A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Modern Era 9781350074538, 9781350074569, 9781350074552

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Series Introduction Megan Jane Laverty and David T. Hansen
General Editors’ Acknowledgments
Volume Editors’ Acknowledgments
Timeline
Introduction: Struggle, Resistance, and Opportunity—A Historical and Philosophical Lens on Education in the Modern Era Andrea R. English
1 John Dewey’s Philosophy of Democratic Education Leonard J. Waks
2 Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Education Deborah Kerdeman
3 Ethical Relationality in Education: Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Nel Noddings Mordechai Gordon
4 Psychoanalysis with Education Deborah P. Britzman
5 The Philosophical Milieu in Nineteenth-Century American Education: From Idealism to Pragmatism James Scott Johnston
6 Philosophy of Education and Early Childhood: Invitations and Provocations of Childhood from Maria Montessori and Reggio Emilia Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd
7 Philosophies of Race, Justice, and Education: Traditions of Embodied Knowledge Kal Alston
8 Critical Theory and Education Christiane Thompson
9 Education and the Linguistic Turn Paul Standish
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

A HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION VOLUME 4

A History of Western Philosophy of Education General Editors: Megan Jane Laverty and David T. Hansen Volume 1 A History of Western Philosophy of Education in Antiquity Edited by Avi I. Mintz Volume 2 A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Edited by Kevin Gary Volume 3 A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Tal Gilead Volume 4 A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Modern Era Edited by Andrea R. English Volume 5 A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Contemporary Landscape Edited by Anna Pagès

A HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

IN THE MODERN ERA VOLUME 4 Edited by Andrea R. English

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Bloomsbury, 2021 The Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xxiv–xxv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte James Cover image © benoitb/ Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-7453-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7455-2 eBook: 978-1-3500-7454-5 Series: 978-1-3500-7466-8 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist

of

F igures 

S eries I ntroduction Megan Jane Laverty and David T. Hansen

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G eneral E ditors ’ A cknowledgments 

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V olume E ditors ’ A cknowledgments 

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T imeline  Introduction: Struggle, Resistance, and Opportunity—A Historical and Philosophical Lens on Education in the Modern Era Andrea R. English

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1 John Dewey’s Philosophy of Democratic Education Leonard J. Waks

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2 Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Education Deborah Kerdeman

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3 Ethical Relationality in Education: Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Nel Noddings Mordechai Gordon

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4 Psychoanalysis with Education Deborah P. Britzman

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5 The Philosophical Milieu in Nineteenth-Century American Education: From Idealism to Pragmatism James Scott Johnston

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CONTENTS 

6 Philosophy of Education and Early Childhood: Invitations and Provocations of Childhood from Maria Montessori and Reggio Emilia Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd

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7 Philosophies of Race, Justice, and Education: Traditions of Embodied Knowledge Kal Alston

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8 Critical Theory and Education Christiane Thompson

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9 Education and the Linguistic Turn Paul Standish

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N otes

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I ndex 

on

C ontributors 

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FIGURES

0.1 Male and female members of the women’s suffrage movement on a protest march through London, c. 1900

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0.2 On the far left, abolitionist leader, Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913) ex-slave and founder of the “Underground Railroad,” which provided safe houses for escaping slaves (photograph c. 1900) 4 0.3 Zitkala-Sa at the National Women’s Party (NWP), an advocacy group for women’s equality, meeting in Washington in 1921

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0.4 A girls’ school in France, 1890

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1.1 John Dewey at typewriter, 1946

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1.2 Children at St. German’s school, Cardiff, making Christmas puddings for their party, December 15, 1939

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1.3 Dewey’s diagram of a primary school as a collection of occupational areas

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2.1 Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), German philosopher

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2.2 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), founder of phenomenology

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3.1 Dialogical encounter of parents of the students of a newly integrated classroom, Louisville, Kentucky School Integration

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FIGURES

4.1 Austrian author and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) with his chow, Jofi, in his study at Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria, c. 1937. The photograph was taken by Freud’s patient, American writer Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

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4.2 Group portrait Anna Freud and schoolkids, Cottage Lyzeum, Vienna, Photograph, 1917

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5.1 Senior High School during construction, Balck River Falls, Wisconsin, 1897

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5.2 Girls working at looms at Hull house in Chicago, which was founded by Jane Addams

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6.1 Italian educational reformer Maria Montessori is pictured during a visit to the Gatehouse School, Smithfield, London, England, 1951

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6.2 Butterfly captures the attention of a girl

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7.1 Panorama of Twentieth Annual session of the NAACP, June 26, 1929, Cleveland, Ohio

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7.2 In 1933 in Harlem, New York, two black children seated on the sidewalk look at their schoolbooks. One of the books concerns American history

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8.1 The Institute for Social Research (IfS) after having been closed and taken over by the National Socialists in March 1933 

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8.2 Adorno at one of his public lectures in Berlin in 1965

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9.1 Gilder on Metal, from the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, 1763

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SERIES INTRODUCTION MEGAN JANE LAVERTY AND DAVID T. HANSEN

A History of Western Philosophy of Education is a five-volume series that traces the development of philosophy of education through Western culture and history. It seeks to illuminate the philosophical origins of contemporary educational debates, policies, and practices. Focusing on philosophers who have theorized education and its implementation, the series constitutes a fresh, dynamic, and developing view of educational philosophy. It expands our educational possibilities by reinvigorating philosophy’s vibrant critical tradition, connecting old and new perspectives, and identifying the continuity of critique and reconstruction.

AN UNBROKEN CONVERSATION Education and philosophy of education are not historical constants, either as concepts or as practices. Their meaning and enactments transform across space and time. What education meant to a medieval monk differs from how a twentieth-century child-centered educator conceived it, and both differ from the understanding of an ancient Roman. However, the questions that reside at the heart of philosophy of education have a long-standing lineage. These questions can be traced at least as far back as Plato. In Plato’s dialogues, ranging from the Laches and Protagoras to the Meno and Republic, Socrates asks: “Can you teach a person to be virtuous (i.e. good)?,” “Which of us is truly a teacher of the souls of youth?,” and “What is the relation between education and a just society?” In these questions, we see the meeting of philosophy and education: a fusion of the spirit of inquiry into fundamental issues of life characteristic of philosophy, with the necessity of education for human continuity, growth, and renewal. Plato thereby helps inaugurate an open-ended conversation that continues

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through the present day. It is a conversation, to cite Michael Oakeshott’s (1989) poetic terms, “in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves” (p. 41). The terms and the idiom of this conversation may change over time, but the questions persist, and in a pressing way. The value of participating in this historical conversation is that it allows today’s students and professors to “disentangle [themselves], for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now” (Oakeshott 1989, p. 41). This practice positions everyone to engage with thinkers from the past as if they were sitting around the table with us today. We revisit their writings in order to learn from them and, in an important sense, with them, for each is an inquirer rather than a peddler of a dogma. To learn from, and with, the past is to have one’s definition of and criteria for education challenged and potentially transformed, and in a highly distinctive and invaluable manner. While we do learn much from our contemporaries, we are typically too close to them in space and time to shake loose from their (and our) assumptions of what counts as “learning.” Every generation of scholars, teachers, and students faces this “almost insurmountable difficulty,” to borrow terms from John Dewey (1985, p. 154), of seeing beyond the end of its own nose. This predicament, too, is part of the long-standing conversation in philosophy of education: it calls for a dedicated effort to participate. The redeeming fact is that the conversation is always already at hand to assist us in facing the problems of a “presentist” myopia. The past can teach precisely because it stands outside current passions and fashions, even while helping us grasp how the latter came into being and why they grip current sensibilities. None of the above implies the past has a “superior” voice, any more than does the present, a point to which we will return. The long-standing conversation at the juncture of philosophy and education has been a constant process of criticism of the past, but always in the very moment that the past challenges the present to become self-aware and self-critical of that which it most takes for granted. To learn from the past is to overcome its limitations, even while striving to overcome one’s own. Philosophy of education features what can be seen across all domains of philosophy: an erotic aspiration, as Andy German (2017) puts it, to look beyond its own tradition and find a way back to the beginning: to that existential moment, metaphorically speaking, when “the first question” about education was enunciated, so that we might pose it in our own terms in light of our own realities. The perennial yearning in philosophy to overcome its own tradition— even while depending upon it as an indispensable inheritance (like one’s native language acquired as a child)—mirrors a deep, typically unspoken desire to grasp the unity behind the “bewildering variety of positions and doctrines” in the field (German 2017, p. 7). “Unity” does not mean unanimity in thought. It is a unity in eros. It represents a longing to find that existential place, named above,

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that is prior to the emergence, proliferation, and intensification of competing perspectives. “[T]he surest mark of philosophically inclined spirit,” contends German, is to be “seized” by this eros (p. 7). The educator aspires to truly think, and to think truly, rather than to mimic others’ thought. This desire means they must “find” their thought even as they “found,” or ground, their distinctive voice in the conversation (see Cavell 1989). The return “to the beginning” in philosophy, which we will witness across the volumes in this series, constitutes what Iris Murdoch conceives of as “an abiding and not regrettable characteristic of the discipline” (1997, p. 299). Contributors to this series do not examine ancient and modern philosophies of education in order to “improve” upon or “correct” them. Rather, they approach thinkers across the ages as our nonliving contemporaries, having recognized that they have something meaningful to say to us. Entering this conversation enables “another’s thoughts to re-enact themselves in [our] own mind,” thereby positioning us to understand ourselves afresh (Oakeshott 1989, p. 68). The educational questions first posed by Socrates and others burst upon each new generation of educators, inviting them to take hold of their educational inheritance and contribute to it in their own singular, irreproducible ways. Although each generation must answer the questions anew, they do not do so de novo, for the history of thought is a reservoir of responses waiting to be drawn upon and engaged. This series invites readers into the history of the most important philosophical questions for education. This history comprises an unbroken, lively, and vivid conversation across time. In looking back over the history of Western philosophy of education, we bear witness to the continuity of the questions, and to the profound commitment our forebears brought to addressing them. We hope the series will help readers sustain this crucial commitment.

A FRESH CANON Education is at the heart of the human experience. Philosophy of education is important because our values—that is, views on how we should live—do not emerge from nowhere. They must be cultivated or supported in individuals by means of education. As the process by which a society renews and improves itself, education is far more than social reproduction, and far less than total revolution. It is an elusive middle path constituted by love for the extraordinary endeavor of conceiving, and bringing to life, human possibilities. From the beginning, canonical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, JeanJacques Rousseau, and John Dewey have addressed education. They have thought philosophically about education’s aims and methods, the nature of learning and thinking, the character of knowledge, and the contributions of curriculum, pedagogy, and schooling to maturation. Philosophers’ answers

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to these questions have defined key periods in the history of philosophy of education from antiquity, to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and into the present. Although studying the history of Western philosophy writ large can advance the understanding of philosophical problems in education, this series attends directly to philosophy’s contribution to conceptions of education. It offers a fresh canon of educational philosophy rather than an overview of the philosophical canon per se (Mintz 2017). For this reason, readers will find that such prominent Western philosophers as Thomas Hobbes and Benedictus Spinoza, who wrote very little on education or whose work lacks explicit educational ramifications, will not be covered in detail. Instead, the contributors focus on those philosophers and educators who have theorized education and its practices, thereby identifying a dynamic and ever-changing canon of thinkers for philosophy of education. Individual thinkers or clusters of thinkers representing schools of thought—feminism, pragmatism, or phenomenology, for example—will be situated within the context of ongoing influences and intellectual relationships. A “canon” in philosophy can be understood as a body of continuously consulted, respected texts that have stood the test of time. People turn to them across the generations not as a result of dogmatic adherence or for purposes of propaganda (though every text, once it leaves an author’s hands, is subject to countless uses and abuses—consider, among other examples, Friedrich Nietzsche’s oeuvre). Nor do people take them in hand because they necessarily subscribe to the thinkers’ views. Agreement or disagreement, as such, is not the key issue, though it remains important depending on context. People read canonical works because they continue to provoke fresh thinking across space and time. As already touched on, they spark new lines of questioning and insight. Contemporary scholarship in any field, including in philosophy of education, is radically uncertain about which recent texts will endure. Current popularity does not necessarily predict longevity. At the same time, the canon in philosophy of education is ever-changing precisely because of new contemporary contributions, some of which spotlight hitherto neglected or forgotten writings, including by marginalized and excluded people in societies past and present. While many of these works will not themselves endure, in terms of a continued readership, they generate an ethos that makes it possible for others that will. This process is how a scholarly ethos functions, a dynamic which is equally true of the ethos in the arts. Shakespeare’s plays are found on stages everywhere in the world today not because they are pure miracles of genius or because some authority has made it so. They emerged out of traditions of theatre that created an ethos for them to take hold of people’s imaginations. Without that ethos, we today would likely have never heard of them. We illustrate this point in the next section with regards to what is often referred to as “progressive education.”

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THE HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION Roughly speaking, progressive education represents a commitment to fuse values sometimes seen as in tension: genuine student autonomy, alongside a strong, democratic social spirit. The approach pivots around learning by doing. Rather than sitting passively in rows of seats in the classroom while educators “pour” knowledge into them, students should be engaged actively with inquiring, discussing, experimenting, exploring, and more. While the progressive education movement began in the United States with the reception of John Dewey’s (1859–1952) philosophy of education, Aristotle (384–322 bce) was one of its earliest precursors. He argued that individuals develop practical wisdom by engaging practically in wise activities rather than by studying theories of wisdom alone. The early modern thinker Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) deployed this Aristotelian insight to argue that education should aim not at filling students with information but rather at cultivating persons holistically from an intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical point of view. From his perspective, young people develop practical wisdom—qualities of tenacity, flexibility, and sound judgment in the face of difficulty—by interacting with a diverse range of social, cultural, and physical environments. Seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury developments were also important. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), an avid reader of Montaigne, Plato, and other forebears, highlighted the qualities of integrity, decisiveness, and consistency that would, in his view, liberate the student to act autonomously. Rousseau would have the student learn firsthand, through concrete experience as well as in developmentally appropriate ways, about the unpredictability of countless life events, the necessity of work, the values in friendship, family, and mutually dependent, supportive male–female relations such as marriage, and the responsibilities of citizenship. Rousseau cautions traditional educators that their intense preoccupation with mature adulthood leads them to neglect the intervening and formative years. He argues that the core dispositions of humane adulthood, compassion and conscience, only develop if the individual fully experiences infancy, childhood, and adolescence. In his educational treatise, Emile, or on Education (1763), Rousseau-the-tutor attends closely to what Emile perceives, comprehends, needs, and desires, from birth through adolescence. Like Montaigne, Rousseau anticipates Dewey’s thesis that the first step in educating children is to observe them in their most natural state. An important philosopher of education influenced by Rousseau’s Emile was Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827). Pestalozzi founded several pioneering schools designed to educate the whole child. He promoted caring relationality rather than one-sided, top-down adult authority, as a model for the artful or well-lived life, including in his educational novel Leonard and Gertrude (1781). After visiting Pestalozzi’s schools, Friedrich

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Fröbel (1782–1852) developed his own progressive educational philosophy and practice. He established the first kindergarten (German for “children’s garden” or “garden of children”) in the world, which stressed the importance of play in the education of the young (and which is now a prominent feature of progressive classrooms). In summary, while Dewey is the most renowned philosopher of progressive education, A History of Western Philosophy of Education clarifies the significance of his thought for contemporary educational theory by providing  a  rich account of its antecedents and shaping influences. The series identifies the key intellectual and pedagogical movements that inform progressive educational thought from antiquity, to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and to the ethos created by Dewey and his contemporaries, among them Jane  Addams (1860–1935), Elsie Ripley Clapp (1879–1965), William James  (1842–1910), George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), Francis Parker (1837–1902), and Ella Flagg Young (1845–1918). As with so many figures in the history of Western educational philosophy, Dewey’s voice resonates with those of other thinkers. For example, there are unspoken resemblances between Dewey’s and Paulo Freire’s (1921–97) influential philosophy of education. Both argue that teachers, to quote Peter Roberts on Freire, Ira Shor, and bell hooks, “need to have an understanding of what they stand for: what they value and why. At the same time, both thinkers caution that teachers must avoid imposing their truths and their ideals on students. Teaching should, they suggest, foster a love of learning, respect for others, and a sense of community” (Roberts, volume five, p. 123). And as with Dewey, Freire’s thought “is shaped by multiple intellectual traditions, including liberalism, Marxism, critical theory, existentialism, phenomenology, radical Catholicism, and postmodernism” (Roberts, volume five, p. 111). As with progressive education, Freire’s critical pedagogy did not spring de novo on the scene, as our contributors to this series make plain. The continuity found in the history of educational philosophy is also present in educational practice, albeit with constant reconstruction and reframing. For example, as long as humans have inhabited the earth, young people have gathered to listen and to learn from their elders. The ancient Athenians formalized this indispensable intergenerational encounter into what they called paideia. The term denotes a systematic pedagogical course of study and activity, involving the education of both mind and body, intended to prepare good citizens. This conception, as Oakeshott (1989) argues, was “passed on (with appropriate changes) from the schools of the Roman Empire to the cathedral, the collegiate, guild and grammar schools of medieval Christendom … [It] informed the schools of renaissance Europe and … survived in our own grammar and public schools and their equivalents in continental Europe” (p. 71). Throughout this history, children and adolescents, concerned parents, professional teachers, and in some cases school administrators and representatives of the church

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or state, have all had a vital presence. Their debates about a developmentally appropriate curriculum, what is in the best interests of children, the requisite training and expertise of teachers, and the role of national interests served to motivate, direct, energize, and in some cases thwart educational reform. As emphasized, philosophers of education today do not scrutinize the history of educational thought for merely antiquarian purposes. On the contrary, they debate continuously their respective interpretations of past thought precisely because of its critical pertinence for forming sound theory and associated practices in our time. In the same breath, they engage one another in spirited dialogue about education’s foundational concepts such as teaching, learning, and curriculum. Understanding and sustaining such debates is critical to the ongoing vitality of the field. As the philosopher W.B. Gallie (1968) argued, reasoned disagreements regarding essentially contested concepts underscore the unity of a field—a unity not of thought but based on a shared spirit of inquiry— and further its optimum development. Philosophers of education know that how they understand educational practice and the constituent concepts of education will be contested by others who perceive them differently, though not so differently that they cannot appreciate the criteria implicit in each other’s understandings. In short, the more philosophers of education appreciate the merits of rival interpretations, the more they contribute to the quality and inclusivity of scholarly debate within the field.

A DYNAMIC AND CRITICAL TRADITION What are “ideas”? Where do they come from? And what are “thinking,” “inquiry,” “study,” and “criticism”? How do they arise? One way to respond to such questions is to ask: To what extent is philosophy, and by extension philosophy of education, a reflection of the particular culture in which it takes place? Is it largely an expression of the taken-for-granted assumptions and presuppositions of the surrounding culture, as might be said of the latter’s other practices pertaining to family life, health, and politics? Or does philosophy generate a different relation with culture, not one of simply swimming in it but of stepping outside the stream in a spirit of criticism and open-ended inquiry? We see truth on all sides of the equation. A heartening development in the long conversation touched on here has been how, in recent decades, it has been steadily recognizing how philosophy itself, like its surrounding milieu, has been at times exclusionary and discriminatory, if not in intent then in consequence. Philosophers and schools of thought have not always acknowledged, much less responded to, realities of sexism, racism, adultism, speciesism, and other “isms” emergent in culture over the millennia. We are moved by being participants in the intellectual-political-academic sea changes of our time, which have opened scholarship up to an expanding range

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of hitherto marginalized or uninvited voices, an array of whom will be heard across the volumes in this series. We picture this turn continuing, and suggest it promises an ever-widening, ever-deepening cosmopolitan ethos in the academy, in general, and in philosophy of education, in particular. At the same time, with regards to the question about the origins of ideas, of thinking, of inquiry, and the like, it is well to remind ourselves that our thoughts can have reasons behind them, not causes, whether the latter be cast as cultural or genetic (Oakeshott 1989, p. 20). This truth is both epistemic and ethical. As Richard Eldridge (1997) poetically writes: “[M]y remembrance of my humanity and its expression or repudiation, is not something that happens in me; it is not the effect of mental or physical or social substance acting according to their fixed and given natures. It is something that I, animated through my life with others, do” (p. 290). The philosophers and intellectual movements featured in this series, and which have given the long conversation its texture and openended trajectory, are not reducible to expressions of the cultural assumptions prevalent in their respective eras. Quite on the contrary. In many cases, ranging from Plato, to Montaigne, to Karl Marx, to Dewey, and to Hannah Arendt, they have been among the most critical thinkers the world in its totality has ever seen: critical of society, critical of prejudice and moral blindness, critical of themselves. To spotlight one specific example among others, in Immanuel Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace—a document that deeply informs the intellectual background to many peacemaking projects, including the creation of the United Nations—the author eclipsed his own prejudices in arguing against European imperialism and colonial exploitation. It bears adding that many thinkers in the long conversation have not even been “Western,” at least in a narrow intellectual sense of the term. In many cases, ranging again from the likes of Plato through Ralph Waldo Emerson, they have been mindful of ideas from the world over, and have embraced this influence. The central point in these remarks is that the history of Western philosophy, and specifically of philosophy of education, is not marked by a preset, linear progression, any more than it is marked by a single cultural, social, or political voice. People rediscover and reconstruct philosophy of education in each new encounter with the tradition, with each new retelling of how previous thought and present concerns intermingle. This five-volume series comes at a time when the horizons of Western philosophy of education are expanding to incorporate the insights of post-anthropocentric, postcolonial, and indigenous and Eastern philosophies. A vital starting point of these new  and inspiring theoretical developments is to acknowledge misunderstandings and blind spots, across space and time, and then attempt to correct them. And yet, if we fail to examine closely the intellectual movements that have shaped these misunderstandings and fueled their transcendence, we risk narrowing our thinking, constraining our possibilities, and reducing our potential for

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improvement (Carr 2004; Mintz 2017; Ruitenberg 2010). Leading scholars of educational philosophy have demonstrated the significance of the history of philosophical debate for critically reviewing extant research fields and developing emergent ones. Ultimately, this five-volume endeavor seeks to be a prize resource for students and scholars in education who perceive that the critical spirit of Western philosophy, including philosophy of education, remains a truly inspirational tradition. Our interest is in keeping the philosophical tradition vibrant so that it can continue to support the infusion of new voices, critiques, and reconstructions. This posture differs wholeheartedly from traditionalism. As a living tradition, Western philosophy of education has the “capacity to develop while still maintaining its identity and continuity” (Pelikan 1984, p. 58). It constitutes a dynamic, ever-changing constellation of pressing questions about teaching, learning, assessment, and more—including questions about how it has identified and posed questions in the past (Hansen 2001a, b). In contrast, intellectual traditionalism constitutes a reactionary, heels-dug-in attempt to resist any challenge to “the way things are.”

PHILOSOPHY’S TWO TRADITIONS We have spoken of “tradition,” but philosophy can be viewed as a dynamic intertwining of two long-standing traditions that reach back to such pioneering figures as Socrates and Confucius. The first tradition is theoretical and conceptual. It distinguishes education from socialization, parenting from schooling, and civics from indoctrination. The second tradition is philosophy conceived as an art of living. It not only embodies the desire to be wise but strives to incorporate philosophy within such a life. In this light, the art of living has four interrelated components: a moral component (living ethically); a social and political component (commitments to inquiry and communication); a psychological or spiritual component (enjoying peace of mind and curbing egoistic passions); and an intellectual component (thinking carefully and critically about one’s value-oriented vision of the world and one’s place within it). The pedagogical methods or “spiritual exercises” intended to help people achieve such a life include intellectual training, contemplative practices, and somaesthetic activities (Gregory and Laverty 2010; Hansen 2011). Living ethically involves engaging conceptions of human values as we seek to cultivate an awareness of how our own experiences are variously marked by compassion, selfishness, honesty, cruelty, and fairness. Ethical inquiry strengthens our capacities to think and feel carefully, to consider sound alternatives, and to self-correct problematic habits of belief and behavior. Moreover, arriving at the most reasonable judgment of an issue requires the free and open exchange of ideas. It calls upon the moral imagination as well as the

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virtues of intellectual humility and courage. The social and political component of the art of living requires individuals to be alive to the myriad ways that power operates in experience (racism, sexism, class oppression, etc.) and to forge and sustain practices of just interaction. The psychological or spiritual component involves working on the self to curb reactivity and recognizing the self’s relation to sources of deeper meaning that inspire awe and reverence, such as nature, cultural or religious traditions, and works of art. The intellectual component of the art of living has been a central focus because it drives the criticism of its very constituents, and such criticism is itself part of the tradition. Philosophy of education brings these two long-standing philosophical traditions—philosophy as the theorization of education and philosophy as a formative practice—into dialogue. Historical and contemporary philosophers who have theorized education in quite different ways nonetheless respect the Socratic imperative for wisdom-oriented education. In this spirit, contributors to the series examine the extent to which society and schools enhance or undermine personal and social transformation. They seek to revivify the two traditions today by refining them and demonstrating their relevance to  practices of teaching, teacher education, curriculum development, and policy-making.

THEMES ACROSS THE VOLUMES AND CHAPTERS Philosophers of education across space and time do not share a consensus as to the aims, nature, and means of education. Nonetheless, we judge it valuable to identify characteristics that, taken together, distinguish philosophy of education from other fields of philosophical endeavor. In view of the divergence of thought among philosophers and intellectual movements, the characteristics should be understood as “family resemblances”—to recall a well-known term coined by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)—rather than as airtight ideational compartments. These characteristics comprise the themes and key questions that are addressed across all five volumes. Philosophical anthropology: What does it mean to be human? How are we to understand the relationship between the mind and body? Who should be educated? Is human maturation developmental or cyclical? What happens to our younger (past) selves? Is the child animal-like? Is childhood a form of life in its own right? Is philosophy native to children? What is the significance of our natality and mortality for education? Ethics: What does it mean for humans to live well or, as the issue is often expressed, to flourish? How does education contribute to living well or to flourishing? What forms of teaching and curriculum might ensure for all an artful, meaningful life? What are the virtues of teaching and

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learning? How  should teachers be expected to conduct themselves in and beyond the school? What ethical dilemmas are unique to schools and school leadership? Social and political philosophy: What is justice and how should we teach it? How do we educate for a more equitable and just society when the educators and educational institutions themselves belong to the very society that they seek to reform? Is the aim of citizenship education knowledge of government, nationalistic patriotism, or a commitment to the common good? How can we ensure an equitable distribution of educational opportunity? Should education be monitored by national standards and tests? What authority should the state have over education? What authority should teachers have over education? What are the rights of children and parents? Epistemology: What constitutes an educational “experience”? What is knowledge? Where does knowledge come from? Is knowledge innate or does it come from sense impressions of the external word? Is it found, discovered, or made? If it is constructed, is that construction individual or social? Should teaching strategies focus on drawing out what the learner already knows or pouring in what the learner does not know? How does the structure of knowledge relate to the structure and sequence of learning? How does knowledge impact individual and social formation? How might education teach us to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom? What is the nature of reason? Is reason procedural/instrumental (i.e., distinct from the passions), or does it combine thinking with intuitive valuing capacities that are oriented to the real and the good? Aesthetics: What are the felt qualities of experience and how can we learn to be mindful of the qualitative dimension of our lives? What is the role of beauty in human experience and education? How might education influence our fundamental sensibilities toward the world? How could education enhance our ability to be sensitive, responsive, aware, and concerned? How might individuals tell their life stories? What are the aesthetic qualities that make the good stories? Pedagogy, schooling, and education: What is the ultimate aim of education? Is the aim of education to promote social order and assimilation or individual freedom? What is the role of institutions like school for generating such experiences? Should schooling focus on developing students’ marketable skills or on their cultural and political awareness? What instructional methods are most appropriate, and how do we warrant them from an epistemic and ethical point of view? How shall we conceive teacher education? Should we think of teachers as state functionaries and/or as “elders” with a profound responsibility for educating children and youth?

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Philosophy of Psychology and the Social Sciences: How should education be assessed? What does it mean to “measure” a human being’s education? What are the strengths and limitations of social scientific research into education? What is the distinctive contribution of the arts and humanities? What are the degrees of freedom individuals, communities, and societies have to form and reform themselves?

CONCLUSION: AN OVERVIEW OF THE SERIES A History of Western Philosophy of Education consists of five volumes, each devoted to an examination of canonical philosophers of education and schools of thought in a distinct period. 1. Antiquity (Ancient Greece to Early Christian) (500 bce–500 ce) 2. The Medieval and Renaissance Period (500–1600) 3. The Age of Enlightenment (1600–1850) 4. The Modern Era (1850–1914) 5. The Contemporary Landscape (1914–present)

Each volume covers a recognizable period in the Western tradition because we want to contextualize emergent and abiding philosophical and educational ideas within a relevant historical and cultural context. To this end, we conclude Volume 1 and commence Volume 2 at 500 ce, which demarcates the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In these two volumes, we see the emergence of the Sophists, Cynics, and Stoics, and their later eclipse by the rise of the Judeo-Christian tradition that would prove so definitive of later thought. We end Volume 2 and begin Volume 3 with the start of the seventeenth century given its inextricable association with the Enlightenment and its emergent embrace of science, human rights, and liberal democracy. We conclude Volume 4 and commence Volume 5 with 1914, the year that saw the beginning of the First World War. This conflagration, unprecedented in its destruction and magnitude, would generate the conditions for the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as spur the creation of the United Nations and innumerable other movements to foster peace, social justice, improved health and nutrition, and expanded educational provision the world over. While the dates that begin and end each volume serve to pivot us from one historical period to another—with each of these characterized by defining social, cultural, political, and economic events, unique and influential thinkers, and diverse schools of thought—they do not represent fixed, impermeable boundaries. The philosophical survey and analysis of education presented by this series transcends easy capture by historical dates. The discussion is wideranging and ever-dynamic, moving back and forth into the past and the future. The dates should be seen as porous membranes that allow for the easy flow of

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ideas across the different historical periods. Readers will see that the authors make connections between thinkers and lines of thought and practice from different eras, all of which shows the play of tradition across geographical and historical markers. While the volume dates are valuable to note, our focus in the series is on the thematic conversations that are woven throughout the history of Western philosophy of education. Chapters in the series are intended to be useful both in a retrospective sense, helping readers grasp the importance of previous thinkers and movements, and in a prospective sense, pointing out areas of inquiry for scholars and students to pursue. Part of what makes this retrospective and prospective approach possible is that many of the contributing authors work to correct stereotypical readings of seminal thinkers in the tradition. They work hard to explain why it behooves us to resist and move beyond canned views about the past. Readers will not find everything there is to know about Western philosophy of education in this series. While comprehensive in scope, the series does not attempt to be encyclopedic or exhaustive. Each volume comprises up to ten chapters and a wide-ranging introduction penned by the volume editor. With few exceptions, chapters were researched and written by professional philosophers of education. These philosophers of education were invited to draw upon, but not to repeat or rely on, their preexisting scholarly oeuvre. They were asked to reengage with a philosopher of education or school of educational philosophy that they knew well, in the spirit of contextualizing that thinker or school of thought in the broader sweep of educational history. Many took it as an occasion to ask new questions and read more broadly than they would have otherwise done. Some authors familiar with a given philosopher’s educational corpus chose to read other texts, including memoirs, plays, novels, and letters. Others familiar with the oeuvre of a particular philosopher of education chose to read texts by the individual’s contemporaries and critics. Still others familiar with one intellectual tradition choose to articulate it with another. Along the way, the contributors engaged in their own liberal learning as authors of the chapters—an experience not that dissimilar from our own, as general editors and readers of the chapters. We hope that future readers of the series will have a comparable experience. To study philosophy of education is to participate directly in one’s own ongoing education.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Bailey, Richard, Robin Barrow, David Carr, and Christine McCarthy (eds.) (2010), The Sage Handbook of Philosophy of Education, Los Angeles: Sage. Biesta, Gert (2014), “Is Philosophy of Education a Historical Mistake? Connecting Philosophy and Education Differently,” Theory and Research in Education, 12 (1): 65–76.

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Carr, Wilfred (2004), “Philosophy and Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 38 (1): 55–73. Cavell, Stanley (1989), “Finding As Founding,” in Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, 77–118, Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press. Chambliss, Joseph James (1968), The Origins of American Philosophy of Education: Its Development As a Distinct Discipline, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Coetzee, J.M. and Arabella Kurtz (2015), The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy, London: Penguin. Curren, Randall R. (ed.) (2005), A Companion to the Philosophy of Education, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Curren, Randall R. (2018), “Education, History of Philosophy of,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780415249126-N014-2 Dewey, J. (1985), “Democracy and Education,” in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 9: Democracy and Education 1916, ed. J.A. Boydston, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Eby, F. and C.F. Arrowood (1940), The History and Philosophy of Education: Ancient and Medieval, Saddle River, NJ: Prentice. Eldridge, Richard (1997), Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gallie, W.B. (1968), Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, New York: Schocken Books. German, Andy (2017), “Philosophy and Its History: Six Pedagogical Reflections,” APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy, 17 (1): 1–8. Gregory, Maughn Rollins and Megan Jane Laverty (2010), “Philosophy, Education, and the Care of the Self,” in “Philosophy, Education and the Care of the Self,” special issue of Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 19 (4): 2–9. Hansen, David T. (2001a), “Teaching and the Sense of Tradition,” in David T. Hansen, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teacher’s Creed, 114–36, New York: Teachers College Press. Hansen, David T. (2001b), “Cultivating a Sense of Tradition in Teaching,” in David T. Hansen, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teacher’s Creed, 137–56, New York: Teachers College Press. Hansen, David T. (2011), The Teacher and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism As Education, London: Routledge. Hayden, Matthew (2012), “What Do Philosophers of Education Do? An Empirical Study of Philosophy of Education Journals,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 31 (1): 1–27. Higgins, Chris (2011), The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice, London: Wiley-Blackwell. Horlacher, Rebekka (2004), “‘Bildung’: A Construction of History of Philosophy of Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23 (5–6): 409–26. Kaminsky, James S. (1988), “The First 600 Months of Philosophy of Education—1935–1985: A Deconstructionist History,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 18 (2): 42–9. Meyer, A.D. (1965), An Educational History of the Western World, New York: McGraw-Hill.

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Mintz, Avi (2017), “The Use and Abuse of the History of Educational Philosophy,” in Natasha Levinson (ed.), Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook 2016, 406–13, Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. Muir, James R. (1998), “The History of Educational Ideas and the Credibility of Philosophy of Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 30 (1): 7–26. Murdoch, Iris (1997), “The Idea of Perfection,”in Peter Conradi (ed.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, 299–336, London: Penguin. Neiman, Susan (2014), Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Oakeshott, Michael (1989), The Voice of Liberal Learning, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Pelikan, Jaroslav (1984), The Vindication of Tradition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Roberts, Peter (2021), “A Philosophy of Hope: Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy,” in Anna Pagès (ed.) A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Contemporary Landscape, 107–28, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg (ed.) (1998), Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives, London: Routledge. Ruitenberg, Claudia (2010), What Do Philosophers of Education Do? And How Do They Do It?, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Siegel, Harvey (ed.) (2009), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soltis, Jonas F. (ed.) (1981), Philosophy of Education since the Mid-Century, New York: Teachers College Press. Standish, Paul (2007), “Rival Conceptions of Philosophy of Education,” Ethics and Education, 2 (2): 159–71. Titone, Connie (2007), “Pulling Back the Curtain: Relearning the History of Philosophy of Education,” Educational Studies, 41 (2): 128–47.

GENERAL EDITORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The General Editors wish to thank the individuals who worked so tirelessly and graciously on this series. We owe a significant debt to our dedicated and tenacious volume editors: Andrea English, Kevin Gary, Tal Gilead, Avi Mintz, and Anna Pagès. They undertook a Herculean effort without which this series would not have been possible. We thank the chapter authors in each volume for their scholarly commitment and their responsiveness to our editorial suggestions. We appreciate the artful editorial assistance of three doctoral students in our Program in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College: Buddy North, Kirsten Welch, and Ting Zhao. Our editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, Mark Richardson, and his always upbeat assistant, Kim Bown, provided the perfect slipstream for our many-sided endeavor. Before Kim Bown, Maria Giovanna Brauzzi offered patient guidance as we shifted to the Bloomsbury Content Management System. We also want to thank the many colleagues who provided support and guidance along the way. Family and friends were always there to lighten our spirits at the end of a long day. For us, the series evokes the many years we have spent together with students in our program reading and discussing the great texts in our field, moving toward our deepest inquiries, and participating in one of humanity’s most compelling conversations.

VOLUME EDITORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the general editors, Megan Jane Laverty and David T. Hansen, for the opportunity to work with them on this important and innovative series. I am so grateful for their thoughtful and supportive guidance in helping me to bring this volume together. I also want to thank the chapter authors, Leonard J. Waks, Deborah Kerdeman, Deborah P. Britzman, Mordechai Gordon, James Scott Johnston, Stephanie Burdick-Sheperd, Kal Alston, Christiane Thompson, and Paul Standish, for the hard work and care they put into each of their chapters. Working with the editors and authors on this project has been truly inspiring. Finally, I thank my husband Adam and our amazing daughter Olivia, who was born during the making of this volume and is a constant source of energy and joy.

TIMELINE

1796–1859 Horace Mann, educational reformer and politician; appointed as the first secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1837, starting the common school movement; published Twelfth Annual Report for 1848 of the Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts in 1848 1818–1883 Karl Marx, philosopher, sociologist and political theorist; he and Friedrich Engels coauthored The Communist Manifesto (1848); Marx published Capital, Vol. 1: The Process of Production of Capital (1867); compiled and expanded into volumes 2 (1885) and 3 (1894) by Engels after Marx’s death 1820–1895 Friedrich Engels, philosopher, sociologist, political theorist 1833–1911 Wilhelm Dilthey, philosopher 1835–1909 William Torrey Harris, philosopher and educator; published Psychological Foundations of Education (1898) 1842–1910 William James, philosopher, psychologist, and educator; published The Principles of Psychology (1890) and Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899) 1852 Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to enact the compulsory attendance act, enforcing mandatory attendance for children between the ages of eight and fourteen 1856–1915 Booker T. Washington, educator and reformer; first president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University) in 1881; announced The Atlanta Compromise in his Atlanta Exposition Speech in 1895; published Industrial Education for the Negro (1903)

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1856–1939 Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis; visited the United States at the invitation of Stanley Hall and gave influential lectures at Clark University (1909); published The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and The Ego and the Id (1923) 1858–1964 Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, author, educator, social activist; published A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892) 1859–1938 Edmund Husserl, philosopher, founder of phenomenology; published Logical Investigations (1900/1901) and Cartesian Meditations (1931) 1859–1952 John Dewey, philosopher and educator; joined the newly founded University of Chicago in 1894 and became head of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology and Pedagogy; founded the University Elementary School (later Laboratory School) in 1896 with his wife Harriet Alice Chipman as the principal; joined Columbia University in 1904, with extensive contact with Teachers College; published The School and Society (1899), Democracy and Education (1916), Experience and Nature (1925), Art as Experience (1934), and Experience and Education (1938). 1861–1947 Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher; published The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929) 1863–1931 George Herbert Mead, philosopher and social theorist; a colleague of John Dewey at both the University of Michigan and later at the University of Chicago; published Mind, Self, and Society (1934) 1868–1963 W.E.B. Du Bois, sociologist, civil rights activist, and educator; became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University (1895); published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920), and Black Reconstruction (1935) 1870–1952 Maria Montessori, physician and educator; started the first Children’s House in Rome (1907); held the first teacher training course in the Montessori Method in Citta di Castello, Italy (1909); traveled to the United States in 1913 and returned in 1915; published The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education in the Children’s Houses (1909), which was revised and expanded as The Discovery of the Child (1948) 1871–1965 William Heard Kilpatrick, educator and philosopher; was a student, a colleague, and an interpreter of John Dewey’s work; earned PhD and taught at Teachers College, Columbia

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University (1909–37); published The Montessori System Examined (1914), the essay “The Project Method: The Use of the Purposeful Act in the Educative Process,” in Teachers College Record (1918) and Foundations Of Method: Informal Talks On Teaching (1925) 1878–1965 Martin Buber, philosopher; published I and Thou (1923) 1880 The Elementary Education Act 1880 in England and Wales made school attendance compulsory between the ages of five and ten; the 1893 Act extended the age to eleven, the 1899 Act to twelve, and the 1918 Act to fourteen 1881 The first set of Jules Ferry Laws in France established free primary education for both boys and girls; a second set (1882) established a free, mandatory, and secular education system 1882–1960 Melanie Klein, psychoanalyst, specialized in child analysis; moved to England and joined the British Psychoanalytical Society founded by Ernest Jones in 1926 1885–1954 Alain Leroy Locke, philosopher, educator, and writer, cited as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance”; edited The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) and published “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace” (1944) 1889–1951 Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher; published Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921); settled at the University of Cambridge (1929): his Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously in 1953 1889–1976 Martin Heidegger, philosopher; published Being and Time (1927), What is Called Thinking? (1954), and Poetry, Language, Thought (1971) 1891 The Elementary Education Act 1891 in England and Wales granted ten shillings a year for each child, making the primary education free 1893 New Zealand became the first currently existing country to grant women’s suffrage 1895–1982 Anna Freud, psychoanalyst, specialized in child analysis; published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936); founded The Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (now the Anna Freud National Center for Children and Families) in 1952 1896 US Supreme Court legalized “Separate but Equal” doctrine, further entrenching racism in society 1896–1971 Donald Winnicott, pediatrician and psychoanalyst; published The Child, the Family and the Outside World (1954)

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1897–1979 Wilfred Bion, psychoanalyst 1900–1976 Gilbert Ryle, philosopher; published The Concept of Mind (1949) 1900–2002 Hans-Georg Gadamer, philosopher; published Truth and Method (1960) 1901–81 Jacques Lacan, psychoanalyst; famous for his published seminars in Paris; published Écrits (1966) 1903–69 Theodor W. Adorno, philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist; he and Max Horkheimer coauthored Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947); published “Education after Auschwitz” and Negative Dialectics (1966) 1904 The International Woman Suffrage Alliance was founded in Berlin; renamed International Alliance of Women in 1946 1905 The Niagara Movement, a black civil rights organization, was founded by a group led by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter 1906–75 Hannah Arendt, philosopher and political theorist; published The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), and On Revolution (1963) 1906–95 Emmanuel Levinas, philosopher; published Existence and Existents (1947), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974) 1908–61 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosopher; published Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Humanism and Terror (1947), and The Primacy of Perception (1961) 1914–18 First World War 1920 The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted, establishing women’s suffrage 1920s The Harlem Renaissance (then known as the “New Negro Movement”) unfolded in Harlem, New York 1920–94 Loris Malaguzzi, educator, creator of the Reggio Emilia approach 1921–97 Paulo Freire, philosopher, activist, and educator; first used his pedagogical methods to teach farmworkers and other laborers in the early 1960s; imprisoned in 1964 and then exiled from Brazil between 1964 and 1980; published Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Education, the Practice of Freedom (1976) 1923 The Frankfurt “Institute for Social Research” (Ger., Institut für Sozialforschung, IfS) was founded in Frankfurt am Main, affiliated with the University of Frankfurt am Main 1928 United Kingdom establishes women’s suffrage

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TIMELINE

Nel Noddings, philosopher, educator, and feminist; published Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984) and The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education (1992) 1935 The John Dewey Society founded 1939–45 Second World War 1944 The Education Act of 1944 (The “Butler Act”) in England and Wales split primary education and secondary education at age eleven; provided free secondary education for all students, and divided this level into grammar schools, secondary modern schools and secondary technical schools 1946 Beginning of the “Cold War” pitting the Soviet Union against the United States 1950s The American civil rights movement started and achieved its largest legislative gains in the mid-1960s 1954 US Supreme Court declared “Separate but Equal” unconstitutional 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. published “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial 1960s–1980s Women’s liberation movement 1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union, which along with the Revolutions of 1989 marked the end of the Cold War

Introduction: Struggle, Resistance, and Opportunity—A Historical and Philosophical Lens on Education in the Modern Era ANDREA R. ENGLISH

The chapters in this volume provide readers with a way to think about questions of education as fundamentally connected to questions of what it means to be human. Each chapter addresses key thinkers, whose ideas were emerging in and beyond this time period. These thinkers, though often from different backgrounds and cultures, have in common their deep considerations of humanity that provide us insight into how, as humans, we learn from encounters with difference. This educational meaning of difference points to the fact that learning with and from the world and others is part of what it means to be human. Readers will find in the volume a provocative collection of educational theories and concepts that point to the inherent value of the diversity of human experience. Beyond this, each chapter illuminates how the ideas of the modern era hold promise for a meaningful reenvisioning of educational practice and policy today.

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The thinkers addressed in this volume were developing their ideas in a time period that was part of a longer trajectory of European modernity, characterized by an idea of sovereignty that defined Europe’s quest for rule within their own borders and over others (Hardt and Negri 2000). Yet the developments of modernity were not simply a smooth and continuous gain of power. Rather, these developments had features that were in tension with one another: increasing imperialist expansion came alongside resistance from colonized groups; ongoing industrialization and capitalism came alongside the fight by trade unions to protect workers; new demands on education to meet economic growth arose alongside demands by marginalized peoples for quality schooling; efforts to define women’s place as in the private sphere of the home came alongside real and ideological battles to redefine women as part of the world of work and the public sphere. All this occurred while  advances in science were used to support both oppressive and liberatory aims.1 In this context, there were historically defining sociopolitical movements to end injustices rooted in previous eras, including slavery, women’s disenfranchisement, and unequal access to education for girls, people of color, working-class children, and those with disabilities. Women and minorities increasingly assumed leadership roles in political movements. Among these are Margaret Grace Bondfield in Great Britain, a trade-union leader and the first female cabinet official, and Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary, an activist in the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and a leader of the international socialist movement, both of whom fought for women’s suffrage and for women workers’ rights.2 There was also Henry Sylvester Williams, a Caribbean student living in Britain, who helped organize the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900, as part of the expanding political discourse  against racism  and colonialism and in support of the political rights of people of African descent (Killingray 2012; see also Bogues 2011). Another example is Zitkala-sa, a leader in the resistance of colonial education and an activist for the rights to citizenship for all Native Americans (Redmond 2016; see also Terrance 2011). In common among these movements was the underlying call for recognition of personhood and for an end to the dehumanizing experiences of being othered—subjugated to the will of privileged white male society. At the turn of the twentieth century, just as today, this political sense of othering is at play. Otherness as a political category can be understood as a divisive term, used in the context of justifying us-versus-them thinking. Through this lens, we might see that Anna Julia Cooper’s words in 1893, at her address to the World’s Congress of Representative Women meeting in Chicago, tell us of this fight for society to stop the othering of all groups, and of the hope to set in its place the voicing of the inherent worth of all human beings as the rightful, necessary, just foundation for any society:

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Let woman’s claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken. A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier than its weakest element. Least of all can woman’s cause afford to decry the weak. We want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this Congress, demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity. The colored woman feels that woman’s cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, is sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; not till the universal title of humanity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is woman’s lesson taught and woman’s cause won—not the white woman’s, nor the black woman’s, not the red woman’s, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman’s wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her “rights” will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of earth. (Cooper 1893)

FIGURE 0.1  Male and female members of the women’s suffrage movement on a protest march through London, c. 1900

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FIGURE 0.2  On the far left, abolitionist leader, Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913) ex-slave and founder of the “Underground Railroad,” which provided safe houses for escaping slaves (photograph c. 1900)

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION: SOME ROOTS The history of Western philosophy of education, before the modern era covered in this volume (depicted in Figures 0.1–0.4), gives us a toolkit for beginning to define a contrasting meaning of otherness, one that sharply opposes this negative political, ethical, and cultural term associated with unjust practices that Cooper alludes to. This toolkit is found namely in educational concepts that support the recognition of the difference and uniqueness of every human being. Three educational ideas articulated, in particular, during the Enlightenment era (see Volume 3, this series) give shape to the concept of difference as central to what it means to be human. In approaching the chapters, readers are invited to consider these three concepts, which have in various ways influenced the thinkers addressed in this volume: perfectibilité as the human capacity to learn; Bildung as the idea of education as transformational; and relationality as a way of describing educational teacher–learner relationships. Perfectibilité The concept of perfectibilité, which can be translated as perfectibility, educability, or also plasticity, as found explicitly in the work of John Dewey (the focus of Waks, Chapter 1, this volume), goes back to Jean-Jacques

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Rousseau and Johann Friedrich Herbart (for more on these thinkers, see Volume 3), who define the idea and articulate its implications for educators. Perfectibility expresses the idea that, as humans, we have the capacity to learn. This capacity refers to the fact that we can take in something new and unfamiliar from our environment, consider it, and creatively respond to it in light of our aims and desires. Beyond this, human perfectibility includes the notion that we can contemplate how the new may transform our aims and desires, or indeed our whole sense of who we are and what we consider worthwhile. In Emile, or On Education (1764), Rousseau’s idea of perfectibility comes to the fore when he describes all humans as born capable of learning in all areas of life. However, importantly, he leaves open the question of what each person is capable of learning, rhetorically asking his readers, including other educators of his time: “who knows the other limit” (Rousseau 1764/1979: 62). His simple statement complicates any idea of education as a prescription for getting learners to specific predefined ends, suggesting instead that the ends of each child’s learning processes are open and unknown. Whether a child will flourish in science or reading, or get stuck in math, cannot entirely be known by the educator in advance. Perfectibility is thus “indeterminate,” which does not mean that all individuals will learn the same things at the same rate and to the same ability. Rather, it is indeterminate because every individual has a right and an ability to participate and uniquely contribute to their own educational processes. Following Rousseau, this thread of thinking comes through in the German tradition of educational theorizing, most notably in Herbart, who states that perfectibility (Bildsamkeit) is the “founding principle of education” (Herbart 1902: 1; 1913, translation modified). This statement was part of Herbart’s project to develop a science of education and, in that context, he contemplated what was needed for teaching to be considered a profession. His principle of perfectibility sets up a demand for anyone entering the field of education as a professional practice: educators must believe in every child’s indeterminate capacity to learn before they can begin to make educational decisions in practice. While it seems tautological to say that to educate one must assume education is possible, Herbart’s idea of making perfectibility a founding principle of education has ongoing meaning for the practice of contemporary education. For example, consider the opposite case. If a teacher were to think that girls are not able to learn mathematics, then there would be no reason for that teacher to engage the girls in her classroom in activities meant to encourage mathematical thinking. Moreover, the principle of perfectibility speaks sharply against deficit views of certain groups of children based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or other classifications.

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Such deficit views have led in some cases to labeling certain children as “uneducable” and have been used in attempts to justify segregated education provision and remedial forms of education for certain groups.3 These views have emerged throughout the history of Western society, including into the modern era, and after it, up  to today. In contrast, perfectibility supports the idea that everyone can strive to realize their full potential—cultivating their capacities, understandings, and ability to contribute to the well-being of others as to themselves—even as we do not know exactly what this full potential might look like. Each chapter in this volume speaks in some way to this sense of realization. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many ideas circulated about who should have access to formal education in schools. Dewey was aware of the principles of education developed in the abovementioned classical education philosophical traditions. At the same time, as an early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)4 and a supporter of women’s rights, Dewey was aware also of the real conditions of children in America who were not being given equal access to formal education (see Scott Johnston, Chapter 5, this volume, which addresses this historical and philosophical context around the development of pragmatism).5 Dewey’s considerations around perfectibility are part of his larger aim to connect theory and practice toward creating real possibilities for a democratic education for all children.6 He picks up the idea of perfectibility, at times discussing it as “educability” and at times, influenced by Charles Darwin, framing it in naturalistic terms as “plasticity.” Dewey writes, “plasticity” is “the power of acquiring variable and novel modes of control” (1916/2008: 50). Dewey is critical of the kinds of traditional educational practices that stifle the child’s capacity to learn: “Routine habits, and habits that possess us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to plasticity. They mark the close of the power to vary” (p.  54). Dewey’s remarks here contain a warning to anyone involved in educating others, namely, that while we do not entirely grow out of plasticity, as it is part of human nature, we can be educated out of it, by the forms of education that force learners to engage in repetitive, mechanistic thinking and doing. With the notion of perfectibility, each of these thinkers (Rousseau, Herbart, and Dewey), in different ways and at different points in history, weaves together the educational and the political. Genuine recognition of perfectibility implies a particular relation between the older generation, who educates, and the younger, who is educated by them. It means that educators do not aim to subject children blindly to their will, nor do they seek to arbitrarily conform to the children’s will as in the case of some child-centered education. Both situations set up a foundation for hierarchical, undemocratic societies of one

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FIGURE 0.3  Zitkala-Sa at the National Women’s Party (NWP), an advocacy group for women’s equality, meeting in Washington in 1921

class of people ruling over another. Rather, the aim should be to show children how to utilize their inherent perfectibility as the indeterminate power to learn. For this to occur, educational environments must foster children’s rich aesthetic experiences through experimentation, imagination, and reflection (English and Doddington 2019).

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FIGURE 0.4  A girls’ school in France, 1890

Bildung Human flexibility and formability grasped in the idea of perfectibility that Rousseau, Herbart, and Dewey posit as a foundation for educational theory and practice is closely tied to the idea of Bildung. Bildung is a concept arising in the German philosophical tradition that has been translated variously as “formation,” “formative education,” “self-transformation,” “self-cultivation,” and more; or, because of its difficulty to translate, often goes untranslated in English-language contexts. Present-day ideas of learning in schools as needing to be “reflective,” “meaningful,” “transformative,” “deep,” and involving “critical thinking” arise out of this essential understanding of human learning processes as processes of Bildung. More generally, Bildung refers to the usage of the word “education” in English, when we are trying to denote an individual’s own learning process, as opposed to the pedagogical efforts that we also call “education.” So, the term Bildung might best be translated as “education as a process of self-formation and transformation.” Whereas perfectibility grasps the fact that we can learn, Bildung is an answer to the question, How do humans learn? How is it that we take in something new and unfamiliar? Bildung illuminates the idea that human beings learn via encounters with difference.7 The idea goes back to the educational thinking of Wilhelm von Humboldt, a German philosopher, who in his short essay on “The Theory of Bildung” from 1792, examines how human beings strive beyond mere maintenance of life by seeking to give meaning and value to their lives (for more on Humboldt, see

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Horlacher, Chapter 4, Volume 3). To do this, Humboldt argues, a human being needs to interact with a multifaceted world that is “not self,” that is other than self (NichtMensch) (Humboldt 1792/1960: 235). The notion of “other” here is a philosophical term with a long history of usage, in particular within the German traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics (for more on these traditions, see Kerdeman, Chapter 2, this volume). Here, to identify something as “other” is not meant as a value judgment, rather it simply refers to something beyond what is characterized as the “self”; this can also be referred to as “the world.” The “other,” in the education philosophical tradition, can also refer to another person, as Dietrich Benner (2008) illuminates.8 But again here it is not meant in a pejorative sense. For the learner, the teacher is “other,” because she is someone different, someone that challenges the learner, so that the learner can learn. For the teacher, the learner is also the “other,” as in “not self.” The learner brings uniqueness and newness—new questions, new ways of acting and thinking—to the educational situation in ways that the teacher cannot anticipate; this can challenge the teacher’s thinking about what to teach, how to teach it, and indeed about the meaning and moral value of being a teacher. The concept of Bildung underscores that our encounters with that which is “other” matter. This means that to learn and grow, human beings must engage with new, different, or unfamiliar ideas, objects, and ways of communicating and interacting, otherwise we are not learning, we are at best maintaining existence, and at worst stifling any future opportunity to expand our thinking. These encounters with newness importantly point us to our own limitations, that is, what we do not yet know, cannot understand, or cannot yet do (on how this idea was taken up in the tradition of psychoanalysis and education, see Britzman, Chapter 4, this volume).9 An example of engagement with things that are new to us could be an all-encompassing experience, such as when traveling to another country and seeing new sights, eating new food, and hearing another language, or it could be a particular everyday experience, for instance a child experiencing the wonder of the feeling of warmth when touching a hot mug of tea for the first time. Such interactions point to the fact that, as Dewey reiterates, influenced by Humboldt’s idea of Bildung, that human learning involves both an active and a receptive side: not only do we influence the world, shaping it, as actors, by way of our actions but we are also inevitably shaped by the world and others.10 Thus, Bildung encompasses much more than learning as a continuous, additive process of accumulating knowledge bit by bit—an idea of learning still so prevalent in today’s educational policy discourse.11 Rather, it is a concept that has been used to capture the idea of education as a transformative process. It is transformative because, in our encounters with difference, our established thinking becomes disrupted in a certain sense. This idea of having our experience disrupted or interrupted is a way of talking about those moments in everyday

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life when we start to question what we know and how we know it, and even whether what we know and do is true and just. As Hannah Arendt says, this is the moment we start to question ourselves—we turn inwards and become “two-in-one,” that is both “the one who asks and the one who answers” (1981: 185). The idea of Bildung is thus underscoring the human being as a reflective being, meaning we are able to think critically about the new things, ideas, and interactions we encounter and, on that basis, make informed changes to how we think and act going forward. In the chapters that follow, readers will find explicit discussions of Bildung, as well as discussions of educational formation and transformation that allude to this tradition. Relationality in the teacher–learner relationship There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a twinkle of mischief, and the hands grasping Webster’s blue-black spelling-book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvelous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill. (Du Bois 1903/2007: 32) These words from W.E.B. Du Bois’s autobiographical essay, describing his time setting up a school in the remote hills of Tennessee around the turn of the century, voice aspects of a certain kind of relationship between the teacher and learner that makes it “educational” (on Du Bois, Cooper, and others in this tradition, see Alston, Chapter 7, this volume). The question of what makes teacher–learner relationships particularly educational, that is to say, fostering the learning and growth of both the learners and the teacher, has been widely examined in contemporary educational scholarship.12 One way of referring to this kind of relationship is by calling it “relational.” Relationality as a term used in education scholarship became more common in the late twentieth century with thinkers such as Nel Noddings (2013), who famously furthered the idea of educative teacher–learner relationships as relational in her concept of the reciprocal nature of caring (for a discussion of Buber, Levinas, and Noddings on relationality, see Gordon, Chapter 3, this volume). More broadly speaking, the term can be used to describe the reciprocal nature of “education,” where here the term “education” does not refer to Bildung, the process of self-formation. Rather, “education” here refers to a particular type of intergenerational pedagogical relationship, in which one person aims to educate another person. This usage of the word “education” in English is more closely connected to the German term Erziehung. Education, in this sense, connects to ideas of the nature of teaching as essentially relational; it points to a view of the teacher as receptive, responsive, and responsible

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to every child’s unique contribution. On this understanding, the teacher’s role is to introduce children to the multifacetedness of the world beyond the immediacy of everyday life, the world “beyond the hill.”13 Describing the teacher–learner relationship as relational has arisen in some sense as a way of moving beyond the prominent two notions of the teacher’s task as either to lead the child to what they should know and learn (referred to sometimes as a “teacher-centered” approach, or critically by Paulo Freire as “banking education”—on Freire’s connection to Marxism, see the Thompson, Chapter 8, this volume, and also Roberts, Chapter 4, Volume 5) or to let the child freely develop “naturally” (referred to sometimes as a “child-centered” approach). In the early twentieth century, these two seemingly opposing ideas of educating were competing for dominance in educational theory and practice, as Theodor Litt, German professor of philosophy and pedagogy, noted in his 1927 book Führen oder Wachsen lassen (Lead or Let Grow). But as Litt pointed out back then, in a radical thesis for his time (notably Litt’s book was banned by the Nazi Party), educating was neither of these in their extreme. Rather, given a particular interpretation, it was a twofold responsibility: the teacher must invite the child to see and understand the world in all its richness and diversity and, at the same time, leave the world of meaning open enough so that the child can actively be involved in contributing to meaning and thereby help shape the future. (This idea is taken up explicitly in Standish, Chapter 9, this volume, and is also reflected in all the chapters in various ways.) Litt’s ideas connect to Dewey’s aims to articulate a “progressive” understanding of educating that was not captured by the “old,” “traditional” education associated with leading but was also not radically child-centered in the sense of letting the child entirely dictate the educational situation. This type of balance that was being sought by educational philosophers of the modern era was not one of “sometimes lead and sometimes let grow”; rather, it was a total reorientation of the idea of the teacher that took the ideas of dominating implicit in both notions entirely out of the picture. The thinking here goes back in some ways to Herbart’s notion of the educator as needing to acquire “pedagogical tact” (Herbart 1802/1887, 1802/1896).14 Herbart’s concept of pedagogical tact has a moral sense to it as it describes a type of improvisational ethical responsiveness to the child’s expressed needs as they appear within the unfolding educational interactions. Herbart’s concept connects to Aristotle’s (2000) notion of phronesis, or the ability to make wise decisions in the moment.15 For a teacher to make wise decisions in the moment, they not only need a strong understanding of the theories and principles of education as the foundation for guiding learners, but also need to be receptive and responsive to what the learner brings to real, lived educational situations.

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This relates further to Deweyan-inspired notions of teaching as a reflective practice. Such practice includes what Donald Schön (2005), drawing on Dewey, calls “messy situations,” as the moments of interaction with learners that are unanticipated and therefore call out reflection and require our attention to how we think and what we do next. Related developments in philosophy of education have also attended more explicitly to the receptive side of teaching by focusing on the teacher as a “listener.”16 In these ways, the idea of the teacher points to teaching as “relational,” as a relation without dominance, but based on learning from and with the child out of a fundamental respect for every child (see English 2016). Three things emerge from this discussion of the history of educational ideas that offer initial insight into how the modern era thinkers discussed in this volume moved past the Enlightenment era and pushed forward influencing the contemporary era into the twenty-first century. The first is the idea of the inherent worth of every child. The Enlightenment value of independence as autonomy, which strongly influenced modern concepts of “the educated man” and supported characterizing the child in relative terms as “not yet adult,” gets questioned in the modern era by many thinkers. The child in this era gains their own standing; the child has agency, a perspective, languages for creating meaning. The child has a lifeworld, as Burdick-Shepherd puts it (see Chapter 6, this volume, on early childhood education). The value and worth of every child are to be respected by the educator in every interaction.17 The second is the idea of the educational environment as a social space, broadly understood. This idea is brought out in education philosophical considerations around what the classroom space should look like if it is to reshape configurations of the teacher as sole authority over knowledge, and to promote children to be in mutually supportive relationships with teachers, to actively learn from peers, and to think and ask questions rather than listen passively. Discussions of the educational environment also relate to philosophical questions around what societal conditions are needed for teachers and schools to be able to provide equitable forms of democratic, nonauthoritarian, education to every child. A third idea arising out of the modern era, and present in different ways in all of the chapters in this volume, is the idea that questions of education and schooling are indispensably intertwined with issues of social justice. Developments in the modern era made more clear that part of the role of philosophy of education is to consider the question, What world do we want the next generation to inherit? Answering this question became ever more pressing after the rise of fascism surrounding the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust. With this turning point came a thorough recognition of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1944/2002), writing in exile from Germany, called “the dialectic of Enlightenment.” This referred to the fact that the Enlightenment project was inherently contradictory in that the idea of the human guided by

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reason entailed a self-destructive rationalizing of human control over nature and over other human beings. The thinkers in the modern era provide us with a clear sense of how educational theory can support our considerations of an educational practice that can help shape individuals, groups, and humanity for the better, while keeping open to debate what the Better is. This sense of connection between education and social justice goes on to contribute to philosophies of education developed in the late twentieth century up until today (see Volume 5, this series), which became more explicitly informed by feminist theory, critical race theory, theories of anti-authoritarianism, liberation, and anarchism, as well as ideas of the inherent worth of every child. The chapters in this volume contain the roots of these later developments in thought. Whether readers are new to or well-versed in the traditions of philosophical thinking discussed in this volume, the chapters, individually and taken together, offer ways to think deeply about one of the most fundamental problems still facing all educational philosophers and practitioners today. Namely, it is the problem that we need a just society to develop an education system that promotes the flourishing of every child; yet, at the same time, we need an education system that promotes the flourishing of every child to create a just society. This is the fundamental dialectic of education and democracy that Dewey so famously considered.

OVERVIEW OF THE VOLUME In Chapter 1, “John Dewey’s Philosophy of Democratic Education,” Leonard J.  Waks offers fresh insight into Dewey’s (1859–1952) seminal work Democracy and Education (1916) by examining it in light of Dewey’s earlier writings on democratic education, which have been largely overlooked within Dewey scholarship. Waks shows how Dewey’s later central concepts, such as “growth,” “communication,” and “freedom,” are rooted in his early thinking, and also that there are shifts in Dewey’s thinking toward the open-endedness of self-realization. The chapter provides detailed analysis of significant political and educational works, including The Ethics of Democracy (1888) and The School and Society (1899). Waks draws out a central theme in Dewey’s work of the essentially social nature of human beings, and in turn, of education. Throughout, Waks illuminates that a democratic education is one that fosters human social nature and “democratic character”. Waks concludes the chapter by highlighting the continued relevance of Dewey’s earliest thinking for how we understand learning, teaching, educational aims, methods and curriculum in education today. In Chapter 2, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Education,” Deborah Kerdeman discusses how these two traditions, phenomenology and hermeneutics, help us think about how engaging with others brings meaning

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and purpose to our lives. To do this, Kerdeman centers on in-depth analyses of the thinking of four key philosophers from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, discussing each in turn: Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). Kerdeman’s study of these thinkers provides readers with an understanding of the fundamental differences between evidencebased social science research and educational research that is informed by phenomenological and hermeneutical perspectives. Her discussion offers critical insight into why, and in what sense, these thinkers viewed science as limited for studying social life. Kerdeman concludes with an examination of contemporary educational research in these traditions, including the work of influential thinkers such as Max van Manen. The chapter reveals how these philosophical traditions have countered instrumental views of education by demonstrating that the educational experience is existentially transformative, valuable, and meaningful. The discussion shows how these traditions support a call for the rehumanization of education. In Chapter 3, “Ethical Relationality in Education: Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Nel Noddings,” Mordechai Gordon considers education within the context of two philosophical subdisciplines: philosophical anthropology and ethics. Central questions in philosophy of education inspired by these subdisciplines, include What does it mean to flourish as a human being? and How does education relate to establishing justice? The chapter focuses on two early twentieth-century thinkers: Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95). Gordon connects their ideas to the ideas of contemporary philosopher of education Nel Noddings. In the first section, Gordon takes up an analysis of Buber’s notion of dialogue. His discussion highlights the idea of I–You central to Buber’s thinking and illuminates how the realm “between” persons as an intersubjective realm of relation is critical for understanding human relations as ethical. Gordon examines how Buber understood the particularity of the relation between teacher and students and the meaningfulness of such relations. The chapter then highlights Levinas’s notion of relationship, pointing out similarities and also key differences to Buber. In the third section, Gordon turns to contemporary thinker Noddings, showing how she draws on Buber to provide an understanding of caring as a relational idea in education. The chapter concludes by underscoring key ideas from each philosopher around educating for the whole person and the need for meaningful relationships. The chapter offers readers an understanding of how, together, these thinkers provide a strong concept of relational pedagogy, and how this concept could support a dramatic shift in the way we educate today. In Chapter 4, “Psychoanalysis with Education,” Deborah P. Britzman offers readers insight into five leading figures in the tradition of psychoanalysis and discusses how their theories can provide important lenses with which we

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can think about pedagogy. Beginning with an introduction to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Britzman draws out the theories and ideas that Freud brought to the formation of the field, including the unconscious, memory, relationality, infantile life, and the idea that we must live with others “without knowing in advance what it all means.” From this discussion, she provides readers with an understanding of how Freud’s ideas on the origins and limits of thinking, and on the unknown that makes us fragile and vulnerable, were influential on later psychoanalytic thinkers. Following this, Britzman turns to discuss Anna Freud (1895–1982), Melanie Klein (1882–1960), Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), and D.W. Winnicott (1896–1971). With Anna Freud, who developed child psychoanalysis, and Klein, Britzman illustrates how they each give readers an understanding of the richness of the psychical life of the infant. Turning to Bion, the chapter reveals how his in-depth understanding of experience as connected to “frustration” gives insight into the mother–child relationship and the need for humans to tolerate frustrations to learn. With Winnicot, Britzman develops the idea of the central role of the value of the child’s world as human and not lesser than the adult. Throughout the chapter, Britzman makes connections to how these thinkers help our contemporary understanding of education, democratic citizenship, and the political self. The chapter provides readers with lasting questions around how a pedagogy that takes account of uncertainty, as opposed to aiming for a simple transfer of absolute knowledge, can come about in the twenty-first century. Chapter 5, “The Philosophical Milieu in Nineteenth-Century American Education: From Idealism to Pragmatism” by James Scott Johnston, draws readers into the early, foundational debates in America over what education is. Johnston begins by looking at the several influences that informed what came to be considered a particularly “American” philosophical tradition called pragmatism—including rich literary thought emerging in America; philosophical traditions, especially the idealism of German philosopher Immanuel Kant; the impacts of developments in science, especially Darwinism; mathematics; as well as the historical developments of the American Civil War and slavery. Johnston’s discussion then focuses on leading figures in pragmatism, Chauncey Wright (1830–75), C.S. Peirce (1839–1914), and William James (1842–1910), to draw out key tenets of their pragmatist theories that relate to education and that influenced the educational thinking of John Dewey. Following this, Johnston focuses on Dewey and provides readers with the lesser known historical, philosophical, and also biographical context within which Dewey developed core early educational ideas, especially those in his 1895 “Interest in Relation to Training of the Will.” Johnston illuminates key figures in Dewey’s life, giving examples of their central influence on Dewey’s thinking about education and the social. These include social activist Jane Addams (1860–1935), who influenced Dewey in his idea of education and social reconstruction, and George Herbert

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Mead (1863–1931), whose concept of play informed Dewey’s understanding of the social nature of the child as presented in School and Society (1899). The history of ideas around pragmatism and education come together in a way that offers readers pathways for reexamining today’s educational ideas and practices in light of our present social and political challenges. In Chapter 6, “Philosophy of Education and Early Childhood: Invitations and Provocations of Childhood from Maria Montessori and Reggio Emilia,” Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd turns readers’ attention to the contributions made by Maria Montessori (1870–1952) and Loris Malaguzzi (1920–94). Her chapter examines these two approaches to education side by side to highlight how each can enrich understandings of child agency, child rights, and the idea of the child. The chapter begins with insight into Montessori’s unique contribution to understanding the child’s world and translating that into an educational environment that “invites” the child to participate. This idea of invitation is shown to be fraught with philosophical meaning that, as Burdick-Shepherd argues, has been underexamined yet informs the creative design of educational spaces and teacher practices commonly associated with Montessori. Following this, Burdick-Shepherd turns to central ideas of the Reggio Emilia approach, focusing on its profound understanding of the child as agent and creator who has something important and unique to offer the world. Throughout, the chapter draws connections between Montessori and Reggio Emilia, showing how they are not simply to be seen as offering a set of practices. Through this discussion, readers can gain an understanding of how each of these philosophically guided approaches pose substantial critiques to traditional classrooms, then and now. The chapter provides a basis for understanding why continued scholarship on these approaches is important for thinking about education and the child today. In Chapter 7, “Philosophies of Race, Justice, and Education: Traditions of Embodied Knowledge,” Kal Alston interweaves late nineteenth- and twentiethcentury American history with the history of “the genesis and development of a modern American analysis of education through the lens of Blackness.” Alston begins by taking readers back to the historical debate between W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) around the education of African Americans and illuminates the nuances of this debate arguing for personhood through education. The chapter includes a discussion of significant female figures, including Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), showing how they were critical to the advancement of African Americans and of women. In the second section, Alston turns to the successor generation and shows how the arts, political activism, and philosophies of education came together to support the importance of educational opportunity. The chapter then provides readers with ways of connecting the thinking of these previous generations to the twentieth- and

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twenty-first-century civil rights movements. Throughout the chapter, Alston points out how recurring themes have been taken up and problematized by the thinkers in this tradition. She examines the contradictions between what African American children learned in school around self-worth and the importance of learning, on the one hand, and what they experienced in society as barriers to a flourishing life, on the other. The chapter offers readers insight into how these key figures remain essential for our present-day thinking about education and social justice. In Chapter 8, “Critical Theory and Education,” Christiane Thompson opens up the nuanced meanings of “critique” in the tradition of critical theory, and their importance for thinking about education. The chapter begins with an analysis of the philosophical thinking of Karl Marx (1818–83), highlighting the key concept of “alienation,” to then focus on Marx’s influence on the contemporary educational thinking of Paolo Freire and the tradition of critical pedagogy. Thompson then turns to discuss the Frankfurt School as it developed out of Marxist thinking. She describes the political developments in the early twentieth century—especially the rise of nationalism and the expansion of capitalism—in a way that illuminates for readers how these events influenced the thinking of the Frankfurt School and the lasting educational ideas, including “education as a social responsibility,” that came from them. In the third section, Thompson discusses how Adorno problematizes the Western, and particularly German, idea of Bildung, following the rise of National Socialism. Her discussion reveals how contemporary thinkers have taken up Adorno’s critical insights to recast the idea of education as always caught up with thinking about societal structures and developments that shape it. Throughout the chapter, Thompson draws out how the critical theory tradition offers profound critiques of Western reason and subjectivity that have impacted educational thinking. To conclude, Thompson examines how critical theory offers pathways for criticism of today’s political developments, including the reemergence of the “authoritarian character” in “postfactual times” and connects this to the idea of “critique” as a basic educational concept that can help guide educational practice. In Chapter 9, “Education and the Linguistic Turn,” Paul Standish argues that language is essential for understanding how human beings “come into the world.” Standish begins by discussing the developments that surround philosophy’s “linguistic turn,” introducing the history of philosophical ideas on the connection of language and thought. Standish focuses on connecting three thinkers, not commonly linked, to develop a picture of the significance of language as part of being human: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). With Wittgenstein, Standish adopts a unique approach: he draws upon Wittgenstein’s biography to contrast his earliest thoughts regarding language as represented in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), with his later thoughts as represented

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in Philosophical Investigations (1953). Standish illuminates for readers how the Investigations provide insight into how children develop language as part of their entry into “human practices,” to which they can contribute new meaning. This idea that there is an “openness of meaning” is what Standish calls the “ground of education.” Giving concrete examples, the chapter examines how both Heidegger and later Derrida, an important critic of Heidegger’s politics, considered the openness of meaning as constituting human experience. With this lens, readers can gain insight into how we might rethink educational policy and practice away from its influence by scientism and Western philosophy’s characteristic dualism between the human and the world. Standish leaves readers with questions around the possibility for a future education that offers every human being experiences which open up their capacity for creative meaningmaking. At the same time, his chapter suggests that this future is only possible with humanities at the center of educational research.

