Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education

Wendy Kohli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136646294
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education presents a series of conversations expressing many of the multiple voices that currently constitute the field of philosophy of education. Philosophy of education as a discipline has undergone several turns--the once marginal perspectives of the various feminisms, critical Marxism, and poststructuralist, postmodernist and cultural theory have gained ground alongside those of Anglo-analytic and pragmatic thought. Just as Western philosophers in general are coming to terms with the "end of philosophy" pronouncement implicit in postmodernism, so too are philosophers of education faced with similar challenges--challenges to long-held moral, political, aesthetic and epistemological commitments. The contributors take up these challenges through a dialogical structure, expressing differing positions without engaging in destructive critique.

Part One

What Counts as Philosophy of Education?

1

What Counts as Philosophy of Education?

Maxine Greene

When Hélène Cixous, critic and philosopher, was asked to deliver an Oxford Amnesty Lecture in 1992, she thought immediately of the millions deprived of liberty over the world; of the tortured ones, and of the forgotten men and women for whom Amnesty International was organized. Like many philosophers in the West, she was aware of the loss of legitimation of what used to be taken for granted about human subjects: freedom, social justice, and equality; and she found herself in tension with regard to a desire for the old standards and an acknowledgment of postmodern scepticism and questioning. She accepted the invitation and then recalled the questions being posed today about traditional norms and principles.

Is there such a thing as an inalienable self? Is the Western conception of the person “as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness ...” defensible in this time of multiple perspectives and multiple realities? (Geertz, 1983). If the self, as defined by an eighteenth century ideology of rights, does not exist, whose freedom are we trying so hard to protect? In any case, are “self” and “freedom” what they used to be?

And I asked myself who these questions were meant for. For a “philosopher”? If they were meant for me, for “myself,” what have I to say about freedom and the self?

I wondered whether I should not point out that all the components of the philosophy of the self in the West have, on the one hand, had a liberating effect, since the values of freedom of expression, of opinion, and so on, have been associated with them; but point out too that this philosophy was undermined by aspects unforeseen and at the time unforeseeable, repressive aspects having to do with phallocentric and colonial patterns of speech. And so, if I were to work towards this philosophy, might it not be necessary to do two things at once: to emphasize both the permanent value of the philosophy of rights and, simultaneously, the inadequacy, the limits of the breakthrough it represented; to construct and deconstruct, to praise and criticize, at one and the same time. [(Cixous 1993, pp. 201–2)]

The definitions of human rights have often assumed the existence of an autonomous, somehow disembodied self who possesses rights. The very notion of possession implies a type of power and, at once, a repression of any kind of dependency. The self, in such definitions, seemed to be identified against or in exclusion of an other, either feminine or in some sense subordinate. Not everyone agrees that the repressive aspects of Western philosophy derive primarily from phallocentrism and colonialism. There is little question, however, that power has effects on the ways in which discourse practices are organized. As Michel Foucault has pointed out, much of what we are able to say at any given moment is controlled by rules and conventions embedded in our social institutions, along with what he called a “régime of truth” (Foucault 1980, pp. 131–3). These rules and conventions also control discussions of the “philosophy of rights”—for so long embodying exclusions few people dared name—so it may well be with talk of growth, inquiry, development, and habits of mind in the discourse of education and the schools.

Educational philosophers also are drawn to assertions of the “permanent value” of Western philosophy when it comes to articulation of their beliefs, even at a time when multiculturalism has become the focus of so much attention. At once, many are impelled to indicate its shortcomings, its blind spots, its insufficiencies. The tension Cixous experienced, the consciousness of being required to “construct and deconstruct,” the recollections of the “liberating effect” of so much now called canonical or “Eurocentric”: all these relate to the question of “what counts as Philosophy of Education” today We have, most of us would admit, come a long way from the conception of philosophy as “the mirror of nature” (Rorty 1979), from notions of objectivism, from confidence in authoritative foundations of what we consider knowledge to be. Whatever our philosophical specialty, most of us are very concerned about communication, intersubjectivity, and the role of language in providing social bonds. We work, in some dimension, from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conception of language games and the “forms of life.” (1968). We understand that they are governed by different rules; but in their intersections, they seem to compose a fabric that may replace the encompassing and transcendent matrix that assured a priori truths.

This differs considerably from a conception of objectively existing frameworks in which we can somehow ground a normative order of consequence for young people in our schools. Yet it remains difficult to set aside our commitments to theoretically-grasped principles like freedom, justice, and equality Similarly, for all our familiarity with the problematic of the “Enlightenment Project” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972), we are still drawn to idealistic renderings of reason linked to progress and to humanism. They continue to draw us towards them, either as regulatory norms or unrealized possibilities. In a moment of shattered frameworks and alternations between scepticism and hopelessness, they seem to glow in the dark as reminders of what might be, and of what is still to be achieved.

