PROPERTY AS SELF

[Note:  Since the content of this posting is lengthy, I have decided to post it over two posting spaces, today’s and that of March 15, 2016.]

I have made the claim that our nation’s political culture has evolved in many of its elements, but particularly in terms of its dominant perspective.  The first pervading view was present during the earliest days of the colonial period and, I would argue, held on to that position until the end of World War II.  That view I have called traditional federalism and my sense of that view is based on the writings of such constitutional scholars as Daniel Elazar and Donald Lutz.  While I believe this prominence was true, I am not blind to the influence of other traditions.  One such tradition is that of the natural rights perspective.  I have argued that that tradition can first be detected during the years between the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the US Constitution and its ratification process. 

As with any mental construct, elements of it were around ever since organized governance took hold.  Since it is a set of ideas that emphasizes the rights of the individual, I’m sure that anyone who lived under any level of oppression, from time to time, would feel that there was something wrong with how he or she was situated.  The Great Courses program (produced by The Teaching Company) has a good survey course on the history of how liberty has been defined through the centuries.  That history begins with the Athenians and the Battle of Marathon.[1]  But in the modern sense, those ideas that make up what we today consider the natural rights version of freedom, rights, and liberty can be traced to the theoretical work of the British philosopher, John Locke.  Published in 1690, his Second Treatise on Civil Government is the work most credited with launching this theoretical radicalism.  As I indicated in the last posting, those who picked up on Lockean ideas were anointed as radicals and I’m certain that those classes of people who were threatened by these ideas considered the upstarts as radicals. 

Mostly, the focus of Locke’s disdain was aimed to those traditional groups who had been favored by the old feudal order and were, by the late 1600s, trying to hang on to their privileges.  The upcoming eighteenth century would prove disastrous to these people.  Across the channel, the French Revolution would strike a very poignant exclamation point on this turn during the later years of the 1700s.  In Britain, there had already been a king decapitated, a republican overthrow of the monarchy, a reestablishment of a monarchy but under a regime of political reforms (in 1688 King James II was ousted in favor of William and Mary during what came to be known as the Glorious Revolution).  With this turmoil, the class that supported the old regime was feeling the heat and its privileges came under stronger attack.  John Locke wrote in the midst of these tumultuous times.  Let us consider what he contributed.

This review is undertaken with a particular aim.  I want to look at the question of how influential Locke was on the development of our constitution.  As I indicated in my last posting, the level of influence by Locke is a debatable topic among constitutional scholars.  One such scholar, Isaac Kramnick, argues that early in the 1600s, American thought was heavily influenced by the republican tradition and its ideals.  These ideals included active citizenship and were deeply rooted in the values of the classical world and the Renaissance or what I would consider those ideals which were related to federalist values.  But the relevant point here is that Kramnick claims that that influence had run its course by the later years of the century when our Revolution and the writing of the Constitution took place.  In its place, he further claims, the ideas of Locke took more and more prominence in the thinking of our founding generation.  I somewhat disagree; yes, there was some shifting toward more commercially and self-interest biases which are among the core values of the natural right perspective, but the conscience of Americans and much of their behavior would be very much couched with a republican, federalist cast.  Here is how even Kramnick describes this earlier thinking:

[The more traditional view is in] part Aristotle, part Cicero, and part Machiavelli [republican arguments], civic humanism conceives of man as a political being whose realization of self occurs only through participation in public life, through active citizenship in a republic.  The virtuous man is concerned primarily with the public good, res publica, or commonweal, not with private or selfish ends.[2]

A distinction needs to be made here; I am not saying that espousing federalist/republican values means a person will act accordingly.  We can all attest to behaving in ways that we, on reflection, judge less than ideal.  While espoused theory has a strong influence on behavior, I have written in this blog about the gap we all have experienced between our espoused theories and our theories-in-use.[3]  I have referred to this gap as “sinning.”  What I seriously would say is that acting in opposition to one’s espoused theory would cause a level of shame or guilt.  So while a person might pursue plans to advance one’s self-interest at the expense of the common good, a federalist would feel shame or guilt; a modern advocate of natural rights would probably not feel any shame or guilt. 

