Speaking of Teaching: Lessons from History

Speaking of Teaching

Speaking of Teaching Lessons from History Gabriel Moran

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • lymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2008 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moran, Gabriel, 1935– Speaking of teaching : lessons from history / Gabriel Moran. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2839-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2839-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3118-3 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3118-4 (electronic) 1. Education—History. 2. Education—Philosophy—History. I. Title. LA11.M65 2008 370.9—dc22 2008025250 eISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3118-3 eISBN-10: 0-7591-3118-4 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Introduction

vii

1

Plato and His Students

1

2

Augustine Despite Aquinas

23

3

Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie

47

4

Dewey: Why So Misunderstood?

67

5

Can Morality Be Taught?

95

6

Can Religion Be Taught?

121

7

Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences

143

Conclusion

163

Bibliography

177

Index

187

About the Author

195

v

Introduction

Why is there almost no discussion of the activity of teaching in works of philosophy and education? Why does the topic of teaching seem to be avoided? My questions may seem preposterous. Are there not libraries filled with books on teaching?1 Undoubtedly, there are numerous books and essays that concern teaching and teachers. What is seldom asked is: What does it mean to teach? What is the meaning of the verb “to teach?” My interest is teaching as one of the most fundamental activities of a human being. In this introduction, I am not trying to set forth the meaning of “teach.” Rather, I wish to call attention to the absence of the discussion in philosophy and education books. If the act of teaching is not obviously a philosophical question, it is surely central to education. And yet, the question of teaching is seldom raised in books and journals on education. It would also be difficult to find a school of education that has a course built upon the question “what is the meaning of to teach?”2 One possible explanation for the absence of reflection on the act of teaching is that the answer is so obvious that the question need not be asked. Everyone has been exposed to the practice of teaching from an early age. Most people have indelible memories of teachers they have met; usually it is a mixture of good and bad memories, of good teachers and bad teachers. If they are asked what made a particular woman or man a good teacher, they tend to list a series of qualities, for example, fairness, patience, dedication, humor. The bad teachers are thought to lack one or several of these qualities. The people who enroll in a school of education have presumably decided that they would like to follow in the path of the good teachers they have met. Their “teacher training” aims to provide them with the skills to teach math, science, literature, or history. If someone were to ask in a school of education vii

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“what does it mean to teach,” the question would likely be dismissed as trivial, a distraction from preparing the prospective teachers to manage a room filled with children and to present lessons in their respective specialties. The teachers in training have available to them many works on mastering their areas of concentration and the skills needed to teach U.S. history in P.S. 51 or teach geometry to tenth graders. The answer, then, to my question of why teaching itself is almost never discussed even in schools of education—or especially there—is that the answer is already known. Perhaps that is true, that everyone does have some knowledge of teaching. Nonetheless, it is still striking that books on education seldom devote a chapter or even a paragraph to the meaning of teaching.3 Even if everyone has an idea of what teaching is, some reflection on that idea would seem helpful if one is asking about education. The educational specialist, however, tends to hand over such abstract-sounding issues to philosophers. The people who write philosophy books these days are not inclined to accept the offer. A second answer to the question of why teaching is not discussed may lie in almost the opposite direction. There could be a fear about what the question would reveal, and it is therefore better to avoid asking the question. One might suspect that many people—including people who are called teachers— are uneasy with the idea of teaching. At some level they fear that if they did think about the nature of teaching, they might conclude that “to teach” is (1) impossible to do or (2) an unethical practice or (3) an unintelligible idea. Occasionally, a “radical reformer” will bring the fear to the surface and launch a direct attack on teaching. Ivan Illich was one of the many reformers who wanted to do away with schools. In his book, Deschooling Society, he equated teaching and corruption.4 In his brief role as a celebrity lecturer, he would develop the thesis “to teach is to corrupt” before an auditorium filled with schoolteachers, after which the listeners would return to their classrooms. A few may have quit their jobs in response, but those who stayed did not get much help by being told that they were corrupting youth. Another example of a severe critic of teaching was Carl Rogers, a popular writer in psychology. Rogers did not passionately attack teaching; instead, he simply thought it was an obstacle to learning and he advocated trying to avoid it. “There is no resemblance between the traditional function of teaching and the function of the facilitation of learning.”5 Unlike Illich, whose broadside against teaching left no discernible effects, Rogers’ advocacy of replacing teaching with “facilitating” continues to influence books on education and school practice itself. Rogers, of course, was not alone in his dismissal of teaching as useless or worse. He would not have got a hearing except that

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there were many other writers saying similar things. The ground had been prepared during the previous century in the United States. One place to get a glimpse of the negative meaning assumed for teaching is found in adult education literature. Malcolm Knowles was a leading theorist of adult education. He laid out a neat opposition between the way children learn and the way adults learn (pedagogy versus andragogy).6 For example, it was said that children study subjects but adult wish to know how to solve problems. Central to the contrast of adult and child was the claim that children should be taught but adults wish to have their learning facilitated. Such a sharp dichotomy between child and adult is of doubtful validity, but it provided a theory for why something called “adult education” exists. What is revealed in these examples is an ethical ambivalence that teaching has for many people. If teaching is assumed to be telling people what to think, what is right and wrong, it seems to be a violation of individual freedom. However, society is possible only if the young do conform to some accepted norms, so therefore a group of adults is needed to oversee the maturing of young minds. Teaching, it is assumed, is not possible before the age when a young person has the power of rational thinking. Before that age, other controls have to be used, especially by parents. Although the standard rhetoric is to bow in the direction of parents as “the first and most important teachers,” everyone knows who the real teachers are: those who work with children in schools until they acquire the rationality and experience to think for themselves. Society is confused about whether these students become adults at age sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one. Wherever that line is drawn, the assumption is that people who have become adults no longer need teaching and it becomes unnecessary, ineffective, and insulting to try to teach them. Society thus seals off the meaning of teaching. It is what a group of people certified as teachers do with children in elementary and secondary schools. Colleges are sometimes included, but more often than not professors are not counted as teachers. A National Education Association survey, which found that only two out of ten teachers are men, obviously excluded college professors. The survey’s results were reported in the New York Times under the headline “Men in Teaching Falls to a Forty-Year Low.”7 In the same week, the Times carried a headline: “Professors Teaching? N.Y.U. President Says It Isn’t Such a Novel Idea.”8 The idea is not entirely novel but different enough to draw a feature story. There are endless problems connected with how to teach children and there is no shortage of reform measures to improve schools. What goes unquestioned is that teaching is an activity engaged in by a person called the teacher with a group of pupils (often just called children). When writers go about the

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serious business of discussing teachers and what they do, there is no ambiguity in who they are referring to: the women and men who staff the elementary and secondary schools of the country.

HISTORICAL WITNESSES In this book I wish to question this assumption on which most educational writing is based. The assumption is so deeply embedded in present educational literature, political discussion, and daily use that there is no direct way to unearth it. Rather than presume that I can state an answer when the language is not available to do so, I have called as witnesses some authors from both the recent and the distant past. Although these authors have had a powerful influence on our ideas of education, what they have to say about teaching may not be immediately evident. It is necessary to attend carefully to what they say, and more often what they imply, about teaching. There are lessons to be learned from history. I have not chosen writers simply because they agree with me or because I can easily extract what I am looking for from their writing. For the most part, I try to let the authors speak for themselves, supplying interpretation only as needed. I do try in the conclusion to draw together some of what I have learned from these and other authors about the nature of teaching. I refer in this book to reading and misreading these authors. Although a variety of interpretations is to be expected, what interests me is when views are attributed to an author that are at variance with the author’s intention. When writers are misread by intelligent readers, the one who is at fault might be the writer. But readers do bring preconceptions to a book, and they are often unwilling to let an unusual approach challenge those presuppositions. Most schools of education used to have a course called philosophical foundations of education. It usually covered Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey. Why these three and only these three writers were studied was seldom explained. The case could be made that each of them thought that there is an intimate and essential relation between philosophy and education. More particularly, Plato was studied because of his portrait of Socrates, assumed to be the model teacher. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was studied as an impractical visionary but someone who is still invoked as the model for rebellious reformers. John Dewey was studied because his language dominates educational discussion in the United States and is presented as liberating the learner from the dominance of the teacher. This book has chapters on Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey but with a different twist on each of them. I make no effort to present their overall views of

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education. I ask only what each says, or more often implies, about “to teach.” For such an ambitious project, I have to rely on the body of scholarship that surrounds each writer. But I am trying to get at a question seldom asked. I am also trying to get at why distorted conclusions have been drawn from these writings. I have said that Plato is usually celebrated for giving us the model of a teacher in Socrates. While I have no desire to belittle Socrates, I claim in the first chapter that in the argument between Socrates and the Sophist named Protagoras, the latter is more helpful for an understanding of teaching. Socrates has much to teach us but his lessons are best learned in a larger context of teaching and learning. I make a somewhat similar case in the fourth chapter regarding Dewey and his opposition to “traditional” education. Dewey’s unwillingness to discover the value of the traditional was part of the reason that his ideas on “progressive education” were (and still are) consistently misunderstood. Dewey’s idea of teaching has to be dug out of more than sixty years of writing. Rousseau’s Emile, which I examine in the third chapter, is a different kind of problem. Emile is one of those books that people feel free to cite without ever having read all the way through it. The strangest assumption is that the book is an argument for “self-directed” learning without the need for a teacher. If there is a central character in the book, it is the tutor. Between the chapters on Plato and Rousseau is a chapter on Augustine of Hippo. He is the founder of the Protestant and Roman Catholic theology that remains the chief source of religious terminology in the United States. He is also one of the most powerful influences in the history of Western education, though his name seldom appears in histories of education today. I examine Augustine’s denial of teaching in favor of interior reflection, a position that has particular resonance in today’s educational literature. I conclude the chapter with what I take to be Thomas Aquinas’ deliberate misreading of Augustine’s position. Chapters 5 and 6 test the meaning of “to teach” in two controversial and confusing areas. Morality and religion run parallel in many respects though they have a few crucial differences. The terms “moral education” and “religious education” were coined at the very beginning of the twentieth century, signaling something new. Unfortunately, both terms have been used to avoid asking in the areas of morality and religion what can and should be taught, who should be taught, where and how the teaching should be done. These two chapters are framed with the verb “can.” The question, Can something be done? may elicit a logical, physical, educational, ethical, or legal response. I break down the question of can it be done into can morality or religion be logically taught, can it be taught in a classroom on sound ed-

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ucational grounds, and can it be taught in a public school classroom ethically and legally? Morality and religion involve contentious issues but that is a good reason for each of them to be put into the classroom’s curriculum. Although confusion in these areas is not surprising, I think the question of teaching morality or religion reveals ambivalence about the very idea of teaching. More specifically, many people are skeptical of teaching morality and their objection is in part moral. Is not teaching morality an unwarranted intrusion on a person’s conscience? Who gives a teacher the right to tell others what is and what is not morally acceptable? Religion is an even more complex issue because of a fundamental ambiguity in the meaning of “religion.” I explore in chapter 6 the ancient and the modern meanings of religion. Religion in the sense of devotion does not belong in the classroom. Religion as a study of historical institutions is an appropriate subject for the academic curriculum. If people think that teaching religion in a public school is educationally and legally wrong, there may be confusion about the meaning of religion. There may also be confusion about what it means to teach anyone anything. My seventh chapter is on Ludwig Wittgenstein. I could have placed this chapter first rather than last. I think Wittgenstein is successful at showing why we have a problem and where to look for help. I put him last because the childlike questions he asks might not be appreciated unless one has previously struggled with the problem that Plato first articulated and has been with us ever since. Wittgenstein does not supply the answer but if one follows the “signals” he offers, interest might be sparked in discussing what teaching is, the several languages of teaching, and the forms of teaching according to its context.