NOTES 1 For more insight into these historical developments, see, for example, Hardt and Negri (2000); two of the books in Eric Hobsbawm’s (2000a, b) series covering this time period, in The Age of Capital 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire 1875–1914; and, for a vivid picture of the history before, during, and after this time in the United States in particular, see Zinn (1995). 2 See the entries on Margaret Grace Bondfield (Vol. 2, pp. 388–9) and Rosa Luxemburg (Vol. 10, pp. 55–6) in the The Encyclopedia of World Biographies (Detroit, MI: Gale, 2004), 2nd edn. Available online: https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/ apps/doc/CX3404700766/GVRL?u=ed_itw&sid=GVRL&xid=5fdfaf6f and https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/apps/doc/CX3404704044/GVRL?u=ed_ itw&sid=GVRL&xid=57e1f1ad. 3 As Harry Daniels, Ian Thompson, and Alice Tawell discuss, in the United Kingdom, prior to the Handicapped Children Education Act in 1970, children could be classified as “uneducable” based on “a measured IQ of < 50” (2019: 2); such tests are debated today as to their validity and morality. In the United States, as Wanda Blanchett (2006) discusses, racism and white privilege have contributed to the disproportionate labeling of African American students in categories of special needs. Blanchett places her discussion within a long history of referrals of African American students to particularly low resourced, special education programs on the basis of subjective decisions rather than on objective assessments designed to support children with special needs and foster their equal access to education as per the United States’ special education service. 4 NAACP was founded in 1909. 5 Lawrence Cremin’s (1961) book, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1875–1957, is an excellent resource on this point. Additionally, Zinn (1995) provides an important larger historical context to questions of the development of education in America. 6 While Dewey is rightly recognized as a visionary progressive educator influencing scholars internationally on the ideas of human perfectibility and the right to education  for all, recent studies argue that he had a notion of progress that put human culture on a linear, upward path of social, political, and economic

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development, with Western civilization as the current highest step (see for example Pratt, 2017). Dewey later became an explicit critic of such thinking, as it failed to account for injustices perpetuated by imperialism, rapacious global capitalism, racism, and other realities. There is extensive literature on Bildung within philosophy of education. For example: Lars Løvlie and Paul Standish (2002) edited a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. The special issue included contributions from international contemporary philosophers of education Rene Arcilla, Hansjorg Hohr, Michael Uljens, Gert Biesta, Roland Reichenbach, Sven Erik Nordembo, Ilan Gur-Zev, Klaus Mortensen, and Helmut Peukert. The journal Educational Philosophy and Theory followed up with a special issue in 2003, edited by Walter Bauer (2003) and a special issue of Philosophy of Music Education Review edited by Estelle Jorgensen (2014) dedicated to Danish philosopher of music education’s Frede V. Nielsen ideas of Bildung, each of which also included international scholars. David Bakhurst (2011) has done much to promote the scholarship of John McDowell within philosophy of education, including his understanding of Bildung in relation to the development of reason. Several books in the German language have been dedicated to understanding Bildung, including Lutz Koch’s Bildung und Negativität (Bildung and Negativity) (1995), which looks at the process of education in the context of various thinkers in the German tradition, and Norbert Ricken’s Die Ordnung der Bildung (The Order of Bildung) (2006), which draws on Michel Foucault’s work. Drawing on the German tradition of Bildung, related work in the English language has used the concept of transformation for understanding education and learning; for example, English (2013), and Wiberg (2016). Related work has looked at themes across concepts of transformation and education; see for example, Yacek (2017) and Yacek and Ijaz (2020). Additionally, there is a growing interest in the Bildungsroman, or “education novel.” Examples of philosophical interpretations of such novels include Arcilla (2020) and Laverty (2014, 2019). See also Roberts and Saeverot (2018). Benner’s discussion provides the history, context, and educational significance of the meanings of otherness (Andersheit) as object, teacher, or learner. There is a long history of thinking about the processes of learning as entailing such encounters with our own limitations; see Benner and English (2004) and English (2013). For a historical and philosophical treatment of this idea of learning, see also Meyer-Drawe (1999). On the connections between the idea of Bildung and Dewey’s concept of education, see Benner (2017). For a critique of the dominance of policy and the public’s marketed discourse on learning as a product for consumption and the learner as consumer, see Biesta (2006). Discussions of educational relationships have come within various topics in contemporary philosophy of education, for example Greene (1973), focusing on the nature of teaching and the implicit and explicit relations with learners that arise therein; Hansen’s (2001) focus on the necessary moral personhood of teachers; Katz’s (2014) focus on trustworthiness in teacher–learner relationships; works examining the nature of teacher thinking and ethical judgment, for example, see Fuchs and Schönherr (2007) or also other works looking at the concept of the teacher and teaching, Biesta (2014, 2017); Bingham and Sidorkin (2004); and Burbules (1993); and other works bringing in questions of education and social justice, for example Boler (1999); Ruitenberg (2015); and Todd (2003).

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13 Various thinkers have taken up in this idea as part of their contemporary philosophies of teaching; see, for example, hooks (1994), Jackson (1986); see also Bohnsack’s (1976) Deweyan-inspired idea of “Erziehung” for democracy. 14 See Van Manen (1991), who draws on and develops Herbart’s concept connecting tact to a phenomenology of teaching, and English (2013: esp. ch. 7). See also Garcia and Lewis (2014) who draw on Van Manen in their discussion of tactful coping. 15 Without necessarily connecting to pedagogical tact, contemporary thinkers have brought in Aristotle’s notion of phronesis to discussion of education and teaching; see, for example, Furman (2018), Higgins (2011), and Phelan (2005). 16 There have been a few recent volumes in philosophy of education dedicated to the growing field of research on listening examining it in its ethical, political, and educative aspects. These include a volume that has examined the concept of listening of in the works of particular philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Herbart, Dewey, and others; see the edited special issue by Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty (2011), and another that has looked at ideas of listening in well-known teaching approaches, for example Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy, or Reggio Emilia, see Waks (2015); building on these philosophies, Allison Hintz, Kersti Tyson, and Andrea English (2018) have brought together several notions of listening to develop a framework for “Pedagogical Listening” as a form of teacher listening that attends to, seeks to understand, and supports the learner’s productive “struggle” between knowing and not knowing, as they strive toward new understanding. They have used this framework to empirically analyze listening during classroom mathematical discussions. Although there is still much work to be done in this area of research, this work can be seen as providing a necessary foundation for turning the common notion of teacher as speaker, and in turn “transmitter” of knowledge, on its head. 17 Related to this point, the end of the modern era was on the cusp of the creation of many experimental schools that were established in Great Britain and the United States. The most famous of these are Summerhill, founded in 1921 and still in existence today, and the Malting House School, which only operated from 1924 to 1929 but formed the basis of some of the challenges to Jean Piaget that were posed within education psychology.

REFERENCES Primary sources Arendt, Hannah (1981), The Life of the Mind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Aristotle (2000), Nichomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Roger Crisp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Anna Julia (1893), “Women’s Cause Is One and Universal.” https://www. blackpast.org/african-american-history/1893-anna-julia-cooper-womens-cause-oneand-universal/ Dewey, John (1916/2008), Democracy and Education, vol. 9: The Middle Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903/2007), The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Greene, Maxine (1973), Teacher As Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1802/1887), “Zwei Vorlesungen über Pädagogik,” in Karl Kehrbach (ed.), Joh. Friedr. Herbart’s Sämtliche Werke in Chronologischer Reihenfolge, Vol. 1, 279–90, Langensalza: Hermann Beyer und Söhne. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1802/1896), “Introductory Lecture to Students in Pedagogy,” in William J. Eckoff (ed. and trans.), Herbart’s ABC of Sense Perception and Minor Pedagogical Works, 13–28, New York: D. Appleton. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1902), “Umriss pädagogischer Vorlesung [1835 and 1841],” in Karl Kehrbach (ed.), Joh. Friedr. Herbart’s Sämtliche Werke in Chronologischer Reihenfolge, Vol. 10, 65–206, Langensalza: Hermann Beyer und Söhne. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1913), Outlines of Educational Doctrine, trans. Alexis F. Lange, New York: Macmillan. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1944/2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1792/1960), “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen,” in Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (eds.), Wilhelm vonHumboldt, Werke in Fünf Bände, edited by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel. Vol. 1, Schriften zur Anthropologie und Geschichte, 234–40. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Humboldt, Wilhelm von (2001), “Theory of Bildung,” in Iain Westbury, Stephan Hopmann, and Kurt Riquarts (eds.), Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition, trans. Gillian Horton-Krüger, 57–61. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Litt, T. (1967), Führen oder Wachsenlassen. Eine Erörterung des pädagogischen Grundproblems. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 13. Aufl. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1764/1979), Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books.

Secondary sources Arcilla, René V. (2020), Wim Wenders’s Road Movie Philosophy: Education Without Learning, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bakhurst, David (2011), The Formation of Reason, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Bauer, Walter (2003), “Introduction,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35 (2): 133–7. Benner, Dietrich (2008), “‘Der Andere’ und ‘Das Andere’ als Problem und Aufgabe der Erziehung und Bildung,” in Dietrich Benner (ed.), Bildungstheorie und Bildungsforschung: Grundlagenreflexionen und Anwendungsfelder, 45–57, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Benner, Dietrich (2017), “John Dewey, a Modern Thinker: On Education (as Bildung and Erziehung) and Democracy (As a Political System and a Mode of Associated Living),” in Leonard Waks and Andrea English (eds.), John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook, 263–78, New York: Cambridge University Press. Benner, Dietrich and Andrea English (2004), “Critique and Negativity: Towards the Pluralisation of Critique in Educational Practice, Theory and Research,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 38 (3): 409–28. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.03098249.2004.00394.x.

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Biesta, Gert (2006), Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future, Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Biesta, Gert (2014), The Beautiful Risk of Education, New York: Routledge. Biesta, Gert (2017), The Rediscovery of Teaching, New York: Routledge. Bingham, Charles and Alexander Sidorkin (2004), No Education Without Relation, New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Blanchett, Wanda (2006), “Disproportionate Representation of African American Students in Special Education: Acknowledging the Role of White Privilege and Racism,” Educational Researcher, 35 (6): 24–8. Bogues, Anthony (2011), “C.L.R. James, Pan-Africanism and the Black Radical Tradition,” Critical Arts, 25 (4): 484–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2011. 639957. Bohnsack, Fritz (1976), Erziehung zur Demokratie: John Deweys Pädagogik und ihre Bedeutung für die Reform unserer Schule [Education towards Democracy: John Dewey’s Pedagogy and Its Meaning for the Reform of our Schools], Ravensburg: Otto Maier Verlag. Boler, Megan (1999), Feeling Power: Emotions and Education, New York: Routledge. Burbules, Nicholas (1993), Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice, New York: Teachers College Press. Cremin, Lawrence A. (1961), The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957, New York: Knopf. Daniels, Harry, Ian Thompson, and Alice Tawell (2019), “After Warnock: The Effects of Perverse Incentives in Policies in England for Students with Special Educational Needs,” Frontiers in Education, 4 (36): 1–12. English, Andrea R. (2013), Discontinuity in Learning: Herbart, Dewey and Education as Transformation, New York: Cambridge University Press. English, Andrea R. (2016), “Dialogic Teaching and Moral Learning: Self-Critique, Narrativity, Community and ‘Blind spots’,” in “50th Anniversary of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain,” special issue of Journal of Philosophy of Education, 50 (2): 160–76. English, Andrea R. and Christine Doddington (2019), “Dewey, Aesthetic Experience and Education for Humanity,” in Steven Fesmire (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dewey, 411–44, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuchs, Birgitta and Christian Schönherr, eds. (2007), Urteilskraft und Pädagogik: Beiträge zu einer pädagogischen Handlungstheorie, Würzburg: Königshauses & Neumann. Furman, Cara (2018), “Descriptive Inquiry: Cultivating Practical Wisdom with Teachers,” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 24 (5): 559–70. Garcia, Justin A. and Tyson Lewis (2014), “Getting a Grip on the Classroom: From Psychological to Phenomenological Curriculum Development in Teacher Education Programs,” Curriculum Inquiry, 44 (2): 141–68. Hansen, David (2001), Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teacher’s Creed, New York: Teachers College Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haroutunian-Gordon, Sophie and Megan Jane Laverty (2011), “Listening: An Exploration of Philosophical Traditions,” Educational Theory, 61 (2): 117–24, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2011.00394.x. Higgins Christopher (2011), The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice, New York: John Wiley and Sons.

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Hintz, Allison, Kersti Tyson, and Andrea R. English (2018), “Actualizing the Rights of the Learner: The Role of Pedagogical Listening,” Democracy and Education, 26 (2): Article 8. Available online: https://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol26/iss2/8. Hobsbawm, Eric (2000a), The Age of Capital 1848–1875, London: Abacus. Hobsbawm, Eric (2000b), The Age of Empire 1875–1914, London: Abacus. hooks, bell (1994), Teaching to Transgress, New York: Routledge. Jackson, Peter W. (1986), The Practice of Teaching, New York: Teachers College Press. Jorgensen, E. (2014), “Editorial,” Philosophy of Music Education Review, 22 (2): 109–22. https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.22.2.109. Katz, M.S. (2014), “The Role of Trustworthiness in Teaching: An Examination of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 33: 621–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-014-9405-8. Killingray, David (2012), “Significant Black South Africans before 1912: Pan-African Organisations and the Emergence of South Africa’s First Black Lawyers,” South African Historical Journal, 64 (3): 393–417. Koch, Lutz (1995), Bildung und Negativität: Grundzüge einer negativen Bildungstheorie, Weinheim: Dt. Studien-Verlag. Laverty, Megan Jane (2014), “As Luck Would Have It: Thomas Hardy’s Bildungsroman on Leading a Human Life,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 33 (6): 635–46. Laverty, Megan Jane (2019), “JM Coetzee, Eros and Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 53 (3): 574–88. Løvlie, Lars and Paul Standish (2002), “Introduction: Bildung and the Idea of a Liberal Education,” Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 36 (3): 317–40. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-9752.00279. Meyer-Drawe, Käte (1999), “Die Herausforderung durch die Dinge: Das Andere im Lernprozess,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 45 (3): 329–36. Noddings, Nel (2013), Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ricken, Norbert (2006), Die Ordnung der Bildung: Beiträge zu einer Genealogie der Bildung, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Phelan, Anne (2005), “A Fall from (Someone Else’s) Certainty: Recovering Practical Wisdom in Teacher Education,” Canadian Journal of Education, 28 (3): 339–58. Pratt, Scott L. (2017), “Boundaries As Limits and Possibilities: On Chapter 16 the Significance of Geography and History,” in Leonard Waks and Andrea English (eds.), John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook, 146–54, New York: Cambridge University Press. Redmond, C.D. (2016), “The Sartorial Indian: Zitkala- sa, Clothing, and Resistance to Colonization,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 28 (3): 52–80. Roberts, Peter and Herner Saeverot (2018), Education and the Limits of Reason: Reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov, New York: Routledge. Ruitenberg, Claudia (2015), Unlocking the World: Education in an Ethic of Hospitality, New York: Routledge. Schön, Donald (2005), The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, London: Basic Books. Terrance, Laura L. (2011), “Resisting Colonial Education: Zitkala-Sa and Native Feminist Archival Refusal,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24 (5): 621–6.

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Todd, Sharon (2003), Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis and Ethical Possibilities in Education, Albany: State University of New York Press. Van Manen, Max (1991), The Tact of Teaching, Albany: State University of New York Press. Waks, Leonard J. ed. (2015), Listening to Teach, Albany: State University of New York Press. Wiberg, Merete (2016), “The Normative Aspect of Learning,” in Ane Qvortrup, Merete Wiberg, Gerd Christensen, and Mikala Hansbol (eds.), On the Definition of Learning, 59–74, Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Yacek, Douglas (2017), “Transformation and Education,” in Bryan Warnick (ed.), Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook on Philosophy: Education, 205–20, New York: Macmillan. Yacek, Douglas and Kailum Ijaz (2020), “Education As Transformation: Formalism, Moralism, and the Substantivist Alternative,“ Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54 (1): 124–45. Zinn, Howard (1995), A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present, New York: HarperPerennial.

CHAPTER ONE

John Dewey’s Philosophy of Democratic Education LEONARD J. WAKS

INTRODUCTION More than a hundred years after its publication, John Dewey’s magisterial Democracy and Education has secured its place in the philosophy of education canon, alongside Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile. It remains among the most comprehensive statements not only of Dewey’s philosophy of education but of his entire system of ideas. The questions about democracy and education addressed in that work, however, concerned Dewey from his earliest years; Democracy and Education extends and modifies his earliest philosophical intuitions, and Dewey continued to clarify and extend these until the end of his life. An account of his philosophy of education must reach beyond Democracy and Education. Traditional education, according to John Dewey (depicted in Figure 1.1), is undemocratic. External authorities establish aims and select subject matters, which are often foreign to learners. Traditional teaching methods restrict thinking to solving textbook problems. Learners are given few opportunities to engage voluntarily in activities that they find meaningful, and thus they have no incentive to think purposefully. In democratic education, by contrast, teachers and learners are co-equal partners in the school community. Teachers establish settings for social activities and learners voluntarily engage, learning by doing as they act to achieve their

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own aims. As they meet obstacles, they reflect and communicate to seek information from peers, teachers, and others. By acting together, learners all grow, both intellectually and socially. They also expand their individual ends to include the ends of others, thus forming democratic personalities. In this chapter, I provide an account of Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education, starting with his early theory and then accounting for his mature formulations from School and Society to Democracy and Education. For convenience, I divide my treatment into sections on the Early Works (EW) and Middle Works (MW).1 School and Society (MW 1), the first major work on democratic education in the Middle Works, marks a sharp break from the theory in Early Works. Some additional topics and minor qualifications are introduced in the Later Works (LW), but these cannot be addressed in this chapter.

FIGURE 1.1  John Dewey at typewriter, 1946

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DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION IN THE EARLY WORKS Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education in the Early Works has largely been ignored by contemporary scholars—dismissed as overly derivative from the British Idealists or passed over as merely an early indication of his mature statement in Democracy and Education (Damico 1978; Ryan 1995; a notable exception is Rogers 2011).2 The early bare-bones theory is presented in a series of disconnected essays. It is remarkably clear—not obscured by the materials that flesh out Democracy and Education, such as accounts and critiques of alternative theories, detailed investigations of educational commonplaces (e.g., aims, subject matter, and method), attacks on entrenched dualisms, and arguments for placing educational theory at the center of philosophy. The early essays thus offer a spare, accessible, and distinctly Deweyan account of the relations between democracy and education that retains interest today for scholars and teachers. My aim in this section is to provide a clear account of Dewey’s early theory of democracy and education. I have examined all essays in the five volumes of the Early Works for sustained treatments of democracy or education and have selected those explicating the central concepts. One of these central concepts is “personality.” Because this concept is unexplained in the essays on democracy and education, I searched further in the Early Works for entries providing further elaboration. To construct my account, I have selected three important essays: “The Ethics of Democracy” (EW 1: 228–50, 1888), “Christianity and Democracy” (EW 4: 4–11, 1892), and “Ethical Principles Underlying Education” (EW 5: 56–84, 1897). I further rely on Psychology (EW 2, 1887) and “Self-Realization as Ethical Ideal” (EW 4: 43–54, 1893) to flesh out Dewey’s developing notions of “personality” and “self,” which are central to his account of democracy and education. “My Pedagogical Creed” (EW 5: 1897), the capstone work of the early theory, sums up its final state and provides a bridge to the Middle Works. Democracy “The Ethics of Democracy” (1888):  In “The Ethics of Democracy” (EW 1: 228–50), Dewey interprets democracy as the self-organizing result when all members of society forge their own positions in the ever-changing social order under conditions of free communication. He begins his argument by critiquing atomic individualism. Individuals, he says, are only persons as they develop, under concrete social conditions, seeking their own ends and discovering their own truths. They are thus all already saturated with social narratives, norms, and values; each person is “society concentrated,” a “localized manifestation” of social life (EW 1: 237). No social contract is needed to join them together;

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society is already an existing fact of human life from the beginning. A people can be (self-)governed simply by living together, communicating, forming bonds of sympathy, and negotiating their respective positions in the social order (EW 1: 231–2). Dewey’s account of the state here as not a logical necessity for governance of social life but only one social institution among others foreshadows his later account in The Public and Its Problems (LW 2). As a result of this shared sociality, says Dewey (following Governor Samuel Tilden, twenty-fifth Governor of New York and 1876 Democratic candidate for president), in a democratic polity the majority and minority are not “opposites” (EW 1: 235–6). Each is, in a different manner, society concentrated. They share a common font of traditions, which they draw on in appealing to those in the middle. The minority does not reject the results of elections and provoke civil war when it loses an election because it retains democratic faith that, based on common ideals, broad communication, and a fair process, its side has the better case and will eventually prevail. Rogers (2011) finds this insight valuable, and it supports Dewey’s view that democratic faith can ultimately be rewarded to note that “Ethics of Democracy” preceded the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, granting women the right to vote, by thirty years, and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, desegregating American schools, by seventy.3 Democracy, Dewey insists, anticipating the famous words to this effect in Democracy and Education, is more than a form of government. To call democracy constitutional government, he says, is like calling a home an arrangement of bricks (or to consider a different example, calling marriage an exchange of vows). The reality of democracy, for individuals who are each society concentrated, is collective memory, consciousness of the present, and future ideals animating social action (EW 1: 241). Democracy is a spirit working through and vitalizing social relations. Democracy is thus primarily an ethical and spiritual ideal. The alternative Platonic social ideal—the rule of the best and wisest—is divorced from reality; “wise men” cannot simply insert people into social positions that are suitable and good for them: “the practical consequence of giving the few wise and good power is that they cease to remain wise and good. They become ignorant of the needs and requirement [sic] of the many” (EW 1: 242). Each person, Dewey insists, must determine their unique place in society and take personal initiative in securing it. Freedom is not, on this view, unrestricted will but, says Dewey, conformity to law—the law (in Kant’s formulation) that every personality is an absolute end. Democracy requires freedom because all personalities must be free to forge their own place in the social order through personal initiative or there is no democracy (EW 1: 243–4)—a point affirmed in post–Civil War amendments to the US Constitution that Dewey forcefully reiterates in the Ethics of 1908. Equality is not predominantly a matter of economic distribution; it lies in

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personality—the equal demand for dignity and respect (EW 1: 245). Democracy, Dewey concludes, is thus the ultimate ethical ideal, where the distinction between the spiritual and secular has ceased. As in the Christian Kingdom of God, so in democracy the divine and human organization of society are one (EW 1: 249). “Christianity and Democracy” (1892):  Even the casual reader will note Dewey’s last-minute transition from ethics to spiritual religion. Nothing in “The Ethics of Democracy” itself justifies this move, but its basis lies elsewhere in the Early Works. For now, I note that Dewey builds on this idea in “Christianity and Democracy.” Christianity is there interpreted as revelation of truth—“truth of the word”—in a form accessible to civilized humanity (EW 4: 6): Revelation must reveal. It is not simply a question of the reality declared, it is also a question of comprehension by him to whom the reality is declared. … A religion of revelation must uncover and discover; it must bring home its truth to the consciousness of the individual. Revelation undertakes, in a word, not only to state that the truth of things is such and such, it undertakes to give the individual organs for the truth, organs by which he can get hold of, can see and feel, the truth. (EW 4: 6) If Jesus had an explicit truth, Dewey says, we could not have grasped it for ourselves until we lived it (EW 4: 7). Dewey here appears to be claiming that the shift from divine commands to parables and metaphor-laden miracles forces civilized audiences to think their meanings through and to test them for themselves. Our actions and their consequences, Dewey says, drawing already on pragmatist conceptions of meaning and truth, are our only means for appropriating truth, and we cannot act except with others and within social contexts. The connection between Christianity and democracy is that democracy is also “revelation,” requiring thinking and thus connecting with our fellows. Democracy thus implies freedom of social action, giving truth the chance to show itself. Personal and cultural truths can only be expressed in social action under conditions of freedom and recognition of those from all groups. The work of history, Dewey says, has been to free truth by tearing down the walls of isolation and class division that prevent free expression and communication (EW 4: 8). In these passages we find the seed of the theory of democracy that flowers in Democracy and Education. Truth can only be revealed when it moves through individuals and becomes a public affair. Ideal democracy is the culmination of freedom in history in that it indicates the elimination of all barriers that prevent the full movement of truth throughout social life. The spiritual unification of humanity in the Kingdom of God is thus but a “further expression” of this freedom of truth, demonstrating the equivalence of the ethical and religious formulations (EW 4: 8–9). This spiritual ideal of

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self-governance of humanity through free communication and cooperation shows affinities between Dewey’s early philosophy and the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy, a writer who inspired Jane Addams and whose philosophical works Dewey greatly admired (LW 17: 381–93). Psychology (1887):  The conceptual connections between personality, truth, and the Kingdom of God are made fully explicit in the Psychology of 1887. Initial awareness of personal existence, Dewey states therein, is through bodily sensations, which are then extended to, for example, the food in our mouth, the spoon, and the nurse who feeds us (EW 2: 242). As social feeling develops, we “merge our private life in … community, transcend our immediate self, and realize our being in its widest way” (EW 2: 245). This merger with others entails our taking the good, and the ends, into our own personal conception of the good. In so doing, we build democratic ethical character and eventually our innate capacities find their final expression in our unification with God. Through knowledge we “take the universe of objects into ourselves” (EW 2: 245). In aesthetic perception and creation we “take the universe of ideal worths into ourselves”; in social life, we take in personal relations and the moral law (EW 2: 245). Finally, a “completely realized personality” unites in itself truth (the unity of the relations of all objects), beauty (the unity of all ideal values), and morality (the unity of humanity). “The self is realized, and finds its true life in God” (EW 2: 245). Democracy is here conceived as a self-organizing process in which all persons, through action and communication, develop fully the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral dimensions of themselves and eventually find themselves realized in God. Democracy is then truly “The Kingdom of God” where human and spiritual realms are united. “Self-Realization as Ethical Ideal” (1893):  The idea of a “completely realized personality” suggests that personal development comes to an end. Dewey insists, however, that social life keeps changing, demanding new knowledge, valuations, and social relationships. This conundrum forces him to reexamine the idea of self-realization and, ultimately, in “Self-Realization as Ethical Ideal” (EW 4), to reject the idea of complete and final realization; selves, he now asserts, are realized in, and only in, present acts in which our energies are concentrated and undivided. There is no end to this process as every new situation calls for concentrated action. This account of the realized self appears to have impelled him to shift from “personality” in the Early Works to “growth” in the Middle Works and thus to leave the “Kingdom of God” behind. Education The essays on democracy in the Early Works already contain the germ of a philosophy of education. Each and every young person is, through social action,

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discovering their own beliefs, establishing personal ends, and, through personal initiative as constrained by the moral law, forging their own unique place in society. “Ethical Principles Underlying Education” (1897):  “Ethical Principles Underlying Education” makes this philosophy of education explicit. Dewey starts by asserting that educating a child as a person means educating them as a member of society, a citizen. But education specifically for democracy requires developing specific powers of self-direction and responsible leadership: The ethical responsibility of the school … is equivalent to that training of the child which will give him such possession of himself that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt himself to the changes which are going on, but have power to shape and direct those changes. (EW 5: 59–60) Dewey continues by stating one of his most characteristic and powerful ideas: the only way schools can fulfill this ethical responsibility is by reproducing in themselves the typical conditions of social life (EW 5: 61). If persons are to construct their beliefs, shape their ends, and forge their own places in social life, the school itself has to provide young persons a scene of social action. Educators thus have to start their work by observing individual children to discover their specific personal strivings and capabilities. They then move to the social field to establish conditions for further development. They then return back to each child to create the “easiest, most economical and most effective points of attachment” to social life (EW 5: 76). Such points of attachment—that is, roles in the interactions in school occupations—are suggested by adult occupations surrounding the child, a generative idea developed into an educational principle in The School and Society and Democracy and Education. These attachments, however, must not be made by teachers (remember Plato and his “wise men”). Assigning to the child a role would be unethical because this would involve a break between means and ends, both of which must be chosen by the child, acting spontaneously: The teacher cannot really make the connection. He can only form the conditions in such a way that the child may make it for himself. Moreover, even if the teacher could make the connection, the result would not be ethical. The moral life is lived only as the individual appreciates for himself the ends for which he is working, and does his work in a personal spirit of interest and devotion to these ends. (EW 5: 77) Character is the end of school work, but character means power of social agency in ethical pursuit of personal ends and a self-chosen social position. This form of character is forged through negotiation with other social actors in the context of social norms and positions. Even though they are social institutions, schools

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and their teachers must be midwives of free, self-directing, and mutually selforganizing persons, not agents of the state. “My Pedagogic Creed” (1897): The Bridge to the Middle Works “My Pedagogic Creed” (EW 5) sums up the theory of democracy and education resulting from Dewey’s developing ideas in the Early Works of the previous decade. The creed is stated in five sections, defining in turn “education,” “school,” “subject matter,” “method,” and “social progress.” In these we already find some of Dewey’s most characteristic ideas: that education is “is a process of living and not a preparation for future living” (EW 5: 87); that “the school must represent present life—life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground” (EW 5: 87); that the center of organization for school studies is not found in subject matter disciplines but in “the child’s own social activities” (EW 5: 89)—a charge against discipline-based curriculum, which Dewey continues to develop in subsequent works.4 Literary texts, he adds, “cannot be made the basis, although (they) may be made the summary of unification” (EW 5: 89). That is, such works can usefully be brought into play in the school but only after the social facts they dramatize have already been considered—an idea Dewey elaborates in Democracy and Education and elsewhere. While each plank echoes themes from the previous essays, the religious vocabulary is dropped; we no longer find a law of completely developed personality that finds its final resting place in God, a resulting society as a “Kingdom of Ends,” or democracy as the union of the human and spiritual realms. All that remains of these formulations is what has to be taken as a rhetorical throwaway line in the final plank—that the teacher is the prophet of the true God and the one who ushers in the true Kingdom of God (EW 5: 95). Dewey has cast off the excess baggage of religious absolutism and is prepared fully to develop the experimentalism of the Middle Works.

DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION IN THE MIDDLE WORKS After adopting his new secular vocabulary Dewey remained at Chicago and continued his involvement with the university’s laboratory school until 1903. During that period his most important work on education in this new key is The School and Society (1899), but Dewey continued to focus on education in such books as The Educational Situation (1901). After moving to Columbia University, however, Dewey, no longer a schoolman, turned his attention to issues occupying the professional philosophers of his day. As Westbrook puts it,

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On the face of it, the years between Dewey’s move to Columbia and American entry into World War I in 1917 were among the most professional of his career. Although his interest in public affairs and educational reform did not slacken, his activism did. The bulk of his writing in this period was confined to professional journals and dealt with abstruse philosophical issues. (1991: 119–20) Though remaining attentive to issues in public education, Dewey did not write another major book on the social aspects of education until Democracy and Education (1916). In that work we find thorough accounts of the concepts of democracy and education as well as a detailed examination of the educational requirements of democratic society. All the main educational commonplaces— teaching, learning, aims, methods, subject matter—are reexamined and reshaped to fit the needs of education for democracy. In that work Dewey reshapes insights from the Early Works as well as from earlier Middle Works classics, from The School and Society (MW 1, 1899) to Ethics (MW 5, 1908). As in section 1on the Early Works, in this section on the Middle Works, I start with Dewey’s renewed theory of democracy and then turn to his more developed theory of education. Democracy Throughout his body of work Dewey conceives democracy primarily as a “form of associated living” with shared interests within and rich communication between social groups and classes (MW 9: 94–5). His most detailed discussion of democracy as a form of associated living is found in chapter 7 of Democracy and Education (MW 9: 87–106), where he both analyzes the concept of democracy and explains the moral value of the democratic way of life. “Democracy” in Democracy and Education:  Dewey begins the discussion of democracy in Democracy and Education by demystifying the concept of “society”: modern societies, democratic or otherwise, are collections of interrelated groups and subgroups—economic, political, religious, and cultural. Each citizen is a member of several groups (MW 9: 87). Some groups are better—for both the individual members and the whole—than others. What, then, is the standard of value for any group? Dewey answers that in any group we will find some common interests (for otherwise what would hold the group together?) and interactions with other groups. We then can evaluate any group along these two dimensions: how numerous and varied are the interests shared by members and how full and free are the interactions of the group with other groups (MW 9: 89). If the interests shared within primary groups are narrow, and if intercourse with other groups is tightly constrained, the expression and expansion of the powers of members will be limited. They

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will not grow as persons, and the society will not prosper by drawing on their cooperation in achieving common ends (MW 9: 87–90). Dewey provides two examples of societies to demonstrate his point. In a criminal band, the members share only a single interest: plunder. The less they reveal, the less they rely upon one another, the less they make themselves visible as a group, the better for their individual safety. This narrow interest in turn limits the group’s free exchange with other groups—they cannot let their potential victims know about the one thing that holds them together. The criminal band is thus an impoverished form of group life. A healthy family, on the other hand, shares many mutual interests: health, economic, and cultural development, and more. The progress of any member in advancing these interests is felt sympathetically by all of the others. Their lives together, moreover, bring them into contact with many other groups and organizations—economic, cultural, educational, and political. They belong to a religious group; they support the local schools and form alliances within the parent–teacher association; they give their kids music lessons and take them to libraries, museums, and the orchestra. They actively support these organizations, which, in turn, support them in achieving their shared family aims. Each member of the family is growing in the power to achieve individual aims as well as in attitudes of care and consideration for each of the others and their aims. As a result, the family itself, as a group within society, and all of the groups to which it connects, also grow and prosper (MW 9: 88–90). These two groups—the criminal band and the healthy family—can be seen as microcosms of different forms of society. In a nondemocratic society, some groups have inordinate power and use it to dominate and exploit other groups for their own narrow aims. The ruling class sends directives to those in subordinate groups but has no interest in taking their thoughts and feelings into account or in cooperating with them for mutual benefit so there is no communication. Subordinates are treated as means, not as ends. Traditional education illustrates all of these tendencies. The lack of equitable intercourse limits the growth of both classes because without diversity of stimulation there is little novelty to provoke innovative thinking. Both subgroups remain stagnant, ignorant, fearful, and antagonistic. Society itself does not gain from ever-more-powerful contributions of and cooperation among its members. In a democratic society—a healthy family on a larger scale—the very opposite process takes place. All contribute to and share in the growth of both the society and its individual members. While these two criteria of social value, taken together, “point to democracy,” they do not define it (MW 9: 92). First, in a democratic society, not only are there numerous and varied shared interests but also there is greater reliance on the recognition of these shared interests as a factor in

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social control. The shared experiences of mutual interest and cooperative activity by themselves are not sufficient; members also must consciously recognize mutuality as a factor in sustaining and enhancing group life. They must consciously engage in both self-direction and social influence by explicit reference to the ends of others and must be self-conscious of doing so. In his context of post-Reconstruction America, an America scarred by race and class violence, Dewey is calling for a deeper recognition of national unity. Second, not only must groups interact freely and fully but there must also be a consequent change in social habit—the continuous readjustment of both individuals and groups as they meet new situations produced by their ever-increasing variety of social contacts (MW 9: 92–3). This requires a selfconscious, even loving, embrace of new challenges and the behavioral changes required to meet them (LW 11: 549–61). We might ask this question: what would mark the transition from the mere natural sympathy of a naturally healthy family to a family in accord with such additional requirements—an ethical family? This transition would require the conscious recognition of the family principle as an instrument of family self-control and the explicit commitment to continuous adjustment to meet emerging family situations. The first would require the explicit and repeated reference to family as a source of norms.5 A mother would not provide music lessons and orchestra concerts merely because she loves her children but in addition would make it clear that she is doing so to further family values and would expect the same concern for important values when her daughters have children of their own: families prosper when we all care for each other. Second, if one of the daughters showed unusual musical interest or talent, and her teacher directed her mother to find a better teacher for her in a city with a richer musical culture, the family would not only be willing to consider such radical readjustment of family life but would welcome and embrace such readjustment to further family values in the emerging situation. Dewey’s definition of democracy reimagines social life as a whole along these lines, living in conscious recognition and habitual accord with democratic principles. All members would be seeking their own ends and taking personal initiative to imagine and realize their chosen places in the social order. But they would also be taking the democratic principle explicitly to heart, taking the good and the chosen ends of others into their own conception of their own good, and forming democratic personalities. In this they would have realized the ethical ideal. Democratic character in the Ethics:  In the Ethics (1908), Dewey argues, as in “The Ethics of Democracy,” that democracy and the ethical ideal are the same. The moral person is one “in whom the habit of regarding all capacities

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and habits of self from the social standpoint is formed and active” (MW 5: 271). This results in democratic personality, harmonizing and expanding all capacities and desires of the self into a cooperative whole and “a blending, a fusing of the sympathetic tendencies with all the other impulsive and habitual traits of the self” (MW 5: 272). Here the self is not lost in the social but takes full account of social values as it expands as a unique force within the social setting. When the natural drive for individual power is permeated with an affectionate, sympathetic impulse, it no longer seeks to dominate. Instead, It becomes an interest in effectiveness of regard for common ends. When an interest in artistic or scientific objects is similarly fused, it loses the indifferent and coldly impersonal character which marks the specialist as such, and becomes an interest in the adequate aesthetic and intellectual development of the conditions of a common life. Sympathy does not merely associate one of these tendencies with another; still less does it make one a means to the other’s end. It so intimately permeates them as to transform them both into a single new and moral interest … The result of this reciprocal absorption is the disappearance of the natural tendencies in their original form and the generation of moral, i.e., socialized interests. (MW 5: 272–3) Self-realization, then, means formation out of the natural self of a voluntary self in which “socialized desires and affections are dominant” (MW 5: 357, emphasis added). Education is then seen as an ethical project, the transformation of the natural self with its distinctive, inborn dispositions and biases into the socially realized self, one in which these individual potentialities have been developed with regard to social values—that is, reformed into the democratic self. Education An education conducive to democratic character requires specific arrangements. As democratic personalities seek to be self-governing and reject external authority, they must find a substitute in voluntary disposition—self-government through communication and mutual concern. The dispositions are not entirely natural even though rooted in human instincts. They need to be developed through an education based on shared activities requiring creative thinking, communication, and active cooperation in breaking down barriers and obstacles of race, class, ethnicity, and gender that keep individuals or groups from grasping the impact of aims and actions of others (MW 9: 93). Such barriers impede the full development of every member and render collective self-government impossible. Although Dewey’s most abstract statement of these principles is found in Democracy and Education, this concrete portrait of education for democracy is prefigured in the Early Works (EW 4: 9) and made explicit in The School and Society.

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The School and Society (1899):  The keynote of “democracy” is sounded right at the start of The School and Society. We are apt, Dewey says, to view schools in terms of what is learned by individual students, but such a viewpoint must be enlarged—school is also a social instrument. A good society wishes to gather its best ideas and practices, its positive self-images and the ideals it hopes to realize in the future, and place them at the disposal of all of its new members. Anything less is “unlovely” and “destroys our democracy” (MW 1: 5). The need for school occupations in industrial society  Democratic society in the emerging industrial era, as Dewey experienced it at firsthand in Chicago and New York, thus required an educational transformation. Previously the school could limit itself to the three R’s (reading, writing, ’rithmetic) because the rural household, as the center of activity, provided the most basic education in habits of industry, cooperation, and effective consecutive thought. In the era of family farming and household manufacture, the entire industrial process stood revealed, and every family member played an important role (MW 1: 7). The household provided for the training in discipline and character. It offered intimate acquaintance with the real things, materials, and processes of nature.

FIGURE 1.2  Children at St. German’s school, Cardiff, making Christmas puddings for their party, December 15, 1939

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Children received training in thinking, that is, in observation, constructive imagination, and logic in forming a vivid sense of reality. Dewey writes: We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building involved in this kind of life: training in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world. There was always something which really needed to be done, and a real necessity that each member of the household should do his own part faithfully and in cooperation with others. (MW 1: 7–8) But children in the industrial cities no longer had such experiences, and no object lessons in the schools could replace them. Conventional schools are crowded places. There is little room to act and no incentive for children to do anything. Dewey remarks that “everything is arranged for handling as large numbers of children as possible, for dealing with children en masse, as an aggregate of units; involving, again, that they be treated passively” (MW 1: 22). There is no impetus for thought: observation, selection, and inference in relation to the achievement of ends. To restore the educational values that had been lost, educationally equivalent activities had to be introduced into the school. In his laboratory school Dewey came to organize such activities under the banner of “occupations,” a term that he subsequently elevated into an educational principle in The School and Society and Democracy and Education.6 What are school occupations?  School occupations are not busy work, not mere “hands-on” tasks, but activities that to the greatest extent possible reproduce adult activities of the surrounding community in the school. The main examples Dewey discusses in School and Society (MW 1: ch. 2) are cooking, sewing, and woodworking, but the principles he develops about school occupations apply broadly (see Figure. 1.2). Occupational activities—both in and out of school— involve the taking of means to ends under conditions of uncertainty. They thus require thought: “continual observation of materials, and continual planning and reflection, in order that the practical or executive side may be successfully carried on” (MW  1: 92). Thus, such activities, in contrast with typical school lessons, require and actually bring out a “maximum of consciousness” (MW 1: 93) because, as we might say, the unexpected is expected. Learners must always be ready to respond to unanticipated events. A rhythmic flow of action (hesitation—reflection—response) prevails, as Dewey explains in such works as Studies in Logical Theory (esp. chs. 2–4; MW 2: 316–67); How We Think (MW 6: 178–356); and Democracy and Education (esp. chs. 11 and 12; MW 9: 146–70). Young people have a direct, instinctive interest in occupational activities; the instincts that find their outlet in occupations are of an “exceedingly fundamental and permanent type” because they develop into relations with nature that sustain life (MW 1: 94–6). The use of occupations in schools connects young people to the surrounding life in society. Even in the industrial

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city children are surrounded daily by home occupations: cooking, sewing, and cleaning. They see their elders engaged in occupations: the postmaster, butcher, baker, greengrocer, milkman, and door-to-door salesman. They are affected continually by the results of these occupations, for example as parents decorate the home or return from work with a paycheck (MW 1: 95). School occupations and democratic community  Dewey’s exposition of the occupational principle in education is guided throughout by his conception of democracy and the goal of promoting democratic character. On the narrowly educational side, school occupations, freed from economic stress, become “allies of arts and centres of science” (MW 1: 13). Geography now presents the earth as the “enduring home” of occupations; it is through occupations that humanity makes historical and political progress and gains intellectual understanding of the forces of nature (MW 1: 3). Occupations supply school children a genuine motivation for school work (MW 1: 15). For democratic education, however, the social side is even more important. Through engagement in familiar occupations, children become alert, and their senses are excited (MW 1: 8); they help others and thus set free their own powers as well as those of others; they participate in the spirit of free communication and the interchange of ideas and suggestions (MW 1: 8); they cocreate their own standard of community value (MW 1: 11). They acquire discipline (MW 1: 13–14)—habits of industry and order (MW 1: 25). Through occupations the school becomes the child’s habitat, a miniature community and an embryonic society (MW 1: 12) filled with the life activities of the larger society (MW 1: 19). Through occupations, schools can provide all young people with the tools for effective self-direction. Schools organized around occupations train all children into membership in community, saturating them with the spirit of service. Schooling through occupations thus provides our best assurance for building a society that is “worthy, lovely and harmonious”—that is, a democratic society (MW 1: 20). How can the school include occupations?  Dewey offers several diagrams of schools organized around occupations. Figure 1.3 is his diagram of the primary school (MW 1: 49). Note that the school is surrounded by homes, businesses, laboratories, and universities filled with adult occupations as well as by nature: gardens, parks, and the countryside. The school, in its turn, is composed of occupational areas for cooking, sewing, and woodworking (other potential occupational areas might include print shops, photography and graphic design studios, and gardens). The school has no classrooms. How, then, is the more intellectual side of education to proceed? “The Bearings of Pragmatism upon Education” (1908):  Dewey provides a useful exposition of the progression from occupations to school subject matter learning in “The Bearings of Pragmatism upon Education” (MW 4: 178–92). He states,

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FIGURE 1.3  Dewey’s diagram of a primary school as a collection of occupational areas

Every educative process should begin with doing something; and the necessary training of sense perception, memory, imagination and judgment should grow out of the conditions and needs of what is being done … something inherently significant, and of such a nature that the pupil appreciates for himself its importance enough to take a vital interest in it. (MW 4: 185 emphasis in original) The something done, Dewey says, should be of the nature of an occupation: “Clay modelling, gardening, shop-work in wood or metal, cooking, weaving, etc. – these are the normal methods for cultivating power of observation and accurate interpretation of sensations” (MW 4: 186). He continues, The race did not acquire its original store of information for the sake of knowledge, nor yet by having natural objects impress themselves on the mind. It learned about plants, animals, stones, metals, weather, etc., because  a  knowledge of these things was required to solve problems of  food,  shelter, clothing, social cooperation and defense and so on. (MW 4: 186–7) “Intellectual instruction,” Dewey now says, in an uncharacteristically dogmatic statement of this occupational principle, “would grow—all of it—out of the

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needs and opportunities of activities engaged in by the students themselves. This principle would be universal” (MW 4: 187, emphasis added). Because of persistent misunderstandings it is essential to emphasize that, on Dewey’s theory, occupational activities and other forms of “learning by doing” provide merely the setting and starting point for intellectual education. More indirect and abstract subject matters grow out of these activities quite immediately as students reach out for additional facts and theories: Some information is immediately required in order to do anything successfully; a child cannot garden intelligently without learning about soils, seeds, measures, plants and their growth, the facts of rain, sunshine, etc. Interest in the continuous carrying on of such an activity would, however, generate curiosity and openness of mind about many things not directly related to the immediate needs … One great object then in having school work organized mainly about … lines of occupation is that these afford natural axes for the collection and organization of all kinds of facts and ideas. (MW 4: 188) Dewey concludes that the “primary value” of school occupations “is educational … It does not exclude, but includes a broad and liberal scheme of knowledge” (MW 4: 190). This claim appears to rely on two competing senses of “educational.” Dewey appears to be claiming that the justification for occupations is that they provide a better education than alternatives in the narrow sense of a “broad and liberal scheme of knowledge.” But Dewey does not support this claim. He would be on safer ground to assert that the primary value of occupations is to support the development of democratic character— on his account the aim of education in the broad sense—while they also support a broad and liberal scheme of subject matter knowledge (but not necessarily the best such scheme). He might then add that democratic character, which embraces wide communication and novelty, in its turn is conducive to full intellectual development (but not necessarily the highest level of intellectual development) for all members of society. Democracy and Education I have explained in this chapter, the theory of democracy presented in Democracy and Education and the theory of education presented in the Middle Works before its publication. What, then, does Dewey’s book, Democracy and Education itself add to the theory of democratic education? The entire work is a comprehensive treatise on democratic education, so I will have to be selective. The first chapters of Democracy and Education present a theory of education applicable to any kind of society, whether democratic or not. Dewey

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explores the values in everyday informal learning and school subject matter learning and  investigates how best to balance them in a school program, bringing  together  ideas we have already encountered but offering a new synthesis. He starts by noting that all doing—human action—is directed to ends. Our actions, moreover, always take place in social contexts, where other people are acting in pursuit of their ends. Thus, every action already presupposes a social world with shared norms that have developed through social interaction. For Dewey, education in its broadest sense is the reconstruction of experience. This implies bringing a child along from infancy to full participation in adult occupations, which themselves involve unending reconstruction. The way to bring young people along is to engage them directly in school occupations requiring reflective thinking throughout childhood and youth. As young people act in pursuit of their ends in social contexts, they learn from what they do and undergo—from experience (acting and undergoing). Experience reconditions their habits. They “grow”— they get better at doing things as they meet with obstacles to overcome, further developing their many capabilities. Doing requires communication, so in doing they also learn how to relate to and get along with, listen to, lead, and follow other people. “The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs,” Dewey argues, “creates for all a new and broader environment” for communication (MW 9: 26). All communication is educative because in communication, as each person shares in what the other has thought and felt, their own attitude is modified (MW 9: 8). Through school occupations young people are surrounded by, and incorporate  within themselves, the norms and attitudes of social life. “Children are gifted with an equipment of the first order for social intercourse” (MW 9: 48). What the child does and what he can do, therefore, “depends  on  the  expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others” (MW 9: 15–16), so as children join in and participate, their behaviors invite the application of norms and their “original impulses are modified” (MW 9: 17). They become members of the group, sharing ideas and feelings with others. In this way children become “possessed by the emotional attitude of the group” (MW 9: 18). In occupations the actions of children are directed by the ends inhering in the occupations themselves, not (directly) by adults. In baking a cake, it is the needs of the cake, not the teacher, that should be directing activity. Adults—parents and teachers—can bring children along best by “setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways of acting” (MW 9: 18). Thus, the first task of school teachers is to design occupational activity areas—the kitchen, the sewing room, the shop—and then design structured activities within which the young people can freely engage according to their interests.

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Deliberate teaching can then “free the capacities thus formed for fuller” exercise (MW 9: 21). As engagement in occupations proceeds, learners will need more logically organized subject matter knowledge to make sense of their experience. Teachers can then progressively blend in such knowledge, so that eventually learners attain adult levels of knowledge and can take on adult roles in society. Young members of society acquire the norms and values inherent in adult behaviors in the surrounding society. But they also possess considerable plasticity—“the ability to learn from experience, to modify their actions on the basis of the results of prior actions” (MW 9: 49). “Life is development, and growing is life” (MW 9: 54). Experience brings novelty in its wake. Education continues throughout life. Life is education, and education is life, not preparation  for future life. There is thus nothing to which education is subordinate (MW 9: 56). Education “has no end beyond itself”; it is its own end (MW 9: 58). Democracy in Education:  The best way of educating young people is by engaging them progressively in occupations of the society. The aim is not to prepare them for specific occupations in society as presently organized but to equip them to face challenges in society as it unpredictably evolves. Establishing democratic settings for education-through-occupations is the optimal way of achieving this aim. This sets the stage for the most distinctive contribution of Democracy and Education: the reshaping of standard educational commonplaces—learning and teaching, aims, methods, and subject matters—for democratic education. Each element contributes a specific feature to the composite picture. Learning and teaching  In conventional, nondemocratic education, teaching consists of conveying preselected, preorganized materials to students. Learning consists in memorizing those materials and replicating them on examinations. By contrast, teaching in the democratic school always begins with engaging learners voluntarily in activities: “The educator’s part in the enterprise of education is to furnish the environment which stimulates responses and directs the learner’s course” (MW 9: 188). Learning, then, does not mean passively listening to lectures or reading textbooks or preparing for exams. It derives directly from engagement in activities with their own inherent ends—flowers in the case of gardening, a cake in the case of baking. “The basic control resides in the nature of the situations in which the young take part” (MW 9: 45). Teachers do not direct learning: “To talk about an educational aim when approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons, and the giving of directions by another, is to talk nonsense” (MW 9: 104). The initial tasks of teachers are thus designing activity areas and devising structured activities within them, the settings in which learners voluntarily

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engage. Consider the school kitchen. When children prepare their food, the “buoyant outgoing energy … is so obvious as fairly to strike one in the face” (MW 1: 10). The justification for the kitchen, however, is not child excitement. Rather, preparing food is a “kind of activity … which leads students to attend to the relation of means and ends, and then to consideration of the way things interact with one another to produce definite effects” (LW 13: 57, emphasis in original). Energy and attention, however, will not emerge in just any kitchen. Everything depends on the design of the kitchen as a laboratory in which young people can think to some purpose and the structure and aims of the structured activities in such a kitchen. Aims  There are, Dewey states, no aims of education lying outside of education. If aims are imposed by some force beyond the educational process, the process is no longer democratic; the free action of teachers and learners is constrained. Aims in democratic education emerge within educational settings and are as numerous as the acts that teachers and learners may take in pursuing them. The questions thus shift from “what are the aims of education?” to “what is an aim in education?” and “what are good aims in education?”. Aims always relate to results, so for the teacher the first issue is “whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity” (MW 9: 108). The aim must prevent “capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous selfexpression.” It must conduce to “the progressive completing of a process” (MW 9: 108). Acting with an aim thus means “foresight in advance of the end or possible termination” (MW 9: 108). Another issue, for teacher and student alike, is whether the aim gives adequate direction to the activity, whether it influences the steps taken to reach the end, by aiding observation of conditions, determination of possible means, and shaping an economical ordering of means (MW 9: 109). What then are good aims? Dewey offers three criteria for evaluating aims. First, the aim must be situational, an “outgrowth of existing conditions. It must be based upon a consideration of what is already going on; upon the resources and difficulties of the situation” (MW 9: 111). Any aims brought in from outside these conditions, for example, by reference to externally imposed theories or established curriculum guides, limit intelligence because they reduce intelligence to the mechanical choice of means (MW 9: 111). Second, good aims have to be flexible. Acting intelligently—with attention to connections and consequences in complex situations—brings unforeseen and unpredictable conditions to light, requiring some modification of our aims. Any end imposed from without is rigid—it lacks a “working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation” (MW 9: 111). Third, by providing an end in view, the aim frees activity by establishing boundaries, just as the rules of a sonnet enable the poet in writing a sonnet. The

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aim is “only a mark or sign by which the mind specifies the activity one desires to carry out” (MW 9: 112). Without a target, without something to hit, the archer’s activity would be arbitrary. Method  In conventional, nondemocratic education, Dewey says, subject matter and method are considered as two independent realms, two separate affairs. Subject matter is conceived as a “ready-made systematized classification of the facts and principles of man and nature” (MW 9: 171). Method, in turn, is then simply “the ways in which this antecedent subject matter may be best presented to and impressed upon the mind” (MW 9: 171). In other words, the official subject matter selection is determined by reference to educational aims imposed from outside the educational process. In democratic education, methods and subject matters interpenetrate. Subject matter is simply material as used in doing something. Method, then, is no more than “the effective direction of subject matter to desired results … the material of study is capable of indefinite uses and method in any case is but an effective way of employing some material for some end” (MW 9: 172–3). When we separate method and subject matter and study instructional methods in isolation, methods no longer serve intelligence. They do not arise out of a teacher’s close observation of young people’s uses of materials. Instead they become “authoritatively recommended to teachers” and reduced to “mechanical uniformity”—tools to be “applied” by all teachers. But, Where flexible personal experiences are promoted by providing an environment which calls out directed occupations in work and play, the methods ascertained will vary with individuals—for it is certain that each  individual has something characteristic in his way of going at things. (MW 9: 175) Teaching method, in short, is intelligent pedagogical thinking in the situation: observation, selection, inference, and action directed toward results. Teachers as free individuals will have their own style of thinking based on their learning histories. The personal methods of an individual teacher are rooted in their “native tendencies and his acquired habits and interests. The method of one will vary (and properly vary) as his original instinctive capacities vary, as his past experiences and his preferences vary” (MW 9: 180, emphasis in original). This hardly means, however, that teachers should capriciously improvise. Teaching, like all forms of action, is social. In any art there already exists a tradition sufficiently definite as to acquaint novices with materials and tools. Teachers are members of communities of practice—their training “requires persistent and concentrated attention to objective materials,” as “artists” they  then make their “own attempts to see what succeeds and what fails” (MW  9:  178). Such experiences “supply the material for what may be called

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general method … a cumulative body of fairly stable methods for reaching results, a body authorized by past experience and by intellectual analysis, which an individual ignores at his peril” (MW 9: 177, emphasis in original). These general methods, however, “are in no way opposed to individual initiative and originality—to personal ways of doing things” (MW 9: 178). There is a clear distinction, Dewey states, between general method and prescribed rule. The first guides indirectly as mediated by individual intelligence. The second works directly through conformity to orders externally imposed. The same considerations of method apply equally to learners. Learners also are saturated by community norms. In democratic education, they too enter, through participation in school occupations, into normative traditions and thus acquire general intellectual methods, which they too use and test in the course of developing their own individual approaches to action (MW 9: 179–80). Subject matter  In traditional, nondemocratic education, subject matter is imposed by external authorities. Neither teachers nor students have any role in selecting or shaping it. In democratic education, subject matter consists of “the facts observed, recalled, read, and talked about, and the ideas suggested, in the course of a development of a situation having a purpose” (MW 9: 188). In informal education, in the home kitchen or shop or playground, subject matter is “carried directly in the matrix of social intercourse” (MW 9: 188)—in the kitchen stove, the mixing bowls and kitchen implements, the shop tools, the swings and see-saws. In formal education, however, in school teaching and learning, we have to distinguish the subject matter of the teacher from that organized for learners. For teachers, who have both a fund of life experiences and a broad secondary and collegiate education, subject matter represents the ripe fruitage of experiences like theirs … the various studies represent working resources, available capital … the formulated, crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the adult; the material as found in books and in works of art. (MW 9: 190) By contrast, the subject matter of the young consists in “isolated scraps” organized not in academic disciplines and professional fields but in connection with the direct practical centers of child interest—the home and neighborhood. “To the one who is learned, subject matter is extensive, accurately defined, and logically interrelated. To the one who is learning, it is fluid, partial, and connected through his personal occupations” (MW 9: 191). How then is subject matter to be developed in the school? I have already discussed Dewey’s general answer as developed in The School and Society and “The Bearings of Pragmatism upon Education.” We start not with the subject matter disciplines that represent knowledge as already organized for adult use but with school occupations that mirror the occupations of the surrounding

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society. Young people are already surrounded by such occupations; they are familiar with their settings and materials and, in an elemental way, their methods. As they engage in cooperative activities in such occupational settings, they rely first on their somewhat primitive understandings. Then they quickly encounter problems and obstacles that cause them to think—that is, to observe and reflect, to abstract and select, to infer and test—a process that Dewey analyzes in detail in chapter 11 of Democracy and Education, “Experience and Thinking” (MW 9: 147–59) and then applies to school learning in chapter 12, “Thinking in Education” (MW 9: 160–71). Learners employ their own methods of attack, and as they use and modify them, they become more effective. This process of growth requires communication both within the group and with adults, who serve in a consultative role, clarifying questions and directing learners to useful information resources. In chapter 14 of Democracy and Education, “The Nature of Subject Matter,” Dewey extends this idea, noting three typical stages in the development of subject matter learning: (1) elementary knowledge in action; (2) knowledge augmented by communication and information; and finally (3) knowledge “enlarged and worked over into rationally or logically organized material” (MW 9: 192)—that is, the disciplined knowledge of subject matter experts. This stage model then serves as his template for presenting and organizing subject matter in school. In the first stage, teachers bring learners into activities involving things the learners are already best acquainted with—that is, things put to frequent use: tables and chairs, food and clothes, knives and forks, paper and pencils—things used so frequently that learners can already anticipate how they will act and react. These activities with familiar things move rapidly into the second stage: dealings with other people. The communicative impulses of the young have to be reshaped to establish and maintain effective connections, in the course of which a large fund of informal social knowledge gets established. Young individuals learn from one another; they tell of their experiences and learn from the experiences of others, including peers, teachers, and other adults, which then enter their own body of experience. Their actions are subject to critical assessments, through which they become familiar with intellectual norms. The information teachers and others introduce at this stage can then be tested against two related criteria: “Does it grow naturally out of some question with which the student is concerned? Does it fit into his more direct acquaintance so as to increase its efficacy and deepen its meaning?” (MW 9: 194). It serves two purposes: it provides a knowledge base “which can be fallen back upon as given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation” as well as a stimulus to further inquiry (MW 9: 196).

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The information introduced in the course of developing activities is, however, still piecemeal, unorganized. In the third stage the information discovered and conveyed is organized and presented in logical form. Ideas are organized so that “every … statement shall be of such a kind as to follow from others and to lead to others” (MW 9: 198). In this way the unorganized information is transformed into a body of rationalized, scientific knowledge. Text materials and media exhibiting the disciplinary—scientific—organization of subject matter are introduced to unify what has been learned, to connect the dots. Science is a name for knowledge in its most characteristic form. It represents in its degree, the perfected outcome of learning … What is known, in a given case, is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think with rather than that which we think about. (MW 9: 196, emphasis in original) What is settled at any time, however, can be unsettled by further inquiry. While ordinary people cling to established truths, science has an “invaluable place” in subject matter learning because only by “initiation into the scientific spirit” can learners use “the best tools … for effectively directed reflection” when considering and reappraising ideas (MW 9: 198). At the end of the third stage of subject matter development, learners are saturated with the spirit of science. In making and assessing claims they habitually appeal to relevant evidence. Their attention remains fixed on problems and issues of public concern, their sympathies extend broadly to all members of the community, and they consider proposed solutions to problems in the spirit of science, just as laboratory scientists test empirical assertions and communicate their results.

CONCLUSION The main lines of Dewey’s theory of democratic education are laid out by the close of Democracy and Education though Dewey extended the theory in his later works (e.g., to adult education in The Public and Its Problems, LW 2) and qualified it, for example, in “The Way out of Educational Confusion” (LW 6: 88), where he reluctantly weakens the demand that all intellectual education must begin with learning-by-doing in cooperative activities. His theory took account of the pressing social and political problems of the human community at the turn of the twentieth century. These included national, ethnic, and class conflict, imperialism and war, and challenges to received concepts of knowledge and value. Drawing on classics from existing philosophical and educational traditions—from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Fröbel, and Herbart, among others—Dewey constructed a new comprehensive theory of democratic education for his time.

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His work was widely recognized in his own day and has continued to be a stimulus for new work in educational theory as well as a guide to concrete projects of educational reform and innovation. Later movements in philosophy of education have had to take account of Dewey’s work. For example, Israel Scheffler (1974) and Richard S. Peters (1977), leaders of the analytic revolution in philosophy of education, both attended to Dewey and acknowledged him as a predecessor. Richard Rorty (1982) and Larry Hickman (2007) claim that Dewey had already solved many of the problems plaguing postmodern philosophy.7 Work in the critical theory tradition of the Frankfurt School is now explicitly moving in directions laid out by Dewey (Frega 2017). As testimony to Dewey’s continuing importance, the centennial year of the publication of Democracy and Education led to an outpouring of new work on Dewey’s theory of democratic education. This new work includes special issues of leading scholarly journals, single-author and edited books, and handbooks.8 Meanwhile, many recent educational innovations have definite roots in Dewey’s thought, including open classrooms, cooperative learning, experiential education, schools as learning communities, and philosophy for children. But, as Laurel Tanner (1997) notes, the power of such movements has been diminished by their selection of only one or two elements of Dewey’s theory while ignoring the rest. As we enter the post-truth era, where alternative facts abound and democratic values recede, it remains to be seen whether Dewey’s theory of democratic education will retain its relevance in philosophy of education. It is possible that entirely new formulations will inspire future educational philosophers and practitioners, but a hundred years after its mature formulation, Dewey’s theory of democratic education continues to inspire leaders in educational theory and practice throughout the world.

NOTES 1 2

EW refers to the Early Works, and MW to The Middle Works, in The Collected Works of John Dewey. LW will also be used in this chapter to refer to The Later Works. Robert Westbrook notes that Dewey scholars have devoted relatively little attention to Dewey’s formative years as a social theorist and that “questions about his career as a democratic theorist remain largely unexplored” (1991: 34). He goes on to say that Dewey’s social ideas were “not especially original. Apart from their considerable importance in the development of his democratic theory, his ethical and political writings … stand as minor and largely derivative contributions to idealist social thought” (p.  37). It is worth noting that Westbrook here signals that, despite their neglect, Dewey’s social writings in the Early Works did have “considerable importance” for the development of his democratic theory. As an example of this neglect of Dewey’s early years in the scholarly literature, in his account of Dewey’s philosophy of democracy and education prior to Democracy

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and Education, J.J. Chambliss (2003) completely ignores the essays in the Early Works; he relies exclusively on two unpublished sets of lecture notes from courses on philosophy of education. See the discussion of Brown v. Board of Education, at the History Channel website, “Brown v. Board of Education” (2009), available online at https://www.history. com/topics/black-history/brown-v-board-of-education-of-topeka. See especially “The St. Louis Congress of the Arts and Sciences” (MW 3: 145–50) and “The Way Out of Educational Confusion” (LW 6: 76–90). Reliance on family norms as keystones of moral development is an essential element of Confucian culture, and such norms are also found in many other cultures. The term “occupation” occurs seventy-four times in School and Society and ninetyseven times in Democracy and Education. Richard Rorty, in the preface to Consequences of Pragmatism, notoriously claims that Dewey was “waiting at the end of the dialectical road” (1982: xiii) that both Anglo-American analytic philosophers and European postmodernists were traveling. For recent edited collections, see, for example, Gordon and English (2018); Lowery and Jenlink (2019); Waks (2016); Waks and English (2017); Oliverio, Striano, and Waks (2016); Zhang (2019). For recent single-author monographs, see Pring (2014) and Phillips (2016).

REFERENCES Primary sources Dewey, John (1887/2008)), Psychology, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Early Works, 1882–1898, Vol. 2 Psychology. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1888/2008), “The Ethics of Democracy,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Early Works, 1882-1898, Vol. 1 Early Essays and Leibnitz's New Essays, 227–249, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1892/2008)), “Christianity and Democracy,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Early Works, 1882–1898, Vol. 4 Early Essays and The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus, 3–10, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1893/2008), “Self-Realization as Ethical Ideal,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Early Works, 1882–1898, Vol. 4 Early Essays and The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus, 42–53, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1897/2008), “Ethical Principles Underlying Education,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Early Works, 1882–1898, Vol. 5 Early Essays, 55–83, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1897/2008), “My Pedagogical Creed,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Early Works, 1882–1898, Vol. 5 Early Essays, 84–95, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1899/2008), The School and Society, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 1 Journal Articles, Book Reviews, and Miscellany, and The School and Society, and The Educational Situation, 1–110, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1903/2008), “The St. Louis Congress of the Arts and Sciences,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 3 Journal Articles, Book Reviews, and Miscellany, 144–149, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1908/2008), Ethics, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899– 1924, Vol. 5 Ethics, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Dewey, John (1909/2008), “The Bearings of Pragmatism upon Education,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 4 Journal Articles, Book Reviews, and The Pragmatic Movement of Contemporary Thought and Moral Principles in Education, 178–91, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1910/2008), How We Think, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 6 Journal Articles, Book Reviews, Miscellany, and How We Think, 177–356, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1910/2008), “Tolstoi’s Art,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 17 Miscellaneous Writings, 380–92, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1916/2008), Democracy and Education, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899-1924, Vol. 9 Democracy and Education, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1927/2008), The Public and its Problems, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 2 Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and The Public and its Problems, 237–372, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1931/2008), “The Way Out of Educational Confusion”, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 6 Essays, Reviews and Miscellany, 75–89, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Secondary sources Boostrom, Robert, ed. (2016), “Rethinking John Dewey’s Democracy and Education on Its Centennial,” special issue of Journal of Curriculum Studies, 48 (1). Chambliss, J.J. (2003), “John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education Before Democracy and Education,” Education and Culture, 19 (1): 1–7. Damico, Alfonso J. (1978), Individuality and Community: The Social and Political Thought of John Dewey, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Frega, Roberto (2017), “Pragmatizing Critical Theory’s Province,” Dewey Studies, 1 (2): 4–47. Gordon, Mordechai and Andrea English (2018), John Dewey’s Democracy and Education in an Era of Globalization, London: Routledge. (Originally published as Educational Philosophy and Theory, 58 (10), September 2016.) Hickman, Larry A. (2007), Pragmatism As Post-postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey, Vol. 21. New York: Fordham University Press. Lowery, Charles and Patrick Jenlink, eds. (2019), The Handbook of Dewey´s Educational Theory and Practice, Dordrecht: Brill/Sense. Oliverio, Stephano, Maura Striano, and Leonard Waks, eds. (2016), “Dewey’s Democracy and Education As a Source of and a Resource for European Educational Theory and Practice,” special issue of European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 8 (1). Peters, Richard S. (1977), John Dewey Reconsidered, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Phillips, D.C. (2016), A Companion to John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pring, Richard (2014), John Dewey, London: Bloomsbury. Rogers, Melvin L. (2011), “The Fact of Sacrifice and Necessity of Faith: Dewey and the Ethics of Democracy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 47 (3): 274–300.