But in those days of our early republic, even those who were attracted to the natural rights ideas of Locke were, at least to some meaningful degree, concerned with the common good.  Why?  Because Locke’s ideas of the late 1600s are not what the natural rights view is today.  Unlike how I have described the natural rights construct – as a moral position in which the trump value is liberty and its position bolsters the self-definition of values and behavior – the initial version of it was more substantive when it came to moral values. 

But now let’s see what Kramnick has to offer concerning the newer Locke thinking and its moral suasion:  he reports that the advocates of Lockean ideas shared with federalists the belief that the corrupt man was the origin of a corrupt system, a corrupt government.  But this is where, but for one exception, the similarities ended.  While civic humanism (the federalist version) castigated corruption in terms of self-interest and indifference to the public good, the natural rights view centered its focus on the immoral characteristics of laziness, parasitic behaviors, and dependency.  Goodness for Locke’s disciples consisted of productive behaviors, hard work, and generally advancing the general good by advancing one’s self-interest (of course, within the confines of the law and general moral precepts such as honesty).  But to understand the origins of the natural rights perspective, we need to appreciate what was happening economically.

This shift took place during very important economic changes in the eighteenth century.  There was a growing tension or conflict of interest going on.  This can be detected with our national debate concerning the Hamiltonian economic plans which preoccupied the nation during the Washington administration.  Our version of this conflict was somewhat similar to what was happening in Britain where the interests of the “country” faction – those interests of the challenged nobility – were doing battle with the interests of the “town” faction – the business class.  Here in the US, the fight was a bit different.  Here, there was not the well-established “country” class of nobility.  Instead, we had the tension between the business interests of merchants and then of industrialists against those of the farmer.  But this reflected another significant difference; both sides of the debate here were not idle and neither could be described as defending inherited privilege.  The question here was more of how “big” the economic entities were to be; would large commercial interests gobble up a more defensive rural class – the yeoman farmer of Jefferson’s concern?  Both sides of this politics were not idle; both sides lived out Locke’s call for productive behavior.  So in either case, and this accounts for the change in basic thinking between the onset of the Revolution and the writing of the Constitution, there was a definite shifting away from the thinking of the Patriots, the Whigs, the Commonwealthmen,[4] to that of a natural rights posture among many Americans.  But like any cultural movements, especially before the advent of mass media and other electronic communications, the shift was slow.

-         I N T E R M I S S I O N  -

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[1] Fears, J. R. (lecturer)  (2001).  A history of freedom, transcript.  Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company.

[2] Kramnick, I.  (1992).  John Locke and liberal constitutionalism.  In K. L. Hall (Ed.) Major problems in American constitutional history, Volume I:  The colonial era through reconstruction (pp. 97-114).  Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company.  Quotation on p. 98.

[3] See Argyris, C. and Schon, D. A. (1985). Evaluating theories in action. In W. G. Bennis, K. D. Benne, and R. Chin (Eds.), The planning of change, Fourth edition, (pp. 108-117). New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  This is what I have written about Argyris and Schon’s article:  For a long time, I have been somewhat aware of this distinction between what is espoused and what is done, but it wasn't until graduate school that this duality became clear.  In an interesting article by Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schon, the authors present a model for organizational planning and action.  In the model, they distinguish between “espoused theory” and “theory-in-use.”  Espoused theory corresponds, more or less, with what I have named domain of the ideal – those values and goals we hold as preferable not at the moment of action but prior to actual implementation of those values and goals.  Theory-in-use is the dominant beliefs we hold when it comes time to act.  For example, let us say an organization decides to perform an activity that will be held with some disfavor by the pupil, client, or customer population the organization serves.  Those promoting the activity believe that in the long run this action will be best for their charges despite the short term annoyance or even hatred it will engender.  The staff commits to it and each person knows that there will be a negative response.  They might even begin their efforts in a way that is congruent with the plan, but as the predicted negative response increases, they cave and revert to the previous courses of action.