IS GENDER SIGNIFICANT? A further issue for this introduction may or may not strike the reader as significant. The five main writers examined are men. I could offer as a defense of my choice that theories of education until very recently were a male prerogative. An attempt to correct that problem by adding some women (for example, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Montessori, or Jane Martin) might only result in tokenism. More important, it might obscure what I take to be the heart of the problem: the absence of what women have known and done throughout history. Every mother has been aware that the roots of teaching-learning lie not in rational explanation but in bodily movements by both teacher and learner. My

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suggestion that women know this area better than men does not impute any deficiency in the rational intelligence of women; it does imply a general lack of contact by men with the messiness of dependent bodily life, especially at the beginning and at the end of life. Instead of adding a woman writer to my list, I prefer to address the absence of women and the absence of concerns of women in theories of teaching. Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey are by no means the worst offenders in this area; in fact, they do better in their writing than most discussions of education conducted by men. Plato is sometimes taken to be a proto-feminist because he included women in his guardian class. He reduced the essential difference between men and women to “one bears, the other begets.”9 That is a doubtful principle given our knowledge today. In any case, the composition of his guardian class left marriage and family life without any traditional support. Plato is rather vague about the young children of his superior class who are to be cared for by nurses. That is no small problem in reference to what teaching means. Rousseau, who condemns Plato’s view of the family, gets a bad press among women writers today. He was looking for a reform of family life in which men and women would have different but complementary roles. Rousseau, as a man who abandoned his own children and never had a healthy relation with any woman, is not a good candidate for defending the family. His complementary curricula for boys and girls do not have many takers today. Some of what he says about women comes across today as outrageous. Still, he actually addressed the question of the education of women, which cannot be said about most writers until very recently. More important, Rousseau attended to teaching-learning at its very beginnings, which cannot be said of most other writers, including those who are writing today. John Dewey, in contrast to Rousseau, is thought to be “progressive” in his views on women. He was deeply affected by many women, starting with his mother. His wife Alice, the young women he worked with in his laboratory school, and his daughter Evelyn, who wrote with him, profoundly shaped his mentality. After some early writing that asked about the differences between boys and girls in education, Dewey joined the ranks of those who were deemphasizing differences in favor of equal rights. What Dewey said of “the child” applies to both girls and boys. But it has to be asked whether the insistence on equality had the unintended effect of obscuring an insight into the nature of teaching that has been preserved in history more by women than by men? My suggestion that the place of women has been obscured may seem trumped by a curious fact, namely, that the great majority of people called

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teachers in the United States are women. What is also curious, and seemingly opposed to my argument, is that the metaphor of “mothering” became central to nineteenth-century images of teaching.10 In doing so, the nineteenth century almost got it right but ended up making things worse. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, private and church-sponsored schools generally employed men as the teachers. It was not a high status job; teaching was viewed as an extension of the local constabulary. The Maryland Journal in 1776 advertised products available for sale from a ship that had arrived in Baltimore; the products included “various Irish commodities, among which are school masters, beef, pork, and potatoes.”11 With the rise of a system of public or common schools, a remarkable change occurred in who were the schoolteachers. Between 1840 and 1865, those teachers shifted from a great majority being men to an overwhelmingly large percentage being women.12 There was theoretical support for this shift, especially in the writing of Johann Pestalozzi, who was both a follower and a critic of Rousseau. Pestalozzi is not much read these days, but he was influential in the nineteenth-century schools. His best-selling book was a novel, Leonard and Gertrude. That book, together with a treatise, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, put forth Gertrude as the model for teachers.13 The way she conducted her household was the inspiration for the classroom instructor. In the United States, Catherine Beecher was the leader of the woman’s movement that viewed men and women as complementary. Woman’s place was in the home. The vocation or profession of women was motherhood but that profession could find extension in being a schoolteacher. As Beecher saw it, “most happily the education necessary to fit a woman to be a teacher is exactly the one that best fits her for that domestic relation she is primarily designed to fill.”14 So much is school teaching women’s work that Beecher says that one of the ugliest abuses women had to witness was children turned over to “coarse, hard, unfeeling men, too lazy, or too stupid to follow the appropriate duties of their sex.”15 Teaching as an extension of mothering would seem to offer a fruitful path of reflection. However, it did not happen that mothers brought their experience to the job of schoolteacher. Paradoxically, until almost the middle of the twentieth century married women were banned from being schoolteachers. When Harriet Brooks was married in 1906, she was dismissed from the faculty of Barnard College because, as Dean Laura Gill informed her, “a married woman was expected to dignify her homemaking into a profession, and not assume that she could carry on two full professions at once.”16 School teaching became not a continuation of mothering, as Pestalozzi’s theory might have suggested; rather it was an alternative to motherhood. The

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image of teacher was the young, unmarried woman, who was supplied with some basic “teacher training” to oversee children in the classroom. Either that or a teacher was often portrayed as the “spinster” who had never found a husband to fulfill her true vocation of motherhood. The explanation for this paradox—teaching as mothering but never by mothers—is suggested in a report of the Boston School Committee in 1841. Their reason for wanting unmarried women to staff the schools was because they were “unambitious, frugal, and filial.”17 The teacher would take orders from her male superiors. If a teacher should advise her superior “it is to be given as the good daughter talks with the father.” The main mission of the school was moral rather than intellectual. “Women’s weakness,” as a New York legislator said, “makes them better teachers of children with their underdeveloped intellectual faculties.”18 The idea of the schoolteacher as a substitute mother had a positive side, especially for kindergarten and the first years of elementary school. It does not work as well when the student is older. There was also the danger of competition between school and family.19 Many parents had to be pressured to accept the school, because they were wary of the school taking over the life of the child. The line between the family and the school has remained unclear throughout subsequent history. It is tragic that the two institutions have not been viewed as cooperating in the teaching of the children. We have had “parent and teacher organizations” instead of organizations to discuss the joint venture of parental teaching and school teaching.20 In the absence of clarity regarding complementary roles of parental teaching and academic teaching, the parent’s role of teacher is almost completely obscured. In their turn, the schoolteachers are then burdened with impossible expectations, starting with being substitute parents. A good teacher becomes identified as someone who gets along with children and can manage to keep the attention of a roomful of youngsters.

IS TEACHING A PROFESSION? Many of the schoolteachers surmount the stereotypes and enthusiastically teach their pupils both school lessons and lessons in life. It is difficult work for which they do not get much support. There is regular talk of a teacher shortage in the country. Actually, there is no shortage of people who go into school teaching but there is a big exit by the fourth or fifth year. Despite the relatively low pay, the main reason why most of them leave school teaching is not money but the lack of support they have received from administrators, colleagues, politicians, parents, and society in general.21

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My approach in this book may seem to be an attack on the one sure thing that schoolteachers have, namely, the title of teacher. My claim is that we avoid asking what teaching is by segregating a group of individuals and calling them “the teachers.” Then teaching is their problem not ours. To some extent, this ordaining of a group of experts is what happens in all modern professions. Many areas of modern life are just too complicated for ordinary people. We are pleased to have airline pilots, tax accountants, and civil engineers who master the details of their respective professions and are dedicated to doing good work. Teaching-learning, however, is not just another specialized activity to be handled by experts. What underlies much of the criticism of schoolteachers is a belief that anyone can teach. The popular belief is correct, that is, every human being can and does teach. For the teaching-learning that occurs in the ordinary course of a day, we do not need specialists. As long as human beings are alive, they continue to learn because they encounter human and nonhuman teachers. It is a mark of adolescent immaturity when someone thinks that he or she is no longer in need of teaching and teachers. Schools of education and educational literature talk incessantly about the “teaching profession.” There is indeed a need for professional experts to teach calculus, medieval literature, how to build a skyscraper, or how to teach a young child to read. Understandably, schoolteachers desire to have the status and perks of a modern profession from which they have been unfairly excluded. But talking about “the teaching profession” says both too much and too little. It says too much because a test of all genuine professions today is that they try to teach their clients rather than exploit the clients’ lack of knowledge. Every genuine profession is a teaching profession. Even the physicians, who got their status by rising far above the lay person, have been discovering that hoarding all the medical knowledge eventually causes serious problems for themselves. The physician’s role today has to include teaching healthy people how to prevent illness and teaching sick people how to aid the body in restoring itself. The title of “doctor,” which means teacher, can then be an appropriate description of the physician. Just as a medical doctor is not simply a doctor in general, a professional classroom instructor is more than a teacher in general. In this sense, the phrase “teaching profession” says too little. It does not indicate the kind of preparation and commitment that school teaching involves. The work of a first-grade teacher or a teacher of Ph.D. candidates requires professional training and dedication. A profession of academic instruction deserves recognition and public support. The “professional” preparation of schoolteachers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was scandalously inadequate. Today’s “teacher

