The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene

'I am ... not yet'

William F. Pinar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135707712
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Maxine Greene is the most important philosopher of education in the United States today. The author of Teacher as Stranger (1973), Landscapes of Learning (1978), Dialectic of Freedom (1988), and Releasing the Imagination (1995), Greene has influenced tens of thousands of teachers in North America as well as her colleagues in philosophy of education, teacher education, and curriculum studies. While widely cited, Greene has not - until now - been the subject of sustained scholarly analysis and investigation. William F. Pinar has organized a systematic study of Greene's contribution from several points of view: studies of the four books; studies of the intellectual and aesthetic influences upon her theory; and her influence on the various specializations within the broad field of education: the teaching of English, arts education, philosophy of education, curriculum studies, religious education, cognitive theory, and theory of teaching. The book opens and concludes with Maxine Greene's own autobiographical statements.

Section Four
Greene’s Influence on Educational Theory

16
A Situated Philosopher

Wendy Kohli

City Life

It was the summer of 1973 and I lived on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village. I was a relative newcomer to New York City, having moved there from a small upstate college town with my ‘counter-cultural squeeze,’ Michael, an Abbie Hoffman look-a-like. We had been at the center of the political and cultural ‘revolution’ on our campus and were ready to expand our horizons. Part of our political involvement at Cortland was with alternative education, including a community ‘free school’ for elementary-age children where I was the headteacher. Having been influenced by such diverse thinkers as Jonathan Kozol, Paul Goodman, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, A.S.Neill, Paulo Freire, Murray Bookchin, and yes—Maxine Greene—we saw the intimate connections between education and social-political change.

Michael was convinced by Murray Bookchin to pursue a PhD in critical social theory at the Graduate Faculty of the New School, the inheritor of the Frankfurt School of thought in the US. Vacillating between studying social theory or philosophy of education, I decided to take a year to decide on my PhD prospects. In the meantime, as a result of my connections in the alternative school movement, I got a job as a junior high school teacher at The Baldwin School, a private, progressive, secondary school on the upper west side. Although I liked the school’s philosophy, my colleagues, and the culturally diverse student body, it was still a job, not a career move, since I had already decided that K-12 classroom teaching was not going to be my life’s work. I was interested in social and educational change, but from the vantage point of a professor. Nevertheless, the teaching job allowed me time and money to support my urban cultural journey and to search for a graduate school I could call home.

In retrospect, it is impossible not to notice the gendered nature of my experiences and choices in those days. As ‘counter-cultural’ as Michael and I were, we still reproduced many of the gender dynamics of our parents, even with my ‘raised feminist consciousness.’ My social circle in New York consisted mostly of men I met through Michael. Even so, it was a heady time for us aspiring intellectuals and social critics: translations of Habermas were hitting the 8th Street Bookstore and visiting speakers from Germany, including Habermas himself, were a regular occasion. Hannah Arendt sightings made our day. And late-night conversations about Hegel or Heidegger over pizza and beer were the rule not the exception. Yet, as exciting as this was for me, it also left something to be desired. I felt a certain disconnection from the scene: a lack of groundedness coupled with no small aversion to the ‘peacocking’ that was going on around me.¹ And, I had this gnawing feeling that no matter what I read or said, I would/could never ‘be one of the guys.’

There were, of course, multiple reasons for my dis-ease, including my own insecurities and ‘lack’² of philosophical training. With both BS and MS degrees in social science and education, I read mostly in sociology and history, as well as that ‘derivative field,’ educational foundations. And as a young woman with a small town, working-class background,³ I was intimidated by what felt to me to be more articulate, urbane male thinkers. I suffered what many women suffer—the invalidation of my own thinking and intuition. Yet, I knew in my gut that in order for me to engage wholeheartedly in doctoral studies, something more would have to happen to/for me than what occurred in our never-ending theorizing in the Village. The theorizing in and of itself wasn’t the problem. But I wanted a more direct link between critical social theory and educational change, what Paulo Freire (1970) called praxis. I also wanted more resonance between me—all of me—and what I was learning. The intellectualism of our group at the New School felt like an ‘out of body’ experience to me. Although I couldn’t name it yet, I wanted Maxine Greene.