[4] Terms prevalent during the Revolution days to describe those who argued for federalist ideals and how the British power holders were corrupt in relation to those ideals.  See Wood, G. S. (1998). The creation of the American republic 1776-1787. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

THE ORGANIC ANALOGY

Among historians there is an argument going on which involves how much influence did John Locke have on the writers of our constitution and on those who ratified the basic law.  This is of particular concern to this blog due to the fact that a good deal of my overall presentation is based on the claim that our political culture evolved more from a traditional federalism rather than the ideas of Locke and his theory of natural rights.  For those who are new to this blog, what I have shared has been the argument that our political culture held predominantly a view of government and politics that emphasizes a collective bias which holds that we, as citizens, are in a partnership in this polity.  Some historians call this general set of ideas and ideals civic humanism.

Civic humanism is central to the collective nature of traditional federalism.  I have defined federalism not so much as a fancy term for states’ rights or the argument that our politics should basically revolve around state issues.  That definition extols state government as that government, at least as compared to the central government in Washington, as being closer to the people, more knowledgeable of their problems and concerns.  It is also the level of government, through the structures of city and county jurisdictions, in which the average person with limited political assets can have a meaningful say and even have influence.  While my use of the term incorporates a lot of this bias, it is more concerned with the notion that federalism is about viewing the body politic as just that:  an organic association in which its component entities are highly interrelated and codependent.  By entities I mean you and I and all of our fellow citizens either individually or in groups.  This whole structure is defined and justified by a “sacred,” albeit secular, agreement; one in which the parties, so agreeing, are consenting to the provisions of either a covenant or a compact.  The word federalism is derived from the Latin word for covenant, foedius.[1]  But not all historians agree with this level of commitment on the part of the founders.  The question revolves around how much influence John Locke had at the time of Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Why Locke?  This will be more fully addressed in my next posting, but here I want to just point out that Locke was the first to theorize – i.e., set down a coherent argument – on the ideas and notions that became the liberal or natural rights view.  What this view has become is not what it was initially.  Back in the late 1600s when he wrote, the impetus was to begin representing the political and cultural aims of the merchant and budding industrial interests class which was becoming more influential due to its growing successes.  Holding its interests at bay were the entrenched landed (country) interests of the nobility.  A country which particularly was experiencing in its politics the tensions among these groups was England.  There, the upstart entrepreneurs were fighting many of the established privileges the nobility enjoyed including the inherited positions in Parliament.  It was in Britain that we have a more immediate effect of Locke’s writings.  He also had an influence on this side of the Atlantic, but it would be more subdued and slower to gain traction.  I will save for the next postings some of the language this clash expressed as the upstarts undermined the legitimacy of this advantaged class.

In this posting, I want to merely set the stage.  I want to remind you why I believe that the founders fell more heavily on the side of republicanism, the governmental system supported by federalists, than on the side of individualism, the side bolstered by the writings of Locke.  While the Constitutional Convention was a definite step away from a purer federalism, it was still well ensconced in its penumbra of ideas.  Let me share the historian’s, Forrest McDonald, account of this argument:

It is a grave mistake, however, to assume from this [the influence of natural rights thinking] that the Framers (or even the court-party nationalists [those who questioned the civic minded motivations of people] or even Hamilton) cynically abandoned the whole notion of virtue in the republic and opted to substitute crass self-interest in its stead.  Several historians have made that assumption, and at least one has gone so far as to pronounce the judgment that the very tradition of civic humanism, of men finding their highest fulfillment in service to the public, thereby was brought to an end.  To commit that mistake is to fail to understand … crucial aspects of the concept that men are driven by their passion.  [This includes] a variety of passions, and many of these – love of fame, of glory, of country, for example – are noble.[2]

One source of possible confusion is that there was a movement at the time of the Convention that can be associated with both federalism and natural rights.  Among those historians that support the stronger influence by Locke and those who took up the natural rights argument is this recognition that with our constitutional development was the origins of a constitutionalism being a way to stem the power of lawmaking bodies, be it Parliament, Congress, or any state legislature. 

