Teaching, Learning, and Loving

Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice

Daniel P. Liston, James W. Garrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135943899
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores emotional aspects of daily educational practice all too often overlooked by theorists and education researchers, but well known to practitioners. These include such topics as eros, the pursuit of happiness, critical hope, vulnerability, mystery, and domestic tranquility. The contributors also examine grief, despair, discomfort, acceptance of ignorance, and loss of hope. While they explore regions outside the bounds of the explicit, cognitive, and categorical, their motivations are familiar: the desire to create hope, meaning, and mutual understanding in the pursuit of better classrooms, more equitable education, and more effective teacher education.

PART 1
Loving Gaps and Loving Practices

In this section, Jane Roland Martin draws on her extensive work entailed in rethinking education to identify a strange omission in our educational thinking, the love whose focus is the growth and development of children. Such love is, in part, a form of bestowal, a part of the teaching eros; that is, in teaching we affirm the value that exists in the world and we create value anew. Echoing the title of one of her earlier books, we might say Martin seeks to change the educational landscape by reconstructing the cultural fences that arbitrarily separate the private domain of the home from public institutions, including not only schools but also many other social institutions. As she has done in so much of her work, Martin shows that these fences form the social contours of gender segregation and discrimination. These fences also function to confine the flow of love to the private sphere of the home, where it is women’s work to nurture and socialize children but not educate them (which remains a public function). She helps us understand why we never think of love and passion as a public concern, hence a concern of educators. The irony is that many teachers experience the call to teach as a call to connect with students in loving, caring, and creative ways that help them learn and grow. Yet, there is no official space inside our educational institutions for teachers to talk about these loves. Martin calls on us to create that space.

Following Martin, Lisa Goldstein concentrates on the role of love in teacher education, but, as she indicates in her paper: “The teacherly love we feel for our preservice teacher education candidates is very much akin to the more widely acknowledged teacherly love we felt for our young students when we were classroom teachers.” As an experienced teacher, Goldstein can assume such a thing among those who have answered the call to teach. Unfortunately, as Martin explained, such love is not widely acknowledged in the official technocratic discourse of schools. To bridge this gap, Goldstein appropriates a general theory of loving that assumes a triadic relation among passion, commitment, and intimacy. Recognizing that intimacy as ordinarily understood, especially in the romantic tradition, is inappropriate for teaching, Goldstein reconstructs it as “intimacy-in-community,” by which she means “creating a caring community of learners who work, dialogue, and explore together.” She is cautious about claiming that her model provides a comprehensive understanding of loving teacher education. And in her conclusion, she urges us to see passion, commitment, and intimate community as cornerstones in a much larger and more elaborate edifice that each teacher education program must construct for themselves given their resources. Because teacher education is a public enterprise, what Goldstein says about loving and teacher education supports and supplements Martin’s insights in many important ways.

After Goldstein, Elaine J.O’Quinn and Jim Garrison examine some of the conditions, complexities, and dangers involved in creating “intimacy-in community.” They begin by expressing concern regarding how standardization, fixed categories, and “sameness” force school communities into controlling rather than creative relations. O’Quinn and Garrison concentrate on building loving relations across difference, claiming that controlling relations tend to suppress diversity while creative relations support it. They question the notion teachers must always “know” students well to teach them well. They insist that we create understanding more often than we discover it, so they strive to show how we may “condition” classrooms for the creative possibility of loving relations. We cannot make people understand or love each other, but we may create conditions making it increasingly possible. Aware that conditioning easily slides into conditions of control, O’Quinn and Garrison identify three serious dangers before offering insights into the creation of shared classroom meaning. They conclude by contrasting the ethos of business and industry, dictated to classrooms by the ethos of a standards-driven technocracy, with the ethos of love in the classroom; and they observe that all they have said also applies to any community, including our democratic nation.

Concluding this section, Michael Dale shows how the standardized discourse of business and industry that controls public education is “a blinding story” of economic calculation that supplements bureaucratic control in ravaging narratives of loving, caring, and connection. In this manner he identifies another significant source for the strange omission in our educational thinking of any narrative of love regarding the growth and development of students. Like Lisa Goldstein, Michael Dale concentrates on teacher education, specifically the teaching of social and philosophical foundations; but what he says applies equally well to elementary, middle-, and high-school classrooms. Drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, among others, Dale shows that by turning directly to literary narrative, we can provide our students with an alternative vocabulary with which to see and describe their personal and professional lives. His insights arise from the fact that teaching is “intimately tied to the understanding and telling of stories.” Dale shows us that when we lend our stories moral and emotional allegiance, the kinds of stories we tell determine the kind of teachers we become. In his paper, he reflects on student reactions to his own teaching to show how student teachers may learn to revise their teaching stories through encounters with rich and rewarding literary narratives, including powerful works such as Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces and Dorothy Allison’s disturbing Bastard Out of Carolina. Dale shows how we may use the moral, aesthetic, and passionate vocabulary of literature to help construct teaching identities committed to creating intimacy-in-community.

