous terms to which they can relate, and then explained in Western terms. For example, when choosing an eddy along the river for placing a fishing net, it can be explained initially in the indigenous way of understanding, pointing out the currents, the movement of debris and sediment in the water, the likely path of the fish, the condition of the river bank, upstream conditions affecting water levels, the impact of passing boats, etc. Once the students understand the significance of the knowledge being presented, it can then be explained in Western terms, such as flow, velocity, resistance, turbidity, sonar readings, tide tables, etc., to illustrate how the modern explanation adds to the traditional understanding (and vice versa). All learning can start with what the student and community already know and have experienced in everyday life.19 The indigenous student (as with most students) will then become more motivated to learn when the subject matter is based on something useful and suitable to the livelihood of the community and is presented in a way that reflects a familiar world-view.20 Since Western perspectives influence decisions that impact every aspect of indigenous people’s lives, from education to fish and wildlife management, indigenous people themselves have begun to take an active role in re-asserting their own traditions of knowing in various research and policymaking arenas.21 As a result, there is a growing awareness of the depth and breadth of knowledge that is extant in many indigenous societies and its potential value in addressing issues of contemporary significance, including the adaptive processes associated with

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learning and knowledge construction. The following observation by Bielawski illustrates this point: Indigenous knowledge is not static, an unchanging artifact of a former lifeway. It has been adapting to the contemporary world since contact with “others” began, and it will continue to change. Western science in the North is also beginning to change in response to contact with indigenous knowledge. Change was first seen in the acceptance that Inuit (and other Native northerners) have knowledge, that is, “know something.” Then change moved to involving Inuit in the research process as it is defined by Western science. Then communitybased research began, wherein communities and native organizations identified problems and sought the means to solve them. I believe the next stage will be one in which Inuit and other indigenous peoples grapple with the nature of what scientists call research.22

Such an awareness of the contemporary significance of indigenous knowledge systems has entered into policy development arenas on an international level, as is evident in the following statement in the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy: Resolving the various concerns that indigenous peoples have about the development of scientific based information must be addressed through both policy and programs. This begins with reformulating the principles and guidelines within which research will be carried out and involves the process of consultation and the development of appropriate techniques for identifying problems that indigenous peoples wish to see resolved. But the most important step that must be taken is to assure that indigenous environmental and ecological knowledge becomes an information system that carries its own validity and recognition. A large effort is now underway in certain areas within the circumpolar region, as well as in other parts of the world, to establish these information systems and to set standards for their use.23

Indigenous societies, as a matter of survival, have long sought to understand the regularities in the world around them, recognizing that nature is underlaid with many unseen patterns of order. For example, out of necessity, Alaska Native people have made detailed observations of animal behavior (including the inquisitiveness of caribou). They have learned to decipher and adapt to the constantly changing patterns of weather and seasonal cycles. The Native elders have long been able to predict weather based upon observations of subtle signs that presage what subsequent conditions are likely to be. The wind, for example, has irregularities of constantly varying velocity, humidity, temperature, and direction due to topography and other factors. There are nonlinear

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dimensions to clouds, irregularities of cloud formations, anomalous cloud luminosity, and different forms of precipitation at different elevations. Behind these variables, however, there are patterns, such as prevailing winds or predictable cycles of weather phenomena that can be discerned through long observation (though global climate change is taking its toll on weather predictability). Over time, Native people have observed that the weather’s dynamic is not unlike the mathematical characteristics of fractals, where patterns are reproduced within themselves and the parts of a part are part of another part which is a part of still another part, and so on.24 For indigenous people there is a recognition that many unseen forces are at play in the elements of the universe and that very little is naturally linear, or occurs in a two-dimensional grid or a threedimensional cube. They are familiar with the notions of conservation of energy, irregularities in patterns, and anomalies of form and force. Through long observation they have become specialists in understanding the interconnectedness and holism of our place in the universe.25 The new sciences of chaos and complexity and the study of nonlinear dynamic systems have helped Western scientists to also recognize order in phenomena that were previously considered chaotic and random. These patterns reveal new sets of relationships which point to the essential balances and diversity that help nature to thrive. Indigenous people have long recognized these interdependencies and have sought to maintain harmony with all of life. Western scientists have constructed the holographic image, which lends itself to the Native concept of everything being connected. Just as the whole contains each part of the image, so too does each part contain the makeup of the whole. The relationship of each part to everything else must be understood to produce the whole image. With fractal geometry, holographic images and the sciences of chaos and complexity, the Western thoughtworld has begun to focus more attention on relationships, as its proponents recognize the interconnectedness in all elements of the world around us.26 Thus there is a growing appreciation of the complementarity that exists between what were previously considered disparate and irreconcilable systems of thought.27 The incongruities between Western institutional structures and practices and indigenous cultural forms will not be easy to reconcile. The complexities that come into play when fundamentally different world-views converge present a formidable challenge. The specialization, standardization, compartmentalization, and systematization that are inherent features of most Western bureaucratic forms of

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organization are often in direct conflict with social structures and practices in indigenous societies, which tend toward collective decision making, extended kinship structures, ascribed authority vested in elders, flexible notions of time, and traditions of informality in everyday affairs.28 It is little wonder then that formal education structures, which often epitomize Western bureaucratic forms, have been found wanting in addressing the educational needs of traditional societies.29 When engaging in the kind of comparative analysis of different world-views outlined above, any generalizations should be recognized as indicative and not definitive, since indigenous knowledge systems are diverse themselves and are constantly adapting and changing in response to new conditions. The qualities identified for both indigenous and Western systems represent tendencies rather than fixed traits, and thus must be used cautiously to avoid overgeneralization.30 At the same time, it is the diversity and dynamics of indigenous societies that enrich our efforts as we seek avenues to integrate indigenous knowledge systems in a complementary way with the system of education we call schooling.31 Conclusion An underlying theme of this chapter has been the need to reconstitute the relationship between indigenous peoples and the immigrant societies in which they are embedded. By documenting the integrity of locally situated cultural knowledge and skills and critiquing the learning processes by which such knowledge is transmitted, acquired, and utilized, Alaska Native and other indigenous peoples are engaging in a form of self-determination that will not only benefit themselves, but will open opportunities to better understand learning in all its manifestations and thus inform educational practices for everyone’s benefit. Traditional processes for learning to hunt caribou by observation and meaningful participation can offer insights into how we create opportunities for students learning to operate a computer. To overcome the long-standing estrangement between indigenous communities and the external institutions impacting their lives, all parties in this endeavor (community, school, higher education, state and national agencies) will need to form a true multilateral partnership in which mutual respect is accorded to the contributions that each brings to the relationship.32 The key to overcoming the historical imbalance in that regard is the development of collaborative research endeavors specifically focusing on education and indigenous knowledge systems, with primary direction

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coming from indigenous people so they are able to move from a passive role subject to someone else’s agenda to an active leadership position with explicit authority in the construction and implementation of the research initiatives.33 In this context, the task of achieving broad-based support hinges on our ability to demonstrate that such an undertaking has relevance and meaning in the local indigenous contexts with which it is associated, as well as in the broader social, political, and educational arenas involved. By utilizing research strategies that link the study of learning to the knowledge base and ways of knowing already established in the local community and culture, indigenous communities are more likely to find value in what emerges and be able to put the new insights into practice toward achieving their own ends as a meaningful exercise in real selfdetermination. In turn, the knowledge gained from these efforts will have applicability in furthering our understanding of basic human processes associated with learning and the transmission of knowledge in all forms.

NOTES 1. Article adapted from Ray Barnhardt and Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, “Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Alaska Native Ways of Knowing,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2005): 8–23. 2. Dean Bartholomew, ed., “Indigenous Education (Theme Issue),” Cultural Survival Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2003). 3. Frank Darnell, ed., Education in the North: The First International Conference on Cross-Cultural Education in the Circumpolar Nations (Fairbanks: Center for Northern Education Research, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1972); James Orvik and Ray Barnhardt, eds., Cultural Influences in Alaska Native Education (Fairbanks: Center for Northern Education Research, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1974). 4. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2003). 5. Marie Battiste, Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education: A Literature Review with Recommendations (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 2002). 6. A. Oscar Kawagley, Delena Norris-Tull, and Roger Norris-Tull, “The Indigenous Worldview of Yupiaq Culture: Its Scientific Nature and Relevance to the Practice and Teaching of Science,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 35, no. 2 (1998): 133–44. 7. Martha Ascher, Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Ron Eglash, “Computation, Complexity and Coding in Native American Knowledge Systems,” in Changing the Faces of Mathematics: Perspectives on Indigenous People of North America, ed. Judith E. Hankes and Gerald R. Fast (Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2002), 251–62. 8. A. Oscar Kawagley, A Yupiaq World View: A Pathway to Ecology and Spirit, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2006); Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2002).

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9. Ray Barnhardt and A. Oscar Kawagley, “Education Indigenous to Place: Western Science Meets Indigenous Reality,” in Ecological Education in Action, ed. Gregory Smith and Dilafruz Williams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 117–40. 10. Harold Napoleon, Yuyaraaq: The Way of the Human Being (Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1991). 11. Manulani A. Meyer, “Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 1 (2001): 124–48; Glen Aikenhead, “Integrating Western and Aboriginal Sciences: Cross-Cultural Science Teaching,” Research in Science Education 31, no. 3 (2002): 337–55. 12. A. Oscar Kawagley, “Alaska Native Education: History and Adaptation in the New Millennium,” Journal of American Indian Education 39, no. 1 (1999): 31–51. 13. Kawagley, A Yupiaq World View. 14. Ray Barnhardt, “Domestication of the Ivory Tower: Institutional Adaptation to Cultural Distance,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2002): 238–49. 15. Lori Lambert, “From ‘Savages’ to Scientists: Mainstream Science Moves Toward Recognizing Traditional Knowledge,” Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–12. 16. Stephen A. Hansen and Justin W. VanFleet, Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2003). 17. Ibid., 3. 18. Judith E. Hankes and Gerald R. Fast, eds., Changing the Faces of Mathematics: Perspectives on Indigenous People of North America (Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2002). 19. Barbara S. Carlson, Unangam Hitnisangin/Unangam Hitnisangis: Aleut Plants (Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 2003). 20. Kawagley, A Yupiaq World View; Jerry Lipka, Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup’ik Eskimo Examples (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998). 21. Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, A Research Program on Indigenous Knowledge (Anchorage, AK: Inuit Circumpolar Conference, 1993); Patricia Cochran, What is Traditional Knowledge? Traditional Knowledge Systems in the North (Anchorage: Alaska Native Science Commission, 2004, http://www.nativescience.org/html/ traditional_knowledge.html)); Graham H. Smith, Kaupapa Maori Theory: An Indigenous Theory of Transformative Praxis (Auckland, NZ: University of Auckland/Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, 2002). 22. Ellen Bielawski, Cross-Cultural Epistemology: Cultural Readaptation Through the Pursuit of Knowledge (Edmonton: Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, 1990), 8. 23. Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, A Research Program on Indigenous Knowledge, 27. 24. Igor Krupnik and Dyanna Jolly, eds., The Earth is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change (Fairbanks: Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, 2001); Barbara Adams and Jerry Lipka, Building a Fish Rack: Investigations into Proof, Properties, Perimeter and Area (Calgary, AB: Detselig Enterprises, 2003). 25. Barnhardt and Kawagley, Education Indigenous to Place; Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence; Eglash, “Computation, Complexity and Coding in Native American Knowledge Systems”; Graham Smith, Kaupapa Maori Theory: An Indigenous Theory of Transformative Praxis. 26. Frithof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Doubleday, 1996); Elisabet Sahtouris, “The Indigenous Way,” in EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 323–43.

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27. Ray Barnhardt and A. Oscar Kawagley, “Culture, Chaos and Complexity: Catalysts for Change in Indigenous Education,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2004): 59–64. 28. Ray Barnhardt, Domestication of the Ivory Tower. 29. Linda Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999). 30. Sidney Stephens, Handbook for Culturally Responsive Science Curriculum (Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 2000). 31. Assembly of Alaska Native Educators, Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools (Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1998, http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/standards/). 32. Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative, Final Report (Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2005, http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/arsi.html). 33. Barbara Harrison, Collaborative Programs in Indigenous Communities (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2001).

chapter 17

Educating at the Interface of Biosphere and Bitsphere The previous chapters in Section Three dealt with the general patterns or traditions that humans employ to perceive and organize various facets of the human condition. In this chapter Ursula Franklin argues that all of these attempts are challenged by new computer-based technologies that influence the process of making generalities by changing our sense of time and space. While humans have always coordinated or sequenced their collective efforts using time, modern Western societies began the effort to employ technology to manipulate time, making it possible to reorganize work and social relations. Ironically, new technologies threaten to undermine previous patterns. The above is exacerbated by the capacity of technology to shrink the planet. The proximity of communities that made it possible to coordinate collective action in relatively manageable units is now challenged by globalization and the capacity to move people, information, resources—and ideas—from distant locations with relative ease. Indeed, the possibility of belonging to a local community is threatened by obligatory membership in a global village. One consequence of the above is the exaggerated importance of certain forms of knowledge facilitated by technology and the marginalization of other human attributes. Franklin, for example, is distressed that so far the information explosion has not been accompanied by any attendant “understanding explosion.” Ursula Martius Franklin is University Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she holds a Ph.D in experimental physics and a number of honorary degrees in science and the humanities. She taught for many years in the University’s Faculty of Engineering and has continued her active involvement in education after her retirement as a Senior Fellow of Massey College. As a Quaker, feminist, and pacifist, much of her research and teaching has centered around the social and political impacts of technologies, ancient and modern. In addition to numerous technical papers, she is the author of The Real World of Technology (2002). A comprehensive collection of her speeches and essays, The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, was published in 2006. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Educating at the Interface of Biosphere and Bitsphere ursula m. franklin I start from the premise that we are living in a very difficult, very interesting time, a time in which a major historical period is coming to a convoluted end. Indeed, we live in a time in which the social and political upheaval is as great or greater than it was at the time of the Reformation. As I see it, technology has built the house in which we all live. The house is continually being extended and remodeled. More and more of human life takes place within its walls, so that today there is hardly any human activity that does not occur within this house. All are affected by the design of the house, by the division of its space, by the location of its doors and walls. Compared to people in earlier times, we rarely have a chance to live outside this house and the house is still changing; it is still being built as well as being demolished. Building this house has profoundly altered the relationships of people to nature, to each other, and to their communities. To a new generation, many of these changed relationships appear so normal, so inevitable, that they are taken as given and are not questioned. Altogether there seems to be a very drastic change in what it means today to be human—what it means to be a woman, a child, a man; to be rich or poor; to be an insider or an outsider—compared with what all this meant in the past. My father was born at the end of the nineteenth century, and many of his approaches to life could be understood from knowing that he was a German intellectual, a member of an old family of a particular social class, coming from a particular region of the country. On the other hand, you would know very little about my son’s approach to life and his values and attitudes by knowing that he is a photographer, born in the late 1950s in Toronto. Technology has muddled or even destroyed the traditional social compass. In this chapter I intend to outline how new computer-based technologies have destabilized previous patterns of how people live together by affecting the basic categories humans use to make sense of their experience: time and space. In many ways, time and space are the two sides of the coin of human existence: Whatever changes one side will affect the other, and often the terms “faster” or “further” are quite inadequate to describe their effects. Not surprisingly, one arena in

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which these new developments have had a dramatic impact is education, where some components have been greatly enhanced—at the cost of perhaps more important components. Uprooting Social and Political Patterns Nature provided human societies with their earliest markers of time. These markers range from the positions of stars, the sun and moon, and the rhythm of the seasons to the migration patterns of animals, and the birth, growth, and decay of all living things. From these experiences comes the understanding of patterns and cycles and the place of human societies within them. But there is a clear distinction to be made between measured time and experienced time. Time is at the center of people’s personal and collective sense of identity, which in turn is based on a shared history, on a common knowledge of the sequence of relevant past events. The sacred books of many civilizations recount such events in terms of their sequence: “ . . . in the beginning there was. . . .” In the same vein, individual lives and their stories have a beginning and an end. Time is always with us; we speak of giving time, making time, wasting, stealing, and even killing time. Women speak of “that time of the month.” There is due time for a child to be born. In all this, time is real and it patterns human existence as it structures our collective and personal memory. It is well to remember that Immanuel Kant saw time and space not as external media within which people move, but as ordering devices of the human mind. Throughout history, human beings have rattled the cages of space and time that confined their natural existence. Human inventions have perfected the reckoning of elapsed time, be it by means of the controlled flow of water, by reading the shadow’s position on a sundial, or later mechanical devices, and are a testimony to the bonding and bondage of society and time. Lamps pushed back the night; domestication and crossbreeding of plants extended the growing seasons. To evade the inevitable consequences of nature’s seasonal patterns, nations fought for ice-free seaports and built empires “upon which the sun never sets.” But even when new technologies, from the telegraph to railways, bridged great distances in short times, the newly created international time zones acknowledged the reality of nature’s predominance over time. “The Clock Carol,” a song by Donald Swann and Paul Townsend, written in 1965, resonates this reality in its opening line: “When the bells chime noon in London, New York begins its day, ‘good morning’ in Toronto means ‘good night’ in Mandalay.”1