This central idea was what galvanized what we consider our version, as opposed to that of the British, of radicalism.  This radicalism refers to the passion some approached this new found sense of entitlement of liberty and individual integrity.  In the political mix of the time were those who took up this radical advocacy.  This had some effect in Britain, but it was in the US that it took on legal status.  We incorporated the concern and adopted; it has become a basic constitutional attribute today.  This initiative became legally established with the ratification of the Bill of Rights – the first ten amendments to our constitution – and the exertion of the Supreme Court especially under the leadership of John Marshall.  Even then, it took the courts until the twentieth century to apply this power of the Constitution in any institutional way.  To put this newer concern in context, a more important aim of the founders was to define structurally what it meant to have the people rule through representation and majority rule.[3]  But as for limiting lawmaking bodies, keeping them from abusing rights and liberties, this concern obviously promotes the individual, the notion that we are born with those powers that government has no authority to disregard or trample.  One can easily see how adopting legal protections from abusive laws which undermine individual prerogatives stems from Lockean ideas.  But, one can also see, with just a little more effort, how it also promotes basic ideals of federalism and republicanism.

Let me explain.  Central to the notion of federalism, one of its basic values, is equality.  This sense of equality has an inclusive quality to it; we are all equal in this common, organic whole of a society.  Laws that favor one group over others, as laws often do, pose, at least potentially, very real threats to the egalitarian character of a polity.  And this is of importance today with the obscene skewing of income and wealth our nation is currently experiencing.  I would argue that above the founders’ concerns for any emerging class of business people was the more fundamental appreciation they had for the organic nature of a polity and the parallel concerns for health of that polity to that of an organic being like themselves.  This concern, it was understood, was negatively affected by abusive laws.  Let us take in John Adams’ central views on constitutions as reported by the historian, Bernard Bailyn:

So John Adams wrote that a political constitution is like “the constitution of the human body”; “certain contextures of the nerves, fibres, and muscles, or certain qualities of the blood and juices” some of which “may properly be called stamina vitae, or essentials and fundamentals of the constitution; parts without which life itself cannot be preserved a moment.”[4]

I know, I know, he was not at the Constitutional Convention, but his writings had a good deal of influence on those who met in Philadelphia in 1787.  He was one of them in spirit and a leader of the Revolution and of the nation (our second president).  There are other quotes I could add, but that is not my intent here.  What I do want to stress is that while the delegates at the Convention had to deal with very practical concerns of the day, they foresaw a national government structured, acting, and functioning within the parameters of federalist values and what we have come to call civic humanism.  So, what then is the place we should attribute to Locke and natural rights principles?  That is the topic of my next posting.

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[1] So the constitutional scholar, Daniel J. Elazar, informs us.

[2] McDonald, F.  (1992).  The power of ideas in the convention.  In K. L. Hall (Ed.) Major problems in American constitutional history, Volume I:  The colonial era through reconstruction (pp. 160-169).  Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company.  Quotation on pp. 162-163.

[3] Reflecting this, for example, was the evolution of how we choose our presidents – we still have the Electoral College. 

[4] Bailyn, B.  (1992).  The birth of republican constitutionalism.  In K. L. Hall (Ed.) Major problems in American constitutional history, Volume I:  The colonial era through reconstruction (pp. 91-97).  Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company.  Quotation on p. 91.

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.

