THE HEROIC SELF

This posting marks the end of a series of postings in which I have attempted to describe the four prominent philosophical traditions in education.  They are perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and reconstructionism.  I pointed out that the first two are considered conservative philosophies and the last two are leftist, with reconstructionism being, among some of its promoters, extreme, at least in the eyes of most Americans.  In this posting, I want to finish these accounts with two “somewhat” educational schools of thought:  eclecticism and existentialism.

In a previous posting, I indicated that my preferred mental construct to guide the content choices in civics education makes me an eclectic.  It mostly relies, for its substantive content, on a view of government and politics derived from a theory of governance known as federalism.  As I have often explained in this blog, I am not relying on a structural notion of governance that has a central government with a string of state governments making up a complex configuration as we have in the US.  Yes, that does demonstrate a federalist arrangement, but one can have a federalist structure within a state.  The key attribute of a federalist government is that it originated and is maintained under the auspices of an agreement in which the founders have sworn allegiance either to a covenant or a compact.  This is derived originally, at least in the US, from the traditional Judaic notion of a covenant via early Puritanical settlers who inhabited the eastern shore of Massachusetts.  All this I have thoroughly described and explained in this blog.  The point here is that while this has a perennial side in that it relies on a long standing political theory for its content, the means of instruction that best reflects this material is mostly progressive.  So that makes me an eclectic in that I borrow from more than one philosophy.  So be it, but I would point out that probably a great many educators are eclectics to some degree.

The danger of such a choice in one’s professional plans is, of course, the potential lack of consistency or hidden contrary beliefs.  I write hidden in that if they were not – or important enough that even if recognized could not be ignored – the mind would strive to address the resulting cognitive dissonance that such a “cohabitation” would cause.   Humans do not sustain logical or emotional inconsistencies well; when confronted with them – i.e., we are cognizant of them – we either change our minds about one or the other of our notions or we ignore the inconsistency.  As I just indicated, though, ignoring can be very hard to do, especially when one of the underlying, contradictory assumptions or beliefs comes painfully into focus due to some life condition.

Of course, since eclecticism is a tailor made sort of belief system, the exact makeup of anyone’s eclectic philosophy is mostly unique to the individual who holds the exact set of beliefs.  As such, it is difficult to say much that generally describes or explains the varying sets of beliefs.  But that is not the case for the last of my reviewed school of thought, existentialism. 

This other set of beliefs and assumptions is a respected philosophical tradition with its own history within the broader Western tradition.  Within that tradition, existentialism is a definite set of beliefs, concepts, assumptions, and the rest of what makes up a philosophy, but central to its tenets is its enshrining of individuality.  This leads to a wide variance among existentialists over an array of philosophical issues and questions.  In that sense, one can detect a very eclectic character in those thinkers who consider themselves existentialists.

So on this, they do agree:  the vast canon of what makes up Western philosophies does not attribute enough centrality to the individual.  This notion is probably most clearly expressed in Jean Paul Sartre’s claim that existence precedes essence.  Let me provide the quote:

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence?  It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.  If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing.  Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.[1]

Note:  when Sartre wrote, as in this quote, “he” also meant “she.”  Under such a general view, one can see that education is central to the beliefs of this philosophy.  But it is an education conceived by its promoters as being as far from essentialist ideas as one could possibly be.

As an educational approach, existentialism takes on a curious turn; it denies any notion of supporting general views of objective truth as in other philosophies (e. g., Aristotle’s claim that humans are political beings).  Instead, it places the responsibility of determining what is true or false (metaphysical questions), what is the appropriate manner of attaining the truth (epistemological questions), what is good or evil (ethical questions), or what is beautiful or ugly (aesthetic questions) squarely on the individual.  The focus of an existential education is to provide the student with opportunities to develop for him/herself the sense of that responsibility; to determine, as an obligation, what the answers to these types of questions are.  As such, there is no blueprint, no universal model for what it means to be human or what the nature of humanity is.  The classroom guided by this level of individualism is a place where students are exposed to various paths, options if you will, so that they can experiment and reflect on whom they want to be, what person they choose to become.  This entails equal amounts of attention to not just the cognitive development of the student, but to his/her emotions as well.  By the very nature of what is emphasized, existentialist schools would give significantly more attention to the humanities over the sciences, math, and other curricular fields of study.  This bias is instructionally implemented with generous opportunities to pursue artistic and creative activities, especially ones in which students are afforded time for self-expression in a variety of genres. 

While public schools might dabble in certain limited experimentations with “existential” lessons, the bulk of such educational efforts is limited to specially designed private schools.  An all-out commitment to existential education demands a specially trained teaching staff.  I am not aware of such training programs in any of the major state universities.

Let me end with a quote that captures the flavor of this philosophy as it pertains to education:

Childhood is not adulthood; childhood is playing and no child ever gets enough play.  The Summerhill theory is that when a child has played enough he will start to work and face difficulties, and I claim that this theory has been vindicated in our pupils’ ability to do good work even when it involves a lot of unpleasant work.[2]

This somewhat inconsistent quote is from A. S. Neill, the founder of a British boarding school, Summerhill, which is run on existentialist principles.  Despite the fact that the school has incorporated many federalist principles – a shared decision-making structural arrangement – it is at heart based on an existential view of individualism.  While the school is fairly straightforward with its foundational belief that “freedom is not license,” its almost devotional adherence to respecting the whims of individual choice makes any appreciation of a communal sense of responsibility hard to attain – at least in the eyes of a federalist like myself.  For after all, if the child never gets enough play, how will he/she ever have played enough?[3]

With that, I end my review of educational philosophies.  It has been my intent to share with you these descriptions so that you might be better “armed” to engage with the faculties and administrations of any local school you care to visit and become involved.  Public schools belong to all of us, not just parents and grandparents.  They are there to serve us all.