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One has to remember also that the very preoccupation of technology with outwitting the constraints of time and space is, in and of itself, evidence of the profound grip of temporality on society. It is the facet of time as sequence and pattern that, in terms of the new technologies, requires our attention most. The concept of synchronicity and its opposite, asynchronicity, are central to this aspect of temporality and technology. Synchronicity will be used here in the meaning that Carl G. Jung2 and Lewis Mumford3 gave it. Mumford stressed how the use of clocks as the instruments for marking time into commonly acknowledged segments changed the structure of communities as well as that of individual work and living. The bell’s call to work or prayer keeps a community “in sync,” often imposing more and more detailed patterns of dominance on individuals and groups. Jung, on the other hand, drew attention to the importance of common patterns and acausal coincidences in establishing a sense of meaning and connectedness within and between individuals. Thus, while synchronicity evokes the presence of sequences and patterns, fixed intervals or periodicities, coordination and synchronization, asynchronicity indicates the decoupling of activities from their functional time or space patterns. Western modernity depended on the prescriptive repatterning of work and social relations through technological manipulations of time in factory, school, or prison. Most of these developments can be interpreted as powerful new patterns that structured people’s lives by imposing new time and space configurations. However, the current widespread use of computer networks and related technologies has led to something different: the prevalence of asynchronicity, indicated by the loosening, if not the abandonment, of previously compulsory time and space patterns. This is a most significant change. No longer is one pattern superseded by another pattern; the change now appears as a move from an existing pattern to no discernible structure. I consider the evolving destructuring by asynchronicity as an extremely important, if not the crucial facet, of the new electronic technologies. The role of asynchronicity in unraveling social and political patterns without apparent replacement with other patterns cannot be overestimated. Let me give you just a few examples of asynchronicity and its social and human consequences. In terms of communication, take e-mail. The ping-pong pattern of communication is no longer tied to space or time: You can send your ping to someone before going to lunch; she may pick it up on her Blackberry when and where she can and, at some point, send back her pong—and there goes the joy of intimate contact, and with it the heart of what verbal communication

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was thought to be: an exchange of messages between people in the present tense. The point here is not so much the interposing of devices into a process of communication, but the changing of a synchronous process into an asynchronous one. Many people have experienced the asynchronous forms of labor and have felt their consequences; the impact often includes the lack of work-related solidarity and self-identification that can have profound social implications. And then there are the visits at all hours to the libraries of the Internet, the electronic articles and books that do not have to be returned. There are the new haves and have-nots, now defined in terms of their ownership of equipment, their access to and knowledge of the new codes that allow asynchronic practices. What does this all mean to us as humans, as social and political beings, evolving within the patterns of nature and culture? It’s not that I believe everything asynchronous is “bad” and that everything synchronous is “good.” Not at all. Women in particular have often treasured the opportunity to work asynchronously—getting a bit of writing done when the kids are asleep, sneaking a slice of private life into their tightly structured existences. But I see a real difference between supplementing a rigidly patterned structure with asynchronous activities and substituting synchronous functions by asynchronous schemes. I will elaborate on these distinctions later because what troubles me is not as much the nature of asynchronous processes but their increasing prevalence, if not dominance. But let me now turn to a book entitled City of Bits,4 that exquisitely illustrates this dominance. The author, William Mitchell, juxtaposes the old realities of time and space with the new bit-world of asynchronicity. Mitchell takes an architectural approach to living and working asynchronically. In the City of Bits, the e-mail address becomes one’s domicile, the Internet the always open library, the chat-group the extended family of choice, the World Wide Web the “information flea market,” as Mitchell calls it. Work and play intertwine to the point of nonseparation, and social justice is defined in terms of access to cyberspace for business, pleasure, and politics. A brilliantly thoughtful and frightening book, it is informed by the research and outlook of the MIT Media Labs and gives the reader a scary sense of inevitability as to the coming of a global “bitsphere.” For Mitchell the issue is not whether the world will turn into a global bitsphere, but how the design of the bitsphere is evolving. Mitchell’s vision is as breathtaking for what it depicts as for what it does not. The inhabitants of the City of Bits are still real live human

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beings, yet nature, of which humans are but a small part, appears to have no autonomous space in the bitsphere. There are no seasonal rhythms, no presence of the land nor the ebb and flow of individual lives, even though these are the synchronous patterns that have shaped culture and community throughout time and, through their patterns, have provided a source of meaning to people for many generations. To substitute, rather than supplement, these synchronous patterns with the asynchronous practices of the bitsphere is not a trivial matter to contemplate. The biosphere, the living earth, people within their communities, their culture, and their history are all still with us. The built environments of the past, the cities and towns, the roads and waterways were all constructed sequentially, one item after another. The sense of history and identity, present in every civilization, is rooted in a common knowledge of past events and their time sequences. History, after all, is as someone once said, “just one damned thing after another.” Human beings perceive life in its physical, social, and political dimensions as having evolved in steps and stages, not as being assembled and constructed from distinct pieces according to a specific design or blueprint. Sequence and consequence are intimately connected in the human mind; can one let go of sequence and maintain the notion of consequence, let alone accountability?

Substituting Global for Local I now need to look at the other side of the coin of human existence: the changing relationships of people and physical space. Fascination with new technologies can change the focus of our perception of what is actual and real. Sometimes I have to remind myself that, after all, one does not bump into a website when walking the dog, though one may meet the neighbors and talk about the potholes in the street. I want to illuminate the struggles at the interface between the human sphere and the bitsphere, and to help I have cooked up an image that allows me to illustrate the structural and historical dimensions of the problems at hand.5 Imagine the whole world as a round cake; its wedge-shaped slices are states or countries. As residents of a slice, we are closer to adjacent slices than to more distant ones. Within the slice we can picture social mobility as a vertical structuring, a rearrangement of place between, say, the crumb of the bottom and the icing on the top, with the raisins in between. Community, then, is locality, as is its representation.

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Democracy has local roots. Its first practice is local: the member of Parliament from Kicking Horse Pass represents a small slice within the larger slice called Canada. Throughout history, language, law, and custom have been identified vertically in terms of locale; locale has been slice dependent. The very notion of foreign languages or of a lingua franca is an acknowledgment of the local nature of language, culture, and community. Yet slices were rarely completely isolated; exchanges across the cuts—whether state borders or boundaries of language or ethnicity—have always existed, more likely, of course, between adjacent slices than between distant ones. Throughout history people have traveled across large distances to foreign lands. They have returned home with new impressions, knowledge, and goods. One can consider this traffic of individuals, goods, and ideas as the horizontal slicing of the global cake. For a long time the extent of such horizontal movements was mitigated by geography and was regulated by local, or vertical, laws. Instruments such as passports, tariffs, and border surveillance protected vertical activities from the encroachment of horizontal endeavor. Many technological innovations, intended to push against the constraints of time and space, have made it easier to achieve horizontal movements: from navigational instruments that improved sea travel to railways, cars, and airplanes, from telegraph and radio to telephone, fax, and e-mail— all have contributed to a vast increase in the cross-border and crosscountry exchanges. Add to this the fact that modern production technologies, with their prescriptive fragmentation, lend themselves very well to global subcontracting and asynchronistic reassembly and you get a feeling for the globalization blueprint. We all know specific realities of the increasing dominance of horizontal activities: goods and parts are manufactured overseas for sale here; services are offered by voices identified by first names only from call centers located who knows where; our newscasts contain stock market news from around the world as frequently as they bring local traffic reports. The instant updates on the routes money travels around the world appear as important to Canadian citizens as hearing about a car accident that may delay their trip home from work. This state of things has not arrived overnight. The growing importance of horizontal transactions demanded facilitation and regulation, beginning with customs unions, relaxing of visa requirements, and the easing up of travel and currency regulations (many strengthened again after 9/11). But the quantum jump came again through the electronic technologies. In terms of the cake model, within the vertical slices some

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parts benefited much more than others from these developments, often, though not always, because of their place within the slice. One has to realize that the laws intended to regulate the effects of the horizontal activities on the vertical patterns have to be made by countries, i.e., by the very states whose capacity to regulate and structure the vertical patterns would be impeded by the creation of autonomous horizontal patterns. Such processes usually result in a divestment of powers of the vertical in favor of the horizontal; as, for instance, when nation-states surrender their regulatory authority in certain areas to transnational corporations, or when international trade agreements take precedence over national law. The ruling apparatus of a country often splits into a horizontal fraction, interested in easing the horizontal activities and therefore attempting to decrease the cohesion and power of the local or vertical component, concerned with the conditions within the slice. In Canada. the social and political consequences of, for instance, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) illustrate the tug of power between the horizontal and the vertical forces. On the other hand, the bitsphere, with its new computer technologies of command and control, greatly facilitates fast and asynchronous monetary transactions. This in and of itself has led to a very substantial increase in global financial trading and profit making. The sphere of speculation and investment has grown with the growth of the bitsphere. While the production of goods has its end-roots somewhere in a locality, somewhere in a vertical slice, money and investment funds are no longer anchored. Note, for instance, that the trading floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange no longer exists as a physical space, but only in the bitsphere. Yet the transactions at the Exchange are real. They bring gains or losses to real people, offer hope to some, despair to others, largely by virtue of opaque horizontal transactions globally conducted in BIT. The new dominance of investment capitalism over production capitalism can be seen as well in the changed relationship between business and the nation-state: when the acquisition of raw materials and the sale of material goods was the dominant form of profit making, the state took an active role in providing a political climate conducive to commercial endeavors by employing instruments of regulation and public policy making. Thus, citizens were regarded mainly as consumers and were encouraged to act as such. The shift of profit making from direct production to investment has not changed the active support of commerce by the state, but it has drastically changed its support

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strategies. These changes have led to a remarkable shift in the relationship between the state and its citizens, a shift not often commented upon. Given the global economy, it became evident to business in the industrialized parts of the world that major profits could be made if the public sector were opened up for private investment. Historically, a country’s not-for-profit sector, from roads and parks to schools, hospitals, and jails, is firmly set into its respective vertical slice. Many public institutions are structured and regulated with local requirements and shared values in mind, not the least among them the democratic conviction that the needs of some—such as children, the elderly, or the infirm—are not a source of profit for others. Yet the recent privatization of many public sector functions and the deregulation of their operations have meant that the government has opened the vertical, community-rooted tasks—traditionally entrusted to the overseeing of the state—to the horizontal forces of global investment. Thus the state has delivered the most dependent of its citizens, as well as resources held in trust, as new investment opportunities to the global market. The question here is not whether individuals are better served by the private or public sphere; the issue, I would argue, is one of governance and responsibility. The destruction of the public sector and the loss of the coherence of the vertical through the pull of the horizontal has profound effects on community and on the bonds between people. Changes in this area should not be initiated without thorough public discussion of the broader issues at stake. Not everything that is technologically possible, such as bitsphere-driven investment capitalism, is either desirable or necessary for the well-being of a country. I regret that public and local discussions on the impact of the new technologies on life in Canada have had so little impact on the governance of our country. I fear that our slice of cake is crumbling without our consent. So much for the cake model. I hope it has served to illustrate that the real world of technology, within which we try to live and work in peace with a modicum of justice and equality, is in the grip of strong and competing forces. The cake model can be linked readily to some of our earlier discussions. Asynchronicity is an essential feature of working along the horizontal cuts, while synchronicity and shared patterns provide much of the cohesion of the vertical. Clearly, each and every one of us is affected by both synchronistic and asynchronistic practices.

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Education at the Interface One arena in which the biosphere and bitsphere collide with dramatic impact is education. Education, I suggest, is a process of growth in knowledge and understanding, whether that is in the teacher or in the student, whether it is achieved formally or informally. I want to make a particular fuss about the two components being linked in an unbroken manner. As a society we cannot afford knowledge without understanding; we have all met those characters who know it all and understand nothing. But we also cannot afford understanding without knowledge; we have also met people who have a profound understanding of the problems they and others are facing, but do not have the knowledge, or the access to knowledge and power, to do anything about it. The task of schools is the pursuit of education. In this enterprise we try to create an environment in which knowledge and understanding can grow, while taking great care that the link between the two components remains unbroken. It is important for me to emphasize this essential link between knowledge and understanding so strongly, because the acquisition of facts and the procurement of information has been so drastically changed by modern technologies. There are now many new and different ways in which facts, information, and knowledge can be transmitted and acquired, and this is good. But these developments affect one component of education much more than the other. It means that the pursuit of understanding, of the social learning that happens in school, must be emphasized and analyzed a great deal more than in the past. Whenever a group of people is learning something together, two separate facets of the process should be distinguished: the explicit learning of, say, how to multiply and divide or to conjugate French verbs, and the implicit learning, the social teaching, for which the activity of learning together provides the setting. It is here that students acquire social understanding and coping skills, ranging from listening, tolerance, and cooperation to patience, trust, or anger management. In a traditional setting, most implicit learning occurred “by the way” as groups worked together. The achievement of implicit learning is usually taken for granted once the explicit task has been accomplished. This is no longer a valid assumption. When external devices are used to diminish the need for the drill of explicit learning, the occasion for implicit learning may also diminish. Yet the implicitly learned social skills and insights may be much needed, even when the explicit skills can be obtained externally via appropriate devices such as spellchecks,

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calculators, or computers. Without an adequate understanding of the social processes of teaching and learning and a careful attention to their well-being, the whole enterprise of education can be at risk.6 An example of what the substitution of a device for an activity can do might be helpful. When I first came to Canada as a postdoctoral fellow, I was surprised by the severity of the injuries that my colleagues incurred while downhill skiing. It took me a while to understand the situation. Although I had skied before coming to Canada, I was not familiar with ski lifts. It had been my experience that once one managed to get up a hillside, one had acquired enough skill to get down reasonably safely. The ski lift removes the “by the way” opportunity to learn how to climb, fall, and get up again, as well as the ongoing reality check on fitness and resources. If such knowledge is not present before using the lift, there is real danger to life and limb. Once understood, it is relatively simple to gain the experience needed to use the ski lift safely. When transferring this analogy to the classroom, it is not that simple to spot the lost “by the way” opportunities for social learning and then to create replacements for them. The production model of education used to organize schooling makes it difficult to even acknowledge the existence of implicit learning, let alone compensate for its loss. At the university where I have taught for the last twenty-five years, students are not only tested and advanced according to a strictly specified schedule, but prospective students and their parents are frequently informed that different universities produce different “products.” Consistent with all production activities, complaints of users are taken very seriously, and complaints can often result in modifications of the production line. Thus adverse comments from captains of industry may result in the establishment of extra courses such as entrepreneurship or ethics for engineers or fundraising for art historians. The implication is that choosing a particular university, following a particular regime, will turn the student into a specifiable and identifiable product. Yet all of us who teach know the magic moment when teaching turns into learning depends on the human setting and the quality and example of the teacher—on factors that relate to a general environment of growth rather than on any design parameters set down externally. If there ever was a process that cannot be divided into rigid predetermined steps, it is education. In a production view of education, ironically, many of the teachers who could help to reshape the new pedagogical settings so as to preserve and encourage implicit learning become surplus. Neither their presence nor their experience appears any longer to be a necessary part of the process of education. As considerations of

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efficiency and cost-cutting shift the balance of synchronous and asynchronous classroom activities, the balance of explicit and implicit learning is changing. While the pool of information available to the students may increase, the pool of available understanding may not. This has considerable consequences for social cohesion and peace and deserves careful attention. The situation in the classroom at the interface between the biosphere and the bitsphere is but one facet of the situation in the workplace within the same realm. In fact, often even the designation of workplace is no longer appropriate. Not only do new technologies, new ways of doing things, eliminate specific tasks and workplaces— telephone operators and their switchboards, statisticians and their files—but the remaining work is frequently done asynchronously in terms of both time and space. But how and where, we ask again, are discernment, trust, and collaboration learned, experience and caution passed on, when people no longer work, build, create, and learn together or share sequence and consequence in the course of a common task? The existence of the bitsphere enables an unprecedented acceleration of the deconstruction of traditional work patterns. When people no longer work together in the same place—the shop floor, the typing pool, the warehouse or the factory—opportunities for social interactions, for social learning and community building disappear, just as the implicit learning opportunities in the classroom can vanish when the cohesion of learning in a group is eclipsed by the device-assisted, individually paced acquisition of knowledge. But where, if not in school and workplace, is society built and changed? The impact of the space-time dislocations of work on individuals and their surroundings has attracted some serious attention recently.7 But what about the substance of work itself? Work provides livelihood as well as meaning, identity, and purpose and, as we live at the interface of biosphere and bitsphere, all these components are under the impact of the new technologies. I think Fritz Schumacher beautifully articulates the place of work in our lives when he writes that . . . we may derive the three purposes of human work as follows: First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services. Second, to enable everyone of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards.