The Seventh Avenue Subway to Freedom⁴

Luckily, my former social foundations professor, John Marciano, knew Maxine and had written a letter of introduction for me. With it and her recent book in hand, Teacher as Stranger—which I had just devoured—I headed uptown on the 7th Avenue IRT subway to meet with Maxine at Teachers College. I still have that same copy of Teacher as Stranger, now tattooed with the layered marginalia from multiple readings over the years. Even with the masculine pronouns, I felt that book spoke directly to me. Greene (1973) opens the preface by saying:

This book is specifically addressed to the teacher or teacher-to-be who is in the process of choosing his [sic] ‘fundamental project’ the activity of teaching in a classroom. The vantage point of the reader is conceived to be that of a person who is involved and responsible, someone who looks out on the educational landscape from inside a specifiable ‘form of life’.
(Preface)

I felt as if I was ‘choosing my fundamental project.’ Still wrapped in the idealism and commitment of the 1960s, I wanted my choices to matter. I believed they would. And although I did not want to be a classroom teacher, I thought I might want to be a teacher of future teachers and change those ‘educational landscapes’ that limited our possibilities.

Greene (1973) spoke to me in other ways as well. She situated herself as ‘a writer who cannot escape her own biographical situation, her own location in the modern world.’ And this location, this ‘standpoint of the author is that of a person who was reared and educated in an urban environment’ (Preface). Although not an urbanite, I felt the general point Greene made was a powerful signal to me that one’s place in the world, although not a strictly determining factor, was absolutely crucial in understanding how we come to know the world. She reminds us of this in a later book, Landscapes of Learning, when she says: ‘it is important to hold in mind, therefore, that each of us achieved contact with the world from a particular vantage point, in terms of a particular biography. All of this underlies our present perspectives and affects the way we look at things and talk about things and structure our realities’ (Greene, 1978, p. 2). So not only does Greene locate the reader in a specific life-context, she also situates herself as author/philosopher.

Details of our first conversation are vague. What remains is a visceral memory: I was smitten. Professor Greene invited me to take her Social Philosophy course that semester, which I did. Little did I know that this would be the beginning of a lifelong relationship, one that would profoundly shape my view of education and philosophy for years to come.

The ‘IRT’ became a connecting link between my various west-side worlds: Greenwich Village wannabe intellectual, junior-high school teacher, and uptown graduate student. But it was more than that. It was my train to freedom. As I shifted between the formal, heavy, male, ‘Old World style’ of lecturing at the New School, to the airy, literary, broadly Continental, multidisciplinary teaching performances of Maxine Greene, I felt my spirit lift and my mind open. There was something so refreshing and inviting about her oratory. It was engaged. It was connected. Just as in Teacher as Stranger, Greene contextualized her lectures in the lived-world; she made philosophy come to life (even John Rawls!) with her own and others’ lived experiences. I could actually imagine myself doing what she was doing—‘doing philosophy.’

The influence of existentialism and phenomenology was evident in her pedagogical stance—a stance underscoring our embodiment as knowers, learners, teachers—and one with direct epistemological and political implications. Inhabiting this philosophical frame, Greene felt obligated to ‘go beyond the situations one confronts and refuse reality as given in the name of a reality to be produced’

(1973, p. 7). For her, ‘it is simply not enough for us to reproduce the way things are’ (Greene, 1995a, p. 1). Unlike many of her academic peers, Greene has never shied away from connecting philosophy to political commitment. Quite the contrary. She has continually implored us to apply our critical intelligence to any situation in which we find ourselves—to not take anything for granted. In 1973 she offered the following invitation to what she has often called ‘wide-awakeness.’

The reader is challenged to do philosophy, to take the risk of thinking about what he [sic] is doing when he teaches, what he means when he talks about enabling others to learn. He is asked to become progressively more self-conscious about the choices he makes and the commitments he defines in the several dimensions of his professional life. He is asked to look, if he can, at his presuppositions, to examine critically the principles underlying what he thinks and what he says. (Preface)

This call to critical consciousness resonated with my own intentions as a radical educator.

Making a Way in the Wilderness

Could it be that I had found a ‘role model?’ I think here not of an unproblematized ‘heroine,’ but of the way Alice Walker used the term. For Walker, in an account offered by Bernice Fisher (1988), role models are important to artists in their struggle ‘to make their way in the world’ (p. 237). They can ‘enrich and enlarge one’s view of existence’ and support a ‘fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking that enlarges the private and public world,’ (p. 237). Fisher recalls that when Walker first encountered the work of Zora Neale Hurston, she felt that she ‘had discovered a model…as if she (Hurston) knew someday I (Walker) would come along wandering in the wilderness’ (p. 238).