LIVE AND LEARN

I have in the previous immediate postings reviewed two educational philosophies.  My interest is to share with you some basic information concerning this topic to assist you in any effort you might make in influencing what is taught at a particular school or schools.  With progressivism, the third philosophical tradition, we turn a page from conservative philosophies, perennialism and essentialism, to considering liberal philosophies. 

Progressivism had its initial following in the US during the 1920s.  It was an outgrowth of the Progressive Era, a time when reformers found the takeover of American politics by the corporate entities disarming.  The years following the Civil War saw enormous changes in the American economy.  Central to those changes was the way those corporate entities took on a national presence.  Of particular importance is how this development was influenced by industrialization and the factory system which routinized the lives of millions of American workers.  Based on external motivations – doing the bidding of others to either receive rewards or avoid punishments – education had become an extension of organizational thinking that was prevalent in industry.  Instead of embracing these changes, progressives saw all of these developments as a dehumanizing process.  With the rise of organizations and bureaucracies, the science of efficiency rendered workers and even customers as mere quantitative assets or liabilities.  Objectifying the bulk of the American populous readily led to abusive practices.  Education, as I pointed out in the last posting, was not immune to these trends.  In its stead, progressives called for education to be considered as a part of life that advances the dignity of the individual.  Incorporating philosophic arguments of pragmatism, progressives called on educators to adopt strategies that have students use natural methods of learning.

One of this philosophy’s prominent spokespersons, John Dewey, wrote quite a bit about this approach to education.  One of his ideas, which says a lot about what progressive education is in general, is his idea of occupations.  Dewey implemented an instructional strategy at the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (which was started by Dewey) introducing students in the earliest grades to the skills involved with several of the occupations that were, due to industrialization, losing prominence in the economy of the day.  A description of this strategy and how it was implemented follows:

The occupations in cooking, weaving, sewing, and gardening, woodwork and metalwork were lifelike, yet had to be simplified, purified, and enriched so that the children were not overtaxed in their mental ability, damaged in their moral growth, or captivated in their narrow world-view.  In fact, the occupations were conceived so broadly that they integrated considerable subject matter in literature, art, history, geography, chemistry, and physics, and included excursions to parks, farms, to factories, libraries and museums, with the objective of extending the horizon of the students beyond the familiar and the immediately necessary.  Moreover, the teacher chose and suggested problems and situations of such nature that the students had to pass through the complete act of thinking and doing and to refer to knowledge and experiences of past and present generations (i.e., to utilize books, expertise, and scholarship) if they were to execute their plans and projects properly.[1]

What I particularly see as reflective of progressive thinking is the educational function the occupations fulfill; they give reasons for learning the 3-Rs.  To do these occupations, whose value is individually self-evident, one needs to do computations, be concerned with how chemical reactions take place (as in cooking), read directions, understand the elements of physical force, and so on.  In other words, the occupations not only introduce the basics, but also give them, in the minds of the students, practical reasons why they are important and necessary to learn.  With that context, let’s review some of the progressives’ other ideas.

As already indicated, they believed in learning through experience.  More specifically, that means the focus of this philosophy is to center it on the child/adolescent as opposed to the content or the teacher.  Lessons should be mostly about performing experimental projects.  That is, through exposure to life, students generate questions and proceed to formulate answers to those questions.  With such a focus, the process – as opposed to the substance – of learning becomes central.  And that learning revolves around solving problems that are relevant and felt relevant by the student.  A good teacher is one who can creatively present segments of life in which the student actively engages in what progressives describe as active learning, not passive reception of content as is the case with “back-to-basics” instruction.  The activity involves, as I just indicated, solving problems and in doing so, is organized by the application of the scientific method:  hypothesizing, testing, and formulating conclusions.  These conclusions, in pragmatic terms, then become the source of new learning and problem-solving.

As part of their ideals, progressives promoted democratic thinking and processes.  They spoke and wrote about shared decision-making and encouraged among all affected parties, active engagement at school, in the community, and all other collective arrangements in which the student or anyone is situated. 