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Rorty, Richard (1982), Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ryan, Alan (1995), John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, New York: Norton. Scheffler, Israel (1974), Four Pragmatists: Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead and Dewey, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Tanner, Laurel (1997), Dewey’s Laboratory School: Lessons for Today, New York: Teachers College Press. Waks, Leonard, ed. (2016), “Symposium: Democracy and Education at 100,” special double issue of Educational Theory, 66 (1/2): 1–296. Waks, Leonard and Andrea English, eds. (2017), The Centennial Handbook of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westbrook, Robert (1991), John Dewey and American Democracy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zhang, Huajun, ed. (2019), “Dewey and Chinese Education,” special issue of Beijing International Review of Education, 1 (4): 585–760.

CHAPTER TWO

Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Education DEBORAH KERDEMAN

INTRODUCTION To introduce the value of phenomenology and hermeneutics for education, I would like to turn to four noted education scholars whose work draws on these philosophical approaches. According to Martinus Jan Langeveld, phenomenology confronts educators with “questions which concern the essential meaning of being human itself” (1983a: 6). Max van Manen writes that, for phenomenologists, “to study pedagogy is to change one’s self … The question is how one can identify and ‘form’ oneself in the everyday experience of the pedagogical encounter” (2014: 609). Andrzej Wiercinski describes how hermeneutic thinkers understand education. “In its deepest existential sense,” Wiercinski explains, “education is a call to transform our life by exercising openness toward the other and the unknown” (2011: 109; see also Wiercinski 2015). Finally, Paul Fairfield maintains that phenomenology and hermeneutics help us see how “the educative process carries us along in a logic of question and answer in which no one has the last word. It forms the soul and leaves us not in secure possession of the truth but in its relentless pursuit” (2011b: 3). As these scholars suggest, phenomenology and hermeneutics envision a clear aim for education. Specifically, education should help people learn to lead good lives filled with meaning and purpose. Engaging with others to explore

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existential and ethical questions is vital for realizing this aim. These engagements produce no final answers. Nonetheless, they form souls and transform selfunderstanding. The phenomenological-hermeneutic view of education differs from the way education tends to be framed today. “In modern societies,” Wiercinski observes, “education is seen as a kind of insurance policy … Education is reduced to useful knowledge which can be applied as need be. Worse still is the reduction of education to the formality of a certification, which stands for mastery and professionality in a given field of knowledge” (2011: 108–9). Van Manen echoes Wiercinski’s viewpoint. He writes, “we neither serve our children nor their classroom teachers and school administrators well when we only focus narrowly on ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘testable results’ that fail to acknowledge that deep and rich educational experiences cannot properly and adequately be described in terms of programs of learning and school productivities” (Van Manen 2016a: 12). According to Wiercinski and Van Manen, education typically is seen as a means for achieving certain outcomes, notably the acquisition of knowledge and skill-based competencies. These outcomes serve ends that are not selfevidently educational, such as economic productivity and professional advancement. This instrumental view of education is dehumanizing, these scholars contend. It assumes that education is a commodity, the value of which depends on market demand, not on whether people find education personally meaningful. It also assumes that education certifies that students have finished learning and can get on with life. By contrast, phenomenology and hermeneutics hold that education is not extrinsic to a good life. Education instead is a potentially transformative experience and thus is an intrinsically valuable end in itself. “We need to restore to education its proper pedagogical impulse and meaningfulness,” Van Manen (2016a: 12) argues. For phenomenologicalhermeneutic education scholars, challenging the instrumental view of education is not a call for reform guided by evidence-based social science research. Fairfield indicates why social science is incapable of rehumanizing education: “When we insist that education, and educational research, be brought within a framework of utility and scientificity, we run the risk of misunderstanding through oversimplification … our theorizing must reflect this fact and not insist that the [educational] phenomena be made to fit a model imported from the sciences” (2011a: 2). Thus, according to Fairfield, employing social science methods and theories will not explain why people find education valuable because social science theories simplify the complexity of educational practice. A hermeneutic theory of education, on the other hand, “is articulated not at some remove from the practice itself but as a phenomenological description of teaching and learning as

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they occur within institutions or without them” (Fairfield 2011b: 3). Langeveld adds, “From a phenomenological point of view, we seek the essential meanings in the human encounter, rather than in pure reflection or in speculative theories, which only pretend to have practical import” (1983a: 6). In sum, the scholars I have examined concur: phenomenology and hermeneutics provide a much-needed corrective to prevailing instrumental assumptions about education. The instrumental view of education, they maintain,  is supported by social science research, which fails to recognize or explain why people find education existentially compelling. By contrast, phenomenology and hermeneutics regard education as an inherently meaningful, fundamentally ethical, and personally transformative experience. People resonate with this view of education, these scholars claim, because it reflectively illuminates what they already know and value about education. On the surface, the phenomenological-hermeneutic indictment of social science seems unfair. Many social scientists and educational researchers question whether abstract theories can illuminate educational practices. Some are developing methods and theories that are rooted in everyday practical knowledge. Additionally, researchers who employ qualitative methods stress that education is a meaning-laden experience, which researchers can interpret from the perspective of people in various sociocultural contexts (e.g., see Flyvbjerg 2001; Jessor 1996; Strauss 1998). Assuming that phenomenological and hermeneutic education scholars are aware of these trends, we can surmise that these developments strike them as inadequate. For phenomenological-hermeneutic scholars, social science knowledge simply cannot clarify people’s existential “lived” experience of education. Why do phenomenological-hermeneutic education scholars contend that the existential meaning of education eludes social science? Why do these scholars believe that phenomenology and hermeneutics are better suited to illuminate education as an existentially compelling experience? What do these scholars do to illuminate lived experience in educational contexts? To answer these questions, it is helpful to turn to the development of phenomenology and hermeneutics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The writings of four German philosophers constitute important turning points in the history of phenomenology and hermeneutics, in part because these thinkers wrestled with the tension between scientific knowledge and lived experience in ways that were especially innovative and deep. These four philosophers are Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). Through summarizing their ideas, it becomes clear that the tension between scientific knowledge and lived experience is not unique to education. This tension instead can arise whenever scholars reflectively examine any aspect of social life.

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In the next section, I will briefly examine how Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer understand the limitations of science for studying social life and why they think phenomenology and hermeneutics are better suited reflectively to illuminate lived experience. I then will refer to their philosophical ideas to suggest why phenomenological-hermeneutic education scholars challenge social science. I also will indicate how these scholars draw on phenomenology and hermeneutics to reimagine the study of education. In conclusion, I will identify an example of how the tension between scientific knowledge and lived experience continues to be significant for phenomenological-hermeneutic education scholars.

LIVED EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL SCIENCE: DILEMMAS FOR DILTHEY AND HUSSERL Wilhelm Dilthey During the nineteenth century, science was making great advances in explaining the natural world. A number of scholars wanted to harness the power of scientific methods to study society. Dilthey (see Figure 2.1) countered that scientific methods could not illuminate social meanings, address practical questions, or guide moral problems. This is because science presumes an incorrect view of human experience. According to Dilthey, science assumes that experience consists of discrete sensory data that cognition links together to render experience meaningful. Thus, for example, scientists invoke a concept such as causation to explain how sense data are meaningfully related. Dilthey argued that experience does not consist of discrete sensory data that must be cognitively linked. Neither does cognition impose meaning on “brute” experience. Experience, rather, is inherently meaningful, that is, experience already is structured and coherent when it is perceived. The holistic meaning of experience, in turn, is directly ascertained in acts of perception. Dilthey used the term “Erlebnis” (lived experience or life experience) to describe both the wholeness and intensity of human experience and the fact that people grasp the meaning of experience with intuitive immediacy.1 Although Dilthey argued that scientific methods cannot explain lived experience, he nevertheless embraced the norms of scientific knowledge. Like many nineteenth-century scholars, Dilthey believed that valid knowledge is objective, general, and certain. “The highest and most important task of all philosophy lies in the securing of valid knowledge,” Dilthey wrote. “For the progress of mankind is conditioned in the modern period by its guidance through scientific knowledge; this knowledge must be secured against dark feeling and the arbitrariness of subjectivity—and the skeptical spirit which accompanies both” (Dilthey, quoted in Ermarth 1981b: 89). Dilthey wanted to develop a

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FIGURE 2.1  Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), German philosopher

method for investigating Erlebnis that would distinguish social science from physical science but that nonetheless would be equal to science with respect to the rigor of its knowledge claims. Dilthey focused on developing a humanistic method for achieving rigorous (scientific) knowledge of how Erlebnisse (plural) were understood in the past.

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To develop his humanistic method for the historical study of Erlebnis, Dilthey turned to hermeneutics, the theory of understanding and interpretation. Hermeneutic scholars had developed a “part–whole” circular method for interpreting biblical, legal, and classical texts. Believing that texts such as the Bible express a unified and consistent meaning, hermeneutic thinkers concluded that specific biblical passages could be interpreted with reference to the meaning of the Bible as a whole. At the same time, understanding the Bible as a whole presumes understanding specific biblical passages. Hermeneutic exegesis thus revolves in a continuous cycle of anticipation and revision. Interpreting the meaning of any part of the Bible depends on having already grasped the meaning of the Bible as a whole, even as understanding the Bible as a whole will be reshaped by clarifying the meaning of its constituent parts. The Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) extended the hermeneutic circle to interpret not only the Bible but all linguistic expressions. Dilthey believed that the circular part–whole method for interpreting linguistic  expressions also described how people intuitively grasp Erlebnis. We pre-reflectively understand the meaning of specific lived experiences (specific Erlebnisse) in terms of how we intuit the meaning of our life as a whole. Intuiting our life’s overall meaning, in turn, both shapes and is shaped by how we intuit the meaning of specific Erlebnisse. Because Erlebnisse belong to all people in every culture and epoch, Dilthey surmised that hermeneutics could be the basis of a humanistic method for achieving reflective interpretations of how Erlebnisse were understood in the past. But when Dilthey tried to extend pre-reflective understanding of one’s own lived experience to achieve reflective historical knowledge of past life experiences, he encountered a problem. Dilthey realized that the “parts” of one’s biography consist of past experiences; the future provides a horizon through which one fathoms the meaning of one’s life as a whole. One’s pre-reflective understanding of the future in turn depends on and also reshapes how one prereflectively understands one’s past, even as one’s pre-reflective understanding of one’s past anticipates and revises how one pre-reflectively understands one’s future. The passage of time, in short, is the condition that makes it possible for human beings pre-reflectively to understand lived experience. Dilthey’s insight that pre-reflective understanding of Erlebnis is temporally conditioned led him to three conclusions. First, Dilthey saw that history could not be an object for understanding. It is impossible to freeze or objectify the past to understand it. Neither is the future a stationary target at which understanding aims. Rather, we understand the meaning of history as we move through history. Where lived experience is concerned, understanding history and experiencing history arise together. Second, if we understand time by moving through time, then the meaning of lived experience necessarily is fluid. With the passage of time, the meaning

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of the past and the meaning of the future are not stable but instead are relative to each other and thus shift. At different points in the future, one’s past will mean different things. The meaning of the future also changes, depending on the particular stage of life from which the future is anticipated. Finally, interpreting lived experience does not produce understanding that is abstracted from the experience of living. We cannot escape our life to interpret it. Neither can we understand our life and then experience it. Rather, we are practically engaged in living the life we interpret. In other words, pre-reflective understanding of Erlebnis is inescapably situated in Erlebnis. Such understanding consequently is perspectival, partial, practical, and personal. The fact that pre-reflective understanding of Erlebnis is inescapably temporal and historically situated presents a paradox for social science. Specifically, the historian who reflectively examines historical events is themselves a historical being who cannot escape their own historical situation, not even through methodological reflection. How, therefore, could historians achieve rigorous scientific knowledge? The meaning of the past inevitably changes, depending on the historian’s historical perspective. Historical knowledge thus is relativistic, not universally valid. Moreover, insofar as the historian “belongs” to history, historical interpretation cannot be objective. Historical interpretation instead is subjective: perspectival, partial, and contingent. The subjectivity of historical interpretation raises the possibility that historical “knowledge” simply proves what it presupposes. In sum, when Dilthey tried to apply the hermeneutic circle to achieve rigorous historical knowledge of past Erlebnisse, he confronted a dilemma. On the one hand, as a method for social science, Dilthey thought the hermeneutic circle could (and must) enable historians to “reflect themselves out of” their historical situation. Reflective transcendence is necessary to achieve knowledge that is true and objective, unfettered by the biases of the historian’s own epoch. On the other hand, as a method for pre-reflectively understanding the meaning of one’s own lived experience, Dilthey concluded that the hermeneutic circle does not enable transcendence. Quite the opposite: the hermeneutic circle reveals that one cannot reflect oneself out of one’s life to interpret its meaning; one cannot escape being situated in history to interpret history. Dilthey could not imagine how to resolve this dilemma. Critical reflection on pre-reflective understanding thus seemed impossible. Edmund Husserl Like Dilthey, Husserl (see Figure 2.2) argued that scientific methods are inappropriate for studying the social world. Husserl’s concern focused on an epistemological presumption, which he argued lay at the heart of scientific method: the dualistic separation of subjects and objects. During Husserl’s time, epistemologists argued that the subject/object dualism is both natural and

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FIGURE 2.2  Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), founder of phenomenology

necessary. They thus tried to show why rigorous scientific knowledge must be objective, that is, unfettered by a scientist’s subjective, idiosyncratic beliefs. Husserl countered that the subject/object divide misrepresents human perception. Perception does not “take in” alien objects, which it then must convert into accurate objective representations of the external world. Husserl

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based his critique on the work of the French psychologist Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Challenging the atomistic view of psychology that prevailed at this time, Brentano posited that human perception is intentional, that is, perception always and necessarily “intends” or is directed toward some object. Husserl extended Brentano’s thesis to claim that all forms of consciousness are always about something. As Dermot Moran explains, every object for Husserl “has meaning and a mode of being for consciousness, it is a meaningful correlate of the conscious act” (2000: 16). Objects thus are not separate from subjects who must try—and may fail—accurately to receive (perceive) and represent them. Objects instead are intended or included in the very act of becoming conscious. If “aboutness” signifies that consciousness is always of an object, “aboutness” also signifies that consciousness is always for a subject. Consciousness is not a free-floating state, Husserl observed. Consciousness instead “belongs to” and is experienced by a subject; without subjects, consciousness could not arise. “All experience is experience to someone, according to a particular manner of experiencing,” Moran (2000: 11) observes. Thus, for Husserl, objects appear or are “given” to consciousness with intuitive immediacy. Put differently, the meaning of objects is disclosed directly to human beings by virtue of the fact that consciousness is intentionally structured. Husserl’s thesis regarding the intentionality of consciousness refutes the assumption that subjects and objects are self-enclosed entities that are detached from each other. On the contrary, subjects and objects are united in a correlative bond. There is only “objectivity-for-subjectivity,” Moran (2000: 15) explains. Dan Zahavi elaborates on Moran’s point: Regardless of whether we are talking about a perception, thought, judgment, fantasy, doubt, expectation, or recollection, all these diverse forms of consciousness are characterized by intending objects and cannot be analyzed properly without a look at their objective correlative, i.e., the perceived, doubted, expected object … it is consequently not a problem for the subject to reach the object, since its being is intentional. That is, the subject per se is self-transcending, per se directed toward something different from itself. (2008: 665–6) Challenging the subject/object divide, Husserl redefined consciousness, the constitution of knowledge, and the meaning of human experience. Consciousness for Husserl is not an interior mental operation, as science assumes. Consciousness instead becomes, in the words of David West, “objectconstituting subjectivity” (2010: 102). Further, given that consciousness is intentional, achieving knowledge cannot necessitate eliminating subjectivity. On the contrary, subjectivity is inextricably involved in the constitution of knowledge. In Moran’s words, Husserl “steadfastly protected the subjective view of experience as a necessary part of any full understanding of the nature of knowledge” (2000: 21). Finally, experience for Husserl is not a detached

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“object” that subjects confront. Experience instead is personal and “lived” (Erlebnis). In lived experience, people intuitively understand what things mean.2 Husserl devoted his life to analyzing “objectivity-for-subjectivity,” that is, the intentional structures that make it possible for objects to “show themselves” to subjective consciousness. Moran explains that, for Husserl, “the central mystery … is the question: how does objectivity get constituted in and for consciousness?” (2000: 15, emphasis in original). This question concerns the constitution of knowledge and thus requires philosophical analysis. But because epistemology during Husserl’s time assumed that subjects and objects are dualistically detached, it was unsuitable for Husserl’s project. Husserl did not forgo philosophy, however. Instead he invented a new philosophical method, which he called “phenomenology.” Phenomenology begins with what Husserl called the “epoché.” The epoché is a process wherein phenomenologists “bracket” or suspend the naïve belief that the world can be known independently from investigating how the world is given to subjects in consciousness. In this respect, the epoché liberates phenomenologists from the dogmatic “natural attitude” of science. In addition to the epoché, phenomenology includes a number of additional steps, culminating in what Husserl called “the transcendental reduction.” Husserl believed that the transcendental reduction offers phenomenologists profound insights into how subject and world coemerge when intentional consciousness constitutes knowledge. As Husserl continued to analyze the intentional structures of consciousness, he came to see that the transcendental reduction illuminates a mode of existence that  precedes the appearance of objects in intentional consciousness.  Husserl called this mode of existence the “life-world” (Lebenswelt). “The life-world … is always already there,” Husserl wrote, “existing in advance for us … The [life] world is pre-given to us … not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual possible praxis, as horizon” (Husserl, quoted in Warnke 1987: 36). The life-world is the world of ordinary experience. Ordinary experience in the life-world transpires in a temporal flow that eludes bounded space and ordinal time and thus precedes both linguistic idealization and scientific objectification (Moran 2000: 12). Husserl’s insight regarding the life-world challenged the premise that science must validate ordinary understanding in the life-world. On the contrary, the existence of the life-world precedes scientific explanation and hence makes it possible. The precedence of the life-world, moreover, means that science cannot fully escape the pre-predicative experiences and intuitions from which its theories and methods spring. Zahavi describes Husserl’s “Copernican turn” as follows: “Science is rooted in the life-world, it draws on insights from the pre-scientific sphere … [science] inevitably continues to draw on the contribution of intuition, as when one looks in the microscope, reads the measuring instruments, or interprets, compares, and discusses the results with other scientists” (2008: 679).

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On the one hand, Husserl’s claim that science is rooted in the life-world could be viewed as good news. While abstract, scientific theory is not necessarily alien to the life-world and consequently could helpfully explain it. But while Husserl’s insight into the life-world may have mitigated the alienating effects of abstract theory, it nonetheless challenged the norms of rigorous knowledge. Because the sciences grow out of the life-world, they “reflect the concerns of specific communities and serve their needs,” Georgia Warnke (1987: 36) explains. Scientific knowledge, in other words, is historically and culturally situated. The norms of scientific knowledge thus could not be “a transcendent idea to which all forms of knowledge must adhere, but rather [are] a standard suited to certain kinds of knowledge with certain purposes and goals” (p. 36). The relativistic implications of this conclusion worried Husserl, and an additional insight compounded his concern. Structures of consciousness, Husserl realized, are relative to different communities. This means that there is not one life-world: there are many (Warnke 1987: 37). Husserl hoped that eventually phenomenology would penetrate the variety of life-worlds and access a deeper essential life-world that, in Warnke’s words, “is the product of an original, non-historical constitution of meaning” (p. 37). But while Husserl’s ahistorical “solution” to relativism preserved his commitment to rigorous knowledge, it also undercut his fundamental premise: because science presumes the independence of subjects and objects, it cannot fathom, much less investigate, the life-world. Only phenomenology can investigate the co-emergence of subject and world. Given the relativistic implications of the life-world, however, Husserl feared that phenomenology could not justify its conclusions or claim that its descriptions of the life-world constitute rigorous knowledge. In sum, both Husserl and Dilthey argued that science misrepresents human experience. Warnke contends that Husserl’s argument regarding the limits of science surpassed Dilthey’s position. Dilthey believed that hermeneutics does not jeopardize the normative status of scientific knowledge and that hermeneutic social science therefore should (and could) be as rigorous as physical science. By contrast, phenomenology’s description of the life-world revealed the network of assumptions on which scientific norms and practices depend. Science, therefore, is not on a par with phenomenology. On the contrary, scientific knowledge is secondary to phenomenological description (Warnke 1987: 35). Ultimately, however, Husserl was no more able than Dilthey to reconcile his insight into the limitations of scientific method with his commitment to the norms of scientific knowledge. Both thinkers realized that pre-reflective understanding is inescapably conditioned by a particular context and time (Dilthey) and by a particular life-world (Husserl). But both thinkers also thought that knowledge of human experience should be rigorous, not relativistic, and that historians and phenomenologists therefore must transcend their own lived experience. Transcendence, however, severs the investigator’s bond with life

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(West 2010: 116). Achieving knowledge of lived experience for Husserl and Dilthey thus appeared to be necessary—but also impossible.

THE HISTORICITY OF UNDERSTANDING: HEIDEGGER AND GADAMER Martin Heidegger Heidegger, Husserl’s student, was deeply influenced by his mentor’s innovation of phenomenology to describe the life-world. But Heidegger identified two ways in which Husserl remained ensnared in the subject/object divide that he fought to surmount. First, the subject/object dualism permeates “bracketing” (the epoché). Husserl stressed that the epoché does not literally liberate phenomenologists from the life-world; it simply promotes a change of attitude that enables them to see the co-emergence of subject and objects more clearly. But while the epoché may not liberate phenomenologists from the life-world, it is designed to liberate them from the “natural attitude” of science. Bracketing thus assumes that the natural attitude of science can be objectified. The epoché therefore seems to be inherently contradictory: it depends on the very subject/ object dualism it denies. Second, Husserl presumed that phenomenological descriptions of the life-world must be justified as objective knowledge. It is not clear, however, how descriptions of the life-world could be justified as objective knowledge when the criteria for establishing “objective” knowledge of the life-world are themselves conditioned by the life-world. Heidegger concluded that the life-world could not be objectified and that descriptions of the life-world did not need to be justified as objective knowledge. “There can be no transcendent perspective on the life-world,” West explains, “because all our thinking inevitably occurs within, and so is necessarily conditioned by, the life-world … the life-world [is] the unsurpassable horizon of all human experience and activity” (2010: 116). Heidegger thus focused on describing the life-world without seeking to convert his descriptions into objective knowledge. To undertake his project, Heidegger turned to phenomenology. Unlike Husserl, however, Heidegger did not ask how the life-world (object) is disclosed to (subjective) consciousness. Heidegger felt that Husserl’s way of putting the issue confused knowledge with the ground of knowledge. In Zahavi’s words, Husserl’s question (according to Heidegger) “fails to ask the truly transcendental question: the question concerning the possibility of givenness as such” (2008: 672). Heidegger thus posed a different phenomenological question: what is the condition that makes disclosure of the life-world possible, and how are structures for understanding this phenomenon “alive” in life itself? Heidegger’s question precedes the constitution of knowledge; as Jeff Malpas explains,

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“Knowledge of things already presupposes that things have first been disclosed as knowable” (2003: 148). Heidegger wanted to probe the “disclosing of disclosedness” (p. 147). According to Heidegger, it is “Being” that makes disclosure of the life-world possible. The notion of Being is familiar to Western philosophy. But Western philosophy, Heidegger felt, regards Being as a topic or “object” about which knowledge claims can be produced and warranted. This view of Being, Michael Ermarth writes, “arrogantly assumes that Being belongs to thinking, rather than that thinking belongs to Being” (1981a: 185). For Heidegger, by contrast, “truth is not a matter of demonstration or judgment, but the self-showing or unconcealment of Being” (p. 185). Imagining that truth is a disclosure of Being, not a possible outcome of thinking, Heidegger reoriented phenomenology from epistemology—the philosophy of knowledge—toward ontology—the philosophy of existence. Arguing that subjects do not produce or certify knowledge of Being, Heidegger not only challenged the primacy of epistemology but also decentered the epistemological subject. As Warnke writes, Heidegger “burst asunder the whole subjectivism of modern philosophy” (1987: 40, quoting Gadamer). But although Heidegger decentered the epistemological subject, he also understood that people are vital to the disclosure process. Influenced by Husserl’s phenomenological premise regarding the co-emergence of subjects and world, Heidegger recognized that Being and beings are not detached from each other. Being instead is disclosed in and through human beings. In Ermarth’s words, “Truth, to be sure, comes through man, but it is not due to man, the choices he makes, and the instruments he has devised. Man is not the master or measure, but the ‘clearing’ and horizon of Being” (1981b: 185). Heidegger coined the term Dasein—“there being”—to distinguish epistemology’s knowing subject from the being who is “there” in the world as a site or “clearing” for Being’s disclosure. Heidegger’s challenge thus was to show how Being is disclosed to beings without falling into epistemology’s misguided tendency to focus on how subjects produce knowledge of Being, forgetting that Being is the condition that makes both human being and human knowledge possible. Heidegger recognized that investigating Being must begin with Dasein: the being whose being is an issue for itself. He wondered: how does Dasein understand its being, and what does Dasein’s understanding of its being reveal about the structures of Being that precede Dasein and make Dasein’s existence possible? Dasein could not be concerned with its being, Heidegger reasoned, were Dasein not already involved with the world, engaging on a practical level with people and things and understanding how to get around situations in light of its cares and concerns. Situated practical know-how, in short, is the primary way

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that Dasein is “there” in the world. Such understanding is not an epistemological achievement of “spectators” who objectify the world. Rather, it is an ontological feature of Dasein’s existence. Understanding, consequently, is not an optional behavior that Dasein can take up at will. On the contrary, there never is a time when Dasein is not understanding the world in one way or another. Situated practical understanding is possible because Dasein finds itself born or “thrown” into meaningful contexts that precede Dasein’s existence. “Human beings always have inherited a way of looking at things around them long before they begin to modify that way of looking and understanding,” Brice Wachterhauser (1986: 22) explains. “Our very ability to understand at all comes from participation in the contexts that make reality meaningful in the first place” (p. 22). The fact that understanding is made possible by contexts that already have been interpreted does not mean that Dasein is “trapped” in its historical situation or that understanding cannot change. Caring about its being, Dasein constantly projects new possibilities for itself. Of course, the way that Dasein projects its future depends on possibilities that Dasein has projected in the past. Future possibilities, therefore, are not freely chosen but rather are circumscribed by prior understanding. Projected understanding does not simply repeat prior assumptions, however. Understanding instead is temporal; it changes with the flow of time. Past understanding thus is not a prison: it is a window that brings the future into view. Heidegger calls Dasein’s mode of understanding “thrown-projection.” The term thrown signifies that Dasein does not construct meaningful contexts, which make understanding possible. Thrown also signifies that understanding is an inescapable feature of Dasein’s existence, not an activity that Dasein chooses (or not). Projection indicates that Dasein anticipates future possibilities. While future possibilities are open, they nonetheless are partially circumscribed by possibilities that already have been fulfilled. Thrown-projection recalls Dilthey’s hermeneutic insight that understanding revolves in a temporal circle. But Dilthey believed that the circularity of prereflective understanding could (and must) evolve into a formal hermeneutic method of critical reflection, which enables historians to transcend their historical situations. Challenging Dilthey, Heidegger showed that the temporal circle of understanding cannot be transcended because it connotes the ontological structure of Dasein’s being. Heidegger coined the term “historicity” to describe the fact that time (history) necessarily conditions Dasein’s way of being in the world. “Human beings are their history,” Wachterhauser (1986: 7) notes. Demonstrating that critical reflection neither negates nor dissolves Dasein’s historicity, Heidegger argued that critical reflection nonetheless is possible. Given Dasein’s historicity, however, critical reflection does not signify that Dasein has transcended the context into which Dasein has been “thrown.”

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Critical reflection instead signifies a new, more enlightened way of being in the world. This way of being can arise whenever Dasein’s intuitions and practical engagements in the world are disrupted. A hammer breaks, for example. As a result, the meaningful context in which using a hammer makes sense “breaks open,” illuminating features of Dasein’s situation that previously had receded into the background—that is, nails that hammers strike, tables that are fashioned by hammering nails into boards, and so on. Dasein consequently becomes aware of hammers (including the network of meaningful things pertaining to Dasein’s use of hammers) in a new, more reflective light. In sum, Heidegger’s phenomenological description of Dasein shows that understanding is not an epistemological achievement on the part of “spectator” subjects. Understanding instead is the distinguishing ontological feature of being human. As the human way of being in the world, understanding is a mode of personal, practical, pre-reflective engagement with people and things, that is, knowing how to get around in light of one’s cares and concerns. The experience of “knowing how” to be in the world is possible because the meaning of being in the world is disclosed to human beings in their everyday experience. In Heidegger’s parlance, Being is disclosed to beings, that is, to Dasein, the being who is “there” in the world as a site for Being’s disclosure and who is centrally concerned with the meaning of its own being. While Being is disclosed to Dasein in the course of ordinary experience, Being also is disclosed whenever Dasein’s pre-reflective know-how is interrupted. Such disruptions illuminate aspects of Being (i.e., the meaning of being in the world) that previously had been hidden. Dasein’s pre-reflective understanding consequently becomes explicitly conscious and critically reflective. As an ontological possibility for Dasein, critical reflection is not an epistemological achievement that secures objective knowledge. Critical reflection instead signifies that Dasein’s way of being in the world has been reoriented to become more enlightened and self-aware. Hans-Georg Gadamer Gadamer, Heidegger’s student, summarized his teacher’s ontological reframing of understanding as follows: “The real question is not in what way being can be understood but in what way understanding is being” (in Linge 1976: 49, emphasis in original). Gadamer thought that Heidegger’s phenomenology not only decentered the primacy of epistemology but also challenged the norms and practices of the social sciences, particularly regarding the centrality of method for scientific investigation. According to Gadamer, science assumes that method helps investigators control or “bracket” their subjective beliefs, which if left unchecked, would bias results in favor of what social scientists already assume or want to prove and thus threaten the achievement of objective knowledge. Following Heidegger

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(but contra Husserl), Gadamer countered that methodically bracketing one’s lived understanding is both impossible and unhelpful. This practice mistakenly denies the investigator’s own involvement in the world. It also positions research subjects as “objects” of study, not as the investigator’s fellow human beings. Gadamer further objected to the belief that method enables investigators to determine what counts as knowledge. This belief, Gadamer worried, makes it less likely that investigators will appreciate when their assumptions—including their assumptions about what constitutes knowledge—are shattered in ways they might resist. Method for Gadamer thus “is not the way to truth,” Ermarth explains. Method “rather [is] the shadow of man which darkens the way to truth … method can be said to be man ‘getting [it] in his own way instead of in the way of Being’” (Ermarth 1981b: 192, quoting Heidegger). In sum, Gadamer argued that relying on method (1) denies the social scientist’s own lived understanding; (2) distances the social scientist from their fellow human beings; and (3) makes it difficult for the social scientist to appreciate how new insights may subvert preconceived views of knowledge. Critical reflection, Gadamer argued, does not require investigators to regulate methodically their assumptions or repress their involvement with the world or with other people. In phenomenological terms, Gadamer wanted to demonstrate that a researcher’s subjective understanding is necessary for the constitution of knowledge. If the investigator’s pre-reflective understandings and relations with others cannot be methodically controlled or objectified, how is it possible reflectively to understand social life? To show how reflective understanding is an ontological possibility for social scientists, Gadamer took up Heidegger’s insight that pre-reflective assumptions must be disrupted to become explicitly conscious and extended this idea to the context of conversation. Gadamer’s turn to conversation may seem surprising. Why is the realization of reflective understanding more like a conversation than a methodological accomplishment? To appreciate Gadamer’s reasoning, it is helpful to summarize his phenomenological description of conversation. In genuine conversations, Gadamer begins, interlocutors care about the same topic or question: what is going on with Susie; what strategies are effective for coping with an impossible boss; and so on. Conversing together, parties do not attempt to score points or defend their respective positions. Rather, they hope to clarify an issue that is of mutual concern. In this regard, Gadamer notes, genuine conversations differ from debates, interviews, and scripted performances. While conversations revolve around issues of common concern, each interlocutor nonetheless approaches the topic from their own perspective. If perspectives were the same, there would be nothing to talk about. We typically think that differences impede conversation and that we therefore should set

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our differences aside to empathize with our partner. Challenging this popular belief, Gadamer insists that empathy is not helpful or even possible. Empathy denies historicity (the fact that neither party can escape the existential situation into which they have been “thrown”). Empathy further ignores how new understanding necessarily is informed by what we already know. What we already know, moreover, reflects the sociohistorical contexts that orient us in the world. We therefore cannot give up our assumptions as easily as we might think to bond with another person in a kind of Vulcan mind-meld. Rather than overlook their differences through misguided empathy, Gadamer wants interlocutors to face their differences honestly. On Gadamer’s ontological model, facing differences is an ethical orientation: it requires each person to regard the other as an irreplaceable human being who brings their own unique life experience into the conversation. The fact that each party is a unique human being suggests that perspectives may not simply differ. More significantly, each person’s perspective may provide insight into the subject of conversation that the other person could not fathom on their own. Acknowledging the possible truth of the other person’s viewpoint, one could respond, “Well, my partner has her truth and I have mine.” This reaction may make us feel better, Gadamer admits. But it keeps the other’s perspective at bay and protects one’s own position. Understanding consequently cannot change. If understanding is to change, interlocutors must do more than entertain their partner’s position. Each party instead must allow themselves to be affected or “claimed” by what the other person has to say. Gadamer calls this experience being “pulled up short” (1989/2013: 280). Being pulled up short may expose one’s own understanding as narrow, incomplete, or wrong. This possibility is hard to face, Gadamer acknowledges. It requires persons to be humble, open, and courageous enough to risk their orienting beliefs. Nevertheless, Gadamer argues, understanding cannot change unless prior assumptions are negated. While painful, the negation of assumptions brings them into the open. One consequently can become aware of them on a more reflective and critical level.3 Becoming reflectively aware thus requires interlocutors to assume an ethical orientation, allowing that one’s own understanding may be pulled up short by the possible truth of the other’s perspective. When each party is open to being challenged, both parties can come to understand their topic in a new, more reflective way. Because conversations engage dispositions, realizing new understanding of a topic changes self-understanding. “To reach an understanding in dialogue,” Gadamer writes, “is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were” (1989/2013: 386–7). Gadamer calls the communion of new reflective understanding that arises in conversation a “fusion of horizons.” The fusion of horizons discloses aspects

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of a topic that previously had not been apparent to either party. New meaning does not assimilate or integrate different horizons (perspectives) into one homogeneous new horizon; horizons do not dissolve when they are fused. “The acceptance of the other certainly does not mean that one would not be completely conscious of one’s own inalienable Being,” Gadamer (1992a: 206) writes. “A type of self-encounter can also occur with another and in relation to what is different” (p. 219). Rather than connote assimilation, the new meaning that is disclosed in the fusion of horizons instead expresses a superior breadth of vision. “To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand,” Gadamer explains, “not only to look away from it but to see it better, within a larger whole and truer proportion” (1989/2013: 316). Gadamer insists that the fusion of horizons cannot occur unless interlocutors are willing to put their views on the line. But while the fusion of horizons depends on what interlocutors do, interlocutors do not control or direct this event. As Gadamer shows, when a conversation is “real,” we get caught up in it. We lose track of time and before we know it we arrive at a new place with respect to the issue under discussion. Genuine conversations, in short, absorb interlocutors in the same way that playing a game absorbs players. Gadamer puts this point as follows: We say that we “conduct” a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus, a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation … The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led. (1989/2013: 411) Just as interlocutors become absorbed in the logic and flow of a conversation, so they also are “taken up into” the fusion of horizons. Interlocutors cannot control or predict how or whether a fusion of horizons will occur. As Gadamer puts it, understanding is “an event that happens to us … over and above our wanting and doing” (pp. 40, xxvi). Further, interlocutors do not shape or produce the meanings that fusions of horizons disclose. New meaning emerges not because interlocutors regulate conversations but because they allow conversations to absorb them. In Gadamer’s words, “What emerges in truth is the logos, which is neither mine nor yours and hence so far transcends the interlocutors’ subjective opinions that even the person leading the conversation knows that he does not know” (p. 376).4 In sum, Gadamer demonstrates that, when a conversation is genuine, interlocutors are absorbed in an experience they neither control nor direct. The resulting fusion of horizons discloses insight into a topic (i.e., the logos) that neither party produces or foresees. Interlocutors cannot reflectively understand

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the disclosure of meaning, however, unless they permit their assumptions to be pulled up short by the other’s perspective. This event may occur in ways that may not be desired or expected. Likening the social sciences to genuine conversation, Gadamer sought to refute the idea that critical reflection is a specialized form of understanding that requires technical procedures to control subjective beliefs. On Gadamer’s view, critical reflection instead arises in the course of everyday experience (i.e., in ordinary conversations) and does not call for investigators to methodically regulate their assumptions. On the contrary, experiencing critical awareness requires investigators to put their assumptions in play, allowing them to be negated by another’s perspective. Being open to this experience requires ethical dispositions, not methodological competency. Specifically, investigators must resist the urge to direct how conversations will flow, curb their desire to predict or preempt what their partner will say, and trust that the experience of conversing with another will disclose new meaning into a topic over and above what either party does or wants. Clarifying how critical reflection arises in dialogical experiences, Gadamer hoped to show how the human sciences are (or can be) distinctively moral practices of interpersonal engagement.

LEARNING FROM PHILOSOPHY: IMPLICATIONS FOR STUDYING EDUCATION The insights that Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer articulated continue to resonate with education scholars today. Four ideas have been especially influential: (1) people understand the world primarily through their practical engagements and interpersonal involvements; (2) understanding the world is possible because the world discloses its inherent meaning to people in the course of everyday life; (3) people cannot fully escape their “lived” experience and thus cannot objectify the world, as epistemology and science assume; and (4) the subject/object dualism that fuels epistemology and science does not fully capture how human beings understand their experience in the world. These ideas provide a framework for analyzing why phenomenological-hermeneutic education scholars believe that the existential meaning of education eludes social science and why phenomenology and hermeneutics are better suited to illuminate education as an existentially compelling experience. Let us examine these issues in greater detail. Limitations of social science From the perspective of phenomenological-hermeneutic education scholars, educational researchers do not study education as an existentially meaningful experience because they do not question the central premise of social science: subjects and objects are detached from each other. This overriding dualism gives rise to other splits, that is, the divide between understanding and experience,

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the divorce of theory from practice, and the separation of means from ends. Taking these dualisms for granted, educational researchers view education in instrumental terms and regard it as an object they can observe, aided by methodological procedures. If, however, education is an existential experience that resists objectification, then education cannot be studied by employing methods that (supposedly) enable researchers to step out of educational experiences to see them more clearly. Education instead must be clarified from within the experience of education itself. This endeavor does not require methodological competency. It requires perspicuity and a set of dispositions, such as sensitivity and patience. Phenomenological-hermeneutic scholars further believe that social science theories are too removed from the life-world of education to bring it into focus. Trying to bridge the theory/practice divide will not solve this problem. Bridging theory and practice presumes that these domains are separate and need to be connected. But in the life-world, understanding and experience already coexist. Put differently, lived experience is a way of understanding, that is, a way of being practically engaged in the world. The abstractions of theory may illuminate educational practices from afar. But abstract theory cannot clarify the intimate relation of experience and understanding that constitutes lived experience. Phenomenological-hermeneutic scholars thus do not theorize educational practices as social scientists do. These scholars instead start “from the phenomenon of pedagogy itself, as it is experienced,” to quote Van Manen (2014: 606). In sum, phenomenological-hermeneutic education scholars believe that the subject/object dualism at the heart of social science prevents educational researchers from explaining why people find education existentially compelling, personally meaningful, and potentially transformative. Some argue that social science must be supplemented by phenomenology and hermeneutics. Others argue that phenomenology and hermeneutics should displace social science altogether.5 In an era that increasingly values evidence-based research to justify educational policies and guide educational practice, the phenomenologicalhermeneutic criticism of social science may seem naïve and perhaps reckless. To appreciate the merit of the phenomenological-hermeneutic position, it is necessary to clarify the fundamental question that distinguishes this approach. Unlike social scientists, phenomenological-hermeneutic scholars do not want to know whether or how evidence justifies findings. Instead they pose a different and more fundamental question: why do things become evident to us at all? Before we can use evidence to warrant knowledge claims about education or about any area of life, we first must believe that life is a meaningful experience. We must further believe that the meaning of life can be disclosed or made evident to us in ways we can understand and that understanding life’s meaning

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does not require us to repress our very existence. Understanding life is part of life; understanding is “lived” experience. This does not mean that life cannot also be understood by using theories and methods. But theoretical and methodological knowledge is secondary to and derivative of a more basic way of understanding life, that is, lived experience. Phenomenological-hermeneutic education scholars maintain that disclosures of life’s meaning and our lived experience of this event are “ripe” with educationally pertinent questions. For example, what are the conditions that make disclosures of meaning possible in various educational contexts? Can people learn to recognize disclosures of meaning when they occur and allow these events to deepen and perhaps change their understanding and experience in the world? Which dispositions, orientations, and habits of mind are required to recognize and learn from disclosures of meaning? Can these qualities be taught and, if so, how? Phenomenological-hermeneutic education scholars seek reflectively to clarify how disclosures of life’s meaning are or can be educational without resorting to abstract theories or dualistic methods. They further argue that reflective clarifications of this phenomenon cannot be objective findings. These scholars instead endeavor to illuminate education “from within” the experience of understanding education. In the next section, I will examine what this approach to studying education entails. Reflectively clarifying educational experience: Phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches Phenomenological-hermeneutic scholars explore how life’s meaning is disclosed to humans in a variety of educational situations and settings. Examples include secret places in children’s lives (Langevelt 1983b), understanding miscues in learning to read (Magrini 2013), educational administration (Vandenberg 1982), the transition to high school (Ganeson and Ehrich 2009), student cheating (Ashworth 1999), the aims of higher education (Mackler 2009), student affairs in higher education (Sherman 2011), humanities education (Sotiriou 2014), and religious education (Aldridge 2015; Lombaerts and Pollefeyt 2004). The disciplinary background of phenomenological-hermeneutic scholars is equally various and includes educational philosophers, curriculum theorists, reading specialists, and so on. Although phenomenological and hermeneutic scholars are motivated by the same goal, they approach it differently. Following Husserl, educational phenomenologists tend to use methods to aid reflective understanding, albeit in ways that do not reinscribe the subject/object dualism of social science methods. Some phenomenologists have published articles that reflectively clarify what the process of reflective clarification entails: a “methods” section or article, if you will (e.g., see Chamberlin 1974). By contrast, hermeneutic education

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scholars maintain that reflective clarification is an intuitive experience that does not require methodological guidance. Following Gadamer, these scholars eschew methods and “meta” descriptions of the reflective process, preferring instead  simply to engage in phenomenological description. In the next section, I will analyze phenomenological methods. I then will summarize how hermeneutic thinkers describe education as an absorbing experience that transforms self-understanding. Phenomenological methods Educational phenomenologists maintain that, to describe disclosures of meaning, one must first recognize and resist the influence of concepts and theories that predispose one to understand education in familiar ways. “This does not mean that one can free oneself from one’s cultural and historical context,” Van Manen notes, “but it does mean that one can orient to the way in which the pedagogical context is experienced in the here and now” (2014: 606). To aid this effort, educational phenomenologists turn to methods developed by Husserl, notably the epoché and the reduction. “The epoché opens up the space for the possibility of discerning phenomenological meaning,” Van Manen explains, “and the reduction aims for phenomenological meaning to appear, give or show itself” (2017: 777). Taking up Husserl’s methods, phenomenologists do not objectify contexts and then investigate how subjects understand them, as qualitative researchers and psychologists do. It is true that life’s meaning cannot be clarified independently of individuals’ lived understanding of existence and that individuals consequently are implicated in phenomenological descriptions. But phenomenologists are not concerned with individuals because they produce, construct, or attribute meaning to phenomena. Individuals instead are of interest because their lived experience is a site or clearing for disclosures of meaning. To illuminate structures of lived experience, phenomenologists do not ask, “How do you understand what this experience means?” Van Manen explains that phenomenological questions instead probe “what shows itself or gives itself in lived experience … how things (phenomena and events) give themselves to us” (2017: 775, emphases in original). Such questions take the following forms: “‘What is this lived experience like?’ ‘What is it like to experience this phenomenon or event?’ Or, ‘How do we understand or become aware of the primal meaning(s) of this experience?’” (p. 776). Answering these questions calls for a set of dispositions, which the epoché and reduction help to cultivate. Van Manen calls these dispositions “a minding, a heeding, a caring attunement—a heedful, mindful pre-occupation with the project of life, of what it means to live a life” (1983: i). Van Manen also uses the word “tact” to describe being oriented in the life-world in a reflective manner. Tact is helpful not only for educational

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researchers, Van Manen suggests. Tact also helps teachers reflectively clarify students’ lived understanding and experience in the life-world of classrooms (Van Manen 2016a; see also English 2013b). Phenomenological insights cannot be warranted as objective knowledge. Warranting phenomenological descriptions instead involves sensing whether or not they help us recognize something concerning education that we had always known but had not explicitly noticed or put into words. “Phenomenology, if practiced well, enthralls us with insights into the enigma of life as we experience it—the world as it gives and reveals itself to the wondering gaze,” Van Manen (2017: 779) writes. “Genuine phenomenological inquiry is challenging and satisfying precisely because its meaningful revelations must be originary and existentially compelling to the soul” (p. 779). Phenomenological descriptions not only must be compelling for educational phenomenologists but also must speak to anyone who is involved with education. Hermeneutic education: Bildung Hermeneutically oriented phenomenologists use the German word Bildung to describe education. Bildung has a long history in philosophy. The term sometimes is translated into English as “cultivation” or “enculturation.” Gadamer uses Bildung to highlight a specific idea: education fundamentally is self-education (Gadamer 2001; see also Cleary and Hogan 2001).6 Contemporary educational discourse associates self-education with constructing identity and cultivating autonomy. Additionally, self-education connotes learning to regulate metacognitively one’s thinking, control the direction of one’s experience, and defend one’s position in an argument or debate. On this view of self-education, the purpose of education is to help individuals strengthen their sense of agency in the world. Self-education means something different for Gadamer. Bildung does not strengthen autonomy or develop competencies and skills. Rather, the general characteristic of Bildung is “keeping oneself open to what is other— to other, more universal points of view” (Gadamer 1989/2013: 16). Learning to be open to others is crucial, Gadamer insists. Unless we allow others to challenge our perspective, our presuppositions cannot be reflectively clarified. Because presuppositions are not simply bits of information that we collect but instead reflect and express our way of being in the world, challenges to our presuppositions are disorienting. Disorientation is an experience we do not expect and probably do not want. In sum, education as Bildung aims to transform understanding and self-understanding through negative experiences that arise in face-to-face engagements with others. This kind of education is deeply personal, intimately relational, and necessarily experiential. Under the umbrella of Bildung, hermeneutic scholars examine a number of different issues.

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For example, some scholars challenge the common assumption that negative experiences shut down learning. These scholars analyze why negativity is necessary for learning and why avoiding negative experience precludes individuals from reflectively clarifying their understanding and self-understanding (e.g., see English 2013b; also, Kerdeman 2003, 2019). Other scholars focus on listening as an experience that both requires and cultivates dispositions that are necessary for being open to others (e.g., see Hartounian-Gordon and Waks 2010). Still other scholars consider the sorts of engagements that foster Bildung. These scholars argue, for example, that Gadamerian conversation trumps lecturing and distance learning, not only in humanities courses but also in science courses (Fairfield 2011a). Bildung also raises questions concerning teaching. Some scholars contend, for instance, that Bildung not only pertains to students but also is relevant for teaching. From the perspective of Bildung, teaching is not an altruistic activity or merely a profession. More significantly, teaching is a way of life that cultivates teachers’ self-understanding in relationship with students. Being open to not-knowing is vital to this way of life (e.g., see Higgins 2011). Gadamer emphasizes the importance of a teacher’s presence in students’ lives. Teachers, for Gadamer, are conversation partners who both respond to students’ questions and help students find the right questions to ask. Insofar as asking the right question invites challenges to one’s own perspective, teachers also model what being open to challenge entails. Gadamer writes, “I do not propose that to be criticized is comfortable. Every person is then a little distressed and doubts himself more than he usually does. This is true for teachers as well as for learners—and to have chosen this is our lot” (1992b: 58). The fact that Bildung is an experience that absorbs individuals raises normative questions concerning teachers’ responsibilities. For instance, should teachers become absorbed in conversations in the same way that students do? If teachers do not regulate or control the direction that conversations take, who ultimately is responsible for conversations that are hurtful or unproductive? How does being open to being challenged refute, enhance, and/or reframe teachers’ responsibility to cultivate pedagogic expertise and subject matter knowledge? Hermeneutic thinkers and phenomenologists have yet to take up these questions in detail. The future thus holds many opportunities for these scholars to continue to clarify, challenge, and perhaps reshape our understanding of education.

CONCLUSION Challenging instrumental views of education and imagining an alternative to social science for studying educational experience, phenomenologists and hermeneutic scholars of education introduce significant and stimulating

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ideas. Above all else, these scholars insist, education should be an existentially compelling experience. Many people resonate with this view. But while the insights of phenomenology and hermeneutics are important and worthwhile, this perspective—like all perspectives—harbors unexamined assumptions that warrant further consideration. One concern relates to Van Manen’s claim that good phenomenology “enthralls us with insights … [that are] existentially compelling to the soul” (2017: 779). This question may be asked, though: compelling for whom? If readers are not moved by a phenomenological description of education, this may not be due to a weakness on the part of the phenomenologist or to a lack of sensitivity on the part of readers. Failing to be compelled by phenomenological description instead could be due to the fact that meaning may not necessarily be disclosed in “benign” or obvious ways. Meaning instead may be misleading or distorted because it has been conditioned by political and economic interests, which do not manifest themselves in direct or obvious ways. If lived experience is conditioned by the very ideologies it seeks to expose, then continuing reflectively to clarify lived experience will not be sufficient to unveil ideological distortions. Reflection instead may require theoretical support and/or methodological assurance of its reliability (Warnke 1987: 34). In sum, understanding may be historically conditioned, as Heidegger and Gadamer saw. But, to become reflective, it is possible that understanding does not and should not remain historically conditioned, as Dilthey and Husserl saw. The tension between scientific knowledge and lived understanding is not simply an artifact of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the contrary, this tension continues to be relevant for present-day efforts reflectively to clarify educational experience.

NOTES 1

2 3

4 5 6

In German, there are two words for experience: Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Dilthey distinguishes Erlebnis, or lived experience, from Erfahrung, or scientific experience. For a good discussion of the difference between these terms, see Warnke (1987: 26–35); see also Kockelmans (1967: 33). For an interesting discussion of similarities and differences between Husserl and Dilthey regarding Erlebnis, see Tillman (1976: 123–30). Warnke (1987) explains that Gadamer uses the term Erfahrung to describe negative experience. In so doing, he follows Hegel’s idea that Erfahrung refers not only to scientific experience but also to learning experiences. For Warnke’s full discussion of how Gadamer understands Erfahrung, see pp. 26–9. According to Gadamer, meaning is disclosed through language because language is “speculative” (1989/2013: 472–90). For a sample of this range of views, see Gallagher (1992) and Pinar and Reynolds (1992). For a consideration of Bildung in postmodern times, see Løvlie, Mortensen, and Nordenbo (2002).

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REFERENCES Primary sources Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1989/2013), Truth and Method, London: Bloomsbury. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1992a), “The Future of the European Humanities,” in Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (eds.), Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, 193–208, Albany: State University of New York Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1992b), “The Idea of the University: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, 47–59, Albany: State University of New York Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (2001), “Education Is Self-Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 35 (4): 529–38. Langeveld, Martinus Jan (1983a), “Reflections on Phenomenology and Pedagogy,” Phenomenology and Pedagogy, 1 (1): 5–7. Langeveld, Martinus Jan (1983b), “The Secret Place in the Life of the Child,” Phenomenology and Pedagogy, 1 (2): 181–91.

Secondary sources Aldridge, David (2015), A Hermeneutics of Religious Education, London: Bloomsbury. Ashworth, Peter (1999), “‘Bracketing’ in Phenomenology: Renouncing Assumptions in Hearing About Study Cheating,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 12 (6): 707–21. Chamberlin, Gordon J. (1974), “Phenomenological Methodology and Understanding Education,” in David E. Denton (ed.), Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education, 119–38, New York: Teachers College Press. Cleary, John and Padraig Hogan (2001), “The Reciprocal Character of Self-Education: Introductory Comments on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Address, ‘Education is SelfEducation,’” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 35 (4): 519–27. English, Andrea (2013a), “Pedagogical Tact: Learning to Teach ‘In-Between,’” in Discontinuity in Learning: Dewey, Herbart, and Education as Transformation, 126–46, New York: Cambridge University Press. English, Andrea (2013b), “Revisiting Learning In-Between and Umlernen,” in Discontinuity in Learning: Dewey, Herbart, and Education as Transformation, 113–25, New York: Cambridge University Press. Ermarth, Michael (1981a), “The Transformation of Hermeneutics: 19th Century Ancients and 20th Century Moderns,” The Monist, 64 (2): 175–94. Ermarth, Michael (1981b), Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fairfield, Paul (2011a), “Dialogue in the Classroom,” in Paul Fairfield (ed.), Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics, 77–89, New York: Continuum. Fairfield, Paul (2011b), “Introduction: Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics,” in Paul Fairchild (ed.), Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics, 1–4, New York: Continuum. Flyvbjerg, Bent (2001), Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, Sean (1992), Hermeneutics and Education, Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Ganeson, Krishnaveni and Lisa C. Ehrich (2009), “Transition into High School: A Phenomenological Study,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41 (1): 60–78. Hartounian-Gordon, Sophie and Leonard J. Waks, eds. (2010), “Listening: Challenges for Teachers,” Teachers College Record, 112 (11): 2717–873. Higgins, Chris (2011), “Teaching As Experience: Towards a Hermeneutics of Teaching and Teacher Education,” in The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice, 241–81, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Jessor, Richard (1996), “Ethnographic Methods in Contemporary Perspective,” in Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder (eds.), Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry, 3–14, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kerdeman, Deborah (2003), “Pulled Up Short: Challenging Self-understanding As a Focus of Teaching and Learning,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37 (2): 293–308. Kerdeman, Deborah (2019), “Pulled Up Short: Confronting White Privilege,” in Ann Chinnery (ed.), Philosophy of Education 2017, 1–18, Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. Kockelmans, Joseph J., ed. (1967), The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company. Linge, David E., ed. (1976), Philosophical Hermeneutics: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lombaerts Herman and Didier Pollefeyt, eds. (2004), Hermeneutics and Religious Education, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Løvlie, Lars, Klaus Peter Mortensen, and Sven-Erik Nordenbo, eds. (2002), “Educating Humanity: Bildung in Postmodernity,” special issue of Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36 (3): 317–512. Mackler, Stephanie (2009), Learning for Meaning’s Sake: Toward the Hermeneutic University, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Magrini, James M. (2013), “When Praxis Breaks Down: What Heidegger’s Phenomenology Contributes to Understanding Miscues in Learning to Read,” Analysis and Metaphysics, 12: 25–46. Malpas, Jeff (2003), “Martin Heidegger,” in Robert C. Solomon and David Sherman (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, 143–62, New York: Blackwell. Moran, Dermot (2000), Introduction to Phenomenology, New York: Routledge. Pinar, William F. and William M. Reynolds, eds. (1992), Understanding Curriculum As Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text, New York: Teachers College Press. Sherman, Glen L. (2011), “Hermeneutics and the Traditions of Student Development and Learning,” Journal of College and Character, 12 (2): 1–10. Sotiriou, Peter Elias (2014), “A Gadamerian Perspective on Teaching the Humanities: Students, Teachers, and the Unmethodical Questioning of Truth,” International Journal of Humanities Education, 11: 9–14. Strauss, Anselm L. (1998), Basics of Qualitative Inquiry: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tillman, Mary Katherine (1976), “Dilthey and Husserl,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 7 (2): 123–30. Vandenberg, Donald (1982), “Hermeneutical Phenomenology in the Study of Education Administration,” Journal of Education Administration, 20 (1): 23–32. Van Manen, Max (1983), “Editorial: Invitation to Phenomenology + Pedagogy,” Phenomenology and Pedagogy, 1 (1).

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Van Manen, Max (2014), “Phenomenological Pedagogy,” in Denis C. Phillips (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy, 606–10, Los Angeles: Sage. Van Manen, Max (2016a), Pedagogical Tact: Knowing What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do, New York: Routledge Van Manen, Max (2016b), The Tact of Teaching: The Meaning of Pedagogical Thoughtfulness, New York: Taylor & Francis. Van Manen, Max (2017), “But Is It Phenomenology?,” Qualitative Health Research, 27 (6): 775–9. Wachterhauser, Brice R., ed. (1986), Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York Press. Warnke, Georgia (1987), Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. West, David (2010), Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd edn., Malden, MA: Polity. Wiercinski, Andrzej (2011), “Hermeneutic Education to Understanding: Self-Education and the Willingness to Risk Failure,” in Paul Fairfield (ed.), Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics, 107–23, New York: Continuum. Wiercinski, Andrzej, ed. (2015), Hermeneutics—Ethics—Education, International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, Vol. 8, Zurich: Lit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Wien. Zahavi, Dan (2008), “Phenomenology,” in Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, 661–92, New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER THREE

Ethical Relationality in Education: Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Nel Noddings MORDECHAI GORDON

INTRODUCTION Two recurrent themes that have intrigued numerous philosophers of education since the inception of Western philosophy are philosophical anthropology and ethics. The former deals with various foundational questions about the human subject such as these: What does it mean to be human? In what ways are human beings different from the other mammals on Earth? And what is the relationship between the physical, spiritual, and emotional aspects of human beings? The latter theme (ethics) addresses problems of human development and flourishing. Philosophers of education who have been concerned with ethics and morality have asked a wide range of questions like: From what sources do human values originate and how are they established? What does it mean for human beings to live well and flourish? What is the relation between education and the establishment of justice? And how can education contribute to human flourishing or to living a good life? This chapter is designed to contribute to the ongoing conversation philosophers of education have been conducting for generations on the

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themes of philosophical anthropology and ethics as well as on some important intersections between the two. More specifically, I examine in depth the insights of three thinkers whose writings focus on ethical relationality in education: Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Nel Noddings. In what follows, I first lay out Buber’s philosophy of dialogue or dialogical approach while carefully explaining his ontology: the distinction between the I–You and the I–It and his notion of the “between” as well as some of the different types of dialogical relationships. In the next part, I examine Emmanuel Levinas’s notions of relationship, the other, and radical ethics, which though inspired by Buber, diverge from his thinking in important ways. Next, I consider Nel Noddings’s concept of caring for others that also contains close ties to Buber’s philosophy. In the last part of this chapter, I turn my attention more specifically to education and examine some important educational implications that can be inferred from the insights of Buber, Levinas, and Noddings.

BUBER’S PHILOSOPHY OF DIALOGUE Martin Buber, the Austrian-born Jewish philosopher and theologian, was a trailblazer in philosophical anthropology—the study of the human being— in that he elucidated a fresh and influential conception of the realm that is “between” person and person.1 He stressed that something essential can happen between two persons that is fundamental to each of the individuals as such and greatly significant for the collective world that binds them. This something, which will be described in detail below, Buber calls “dialogue” or the “I–You relationship.” Dialogue emerges when one whole person encounters another whole person, an encounter in which each individual presents their entire being (physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually) to the other and does not hold anything back. As Buber eloquently writes in Between Man and Man, The life of dialogue is no privilege of intellectual activity like dialectic. It does not begin in the upper story of humanity. It begins no higher than where humanity begins. There are no gifted and ungifted here, only those that give themselves and those who withhold themselves. (1947/1969: 35) To introduce Buber’s concept of dialogue or I–You relation one must also include the I–It because these two attitudes, though radically opposed to each other, cannot really be separated as one separates two distinct objects. Indeed, although Buber poses the I–You as fundamentally opposed to the I–It, these two attitudes help to delineate and make sense of each other. By attitudes, he means not simply psychological outlooks or moods but rather two distinct ontological modes of existence. As Buber explains in his book I and Thou,

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The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two basic words he can speak. The basic words are not single words but word pairs. One basic word is the word pair I–You. The other basic word is the word pair I–It; but this basic word is not changed when He or She takes the place of It. Thus the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the basic word I–You is different from that in the basic word I–It. (1923/1970: 53) Buber maintains that there is no I as such but only the I of the basic word I–You and the I of the I–It. In other words, when one addresses another as You, the I of the basic word I–You is included; likewise, when one addresses the other as It, the I of the basic word I–It is included. Buber’s distinction between the I–You and the I–It may be too extreme as when he notes that “the basic word I–You can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The basic word I–It can never be spoken with one’s whole being” (Buber, 1923/1970: 54, emphasis added). Still, his point is to highlight two very different modes of existence: experience and relation. The basic word I–It belongs to the realm of experience that always has something for its object. To see something, to feel something, to want something, and so forth are all conscious acts directed at an object, an object that can never be grasped in its entirety. That is, when we perceive something, we are always perceiving parts of it or viewing it in parts rather than encountering it in its entirety. In short, Buber believes that the I–It by its very nature can only provide us with partial aspects and incomplete understandings of its objects. The basic word I–You, on the other hand, belongs to a different realm altogether—the realm of relation or dialogue. This realm is very difficult for us to think about or know because, in Buber’s model, there is no object to which one can relate it. By the I–You relation or dialogue Buber does not mean the ordinary conversations that we have with colleagues, friends, or family every day. For him, the term “dialogue” is used in a much narrower sense to signify the act of one whole being encountering or confronting another whole being. To relate means to encounter or confront another being, but it is never to experience, which Buber uses in I and Thou to refer to our practice of disconnecting from and objectifying the world. The word “confront” might sound a bit harsh but is actually meant to capture a relation in which each person affirms the other’s basic difference and still stands firm in their own being. Buber’s point is that a genuine encounter often involves confronting the other not to impose oneself or change the other but to confirm and accept the other as a partner in dialogue. To experience an object is to set it at a distance, to objectify, and to remove the I (the subject) from it. Descartes and other Western philosophers detached the individual subject and then attempted to establish the being of an “objective

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world.” The individual subject, the ego, was removed from the world and all other beings and considered as significant in itself. For Buber, any such attempt belongs to the realm of experience, the I–It, because these theories view the beings that are contemplated as objects. He believes that the subject/ object dichotomy that is at the basis of many Western philosophies results in a distancing of the individual from the beings that confront her. Moreover, our everyday language presupposes the subject/object dichotomy; when we speak, it is about something, an object, which is removed from us. We continually analyze objects, that is, divide them into parts, abstracting their colors, shapes, and numbers. The problem is that, according to Buber, “those who experience do not participate in the world” (1923/1970: 56). Put differently, those who experience do not grasp the whole being but only parts, qualities, or characteristics of it. Unlike the realm of experience, the I–You relation is unmediated: Nothing conceptually intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity to wholeness. No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur. (Buber, 1923/1970: 62–3) This quote suggests that, for Buber, the term “dialogue” refers to a unique kind of immediacy and connection of two beings that have no conscious intent to influence the other. Dialogue means that I communicate with you for no purpose I wish to accomplish, that I expect nothing specific from you, and that my experience of you is not limited by ideas I have formed from our previous encounters. This is why Buber says that “every means is an obstacle,” suggesting that, when we relate to others as means in the service of our ends rather than as unique individuals, dialogue cannot emerge. As noted, Buber’s radical opposition between the I–You and the I–It is a distinction between two very different modes of being, but it can also be viewed as a conflict between two ethical positions. Indeed, Lisbeth Lipari characterizes this conflict as one between “the intersubjective, ethical, dialogical relation of the I-Thou and the instrumental, goal-oriented, monological relation of the I– It” (2004: 125). The former is based on attitudes such as care and acceptance of difference while the latter rests on a feeling of superiority and a desire to control the world. Although Buber stressed that both the I–You and the I–It are necessary modes of being, he believed that we exist too little in the former and too much in the latter. For him, human beings fully emerge as persons neither as isolated individuals nor as part of a collective but rather in a dialogue or relation with other beings. Although the focus of my analysis

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here is on dialogue between human beings, a number of Buber scholars have rightly pointed out that his concept of dialogue is not limited to relations between persons. For instance, Sean Blenkinsop (2005) demonstrates that Buber’s notion of dialogic relationship includes the possibility of encounters with animals, minerals, and plants, not to mention encounters with a divine being. Wayne Veck echoes Blenkinsop’s point, writing that it is possible for a person to “become attentive to the tree and, in this way, to be seized by the power of exclusiveness of the tree” (2013: 615). The point is that Buber’s notion of dialogue is not restricted to a relation between two persons though it does seem to involve at least one human subject who is open to forging a connection with another being. For Buber, what is essential in the I–You relation is not I as an individual nor You as an individual but rather something that happens between You and I in a dimension that is accessible only to us. Love, Buber holds, unlike feelings that each person has, is between You and I. He notes in I and Thou that “feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love” (Buber, 1923/1970: 66). Unlike feelings such as anger or sadness, which can be localized in an individual, love implies a reciprocal responsibility of one person to another. Regarding this responsibility, Buber writes that it assumes “one that addresses me primarily, that is, from a realm independent of myself, and to whom I am answerable” (1947/1969: 45). Responsibility, therefore, is not so much a personal trait as it is a presupposition of one individual who responds to another as a person. Still, what is Buber really getting at when he says that love is between you and me? And what does he mean by the sphere of “between”? His point is that we must stop localizing the relation between human beings within the individual souls or in some collective group that binds them; rather, he insists that relation is something that happens literally “between” persons. As he writes, in a genuine conversation, a real classroom lesson, or a spontaneous embrace, “what is essential does not take place in each of the participants or in a neutral world which includes the two and all other things; but it takes place between them in the most precise sense, as it were in a dimension which is accessible only to them both” (Buber, 1947/1969: 203–4). Thus, dialogue occurs, according to Buber, in the intersubjective realm that exists between persons; it cannot be reduced to something that happens within an individual’s psyche or the dynamics of a group. Inspired by Buber’s notion of dialogue, in my education courses I always make a point to tell my students that what is most essential in our class is not the readings that they do at home or the papers that I assign them but rather “the conversation that we have twice a week for an hour and fifteen minutes about the texts they read and about education.” True to Buber’s notion of dialogue, the conversations that I have with my students often lead to unexpected insights and spontaneous teachable moments.

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Dialogue between persons, according to Buber, can occur on various levels, including the level of speech, as when an I address a You using language. Still, Buber makes it quite plain that the dialogical relation between persons is by no means limited to speech. In fact, a glance, a look, or a gaze that meets the eyes of another person is sometimes enough for dialogue to emerge. Buber gives an example of two people who are stuck together in a shelter during an air raid and another of two audience members who are listening together to an opera: In the deadly crush of an air raid shelter the glances of two strangers suddenly meet for a second in astonishing mutuality; when the All Clear sounds it is forgotten; and yet it did happen, in a realm that existed only for that moment. In the darkened opera-house there can be established between two of the audience, who do not know one another, and who are listening in the same purity and with the same intensity to the music of Mozart, a relation which is scarcely perceptible and yet is one of elemental dialogue, and which has long vanished when the lights blaze up again. (1947/1969: 204) Needless to say, the cases that Buber is citing here are fleeting and do not occur all too often. Yet many people would probably acknowledge that they have lived through a similar ontological occurrence at least once in their life. What is significant about the two examples cited by Buber is that in each case the dialogical relation takes place on the level of looks and gazes through a shared experience rather than on the level of speech. Peter Roberts develops this point further, noting that, For Buber, dialogical relations are not confined to conversational communication: dialogue can occur without speech and even in the absence of sound and gesture. At its most basic level, dialogue is the experience of, and more particularly the acknowledgement of, an other: a being through which the self is defined. (1999: 184) Although the ideal I–You relation is characterized by reciprocity and mutuality as in the case of love between two persons as illustrated, Buber believes that not all relations are entirely reciprocal. Some relationships, for instance the ones between an educator and their students or a psychotherapist and their patients, by their very nature can never unfold into complete mutuality. Buber insists that the educator who wants to help their students realize their potentialities must grasp them as a whole and not merely as a sum of qualities and aspirations. But this can only be achieved if they encounters their students in a dialogical relation. In the Afterword to I and Thou, written in 1957, Buber explains that to make his influence meaningful, the educator must try to live through the situation in all its aspects not only from his point of view but also from that of his partner. He must practice the kind

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of realization that I call embracing. It is essential that he should awaken the I–You relationship in the pupil, too, who should intend and affirm his educator as this particular person; and yet the educational relationship could not endure if the pupil also practiced the art of embracing by living through the shared situation from the educator’s point of view. (1923/1970: 178, emphasis added) Thus, as Buber recognizes, there is a certain tension and discord between the  educational relationship and complete mutuality. Likewise, he claims that  the therapist–patient relationship cannot endure a total reciprocity; if  the  patient attempted to embrace the feelings felt by the therapist, they would undermine the therapeutic relationship. Buber uses the term “embrace” here to refer to the act of identifying with someone else’s position and lived situation while simultaneously maintaining a clear sense of oneself. The point that needs to be stressed here is that an I–You relation that is characterized by  complete mutuality presupposes that the two partners are relatively equal  and have no conscious intent of changing the other. Contrarily, Buber  argues that “every  I–You relationship in a situation defined by the attempt of one partner to act on the other one so as to accomplish some goal depends on a mutuality that is condemned never to be complete” (1923/1970: 179) (see Figure 3.1).

FIGURE 3.1  Dialogical encounter of parents of the students of a newly integrated classroom, Louisville, Kentucky School Integration.