I see a parallel between the artist and the female philosopher of education. Both are finding their way in their respective wildernesses as they ‘risk ridicule’ and overcome their fears of failure (Fisher, 1988, p. 238). They are also both on searches, trying to break down the loneliness and isolation as they create something new (p. 238). Maxine Greene speaks often of her search, her quest. We see this described eloquently in The Dialectic of Freedom:

This book arises out of a lifetime’s preoccupation with quest, with pursuit. On the one hand, the quest has been deeply personal: that of a woman striving to affirm the feminine as wife, mother, and friend, while reaching, always reaching, beyond the limits imposed by the obligations of a woman’s life. On the other hand, it has been in some sense deeply public as well: that of a person struggling to connect the undertaking of education, with which she has been so long involved, to the making and remaking of a public space, a space of dialogue and possibility. (Greene, 1988, p. xi)

This connection of the personal with the political was one more quality that drew me to Maxine. At the same time, my attraction to her and her way of doing philosophy was not without its contradictions and confusions. You see, I had internalized the masculinist bias that what was going on at the New School Graduate Faculty was the real work, the real arena in which to toss my hat. What made this the legitimate arena? To some extent it had to do with the fact that what they were teaching wasn’t education. But perhaps most importantly, The New School was where the boys were.

Elizabeth Young-Bruhle (1988) reminds us women that ‘there is a great deal in our personal and cultural histories suggesting that thinking is not our province, not our privilege, not even our possibility’ (p. 9). Few women held teaching positions in the philosophy ‘wilderness’ of the early 1970s. In my mind’s eye, philosopher equals man with beard, tweed jacket, and pipe. This was intimidating but also part of its allure, its legitimation, its power. I wanted to be like that. As JoAnne Pagano (1990), a feminist philosopher of education who writes about the (patriarchal) wilderness suggests, ‘the male teacher, like the father, serves directly and unproblematically as the representative of the abstract world of order, method, beauty, justice, etc. He is the “reader,” the “scientist,” the “philosopher,” the “lover,” the “artist,” the “he,” whose voice we mimic’ (p. 118).
So, even though I was drawn to what was happening on 120th Street in Main Hall at Teachers College, I was a bit suspicious of its ‘seriousness,’ of its ‘rigor.’ Having straddled the fence between the liberal arts and education in undergraduate school, I knew of the reputation education had in the academy. Social Theory and Philosophy were true disciplines. Education was not, even if it was philosophy of education. And those doing it were constructed as second rate in/by the knowledge hierarchy.

It was only years later, in fact in preparing to write this and another essay on Greene’s place in philosophy of education,⁵ that I learned through an interview that Maxine had internalized the same things about education and philosophy as I had. It was extremely difficult for her to name herself, to take up the identity of philosopher of education. For years, she had doubted her competence and legitimacy. At one point soon after getting her doctorate from NYU in Foundations of Education, she thought about going back to graduate school to ‘get a real PhD,’ to study a ‘real discipline’— philosophy. In a patriarchal institution like the academy, the double jeopardy of being in education and being a woman caused Maxine to second guess her intelligence and importance far too often, and for far too long.

Complicating my decision about graduate school and my future in the university was the way I saw Maxine Greene teach. Comparatively, those New School professors represented the received view of ‘philosophical purity,’ in both their process and content. She, on the other hand, created a space ‘for the articulation of multiple perspectives in multiple idioms’ (Greene, 1988, p. xi) by inserting references to contemporary politics, literature and the arts in her lectures. Maxine’s approach to philosophy was not bound to the making of ‘logical’ arguments or to the exegesis of texts. Philosophy as noun was transformed into a verb in the Greene lexicon. For her, philosophy is not a dead body of knowledge, a static thing; it is an ever-evolving search for meaning and freedom; it is an opportunity to confront the world critically in order to change it; it is acting, choosing, deciding to live in-the-world, to experience the lived reality of one’s existence.

With this perspective, Maxine opened a space in the wilderness for me, and others like me, as she embodied the passion that helped ‘carry [me] into the future’ as a female philosopher of education (Fisher, 1988, p. 243). Seeing her in action, I emerged out of my confusion, remembering that I was someone committed to transforming education and society. Consequently, I chose to study philosophy of education—to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Section One: Four Books
• Section Two: Themes
• Section Three: Influences On Greene’s Thought
• Section Four: Greene’s Influence On Educational Theory
• Section Five: Conclusion