This bias lends itself nicely with the aims of federation theory.  In my review of federation theory, I pointed out the role progressive thinking plays in a curricular approach that features that theory.  I made the claim that while implementing a curriculum guided by federation theory, it could accommodate any of the established instructional approaches usually implemented by teachers – the approach that is most conducive to federation theory is progressive education.  The only reservation in making this connection is that federation theory is based on a definite set of values and progressivism supports a more natural rights approach to values.  The only proviso I would add is that if one reads progressive inspired articles and books, the tacit values they seem to rely on is, in my estimation, highly federalist in nature.  I can readily observe that none of the values comprising the federalist moral code I have presented in this blog contradict any of the concerns that progressives opine.

Unfortunately for progressives, the reaction to it was to readily judge it as excessively permissive.  It flew in the face of more authoritarian views of schooling and even as a challenge to more Puritanical biases that were still held strongly across the country, especially in rural areas.  The very idea that youngsters were to be sent to school and “study” subject matter of their own choosing sounded foreign to many.  This seemed as though it was a plan to lower the standards that students would face in school.  This was not true.  Progressivism was not an introduction to a softened curriculum.  Progressive lessons could be as demanding as any instruction emanating from perennialist or essentialist educators, but the permissive impression was communicated to many by the language progressives used.  There were also off-shoots of progressivism that were guilty of such degraded educational endeavors.  This negative image was further advanced by conservative elements in our political and educational establishment that wanted to undermine any attempts to institute progressive efforts.  A dramatic rendition of this antagonism can be detected in the popular film, Auntie Mame.[2]

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[1] Knoll, M.  (2004).  Laboratory School, University of Chicago.  In D. C. Phillips (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy, (pp. 455-458).  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage.  See http://mi-knoll.de/122501.html .

[2] DaCosta, M. (director)  (1956).  Auntie Mame.  Warner Brothers.

NO-NONSENCE EDUCATION

As I mentioned in my last posting, there are two conservative philosophies of education:  perennialism and essentialism.  I reviewed the basic beliefs comprising the perennialist philosophy in that posting and in this one I want to describe essentialism.  Before beginning this description, I will point out that in my experience, I would say of the numerous teachers and administrators I encountered over my career that the vast majority were essentialists.  I base that observation not so much on what they espoused but by how they conducted their professional responsibilities.  Again, most of them had no vocabulary to express this allegiance; most had never heard or had long forgotten the term essentialism.  During the eighties though, there was a dose of popular interest in this philosophy with an upsurge of essentialist commentators and books.  Coinciding with the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, a significant reaction to the more liberal days of the sixties and somewhat the seventies, the nation took a definite conservative turn.   In education, the popularity of such books as Cultural Literacy:  What Every American Needs to Know by E. D. Hirsch exemplifies this trend.  But essentialism did not begin in the eighties; it began in the 1920s and 1930s and basically for the same reasons.

During that earlier time, the nation was trying to “recover” from another liberal time.  During the years leading up to and including the turn of the century, the nation experienced a great deal of change.  The successive movements of the Populists, the labor movement and the Progressive movement, introduced a great deal of social, political, and economic changes.  This is not the place to review that history (readers of the blog know that I have presented my understanding of these times in previous postings), but an obvious general description is that in the course of three decades or so, the basic understanding of what it meant to be an American or the essence of America as an idea experienced extensive revisions.  Education did not escape this turmoil.

Along with the ratification of three constitutional amendments, a slew of labor and consumer laws, and the rise of industrialization, the nation saw that its local schools were being threatened by new-fangled ideas.  The leading figure was John Dewey.  I will review some of his ideas when I describe progressivism, but the scholarly philosopher was writing and implementing, first at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia University, ideas about student centered education.  The opinion this type of talk stirred among many Americans was that change equals permissiveness.  I will, in my next posting, write about how much of the reaction against progressivism was based on misunderstandings but, be that as it may, part of that reaction resulted in the development of essentialism.  Perhaps a lot of essentialism consisted of attempts to put a more scholarly image on what had and was being practiced in schools.  In any case, many of the tenets comprising this philosophy are in direct opposition to what the progressives were promoting.