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training” that concentrates on methods for classroom management is still inadequate. Schoolteachers need to be lifelong learners whose professional preparation stimulates their own intellectual excitement. And the continuing stimulation of their minds through books, conversations with colleagues, and substantive in-service programs, is indispensable for retaining knowledgeable and dedicated schoolteachers in the classroom. Professional people have to keep learning on the job, not just keep repeating the same patterns. One aim of this book is to provide support and encouragement to schoolteachers, but I cannot do that without first prying away the idea of teaching from the professional problems of schoolteachers today. This is not a book on the “profession of teaching.” I want to explore why our view of teaching is blocked to such an extent that the activity of teaching, including but not restricted to the specialized work of schoolteachers, is almost never discussed. I invite the reader to reflect on what some of the great minds in Western history have had to say about teaching and why it is necessary to challenge the deeply rooted language of education today. NOTES 1. Amazon.com currently lists more than half a million books under “teacher.” 2. There are books that ask about the nature of teaching, but they almost inevitably revert to the classroom for the main meaning of teaching and consider other uses of “teach” as an extension. Examples of books that ask the question are: John Passmore, The Philosophy of Teaching (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Thomas Green, The Activities of Teaching (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971); C. J. B. MacMillan and Thomas Nelson, Concepts of Teaching (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968); R. S. Peters. ed., The Concept of Education (New York: Humanities Press, 1967). 3. A typical case is Philosophy of Education, ed. Randall Curren (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). In a book of almost six hundred pages, there is a thirty-page section on teaching, within which all four of the essays are about school teaching. While other essays do speak of teaching, there is not a single entry that philosophically reflects on what teaching is. 4. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 5. Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn for the 80s (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1983), 135. 6. Malcolm Knowles, The Modern Practice of Adult Education: From Pedagogy to Andragogy (New York: Follett Publishing, 1980). 7. New York Times, 29 August 2003, 26. 8. New York Times, 3 September 2003, B1; of course, there are college professors who take teaching seriously: Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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9. Plato, The Republic, 454e. 10. Redding Sugg, Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978). 11. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 313. 12. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 76. 13. Johann Pestalozzi, Leonard and Gertrude (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004); How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2007). 14. Sheila Rothman, Woman’s Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices 1870 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 57. 15. Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 123. 16. Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars (New York: Times Book, 1995), 168. 17. David Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 62. 18. Tyack, The One Best System, 60. 19. Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 86; Dan Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 20. There are some excellent books on the relation of school teaching and parental teaching, such as Robert Evans, Family Matters: How Schools Can Cope with the Crisis in Childrearing (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004); Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002). 21. C. M. Guarino, L. Santibanez, and G. A. Daley, “Teacher Recruitment and Retention: A Review of the Recent Empirical Literature,” Review of Educational Research, 76, no.2 (2006): 173–208; D. N. Harris and S. J. Adams, “Understanding the Level and Causes of Teacher Turnover: A Comparison with Other Professions,” Economics of Education Review, 26 (2007): 325–37.

Chapter One

Plato and His Students

The students referred to in the title of this chapter are all of us. Alfred North Whitehead once said that all of Western philosophy “consists of series of footnotes to Plato.”1 Whitehead added that he did not just mean the kind of “Platonism” found in textbooks. There are easily two or three if not a dozen philosophical outlooks traceable to Plato. Even people who attack Plato cannot entirely escape from his initial shaping of the philosophical language we still speak. Plato’s own mentor was Socrates. At least Socrates is presented that way in Plato’s writing. In the dialogues written early in Plato’s career, the portrait seems to be of a real, historical character. Later, Plato seems to use Socrates as a literary creation, an instrument for articulating Plato’s philosophy. There has been a never-ending debate about where to draw the line between the real person and the literary figure. However, there is a general consensus that Socrates in the early dialogues is close to the historical person, while the literary Socrates is found by the time of what is called Plato’s middle period. Socrates, real and fictional, occupies a special place in educational history. He comes as close as anyone does to being a secular saint. Paraphrasing Whitehead, one might say that all of Western writing on teachers and teaching consists of footnotes to Socrates and Socrates’ work. As with Plato, even when writers try to get around Socrates, they find it necessary to tangle with this model of the teacher. His rational approach to philosophy and teaching seems impossible to reject without landing in irrationalism. Some philosophers in modern times are fascinated by Socrates while at the same time they express ambivalence about the path which he offers. Nietzsche is perhaps the most famous critic. Socrates seemed to be a physician and a savior, wrote Nietzsche, and therefore, “one must imitate Socrates and 1

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counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight—the daylight of reason.” Otherwise, “every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward.”2 But Nietzsche has doubts about anyone producing a permanent daylight. Many writers in the twentieth century shared Nietzsche’s intimation that reason’s rejection of the “dark desires” cannot triumph. It must be added, however, that a popular assumption that Plato simply pits reason against emotion is an unfair characterization. Certainly by the middle period Plato has a much more complex psychology of the individual.3 Nevertheless, my main interest in this chapter is what Plato’s students—all of us—have taken from him about teaching, especially from the Socrates of the early and middle works. On the meaning of “teaching,” people seemed to have taken two nearly opposed lessons from Socrates. The two conclusions roughly correspond to the Socrates of the early works and the Socrates of the middle works, although that distinction is not always introduced in this discussion. The lesson learned from the early Socrates is that no one can teach anyone anything.4 The lesson drawn from the later Socrates is that the “Socratic method” is the only way to teach. Neither of these conclusions is especially helpful to teachers in their efforts to teach. The first conclusion is an obvious dismissal of that very effort. There are numerous books on education today whose message to the teacher is: Get out of the way so that the students can learn. Teaching is not the way to learning. The second conclusion, which takes a method from Socrates, is, at best, highly reductive by fitting all teaching into one narrow mold. “Socratic method” may signify a genuine searching by teacher and student, but it is also the case that the popular version of getting to the answer by asking a series of questions can be as heavy-handed as simply telling people the truth. Alexander Nehamas, a Plato scholar, writes: “No mode of teaching is more dogmatic than what goes by the name ‘Socratic method’ today.”5 This form of teaching is not a complete denial of teaching, but it fails to recognize that teaching is more than a clever set of questions leading to a rational piece of knowledge.

EARLY SOCRATES: THE APOLOGY For my purposes, I will concentrate among Plato’s early works on The Apology and Protagoras. The first is a literary gem that portrays Socrates before the court in Athens in 399 B.C.E. fighting for his life. He was accused of corrupting youth by his teaching. Athens had experienced twenty-seven years of war and political turmoil. An attempt at democracy had been overthrown by

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a group of thirty oligarchs. The two urgent questions at the time of Socrates’ trial were “Who is responsible for the immediate past?” and “Who is to improve the young?” Socrates was associated by many people with a group called the Sophists. He was intent on drawing a sharp contrast between himself and this group. The trial became a forum for the question “Who is the true teacher?” One can puzzle out what the question means by listening to what Socrates denies. The fundamental charge, he says, is that “I am a teacher and take money” (19d). That is not so, he says, “anyone whether he be rich or poor may ask and answer me and listen to my words” (33b). Because Socrates makes no claim to teach virtue, he cannot be held responsible for anyone else’s moral failings, that “whether he turns out to be a bad man or a good man, neither result can be imputed to me, for I have never taught nor profess to teach anything” (33b). The case, then, seems clear that Socrates does not consider himself to be a teacher. But then he slyly adds in reference to the Sophist claim to teach: “Happy is Evenus, I said to myself, if he really has this wisdom and teaches at such a moderate charge. Had I the same, I should have been very proud and conceited, but the truth is that I have no knowledge of the kind” (20c). Here the question of being a teacher is directly connected with charging money. Socrates claims that not even his accusers say that he sought pay from anyone. “I have a sufficient witness to the truth of what I say—my poverty” (31b). Actually, the Sophists’ fee for teaching was sizeable. Socrates’ ironic reference to their “moderate charge” has led some commentators to conclude that Socrates’ denial that he is a teacher is an ironic attack on the people who claim to be teachers. Since he is the opposite of what is false about the Sophist claim, he is claiming to be the true teacher. Thus, he says he is not a teacher; he ironically means he is the true teacher. The great scholar Werner Jaeger draws that conclusion: “Socrates was right to say that he did not teach men—not by giving them information. But by asserting that virtue must be knowledge and making his way toward that knowledge, he took the place of those false prophets of wisdom as the only real educator.”6 Gregory Vlastos, like Jaeger, thinks that irony is a sufficient explanation for Socrates’ denial that he is a teacher.7 Part of this issue concerns the nature of irony. Before Socrates, “irony” simply meant deception and lying. In Socrates’ hands, irony became an assertion of a conventional truth together with a sign that the speaker questions the truth of the statement. The sign can be a peculiar detail in the story line, the tone of voice used, or a raised eyebrow. The speaker playfully conveys to listeners that the truth may be quite different—even the very opposite of what is being said.

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Although the term “irony” is overused and misused today, we are still heirs to the word and the idea that Socrates shaped. Ironic humor is indispensable for digging at hard truths. The playfulness hides the deadly seriousness of the matter at hand. Like oppressed people who use irony as a form of mockery together with a means of communication to those on the inside of the joke, Socrates was defending his life. On the surface, it seems a negative attitude. The speaker is not claiming to know the truth, only puncturing the pompous claims of self-satisfied people. Not all Plato scholars are convinced. They insist that Socrates should be taken at his word, and he says in several dialogues, in addition to the Apology, that he is not a teacher (Protagoras 348c; Gorgias 506a). Gregory Vlastos and Alexander Nehamas disagree about the nature of irony and therefore whether Socrates considered himself to be a teacher. Their disagreement has its nub in this statement of Vlastos’: “In the sense which he would give to ‘teaching’—engaging would-be learners in elenctic argument to make them aware of their own ignorance and enable them to discover for themselves the truth the teacher had held back—in that sense of ‘teaching’ Socrates would want to say that he is a teacher, the only true teacher.”8 Nehamas zeroed in on the phrase “the truth that the teacher had held back.” Irony does not suppose that the truth is already in the teacher’s possession and that the teacher simply withholds the truth as a pedagogical tactic.9 Irony simply undermines someone’s pretension to possess the truth. I think that Vlastos is vulnerable on the point. All that irony does is let the listeners become aware that there are other possibilities. The speaker does not claim to know the whole picture. Although Vlastos has claimed too simple a reversal of meaning, his more general point can perhaps still stand. Socrates is—in some sense—a teacher. He was perceived that way by his contemporaries and described himself as driven by a more than human source to engage others in dialogue. People who say that Socrates did not engage in teaching find it difficult to hold to that line all the way. For example, in an essay entitled “Nonteaching and its Significance for Education,” James King argues that Socrates is not a teacher: “I have taken Socrates at his word that he was not a teacher and found in the theory of teaching presented in the Gorgias confirmation of this fact.” Yet in the course of the article, King has to acknowledge that “we would misunderstand Socrates should we fail to recognize that by his example, his exhortation and relentless critique of beliefs, he strove to be a teacher of the love of truth. In most respects it is true to say that Socrates was not a teacher, but it would obscure the truth to say in this respect.”10 This “one respect” that King states as an exception would seem to be central to affirming or denying that Socrates is a teacher.