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LEVINAS, THE OTHER, AND RADICAL ETHICS That Emmanuel Levinas (a French philosopher of Lithuanian, Jewish ancestry) was influenced by Buber and held him in high regard is evidenced by the numerous essays that he dedicated to an examination of Buber’s thought.2 Much like Buber, Levinas spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about the intersubjective realm, the realm in which human beings interact with each other in everyday life. Like Buber, Levinas assumed that any serious philosophical anthropology should begin by critically examining the realm of human interaction as opposed to attempting to characterize the individual subject (e.g., Descartes and Sartre) or describing the nature of human communities and societies (e.g., Marx and Weber). Finally, like Buber, Levinas was convinced that a philosophical anthropology based on an analysis of the intersubjective realm compels us to wrestle with some serious ethical questions concerning how human beings should relate to each other. Yet, despite these parallels between Levinas and Buber, the former diverged from the latter in significant ways on issues such as the representation of the other with whom we wish to enter into a relation, the nature of the relationship between two individuals, and the ethical obligation that is placed on us vis-à-vis the other. It is to these parallels and the differences to which I turn my attention now. In his book Time and the Other, Levinas writes that, It is banal to say we never exist in the singular. We are surrounded by beings and things with which we maintain relationships. Through sight, touch, sympathy and cooperative work, we are with others. All these relationships are transitive: I touch an object, I see the other. But I am not the other. I am all alone. It is thus the being in me, the fact that I exist, my existing, that constitutes the absolutely intransitive element, something without intentionality or relationship. One can exchange everything between beings except existing. (1947/1987: 42) Sharon Todd interprets this quote by Levinas to mean that he does acknowledge that there are meaningful relationships between human beings but also that he insists such relationships are only possible between two separate and irreducible subjects. Todd points out that Levinas believed that to assume that one is the same as the other “is to colonize the other in an imperious move. Instead, the other is always more than me, more than the sum of knowledge, more than I can possibly know” (2015: 248). The other, for Levinas, through her being an other-than-myself, always escapes my intentionality and categorization of her. Here we can begin to see one of the major differences between Levinas and Buber. Unlike Buber, Levinas’s focus is less on dialogue between persons and more on the transcendence of being, that is, on what is otherwise than being. Simply put, Levinas is concerned with carefully delineating how the other

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always transcends our attempts to understand and identify with her. According to Levinas, regardless of such attempts the other always maintains a difference and uniqueness that cannot be fully known. Neve Gordon captures this point well when he writes that “the difference between the other and myself is not a difference of properties (tall, strong, and so forth), nor a difference of psychological dispositions (the other’s despair does not dominate me). The difference arises from my orientation as a being that is separate from the other” (2004: 99). For teachers, Levinas’s insight suggests that they should try to approach their students with a sense of wonder, never assuming that they know all there is to know about them. Taking Levinas’s notion of the other seriously would also require teachers to be humble in their interaction with their students so that the distinctive beings of the students can feel welcome to make themselves present in the classroom. In emphasizing the point that the other is always separate from being and evades our attempts to characterize them, Levinas is not trying to create a new conception of subjectivity. As Gert Biesta notes, What Levinas is doing should not be read as an attempt to outline the nature of human subjectivity, but as an attempt to express that the subject has no nature … Or, to be more precise: it should be read as an attempt to express that the singularity or uniqueness of the subject cannot be conceived in ontological terms. (2003: 63) Biesta’s point is that Levinas rejects a notion with which Buber would have been quite comfortable—that it is possible to identify the uniqueness of human beings in ontological terms, namely their ability to enter into dialogical relations with other beings. For Levinas, unlike Buber, the uniqueness of the human subject needs to be expressed in ethical rather than ontological terms (Biesta 2003). Another important difference between Levinas and Buber concerns the nature of the relationship between an I and a Thou, between oneself and the other. Buber’s notion of dialogue suggests that one can create, albeit momentarily, a symmetrical relation with another being that dissolves any hierarchical, ideological, or moral differences that may exist between the two individuals. Although Buber acknowledges that not all relations are entirely reciprocal (e.g., a relation between an educator and a student or a therapist and a patient), he insists that the ideal I–You relation is characterized by reciprocity and mutuality. Examples of such symmetrical relationships include the case of love between a husband and wife or a friendship between two individuals. In both these cases, Buber assumes that the two partners are essentially equal and are not trying to manipulate or dominate the other. Unlike Buber, Levinas denied the possibility that a dialogue between an I and a Thou can ever become a reciprocal relationship; indeed, he believed that such a relationship is inherently asymmetrical. Levinas underscored this

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point in his book Totality and Infinity, in which he noted that human beings are situated in a space that is essentially asymmetrical and that can never be fully balanced (1961/1969: 216). Moreover, in his 1964 encounter with Buber, Levinas writes, Are we not compelled to substitute for the reciprocity of the Thou relation a structure which is more fundamental and which excludes reciprocity, that is, one which involves an asymmetry or difference of level and thereby implies real distancing? (1964: 27) The structure to which Levinas is referring in this quote is an ethical relation to the other that is fundamentally asymmetrical. As Lipari notes, for Levinas, “the ethical relation is unidirectional—the subject suspending self for other. Levinas’s ethical ontology thus rejects Buber’s intersubjective meeting in the I-Thou relation” (2004: 135). The notion that, for Levinas, ethics precedes and has priority over ontology brings us to the third essential difference between his and Buber’s respective philosophies. In his book Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Levinas writes, The responsibility for the other cannot have begun in my commitment, in my decision. The unlimited responsibility in which I find myself comes from the hither side of my freedom, from a “prior to every memory,” and “ulterior to every accomplishment,” from the non-present par excellence, the nonoriginal, the anarchical, prior to or beyond essence. (1974/1998: 10) For Levinas, as Ann Chinnery and other scholars have noted, one’s ethical commitment to the other is prior to one’s actualization as a subject (ontology). Chinnery writes that it is from Levinas’s “inescapable position of existential/ ethical debt to the other that all else derives” (2003: 12). According to this view, subjectivity is constituted not by the rational autonomy of the subject but by an ethical responsibility to and for the other. To be sure, like Levinas, Buber also acknowledged the fact that human beings have an ethical responsibility to the other. In Between Man and Man, he writes that “genuine responsibility exists only where there is real responding” (Buber, 1947/1969: 16). Hence, for both Buber and Levinas, ethics arises out of an encounter with another being, one that necessitates a renunciation of our  egocentric self. However, the two thinkers diverge in the way in which each conceives of the nature of the response that one is obliged to communicate to the other. For Buber, an ethical response toward another being arises when one is able to suspend the inclination to treat them as an object that can be manipulated and controlled. Buber believes that responding to another as a unique individual and relating to this other as a whole person can result in  creating an ethical relationship with them based on mutual recognition and trust.

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Levinas theorizes a much more radical type of ethical relationship with the other than the one envisioned by Buber. As Lipari argues, “to Levinas, the subjectivity of the subject owes everything to the other” (2004: 130). This means that Levinas assumes that “because the self is always already responsible for the other, it owes its basic existence to the call of the other” (Lipari 2004: 128). Indeed, Levinas claims that a human being needs to be “obsessed” with the wellbeing of the other and not rest until the other’s needs have been completely met. He writes that, To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as “Vous” in a dimension of height. (Levinas 1961/1969: 75) Thus, Levinas seems to be suggesting not only that displaying an ethical response to the other is mandatory and not a matter of individual choice but also that the moral positioning of the other should be considered as higher than that of oneself. On his view, there is never any situation that could be viewed as an ethical equivalency between oneself and the other as is the case with Buber’s ideal dialogical encounter. This brief comparison of Levinas’s insights to those of Buber is not intended for the purpose of advocating for one theorist’s views versus the other’s (as various scholars have already done). Neither is my intention to speculate on why Buber and Levinas were never able to bridge their differences even as each was aware of the other’s views and took them seriously. My goal here is more modest—to try to identify those ideas of Buber’s that inspired Levinas as well as how the latter diverged from the former on several important issues. My analysis suggests that Levinas’s conception of the other and our ethical obligation toward her was heavily influenced by Buber’s insistence that a worthy philosophical anthropology has to begin with a study of human relationships and dialogue as opposed to an investigation of the individual subject or ego. At the same time, Levinas diverged from Buber in important ways, not the least of which is the way he characterizes the nature of our responsibility toward the other. Biesta argues correctly that, for Levinas, the responsibility toward the other is not something that we can choose “since this would be possible only if we were an ego or a consciousness before we were ‘inscribed’ in this relationship” (2010: 294). Instead, Levinas regards this responsibility as something that is driven by an absolute passion to help the other, which cannot be justified by appealing to any prior commitment or to a primordial conception of the human subject. Resembling Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that human beings are condemned to be free, Levinas argues that they are condemned to be responsible for their fellow humans. It is a bold position that has obvious implications for a variety of public issues such as how we take care of homeless people, how we should regard immigrants who want to seek asylum in Western

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democracies, and the way in which we educate students with special needs and other disadvantaged populations. Levinas’s position also raises many questions having to do with whether human beings are born with the rudiments of the outlook he puts forward or whether they have to be educated into it.

RELATIONAL ETHICS, NEL NODDINGS, AND THE CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE Aside from Levinas, several contemporary educational theorists have been inspired by Buber’s philosophy of dialogue (e.g., Nel Noddings, Paolo Freire, Madeleine Grumet, and Parker Palmer). Among the various contemporary thinkers that were influenced by Buber, I would like to highlight some ideas of Noddings, the twentieth-century American philosopher, educator, and feminist. Noddings readily acknowledges her indebtedness to Buber in her well-known book Caring: A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1986) as well as in several other works on the topic of caring (Noddings 1992, 2010). Scholars of Noddings have noted that her notions of the “one-caring” and the “cared-for” are reminiscent of Buber’s concept of the I–You relation. For instance, Barbara Thayer-Bacon writes that, when comparing Buber to Noddings, it becomes evident that “the one-caring and the one-cared-for in a caring relation are similar to the I and Thou in a particular I-Thou relation” (2003: 135). Moreover, both Buber and Noddings suggest that an I–You or caring relation is characterized by responsiveness to the other and by reciprocity between two subjects in a relationship. Hence, exploring Noddings’s views on caring in relation to Buber’s philosophy of dialogue seems to make a great deal of sense. In chapter 1 of her book Caring: A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Noddings asserts that the phenomenon of caring implies being engrossed with another being. Noddings points out that, while caring relationships might very well differ with respect to their level of intensity, time span, and type of association, virtually all such relationships require an engrossment with the other. As she puts it, At bottom, all caring involves engrossment. The engrossment need not be intense nor need it be pervasive in the life of the one-caring, but it must occur. This requirement does not force caring into the model of romantic love, as some critics fear, for our engrossment may be latent for long periods. (Noddings 1986: 17) Thus, Noddings clearly recognizes that there are different types of caring relationships, only some of which involve romantic love. At the same time, she insists that all such relations—whether between lovers, parent and child, siblings, or friends—entail a deep concern and engagement with the cared-for.

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To make sense of Noddings’s notions of the “one-caring” and the “cared-for,” it is important to stress that she does not start her analysis by assuming that care is a uniquely human attribute akin to those posited by several Western philosophers (i.e., rationality or speech). Instead, she begins by examining the primordial connection between a mother and an infant and the natural instinct of the former to care for the latter. Noddings writes that, when infants cry, their mothers do not begin “by trying to interpret the cry, although we may learn to do this. We first respond to the feeling that something is the matter” (1986: 31). Her point is that caring involves for the one-caring, first and foremost, a feeling with the other. Caring, Noddings argues, is not the same as empathy, which has to do with projecting one’s personality into the object of contemplation; caring has to do with sharing a feeling with the cared-for, receiving them as someone who is in need and then responding to that need. At the same time, Noddings emphasizes that caring and receiving the other is more than just feeling since it involves a motivational shift: My motive energy flows toward the other and perhaps, although not necessarily, toward his ends. I do not relinquish myself; I cannot excuse myself for what I do. But I allow my motive energy to be shared; I put it at the service of the other. It is clear that my vulnerability is potentially increased when I care, for I can be hurt through the other as well as through myself. But my strength and hope are also increased, for if I am weakened, this other, which is part of me, may remain strong and insistent. (1986: 33) The act of caring and receiving the other, which Noddings is describing here from the perspective of the one-caring, is reminiscent of Buber’s I–You relation. In both cases, our attention is directed toward another being who has signaled that they are interested in forging a relationship with us. Much like Buber’s notion of dialogue, Noddings believes that responding to the other necessitates more than just an emotional response. It necessitates receiving the other with one’s entire being in an effort to establish a meaningful connection with this person without knowing in advance the results of this encounter. An example provided by Noddings is helpful in making sense of the actions taken by the one-caring vis-à-vis the cared-for. Trained as a mathematics teacher, Noddings describes a rather familiar situation in which students get stuck trying to solve a particular math problem because they are overthinking the issue. She points out that many students faced with such a situation try to force a particular solution onto an unyielding problem and as a result get very frustrated and discouraged. However, a shrewd teacher might use this opportunity to say,

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“Wait. Just sit still for a minute. Stop thinking and just look at the problem.” Humor, patience, and quiet enter. The student may say, “What kind of mathematics teacher would tell a person to ‘stop thinking’?” Teacher and student receive each other. Then the student relaxes and receives the problem. Often the result is quite remarkable. Over and over, I have heard students say, as they looked at what was in front of them, “for goodness sake! Why didn’t I see that before?” (Noddings 1986: 35) In this case, the teacher was able to encounter the frustrated student and at the same time guide them to a way to get unstuck by receiving them and relating to them as a person. Like the one-caring, in Noddings’s model the cared-for has an important role to play in establishing and maintaining the relationship between the two. She writes that “the cared-for responds to the presence of the one-caring. He feels the difference between being received and being held off or ignored” (Noddings 1986: 60–1). Noddings argues that the cared-for responds to the actions of the one-caring with an attitude that either enhances or diminishes the relation. What she means by “attitude” is similar to what Buber refers to as being “open” to the summons of the other. Noddings would probably say that, to the extent that the cared-for can receive the invitation of the one-caring, the relation between the two is enhanced. Consider the abovementioned example of the student who got stuck trying to solve a complex math problem and became flustered until the teacher helped them to relax and change their overly serious approach to the problem. Had this student not been able to receive the teacher’s suggestion to take a little mental break from trying to solve the problem, it is possible that the student would have felt neglected and the relation between the two would have taken a turn for the worse. Thus, the cared-for’s response to the summons of the one-caring is necessary to fulfill the reciprocity of the relationship. Still, what form does the reciprocity between the one-caring and the caredfor take from the perspective of the latter? Once again, following Buber’s lead, Noddings reminds us that reciprocity does not imply an identity of gifts given and received. She writes that “something, not necessarily identical to my engrossment as one-caring, is required of my Thou, the cared-for” (Noddings 1986: 74). What the cared-for brings to the relation can certainly be something quite different from that which the one-caring provides as long as they present a genuine response (e.g., an honest word, a feeling, a smile). Such a response, Noddings believes, “contributes to the maintenance of the relation and serves to prevent the caring from turning back on the one-caring in the form of anguish and concern for self” (1986: 74). To verify Noddings’s claim that the onecaring and the  cared-for often bring something completely different to the relationship, we just need to think of the relation between a parent and an

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infant, in which the latter is completely dependent on the former yet can fulfill the relation through a mere smile, cry, or gesture. Despite the similarities between Noddings and Buber, there are also some important differences that need to be mentioned. For one, Noddings provides many more concrete illustrations of caring and relationships than what Buber offers in his philosophy of dialogue. As many of his critics have noted, Buber’s writing in I and Thou is very symbolic and poetic. In contrast, Noddings’s discourse includes numerous examples that are designed to illustrate different types of care relations, examples that are all corporeal in nature. For instance, when discussing the question of whether caring can exist in the absence of action on behalf of the cared-for, Noddings presents the following case: Consider the problem of lovers who cannot marry because they are already committed to satisfactory and honorable marriages. The lover learns that his beloved is ill. All his instincts cry out for his presence at her bedside. Yet, if he fears for the trouble he may bring her, for the recriminations that may spring from his appearance, he may stay away from her. Surely, we would not say in such a case that the lover does not care. (1986: 10) One would be hard-pressed to find such a tangible example of two people involved in a relation in the writings of Buber, not to mention in Levinas’s works that are much more abstract and obscure than Buber’s. A second difference between Noddings and Buber has to do with the feminist approach Noddings presents on the significance of care in human relations versus Buber’s existential-ontological perspective on dialogue. For Buber, as illustrated, a dialogue is an encounter between two whole beings who are each present to the other as subjects rather than objects. Noddings’s focus is less on an ontological encounter between whole persons and much more on the phenomenon of care that manifests most clearly and completely in the mother’s care for the infant. Hers is a feminist perspective that draws on women’s experiences of caring for babies, children, and human beings in general. The feminist notion of caring that Noddings supports is not only a primordial instinct common to human caretakers but also an approach to responding to others ethically that can serve as an alternative to various rationalistic models of morality that marginalize emotion and sympathetic responsiveness.

RELATIONAL PHILOSOPHIES AND EDUCATION Thus far, my analysis of Buber, Levinas, and Noddings has focused on their respective relational philosophies while saying relatively little about the realm of education and schooling. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus more explicitly on some important educational implications that can be gleaned from the three relational philosophies considered here. Specifically, in this section I address

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some critical questions: How would an emphasis on relational philosophies change the way in which we conceive of the aims of education? And how might such an emphasis impact the interaction between teachers and students and among students? As I address these and other educational questions, I draw on some of the key insights presented earlier from Buber, Levinas, and Noddings. To be sure, I am not the first scholar to focus on such questions in the context of a discussion of the philosophies of Buber, Levinas, and Noddings. One noteworthy text that does this is Charles Bingham and Alexander Sidorkin’s (2004) book No Education Without Relation, an edited volume that attempts to develop a pedagogy of relation. In her chapter on “Personal and Social Relations” in Bingham and Sidorkin’s volume, Barbara Thayer-Bacon addresses the question of how a relational model of education might conceive of the aims of education. Thayer-Bacon first reminds us that most public schools in the United States currently focus on the products and outcomes of schooling rather than the process. She writes that in such a model of education, Students become objects who must produce a certain amount and quality of products in order to graduate, and teachers become the managers of this production effort, whose job security and salaries depend on how productive their students are. Current emphasis on proficiency exams in the United States, attempts to hold teachers accountable and make sure all students are able to produce the predetermined outcomes, only further enhance a product focus. (Thayer-Bacon 2004: 168) In contrast to the product model, Thayer-Bacon argues that a relational approach to education must focus “on the process of learning and consider very deeply how we can help students, as social beings-in-relation-withothers, become knowers” (2004: 168). Inspired by thinkers such as Buber and Noddings, Thayer-Bacon suggests that attending to the educational process implies that the aims of schooling need to shift from emphasizing outcomes and test scores to cultivating meaningful relationships between teachers and students and among students. When outcomes and test scores recede into the background and relationships come to the fore, the chance that dialogical and caring relations will emerge between teachers and students is greatly enhanced. In a school that has become a caring and trusting environment, teachers are focused on listening to and addressing the needs of their students. Moreover, in such an environment, students are eager to work together with and learn from their teachers since they appreciate the fact that teachers have more knowledge and experience than they do. Buber and Noddings also have a great deal to say about how a relational model of education might impact the interaction between teachers and students and among students. For these two theorists, it is quite obvious that, to the extent that teachers can adopt a relational pedagogy, the classroom climate as

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well as the relationships among all the participants in the learning process are greatly enhanced. In Buber’s essay “The Education of Character” (1947/1969: 104–17), he introduces the concept of starting from above, which happens when teachers begin the lesson by attempting to enter into a dialogue or make a connection with their students. Buber’s notion of starting from above as opposed to starting from beneath can be conceived as an alternative way of making sense of and responding to discipline problems in the classroom. From Buber’s perspective, students who are disrupting the class when a new teacher enters are not just misbehaving and showing no respect but are probably trying to determine if they can trust this teacher. The advantages of beginning the school year by trying to establish a relation based on trust with one’s students instead of by issuing orders are considerable. Students are much more likely to open up, listen, and respect the teacher if they recognize that they are not trying to manipulate them but rather are seeking to get to know them as persons who have something of value to contribute. And teachers have a much greater chance of making a long-lasting impact on the kind of persons their students will become if they strive to create meaningful dialogues with them. Like Buber, Noddings believes that embracing a relational approach to education based on care can greatly enhance the classroom dynamics. Noddings insists that teachers need to establish caring relationships with their students in which students are active participants who are able to criticize or reject relationships when the latter are not perceived as caring. According to ThayerBacon, a caring relationship is based on treating the other with respect and dignity, so that a trusting relationship can develop between the two. In a caring relationship, teachers must focus their efforts on valuing and appreciating students’ needs and learning what their interests and desires are. (2003: 168) Thus, Noddings believes that a caring relationship between teachers and students can help ensure not only that no individual in a classroom is manipulated or harmed but also that the students will develop intellectually, socially, and morally. Unlike the cases of Buber and Noddings, the ideas of Levinas are much more difficult to connect to education. Indeed, both Biesta and Todd suggest that it is misguided to believe that one can just take a Levinasian concept and apply it to the classroom. Biesta asserts that “to explore the relationship between Levinas and education is not a question of the application of his ideas to education” (2003: 61). For Biesta, the problem is that Levinas’s understanding of education calls into question the possibility of our common notion of application. Todd echoes Biesta’s sentiment when she writes that “Levinas’s non-systemic approach to ethics refuses a traditional application model; in seeking the meaning of ethical relationality, his work offers, rather, an orientation, an approach, a mode of

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engagement that opens up the potential to ‘read’ actually existing relations in terms of their engenderment of the ethical” (2003: 3). Todd’s point is that, since Levinas’s writings offer us an orientation or approach rather than a theory or a set of concepts, the efforts to relate his writings to education become an issue of implication rather than application. In light of the insights of Biesta and Todd, we need to realize it is not fruitful to try to directly apply Levinas’s ideas to education. Instead, as they recommend, we should ask questions such as these: How is education implicated in Levinas’s notion of an unconditional ethical obligation to the other? Or what would moral education look like if we were to take seriously his understanding of ethical responsibility toward others? Both Biesta and Todd raise other questions that are important to ask when reading the works of Levinas. Biesta poses questions that not only are fundamental to Levinas but are equally important to pose to other thinkers, such as Socrates, whose ideas have implications for education. For instance, Biesta asks, “What kind of a teacher is Levinas?,” “What can we learn from Levinas?,” and “How can we learn from Levinas?” (2003: 64). For Todd, approaching education from a Levinasian perspective might lead us to ask more specific questions, including, “How do subjectivity, responsibility, and communication perform in the processes of teaching and learning? What are the constitutive features of pedagogical life that give rise to ethical relationality?” (2003: 3). Needless to say, there are no easy answers to these questions, though the 2003 special issue of Studies in Philosophy and Education as well as other works by Todd (2003), Biesta (2003), and Joldersma (2008) have advanced our understanding on some of the implications of Levinas’s thinking for education. My intention here is not to offer an alternative understanding of Levinas but merely to emphasize the fact that Todd’s and Biesta’s notion of the implication of Levinas’s thinking for education seems to me to be the correct one. Following Todd and Biesta, we need to acknowledge that Levinas’s opus offers philosophers of education some rich moral and educational insights that have yet to be fully explored. Be that as it may, I would like to conclude this chapter by bringing back Buber and Noddings into focus together with Levinas to highlight what a relational philosophy can bring to education.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate that Buber, Levinas, and Noddings offer three conceptions of relational philosophies that, in my view, powerfully illuminate the necessity of ethical considerations in education. The three relational philosophies examined here all endorse the position that what is most fundamental about human beings is not the autonomous subject as such or some community that binds them together but rather the attempt to establish

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a relationship between different individuals. Whether one characterizes this relationship as a dialogical encounter between an I and a Thou (Buber), as an absolute ethical obligation toward the other (Levinas), or as a caring relation between two persons (Noddings), the key is to recognize that the forging of a relationship between one being and another is an aspect of human reality that needs to be better understood. Moreover, for Buber, Levinas, and Noddings, it is important not only to make sense of how human beings forge meaningful relationships with each other but also to strive continuously toward this goal. The act of forging relationships is essential according to these three thinkers since it is an ethical goal, one that opens the possibility for reducing human suffering, improving communication among diverse individuals and groups, and ultimately moving us closer toward a better and more humane world. My contention is that the implications of a relational philosophy to educational practice are substantial and far-reaching. That is, once we take seriously the notion that an emphasis on dialogue and a relational pedagogy is essential in education, the changes that will be required in schools and classrooms cannot involve simply making some minor or cosmetic shifts. Indeed, I believe that embracing a relational pedagogy will require us to make radical changes to the way in which we conceive of teaching and learning and to move away from the current focus on outcomes, testing, and accountability in the K-12 education system in the United States. At stake here is an educational paradigm shift from one that focuses almost exclusively on those results that are measurable to one that attends to the social, emotional, and moral development of children as well as to the cultivation of meaningful relationships between teachers and students. Currently, there are some efforts being made in a number of schools to redefine and expand the aims of education from the narrow focus on measurable outcomes to ones that emphasize social and emotional learning and the development of the whole child. At the same time, such initiatives appear to be the exception rather than the rule. Time will tell if these efforts have been successful in moving the needle away from outcomes and accountability and toward the cultivation of relationships and the development of the whole child.

NOTES 1 2

Major parts of this section of the chapter were published previously in my article “Listening As Embracing the Other: Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue”; see Gordon (2011). Among the different works by Levinas in which he discusses Buber, see especially “Question to Martin Buber” (1964), “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge” (1967), Totality and Infinity (1969), “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism” (1993), “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy” (1993), and “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes” (1993).

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REFERENCES Primary sources Buber, Martin (1923/1970), I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufman, New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. Buber, Martin (1947/1969), Between Man and Man, trans. Roger Gregor Smith, New York: Macmillan. Levinas, Emmanuel (1961/1969), Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1964), “Question to Martin Buber,” in S. Rome and B. Rome (eds.), Philosophical Interrogations, 27, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Levinas, Emmanuel (1967), “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” in P.A. Schilpp and M. Friedman (eds.), The Philosophy of Martin Buber, 133–150, La Salle, IL: Open Court. Levinas, Emmanuel (1974/1998), Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Niihoff. Levinas, Emmanuel (1947/1987), Time and the Other, trans. R. Cohen, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1993), “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes,” in Outside the Subject, trans. M.B. Smith, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Noddings, Nel (1986), Caring: A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley: University of California Press. Noddings, Nel (1992), The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach in Education, New York: Teachers College Press. Noddings, Nel (2010), The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Secondary sources Biesta, Gert (2003), “Learning from Levinas: A Response,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 22: 61–8. Biesta, Gert (2010), “Education after the Death of the Subject: Levinas and the Pedagogy of Interruption,” in Zeus Leonardo (ed.), Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education, 289–300, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Bingham, Charles and Alexander Sidorkin, eds. (2004), No Education Without Relation, New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Chinnery, Ann (2003), “Aesthetics of Surrender: Levinas and the Disruption of Agency in Moral Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 22: 5–17. Gordon, Mordechai (2011), “Listening As Embracing the Other: Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue,” Educational Theory, 61 (2): 207–19. Gordon, Neve (2004), “Ethics and the Place of the Other,” in P. Atterton, M. Calarco, and M. Friedman (eds.), Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference, 98–115, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Joldersma, Clarence (2008), “Beyond Rational Autonomy: Levinas and the Incomparable Worth of the Student as Singular Other,” Interchange, 39 (1): 21–47. Lipari, Lisbeth (2004), “Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications for the BuberLevinas Encounter,” Communication Theory, 14 (2): 122–41. Roberts, Peter (1999), “Beyond Buber: Dialogue, Education, and Politics,” Journal of Educational Thought, 33 (2): 183–9.

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Thayer-Bacon, Barbara (2003), Counterpoints, Vol. 226: Relational Epistemologies, New York: Peter Lang. Thayer-Bacon, Barbara (2004), “Personal and Social Relations in Education,” in Charles Bingham and Alexander Sidorkin (eds.), No Education Without Relation, 165–79, New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Todd, Sharon (2003), “Introduction: Levinas and Education: The Question of Implication,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 22: 1–4. Todd, Sharon (2015), “Experiencing Change, Encountering the Unknown: An Education in ‘Negative Capability’ in Light of Buddhism and Levinas,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 49 (2): 240–54. Veck, Wayne (2013), “Martin Buber’s Concept of Inclusion as a Critique of Special Education,” International Journal of Inclusive Education, 17 (6): 614–28.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Psychoanalysis with Education DEBORAH P. BRITZMAN

PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWS ON THINKING: A LIFE PROBLEM This chapter explores five leading figures of the twentieth century who ushered in an era of psychoanalysis with education, examining some fundamental psychoanalytic conceptions of the origin, development, and causes of thinking and considering educational problems and pedagogical difficulties made from introducing psychoanalysis. It does so at a time when thinking is dissociated from relational ethics, when censorship forecloses interpretation, and when freedom to have one’s own mind while caring for the vulnerability and creativity of the emotional world of self and other is still to be fought for and imagined. The argument here is that psychoanalytic approaches to thinking open new philosophies for pedagogy and provide interpretive methods for integrating the influences of early existence and current life tasks with the reception and transmission of the great contemporary pedagogical conundrums of relationality, reparative histories, ethics and loss, and the interpretation of the suffering body. When we return to beginnings, unknown motives, relations of love and hate, and the ways in which self and other transmit, receive, and argue over the interests and significance of psychical life, thinking must then lean on intersubjective relations, uneven development, and the fragility of freedom (Bass 2006; Bollas 2018; Britzman 2016; Edmundson 2007; Forrester and Cameron  2017; Kristeva 2010; Leader 2011; Major and Talagrand 2018; Von Unwerth 2005;

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Webster 2018). The human, as the heart of its own emotional situation, is also the subject of anxiety and defense and so, in meeting external reality, is given the ongoing work of accepting the reach, transformation, and even loss of psychical reality. There is a delicacy of involvement and estrangement to the creation of meaning, which gives to philosophy its lifelong conflicts, questions, and desires. With psychoanalysis, thinking has a great deal to do with how the self can learn to stand itself thinking while encountering the unknown. Any introduction to psychoanalysis with education begins with the writings of its founder, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Like education, psychoanalysis is both a view of life and the means for its symbolization. Although Freud extended the contingencies of education to experiences and unconscious impressions not considered in its purview, it still seems curious that he is not often freely associated with theories of teaching, learning, and thinking. This oversight is all the more striking given that psychoanalysis assigns a forgotten history of childhood impressions to the conflicting designs of adult mental life and that the field of child psychoanalysis understands infancy through the drive for relationality. Both ends of the developmental spectrum create emotional attitudes toward and unconscious phantasies for teaching and learning that help account for why the public goes hot and cold on the topic of education. A lesser known tie with education belongs to Freud’s temperate advice regarding learning the practice of psychoanalysis. He focused on the analyst’s difficulties in and obstacles to learning its methods of inquiry and did not shy away from identifying the inevitable mishaps and breakdowns in communication embroiled in human practices. These psychoanalytic difficulties emerge from the disturbing qualities of its relational conundrums that, at the very least, involve a history of learning to live with others while feeling desire and without knowing in advance what it all means. Freud named as “transference” those relational conundrums that gain psychic momentum from a history of demands for love and anxieties over its loss. The transference—or the repetitions of unconscious conflicts of love, hate, and authority through the exchanges of wishes, affects, defenses, and knowledge—serves as the greatest danger in trying to know and the finest resource for shared reflection. Indeed, there is no education without the transference for we cannot help projecting our deepest desires and conflicts with authority into the situations of teaching and learning (Felman 1987). Freud’s studies on the problems of and obstacles to self and other relationality draw from the Western philosophic canon and include analysis of Greek mythology, tragedy, philosophy, sculpture, art, archeology, and literature (both classical and contemporary to his time). He brought a modernist sensibility to the narration of the great psychical conflicts of life and death; he parsed these drives with scenes of aggression, sexuality, destruction, culture, and madness and with their phantasies of activity and passivity, love and hate, pleasure and reality, and

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the individual and society (Brenkman 2004). The elemental passions—named as delegates and representations of psychical reality—could be found in creative cultural expressions and in the phantasies, dreams, unconscious emotional logic, and suffering of his patients. From there he created new designs for listening with the psychoanalytic method of free association and gave attention to narrative drifts into unmeant things (Britzman 2011). Free association gave permission of expression to what was furthest from his patients’ minds and to the nonsense of dreams, accidents, and phantasy. The linking of memory and forgetting with the mundane and traumatic gave way to a new kind of communication and affected writing. Michel de Certeau describes Freud’s writing as “discourse disturbed” by affect (1988: 244). Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex is Freud’s most compelling mythic touchstone on the nature of being with others and serves as his orienting fiction/ construction on the difficult unfolding of memory, forgetting, ignorance, selfknowledge, and reflection. That terrible family became the model for the greatly disputed Oedipal complex, thought of as a nuclear conflict or structuring story of the child’s sexuality and its early encounter with the moral quandaries of wanting, wishing, knowing, and separating from parental love. The child, who wishes to be king but cannot, loves one parent and hates the rival. The Oedipal complex, as phantasy, is thought to create a psychical agency—the super-ego— that represents an internalized history of affective ties to cultural traditions, inheritances, and prohibitions. The waning of the complex instigates the ego’s feelings of guilt, which Freud considered to be the dawn of conscience. There is no irony to the emotional fact that the ego feels guilt without having committed any crime. Without feeling guilt there would be no conscience. The capacity to imagine that one can do wrong and then feel responsible for judging right from wrong places inner life in an ethical dimension and in conflict with its wishes and drives. At the very least, the Oedipus myth is a story of thinking as difficult knowledge—clearly a shared question for the future of educational philosophy with psychoanalysis. The five psychoanalysts discussed in this chapter span the first seventy years of the twentieth century, which Julia Kristeva (2000) has called a time of revolt, education, and information. Their questions of how, when, and why thinking begins and what stops it short or urges the desire to think, relate, and overturn meaning have made their way into contemporary philosophical, pedagogical, and political discussions on life problems of love, recognition, and safety, and experiences of loss, mourning, forgiveness, and restoration. Sigmund Freud’s introduction to psychoanalysis and his tentative formulations of the origins of conscious and unconscious psychical life propose a conflictive model of the mind, which oscillates between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In the next section on interpretation and in the section on Freud that follows it, Freud’s approach stands as a leitmotif since his efforts in presenting

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psychoanalysis to the general public opened the problem of pedagogy to the work of trying to understand the deep dimensions of anxieties made from human activities that accompany and obscure the registration and transmission of knowledge. Freud’s introduction of psychoanalysis to the general public as well as to his colleagues serves as a study for the problem of having to think; his approach is psychoanalytical in that he joins difficulties of learning to the disturbing qualities of its relational conundrums. A relational turn for thinking emerges with the topic of anxiety and the ego’s mechanisms of defense, situations developed in the writing of Anna Freud (1895–1982), one of the founders of child analysis who is known for her interest in education (broadly construed) as tied to the destiny of infantile life. In her view, early libidinal life manifested as the wish for immediate satisfaction conflicts with the educator’s demand that the child master instinctual urges and learn to wait. Anna Freud conceived of education as all types of interference, and this presents to educators a relational conundrum that involves problems of love and authority. They too must step back from the wish for immediate satisfaction and wait to understand more fully two different and opposing experiences: first, their own ego defenses as transferences in teaching and learning and, second, what the child is trying to convey to them (Britzman 2003). While Anna Freud mainly addressed developmental situations of childhood and adolescence, her theories can be extended to the emotional situations and ego defenses found in family, university, professional education, and political life. Melanie Klein (1882–1960) analyzed the anxiety of very young children through their phantasms of object relations that include early, sadistic defenses tied to the desire to know. She stressed emotions as the pictured situations of mental life, which begins with bodily affairs and urges. Klein’s panorama of the drama of infancy required her theory to be expressed with imagistic, fantastical states of mind, and she opposed the child’s unconscious knowledge to that of the adult’s emphasis on enlightenment (Klein 1921/1975; Kristeva 2001). She considered the body’s organs as the origin of an internal world of feelings, phantasies, and object relations, and while there remain questions as to the basis for personifying body parts as “part objects” that also have their own feelings, Klein had the special talent of entering the feeling world of bodily life on its own terms and arguing that depression is a human condition as much as it is the condition of our humanity (Britzman 2016, 2017). Wilfred Bion (1897–1979) presented the rigors of a philosophical approach to the origin of thinking. Bion (1994) drew his ideas from Kant’s concept of “empty thoughts”—things thought but not known—and Kleinian object relations, which stressed the projection of good and bad feelings as emotional situations and attitudes toward someone. Bion expanded Klein’s view of feeling-thoughts

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or projective identification, defined as a defense against anxiety whereby parts of the ego are projected into objects, distorting both perception and the object so identified. He also described what it is like for those who receive these hostile projective identifications. Bion termed this mental hostility as “thoughts” and conceptualized thinking as an apparatus, modeled on maternal receptiveness to and transformation of the infant’s painful affects, which the mother makes into manageable experience. Such containment creates the thinker who can think or digest thoughts. Bion also introduced to psychoanalysts the poet John Keats’s idea of “negative capability” as a means for the analyst to create the pathos of thinking needed to accept the unknown, tolerate the pain of frustration, and learn from these emotional experiences (Bion 1995: 124). For D.W. Winnicott (1896–1971), thinking is contingent on the transitional space of culture that can hold and survive primal agonies, fear of breakdown, and accept efforts of creative living. Of all the analysts discussed, Winnicott emphasized development as dependent on the primacy of a good-enough environment. His orientation to thinking recognizes that maternal care and good-enough mother/infant holding works to accept the infant’s illusion of a perfect correspondence between creating the object of perception and finding the object in external reality that was already there (Winnicott 1999). The baby’s illusion of magical subjectivity is permitted because the good-enough mother knows that objectivity presents a problem the infant has no means to solve. The mother’s gradual disillusionment of infantile omnipotence allows the growing child to leave the magical other as a subjective object to meet the other as an objective subject in its own right. Winnicott’s theory of play suggests that sensate humanness and vulnerability begins with the recognition of our need for and dependence upon actual others. Only then with the recognition of need can there be the capacity for concern. These analysts created their own language that linked emotional experience and sensate life to internal and external objects in mind. They were all differently concerned with the relation between thinking, imagination, anxiety, and reality. Each rewrote the Kantian questions of “What can I know?,” “What can I do?,” and “What can I hope?” They also posed uncanny questions: “Why do I think?,” “What am I thinking of?,” “When does the ‘I’, ‘You’ and ‘We’ come about?,” and “What inhibits creative thinking?” They would, at the very least, agree that the origins of and resources for thinking are beholden to the other in tandem with the human predicaments of the life and death drives, the finding, losing, and recovery of meaning, and the processing of love and hate. The origin and causes of thinking turned out to be the basic pedagogical problem Freud introduced into his own theories and that involved him in the work of communicating novel versions of humanity while examining the affective reception of and conflicts within psychoanalysis with education.

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ON THE NOVELTIES OF INTERPRETATION, “THEN AND NOW” It is hard to imagine what it was like, at the start of the twentieth century, to first encounter the Freudian subjects of sexuality, the unconscious, dreams, and infantile life. Perhaps just as difficult to conceive of is the view that the flux and flummox of psychical life can be interpreted as Freud (1900) announced with his Interpretation of Dreams. Yet knowing of the existence of psychical reality and its unconscious dimensions does not immediately translate into accepting its force, contradictions, convolutions, means of expression, or its origin. What may be forgotten today, as Alan Bass points out, are the novelties of both mental life and psychoanalysis: “Freudian psychoanalysis is synonymous with interpretation. Do we always remember how unusual it is as a therapeutic measure?” (2000: 1). Do we always remember how strange ideas of constructions, narratives, communities of agreement, and testimony felt when trying to understand the relation between the discovery of facts and scientific revolutions at their limit (Forrester 2007, 2017; Kuhn 1970)? Interpretation may well be a tonic to forgetting, but it also opened modernist experiments to states of uncertainty that played with the deceptions of appearance, perception, and language and communication. The early psychoanalytic movement in Europe was one of the central grounds for modernist aesthetics (Fuechtner 2011; Meisel and Kendrick 1985; Spitz 1994). Freud’s emphasis on psychical reality as worth knowing and as hard to know gave meaning to unconscious motives for illness and health. Today, Freudian influence on the significance of interpretation can be found in theories of close reading, literary and aesthetic studies, anthropology, conceptions of trauma, memory and historical studies, language learning and linguistic studies in early childhood education, pedagogy, and research methods of participant observation and medical interviews (Forrester and Cameron 2017). This history of finding significance in a forgotten, buried past shaped Freud’s (1899) studies on the difficulties of remembering his childhood, his (1905) theories of infantile sexuality and infantile amnesia, and his (1914) psychoanalytic technique called “working through.” (see Figure 4.1) Dynamics of shock, resistance, and attention were at play when, in 1909, Sigmund Freud traveled from Europe to Clark University in Wooster, Massachusetts, by invitation of the psychologist and pedagogue Stanley Hall to introduce psychoanalysis to a general public (Hale 1971; Taubman 2012). Freud’s (1909) five lectures, given in German, recounted the short history of psychoanalysis, the novel approach to the development of infantile sexuality and its residues in the adult mind, the flight from reality to fantasy, the inevitable resistance to psychoanalytic views, and the difficulties all of this presented for a lay audience. Freud turned to everyday scenes of individual misunderstanding,

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FIGURE 4.1  Austrian author and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856– 1939) with his chow, Jofi, in his study at Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria, c. 1937. The photograph was taken by Freud’s patient, American writer Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

missed encounters, thought disturbances, love affairs, and intersubjective relations. These audacious introductory lectures occurred when psychology, medicine, science, education, philosophy, literary works, and theories of learning were still in flux and exchange (Micale 2004). They all had a share in the idea of “soul” or spirit as part and parcel of human consciousness and as subject to illness and reverie (James 1899/1983; Makari 2015; Zaretsky 2005). Freud was prescient in his view that psychoanalysis would have a difficult reception, even though during his visit to the United States he found common ground with the philosopher William James on matters of anxiety, inhibitions, memory, and neurosis. James had already published his two-volume Harvard course The Principles of Psychology (1890/1950). His explorations of mental life were in dialogue with a history of philosophical debates on the nature of consciousness, dissociation, perceptual distinctions, personal thoughts, and theories of the soul, to name just a few burning topics. For James, philosophy, literature, and psychology shared the problem of knowing the activities of the mind that does not hold still. He seemed to have anticipated Freud’s (1905) idea of infantile amnesia and the splitting of affect from ideation or event when, in a

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section on consciousness of the self, James argued that adults cannot remember what childhood feels like, that there are no “continuous memories … partly because no representation of how the child felt comes up with the [parent] stories” (James 1890/1950: 335, emphasis in original). Freud’s (1899) early work also considered the uneven developments between affect and memory, or the break in continuity between the thing presentation (visual) and word presentation (auditory). These memory traces led to Freud’s exploration of the origin of consciousness. He provided other reasons childhood cannot be remembered: memories are fragmentary, “no more than a torso” (Freud 1899: 306), and while our earliest impressions of infantile life are deeply formative for the mind, due to infantile amnesia these impressions or intensities of affect are not memories. Displaced affect is associated with other events, and so childhood memories have been worked over through migration and exile. We may remember the arousal—fear, excitement, love, and hate—but in a form almost untellable. So Freud then distinguished psychoanalysis from its interpretive neighbors with the proposition of the dynamic unconscious, “to regard consciousness as a quality of the psychical, which may be present in addition to other qualities or may be absent” (1923: 13). How then might one convey the precarity of consciousness with the disquieting features of the unconscious? Freud’s conversational style opens the Socratic dialogue and the imperative to know thyself with the dynamic unconscious, a quality of mental life largely unknowable. It would be a mistake to suggest that consciousness is unimportant, just as it would be a mistake to dismiss as meaningless the fantasies that tag along for no apparent reason. Freud worked from the subjective complication that consciousness-perception and unconscious-wish are conflictive psychical functions and activities that seek to blur the boundaries between what is inside and what is outside the subject (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 84). That the ego is also partly unconscious lends pathos to how and what the ego comes to know, believe, feel, and misrecognize (Freud 1938–40). Knowing thyself thus comes with a psychoanalytic paradox. We cannot know the unconscious although we can open the boundaries of self-knowledge with it by interpreting the far reaches of its irruptions in dreams, mistakes, accidents, humor, forgetting, and defenses. We can become interested in times when we do not know what to say or when there are urges without words. We can associate the force and quantity of affect with our investments held in earliest life to wander between the thickets of forgetting and remembering. Given how difficult these claims can seem, specifically that consciousness is the exception of mental life, and given the strength of ego defenses against anxiety over loss, psychoanalytic methods utilize resistance to interpretation as part and parcel of psychical reality and as the subject that can be taken apart and rethought with a difference. While not considered as a philosophy of learning to live,

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psychoanalytic approaches to the nature, causes, and care for thinking provide a new approach to an old dilemma, namely accepting education as an unsolvable problem yet still wanting education (Britzman 2006, 2009, 2011, 2015). Ten years after his lectures at Clark University, Freud (1917) considered again the reception of psychoanalysis by both lay and medical audiences. By then, reception had become synonymous with the problem of education. Freud had to note that psychoanalysis proposes affective rather than intellectual difficulties, and this can lead one to wonder if becoming openminded to the passions of psychical reality is itself only possible in dream life or artistic affairs. Resistance to psychoanalysis became a distinctive motif in Freud’s research and would affect the nature and style of his writing to the general public. The psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, Freud’s English translator, found his method of writing effective because it is so direct: “He is addressing you” (1958/1991: 350). Freud introduced a therapeutic orientation to the uneven relations between affect and thought; he considered thinking through the work of symbolizing psychical representatives of the drives and thinking as containing anxiety made from love and its loss. And all of this affects the ways ideas are received and the world is perceived. Freud’s (1932–33) late introductory lectures, published the same year his books were burned in Berlin, admitted the pedagogical limits of introducing psychoanalysis to a disinterested general public, and Freud advised that we interpret education with its discordant meanings when he acknowledged education, along with government and medicine, as one of the impossible professions. He did so not just because the carrying out of the tasks of education, just as those of childhood and adulthood, exceed the subject’s anticipation of them. The intersubjective conundrum belongs to the transference or the exchange of love and authority that we know so well from having been children in school. Freud’s approach to psychical life radically opened the interpretation of education as doing something other than its official pronouncements (Britzman 2009, 2011). Education with psychoanalysis can then signify unwieldy scenes of unconscious impressions, memory traces, sexual accidents, pathways of associations, broken links, sensate experiences, repressed ideation and affects, susceptibilities to phantasies, the pleasure principle, and believing impossible theories of love without knowing why. Given the uncertainty of interpretation and the admission of doubt over the veracity of its findings, psychoanalysis cannot be a Weltanschauung, or a total worldview. Its project is unfinishable and subject to new discoveries that unseat the old views (Freud 1932–33: 9). Freud considered total worldviews as “a fabrication … left to the philosophers” (1926: 96). There cannot be a general program for how to live though there can be what Paul Ricoeur termed, in his study of the state of interpretation in Freud’s writing, “a new approach to human speech [and] to the meaning of desire” (1970: 6). There can also be a

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new orientation to culture as a transitional space so as to imagine surprising relations between livable lives and reparative activities. Following these lines of thought, there can be a philosophic conviction to depth psychology as the human right to care for thinking, imagination, and creative living.

SIGMUND FREUD: ON PLEASURE AND REALITY AND THEN ON UNHAPPINESS AND CULTURE Freud (1911) grasped the difficulties of psychoanalytic transmission with his early model of the psychical apparatus. He proposed two governing principles that create the working mind in the order of their sequence: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. He considered the pleasure principle as originating from the viewpoint of the satiated, happy infant at the mother’s breast. He then imagined the infant’s gradual development from seemingly monadic autoeroticism, primary narcissism, and hallucinatory existence, to feeling bodily pain from unmet needs, to crying and reaching out to affect the world, and in doing that, to searching to re-find in the world lost satisfactions that had previously laid memory traces. The reality principle is a later development and is dedicated to the capacity to wait, the interest in testing the veracity of one’s perceptions, and finally a decision to delay the urge for immediate satisfaction. Freud then defined thinking as an experimental form of action. The surprising turn in his approach is that it is not reality that allows the self to think but the other way around: thinking provides a means to contain unbearable stimulation, delay action, associate impressions with actualities, and connect “verbal residues” or memories of language with speech (Freud 1911: 221). The pleasure principle, however, does not go away. As the basis for imagination and desire, Freud considered this principle tenacious, found in sublimations, scientific inquiry, writing, creative work, and also in daydreaming, in dreams, and in sexual experiences with self and others. Freud (1929–30) continued to develop the difficulties wrought by the pleasure principle when he pictured psychical life through the problem of ego boundaries and the cultural imperative to love thy neighbor. His mass psychology, articulated in Civilization and Its Discontents, portrayed society as if it stood in for a gigantic psychical apparatus that somehow preserved and repressed its earliest stages of prehistory and so, through its social conflicts, repeated and recapitulated its forgotten history of uneven development and abandoned love objects. The program of the pleasure principle “is at loggerheads with the whole world” (Freud 1929–30: 76). His conclusion: “Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution” (pp.  76–7). Perhaps most surprisingly, the force of sexuality—that temple of pleasure—itself resists satisfaction. Just as consciousness is fleeting, so too is sexual happiness. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents can be read today as a primer for how the ego may or may not cope with working through inevitable life problems of love,

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aggression, and loss. But Freud also ends his study with a question as to whether humanity can overcome its externalization of its hostilities and proclivity to hate and whether educators can find the courage to present to their students what life is like.

ANNA FREUD: THE EGO, ANXIETIES, AND MECHANISMS OF DEFENSE Anna Freud is known for her development of child psychoanalysis and as the builder of postwar diasporic Freudian psychoanalysis (see Figure 4.2). She is unmatched in her remarkable contributions to the fields of education, law, and social work (Young-Bruehl 2012) and her loyalty to the theories of Sigmund Freud. Anna Freud’s best-known book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936/1995), can be read as a primer for psychoanalysis with education. Anna Freud demonstrated why anxiety is so central to the formation of perception, fantasy, and ego defense and serves as both an inhibition and resource for learning. She clarified the various ways the ego as organization defends against unconscious anxiety, actual trauma, real and fantasized danger, worries over loss of love, and dependency on the world of others. Her discussion provides a developmental view of life from early childhood through to adulthood and old age. Here, then, are new ways to consider the complex emotional logic or affects with a social ego that is partly unconscious, closest to the world of others, and that is also the seat of both anxiety (the anticipation and signals of danger) and libido (the pull of pleasure and fantasy life). The ego develops from its ongoing and contradictory tasks of reality testing, perception, attention, adaptation, judgment, and thinking. The functions of the ego can be thought of as expressions of thought-attitudes toward something or someone or as protecting the ego from a constitutive anxiety over loss of love. Anna Freud described three kinds of anxiety: anxiety made from drive impulses (id), anxiety made from objective danger (ego), and anxiety made from guilty conscience (super-ego). The ego then gets rid of un-pleasure while attempting to judge the qualities of its source. Some common methods of defense against anxiety include projection, introjection, denial, magical thinking, repression, identification, negation, splitting into good and bad, idealization, undoing what has already been done, identification with the aggressor, altruism, displacement, reversal into its opposite, intellectualization, and disavowal. It is worth noting that most of these defenses are valued in schools though they are hardly identified as restrictions on thinking and so as diminishments of the ego. The defenses work to repudiate bad feelings and uncomfortable ideas. They ward off various threats to illusory narcissism at the cost of restricting freedom while splitting the ego in the process of defense (S. Freud 1938–40). However, while the ego cannot do without defenses, just as it cannot be without

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FIGURE 4.2  Group portrait Anna Freud and schoolkids, Cottage Lyzeum, Vienna. Photograph, 1917

the signal of anxiety and the wish for love and recognition, the internalized problem for the social ego is how the amount or quantity of affect or anxiety contributes to rigidity, closed-mindedness, and hostility toward self and the world. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (2011) considers Anna Freud’s views of the ego as the basis for becoming a democratic subject. While democracy requires its citizens to create a strong ego to speak and act as defenders of freedom and civil rights, political life also requires its citizens to sacrifice personal interests for the greater good and thus enjoy altruistic surrender. People have the paradoxical work of both being strong in their views and cultivating a softer sense of self with a willingness to give in and even to accept loss. Giving in belongs to the defenses of identification (with others) and altruistic surrender. Both involve the capacity to share in group feelings. Yet thinking for oneself may also mean refusing groupthink, and defenses are never far away from relational conundrums. Stewart-Steinberg asks how Anna Freud’s work may help us understand the psychical conditions for a democratic citizenry through the paradoxical idea that the self is both a central actor in democracy and democracy’s ongoing task. This paradox of addressing what exists and does not yet exist is also the case for any education, and Anna Freud’s theories create a way to find our political roots and their limits in the nursery. There, young children are preoccupied with

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being treated fairly and equally just as they are entering the group psychology of education. If we can picture the anxieties of defense in social life, we may then open questions of when and how ethical conduct develops as thinking for democratic possibilities.

MELANIE KLEIN: OBJECT RELATIONS, REPARATION, AND GRATITUDE Melanie Klein’s theories of psychical reality begin with infancy and do not distinguish between mind and body; indeed, in Klein’s (1937) view, psychical life or the inner world of object relations develops from introjected organs originating with the breast, the Ur model for our earliest emotional situations, good and bad. Introjection sets the inner stage for curiosity and the urge to understand what other people are like on the inside. If the breast seems to invite the tiny ego’s capacity to love, when withdrawn it creates a compulsion to hate and destroy it. Klein held the belief that infants have an unconscious knowledge of the breast and an innate capacity to feel persecutory anxiety over its loss. She also believed that the infant’s greatest fear was its own annihilation, a consequence of the conflict between the death drive and the life drive. This meant that the infant’s feelings were powerful, urgent, gigantic, talisman-like in principle, and object related. It also meant that, for Klein, from the beginning of life the infant was utterly human in all of its emotional complexity. Klein treated the inner world as a consequence and representative of bodily activities that, in phantasy, are experienced as feelings that involve love, hate, greed, envy, guilt, reparation, and gratitude as well as defenses against anxieties such as splitting into good and bad, projective identification, omnipotence, and denial. Her theories begin with the insistence that the infant already possesses an emotional life with a strong capacity for love and hate and strong prelinguistic attitudes toward feelings against pain and frustration (Klein 1952/1975). In Klein’s view, affect or anxiety is always about an object, and all thinking is imbued with feelings directed toward someone or something (Rusbridger 2012). Klein understood symbolization as displacement or love’s migration to new objects: “In the baby’s mind, one part of the body can stand for another part, and an object for parts of the body or for people” (1937: 103). Thinking then consists of a slow devolution from concreteness and symbolic equation to abstraction and a desire for more symbols. Her most affecting contribution is that children’s anxiety has an unconscious meaning and the analyst’s interpretation of anxiety reduces the child’s distress and invites the child to think of emotional life as an adventure in meaning. The child’s wishes for love, she believed, are also wishes to be understood.

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Whereas both Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud conceptualized the mind through the pleasure and reality principles, Klein personified the mind as an emotional situation consisting of object relations and worries over their internal conflicts. The idea of object mainly signifies the internalization of aspects of the outer world (Britzman 2016). Objects by definition are relational and phantasmatic. They signify anxiety situations due to the infant’s dependency, frustration, vulnerability, and desire for love. The work of object relations led Klein to consider the mind as created from two positions of anxiety: the paranoid/schizoid and the depressive positions. The former defends against loss through hostility, destruction of bad objects, and splitting while the later type of anxiety involves feelings of guilt leading to urges for repair, a step beyond Sigmund Freud’s view on mourning the loss of the loved object (Britzman 2017). The second kind of anxiety, the depressive position, lends poignancy to feelings of guilt and the reparative drive (Todd 2001). It can seem as if Klein is most intuitive with respect to the ways in which the human falls apart and pieces itself back together (Vulevic 2018). Perhaps more than any other child psychoanalyst, Klein (1957/1975) proposed a moral theory of infant development predicated on the wish for a good object that she felt constituted the heart of the ego. Good internalized object relations provide the ego with the capacity to bear the pain of guilt and the pain of integrating love and hate. These very early emotional situations, Klein (1959/1975) believed, form the infantile roots of the adult mind that can be observed in adults’ expressions of anxiety situations and defenses against the grievances of emotional life. In her view, from the beginning of life the infant struggles with love and hate whereby love is equated with presence of the breast and hate is equated with absence and frustration. These early symbolic equations gradually become more abstract, but the struggle is needed: “conflict, and the need to overcome it, is a fundamental element in creativeness” (Klein 1957/1975: 186). Klein’s turn to feelings of gratitude toward the end of her life opened her theories to trust in goodness and generosity. Gratitude becomes a means to know the relation between how one feels about the self and also a commentary on how one feels about the world. All of this depends on “[the] longing for a good object and for the capacity to love it” (Klein 1957/1975: 193). Yet there is also the loss of love and a new thinking position: the capacity to accept a more ambivalent view of self/other relations that also involves tolerating inevitable failure, sadness, helplessness, dependency, and vulnerability (Britzman 2016). Julia Kristeva’s (2007) formulation of the adolescent syndrome of ideality opens Kleinian thought to the ethical dimension of understanding the libidinal dedication to extreme politics. The adolescent is particularly susceptible to the defense of idealization as a means to stabilize a sense of the perfect future but only through the defense of splitting by separating good people from bad

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people, good knowledge from bad knowledge, and paradise from hell. Kristeva’s argument is that there are adolescent states of mind, ideal adolescents, and actual adolescents. Her view is that the adolescent has given up on research and curiosity and instead is dedicated to the need to believe in the existence of absolute knowledge. The need is incredible in two senses of the word: wonderful and unthinkable. We are all adolescents when we believe in absolute knowledge. Kristeva illustrates this need to believe with the adolescent lovers Romeo and Juliet, who cannot overcome their family prohibitions against their relationship. Their solution is to create a perfect, impossible love, and someone must die to preserve an unchanging idealized object. The difficult problem concerns the view that fundamentalism of belief rests on an idealization of love and a defense against any change or any loss that love also requires. On a more mundane level, the adolescent syndrome of ideality can be found in schools’ and universities’ rituals of exclusion, in pedagogy that involves the insistence on only one kind of knowledge, and in a hatred of uncertainty, incompleteness, and development that defends against the pain of having to learn.

WILFRED BION: “THOUGHTS AWAITING THINKERS” Wilfred Bion did not speak of education. Nor did he work with children. His great topic, however, was the one that utterly preoccupies educational efforts, namely the problem of learning from experience. Bion’s surprise is found in his definition of experience. He defined experience as all types of frustration and in doing this went against the grain of the idealization of experience as the royal road to practice. Experience feels frustrating because one does not know in advance what will happen and anticipation of what one does not know leans on preconceptions that Bion called “empty thoughts,” a term borrowed from Kant. Bion likened the mind to a stomach and thought that the apparatus called “thinking” digests thoughts. Just as we have food set in front of us before we can begin to eat, there are thoughts drifting around and awaiting a thinker. As sensate experience, thoughts require digestion or working over. While there may be some dilemmas posed by Bion’s metaphor of the mind as stomach (and he himself identified the main problem as the fact that the digestive metaphor can become too concrete and rigid) his language is both deceptively simple and conceptually complex. In reading Bion, one may have the impression that he is arguing with someone over the meaning of language functions and warning anyone who will listen that, if words are to create new experiences, definitions must be taken out of their preconceptions or what we suppose they can only mean. There are, for psychoanalysts, two inevitable misunderstandings that the theory and practice are responsible for addressing. First, words create “a semantic gap,” where we may argue over their meanings and limits. The second misunderstanding is ontological and concerns “the scientific propriety of

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attributing to infant experience a modified yet recognizably similar experience” (Bion 1994: 33). For example, in attributing the word “love” to the infant’s experience of milk, the psychoanalyst must assume that taking in the breast is an emotional experience. A brief description of Bion’s vocabulary is useful for understanding his novel contribution to the problem of thinking. Bion created a notation system he used both to track emotions during a psychoanalytic session and to name functions that permit or inhibit an interest in learning from emotional experience. The notational system is strange and is used to examine unknown values (Bion 1994: 3). This is particularly the case with Bion’s idea of “alpha functions” and “beta elements,” which name two different emotive situations. Alpha functions are the means for life experience to be understood and given sequence, time, place, and memory. The exercise is one of linking or binding ideas. Beta elements are chaotic experiences, feeling as if inanimate objects have invaded the mind, and are subject to evacuation, evasion, confusion, and acting out. They are attacks on linking and essentially are feeling situations from which one cannot learn (Bion 1993). They are also relational conundrums, and for Bion, thinking always involves thinking over emotional experience. Bion symbolized these object relations as made from L (love), H (hate), K (knowledge), and −K (no knowledge). The idea of intolerance for feeling frustration is key to Bion’s theories of why thinking fails. In his review of Freud’s 1911 essay on the two principles of mental functioning, Bion emphasized, “the part played by intolerance of frustration in producing tension, and then its relief … The choice that matters to the psycho-analyst is one that lies between procedures designed to evade frustration and those designed to modify it. That is the critical decision” (1994: 28–9, emphasis in original). How frustration can be held or contained depends upon the mother’s reverie or acceptance of the infant’s frustration and her capacity to transform frustration (beta elements) into words that allow the infant to relax and feel secure. In a nutshell, the capacity for reverie (alpha function) is what Bion means by learning from experience (frustration). The mother’s experience of modifying frustration and even its excited love returns to the infant, who can then digest the experience and learn from reverie. Learning, then, is sensate as much as it is the capacity to transform feelings of frustration into emotional experiences of a relationship. This leads to Bion’s key question: “How are we to think about thought?” (1994: 62). And, then, how are we in education to think about the ways teachers and students think about their thoughts? From Bion’s perspective, thoughts are fairly close to beta elements. Initially, there is felt frustration, and, just as Anna Freud defined education as all types of interference, Bion considers learning as all types of frustration since what is encountered is the unknown. Bion’s idea of K or knowledge refers to getting to know experience rather than possessing a thing: “If the learner is intolerant of

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the essential frustration of learning he indulges phantasies of omniscience and a belief in a state where things are known” (p. 65). The relational conundrum is epistemological: the teacher may be imaged as withholding the answer from students, and if so, knowledge becomes thought of as a dead thing. “The problem is simplified if ‘thoughts’ are regarded as epistemologically prior to thinking and that thinking has to be developed as a method or apparatus for dealing with thoughts” (p. 83). Here, then, is where learning becomes far more challenging than the models presented by additive views or behavioral theory might lead one to believe. The other’s mind becomes the means for getting to know experience without recourse to intolerance and hatred of development. Bion associates thinking with the value of “negative capability,” or tolerating uncertainty without reaching for quick solutions.

D.W. WINNICOTT: BABY AS HUMAN In a talk to medical practitioners and psychoanalysts on the development of his own thinking, given near the end of his life, D.W. Winnicott made a startling admission: At the beginning there was myself learning to do analysis as a paediatrician having had a tremendous experience of listening to people talking about babies and children of all ages and having had great difficulty in seeing a baby as human at all. It was only through analysis that I became gradually able to see a baby as a human being. This was really the chief result of my first five years of analysis, so that I’ve been extremely sympathetic with any  paediatricians or anybody who can’t see babies as human, because I absolutely couldn’t, however I used to try. (1967/1989: 574) Winnicott’s confession involved two challenges. One concerns his medical education, which tended to treat babies as if they were only biological entities in a state of need and no communication. The other belongs to the personal problem of remembering early life. To see a baby as human requires something that adults have difficulty thinking of, namely their own beginnings in vulnerability, helplessness, and dependency, all signifiers of relationality to the world of care and love and yet, more often than not, symbolically collapsed as indicating femininity and weakness. What is it about the human that seems to exclude the baby from this category? And, thinking with Winnicott, would this disavowal of humanity at the beginning of life also serve as opening a different understanding of the dehumanization of women, children, LGBTQ, displaced people, indigenous people, and so on? Winnicott’s answer to the question of why the baby is not considered human is deceptively simple and does lead to consideration of how political demands for justice are heard or dismissed. His argument is that, by nature, the baby

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makes too many demands and is often reduced to a bundle of needs rather than seen as communicating, doing, creating, and finding objects in its world. These demands for care, Winnicott (1999) explains, are ruthless in that there is no consideration for the one who meets them. And demands ask a great deal of the carer. In Winnicott’s (1947/1992) view we sometimes have to hate the baby. The baby’s demand, while at times felt as persecutory, cannot be met through the carer’s enactment of the wish to retaliate. At first, the baby cannot distinguish between “me” and “not me,” and Winnicott’s language is close to what it must feel like to become a self, separate and with others. Winnicott (1999) had to acknowledge, as did Bion, that adult language is incompatible with babies’ experiences of object relating and object use. So it is also with the educator’s technical language of teaching and learning that seems to skip over the human element of not knowing. As with those psychoanalysts who came before him, Winnicott created his own vocabulary and handled development in three dimensions: development of subjective objects, or what the young child magically creates; development of objective subjects, or how the young child encounters others who are different or “not me”; and development of a caring, holding environment that contains the child’s vulnerability and primal agonies such as falling forever, fragmentation, depersonalization, derealization, and isolation without any means of communication (Winnicott 1963/1989). Winnicott placed the most stress on the external world of others, a third dimension needed to imagine and receive uneven development. The environment provides good-enough care and good-enough disillusionment so as to help contain the pain of frustration and the needed aggression to express one’s place in the world. Not all needs can be met, and everyone is subject to the pain felt from encountering reality as a ready-made world demanding our compliance. To return to Winnicott’s confession, one can surmise that there was not a good-enough environment either at home or in education to think the thought that a baby is human in the sense of being meaningful, hard to know, and wanting for love and recognition. Winnicott’s writing is particularly attractive to political theorists writing after poststructuralism. There is a new wish to “recenter the subject” through an analysis of emotional life and grapple with its therapeutic action (Bowker and Buzby 2017). Such a turn to the affected subject is elemental to educational relations since people do not experience each other as walking discourses and since phantasies and affective ties made and broken seem more persuasive than do anonymous structures. With his focus on the relations between intersubjective qualities of individual development, the trauma of social deprivation, the ordinary blows that frustration and reality carry forward, and the emotional situations of vulnerability and living creatively that accompany demands for human rights, Winnicott’s turn to the subject includes the terms for

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a holding environment that lends warmth and even tenderness to understanding institutional failures as played out in self/other conflicts. Sally Swartz (2019) extended Winnicott’s theories to the ongoing demands and movements of decolonization that challenge the field of psychoanalysis in South Africa and the field of education at the University of Cape Town. Her focus is on the ways in which ruthlessness and group turbulence in political protest occurred in the “Rhodes must go” anti-apartheid movement that demanded the university remove national symbols of racism, including the statue of Cecil Rhodes, one of the architects of apartheid. Swartz provides a careful analysis of the difficult paradoxical frame of development proposed by Winnicott. As both a psychoanalyst psychotherapist and a university administrator, Swartz considers the challenges for psychoanalysis to decolonize its own imaginary and vocabulary, for the university to affect its own imaginary and accommodate the students’ ruthless demands, and eventually for the protest to create from destruction a new containing a frame for education. For all of these movements, there are questions as to whether theories of infant development, oedipal conflict, ego defenses, object relations, and emotional situations are enough to provide the flexibility to hold and become transformed by the complexity of social change. On the other side, the question must also be extended to the theories of psychical change. We can also ask whether the enterprise of education can tolerate, in the Bionian sense, the frustration of experiencing the status of self and other while changing views on thinking. A further ongoing problem was identified by Ricoeur’s (1970) study of Freud, which centered the problem of thinking on that of the interpretation of uncertainty, distress, and wishes. Ricouer proposed that a theory of thought or mental space must suffer from a crisis of complexes: of language, of interpretation, and of reflection. From the viewpoint of Winnicott, the crisis has already occurred for the environment and now belongs to the work of disillusioning the defense of magical thinking.

A PHILOSOPHY FOR THE INFANTILE ROOTS OF THE MIND To follow psychoanalytic views on the nature of thinking, one has to begin with the infant as human and to consider thinking as an emotional situation. Even the baby doctor D.W. Winnicott found this idea astonishing and eventually had to wonder what happened so that he could not imagine the beginning of life as life. The significance of the intersubjective emotional world as the heart of thinking subjects is still to be argued for, particularly given resistance to symbolizing the force of experience and the emotional challenges of social introspection. The worry is that attending to the inner world and acknowledging the uses and vulnerabilities of interior life as relational and as subject to interpretation may only lead to infinite regress and softness as opposed to the urge for reparation

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and gratitude. The psychoanalysts discussed in this chapter have mainly explored the destiny of the human dilemma of susceptibility to the unknown, and they all agree that the external influences and unconscious registrations of internal and external worlds are felt before they may be understood. They are unafraid of the emotional world and consider such courage as the soft grounds of ethicality. Furthermore, they all attend to the sways and oscillations of psychical life as itself a practice for interpretation. Of all the analysts discussed, Anna Freud was most known for her efforts in framing emotional life from this other side of pedagogical relationships. Education, like psychical life, cannot occur without conflict, failure, problems of dependency and autonomy, and arguments over desire and loss. She offered three useful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis with education: as a criticism of pedagogical impasse, as a theory of the drives, and as a method of therapy that particularly addresses the injuries and indignities of education (A. Freud 1930/1974: 129). But there are other relational demands for an ethical turn including: understanding fear of emotional life and the forms it may take in political affairs; identifying constraints in social comportment and saying why rigid social expectations narrow freedom; overturning preconceptions so new questions can be raised; and noticing procedures of dismissal and splitting off of human complexity. All involve accepting the pathos of intersubjectivity. Yet the idea so difficult to express is that only through a study of subjectivity and intersubjective relations may we create an interpretation of objective reality that can indeed be subject to interpretation. What kind of philosophy for pedagogy does psychoanalysis with education create? Psychoanalysis with education proposes the currency and infantile roots of our thinking dilemma: We cannot do without forgiveness, tenderness, the wait mechanism, and the capacity to tolerate the frustration that is our experience. We cannot do without a view of the difficulties of learning as the basis of development and inhibition. We cannot do without the risk of interpretation, and we need a good-enough environment. It may seem counterintuitive to begin conceptualizing ethical space and care through natality unless, however, one imagines, as did the Freuds, Klein, Bion, and Winnicott, the movements of the infantile roots of the adult mind and considers their animations as our most radical means for receptivity, impressions, and creative expression. In this way the very thought of education can be released from a tendency toward absolute knowledge and be given over to risks opened by symbolizing the otherness and even ruthlessness of learning. The psychoanalysts discussed in this chapter privilege the intersubjective frame as their ethical dimension. Attention is given to affect, to relational conundrums, to vulnerability and dependency, to phantasy and desire, to the reception of history and political life, and to the tenders of transference exchange (Kirshner 2017; Reeder 2008). Free association, the key method of permitting

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the unconscious to think, becomes a tonic to the pushes and pulls of censorship, to undoing inhibitions in thinking, and indeed, to deeper understandings of why the hatred of imagination and interpretation is so prevalent in educational and political institutional life. These elements are nonmedical and have to do with savoir faire, a kind of know-how aptly described by Jurgen Reeder as “the soft tissue of heedful listening and wise decision” (2008: 117). To think psychoanalysis with education is to be affected by both resistance to emotional life and the investment in wanting its complex yearnings and procedures to speak. This double pressure, thought of as negation and its lifting, instructs psychoanalytic methods of listening, the radicality of interpretation, free association, and the ongoing developments of relationality.

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Klein, Melanie (1937), “Love, Guilt, and Reparation,” in Love, Hate and Reparation: Two Lectures by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere, 57–119, London: Hogarth Press. Klein, Melanie (1952/1975), “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Envy and Gratitude & Other Works 1946–1963, 61–93, London: Hogarth Press. Klein, Melanie (1957/1975), “Envy and Gratitude,” in Envy and Gratitude & Other Works 1946–1963, 176–235, London: Hogarth Press. Klein, Melanie (1959/1975), “Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy (1959),” in Envy and Gratitude & Other Works 1946–1963, 247–63, London: Hogarth Press. Winnicott, Donald W. (1947/1992), “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers, 194–203, New York: Brunner/ Mazel. Winnicott, Donald W. (1963/1989), “Fear of Breakdown,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations: D.W. Winnicott, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis, 87–95, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winnicott, Donald W. (1967/1989), “Postscript: D.W.W. on D.W.W.,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations: D.W. Winnicott, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis, 569–82, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winnicott, Donald W. (1999), Playing and Reality, London: Routledge.