So, what do essentialists believe?  These educators begin with a simple observation that any civilization at any given time has a common core of knowledge.  The primary responsibility of education – its schools – is to transmit to the next generation that knowledge.  Beyond that, the charge includes that this material be transmitted in an organized – in a logically broken down sequence – clear, and disciplined way.  This latter quality has the added benefit of promoting a disciplined disposition toward education and life in general.  After being exposed to such an atmosphere for many years, the student will be “encouraged” to adopt not only a disciplined mode of life, but one that finds benefit in the intellectual and moral standards such schooling will provide.  But this intellectual concern is not that of the perennialists – that of the great enduring ideas of Western Civilization – but of what is deemed to be essential knowledge and skills.  The essentialists saw this quality as relative; what is essential to a student from a professional family is different from what is essential to a student from a working class family.  Therefore, the curriculum is, unlike for the perennialists, changeable as it needs to be practical for the student body being serviced.  Instruction does not focus on ideas but on factual content.  Educators should ask:  what are the useful and objective aspects of reality that these students before us need to know?  Implemented, this approach emphasized “the basics.”  All students need to know how to read, write, speak, and compute clearly and logically.  Students also need to be instilled with a work ethic that accepts hard work.  Along with this disposition, students need to be respectful of authority, so a large portion of teachers’ efforts is geared toward having a no-nonsense approach to attitudes and dispositions students might have concerning counterproductive instincts – laziness, mischievousness, aggression, salaciousness, and the like.

The popularity of this view has ebbed and flowed through the subsequent years.  As I mentioned above, there is always a level of support for this pedagogy – most teachers are essentialists – but as one that attracts a heightened level of interest among the populous, that seems to coincide with conservative periods.  In addition to the twenties and eighties, the fifties were also a time of such popularity.  This mirrors when its most noted spokespersons took on some level of fame:  William Bagley (1920s-1930s), James D. Koerner (1959), H. G. Rickover (1959), Paul Copperman (1978), Theodore Sizer (1985), and E. D. Hirsch (1987).

Some long lasting effects of essentialism have been the incorporation of vocational education, ability grouping and tracking (placing students in classrooms with students who demonstrate the same levels of ability usually determined by I. Q. testing and past school performance), 3-Rs curriculum (“back to basics”), incorporation of behavioral psychological strategies (manipulation of rewards and punishments), programmed instruction, behavioral objectives, and high stakes testing.  Usually, advocates of this philosophy use a no-nonsense language to describe and tackle prevailing educational shortcomings.

In terms of how essentialism relates to federation theory, federation theory is mostly antagonistic toward hierarchical views of social arrangements which essentialists favor.  With its focus on discipline and respect for authority, essentialism takes on an emphasis that shies away from values that promote a shared partnership in collective efforts.  Some might say that the main objective of federation theory is good citizenship and the main objective of essentialism is a good worker.  Goodness here is equated with being compliant.  The school is seen as a dispenser of services and not a communal place which is an outgrowth of the community.  Lasting effects of essentialism include the model of schools where desks are arranged in rows and student progression is organized around the ringing of bells, similar to a factory.  Initially, the factory model was used to arrange these structural features.  A lot of this has maintained its presence in schools due to their large size and the practicalities involved.  But the question remains:  how much of a school’s “heart” should be devoted to such arrangements?

A SOCRATIC INTERLUDE

I have in the last two postings made a case:  those concerned with local schools should know something about educational philosophies.  This includes those parents who take an active role in their children’s education.  And while I believe that local business people and other citizens should be likewise engaged, they too would benefit in their interactions with schools by knowing this material.  The call is not for such people to be experts, but to have a conversational familiarity with the subject.  The main reasons for this is to apply that knowledge toward, one, evaluating the schools in question – each philosophy sets a normative direction for what a particular school’s efforts should be – and, two, determining where the school people they interact with are “coming from.”  The lay person can be armed with an albeit limited language so that interactions can be more meaningful and better directed. 