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Sometimes authors introduce questionable distinctions so as to maintain the thesis that Socrates was not a teacher. Solomon Scolnicov writes that “Socrates saw himself as an educator. But unlike the Sophists, he did not consider himself a teacher, he professed to know nothing, hence to teach nothing.”11 It is unclear what connotations Scolnicov gives to the term educator. But since that modern word is used for today’s “professional” teachers, I would think it easier to argue the opposite case, that is, Socrates considered himself a teacher of some kind but not a professional teacher or “educator” in today’s language. Authors regularly ascribe the term professional to the Sophists. “Professional” is a Latin-derived word without a Greek equivalent, but it is used to indicate two things about the Sophists: they claimed to have special knowledge and skill and they required pay for their services. That seems to be the common meaning of “professional” in today’s world and it fits the Sophists. An older meaning of “professional,” still evident in most professional codes of ethics, emphasizes the dedication of the professional beyond monetary values. Ironically, professional meant not being paid. The professional was to serve the community and be supported in ways other than by salary. In the twenty-first-century meaning of professional, the Sophists are professionals; in the twelfth-century meaning, Socrates is the professional. The question of money plays a central role in Protagoras to which we now turn.

PROTAGORAS Plato’s dialogue Protagoras is a portrait of a respected Sophist with that name. Plato seems to have a grudging respect for Protagoras, who is Socrates’ opponent in the debate. As I indicate later, Plato may have incorporated some of Protagoras’ educational program into his later writing. In Protagoras, however, the sympathy is with Socrates’ side of the debate. One should not forget that all of the Sophists’ writings have disappeared and we have only second-hand knowledge of their views. Plato is a main source of this knowledge and a somewhat biased reporter. The term “sophist” is derived from the word for wisdom which also gives us the word for philosophy, a love of wisdom. But “sophist” has had a meaning almost the opposite of wisdom. In Plato’s view, the sophists were not lovers of wisdom but deceptive rhetoricians. Plato triumphed insofar as “sophist,” “sophistry,” and “sophistical” have had negative meanings throughout history.12 A ray of difference may have emerged, however, in the twentieth-century use of the term “sophisticated.” It shifted in meaning from deceptive and misleading to smart and elegant. The Sophists made a comeback in the twentieth

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century. Nietzsche was prescient in saying that “every advance in epistemological and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists.”13 Nietzsche’s ambivalence about the rationalism of Socrates naturally led him to wonder whether the Sophists were the bad guys as they were portrayed by Plato. My own judgment in what follows is that on the question of teaching Protagoras is more helpful than Socrates. I acknowledge that Protagoras probably made unwise and indefensible claims about his own teaching. Nevertheless, his approach to education properly situates the question of teaching. The way that Socrates isolates the issue of “teaching virtue” makes it almost impossible to attend to teaching as it emerges in early life. The debate over who is the true teacher is in many ways diversionary. Whether or not Socrates considers himself to be the true teacher supposes that there is a class of people called teachers. If one can identify them, then the question of teaching is answered because what do teachers do but teach. And the standard for a true and genuine teacher is having both the knowledge of virtue and the skill to communicate it to others. The criticism of the Sophists is that they claimed to be such a class of individuals. They taught or claimed to teach only paying customers, while Socrates talked to everyone. But the charge against the Sophists in ancient texts is that they sold their wisdom to all customers. By charging fees, they failed to discriminate and they lectured “before all kinds of people.”14 The democratic impulse in their approach was part of what made them suspect. The question of “who is the true teacher” is moot if everyone and everything teaches. The specifically Socratic question is not how to teach but how to teach virtue. After reviewing the debate on whether Socrates was or was not a teacher, Nehamas concludes: “I still believe that he was not—that he was not, that is, a teacher of virtue.”15 Teaching and teaching virtue may be one question for Socrates, but there is no reason why one has to accept that premise. Part of what Protagoras offers is that there is another place to start. Before one asks about teaching virtue, one can ask about teaching. And the most obvious place where humans are taught—and taught with success—is at the beginning of life. They are taught how to eat, how to point, how to talk, how to walk, and hundreds of other actions that are necessary for a full human life. The peculiar conflating of teaching and teaching virtue is still with us in books on education and assumptions about teaching. Contemporary writers do not use the term virtue, but they have inherited Socrates’ question and a variation on his answer. That is, they assume that teaching is the conveying of rational knowledge, what Socrates thought to be the basis for a good or a virtuous life. It is surprising that there is not much discussion about the translation of arete as virtue. Gregory Vlastos says that there is no doubt about the transla-

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tion because whenever Socrates scrutinizes the teachability of arete he assumes it includes courage, justice, temperance, piety, and wisdom.16 The problem, however, is not in the Greek but in the English. “Virtue” had almost disappeared from scholarly discussions until recent decades when it has made a comeback of sorts. Even now its use is favored in select political circles and it has nowhere near the comprehensive meaning that it had in earlier centuries. After Cicero coined the Latin virtus with its echoes of strength and manliness, the Christian Church came to control the term. By the nineteenth century “virtue” was applied to women more than to men. A more literal translation of arete as “excellence” comes closer to what unites the ancient Greeks and us: a search for a satisfying human life that is of the best quality. Socrates wins the argument if one asks whether anyone can directly transfer rational knowledge from one person to another. But the Sophists are not vanquished if one starts with teaching not as rational explanation but as showing someone how to do something. Perhaps in showing a small child how to dress himself or how to eat certain foods one is already engaged in teaching a child excellence, “the good life.” Protagoras begins with two premises about teaching. First, teaching starts very early in life. Second, teaching is done by a community and by all the individuals in the community. “Beginning from their earliest youth and continuing so long as they are alive, [parents] both teach and admonish them” (325c). Protagoras locates the beginning of teaching when the child can understand the spoken word. He might have begun even earlier, right at birth, when a person’s nature begins to be shaped and reshaped. “As soon as he understands the spoken word, nurse and mother and attendant and the father himself earnestly strive to see to it that the boy will be the best possible, teaching and demonstrating with regard to every deed and speech that one thing is just, another unjust, and that is noble, that shameful, and that this is pious, that is impious” (325d). Protagoras’ conclusion to this passage sounds harsh to our ears: “If he willingly obeys [fine], but if not they threaten him with threats and blows” (325d). It should be noted, however, that Protagoras speaks of punishment as having value only if its purpose is educational. He is the first writer in history to clearly distinguish punishment and revenge (324a–c).17 Protagoras was way ahead of his time and still ahead of ours in grasping that while revenge solves nothing, punishment can be salutary if it teaches the miscreant to behave better in the future. A lifelong education does not cease with childhood. Protagoras thought that reading the poets was central to education for the good life. The young person should memorize the poetry and come to imitate the wise elders (325e). The law itself is a teacher that guides the behavior of everyone in the community (326d).

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The heart of Socrates’ attack on Protagoras is that a wise man cannot bestow virtue on his son. Socrates uses as an example the revered Pericles (320a). His two sons did not acquire the wisdom of their father. As for teaching wisdom or virtue, Socrates says to Protagoras, “I don’t hold it to be teachable, nor something that humans can bestow on other humans” (319a). Instead of meeting Socrates’ argument head-on, Protagoras tells a long story about the origin of the human race. Humans could not live together so Zeus sent Hermes to distribute conscience and justice to everyone (322c). Virtue is possessed to some degree by everyone, and everyone can be a teacher of virtue. People do not always teach by conscious and deliberate intention. Most teaching is done by community action. “You are spoiled, Socrates, because all are teachers of virtue, insofar as each is able, and none is apparent to you. Well, just as if you should inquire who is a teacher of Greek, no single one would be apparent” (328a). His example of the teaching-learning of Greek is telling. To the question of who teaches a child to speak, there are two answers that can be given: Either no one teaches the child or else everyone and everything in the environment teaches the child. The latter answer is more persuasive in that little German children learn German; little French children speak French. The human mind has a capacity for language, but the particular language (or languages) a child learns depends on the child hearing what is demonstrated and then responding to that particular way of speaking. Saying that everyone and everything can be a teacher means that the teacher shows how to do something and the learner responds to what has been shown by trying to do that in his or her own way. Protagoras is most famous for a line cited by Plato and other writers: “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are as to how they are and of things that are not as to how they are not” (Theaetetus 161c). Plato’s problem was not “man” being the measure but that measuring is done by “man as user” rather than “man as contemplator.”18 Protagoras has been condemned with a string of accusations. He is called a subjectivist, a relativist, a denier of truth, and the ancestor of modern education that makes social adjustment its aim.19 Protagoras was famous for teaching people to argue on both sides of a question. It is claimed that he could not teach people the truth because he did not think there was any truth. Plato, it should be noted, also thinks that one can argue on both sides of an issue. However, Plato, at least in his later work, thinks that one has to push beyond the way things appear so as to grasp how things are in themselves, that is, the ideas or forms for which Plato is famous. A lot of ink has been spilled over what kind of relativist or subjectivist Protagoras was. The proper context for understanding him is not Plato’s metaphysics but Protagoras’ educational framework. His metaphors for teaching