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Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.8

“This threefold function,” Schumacher continues, “makes work so central to human life that it is truly impossible to conceive of life at the human level without work. ‘Without work, all life goes rotten,’ said Albert Camus, ‘but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.’ ” Work, in Schumacher’s perspective, is in and of the biosphere. His notion of working is a far cry from the activities of the agile, flexible, and disposable labor force that the globalized economy favors.9 You will say, surely, that work is more than gainful employment; we work in our homes, our gardens, we make music together, or serve on committees. Human fulfillment may come from work that is unrelated to incomeproducing jobs. Yet all of us need nourishment for body and soul and the interface between the bitsphere and the biosphere is a risky place for both body and soul. New Problems, New Opportunities In a technologically structured world, individuals are rarely able to assure their physical and emotional survival solely by their own wits. What might increase their chances for a full and healthy life are the social, political, and economic structures of their country. The viability of such structures, characterized as belonging to the vertical slice in the cake model, depends to a large extent on the viability of the country as a whole and its responsiveness to change. What, then, of the role of the state in this turbulent border realm of biosphere and bitsphere? I used the cake model to illustrate the tensions on governance that the pull of the horizontal forces has asserted. The inability, but mostly the unwillingness, of the state to intervene in order to limit the social and human impacts of the new technologies on their own citizens has been documented thoroughly. This “retreat from governance,”10 as H.T. Wilson calls it, is relatively new. It had long been assumed that being a citizen, belonging to a nation or a community, conferred a measure of practical and emotional security. But at the interface of biosphere and bitsphere, the reality of togetherness and belonging becomes eroded by the asynchronous activities in virtual time and space. As the nation-state bows to the forces of local and global commerce, vital social and human structures become deeply eroded. Today in Canada, the practice of democratic governance is in grave question and the advancement of social justice and equality appears

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stalled in a labyrinth of random transactions.11 This does not have to be so. The interface of the biosphere and the bitsphere not only poses problems and precipitates crises, but it offers new opportunities to advance the common good. It will take the collective thought, moral clarity, and strong political will of many people to move toward this goal rather than away from it. NOTES 1. Donald Swann, Sing around the Year (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1965), 68. 2. Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflection (New York: Random House, 1961), 221, 388. See also Jung, “Synchronicity, an Acausal Connecting Principle,” in Carl Jung: Collected Works, Vol. 8 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954). See also Victor Mansfield, Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1995). 3. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 286. 4. William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Time and the Infobahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 5. Ursula M. Franklin, “Beyond the Hype: Thinking about the Information Highway,” Leadership in Health Services (July/August 1996); Ursula M. Franklin, Every Tool Shapes the Task: Communities and the Information Highway (Vancouver: Lazara Press, 1996). 6. Ursula M. Franklin, “Personally Happy and Practically Useful,” in Our Schools/ Our Selves 9, no. 4 (October 1998). 7. See for instance Armine Yalnizyan, T. Ran Ide, and Arthur Cordell, Shifting Time: Social Policy and the Future of Work (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1994). 8. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Good Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). 9. Heather Menzies, Whose Brave New World? (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996); Jamie Swift, Wheel of Fortune: Work and Life in the Age of Falling Expectations (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995). 10. Linda McQuaig, The Cult of Impotence: Selling the Myth of Powerlessness in the Global Economy (Toronto: Viking Press, 1998); Stewart, Dismantling the State. An early and important warning regarding Canada was given by H.T. Wilson, Retreat from Governance (Hull, QC: Voyageur Publishing, 1989). 11. For details see note 10 (above), and, for instance, Tony Clarke, Silent Coup (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives/Lorimer, 1998). For more global and philosophical perspectives see Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zen Books, 1993).

Part Four Imagining and Becoming: Education as Lifelong and Lifewide Wisdom [is not] only concerned with universals: to be wise, one must also be familiar with the particular, since wisdom has to do with action, and the sphere of action is constituted by particulars . . . which come to be known through experience, and a young person is not an experienced one, for it is quantity of time that provides experience.1

The people identified as “educated” in the Educated Person Exercise consistently shared two attributes. One was age. The vast majority of the exemplary people were adults who had accumulated significant life experience; they were elders, respected in their community not only for what they knew, but how they acted. Using Aristotle’s language, they were phronemos and not just sophos, that is, they were able to use their accumulated experience in the world to perceive situations correctly, decide what was the right thing to do, and act appropriately on that understanding. The other attribute they shared was humility. They were not impressed with their own learning or wisdom. Indeed, they were acutely aware of their own ignorance and focused on continuing their efforts to make meaning of their lives in its various dimensions. For them education was an ongoing journey and not a destination at which they would or could arrive. Indeed, as one of our first participants commented, our question, “Who is an educated person?” concealed a paradox: our audiences chose people who were not educated, but people who were educating themselves. The authors in Section Four understand that people who are seven, seventeen, and seventy bring different resources to making their own good and worthwhile lives. They believe that experience and age are important components of wisdom, but not guarantees. After all, some seven-year-olds lead better, more fulfilled lives than some seventy-yearolds. Some older people never develop wisdom. The challenge our contributors explore is to understand and take educational advantage of what is distinctive about life at a certain stage—and also understand and take advantage of the relationships and connections among life stages. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Ironically it is the educational theorist Richard Peters who captures the interrelated character of the educational journey best for us: “To be educated is not to have arrived at a destination; it is to travel with a different view. What is required is not feverish preparation for what lies ahead, but to work with precision, passion and taste at worthwhile things that lie to hand.”2 Peters helps us remember that education involves the ongoing attempt to make meaning of our lives, that is, to become educated. NOTES 1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. with historical introduction Christopher Rowe, introduction and commentary Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1141b15–17; 1142a15–17. 2. R. S. Peters, “Aims of Education—A Conceptual Inquiry,” in Philosophy of Education, ed. R. S. Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 20.

chapter 18

Education and Childhood This chapter grapples with “the obligation that the existence of children entails for every human society” (Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future [New York: Penguin Books, 1968], 185.) Joseph Dunne begins by considering the dominant views of Western societies about the early years of childhood, the ideas which have shaped primary education practices. Those ideas, he claims, have been shaped by (1) the modern idea of “progress,” with its ultimate goal of “maturity,” and (2) postmodern social conditions which sometimes, for example, “enlist children as consumers,” transforming innocence into knowingness and cynicism. Dunne labels the two dominant conceptions of childhood as “privative” and “privileged.” The privative view understands childhood as deficient from the viewpoint of adulthood; the privileged view conceives growing up as both loss and gain, with the aim of education being the carrying forward of some childhood qualities. Rather than reject the contributions made by both ways of thinking, he seeks to “reconstruct” childhood, incorporating aspects of both positions. The way to do this (almost in the way that Løvlie valorizes everyday living) is to engage real children at work and play with other children and with adults. Dunne contends that children can consider deeply philosophical and ethical questions, contributing in significant ways to their relationships with other children and adults. He closes by offering how an example, the Reggio Emilia community, might play out to give children and childhood their real due in renewing society. Joseph Dunne enjoys teaching courses with a philosophical and historical orientation in the Education and Humanities programs at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, where he coordinates foundation studies in Education and is Head of Human Development. Author of Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (1997), he has also co-edited Questioning Ireland: Debates in Political Philosophy and Public Policy (2000); Childhood and Its Discontents: The First Seamus Heaney Lectures (2002); and Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and Learning (2004). Among his study interests are engaged agency, childhood, and human flourishing. A collection of his essays, Persons in Practice, is due from University of Notre Dame Press next year. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Education and Childhood joseph dunne Why do we educate our children? Any extended conversation around this question is likely to yield several worthy responses. Some people will claim that particular historical and cultural achievements are especially worthy of appropriation by the young. Others will insist on educators’ responsibility to take account of the most pressing challenges of a more or less discernible future for which children now need to be prepared. Still others will propose visions of the good society which education should help to create—with emphasis, for example, on democratic vibrancy, economic prosperity, social equity, environmental sustainability, or civic accord. Particular views about the nature of pedagogy as an interpersonal and intergenerational exchange are also likely to feature. In my discussion of this basic question here, however, such considerations will be displaced, or at least heavily qualified, by views about children themselves. I want to explore how our practice of primary education might be guided by an understanding of childhood and be made responsive to its particular claims as a distinctive phase of the human life span. If it makes sense to look to childhood as a source of orientation in primary education, this source, we quickly discover, is itself now keenly disputed. Rather than providing a clear-cut normative basis for pedagogical decision making, “childhood” is a site where conflicting beliefs and values collide. Moreover, its virtual monopolization by psychology for most of the twentieth century and its earlier valorization by Romantic philosophy has recently been challenged by contributions of historians and sociologists to “childhood studies” as a newly crystallized area of interdisciplinary scholarship. In this now deeply contested terrain, formerly accepted universal conceptions of “the child,” what it means to be a child, and “childhood” as the life-phase of children have come under attack from new ways of thinking and understanding. In this chapter I shall provide a brief overview of these upheavals in “theorizing childhood” and of the previous positions whose dominance they have disturbed,1 offer some brief interpretative and critical remarks on the upheavals, and sketch a picture of education in (especially early) childhood that is congruent with these remarks and the philosophical perspective that inspires them.

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Any single, univocal notion of “the child” is now shattered by fuller exposure to the sheer multiplicity and heterogeneity of actual children. And “childhood” is deconstructed through heightened awareness of the extent to which it has always been constructed—has always been a cultural space variously shaped by shifting and interacting forces, economic, medical, demographic, scientific, technological, religious, and philosophical. Thus childhood connotes not a fact of nature but rather a cluster of meanings and values through which young human beings are perceived, responded to, and treated. And the historical variability of these meanings and values is well illustrated in the genealogy that we can now more explicitly trace of a particularly dominant version of Western childhood. Major “moments” in this genealogy include the new emphasis at the Renaissance on “civilized” behavior and literacy as desirable achievements for children of European elites; the Reformation’s reinforcement of new kinds of interiority and privacy and its targeting of the young as objects of anxious indoctrination; the later emergence of the bourgeois family and of childhood as a privileged space of nurture, pedagogy, and play secured through newly esteemed parenting, especially mothering, roles; a radical secularization of time in which the future came to seem more open and worth investing in, with birth replacing death as the crucial personal event and with children coming to seem the main investment, the real afterlife; the development of a new conception of individual dignity whose attribution would eventually be extended to children, inspiring various Reform Acts and the entrenchment of “children’s rights”; and, of course, the creation by nation-states of school systems expected to shape young citizens according to strong cultural and economic agendas, an expectation to be realized under the guidance of increasingly “scientific” pedagogy. Two quite different responses to childhood as the complex outcome of this genealogy (itself so bound up with the emergence of Western modernity and especially of liberal democratic polities) have been notable. First, there has been a spate of books announcing—and lamenting—the “erosion,” “fall,” or “disappearance” of childhood.2 Reflecting Philippe Aries’s well-known thesis that childhood (or at least anything close to what we would recognize as such) did not yet exist in the Middle Ages, these books claim that it can no longer exist in contemporary societies in which literacy and the culture of the book recede before a new culture of the electronically mediated image. The argument goes that electronic culture is more immediate, undifferentiated, and ever harder to police. The private zone of the family and the

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separate space of the school have become increasingly porous to powerful market and media forces that enlist children as consumers and prematurely eroticize them, transforming innocence into knowingness and cynicism. Moreover, the kind of stable family that might even attempt to shield children from these forces is itself showing huge fissures. Those who provide this account of it as a now endangered state and status would like to be able to defend “childhood” as the proper entitlement of every child—there should be no “children without childhood”;3 and they see the source of endangerment in what might be called the social conditions of postmodernity. But there is another, very different and now much more influential response to the genealogy of childhood outlined above that unmasks it as a narrative of progress, disclosing instead the layers of power and coercion that it both carries and conceals. This critique of childhood is directed less at social conditions in which childhood is lived out than at “discourses” through which it has been represented, conceptualized, and legitimated; and it draws heavily on the conceptual resources of a theorized postmodernism. Two Conceptions of Childhood Two discourses have been especially dominant in shaping the modern conception of childhood and the pedagogical theory and practice most closely associated with it. The first, which I shall call the “privative” discourse, is committed to a strongly teleological conception of the human life course; that is to say, it assumes that this course is properly aimed at a specific purpose (telos) which lays down for it a linear pathway of growth. Within this, the early years are seen as relative lack or deprivation, a period when one is without, or does not yet possess, the most humanly worthwhile qualities. With important antecedents in Greek philosophy,4 this privative view has found its most influential modern expression in developmental psychology, more specifically in Piaget’s mapping of “stages” of cognitive development and Kohlberg’s marking of parallel developmental stages in the moral sphere. In these developmental models, there is a succession of hierarchically ordered capacities and achievements, with earlier ones being definitely superseded by later and better ones. From the viewpoint of adulthood as the destination point of this development, childhood is seen as deficiency— or at best as potentiality for what rightly (all going well) comes later. There is a normative conception of what constitutes mature competence and an account of a development toward it through various kinds

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of incompetence, or intellectual and moral deficits, ordered in a progressive series that maps onto the progression from early, through middle, to late childhood and beyond. This progression involves an invariant and irreversible sequence: each stage must be reached and outgrown consecutively (no stage skipping) and a later stage, once securely reached, does not allow regression to an earlier stage. Exemplifying a new seriousness of engagement with children as objects of systematic research, Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s work led to an unprecedented awareness of the differences between children’s and adults’ thinking. For this reason it could be assimilated into childcentered pedagogy: it was assumed to enable adults, in thinking themselves into the ways of children, to put aside their own ways, thereby disabusing them as teachers of unrealistic expectations and sensitizing them to the newly important concept of “learning readiness.” That all this can be represented as a gain for children should not distract from the fact that it remains committed to a privative view of childhood. For the movement from earlier to later is also always a movement from lower to higher (so that slippage backward, were it possible, would have to be recognized precisely as regression). Learning is now tied to development as an inexorable movement onward and upward. To be sure, the present stage of a child’s competence is under a keen spotlight: less, however, as a stage with its own possibilities to be explored and expanded for the valuable learning unique to it than as an unavoidable staging post to the next, higher stage that will supplant it. Piaget speculates on similarities between young children’s thinking and that of “prehistoric man,” while Kohlberg compares the differences between a person operating at the higher (“postconventional”) level of moral judgment and a child operating at the lower (“preconventional”) level with differences between technically advanced—that is say “modern”—cultures and their pre-modern counterparts. And in both cases, that of the child and that of the pre-historic or pre-modern culture, there is no sense of anything other than gain accruing when they are replaced by their more “developed” or “advanced” successors. The second discourse to be adverted to here has given us what I’ll call the “privileged” conception of childhood. So far from defining it as a period of deprivation, this discourse represents childhood as a time when one is uniquely gifted with positive qualities all too easily lost in the passage to adult life. Deriving mainly from eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism—though with significant roots in earlier religious and spiritual traditions—this representation has been hugely

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influential as an inspiration of progressive and “child-centered” education. While much of its élan was already apparent in the founding text, Rousseau’s Emile, it was more fully elaborated by later figures such as Froebel and Pestalozzi and later again by Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner. “Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking and feeling; nothing could be more foolish than to try to substitute our ways”; “allow childhood to ripen in your children.” These famous sentences from Emile (1762) announce this privileged paradigm. But what are these “ways” that are not to be substituted, and what—somehow already there in children—is to be allowed to “ripen”? The answer, on behalf of this whole tradition, would highlight qualities such as these: relative simplicity and wholeness; freedom from debilitating selfconsciousness, from the fragmentations that can cause painful conflict between mind and body, thought, and feeling, self and others; greater readiness to trust and greater ability to feel and to express the “here and now” quality of experience; an immediate and alert presence to the sensuous world that may be all the fresher and more intense for being less under the mediating influence of conceptual and linguistic schemes; wonder, a capacity to be captivated and transported by the ordinary wonders of the available world and an inclination to explore them repeatedly and without boredom through direct embodied engagement as well as through a torrent of questions and conjectures that, unbound to “yeastless factuality,” open the possibilities of being; a capacity for deep undistracted absorption that is both play and work, or rather a form of experience in which the distinction between work and play is undercut—for it is without the distancing calculation that sees work as laborious and play as “recreation” enabling one all the better to return to work (play, Froebel says, is the serious business of childhood). With reference to qualities such as these, one might say that children are not just to grow up into adulthood but to grow down into childhood; for “growing up,” it is realized, can entail severe losses underneath the more obvious gains. Minimizing losses as well as maximizing gains becomes an important educational responsibility—a theme long in the mainstream tradition of child-centered education and taken up again recently by writers as different as Kieran Egan, for whom layering rather than linearity is the appropriate metaphor for development, and Gareth Matthews, who argues that children’s capacities for bold philosophical speculation and artistic creation decline after the early years.5 This theme of loss and gain not only alters the valences in the

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pedagogical relationship but, more generally, reconfigures the relationship between adulthood and childhood and indeed the whole process of human growth. Adulthood can no longer be conceived as simply a leaving behind or “putting off” of childhood things; even if they cannot be preserved in their childlike state, these qualities must somehow be carried forward and integrated (“sublated”) into what can properly be called adult maturity. The idea of linear progress may fit scientific and technological advances. But part of the Romantic critique of Enlightenment is to argue that (aside from the fact that these are not in themselves unambiguous goods) human development, whether on the historical plane or in an individual biography, has a more complex, spiral structure. It entails separation and division—through the emergence of “reason” and “autonomy”—that must be transcended through an ultimate reconciliation in which wholeness is restored. While far from this recovered wholeness, childhood is still a powerful prefigurement of it—for poets (e.g., Blake, Wordsworth) as much as for philosophers (e.g., Herder, Schiller). A memorable invocation of it is given by a later poet, William Butler Yeats, in the closing stanza of “Among School Children”, a poem prompted by his visit to a pioneering, Montessori-inspired primary school in Waterford in 1925: Labour is blossoming and dancing Where body is not bruised to pleasure soul Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil . . . Oh body swayed to music, oh brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Challenges to the Two Conceptions of Childhood Over the past two decades, both the privative conception of childhood enshrined in the developmentalist account and the privileged conception spawned by Romanticism have been subjected to severe criticism. The critique of developmentalism has challenged its contention that a “scientific” method of inquiry can establish an invariant structure of stage-like development with universal, transcultural

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validity. This challenge is directly related to the wider critique of positivism and especially the contention that the methods of observation, measurement, and explanation developed in the natural sciences can deliver equal success in the human or social sciences. This critique targets, then, the “naturalized” child, so easily linked to the biological roots of Piaget’s psychological interests. And it seeks to highlight researchers’ inattention, or insufficiently reflective attitude, to several important factors: for example, the norm of rational competence against which they measure children, the life-world contexts in which children’s own sense-making capabilities are embedded, and the imbalance of power in the research process itself between adult-researchers and child-subjects. The claim here is that methods that are more interactive and hermeneutically sensitive (i.e., more attentive and attuned to the difficulties of any process of interpretation) would be more resourceful in catching what children say or do in contexts where they themselves can take the initiative or demonstrate a wide range of responsiveness in many varied situations involving other children as well as adults. Such methods, researching with rather than on children, would do more to honor and elicit children’s individual and collective voice and agency. But the concern here is not only to empower children within the research process itself but also to contest the power of developmentalism across interconnected networks of research, policy, and practice. For this kind of research has had huge influence and prestige in establishing developmental norms for different “stages” of childhood, thereby supplying criteria by which to determine what is normal (and abnormal) functioning for children of different ages—criteria that have been embraced by policymakers and incorporated by practitioners in pre-school and primary education, as well as across a wide range of institutionalized child-care services. This line of critique regularly invokes the concept of “normalization” developed by Michel Foucault in exposing the “disciplinary” effects of “truth regimes.” In the light of these ideas, it is not difficult to entertain large suspicions about the ways in which stages of attainment have been identified as supposedly natural and normal—inscribed, so to speak, in the very being of children at four or seven or nine or eleven, independently of cultural, social or economic contexts—providing “developmentally appropriate” and scientifically accredited educational targets and learning outcomes, to which whole populations of children are to be subjected, and in relation to which they are to be graded and selected. Moreover, critics have offered Foucaultianinterpretations of the school