CHAPTER 1
The Love Gap in the Educational Text

JANE ROLAND MARTIN

Introduction

The ancient Greeks acknowledged several forms of love, among them: sexual passion; parental, filial, and conjugal affection; fraternal feeling; friendship; love of country; love of wisdom.¹ An anthology of philosophies of love distinguishes six varieties in western thought: romantic love, eros, agape, Tristanism and chivalric love, friendship, fellow feeling.² A three volume work on historical ideas of love discusses sexual love, courtly love, romantic love, married love, and religious love and makes passing reference to mother love, father love, and family love.³ And a 2002 essay on teaching the philosophy of love calls friendship, romantic love, the love of parents for children, and the love of humanity the most basic forms of love.⁴

Despite the general acknowledgment that love takes many different forms, the kind with special relevance to the education of children is either missing from the lists, subsumed under some other category, or treated as an afterthought.⁵ It has been said that commentators on Plato’s Symposium ignore that this dialogue is about passionate love.⁶ This philosophical neglect pales in comparison to the neglect of the kind of love whose object is the growth and development of children. In what follows I will first trace the fate of this love in the history of educational thought, then ask why the neglect, and finally show that it matters.

In focusing on the love whose object is the growth and development of children, I will leave open the question of whether other forms of love also have relevance for educational contexts. This issue is too huge, complicated, and controversial to be entered into here. However, because the sexual abuse of children is so pervasive a disorder of contemporary culture that any serious discussion of love for children is liable to be misunderstood, let me insist that there is no room for abuse of any kind in the form of love I will be discussing.⁷

My inquiry will also leave open the question of the precise nature of the love that has alternatively been called preservative, attentive, maternal, parental.⁸ Interpretations of this love will vary, and it is beyond the scope of this paper to decide among them, just as it is beyond its scope to choose between competing visions of what counts as growth and development. Does the love whose object is children’s growth and development share some of the characteristics of agape? Does it involve elements of romantic love, fellow feeling, or both? Are there perversions other than sexual abuse that need to be guarded against?⁹ How does this form of love relate to the caring that feminist psychologists and philosophers have associated with women’s experience?¹⁰ It would lead too far afield to undertake an exploration of these and all the other vital issues regarding my subject.¹¹

The Strange Fate of Home and Family in the History of Educational Thought¹²

With few exceptions, western thought has assumed that the natural site of the love that aims at the growth and development of children is the world of the “private house,” to use Virginia Woolf’s s apt phrase.¹³ Since that “world” has suffered from philosophical neglect, it is hardly surprising that this form of love has too.

Like other philosophical narratives, the strange story of the fate of home and family in the history of educational thought begins with Plato. Maintaining in the Republic that the institutions of private home, marriage, family, and child rearing will tear a city apart, Plato envisioned a state in which these social arrangements are abolished, at least for the guardian class. True, the guardians of his Just State are supposed to consider themselves one big family, and so “will think of the same thing as their own, aim at the same goal, and, as far as possible, feel pleasure and pain in unison.”¹⁴ But even if this is counted a form of love, it is very different from the kind under discussion here. The love that Plato’s guardians feel for one another— assuming for the sake of argument that it is love—is a reciprocal affair between equals. Reciprocity and equality do not characterize the love that seeks the welfare of young children.