Cixous, like many writers and artists of our time, chose to argue against unwarranted imprisonments as if they offended what everyone knew were universal principles of justice. Many of us oppose what we think of as “reason” to terror in the case of the fatma issued against the novelist Salmon Rushdie. A number of educational philosophers are committed to the Deweyan vision of education “as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims” (Dewey, 1916, p. 115). The view may not be ascribed a universality; but many will say, along with Dewey, that the meaning of the idea of education has not been adequately grasped if educators do not believe it feasible to instill “as a working disposition of mind” a confidence in a “fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all human beings with one another. ...” Dewey went on to say that the end of such intercourse might be the overcoming of international jealousy and animosity.

This confidence in the uses of intelligence and the possibility of social harmony is very much in the Enlightenment tradition. It even evokes the so-called “metanarrative”—or the grand narrative—associated with the all-encompassing world view of the Age of Reason, a view of ongoing progress that anticipated all questions and offered a range of predetermined answers (Lyotard 1984). Even as we are moved by it and often motivated by that narrative, we are bound to recall the repressive ends it—along with the discourse of rationality—came to serve. Reason, like science itself, can be dominating and oppressive, especially when it claims under all circumstances to have the “best answer” to social problems. Stephen Toulmin, looking back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has written about calculation being “enthroned as the distinctive virtue of the human reason,” while the life of emotions “was repudiated as distracting one from the demands of clear-headed deliberation” (1990, p. 134). Dewey himself once warned against the “monopolistic jurisdiction” of true-and-false meanings with the reminder that “the realm of meaning is wider ... it is more urgent and more fertile” (1958, p. 410).

More serious than that jurisdiction, of course, was the transformation of rationality in so many places into instrumental rationality; with all its linkages to technology, its neglect of self-reflectiveness, its setting aside of value considerations. We are all familiar with the ways in which instrumental rationality has been used to legitimate not merely bureaucracies and social engineering, but Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the massacres in Vietnam, and even (from a different point of view) Stalin’s Gulag. We are aware that science and scientific method cannot be subsumed under the rubric of instrumental rationality; and we are equally aware that reflection on the relations between theoretical science and its applications must be part of what “counts as Philosophy of Education.” D. C. Phillips, discussing the diversity of methods and theories in the spheres of the sciences, has written that contemporary Philosophy of Science “does emphasize the importance of research programs progressively opening up new phenomena, the exposing of assumptions; and the giving and receiving of strong criticism.” (1981, p. 255). As critiques diversify, even within educational theory and research, it is important to hold this in mind. The contributions made by the sciences to medicine, psychology, the environment, and (on occasion) social policy decisions cannot be set aside. Educational philosophers also need to attend to feminist approaches to the sciences (Keller 1985): “feminist empiricism” and “feminist standpoint epistemologies” (Harding 1986, pp. 136–162). There is also a persistent dissonance between the predictability and organization of the sciences and the multiplicity, heteroglossia, contingency, relationality, and what Mikhail Bakhtin called “carnival” of social life (1981). We may wonder whether languages and methods enriched and expanded by feminist and humanistic ideas may become less tainted as we plead for freedom, human expression, and the growth of compassionate communities.

While wondering, we cannot set aside the texts that compose so much of our tradition and provide so many of our references and allusions, texts by: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, George Herbert Mead, William James, John Dewey, Paulo Freire. Can we prevent such texts from being undermined by the “unforeseen” and the “unforeseeable”? How can we expose the inadequacies (and the racism, and the sexism) in so much of the discourse without disposing of the texts—and our own intertextuality—as well? Must they be shredded? Must we start again? Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, “Earth’s Holocaust,” comes to mind. It tells of a great bonfire built on the American prairie to burn the world’s accumulation of “worn-out trumpery.” People toss in everything from thrones to uniforms, to guns, to vats of wine. At length, they begin throwing in books and pamphlets: “the weight of dead men’s thought which hitherto has pressed so heavily on the living intellect that has been incompetent to any effectual self-exertion” (1969, p. 200). At the end, Hawthorne reminds us that the human heart must first be purified if crime and misery are to disappear; but “if we go no deeper than the intellect and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream” (p. 209).