Secondary sources Bass, Alan (2000), Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bass, Alan (2006), Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bollas, Christopher (2018), Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment, London: Routledge. Bowker, Matthew H. and Amy Buzby, eds. (2017), D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brenkman, John (2004), “Freud the Modernist,” in Mark S. Micale (ed.), The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940, 172–96, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Britzman, Deborah P. (2003), After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning, Albany: State University of New York Press. Britzman, Deborah P. (2006), Novel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning, New York: Peter Lang. Britzman, Deborah P. (2009), The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions, Albany: State University of New York Press. Britzman, Deborah P. (2011), Freud and Education, New York: Routledge. Britzman, Deborah P. (2015), A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom: On the Human Condition of Education, Albany: State University of New York Press. Britzman, Deborah P. (2016), Melanie Klein: Early Analysis, Play, and the Question of Freedom, London: Springer. Britzman, Deborah P. (2017), “Mrs. Klein and Paulo Friere: Coda for the Pain of Symbolization in the Lifeworld of the Mind,” Educational Theory, 67 (1): 83–95. Certeau, Michel de (1988), The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley, New York: Columbia University Press. Edmundson, Mark (2007), The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, London: Bloomsbury Press.

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Felman, Shoshana (1987), Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forrester, John (2007), “On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm,” Critical Inquiry, 33 (4): 782–819. Forrester, John (2017), Thinking in Cases, Cambridge: Polity Press. Forrester, John and Laura Cameron (2017), Freud in Cambridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fuechtner, Veronika (2011), Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hale, Nathan G. (1971), Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917, New York: Oxford University Press. James, William (1890/1950), The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, New York: Dover Publications. James, William (1899/1983), Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kirshner, Lewis (2017), Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Model for Theory and Practice, New York: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia (2000), The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman, New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia (2001), Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia (2007), “Adolescence, a Syndrome of Ideality,” trans. Michael Marder and Patricia I. Vieira, Psychoanalytic Review, 94 (5): 715–25. Kristeva, Julia (2010), Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine Herman, New York: Columbia University Press. Kuhn, Thomas (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn., Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1973), The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Leader, Darian (2011), What Is Madness?, London: Hamish Hamilton. Major, René and Chantal Talagrand (2018), Freud: The Unconscious and World Affairs, trans. Agnes Jacob, London: Routledge. Makari, George (2015), Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, New York: W.W. Norton. Meisel, Perry and Walter Kendrick, eds. (1985), Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924–1925, New York: Basic Books. Micale, Mark S., ed. (2004), The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Reeder, Jurgen (2008), “The Enigmatic ‘Nature of the Subject’: With Philosophy at the Interface of Psychoanalysis and Society,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 31: 114–21. Ricoeur, Paul (1970), Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riviere, Joan (1958/1991), “A Character Trait of Freud’s,” in Athol Hughes (ed.), The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers 1920–1958, 350–4, London: Karnac Books. Rusbridger, Richard (2012), “Affects in Melanie Klein,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 93 (1): 139–50.

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Spitz, Ellen Handler (1994), Museums of the Mind: Magritte’s Labyrinth and Other Essays in the Arts, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne (2011), Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Swartz, Sally (2019), Ruthless Winnicott: The Role of Ruthlessness in Psychoanalysis and Political Protest, London: Routledge Press. Taubman, Peter (2012), Disavowed Knowledge: Psychoanalysis, Education, and Teaching, New York: Routledge Press. Todd, Sharon (2001), “Guilt, Suffering and Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 35 (4): 597–614. Von Unwerth, Matthew (2005), Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk, New York: Riverhead Books. Vulevic, Gordana (2018), “Language and Speech in Melanie Klein’s Work,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 99 (4): 793–809. Webster, Jamieson (2018), Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis, New York: Columbia University Press. Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth (2012), “Anna Freud: The Teacher, the Clinician, the Person,” in Norkat T. Malberg and Joan Raphael-Leff (eds.), The Anna Freud Tradition: Lines of Development, Evolution of Theory, and Practices over the Decades, 10–13, London: Karnac Books. Zaretsky, Eli (2005), Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, New York: Vintage Books.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Philosophical Milieu in Nineteenth-Century American Education: From Idealism to Pragmatism JAMES SCOTT JOHNSTON

INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the context in and from which a specifically pragmatic educational thinking evolved in the period 1867–95. This educational thinking ultimately led to a self-conscious philosophy of education with John Dewey’s publication Democracy and Education in 1916. While philosophy of education as such was unknown to American educational thought until 1886 with the publication of Karl Rosenkranz’s The Philosophy of Education under the auspices of William Torrey Harris, pedagogy, or the science of education, was a topic of heated discussion from at least the mid-century. A milieu existed in which a philosophy of education developed from the science of education beginning in the mid-century, and it was an idealist philosophy of education that sprang forth. It was this idealist philosophy of education—the philosophy of education Rosenkranz and Harris championed—that would be challenged by Dewey beginning with his 1896 publication “Interest in Relation to Training of the Will.” This context in which a pragmatic educational thinking evolved is a central feature of Dewey’s own thinking on education in the years leading up

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to his 1896 publication. Though Dewey produced no philosophy of education to compare with Rosenkranz until 1916 with the publication of Democracy and Education, nevertheless, by 1895, Dewey had in place a basis from which to challenge the idealist philosophy of education pervasive in educational circles. This chapter will first examine the role early American philosophy played in educational thought, highlighting the traditions of romanticism, idealism, and materialism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Subsequent to this, mid-nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific influences on education, including the influence of Johann Friedrich Herbart, will be discussed. The chapter then turns to consider three leading lights of classical pragmatism— Chauncey Wright, C.S. Peirce, and William James—and their contribution to education and to later pragmatist thought. Finally, the chapter examines the roles of figures central to the development of pragmatist thought at the fin de siècle, specifically figures important to John Dewey’s intellectual development in his early years at Michigan and, later, Chicago. These include Jane Addams, James Tufts, J.R. Angell, Addison Webster Moore, and George Herbert Mead.

EARLY PHILOSOPHY AND AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT Before I discuss the specific contributions pragmatism and pragmatists bring to educational thought before and during the fin de siècle, it will help to construct the scaffolding upon which pragmatism developed. This is complicated by competing religious, literary, philosophic, and scientific antecedents. On the one hand, early American thought, especially exemplified in the writings of F.H. Hedge and Bronson Alcott and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, drew on Platonism and the German idealism common to Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, F.W.J. Schelling, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Greenham 2015; Kuklick 2002; Pochmann 1957). On the other hand, the naturalism and materialism of much nineteenth-century scientific thought, especially exemplified by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, had an outsized influence on the larger academic community, especially William James, who followed the Agassiz–Darwin debate very closely (McDermott 1986; Menand 2002). Furthering this already pluralistic environment was the legacy of Scottish Realism from Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and from them to F.H. Hedge (Flower and Murphey 1977; Kuklick 2002). Emerson’s literary works were emblematic of the attempt to synthesize the worlds of metaphysics and nature in an idealist-inspired rhetoric emphasizing the unity of mind and matter, freedom and determinism (Greenham 2015). Emerson’s “The American Scholar” was redolent of this pluralism in regards to philosophic and literary thinking (Emerson 1904: 1). The address was presented at the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1837, and later

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transformed into an essay. Emerson saw the American scholar’s role to go out into the world: the American scholar was “the world’s heart,” and “the world’s eye.” “He and he only knows the world” (Emerson 1904: 1). The American scholar, in contrast to his European confrère, was a cosmopolitan, even global scholar, in whom the nationalisms of Europe were absent. The American scholar was a pluralist, and this sense of pluralism was divined in nature, history, and action. Nevertheless, the “philosophy” of Emerson and Hedge was intuitionist rather than speculative in the all-encompassing sense Hegel was to give it (Lysaker 2008). Emerson’s divine was more felt than known; in idealist terms, it was kennen rather than wissen. This Erkenntnis of the divine would later shine through in the St. Louis school superintendent and, later, Commissioner of Education William Torrey Harris’s intuitionist rendering of Hegel’s Absolute (Harris 1896; Harris and Doty 1874). Alongside these idealist developments was a response to the horrors of slavery and the Civil War. The great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes served on the Union side in the Twentieth Massachusetts Regiment. A rifle bullet penetrated his chest and he lay near death in a makeshift hospital. It is said he turned not to God but to uncertainty itself (Menand 2002: 37). And this would not be the only time Holmes was injured (p. 41). Holmes would later attend Chauncy Wright’s Metaphysical Club in the early 1870s and regale Peirce and James with his tales of the war and the role that certainty plays in violence (p. 61). The denial of the quest for certainty and the turn to fallibilism in matters of knowledge became a mainstay of the classical pragmatists Peirce, James, and Dewey. Holmes, who was a close personal friend of James since their days as undergraduates at Harvard, was also an abolitionist (Wilson 1969: 119). This had a profound impact on James, doubly so since James’s father, Henry Sr., also took a pronounced antislavery position (p. 73). American higher education in the mid-nineteenth century was increasingly moving from a religious training ground to a worldly emphasis on practical living and the professions (Kuklick 2002). The original role of the American universities—to provide theological and ministerial training—gradually gave way to fuller education in the liberal arts and sciences as well as the other professions. However, the transition was a difficult balance to maintain for those students studying sciences until the latter half of the nineteenth century; they very often received religious training in a capstone course on morals courtesy of the president himself (Flower and Murphey 1977). Students interested in furthering their education beyond the baccalaureate would often attend universities in Europe, including Great Britain, France, and especially Germany. By the 1850s, universities began to be populated by faculty trained in Germany’s prestigious higher education institutions. This was especially true of scientists. These scholars brought with them the latest learning from institutions whose twin ideals, Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit—freedom to teach and freedom

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to learn—emboldened them to recreate the conditions for research universities in the United States (Ream 2007; Tanaka 2005). Harvard was the first graduate school in America, opened under Charles Eliot in 1872. Johns Hopkins graduated its first doctoral candidate, Josiah Royce, in 1878 (Kuklick 1985). Scientists populating these novel schools adopted in the main the prevailing positivistic methods then common in German research universities, including patient observation and attention to detail, a prioritization of analytic over synthetic methods, the reduction to and communication of laboratory results in a formal symbolic language, and a distaste for speculative and/or metaphysical explanations of natural phenomena. G. Stanley Hall of Johns Hopkins and, later, Clark University, who straddled the divide between idealism and experimental psychology, was emblematic of this transition from metaphysics to physiology, while George Sylvester Morris, the leading Hegelian in the East until his death in 1888, remained firmly in the speculative philosophic camp. Herbart’s role in educational thought and Hegelian idealism in philosophy were in vogue by the mid-century. Herbart himself drew on Pestalozzi in developing a psychology of perception that, for Herbart, is meant to guide the teacher in guiding the learner. In 1843, Massachusetts school commissioner Horace Mann embarked on a lengthy tour of Europe and spent time examining Prussian schools. His insights for American education were documented in his Seventh Annual Report (Mann 1957). Mann spoke positively regarding Pestalozzi’s and Herbart’s methods, and this served to stimulate interest in each. Mann specifically isolated Herbart’s method of teaching as leading children’s learning through fixed steps of presenting subject matter to the child. Herbartianism in America, however, was a late nineteenth-century development. The Herbart Society was an outgrowth of the National Educational Association. Charles De Garmo, fresh from completing his doctorate at Halle, and Charles McMurry took the idea of a Herbart Club—itself an outgrowth of the 1892 National Educational Association convention—and formalized it as an institution (Johanningmeier and Richardson 2008). The very first meeting was held in Denver, Colorado, at the 1895 National Educational Association annual convention. Both John Dewey and William Torrey Harris were present. The emergent publication was entitled The First Yearbook of the Herbart Society for the Scientific Study of Teaching: Prepared for Discussion at the Denver Meeting 1895 of the National Educational Association (1896) and was edited by McMurry. Dewey’s “Interest in Relation to Training of the Will” (1896) is a supplement to the second yearbook. Dewey’s criticism that Herbartianism is a “schoolmaster’s psychology” (EW 5: 147) is more likely applicable to Herbartianism than to Herbart (Bellmann 2004: 480; English 2017: 56; Oelkers 2017), and likely directed at De Garmo.1 Indeed, Dewey approved of the psychological turn Herbart offered to pedagogy and applauded the empiricism at the heart of the pedagogical enterprise (an empiricism that Harris himself bemoaned) (English 2013).

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Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that idealism was the only exemplification of philosophical thinking in North America at the dawn of pragmatism. There was a groundswell of activity not only in the sciences but also in mathematics and, specifically, logic. Scholars in America imbibed the results of Scottish mathematician Sir William Hamilton and English mathematician Augustus De Morgan (Flower and Murphey 1977). The debate had an influence on the English mathematician George Boole and the American scholar Francis Bowen. Boole’s use of symbols to stand for classes, and particularly his use of the symbol “v” to characterize “some,” led the way to the formalization of logic (Flower and Murphey 1977). The debate between Boole and Bowen over the quantification of predicates and Boole’s subsequent developments—a clear precursor to the later formalization of logic in Frege and Russell—paid dividends, especially for young Charles Saunders Peirce (Fisch 1986b; Murphey 1960). So did Bowen’s scholarship, which followed Scottish logician William Hamilton in developing an axiomatic account of general logic. Bowen’s scholarship was a clear broadside against that other school of thought popular in Great Britain, the philosophy of induction, as supported by J.S. Mill and his followers’ scholarship. Bowen’s deductive program was squarely opposed to Mill’s inductive one. Darwin had been sufficiently popularized by T.H. Huxley in the English-speaking world, and was well known in German scientific circles, owing to the influence of Ernst Mach. In the 1880s, James was fascinated by Mach’s Darwinian conclusions regarding the biological genesis of human knowledge through training—the socalled “genetic method of teaching” (Siemsen 2014: 2346). Fellow travelers in the empirical worldview common to pragmatism were British thinkers Nicholas St. John Green and Alexander Bain. Because both espoused an experimental approach to justification of knowledge claims, Peirce considered either Green or Bain (it is unclear in his letter) the “grandfather” of pragmatism (CP 5: 12). By 1879, with the publication of G. Stanley Hall’s “Philosophy in the United States” in the British journal Mind, all of these thinkers received credit for leading American thought from speculative metaphysics toward an experimental, even physiologic, psychology (Hall 1879). Until the advent of a specifically Hegelian idealism under the direction of Harris, America lacked a cohesive and coherent science of education, to say nothing of philosophy of education. What was offered mid-century consisted in an amalgam of religious thinking against a backdrop of transcendentalist thinking more poetic than philosophical, as well as an increasingly materialist thinking in matters of science, especially with regards to the latest findings of geology and biology. Indeed, just what constitutes American in American philosophy is a subject of great debate; the varieties of philosophies Emerson addressed himself to, and took up in his own writings, are testament to this (Lysaker 2015). And though this pluralism of philosophical schools was true of the universities, it couldn’t be said to be true of public schools, which were,

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until the interventions of Horace Mann and others beginning in the 1840s, mainly occasions for rote. Philosophy of education simply did not exist in midnineteenth-century America. Leading German educationists, such as Herbart, Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Fröbel did make headway in America; but they did not initially serve as the occasion to develop an American philosophy of education so much as a science of pedagogy—a set of practices based on principles that could be implemented across classrooms and school boards. If we define philosophy of education as a systematic and self-conscious account of education with a supporting metaphysical, logical, ethical, and social program, nothing remotely close existed in mid-nineteenth-century America. Something like moral education did exist, and was vociferously pursued by Protestant-minded thinkers such as Mann, as well as by Catholic bishops, priests, and lay teachers (Kaestle 1983; McClellan 1999). But moral education was neither systematic nor self-justifying in the senses that a philosophy of education requires; it was rather based on an appeal to scripture and (in the case of Catholic moral education) doctrinal tradition. The chief purveyor of a science of education in the latter half of the nineteenth century was William Torrey Harris. Harris, who served as the superintendent of the St. Louis schools and later acted as the first Commissioner of Education, was a voluminous writer with an outsized influence on school leadership and educational thought (Leidecker 1971). By 1898, the year of his Psychologic Foundations of Education, his role as the quintessential American thinker on education was well established (Harris 1898). Harris would also serve on Charles Eliot’s Committee of Ten in 1892 to revamp the foundations of the American high school (see Figure 5.1). Harris’s philosophic background included Emerson, Plato, and above all, Hegel. He understood America in absolutist, theological terms (Johnston 2013). Education for Harris was a branch of psychology, or mind. Mind, in turn, was intuitive and spiritual at base; senseperceptions were mere content ordered by a priori concepts (Harris 1890). He therefore rejected Herbart’s Lockean commitment to the construction of images from sense-perceptions, though he otherwise applauded Herbart’s methods (Harris 1895). Harris understood education as a progressive unfolding of mind, a position Dewey would later criticize in Democracy and Education (MW 9: 61; Oelkers 2017: 284). Interestingly, though both Harris and Dewey were members of the Herbart Society, and both were critical of aspects of Herbart’s psychology, Dewey was critical of Harris’s theory of interest and will (EW 5). Indeed, this would become the linchpin upon which their differences turned. By 1886, America’s first philosophy of education was established: Karl Rosenkranz’s The Philosophy of Education, consisting in extended papers first published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1873–4, emerged. Dewey would not provide an equivalent response until 1916, when his own general statement on the philosophy of education emerged with the publication of Democracy and Education.

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FIGURE 5.1  Senior High School during construction, Black River Falls, Wisconsin, 1897

PRAGMATIC PRESUPPOSITIONS, 1867–95 The question of pragmatism’s genesis is an ongoing one. In 1900, in a letter, Peirce had asked James who invented the term (CP2 8: 253). James replied that Peirce himself had done so. According to James, the term was first heard in a lecture Peirce gave in 1878 (CP 8: 253). Both considered Green and Bain, together with Wright, progenitors. And both considered the variety of conversations and debates had at Peirce’s Metaphysical Club and clubs in Boston in the two decades following to be the birthplace of those ideas (Fisch 1986b). Though Hall (1879) did not use the term in his “Philosophy in the United States,” the stress on behavior, sensation, perception, and experimental and physiologic psychology Hall outlined prefigured similarities that James would later emphasize. James first used the term pragmatism in a series of lectures at the University of California in 1898. Dewey, who was very cognizant of the consequences of being labeled a pragmatist, seldom used the term to describe himself, and preferred the term experimental idealism in 1893–4 and instrumentalism in the first two decades of the twentieth century (EW 4; LW 5). Nevertheless, pragmatism is the term that has stuck to Peirce, James, and Dewey (among others), for better or worse. At its most general, pragmatism consists in a school of thought that rejects the poles of rationalism and empiricism,

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favors a realism that takes into consideration the “practical bearings” or effects of intelligent intervention on the world, and does so against an idealism that considers mind as absolute (CP 5: 410). It considers traditional metaphysical topics such as God and freedom valuable insofar as they yield practical fruits. It champions method and science, and stresses psychology, individual and social, as keys to better living. It has been described by many as a quintessentially American philosophy, suitable for the frontier and the capitalist (Russell 1945/1979; White 1943). Here, I am interested in what of early pragmatism played a role in educational thought, particularly as it was articulated by Dewey circa 1895. The central figures I examine are Chauncey Wright, C.S. Peirce, and William James. Wright is famous not for producing a philosophy of his own but rather for his influence on Peirce and James, together with founding the so-called Metaphysical Club in Boston. Wright—as adept at mathematics as Peirce— was for a time a computational analyst for the Nautical Almanac and, later, lived off of book reviews he composed. He was a follower of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Alexander Bain (the latter with whom both Peirce and James shared an interest). He was a friend of the James family and met Peirce in the mid-1860s (Fisch 1986c; Menand 2002). The Metaphysical Club met for suppers one Tuesday each month, and consisted of notable local luminaries, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, and Henry Adams, as well as Peirce and James. Wright had a direct influence on Peirce’s adoption (with reservations) of Darwin’s findings, and Peirce’s and James’s adoption of Bain’s empirical psychology (MS 823). The club ran for several years, finally succumbing, in part, due to the reforms of Harvard University under its new president, Charles Eliot. By 1867, Peirce’s exposure to Wright’s work on physics and his own father Benjamin Peirce’s work on algebra was sufficient to give him courage to provide a series of lectures at Harvard University on logic (Brent 1990). Shortly thereafter, he published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “On a New List of Categories.” This was the work of at least nine years’ struggle with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It was to be the one work he felt was his definitive contribution to philosophy (MS 823). It was not, however, the work for which he would become important to James and Dewey. This work (or works) was a series of manuscripts published in the Popular Science Monthly, including 1878’s “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” These two articles together stressed two central tenets common to pragmatism thereafter: the focus on the superiority of scientific method over and against other approaches to holding beliefs, and the practical bearings our ideas and conceptions must have if they are to be clear. What was at stake for Peirce was our ability to give an account of reality; scientific method, or so Peirce thought, could best put us in a position to do so:

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It may be asked how I know that there are any Reals. If this hypothesis is the sole support of my method of inquiry, my method of inquiry must not be used to support my hypothesis. The reply is this: 1. If investigation cannot be regarded as proving that there are Real things, it at least does not lead to a contrary conclusion; but the method and the conception on which it is based remain ever in harmony. No doubts of the method, therefore, necessarily arise from its practice, as is the case with all the others. 2. The feeling which gives rise to any method of fixing belief is a dissatisfaction at two repugnant propositions. But here already is a vague concession that there is some one thing which a proposition should represent. Nobody, therefore, can really doubt that there are Reals, for, if he did, doubt would not be a source of dissatisfaction. The hypothesis, therefore, is one which every mind admits. So that the social impulse does not cause men to doubt it. 3. Everybody uses the scientific method about a great many things, and only ceases to use it when he does not know how to apply it. 4. Experience of the method has not led us to doubt it, but, on the contrary, scientific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of settling opinion. These afford the explanation of my not doubting the method or the hypothesis which it supposes; and not having any doubt, nor believing that anybody else whom I  could influence has, it would be the merest babble for me to say more about it. If there be anybody with a living doubt upon the subject, let him consider it. (CP 5: 383) The other central tenet held by pragmatists was the role to be played by practical bearings, matters of fact, and effects in any account of truth or reality. Peirce puts the matter this way; “It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (CP 5: 410). James would, of course, make much of this in Lecture Two of Pragmatism (1907), particularly in regard to his various statements on truth. On Dewey’s part, Peirce’s ideas did not become a feature of his thinking until 1916, with the publication of “The Pragmatism of Peirce” (MW 10). Though Dewey responded indirectly to Peirce’s 1893 “The Doctrine of Necessity” in the Monist (CP 6), his conclusion—that necessity was the holdover from a time in which scientific method had not yet come on the scene—was antithetical to Peirce’s (EW 4). In 1916, Dewey would “re-discover” Peirce’s scientific method and his account of reality. Though Peirce occasionally wrote on the subject of education, he produced no formal, to say nothing of systematic, account. The context in which education was discussed was frequently logic and/or method. An abstract for one of his lectures given at Johns Hopkins University in September of 1882 gives us some idea of the relation between education and logic:

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In short, if my view is the true one, a young man wants a physical education and an aesthetic education, an education in the ways of the world and a moral education, and with all these logic has nothing in particular to do; but so far as he wants an intellectual education, it is precisely logic that he wants; and whether he be in one lecture-room or another, his ultimate purpose is to improve his logical power and his knowledge of methods. To this great end a young man’s attention ought to be directed when it first comes to the university; he ought to keep it steadily in view during the whole period of its studies; and finally, he will do well to review his whole work in the light which an education in logic throws upon it. (CP 7: 68) In addition to Darwin and Bain, James’s pragmatism was heavily influenced by Charles Renouvier’s work and Hall’s work on sensation and perception (Fisch 1986c). Unlike Peirce, James’s contribution to Dewey was immediate. It has been repeated countless times that James, together with Darwin, moved Dewey away from Hegel, beginning with Dewey’s reading of The Principles of Psychology in the early 1890s (Boisvert 1998; Campbell 1999; Dalton 2002; Dykhuizen 1973; Fesmire 2015; Popp 2009; Rogers 2009; Ryan 1995; Tiles 1990; Westbrook 1991), though this transition has been challenged (Buxton 1984; Good 2006; Morse 2011; Shook 2000). James’s influence on Dewey is primarily semantic and attitudinal, a move away from psychology in the terms of Absolute Idealism toward a Darwinian-inspired, functionalist set of terms that complemented experimental and physiologic psychology, and that Dewey described as an intellectual “conversion” (LW 5: 151). According to Dewey, James was primarily responsible for the trading in of his Hegelian “garb” (LW 5: 151). Specifically, James’s Principles of Psychology, 2 volumes (1890/1918) and James’s 1894 article “The Physical Basis of Emotion” seem to have had a great impact. James’s theory of emotions, in which an organism’s felt state and subsequent response precedes a specific emotion (James 1894, 1899) and the purposiveness of the subsequent emotion produced as containing a content, clearly had an influence on Dewey’s early accounting of emotions, as can be seen in his 1893 essay “The Chaos in Moral Training” (EW 4) and his 1894 work The Theory of Emotions (EW 4). Though Dewey did not accept the way James gave preeminence to emotion over physical activity, he did attempt to “reconcile” his theory of emotions with Darwin’s theory of the discharge of emotional into physical activity such as movement (Darwin 1873; EW 4: 153). The focus on the concrete content of emotion Dewey thought a significant improvement on the idealist account of feeling, which though presaging James, apparently did not do enough to advance this content (EW 4). But perhaps the greatest influence from James concerns the reappropriation of teleology to natural ends. Hegelian absolutism seemed to suggest that ends were something apart from and beyond human consciousness, existing in a divine realm. Certainly, Harris oftentimes talked as if they were, and as he

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was the leading light of Hegel’s philosophy in America in the latter half of the nineteenth century (though by no means the only one), his voice was resounding (e.g., Harris 1890: 105). To this view, James insisted otherwise. Ends were “products of consciousness” (James 1890/1918: 1:140–1). They were the aims and goals of human beings made self-aware of their existential situations and “actively planning for their amelioration” (James 1890/1918: 1:482). Outside of or beyond human consciousness, they were nothing; “barren” (James 1890/1918: 2:665). Dewey of course, would make much of this beginning in the early 1890s, when he began to champion James’s psychology over the rival accounts of Herbert Spencer and T.H. Green (EW 4). Dewey would specifically tie the issue of teleology to the human organisms’ interests—a tie that Dewey claimed was first made manifest in James (EW 4: esp. p. 47), and would resurface in Dewey’s Herbart Society Yearbook presentation (1895) and, later, in the supplement “Interest in Relation to Training of the Will” (1896) (EW 5). In the early and mid-1890s James spent time touring the United States on the subject of psychology to teachers, ultimately delivering fifteen lectures. The lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1892 were published. His estimation of the role of psychology for teacher education was, unlike Dewey’s, negligible. “The amount of [psychology] which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great … for the great majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a true one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written on the palm of one’s hand” (James 1899: 26). Instead of psychology having a positive use, it rather had a negative one, limiting the pretensions of teacher-trainers to certain scientific methods over others, as well as imbuing clarity to theory. But, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice. (James 1899: 25) James himself had comparatively little to say about education, though there is some scholarship extant on his role in philosophy of education and the role his thought might play in contemporary matters (e.g., Garrison, Podeschi, and Bredo 2002).

TOWARD A PRAGMATIST PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION The turn to pragmatism in educational thought is also a turning away from Absolute Idealism in its various guises. There is undoubtedly for Dewey a general turning away from British idealism and its American cousin; the question of the

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turning away from Hegelian idealism remains an open question. To begin with, the scope and degree of this turn is hotly debated in the Dewey scholarship (Dalton 2002; Dykhuizen 1973; Garrison 2006; Good 2006; McClintock 2016; Morse 2011; Shook 2000; Shook and Good 2010; Westbrook 1991). Additionally, what counts as idealism is frequently in question in the various claims for or against its influence on Dewey (Shook 2000; Shook and Good 2010). By all accounts, at the time Dewey arrived in Chicago in July 1894 to take his positions as professor of philosophy and professor of pedagogy, Dewey’s idealism was already tempered by his reading and incorporation of various Jamesean motifs. Subsequent considerations moved Dewey beyond the psychology of the individual and individual differences, to broader community and social relationships. These considerations included the dire poverty and general helplessness of immigrants in Chicago, and the views of people he began to associate with both at the university and in the city. This development has been well documented in the main intellectual histories and biographies of Dewey and the Chicago pragmatists (e.g., Coughlin 1975; Dalton 2002; Deegan 2017; Dykhuizen 1973; Feffer 1992; Fesmire 2016; Kadlec 2007; Menand 2002; Ryan 1995; Westbrook 1991, 1992). At the time of Dewey’s move, pedagogy, to say nothing of philosophy of education, was only of nascent interest to him, but while at the University of Michigan he became interested in the philosophy curriculum for students, student ethics, and lecturing.3 While at Michigan, Dewey published his first article in November 1893 entitled “Teaching Ethics in the High School,” for the Educational Review (EW 4), a professional journal of education. His one contribution to the pedagogy of morals, “The Chaos in Moral Training” (EW 4), was written in his last semester at Michigan and published upon his arrival in Chicago. Thus, when Dewey arrived in Chicago, he had already begun to think about educational issues and problems, though primarily with universities in mind. However, he had just begun to think about schools, and child studies were confined to the psychological development of infants. His public accomplishments in education by early 1894 amounted to an appointment as an official of the Michigan Schoolmaster’s Club, which was concerned with the integration of high school students into college. All this would change during the first year of Dewey’s tenure at the University of Chicago. Several factors united to bring this change about. The first of these was the living conditions of the laborers and immigrants in Chicago, which Dewey saw firsthand. Dewey would increasingly see education as the means to social uplift (Deegan 2017; Feffer 1992; Fesmire 2016; Westbrook 1991, 1992). A second was Dewey’s knowledge of, and subsequent enrollment of his children in, Col. Francis Parker’s Cook County Normal School. Parker attracted a number of the Chicago intelligentsia, and through Parker and his school,

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FIGURE 5.2  Girls working at looms at Hull house in Chicago, which was founded by Jane Addams

Dewey was able to develop important contacts that would prove valuable in supporting his own school (Westbrook 1992). The awful social conditions of Chicago, and the paralysis of existing Chicago schools to ameliorate them, played a role in Dewey’s desire to open a school operating under the premises of an experimental science.4 Third, alongside the horrid social conditions stood the settlement houses and other institutions designed to mitigate the suffering of the disenfranchised and improve their social and economic lot. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were the chief influencers on Dewey in this regard. Addams and Starr cofounded Hull House in 1889 on Chicago’s near west side. After initial personal support, Hull House relied on numerous wealthy benefactors among Addams and Starr’s friends. Residents of Hull House generally consisted of wealthy educated men and women given access to the disenfranchised of Chicago’s working class. Educators participated in Hull House’s night school. Dewey first visited Hull House in 1892 while still at the University of Michigan, and met with Addams and Starr.5 In writing to his wife Alice, Dewey claimed not only that Addams’ view that settlement “was the unification of the city’s life, or the realizing of the city’s … unity. It was a way of living in wh. [sic] there … was more to be got than to be … given—for example, the great awakening of social … consciousness in

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the labor movement was one of the most deeply religious things in modern times—if not the most so.”6 Dewey’s experience with laborers and immigrants while lecturing at Hull House and other establishments furthered this turn. While Dewey did not abandon the “dialectical method” common to Hegel and idealists of various stripes, he did claim it was modified in his encounter with Addams: I can sene [sic] that I have always been interpreting the Hegelian dialectic wrong end up—the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated physical tension into a moral thing—As a sample of Miss Addam’s intellect, when I spoke of the place tension held in … all natural forces & in growth, she said “Of course, there’s the stress of action, but that’s an entirely different thing.” I don’t know as I give … the reality of this at all—it seems so natural & commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so; & … at the time it didn’t impress me as anything wonderful; it was only the next day it began to dawn on me.7 For his part, Dewey would express his debt to Addams in a number of letters.8 For her part, Addams was more modest, finding in Dewey a fellow traveler in matters of social settlement and social activism (Addams 2002; Deegan 2017), and increasingly, a proponent of the melioristic and gradualistic approaches to solving social conflicts, especially with his emphasis that “education is par excellence the method of social reconstruction” (Dewey, quoted in Feffer 1992: 113). It is well known that Addams (and Dewey, at least in 1893–4) espoused a socially liberal Christianity that stressed negotiation and compromise rather than conflict (Addams 2002; Deegan 2017). We see this as well in Dewey’s 1893 address and publication, “Christianity and Democracy” (EW 4). But it is also the case that Dewey, too, had by 1891, in Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, developed a social view of morality that was to consider not only the individual’s needs and wants but also the role society played in shaping these; that recognized “actual social relations” and not mere “oughts apart from what is,” “afford the law of what should be” including the negative social consequences as well as the positive ideal (EW 3: 351). In any event, Dewey was already moving toward the more gradualist position regarding social ethics by the time he worked closely with Addams at Hull House, beginning in 1894. Though Dewey did have an influence on the philosophic basis of settlement during and after his stay in Chicago, ultimately Mead and his colleague Tufts, through their long-term engagement with the Hull House and other settlement houses in Chicago, were to have a more direct and practical significance for their long-term growth and maintenance (Deegan 2017; Feffer 1992).

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Certain of Dewey’s colleagues at the university proved most helpful to him, both academically and socially. In the years under consideration, these included James Tufts, H.R. Angell, Addison Webster Moore, and George Herbert Mead. Tufts had experience as a high school principal in Connecticut and taught mathematics at Amherst College before attending Yale to study divinity. After two years at Yale, Tufts taught at Michigan, then left for Chicago after completing his doctorate in Germany (Feffer 1992). Tufts would cowrite Ethics with Dewey in 1908, a textbook that would go on to sell tens of thousands of copies. Angell was Dewey’s master’s degree student at the University of Michigan and joined the University of Chicago as a lecturer in 1895. Moore was a doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at the time of Dewey’s arrival. Together, Angell and Moore published a significant paper in the Psychological Review entitled “Reaction-Time: A Study in Attention and Habit” (1896). Briefly, their thesis was that a relation between attention and habit existed, a relation in which a circuit, disrupted by stimulation, provoked attention. This idea was more or less a vindication of James’s theory of emotion (as well as Dewey’s at the time), that emotion was a by-product (or state) of acting and being acted upon. This development would lead Dewey to his own conclusions regarding “the reflex circuit” in his 1896 paper “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (EW 5), the following year. His turn to James that began in the early 1890s was beginning to bear fruit in the guise of a holistic account of child development, an account in which behavioral patterns and emotions were active ingredients in a greater whole consisting of the organism. Consonant with this productive account was Dewey’s burgeoning account of childhood motivation, an account that Dewey would call “interest” (EW 5: 113). Mead was first hired into the philosophy department at the University of Michigan after the departure of Tufts. Mead followed Dewey in the latter’s departure from Michigan to Chicago. Mead also had experience teaching high school (Feffer 1992). As with Dewey and Tufts, Mead became immersed in the social activism of Chicago’s reform movements, beginning in 1894 (Feffer 1992). Mead’s early influence on Dewey is well captured in Coughlin (1975) and Feffer (1992). His early writings foreshadowed Dewey’s later works, particularly on social psychology and mind. Particularly helpful in this regard was Mead’s “Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning” and “The Social Self” (Mead 1910b, 1913). In terms of education, Mead’s “The Psychology of Social Consciousness Implied in Instruction” challenged behavioristic and individualistic accounts of psychology in education to consider carefully social relations. Mead went so far as to say that the child learns only through being social (Mead 1910b). Furthermore, Mead’s early work on the role of play in education, originally presented as a settlement house lecture and later published

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in the University of Chicago Record (1896), demonstrated play as a significant practice for the development of the child’s self (Feffer 1992). In the play period the child utilizes his own responses to these stimuli which he makes use of in building a self. The response which he has a tendency to make to these stimuli organizes them. He plays that he is, for instance, offering himself something, and he buys it; he gives a letter to himself and takes it away; he addresses himself as a parent, as a teacher; he arrests himself as a policeman. He has a set of stimuli which call out in himself the sort of responses they call out in others. He takes this group of responses and organizes them into a certain whole. Such is the simplest form of being another to one’s self. (Mead, quoted in Deegan 1999: 4) Dewey would incorporate this notion of play into his 1899 book School and Society (MW 1: 86–7) in contrast to Friedrich Fröbel’s spiritualizing of the child’s imagination. It would resurface again in chapter 15 in Democracy and Education (MW 9). Above all, it was Mead’s 1903 article “The Definition of the Psychical” that drew the attention of Dewey and functionalist psychology most fully. Here, Mead begins his fundamental critique of psycho-physical parallelism exemplified in the German scholarship of Wilhelm Wundt and others working in the tradition of physiologic psychology (Mead 1903). Mead draws on Dewey’s 1896 “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” and specifically the notion of “circuit” in so doing. His argument also incorporates criticisms of phenomenalism—a holdover from classical empiricism that Wundt and others maintained. The very idea that there are mental intermediaries (sensations) betrays the science of experience whose subject matter is immediacy (Joas 1985: 81; Mead 1903). This would find purchase in essays Dewey wrote shortly thereafter; the most well known of these is “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” (MW 3). Dewey’s “Interest in Relation to Training of the Will,” presented at the Herbart Society in 1895 and subsequently published in 1896 as the second supplement to the Herbart Yearbook, was the surest statement to date of Dewey’s educational thought. Dewey’s functionalism and naturalism were on full display here. The child’s interest in subject matter was neither an internal development of external motivations nor a divine telos as Harris would have it; it was rather derived from an internal, organic power—a “spontaneous power” (EW 5: 119). For Dewey, the child’s “spontaneous power” cannot be suppressed. This power was supplied through the channeling of native impulses. Harnessing this power and directing it to native interests would be the surest means of effecting effort (EW 5: 117). The “externality of the object or idea to be mastered, the end to be reached, the act to be performed” is an assumption that has its basis in the dualism of

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mind and world (EW 5: 117). But this is a false dualism, according to Dewey. For the self, in putting forth its end-in-view, already has the object, and has it as ideal. Nature turns out not to be external to self; it turns out that nature is the externality of the self as the self, grasping its object through its ideal. Selfactivity, which is the power represented here, reemerges in new garb: no longer is it the chief characteristic and function of Mind; it is now a basic consideration in a functionalist psychological account of the child’s behavior. There is no need for an appeal to divine providence to provide metaphysical support to a dualism of mind and nature because, in an organic accounting of self, mind and nature are the internal and external aspects of self as whole. This “identification, through action,” of the self to its object, Dewey calls “interest,” in contrast to the separation of self and object, which requires “effort” to overcome (EW 5: 121–2). In dropping the Hegelian “garb,” Dewey manages to provide a rival, and naturalistic, accounting of self and its functions that rivals the accounting of Harris. Interspersed among Dewey’s accounts of interest and effort are discussions of attention, impulse, desire, and ideas, together with critiques of Kantianism and Herbartianism. The account of interest Dewey offers is clothed in naturalistic and functionalist garb, and this owes a great deal to James and to the work being done at the University of Chicago by Dewey’s colleagues. The following year, 1898, saw the publication of “My Pedagogic Creed,” for Ossian Lang’s Educational Creeds of the Nineteenth Century—Dewey’s first attempt approaching a science of education. Indeed, the period 1895–8 saw Dewey publish no less than thirteen articles and books on educational topics. Harris would pass away in 1909, and partly without his support, idealism gradually lost its place as a bona fide philosophy of education in North America. The intellectual tide turned against Germany and German ideas in the runup to, and during, the First World War. This disillusionment had as much to do with idealism’s demise as strictly philosophic factors and the presence of rivals (Campbell 2004).

CONCLUSION The characteristics common to pragmatist educational thinking circa 1895 included the establishment of scientific method as the best means to hold certain beliefs over others, together with a central place for the practical bearings and effects of holding such beliefs. It also included a realist accounting of objects and a natural teleology of aims and ends of selves from which these emanate, together with the natural and social significance of play and work, attention and stimulation, interest and will. A corresponding repudiation of transcendentalmetaphysical and spiritual accounts of will, imagination, and mind was also on offer. To these ingredients Dewey would later add the anthropological and

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social significance of beliefs scientifically held, a theory of inquiry, and a theory of experience. All of this and more would be present by 1916 in Democracy and Education—the next full approximation of a philosophy of education in America. As we see, a manifold of influences on pragmatist educational thinking exemplified in John Dewey’s “Interest and the Training of the Will” and related works is evident. To begin with, the milieu in which American educational thought emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century consisted in strands of romanticism, materialism, idealism, and Platonism, exemplified by religious and transcendentalist thinking. The rise of experimental psychology as a discipline played a significant role thereafter, as did the development of early pragmatist lines of thought by Holmes, Wright, Peirce, and James. More immediately for Dewey’s intellectual development was his familiarity with Hegel and Hegelianism, and the Hegelian and Herbartian backdrop to the leading educational thought of the day. This was best exemplified in the writings of William Torrey Harris. Dewey’s encounters with Jane Addams, and his colleagues James Angell, Addison Webster Moore, James Tufts, and George Herbert Mead, were exemplary in their significance for his philosophical and educational thinking. Of course, the debate between idealism and pragmatism in educational thinking is long over, and pragmatism won. Historians of education, in examining the directions that progressive education took in the new century, have often concluded that the scientific arm has had the better of it, and for better or worse, we operate in a culture of administrative bureaucracy, with efficiency and accountability as ends. It is therefore tempting to fall back on a commonplace and say that pragmatism in educational thinking is alive and well, though this sentiment cannot be sustained in the case of educational practice. In the case of educational theory, though the importance of attending to the social in its various guises remains important, various other non-pragmatist theories have challenged pragmatism’s authority. In my opinion, pragmatism will continue to buttress educational theory, though it will not regain its once-held (pre–Second World War) hegemony over educational practice. The question then becomes, what should the role for pragmatism in educational theory be? And here I submit that it cannot and should not continue as it has. While its attention to the natural impulses, desires, behavioral circuits, habits, and biopsychosocial growth of children remains important, the political and especially democratic ends to which such accounts are put have irrevocably changed and these accounts need to be reconstructed in line with present democratic and political aims and ends. Whereas earlier political ends of pragmatism included social democracy for industry and labor, many of these positions have disappeared or taken flight to developing nations. And whereas schools once ostensibly educated for life, schools now educate increasingly for

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employment and to supply the knowledge economy. If anything, the means of democracy have become more, not less, bureaucratic and more, not less, opaque. The reconstruction of our accounts must take their point of departure from these challenges and forge responses to them.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

EW refers to the Early Works of John Dewey in The Collected Works of John Dewey. MW and LW will also be used in this chapter to refer to The Middle Works and The Later Works, respectively. CP refers to Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Peirce. Volumes 1–6 refer to the 1930 edition edited by Paul Weiss and Charles Hartshorne. Volumes 7–8 refer to the 1958 edition by Arthur Birks. See Dewey “Philosophy in American Universities: The University of Michigan” (EW 3, 90–3), “Ethics in the University of Michigan” (EW 3, 48–51), and “Lectures vs. Recitations: A Symposium” (EW 3, 147–8). John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey, 1894, 11, 1, 00218. Jane Addams Collection. Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Series 1: Box 1 1870–1895 Correspondence. John Dewey to Jane Addams 1892 01 27. John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey 1894 10, 09, 00205. Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey 1894 10, 10, 00206. For example, John Dewey to Jane Addams 1898, 08, 12.

REFERENCES Primary sources Addams, Jane (2002), Democracy and Social Ethics, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Addams, Jane (2019), The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, Vol. 3: Creating Hull-House and an International Presence, 1889–1900, ed. Mary Lynn, McCree Bryan, Maree De Angury, and Ellen Skerrett, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Angell, James Rowland and Addison W. Moore (1896), “Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of the University of Chicago: 1. Reaction-Time: A Study in Attention and Habit,” Psychological Review, 3: 245–58. Darwin, Charles (1873), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, New York: Appleton and Co. Dewey, John (1967–91), The Collected Works of John Dewey: the Early Works 1882–1898; the Middle Works 1899–1924; the Later Works 1925–1952, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (2001–3), The Correspondence of John Dewey, Vol. 1: 1866–1918, ed. L. Hickman, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (2010), “The 1987 Lecture on Hegel,” in John Shook and James Good (ed), John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, New York: Fordham University Press. Eliot, Charles, ed. (1894), Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary Studies, with the reports of the conferences arranged by the Committee, New York: National Education Association.

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1904), The Complete Works, Vol. 1: Nature, Addresses and Lectures, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. Hall, G. Stanley (1879), “Philosophy in the United States,” Mind, 4: 101–5. Harris, W.T. (1890), Hegel’s Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind. A Critical Exposition, New York: Kraus Reprints. Harris, W.T. (1895), “Reply to De Garmo’s ‘Is Herbart’s Theory of Interest Dangerous?’,” Public School Journal, 14 (June): 575–6. Harris, W.T. (1896), “Professor John Dewey’s Doctrine of Interest as Related to Will,” Educational Review, 11 (May): 486–93. Harris, W.T. (1898), Psychological Foundations of Education, New York: Appleton. Harris, William Torrey and Duane Doty (1874), A Statement of the Theory of Education in the United States of America, As Approved by Many Leading Educators, Washington, DC: United States Office of Education. James, William (1890/1918), The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols., New York: Dover. James, William (1894), “The Physical Basis of Emotion,” Psychological Review, 1: 516–29. James, William (1899), Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, New York: Henry, Holt & Co. James, William (1907), Pragmatism: A New Word for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Mineola, MN: Dover. Mead, George Herbert (1903), “The Definition of the Psychical,” Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, First Series, Vol. 3, 77–112, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, George Herbert (1910a), “The Psychology of Social Consciousness Implied in Instruction,” Science, 31: 688–93. Mead, George Herbert (1910b), “Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning,” Psychological Bulletin, 7: 397–405. Mead, George Herbert (1913), “The Social Self,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 10: 374–80. Mead, George Herbert (1999), Play, School, and Society, ed. Mary-Jo Deegan, New York: Peter Lang. Peirce, Charles Saunders (1931–4), The Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Peirce, Vols. 1–5, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles Saunders (1958), The Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Peirce, Vols. 7–8, ed. Arthur Burks, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles Saunders (1977–), Charles Sanders Peirce: Complete Published Works, Including Secondary Materials, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosenkranz, J.K.F. (1925), The Philosophy of Education, 2nd edn., New York: Appleton. White, Morton (1943), The Origins of John Dewey’s Instrumentalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Secondary sources Bellmann, Johannes (2004), “Re-interpretation in Historiography: John Dewey and the Neo-Humanist Tradition,” Studies in Philosophy of Education, 23: 467–88. Boisvert, Raymond (1998), John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time, Albany: State University of New York Press. Brent, Joseph P. (1990), Peirce: A Life, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Buxton, Michael (1984), “The Influence of William James on John Dewey’s Early Work,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 45 (3): 451–63. Campbell, James (1999), Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence, Peru, IL: Open Court. Campbell, James (2004), “John Dewey and German Philosophy in Wartime,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 40 (1): 1–20. Coughlin, Neil (1975), Young John Dewey: An Essay in American Intellectual History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dalton, Thomas (2002), Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deegan, Mary-Jo (1999), Play, School, and Society, New York: Peter Lang. Deegan, Mary-Jo. (2017), Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892– 1918, New York: Routledge. Dykhuizen, George (1973), The Life and Mind of John Dewey, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. English, Andrea (2013), Discontinuity in Learning: Dewey, Herbart, and Education As Transformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. English, Andrea (2017), “What Is the Role of the Past in Education?,” in Leonard Waks and Andrea English (eds.), John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook, 54–63, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feffer, Andrew (1992), The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fesmire, Stephen (2015), Dewey, New York: Routledge. Fesmire, Stephen (2016), “Democracy and the Industrial Imagination in American Education,” Education and Culture, 32 (1): 53–62. Fisch, Max (1986a), “Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism,” in K.L. Ketner and C.J.W. Kloesel (eds.), Peirce, Semiotics, and Pragmatism, 79–109, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fisch, Max (1986b), “Peirce at the Johns Hopkins University,” in K.L. Ketner and C.J.W. Kloesel (eds.), Peirce, Semiotics, and Pragmatism, 39–78, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fisch, Max (1986c), “Philosophical Clubs in Cambridge and Boston,” in K.L. Ketner and C.J.W. Kloesel (eds.), Peirce, Semiotics, and Pragmatism, 137–70, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Flower, Elizabeth and Murray G. Murphey (1977), A History of Philosophy in America, Vol. 1, New York: G.P. Putnam’s. Garrison, James (2006), “The “Permanent Deposit” of Hegelian Thought in Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry,” Educational Theory, 56 (1): 1–36. Garrison, James, Ronald Podeschi, and Eric Bredo, eds. (2002), William James and Education, New York: Teachers College Press. Good, James (2006), A Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent Deposit” of Hegel in John Dewey’s Philosophy, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Greenham, David (2015), “‘Altars to the Beautiful Necessity’: The Significance of F. W. J. Schelling’s ‘Philosophical Inquiries in the Nature of Human Freedom’ in the Development of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concept of Fate,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 76 (1): 115–37. Joas, Hans (1985), G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought, trans. Raymond Meyer, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Johanningmeyer, Erwin and Theresa Richardson (2008), Educational Research, the National Agenda, and Educational Reform, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Johnston, James Scott (2013), “Rival Readings of Hegel at the Fin de Siècle: The Case of William Torrey Harris and John Dewey,” History of Education, 42 (4): 423–43. Kadlec, Alison (2007), Dewey’s Critical Pragmatism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kaestle, Karl (1983), Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860, New York: Hill and Wang. Kliebard, Herbert (2005), The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958, 3rd edn., New York: Routledge. Kuklick, Bruce (1985), Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Biography, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Kuklick, Bruce (2002), A History of Philosophy in America, New York: Oxford University Press. Leidecker, Kurt (1971), Yankee Teacher: The Life of William Torrey Harris, New York: The Philosophical Library. Lysaker, John (2008), Emerson and Self-Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lysaker, John (2015), After Emerson, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mann, Horace (1957), The Republic and the School: On the Education of Men, ed. L. Cremin, New York: Teachers College Press. McDermott, John (1986),“Spires of Influence: The Importance of Emerson for Classical American Philosophy,” in Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture, 29–43, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. McClellan, B. Edward (1999), Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present, New York: Teachers College Press. McClintock, Robbie (2016), “Dewey in His Skivvies: The Problem with Reconstruction,” Educational Theory, 67 (5): 545–75. Menand, Louis (2002), The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Morse, Donald (2011), Faith in Life: John Dewey's Early Philosophy, New York: Fordham University Press. Murphey, Murray G. (1960), The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oelkers, J. (2017), “John Dewey’s Refutation of Classical Educational Thinking,” in Leonard Waks and Andrea English (eds.), John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook, 279–89, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pochmann, Henry (1957), German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Popp, Jerome (2009), Evolution’s First Philosopher, Albany: State University of New York Press. Ream, Todd (2007), “Pragmatism and the Unlikely Influence of German Idealism on the Academy in the United States,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39 (2): 150–67. Rogers, Melvin (2009), The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Russell, Bertrand (1945/1979), A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen & Unwin. Ryan, Alan (1995), John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, New York: W.W. Norton. Shook, John (2000), Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Shook, John and James Good (2010), John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, New York: Fordham Press. Siemsen, Hayo (2014), “Ernst Mach: A Genetic Introduction to His Educational Theory and Pedagogy,” in Michael R. Matthews (ed.), International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching, 2329–57, Dordrecht: Springer. Tanaka, Masahiro (2005), The Cross-Cultural Transfer of Educational Concepts and Practices: A Comparative Study, Oxford: Symposium Books. Tiles, J.E. (1990), Dewey, New York: Routledge. Westbrook, Robert (1991), John Dewey and American Democracy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Westbrook, Robert (1992), “Schools for Industrial Democrats: The Social Origins of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education,” American Journal of Education, 100: 401–17. Wilson, R. Jackson (1969). In Quest of Community: Social Philosophy in the United States, 1860–1920. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

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CHAPTER SIX

Philosophy of Education and Early Childhood: Invitations and Provocations of Childhood from Maria Montessori and Reggio Emilia STEPHANIE BURDICK-SHEPHERD

In the modern age, child study as a practice has gathered momentum and funds the growth of multiple disciplines and institutions. Two philosophies of early childhood education, the Montessori Method and Reggio Emilia, carry child study through educational practice and philosophy. These approaches to studying and educating the child continue to shape both popular and academic beliefs about the child and childhood today, reframing current questions of child agency, child rights, and the young child.

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EARLY CHILDHOOD IN MODERNITY If modernity gave us the child as a fluid object and concept of study, the twentieth century gave us early childhood education not as an abstract inquiry but as an educational vision rooted in actual practices with children (Hansen 2007). Despite this growth of a robust body of practices of early childhood, the scholarship on early childhood in philosophy of education remains limited, for a variety of reasons. The most prevailing reason cited is that early childhood care and education has been relegated to the sphere of “woman’s work” and the “work of the home” and thus does not merit serious scholarship (Martin 1995). Another predominant reason seems to be that early childhood as a field can appear methodological in focus rather than illuminating philosophical concerns (Colgan 2016; Martin 1995).1 In this chapter, I focus on the latter of the two reasons, arguing that descriptions of early childhood include rich philosophical inquiry.2 This chapter examines two different approaches to early childhood education: the Montessori Method3 and Reggio Emilia.4 Though the two approaches emerged from different historical circumstances, we will see that giving them serious consideration alongside one another can help us understand what their approaches offer philosophy of education (Dodd-Nufrio 2011). Read together, they describe an arc of childhood and creativity that covers several decades of the twentieth century. These educational theories are philosophical inquiries that invoke the child’s dialogue and engagement with the cultural concerns of moral and spiritual progress. The chapter provides a brief historical context before pointing out some of the main tenets of the approaches and then offering critical considerations. In conclusion, connections and insights for the contemporary philosophy of education audience are drawn. Although the founders of the Montessori Method (Maria Montessori) and Reggio Emilia (Loris Malaguzzi and Bruno Ciari) are Italian, this feature is not what makes them interesting to read together. The Montessori Method is rooted within the practices and philosophies of the late nineteenth century. But it challenged the prevailing notions of childhood’s fragility and lack of rationality. Reggio Emilia’s influences are grounded by both psychological and philosophical movements of the mid-twentieth century as well as an interest in education for a democratic citizenry (Edwards 2002).5 Partly due to the control by the Fascist regime and to the two world wars, Montessori schools never gained prominence in the Italian national school system. The Italian government and the Roman Catholic Church held strict control of both the education of grade-school children and those of nursery-school age (Malaguzzi 1996: 14). Only after the collapse of this system, after the Second World War, did early childhood education gain a prominent place in the Italian system, allowing the school of Reggio Emilia to gain both national and international attention. Each

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model successfully built an influential following in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia (Feez 2013). Reggio Emilia remains critically influential in terms of practice and research for early childhood education both nationally and internationally (Babini 2000; Edwards 2002; Lillard 2013; New 2003). Montessori education has moved through several waves of popularity across several decades and is currently enjoying an increase in scholarly attention after several endorsements from the innovative tech industry and several high impact research studies on Montessori’s effect on low-income and high-risk populations (Meckler 2018).

THE MONTESSORI METHOD A child walks softly to a low sink and fills a small pitcher with water. Carefully, he walks toward a table. On the table, there is a tray of cut flowers. He chooses a cone of purple flowers and one small, yellow wildflower; using scissors he trims each stem of leaves. Silently he arranges the flowers in a small glass vase. He pours water into the vase from the small pitcher and looks around the classroom. Slowly, he walks with his flower arrangement to a small table. He leaves it there with a soft smile. Montessori’s early childhood philosophy revolves around the movement of invitation and connection with young children and the world. A young physician in early twentieth-century Italy, Maria Montessori (1870–1952) first taught a group of young working-class children, who were left alone in tenement housing while their parents worked. Montessori recognized in these forgotten children living in poverty a vast world where minds and spirits have a limitless potentiality to connect and create when properly invited to do so.6 In this section, I consider the dynamic of connection and invitation as a radical aspect of the Montessori approach that can yield deep implications for the philosophy of education beyond an appreciation of Montessori’s pedagogy. The notion of invitation is central, as we will see, denoting a fundamental recognition of the child’s agency and dignity, as the child can choose upon request to enter into the educational relationship and environment. Although she was the first woman in Italy to graduate with a medical degree, Montessori was never paid for her medical work, relying instead on positions in women’s colleges in Hygiene and Pedagogy to supplement a volunteer role as an assistant doctor at the University of Rome’s Psychiatric Clinic (ThayerBacon 2012). This volunteer work provided her with an extensive background in observing how health was intimately connected to the broader concerns of education and society; as she writes, “I differed from my colleagues in that I instinctively felt that mental deficiency was more of an educational than medical problem” (Montessori 1967: 21). Reading the works of Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard and Edward Seguin, who focused on the education of the developmentally

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delayed, she continued to question traditional educational methods and to consider their effects on both students deemed abnormal as well as the general population (Colgan 2016: 126). In 1907, Montessori was offered an opportunity to work with the children of families housed within a low-income building project in the San Lorenzo district (Edwards 2002). These children and her work with them would become part of the institution of the first “Casa Dei Bambini” or “The Children’s Home.” It was here that Montessori would develop her pedagogical methods. The success of this first Casa became world-renowned, and Montessori herself was amazed at the children’s focus, attention to learning, and development (Montessori 1967: 38). On several occasions between 1907 and 1915, she was invited to the United States and asked to present, to lecture, and to demonstrate a classroom of practice at the US World’s Fair in 1915 (Sobe 2004). John Dewey provided a few words of welcome at her talk at Carnegie Hall in 1913, where “around 1000 people were turned away” (Thayer-Bacon 2012: 9). However, within a few years, such invitations came to a halt. Though early childhood Montessori schools continued to proliferate across the United States in the early half of the twentieth century, Montessori was disinvited from the educational conversation of this time by American philosophers and Italian pedagogues (Babini 2000; Martin 2016; Thayer-Bacon 2012). William Kilpatrick, founder of the project method, dismissed her approach to choice and freedom in the classroom, which negatively impacted Montessori’s admission into the academic discussion (Martin 2016; Simons 1988; Thayer-Bacon 2012).7 However, the more important critique for the purposes of this chapter is John Dewey’s critique, as his reading aligns with some of the concerns that critics still have today. After a more complete discussion of the Montessori Method, Dewey’s critique will be examined. Montessori indicates that she does not see herself as either a philosopher or a psychologist. She grounds herself firmly in the scientific method, seeking to observe how the child works within their environment, as a scientist would (Montessori 1964: 70). In telling her foundational origin story, she says she cannot really see what a child is in the traditional school because the school does not fit the child and thus renders invisible the child’s self. For Montessori, there is an actual self, a piece of the growing human that is “child” (Montessori 1967: 46). Thus, there is something real of the child that can be harmed, hidden, or carefully nurtured by the structures of modern society. She begins by taking measurements of the young children’s bodies, as she wants to know who these children are through observations of their corporeal selves—their bodies that look, act, and feel different than the adult body—to mark how the child might move differently and thus is a different being than the adult. She then makes furniture molded for this body, observing how the children might work and play in an environment that suits their physical scope.

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The tables which I had made were of various shapes. They were strong but extremely light so that two four-year-olds could easily move them about … These [the chairs] were not miniature copies of adult chairs but were proportioned to a child’s body. (Montessori 1967: 46) Though it appears that Montessori’s emphasis in this passage is merely on the particular shape, weight, and make of the chairs, it is an example of her more general emphasis on material objects and the empirical world, which underscores the core of the Montessori Method: the child’s environment is created after careful observation and measurement. This move from observation to action is perhaps the most important insight for those wishing to study Montessori as an early childhood philosophy. The overwhelming emphasis in the early childhood literature is on the practices of the Montessori classroom—the pink towers, the rolled-up rugs, the soft-soled indoor shoes, or the children’s independence in activities. While interesting in their own right, the study of these practices alone may shield an examination of central philosophical concepts, such as the way attention or epistemological beliefs are at the Montessori core. I would argue that the Montessori Method is not reducible to the material environment nor even to the teacher’s control over the material environment. Rather, the method is the observational work to see the child and then actively to invite the child to engage with the teacher or, more often, with a specific set of objects. It is the study of children that directs the Montessori Method. And because it is children that are to be studied, the method calls for a creative act, a scientific pedagogy—what today we might call “action research,” whereby the scientist, in the moment of observation, retests and recreates the experiment to affect positively the study.8 In her lectures on pedagogical anthropology, Montessori describes this kind of study: We should study for the sake of creating since the whole object of taking is to be able to give again; but in this giving and taking we ought not to be mere instruments, like high-pressure suction pumps; in work of this sort, we ought to be creators. (1913: xx) As the child moves through the classroom, the teacher watches to see how the child works. It is through careful observation, noting activity and interest, that the teacher is directed toward the child. Montessori compares the observational action of the teacher to the difference between the scientist studying butterflies under glass versus catching them in an open field. The teacher must learn to see in a particular way, while children move, and then in turn the teacher must seek to forge a relationship between the child and an aspect of their world. Montessori remarks, One who desires to be a teacher must have an interest in humanity that connects the observer with the observed more closely than that which joins

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FIGURE 6.1  Italian educational reformer Maria Montessori is pictured during a visit to the Gatehouse School, Smithfield, London, England, 1951

the zoologist or biologist to nature and since this union is more intimate, it is necessarily more delightful. A man cannot love an insect or a chemical reaction without giving up something of himself, and such a surrender seems to anyone who watches it dispassionately to be a kind of suffering, a distortion of one’s own life, a martyrdom. (1967: 8) Though Montessori’s language might appear negative, I believe that Montessori’s concern is to show that the teaching experience cannot easily be understood

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by someone outside of the relationship, that it entails love and is a deeply interpersonal and complex domain of human emotion and experience. Some of this complexity may be captured in this image of Montessori’s interaction with a young girl in Figure 6.1.

INVITATION The word “invitation” is layered throughout the Montessori opus; it articulates the idea that the child cannot be forced to engage. However, in much of Montessori education, the word has come to refer simply to the teacher’s activity of presenting the lesson to the child. Thus, in a Montessori classroom, we might hear the word used in the following ways: “I would like to show you the spooning invitation,” or “I invite you to use the pouring work.” Such usages do not capture the full meaning of Montessori’s concept of invitation. To invite is not simply to request that the child choose but rather is to present the work so that the child wants to use it and to use it well. The teacher thus moves between observation and invitation over and over in a dynamic cycle of growth and response: “The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences” (Montessori 1995: 84). The movement between object, teacher, and invitation could be interpreted as a rigid method, for the teacher’s movements are to be repeated precisely. However, Montessori sees this not as a rigid method but as a liberatory dynamic. In Montessori’s words, “There was no method to be seen, what was seen is child. A child’s soul freed from impediments was seen acting according to its nature” (1964: 136). When the teacher turns toward the child, sees the child, and then invites toward the child yet again, this movement recognizes the real child as an individual, free, moral person who has choice, agency, and the capacity to discover their world deeply. Thus, we see how Montessori’s passion for scientific rigor in observing fuses with an equally vital ethical awareness of the totality of the child (See Figure 6.1). The movement discussed above hinges on Montessori’s core belief that liberty is at the heart of the Montessori pedagogy (Frierson 2016), and it was this concept that John Dewey, a careful reader, saw in the Montessori school. The problem for Dewey was not that Montessori misunderstands how central liberty is within the educational context but rather that she misunderstands how liberty demands a fuller freedom, not only the freedom from but a freedom to, which Dewey cannot find in the precisely concrete Montessori materials. He begins his critique by applauding Montessori’s own criticism of traditional schooling methods: “Madame Montessori believes that repressing children physically while they are in school and teaching them habits of mental passivity and docility is mistaking the function of the school and doing the children real harm” (Dewey 1915/2008: 300). Dewey agrees with Montessori’s insistence that one key to teaching is a child’s liberty, and he notes the way Montessori

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considers discipline, remarking that the children in Montessori classrooms learn to behave as independent beings as they are not “under restraint” (Dewey 1915/2008: 301). However, for Dewey, the Montessori educational materials are so restrictive and self-correcting that they negate the authentic opportunities to learn absolute freedom. Dewey writes, there is no freedom allowed the child to create. He is free to choose which apparatus he will use, but never to choose his own ends, never to bend a material to his own plans. For the material is limited to a fixed number of things which must be handled in a certain way. (1915/2008: 309) It is clear that Dewey respects some of what Montessori has done, but he cannot resolve a fundamental difference between what he sees as a more superficial physical liberty (the freedom to move around the classroom) with a deeper freedom that would come from children working with the materials  in any way they chose.9 Dewey cannot resolve Montessori’s insistence that the child requires materials that are structured so that they can only be used by the child in a specific and regimented manner. Dewey believes that Montessori’s understanding of the child’s self and capacity to enact their freedom is just too developmentally rigid, though in terms of child study Dewey seems to  align himself closely with Montessori’s position. Moreover, the modernday interpretation of the Montessori Method sees little difference between laboratory schools, such as the one Dewey founded in Chicago in 1896, and Montessori schools, in particular during the ages of six and twelve. One wonders if the major disagreement between Dewey and Montessori might lie with their understandings of the very young child. Dewey’s examples are often of children “doing” things, things that physically and cognitively seem to mark children of primary elementary ages (ages six to twelve) while Montessori often uses examples of children between the ages of two and four. Fundamentally, the real argument between Dewey and Montessori seems less about freedom itself (both Dewey and Montessori discuss freedom as the main goal of education) but more, as Colgan (2016) articulates, about when the child is ready to enact full freedom and can be unharmed by the social constraints of others. For Dewey, the child is always and already a cultural agent who at the moment of birth is directed within the experience to learn.10 For Montessori, the child, viewed from the adult vantage point, is a developing being and learns best in a carefully cultivated environment. Certainly, Dewey also believes in teacher facilitation and teacher direction, but he seems less sure that children cannot create their own learning environments and tools. In her lectures, Montessori states, “It is only after a child has worked that he begins to learn and to be interested” (1913: 33). The Montessori child is the pure potentiality of mankind and as such requires careful guidance toward adulthood and the subsequent inheritance of culture and cultural agency. Scholarship on the socalled “cosmic years” (roughly ages six to twelve) in the Montessori classrooms

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further complicates the anti-progressive reading of Montessori because, in these older years of childhood, there is indication that Montessori saw in the child a great capacity for interest, scope of understanding, and a more complete agency over the environment and curriculum (Cossentino and Whitcomb 2007; Grazzini 2013; Murray 2011). Montessori writes, “the child’s mind can acquire culture at a much earlier age than is generally supposed, but his way of taking in knowledge is by a certain kind of activity which involves movement” (1995: 172).

MONTESSORI AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION TODAY Montessori early childhood education offers philosophy of education a considered approach to rethinking child rights and child agency. In seeing the young child as a person who can be invited to discover their world and who can learn how to move through the environment as an individual being, Montessori sets out a rich philosophical anthropology. The young child, as the teacher looks on sympathetically, enacts new expressions of the human-in-development as they attend to and absorb the cultural world (Montessori 1995: 16). In her later years, Montessori championed both women’s and children’s rights, and not only from the standpoint of protection. Rather, she used her educational philosophy to argue that the developing child deserves rights and an educational space for flourishing. As Jacqueline Cossentino and Jennifer Whitcomb (2007) argue, Montessori’s developmental construct of the child is not a limiting image of childhood. Rather, as the child matures, so too must the community. The child who learns and absorbs culture cannot help but fundamentally change their culture and community. In other words, the moment the child engages with learning, the world has been affected. Our adult orientations change precisely through our support of children to learn. In Montessori’s Absorbent Mind, she ends the book by stating, Such is the child’s power. Whatever be our political or religious afflictions we are all near to the child and we all love him. It is from this love that comes the child’s power for unity … If we want to produce harmony in the world, it is clear that we ought to think more about this. (1995: 288) Granting children and women rights ensures that these actors are able to participate fully in making the world better. The work of the early childhood educator requires the freedom to teach and to lead a correspondingly free life, including through women’s suffrage and the ability to participate fully in civic life (Montessori 1967: 365). Montessori education provides much insight into the work of current philosophers today whose scholarship examines how the practical side of teaching and the care of the family and home is ignored at great peril to the wider discipline (e.g., Mackler 2017; Mintz 2019; Suissa and Raemakers 2011).

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REGGIO EMILIA EDUCATION A young child lives in the Reggio Emilia community; her grandmother sits on the community advisory board for the school and visits the school quite regularly. The child begins her day speaking with the atelierista11 and asks if she might learn how to draw a “grandmother.” She walks back to her classroom and is transfixed by a tray of mirrors made of various sizes and shapes. She examines her facial features and those of her peers. She talks with her teacher about learning to draw how people grow old. The teacher gathers the children for an afternoon walk through the city center, where the students plan to look at the faces of the people walking in the central plaza. Reggio Emilia, often simply called “Reggio,” is a philosophically rich model of education, particularly concerned with children as cultural creators as well as endowed with the moral rights of persons (Edwards 2002). The philosophy uncovers a rich tension between provocation and creation, a dynamic educational process where children and teachers are energized by each other as well as the world to wonder and see and thus do differently. In this early childhood education model, the child comes to school filled with diverse experiences of relationship. The child is seen as a life force brimming with knowledge—the knowledge of how to move, how to create, how to learn. Today, the original Reggio school still functions, and its pedagogical practices have been incorporated across many different regions of the world (New 1993, 2007). In 1946, Loris Malaguzzi (1920–94), an Italian middle school teacher weary of the effects of the war, heard of a group of parents in the small city of Reggio Emilia who wanted to start a school of young children from scratch, built by parents and community leaders frustrated by the ruins of the Italian state. Malaguzzi said, “That idea seems incredible to me! I rush there on my bike and I discover it is all quite true!” (Malaguzzi 1996: 42). He elaborates that the Fascist regime had stunted all new educational philosophy in Italy but that with its fall there was an opening for the philosophy and psychology of the American pragmatists, the work of Lev Vygotsky, and the contributions of child development experts such as Eric Erickson to bear fruit in Italy (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman 1996). Malaguzzi saw traditional schooling as a threat to the child. Because the system of school is set up only through the normalized discourse of adult reason and logic, the traditional school is unaware of the potential of children to be agents and creators. Moreover, educators in the traditional model prioritize one language, the language of adult reason, and many children do not learn and cannot succeed in this model. Malaguzzi wrote, “The school and the culture, separate the head from the body” (Edwards 2002: 37; see the section “Provocation,” below, for the poem that is the source of this quote). A reimagined school would need to protect children from this violence, but it would also need to nurture and allow for the newness that children always brings to the world through their very child-ness.