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come from farming, husbandry, and medicine. In caring for a plant, one is not interested in the idea of plant but in the particular conditions of a particular plant. The knowledge of how to aid the plant in its growth to maturity is relational; it includes a human subject’s response to another living being. The derogatory terms subjectivist and relativist do not apply. The farmer has to act in relation to this plant under these conditions. For example, Protagoras says that manure in relation to a plant can be good or bad depending on how and when it is used. For the root, manure can aid growth; on the shoot, it is bad because it hinders growth. In an agricultural metaphor, a teacher deals with the true and the good, but they are found in relational and practical knowledge. This metaphor for teaching as the taking care of a plant is useful and insightful. It has been used by numerous writers since Protagoras. Johannes Comenius, the first great writer in modern educational theory, uses more than a dozen metaphors for teaching-learning. But his favorite is a man cultivating a tree. Comenius carefully distinguishes between a wild tree that grows on its own and a fruit tree that is cultivated so as to bring forth abundant fruit.20 Jean-Jacques Rousseau toward the beginning of Emile writes: “Plants are shaped by cultivation, and men by education.”21 Rousseau was referring to Comenius’ metaphor. However, because of the modern bias against teaching, Rousseau’s line has been cited numerous times in support of the view that Rousseau thought that the teacher should just get out of the way and let the child grow “naturally.” His use of “cultivation” and everything that follows the opening page show that Rousseau, like Comenius and Protagoras, argues that the teacher has to shape the behavior of the student. The human–human interrelation is more complex than the human–plant relation. The metaphor of cultivating a plant or tree is limited, as all metaphors are. Nevertheless, it is better than the seventeenth-century metaphor of writing on a slate. The assumption in that image is that the teacher says things or writes them on the blackboard and the student by copying the words receives knowledge impressed upon the mind. Most university professors would claim to have rejected that image of teaching, but quite obviously it can still be found in practice. Another of Protagoras’ metaphors—from medicine—has some advantages but also some drawbacks compared to farming. A teacher is like a physician who is trying to restore health to the organism.22 But this metaphor should not be reduced to the supplying of medicine. This metaphor should focus not on medicine but on the care of the body that sometimes needs to be restored to health. The knowledgeable person can help to bring out the possibilities within the organism itself. In this way, the physician’s work offers a helpful way to think about teaching. As we will see, Thomas Aquinas uses the body’s

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healing of itself with the help of a physician as a metaphor for teachinglearning. Protagoras and Thomas Aquinas fit in with current practice in health care, which includes but is not limited to handing out medicine. This distinction between medicine and health care is relevant to the use of medical metaphors by the Sophists. Hippocrates is the most famous of the group; his oath for physicians is still taken seriously. Socrates voices what is Plato’s objection to using the physician’s work as a model for teaching. For Plato, medicine is a corrective art; one must first establish the proper state of the body. Otherwise, the teacher will substitute the actually desired for the desirable.23 Plato is right that the physician should understand health before assigning medicines. Plato’s physician of the soul has to distinguish between immediate and urgent desires that are detrimental and the deeper desires that are for the long-term good of the soul. Plato’s warning is well taken, but Protagoras thinks that we all have some sense of our own health without waiting for medical experts to tell us what health is. We are often unsure of what enhances health but we can usually get signs of what is destructive of health. The standard of health necessary is mainly set by a community’s experience and the best insights of individuals. We do need “professional physicians” with specialized knowledge of medicine and skill at surgery. Protagoras readily granted the need for this advanced knowledge but it is only a part of health and health care. Socrates in his formulation of the question wins the argument; but Protagoras, Gorgias, and Hippocrates are the bigger help in pointing out the teaching that happens every day in every community. A final significant point in Socrates’ attack on Protagoras concerns money. What Socrates implies in the Apology and what runs throughout other dialogues is that the payment of money for teaching inevitably corrupts the process. After his effective description of how everyone in a community teaches to whatever degree they can, Protagoras concludes with a dubious claim. Within a community, he says, some people have specialized knowledge and “I am one of those who can advance toward virtue and therefore I am worthy of the fee” (328b). He is surely right that some people are more advanced in virtue and become teachers of virtue to a degree beyond the average citizen. It is obvious that outstanding citizens inspire others to live differently. We learn to become virtuous, Aristotle would later say, by growing up in a virtuous community.24 Not everyone learns the lesson; or rather, they learn other lessons. Teachinglearning requires an openness on the part of the would-be learner. As for the teacher, the teaching is not under his or her direct control. Paradoxically, the attempt to make oneself an exemplar of virtue is likely to be an obstacle to the teaching of virtue.

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Protagoras is not claiming to be an outstanding example of virtue but to be someone who can instruct in virtue. That claim makes him vulnerable to the criticism that he is selling what is not his to sell. He establishes a contract with the student that guarantees knowledge of virtue in exchange for a fee. But no teacher can guarantee that result. Aristotle did not think that his work called Ethics would make a bad person into a good person.25 He did think that with instruction a good person could be helped to pursue the good more intelligently. Protagoras should not have claimed more than Aristotle did. Protagoras could have stated his case more modestly as “I try to instruct people who are on the way toward virtue but the effectiveness of the instruction depends on the receptivity of the student.” Admittedly, that is not a good advertising slogan. Protagoras’ restating of the contract would not likely have satisfied Socrates, who seems to reject the element of money altogether. Teaching is a gift offered to another. Demanding payment is proof that it is not a gift at all; what is most valuable is priceless. Love is not for sale and neither is the teaching of virtue. In back of this principle is a key premise of Socratic teaching, namely, that human beings find it painful to give up their illusions. They have to discover that they do not know what is for their own good. The road to true virtue is “ascetic,” a fundamental reorienting of one’s life. When the teacher is dependent on the student’s fee, the hard truths will be avoided. The teacher will pander to the comfort zone and preconceptions of the student (Gorgias 521e).26 The teacher will not wish to drive away the paying customers. Although the Sophists were vulnerable to the charge that money can corrupt the process of teaching, I do not think that Socrates’ premise is completely accurate. The teaching of virtue challenges the comfortable illusions of the learner only after those illusions have been learned. The oft-repeated principle of Socrates’ followers that learning has to begin with unlearning is not true of the first learning.27 The young child who is learning to eat with a fork or move on two legs experiences a physical struggle but the child’s problem of learning is not the presence of preconceived ideas or self-deception. Undoubtedly, the illusions start early in life but for teacher as well as student, life is not simply illusion versus truth. Teachers should not pander to the self-deceptive illusions of the students but they also have to be concerned about their own illusions. Who can certify that any teacher is free of selfdeception and can be trusted to deal only in truth, goodness, and the ultimate welfare of the student? Whatever the age or the condition of the student, both teacher and student start with a mixture of truth and falsity, unexamined prejudices and rationally affirmed prejudices. Unlearning and learning is not a single sequence in the learner; it is a continuing process in both teacher and student. The teacher who does not learn from the student is not teaching well.

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If Socrates is correct—that teaching is a gift offering which money corrupts—what of today’s professional teachers? The fact that it was considered a scandal in the twelfth century when teachers began to be paid may be met with a smile today.28 But the underlying issue is a serious, unarticulated problem for today’s schoolteachers. To some extent it is a problem shared with other “helping professions” but for school teaching it is more severe. The person who comes to a law office or a physical therapy clinic really wants the services of a lawyer or a therapist. It cannot be said that millions of sullen youngsters in classrooms experience teaching as a gift that they are seeking to receive. Even college students may feel coerced despite the fact that their parents are paying an exorbitant tuition for the privilege of their children attending a famous university. Before World War II, one out of ten students got to college and generally these lucky ones were grateful for the privilege of exposure to college teaching. Today six out of ten students go to college and many of them feel coerced into undergoing this ritual for the purpose of getting a good job. The high school diploma has been replaced by the college degree. The system that has grown up quickly and somewhat haphazardly is in need of reform, and there is no shortage of reform packages on the market. Much of the sloppy reform goes in the wrong direction. It tries to overcome the boredom and/or rebellion by letting students study whatever they think they want to study and in no particular order. Learning is made entertaining, something pleasant and unthreatening. The inflation of grades is the way to keep everyone content; no low grades mean no complaints to the teachers and administrators. The teacher is considered an entrepreneur trying to sell a product; the student is the skeptical consumer. Teachers can be judged by how many satisfied customers they attract, especially as indicated by student evaluations. Genuine reform would go in almost the opposite direction. There should be some freedom of choice throughout the school system that might lessen the feeling of being coerced into a particular learning environment. Nonetheless, there is a discipline to learning anything; a definite sequence of steps is usually needed. Internship could be an option in more settings than it currently is. Internship for a job would be a more sensible outlet for many youngsters, at least in college if not senior high school. They might appreciate the university classroom when they are age forty or sixty. The school system should provide a protective barrier so that teachinglearning is not reduced to commodity exchange. In the actual encounter of teacher and learner, money ought not to be an issue. If the teacher of biology, medieval history, or statistics is to be prepared for the work and to persevere in doing it well, money is indispensable. But the teacher is not paid by the stu-

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dent. The student pays the institution which provides many services and pays many bills besides the teacher’s salary. A tax-supported school is an admirable way for a community to provide a buffer between teacher offering and student paying. Even in an institution where student tuitions pay most of the bills, the faculty need not be seen as being paid on a per-capita basis by students. That is, a course on Greek literature or Chinese philosophy that attracts a handful of students can be supported by courses that have large enrollments. That is what a university is supposed to be: the defense of important but unfashionable learning against the ravages of the market. There are “universities” today that have no campus, no library, no faculty, whose advertising pitch is send us money and you can get a degree with a minimum of effort. If universities continue in that direction of providing only courses that are bestsellers taught by popularly approved teachers, then we will have not learned much since Plato warned about the selling of knowledge.

