A Philosophy of Schooling

Care and Curiosity in Community

Julian Stern

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319715704
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319715711
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides an optimistic account of the value and role of schooling. Schooling is a common but not universal approach to education and has need of its own distinctive justification, in contrast to other approaches such as home-based or work-based education. The book tackles and rejects the various large-scale 'functional' theories of schooling which continue to dominate current debates and policies, such as schooling supporting employment and the economy, or developing citizenship. Instead, it argues that schooling and schools should be viewed as places to learn community within and through community. The lived reality of relationships within schools, based on care and curiosity, is as strong as ever: and upon this foundation is built an original philosophy of schooling. This reflective book will appeal to students and scholars of philosophy of education and to all professionals concerned with schools.

© L.J. Stern 2018

Julian SternA Philosophy of Schoolinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71571-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Why Care About Schools?

Julian Stern¹

(1)

York St John University, York, UK

I will care for people and care about learning.

End Abstract

Introduction

I care about schools, and they need defending. People take schools for granted and assume they need no justification. This is wrong. Schools are important, I think, but not necessary. Most learning—even with mass schooling—takes place before, after, and beyond schooling, with most of all happening in the first few years of life prior to any form of schooling. It is therefore more helpful to consider what schools might add to the education of children and young people, rather than assuming schools are the only source of education. As Mounier said, ‘[t]he educational question cannot be reduced to the problems of the school: the school is only one educational instrument among others; and even to make it the principal instrument is a dangerous error’ (Mounier 1952, p 117). This book is my explanation—my philosophy—of schooling, my reason for valuing schools even if they are not necessary.

Why do I care about schools? There are all too many unpleasant aspects of schools, just as there are of families and of every other social group. But a number of philosophers not only care about schools, but write of care in schools not as an additional extra, or a normative ideal, but as schools’ core activity. I would like to build on this understanding of schooling in a chapter that is an account of care in the educational philosophy of Macmurray and Noddings. My purpose is in part to contribute to academic debates on schooling, but I am writing for those involved in schooling, and I am therefore also concerned about contributing to school-based debates on schooling. Teachers and others employed in schools, pupils, families, governors, and politicians can all benefit from seeing schools as caring institutions—better or worse at it, of course, but caring, nonetheless. This will in turn help them understand why we might care about schools. That is why the first sentence of my ‘manifesto’ (the Afterword of this book) says that ‘the school I would like will have people in it who will care for me and care about learning, and will give me opportunities to care for other people’. Care is one of six key concepts—care, dialogue, curiosity, learning, community, and personhood—used throughout the book.

Macmurray and Noddings on Care and Ethics

Why care about care? Care is one of a trio of words—care, love, and friendship—that are central to any consideration of relationships, and therefore ethics, and yet which present challenges. All three terms can be sentimentalised, romanticised, sexualised: all are somewhat dangerous words to use. In some ways, ‘care’ is the least challenging of the three terms, but this certainly does not mean it is straightforward. Being ‘caring’ and ‘careful’ have very different meanings, and ‘care’ can mean a worry or grief just as much as it can mean protection and support (OED 2005). And the danger of associating care with schooling is that schools’ educational function could be ignored in favour of seeing them as little more than babysitting facilities. Into this minefield, I therefore step with some care. (If you are feeling particularly carefree at the moment, you may want to move straight on to Chap. 2, and come back to care later.)

The philosopher Macmurray writes distinctively of care, love, and friendship. Long before ‘care ethics’ was presented as an explicit alternative to the rationalist duty-based ethics of Kant (1964), and the consequentialist utilitarian ethics of Mill (1910), Macmurray’s moral philosophy was centred on care, love, and freedom. Being motivated by duty or by utility is a kind of ‘Stoic solution – … to suppress the emotional elements in human relationship and to depend upon pure reason’ (Macmurray 1946c, p 8). Love or care is a more proper moral motivation.

Love, as the positive ground-motive of personal activity, can best be defined as the capacity for self-transcendence, or the capacity to care for the other. Love is for the other: fear is for the self. In actual experience, of course, both motives are operative together; and either may dominate the other. (Macmurray 1993, p 57)

It is important to note that ‘[m]y care for you is only moral if it includes the intention to preserve your freedom as an agent, which is your independence of me’, and ‘[e]ven if you wish to be dependent on me, it is my business, for your sake, to prevent it’ (Macmurray 1991b, p 190). The danger, that is, is of care creating a dependency and therefore being a potentially oppressive form of care. Care links Macmurray’s work to the philosophy of Noddings. She, like Macmurray, distinguishes different types of care, only one of which is appropriate to a care-based ethic. Noddings contrasts ‘caring’ and ‘care-giving’:

Care-giving can be done without care. We have Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest … as an example. While caring is certainly associated with care-giving, and we hope that it will be paramount there, it isn’t always, and so they are different. … I … want to emphasise the relational character of caring. So if I meet with a stranger, it is equally likely that I will be carer and he cared for, or the other way round. Both contribute to the caring relation. I’d emphasise that. (Noddings, in Stern 2016, p 33)

Caring is mutual, and it is not simply up to the carer to decide what is needed. That would be, in Macmurray’s terms, too oppressive or too liable to create a dependency. Nurses or teachers have professional caring responsibilities, but that does not necessarily make it a one-way (non-ethical) form of caring.