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Thus, the school must be both a protector and that which provokes the child (New 1990). A school accomplishes this in the Reggio model by being a fluid space that supports open communication between child, parent, community, and teachers. It is one branch of the social relationships that cultivate the child. The school, then, is not a separate entity but rather is a branch of the community. It must not be walled off from the city; instead, it must be made part of the fabric and history of the city itself. One cannot separate Reggio early childhood philosophy and practice from the city of Reggio Emilia itself. Rebecca New writes that the approach “is deeply rooted in the town’s long history of resistance to social injustice and its alliance with Italy’s socialist and communist parties” (1993: 6). She argues that Reggio philosophy enacts and argues for learning to take place within its sociocultural conditions. She quite rightly asks what Reggio might look like in another context and problematizes what it means for educators outside of the context to simply “import” the Reggio model. New is correct to problematize appropriation. However, to argue that Reggio springs forth only from the confines of its local culture is too narrow an image for a philosophical practice built around an understanding that culture and community are provoking and can be provoked. Reggio understands culture as fluid and dynamic, which gives rise to an orientation toward education that is, if not borderless, border-crossing. New’s reading may also limit the understanding of Reggio’s important philosophical influences, in particular John Dewey’s ideals of democratic education. Recent scholarship suggests that Dewey’s work was quite well known and popular in 1950s Italy, in part through the work of Bruno Ciari (1923–70).12 There is some argument to be made that Reggio Emilia is a Deweyan experiment, a practical model of constructive, democratic, experimental education funded both by its sociocultural roots and by a rich philosophical “matrix of sources” (Lindsay 2015). This is a critical reading, for it indicates that while culture is important to the Reggio model, so too are its philosophical roots. Reggio Emilia offers one way for a philosophy of education to consider how philosophies of educational practice cross borders and go beyond original structures and systems (see Cagliari et al. 2016).

PROVOCATION At the heart of this argument about cultural and philosophical roots is that Reggio is less a method than an orientation toward education. This orientation is built upon a deep appreciation for the life-world of the child and the need to fund this life-world anew. To support a child’s engagement with the world is to allow the child time and space to be provoked by the world itself, to wonder, and then to create. To teach and to learn is thus about provocation—both being provoked by and then provoking in turn, creating opportunities for one’s community to be provoked. A provocation is an invitation to question open-

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endedly but also to move toward expression and recreation. What provokes can be as varied as the world itself, anything from a book to an array of leaves found on a walk; all can provide this moment of invitation to see the world differently, see Figure 6.2. At the beginning of this provocation is the image of the child. Malaguzzi challenges the educator to think of the child when educating, not with the child (for the adult is not the child), not as the child (for the child is always something else), and not for the child (for the child is already moving toward the future, well beyond the adult). The educator is tasked with imagining the child. This is not the imagination of fantasy but image itself, being able to hold something up, define it as something with which to reflect, to project, and ultimately to provoke. This image of the child comes through in Malaguzzi’s most famous writing, a poem entitled “The 100 Hundred Languages of Children.” Here is an excerpt: … The child has A hundred languages A hundred hands A hundred thoughts A hundred ways of thinking, of playing of speaking. A hundred ways of listening … (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman 1998: 3) The content of the poem articulates the foundational beliefs of Reggio education. Yet also consider that it is through poetry that Malaguzzi delivers the

FIGURE 6.2  Butterfly captures the attention of a girl

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message about who the child is. The philosophical beliefs are presented through rich images and visualization about the child itself. It is this image of the child that grounds Reggio philosophy (Moss 2016). The child of Reggio Emilia is a multiplicity but is not a mere replication of the adult or the surrounding society. There might be 100 or more different adult interpretations of the child, but none of them take the place of the child’s own creative and generative life force. As such, the child can be provoked but is also provocateur. The child brings the new into being. The child has more than 100 ways of knowing and connecting because the child can always recreate, rethink, renew. To signify that the languages of childhood are profound, Malaguzzi invokes the number 100, and his readers know that the list might as well be endless. It is as if Malaguzzi asks the adult how infinite the possibilities of children’s communication, a list that includes “words, movement, drawing, painting, building, sculpture, shadow play, collage, dramatic play, music”—and more (Edwards 2002: 37). Because the child is always creating, there is no “starting point” to education; and yet the moment that teacher and child interact, there is provocation. In the Reggio model, the teacher and child provoke each other. “The initial phase is an essential part of any project; the aim is to open up and to assess the children’s knowledge and interests concerning the subject” (Rankin 1996: 193). Thus, the initial phase of provocation is not simply instigation or irritation; rather—as contrasted with the Socratic gadfly—it is an invitation to connect with the community. As Malaguzzi says, “We reinvent and educate ourselves along with the children. Not only does our knowledge organize theirs, but also the children’s ways of being and dealing with reality likewise influences what we know, feel, and do” (Rinaldi 1996: 111). This is a complex philosophy of childhood that considers children as intrinsically valuable, ethical beings; the child is seen as one, who is already concerned both with their place in the world and with what it means to have to enact themselves always with others. Reggio educators use the phrase “Io chi siano” (the I who we are) to express the idea that it is within this shared space that each child “offers his or her best thinking, leading to a rich and fertile group exchange and stimulating something new and unexpected, impossible for any one person to create alone” (Rankin 1996: 193). This construct that the child is an individual with concerns and thoughts and wonderings but is also never only a singularity fosters a continued understanding of belonging within a community. In sum, the child in the Reggio model is never without the connection of relationship and integration of culture with others. The child is informed by and through others. In this way, culture is not an object in as much as it is the way that people are related to one another. Because the child is viewed as already having deep personal connections to the culture, the emphasis in the curriculum is not on what new learning the child requires about the culture to

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participate in it. Rather, the emphasis is on how the child wonders how best to engage newness and complexity through a connection already there within the community/culture. The educational goal is to encourage deep wonder, which may mean encouraging new wonder or expanding deeply held wonder. Malaguzzi says, It might help to look at this in system terms. The system of relationships in our schools is simultaneously real and symbolic. In this system, each person has a formal role relationship with the other. Adult and child roles are complementary: They ask questions of one another, they listen, and they answer. (Malaguzzi 1996: 63) This is a model of childhood that is about the mutual construction of the social world between adults and children, not the one-way inheritance of the culture or the passing down of culture, as is associated with conservative views of education. Adult and child are provoked to discover what is as yet unknown to either. While the adult may have some sense of the territory that the child discovers, because the child creates within the inquiry, the discovery is new to both: the adult can never quite know what the child will do. The Reggio model encourages authentic motivation to learn and engage: “Once children are helped to perceive themselves as authors or inventors, once they are helped to discover the pleasure of inquiry, their motivation and interest explode” (Malaguzzi 1996: 60; American Journal of Play 2011). The risk in this relationship is the fragile, physical reality of the child. The child may embark on discoveries with risks and challenges that go far beyond their immediate readiness. Critics of the Reggio curriculum often question the value of a young child setting the content. Yet this model is not a free-for-all where children run throughout their city without a guide; it is not the famed Summerhill model where children run wild with virtually no structure whatsoever. The relationship between teacher, student, and community is central. Consider a group of young children who are worried about the extreme wildfires in Australia. In the Reggio model, teachers might bring in photographs of the wildfires, inviting the children to notice the impact of fires on the natural world. One of the children might notice how there are young tree shoots already growing up in burned areas, something unexpected that provokes questions such as, “What can survive a fire?,” “How can there be life after a fire?,” “Who takes care of the trees after a fire?” The teachers might invite a forest ranger to the school to answer these questions; perhaps the forest ranger might show how seeds can survive fire; the children might plant seeds that have survived a burning. Older children might research the topic further and write letters to community leaders, and younger children might build a “new forest” and take care of it in an imaginary play center. Many of the children might use charcoal

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to draw or look closely at the material quality of ash that fire leaves behind, examining its use both as fertilizer for young trees and as an artistic medium, something that calls for creation and exploration. In any of these cases, what is clear in the Reggio model is that these are not children free of adult guidance— they are children that are directing their inquiry through interest, supported with appropriate levels of care.

CREATION The connective move in the Reggio curriculum is to foster children’s participation in the community as learners and agents of knowing, both affectively and cognitively. Through creative acts, such as drawing, dancing, composing, and sculpting, children do not reconstruct or replicate their culture but are guided to articulate their wonder and learning as unique selves. This is easily seen in the focus on art in the Reggio model. These are creative acts valuable as human expressions rather than merely as products. The emphasis is not on the worth of the artistic product itself but on art as democratic practice (Cutcher 2013). The 100 languages of the child are mediated through creativity. These creative acts in Reggio are most often mediated through the unique environment of the atelier (the school art studio), which is a fundamental component of the school building. It is the work of the atelierista (artist in residence) to support the children’s expression of wonder and inquiry. And the aim is to celebrate that creative expression; as Vechhi, one of the first atelieristas, says, “I can say first, that I have discovered how creativity is part of the make-up of every individual, and how the ‘reading’ of reality is a subjective and cooperative production, and this is a creative act” (1996: 123). In many preschools in the Western world, classroom art has been watered down to bare imitative acts, such as the tracings of hands that make turkeys or pre-cut-out circles that all become the same snowmen glued on a dark background.13 The Reggio students do not imitate adult models; instead, they are invited to create from the provocation itself. As only one example, we might imagine students playing in the snow that fell unexpectedly in an early April snowstorm in the northern United States. They might ask the teacher to take pictures of them lying face up in the snow. The children might work with an artist and later print these images, then tape them to the ceiling for an activity where they try to replicate the feeling and shape of their bodies inside the school building, using both dance and photography to explore snow and mass. These children might plan drawings of snow buildings and then construct them outdoors with the snow, perhaps noting how difficult it is to move from twodimensional drawing to three-dimensional construction. The focus on creation, rather than imitation, supports the foundational purpose of Reggio education: that the child is the creator of the new and that this is the ground of learning.

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The art in the gallery of learning “becomes a center of culture” (Vecchi 1996: 122), or put in other terms, a system of language, meaning, beliefs, and values. Malaguzzi states, “What children learn does not follow as an automatic result from what is taught. Rather, it is in large part due to the children’s own doing as a consequence of their activities and our resources” (Malaguzzi 1996: 59). Malaguzzi was an avid reader of John Dewey’s work with children, and in this statement and in others we can see his deep appreciation and understanding of Dewey’s philosophy in Reggio. The Reggio model overturns many conventional understandings of the nature and purposes of school. The school becomes a center of expression and care, built around an understanding that children are in constant dialogue and relationship. If school is a culture, not merely a building, it has normative and regulative ideals that strengthen the status of the child as agent and creator. Through art and regular physical movement, the school can expand and strengthen children’s ability to transform and create their own culture. As Malaguzzi reminds us, learning is supported not only through wonder but also through a system of care and relationship. And it is precisely because adults have so much actual control that they must work to nurture the entire child in all the “languages” of children by making spaces for their voices. As Malaguzzi continues in the poem “The 100 Languages of Children” (also cited in the section “Provocation”). … The school and the culture Separate the head from the body. They tell the child To think without hands To do without head … They tell the child: to discover the world already there and of the hundred, they steal ninety-nine … The child says, No way. The hundred is there. (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman 1998: 3) Kennedy argues that, as the Reggio model “leads us to revise our construct of the child, it will also lead us to revise our ideas of what is developmentally appropriate in the way of practices with young children” (1996: 24). Because the adult and the child in Reggio are in a mode of continual reconstruction and reconsideration within a dynamic relationship, the process opens the adult up to consider one’s own self-in-the-world. At the same time, the Reggio models offer a practical example of how childhood can construct itself, and be understood, in productive tension with conceptions of adulthood (Kennedy 1996). Because childhood has its own creative integrity, rather than being seen as nothing but “pre-adult,” the traditional mode of schooling, with the teacher directing all learning, is no longer supported.

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REGGIO AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION TODAY The philosophical approach to childhood and educational practice embodied in Reggio supports the position that children have both rights and a political voice. However, the potential critique of this movement is that children, qua children, cannot adequately participate in their civic and cultural communities. Moreover, one might ask, even if children can participate (as rational or intentional agents), can they participate without harming themselves through their relative inexperience? Malaguzzi supported children’s rights to both voice and protection, and current Reggio practices continue in this vein. In reading Reggio as an orientation toward children’s cultural creation, it does not follow that one must also conclude that children should act alone in this culture. If anything, Malaguzzi, much like Dewey, critiques an idea of childhood that calls for the child to live without adult guidance, something often mistaken for progressivism (see Dewey 1934/2008: 169–74). Rather, Reggio involves a recognition that children and adults are and must continue to be mutual actors in their communities and in the creative act of living. Malaguzzi was quite concerned about emerging conceptions of childhood in his era. He articulated the idea that children are only seen as blank slates or as already all-powerful adult actors when the reality is that they are something entirely in-between and ultimately complex. Malaguzzi writes, “a child so endowed paradoxically explodes in the hands of his creators” (Malaguzzi 1996: 73). Children can be irrevocably harmed in their duality; thus, the work of educators is to both nurture and protect, always working within this space as co-creators and dynamic mediators of children’s voice and interests. In this respect, Reggio Emilia supports the consideration of early childhood education as a kind of social justice education—that is, work focused on expanding inclusion of all children and the diverse perspectives that children bring to the world. As a cultural orientation to education, Reggio considers early childhood education as a right of children, not a privilege (Rinaldi 2005). As such, this right must be protected both from those who refuse to grant it and also from those who do not recognize a particular image of the child as a being already of the future. In this light, Reggio Emilia works against the standardized movement today that trickles down from K-12 education to early childhood. For Malaguzzi, what seems nostalgic is really a remembering that the child is always a component of the future, that children are in fact the only way we move forward, and that we have a duty to protect the many languages of childhood. As Malaguzzi tells us, “The child says: No way. The hundred is there” (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman 1996). To take this vision seriously is complex work for educators; it means to make space for the child in the present time in a way that ensures the child can enact their future with agency. This cannot be purely a protective stance; it has to involve some risk, for it has to make space for creativity, for innovation, and for provocation.

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CONCLUSION: INVITATIONS, PROVOCATIONS, AND REORIENTATION It is perhaps Montessori’s and Reggio’s shared regard for childhood that so easily ties them together and often makes them partners in books on early childhood philosophy and practice. The child is ever-present in each, and to their creators, to educate without this understanding would be to embark on something other than education. As Wexlar notes of Reggio Emilia, “All wisdom is gained by asking, listening, and walking” (2004: 13), and in Montessori, too, the teacher always sees the child before them. But it is also their differences that provoke and invite us to move forward. In particular, in closing, I consider further what reading these two approaches together offers us for understanding education as liberation, the child as a member of a culture and community, and the position of the teacher. In both philosophies, children are free selves, beings with a will, with rationality, with potentiality. In Reggio, the understanding is that children are always and already freed while to be a self is only to be as free as those in one’s community. In a sense, it is to recognize the bounded way in which culture itself always negotiates one’s actual freedom to and freedom from. Thus, the child, recognized as an actor in culture, is already in the negotiation of this freedom. The school’s responsibility is to nurture this negotiation as the child engages with it, in the child’s way, in those 100 languages. For Montessori, this freedom is practiced first with others in a controlled but inviting environment. The practical, practiced freedoms to fix one’s food, create one’s learning space, move furniture, negotiate with a peer in how to work together, and more, are all ways in which developing children authentically realize their freedom. While the freedom of the Montessori classroom does not look like the more studentcontrolled freedom of the Reggio Emilia classroom, it is a deeply respectful mode of recognizing the child’s agency in terms of choice and movement. In Reggio Emilia, the idea of the child is of a being who cannot help but be provoked by the world around them; to be a child is to be provoked to discover and then to engage. The teacher allows and creates space for the natural orientation of the child, as a wonderer, to appear. In Montessori, the emphasis is on the structure of the engagement itself so that the child’s capacity can be realized. In each approach, the child has the potential to discover and is a creative agent. The difference lies in emphasis: whether or not the teacher focuses on organizing the structure (Montessori) or on ensuring structure does not get in the way (Reggio). Thus, the orientation of the teacher in each is very different. In Reggio, the teacher is co-creator, not merely a guide toward content and method. The teacher learns alongside the child, as both influence the community and the world in their own modest ways. The Montessori teacher is as if absent; they are

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an invisible guiding hand, facilitating the child to move toward independence and confidence. Yet, in each model the child and the teacher are in a loving, connected, caring relationship. This relationship is not based on authority from above but rather on abiding respect for each. Finally, though these are not the same philosophies of education, read together they invoke the idea that children’s dialogue and participation with their wider culture is absolutely essential to moral and spiritual progress. Although this idea of progress is at odds with the sweeping postmodern wand of relativistic portrayals of culture and knowledge, early childhood requires a reconsideration of the argument that relativism also implies that we cannot make progress. There is a resounding optimism for peace, for rights, for sustained engagement, and for humanity in each of these philosophies. There is little indication that Montessori education or Reggio will disappear from either popular culture or early childhood research and scholarship. As indicated in this chapter Montessori is experiencing a rise in popularity (Cossentino and Whitcomb 2007; Lillard 2019), and Reggio continues to impact early childhood scholarship. The concern today is less that they will lose their legitimacy as valid approaches to early childhood education but more that they will continue to be seen solely as alternative approaches to working with young children and, in an equally problematic way, as early childhood practices that are not informed by rigorous philosophical arguments. That these approaches were once “alternative” is not up for debate. At the  time Malaguzzi and Montessori were writing, their approaches were critical  responses to the traditional mode of schooling of the early 1900s. Today, however, it is hard to see why they should still carry the label “alternative.” In early childhood scholarship, though play-based approaches dominate practice and institutional emphasis, there is no clear indication that any “one” method of early childhood education is “standard.” Seeing them as “alternative” hides much of what the philosophies say about freedom, agency, connection, and culture, ideas that not only can radically affect our understandings of teaching and learning in early childhood but also take us into fresh possibilities. Montessori and Reggio Emilia provide us with philosophically insightful ways of articulating early childhood educational practices in terms of construct, concept, and pedagogy. Reading them together, moreover, shows that one arc of the twentieth century has been to see children as persons connected to culture, as creative agents in their own right, and as beings that invite humanity to see itself differently. In this light, these no longer seem like radical philosophies of education, which they were in their dawning days, but rather like prescient philosophies of education that speak to us of how we might want to practice living in the world with children.

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In her introduction to Men in Dark Times, Arendt writes, For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse. However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. (1968: 25) As Arendt indicates, engagement with others often turns our thinking upon ourselves; as a result, we appear also to ourselves in a new light. And, in this appearance, we are able to become aware of the gaps that exist between us and others, objects, and the future. Discussion, engagement, and dialogue with others does not simply allow us to perceive this gap but also to experience it in its complexity and its fragility. When we pay close attention to our thinking that appears when young children are our philosophical interlocutors, whether this be through the Montessori approach of carefully observing and spending time with children or the Reggio approach of making the world change its present shape through conversation and creation with children, we find ourselves in the midst of a rich human practice—an exploration of anthropological knowing—and also a humane practice—one that allows children to be human with us, as they appear in our thoughts and world. Reading these philosophies of early childhood education practice together demands of us that we think about whether or not philosophical inquiry can itself be humane. The traditional image of the philosopher has been the gadfly, the one who critiques, who stings the world into either numbness, anguish, anxiety, despair, or revolt. But we also know that philosophy can be creative, productive, and communal. What if we reorient philosophy toward these modes of inquiry? What if the philosopher is also one who practices invitation, movement, connection, and provocation? It is perhaps this that the young child demands of us in our present dark times.

NOTES 1

2

While many of early childhood’s significant historical figures—Friedrich Fröbel, John Amos Comenius, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Maria Montessori, and Loris Malaguzzi—are recognized as influential, these figures are underexplored in the scholarship in philosophy of education and deserve wider attention. As Hansen suggests, a mature educational philosophy constitutes “(1) a statement of values, (2) a moral compass, and (3) an abiding engine of ideas” (2007: 7). When early childhood models of the twentieth century are examined as philosophical enterprises, new concerns arise that deepen our understanding of how childhood itself shapes philosophy.

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  3 The Montessori Method is often referred to as “Montessori.” Here I have chosen to use the Montessori Method to distinguish Maria Montessori (the founder) from the philosophy.   4 Reggio Emilia often refers to the city, the school, the method, or the method simultaneously in scholarship. Often the philosophy is referred to as “Reggio” in the literature. Unlike Maria Montessori, there is little popular knowledge of Loris Malaguzzi, the Reggio Emilia school and method’s founder and philosopher.   5 It is unclear if Loris Malaguzzi knew Maria Montessori. Certainly he must have been aware of Montessori schools in Italy. From the scholarship, it appears that Reggio was more influenced by the popularity of Dewey’s ideas in Italy through the 1950s and 1960s.   6 Jane Roland Martin’s (2016) description of the actual impoverishment of these children and their families and her analysis of how her work could affect the way we educate children living in poverty today is an important reminder of how Montessori’s work with children was not only philosophically radical but socially and politically so.   7 Kilpatrick published a book in 1914 called The Montessori System Examined.   8 Action research is a form of inquiry often used by educators and administrators to investigate and solve practical problems within a specific situation or context an in iterative manner, see Efron and Ravid’s Action Research in Education (2019).   9 Dewey also criticizes what he regards as Montessori’s outdated psychology, including the view that there are inner faculties of the young brain that needed to unfold. He contrasts this with the recent argument, in his day, that the child’s brain requires new experiences to develop. Modern neuroscience now supports a quite complex understanding of the young child’s brain, which supports neither view in its extreme: the brain is neither entirely self-generated based on innate structures nor is it completely created from experience after birth. In either case, Dewey’s misunderstanding of Montessori’s method on experimentation also carries through to the child’s use of materials, for though self-correcting, or “fixed,” as Dewey puts it, the child also enacts the Montessori Method itself, observing and then experimenting to get the materials to work correctly. 10 It is worth noting that Dewey’s concept of experience includes learning from and with others as part of the social nature of the child (Dewey 1916/2008: esp. pp. 48–50); see also Leonard J. Waks’s discussion of Dewey’s early thinking in Chapter 1, this volume. 11 The “atelierista” refers to the artist-in-residence at the school. 12 Malaguzzi’s colleague is recognized as the Italian pedagogue influential in bringing the socioconstructivist philosophy of Dewey to bear on the school practices both in Reggio Emilia and elsewhere in Italy (Lindsay 2015). 13 This trend continues despite national organizations and early childhood research supporting educators to consider process-focused art over craft products. See National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC 2020).

REFERENCES Primary sources Arendt, Hannah (1968), Men in Dark Times, San Diego: Harcourt Brace. Dewey, John (1915/2008), “Schools of To-morrow,” in J.A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 8: Essays and Miscellany, German Philosophy and

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Politics and Schools of To-morrow, 1915, 205–404, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1916/2008), Democracy and Education, in J.A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Vol. 9: Democracy and Education, 1916, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1934/2008), “The Activity Movement,” in J.A. Boydston (ed.), The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 9: Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and A Common Faith, 169–74, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Malaguzzi, Loris (1993), “For an Education Based on Relationships,” Young Children, 49 (1): 9–12. Malaguzzi, Loris (1996), “History, Ideas, Basic Philosophy,” in Carolyn Pope Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George E. Forman (eds.), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation, 41–90, New York: Ablex Publishing. Montessori, Maria (1913), Pedagogical Anthropology, trans. Frederic Tabor Cooper, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. Montessori, Maria (1964), The Montessori Method, New York: Schocken. Montessori, Maria (1966), The Secret of Childhood, New York: Ballantine Books. Montessori, Maria (1967), The Discovery of the Child, New York: Ballantine Books. Montessori, Maria (1995), The Absorbent Mind, New York: Henry Holt.

Secondary sources Abbott, Lesley and Cathy Nutbrown, eds. (2001), Experiencing Reggio Emilia: Implications for Pre-School Provision, Philadelphia: Open University Press. American Journal of Play (2011), “Play and the Hundred Languages of Children: An Interview with Lella Gandini,” American Journal of Play, 4 (1): 1–18. Babini, Valeria (2000), “Science, Feminism and Education: The Early Work of Maria Montessori,” History Workshop Journal, 49 (1): 44–67. Cagliari, Paola, Marina Castagnetti, Claudia Giudici, Carlina Rinaldi, Vea Vecchi, and Peter Moss, eds. (2016), Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia, New York: Routledge. Colgan, Andrew D. (2016), “The Epistemology behind the Educational Philosophy of Montessori: Senses, Concepts, and Choice,” Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 23 (2): 125–40. Cossentino, Jacqueline and Jennifer Whitcomb (2007), “Peace as a Premise for Learning: Maria Montessori: Italy, 1870–1952,” in D. Hanson (ed.), Ethical Visions of Education: Philosophies in Practice, 111–25, New York: Teachers College Press. Cutcher, Alexandra (2013), “Art Spoken Here: Reggio Emilia for the Big Kids,” International Journal of Art & Design Education, 32 (3): 318–30. Dodd-Nufrio, Arleen (2011), “Reggio Emilia, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey: Dispelling Teachers’ Misconception and Understanding Theoretical Foundations,” Early Childhood Education Journal, 39: 235–7. Edwards, Carolyn Pope (2002), “Three Approaches from Europe: Waldorf, Montessori, and Reggio Emilia,” Early Childhood Research & Practice, 4 (1): 1–24. Edwards, Carolyn, Lella Gandini, and George Forman, eds. (1998), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation, New York: Ablex Publishing. Efron, Sara Efrat and Ruth Ravid (2019), Action Research in Education: A Practical Guide, 2nd edn., New York: Guilford Press.

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Feez, Susan (2013), Montessori: The Australian Story, Sydney: New South Publishing. Frierson, Patrick R. (2016), “Making Room for Children’s Autonomy: Maria Montessori’s Case for Seeing Children’s Incapacity for Autonomy as an External Failing,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 50 (3): 332–50. Grazzini, Camillo (2013), “Maria Montessori’s Cosmic Vision, Cosmic Plan, and Cosmic Education,” NAMTA Journal, 38 (1): 107–16. Hansen, David T. (2007), Ethical Vision of Education: Philosophies in Practice, New York: Teachers College Press. Kennedy, David K. (1996). After Reggio Emilia: May the Conversation Begin! Young Children, 51(5), 24–27. Lillard, Angeline S. (2013), “Playful Learning and Montessori Education,” American Journal of Play, 5 (2): 157–86. Lillard, Angeline S. (2019), “Shunned and Admired: Montessori, Self-Determination, and a Case for Radical School Reform,” Educational Psychology Review, 31: 939–65. Lindsay, Gai (2015), “Reflections in the Mirror of Reggio Emilia’s Soul: John Dewey’s Foundational Influence on Pedagogy in the Italian Educational Project,” Early Childhood Education Journal, 43 (6): 447–57. Mackler, Stephanie (2017), “Raising a Human: An Arendtian Inquiry into Childrearing in a Technological Era,” Philosophy of Education 2017: 65–77. Martin, Jane Roland (1995), The Schoolhome, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martin, Jane Roland (2016), “Maria Montessori,” in Joy Palmer Cooper (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Educational Thinkers, 233–6, New York: Routledge. Meckler, Laura (2018), “Montessori, Long a Favorite for Wealthy Families, Struggles to Expand Its Reach,” The Washington Post, November 5. Available online: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/montessori-long-a-favorite-of-wealthyfamilies-struggles-to-expand-its-reach/2018/11/05/51a5ae02-ccc9-11e8-920fdd52e1ae4570_story.html. Mintz, Avi (2019), “Socrates, Cadmus, and the Case for Unphilosophical Parenting,” Philosophy of Education 2019: 374–87. Moss, Peter (2016), “Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia: Provocation and Hope for a Renewed Public Education,” Improving Schools, 19 (2): 167–76. Murray, A. (2011), “Montessori Elementary Philosophy,” Montessori Life, 23 (1): 22–33. NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) (2020), Teaching Young Children, February–March 2020. New, Rebecca S. (1990), “Projects and Provocations: Preschool Curriculum Ideas from Reggio Emilia, Italy,” ERIC. Available online: https://eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/ servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED318565. New, Rebecca S. (1993), “Reggio Emilia: Some Lessons for U.S. Educators,” ERIC Digest. Available online: https://eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ ERICServlet?accno=ED354988. New, Rebecca S. (2003), “Reggio Emilia: New Ways To Think About Schooling,” Educational Leadership, 60 (7): 34–8. New, Rebecca S. (2007), “Reggio Emilia as Cultural Activity Theory in Practice,” Theory into Practice, 46 (1): 5–13. Rankin. B. (1996), “Curriculum Development in Reggio Emilia: A Long-Term Curriculum Project About Dinosaurs” in Edwards, Carolyn, Lella Gandini, and George Forman (eds), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation, 41–90, New York: Ablex Publishing.

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Rinaldi, Carlina (1996), “The Emergent Curriculum and Social Constructivism,” in Carolyn Pope Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George E. Forman (eds.), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation, 91–100, New York: Ablex Publishing. Rinaldi, Carlina (2005). In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. London: Routledge. Simons, Martin (1988), “Montessori, Superman, and Catwoman,” Educational Theory, 38: 341–9. Sobe, Noah W. (2004), “Challenging the Gaze: The Subject of Attention and a 1915 Montessori Demonstration Classroom,” Educational Theory, 54 (3): 281–97. Suissa, Judith and Stefan Raemakers (2011), The Claims of Parenting, Dordrecht: Springer. Thayer-Bacon, Barbara (2012), “Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and William H. Kilpatrick,” Education and Culture, 28 (1): 3–20. Vecchi, Vea (1996), “The Role of the Atelierista,” in Carolyn Pope Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George E. Forman (eds.), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation, 119 –27, New York: Ablex Publishing.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Philosophies of Race, Justice, and Education: Traditions of Embodied Knowledge KAL ALSTON

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (DuBois 1986: 8–9)

“What shall be done with Negroes? Peremptory military commands, this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties” (DuBois 1986: 16). This conundrum is raised at the end of a paragraph that begins with a more famous pronouncement by W.E.B. DuBois: that “[t]he problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line” (p. 175). DuBois and his contemporaries, Black and white,1 understood that the manumission of the American enslaved might have resolved one moral and political tension but loosed multiple more. Despite the optimism and moral determination of abolitionists, antislavery forces, and others, freedom was not yet at hand for the majority of Black people in the

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Southern United States of America. Between 1863 and 1903, when The Souls of Black Folks was first published as a collection, several generations had seen promises made and broken and hopes enflamed and doused on multiple fronts. The importance of education to the attainment and maintenance of freedom was understood long before the end of the American Civil War. As the early drive toward the Common Schools Movement accelerated in Massachusetts and beyond, Horace Mann envisioned primary schooling for children from all backgrounds (Cremin 1957). It often remained a struggle, however, for free Black parents to find schools that would take their children in as pupils in the mid-nineteenth century. In the southern states that would form the Confederacy, however, statutes enacted throughout the first half of the nineteenth century outlawed teaching enslaved children to read or write (DuBois 1990: 638). The fact that these practices were forbidden by law suggests not only a belief that, contra social narratives of natural inferiority, the enslaved could be taught but a fear that, once so taught, the conditions of slavery would no longer be borne by the shackled labor force. As Alexander Crummell wrote in 1897, [Making educating slaves illegal] was done, too, with the knowledge that the Negro had brain power. There was then, no denial that the Negro had intellect. That denial was an after thought. Besides, legislatures never pass laws forbidding the education of pigs, dogs, and horses. They pass such laws against the intellect of men. (Crummell, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 849) In DuBois’s massive accounting of Reconstruction, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, he credits broader public funding of common schools for both the formerly enslaved and the poor working-class whites to demands from and on behalf of the newly freed Blacks (DuBois 1990: 638). After the war, public school funding became more established, despite continued opposition from white elites toward educating “Negroes” for fear that they would be “ruined” as labor and get ideas above their station. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly referred to as The Freedmen’s Bureau, was established in the (Federal) War Department in 1865 for the purpose of distributing goods, services, and land to all those displaced in the aftermath of the end of the Civil War and the reality of emancipation. This federal project did not begin with any explicit educational directives, but in the seven years of its existence through the end of deployment of Federal troops in the former Confederacy in 1877, in conjunction with Northern (religious) philanthropies, the bureau’s work made possible the establishment of eighty-four normal2 and high schools and sixteen colleges (DuBois 1990: 665). In DuBois’s opinion, the establishment of these schools and training of Black teachers remained one of the enduring achievements of Reconstruction even as Federal support disappeared and economic and political advances evaporated.

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This chapter examines the genesis and development of a modern American analysis of education through the lens of Blackness, beginning with an excavation of nineteenth-century African American philosophers and classicists, who both wrote and lived the answer to the question of recognition. Traditionally William Edward Burghardt DuBois and Booker T. Washington have been presented as the major spokesmen for two positions—classical and liberal education versus agricultural, technical, and industrial institutions. This debate may have propelled the major arguments of Reconstruction into the twentieth century in the (white) public sphere, but these stances were not the only framing of philosophical argumentation on educational possibility. Black public intellectuals were visible before the Civil War, but afterward a major conversation about advancement was exemplified by a generation of graduates of classics programs in primarily white institutions arguing for personhood through pushing for education. This chapter begins with the philosophical and applied frameworks argued by multiple figures from diverse backgrounds and perspectives on the social good for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction era. Secondly, the chapter discusses how the successor generation of these public intellectuals, now relocated to the urban centers for arts and culture, such as Harlem in New York City, makes revisions in its educational demands. Thirdly, the chapter references this new social identity and the educational aims leading up to massive changes in schooling during the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement as well as the later renewal of demands of social equality in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century.

EDUCATION IN A NEW WORLD OF FREEDOM Through this late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century conversation,3 matters both esoteric and practical were debated; the needs of Black people and the possible acceptance of whites were balanced and rebalanced. The results were seen in schooling structures for “colored” children, the founding of philosophical and classical study in HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), the agricultural and technical colleges movement, and broader cultural and public discussions. In the twenty-five years between the withdrawal of Federal support of Reconstruction and the beginning of the twentieth century, public intellectuals and scholars such as William Crogman (1896), Henry Morton Lightfoot,4 and William Sanders Scarborough (see Ronnick 2006), alongside W.E.B. DuBois, argued that the antebellum assumptions about the inability of the slave to excel at higher-order thinking (as well as the dangers posed to the status quo by enslaved peoples learning at all) needed to be laid aside for Black Americans to assume their proper role as citizens and self-determined individuals. They argued that manumission was insufficient to free formerly enslaved individuals (and even those born free) from the perceptions that their moral value was permanently degraded, which

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in fact explained their previous condition of servitude. Those perceptions were instantiated in law as well as custom, but these scholars were determined to fight against their being engraved into the future of their children’s children. As DuBois writes, He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. This, then is the end of his striving, to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best power and latent genius. (DuBois 1986: 8–9, emphasis added) The founding of those sixteen colleges is a tribute to the understanding that education for Blacks would in the main be reliant on the production of educators of the race from the race. A first post-slavery generation of scholars and public intellectuals were indispensable in “making the case” for Blacks having the intellectual capacity and, importantly in the context of the times, the moral sufficiency to benefit from and to contribute to the progress of the race and American society at large. Many of these men and women were visible in the public arenas in the United States and internationally; most of them were well known to one another via Howard University, Atlanta University, and Wilberforce University as well as Fisk, Berea, Oberlin, and Tuskegee. Many were connected through the auspices of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which sponsored higher education institutions and produced most of their leaders. As is ever the case, despite an overarching common cause of the freedom and survival of Black Americans into the future, several strands of argumentation and differing philosophies of race created multiple strategic positions. One axis of difference ran along the extent to which these educators were interested in sharing public space and status with whites. Another major area of difference and sometimes conflict revolved around the nature of the education most suited to Blacks and the possibility of living in freedom. Booker T. Washington, in his famous speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, essentially promised that success for the Negro would be predicated on a race-wide recognition that Black Americans would not pursue social equality but only participation in the economic rebuilding of the country. His invocation of “casting down your bucket where you are” served as a public rebuke to both ends of that first axis. First he mentions those who advocated for emigration of Blacks to other, presumed more welcoming, shores, such as Martin Robinson Delaney,5 John E. Bruce,6 or Edward Wilmot Blyden.7 He also makes clear that

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the “wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social quality is the extremist folly” and promises that if the whites whom he addresses will utilize the labor and industry of the Negro for whom he speaks, they will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past … so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. (Washington 1895, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 804, emphasis added) Those promises of deference and patience in the fulfillment of civil and political equality won him the rapturous support of the white crowds at the exposition, many of whom were quite perturbed that a Negro had been granted the podium at all. Blacks who supported the Washington perspective saw a strategic advantage in maintaining a toehold in the economic world of the South and deferring a renewed aggressive push for the fulfillment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had been itself ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883.8 For many other prominent Black thinkers, this position was anathema. Reverend Francis J. Grimké was one such public figure; he contended that any such patience and deference could only lead in one direction for Blacks: political annihilation. Grimké stated, The fixed purpose and determination of the Southern whites is to negative these great amendments, to eliminate entirely the Negro as a political factor … This is a white man’s government. And that means, not only that the whites shall rule, but that the Negro shall have nothing whatever to do with governmental affairs. If he dares to think otherwise, or aspires to cast a ballot, or to become anything more than a servant, he is regarded as an impudent and dangerous Negro; and according to the most recent declarations of that old slave-holding and lawless spirit, all such Negroes are to be driven out of the South, or compelled by force … to renounce their rights as men and as American citizens. (Grimké 1898, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 872) Grimké went further, not only criticizing the beliefs and actions of Southern whites but also denouncing in the strongest terms “members of our race—not the ignorant … but the educated—who are found condoning such offenses … Any Negro who takes that position is a traitor to his race, and shows that he

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is deficient in manhood, in true self-respect” (Foner and Branham 1998: 873, emphasis added). John Hope, who later became president of Atlanta Baptist Seminary for Men (Morehouse) and Atlanta University, also spoke out in no uncertain terms against the accommodationist tendencies embedded in Washington’s rhetoric: If we are not striving for equality, in heaven’s name for what are we living? I regard it as cowardly and dishonest for any of our colored men to tell white people that we are not struggling for equality. If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse and not a blessing. God forbid that we should get the implements with which to fashion our freedom, and then be too lazy or pusillanimous to fashion it. (Hope 1896, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 833) Grimké was explicit that political, economic, and social equality were not as separate as the fingers but were united as rights that all citizens had the right, the responsibility, to “demand.” The intellectuals on this side of the spectrum saw no advantage in second-class citizenship; the post-Plessy9 world of Jim Crow would be the consequence. In many of these writings, Black thinkers did not express a particular desire to integrate as much as they articulated the destructive nature of acquiescing to law and practices that enforced separation. As T. Thomas Fortune, the editor of the New York Age, offered to the founding convention of the National Afro-American League in 1890, schooling is a ubiquitous site in which to identify the pernicious effects of accepting lowstatus citizenship: Take our public schools—take the schools and colleges throughout the land; who draws the color line in these? Is there an Afro-American school of any sort in the South where a white applicant would be refused admission on account of his color? Not one! Is there a white school in the South where a colored applicant would not be refused admission on account of his color? Not one! The thing is plain. The white man draws the color line in everything he has anything to do with. He is saturated with the black mud of prejudice and intolerance. (Fortune 1890, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 726) On the other axis of what the best appropriate education was for Blacks, Washington again was an avatar for starting “at the bottom” and institutionalizing agricultural and technical education for the foreseeable future as the pinnacle for most of the formerly enslaved. An early graduate of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, he notably went on to develop Tuskegee as a normal school to produce teachers for the increasing landscape of schools for Negroes. Through Hampton and his mentor, Samuel Armstrong,

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Washington understood the importance of the Northern and missionary funds for sustaining an institution of higher learning. Much is made of the conflict between Washington and DuBois, in part because of each man’s public profile and ability to self-promote. Nevertheless, the importance of material and moral uplift was a theme in almost all writing about Black education in the nineteenth century. There was no doubt that Blacks in that period needed education that gave them access to work and to the economy. There was also much agreement about the moral imperatives of education, partially through religion and partially as a means of asserting the worth of the cause of freedom. The depth of the conflict was related to the idea of exclusively attaching an industrial education to the race, to progressing this-far-and-no-farther in Negro ambition. A generation of scholars and institution builders By the time Washington became a national figure, a generation of men and women of African descent had graduated from higher education institutions of all sorts. While many had been educated with the purpose of becoming teachers, many of them became educational, religious, and professional leaders in both Black and white spheres of influence—founding and leading secondary- and tertiary-level institutions, newspapers, and legal and business enterprises as well as leading organizations pushing for race and gender reform. William Henry Crogman (1841–1931) took an unusual route to becoming a preeminent public intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was born in the West Indies on St. Martin’s and was orphaned at an early age. He was taken into the home of a seafaring family and traveled the world on ships with one or another of the adult brothers in the family. It was not until he attained the age of twenty-five that his original benefactor suggested that he settle into traditional education. Crogman began his formal schooling at Pierce Academy in Marlborough, Massachusetts, at age twentyseven, studying English, French, and bookkeeping. Despite trouble encountered in finding housing due to “race prejudice,” Crogman distinguished himself in the classroom and after two years moved to teach English at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. After three years he moved to advanced study in classics at Atlanta University. When he completed his degree, Crogman joined the faculty of classics, which he eventually chaired, at Clark University. At the same time, he was becoming a recognized leader in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was the first African American president of Clark and the first African American to serve as secretary for the General Conference of the Church. He argued that the Negro in the South had contributed both through labor and funds to the development of a robust system of privately supported schools to supplement the still-meager state-funded education:

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The biggest obstacle to the Negro is neither the absence of schools or of intelligence, but the conflict between what he learns in school and what he is taught in society. In school he is taught that he should cultivate his good character and his learning. In society it is made clear to him that no matter the high levels to which he may ascend or even the income he may generate, his position will always be beneath. (Crogman 1896: 64–6) In his Talks for the Times (1896), Crogman references another classics scholar, Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922). Greener attended the preparatory school at Oberlin College, Phillips Academy Andover, and Oberlin College. He was the first African American undergraduate granted an AB degree from Harvard College in 1870. He went on to be principal in the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia (later Cheyney University), and in 1873, he became the first African American faculty member at the University of South Carolina, where he served not only as professor of mental and moral philosophy but also as librarian. Greener graduated from University of South Carolina Law School in 1876; a year later he moved to Washington, DC, where he was first professor, then dean, of the Howard University Law School. Despite his public work on behalf of the Republican Party (he was in the diplomatic service and served at the United States Treasury) Crogman suggested that his trajectory in the world was nevertheless constrained by Jim Crow and that he is emblematic of the barriers faced by all Negroes. One of the many places that DuBois and Washington came together was in Alexander Crummell’s American Negro Academy. Crummell was of the predecessor generation and had worked with antislavery movements before the Civil War. He was also a pan-Africanist who had lived in Liberia for about twenty years. Upon his return to the United States, he was a sought-after lecturer on education and politics. He advocated for vocational education for most Black students, but he was committed to the nurturing of highly educated race leaders. At the end of his life he taught at Howard University, and in the final year of his life, he founded the American Negro Academy, with DuBois and William Sanders Scarborough as vice presidents and Grimké as treasurer, as a vehicle for promoting Black scholarship, particularly that which answered back to the so-called “scientific” and racist claims about the inhumanity of African descendants used in the nineteenth century to justify the legal separation of the races and continued slavery. He insisted that rational counterarguments about the intellect and moral sufficiency of the Negro must be produced and disseminated in schools and from pulpits to change public understanding. In his 1897 speech to the American Negro Academy, entitled “The Attitude of the American Mind toward the Negro Intellect,” Crummell notes that civilization is the goal of all peoples, a goal only recently set as a possibility to the American Negro (see Foner and Branham 1998: 846). He praises

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the fruitfulness of the post-slavery generation in setting the conditions for intellectual development of people who had been unable to see, much less enjoy, the full promise of the civilized life. He uses the speech as an opportunity to launch a critique of education solely to produce labor. He criticizes that project, whether its purveyors are white philanthropists, industrialists, or politicians; he will not approve of these arguments from Black thinkers either. He claims that if there is one thing Blacks already know how to do it is to labor; labor may be a human activity born of necessity for all. However, now free to cultivate other developmental activities, the Negro must be free to focus less on labor and more on intellect. The success of the race rests on its ability to partake in all the natural endowments from the Creator, “to traverse the whole circle of existence” (Foner and Branham 1998: 854). Crummell cautions the Negro to ignore the “Gradgrinds” who wish to negate the successes of higher education and its benefits. He further adjures his audience to recognize the Negro intellectuals—many of whom were in the room—as well as the artists, such as Paul Dunbar10 or Henry Ossawa Tanner,11 as avatars of both accomplished and future advancement. Crummell wanted to highlight evidence of development of Negro civilization across subject matter in universities as well as acknowledged achievement in arts and culture, as represented by the reputations of artists such as Dunbar and Tanner (Foner and Branham 1998: 853–6). W.E.B. DuBois acknowledged that training in practical skills had a place and that Washington at times supported the more progressive principles closer to DuBois’s heart. For DuBois, Washington’s aims of work and money were not in themselves the issue; the overshadowing of the “higher aims in life” was (DuBois 1986: 42, 46–7, 64–5, 71). His worry was that, at a time when race prejudice was so intense, the submissive posture called for in the Washington thesis amounted to giving up on values such as political power to resist disenfranchisement; civil rights to combat legal structures premised on false notions of inferiority; and the higher education of Negro youth to ensure that the institution would not face the dangerous prospect of public withdrawal of support. DuBois was concerned that the business aims, self-respect that elevates character, and the production of teachers for Negro children in any level of education could not coexist with the deleterious effects of that posture of submission. In DuBois’s view, while Washington had rightly spoken out against lynching, he nevertheless attributed the position of Blacks to an erroneous reading of both history and the inclinations of the white South. Both DuBois and Washington had pragmatic foundations to their perspectives on the future, but DuBois’s pragmatism had its origins in a Jamesian framework. DuBois acknowledged an intellectual debt to William James, one of his teachers at Harvard, and to Crummell, both of whom connected theories of living and

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development to history and culture. James was respectful of scientific method and studies but did not consider either to be deterministic of reality for the individual (Campbell 1992: 573). DuBois’s work emanated very much from a multidisciplinary inquiry into history and culture. DuBois may also have been influenced by James’s recognition of the “social self” as being both individually and socially created, an idea reflected in DuBois’s complex conception of the “doubled” condition of the Negro in America (p. 573). DuBois acknowledged some errors in the timing and setting of some of the Black schools and colleges. However, while the classics might not be the right education for every Negro child, the support of that academic opportunity was crucial to the survival of the race outside of slavery, peonage, and dependency. DuBois acknowledged and enumerated the educational successes of both those like himself who had graduated from the elite institutions that cracked the door open to talented Black students, particularly since the Civil War, and those who had graduated from the Negro colleges, led in large part by those in the first group when they allowed for Black leadership. What are the especial goals of these colleges, by DuBois’s lights? They must “maintain the standards of popular education,” “seek the social regeneration of the Negro,” and “help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation” (DuBois 1986: 81). Only nurturing these institutions to their higher purposes will allow for the achievement of the striving “to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture” (p. 9). This perspective on the essential nature of higher education echoes a speech given in 1890 by Joseph Price, another Lincoln University graduate who went on to rise in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and found Zion Wesley College (later Livingstone). His premature death cast his reputation for oratory into the shadow of more long-lived friends and colleagues, but DuBois heard him speak during his college days and was among those, like Frederick Douglass, who praised him after his passing. Price spoke as follows: The solution of the race problem means the satisfactory and harmonious adjustment of the racial relation in the South and in the country as well, on the principles of humanity and justice. In other words, it is the concession to the negro of all the inalienable rights that belong to him as a man and as a member of that family of which God is the common Father, and the granting to him all the civil immunities and political privileges guaranteed to every other citizen by the authority and power of the Constitution of the American Government. (Price, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 737) I believe that education, in the full sense of the term, is the most efficient and comprehensive means to this end, because in its results an answer is to be found to all the leading objections against the negro which enter into the make-up of the so-called race problem. (Price, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 739)

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Price here refers to the commonly agreed-upon objections of ignorance, poverty, and moral conditions, all of which could only be addressed by more education for the Negro. He also is clear that more education for only Negroes would only leave them more bitter about their status; resolution of the problem also required more education for Southern whites. William Sanders Scarborough (1852–1926) was an educational pioneer in the post–Civil War South. He received his secondary education in Macon, Georgia, and then became the first graduate of Atlanta University. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oberlin College and went on to champion education in the classics for African Americans, including when he moved to Wilberforce University, where he was professor of Latin and Greek. His first textbook, First Lessons in Greek, became a classic in the field. Scarborough and his wife joined the Modern Language Association together in 1880, when he became the first African American member; he also became a member of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies).12 Scarborough served as president of Wilberforce University from 1908 to 1920 and was an advocate for liberal arts education for African American success (Ronnick 2005). Despite his own pursuits, Scarborough also wrote in support of the Hampton University mode of “molding character and in making good, respectable and productive citizenship.” He congratulated its mode of education as conveying the “dignity that attaches itself to labor” (Scarborough, quoted in Ronnick 2006: 194). In an essay two years later, Scarborough continued to endorse industrial education but posited that “higher education is not wasted on the race, no matter what the facts are found as to his condition brought about by his environment” (Scarborough, quoted in Ronnick 2006: 205). In this account, education through Latin and Greek is uplifting in and of itself. The structure of the classics was the means by which Scarborough himself was taught as a child. Scarborough interpolated the classics as both a curriculum and as a pedagogy through which oratorical and moral skills could be acquired, demonstrating intellect on a universal scale. Once he became a college president, he continued to write and speak against the pernicious effects of what he perceived as trendy “electives.” By 1900, Scarborough began to indulge in a gentle critique of Washington for ignoring the great race questions of the day. For Washington to do so, Scarborough acknowledged, would imperil the platform on which Tuskegee necessarily stood—the acceptance of Southern whites. He concluded that Washington could lead his institution according to his own vision but that the race needed additional theories of leadership and accounts of its broad aims (Ronnick 2006: 207–12). As the twentieth century progressed, more of his writing about Negro education was insistent on the need for an adjustment in perspective; the next stage of freedom called for more intellectuals to take up leadership and service to the race.

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Women’s voices for educational and social transformation Part of the leadership service referred to by Scarborough is teaching, and Scarborough was one of the few male educational leaders who called for women teachers beyond the domestic needs of the race and for the development of Negro teachers to ensure that Black education did not remain dependent on the charitable impulses of white philanthropists (Ronnick 2006: 190–2). Anna Julia Cooper both embodies that educator and rigorously advocated for Black women’s place in those educational and intellectual endeavors spoken of by her male contemporaries. Cooper was an early African American woman graduate of Oberlin who went on to teach at Wilberforce University before moving to Washington, DC, where she was part of the Black educational and intellectual leadership. As a teacher and principal of M Street High School (later Dunbar), then the only public African American high school in Washington, DC, she took a very strong position vis-à-vis the academic expectations for students. She led a successful effort to get accreditation for the school by the Northern colleges (e.g., Harvard) that authorized the school’s curriculum rather than an entrance exam to serve for student admission. Refusing to use in the school what she considered racially derogatory textbooks required by the school district, she advocated for the classical college preparatory curriculum to be available alongside the industrial curriculum. As she remarked, “Enlightened industrialism does not mean that the body who plows cotton must study nothing but cotton and that he who would drive a mule successfully should have contact only with mules” (Cooper, quoted in Lemert and Bhan 1998: ch. 19, para. 21).13 Booker T. Washington was one of those who advocated for Cooper’s removal from the leadership of the school, and in the end she was forced out. Her curricular innovations remained in place despite antagonism from the white school board. She did eventually return to the school for another twenty years. Before retiring from her long tenure, Cooper received her PhD from Columbia, via the Sorbonne, in 1925. Cooper went on to run Frelinghuysen programs at a later point, from her home, the mission of which was to serve adults seeking higher education. Her school was the only higher education option for African Americans in Washington, DC, other than Howard University, and her students were most often working-class Blacks who could only attend school in the evening or on a part-time basis with interruptions. Although Cooper, like many of her educated peers, was socially conservative in many ways, she also held the progressive view that education should serve to raise the consciousness of the people and should help to break down social hierarchy: This places the educative before the occupative—the cultural before the special, the development before the industrial. This is the natural order of any

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educational program based on scientific principles of human development. (Cooper, quoted in Lemert and Bhan 1998: ch. 19, paragraph 18) Any scheme of education should have regard to the whole man—not a special class or race of men, but man as the paragon of creation, possessing in childhood and in youth almost infinite possibilities for physical, moral and mental development. If a child seems poor in inheritance, poor in environment, poor in personal endowment, by so much the more must organized society bring to that child the good tidings of social salvation through the schools. (Cooper, quoted in Lemert and Bhan 1998: ch. 19, para. 24) Cooper followed Crummell’s viewpoint that the races have specific purposes in human progress, an idea that has been attributed to eighteenth-century writer Johann Gottfried von Herder. Herder regarded Kant’s conception of race as dehumanizing of Negroes and others and opposed this view with his proposition that “one and the same species is humankind on earth” (Herder 1828, quoted in Bernasconi and Lott 2000: 25). Cooper’s contributions in this area primarily in A Voice from the South by a Woman of the South (Lemert and Bhan 1998) were overshadowed by DuBois’s subsequent essay, “The Conservation of the Races” (1897). Nonetheless, education and the development of a people were paramount to her educational theories. Cooper participated in the intellectual life of Washington, DC, alongside people such as the Grimkés and the Crummells. Although she was the only woman invited to speak at a meeting of the American Negro Academy (May 2012: 21), she was never invited to join the all-male organization. Likewise, she was one of the women who were in the conversations around the formation of the Niagara Movement in direct opposition to the accommodationist social philosophy of Washington. The Niagara Movement convened its first meeting July 11–14, 1905, in Ontario, Canada, after being refused accommodation in Buffalo, New York. Twenty-seven men attended the first meeting, led by DuBois and William Trotter, a radical fellow Harvard graduate who owned The Guardian newspaper. When women were admitted into the group two years later, with the support of DuBois, Trotter left the organization. Despite DuBois’s support of women’s participation in the organization (see Figure 7.1) and in the subsequent National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),14 DuBois and many of his male colleagues were often reluctant to give public acknowledgment of the women’s (Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, among others) intellectual contributions. While Cooper did use language of “uplift,” as was common among the educated classes, her conception of the intersection of race, sex, and class differed in many of her writings from that of her contemporaries. Lucy Craft Laney, for example, was a founder and principal of Haines Normal School in

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FIGURE 7.1  Panorama of Twentieth Annual session of the NAACP, June 26, 1929 Cleveland, Ohio

Georgia and spoke to Black audiences of the need for Black women teachers not only in the primary grades but also through college. Her rationale was that “[o]nly those of character and culture can do successful lifting for she who would mould character must herself possess it” (Laney 1899, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 889). Educated Negro women were the only ones capable of the moral uplift needed by the race that had been morally degraded by the domestic practices embedded in and enforced by slavery. Other women educational leaders, such as Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, were deeply connected with integration of the needs of Negro women into the suffrage movement and with abolition before the Civil War. St. Pierre Ruffin was disillusioned by Negro women’s exclusion and became a vocal spokeswoman for the acceptance of Black women into the national women’s organizations. She eventually served as a leader in the formation of what became, in 1896, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), an entity that sought to align the interests of colored women with those of “all good aspiring women” without regard for the color line (Ruffin 1895, quoted in Foner and Branham 1998: 799). Both Cooper’s absolute rejection of the conciliatory approach with the white world advocated by followers of Washington (the success of which appealed to many “club” women) and her strong view that education was a route to escape from traditional “female dependence” may have been factors in eliminating a strong political alliance with her Oberlin classmate, Mary Church Terrell. Terrell was associated with the sponsorship of Washington and also may have maintained the social class differences under which they came to Oberlin as students and lived during their time as colleagues at M Street School (May 2012: 17). Nevertheless, Terrell and Cooper shared a commitment to racial advancement sometimes in shared circles, such as the NACW, and sometimes in different styles and audiences. Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) shared a critique of race equality as solely a male struggle and sex equality as solely that of white women.15 Wells-Barnett, like St. Pierre, was extremely vocal in her insistence that Negro women deserved a prominent place in the suffrage

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movement, which led to alienation from some of the white organizers. She was an investigative journalist who, like Cooper, was born into slavery but received a university education. Although she taught for a time, she is known primarily for her journalistic work exposing the racism and sexual hypocrisy embedded in the epidemic of lynching. She developed data to expose the goals of white supremacy to support both economic and social Jim Crow laws and practice. When she was teaching elementary school, Wells-Barnett wrote about racial inequality in educational funding in Memphis, which involved complicity of both white and Negro elites, leading to her dismissal (Black 2001). Cooper, like Wells-Barnett, was not afraid to push at the insufficiencies of Black politics in reaching her social and educational goals. Her deep connections to the Negro intelligentsia did not result in a retreat into a bourgeois cocoon. Cooper’s continued activism, both educational and economic, on behalf of working-class Blacks continued well into the twentieth century, especially in adopting the Frelinghuysen University mantle during the latter years of her life (Johnson 2009).16 Frelinghuysen University for Colored Working People was originally founded in 1906 to support the schooling of youth seeking advanced education who, due to economic circumstances, worked full-time and wanted to pursue an education that was practical in its provision of high-quality social, religious, mental, and artistic instruction.

THE NEW NEGRO Alain Locke is often styled as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance.” Whether this conclusion stands, it is certainly the case that Locke was one of the catalysts for a new analysis of Negro social and cultural life. He was an intergenerational connector between those like DuBois and Crogman who represented the challenges of Reconstruction and the post–First World War generation, who led the Great Migration northward and created a cosmopolitan vortex in Harlem. Of course, the migration also led to Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Moreover, the pilgrims to Harlem came from everywhere in the United States and beyond in the Black diaspora. The stories of the Harlem Renaissance focus on artists’ production, but even those most famous productions resonate with philosophies of education. Thinkers pressed this question: where, when, why, and how is the “New Negro” to learn and to become the “new” self? Locke, like DuBois, was Harvard-educated, but his philosophical education was guided by Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, and George Santayana. Locke had a Jamesian pragmatic view of racism: racism is not a function of fixed reality but an effect that can be overcome with empowered agency. Both as a Harvard undergraduate and in his later philosophical and cultural contributions, Locke (in contrast to DuBois; Orizu 2001) considered race as a “performance”—one that he dressed up in a dandy’s attire and an air of

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aesthetic detachment from political reality (Stewart 2018: 48–72). DuBois regarded the representation of Blacks in the mainstream as degraded. He perceived art as a weapon, and as an opportunity, when in the hands of Black artists, to revise the view of Blacks by whites and by Blacks themselves. Locke approached matters differently. After he completed his studies at Oxford as the first Black American Rhodes Scholar and went to teach philosophy at Howard University, he connected to the NAACP Drama Committee in Washington, DC. Anna Julia Cooper, a member of the Committee, promoted a play that explicitly presented anti-racist politics, which was precisely opposed to Locke’s aesthetic sensibilities. The play, Rachel (Grimké 1920), presented the story of an African American woman, Rachel Loving, who has a domesticated and maternal vision of Black womanhood that is destroyed by the revelation to her of family members’ deaths by lynching. Grimké wrote the play in the year after the debut of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, partially as an appeal to white women to oppose racist violence. He remained connected to the Committee for the duration of the play in 1916 but quit the committee and returned to Harvard briefly to complete his PhD in philosophy, despite the death and retirement of his undergraduate mentors. His aesthetic theories were informed not only by his earlier exposure to Santayana but also by his belief that Black art ought to explore the subtleties of all dimensions of Black life, not direct political messages. His graduate work sought a modernist approach to art and philosophy “designed to rescue that which was ‘ancient and perennial’ in values from the dust heap of nineteenth century idealism and re-establish them on the more scientific foundation of twentieth century psychology” (Stewart 2018: 285). His openness to accounts of Black life by white artists or in imitation of white styles connected him to the new generation of artists who were rejecting the middle-class attitudes and goals of the Black bourgeoisie. He was a mentor, catalyst, and connector for the break from DuBoisian aesthetics, championing beauty over what he considered propaganda. Schools in Harlem were not segregated by law or practice, although, as the Black population grew, so did the number of classrooms predominately populated by Black students. Disparities in economic resources had a large effect on the physical spaces and educational opportunities available in the public schools. The understanding among Black educators of the importance of adult education for community members who might not have previously had access to schooling—as well as the demands for equality from returning veterans from the First World War—connected the zest for cultural production to broader social needs. The growing access for Black writers and artists to both sponsors and publishers (Paul Kellogg, Carl Van Vechten, and Charles Van Doren, for example) created part of the allure of moving away from the centrality of the classics to the world of modernity.

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The Kellogg brothers, who had produced a three-volume study of Pittsburgh just prior to the First World War, launched the magazine Survey Graphic in 1921 as an entry into the progressive press. It was founded in the belief that the drama of human living may be as thrilling as the tale of a battle; that the destiny of a million new citizens, the struggle for public health, the aspirations of workaday men and women are as colorful as a trip to the Fortunate Isles … Its cargo will be the stuff of creative experience, observation, and invention.17 Survey Graphic was the home of Alain Locke’s 1925 special edition Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro. Most of the thirty-four Black contributors to the volume were or were shortly to become famous, including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Countee Cullen. As Locke writes in his keynote essay, For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro Life. The Old Negro … has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. (Locke, quoted in Moleworth 2012: 442) By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual self-understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem ourselves as we still are to others. With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase … [moving from being] a problem in common rather than a life in common. (Locke, quoted in Moleworth 2012: 443)

NEW WORLD CIVIL RIGHTS These themes (What kind of Being is Black? What can be known by and about Blackness?) carried through the twentieth century as the rationales for de/segregation and for affirmative action/color-blind policies in education. The “mid-century turn” in philosophy of education began largely situated in liberalism and rights-based theory. Brown v. Board,18 as a strategy of the civil rights movement, was predicated on a belief in the ability of educational access to leverage public politics. The critical race theory intervention serves as a critique of reliance on the liberal tradition that picks up on a deep suspicion about whether these tools help make liberatory institutions possible.19 Critical race theory has its origins in legal scholars’ critiques of color-blind litigation

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that allowed the promise of Brown v. Board to be pushed back into a system of delayed implementation and secondary segregation.20 The themes mentioned above flourished through public philosophy in raced social spaces beyond the schoolhouse door: in courts, in the public square, and in the literary imagination. Aside from critical race theory, two other traditions that resonate with philosophy of education are the aesthetic/politics of representation and the radical manifestos that are the records of intent over multiple generations. The philosophical directions taken by artists and culture critics21 and by activists22 in their invocation of the political and social importance of education in the US (and broader) context sometimes converge and other times diverge. Just as Locke had declared the poets of the Harlem Renaissance (Adoff 1970) the central culture bearers of social change, the mid-century turn and the very public centering of education as the battlefield of race relations in America was very much reliant on writers. Lorraine Hansberry (who died too soon at age thirty-four in 1965) (Ellis and Smith 2010), Amiri Baraka (formerly published as LeRoi Jones, 1934–2014), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), Nikki Giovanni (1941–), and Maya Angelou (1928–2014) were all known (Randall 1971) and sometimes contested figures in Black arts circles as well as in more mainstream culture. They all had work that commented on childhood, Black family life, and American culture, and they each had a specific relationship to the politics of the times. Perhaps the Black writer most visibly navigating the nexus of Black arts, American politics, the movements for racial equality, and the educational consequences of American racism was James Baldwin (1924–87). He lived over, in, and against the demands of Harlem and its unique relationship to America, situating himself as a witness to the politics of the times; yet he was regarded as much as a public intellectual as an artist. In his 1963 essay “A Talk to Teachers,” Baldwin points to the weakness in the Negro’s perpetual faith in achieving the American Dream through education (1985: 325–32): Now, the crucial paradox … occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society … The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for [herself] whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way [they achieve their] own identity. (p. 326) What Baldwin emphasizes in this essay is that beneath the platitudinous goals of American education we all share lie two problems. The first is the challenge of social reproduction, which many educational theorists—not least Marxists and feminists—have critiqued. Baldwin (1985) asserts that societies rationally set out to continue themselves and to produce a citizenry that will not challenge

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their legitimacy. Although every society’s survival depends on responding to those who challenge its status quo, societies rarely accept with equanimity those playing the role of the questioner, the change agent, or the rebel. The second and main argument of this essay draws on the paradox of the American Negro and his place in the society that provides the framework for the aims of education. On the one hand, the child is bathed in the mythos of equality and freedom—politically, economically, and historically. Yet they experience a world that does not allow for that narrative to be incorporated. This analysis harks back to Crogman’s in his 1896 Talks for the Times. Baldwin (1985) alleges that white and Negro students are robbed both of their ability to stand up to the paradoxes of their education and the history that seems impervious to their participation. But it is the teacher of that Negro child (see Figure 7.2) to whom Baldwin speaks directly here: Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them—I would try to make them know—that

FIGURE 7.2  In 1933 in Harlem, New York, two black children seated on the sidewalk look at their schoolbooks. One of the books concerns American history

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those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the results of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach [her] that if [she] intends to get to be a [person], [she] must at once decide that [she] is stronger than this conspiracy and that [she] must never make [her] peace with it … I would try to make [them] know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible but principally larger—and that it belongs to [them]. (pp. 331–2) What Baldwin points to but does not explicitly acknowledge is the revolutionary nature of teaching children in a culture that does not actually wish them to end up educated. While he posits the paradox between the aims of education and its situatedness, he does not tell the teacher what tools, armor, and weapons  they  will  need to disarm schools that are part and parcel of the conspiracy and the place of unrealized hope. He gives the project to the teacher but does not tell them how to their job in the embodying of this revolutionary agenda. He assumes that the teacher’s motives are, as most of them state during their training, to help children, and that they understand the word “help” in the same way as Baldwin means it. Baldwin warns that to overcome the challenges endemic to American society, anyone who cares about education will need all the courage available: So any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible—and those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people— must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen. (1985: 678)

THE DEMAND: EDUCATION FOR FORMATION Baldwin certainly read the tea leaves accurately as the post-Brown world of Black education has been embedded in a history of political retrenchment, social resistance, and amidst some sporadic advancements, failures in providing widespread educational equity. In light of his warning, perhaps it comes as no surprise to see that in moments of radical demand spread over more than a century, the promises unfulfilled of the American Dream look similar. Consider the following well-known statements:

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The Niagara Movement Speech, 1905: We want our children educated. The school system in the country districts of the South is a disgrace and in few towns and cities are Negro schools what they ought to be. We want the national government to step in and wipe out illiteracy in the South. Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States. And when we call for education we mean real education. We believe in work. We ourselves are workers, but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think, to aspire. (emphasis added)23 The Black Panther Party for Self Defense Ten Point Platform and Program, 1966: WE WANT DECENT EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE THAT EXPOSES THE TRUE NATURE OF THIS DECADENT AMERICAN SOCIETY. WE WANT EDUCATION THAT TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of the self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and in the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else. (emphasis added)24 Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, & Justice, 2016: Reparations for the cultural and educational exploitation, erasure, and extraction of our communities in the form of mandated public school curriculums that critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery, and funding to support, build, preserve, and restore cultural assets and sacred sites to ensure the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs. (emphasis added)25 These are only three moments of the radical demand for “real’” education for Black children in America, with recognition that the educational systems, rules, and exclusionary practices have laid layer after layer of the foundations of the miseducation of Black folk. Each set of demands is in fact calling for the recognition of the humanity of Blacks, on the one hand, and the removal of the misrecognition that leads in every age to an education unworthy of them and their future, on the other. None of these demands view the schoolchild as an unformed lump of clay that proper schooling can form into a future citizen or worker. These demands are set in a context of formation that is itself set in a history that may not be ignored or silenced and that requires a social remediation—no matter the individual intellect or academic skills. Formation is

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set as an individual, social, and structural goal; regardless of the achievement of any Black student, they are set in the frame—whether congruent or in tension— of community association and the structures of history, economics, politics, and culture. Once a child is registered as Black in the American context, the weight of that history is upon that child, no matter their class position or family background. At the turn of the twentieth century, public intellectuals and scholars argued that the aims of education for Black children had to look ahead to a future in which those children would take their place as equals in the classroom, schoolhouse, and nation. The Black Panther Party demand was open in its critique about the way things were in their community—first in Oakland, California, then across the country as the same conditions sparked the same demands. Its party platform was formed in the understanding that Brown v. Board was not having the same effects in Northern and Western Black communities as may have been hoped for in the South. Residential segregation was keeping Black communities Black, and to form the self-determined communities that the party envisioned, the education needed by Black children was not the same as that offered by the normal white public school. Love for the People was tied to Power to the People. That love was conditioned on self-knowledge not obscured by the traumas of racism and oppression, and power was conditioned on understanding the purported ideals of America at the same time as acknowledging the myriad ways in which its history had already distorted those ideals. These two earlier radical movements—the Niagara Movement and the Black Panther Party—asserted that Blacks were entitled to be understood fully as knowing beings who were neither to be left in a shadowy cave nor forced to work in the blazing sun that also left their vision of reality obscured. The legitimacy of Black people as a people was dependent both on being knowers and the worthiness of the knowledge that was to be imparted—knowledge that had to be untangled from history without losing its stinging lessons and the effects on contemporary success in education. The Movement for Black Lives, founded in 2014, focuses its demand on the material conditions for that education, while also grappling with historical distortions and erasures, through curriculum and through cultural revival. These contemporary educational activists are alert to the through-lines of American history and the multiple attempts to reform the institutions that have continuously harmed Black people—attempts that have fallen short time and again. The movement’s perspective over this history is what propels its systemic and transformational vision of the world as it ought to be. The conceptions of legal justice, economic justice, and educational justice are all working in step to the benefit of the many and for the repair of society. W.E.B. DuBois’s claim in 1903 that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line was uttered in hope that the proclamation itself might be the first step in resolving the problem. The struggles of the many parents,

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scholars, public intellectuals, journalists, artists, educators, and cultural critics have been mighty and not for naught. However, the hopes and expectations of the Niagara Movement for the children of freedom have continued to face headwinds that might have discouraged a less resolved people. The children who became the symbols of the end of legal segregation—Ruby Bridges (see Michels 2015), James Meredith (see Brevard n.d.), the Little Rock Nine,26 and the many nameless students who sat in at luncheonette counters27—stood up for generations of other children who were to come after them. Those radical acts of insistence on having a place in the schoolroom moved a nation forward, however imperfectly and however impermanently. The second part of that mid-twentieth-century demand was explicitly naming the “power” its purveyors sought, but schooling remained an important site of battle. Whether in the afterschool programs and Saturday schools of the Black Panthers or in the demands of students at PWIs (Predominately White Institutions), such as Columbia or Cornell, to have Black faculty and curricula that situated the Black (and pan-African) experience in the disciplines, the centrality of educational parity remained. In the contemporary analysis of race and education, arguments are ranging from the imperative to disable the school-to-prison pipeline, to critiques of public charter schools and of disparities in disciplinary and educational outcomes, and to a questioning of the value of integration as an American school aim. No matter where these demands and debates take place, the understanding that education undergirds human self-understanding and self-determination remains at the heart of every argument about American education for its Black citizens, of every claim to human dignity and rights. Those arguments have both reflected and influenced demands for educational justice around the world, especially where and when slavery, colonialism, and anti-Black racism have set the philosophical foundation of educational conditions.