MIDDLE WORKS Among the works attributed to Plato’s middle period, I will concentrate on the Republic. However, one should note that there are works that are transitional to the mature politics, metaphysics, and educational theory of the Republic. I will refer here to Gorgias and Meno. In the early dialogues, Socrates seems content to leave the student frozen in a conceptual puzzle. Perhaps there is an implication that Socrates knows the right answer; nonetheless, he professes to know only his own ignorance. In Gorgias and Meno there is at least the beginning of a theory that the truth can be found within a person who digs deeply enough. To this day, many of our terms concerning knowledge reflect this Platonic premise: remember, recollect, realize, remind. The knowledge is a going back to something that has been misplaced or not noticed (Symposium 208a). What is needed is a method to get behind everyday impressions and discover what has been covered. Socrates’ attack on rhetoric in Gorgias is based on rhetoric’s incapacity to get at hidden truths.29 Only dialectic or philosophy can lead the learner to the higher reaches of the mind. The presence of knowledge which has to be recovered can suggest that knowledge is innate, that is, given at birth (Phaedo 73b). The Timaeus includes a scene (27d–29d) in which the forms or ideas are inserted by the gods at birth. However, one need not take this myth as Plato’s final version of where knowledge comes from. A theory of knowledge as remembrance might also suggest metempsychosis—remembering what happened in a previous

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lifetime. Here, too, Plato offers a myth at the end of the Republic (614–16) that describes souls choosing new identities after crossing the river of forgetting. Rebirth explains the forgotten knowledge in this lifetime but not the ultimate origin of knowledge. The dialogue, Meno, also suggests that knowledge is innate, perhaps from a previous existence (81c, d). The focus of the work, however, is not the ultimate source of knowledge but a teaching method to recollect it. Meno asks, “Do you think there are no teachers of virtue?” to which Socrates replies, “I have often certainly inquired whether there are, and taken great pains to find them, and have never succeeded” (89c). Despite this seeming denial of teaching, Socrates proceeds to argue for the recovery of forgotten knowledge. The way to knowledge is by way of right opinion, which is a state in between ignorance and knowledge. Meno had posed the dilemma that one cannot learn because if you already know something you cannot learn what you already know, and if you are ignorant you don’t know what you are looking for. Socrates’ solution to that dilemma is “he who does not know may still have true notions of that which he does not know (85c). He says at the end of the dialogue that statesmen are guided by right opinion (99c). A centerpiece of Meno is a dialogue within the dialogue. Socrates questions a boy who is identified as one of Meno’s slaves. Socrates wants to show that even such an uneducated boy has knowledge that he is unaware of. Geometry is the crucial choice of topic for the conversation. For Plato, the royal road to knowledge is mathematics which disciplines the mind by way of abstraction from concrete phenomena and which leads to the intellectual forms. Socrates first asks if the boy knows Greek (82b). That issue is more than a simple factual question. The learning of a language is the first great specifically human step in learning. The person who knows any of the world’s developed languages implicitly knows a great deal that he or she cannot immediately articulate. It is not surprising that a slave boy has a world of knowledge inside his mind. Greek or a similar language embodies centuries of learning. Socrates asks a series of questions about mathematical figures (rectangles, circles, triangles). The boy is able to respond, indicative of quite complex learning that preceded his encounter with Socrates. The boy might not have engaged in much mathematical reasoning but he has a grasp of mathematical shapes that are exemplified in the world of passing phenomena. For Socrates, the knowledge is both recognition and the connections between things that require abstraction from individual cases. The conclusion to the dialogue still has a tentative quality to it. Socrates would seem to have demonstrated the power of a teacher to bring out knowledge in contrast to mere opinion and to show how ideas can be remembered

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in recollection. Yet, he seems again to deny the role of the teacher by saying “virtue is neither natural nor imparted by teaching but an instinct given by God to those to whom it is given” (99c). Socrates realizes that this conclusion is unsatisfying and leaves open future progress in understanding. “We shall never know the certain truth until, before asking how virtue is given, we inquire into the actual nature of virtue. I fear that I must go away, but do you, now that you are persuaded yourself, persuade our friend Anytus” (100b). The teacher leaves the student neither too exhilarated by success nor exasperated by the incompleteness of the process. For Plato, teaching virtue still requires a metaphysical explanation of the source of our ideas.

REPUBLIC30 The Republic is our best source for Plato’s mature ideas on politics and education. Socrates is still the main interlocutor in the dialogue. But while Socrates is playful and clever with the language, he seems intent on convincing others of the truth of Plato’s metaphysics and its related educational theory. The first book of the Republic, which some people think was a separate treatise from an earlier period, raises the question of what justice is. Socrates and his opponent, the Sophist, Thrasymachus, differ strongly. Thrasymachus says that justice is the rule of the stronger, a phrase that can be taken either as a realistic description of the way things are, or as a commentary on the misuse of the word justice. Socrates argues against a conventional meaning of justice as giving everyone his due, but he also criticizes Thrasymachus’ meaning. The remaining nine books of the Republic lay out what justice means for a community and for an individual. The realization of the just polis or community depends on education so that Plato develops a quite detailed curriculum. Some of the early educational curriculum may show traces of Protagoras and the Sophists but Plato still speaks disparagingly of them (493). It has to be constantly kept in mind that Plato views the education of the individual as penultimate to the formation of the perfect community. He simply states that he will study the community or society rather than the individual because the society is the individual “writ large.” It is a premise readily agreed to by his hearers but one that can be doubted. His interest, in any case, is how the polis is constituted. Plato does not cite numbers or percentages but it is obvious that the great majority of individuals in his society will receive only the most basic elements of education, enough to fit in as farmers, nurses, tailors, tradesmen, or

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builders. The full curriculum is only for guardians, a political, administrative class that is supported by auxiliaries, a second class that is both police and military force (415a–c). Plato elaborates a myth that will justify where each person fits in society. According to the myth, people are born as gold, silver, or bronze and that usually determines their place in life. The possibility of movement between classes is acknowledged but no mechanism is in place that would suggest that it is a regular occurrence. When he is asked whether people will believe this fanciful story, he answers somewhat ominously “not in the first generation but you might succeed with the second and later generations” (415d). The first stage of education, which was apparently to be provided for everyone, is a combination of physical and mental education. “We shall begin by educating mind and character” (376c). He wants a guardian class in which individuals will have a harmonious balance of self-control and bravery. Nonetheless, the aim of both physical and “literary” education is “to train the mind” (410c). His section on physical education is disappointing. It is immediately made clear that he is referring to military training, which comes after literary education. He wants a physical training that is simple and flexible, particularly in its training for war (404c). And then he goes off on a rant about physicians and makes harsh judgments about the sick (405–8). Although he begins and ends the section on early education by speaking of a harmony of the physical and mental, a systematic look at the physical education of young children is missing. He thinks of physical education as something for eighteen-year-olds but not for eighteen-month-olds. One of his best lines plays upon the common derivation in Greek of the words child, play, and education. Accordingly, he says that the education of a child is play rather than compulsion. However, there is no description of the child learning at play (537a). “Literary” is the usual translation of Plato’s word which describes a main part of education. It is the word from which we get the word music. The literary education of a child could include both poetry and playing a musical instrument. Education as a whole must have the harmony of music. Plato is aware throughout the Republic that rational knowledge can be overwhelmed by other forces within the soul (588). Plato is a strict censor of the stories told to children and what we call “plays.” He wished to protect children from errors about the gods, telling children only stories about what is good. But keeping young people away from poets who offer a variety of stories about the gods and away from actors who portray unsavory characters does not seem to be an educational shaping of human thought and emotion. A crucial proposal of the Republic is the elimination, or at least the radical reform, of the family. Plato does not exclude women from the guardian class

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even though he seems to forget that fact in some of his references to the guardians. The best offspring will be produced by matching guardians at mating festivals. To enforce the control of sex during the childbearing years, Plato refers in veiled ways to abortion and infanticide (461). He is also vague about the care of the superior children born to the properly mated guardians. The nurses and surrogate mothers would seem to be in powerful positions of teaching and yet Plato has nothing to say about the preparation of these teachers and the performance of their work. His main educational interest remains the ascension of the mind to the world of unchanging forms. The guardians have an education that is nearly lifelong. After the early period that has no direct correlation to age, Plato helpfully sketches his curriculum from about age eighteen to fifty-years-old and beyond. When the future guardian is eighteen, he or she is given military training for two years. Then the student spends ten years in mastering the existing branches of mathematics. Plato notes that studying math is not for practical purposes but to prepare the mind for philosophy proper (521c). At about age thirty the student would be ready to master the tools of philosophy with the study of dialectic. Plato holds off on philosophy until this age because, he says, younger students who learn to argue become arrogant (539b). The thirty-five-year-old man or woman, now having a vision of the good, is required to give something back to the community. This service takes the form of what seems to be low-level administrative positions. Today’s common meaning of “community service,” unfortunately, is court-imposed punishment. Plato would like his guardians-to-be to recognize that their mission in life is to serve the needs of a just community. When Socrates is asked whether the guardians will be happy, his brusque reply is that their happiness is not his concern (519e). His interest is a community in which justice will reign because each individual attends to his or her business. In this way the three classes in the community will play their respective proper roles. Only after the long internship of service does the philosopher-king emerge to serve in the top position and guide the community. A kind of rotating system will include the guardians continuing to study philosophy and being the “watchdogs” endowed with both strength and gentleness. Eventually, they will retire to the land of the blessed, a place sufficiently attractive that they willingly give up the perks of high office. The journey of this curriculum is beautifully captured in the famous allegory of the cave, (514–17) at the conclusion of which Plato offers his most precise description of teaching. Plato recounts a myth or story of prisoners who are chained in a cave. All that they can see are shadows thrown upon the wall by an unseen fire. Various games are played by the prisoners concerning the movement of the shadows.

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Then one prisoner is freed, or more exactly, is dragged upward into the light of day. At first he finds the light blinding but gradually he adjusts and begins to see people. Eventually, he grasps a world of realties that is so different from mere shadows. He feels bad for his former comrades who are caught up in illusions. But he is fearful of returning to the cave because he would be blinded by the darkness and would no longer have either the skill or the interest in playing their games. So resentful would the prisoners be of someone trying to enlighten them that they might kill him. Despite the danger to the liberated prisoner, Plato wants the best minds in the community to return to the prisoners in the cave and “share their labors and rewards, whether trivial or serious” (519d). Coercing the best and the brightest to be leaders seems strange in our world where politicians are supposed to have “fire in the belly,” a willingness to sacrifice everything to their desire for high office. There were societies like that in Plato’s time where it was thought desirable that leaders struggle to attain power. Plato says “the truth is quite different: the state whose prospective rulers come to their duties with least enthusiasm is bound to have the best and most tranquil government, and the state where rulers are eager to rule the worst” (520d). From the myth of the cave, Plato derives a precise description of teaching. He begins that description with a denial of a false idea of teaching: “We must reject the conception of education professed by those who say that they can put into the mind knowledge that was not there before—rather as they could put sight into blind eyes.” He then states his own premise for teaching: “The capacity for knowledge is innate in each mind.” Not knowledge but a capacity for knowledge is universal and given at birth. The capacity needs actualization. Like the eye being turned to the light, the mind has to be turned from a world of change and after a while it will be able to perceive what is truly real. Finally, Plato gives his description of the act of teaching: “This turning around of the mind itself might be made a subject of professional skill which effects the conversion as easily as possible. It would not be concerned to implant sight, but to ensure that someone who had it already was not either turned in the wrong direction or looking the wrong way” (518 c, d). This idea of conversion became a central idea in Christian history.31 Philosophically, it returns in Wittgenstein’s idea of knowledge. In one respect, the teacher has a great responsibility to oversee the conversion of the mind to truth. From a different angle, the teacher’s job is minimal: simply make sure the body is not turned in the wrong direction. Turning the whole body in the right direction implies more than either a passive lookingon or a forceful shove. As Plato notes, it requires a skill or art to gradually move the student to look in the right direction.