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(and the pre-school and crèche) as a currently prevailing example of the disciplinary, normalizing institution, on a continuum with the prison or the psychiatric asylum. And they may go so far as to construe “childhood” itself as an irredeemably oppressive category, serving the interests not of young people but of adults, the state, or the market economy. Like the school, then (and indeed much else that is confidently modern), childhood is in need of “deconstruction.” The critique of the “privileged” conception of childhood has shared some common ground with the critique of the “privative” conception just outlined, both being conducted across two main areas of theoretical discourse, the “new social studies of childhood” and the “new paradigm” now being developed in the field of early childhood education.6 In both cases there is a charge of “essentializing” or “naturalizing” “the child.” And both highlight the fact that while these conceptions are about children and are constructions of childhood, they have been constructed by adults—being therefore all too likely to carry, even if unwittingly, adult priorities and projections. There has been a specific twist to this suspicion in the case of the privileged paradigm: that it has been the obverse side of a particular experience of adult privation, or a disguised response to quite specific adult needs. The cultural historian, John Gillis, for example, has argued that this conception of childhood was mainly promoted by highly literate adult males in the nineteenth century, who were simultaneously losing their religious faith; being deprived by industrialization and imperial conquest of the last places on the inhabited earth on to which they could project fantasies of untarnished natural simplicity; and being expelled from the newly feminized spaces to which children were increasingly being confined.7 In response to all this, paradise lost became childhood lost, as the fixated object of displaced sentiment and intense nostalgia, what Gillis calls the “mythic country called childhood,” was discovered. This idealized childhood had little or nothing to do with real children— apart from the damage it could cause them. For the idealization could all too easily be a prison for the child who seemed to fit it and provide a basis for demonizing the child who did not—the devil or monster as the angel’s unassimilated “other.” What is to be made of these critiques of theoretical understandings of childhood on which—albeit in uneasy tension, if not outright conflict—the practice of primary education in most Western societies has been so heavily based for most of the last century? I believe that critical reflection on the scientific study of children has valuably exposed its limitations and practical distortions as well as the futility of its

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ambition to provide, for the practice of education, the kind of reliably predictive basis that the natural sciences provide for advanced material technologies. I believe too that criticism of the privileged paradigm of childhood has brought valuable insight into the need for greater vigilance about any boundary drawn between childhood and adulthood and about the often hidden ways in which they can inflect (or infect) each other. For instance, if we too easily see children as paragons of play, spontaneity, and wonder, and adults, then, as the experts in rational thought and effective action, this neat, age-based parceling out of qualities impoverishes both children and adults: we won’t then expect children to think critically or act responsibly while adults, well adapted to the “real” world, will have put wonder and play behind them. However, I have no desire to endorse the kind of outright, blanket rejection of universality and truth that drives much of the critique of Piagetian developmentalism. Nor do I want simply to jettison the emancipatory thrust running through the Romantic inheritance—even if it can be badly sentimentalized, as much of the writing and art around children over the past two centuries makes manifest. More broadly, I believe that childhood’s exposure in the crossfire of recent ideological and meta-theoretical debates has been a decidedly mixed blessing. This is not because we should or ever could inoculate childhood against infection by some philosophical presuppositions. It is rather because, in my view, we can get critical purchase on the pretensions and debasements of modernity—if only by better understanding how deep are the tensions between some of its defining ideals, for example, rational control and authentic subjectivity—without surrendering to postmodernist excesses. Postmodernism may be little more than a contemporary and particularly energetic version of a recurrent countermove that has always been possible in Western philosophy—and that is fated always to be overtaken by a fresh move in the endless interplay between “the one and the many” (Plato). If “deconstruction” is the current name for this countermove, what we now need, perhaps nowhere more than in our understanding and practice of primary education, is reconstruction (which must, to be sure, incorporate any gains of the latest countermove). Reconstruction in Childhood and in Education “Reconstruction” is of course a key category in the philosophy of John Dewey, who well understood that education, in addition to being the main medium for reconstructing childhood, itself needs to be

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continually reconstructed. A particularly rich theoretical resource for reconstruction in contemporary education, I believe, is offered by the hermeneutical tradition and the “philosophical anthropology” developed within it.8 Without attempting here to elaborate or justify this philosophical style, I shall try to indicate very briefly how thinking about the education of children—and especially about how to recognize and cultivate their “voice” and “agency”—might keep company with its characteristic reflections on speech and action as essential realizations of our humanity. Words count as genuine speech only as they reveal the speaker’s meaning or, as is nearly always the case, as they reveal (or rather partly create) what we are trying to mean: speech only partly as declaration and so also as probe, experiment, play—our meaning always slightly beyond us as we are stretched out in language toward it.9 This is living, serious, meaning-making speech, which can also be light and effortless, words falling incongruously together and complex syntax doing its work unnoticed. It is the kind of speech that young children latch onto early on—when they are not answering ritual questions, repeating mindnumbing formulae, or being tied to a recitative script that deflects the trajectory of their actual interest. It is speech as directed to others and as responding to them: locution as inter-locution. The realness and range of interlocutory stances available to children is crucially important: that they can ask questions, volunteer opinions, entertain conjectures, interject a comment, seek clarification, amplify or challenge what others have said, give the conversation a fresh twist, or bring it back on course—and be in a position to have all these kinds of speech acts directed towards them. Plato has the fine image of dialogue as the rubbing together of two fire-sticks, neither of which, on its own, can produce the illuminative flame (Republic 435a). And Vygotsky teaches us that we are who we have become in relationship; it is on the plane of the inter (the between) that the intra (the within) is formed.10 Relationships connect us with others. But also it is very largely in and through them that the world opens up to us and that we are opened to it. A small child will explore the immediate sensuous world on her own, a world of very small things minutely observed, of vivid colors, interesting textures, spectacular shapes. But the small child also makes sense of her world, sometimes in very big ways. To my wife’s frustrated cry in the garden, “I hate ants,” her four-year-old granddaughter immediately retorted, “but, Biche, you shouldn’t hate anything.” I know another four-year-old who proposed to her parents that the Traveller family who called every Saturday for food should be given the upstairs part of their

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house to live in; and a two-and-a-half-year-old, brought with her mother to the butcher to collect the Christmas turkey, who, overcome with tears by the sight of hanging dead birds, implored that they find some other way of celebrating the feast. What is striking about such examples, which can be multiplied many times over, is first, that, freed from complete bondage to the factual is, they are already responsive to the demand of an ethical “ought”; second, the inclusiveness of their identifications, what might be called their intuitions of “all” (all people, all living beings); and, third, the immediacy and forthrightness with which they are tossed to the other person, the adult who thereby finds herself pitched into a deeply ethical—and potentially political—conversation. The utterance “you shouldn’t hate anything” did not just spring up from somewhere deep within the child herself; she had already been party to conversations in which “hate” and “love” had occurred— sometimes in the context of feelings and dealings toward her younger brother that would have given her some quite personal purchase on what “hate” means. But here she was now, at four, having somehow taken hold of this concept, deploying it in a new context and returning it, with interest, to an adult. We should not doubt the force of the challenge to us adults, and our more or less confused and compromised moralities, that will come regularly if we engage in real conversations with quite young children—conversations in which, if our thinking can pick up some of the candidness and mobility of theirs, we too may have much to learn. “Catching the ball that the children throw us” is a favorite metaphor of Reggio Emilia, the impressive and influential communal project in early childhood education in Northern Italy; it is also the image in a stanza of one of Rilke’s poems that the great German philosopher of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, took as epigraph for his magnum opus, Truth and Method. “They [the Reggio Emilia community] like to use the metaphor of the children and teacher participating in a game of ping-pong,” Carolyn Edwards writes. And she goes on: “All of the. . . supportive adult interventions are based on keying in to the rhythm of the game and modeling an attitude of attention and care.”11 It is an extraordinarily imaginative achievement to have built a rich, variegated pedagogy—with so many themes, across so many areas, and in so many media—as Reggio has done, with this metaphor of a game as a basic inspiration. You can’t play the game from the outside, and everyone inside the game is a player, a partner, or co-protagonist—sometimes stronger or weaker but always capable, when the other player is responsive, of progressing in the myriad of ways that the game itself keeps open. This model of learning and of pedagogy, embodying solidarity

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and reciprocity in a shared project, is completely different from the consumption model: the pupil as consumer and the teacher as transmitter or vendor. It also rectifies a key weakness in—and thus helps to “reconstruct”—the two modern models of childhood I outlined earlier, both of which conceive “the child” too much outside the context of relationships, with other children as well as with adults. I have emphasized speech here because of its defining human significance and because children from early on are such natural oralists. In putting speech at the heart of education we need to be aware of it as a medium through which we can muse, ruminate, clarify, conjecture, discuss, argue and persuade—while not neglecting its role in telling stories, making jokes, creating rhymes, or all the other freewheeling ways in which it can work and play for children. And we also need to make a place for action as the complement of speech. Speech itself of course often is action as, for instance, when a child finds the courage to say something that he truly thinks or feels even when it conflicts with the prevailing view in his group. Not all behavior is action in the sense intended here, a sense clarified by another thinker with strong roots in the hermeneutical tradition, Hannah Arendt. An action is a venture or initiative: it begets something new. It makes something happen that was not there before and in doing so it realizes the agent, and reveals her to herself, and to others, in a new way. This kind of action is then a spring of development; it is most significantly through my actions that I am changed, becoming who I am. Actions are inserted into webs of relationships, evoking responses from others and unleashing chains of consequences that can never be fully determined in advance. Every action is an event in the original sense of a coming-into-being. And it is closely related to story. For through our actions, we enact our histories; stories are not prescripted—they narrate what has emerged through actions, different actions of different agents gradually defining their individual characters and interlocking with each other to form the plot that no one agent on her own could have anticipated or devised. It is not easy to ensure that action will be at the centre of education. And that is why, understandably, we rely on plans. But plans (of the usual linear kind) bring about “outcomes”—which are almost the opposite of “events.” One of the remarkable feats at Reggio Emilia is—against the force of gravity, as many might have supposed—to have created a form of education in which young children can and do act.12 In the projects that are a central part of the work, for instance, children are enabled to try things out, to explore possibilities, to experience the

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responses of other children, confirming, or conflicting with, or running at a tangent to their own. What takes shape emerges as a function of their interests, suggestions, interventions, their considerations and reconsiderations, their ways of taking up and developing what has been contributed by others, their ability to stay with stuckness when it happens and to work their way through or around it, their readiness to face and deal with conflicts along the way; and, in and through all of this, their engagement in an enormous amount of multifaceted and never entirely predictable learning. But one should not focus only on the children in Reggio Emilia— who in themselves may not be so different from children elsewhere. The really remarkable aspect of this educational undertaking is the work of the adults, the teachers who make all this possible for children through a combination of imaginative and painstaking preparation of resources, ideas and hypotheses; sensitive listening; the most delicate judgment of when to intervene and when to hold back; pitching an intervention so that it is just within a child’s reach and less a solution to a problem than a spur to further thoughtful action; enough trust to forego the security of pre-specified outcome—trust in the children, in themselves, and in the fecundity of the game; careful documenting of the children’s activity and speech so that, when played back to them, it can help them to recognize what they have accomplished and be motivated to elaborate it further; sustained reflection on what they are doing and not doing (aided partly by this same documentation), and readiness to extend this reflection in critical discussion with colleagues and parents. All of this is done in the closest rapport with the children and all for the sake of ensuring that they will, in the greatest possible degree, be active protagonists in their own learning.13 I have just been stressing the ungainsayable fact that what children become is in very large measure what adults enable or allow them to become. And children’s dependence on quite focused help is greater as they make the transition from intuitive, embedded structures and styles of understanding to more scholastic or disciplinary forms of knowledge. But even in making this transition, children will be well helped only by a pedagogy that directly engages, and does not always displace, their already robustly established informal “theories” (about well-nigh everything) and that seeks “to preserve the most remarkable features of the young mind—its adventurousness, its generativity, its resourcefulness, and its flashes of flexibility and creativity.”14 A necessary emphasis on childhood’s constitutive relationship with adulthood does not obviate adults’ need to understand—however

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hermeneutically fraught the conditions of such understanding—the nature of childhood itself. “Nature” is a term we scarcely dare to use anymore—so intimidating now is the charge of “essentialism,” one of the more damning terms in the postmodernist lexicon of excoriation. Curiously, however, JeanFrancois Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition and other important postmodernist texts, has not felt disbarred from writing of childhood as “the season of the mind’s possibilities.” “Philosophizing,” he tells us—and he would include all creative work in any medium— “responds to a demand for a return to the childhood of thought. . . [but] what would happen if thought no longer had a childhood? If those who pass for children . . . ceased to be the milieu of man’s uncertainty, the very possibility of ideas?”15 Here Lyotard is pointing to something many of us perhaps intuitively recognize: the deep connection between childhood and our still open and best possibilities—and the fact that, nonetheless, for real children these possibilities can all too easily and quickly be closed down. A similar point is made by Martin Buber, a thinker with a more richly rounded understanding of education than Lyotard. “In every hour, the human race begins,” Buber writes in a great essay, referring to the thousands of children born hourly. And he goes on: “what greater care could we cherish or discuss than that this grace may not henceforth be squandered as before, that the might of newness may be preserved for renewal?”16 Buber’s question here points to a most essential task of primary education: to recognize and respond to the gift and power disclosed in childhood and thereby to contribute to a renewal of the whole society.17 NOTES 1. Theorizing Childhood (by A. James, C. Jenks, and A. Prout [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998; 2006]) is the title of one of the books in the new social studies of childhood that has most trenchantly criticized older viewpoints and canvassed “childhood” as a scene of deeply ideological contest. 2. See V. Suranski, The Erosion of Childhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); N. Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982); and J. Somerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood (Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1990). 3. The title of a well-known book by Marie Winn (New York: Random House, 1983). 4. In classical Greek thought, children appear (insofar as they do appear) as conspicuously lacking the qualities that make one admirable as a human being or indeed— when a human being is defined as a rational animal (zoon logon echon)—that make one human at all. Following Plato’s low esteem for children, Aristotle, for example, makes short shrift of arguing—if he does not just assert—that, being unable to exercise deliberate choice (since they are creatures of whim and appetite and subject to the immediate vagaries of pleasure and pain), children are incapable of happiness (eudaimonia), for him the highest good and ultimate end of human living.

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5. See Kieran Egan, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Gareth Matthews, The Philosophy of Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 6. In the new social studies of childhood, various texts by A. James, A. Prout, and C. Jenks have been important (see note 1 above); for the new paradigm in early childhood education, see, e.g., G. Dahlberg, P. Moss, and A. Pence, Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Postmodern Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002) and G. Mac Naughton, Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying Poststructuralist Ideas (London: Falmer Press, 2005). 7. See John Gillis, “The Birth of the Virtual Child,” in Childhood and its Discontents: The First Seamus Heaney Lectures, ed. Joseph Dunne and James Kelly (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2002). Apart from the critiques of both paradigms mounted in the new social studies of childhood and in the new paradigm of early childhood education, more specific critiques of the privative conception have emerged within psychology itself, and of the privileged conception within recent reevaluations of Romanticism in literary studies. For the former, see e.g., W. Kessen, The Rise and Fall of Development (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1990); E. Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (London: Routledge, 1994); and J. Henriques et al., eds., Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). For the latter, see e.g., A. Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); J. H. McGavran, Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuities, Postmodern Contestations (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); and J. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 8. “Philosophical anthropology” is a term frequently used to characterize his own work by an outstanding contemporary hermeneuticist, Charles Taylor. For Taylor’s cogent critique of positivism and naturalism in their many diverse manifestations in the practice of social science and for his sympathetic but highly nuanced treatment of the Romantic tradition, see especially Philosophical Papers 1: Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 9. See J. Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), ch. 5. 10. L. Vygotsky, Mind in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). 11. C. Edwards, L. Gandini, and G. Forman, The Hundred Languages of Childhood: The Reggio Emilia Approach—Advanced Reflections (Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing, 1998), 181–82. 12. I should acknowledge here that for all the fruitfulness of “action” in Arendt’s analysis—and despite her sense of its deep affinity with birth (“natality”)—she herself was anxious to preclude any invocation of it in the education of children. See “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1993). 13. See Edwards et al., Hundred Languages, and C. Rinaldi, In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 14. H. Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach (London: Fontana, 1991), 111. 15. J. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children, trans. and ed. J. Pefanis and M. Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992), 120. 16. M. Buber, “Education,” in Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 83. 17. This chapter draws heavily on my article, “Childhood and Citizenship: A Conversation across Modernity,” European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 14, no. 1 (2006): 5–19.

chapter 19

Educating Adolescents The prolonged schooling of modern Western societies has posed special challenges for the education of adolescents, that is, those people who are neither children nor adults. Conventional approaches and structures (e.g., begin with the known, the local, the concrete) have been demonstrably unsuccessful, yet continue to be regularly employed. In this chapter Kieran Egan advocates dramatically different strategies based on examining what actually engages the imaginations of adolescents (e.g., electronic games, MTV videos, Archie comics) and adapting some of the same tactics in efforts to educate young people. His inventory of tools takes advantage of adolescents’ keen interest in figuring out who they are and how they fit into their social world. Their particular interest in narrative, for instance, is partly due to the capacity of story to fix emotional meaning, and helps insecure adolescents learn how they should feel about important events. Their vulnerability in the face of daunting futures is relieved somewhat by associating themselves with personalities who embody the very heroic qualities that trump reality (athletes, movie stars). Egan is concerned that we remember that “all knowledge is human knowledge” and that “education is very largely a realm dominated by values and meanings.” Attempts to educate adolescents need to take these considerations into account. Kieran Egan is a professor of education at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, Canada. His most recent book is The Future of Education: Re-imagining the School from the Ground Up (2008). His other books include The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding (1997) and An Imaginative Approach to Teaching (2005).