NOTES 1 In the context of this article, “Black” is marking a specific racial and cultural group and shared experience, which is not similarly described by “white.” 2 Normal Schools in the United States were established first in 1839 to provide a post-secondary school training for teachers who were needed in parallel with the expansion of publicly funded elementary schools. Over the next century, as teaching became more state-regulated, teacher education moved into university settings (Wright 1930: 363–71). 3 William Crogman, William Sanders Scarborough, Daniel Barclay Williams, Reuben Lovinggood, Anna Julia Cooper, and Fannie Barrier Williams, among others, exemplify these generational and often class-based debates. 4 This document from 2013 is an application to place the Lightfoot home in the National Registry for Historic Places. Pages 10–11 provide specific biographical information on Lightfoot and the importance of the home (which he owned from 1917 to 1947) for social and intellectual activities for Black Howard University

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faculty and other Washington, DC cultural activities. Available online: https://www. nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/13001070.pdf. Delaney defends this view in “Advice to Ex-slaves” (1865), referenced in Foner and Branham (1998: 445). Bruce defends this view in “Reasons Why the Colored American Should Go to Africa” (1877), referenced in Foner and Branham (1998: 586). Blyden’s adult scholarly life developed after he moved in 1851 to Liberia and completed his education. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church and became a high school principal and newspaper editor. Importantly, Blyden was appointed president of Liberia College from 1880 to 1884. He is regarded as a father of PanAfricanism, and he argued in four of his many books for the equality of Blacks and Africans—namely A Voice from Bleeding Africa (1856); A Vindication of the African Race; Being a Brief Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority (1862); Africa for the Africans (1872); and Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887). He called for the emigration of skilled Blacks from the West Indies and the United States to Liberia and ran unsuccessfully for president of Liberia in 1885. After his electoral defeat, he went into exile in Sierra Leone. The “Civil War Amendments” to the United States Constitution installed changes in the status of Black Americans in federal law. Amendment Thirteen (1865) outlawed slavery (involuntary servitude) in the United States. Amendment Fourteen (1868) granted citizenship to all born and naturalized in the United States, guaranteed equal protection under the law, and allowed the federal government to enforce these provisions. Amendment Fifteen (1870) prevented states from keeping citizens from voting on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was introduced to blunt the effects of the restoration of land and rights to former Confederates. When it passed, the law provided “That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” The US Supreme Court ruled this law unconstitutional in 1883, due to the federal oversight of individual actors (rather than states). See Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), a case revolving around segregated rail cars establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine for “public accommodations” lasting until Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American poets to receive wide literary acclaim. His recognition in the United States and abroad was important to public (white) support for Black art and artists. See his biography online: https://poets.org/poet/paul-laurence-dunbar. Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) was a distinguished African American painter, who received major accolades in France and other cities in Europe, particularly for his religious subjects, such as The Resurrection of Lazarus (1887). See the entry for Tanner on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s website: https://americanart. si.edu/artist/henry-ossawa-tanner-4742. In 2001, the Modern Language Association named a book prize for Scarborough that recognizes “an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture published in the previous year.” This quote comes from an essay, “On Education,” reproduced in Lemert and Bhan (1998). The editors believe this is from a speech given by Cooper in the 1930s but do not have further citation information.

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14 The NAACP was founded in the aftermath of an anti-Black riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. The Niagara Movement had faced challenges in raising funds, and the initial call for the formation of the NAACP, which included many white progressives and seven Blacks (including DuBois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell), raised the principles of common cause. When the NAACP founded its national office in 1910, DuBois, the only Black executive, began to publish The Crisis, the prominent civil rights magazine. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund eventually spearheaded the civil rights cases that led to the desegregation of public schools. On DuBois’ life see Holt (2008). 15 See Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, a pamphlet in Wells-Barnett (1892). 16 See also the “Frelinghuysen University Pamphlet” (1906), Frelinghuysen Memorabilia, 3. Available online: http://dh.howard.edu/ajc_freling/3. 17 Survey Graphic was “founded in the belief that the drama of human living may be as thrilling as the tale of a battle; that the destiny of a million new citizens, the struggle for public health, the aspirations of workaday men and women are as colorful as a trip to the Fortunate Isles … Its cargo will be the stuff of creative experience, observation, and invention” (Haygood 2018). 18 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 US 483 (1954) was the decision in a consolidation of cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, DC, challenging the very possibility of separate educational systems (by race) providing equal education, per the doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Court unanimously decided in favor of the plaintiff parents and paved the way for challenging “separate but equal” in all forms of public accommodation, beginning with public schools. 19 Martin Luther King Jr., (1967); Bob Moses and Charles E. Cobb (2001); John Hope Franklin (1947); Derrick Bell (1992); and Patricia Williams (1991) represent positions on the hope and the failures of liberal analyses. 20 The central principles of critical race theory are as follows: (1) racism is “normal science”; (2) self-interest on the part of elite whites often drives ostensive racial progress; (3) race and races are social products; (4) races are subject to differential origin and history and are always intersecting with other nodes of difference; and (5) identity informs “voice.” See Derrick Bell (1992), Cheryl Harris (2001–02), Patricia Williams (1991), Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas (1995). In Education, see Taylor, Gillborn and Ladson-Billings (2016). 21 Alain Locke, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Adrian Piper are avatars for this movement. 22 Specific reference will be made in this section to the distance between the Niagara Movement and the Black Panthers and the Movement for Black Lives. 23 W.E.B. DuBois, “Niagara Movement Speech” (1905). Available at the Teaching American History website: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/ niagara-movement-speech/. 24 See “The Blank Panthers: Ten Point Program” online at: http://www.blacklivesmatter syllabus.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/BPP_Ten_Point_Program.pdf. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton to promote Black Power and Black community self-determination. They developed many local social programs, challenged the law enforcement practices in Black communities, and adopted radical principles that challenged the status quo. Chapters opened in other American cities, which led to concerted surveillance and counterintelligence programs in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Government-sanctioned assassinations and criminal trials led to

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factionalism and the eventual diminishment of unity and influence. See the article “The Black Panther Party: Challenging Police and Promoting Social Change” on the National Museum of African American History and Culture website: https:// nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/black-panther-party-challenging-police-and-promotingsocial-change. 25 “Reparations,” M4BL. Available online: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/ reparations/. 26 “Little Rock Nine,” History.com, January 29, 2010. Available online: https://www. history.com/topics/black-history/central-high-school-integration. 27 “The Sit-In Movement,” ushistory.org. Available online: https://www.ushistory.org/ us/54d.asp.

REFERENCES Primary sources Baldwin, James (1985), The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985, New York: St. Martin’s/Marek. Crogman, William Henry (1896), Talks for the Time, Atlanta, GA: Press of Franklin Printing. DuBois, W.E.B. (1986), The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Library of America. DuBois, W.E.B. (1990), Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, New York: Free Press. Foner, Philip and Robert J. Branham (1998), Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory 1787–1900, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Grimké, Angelica Weld (1920), Rachel, A Play in Three Acts, Boston: The Cornhill Company. Lemert, Charles and Esme Bhan, eds. (1998), The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters, Kindle version, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. May, Vivian M. (2012), Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction, New York: Routledge. Moleworth, Charles (2012), The Works of Alain Locke, New York: Oxford University Press. Ronnick, Michele V., ed. (2006), The Works of William Sanders Scarborough, New York: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Jeffrey C. (2018), The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, New York: Oxford University Press. Wells, Ida B. (1892), Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, New York: The New York Age Print.

Secondary sources Adoff, Arnold, ed. (1970), I Am the Dark Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Black Americans, New York: Collier Books. Bell, Derrick (1992), Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, New York: Basic Books, Bernasconi, Robert and Tommy Lee Lott, eds. (2000), The Idea of Race, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

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Black, Patti Carr (2001), “Ida B. Wells: A Courageous Voice for Civil Rights,” Mississippi History Now, February. Available online: http://www.mshistorynow. mdah.ms.gov/articles/49/ida-b-wells-a-courageous-voice-for-civil-rights. Brevard, Elizabeth (n.d.), “September 30, 1962: James Meredith & the University of Mississippi,” Facetoface: A Blog from the National Portrait Gallery. Available online: https://npg.si.edu/blog/september-30-1962-james-meredith-universitymississippi. Campbell, James (1992), “DuBois and James,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 28 (3): 569–81. Cremin, Lawrence, ed. (1957), The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Fre Men, New York: Teachers College Press. Crenshaw, Kimberle, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (1995), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that formed the Movement. New York: New York Press. Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic, eds. (2017), Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. DuBois, W.E.B. (1897), The Conservation of Races, The American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, No. 2, Washington, DC: American Negro Academy. Ellis, Catherine and Stephen D. Smith (2005), Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches, New York: The New Press. Ellis, Catherine and Stephen D. Smith (2010), Say It Loud: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity, New York: The New Press. Franklin, John Hope (1947), From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes, 1st edn., New York: A.A. Knopf. Harris, Cheryl (2001-02), “Critical Race Studies: An Introduction,” UCLA Law Review 49, 1215–39. Haygood, Wil, ed. (2018), I, Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, Columbus, OH: Columbus Museum of Art. Holt, Thomas C. (2008), “Du Bois, W. E. B.,” in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (eds.), African American National Biography, New York: Oxford University Press. Available online: https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/aanb Johnson, Karen (2009), “‘In Service for the Common Good’: Anna Julia Cooper and Adult Education,” African American Review, 43 (1): 45–56. King, Martin Luther Jr. (1967), Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Boston: Beacon Press. Michels, Debra (2015), “Ruby Bridges,” National Women’s History Museum. Available online: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ruby-bridges. Moses, Robert P. and Charles E. Cobb (2001), Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, Boston: Beacon Press. Orizu, Michaela C. (2001), “The German Influence on the Life and Thought of W.E.B. DuBois,” MA thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Randall, Dudley (1971), The Black Poets, New York: Bantam Books. Ronnick, Michele V. (2005), The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Taylor, Edward, David Gillborn, and Gloria Ladson-Billings, eds. (2016), Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education, New York: Routledge. Williams, Patricia J. (1991), The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Wright, Frank W. (1930), “The Evolution of the Normal Schools,” Elementary School Journal, 30 (5): 363–71.

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Critical Theory and Education CHRISTIANE THOMPSON

But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory’s refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944/2002: 33)

INTRODUCTION The present chapter deals with a specific conceptual path of critical theory and its relevance for education and educational theory. Seen in terms of this path, the scope of critique has been conceptualized as “ideology critique” in comparison or demarcation to other forms or traditions of critique (e.g., “transcendental critique” or “critique of power”). In the following, the conceptual path of critique will focus on the connection between Karl Marx and the so-called critical theory of the Frankfurt School. However, this connection is not to be understood as a consistent and unitary philosophical program (Bünger 2019). Instead, what the different approaches and thinkers have in common is their participation in a lively debate about what is worthy of criticism and about the concepts and standards according to which critical thinking is able to operate. The complexity of critical theory is made clear with reference to the opening epigraph, cited from “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944/2002). In this short quote, there are three dimensions of critique worth noting. First, critical theory is closely related to transforming “true praxis.” It is certainly not improper to put this true praxis in relation to the ancient idea of

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a fulfilled life (eudaimonia). In contrast to the ancient topos, however, critical theory assumes that social conditions stand in the way of a positive realization and fulfillment of human life. Accordingly, the term “critical” in “critical theory” stands first and foremost for the processing of the very adversities and forms of resistance that prevent a fulfilled life and human flourishing. “Critical theory” is about the inconsistency existing between, on the one hand, modern society’s self-understanding in the sense of freedom and equality of all people, and on the other, social reality with its manifestations of power and domination. The second important dimension of critique refers to how the above mentioned inconsistency or contradiction can be explained. The epigraph from the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” suggests that social conditions also influence the extent to which it is even possible that we can recognize and analytically penetrate relationships of power and domination. Society, according to Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69), leads to a hardening of thinking and thus to an inability to orient one’s actions in accordance with the aim of true human practice. Concepts such as “ideology,” “alienation,” and “reification” are central to the critical theoretical tradition that seeks to grasp this problem philosophically. Thus, the second dimension of critique touches upon the limitations of thought and of philosophy—grasped in concepts like “alienation” and “ideology.” In connection with this, there is a third dimension of “critical” or “critique” that is related to the problematic standpoint of the analysis of critical theory: From where, one might ask, can social reality be accessed? To what extent can the critic’s point of view not be caught up in what he or she criticize? As the epigraph emphasizes, there is an intransigence of theory and for that reason philosophical reflection must make an effort toward self-examination and the rejection of concepts that no longer persuade. Criticism, in the eminent sense, therefore means extensive readiness for self-criticism. If cherished concepts and methodological procedures prove to be accomplices of power and domination, then it is necessary to accept the consequences of this insight when it comes to the objects and practice of one’s own reflection. Based on these considerations, the significance of critical theory for education is obvious: It is important to analyze critically educational processes in light of social conditions—including inequality and power relations. This analysis demonstrates how inequality is perpetuated and reproduced (among other things) via educational institutions. Not only this, but critical theory also enables the categorical reflection on concepts and their complicity with the occidental process of rationalization. In this chapter, I discuss how Marx and the Frankfurt School were received in the educational field while showing that the categorical conclusions differ for these various philosophers. My aim is to allow the educational-philosophical diversity of the different strands of critical theory to come to the fore. The central arc of this chapter is constituted

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by the concepts of alienation and reification. These two concepts indicate the contradictions of bourgeois society as well as its discrepancies with a true, that is, socially just practice. The chapter unfolds in three sections. The first section focuses on the philosophical and political-economic writings of Karl Marx. Starting from Marx’s criticism of idealist philosophy, I trace his analysis of social reality using the guiding concept of alienation. Subsequently, I present educational approaches and studies—ones that treat the overcoming of alienation as a pedagogical project. Starting with Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” I introduce several representatives of Critical Pedagogy (a term I will address in that section). In the second section, I turn toward the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and outline its foundation and development. Here, it should be acknowledged that alienation and reification are deeply engrained into the structures of modern capitalist society. As a preliminary description, we can say that alienation and reification denote the reduction of human experience in subjectivity as well as social interaction in terms of things or objects. “The authoritarian personality”—an important research focus of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research—embodies the idea of this reified mind and is the result of authoritarian “education.” In the third section of the chapter, starting from the thesis of the “totality of false consciousness”1 put forward in the “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” I raise the question of how philosophy is still able to fulfill its task of critique. Against the objections of a “negative philosophy of history,” it is shown here how philosophy changes its role and significance for Adorno in the sense of “negative dialectics,” a concept I will discuss in the third section. The crucial point here is a form of philosophical or educational experience that does not subsume or reduce the objects of experience. It is a form of experience that is concerned with the limitations of identification. The chapter will conclude with an overview of more recent educational contributions from Marx to Adorno and argue that critique is a “basic educational concept.”

MARX’S PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF ALIENATION Developing a philosophy of practice Karl Marx’s philosophy of practice developed as a critique of idealism. In the well-known 11th Feuerbach Thesis (1845), Marx writes: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; what matters is to change it” (MEW 3: 5–7).2 The quote addresses the deep fault line between theory and practice that has shaped Western philosophy since its beginnings in Greek antiquity through to Hegel. Western philosophy was built around the metaphysical

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project of understanding and explaining the world. According to Marx, this idealistic orientation obscures our view because it ignores the way in which human beings have to organize the preservation and advancement of their lives in society. The “philosophy of practice” requires us to focus on the productive and reproductive activities within society: How do human beings in modern societies organize the preservation and further development of living conditions? Elaborating on this question, Marx exposed the contradictions of modern society: It promises freedom and equality, yet, at the same time, it has a large segment of the population living and working under precarious conditions. In his political-economic studies, Marx gave the problem of pauperization— discussed under the keyword “soziale Frage”3 (social question)—a political turn. According to Marx, the workers are simply forced to sell their labor because they have no other way to provide for themselves. At the same time, the owner of the means of production (e.g., factories) can appropriate the so-called “Mehrwert” (surplus value) that results from the workers’ labor (MEW 23: 331–40). Given these economic conditions of production and the corresponding social inequalities, class struggle is inevitable, and the consequence of this—according to the assumption made by Karl Marx and (his companion and friend) Friedrich Engels—is revolutionary upheaval. Such revolutionary upheaval, however, can only take place if the workers understand the power relations to which they are subject. What is it that prevents those who live and work under fatal and degrading conditions from seeing through the injustice and scandal of their own circumstances? While Marx in his early Paris manuscripts (1844) formulated an anthropologically conceived figure of alienation,4 later, in “The Capital,”5 he presents an interpretation that attributes alienation to the logic of capitalist production. In his famous chapter “The Fetish Character of the Goods and Its Secret,” Marx explains that there is an illusion concerning the worker’s relation to the objects or things produced (Marx 2000: 104–5; MEW 23: 86). There is a pretense or an illusory appearance (see Böhme 2001). Owing to the illusory appearance or projection of work in the thing that is produced, the social and subjective dimension appears as something that has the character of an object. According to Marx, the reason for this reification lies in the form of commodity (and not in the physical quality of the produced goods). This means that any social dimension involved in the production of that object as a commodity is erased. The product seems to stand on its own; its existence is natural and selfevident. The reifying quality can first of all be concretized in such a way that the workers no longer perceive the product as the result of their own work. The division of labor in the production process implies a separation of the workers from what they are working on. Since the entire production process is oriented

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toward the efficiency of the overall production (and is no longer thought of in relation to the workers), the sphere of action is reduced to monotonous activities, in which a communicative exchange with others is unnecessary. In a sense, the workers become an extension or appendage of the production machinery, as portrayed in the film Modern Times (dir. Chaplin 1936). However, the commodity fetish is not limited to the immediate production process. It also has an effect in that the workers generally begin to understand their performance in the context of a “market value.” This is the case not only when the workers equate their work with earnings but also when fearing the loss of their jobs in competition with other workers. Within the context of this system, labor itself ultimately becomes a commodity, since it is traded as something quantifiable and comparable—as something that participates in the exchange of goods. With the increasing establishment of the world of commodities in the sense of the quantitative and qualitative expansion of the capitalist mode of production, the appearance of the self-evident nature of this perspective is consolidated. Eventually, the workers constantly and increasingly produce the dominant and exploitative conditions in or through their work (MEW 23: 596). What Marx calls ideology is precisely this illusory appearance. The worker takes part in this illusory appearance without recognizing it. There is a “false consciousness” in the worker’s inability to recognize their part in these power relations. The far-reaching role of social production conditions is misunderstood. The institutionalized and infrastructural aspects of work are underestimated, and the attitudes as well as intentions of individuals are overrated with respect to the working process. It is here that we can make the connection to educational-philosophical reflections: To what extent are education and modern schooling accomplices of capitalism and ideology?6 Are schooling and education possibly affected by reification and alienation? Is it possible to conceive of education as a liberating practice that moves beyond alienation? While Marx understood himself as a political thinker, there have been considerable attempts to translate his philosophy of practice into the context of education. Educational approaches following Marx Among the numerous thinkers influenced by Marx, the educational work of Paolo Freire (1921–97) has been very important and influential. Freire came from the Brazilian middle class. After training and working as a lawyer, he taught Portuguese. Over time, he became convinced that the students were restricted by a reified idea of education, which he referred to as “banking education,” wherein ideas are deposited in passive, obedient learners. Freire believed that if education does not generate critical awareness (conscientização; Freire 1973)— revealing one’s own participation in oppression, as well as the problems of

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a banking education on the whole—liberation is inconceivable (Freire 1994). Freire’s own pedagogical practice and his conception of education were, therefore, never just about learning how to read and write but always about developing students’ and teachers’ awareness of having a democratic voice of their own—a voice that is capable of opposing oppression.7 Freire’s thinking was closely associated with liberation theology, and he placed a strong emphasis on the cultivation of a meaningful language from which a changed dialogue could emerge. For Freire, an intact dialogue preserves the reflection and action within words (in contrast to meaningless, i.e., alienated speech; see Freire 1994: ch. 3). This way, speech and dialogue enable the encounter of human beings and their common political practice. For Freire, liberation is a communal act that requires hope and solidarity. His account of (educational) dialogue certainly deviates from Marx’s idea that economic structures are primordial (and that culture is an epiphenomenon). However, Freire follows Marx to the extent that the oppressed have to understand their active participation in domination so that they can overcome their surrender to fate. Freire’s theoretical and practical work has had a tremendous impact both in the critique of colonial power structures and in the course of civil rights movements in various countries (Duarte 2018). It is also an important point of reference for various approaches and strands that are summarized under the term “Critical Pedagogy.” After what has been argued in this section, it should come as no surprise that critical pedagogy assumes the existence of structural power relations and domination. For Peter McLaren—a central figure in critical pedagogy—this awareness calls for an emphatic demand for a revolutionary liberation or a “revolutionary critical pedagogy” (McLaren 2000; McLaren, Macrine, and Hill 2010). Its task is to make visible the domination connected with everyday life and to demonstrate critically how education is subjected to commodification and economization. Henry Giroux’s studies are anchored in the public significance of culture and education. The critical scope of Giroux’s work is directed against the very diverse forms of political and corporate indoctrination, placing a specific focus on neoliberalism and the dismantling of democracy (see, e.g., Giroux 2004, 2006). Douglas Kellner, a third figure who needs to be mentioned in this context, has intensively examined the different strands and traditions of critical pedagogy, not only emphasizing the role of British cultural studies and its analysis of cultural practices (Kellner 1997) but also reflecting on the connections to the cultural analyses of the Frankfurt School (“culture industry”; Kellner 2006; Kellner and Share 2019). Following the lead of cultural studies, the sphere of culture is the terrain of symbolic processes of exchange and identity formation—and thus a space of power and domination. Understanding the cultural sphere enables changes and critique in relation to society and culture.

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Furthermore, Douglas Kellner placed a strong emphasis on the role of media and (global) mediality in his work. Overall, the richness of critical pedagogy rests on its differentiated analyses of society and culture as well as its ability to connect productively various theoretical approaches. Furthermore, the scope and impact of this influential group of scholars is relevant for opening the field of debate beyond academia—by making connections to the field of educational practice and a wider public.

THE FATE OF REIFICATION: ENGAGING WITH THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL On the genesis and development of the project of a critical theory of society The establishment of the Frankfurt “Institute for Social Research” (IfS, see Figure 8.1), whose research tradition was first referred to as the “Frankfurt School” in the 1960s, goes back to a group of Marxist intellectuals in the early 1920s. The group, to which Karl Korsch (1881–1961) and Georg Lukács (1885–1971) belonged, discussed how a Marxist revolution could still succeed in view of the suppression of the revolutionary aspirations in Germany in 1919. This question was connected to the task of an intellectual return to Marxism. In his influential text, “History and Class Consciousness” (1923), Georg Lukács offers an interpretation that connects this return to the advanced alienation of contemporary society. According to Lukács, the state of alienation and reification has become a general and total state in the society of the time: “Just as the capitalist system produces and reproduces itself economically at an elevated level, so in the course of the development of capitalism the structure of reification sinks deeper and deeper, more fateful and more constitutive into the consciousness of the people” (Lukács 1968: 185, my translation). Lukács asserts a systematic expansion of capitalism that simply cannot be understood in the sense of progressive rationalization (as can be seen in the Taylorist mode of production; Lukács 1968: 177). The totality of alienation and objectification is fixed in the orientation of the entire social life toward the character of commodities. It follows that an “abstract-quantitative form of calculability” (p. 177) now determines social relations and social identities. The alienated relations are thus no longer centered around the capitalist mode of production; they also unfold their effects and consequences in other areas of social life. Thus, reification becomes man’s “second nature” (p. 260). Insofar as it is necessary to appropriately conceptualize these developments, the research task of a Marxistinformed social analysis begins to take shape. This aim is an important point of departure for the IfS. The IfS was established in Frankfurt am Main, which was affiliated with the recently founded university (1914), thanks to the generous donation of

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FIGURE 8.1  The Institute for Social Research (IfS) after having been closed and taken over by the National Socialists in March 1933 (printed with the kind permission of the Archive Centre of the Frankfurt University Library, Unit Na 1, No. 1292)

Hermann Weil, a resident entrepreneur who supported numerous humanitarian and charitable causes. Max Horkheimer became director of the IfS in 1931, after the first director of the Institute, Carl Grünberg, had a stroke. However, the IfS’s work in Frankfurt was short-lived; after the National Socialist “Machtergreifung” (seizure of power), the IfS was closed in March 1933. Horkheimer succeeded both in transferring the assets of the IfS’s foundation

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abroad prior to their confiscation by the National Socialists and in moving the IfS to Columbia University in New York (for more on the history of the IfS and its members, see Jay 1973; Jeffries 2016; Wiggershaus 1994). The political events surrounding the IfS and its members offer a glimpse of the topics and issues they dealt with. The Marxist perspective on the development of modern capitalist society was linked to the question of how to understand the rise and success of nationalist movements (as classspanning mass phenomena). In his 1931 inaugural speech as director of the IfS, Horkheimer spoke of the task of investigating the relationship between “the economic life of society, the psychological development of individuals and changes in cultural areas in the narrower sense” (Horkheimer 1988: 32, my translation). Beyond the Marxist program, the task was to investigate the psychological developments of individuals in interaction with economic, social, and cultural conditions. Introduced by Erich Fromm (1900–1980), psychoanalysis offered productive theoretical connections to the work carried out at the IfS. From the very beginning, Fromm’s FreudianMarxist perspective played a central role in the IfS’s work on understanding “authoritarianism.” In the following, this perspective will be presented in a more detailed way because it is very important for understanding the researchers’ take on education at the IfS. The studies on authoritarianism In the interdisciplinary study “Authority and Family,” published in Paris in 1936, the researchers at the IfS analyze the subjugating adaptation and authoritarian serfdom in the society of the time. According to the authors, the latter phenomena are misunderstood if they are related to a small fragment of the population, a somewhat “uncivilized rest” in an otherwise modern society. As Horkheimer shows in the main section, for which he was responsible, these phenomena also correlate with the rational and utilitarian modern mindset. The primary site of consolidation of the authoritarian structure is the family. The head of the family is a powerful father whose superiority—physical, moral, and economic—is complete. According to Horkheimer, upbringing in such an authoritarian family constellation, in which the children (and the wife) are committed to unconditional and fateful obedience, forms the starting point for the so-called authoritarian character: For the development of the authoritarian character it is particularly decisive that the children learn under the pressure of the father not to attribute every failure to its social causes, but to stop at the individual ones and to hypostasize them either religiously as guilt or naturalistically as lack of talent  … The result of a fatherly upbringing are people who from the outset seek the fault with themselves. (Horkheimer 1987: 59, my translation)

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Horkheimer offers an interpretation of how people, due to the existing family power structures, take social reality, with its economic rationality calculations, for granted and simply accept it. This is the birth of the weak ego. From this moment onward, this ego seeks satisfaction and pleasure in identifying with an authoritarian entity. People masochistically begin to negate themselves, to suppress their own needs, desires, and even their own individuality, as Erich Fromm worked out in the socio-psychological part of the study “Authority and Family” (Fromm 1987). The members of the IfS agreed that this mechanism was an important operational moment in the National Socialist ideology. In his famous 1966 lecture “Education after Auschwitz,” Adorno notes that the authoritarian or manipulative character is characterized by organizational frenzy, by an inability to have any direct human experience at all, by a certain kind of emotionlessness, by superior realism. The manipulative character wants to pursue alleged, albeit delusional, realpolitik at all costs. S/he does not think or wish for even one second the world differently than it is, obsessed by the will of doing things [in Engl.], to do things, indifferent to the content of such doing. (1971a: 97, my translation) The consequences of the educational relationships described in this section are to be understood as alienation or reification, which according to Adorno make it impossible to have “direct human experiences” (1971a: 97). With this expression, which incidentally can be found in numerous writings by Adorno, he qualifies the behavior and conduct of Nazi myrmidons such as Rudolf Höss (commandant of Auschwitz) and Adolf Eichmann (the bureaucrat responsible for the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps). Because they identified themselves completely with the national collective, they lost their intellectual and perceptual ability to experience. The reification, which is understood as the extinction of the self, is heroicized as (sacrificial) service to the nation (Thompson 2019). Submission to the national ideal is completely affirmed, since it ensures social recognition and the possibility of having others at one’s disposal under the given circumstances.8 Pedagogy and authoritarianism When thinking about the pedagogical implications of authoritarianism, it is crucial to consider the specific historical situation in which Adorno, as an important public intellectual in post–National Socialist Germany, addresses in numerous radio speeches, see Figure 8.2 (Adorno 1971b): namely, the refusal of the Germans to face up to their responsibility for the murder of six million Jews. Adorno sees in this refusal precisely the reification of the self that prevents intellectual experience. In this regard, it should be noted that

FIGURE 8.2  Adorno at one of his public lectures in Berlin in 1965 (printed with the kind permission of the Regional Archive Berlin, F Rep. 290, No. 108608; photograph by Karl-Heinz Schubert)

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numerous National Socialists were able to remain in their positions long after the Nazi regime had come to an end. This continuity of personnel in the areas of law, administration, and politics played a significant role in hindering the investigation and prosecution of National Socialist crimes within the context of the Federal Republic (West Germany).9 This is what Adorno was referring to when he stated that the conditions that had made Auschwitz possible had not yet been overcome; on the contrary, these conditions continued to permeate the newly founded republic. Adorno’s utmost demand is that education take place in such a way that it prevents Auschwitz from ever happening again, an idea articulated in his famous essay “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (Education after Auschwitz) (Adorno 1971a). There is a profound moral impulse in this demand: it requires that we admit that the relapse into barbarism was not all that long ago and that these crimes against humanity were in no way prevented. Education thus becomes a site of social responsibility, which generates in educators, learners, and the public a continuous reflection on what it means to educate “after Auschwitz.” This form of reflection could indeed lead to people’s attitude of “noncooperation,” a conviction not to cooperate with group-related enmity and the associated “Angst” toward difference. Following Kant, Adorno considered such an attitude as a sign of autonomy (Adorno 1971a: 93). However, the social reality in post–National Socialist Germany was very different. Forgetting and repression were ever-present features of postwar society, which ultimately meant that the democratic constitution appeared to the population at large to be something external and interchangeable (cf. Adorno 1971c: 15). To summarize, education after Auschwitz means critically facing the conditions that made Auschwitz possible instead of returning to those humanist theories that did not prevent barbarism.

CRITICAL THEORY AT ITS LIMITS: ON THE LIMITS OF AN EXPERIENCE OF REIFICATION On the “totality of false consciousness” In their influential work “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” written while in American exile and published in 1947, Horkheimer and Adorno analyze the development of modern civilization in terms of its contradictory and even reverse dynamics (Horkheimer and Adorno 1987). Enlightenment, progress, and the improvement of the world turn out to be an extensive relation of domination: What human beings seek to learn from nature is to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness.

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Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944/2002: 2; Ger.: Horkheimer and Adorno 1987: 26) In the “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Horkheimer and Adorno follow a philosophical criticism that has put the development of Western civilization under the cipher of rationalization and disenchantment. Whereas Husserl (1976) speaks of the “forgetfulness of the lifeworld,” Horkheimer and Adorno note the focus on facts has triumphed over every other aspect of nature and life. According to the development of modern science following Bacon and Descartes, methodological control has become a pivotal moment in the production of knowledge. Objects are measured against a scale that is supposed to be independent of the object and the production of knowledge. Thus, the production of knowledge brings about a twofold domination: in relation to the objects of knowledge, there is an advancement of a technical-instrumental control of nature; the subjects, in turn, take up the perspective of objectifiability and comparability (toward the world and themselves): “The equation of mind and world is finally resolved, but only in the sense that both sides cancel out” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944/2002: 20; Ger.: Horkheimer and Adorno 1987: 49). In other words, the functionality of knowledge production rests on the control and self-identity of the knowing subject. Consequently, everything that is natural and undisciplined must be excluded. Everything not conforming to these epistemological and methodological restrictions is declared irrelevant or nonexistent. Using the figure of Homer’s Ulysses, Horkheimer and Adorno illustrate the “unspeakable effort” required by the compulsion of identity. We need only recall briefly how Ulysses, through the cunning of having himself tied to the mast of his ship, buys self-assertion through self-suppression. In order to hear the seductive song of the sirens, Ulysses must give up the freedom of his actions and, moreover, do violence to his desires and inclinations. It is the so-called introversion of the sacrifice—its internalization—that grants identity. For the purpose of self-preservation, the ego’s effort is needed to “hold itself together” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944/2002: 26; Ger.: Horkheimer and Adorno 1987: 56). This is where the Western model of Reason comes into play, which produces a self-identical subject—one oriented toward the rationality of means and ends. That which does not serve the purpose of preservation and enhancement, that is, does not conform to this logic, is erased, including physical and emotional impulses. The case of Ulysses reveals another relationship of domination, which consists in the fact that, unlike Ulysses, the crew of the ship is obliged to row past the island (their ears covered with wax). They do not enjoy the siren song. The social division of labor, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, partakes in the compulsions and constraints of modern society.

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The essayistic form of the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” documents just how far-reaching the failure of Western Reason is. A philosophical treatise, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, is neither adequate nor appropriate in light of the collapse of civilization in the twentieth century, that is, the industrially organized mass murder of millions of people. The fact that a relapse into barbarism could even occur radically challenges the idea of an enlightened Reason. The self-conviction of being a rational being obscures how modern life is entangled in inhumane practice (Horkheimer and Adorno 1987). According to Horkheimer and Adorno, human existence is placed within the totality of false consciousness. Critics of the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” have characterized this position as a “negative philosophy of history.” In a reversal to the progressive, optimistic positions of enlightened modernism (Herder, Schiller), the historicalphilosophical understanding of Horkheimer and Adorno consists in the fact that they see no escape from the totality of false consciousness and thus effectively pull the ground out from under the feet of philosophical reflection as a whole. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, this “ontology of the false state” has problematic consequences for “critique” and “criticism.” If alienation includes all areas of human experience, what can be the foundation of critical statements? Do Horkheimer and Adorno simply overstretch their idea of total delusion? In the sense of a radicalization of the alienation problem, however, Horkheimer and Adorno’s position could be understood differently. If alienation is constitutive for the basic structure of the subject itself (cf. Adorno 1966: 10), then the role of philosophy changes. The latter is, from the very beginning, burdened with the guilt and responsibility of doing justice to the world and the subject by exploring and criticizing what is lost in and through identification. This is exactly what Adorno’s philosophical project of a “negative dialectic” comprises. “It should be … a dialectic not of identity but of non-identity. It is the outline of a philosophy which does not presuppose the concept of identity of being and thinking, nor does it terminate in it. Rather it seeks to articulate just the opposite, i.e. the separation of concept and thing, of subject and object, and their irreconcilability” (Adorno 2003b: 15–16, my translation). Adorno’s use of a negative dialectic is closely intertwined with a critique of the philosophy of identity—the philosophy on which the Western metaphysical project is based and that strives to determine what something is (ti estin). Even Hegel’s dialectic, which propels knowledge in and through contradiction, according to Adorno’s criticism, is based on the trust in the identifiability of the object. Adorno opposes this epistemological relation of concept and thing. The nonidentical brings into focus the awareness and experience that “concept” and “thing” do not correspond to subject and object.

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Adorno is aware that the process of thinking, which is characterized as a process of judgment that seeks to identify things, has no epistemological alternative. Therefore, the negative dialectic remains bound to the highest categories of identity philosophy (Adorno 2003b: 150). In other words, the negative dialectic does not escape “thinking as identifying.” But through its work, philosophy preserves the possibility of reconciliation, which can only exist in appearance.10 If the concept of alienation is used in this context, it is primarily to put itself in a twofold critical relationship to language: a critique of (the phenomenon of) alienation, combined with a critique of (the concept of) alienation. In other words, the concept of alienation becomes itself a matter of critical elaboration. Therefore, critical practice works on its matters and on itself. It is a radicalized practice without having solid ground under its feet (Jay 2019). An essential mechanism of this twofold critical relationship is to reveal the failure of the concepts in the practice of identification. Adorno, following Hegel, describes this as “definite negation” (Hegel 1970: 49). But unlike Hegel, who interprets this particular negation as the starting point for a (positive) positioning of the object by consciousness, Adorno holds on to the negation of the negated: “If the whole is the spell, if it is the negative, a negation of particularities—epitomized in that whole—remains negative. Its only positive side would be criticism, definite negation; it would not be a circumventing result with a happy grasp of affirmation” (2000: 158–9; Ger.: Adorno 1966: 161). Instead of viewing particular negation as an intermediate phase to positive knowledge (“happy grasp of affirmation”), Adorno sees it as a testimony to what is problematic in the generation of knowledge. This can be seen as the starting point for an educational experience, from which—through the tension between determination and negation—new perspectives on objects are produced (Schäfer 2002: 215).11 Bildung as experience: Negativity—promise—aporia In Adorno’s work, quite a number of passages can be identified in which philosophy refers to “educational experience” (bildende Erfahrung) and is distinguished from reified consciousness. In its process-like character, educational experience, or Bildung,12 can be understood as a mode of confrontation with objects in which the individual experiencing is not overcome by the pull to identify and classify the world. In this process, the individual experiences the negativity of experience as an experience of the limitation of their own established perspective and knowledge. However, the negativity of Bildung or educational experience also impacts how we understand educational theory as well, as Adorno (2003a) shows in his seminal conference contribution “Theorie der Halbbildung.”13 Here, Adorno

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demonstrates that Bildung—as an important bearer of the modern promise of freedom and equality—has become a privilege of the bourgeois class, making it an instrument of status (pp. 97–8). Adorno contends that Bildung is instrumentalized in various ways: instead of it engendering a vital confrontation between the living subject and the world, it involves a superficial and cultureindustrial engagement with objects, wherein the subject’s main concern is self-preservation in the world of social competition: “The perennial ‘statussociety’ absorbs what remains of Bildung and transforms it into emblems of status” (p.  108, my translation). Bildung regresses to “Halbbildung,” which implies a self-interested mode of “thinking as identifying.” Even after its decay, Adorno contends that we nevertheless hold on to the idea of Bildung. But our engagement with Bildung is not what it once was; it has been transformed into critique. If, however, the mind only does what is socially right, as long as it does not dissolve into the indiscriminate identity with society, then the anachronism is time: to hold on to Bildung after society has withdrawn its basis. Bildung, in turn, has no other possibility of survival than by critical reflection on the Halbbildung into which Bildung has necessarily transformed. (p.  121, my translation) This concluding quote of the “Theorie der Halbbildung” has implications for educational theory: from the perspective of negative dialectics, educational theory, for one, cannot be separated from the critical reflection of societal structures and developments, and for another, it has to confront its own conceptual and idealistic contradictions. Several educational-philosophical thinkers have taken this notion of negativity and the aporetic critical project of educational theory as the starting point for their thinking about education. To conclude this section, I will name a few key positions. In his educational studies, Andreas Gruschka emphasizes the constitutive role of critique against so-called “educational postulates” (Postulatepädagogik; Gruschka 2004). According to Gruschka, work in the field of educational theory cannot simply return to prescriptive educational programs. Rather, the starting point of educational theory is the confrontation with problematic social developments, for example the “social coldness” (gesellschaftliche Kälte) that also can be found in educational institutions. In his educational-philosophical contributions, Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (2005) employs critique and negativity in a different way. In his view, educational theory is about turning away from dehumanization. Gur-Ze’ev takes up the works of Adorno, Benjamin, and Horkheimer in his account of “counter-education”: “[W]ithin the framework of negative Utopia, counter-education if true to itself, does not need more than this presence of the absence, as dwelling in exile, as a meaningful homelessness, as a worthy religiousness in a Godless world” (2002: 393). Gur-Ze’ev equally

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criticizes (naïve) optimism and (destructive) pessimism. Counter-education is based on the hope that there is a way to go beyond the present experiences of suffering and loss of meaning. It is therefore an educational, a moral, and a political issue. While Gur-Ze’ev emphasizes the turn against dehumanization, Itay Snir (2017) works on changing our understanding of educational theory in the light of a minima pedagogica—as a renunciation of a “grand theory.” In a related sense Schäfer (2002, 2004) and Thompson (2009) conceive of educational theory as a project that is bound to negativity. Categories such as “education” (or Bildung) and “experience” require ongoing theoretical explorations with respect to the possibilities to disclose and criticize social reality. Thus, education and educational theory have an aporetic character. Time and again, they call for our critical engagement.

CONCLUSION: CRITIQUE AS A “BASIC EDUCATIONAL CONCEPT” This chapter has presented the various educational conceptions and contributions that are based on critical theory following Marx and the Frankfurt School. The common point of reference is the concept of “alienation” in its various epistemological constructions and educational translations. For Marx, in his critique of political economy, “alienation” points to alienated work and the contradictions within bourgeois society. Accordingly, critical pedagogical approaches conceptualize education as a process of liberation and emancipation as opposed to oppressing political and educational conditions. The members of the Frankfurt School radicalized the concept of alienation by identifying the social pathologies that arise from the advancement of a modern capitalist society. One of the most problematic consequences of these pathologies is the birth of authoritarian personality—which is based on a subjugating and even violent “education” or rather upbringing that reifies the mind and makes experience impossible. In “Education after Auschwitz,” Adorno reflects critically on these social pathologies, as well as on their continuity after the end of National Socialism. In the final part of the chapter, I explored Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in terms of the inner problematic of Western rationality and subjectivity. If the problem of alienation is deeply rooted in the Western idea of the rational subject, then educational experiences and Bildung are about disclosing the reductive frameworks of human experience, yet without being able to overcome them fully. These different critical conceptions or modes of education have formed their own lines of traditions that remain important even today. However, prominent figures such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth have also continued to advance the philosophical school of critical theory. Whereas these figures do not

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fall directly within the scope of this volume, it is important to mention that they also have had a tremendous influence on the philosophy of education (Bünger and Mayer 2018). It was above all Habermas’s (1981) idea of “communicative rationality” that helped critical theory to be widely received in the discipline of education; interpretations of education on these lines have overall been more influential than the abovementioned idea of Bildung that builds on aporia and negativity (Kelle 1992; Peukert 1983). With communication as a sphere of critically emancipatory practice, the emerging paradigm of critical pedagogy in Germany (e.g., with Mollenhauer 1973) found its central epistemological interest (Erkenntnisinteresse) in “emancipation” (Habermas 1968). Notwithstanding the further development of the philosophical school of “critical theory,” we can find a differentiated terrain of educational contributions that follow the conceptual pathways developed in this chapter. At least a few of them shall be mentioned. With reference to Marx, there has been a renewed interest and revival in the humanities (see, e.g., Quante 2018)—regardless of the so-called “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992). One important dimension of educational-philosophical research is about the unlivable living conditions. In a time when it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Fisher 2019), it becomes more urgent to relate the global crises to our ways of life. The social division between rich and poor has reached a point where large segments of the population in the Global South can no longer even be exploited as workers (Mbembe 2017). Precarization is evident everywhere (Lorey 2015). These processes also have an educational reference. Should educationalists make sure that everyone is able to optimize their lives in accordance with economic development, a view that is supported by the OECD? From the standpoint of critical theory, it is vital to scrutinize the ongoing reduction of learning and education to “selfoptimization” and “human capital” (Czejkowska 2010). Marx’s perspective makes it possible for us to pose the question of what a livable life looks like while staring directly into the face of global market capitalism. It has already been mentioned that the research on authoritarianism remains an important and established feature of social psychology to this day. Given the (re-)emergence of anti-Semitism and the rise of (right-wing) populism, this research has become acutely relevant and has also sparked a renewed interest in the original studies by the Frankfurt School. Milbradt (2018) describes an authoritarian character “in postfactual times.” Authoritarianism and antiSemitism are conceptualized as specific language forms or language practices that are spread in contemporary post-digital communication spaces. Gordon (2018), in turn, takes up critical theory’s studies on authoritarianism in his account of trumpism. Here, as well, communication practices have changed, that is, the transformation of political culture toward a “spectacle of a commentariat” (Gordon 2018: 70). We are confronted with a discourse that is no longer oriented toward truth. Rather, this discourse ultimately serves the

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flow of affects that can be politically instrumentalized. Adorno would certainly have used the terms of reification and alienation to conceptualize the impact of such a discourse. In 2019, a lecture by Adorno on right-wing radicalism (held in 1967) was published for the first time (Adorno 2019). The parallels that can be drawn to today are—to use a Freudian term—uncanny. Therefore, it is crucial to update the problem of authoritarianism in the face of a (post-)digital global market society with its tendencies of de-civilization and renationalization. One central educational issue will be to reconsider the meaning of “citizenship education” with a particular focus on the formation of the “political subject” and in light of the current crisis of liberal democracy. With respect to the radicalized view of the “totality of false consciousness,” I would like to draw a connection to contemporary contributions on the state and reliability of critique. It has become an accepted diagnosis that social analysis and critique have been appropriated by the capitalist logic of innovation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007), for example, in the demand for permanent self-optimization (Bröckling 2016). This has brought about a renewed discussion concerning the normative foundations of critique or criticism (Jaeggi and Wesche 2009). It is interesting to note that there has been at the same time a renewed interest in the category of “alienation” (Honneth 2005; Jaeggi 2016). These developments and contributions can be interpreted as a form of categorical reflection—as an insight that our practice of criticism depends on our relationship to the concepts we use. Is it not precisely this point that Adorno described as an educational experience: to confront ourselves with the shortcomings of “thinking as identifying” and to search for that which has been lost in it? This chapter concludes by suggesting that we understand critique as a basic educational concept. Critique is the mark of educational experience, or Bildung, in that it lays open the shortcomings of our world-disclosing practices. Furthermore, critique is crucial for the philosophy of education because it links conceptual work to historical, as well as societal, structures and developments. This linkage also means that the productivity of critical theory lies in material analyses—and in its ability to allow others to think (differently). Critique is a basic concept of education precisely because it does not rest on an anthropoontological state based in freedom and equality. The unfulfillment of freedom and equality remains both the starting point and the driving force of a critical theory, and practice, of education.

NOTES 1

This term is used here as a translation for “Totalität des Verblendungszusam­ menhangs.” It is important to note that this term differs from what Marx calls “false consciousness.” Horkheimer and Adorno think social reality as a total and contextual structure of illusionary appearances. From an epistemological point of view, this means that there is no standpoint free from these appearances.

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  2 MEW, which stands for Marx-Engels-Werke, is the standard way of citing the scholarly edition of the complete works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and will be used in this chapter.   3 It is not possible in this chapter to go into detail with respect to the societal transformations from an agrarian society to an urbanized industrial society.   4 In the economic-philosophical manuscripts, alienation is understood as man’s loss or falling away from his true nature. This anthropological figure, according to the criticism of Louis Althusser (1968), is based on the uncovered precondition of a “natural human being.” In addition to this anthropology-critical position, however, there are others who reread Marx’s relationship to nature (e.g., most recently Butler 2019).   5 The first volume, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, brings together previous studies by Marx on the production process of capital. After Marx passed away in 1883, Engels compiled two further volumes from the manuscripts Marx left behind. Already within Marx’s lifetime, a number of revisions were made by Marx and Engels. These and other editorial revisions are currently being published in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities project Marx–Engels– Gesamtausgabe (MEGA; planned completion in 2025), including the previously unpublished manuscripts. The writings in Capital are collected in the second section and have already been published. In 2013, the first volume of Capital and The Communist Manifesto were included in the Register of Document Heritage of UNESCO.   6 The French philosopher Louis Althusser has analyzed schools as “ideological state apparatuses” for bourgeois society and its orientation toward achievement and universalism (Althusser 2010: 64–70).   7 It is probably not surprising that Freire was also politically persecuted because of his activities. After a military coup in Brazil, he was placed under arrest and later fled into exile in Chile.   8 Adorno’s diagnosis relies on the studies on the “Authoritarian Personality” (Adorno et al. 1982) that he published together with Elke Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The aim of the study was to investigate the spread of prejudice and the receptivity of individuals to ideological interpretations of the world (Adorno et al. 1982: 3). This study has become a classic text of social psychology and is still highly regarded. Adorno, however, has been skeptical concerning the empirical positivism of the study (Thompson 2019; Ziege 2019).   9 It is worth mentioning here that the Hessian General Prosecutor Fritz Bauer, who initiated the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–5), had to conceal his knowledge of Adolf Eichmann’s whereabouts from the German authorities, since the latter, as Bauer had unfortunately come to realize, were protecting the perpetrators. Bauer, instead, contacted the Israeli authorities. 10 There is a theoretical kinship to Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history. Benjamin (1940) contrasted a history that was designed for progress and improvement with a discontinuous experience of time from which a social or even utopian transformation could emerge. For an exploration of the theory of experience, see Jay (2004). 11 At this point one can see the parallel to the anti-substantialist thinking of poststructuralism. Cf. Saar 2019. 12 The concept of Bildung has played a key role in the political and social language of Germany since 1800. From an educational-philosophical point of view, it is connected to an idea of self-formation that realizes modern society as a manifold of

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individual existence (Humboldt). Here, the conception of “liberal education” comes to the fore. For more, in English, on the concept of Bildung, see Løvlie (2002). 13 The German term “Halbbildung” is used by Adorno as a counter-concept to Bildung: “Halbbildung” is the “deadly enemy” of Bildung. It is difficult to translate the concept into English. The prefix “Halb-” means “half” in the sense of “halfhearted.” So Halbbildung refers to a severely compromised Bildung.

REFERENCES Primary sources Adorno, Theodor W. (1966), Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (1971a), “Erziehung nach Auschwitz,” in Gerd Kadelbach (ed.), Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, 88–104, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (1971b), Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (1971c), “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,” in Gerd Kadelbach (ed.), Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, 10–28, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (1973), Studien zum autoritären Charakter, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (2000), Negative Dialectics, New York: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor W. (2003a), “Theorie der Halbbildung (1959),” in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 8, 93–121, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (2003b), Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (2019), Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W., Elke Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford (1982), The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Benjamin, Walter (1940/2003), “On the Concept of History,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–40, 389–400, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1968), Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen (1981), Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Honneth, Axel (2005), Verdinglichung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, Max (1987), “Allgemeiner Teil,” in Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse et al. (eds.), Studien über Autorität und Familie, 3–76, Lüneburg: Zu Klampen. Horkheimer, Max (1988), “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgabe eines Instituts für Sozialforschung,” in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, 20–35, Frankfurt: Fischer. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1944/2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1987), “Dialektik der Aufklärung,” in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 1940–1950, Vol. 5, 25–290, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lukács, Goerg (1968), Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik, Darmstadt: Luchterhand.

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Marx, Karl (1966), The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. M. Milligan, New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl (1990a), Das Kapital, Marx-Engels-Werke, Vol. 23, Berlin: Dietz. Marx, Karl (1990b), “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte,” in Marx-EngelsWerke, Vol. 40, Berlin: Dietz. Marx, Karl (2000), Capital, Vol. 1, London: Electric Book Publishers.

Secondary sources Althusser, Louis (1968), Für Marx, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Althusser, Louis (2010), Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate, ed. Frieder Otto Wolf, Hamburg: VSA. Böhme, Hartmut (2001), “Das Fetischismus-Konzept von Marx und sein Kontext,” in Volker Gerhardt (ed.), Marxismus: Versuch einer Bilanz, 289–319, Magdeburg: Scriptum. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello (2007), The New Spirit of Captialism, London: Verso. Bröckling, Ulrich (2016), The Entrepeneur Self Fabricating a New Type of Subject, trans. Steven Black, Los Angeles: Sage. Bünger, Carsten (2019), “Kritik,” in Gabriele Weiß and Jörg Zirfas (eds.), Handbuch Bildungsphilosophie, 161–73, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Bünger, Carsten and Ralf Mayer (2018), “Critical Theory and Its Aftermath,” in Paul Smeyers (ed.), International Handbook of Philosophy of Education, 569–90, Cham: Springer. Butler, Judith (2019), Rücksichtslose Kritik, Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. Czejkowska, Agnieszka (2010), “Wenn ich groß werde, werde ich Humankapital,” Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 86: 451–5. Duarte, Eduardo (2018), “Paolo Freire and Liberation Philosophy of Education,” in Paul Smeyers (ed.), International Handbook of Philosophy of Education, 175–85, Dordrecht: Springer. Fisher, Mark (2019), Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Winchester: O Books. Freire, Paolo (1973), Education for Critical Consciousness, New York: Seabury. Freire, Paolo (1994), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum. Fromm, Erich (1987), “Sozialpsychologischer Teil,” in Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse (eds.), Studien über Autorität und Familie, 77–135, Lüneburg: Zu Klampen. Fukuyama, Francis (1992), The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Macmillan. Giroux, Henry (2004), The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy, London: Paradigm Publishers. Giroux, Henry (2006), America on the Edge: Henry Giroux on Politics, Culture, and Education, New York: Palgrave. Gordon, Peter (2018), “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump,” in Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky (eds.), Authoritarianism, 45–84, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gruschka, Andreas (2004), “Kritische Pädagogik nach Adorno,” in Andreas Gruschka and Ulrich Oevermann (eds.), Die Lebendigkeit der kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie, 135–60, Wetzlar: Büchse der Pandora.

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Gur-Ze’ev, Ilan (2002), “‘Bildung’ and Critical Theory in the Face of Postmodern Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36 (3): 391–408. Gur-Ze’ev, Ilan (2005), “Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic Philosophy, Negative Theology, and Counter-Education,” Educational Theory, 55 (3): 343–65. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1970), Wissenschaft der Logik. Werke, Vol. 5, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Husserl, Edmund (1976), Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, The Hague: Nijhoff. Jaeggi, Rahel (2016), Alienation, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, New York: Columbia University Press. Jaeggi, Rahel and Thilo Wesche, eds. (2009), Was ist Kritik?, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Jay, Martin (1973), The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, Boston: Little, Brown. Jay, Martin (2004), “Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament,” in Tom Huhn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, 129–47, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jay, Martin (2019), “Ungrounded: Horkheimer and the Founding of the Frankfurt School,” in Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School, 223–44, Abingdon: Routledge. Jeffries, Stuart (2016), Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, London: Verso. Kelle, Helga (1992), Erziehungswissenschaft und Kritische Theorie: Zur Entwicklungsund Rezeptionsgeschichte, Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft. Kellner, Douglas (1997), “Critical Theory and British Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation,” in Jim McGuigan (ed.), Cultural Methodologies, 12–41, London: SAGE. Kellner, Douglas (2006), “Toward a Critical Theory of Education,” in Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (ed.), Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today: Toward a New Critical Language in Education, 49–69, Haifa: University of Haifa Press. Kellner, Douglas and Jeff Share, eds. (2019), The Critical Media Literacy Guide, Leiden: Brill/Sense. Lorey, Isabell (2015), Die Regierung der Prekären, Vienna: Turia + Kant. Løvlie, Lars (2002), “The Promise of Bildung,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36 (3): 467–86. Mbembe, Achille (2017), Critique of Black Reason, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McLaren, Peter (2000), Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McLaren, Peter, Sheila Macrine, and Dave Hill, eds. (2010), Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Educating for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-liberalism, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Milbradt, Björn (2018), Über autoritäre Haltungen in “postfaktischen” Zeiten, Opladen: Budrich. Modern Times, (1936), [Film] Dir. Charlie Chaplin, United Artists. Mollenhauer, Klaus (1973), Erziehung und Emanzipation, Munich: Juventa-Verlag. Peukert, Helmut (1983), “Kritische Theorie und Pädagogik,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 30 (2): 195–217. Quante, Michael (2018), Der unversöhnte Marx: Die Welt in Aufruhr, Münster: mentis.

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Saar, Martin (2019), “Critical Theory and Poststructuralism,” in Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School, 491–509, Abingdon: Routledge. Schäfer, Alfred (2002), “Solidarität mit der Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres Sturzes: Anmerkungen zur kritischen Rhetorik Adornos,” in Andreas Dörpinghaus and Karl Helmer (eds.), Rhetorik—Argumentation—Geltung, 205–20, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Schäfer, Alfred (2004), “Bildende Erfahrung und sozialisierte Selbstbehauptung: Zu Adornos ‘Theorie der Halbbildung,’” in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 80: 312–25. Snir, Itay (2017), “Minima Paedagogica: Education, Thinking, and Experience in Adorno,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 51 (2): 415–29. Thompson, Christiane (2009), Bildung und die Grenzen der Erfahrung, Paderborn: Schöningh. Thompson, Christiane (2019), “‘Über die Angst, verschieden zu sein’: Eine Lektüre zum ‘autoritären Charakter’ in Zeiten digitaler Überwachung,” in Sabine Andresen, Dieter Nittel, and Christiane Thompson (eds.), Erziehung nach Auschwitz bis heute. Aufklärungsanspruch und Gesellschaftsanalyse, 221–38, Frankfurt: Fachbereich Erziehungswissenschaften der Goethe-Universität. Wiggershaus, Rolf (1994), The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ziege, Eva-Maria (2019), “Nachwort der Herausgeberin,” in Eva-Maria Ziege (ed.), Theodor W. Adorno: Bemerkungen zu “The Authoritarian Personality” und weitere Texte, 133–60, Berlin: Suhrkamp.

CHAPTER NINE

Education and the Linguistic Turn PAUL STANDISH

The linguistic turn in philosophy has shown that our thought overwhelmingly arises through our capacities in language and that language depends upon the public circulation of signs. This, as the following discussion tries to show, has a bearing on notions of the inner and the outer, of subject and object. Language, we might say, is neither inner nor outer to the human being but the very medium in which human being is possible and the world comes to light. It is in our lives in language that the inner/outer distinction can make sense and within them that contrasts between subjectivity and objectivity find their footing. If we do not see this, we risk slipping into the fantasy that we can step outside the world, outside reality. But this is a fantasy that, in the modern world, has embedded itself in many ways of thinking—not least in education. My discussion illustrates the problem and makes some suggestions about what can be done about it. A podcast of a program in the excellent BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time,1 hosted by Melvyn Bragg, features Ray Monk, Stephen Mulhall, and Julia Tanney discussing Ordinary Language Philosophy. Ordinary Language Philosophy—associated especially with the work of J.L. Austin (1911–60) and Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), and in a less explicit way with the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)—came to the fore as an approach to philosophy in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It is perhaps a surprise, then, that a substantial part of the discussion in the program dwells on the work and influence of Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), who was writing

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several decades earlier. Frege revolutionized the study of logic, was of profound importance in the philosophy of mathematics, and especially in his work Sense and Reference (1892), established a line of inquiry that was to be enormously influential for the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein visited Frege in Jena in 1911, and it was at Frege’s suggestion that he subsequently contacted Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). These are moments of fundamental significance in the background to the story of philosophy’s “linguistic turn,” a story that leads through the establishment of modern analytical philosophy to the departures from its central tenets effected especially by the later Wittgenstein and by Austin. The account to be developed here shares much with this history, but we shall begin by going further back, and in the process we shall reach beyond what has been, in spite of the crucial part played by philosophers writing in German, a predominantly and characteristically Anglophone line of thought. To reach beyond this is to acknowledge that, during this period, there has been growing attention to language in other European traditions of thought. That shift of attention has been less remarkable because it is more natural where philosophy has been aligned rather with the humanities than with the (physical) sciences. In fact, a line from Shakespeare can provide a pointer to the central concern: “[T]here is nothing either good or bad,’” Hamlet remarks, “but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2). This appears at first blush to be a remark about the nature of value—that value is something that human beings confer on the world. But it can also be read with the accent not on the value-words, “good” and “bad,” but on “nothing” and, hence, in a more ontological way: there is a relation between the being of things (between what a thing is in the ordinary sense) and thought. Given that language is overwhelmingly the element of human thought, Hamlet’s remark might be restated as, “There is nothing either good or bad, but language makes it so.” But these claims plainly need exploration and substantiation, and at this stage they serve mainly as pointers to the discussion. By no means could it be said that the philosophers alluded to here were leading figures in the development of the philosophy of education. Nevertheless, their ideas have laid the way for consideration of education in largely unprecedented ways, and in what follows I shall illustrate this through reference to fruitful examples of work in the field over the last thirty years. In the main, however, I shall follow a line of thought that will lead through Wittgenstein and be developed in relation to Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and, later, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)—a line that is fundamentally concerned with what language is, what it is to come into language, and what, therefore, it is to come into the world. To use the expression “come into” is to move tentatively here, avoiding the familiar assumption that language is something we “acquire” in the way that we might acquire a new skill, and suggesting that our entry into community and world is not just additional to but constitutive of who and

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what we are. To enter into these practices is to learn what to do, and this is not something we do simply as a matter of biological maturation: our behavior is shaped through copying and being corrected, by being guided and sometimes explicitly taught. These are constitutive features of what a practice is. While young animals (higher animals, at least) learn to cope with their environments by copying the behavior of the adults around them, this process issues only in a kind of repetition; in human practices, by contrast, there is always the possibility of new departure and originality, and this openness of meaning is the basis of culture, the ground of education. The discussion that follows interweaves questions concerning the development of human subjectivity with questions about objectivity, knowledge, and value— all integral to an understanding of language. At the end of the discussion, I shall raise some criticisms of contemporary educational practice in the light of the discussion.

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION Widely held contemporary assumptions about language’s relation to thought are betrayed in the idea of communication: language is typically taken to be an “instrument” of communication that one “acquires.” In the course of the latter half of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world, the term “communication” acquired a certain vogue: “Communications” was sometimes studied rather than “English.” Clearly this signaled the need for practical competence in a variety of transactional and especially vocational settings, and it chimed nicely with the rise of communications technologies, whose structuring of thought came to imbue the substance and method of education in various ways and to affect adversely the understanding of language. A starting point for communications is the following schema: A has a thought that she wishes to convey to B; she codes the thought in words and speaks, and B decodes the words she hears; if all goes well, B has the same thought as A. That this view is hardly new is apparent from the fact that Aristotle, in Of Interpretation (pt. 1), affirms similar ideas: Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. (Aristotle, Of Interpretation 1) Let us note three assumptions within these remarks. First, Aristotle takes it that differences between languages are incidental to the business of thought and, hence, that “mental experiences” exist in some sense independently of speech. Second, there is the assumption of a correlation between such experiences and

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things in the world: there is a natural fit between thought and world. And, third, the mental experience of things is believed to be the same for all people. The difficulties of translation perhaps encourage human beings—not least those who are monolingual—in the complacent assumption that there is a natural fit between their own language and the world, such that other languages must in principle match tidily onto their own. The attractions of Aristotle’s account are, then, partly to be found in its seeming confirmation of common sense. There is a history of similar theorizations that extends through the centuries. One facet of these is that the subject (the person speaking or writing) is conceived of as fundamentally an isolated thinking being who makes contact with the world beyond herself through the instrument of language. The subject is separated both from the objects of experience and from the language that will be her instrument of communication. Both become objects set over against her. There may be a tidy fit between the subject’s thoughts and the world, but it is a mirroring relation, an image that itself separates the subject perceiving from the object perceived. A highly influential expression of the idea that there is a natural fit between thought and world is found in graphic terms in the eighteenth century, when against the background of speculations about the nature and genesis of language and about the relation between language and thought by such thinkers as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), a new age of the encyclopedia was born. Its most celebrated product is the Encyclopédie of Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot, which comprised twenty-eight volumes, included more than 3,000 engraved plates, and was published between 1751 and 1772. The characteristic style of these illustrations, and of the mode of presentation and accompanying text, is brilliantly described by Roland Barthes in his essay “The Plates of the Encyclopaedia” (Barthes 2010; see also Lee 2020; Standish 1992, 2014).2 Each plate comprises an upper part, where a scene is depicted as a kind of vignette (the mine, the bakery, the spinning of wool), while in the lower part the equipment that is being used in the scene is itemized and presented in a kind of abstraction from use (see Figure 9.1). The plates, as well as the overall form and substance of the Encyclopédie, constitute a sustained reinforcement of the idea that the most fundamental characteristic and function of language is the naming of things. The human subject is positioned as primarily encountering things as objects of observation; even the purported fluidity of the vignette becomes frozen in the still and idealized image of the plate, not action engaged in but a scene observed. Moreover, the very idea of an encyclopedia betrays a tacit atomism of meaning. Our statements about the world, even our simplest statements, are like molecules that comprise more fundamental parts, and these elementary atoms of meaning match the building blocks of the world. An ideal survey of this reality would provide an inventory of the world.

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FIGURE 9.1  Gilder on Metal, from the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, 1763

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ATOMIC FACTS A powerful expression of such a thought is found in Wittgenstein’s (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a work whose earlier parts, at least, echo the logical atomism of his teacher, Bertrand Russell. The first four of the seven main propositions structuring the text read as follows: 1. The world is everything that is the case. 2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. 3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought. 4. The thought is the significant proposition.

The world (the universe) is made up of atomic facts, and thought stands in a picturing relation to these facts: there is the object in the world, here the thinking subject considering it. The thinking subject is typically understood as the person perceiving something, observing it, contemplating it. If the person is doing something, they are, as it were, operating on the world outside them; they are not immersed in the world. In this light, meaningful thought takes the form fundamentally of propositions. It is a characteristic of propositions, of course, that they can be true or false, but if a proposition does not provide a logical picture of a purported fact, then it is meaningless or nonsense. Wittgenstein spells out this thesis, but a question arises. Is this thesis one to which he is himself committed? Or is it one that he is describing, perhaps as a logical extension of the views of Russell, but that the Tractatus progressively dissolves? The former, “standard” reading points to the fact that in his later writings Wittgenstein refers to his earlier self as the holder of the thesis in question, a way of thinking that he had by then rejected. The latter interpretation relies heavily on remarks later in the Tractatus to the effect that the propositions the author has presented are to be surmounted, like a ladder that you kick away after you have climbed up: you must do this to see the world rightly (6.54). While this controversy has divided scholars of Wittgenstein in recent decades, few would deny that, since the book’s publication, the wider reception of the work has indeed taken it that this is a thesis to which the early Wittgenstein is committed. This view’s austere conception of meaning, which shaped decisively the developments associated with the so-called Vienna Circle and logical positivism, was such that it not only hardened the disjunction of subject and object in the way we have been considering but also amplified the idea of a fact/value divide, inherited especially from British empiricism. In fact, these dichotomies support one another. In this modern version of the problem, meaningfulness became tied to the possibilities of verification: if you did not know at least in principle how a proposition might be verified, then it was consigned to the category of nonsense. The eighteenth-century version, as David Hume more or less phrased

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it, was that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is.” To try to do so would be to commit what, in the early twentieth century, G.E. Moore (1873–1958) called the “naturalistic fallacy” (Moore 1903). The facts of the world do not show what should or should not be valued. Propositions about facts are amenable in principle to verification: we know what would show that the proposition is true, even if we do not have the means to carry out the required test. But there can be no test to show that something is (morally) good or beautiful, and so propositions that assert such values are meaningless. In the 1930s and 1940s in the United States, Charles Stevenson (1908–79) developed this logical positivist doctrine in relation to ethics (moral philosophy and aesthetics) with the idea of emotivism, according to which a proposition asserting an ethical statement (“She is very courageous”) is designed to rally others to a similar response, as if one were saying “boo” or “hurrah.” Wittgenstein’s Tractatus had become a classic even before it was accepted as his doctoral thesis, and, when he had completed it, he believed that he had solved the central problems of philosophy. No doubt this belief must seem arrogant in the extreme, but it was not. Wittgenstein was of an unusual background and disposition, and the remark should not be seen exactly as self-referential pride in the achievement: on the contrary, there was a humility about him, reflected perhaps in what he then went on to do. Having solved the problems, Wittgenstein left Cambridge University and returned to Austria to train to be a schoolteacher. In 1920, he took up a post in the village school at Trattenbach, later moving to Puchberg am Schneeberg and then Otterthal, in the Wechsel mountains of Lower Austria. He worked there as a teacher until 1926.

WITTGENSTEIN GOES TO SCHOOL Wittgenstein was an eccentric but dedicated schoolteacher who went to considerable lengths to do things to stimulate his class, spending much time trying to stretch the children’s minds. As Désirée Weber writes, His approach to teaching his young pupils, while difficult to categorise wholesale, was often to provide them with hands-on and practical experiences. Letters indicate that Wittgenstein went to significant lengths to produce and procure teaching materials that would be suitable for his students. Surviving evidence of his teaching materials includes a model steam engine that he built for his class, a cat skeleton that he prepared and mounted, and descriptions of long nature walks and fieldtrips to Vienna that he took with his classes. (Weber 2019: 690; see also Monk 1990: 193) Weber draws attention particularly to the way that Wittgenstein’s inquiry into language and meaning shifted from the abstract, logical investigations that had preoccupied his philosophical work into the practical experience of

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guiding the development of children’s language through their school lessons. In 1925, Wittgenstein spent much time preparing a Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Dictionary for Elementary Schools), which was intended to answer the need to teach children to recognize their responsibility for the words they were using. The book had its origins in a class project where each student wrote and bound their own word book. The preface that Wittgenstein wrote indicates the interest he took in how his students were learning the use of words and their spelling. It is extraordinary that this was to be the only book, apart from the Tractatus, that he would publish during his lifetime.3 As a teacher, then, Wittgenstein was innovative and in some ways progressive, but he was demanding and could be impatient too, especially with children he saw as intelligent but lazy. Eventually this led to problems. In the spring of 1926, he became so angry with one boy that he beat him violently. This aroused the ire of the villagers, one of whom told Wittgenstein that he was not a teacher but an animal-trainer and attempted to call the police (Monk 1990: 233). In shame at what he had done, Wittgenstein more or less ran away. The point of this biographical digression is not just to expose—and certainly not to excuse—Wittgenstein’s behavior at the end of his time as a schoolteacher. It has to do with the bearing this experience of teaching had on the subsequent development of his philosophy. It was only some years later that he was eventually persuaded, primarily by Russell, to return to Cambridge, where he worked for the rest of his life. Fairly soon after his return, he embarked on the work that was to become the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein deliberated extensively about the form this book should take and what it should include, and it was not published until after he had died. Nevertheless, this much can be said: whereas the Tractatus, with its HTMLlike organization, is highly systematic, the Investigations is arranged in uneven sequences of numbered paragraphs that move from topic to topic, without any overarching structure. Whereas in the Tractatus Wittgenstein unfolds a tightly structured linear argument, in compiling the Investigations he found that, if he tried to force his thoughts in any single direction, they were “soon crippled.” This connected, as he explains in the preface, with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.—The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. (Wittgenstein 1953: vii) This less systematic writing fits the change in the substance of Wittgenstein’s thought. It is significant also that, instead of boldly setting out a thesis as the Tractatus had done, the Investigations begins with someone else’s work and in someone else’s voice—that of Saint Augustine in his Confessions.

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In fact, there is an element of the confessional in Wittgenstein’s text, not in the sense that he is telling his life story but in the sense that the firstperson perspective—describing the world as you find it—becomes important. This contrasts with the impersonal, abstract, third-person voice that is so commonly found in philosophy and across much of the range of social science. Wittgenstein’s earlier “Lecture on Ethics” (Wittgenstein 1929/1965) had claimed that the first-person perspective was of particular importance, and he was perplexed by the scant attention to this in moral philosophy. Thinking of responsibility or of guilt when it is my own has a different feel, a different weight, from thinking impersonally about the problems that other people face.4 One consequence of this, enacted in the very style of the text, is that the Investigations puts the readers, again and again, in a position where they are forced back on the resources of their own judgment. The judgment in question cannot be supplied by appeal to a systematic rule but relates to occasions that are varied and unpredictable. Judgment of this kind is shaped and refined by experiencing similar cases and by a strengthening readiness to appraise things in new ways. Such is the experience Wittgenstein describes in his preface. Perhaps this was also what he had learned in school in the isolated villages of Lower Austria.