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The ultimate teacher is the sunlight or the light that goodness casts in the interior of the student’s mind. The human teacher has to lead the body in its external activity. Plato’s own description of teaching seems to point up his inadequate treatment of physical education in childhood. Although the teacher cannot put knowledge into the mind, teaching can discipline behavior so as to make possible the mind’s recognition of the truth. In the Republic, Plato seems to play down language in the description of teaching. Silence precedes verbal instruction and silence is at the end of speech. In between the silences, dialectic is integral to directing the forces of the soul and body. Plato indicates in the Republic and the Symposium (211a–e) that the truth is beyond words, a contemplation of eternal forms. Speech is what leads up to the speechless.32

CONCLUSION I began this chapter by pointing out the centrality of Socrates to most writing on teaching. Or, rather, most writing is about the teacher because one of the results of Socrates’ dominance in the area is that educational literature is more concerned with teachers than the act of teaching. And in an irony worthy of Socrates, most educational writing identifies the teacher with the professional educator. Most writing that purports to be about teaching is actually about the professional problems of schoolteachers. To be sure, those problems are real and complex; and an analysis of teaching would not solve all of those problems. Still, there should be room for asking what it means for humans to engage in the activity of teaching. A response to the question “what is teaching?” would start from an earlier time and a wider world than the faculty lounge of the local high school. Such a discussion could eventually provide some help to elementary and high schoolteachers but the Sophists as well as Socrates need to be allowed into the conversation. Protagoras may have been corrupted by arrogance and money, which was Plato’s view of the Sophists, but he was on the right trail by saying that teaching is done by a community and each individual in the community. One can understand from the Sophists that most teaching is nonverbal; when speech does emerge from the silence, it is in the mode of storytelling, poetry, and the commands of a parent or the law. Virtue or excellence of life is taught by example and everything of value that a person learns from childhood onward. Socrates’ questions are important provided they a superstructure on a variety of virtues and several kinds of knowledge. It is surprising that Aristotle has not exercised more influence than he has on the understanding of teaching. He articulated one version of Plato, but in

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his self-description, said he was more down to earth than Plato in philosophical speculation. While Aristotle, like Plato, does not have much good to say of the Sophists, his distinctions among the virtues and his emphasis upon practical knowledge have definite echoes of sophistic teaching. “The object of our inquiry,” Aristotle wrote “is not to know what virtue is, but to become good men” (Ethics 1103b27). And to become a good man, one must develop the right habits. “If anyone wishes to make a serious study of ethics, or of political science generally, he must have been well trained in his habits” (Ethics 1095a29). The habits that we form from the earliest age make “a vast difference, or rather all the difference in the world” (Ethics 1103b25). Aristotle implies a preference for Gorgias rather than Socrates in his enumerating separate virtues and a multiplicity of goods (Politics 1260a25).33 In his ethical, social, and political writing, Aristotle does not demand demonstrable proofs. He says that to demand logical proof from a farmer or an orator makes no more sense than accepting persuasion from a mathematician (Ethics 1094b25). Aristotle escapes the accusation of “relativism” because he accepts the possibility of a theoretical knowledge based on fixed forms. Nonetheless, for the practice of teaching, one is faced with a world of relativities and questions of making and doing in a relational context. “Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it” (Ethics 1103 a14). The process of showing how to do something always depends on the concrete conditions of the learner and the kind of knowledge that is at stake. The political philosopher, Michael Oakshott, writes: “Practical knowledge can neither be taught nor learned but only imparted and acquired. It exists only in practice, and the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master.”34 That is a strange contrast. The relation of master and apprentice surely qualifies as a teaching-learning relation. Oakshott is defending other kinds of knowledge besides the only kind that modern rationalism accepts. But in the process he relinquishes teaching-learning to rationalists. A more effective approach is to question whether rational concepts can be taught except on the ground of practical knowledge. In the course of his writing, Plato moved away from a world in which only absolutes counted as knowledge. He seemed to recognize that most people do not live in a heady world of eternal forms (Symposium 202a). Although we hear little in the Republic about the education of the “third class,” the laborers, there can be no justice or peace unless the whole community and the whole individual embody virtue. Plato’s description of the teacher as one who turns the whole body toward the light is a description that can include farmer, shoemaker, tradesman, politician, and nurse, as well as the skilled speaker. The metaphor for teacher that Socrates applies to himself in Theaetetus is “midwife” (150c–51e). Like the Sophists’ use of agriculture and medicine,

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Socrates’ midwifery image has rich possibilities. Not surprisingly, the metaphor has attracted feminist writers in recent years. The authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing appeal to that image: “Mid-wife teachers help students deliver their words to the world.”35 The link between giving birth to knowledge and giving birth to a child is an ancient one that has continued throughout history. Knowledge is conceived and the result is concepts. Socrates is more than just an example of those who spoke of the birth of ideas. The Hellenistic Age, so rich in philosophical concepts, was itself the birth of a new order in which individual, rational man would ascend. Aeschylus signifies this new order in having the god Apollo declare Orestes innocent though he murdered his mother Clytemnestra: “The mother of what is called her offspring is no parent but only the nurse to the seed that is implanted. The mounter, the male, is the only true parent. She harbors the bloodshoot, unless some god blasts it. The womb of the woman is a convenient transit.”36 Like Plato’s advocacy of sexual equality, Socrates’ claim to be a midwife is suspect. A comparison of knowledge and newborns is an attractive idea that can bring together intellect and emotions, individual and community, men and women. But Socrates is portrayed as giving birth to ideas and definitions of words. Immortality is now sought in the ideas that men conceive. It seems that Socrates’ midwifery became interpreted not as an application of a metaphor but a replacement of the primary meaning of midwifery. Rationalistic philosophers and university professors have been comfortable with being at the birth of grand ideas so long as the messy details of a baby coming forth are not included. Socrates without the Sophists can be dangerous. Socratic dialogue can be a powerful teacher if all the other teachers, starting with mothers, are recognized.

NOTES 1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 39. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), #10, 11. 3. Plato, Republic, 588–89; Phaedrus, 246–57. 4. Wilfred Wees, Nobody Can Teach Anyone Anything (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971). 5. Alexander Nehamas, “What Did Socrates Teach and to Whom Did He Teach It?” Review of Metaphysics, 46, no. 2 (1992): 288. 6. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), II, 171. 7. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 33.

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8. Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 32. 9. Nehamas, “What Did Socrates Teach,” 295. 10. James King, “Nonteaching and its Significance for Education,” Education Theory, 26 (Spring, 1976): 230, 228. 11. Samuel Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1988), 16. 12. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), par. 428. 14. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 25, 144. 15. Nehamas, “What Did Socrates Teach,” 284. 16. Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 200. 17. Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 25. 18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 157. Arendt translates the saying of Protagoras as “man is the measure of all things for use.” 19. Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 7. 20. Johannes Comenius, The Great Didactic (London: Russell and Russell, 1967), 26. 21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 38. 22. Guthrie, The Sophists; or, On Education, 168–69. 23. Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 35. 24. Aristotle, Ethics, 1103a14. 25. Aristotle, Ethics, 1095a29; 1179a20 26. Gary Alan Scott, Plato’s Socrates as Educator (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 2000), 25. 27. Scott, Plato’s Socrates, 41. 28. Jacques Goff, The Birth of Europe (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 121. 29. Samuel Ijssling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 7. 30. Numbers in the text refer to Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). 31. Jaeger, Paideia, II, 295. 32. Arendt, Human Condition, 291. 33. Gilbert Ryle, “Teaching and Training,” in The Concept of Education, ed. R. S. Peters (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), 109. Ryle complains that Aristotle’s ideas are “grossly translated” by “habit.” One certainly has to resist a common meaning of “habit” as a mindless repetition that restricts freedom; however, the ambiguity seems built into the idea. 34. Michael Oakshott, Rationalism in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 11. 35. Mary Belenky and others, Women’s Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 219. 36. Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 72.

Chapter Two

Augustine Despite Aquinas

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) form an intellectual bridge between ancient and modern worlds. Their contrasting views on teaching are still with us. Augustine is the more complex character and he more directly influences modern thinking; I will focus attention on him. Thomas Aquinas is one of the most profound thinkers in history, but I will deal only with his essay Truth in which he responds to Augustine’s essay, The Teacher. Most histories of philosophy and of education omit a discussion of Augustine and Thomas. The reason is that both men wrote within the framework of Christian theology. They believed in a God revealed in the history of the Jewish people, culminating in Jesus, called the Christ. Unlike some Christians they do not describe faith as a substitute for reason. Nor was their writing of theology simply an exercise in applying reason to “revealed truths,” or “Christian revelation,” modern phrases that collapse the tension between faith and understanding. What makes both authors interesting is that they bring together a long religious tradition and the resources of classical philosophy. Augustine worked his way through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism before becoming Christian. He never left behind his immersion in the rhetoric of Cicero and the philosophical imagery of Plotinus’ Neoplatonism. Thomas Aquinas is known for his integrating Aristotle into Christian thinking but his dependence on Plotinus is just as profound. The Augustinian and Thomistic ideas of teaching are inspired by the New Testament but they are given expression in the images and concepts of Greek philosophy. I wish to show that Augustine and Thomas agree that God is the ultimate teacher but they draw sharply divergent conclusions about human teaching 23