Given the Republic’s disregard for the private home in general and for its parent/child relationships in particular, it is scarcely surprising that Aristo tle, whose philosophy so often countered Plato’s, began his Politics with a treatment of it.¹⁵ Remarkably enough, however, after making the household a basic constituent of the polis, and then discussing slavery and the art of acquisition in some detail in Book I while devoting only a single sketchy paragraph to a man’s rule over wife and children, Aristotle quit the subject. Although he promised to return later to the topics of marriage and parenthood, he did not. More interesting still, when he discussed education in Books VII and VIII of the Politics, Aristotle was strangely silent about both the educative activities of the household and the interpersonal relationships these involve. He pointed out that children can easily learn what they should not—especially from slaves. But instead of crediting the household members in whose care he placed children up to age seven with showing affection for their charges and playing a positive role in furthering their charges’ growth and development, he ignored these educational agents altogether.¹⁶

The educative aspects of home and family disappear in Rousseau’s philosophy, too, as do home’s domestic affections. In The Social Contract, published in 1762, this other philosopher who reacted so strongly to Plato’s social policies called families the first model of political societies. In Emile, published that same year, he presented the private home as a necessary foundation of a healthy state and discussed the relationship between husband and wife, parent and child. Yet Rousseau was of two minds about the claims of home and family. Although in the last book of Emile he said that the love of one’s nearest is the principle of the love one owes the state, the treatise begins with the orphaning of a newborn child. Our hero’s parents are not dead. For the sake of education, the author has simply dismissed them from Emile’s life, putting him instead in the hands of an unmarried male tutor with whom he is to live in virtual isolation.

Rousseau’s ambivalence toward home and family was marked. Acknowledging in Emile that there is “no substitute for maternal solicitude,”¹⁷ he dismisses Emile’s mother from the scene. Insisting that it is “the good son, the good husband, and the good father who make the good citizen,”¹⁸ he removes mother love and family affection from Emile’s childhood. He also says that because a man does not know how to love his children, one of a woman’s duties is to teach her husband to love them. Yet he puts Emile in the hands of the tutor and tells his readers how important it is for Jean-Jacques and Emile “to make himself loved by the other.”¹⁹

The love that Rousseau wants Jean-Jacques to feel for Emile is not romantic love or sexual passion. Rather, he likens it to the tenderness and care a father feels for his children. However, according to the theory of gender relations Rousseau propounds in Book V of Emile, an unmarried man does not know how to love a small child in this way. If Jean-Jacques had a spouse, she could teach him to love Emile. But Jean-Jacques is a bachelor. Perhaps—and this is stretching a point—if Emile and his tutor were to make their permanent home with the wet nurse Jean-Jacques is compelled to hire, she could perform this part of a wife’s services. But Rousseau wants Jean-Jacques and Emile to set up house for themselves as soon as they can. Assuming they accede to his wishes, the tutor will not be able to do the very thing that Rousseau believes is so critical to a child’s early education—love Emile.

In Leonard and Gertrude, a pedagogical novel published in 1781, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi has no trouble remembering the “world” that the much admired Rousseau tried so hard to forget. When in Leonard and Gertrude Cotton Meyer is asked how a “true” school—one that would “develop to the fullest extent all the faculties of the child’s nature”²⁰—could be established, he advises the village lord and his aide to visit Gertrude’s home and observe how she teaches her children. The impression Gertrude’s teaching makes can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the aide opens his eyes the next morning, he murmurs: “I will be schoolmaster!” Returning to Gertrude’s house, he asks her if it would be possible to follow in a regular school the method she uses at home, and he requests her help in so doing. “There can be no substitute for your mother’s heart, which I must have for my school” he says.²¹

Authors of texts and anthologies in the history of educational thought have neglected the gender reversal that distinguishes Pestalozzi’s work on education from Rousseau’s. Whereas Rousseau made a man his model educator, Pestalozzi bestows that honor on a woman. In consequence, commentators have not seen, or else have been unwilling to report, the domesticity at the very center of his educational philosophy. These oversights are more than matched by Pestalozzi’s own ambivalence, however. In 1801 How Gertrude Teaches Her Children was published. Gertrude’s name is not mentioned in this abstract, didactic work, nor is a mother in evidence until the last fifteen pages. The mother’s appearance is so long delayed and so brief that few readers will take seriously Pestalozzi’s protestations about the importance of her educational role. His stereotypical portrayal of her as a creature “forced by the power of animal instinct”²² and his appropriation for himself of the methods she follows all but guarantee that she will not be given credit for the accomplishments Pestalozzi says are hers.

The mother one meets in How Gertrude Teaches Her Children is the direct opposite of the Gertrude of Leonard and Gertrude. The latter is a tower of strength, a repository of good sense, and a model of self-discipline. The former is a woman whose heart is detached from her hearth and whose love for her children is devoid of intelligence. It see...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION LOVE REVIVED AND EXAMINED
• PART 1: LOVING GAPS AND LOVING PRACTICES
• PART 2: LOVE, INJUSTICE, TEACHING, AND LEARNING
• PART 3: LOVE’S LOSSES AND LOVE REGAINED