COMING INTO LANGUAGE What is particularly important about the extract from Augustine, however, is what it says about how children come into language. This is the passage Wittgenstein quotes at the start of his text: When grown-ups named some object and at the same time turned towards it, I perceived this, and I grasped that the thing was signified by the sound they uttered, since they meant to point it out. This, however, I gathered from their gestures, the natural language of all peoples, the language that, by means of facial expression and the play of eyes, of the movements of the limbs and the tone of voice, indicates the affections of the soul when it desires, or clings to, or rejects, or recoils from, something. In this way, little by little, I learnt to understand what things the words, which I heard uttered in their respective places in various sentences, signified. And once I got my tongue around these signs, I used them to express my wishes. (Augustine, Confessions 1.8, quoted in Wittgenstein 1953/2009: §1) In other words, the adults in a community point to objects and name them. This is a process of ostensive teaching (showing by pointing). At first sight, this picture may seem plausible enough. After all, if you learn a new language, much of what you pick up in the way of vocabulary may come as a result of some equivalent of showing by pointing and naming. But it is important that

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Augustine is not talking about second-language learning: the issue is how we come into language in the first place. It is important to remember, for example, that the practice of pointing to an object when you want someone to attend to it is also one that we have to learn: the practice (one person points, another attends) is not something that merely comes naturally to us (not something innate), although later, perhaps by the age of three, it will become a natural response. There are also assumptions about language that demand attention here. Augustine’s account makes it seem as though all words are names of objects. But what about words such as “because,” “and,” “sometimes,” and “very,” as well as numbers and color-words? It is not clear that there is anything one can point to in those cases. Similarly, the grammatical structures upon which language depends—the multiple, complex ways in which sentences and thoughts are put together—cannot be taught in that way. They depend upon the child’s gradually becoming part of an increasing range of human practices, beginning, say, with being held and talked to as a baby, with being washed and cleaned, with being dressed, with feeding, with sitting up at a table, with learning to walk from one person’s hand to another’s and then to toddling unaided across a room—this and so much more! When Wittgenstein stresses the variety of things we do with words and when he speaks of “language games,” he is thinking of this diversity of practice, where the newcomer to the practice gradually learns how to go on. He refers to these as “games” not with any intention of trivializing them. The analogy works best if we remember the extraordinary variety there is to the things we ordinarily call games (from football to rugby, badminton, bridge, chess, card games, dressingup games, word-games, etc.) and the fact that, although there are clearly overlaps between these activities, there is no ingredient common to them all. The variety of language and practice is like this, but we are easily deceived into thinking there is a uniformity because of the superficial resemblance of verbal signs—that is, because words taken out of context (say, words in a dictionary) all seem to be part of a unified order. To lose sight of the variety of things we do with words is to lose sight of the variety of our experience and of the very nature of the world. How-to-go-on will be a matter of contributing to the practice in a manner that makes sense to others, and it will include saying and doing things in new ways, little by little developing and extending the practice. Some practices are like the game of chess, where rigid rules limit the ways pieces can move but still make possible an infinity of plays within the game. Other practices are more like jazz, where a “standard” tune is taken as the basis for a series of improvisations and where the series can incorporate progressive departures from the original tune, departures that retain their coherence in relation to that tune and its chord sequence. Hence, while in the Tractatus Wittgenstein advances a picture

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theory of meaning (coinciding with the view that words, for the most part, refer to things, name objects, etc., and that propositions match what is the case), this is displaced in the Investigations by the idea of meaning as use, where to understand a word is to be able to use it correctly or appropriately and to know how to go on in ways others will (mostly) recognize. In the 1990s, a poll of professional philosophers in the United States and Canada was conducted, and respondents were asked to name the five most important books in philosophy in the twentieth century (see Lackey 1999). We saw how already in the 1920s the Tractatus had become something of a classic, and in the poll it came fourth. But the first place went, by a clear margin, to the Philosophical Investigations. It will come as no surprise at this point that it is Wittgenstein’s later work that has had the greater influence on education. A convenient starting point for surveying contemporary work in the field is provided by Michael Peters and Jeff Stickney’s A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Philosophical Investigations, whose fifty-seven chapters reflect the health of recent work in the field. More than fifty years ago, in the work of R.S. Peters, Paul Hirst, and Robert Dearden, Wittgenstein was referred to frequently, though in ways that came to be questioned. Around the same time, the “Swansea Wittgensteinianism,” associated especially with Rush Rhees,5 developed in relation to education through the teaching and writing of Ieuan Lloyd (see Lloyd 2020). In the 1970s and 1980s, C.J.B. Macmillan in the United States and James D. Marshall in Australasia were similarly influential in promoting understanding of Wittgenstein’s importance for education. Marshall collaborated with Paul Smeyers on the collection Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s Challenge (1995), which in part took issue with the adoption of Wittgenstein in the work of Peters, Hirst, and Dearden. My own Beyond the Self: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Limits of Language (Standish 1992) also attempted to change the discourse of education through greater sensitivity to the nature of language. Questions of language and learning have been taken in a more epistemological direction (Winch 1998, 2006), toward educational research (Smeyers and Smith 2014), with therapy (Smeyers, Smith, and Standish 2006), and in connection with aspects of poststructuralism (Blake et al. 1998; Peters, Burbules, and Smeyers 2010; Peters and Stickney 2018). Poststructuralism could scarcely have arisen without its background in Heidegger, and it is to his phenomenology that we now turn.

PHENOMENOLOGY AND COMING TO KNOW THINGS The nature of the shift in Wittgenstein’s thinking provides a nice point of entry into the apparently very different philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976). Wittgenstein and Heidegger were born in the same year, and yet the philosophical contexts of their work were very different. Whereas Wittgenstein

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can be seen as developing his own highly original thoughts in a philosophical context heavily influenced by Russell and Frege, Heidegger’s work derives from an immediate context of influence by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and his phenomenology. Phenomenology approaches enquiry in terms of the way that the world comes to light to the human being as embodied. This is a recognition of the fact that whenever we picture an aspect of the world, we do so from the point of view of a particular physiology and temporality—with human eyes, as opposed to those of spiders, and in the light of the human life span, as opposed to that of the butterfly. Moreover, the way that the world shows up is a product of a particular human interestedness. We enter a room for the first time and notice some things and not others, all in the light of particular interests: there is a table and chairs to sit at, there is a screen with a film playing, there is food being cooked. And this interestedness is fostered, shaped, and developed through our interactions with others and the projects we generate together. Being-with-others is not something that, fundamentally, we enter into as a matter of conscious decision: it is the already-there ground for our coming to be as we are, and it essentially comprises language, a point to which we shall shortly return. A convenient entrée into Heidegger’s take-up of phenomenology is provided by the distinction he draws early in Being and Time (1927) between the presentat-hand (vorhanden) and the ready-to-hand (zuhanden). Things are present-athand where they are the direct object of an observational stance, its point of focus. They are ready-to-hand where they are encountered in everyday use and without being the focal point of attention. Whatever we are focusing on, there is always a background of coping with things—of sitting on the chair, drinking the coffee, moving the mouse; and this background coping, the running undercurrent of our being in the world (and, that is, of the way the world comes to light), is often ignored. The consequences of this in social scientific enquiry, in psychology especially, are particularly damaging. Heidegger identifies Being and Time as an exercise in fundamental ontology. Ontology—a term recently appropriated for different purposes in social science—is concerned with the nature of being and the different forms this takes. The being of a table or tree is different from that of a spider, which is different again from that of a human being. There are surely differences in terms of consciousness and self-consciousness, though this formulation may come too easily and be rather trite. Heidegger’s account is more precise though indirect. He eschews the very term “human being” on the grounds of its being burdened by connotations accumulated since the time of Plato and especially in the modern period (the past 400 years) and identifies instead Dasein (being-there) as the central subject of his study. Dasein, he claims, is the being for whom being is a question. But what exactly does this mean, and why is it important?

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Heidegger works with a distinction between beings or entities (Seiendes) and what is sometimes capitalized as “Being” (Sein). Entities are understood in terms of differential characteristics (being yellow, being small, being puzzling, being brave). But beyond this there is the sheer fact of a thing’s being. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes, “That is the wonder—that the world exists,” and some sense of wonder is retained in his subsequent thought. For Heidegger also this is the case. But it is important that what is implied by “Being” here needs to be understood not just with reference to wonder but primarily at a somewhat lower level of intensity. An example may help. Imagine that you are looking at a picture of flowering plants in a gardening catalog. Each picture shows the head of the flowers in bright sunlight, their colors emphasized and the foliage in pristine form. A caption to the picture gives the plants their horticultural name as well as some additional information, such as, “grows well in full sun; height 1–2 meters, full blooms July–September.” The plant you are looking at is a sunflower, variety “Lemon Queen, impressive with stylish pale blooms.” The photograph of the plant is eye-catching, and a range of information useful to the gardener is provided. But consider this image once again, now juxtaposed against another picture of sunflowers—not of a different variety of sunflower but a picture that is different in kind: one of the iterations of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. While it was easy to describe the picture in the gardening catalog (in terms of the information it provided and the categories this readily fell into), with the Van Gogh painting it is more difficult to know what to say. This is a telling point for education too. The work does not really provide information at all. Rather, it encourages anyone looking at it to slow down … Maybe you begin to notice the hang of the petals, the dark yellows and ochres, the thick paint and brushstrokes, and the flatness of the image. This list suggests something other than a checklist of criteria, and it has little to do with the amassing of information. It solicits from you a different response. You are becoming acquainted with the work, absorbing something of its presence. The sunflowers show themselves forth, not as a certain species with distinct properties but simply as there-in-themselves. The idea that there is a kind of knowing that is other than both knowingthat (propositional knowledge) and knowing-how and that might be thought of as “knowing by acquaintance” (or knowing with a direct object) was brought to the fore by Bertrand Russell. But what he had in mind in speaking of this third class of knowing was the knowledge acquired through the immediate deliverances of the senses. The significance of this immediacy of presence— noncognitive, nonlinguistic, a kind of extreme empiricism—was taken up and accentuated by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. But this has nothing to do with what I have referred to as “becoming acquainted with the work,” this absorbing of its presence that I have associated with Heidegger. When Heidegger writes of Van Gogh’s paintings of the peasant’s shoes, he suggests

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that they convey something of the trudge back from the fields, weary after a day’s work, the shoes marked and shaped by the body of the person wearing them, by bearing their weight. There is a narrative element to this, the past (toil in the fields) and future (the return home, rest, the evening meal) folded into this present: presence is not an isolated moment in chronological time but experience thematized in these ways. This is emphatically not to suggest that the experience of the painting must be articulated or verbalized in this manner, but it is experienced—one comes to know it by acquaintance—against the background of these thematizations, which are structurings of experience by beings with language. Knowledge by acquaintance in this important sense could not be the product of the raw deliverances of the senses: it depends upon this background in language. Indeed, it is difficult to see what sense can be made of the idea of the deliverances of the senses in the absence of some thematization. When we see, we see something: this table, that tree, … yes, the light rays strike the retina, but that is not enough for seeing in the ordinary sense. What enables infants to come to see the table and tree is their coming into practices that are inevitably linguistically structured or conditioned. It is through those practices that things are differentiated and that the world comes to light. In a lecture entitled “Language” (Die Sprache) of 1950, and against the idea that the human being uses language to communicate, Heidegger makes the provocative claim that language speaks. This extraordinary reversal is intended to dispel the idea that language is one activity among others that the human being chooses to take up. For anything that we do decide to do, language is already there in the decision and its background; when silently we think, language is there as the running commentary of thought in our minds, whether we speak or not. That it is from the circulation of signs in the community that we come into speech further illustrates that language precedes us and opens the world for us. Language neither is a tool at our disposal nor could it be the object of study as other phenomena are. Linguistics can, of course, study sociocultural variations in accent or differences in verb form among different languages. But such study, taking language as its object, cannot get to what is most important in language. It may stand in the way of recognition that language is the wellspring of thought. It is important not to make this sound unduly mystical. Part of Heidegger’s concern is to show that the way things can be is not something constant or stable because it depends in part upon the ways of thinking and living available in different eras, in different cultures. The issue here is not really whether any one way of thinking is right; it is rather that there will always be some open set of connotations, a discourse, in which things come to light and questions of truth emerge. We can gain a sense of this when exposed to cultural difference or in the experience of translation (Standish 2011; Yun and Standish 2018). Conversely, for most readers of this chapter, a massively important, if not

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overwhelming, factor shaping understanding and deadening this sense of difference is techno-scientific thinking. The rise of science over the past four centuries has accelerated the hard separation of subject and object: the person thinking becomes the person peering through a microscope or telescope, instruments that have contributed massively to human progress but that have the effect of accentuating one sense—especially sight—while subduing others and of engendering a more technically focused but less holistic relation to the world. The absorption of science into technological application has encouraged a conception of thought as problem-solving, where the assumption is that problems are amenable in principle to technical solution: if we cannot solve a problem, we need more research. In some respects new technology accelerates this direction of thought, especially through its reduction of reasoning processes to binary terms (see Heidegger 1957/1991) and the promotion of the algorithm as model for thought or means of its manipulation—in, say, the use of “big data.” This is not to demonize technology, but it is to recognize that the way in which technological thinking brings things to light is apt to crowd out other ways of thinking (see Heidegger 1977). Techno-scientific thinking encourages a universalistic worldview. This is a universalism that physics, within its confines, legitimately achieves, but beyond those confines universalism has been a characteristic of a certain (especially European) colonialism of thought that absorbs the other into the same, translating it, as it were, into its own terms. This stifles ways in which things come to light that have emerged in diverse cultures and through different languages. A universalistic worldview stifles those possibilities of revealing the world. It shapes the way things can be. The inclination at this point, in resistance to any suggestion of mysticism, may be to ask this question: but what is the world really like? Let me emphasize two points in response. First, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that thoughts about the world can be wrong! There is a resistance in things: we cannot simply change everything by developing a new vocabulary. And, of course, human beings are prone to deluding themselves in multiple ways, sometimes preferring to go with their fantasies than to see what the evidence shows. Science has got it right in multiple ways. Second, when it is asked what the world is really like, it is easy to imagine that there is an ideal detached point of view from which we would understand things truly. But this is like the viewpoint of (a monotheistic) God—which is, after all, not a point of view because God is everywhere and knows everything anyway. Such a way of thinking is literally inconceivable. Resisting the ideal detached point of view does not mean giving up on scientific or other kinds of enquiry (nor necessarily abandoning religious belief). It does mean that science needs to be understood in terms more often of the fruitfulness of a way of thinking rather than of an unconditioned relation to truth itself. After all, is it not the case that truth is not something embedded in nature but rather a property of propositions?

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Heidegger is concerned to show that truth is not just this: by contrast with the idea of truth as correctness (the proposition is either true or false), he draws attention to the notion of aletheia, the conception of truth as revealing. How is the world brought to light? For a proposition to be assessed for its correctness, something must already have appeared, whatever it is to which the proposition refers. Aletheia is a difficult notion in a culture steeped in ideas of truth as correctness, but we had some intimation of this when we considered the two pictures of the sunflowers. It may or may not be true that sunflowers of the Lemon Queen variety grow to 1–2 meters, and this was something we readily understood. But whatever it is that Van Gogh’s painting reveals cannot be unpacked in that way, and when one resorts to such expressions as that Van Gogh reveals the “thereness” of the sunflowers, their “sunflowerness,” one’s thinking can easily appear enfeebled or sentimental. But no one was compelling us to translate the painting into words: it is meaningful there as we look at it, in ways that go beyond representation; the painting is not like a sign or label for the thing it represents. Better to say that the painting shows something— of sunflowers, about sunflowers, about representation, and perhaps about the world itself and its revealing.

LANGUAGE AND THE HOUSE OF BEING Heidegger’s provocative claim that language speaks is amplified in the further statement that language is the “house of Being.” In elaborating on this, he brings together the ideas of building, dwelling, and thinking. Indeed, in his 1951 lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking” (Bauen Wohnen Denken) these three terms are found together, without punctuation and without a conjunction, as if to show their mutual dependence and perhaps merging, one into the other. This is in many respects an extension of the thought, developed already in Being and Time, that the world in its ordinary sense needs to be understood in terms of a mutuality of relation with Dasein, where what the world is and what Dasein can be involve a mutual appropriation through language. As I phrased this in the section entitled “Phenomenology and coming to know things,” the world as we ordinarily understand it appears as already thematized. Physics, wonderful and powerful as it is, is an abstraction from this ordinary world. In his later writings, Heidegger turns more explicitly to the nature of language, and in so doing he places considerable importance on the figure of the poetthinker (a combination captured better in the German Dichter). This is illustrated especially by the attention he gives to Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Crucial to this idea is that poetry is a kind of poiesis—that is, a kind of production—in which something new is brought into being. The great thinker, the great poet, is not someone who autonomously utilizes the resources of language but someone exceptionally attuned to possibilities that inhere within language. This is not

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language in the abstract—there is no such thing—but the particular languages of ancient Greek and now German, languages that have exceptional power and possibilities of revealing.6 There is the residue in these later writings, powerful and insightful though they are, of that exceptionalism found in the later stages of Being and Time, where the initial focus on Dasein’s everyday coping with things gives way to ideas of the destining of the community—ideas that in the decade following the publication of Being and Time seemed too ready to coalesce with the political aberration of Nazism. The most trenchant criticism of Heidegger’s politics comes in important respects from thinkers who were profoundly influenced by him: Emmanuel Levinas, who in the late 1920s had attended Heidegger’s lectures, was early in his indictment of “Hitlerism” (Levinas 1934/1990), and this developed into a critique of Heidegger’s ontology as complicit with a kind of violence; Michel Foucault’s widely influential analyses of the “microphysics of power,” “governmentality,” and the construction of “docile subjects” derive in no small part from Heideggerian themes; Jean-François Lyotard, in Heidegger and “the jews” (1990), developed a searching account of the depth of connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and practices of exclusion; and Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987/1991) provided searing criticism of the forms of “staging” through which, inadvertently or artfully, Heidegger’s phenomenology was constructed. It is important fully to acknowledge these problems but also to recognize Heidegger’s creative influence on lines of thought in poststructuralism, within which the linguistic turn has in so many respects been productively taken forward. Further rich developments are found among feminist poststructuralists, including Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, while feminist epistemology, in a more analytical vein, has also contributed to the linguistic turn. Given that language depends upon the public circulation of signs, what can be said about the form signs must take? The topic is there recessively in Wittgenstein’s late writings and in Heidegger’s later lectures, albeit tainted with mysticism. But in Derrida, the topic comes into central focus.

THE MATERIALITY OF THE SIGN To speak of the materiality of the sign is to attend to the fact that language depends upon the making of marks—whether on paper or on a screen, in sound waves or gesture. Words are not abstract but require concretization. Yet their material form is of an order different from the materiality of a tool such as a hammer. The hammer I am using is about 30 centimeters long and weighs about 400 grams, and these qualities determine how it functions. But the word “hammer” in the previous sentence functions differently. In the version of this text you are reading, it appears in a font and pitch different from what I am

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using as I write; perhaps you are looking at a variable image on a pixelated screen. The word can appear as: hammer, hammer, hammer,

hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer

The font, size, and color of the script have no necessary effect on meaning. By the same token, the word “hammer” can be spoken at different pitches and with different accents, once again without any necessary effect on the functioning of the sign and meaning. Whereas the hammer must have a particular mass and material construction (say, a metal head) to perform its task, the sign’s functioning depends instead on a structural relationship between its parts. The varying fonts and pitches in the example above function not through uniformity but through continuity in the relation between the parts in each sign: the H rises above the A; the M is repeated, whether italicized or not. Derrida’s discussion of these matters relates initially to the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). De Saussure successfully shows that signs depend not primarily on the correlation of a word with a thing but on systems of difference between signs: there can be no “yellow” without “red,” “green,” and so on; and without these other colors in the range, there can be no concept of yellow either. Derrida criticizes and builds upon de Saussure’s structuralist account but shows that these structures of relationship are also dynamic. A sign’s connotations change: yellow becomes the color of cowardice and, more recently, of the smiley; red means danger but also, at a later stage, communism; “green” names a political party. This is true for relatively simple signs such as color-words but also for complex concepts, phrases and sentences, and larger constructions such as religious texts, political tracts, and works of art. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities was written in 1859 but set at the time of the French Revolution. Interpretation of the novel cannot be finally fixed because it remains open to new connection, beyond what Dickens himself could have known: that revolution is now understood in the light of the continuity of modern France, while the very idea of revolution now connotes the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, for example, not to mention the iconography of Che Guevara sweatshirts, none of which Dickens knew. Signs, then, are iterable, always open to new association and connection. Their meaning is always deferred: it is not that we can never know what they mean but rather that there can be no definitive or final meaning. Signs can always be used in new ways and attract new connotations. It is easy to run to the conclusion that this openness of the sign is a recipe for skepticism: meaning is never fixed or secure, and nothing is ever clear. But to rush to this response is to go deeply wrong. What Derrida is demonstrating is the very condition of human signs and meaningfulness. The openness of the sign is the opening to imagination, to creativity, and to culture itself: it is internal to reason where this is rightly seen as extending beyond the systematic, beyond algorithms, extending also to the thinking that makes the construction

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of algorithms possible and gives them point. Hence, this is by no means confined to matters that are “purely linguistic”: it extends into notions of the identity and integrity of human beings. One way of acknowledging this is to consider the way that, in the prevailing philosophical tradition, autonomy is seen as virtuous and heteronomy condemned. Given the pernicious forms that heteronomy can take, there is good reason to advocate autonomy in this way. Yet a preoccupation with autonomy—say, to a securing of the self in a citadel of what is imagined to be reason—can lead to thinking that incorporates the other into the same or inoculates itself against difference in order surreptitiously to suppress it. Hence, what is needed may not exactly be multicultural toleration, nor mastery and knowingness in the study of a subject, nor a blocking of the other who does not understand or meet me as I expect, but a readiness for exposure: the constant ground of newness. This is fundamentally a matter of exposure to what does not fall into our expectations, our accustomed categories of understanding and methods of analysis, and this may extend to a kind of physical exposure, when one is “on the spot,” say, in front of a class. Wittgenstein was exposed to rigorous argument with Russell and his Cambridge colleagues, and he faced great danger during the First World War. But in the village schools of Lower Austria, we can imagine, he confronted something different: his teaching plans went awry, his expectations of children’s learning were thwarted, he encountered recalcitrant children who behaved in ways unlike anything he had known before. This was no heroic battle but perhaps rather a drab, workaday routine, which defied his intentions and at times exhausted his capacities. That such experience can “get to you,” testing you and perhaps changing how you see yourself and the world, is surely familiar to many who have taught in challenging schools, as it can be, in a different way, to the conscientious parent confronted by the young baby that cries and will not sleep. That such experience can “get to you” not only in schools that are “difficult” in some way but across a vast range of teaching contexts—including the privileged circumstances of the university lecture hall or tutorial and extending through the experience of the piano or singing teacher or athletics coach—helps to show how closely teaching touches on the human condition and how much it can expose us in ways that cannot be readily mastered or easily circumscribed, in ways that put us out of our stride. These are aspects of the experience that the professional education of teachers is apt too often to suppress. We forever find ways to guard against or deny this exposure to the other, yet it is built into our language and thought. In speaking, we shelter in the words of our teacher or fellow students. If we speak for ourselves, we risk being laughed at or scorned. But it is our own words we need to find, risking the rebuff. This finding of words is critical for our education and formation as human beings, critical for the furtherance of reason and democracy too. Heidegger describes the human condition as unheimlich, which is usually translated as “uncanny” but which we can think of also as not-being-at-home.

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When you are at home, it is not quite like in the family photos or the Hollywood movies: you are at home and not-at-home. So too in life more generally: you love to be absorbed in things, but your absorption—unlike that of the animal— is intermittently interrupted and doubled by self-consciousness. You are not just eating but aware of yourself eating. You are not self-contained in your experience but continually broken open by it. Derrida shows this to be happening at the most basic level, in the very structures of language and thought. Far from seeing this as a denial of or threat to reason, Derrida reveals the structures within which our reasoning (sometimes our craziness) necessarily occurs. Not to see this is itself a failure of reason—a metaphysical fantasy of the kind that was identified early in this chapter, where the world as object stands over against the thinking subject, as if there were a vantage point on the world that enables it to be contemplated from outside. This fantasy obscures recognition of the subject as already immersed in the world, and it theorizes the world as comprised of neutral objects of perception and manipulation, hiding the ways in which things come to light through human engagement and experience. It is blind to the realities of our lives in language. Such an excess manifests itself at the heart of contemporary education.

SUBJECTIVITY, OBJECTIVITY, KNOWLEDGE, AND VALUE To illustrate, let us consider a series of snapshots of educational practice, sometimes soundbites of dogma, each of which, in its metaphysical excess, accentuates the distancing of subject from object and effects an abstraction from the complexities of practice. (1) The fabled Victorian conception of teaching as filling empty vessels with knowledge takes learners to be mindless receptacles and makes irrelevant their existing capacities and interests. (2) A century later, especially in the 1980s and continuing recently in OECD policy, the passing on of mindless facts was demonized in favor of education in skills and competences, transferring the emphasis from what is learned to the way knowledge is accessed. (3) The broad trend toward the assessment of learning outcomes, coupled with an artificial conception of “criteria” (as checklists), focuses on learners’ correct behavioral performance, obstructing the way to any richer sense of what the learner understands. (4) Stress on “efficient delivery” downplays teachers’ and students’ engagement with learning content in the name of performance and commensurability. (5) Ideas of personal development risk anonymizing the person as the abstract bearer of a portfolio of skills. In university education, (6) the gesture toward a more rounded, outward-facing education with the adoption of the idea of “graduateness” risks replacing the genuine character development that might be found in the study of a subject with the bland characteristics and skill set required of all degrees. Graduateness is the offspring (7) of transferrable

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skills, including communication, interpersonal, ICT, and entrepreneurial skills, which supposedly complement but often displace the knowledge and understanding needed in academic subjects of study. Yet a further deflection of attention from content arises (8) with ideas of “learning styles”; priority is given to particular learning types (kinaesthetic, linguistic, etc.), rendering incidental the question of what is learned. One consequence of this broad range of trends is that matters of judgment, in ethics and aesthetics, come to be seen (9) as arenas for the exercise of a pure “subjectivity,” primarily as matters of personal taste or preference. This hardening dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity provokes in turn (10) the quasi-compensatory measure of “adding” values to the curriculum, otherwise presumed to comprise the accessing of facts and the acquisition of skills. Whatever the earnestness of those pressing for “valueadded,” values are conceived as an optional extra. The hazy distinctions and associations that hover around the word “subject” in educational practice and research (as “human subject,” “academic subject,” “research subject,” “subjection,” etc.) compound confusions regarding subject– object relations. Sensory perception is thought of, first and foremost, in visual terms: the object of perception is present-at-hand, the direct object of an observational stance, the light waves hitting the retina. Subjectivity, supposedly the inner realm of feeling, contrasts with objectivity, the value-free outer realm of fact. These contrasts are asserted with the confidence that this must be so, betraying the muddle of metaphysical conviction that arises in the absence of attention to the variety and contingency of our lives in language and to the ways that the world thus becomes what it is. They affect and contort the idea of a person and curtail and distort the ways that things can be known. They limit disastrously what education can be. How did we get to this point? And what is to be done? The insights of the philosophy we have been considering work, first of all, as a kind of via negativa: they draw attention to what we should not be doing, as illustrated in the snapshots provided in this chapter. A particularly important facet of the general picture that comes into view is the dominance of aggressive and reductive forms of assessment. It is aggressive to the extent that it is imposed frequently in an educational career and with consequences for a person’s life of far-reaching effect. It is reductive where it relies on narrowed notions of behavioral performance, where only limited scope is allowed for the interpretation of that behavior and where the exercise of judgment on the part of the teacher or examiner is subordinated to the provision of numerical grades for spreadsheets. Assessment is crucially important because it shapes the ways that the content of education is selected and that teaching and learning are conceived. Where assessment is deficient, it duly depletes content and the possibilities of teaching and learning. This via negativa reveals also the need to de-psychologize psychology—that is, to develop an understanding of human psychology that is not mired in the

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metaphysical muddle engendered by false ideas of the inner and the outer and, hence, does not become pseudo-science (see Skilbeck 2021; Standish 2018). In this, the humanities will have a greater role to play, in both the substance of the curriculum and the education of teachers. In recent decades, when the demand has been placed on research that it justify itself by producing the evidence that will legitimate policy (with medical research taken as the model), psychology has been drawn into presenting itself as the subject that can solve problems. This way of thinking has too great a hold on both educational policy and the preparation of teachers. It shores up the tendencies identified in the snapshots in this chapter. There is a tension at present between images of teachers as, on the one hand, skilled technical operatives following protocols of procedure and, on the other, human beings exposed in dynamic and unpredictable relationships with those they teach through live engagement with what is being studied. Once again, the myopic vision of the former contrasts with the existential realism and sensitivity of the latter. These different conceptions issue not only in different practices of teaching and learning but in substantially different kinds of curricular content. Philosophy’s linguistic turn makes it possible to think constructively about that content. Whether this is realized in separate subjects or in some more integrated form, in academic or vocational contexts, what is being passed on is in many respects well described as part of the “conversation” of humankind, as Michael Oakeshott (1991) phrases it. Conversation has the qualities of open-endedness that Wittgenstein identifies in language games as well as the openness that Derrida reveals in the very structure of the sign. The myopic vision tries to close this openness down, sometimes with perverse results—as with the obsession that is encouraged over rankings and league tables, or as revealed in the example recounted to me of an eight-year-old child in Scotland worrying about whether she had “fulfilled the criteria for the assignment.” Realism is attuned to the fact that the meaningfulness, the significant action, which inheres in a practice is concretized in signs that are themselves dynamic and open to new possibility. Hence, this is a vision of content that, even where it is apparently traditional in name, is nothing like a static body of knowledge but is dynamic and open to criticism and requires of learners the imagination to see things in a new way. The rigid specification of learning outcomes will not prepare the teacher for the more dynamic encounter described here. Excessive anxieties about “behavior management” may blind the teacher to the importance of what potentially is being passed on. The linguistic turn has a bearing on content also in more specific ways. It is possible to present children and students of all ages with learning that is neatly packaged and readily assimilable. Much in prevailing educational systems conspires to encourage learners to expect just that. In the process, it not only produces an impoverished experience of the subject in question but imparts a distorted conception of what education is. One way in which a better

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education can be provided, then, is by selecting content that calls for more from students in response. This can readily be illustrated with reference to the selection of texts on a literature course. A story with clear-cut characters and a strong plot that dramatizes the relationship between good and evil forces in a readily understandable way is likely to be welcomed by students, especially if these factors correlate nicely with the kinds of response that will be required when they are assessed. By contrast, a book that is not so readily assimilable, where different layers of meaning become apparent through closer attention or where the tensions within the text defy straightforward interpretation, is likely to unsettle students: it may put them in a position where they have to exercise judgment in ways they are not used to. Much classic literature has precisely these qualities, and it is in virtue of this complexity that it seems continually to amass criticism. I stress that the contrast drawn here should not be taken to apply only to appreciation in the arts. A topic in physics can be taught in a set of easy steps, and sometimes this will be appropriate; but it can also be broached in a way that exacts puzzlement from the class and prompts them to the exercise of critical thought and imagination. The point extends to more practical subjects too, in ways that may be harder to formulate but are no less real. Sometimes what holds learners back is a kind of anxiety, characterized often by a grid of expectation through which they peer and a self-consciousness about what they are doing. It is generally wrong to think of this as a problem with the learner’s inner state of mind or as a failure in their thinking skills; rather, what is needed is a redirecting of attention to the matter at hand, in such a way that they lose themselves in what they are doing. Music teachers and sports coaches, as well as teachers of hairdressing and engineering and social care, sometimes have the right touch in these matters. There is nothing systematic about this. It is more a matter of giving the right tip, of knowing what to draw attention to, and when and how, and how to break the spell of a mood. Philosophy’s linguistic turn has exposed the hardened distinctions between the inner and the outer, between subject and object, and between subjectivity and objectivity as fantasies that have beset the modern world. The fallacies have been evident in educational policy and practice, as in other aspects of contemporary culture, but educational research bears particular responsibility in that its scientistic tendencies have exacerbated these problems. It is imperative, then, that educational research is substantially reconceived in such a way that these insights are given the attention they merit. The humanities must be at the heart of inquiry into education.

NOTES 1 2

The series is available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b03ggc19. Soyoung Lee’s discussion reads Barthes’s essay in relation to the emergence of new encyclopedic forms in the contemporary proliferation of “handbooks” and other compendious resource books on aspects of education. The discussions in

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Standish (1992, 2014) take up themes from Barthes to explain the rhetorical effects of prevailing forms of educational discourse, beyond their apparently descriptive intention. See Weber’s “Wittgenstein’s Dictionary for Elementary Schools: “Only a dictionary makes it possible to hold the student completely responsible.” Available online: https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/wittgensteins-dictionary-for-elementary-schools. The Wörterbuch itself has recently been published with an English translation (Wittgenstein 2020). Weber is writing a monograph on the role of teaching and learning in Wittgenstein’s biography and later work (see also Weber 2019). That this can be demonstrated through attention to the workings of our language is perhaps the most famous feature of J.L. Austin’s Ordinary Language Philosophy: to say “she promises to … ” (a constative utterance) is to describe an action, whereas to say “I promise to … ” (a performative) is to act. This telling example lays the way for a much wider account, which draws attention to the fact that what we say does not just refer to the world but has force: it effects change in the world, however minimally this will often seem, without which the world would not be what it is (see esp. Austin 1962). Space prevents due acknowledgment of Austin’s enormous contribution to the linguistic turn and of his influence on Derrida and especially Stanley Cavell (see, e.g., Standish 2012). Rhees had met Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1936 and became his lifelong friend. He had an incomparable knowledge of and was a leading interpreter of Wittgenstein’s work. He translated and edited several collections of Wittgenstein’s later writings. Heidegger saw ancient Greek and German as having special qualities as languages. My parenthetical remark—there is no such thing as language in the abstract—draws attention to the fact that the tendency to refer to language in general terms is apt to downplay the differences between languages as they actually occur in the world, as if they were all just slight variations on language in its true form. There is no true form. There is just this variety. It is right to remember both the commonality among languages—that there is no language without overlaps and connections, and that translation, for all its difficulties, is possible—and their different ways of bringing the world to light. Philosophers have sometimes seen logic to be the basis of human reasoning, but as Wittgenstein’s later writings show, logic is constructed out of and always depends upon the background of ordinary (natural) language. Similarly, it has sometimes been proposed that the world would be a simpler and better place if there were only one language. But this is a fantasy of a totalitarian kind, the consequences of which are suggested by George Orwell’s novel 1984. In any case, as the present chapter goes on to show, language cannot ultimately be contained in this way as the signs that human beings make are always open to new connections and connotations (see also Standish 2010).

REFERENCES Primary sources Aristotle (originally 350 bce), On Interpretation, trans. E.M. Edghill. Available online: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/interpretation.1.1.html. Austin, J.L. (1962), How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Barthes, Roland (2010), “The Plates of the Encyclopedia,” in New Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1987/1991), Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frege, Gottlob (1892/1980), “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100: 25–50; translated by M. Black as “On Sense and Reference,” in Max Black and Peter Geach (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 3rd edn., 56–78, Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin (1927/1961), Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin (1950/1971), “Language,” trans. A. Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 187–210, New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin (1951/1991), “Building Dwelling Thinking,” trans. A. Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 145–62, New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin (1957/1991), “The Principle of Reason,” trans. R. Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1977), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row. Moore, George Edward (1903), Principia Ethica, New York: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1921/1922), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Originally published as “Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung,” Annalen der Naturphilosophische, 14 [3–4].) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1929/1965), “A Lecture on Ethics,” The Philosophical Review, 74 (1): 3–12. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2020), Word Book, trans. Bettina Funcke, with an introduction by Désirée Weber, New York: Badlands Unlimited.

Secondary sources Blake, Nigel P., Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (1998), Thinking Again: Education after Postmodernism, Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Lackey, Douglas P. (1999), “What Are the Modern Classics? The Baruch Poll of Great Philosophy in the Twentieth Century,” The Philosophical Forum, 30 (4): 329–46. Lee, Soyoung (2020), “Poetics of the Encyclopaedia: Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Research Today,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54 (5). Levinas, Emmanuel (1934/1990), “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Seán Hand, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1): 62–71. Lloyd, D. Ieuan (2020), “Rush Rhees on Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54 (3): 772–84. Lyotard, Jean-François (1990), Heidegger and “the jews,” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Monk, Ray (1990), Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London: Vintage Books. Oakeshott, Michael (1991), “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 488–551, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Peters, Michael and Jeff Stickney (2018), Wittgenstein’s Education: “A Picture Held Us Captive,” Singapore: Springer Briefs in Education. Peters, Michael A., Nicholas C. Bulbules, and Paul Smeyers (2010), Showing and Doing: Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher, London: Routledge.

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Skilbeck, Adrian (2021), Stanley Cavell and the Human Voice in Education: Serious Words for Serious Subjects, Dordrecht: Springer. Standish, Paul (1992), Beyond the Self: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Limits of Language, Aldershot: Ashgate. Standish, Paul (2010), “One Language, One World: The Common Measure of Education,” in G. Biesta (ed.), Philosophy of Education Yearbook 2010: 360–368. Standish, Paul (2011), “Social Justice in Translation: Subjectivity, Identity, and Occidentalism,” Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook, 6: 69–79. Standish, Paul (2012), “Transparency, Accountability, and the Public Role of Higher Education,” Educationalfutures, 5 (1): 3–14. Standish, Paul (2014), “Signs of the Times,” in Mark Depaepe and Paul Smeyers (eds.), The Material Dimensions of Educational Research, 179–90, Dordrecht: Springer. Standish, Paul (2018), “‘Nothing but Sounds, Ink-Marks’—Is Nothing Hidden? Must Everything be Transparent?,” Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, 51 (1): 71–91. Smeyers, Paul and James Marshall (1995), Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s Challenge, Dordrecht: Springer. Smeyers, Paul and Richard Smith (2014), Understanding Education and Educational Research, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smeyers, Paul, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (2006), The Therapy of Education: Philosophy, Happiness, and Personal Growth, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, Desiree (2019), “A Pedagogic Reading of Wittgenstein’s Life and Later Works,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 53 (4): 688–700. Winch, Christopher (1998), The Philosophy of Human Learning, London: Routledge. Winch, Christopher (2006), Autonomy, Education, and Critical Thinking, London: Routledge. Yun, SunInn and Paul Standish (2018), “Technicising Thought: English and the Internationalisation of the University,” in Søren Smedegaard Bengtsen and Ronald Barnett (eds.), The Thinking University, 119–34, London: Taylor & Francis.

CONTRIBUTORS

Kal Alston is Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education and Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. Her teaching and research span areas such as youth culture and media literacy, civil rights in education, race and cultural representation, and ethics in higher education leadership. She is a leader in the Imagining America Consortium, exploring the role of public arts, humanities, and design interventions in creating more just communities, institutions, and social structures. She has been the Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation project to advance women in STEM fields and Co-PI in a Mellon Foundation-funded project to fortify public scholarship. Deborah P. Britzman is Distinguished Research Professor at York University, Toronto; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; and holder of the York Research Chair in Pedagogy and Psychosocial Transformations; she is also a psychoanalyst. Author of eight books and more than 100 articles, Britzman’s scholarly area of expertise is in psychoanalysis with education and the Freudian and Kleinian histories of psychoanalysis both applied and clinical. Recent books include Melanie Klein: Early Analysis, Play and the Question of Freedom (2016), A Psychoanalysis in the Classroom: On the Human Condition in Education (2015), and Anticipating Education: Selected Papers on Pedagogy with Psychoanalysis (forthcoming 2021). Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd is Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Lawrence University and holds a PhD in Philosophy and Education. She directs an innovative approach to elementary teacher certification in cooperation with local schools. Her current research interests include Montessori education, the relationship of philosophy in schools to children’s mental health and children’s friendships, and the ethics of teaching and parenting young children.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Andrea R. English is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Philosophy of Education, University of Edinburgh, and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is author of Discontinuity in Learning: Dewey, Herbart, and Education as Transformation (2013), coeditor of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook (2017), and coauthor of “Dewey, Aesthetic Experience and Education for Humanity” in the Oxford Handbook of Dewey (2019). Her research is published in a range of international journals and edited volumes. She is currently Associate Editor of Dewey Studies, and Teacher Education Coordinator and Edinburgh Branch lead for the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Mordechai Gordon is Professor of Education in the School of Education at Quinnipiac University. His areas of specialization are philosophy of education, teacher education, and humor. He is author of Existential Philosophy and the Promise of Education: Learning from Myths and Metaphors (2016) and the editor of Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing our Common World (2001), winner of the 2002 AESA Critics Choice Award. Gordon has published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as Educational Theory, Journal of Teacher Education, Oxford Review of Education, and Journal of Aesthetic Education. James Scott Johnston is Jointly Appointed Associate Professor, Faculty of Education and Department of Philosophy, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. He has published recently in journals such as Studies in Philosophy and Education and the Journal of Philosophy of Education. He is the author of Regaining Consciousness: Self-Consciousness and Self-Cultivation from 1781–Present (2008), Deweyan Inquiry: from Educational Theory to Practice (2009), and Dewey’s Earlier Logical Theory (2014); and coauthor of Democracy and the Intersection of Religion and Tradition: The Reading of John Dewey’s Understanding of Democracy and Education (with R. Bruno-Jofre, G. Jover Olmeda, and D. Troehler, 2010), as well as Teacher Education in a Transnational World (with R. Bruno-Jofre, 2015). Deborah Kerdeman is Professor Emerita in the College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle. Her work in philosophy of education focuses on the implications of phenomenology and hermeneutics for educational purposes, practices, and policies. Kerdeman is a former Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education postdoctoral fellow and a past president of the Philosophy of Education Society of North America. Paul Standish is Professor and Head of the Centre for Philosophy of Education at UCL Institute of Education. He is the author or editor of some twenty books,

CONTRIBUTORS

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recent examples of which are Stanley Cavell and Philosophy As Translation (2017) and Democracy and Education from Dewey to Cavell (2021), both in collaboration with Naoko Saito, and On Not Sparing Others the Trouble of Thinking: Wittgenstein and Education (2021), coedited with Adrian Skilbeck. He is interim Co-Editor and was Editor (2001–11) of the Journal of Philosophy of Education and Chair of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (2017–20). Christiane Thompson is Professor of Theory and History of Education and Bildung at Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Her research areas include philosophy of education, critical theory of education as well as theories of Bildung and culture. Her recent works include a coedited volume Erziehung nach Auschwitz bis heute: Aufklärungsanspruch und Gesellschaftsanalyse (Erziehung after Auschwitz until Today: Enlightenment Claims and Societal Analysis, 2019). Leonard J. Waks is Distinguished Professor at Hangzhou Normal University and Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership at Temple University. Waks taught philosophy and educational theory, retiring in 2005. He is the author of most recently, Education 2.0: The Learningweb Revolution and the Transformation of the School (2013) and The Evolution and Evaluation of Massive Open Online Courses: MOOCs in Motion (2016). He is editor of the book Listening to Teach: Beyond Didactic Pedagogy (2015) and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A Centennial Handbook (with Andrea English, 2017). He is a past president of the John Dewey Society, founding editor of the journal Dewey Studies, and recipient the Dewey Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He is currently working on a book about John Dewey’s theory of teaching and teacher education.

INDEX

abolitionism 129 Absolute Idealism 136, 137 Adams, Henry 134 Adams, John 128 Addams, Jane 15, 16, 30, 128, 139–40, 144, xiv adolescence psychoanalysis 106, 116–17 Adorno, Theodor W. 12, 17, 203–4, 205, 212–17, 218, 219, 221, xxix aesthetics xix African Americans education for formation 194–7 education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 177–89 Harlem Renaissance (“New Negro Movement”) 189–91, 192 new world civil rights 191–4 special needs categorization 18n3 women’s leadership and advocacy 186–9 African Methodist Episcopal Church 178, 184 see also Methodist Episcopal Church aims of education Dewey 44–5 Alcott, Bronson 128 aletheia 242 alienation 17, 204, 205, 206, 209, 212, 216, 217, 219, 221 alpha functions 118 Althusser, Louis 222n4, 222n6

American Civil War 15, 129, 176 American Negro Academy 182–3, 187 American Philological Association 185 anarchism 13 Angell, James R. 128, 141, 144 Angelou, Maya 192 anthropology xviii anti-authoritarianist theory 13 anti-Semitism 220 anxiety 106, 107, 113–15, 116 aporia 220 Arendt, Hannah 10, 170, xvi, xxix Aristotle 11, 48, 229–30, xi, xiii Armstrong, Samuel 180 art African American 190–1, 192 in Reggio Emilia education 165–6 art of living xvii, xviii assessment methods 246, 247 Atlanta University 178, 185 atomic facts 232–3 Augustine, Saint 234, 235–6 Auschwitz 212, 214 Austin, J.L. 227, 228 authoritarianism, Frankfurt School studies on 211–14, 219 babies as humans 119–21 see also children; early childhood Bain, Alexander 131, 133, 134, 136

INDEX

Baldwin, James 192–4 banking education 207–8 Baraka, Amiri 192 Barthes, Roland 230 Bass, Alan 108 Being 65, 67 see also Dasein (there being); Seiendes (beings/entities); Sein (Being) Benjamin, Walter 218, 222n10 Benner, Dietrich 9 Berea University 178 beta elements 118 Bible, the 58 Biddsamkeit (perfectibility) 5 Biesta, Gert 91, 97, 98 “big data” 241 Bildung 75–6 critical theory 217–19, 220, 221 Bingham, Charles 96 Bion, Wilfred 15, 106–7, 117–19, 122, xxviii Black Americans see African Americans Black Panther Party 195, 196, 197 Blenkinsop, Sean 85 Blyden, Edward Wilmot 178 Bondfield, Margaret Grace 2 Boole, George 131 Bowen, Francis 131 bracketing 64, 67–8 Bragg, Melvyn 227 Brentano, Franz 61 Bridges, Ruby 197 Brooks, Gwendolyn 192 Brown, Sterling 191 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 28, 191, 196, 198n9 Bruce, John E. 178 Buber, Martin 14, 82–7, 88–92, 94, 95, 99, xxviii ethics 90 teacher-student relations 96–7 “Butler Act” (Education Act of 1944) (England and Wales) xxx Butler, Judith 243 canonical philosophers xi–xii capacity to learn 5, 6 see also perfectibilité capitalism 17, 206, 220 “cared-for” 92, 93–4

257

caring 14 Noddings 82, 92–5 Certeau, Michel de 105 character 31–2 Chicago social conditions and settlement houses 138–40, 141 child psychoanalysis 15, 104 Anna Freud 106, 113–15 babies as humans 119–21 infantile roots of the mind 121–3 Klein 115–17 “child-centred” approach to education 11 children inherent worth of 12, 13 “spontaneous power” of 142 see also child psychoanalysis; early childhood; mother-child relationship children’s rights Montessori Method 159 Reggio Emilia education 167 Chinnery, Ann 90 Chipman, Harriet Alice 140, xxvii Christianity, and democracy 29–30 Ciari, Bruno 152 “circuit” 142 “citizenship education” 221 Civil Rights Act 1875 (US) 179 civil rights movements 16–17, 191–4 Cixous, Hélène 243 Clark University 130, 181 class struggle 206 classic literature 249 Cold War xxx Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 128 Colgan, Andrew D. 158 colonialism 2, xvi, 195–7 Columbia University 32–3, 211 coming into language 235–7 see also language and the linguistic turn Committee of Ten, 1892 132 commodity fetishism 206–7 Common Schools Movement, US 176 communication, and language 229–30 “communicative rationality” 220 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 230 Confucius xvii conscientização (critical awareness) 207–8

258

consciousness Husserl 61, 63 Sigmund Freud 110 conversation 248 Gadamer 68–71, 76 Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood 2–3, 4, 16, 186–7, 188, 189, 190, xxvii counter-education 218–19 criminal bands 34 critical awareness (conscientização) 207–8 critical pedagogy 17, 205, 208–9, 219, 220 critical race theory 13, 191–2 critical theory 17, 49, 203–5 authoritarianism studies 212–14, 219 as a “basic educational concept” 219–21 Bildung as experience 217–19 Frankfurt School 203, 204, 205, 208, 209–14, 219, 220 Marx 203, 204, 205–9, 219, 220 “totality of false consciousness” 212–17 see also Adorno, Theodor W.; Horkheimer, Max Crogman, William Henry 177, 181–2, 189 Crummell, Alexander 182–4, 187 Cullen, Countee 191 cultural studies 208–9 curriculum xv d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 230–1 Darwin, Charles 6, 128, 134, 136 Darwinism 15 Dasein (there being) 65–7, 238, 242, 243 De Garmo, Charles 130 De Morgan, Augustus 131 De Saussure, Ferdinand 244 Dearden, Robert 237 decolonization 121 Delaney, Martin Robinson 178 democracy, and Dewey Christianity 29–30 Early Works 27–30 Middle Works 33–6 democratic education, and Dewey 13, 25–6, 48–9 Early Works 26, 27–32 Later Works 26 Middle Works 26, 32–48

INDEX

depressive position 116 Derrida, Jacques 17, 18, 228, 243–6, 248 Descartes, Rene 83–4 development delay 153–4 Dewey, John 4, 6, 8, 11, 166, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, xxvii democratic education 13, 25–6, 48–9 Early Works 26, 27–32 Later Works 26 Middle Works 26, 32–48 pragmatism 15–16 influence on later movements 49 and Montessori 154, 157–9 pragmatism 120, 127–8, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137–40, 142–3, 143–4 dialogue Buber 14, 82–7, 88–92, 94, 95, 99 Dichter (poet-thinker figure) 242–3 Dickens, Charles 244 Diderot, Denis 230–1 difference, centrality of 4 Dilthey, William 7, 14, 55–9, 63–4, 66, xxvi “direct human experiences” 212 Douglass, Frederick 184 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt 10, 16, 175, 177–8, 181, 182, 183–4, 187, 189, 190, 196, xxix, xxvii Dunbar, Paul 183 early childhood 16 in modernity 152–3 see also Malguzzi, Loris; Montessori, Maria; Montessori Method; Reggio Emilia “educability” 6 education access to 6 as an intergenerational pedagogical relationship 10–11 Dewey Early Works 30–2 Middle Works 36–49 instrumental approach to 54, 55 language and the linguistic turn 246–9 outcome focus of 96 “progressive” 11, xii, xiv and social justice 12–13 as a social responsibility 17

INDEX

traditional 25, 34, 45, 46, 160 as a transformative process 9–10 see also democratic education; philosophy of education; school occupations; schools Education Act of 1944 (“Butler Act”) (England and Wales) xxx educational environment 12, 16, 155 educational research 14 Edwards, Carolyn 162, 166, 167 “effort” 143 ego defense mechanisms 106, 113–15 and democracy 114 Eichmann, Adolf 212 Eldridge, Richard xvi Elementary Education Act 1880 (England and Wales) xxviii Elementary Education Act 1891 (England and Wales) xxviii Eliot, Charles 130, 132 “embrace” 87 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 128–9, 132, xvi “empty thoughts” 106, 117 Encyclopédie 230–1 “end of history” 220 Engels, Friedrich 206, xxvi engrossment 92, 94 Enlightenment era philosophy of education 4–13 epistemology 59–60, 62, 65, 67, xix epoché 62, 64, 74 equality 28–9 Erickson, Eric 160 Erlebnis (lived experience/life experience) 56–9 Ermath, Michael 65, 68 Erziehung 10 ethical relationality 81–2, 98–9 Buber 82–7, 88–92, 94, 95, 99 and education 95–8 Levinas 82, 88–92, 95, 97–8, 99 Noddings 82, 92–5, 96–7, 99 ethics 14, xvii, xviii Dewey 31, 35–6 see also radical ethics; relational ethics eudaimonia 204 evidence-based research 72

259

experience Bion 117 Buber 83–4 “direct human experiences” 212 Husserl 61–2 lived experience/life experience (Erlebnis) 56–9 experimental idealism 133 Fairfield, Paul 53, 54–5 false consciousness 212–17, 221 families authoritarianism in 211–12 healthy 34, 35 feeling-thoughts 106–7 feminist theory 13, 95 feminist poststructuralism 243 Fisk University 178 Forman, George 162, 166, 167 Fortune, T. Thomas 180 Foucault, Michel 243 Frankfurt Institute for Social Research 205, 209–11, 212, xxix Frankfurt School 17, 49, 203, 204, 205, 208, 209–14, 219, 220 Franklin, Benjamin 128 free association 105, 122–3 Freedmen’s Bureau, The (The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) 176 freedom Dewey 13, 28, 29, 157–8, 168 Montessori 157–8, 168 Reggio Emilia education 168 freedom to teach/freedom to learn (Lehrfreiheit/Lernfreiheit) 129–30 Frege, Gottlob 227–8, 238 Freire, Paulo 11, 17, 92, 205, 207–8, xiv, xxix Frelinghausen University for Colored Working People 186, 189 Freud, Anna 15, 106, 113–15, 116, 118, 122, xxviii Freud, Sigmund 15, 104–6, 107, 108–13, 116, 118, 121, 122, xxvi Fröbel (Froebel), Friedrich 48, 132, 142, xiii–xiv Fromm, Erich 211, 212 frustration 15, 118–19

260

functionalism 142 fusion of horizons 69–71 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 14, 55–6, 67–71, 74, 75–6, 77, xxviii Gallie, W, B. xv Gandini, Lella 162, 166, 167 German, Andy x–xi Germany critical pedagogy 220 higher education 129–30 National Socialism 210–11, 212, 214 Giovanni, Nikki 192 Giroux, Henry 208 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 128 good-enough 107 Gordon, Peter 220 gratitude 116 Greek culture 104 Green, Nicholas St. John 131, 133 Green, T. H. 137 Greener, Richard Theodore 182 Griffiths, D.W. 190 Grimké, Francis J. 179–80, 182, 187, 190 “growth,” in Dewey’s democratic education 13, 30, 34, 47 Grumet, Madeleine 92 Grünberg, Carl 210 Gruschka, Andreas 218 Gur-Ze’ev, Ilan 218–19 Habermas, Jürgen 219–20 Haines Normal School, Georgia 187–8 Halbbildung 218 Hall, G. Stanley 130, 131, 133, 136 Hall, Stanley 108, xxvi Hamilton, Sir William 131 Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute 180–1 Hampton University 185 Hansberry, Lorraine 192 Harlem Renaissance (“New Negro Movement”) 189–91, 192, xxix Harris, William Torrey 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136–7, 144, xxvi Harvard College 182 Harvard University 130 HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) 177–8

INDEX

Hedge, F.H. 128, 129 Hegel, G.W.F. 129, 130, 132, 136–7, 140, 143, 144, 205, 216, 217 Heidegger, Martin 14, 17, 18, 55–6, 64–7, 77, xxviii language and the linguistic turn 228, 237–42, 243, 245–6 Herbart, Johann Friedrich 5, 8, 11, 48, 128, 132 Herbart Society 130, 132, 137, 142 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 187 hermeneutics 13–14, 53–6, 76–7 Bildung 75–6 Dilthey 7, 55–9, 63–4, 66 and education 75–6 hermeneutic circle 59 the “other” 9 see also phenomenology Hickman, Larry 49 Hirst, Paul 237 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) 177–8 historicity 66, 69 Hobbes, Thomas xii Hölderlin, Friedrich 242 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 129, 134, 144 Holocaust, the 212, 214, 216 Homer 215 Honneth, Axel 219–20 Hope, John 180 Horkheimer, Max 12, 203–4, 210–11, 212–16, 218, 219, xxix Höss, Rudolph 212 house of being, and language 242–3 Howard University 178, 182, 186, 190 Howells, William Dean 134 Hughes, Langston 191 Hull House, Chicago 139–40 humanities, the 248 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 8–9 Hume, David 232–3 Hurston, Zora Neale 191 Husserl, Edmund 14, 55–6, 59–64, 73, 74, 77, 215, 238, xxvii Huxley, T.H. 131 idealism 127, 128, 130, 131, 138, 143, 144 Absolute Idealism 136, 137 Marx’s critique of 205–9 ideality 116–17

INDEX

identification 217 identity 215 ideology 204 “ideology critique” 203, 207 see also critical theory I-It relationships 82, 83, 84 imperialism 2, xvi induction 131 Institute for Colored Youth 182 instrumentalism 133 intellectual education 40–1 intellectual training xvii, xviii “interest” 143 intergenerational encounter xiv International Alliance of Women xxix International Woman Suffrage Alliance xxix interpretation, in psychoanalysis 108–12, 122 intersubjectivity 122 introjection 115 Irigaray, Lucy 243 Italian school system 152 see also Malguzzi, Loris; Montessori, Maria; Montessori Method; Reggio Emilia Itard, Jean-Marc-Gaspard 153 I-You (I-Thou) relationships 14, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89–90, 92, 93, 99 James, William 15, 109–10, 183–4, xiv, xxvi pragmatism 128, 129, 131, 133, 135–6, 137, 141, 144 Jefferson, Thomas 128 Jim Crow 180, 182, 189 John Dewey Society xxx Johns Hopkins University 130, 135 Joldersma, Clarence 98 Jones, Ernest xxviii Jules Ferry Laws, France xxviii Kant, Immanuel 15, 48, 106, 107, 117, 128, 134, 143, 187, 214, xvi Keats, John 107 Kellner, Douglas 208–9 Kellogg, Paul 190, 191 Kennedy, ? 166 Kilpatrick, William Heard 154, xxvii–xxviii King, Martin Luther, Jr. xxx Klein, Melanie 15, 106, 115–17, 122, xxviii

261

knowledge production 215 Korsch, Karl 209 Kristeva, Julia 105, 116–17, 243 labour, as a commodity 206–7 Lacan, Jacques xxix Laney, Lucy Craft 187–8 Lang, Ossian 143 Langeveld, Martinus Jan 53 language and the linguistic turn 17–18, 227–9 atomic facts 232–3 coming into language 235–7 Derrida 228, 243–6, 248 educational practice 246–9 Heidegger 228, 237–42, 243, 245–6 and the house of being 242–3 language and communication 229–30 Ordinary Language Philosophy 227–8 Wittgenstein 227, 228, 232, 233–7, 239, 243, 245, 248 “language games” 236, 248 Lebenswelt (lifeworld) see lifeworld (Lebenswelt) Lehrfreiheit/Lernfreiheit (freedom to teach/ freedom to learn) 129–30 Levinas, Emmanuel 14, 82, 88–92, 95, 99, 243, xxix and education 97–8 liberation theory 13, 208 Liberia 182 liberty, Montessori and Dewey on 157–8 libido 113 lifeworld (Lebenswelt) Heidegger 64 Husserl 62–3, 215 of children 12 Lightfoot, Henry Morton 177 linguistic turn see language and the linguistic turn Lipari, Lisbeth 84, 90, 91 Litt, Theodor 11 Little Rock Nine 197 lived experience/life experience (Erlebnis) 56–9 Lloyd, Ieuan 237 Locke, Alain Leroy 189–90, 191, 192, xxviii Locke, John 48 logic 131

262

logical positivism 232–3, 239 love 85 Lukács, Georg 209 Luxemberg, Rosa 2 lynching 189, 190 Lyotard, Jean-François 243 M Street High School 186, 188 Mach, Ernst 131 Macmillan, C.J.B. 237 Malguzzi, Loris 16, 152, 160, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169, xxix Malpas, Jeff 64–5 Mann, Horace 130, 132, xxvi Marshall, James D. 237 Marx, Karl 17, 203, 204, 205–9, 219, 220, xvi, xxvi materialism 128, 144 mathematics, and pragmatism 15 McLaren, Peter 208 McMurry, Charles 130 Mead, George Herbert 15–16, xiv, xxvii concept of play 16 pragmatism 128, 140, 141–2, 144 “Mehrwert” (surplus value) 206 memory 15 in Buber 84, 90 in Dewey 28, 40 in psychoanalysis 105–19 Meredith, James 197 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice xxix “messy situations” 12 Metaphysical Club, Boston 134 method 68 Methodist Episcopal Church 181 see also African Methodist Episcopal Church methods of education 45–6 Michigan Schoolmaster’s Club 138 Milbradt, Björn 220 Mill, J.S. 131 minima pedagogica 219 Modern Language Association 185 modernity 2 early childhood in 152–3 Monk, Stephen Ray 227 Montaigne, Michel xiii, xvi Montessori, Maria 16, 152, 153–4, 155–6, 157–9, 168, 169, xxvii

INDEX

Montessori Method 16, 152, 153–7, 160, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168–9, 170, xxix contemporary perspective 159 invitation 153, 155, 157–9 Moore, Addison Webster 128, 141, 144 Moore, G.E. 233 moral education 132, xvii Moran, Dermot 61, 62 Morris, George Sylvester 130 mother-child relationship caring 93, 94 frustration 118 psychoanalysis 15 Movement for Black Lives 196 Mulhall, Stephen 227 Murdoch, Iris xi NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) 6, 187, 190 NACW (National Association of Colored Women) 188 National Afro-American League 180 National Educational Association 130 National Socialism, in Germany 210–11, 212, 214 nationalism 17 Native Americans rights of 2 naturalism 142 “naturalistic fallacy” 233 “negative capability” 107 negative dialectic 205, 216–17 negativity of experience 217 “negative philosophy of history” 216 “New Negro Movement” (Harlem Renaissance) 189–91, 192, xxix New, Rebecca 161 Niagara Movement 187, 195, 196, 197, xxix Nietzsche, Friedrich xii Noddings, Nel 10, 14, 82, 92–5, 96–7, 99, xxix non-human world, encounters with 85 Oakeshott, Michael 248, ix–x, xiv Oberlin College 178, 182, 185, 186

INDEX

object relations 106, 115–17 see also subject/object dualism “objectivity-for-subjectivity” 62 Oedipus complex 105 “one-caring” 92, 93–4 ontology 238 Ordinary Language Philosophy 227–8 Orwell, George 250n6 Ossawa, Henry 183 other, the 2–3 in German philosophy 9 Levinas 82, 88–92 paideia xiv Palmer, George Herbert 189 Palmer, Parker 92 Pan-African Congress, London 1900 2 pan-africanism 182 Parker, Francis 138, xiv pauperization (soziale Frage/social question) 206 pedagogical tact 11 see also tact pedagogy xix, xvii and authoritarianism 212–14 Peirce, Benjamin 134 Peirce, Charles Saunders 15, 128, 129, 131, 133, 134–6, 144 perfectibilité 4–7, 8 perfectibility (Bildsamkeit) 5 “personality” 27 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 130, 132, xiii Peters, Michael 237 Peters, Richard S. 49, 237 phenomenalism 142 phenomenology 13–14, 53–6, 76–7 and education 53–4, 71–5 Gadamer 55–6, 67–71, 74, 75–6, 77 Heidegger 55–6, 64–7, 77 Husserl 55–6, 59–64, 73, 74, 77 language and the linguistic turn 228, 237–42, 243, 245–6 see also hermeneutics philosophical anthropology 14, 81–2 philosophy of education Bildung 4, 8–10, 17 canonical philosophers xi–xii dynamic and critical tradition xv–xvii early American 128–32, 144

263

historical origins xiii–xv perennial questions ix–x perfectibilité 4–7, 8 pragmatist 137–43 relationality, in the teacher-learner relationship 4, 10–13 roots of 4–13 theoretization xvii, xviii “philosophy of practice” 205–6 phronesis 11 Piaget, Jean 20n17 “plasticity” 6 Plato 25, 48, 128, 132, 143, 238, ix, xiii, xvi play Dewey 142 Mead 16, 141–2 Winnicott 107 pleasure principle 112, 116 Plessy v. Ferguson 198n9 poet-thinker figure 242–3 poiesis 242 politics xix, xvii, xviii populism 220 postmodernism 49 poststructuralism 120, 237 feminist 243 pragmatism 6, 15–16, 127–8, 143–5 early philosophy and American educational thought 128–32, 144 pragmatist philosophy of education 137–43 presuppositions, 1867–95 133–7 see also Dewey precarization 220 Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) 197 present-at-hand (vorhanden) 238 “presentism” x Price, Joseph 184–5 Priestley, Joseph 128 product model of education 96 “progressive education” 11, xii, xiv psychoanalysis 14–15, 103–4 Anna Freud 15, 106, 113–15, 116, 118, 122, xxviii Bion 15, 106–7, 117–19, 122, xxviii and the Frankfurt School 211 interpretation 108–12, 122 Klein 15, 106, 115–17, 122, xxviii

264

Sigmund Freud 15, 104–6, 107, 108–13, 116, 118, 121, 122, xxvi Winnicott 15, 107, 119–21, 122, xxviii psychology xix Dewey 30 educational practice 247–8 see also psychoanalysis “pulled up short” 69 PWIs (Predominantly White Institutions) 197 race 2, 16–17, 176–7 education for formation 194–7 education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 177–89 Harlem Renaissance (“New Negro Movement”) 189–91, 192 new world civil rights 191–4 women’s leadership and advocacy 186–9 radical ethics 82, 88–92 ready-to-hand (zuhanden) 238 reality principle 112, 116 Reason, Western model of 215–16 reciprocity in caring relationships 94–5 in I-You relationships 86–7 reduction see transcendental reduction reflective practice 12 Reeder, Jurgen 123 Reggio Emilia 16, 151, 152–3, 160–1, 168, 169, 170, xxix contemporary perspectives 167 creation 165–6 provocation 160, 161–5, 168 reification 204, 205, 206–7, 209–14, 212–19, 221 relational ethics 92–5 relational pedagogy 4, 10–13, 14, 99 relational philosophies see ethical relationality relationality in the teacher-learner relationship 4, 10–13 psychoanalysis 15 see also ethical relationality relationship Levinas 14, 82 see also mother-child relationship; teacher-student relations Renouvier, Charles 136

INDEX

reparation 116 revelation 29 revolution 206 Rhees, Rush 237 “Rhodes must go” movement 121 Ricoeur, Paul 111, 121 right-wing populism 220, 221 Riviere, Joan 111 Roberts, Peter 86 Rogers, Melvin L. 28 romanticism 128, 144 Rorty, Richard 49 Rosenkranz, Karl 127, 132 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 4–5, 8, 25, 48, 230, xi, xiii Royce, Josiah 130, 189 Russell, Bertrand 228, 232, 234, 238, 239, 245 Ryle, Gilbert 227, xxix Santayana, George 189, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul 91 savoir faire 123 Scarborough, William Sanders 177, 182, 185, 186 Schäfer, Alfred 219 Scheffler, Israel 49 Schelling, F.W.J. 128 Schiller, Friedrich 128 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 58 Schön, Donald 12 school occupations 37–41, 42–3, 46–7 schools xiv, xix, 96, 157–66, 176–97 Dewey’s theory of 31–2, 37–48 outcome focus of 96 see also educational environment; Montessori Method; Reggio Emilia science 48 Gadamer 67–8 Husserl 62–3 pragmatism 15 Scottish Realism 128 segregated education 6, 28 Seguin, Edward 153 Seiendes (beings/entities) 239 Sein (Being) 239 self-realization 30, 36 ‘Separate but Equal’ doctrine, US 198n9, xxviii, xxx

INDEX

settlement houses, Chicago 139–40 Shakespeare, William 228, xii Sidorkin, Alexander 96 signs 227 materiality of 243–6 slavery 2, 4, 15, 129, 176–97 see also race Smeyers, Paul 237 Snir, Inat 219 social and political philosophy xix, xvii, xviii social sciences xix Fairfield 54–5 Gadamer 67–8, 71 limitations of 71–3 Socrates 98, ix, xi, xvii Sophocles 105 South Africa 121 Spencer, Herbert 134, 137 Spinoza, Baruch (Benedictus) xii spirituality xvii, xviii “spontaneous power” of children 142 St. Pierre Ruffin, Josephine 188 Starr, Ellen Gates 139 Stevenson, Charles 233 Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne 114 Stickney, Jeff 237 subject matter 45, 46–8 subject/object dualism 59–61, 64, 71–2 Buber 83–4 language and linguistics 247 Survey Graphic 191 “Swansea Wittgensteinism” 237 Swartz, Sally 121 tact 74–5 Tanner, Laurel 49 Tanney, Julia 227 teachers education of 137, 186, 197n2, 248 “teacher-centred” approach to education 11 teacher-student relations Buber 96–7 Gadamer 76 Levinas 89 Montessori Method 168–9 Noddings 93–4, 96–7 reciprocity in I-You relationships 86–7

265

teaching and Bildung 76 and education of African-Americans 194 and ethical relationality 98–9 and psychoanalysis 104–6, 120 and pragmatism 130, 131, 138 enslaved children 176 see also Montessori Method; Reggio Emilia; Wittgenstein; Dewey Dewey 41–6 “genetic method” 131 as a reflective practice 12 techno-scientific thinking 241 teleology 136–7 Terrell, Mary Church 188 Thayer-Bacon, Barbara 96, 97 therapist-patient relationships 87 thinking 217 psychoanalytic approaches to 103–4, 106–7, 117–19, 131–3 reflective 42 techno-scientific 241 Thompson, Christiane 219 “thrown-projection” 66 Todd, Sharon 88, 97–8 Tolstoy, Leo 30 topos 204 “totality of false consciousness” 212–17, 221 trade unions 2 transcendence 63–4 transcendental reduction 62, 74 transcendentalism 143 transference 104, 111 Trotter, William Monroe 187, xxix trumpism 220–1 Tubman, Harriet 4 Tufts, James 128, 140, 141, 144 Tuskegee University 178, 180, 185 Ulysses 215 umheimlich (uncanny/not-being-at-home) 245 unconscious, the 15, 108, 110 “uneducable” children 6 United Nations xvi, xx United States civil rights movements 16–17, 191–4, xxx

266

early American educational philosophy 128–32, 144 higher education 129 United States Constitution Fifteenth Amendment 179 Fourteenth Amendment 179 Nineteenth Amendment 28, xxix Thirteenth Amendment 179 University of South Carolina 182 values xvii Van Doren, Charles 190 Van Gogh, Vincent 239–40 van Manen, Max 14, 53, 54, 72, 74–5, 77 Van Vechten, Carl 190 Veck, Wayne 85 Vienna Circle 232, 239 vorhanden (present-at-hand) 238 Vygotsky, Lev 160 Wachterhauser, Brice 66 Warnke, Georgia 63, 65 Washington, Booker T. 16, 177, 178–9, 180–1, 182, 183, 185, 186, xxvi–xxvii Weber, Désirée 233–4 Weil, Hermann 210 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 16, 187, 188–9 Weltanschauung (worldview) 111 West, David 61, 64 Westbrook, Robert 32–3

INDEX

Whitehead, Alfred North xxvii Wiercinski, Andrzej 53, 54 Wilberforce University 178, 185, 186 Williams, Henry Sylvester 2 Winnicott, Donald W. 15, 107, 119–21, 122, xxviii Wittgenstein, Ludwig 17–18, 227, 228, 232, 233–7, 239, 243, 245, 248, xviii, xxviii women African American women’s leadership and advocacy 186–9 enfranchisement of 2, 28 leadership roles in political movements 2 rights of 2–3, 159 role of 2 see also mother-child relationship “working through” 108 World’s Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893 2–3 worldview (Weltanschauung) 111 Wright, Chauncey 15, 128, 129, 133, 134, 144 Wundt, Wilhelm 142 Young, Ella Flagg xiv Zahavi, Dan 61, 62–3, 64 Zitkala-sa 2, 7 zuhanden (ready-to-hand) 238