This posting is dedicated to reviewing the first of four philosophical traditions and two “near” philosophical traditions.  The first addressed philosophy is considered the most conservative of the four and is one of two philosophies that are classified as teacher centered approaches to education; I’ll explain shortly.

Perennialism, at its core, is based on an assumption.  That is, in life, throughout the course of history, there is a list of principles and concerns that is timeless, universal, and deserving of our continued interest.  This list includes liberty, happiness, equality, trust, and the like.  This focus is preferred over educational efforts to convey facts, structures, or processes, for example.  As these listed concerns indicate, topics of interest are aimed at human issues as opposed to technical, mechanical, or vocational topics.  A main difference between perennialism and essentialism, the other conservative philosophy, is that essentialism tends to be centered on what is considered essential knowledge and skills for the given economy in a school’s location.  So, present day conditions, for example, would be aimed, in part, at teaching computer skills.  Perennialism would consider such a focus short-sighted and a bit superfluous.  Those who subscribe to perennialism would instead state that the aim of education is to prepare students to live more meaningful lives and that calls for them to be engaged in dialogues over the time honored principles and values, such as those just listed, as they pertain to contemporary realities. In terms of initiating such discussions, students should be exposed to the great thinkers of Western Civilization. 

This approach has been popularly related to the Great Books program that originated at Columbia University through the efforts of John Erskine back in the 1920s and later popularized chiefly through the public efforts of Mortimer Adler.  Encyclopedia Britannica publishes the set known as the Great Books series and provides in-service teacher training programs on the use of the Great Books for classroom use.  Their training is based on perennialist principles and teaching instructional strategies.  Adler provides the following three standards by which to include a particular work in the Great Books collection:

·        The book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our time;

·        The book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; “This is an exacting criterion, an ideal that is fully attained by only a small number of the 511 works that [were] selected.  It is approximated in varying degrees by the rest.”

·        The book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.[1]

Along with the assumption regarding timeless principles and values, perennialism also assumes that mental capacity can be likened to a muscle and that appropriate educational efforts should be about exercising that “muscle” by engaging in active discussions that challenge accepted beliefs and values.  If this sounds familiar, it is highly reliant on the Socratic method.  Based on, in my opinion, a not so accurate view of Socrates’ “gadfly” role in ancient Athens, teachers skillfully using focused questions challenge students to reflect and reconsider opinions, beliefs, values, and attitudes associated with an issue.  The questions would probably reflect some position proffered by a great thinker.  Who are these thinkers?  The list includes, randomly, Plato, Livy, Cicero, Plutarch, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Jane Austin, Charles Darwin; you get the idea.

What can be said about perennialism in relation to federation theory?  In effect, federation theory is a perennialist approach in that it banks on Enlightenment ideals – its strong reliance on reason, for example – as those ideals influenced the philosophical basis of our nation’s constitutional principles.  But it does not solely depend on this tradition (I will further develop this theme when in a future posting I review progressivism).  Pure perennialism has an absolutist view of values; they are valuable in and of themselves and do not rely on consequential factors.  That is what gives these values and principles their timeless character.  As with essentialism, this philosophy has an objective view of reality – it shies away from relativistic and constructed views of knowledge.  The teacher is expected to control the teaching/learning process, although he or she is counted on to pose the challenging questions mentioned above.  In this, perennialist ideals call on teachers to open instruction so that students can engage in the give and take of dialectic discussion.  This process will find corresponding strategies in the more liberal philosophies of progressivism and reconstructionism.  As such, it also mirrors what I have indicated my favored instructional approach would be in implementing federation theory content – a modified values clarification approach.

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[1] Wikipedia, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_books .