[I]f you’re looking at caring and teaching, it’s usually the teacher who’s the carer, and the student who’s the cared-for. But that doesn’t mean that the cared-for doesn’t contribute anything to the relation. As you know I’m very interested in what the cared-for does contribute to the relation. So that is the kind of openness, reciprocity, that I want to try to sustain. It isn’t this powerful group of carers, care-givers, who decide what the other folks need and then they’re generously going to give it to them – instead of meeting together and realising that both contribute to the relationship. (Noddings, in Stern 2016, p 33–34)

Care is certainly needs based, but this requires that the carer is ‘attentive – I listen to whatever needs are expressed – and, if possible, I try to respond positively’ (Noddings 2005a, p 147). If a teacher decides what is needed, without listening, then this might be an example of ‘virtue caring’. ‘Some day you’ll thank me for this!’ is how they are remembered, and ‘they do not establish caring relations or engage in “caring-for” as described in care ethics’ (Noddings 2012, p 773).

Care ethics emphasises the difference between assumed needs and expressed needs. From this perspective, it is important not to confuse what the cared-for wants with that which we think he should want. We must listen, not just ‘tell’, assuming that we know what the other needs. So Martin Buber, also, in his positing of relation as ontologically basic and of dialogue as the basis of the relation in teaching claims that ‘The relation in education is one of pure dialogue’. (Noddings 2012, p 773, quoting Buber 2002a, p 116)

It is not easy to describe exactly what counts as ‘care’ in all circumstances, but this is because care theory is a ‘non-ideal’ theory, dealing with the complexities of real situations.

Here are the way things are: we look at a situation, and we say, this is not good. On what grounds do we decide that? We talk about that. Do we have any good examples? Yes, there are good examples. We’re looking at some problems in teaching, we compare them with families. There are some wonderful families that do wonderful things: here is an example in the real world. We don’t have to copy it, but we can learn from it: we can try this and that from it. That’s the whole idea of these so called non-ideal theories, of which care theory is one. (Noddings, in Stern 2016, p 31–32)

Although Macmurray could make sweeping generalisations on many topics, I think he would be attracted to this description of ‘non-ideal’ theorising in philosophy. He shares with Noddings a sense that what goes on in schools, too, is not something that is easily ‘boxed’ into a systematic rational theory. Rosenzweig similarly writes of the ‘old philosophy’ that deals in ‘philosophical astonishment’, which he tries to replace with the ‘new thinking’ that is at one with ‘healthy human understanding’ in seeking wisdom through ‘understanding at the right time’ (Rosenzweig 2000, p 123). Noddings retains thinking in time, in practice, and says,

The living other is more important than any theory. This is a central idea in an ethic of care. It is pre-theoretical, rooted in natural caring. It is, however, often very hard for teachers to accept, because teacher education and educational research inculcate certain theories and modes of practice as the scientifically approved ways of doing things. … “Constructivism says …” and so the child is sacrificed to the theory. This happens repeatedly with fashionable ideas in education. (Noddings 2005b, p xix)

Care that intends to preserve the other’s freedom, in Macmurray’s sense, or that is attentive and mutual, in Noddings’ sense, is therefore relational. ‘There are two things about personal relations which make them quite different from all other relations’, Macmurray says: ‘[t]hey are always mutual and they are always intentional’ (Macmurray 1945, p 27). Care cannot be described of a single person, but only of a relationship. For this reason, Noddings prefers to talk of the care ethic as distinct from the idea of a ‘virtue’, which she takes to be a quality of an individual person. ‘A caring relation … involves two parties, a carer and a cared-for; the carer attends to the expressed needs of the cared-for, is moved affectively by what he or she detects in the other’s situation, and is prepared to respond in some appropriate way; the cared-for completes the relation by recognizing – showing in some way – that the attempt to care has been received’ (Noddings 2015, p 120–121). This position is in contrast to the more ideal (if not idealist) ethical theories of ethical autonomy—exemplified by the Enlightenment philosophies of Kant (1964) or Locke, for whom ‘[c]hildren have as much a mind to shew that they are free, that their own good actions come from themselves, that they are absolute and independent, as any of the proudest of you grown men, think of them as you please’ (Locke 1998):

The ethic of care rejects the notion of a truly autonomous moral agent and accepts the reality of moral interdependence. Our goodness and our growth are inextricably bound to that of others we encounter. As teachers, we are as dependent on our students as they are on us. (Noddings 2016, p 237)

This in turn means that ‘moral rules’ are not sufficient in themselves to guide morality. Something else needs to happen:

Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings were influenced by Buber in arguing that moral rules and principles are not reliable guides to moral behavior. They argued that moral growth is more affective than cognitive – better conceived as grounded in feelings of care than in justifiable moral rules and principles. Rules are grounded in object-object or instrumental relationships. Buber called them I-It relations. Caring, on the other hand, requires the meeting of two subjects in a moment when the other “fills the firmament,” to cite Noddings’s reference to Buber. He called those moments of meeting I-Thou relations. (Alexander 2015, p 166)

It has taken a long ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Why Care About Schools?
• 2. Schools as Communities
• 3. Learning in Dialogue
• 4. Personhood and Personalism in School
• 5. Pedagogy, Research, and Being a Curious Teacher
• 6. School Leadership: Caute in the Middle
• 7. The Sustainability of Schooling and Its Alternatives
• 8. A Curriculum for One: Overcoming Dualism
• 9. The Politics of Schooling
• Back Matter