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Educating Adolescents kieran egan Human beings adapt with astonishing fluency to social environments in their early years. We are born programmed to harmonize ourselves with any of an indeterminate range of social conditions and varied belief systems that ensure our solidarity with the group. Looking casually at the huge variety of human cultures, it is clear that children can be persuaded to believe almost anything; any story, however bizarre, which purports to explain their circumstances is acceptable, and usually continues to be believed till the individual’s death. So people may believe that the Earth is a disc resting on the back of a huge turtle, supported by elephants. (An earthquake? The turtle shifted.) Or they may believe that the Earth is a vast orb spinning in space and racing around a distant star called the Sun. Whatever is believed, events are interpreted in terms of the stories that assert these accounts of origins, current conditions, and future likelihoods. Think of the vast number of such accounts of the world that have been told to children in the past and are told now. In the process some of our indeterminate range of mental capacities are evoked and stimulated, and others are suppressed or left dormant. This harmonizing, and homogenizing, goes on through our lives, though we are evolutionarily prepared for it to be most active and plastic in our earliest years. Largely because of our odd cultural developments, especially literacy and all it has led to, we experience a further complex and more muted period of harmonizing, and homogenizing, during adolescence. Our ancestors exploited language and literacy for various purposes, generating our cultures, and they have deposited in our cultural history the results for us to pick up and use in our own present cultural lives— in our sense-making and intellectual engagements. Following Lev Vygotsky’s elaborated description of how this process has occurred,1 we may see these cultural deposits as tools, which we can pick up and use to enlarge our understanding and power to deal with the world we find ourselves in. They exist as cultural tools and once we pick them up and incorporate them into our mental lives they can become for each of us cognitive tools. One way to try to take a somewhat new look at the education of adolescents is to attend to some of the more prominent cognitive tools evoked and stimulated by their typical interactions with the cultural

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world around them, and with the cultural tools it proffers to them and energetically invites them to internalize as cognitive tools. Education sometimes has competing aims with the powerful processes of socialization—fitting students to society’s current vocational requirements can often conflict with education’s purpose to enlarge individuals’ potentials as much as possible. Socializing requires homogenization of individuals where education seeks to stimulate distinctness. But that doesn’t mean both processes may not use the same cognitive tools in achieving their ends. Learning to fit in with a gang or Second Life may require some of the same tools as learning to find geometry or history meaningful. In the abstract, identifying the array of cognitive tools most energetically used by adolescents in their everyday engagements with pop culture might seem a little implausible as an approach to reconsidering methods of teaching and the curriculum for them. But we are not generally doing so wonderfully well at educating adolescents at the moment, and our underwhelming achievement might justify a somewhat unconventional approach. Some Cognitive Tools of Adolescents We can begin this approach by examining what seems to engage adolescents spontaneously in energetic learning. Consider Facebook and Second Life, complex online interactive games, Archie comics, MTV and the TV shows and movies that appeal to adolescents, their pop and sports heroes, their collections and hobbies, their iPod playlists, and so on. (Yes, some of us have put in many hours scrutinizing Archie comics, analyzing their appeal. There should be special awards for this kind of research.) We can begin by making an inventory of some of the cognitive tools that are evident in these engagements. Having made our inventory, we can explore how we might use these tools to educate more effectively. Before beginning on the inventory, it might be worth making a point about this procedure. Quite commonly, when educators observe the spontaneous engagements of adolescents, the educators express regret or disapproval or shame at how the educational intents of the school seem to do so little to educate tastes or interests—is all that effort at teaching about feudalism, Shakespeare, that interior opposite angles are congruent, and all the rest as nothing in the face of rock videos? But educators have the choice of regretting this and railing against what they consider the egregiously bad features of pop culture or of

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examining these phenomena and seeing what can be learned from them. What I am after is not some way to make education more entertaining—though I can’t think why we should regret this if we could manage it—but rather exploring what engages the imaginations of adolescents so that we might better discover how to design our lessons and curricula to show how we might also engage them with something more substantial. An Inventory of Adolescents’ Learning Tools Electronic games, Archie comics, MTV videos and the like share a number of prominent characteristics. They incorporate flexible narratives; they are full of characters with heroic or dramatic qualities; there is commonly a significant accumulation of detailed knowledge (even if only about pop stars’ lives, clothes—or lack thereof—and the rules of complex gaming environments); protagonists’ emotional lives are prominent; they constantly supply emotionally charged images; and, for the most part, they involve exotic environments that push, or exceed, the limits of reality. (Even the Archie comics inhabit a strangely unreal world, somewhat reminiscent of the more explicit oddity of Rupert Bear’s exotic environments.) Let’s look at some of these in a little more detail. Narrative What role does narrative play in adolescents’ imaginative engagements? Narratives and stories are distinct forms of language that have beginnings, middles, and ends. That they have determinate ends gives them a unique power: they can fix the emotional meaning of the events that make them up. When you hear a story, you know you have reached the end when you know how to feel about its constituent elements. If you hear that the beautiful young woman, normally kept doing demeaning work by her rich and cruel relations, is suddenly enabled to go to a ball on the condition that she return by midnight, and loses a shoe as she runs from the prince’s arms hearing the clock begin to strike, and so on, you know that the end of the story is not at that point, nor at the point when the prince finds that the shoe doesn’t fit any of the young women in the kingdom. Finally Cinderella is brought forward, and the prince recognizes her and they marry. You then know how to feel about all the events that make up the story. Without a satisfactory end—as we don’t have for life and history—events are just “one damn thing after another.” We give them provisional meaning by trying to fit them into

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a story, because the story form can fix their emotional meaning for us. That desire for security of feeling about events is why the story is ubiquitous in all human cultures, and why it is so vividly present in the imaginative engagements of adolescents. So a narrative context within which knowledge is set can establish its emotional importance, and thereby engage our imaginations, while also conveying the knowledge. This principle can be used for the structuring of an electronic game, a comic story, a rock video, or a lesson designed to teach and engage students’ imaginations in physics, mathematics, history, or literature. As the designer of the electronic game works to make the cultural tool of narrative or story structuring fit the medium, so can the educator. Using such a principle to plan a lesson on eels in seventh grade science, for example, will lead us to begin with a mystery or puzzle (for millennia people had fished for and eaten eels but no one had ever found a pregnant one), elaborate it (the various theories about where eels came from), associate it with some heroic figure who solves the puzzle (Johannes Schmidt in the early twentieth century) and exposes in the process all the knowledge we need to convey to successfully teach about eels (see a lesson plan based on this principle here: http://ierg.net/lessonplans/unit_plan.php?id=35). We do not need to make our lessons into stories in the fictional sense, but rather in the common sense in which we talk about the story of the fire downtown or the bridge collapse or the war on drugs. That is, narratives can be true equally easily as they can be fictional, and the task for the educator is to work out how to shape the content of lessons into narratives. By doing so one need in no way falsify the knowledge one wants the students to learn, but one does have to think how to shape the knowledge to engage students’ imaginations and emotions in it. This may seem hard only because we in education have spent so long ignoring the importance of such an obvious principle, focusing instead on organizing content and concepts in ways that pay little attention to the cognitive tools with which students can most effectively learn. Heroic Characters with Dramatic Qualities The electronic games, movies, rock videos, pop star websites and “fanzines” that attract adolescents in huge numbers commonly involve heroic characters with dramatic qualities. That is, the adolescent is invited to associate with the transcendent human qualities the hero is presented as embodying—power, wealth, courage, cleverness, strength, skill, whatever. This easy association with those heroes is a cognitive tool that enables us to overcome some of the threat of alienation

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involved in the new reality adolescents find themselves among. By associating with those things or people that have heroic qualities we gain confidence that we too can face and deal with the real world, taking on the qualities to which we resonate. As the pop star’s image manager situates the star to represent particular heroic qualities, so we can imbue any aspect of reality with similar heightened importance. Science and Social Studies are full of heroes, or people who represent heroic qualities. It is not hard to shape our lessons to show the knowledge we want students to learn through the heroic qualities of its initial inventors or through people today who give that knowledge a living meaning. Learning about the use of the semicolon becomes much easier if we show what its inventor, Aldus Manutius, used it for and why he found it useful. Well, he found it useful for the same reason that we still do. It allows us a more subtle way of reflecting what we mean in texts, indicating breaks and pauses that are less abrupt than the full stop, yet more potent than the comma. It sets off one statement against that which precedes the semicolon, to give both a more nuanced meaning. By embedding the knowledge in some small and dramatic details of Aldus Manutius’s life, we can show the knowledge more engagingly. Or, to revert to the previous example, seeing the details of the life-cycle and structural characteristics of eels through the astonishing adventures of Johannes Schmidt, who tracked them down and studied them, supplies drama, as well as an association with ingenuity and persistence that brings out the inherent meaning of the facts. The whole curriculum is made up of knowledge invented or discovered or used by heroic people, often in dramatic circumstances. And the heroic qualities can also be associated with things—the tenacious weed on the rock face, for example. In no way is our effectiveness in teaching diminished when we display knowledge in the context of the heroic characteristics that give it vivid meaning and engage students’ imaginations as they exercise this cognitive tool in their learning experience. Sometimes it seems as though the classroom is a place for doing the opposite—stripping knowledge of its human context and human meaning. The condition of the normal classroom is one in which all those things that John Goodlad years ago described as filling at least half of the time each student spends in class with boredom2 still commonly prevail: preparations for some activity, readying students for tests, waiting for others to finish a task, listening to things the student already knows or doesn’t understand. And all the while, meaning, emotional and imaginative engagement with knowledge, fail to kick in. By

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attending to the heroes that should throng the daily life of adolescents in school we can make the content we wish to teach as dramatic and imaginatively engaging as it really is. Exotic, Strange, Extreme, Wonderful Features If we look at the kinds of things that engage adolescents’ interest spontaneously, we find the exotic and strange, the extremes of reality and human experience. Yet part of the odd folklore of educational textbooks is that students need to have any new knowledge connected with what they already know. “Begin with what is familiar to the student” is a principle that has contributed not a little to making classrooms duller. It is also a principle that flies in the face of what is blindingly obvious if one looks at what actually engages adolescents most readily. It isn’t the material of their everyday experience that engages their imaginations, it is the exotic and extreme. Students’ interests are first caught up by the most terrible and courageous events, not the most familiar. We can recognize this kind of material from sensational newspapers and TV shows. The ten- and eleven-year-old girls I know are interested in spies, vampire-slayers, and seriously weird pop stars, and the boys are into superheroes, supernaturally inarticulate sports stars, and creatures from outer space. Both really want to know who had the longest fingernails ever, what is the most colorful worm, and that for every human being on the planet there are 200,000,000 insects, give or take, and about twenty-six billion insects per square mile. Extreme sizes of body parts are also big interest generators. Everything we teach, every topic in the curriculum, has its own limits and extremes, its own exotic and bizarre elements. Again, drawing on these to shape our teaching is not to seek to entertain rather than educate—it is, rather, a crucial aspect of education, engaging students in the wonder that underlies the dull surface of so much of the content dealt with in classrooms. It provides us with a cognitive tool that brings out what is truly extraordinary in the world for adolescents. It enables us to focus on any aspect of the world around us, or the world within us, and see its particular uniqueness. We can turn this sense of wonder on to anything, recognizing the wonderful in every feature of the world. This tool can provide the gift that allows us to recognize something wonderful behind even the most routine and taken-for-granted things. The starting point of all science and all inquiries is “I wonder . . .”

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Accumulation of Details Nearly all young people begin a hobby or a collection at about age seven. The activity reaches a peak of intensity at about age eleven, and usually dies out at about age fifteen. You wouldn’t guess this from reading educational textbooks. That is, you would get no clue about one of the near-universal and intense spontaneous intellectual engagements of young people during those years. What is going on? Why do nearly all students engage in this kind of activity? Don’t look at educational texts for an answer. One of the most recent studies of the collecting instinct that I can find was conducted by Carolyn Frear Burke—in 1907. How can an enterprise like education fail to attend to something so obviously important to its concerns? Only if driven by theories that direct its attention away from such phenomena can such craziness persist. So what is going on? Why do we see this powerful spontaneous intellectual engagement in nearly all children? An adequate explanation is beyond what I can manage here, or anywhere, but we can see it as a response to young people’s orientation to reality. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy have been left behind, and the real world is worryingly extensive. One way we can achieve some security is to gain exhaustive intellectual control over some part of it.3 Commercial interests, of course, are very alert to this engagement, and so they produce sets of collectible objects that have the twin requirements of being moderately extensive but also limited and exhaustible. We can draw on this cognitive tool when teaching almost anything. All topics have within them some area of knowledge that is both moderately extensive and also exhaustible. Often teachers involve students in a “project” which might be an elaboration of some general topic being studied. It might sometimes have the features required, but usually won’t. The key is that “exhaustibleness”; the teacher needs to find something—often something quite arcane will do well—that the student can explore in detail and come to know all there is to know about it, or, even if they don’t learn all there is to know, they come to grasp the limits of the knowledge that exists about it. That is, it can feed their need for security that the world is not limitless and they are, consequently, not infinitely insignificant. Studying eels in the manner suggested above, a student might be given the task of discovering the changes eel larvae go through as they float on the ocean currents after leaving the Sargasso Sea, or what determines the sex they fix on after the changes they go through in the larval stage. The more collection-like or

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hobby-like the topic, the better it will feed this need and stimulate the further development of this cognitive tool.

Conclusion Education’s thralldom to psychology during the past century has had few obvious benefits and a number of clear deficits. One of the deficits lies in the kind of categories in which educators have been encouraged to think when planning teaching and learning, and the kind of principles those categories have yielded. So we have a set of principles—“start with what the child knows,” “begin with the concrete and move to the abstract,” “young children’s perceptions override conceptions,” and so on—that are in a language derived from psychological concerns, leaving the educator to discover pedagogical guidance from them. It seems to be taken for granted that psychological theories yield implications for education, and we have seen huge programs concerned with applying them to practice. None of these programs has shown any systematic improvement in educational practice. This should be unsurprising, as psychology’s concerns are not education’s concerns. In particular, central to education’s interests is engaging students’ imaginations in learning, and also engaging their emotions with the content of the curriculum. Because of the thralldom to psychology, these centrally important issues have received scant attention. My intention in the brief discussion above is to suggest that even small attention to these issues promises large returns for educational practice. The categories I have looked at briefly above are derived from material that—we can patently see—succeeds in engaging students in avid learning. They are—some of them—rather odd categories in educational discourse: emotive images, heroic characteristics, the exotic and extreme. These “cognitive tools,” though largely unfamiliar in educational discourse, are seemingly well calibrated to education’s needs, and especially the need to engage the imaginations of adolescents in learning about and engaging with the wonders of the world about them. This approach is based on the principle that “all knowledge is human knowledge; it grows out of human hopes, fears, and passions. Imaginative engagement with knowledge comes from learning in the context of the hopes, fears, and passions from which it has grown or in which it finds a living meaning.”4 Education is very largely a realm dominated by values and meanings, and we have tried to avoid these problematic matters by pretending that we have a science and

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methodology that will yield us answers to our questions about how best to educate. That we relinquish this patent illusion is long overdue. NOTES 1. L.S. Vygotsky, The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, vol. 3: Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology, ed. Robert W. Rieber and Jeffrey Wollock (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 1997). 2. John Goodlad, A Place Called School (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984). 3. For a fuller, but still inadequate, account see Kieran Egan, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), ch. 3. 4. O. Tyers, A Brief Guide to Imaginative Education (Burnaby, BC: Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Imaginative Education Research Group, 2006), 1.

chapter 20

Some Educational Implications of Adulthood Most approaches to education “begin with the end in mind,” that is, start with a conception of an educated adult (much as we do in the Educated Person Exercise) and then work backwards to determine how to achieve desired outcomes. In this chapter Gary Fenstermacher attempts a very different approach: he examines our attempts to educate young people and tries to determine our actual rather than avowed focus. He discovers an emphasis on academic achievement and educational equity (both laudable goals)—to the exclusion or assumption of other critical aspects of being a responsible adult, a democratic citizen, and an educated person. He argues that being an adult, for example, involves consistently demonstrating certain traits, including employing reason to guide actions; accepting responsibility for those actions; recognizing others as deserving of respect; and treating them accordingly. Reasonableness, agency, relationship and morality are, of course, central considerations for adulthood, but not, however, topics of current public educational discussions. Fenstermacher’s point is that we are unlikely to foster these traits unless we pay attention to them. He finds similar blind spots in our attempts to foster democratic citizens and educated people and concludes by challenging us to reopen the conversation about what might be reasonable responsibilities for schooling in a democratic society. Gary Fenstermacher is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Michigan. He previously held tenured faculty appointments at UCLA, Virginia Tech, and the University of Arizona. He has held appointments as Dean of the College of Education at the University of Arizona, as Director of the Northern Virginia Graduate Center at Virginia Tech, and as President of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University in the field of philosophy of education. His primary scholarly interests are in the philosophical study of teaching, the analysis of educational policy, and the education of teachers. His scholarly work is available in over 150 publications.

Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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Some Educational Implications of Adulthood gary d fenstermacher Why Look at Adults? What is an adult? And why is this question pertinent to the topics discussed in this book? The quick but incomplete answer is that our views of adulthood influence our treatment of children—particularly how children should be educated. So much of what is done in family and school settings is driven by what we believe an adult needs to know and be able to do. Adults, we believe, must be prepared to earn a living, live within their means, conduct themselves within the law, form intimate and sustained personal relationships, exercise the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, and make wise choices regarding health, leisure, and family life. Realizing that these are the challenges of adulthood, we organize much of the lives of the young around preparation for adult life. Perhaps this is nowhere more true than in the schooling of children and youth, especially as they make the transition to later elementary school grades and on through middle and high school. Given that our conceptions of adulthood are so influential for the activities of childhood it seems proper to inquire into these conceptions—to ask just how sophisticated and proper these conceptions are and how well or poorly they translate “backwards” to the activities we put in place to prepare children for being adults. Although this approach seems the logical one, it is not the one we will take here. Instead we will reason “forward,” examining what we do in school as a projection of what we believe is required to be an adult. This forward projection reveals not only what schools are explicitly attempting to accomplish to prepare the young for adulthood, but also what is being ignored, dismissed, or taken for granted in the formal education of children and youth. There are a number of ways to ascertain conceptions of adulthood implicit in the ends and means of formal schooling. One of these is simply to look. But that is not nearly so easy as it appears. What one sees is always subject to the interpretation of the viewer. Even more challenging is where to look: Rural or urban schools? Public or private schools? Middle or high schools? Poor schools or rich schools? Inside specific classrooms or inside whole schools? Within school districts or within states? A way around these perplexing questions is to shift the inquiry to a different plane, to inquire of the larger social order what it

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asks of its schools. This social expectation is often revealed by examining the educational policy initiatives of a given society, using these as a proxy for what a society believes are the knowledge, skills, and capacities its children must have in order to take their place as adults. In the contemporary United States (and a number of other nations with similar infrastructure and economies) there are two broad policy goals that seem to have gained attention at this time: academic achievement and educational equity. For the first, we seek students who have mastered the several subjects of schooling, especially those thought essential to commercial progress and global competitiveness (literacy, science, and mathematics, for example). For the second, we seek this mastery of subjects for all students, not just for those with the good fortune to have been born to economic advantage or to the privileges conferred by membership in the dominant race. Acknowledging the great sway these two aims have in current educational policy and practice, it is worthwhile to ask what is left out as a result of our attention to the goals of academic achievement and educational equity. That is, from among the range of tried-and-true answers to what may be the fundamental question of education—What knowledge is of most worth?— what answers are ignored or taken for granted in the zeal to attain high levels of academic achievement and educational equity? Missing Features of Contemporary Educational Goals Perhaps the first feature that appears to be ignored or taken for granted is reasonableness. We want our children to be reasonable—to be able to think clearly, logically, and in ways that are attentive to such facts and evidence as are available to humankind. On reading this, you might say, “Well, of course. I just assumed that would be the case.” But if we do not make reasonableness a conscious aim of education, it may not be attained at all, or not nearly to the extent we desire. How this happens is discussed a bit later in this chapter. Second, there is a characteristic of well-developed human beings that philosophers call agency. It refers to our acting on the basis of our own plans and intentions. Agents are persons who are governed, in large part, by their own acts of will. They are not creatures of others—not automatons whose actions can be explained solely by reference to influences beyond the behaving self. The behavior of agents is not simply the result of training, as if they were family pets or lab rats. Rather, agents formulate their own views and beliefs and their actions can be explained by reference to these views and beliefs. In short, agents think for themselves.

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It should be noted, however, that a person can choose to be subject to the will of others yet remain an agent (because it was the person’s own choice to do this—for example, athletes who are subject to the will of their coaches or soldiers whose actions are the result of obedience to orders). As simple an idea as agency is, it is not easily cultivated. A great deal of human behavior results from imitation, or is directed by peers and significant others (such as parents, clerics, advertisers, and supervisors). In the early years of life, positive guidance and direction are vital to the health and security of the child. As the youngster develops, however, we aspire for him or her to become an agent, to think and act on the basis of his or her own plans, desires, and intentions. The third feature is a sense of relationship, a sense we have of other people—both those with whom we are intimately connected as well as those we have never met (such as the victims of natural disasters or wars in foreign lands). Relationship is rooted in a recognition of others and how our perceptions of others define them as well as define us. By relationship I do not mean to imply particular kinds of relationships, such as those that are loving, productive, or uncaring. Instead relationship, as used here, is a consciousness of others in the world and an awareness that the ways we recognize or acknowledge their presence contributes both to their definition of themselves and our definition of ourselves (what we sometimes call “identity”). Once again it may seem obvious that we all need to grasp notions of relationship and that doing so is an automatic part of growing up. Yet even a sideways glance at human affairs offers evidence of how rare relationship is in the world. Greed, narcissism, prejudice, discrimination, genocide, selfishness . . . all these are markers of an inattentiveness to relationship as one of the central features of adulthood. The fourth characteristic often ignored in the contemporary pursuit of achievement and equity is morality. This may seem an odd claim, for are not the very objectives of achievement and equity rooted, to some extent, in notions of moral goodness? Indeed they are, but these two educational aims are multiple tiers beyond a core (or basic) notion of morality. At the core one finds such characteristics as prudence, generosity, moderation, honesty, courage, and humility.1 It is from this core that we generally aspire to have our policymakers and educational leaders formulate the larger aims to be pursued. The risk here is that in promulgating morally defensible goals for the institution or system, we will overlook the pursuit of morally defensible goals for those who populate the system. That is, in seeking to have the system of schooling achieve excellence and equity, it is possible to ignore the pursuit of core

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virtues in the case of the children who are in the very schools that are charged with attaining excellence and equity. Asserting that morality is an ignored feature of contemporary educational policy is likely to spur questions about whether it is a fit subject of study in the schools, especially public schools that claim to be decidedly secular in both curriculum and instruction. There is, at least among the American public, much discussion about whether moral matters may properly be introduced in its public schools. This turns out to be an easy matter to resolve. The simple fact is that it is impossible to “do school” in the absence of many of these basic or root virtues just mentioned. Imagine a classroom where there is no sense of turn-taking, no sharing of materials and resources, no attention to honesty, no sense of craft or good work, no courtesy exhibited toward teacher or fellow students. Such a classroom is unlikely to be anything more than chaos. Hence the very notion of education entails some number of core moral traits. One sees this moral presence in the charming essay, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” by Robert Fulghum. Here are some of the things he says we learn in kindergarten: “Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone.”2 To recap, we have considered four features that are overlooked or taken for granted in contemporary efforts to answer the question of what knowledge and skills are of greatest worth. The four features are reasonableness, agency, relationship, and morality (or virtue, a term often used as a synonym for morality). Centuries of educational philosophy (in Western thought and literature) have argued for the primacy of these characteristics. They are considered to be part and parcel with our understanding of what it means to be a human being and are generally accepted as constituting the definition of a person, particularly the adult person. Despite their elevated status, these features are often “off the radar” of contemporary educational policy initiatives. The reason may be that they are simply taken for granted, such that we assume they will always be part of the educational enterprise regardless of what else comes to the fore. Or they are overlooked, forgotten or dismissed as important contenders for emphasis in policy formation and implementation. Regardless of reason, they are not central in the current policy climate of the United States and many other developed nations. That is puzzling, given what we presume qualifies a person for adult standing in a society. It is also unfortunate, given the requirements for

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a well-governed democratic society. Perhaps we might shed some light on the puzzle by looking a bit more carefully at the characteristics most often associated with being an adult. Some Minimal Qualifications for Adulthood What defines the transition from childhood and adolescence to adulthood? Even though the question is of considerable import to education, it has received far more attention in law. In legal affairs, the answer is generally framed in terms of chronological age—typically eighteen years in more developed societies. Why eighteen? The answer is revealing. This is the age thought to represent that point in human development when a person can be expected to know the difference between right and wrong, is sufficiently mature to assume responsibility for the consequences of his or her actions, and possesses the understanding needed to properly exercise such rights and responsibilities as are conferred by whatever compact regulates social and political conduct (in the United States, this compact is the Constitution as well as the pertinent statutory and case law that flow from it). Prior to age eighteen, impulse, ignorance, indoctrination, or lack of maturity are often allowed as reasons for emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment, for diminished severity of punishment, and for some form of “forgiveness” until one reaches the age of majority (such as the sealing or expunging of criminal records). The juvenile court system in many nations is testament to the distinctions frequently drawn between children and adults. There are exceptions to the chronological criterion for adult standing. Mental deficiency is one of them. Someone over eighteen may have committed an offense that would normally result in a sentence accorded an adult, but due to a demonstrated mental deficiency the courts presume the offender lacks sufficient powers of reasoning to judge the true effects of an act. Pleas of insanity, temporary or otherwise, are frequently given similar acknowledgment. In contrast to these forms of sentence reduction, there are cases of wanton and heinous crimes committed by children (under the age of eighteen) who are charged as adults. In these cases, the sentence of the court may far exceed what would have happened had the perpetrator been tried as a juvenile. These exceptions help to illuminate the standard case. When it can be presumed that the perpetrator was able to exercise reasonableness and agency, when it is appropriate to expect the perpetrator to acknowledge that other human beings have a standing equal to one’s own and

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can differentiate between right and wrong, then the law treats the perpetrator as an adult. In cases of mental deficiency and insanity, these qualifications of adulthood are suspended or diminished, leading to a reduced sentence, an incarceration appropriate to the mental capabilities of the perpetrator, or perhaps even acquittal. In such instances, the courts reduce or decline punishment because we do not expect those who lack reasonableness, agency, relationship, and morality to meet the same standard of conduct as those we presume to be in full possession of these features. In cases of wanton and heinous crime committed by someone under eighteen, the law appears to argue that the crime is so terrible that its atrocious character should be evident even to those whose capacities for reasonableness, agency, relationship and virtue may not yet be fully formed.3 In drawing these various distinctions, the law offers us a baseline for explicating the notion of an adult. This baseline pertains to grasping the difference between right and wrong, possessing the mental capacity to judge this difference with regard to a particular action, and being aware that you will not be excused from taking responsibility for your action. Notice how these minimum conditions for adulthood connect to the four assumptions outlined in the previous section. The conditions established in law depend upon notions of reasonableness, agency, relationship, and morality. An adult is someone we expect to possess the capacity to reason about his or her actions and their consequences; it is someone whose plans and intentions are assumed to spring from his or her own thoughts, beliefs, and prior experiences; it is someone who is aware of others in the world, possessing a sense that his or her actions have consequences for these others; and finally, it is a person who has a sense of the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. It is of no small interest that the very qualities we presume to be foundational to being an adult are among the least discussed in the contemporary world of educational policy and discourse. In our attentiveness to the twin objectives of academic achievement and educational equity, we ignore, assume, or dismiss these basic qualities of adulthood. Perhaps we regard these four essential features as so basic and obvious that we simply presume they are always being addressed, that they are the “background conditions” of any form of education while achievement and equity are the contemporary foreground conditions. On such a scheme, the foreground aims may change from time to time, as need and interest require, while the background conditions are seen as permanent and essential features.

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Would that it were so! The contemporary rhetoric attending to the foreground is, at least in the United States, so loud and strident that it overwhelms whatever educational aims may reside in the background, causing them to be all but forgotten save by a few who hold fast to the view that education without attention to core human capacities is an empty and ultimately defeating endeavor. Aside from the obvious consequences of this oversight for the general quality of life in civilized society, might there be other consequences for nations that count themselves as democracies? To answer this question, we turn our attention to the requirements for a well-governed democracy, where the harmful consequences of educational shortcomings are magnified many times. The Adult as Democratic Citizen The form of democracy that has proven so enticing to so many peoples of the planet is often described as “liberal democracy.” The “liberal” here is not the same as the current use of the word “liberal,” either when standing alone (as in, “she’s a liberal”) or used as an adjective (as in, “liberal politicians oppose the free market”). It is not the sense of liberal used to signify a position on the left of the political spectrum or to identify someone who believes in the salutary effects of government’s assistance to less fortunate citizens. Rather it is the liberal of liberated, or free. A liberal democracy is one which permits each of its members the freedom to construct and pursue his or her own vision of the good life. This notion is one of the most remarkable ideas to emerge in the history of human thought. The idea that every human being, merely as a consequence of being human, should be free to imagine and form his or her own view of the good life, and furthermore that the government of which he or she is a member shall act to assist in the realization of this ideal, has been simply unimaginable in all but the last few hundred years of human history. To make such lofty conditions possible, some requirements are in order. First, persons are not permitted to form and pursue just any vision, for that would permit visions that interfered with those held by others. For example, you cannot physically harm another in the course of pursuing your vision. Cheating, lying, stealing, and related offenses are crimes, in part, because they diminish the capacity of those against whom they are perpetrated to pursue their visions. Thus the liberal government is committed to nurturing politeness (a combination of relationship and virtue) and also to having a police force to handle

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those instances when politeness fails and one person’s pursuit harms another’s (although police, politeness, policy, and polity do not consistently share the same etymologies, there is a strong affinity among them).4 In addition to fostering politeness and adjudicating conflicts in vision, the liberal democracy is required to assist its members in attaining the capacities needed for the exercise of independent thought and action. This requirement is at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted admonition: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”5 The eradication of ignorance is a required task for the liberal, democratic government. The most frequent means for accomplishing this goal in industrial and post-industrial nations is formal schooling. Schools are at the heart of democracy’s promise to its members. They are the means for preparing members to form visions that express high ideals, while also preparing members to associate with one another for mutual aid and assistance in the realization of their visions. The liberal, democratic government, if it is to realize its full promise, is required to assist its members to form and pursue fulfilling visions that do not trample on the freedom of other members to pursue their visions. Modern governments do this primarily through systems of schooling that instruct future citizens on the formation and pursuit of visions of the good life, and also by providing a police force to enforce laws intended to prevent one person’s pursuit from harming another’s. These two provisions may yield a well-regulated government, but they do not yield anywhere near the potential for human progress that is inherent in the notion of liberal democracy. This potential is realized when the visions held by different citizens reinforce one another in ways that advance and uplift the entire citizenry. The objective here is to nurture human capacities to the point where the vision of one citizen not only sustains and advances that citizen’s interests, but also the interests of other citizens.6 This state of affairs will strike some as pie-in-the-sky, and in some ways it is. But it is a pie worth striving for, even in the recognition that it may never be achieved. It is the high and noble promise of democracy, the one we hope for and the one we so often use to measure humankind’s progress. It is an ideal that allows us, as a species, to maintain our moral orientation, to remain on an uplifting and redemptive path while passing from era to era. Education, particularly in the form of schools, is essential to this pursuit of human potential, as it is the means for sharing with the generation emerging into adulthood what has been

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learned and codified by prior generations. Moreover, education provides (or perhaps more correctly, should provide) the instruction manual for how to add rather than subtract from this inherited fund of knowledge and wisdom. The reader has no doubt noticed the “scaling up” that has taken place as we moved from section to section of this essay. We began by examining four critically important features of being human, features often ignored or taken for granted in educational policy. Then we explored these features as they appear in legal notions of adulthood and found that they are an essential part of what it means to be an adult. From the somewhat elementary conceptions embodied in law we turned to more elevated notions found in the demands that liberal democracies make on their citizens. Another way to frame these section-to-section transitions is to note that attaining the age of eighteen is, for most of us, biologically inevitable. In contrast to simply reaching one’s eighteenth birthday, however, gaining the standing of an adult calls for something more than biological development. It requires minimal qualifications in the domains of reasonableness, agency, relationship, and virtue. Finally, although gaining adulthood is often presumed to simultaneously confer the privileges of citizenship, it has been argued here that the conferral is more complicated. As the political theorist Benjamin Barber notes, “Democracy is not a natural form of association; it is an extraordinary and rare contrivance of cultivated imagination.”7 The requirements for citizenship in liberal democracies are sophisticated, particularly if citizens are to be prepared to assist one another in the constructive pursuit of life, liberty, and well-being. As the shift from the legal qualifications for adulthood to the political requirements for citizenship takes place, the demands upon a nation’s system of education increase. Barber takes note of this increase when he writes, “Citizens are men and women educated for excellence—by which term I mean the knowledge and competence to govern in common their own lives.”8 This education for excellence certainly includes academic achievement and educational equity, although these contemporary goals can now (hopefully) be seen as part of a far broader and much more intricate tapestry of educational aims and challenges. There is an even more elevated expression of educational aims than those contained in the demands of liberal democracies. These are found in theories of liberal education. Even though much of the foundation for liberal education was erected long before notions of liberal democracy became part of the political imagination,9 it can fairly be