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[1] From Existentialism in a Humanism.  See http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/406216-what-is-meant-here-by-saying-that-existence-precedes-essence .

[2] Neill, A. S.  See http://rousseaustudies.free.fr/articlesummerhill.html .

[3] I will admit, I am not an expert on the Summerhill school.

THE IDEOLOGICAL LEFTISTS

As I have been pointing out in the last several postings, there are four basic philosophies of education.  To date, I have reviewed two conservative philosophies, perennialism and essentialism, and one liberal one, progressivism.  With this posting, I review the last of the four, reconstructionism.  I have already dedicated quite a few entries to reviewing this philosophy.  In that effort, I cast its ideas as an antithesis to the prevailing mental construct that more or less governs the content choices of our civics educators, the natural rights construct.  In that account of reconstructionism, I emphasized certain aspects.  One, the movement among leftist educators to promote reconstructionist ideas takes on, to varying degrees, the arguments advanced by Karl Marx.  Before one castigates this fact as anti-American, I would point out that if one sees Social Security as a positive government program, he or she also, to some degree, accepts Marxian ideas.  As for the educators in question, there exists a wide variance as to the degree any one of them considers him/herself a Marxist – ranging from a committed to a lukewarm Marxist.  Two, since there are varying degrees of allegiance to the ideas of the “father” of communism, there is room for the influence of several schools of thought that have been incorporated by various reconstructionist educators including Freudianism, existentialism, structural-functionalism, ideas of self-actualization advanced by Abraham Maslow, humanist ideas and ideals of Carl Rogers, and others.  In effect, the influences emanating from these other sources soften the Marxian character of these reconstructionist ideas.  Three, all reconstructionist educators are committed to political action or praxis.  Addressing social needs, mostly those relating to economic deprivation and discriminatory practices, calls on educators to engage in targeted instruction; that is, instruction that leads to students taking on active roles in reform efforts.  And four, there is the general belief that social needs take priority over individual needs.

With this fourth attribute, we see education changing its emphasis from preparing students for the challenges of the adult world for mostly private reasons to addressing those questions related to creating an improved society.  In the process, an implicit goal is to promote worldwide democracy.  These educators shift their attention from private concerns such as imparting employable knowledge and skills to an education that aims to reconstitute social relations that support a truer, in their view, equality (closer to the standard of equality known as equal results[1]).  The origins of this pedagogic approach emanated from progressive education and began with the writings of John Dewey, but the title of founder goes to Theodore Brameld.

Brameld, seemly affected by the brutality of World War II and the effect the war had on the human psyche, set about to address the dangers left to humankind by the technological advances brought about by war.  The twin dangers of annihilation through nuclear weapons and the level of cruelty and brutality experienced during the war led him and others to see education as a way of advancing the use of technology and human compassion to create a more humanistic society. 

Two other educators who advanced reconstructionism were George Counts and Paulo Freire.  George Counts saw education as the opportunity to encourage and prepare students to engage in the establishment of a social order committed to social justice.  Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and government official who, using his own experiences of living in poverty, set out a general educational approach. 

This blog reviewed Freire’s ideas as presented in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In that review, I pointed out how he called on a cooperative relationship between teacher and student where each played the roles of being teacher and student.  He argued that the oppressed needed to divorce themselves from any desire to be an oppressor – those who occupy the position of what is considered advantaged in an oppressive system – to seek true liberation in which they understand the inherent dignity and integrity of each individual.  Emphasizing dialogue between oppressed and oppressor, he argued for developing awareness to combat domination.  He particularly saw as counterproductive the view of education as “teaching as banking” in which a teacher strives toward “depositing” information in the students’ heads – reminiscent of essentialism.  Instead, Freire envisioned teaching and learning as a reciprocal endeavor between those assigned as teacher and those as students.  Relying on the impetus of students to use their experiences to denote what is to be studied, they engage in inventing a new social reality – praxis.  Specific topics that these learning interactions entertain would be reflective of the oppressed lives the students experience, such as hunger, discrimination, lack of opportunity, violence, domestic abuse, drugs, divorce, corruption, cronyism, and the like.  There is also associated with this approach a trend toward focusing on both local, community conditions, and worldwide forces that affect local conditions.

Collectively, this approach is also known as critical theory or critical pedagogy.  Its relation to federation theory is that federalist thought shares a concern for inequality with reconstructionist ideas.  The basis of this concern is different in its application.  While critical theory promotes equal results – a belief in a more equal distribution of income and wealth – federalists believe in equal opportunity and regulated income and wealth distribution.  Federalist theory holds that equal conditions have definite problems with providing the incentives necessary to advance economic initiatives.  But federalists do lend a supportive disposition toward the concern that not all of the entities making up a society, as currently structured, are afforded equal standing in the social realities of that society.

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[1] Equal results basically refer to an economic arrangement in which variance in income and other compensations is roughly the same for all participants in the economy.