The story communicates the weight of dead authorities, as it holds intimations of later positivism and reaches forward to the days of multiple language games. It also suggests that “self-exertion” on the part of the “living intellect” is a far more reliable panacea against “trumpery” than a vast fire on the prairie. Hawthorne renders obvious the degree of conceptual mastery that makes people feel entitled to destroy, or exclude, or ignore. At once, he makes clear the notion that formal reason, in disembodied form, cannot cure human ills nor solve existential problems. If free and enriching dialogues are to take place in the spheres of education, among teachers or learners; if serious efforts to deconstruct and to redescribe are to be undertaken; people must reach out from their own lived situations in as many directions as seem feasible. Educational philosophers, in their turn, must identify themselves as situated in the same fashion and actively participant in a community—stretching back in time and forward towards the unexplored. This means engaging with the canonical texts so as to make them our own, enlarging and diversifying the canon even while consulting the texts that have defined us to this point: the analytic and logical texts, the experiential, the linguistic, the phenomenological (Archambault 1965, Green 1971, Hirst 1965, Peters and Hirst 1970, Phillips 1981, Scheffler 1943, Soltis 1981). No list can be more than suggestive. To create “what counts,” educational philosophers have to discover their own intertextuality, extend their minds towards the horizons, shape and reshape their traditions. In the shaping, in the interpretation, in the reflection, the questions will multiply. Posing the questions, loving the questions, philosophers may open whatever doors there are.

Elizabeth Bishop, in the poem “January First,” wrote about the year’s doors opening and about having to invent “once more, the reality of this world.” At the end, she says:

When you open your eyes

we’ll walk, once more,

among the hours and their inventions.

We’ll walk among appearances

and bear witness to time and its conjugations.

Perhaps we’ll open the day’s doors.

And then we shall enter the unknown. (1983, p. 274)

Taking this seriously, we may have to explore our own bildung, our self-formation as persons and as educational philosophers. For many, the authors listed previously evoke speakers and writers who are models—or thinkers against whom we may have chosen to rebel. In absorbing them as models or in refusing their ideas, we define and continue to redefine ourselves. When many of us began, we were not conscious of the “patriarchal” (what Cixous called “phallocentric”) at the core of what we read. Often, as we now know, the adjective has been used to make us aware of a core, a kind of center in many philosophical pronouncements, sometimes even in the most rigorous analysis. As many feminist critics view it, it is a mode of communication tightly constrained by rules of logic, linearity, and (on occasion) a range of largely technical rules. Valuing distance and autonomy, such thinkers are “more exclusionary,” unlikely to pay heed to the interdependence of “they” and “we” (Belenky et al. 1986, p. 4). It is at least likely that this mode of knowing and way of being prepared the ground and origin of what is described as instrumental rationality. This is another open question to be pondered in educational philosophy We may find it to be of considerable moment that people who think in that manner are prone to assert that the rule-governed, “neutral” cognition of which they are capable can be relied upon for realistic representations of the world. (Judith Butler, seeking a paradigm for this mode of cognition, turns to the Gulf War and the celebration of the “phantasmatic subject, the one who determines its world unilaterally, and which is in some measure typified by the looming heads of retired generals framed against the map of the Middle East, where the speaking head of the subject is shown to be the same size, or larger than the area it seeks to dominate. This is, in a sense, the graphics of the imperialist subject, a visual allegory of the action itself [1992, p. 10].)

We might think of the interplay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. (Novels, of course, do not argue. They set forth; they present; they offer metaphors; in some indirect fashion, they illustrate.) At the beginning, Mrs. Ramsay is talking to her little son about going to the lighthouse.

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added. To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place. . . . “But”, said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window “it won’t be fine”. . . . What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth. (1962, pp. 3–4)

Mr. Ramsay, usually thinking with the aid of abstract symbols (sometimes, the letters of the alphabet) is convinced (as is his irate little son) that he represents reality accurately, in contrast to his wife. When Andrew tries to explain to the artist Lily what his father does, he says: “‘Think of a kitchen table then, . . . when you’re not there.’ So she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table . . . lodged now in the fork of a pear tree . . .” (p. 26). In truth, his is the kind of mind that constructs what is believed to be real; it excludes almost on principle his wife’s sad hesitancies, his young son’s despair, the length of the shadows in the garden, the feel of his own organic life. Whether or not we choose to see Mr. Ramsay as representing some masculine “essence,” it is clear enough that the mode of thinking described excludes and subordinates intuition, imagination, feeling, and metaphoricality. Narrowing in on a particular type of cognition, the person favoring this way of sense-making has only a partial view of things. The rigor, the exclusiveness, the abstractness cannot but affect the discourse used in speaking about freedom, human rights, and education as well.

So it is with what Cixous calls the “colonial.” Identifying with and making dominant a “First World” type of rationality and technicality, colonial thinking has not only imposed a “right” way, with a “right” pay-off; it has, in many cases, deformed, belittled, or exoticized what has been considered “undeveloped,” “primitive,” and implicitly regressive. We have only to recall the treatment of Native American cultures in this country. We have only to revie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contextualizing the Conversation
• PART I WHAT COUNTS AS PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION?
• PART II VARIATIONS FROM/ON THE “CANON”
• PART III EXPANDING/EXPLODING THE “CANON”
• Contributors