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said that the latter were profoundly influenced by the former. Indeed the full potential of liberal democracy may depend on forms of liberal education in full flower. By way of concluding this chapter, let’s take a brief look. The Liberally Educated Adult Although the thinkers of classical Greece had great reservations about the freedoms that might be intrinsic to a person merely due to his or her status as a person, they did much to help us understand the potential of a free mind. Indeed they may be given credit for providing definitive notions of the human species, notions that not only marked the separation between humankind and the rest of the animal kingdom but also revealed the enormous range of capabilities and possibilities of the human mind. These ideas were so powerful and so promising that they continue to guide our thinking to this day. For the ancient Greeks the mind was indeed “a terrible thing to waste.” As such they pushed the boundaries of knowledge, breaking through to new levels of understanding in much the way modern science and engineering attain ever higher levels of technological innovation. As their knowledge accumulated, the Greeks established schools to communicate it, as well as writing treatises on the proper content of education and how this content is best conveyed.10 As this literature was absorbed into the consciousness of Western civilization, it was expanded by such scholars as Maimonides, Aquinas, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Locke, and Russell. Over time many of the ideas explored in this literature were embodied in educational theories often labeled “liberal education,” “liberal learning,” and sometimes “general education.” One of the more recent and influential expressions of these ideas is embodied in the work and writings of Robert Maynard Hutchins, who served as president of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1945.11 A more recent voice for liberal education is that of Alan Ryan. In evocative prose Ryan describes some of the sensibilities of liberal educators: If every student in America went to a clean, sanitary, non-violent, and wellmanaged middle-class high school in a quiet Midwestern suburb, if none of the young women had babies before they graduated and none of the young men went to jail, there would still be educational theorists and political philosophers standing on the sidelines complaining that these respectable young people emerged as bland, uncultivated, conformist, unimaginative cannon fodder for

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the industrial, managerial, and service armies of the modern economy. They—I would be one of them—would complain that the students’ souls had not been seared by Dostoyevsky, their imaginations not liberated by the reading of Baudelaire in French, their analytical capacities not stretched by thermodynamics, and their political aspirations not touched by encounters with history teachers with a passion for Eugene Debs.12

For our purposes in this essay, we need only the briefest expression of liberal education in order to connect it with our explorations of what it means to be an adult. Arguably the most concise and inspiring expression is that provided by Israel Scheffler, a Harvard philosopher writing during the latter half of the twentieth century. The aims of education, contends Scheffler, must encompass “the formation of habits of judgment and the development of character, the elevation of standards, the facilitation of understanding, the development of taste and discrimination, the stimulation of curiosity and wonder, the fostering of style and a sense of beauty, the growth of a thirst for new ideas and visions of the yet unknown.”13 Here in a nutshell are standards that take us far beyond the four essential features for adulthood and the demands of liberal democracy for basic citizenship. Yet it is important to note that this third tier of educational aims depends on the first tier (reasonableness, agency, relationship, and virtue), and is profoundly advantaged by the second tier (standards for constructing an enlightened vision of the good life while nurturing the potential of others to do the same). There is an obvious complementarity between liberal democracy and liberal education. Pursuing the aims of liberal education fosters our capacities for achieving the promise of liberal democracy, while effectively functioning liberal democracies offer a highly facilitative setting for the pursuit of liberal education. This symbiosis is beautifully and persuasively developed by John Dewey in his much-heralded book Democracy and Education.14 In this work Dewey shows how democracy and education commingle to create the potential for realizing that which is best and most noble about the human species (in fairness to Dewey, it should be noted that while he embraced many of the aims of liberal education, he was a powerful critic of the means most frequently used by schools to achieve them). It is helpful to think of a liberally educated citizen as an outcome that is achieved incrementally, beginning in its most elementary forms with the four features that mark a person as an adult, extending on to the additional requirements for effective citizenship in democratic societies, and ultimately reaching out to the promise of an enlightened, liberal education that makes possible the fullest realization of human potential.

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Given such a continuum, we may now ask what a democratic society might legitimately ask of its system of education. That is, what might be reasonable expectations for schooling in democratic society, schooling that readies the child for the rights and responsibilities of adulthood as well as for the rights, responsibilities, and possibilities of democratic citizenship? As I hope is now evident, these expectations must certainly include academic achievement and educational equity. But they must also extend much further and deeper than these two policy goals. We cannot permit the policy goals of any given period of time to overwhelm, diminish, or destroy aims that are foundational to being human, goals that define what it means to be an adult and that mark off the nature and potential of membership in the human race. Reasonableness, agency, relationship, and virtue might be thought of as the ends of childhood and the beginnings of adulthood. Education’s task is to prepare us for the transition, and do so in such a way that when we cross the line, we can continue to advance in each of these four features. Democracy both enables and requires this progression. Schooling, done right, makes it all happen. Done wrong, it constitutes a failure far greater than the loss of competence in school subjects or the unequal distribution of educational benefits. Done wrong, it deals a crippling blow to democratic ideals and to human potential.15 NOTES 1. For a superb, readily accessible discussion of these core virtues, see André ComteSponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996). 2. Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (New York: Villard Books, 1989). 3. I omit here the possibility that laws permitting children to be charged as adults are solely the result of a desire for deterrence or retribution, and thereby show little or no regard for the normal criteria differentiating a child from an adult. That is, erasing the line separating children from adults in the criminal justice system may be primarily a political act, without cognizance of the biological and psychological evidence we have for drawing such a line. 4. I owe this insight to Thomas F. Green, a remarkable philosopher whose book Voices (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) is an extraordinary argument for how education forms the conscience of the democratic citizen. 5. Thomas Jefferson to Col. Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols., ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1892– 99), X, 4. Quoted in Lawrence A. Cremin, The Genius of American Education (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 5. 6. This reference to the interests of others touches on what is often referred to as the communitarian critique of liberalism. While the differences between communitarian and liberal theories of democracy call for a much more fine-grained analysis than is

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appropriate for this chapter, they provide an occasion to note that there is a robust debate among political theorists about the central precepts and societal benefits of liberalism. The interested reader may wish to consult the work of such communitarian-oriented scholars as Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Amitai Etzioni, and Michael Walzer. 7. Benjamin R. Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 5. 8. Ibid. 9. For a brilliant (but densely written) history of liberal education, see Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, expanded edition (New York: College Board Publications, 1995). 10. Interested readers may wish to consult Henri A. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956). For a more careful examination, consult Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, ed. Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 11. Hutchins was a prolific writer, with many books on the subject of liberal education. His long association with another influential scholar at Chicago, Mortimer Adler, adds considerably to the literature on the topic. An Internet search of either name will turn up many pertinent and helpful readings. 12. Alan Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 14–15. 13. Israel Scheffler, “Basic Mathematical Skills: Some Philosophical and Practical Remarks,” Teachers College Record 78 (1976): 206. 14. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1919). 15. There are many excellent books detailing the connections between democracy and education, including those cited in the endnotes immediately above. The interested reader should also consult the references provided in other chapters in this volume. In addition, I suggest Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and John I. Goodlad and Timothy J. McMannon, eds., The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997).

chapter 21

Epilogue: Democratic Eruptions john r. wiens and david coulter

The decisive difference between the “infinite impossibilities” on which the reality of our earthly life rests and the miraculous character inherent in those events which establish historical reality is that, in the realm of human affairs, we know the author of the “miracles.” It is men who perform them—men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own.1

In his foreword to this volume, Gary Fenstermacher suggests that “too many public discussions on education are dominated by too few ideas.” Why Do We Educate? Renewing the Conversation aims at contributing important, yet generally neglected, ideas for public debate. No “answers” are proffered, but perhaps some extraordinary conversation starters are. In this final chapter, we shift the focus to Fenstermacher’s other concern: that too few people are engaged in educational conversations, that is, current discussions are not fully public, fully democratic. We follow Hannah Arendt (above) in accepting that humans are given the remarkable gift of making their own lives—and the accompanying responsibility to use their freedom to act, to make their lives worthwhile or flourishing. Education prepares us for accepting this responsibility, that is, makes it possible for us to live well and to live well with others. Indeed, democracy and education can be understood as two sides of the same coin. Democracies ideally provide, as our Part II contributors affirm, the contexts and conditions where freedom and action can be learned and pursued. Education adds the dispositions, skills, and understandings to make democracy, that “infinite improbability,” even imaginable. Needed to link freedom, action, education, and democracy, we believe, is a robust conception of the public, perhaps the most endangered of these concepts because it is so taken for granted in Western democracies. We contend that attempts to renew the conversation about education in a democratic society need to be grounded in an understanding of the possibilities of public and private spaces for dialogue. Why do we Educate? Renewing the Conversation, Volume One Edited by David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens © 2008 National Society for the Study of Education ISBN: 978-1-405-19217-0

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In this chapter we use two sources to grapple with how to foster public discussion of education: our research on the role of public and private spaces in fostering dialogue, and our experience as teachers working in institutions that aim to foster education. Both sources help us to understand the depth of the challenge we must confront and how we might begin to use our freedom to act together. A Brief History of the Western Public and Private2 Any historical account of the public in Western society begins with the ancient Greek polis, the public space of Athenian society, in which people assembled to appear to one another as equals and regulate their lives together. Public morality and governance were constructed in the forum of the Greek city-state and kept separate from the private world of the household with its concerns for family and economic life. Public and private had distinct “out there” and “in here” locations and populations; only male citizens could appear in public where significant matters of common concern would be decided. All other people were confined to the private sphere. It was a Golden Age of Democracy—for those few allowed to participate. The rigid separation of private from public continued in the Roman interpretation of the public space, the res publica, but with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the development of feudal society, private and public became separate spaces with different populations: for example, the public noble and the private serf. Louis XIV could accurately say “E¯tat, c’est moi” (“I am the state”). The collapse of feudal society with its reliance on traditional forms of authority invested in the clergy and monarchy led to the ascendancy of new ways of regulating common life based on the ideas of the Enlightenment—especially human reason. The dominant intellectual figure of the age, Immanuel Kant, explicitly linked freedom and reason, explaining, “Reason depends on . . . freedom, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each one of whom must be permitted to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back.”3 For Kant, reason had to be tested publicly (even if only hypothetically) and new public spaces briefly emerged where some citizens could appear and test their reason together. While public and private still had distinct locations, it was possible for some individuals to move between the salons, taverns, and coffee houses of London, Paris, and Berlin. Writers, artists, civil servants, aristocrats, and business people from different classes, religions, and genders were able to gather, debate,

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and be seen and heard by others in a new kind of polis, albeit one still restricted. These public spaces, however, were short-lived because of structural features. Their continuous expansion eventually changed their character; the “rational-critical debate” that was possible in faceto-face encounters over beer or coffee was no longer possible on an expanded scale. Soon debates among citizens were replaced by “minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical.”4 The public space was dominated by emerging professional bureaucracies. The consequences are predictable: Democratic dialogue in public spaces where all are presumed to have equal status is not easy to accomplish in hierarchical institutions where some are “more equal” than others. While public spheres briefly appeared and then disappeared, new private spheres of market and family were created alongside the professional elites. Control of work moved from individual wage laborers or property owners to large administrative/industrial complexes with accompanying bureaucracies. Simultaneously, the family, largely relieved of its economic power, became even more private, more intimate, and increasingly vulnerable to incursions from government agencies and institutions. The changes in both the public and private spheres resulted in a “re-feudalization” of society in the nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries, as professional bureaucracies assumed public power while the administrative state penetrated what had previously been private. “State and society, once distinct, became interlocked,”5 leaving few autonomous public or private spaces. The Challenge of Creating Public Spaces in Schools We seem to have backed ourselves into a corner: a good and worthwhile life involves our exercising our freedom to act in the world, which depends partly on our education, which, in turn, is decided by debate—in a democratic public sphere that is difficult (if not impossible) to find in increasingly bureaucratized societies. Thomas Green captures the critical role of the public in democracies: Without public speech, the public dies. Politics degenerates into polemics, becomes partisan in the worst sense, even venomous, and we are left with nothing we can reasonably speak of as public education, public service, or public life. . . . We are thrust into a world of plurality; we must be nurtured to enter whatever public there be. The one is a consequence of birth, the other an achievement of life. It is, moreover, an educational achievement.6

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Some contemporary thinkers despair of the possibility of genuine democratic dialogue in societies where public opinion is too often a commodity to be measured, manufactured, and manipulated. The political philosopher Jürgen Habermas, for example, believes that the power relationships and ways of thinking characteristic of modern Western bureaucratic institutions severely constrain democratic dialogue: too few people have too much power to decide for others. As a consequence, he advocates the rejuvenation of civil society, that is, the non-governmental agencies largely outside existing power configurations. He contends that amorphous discussions that begin on the periphery of society can eventually “force their way into newspapers and interested associations, clubs, professional organizations, academies, and universities. They find forums, citizen initiatives, and other platforms before they catalyze the growth of social movements and new subcultures.”7 His examples include the successes of environmental activists and of the civil rights and feminist movements. An educational example of what Habermas describes might be the parental lobby for special needs children. When we began teaching forty years ago, students with special needs were not in the schools in which we worked: At best, they had been placed in separate institutions. Over time, public discussions—initiated by the parents of children with special needs—worked on the schools in a “siege-like manner,” creating the possibility of educating all young people together in some meaningful way. Certainly we hope that the ideas in this volume will stimulate multiple overlapping conversations about education and democracy in coffee shops, book clubs, and community centers as well as in public bureaucracies and universities—and the halls of educational policymaking. But we also hope the ideas will provoke discussion within existing institutions: in staffrooms, boardrooms, union meetings, administrator conferences, and parent associations. We are more hopeful than Habermas is that democratic dialogue can be approximated within modern organizations. While we admit we both have invested our careers in the very institutions that he criticizes, we have both experienced eruptions of democratic discussion in those institutions. As students, teachers, principals, superintendents, and professors, we have often been part of wonderful conversations where all participated, all listened deeply to our other dialogic partners, and all benefited from the experience. At board meetings the airing of a student or teacher complaint would break out into a general discussion about our adult obligations to children and the purposes of education. In a staff meeting, a

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discussion about student fundraising led to a discussion about the ethical and political responsibilities of teachers and schools. In the staff room, a complaint about a child led to a discussion of protection of children’s privacy. In university classes a presentation on child abuse sparked a discussion about the public’s intrusion into people’s private lives. As school superintendents, people officially charged with providing educational leadership, we set about making the eruptions more frequent. We reasoned that we needed a public space, much like that provided by the Greek polis, a place where people could talk with one another about matters of import, but a place where all were welcome. We quickly realized that we had multiple opportunities for dialogue—when we learned to recognize them. We had board meetings every week, principals’ meetings every month, meetings every day all day long for a myriad of reasons. And we reasoned that having those meetings could not be justified if they weren’t mostly educational (considering that education was the enterprise in which we claimed to be engaged). We concluded that each meeting, including those that happened on the spur of the moment, provided an opportunity to discuss education. Moreover, our community schools and school boards were still places or spaces where governments ensured our freedom to deliberate locally, not appropriating to themselves the authority to be arbiter on all schooling matters. We were sitting on educational gold mines and hadn’t realized it. Our enthusiasm was not shared by those around us. We were initially greeted with puzzlement, some skepticism, and significant suspicion from the people—trustees, school principals, and teachers—we worked with. True, they were intrigued by the possibility of creating an inclusive dialogue as a way of being together. The idea of face-to-face dialogue about larger, significant human purposes that might have broad positive consequences resonated with them. Their experience, however, was that attempts at dialogue soon degenerated into monologues, or worse, pretend dialogues where the answers and the outcomes had been predetermined and the activity became guessing how to get there. As we began to ask educational questions, we learned three things. First, it was clear that most people were not content with just being successful school functionaries; they wanted to be educators. This was a challenge: If we wished to be educational leaders, new language and new structures were needed. Second, schooling required, indeed commanded, the organizational imperatives of policies, budgets, blueprints, directives, and accountability schemes supported by its ideological vocabulary. We could not abandon this language or these structures.

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Finally, we were challenged to reconcile the competing educational and schooling agendas. We seemed to lack the means by which to change the above situations—certainly, arguing successfully that they existed and were misguided was not good enough. We had to act and, as one of our principals put it, “we had to do everything at once one thing at a time.” Creating Private Spaces to Prepare for Public Dialogue Our initial efforts to create robust public dialogues about education regularly flopped. People had difficulty understanding both what we wanted to discuss with them and why. Both reactions are understandable. The Garrison Keillor column mentioned in the foreword epitomizes the difficulty: Keillor is confident that education involves “test results,” leaving only two topics to talk about: how to get good test results and who to blame when the test results are not so good. His understanding reflects the current state of public discussion of education and schooling. The school reform literature (we are aware of no comparable educational reform literature) conceives of schooling as primarily about preparing people for their role in the national or international economy and uses the assumptions of economic development of the mid-twentieth century to conceive the entire enterprise as a private exchange of goods. The rich discussion about what counts as education to which the contributors to this volume refer is not on the public agenda (and sadly, not on the academic agenda for most faculties of education either). Even more puzzling to many of the people we talked with initially was the goal of the discussions we were trying to initiate. What was the superintendents’ “grand design”? We did not have answers that we intended to inflict on them; indeed, we were not aiming for “answers” at all. We hoped to create a genuine dialogue in which all would share their understanding of education so that collectively we could better understand. Unanimity or even consensus was not only unlikely, but also undesirable—we would all agree about what counts as education when we all concurred about our life purposes and how we would pursue those purposes. Not likely. Truth be told, promoting discussion that would lead to dissensus is generally not considered a good career move for school superintendents. We retreated. Those responsible for the educational leadership of the district regularly created private time together where we could talk about what we were attempting, share our frustrations, and celebrate what we believed we were learning. We discovered, ironically, that

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creating public spaces required the construction of private spaces to prepare for the public. While the ideal public might be characterized as a space where people appear to one another and debate how they will live together, the ideal private might be understood as a sanctuary where people are hidden from view and safe from interference—where their ruminations did not have to pass the test of public scrutiny. Initially, outside our own group we met with small groups with similar institutional responsibilities, groups of middle school principals, professional development committees, and parent council executives. As we gained more confidence we declared some administrators’ meetings, in-committee parts of board meetings, and gatherings associated with our invited lecture series as “private times,” meaning that while the ideas discussed in those settings might very well be publicized at some point, the people involved would make no public appearance as individuals. In other words, ideas might be attributed to groups rather than to individuals. We began to understand private and public as involving different conditions of communicating with other people.8 If the private is indeed to be a sanctuary, people must be able to see themselves as relatively safe, that is, they must be able to trust the intentions of particular others. The public, however, provides no comparable safety. Other people are unknown to us and their intentions suspect. At best, we can act with confidence that they will respect the collectively agreed rules for participation. Seligman captures the distinction when he contends that trust in people in private must become confidence in institutions in public.9 Public and private so understood are not simple dichotomies or even places (as they have been throughout much Western history), but a kind of sliding scale of mutuality and vulnerability. Armed with our new distinctions, we returned to the public of the school district. We went back with a new language. We no longer talked about resources and products and, as time went on, infrequently used the terms pupils or students. We talked about children and young people— and we were amazed by the power of a shared humanizing vocabulary. It’s a lot harder to imagine manipulating a child, especially a real child with a real name, for arbitrary purposes than to think in terms of changing raw material into material products by some predetermined processes as if every child is alike. It is equally hard to preconceive what each child ought to turn into even when we do think we know her or him. It has proved a lot easier for most educators to see themselves as part of an adult population with responsibility for the education of all children than as civil jobholders, or even as professional champions of

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teacher rights in an adversarial system. Most important, we distinguished between “education” and “schooling.” Education involves everyone attempting to lead, and to help others lead, good and worthwhile lives. All must be involved as equals in ongoing debates about what counts as education and how this might be determined. Schooling, on the other hand, involves the contingent institutionalization of education. Some degree of consensus about education and some differentiation of responsibility must happen for schooling to be possible, but in a democracy that consensus must always be open and challengeable. All citizens have educational responsibility; only some people have the particular responsibility of teaching grade five, or administering the school or the school district. We emerged into the public of our community determined that we had dual responsibilities: as citizens we had to talk about education; as superintendents, we had to make education more feasible. We also brought a new set of strategies to promote public discussion. We reasoned that other people needed the private time to think and prepare for the public arena, so we used our administrative power to facilitate that possibility. We encouraged and promoted the idea of protected private thinking time and space for principals, teachers, students, and others. We emphasized that public appearance and public performance must reflect personal excellence, reflecting meaningful use of private time. Finally we insisted that private/public considerations are not only prerequisite but also essential aspects of educational renewal. To accomplish this, we had to build in private space, time to stop and think—and to refine. For example, sometimes we had meetings where the only agenda was for each high school principal and vice-principal to tell a story about a school initiative or how their school dealt with particular children or issues. When everyone had told their story the meeting was over. Other times, with the board’s approval, we set trustee meetings aside for discussion only. In all cases, administrative decisions were held in abeyance—the only agenda was dialogue in order to understand better. The consequences were, at first, unexpected: better decisions, better responses to school problems, increased confidence and a renewed sense of common purpose (“we’re all in this together”), less seeking of localized advantage or personal gain. For this renewal we looked to two sources. The first included scholars, some in education, some in other fields, who wrote about what we were experiencing and helped us to see things anew and to understand in different and better ways. In particular, we searched for vocabulary

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and ways to talk about education and democracy. Many authors are present in this book in one way or another, some as chapter authors. One whose work is referred to in several chapters (including earlier in this one), Jürgen Habermas, is someone who has thought carefully about the requisites for democratic societies, including the publicprivate relationship and the tendency of hierarchical administrative systems to dominate or “colonize” human communities.10 While Habermas is pessimistic about the possibility of making Western institutions fully democratic, we found resources in his work that helped us to promote democratic eruptions in schools and school communities, making them more (although certainly not fully) democratic. He helped us understand the inevitable clash between education and schooling and the importance of both maintaining the distinction and working out the complex relationship between the two. Indeed, while administrative power can be used to squelch democratic dialogue, under some conditions it can also be employed to promote public dialogue. Administration is, of course, necessary for the effective management of the large, complex organizations which now are the reality for most of us. Organizational structures, with their divisions of labor, policies, procedures, and other standard practices, are the way large systems keep their promises to people both in terms of interactions and results. We need to know, with a high level of certainty, when the school bus will pick up our children. We need to know who to go to if our children, ourselves, or others, need help. We need to know that the people who teach our children are qualified to do so. We need to have a general sense about what will happen in emergencies of many different kinds. We need to know that our schools are safe places for children. It requires little imagination to understand that we could not do without reliable systems that deliver on their promises for the treatment of people in the system. No one in the school district, for example, could disregard or abandon their responsibilities as trustees, administrators, teachers, secretaries, or bus drivers while we talked about education. What we had to learn to do, however, was separate our private and public civic discussions concerned with education from our conversations about how to fulfill our institutional responsibilities: Were we talking as individual citizens or system administrators, for example? Hannah Arendt succinctly captures this distinction when she writes: “The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is.”11 This was not an easy distinction to make, and never an absolute, but one that we discovered many people found made sense.

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We should acknowledge, however, that making such distinctions is extraordinarily difficult in large, hierarchical administrative systems. For many enterprises (e.g., manufacturing) this is not a problem; for schooling that aims to promote education in a democratic society, the problem is critical. There are real questions as to whether our schooling systems need to be such huge enterprises, with multiple hierarchical layers to “manage” large numbers of people. One casualty of the pressure to make schools and school districts larger with the avowed aim of increasing efficiency is the human conversation that we believe is essential to both education and democracy. When the public becomes too large and too distant from the private spaces available to people, and the administrative hierarchy too steep and cumbersome, face-to-face dialogue becomes impossible. Efficiency and legitimacy are always in tension in bureaucracies; it seems to us that too often the former has trumped the latter in organizing schooling. Indeed, if our school system had been too large, we would not have been able to access the other key source available to us for renewing our understanding of education: the people in our community. We learned to create opportunities for people to tell their stories and we listened carefully. The Educated Person Exercise exemplifies this attempt, but we discovered that we were surrounded by opportunities to learn from people—if only we stopped to listen. We heard stories about school staffs’ “adopting” children who had been moved from school to school because they had burned their bridges by their bad behavior, educational assistants who fed children who came to school with no lunches, special needs parents who said the school was the only safe and supportive place for them as parents of children who didn’t fit easily into their communities, teachers who personally sponsored children to camps and bought their school supplies, principals who praised, and prized, the work of volunteers, high school children who campaigned against racism, homophobia, and/or homelessness and for environmental integrity and social justice. There was no end to the work that was being done to enhance the lives of our community and the people in them. The stories, particularly when they made a public appearance in some respectful way, provided a very different source of educational renewal than academic books and papers. They spoke to the human “miracles” that exist among all the improbabilities of which Arendt spoke. They interrupted the seemingly inevitable patterns of the prevailing conversations by introducing something new. In general, we did not discover new conceptual frameworks, new vocabulary, or general-

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izable insights. Instead, we learned about the people we lived alongside, how they made sense of their lives and what was important to them. Thomas Green describes these as “umbilical stories”: In the interior conversation going on as the speech of another campaigns as candidate for my own, some reasons offered may be clothed as arguments, but others arrive simply as umbilical stories. They stem from a narrative of memory, and their recitation presents neither arguments nor truth claims. It simply calls forth objects of recollection, making them present to some community of memory. Their recitation by some invites their recitation by others.12

The umbilical stories that make up our conceptions of education and democracy need to be told and re-told—constantly renewed—”so they don’t fade away as in a dream.”13 One such true story helped us begin to understand the complex relationship between the public and private—and the special place of the school between the two: The phone rang in the principal’s home. It was four in the morning. Who could be calling at this time of the night? Billy (six years old and a much ravaged family sexual abuse victim) seemed to have disappeared, meaning run away, from his group home again. The police had been summoned and were out looking for him. Could the principal offer any clues to where he might have gone because he seemed to have connected with the school in a very positive way? The principal responded that he wasn’t sure he could help but when he went to school in the morning, he would check with Billy’s teachers to see if there might be clues to where he might have gone. At five the phone rang again. Billy had been found—at the school. This scenario was repeated at least three more times—Billy kept running away to school. School seemed to be the one place in his life where he felt safe.14

Connecting Public and Private Billy’s story captures how schools exist in-between—between childhood and adulthood, between home and the world, between public and private, between institutions and communities, and can provide important opportunities to understand how the public dialogue so crucial to education and democracy is related to preparation in private. Indeed, the school’s capacity to educate depends largely on its understanding of both private and public purposes. For Billy, the school was a sanctuary where he knew he would be accepted, and “home” was dangerous. For many children, this is their reality. Schools can also be places where, as

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children age, they have increased opportunities to play at, and experiment with, democratic ideas and activities in safe places protected from the actions of other children and shielded from the actions of adults whose intentions may be less than judicious and honorable. We are reminded of Sarah’s story: Sarah arrived in Miss Smith’s grade four classroom in September with her pencils, books, and teddy bear, but without her voice. Sarah was a select mute, that is, she could talk, but chose not to. She followed Miss Smith’s lessons and completed her work without difficulty. But she didn’t talk to her teacher or her peers (who had become accustomed to Sarah’s silence). Gradually Miss Smith made the classroom a safe place for Sarah, beginning with conversations with Jane (Sarah’s teddy). Sarah began staying after school and hanging around Miss Smith’s desk along with Jane and another student, Mary. Eventually Sarah began to talk with Mary and Miss Smith—but only after school. In class, Sarah remained mute, but continued to attend and began to communicate non-verbally. When Miss Smith thought that Sarah was ready, she talked with her about perhaps answering the math quiz the next day. Sarah agreed and they practiced together. When Miss Smith asked for answers the following day, Miss Smith called on Sarah, Sarah answered, and Miss Smith thanked her and went on with the lesson. Later Miss Smith called Sarah into the hallway so they could celebrate privately; this triumph was followed by many others until the climactic event: Sarah’s speech at the spring school assembly. Sarah had joined the public of the school and Jane was relegated to the private of the cloakroom.

The evidence is clear. Schools are one of the few places where all are supposed to be welcomed and celebrated, no matter who they are or how they show up. At their best, schools become sanctuaries where talented, responsible adults help children figure out who they are and who they want to become. Schools, however, are also public places where society attempts to make its purposes manifest, its principles explicit, and its needs apparent. The school is intended as a site of justice for equal opportunity and other forms of equality. It can be a place where nonviolence as a way of living together is learned. In schools, children are supposed to be socialized to the mores and conventions and introduced to the ideals to which our societies aspire, sometimes in contradistinction from those actually practiced in other places, including the home. We hope that in school young people learn that they achieve individuality not only for its own

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sake but also for the sake of others and for the collective other, the public. Another story serves well here: Mary, a very competent, outgoing and confident Grade 12 student, was being a particular thorn in the side of the board and the superintendent. We were involved in a public consultation process about a major reorganization of the school division—not closing schools but changing the communities and the children and young people they served. Mary, who was graduating and therefore not personally affected, nevertheless showed up at meeting after meeting criticizing the scheme, often being harshly critical of individuals on the board or the superintendent. To top it off the board, just prior to a meeting, was informed that Mary was being granted an interview on a popular local radio station.

It’s not hard to imagine how the discussion started at the meeting. Mary needed to be put in her place, “shut up.” The heated discussion about how to do this without looking like heavies worried only about our own credibility raged on for well nigh an hour. This, however, was a “private” meeting and after exhaustion and frustration was about to carry the day, one wise board member, who had been listening more than speaking (more in her own private world than in ours) spoke up. “May I interrupt? I’ve been thinking—isn’t this just what we want our young people to do when they get out of school—isn’t this just what we’ve been talking about when we talked about the ‘educated person’ being a democratic citizen?” SILENCE. Then one after the other, all present entered a much different conversation. The agenda turned from how to shut Mary down to how we could make sure that she made a good appearance in public. In institutional terms, this meant, “how do we try to ensure that one of our students has been served well by her education for which we are responsible?” The superintendent was requested to attempt to meet with Mary to help her prepare her best argument, which he did. Green captures this purpose of education neatly, describing it as the formation of a public: I mean to be asking an educational question: What needs to be done, what skills acquired, what practices employed so that a public may emerge from the plurality in which we begin and so that it may be sustained for all the years of our lives and our children’s lives?15

As superintendents trying to promote a public discussion of education, we had to learn some of the lessons that we regularly saw expert teachers teaching children: how to participate in public dialogue by

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preparing carefully and deliberately in private. Testing the goodness of those private spaces involves public examination. Our responsibility as educational leaders (and not just system administrators) involves creating safe places for people to talk about education, where they can develop their understanding together—and then support them as they go into the public so those understandings are shared and tested in dialogue with other people who may have different perspectives, different ways of seeing the world, different notions of a good and worthwhile life and how it might be fostered. Like good teachers, we had to put our “best” thinking out there—in board, administrator, and other meetings; at legislative hearings; in conferences; in speaking and in writing—and also had to provide opportunities for others with whom we worked to do the same. Our strategy is not an “answer” in any conventional sense. Fostering democratic dialogue about education means starting over and over again: individual people with unique ideas in particular contexts at various times will generate diverse understandings (or not). That’s the curse—and joy—of education in a democratic society. An Invitation to Dialogue We believe that the following words of a Navajo elder in The Wind Won’t Know Me capture our challenge and its importance: What is a human being? What do you mean by that? Aren’t we all human beings? And she says no. “A human being thinks with his heart, a person who thinks of the good all the time, that has respect for life around him, that has respect for even the smallest rock. A human being is a person who talks to rocks, a person who thinks the rock will talk to him and teach him a lesson. The smallest thing that Mother Nature has made available to us. A human being must understand why we are here on earth, why the plants are growing, why we have the four seasons. Why we have the heavens, that is a human being, somebody that understands nature. Somebody who thinks he’s not better than anyone else. That thinks everybody is equal no matter what color they are or what language they speak. That is a human being.” She says, “I don’t want life to end. I want my children to grow and reproduce. And I want my children to get along with the white children, learn to share and live like human beings.”16

What an invitation to further dialogue! We hope that Why Do We Educate? is full of similar invitations for thinking about education, invitations that address the aboriginal grandmother’s wonderings about who we are, what we have become, and who we want to become (and who, not what, we want our children to become). Contributors are open

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about their fears, frustrations, and hopes, but determined not to yield to those who would hijack education or shut them out of the educational conversation. They hold it as a right, indeed a civic responsibility, to enter the fray that is democratic dialogue. However, a right is not a right without the provisions and conditions to make it achievable and sustainable, that is, the requisite private and public spaces. It is of some significance to us, as it was to our authorcolleagues, that if we are to take the idea of education for democracy seriously, the talk about it must be regular, frequent, and open to all. Our authors have attempted to write for all readers, to open doors to the educational conversation for all to participate. Part of that hospitality involves providing appropriate guideposts or “wayfinders” helping people find their way into the educational conversation, with the realization that these openings are merely gateways into conversations that are both new and familiar. Arendt’s words bear repeating here: “What saves the affairs of mortal men from inherent futility is nothing but this incessant talk about them, which in turn remains futile unless certain concepts, certain guideposts for future remembrance, and even for sheer reference, arise out of it.”17 We hope that each chapter is a gateway to a conversation that must be continually revisited and explored. Each chapter attempts to raise questions about what was true and good, what is true and good, and what will be true and good. We believe that education is created among people as they reveal their anxieties and their aspirations, and their understandings about historical events, current happenings, and imagined future possibilities. Our writers offer their references somewhat tentatively, with a kind of courageous humility: “This is the way I’m thinking about this right now; maybe tomorrow it will be different.” Our contributing authors also understand, as we came to understand in our work, that the right time to start is always right now with the opportunities and tools we have at hand. They demonstrate how to be expert and precise in employing our most important tool: language. Our words reveal our prejudices and intentions, putting them “out there” for everyone to judge. In a somewhat ironic twist, the implication is that the way out of our current dilemmas is the same as what got us in—more writing, more talk—but in more democratic spaces. Finally, they also communicate some urgency for democratic dialogue about education rooted in, and marked by, thoughtfulness and judgment. Being silent is not an option. Green laments that today few people speak powerfully about our ties to one another. He writes:

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It is precisely this [public] silence about the nature of our presence to one another and from generation to generation, silence about the nature of the political office we share as citizens, that has permitted us to engage in a virtual deluge of deeply confused talk on [school] reform. We live in the presence of a broad movement aimed directly at the revision of schooling, yet the movement remains virtually silent on the role of education in the formation of the public.18

The current school reform movement has left us wondering and worrying, feeling excluded and confused, even resentful. We’re unconvinced, uneasy, silenced—and still we feel implicated. What to do now? Green’s suggestion (and ours) is to speak publicly and to create opportunities for others to speak, thereby creating, again and again, our democratic citizenship, and thereby reaffirming the freedom and power of education. NOTES 1. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 171. 2. For discussions of the role of public and private in education see Gary D. Fenstermacher, “On Restoring Public and Private Life,” in The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling, ed. John I. Goodlad and Timothy J. McMannon (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 55–71; and David Coulter, “Creating Common and Uncommon Worlds: Using Discourse Ethics to Decide Public and Private in Classrooms,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 34, no. 1 (2002): 25–42. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A738/B766. 4. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 175. 5. Craig Calhoun, “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 21. 6. Thomas Green, Voices: The Educational Formation of Conscience (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 149. 7. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 381. 8. Ibid., 366. 9. Adam. B. Seligman, The Problem of Trust (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 10. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 66. 11. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 181. 12. Thomas Green, Voices, 160. 13. Idea taken from the wonderful conclusion to Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1993), 142. “But neither will they curse our memory because we permitted, through our silence, democracy to pass away as in a dream.” 14. This story, as the others here, is based on an actual account—anonymity protected in all cases.

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15. Thomas Green, Voices, 149. 16. Emily Benedek, The Wind Won’t Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 272. 17. Hannah Arendt, “The Revolutionary Tradition in Its Lost Treasure,” in On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 220. 18. Thomas Green, Voices, 149.