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from that principle. That fact is not immediately evident in reading Thomas’ comments on Augustine’s The Teacher because Thomas always tried to avoid contradicting Augustine who was and is revered as the father of Western theology. Nevertheless, the difference is profound. The neglect of Augustine is a barrier to understanding modern thinkers from Descartes to Wittgenstein. Augustine has been called the first modern man. He was a man at war with himself and he possessed the talent and originality to reveal the personal struggle in his writing, especially in the Confessions.1 Plato had described philosophy as a conversation that the soul has with itself and Socrates emerges from the dialogues as a reflective individual. Augustine represents what Charles Taylor calls “radical reflexivity,” in which the individual not only thinks profoundly but thinks about the origin and nature of thinking.2 Augustine, however, is not a Cartesian, though he is often seen to be a predecessor of the French thinker of the seventeenth century. Descartes isolates thinking from the world of objects and even doubts the existence of “world.” Augustine in his Confessions is a man turning inward and wrestling with his memory, but the book is also a rich source for our knowledge of the late fourth-century Roman Empire. Much of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writing is unintelligible without some knowledge of Augustine. Rousseau was intent on getting rid of the doctrine of “original sin,” first conceptualized by Augustine. Rousseau was well aware of Augustine’s place in the history of Western ideas of freedom, knowledge, sin, guilt, grace, politics, and apocalypticism. In one of Augustine’s most famous books, The City of God, he built a contrast between two cities around the “love of God” and “love of man.”3 Rousseau adopted the idea of conflicting loves but made them into a true and a false love of oneself.4 And toward the end of his life, Rousseau wrote his own Confessions in imitation of Augustine. However, the meaning of “confession” had shifted from Augustine’s testimony before God and praise of God’s blessings to Rousseau’s and our more modern meaning of confession as telling secrets, admitting faults, and settling some scores along the way. Wittgenstein begins his major work, Philosophical Investigations, with a long quotation from Augustine’s Confessions.5 Augustine is describing how as a small child he came to know the names of things. Wittgenstein uses that description to set off his own understanding of language. Wittgenstein does not entirely disagree with Augustine. But what Augustine uses as background, such as the bodily gestures of the adults, is what Wittgenstein brings to the foreground. Given that Augustine does think that ideas are more important than words and that words are expressions of inner ideas, Wittgenstein has some basic differences with Augustine.

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I will use two of Augustine’s works to examine his view of teaching. The first is entitled De Doctrina Christiana which exists with several English translations of the title. Its literal translation On Christian Doctrine does not convey the purpose or content of the book nor does an edition with the title Christian Instruction. A recent edition has the title Teaching Christianity which has the virtue of indicating it is about teaching, but the object “Christianity” is an unhelpful anachronism.6 I think the most accurate title, and the one I will use, is Christian Teaching. The first three books of the work are about the teaching(s) of the Christian Church. The fourth book, the most relevant for my purposes, is on how to teach. The second work that I focus on is entitled De Magistro which is adequately translated as The Teacher.7 It covers the same ground more briefly than Christian Teaching but has a more pointed opinion about the people in Augustine’s day who were called teachers. Christian Teaching had more prominence in the Middle Ages, appealed to by opposing schools of thought in the early Renaissance.8 Nevertheless, the brief treatise, The Teacher, is the one that resonates today on the possibility or impossibility of teaching.

LIFE AND THEMES Augustine was an African living in the waning days of the Roman Empire. He spent some time in Rome and Milan but he spent most of his life in a backwater place in northern Africa, Thagaste, removed from Carthage, which was the metropolitan center. Through his nearly one hundred books and numerous letters and sermons, he shaped Christian theology with reverberations that continue to the present. It was not a triumphant theology, confident of Christian success. It was seemingly a cramped view of human possibilities, emphasizing sin, guilt, and the desperate need for outside help. This outlook reflected his personal conflicts as well as the cultural collapse occurring in his lifetime. As a young man, he assumed that the empire was eternal. In his later years, as he wrote The City of God, Rome was being ransacked. In that work, he pictures all human cities as ephemeral; only the City of God is permanent. The book fed into apocalyptic tendencies several centuries later. Much of Augustine’s life as a churchman was taken up with fighting intrachurch battles against groups called Donatists and Pelagians. I will not attempt here to explain the subtleties of these Christian heresies but a person’s writings usually reflect what he or she is opposing. Augustine, for example, has a bad reputation for his views on sexuality, but as Garry Wills points out, he was defending the “liberal” position against his opponents.9 Reading his

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sermons, one finds much more concern with greed than sexual sins. It is true that he thought that the human inability to control sexual desire was a sign of disorder, but the problem was the lack of control not the sex itself. The doctrine of an original fall is at the heart of Augustine’s writing. He is credited with or blamed for inventing the doctrine of “original sin.” While he was the major force in conceptualizing the doctrine, he was bringing together elements of Christian belief that include the Genesis story of Adam and Eve; the denunciation of moral failures by the prophets of ancient Israel; the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; and the formation of the church as an ark of salvation in a world of violent conflicts. Augustine’s personal struggle to come to grips with his own past and with the conflicts that surrounded him is recounted in one of the great works of all literature, The Confessions. This book invented the genre of autobiography, the search in memory for the key events of one’s life. Without knowledge of its context, some readers are put off by his giving importance to seemingly trivial incidents. But for Augustine, these flaws in his own character are symptomatic of human failings on a larger scale. The reflection on his past leads to a brilliant reflection on the nature of time itself.10 I will not use The Confessions as a main source for my reflection on teaching. However, the work is unavoidable for what it implies about philosophy and education. Most relevant for my concern is his concept of memory that links him to the Platonic tradition. Like Plato, Augustine thinks of knowledge as recollection, a locating of ideas buried deep in consciousness.11 He thinks that these ideas are divine in origin; human ideas participate in God’s ideas. Plato’s Timaeus has a picture of ideas being inserted in each newborn human. The Timaeus was favorite reading among early Christian writers and led them to believe in a neat fit between Platonism and Christianity. According to Augustine, humans are born with “seminal reasons,” that need actualizing. One could imagine an educational program of Augustine’s similar to Plato’s Meno in which the young boy is shown to possess pre-existing knowledge of geometric shapes. Augustine even has some of the Platonic-Pythagorean fascination with numbers as pointers to eternal truth.12 Augustine pushes beyond the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions when he posits God as the principle of knowing, the healer of a wounded faculty. For Platonists, the human being can turn toward the light and be confident of grasping the truth; for Augustine, the humans are in need of a “grace” (gift) to overcome their penchant for disordered desires that block a clear view. Education thus takes on the character of therapy. Augustine does not separate knowledge and love. A Socratic view of education is usually described by referring to an opposition between knowledge and ignorance. The concept of “will” had not been

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developed. At the end of the Republic Plato does have the myth of the man confronted by a tiger and a hydra. The hydra needs to be kept in check lest its multiple graspings bring down the man. The faculty of knowing operates within conflicting elements of a human life. The idea of the will emerged with the Stoics and their fatalistic perception of the human condition. The human’s one choice is to assent or not to assent to what nature dictates. Humans will be happier if they simply accept what is, instead of being dragged kicking and screaming by nature.13 Augustine agrees that the range of freedom is narrow; nonetheless he has a more expansive idea of will than the Stoics. His is a wounded will, one that is not as free as it is imagined by deluded human thinking, but it is a free will nonetheless. Augustine does not take choice to be the essence of freedom; in fact, choice is a sign of the fragmenting of one’s perception of the good.14 The modern attack on free will glances off Augustine whose idea of freedom is the coalescing of knowledge and love. The separating of freedom and choice may seem Orwellian if one does not understand that Augustine is taking a view from the end of history. The saints in heaven do not have choices because they finally have what they have been seeking. Even with this proviso that knowledge and love perfectly fuse only beyond history, Augustine’s view of freedom is vulnerable to authoritarian abuse. Governments, civil and ecclesiastical, are inclined to distrust the choices of people who are not rationally competent to exercise freedom. Augustine has often been invoked in defense of repression, censorship, and corrective punishment. Augustine did develop a theory to justify repressive activity. Garry Wills notes that others were practicing repression but Augustine gets the opprobrium for trying to explain it and justify some forms of religious coercion.15 Augustine may not have been familiar with Protagoras’ distinction between revenge and punishment, but he was in agreement that punishment is acceptable only when it has an educational purpose. “For if they were only being terrorized and not instructed at the same time, this would be an inexcusable tyranny on our part.”16 Although he rebelled against the physical beatings he received in his early schooling, he believed that the will needs some coercing to settle into the hard work of learning.17 Before I examine my two main texts on teaching, I will comment on a few practices and themes relative to teaching that frequently occur in The Confessions and elsewhere in his writing. I will comment on dialogue, friendship, and interpretation; these themes run throughout his work. I will then examine three metaphors for teaching and Augustine’s image for the human journey that encapsulates a meaning for teaching.

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THEMES The first theme is dialogue, a practice that implies an attitude to teachinglearning. The teacher and the learner are within a process in which their respective roles can be reversed. Dialogue as a literary form is artificial unless it is the actual report of an oral exchange. If a writer is taking both sides of the conversation, a give and take in argument is mostly pretense. Still, a thinker who writes dialogues is making an attempt to understand what a reader may be thinking. The give and take within the writer’s own mind is a sign of respect for another point of view besides the one that the writer deems to be true. During his first ten years of writing (387–397), Augustine’s chief literary form was the dialogue. Similar to Plato’s early dialogues, Augustine seems to use a genuinely dialectical approach for trying to get at the truth. Plato had Socrates on whom he was reporting; Augustine has friends, patrons, colleagues, and church officials in the company of whom he was working his way toward a synthesis of a philosophical position and Christian teaching. The later works of Plato use dialogue more as a literary instrument to convey Plato’s mature thinking. Once Augustine is a bishop, his style of teaching, while still indicating a searching within, often takes the form of homily or sermon. Before Augustine was a church official he was a schoolteacher for more than ten years in Rome, Carthage, and his hometown of Thagaste. He apparently was not very successful as a classroom instructor. He describes one difficult environment in Carthage: “Outsiders, looking almost crazed, barge shamelessly into classrooms and dispel any atmosphere for learning the teacher may have established.”18 Under such conditions the student may not learn much about school subjects but the teacher is forced to confront some realities about teaching. Naïve assumptions about transmitting knowledge to waiting minds are quickly undermined. Minimal conditions need to be established for teaching-learning. A second theme—friendship—is related to the first. One of the most obvious characteristics of friendship is conversation, a less technical term than dialogue. Conversation suggests some degree of friendship while dialogue need not. A friendly conversation has a much looser form than the dialogue of diplomacy. Much of the conversation between friends has no purpose beyond itself. Close friends sitting in the same room can be said to converse even when no words are being spoken. Both dialogue and friendship point to the relational character of teaching-learning. Friendship was a major theme in Augustine’s life and he regularly refers to it in his writings. That was especially true when he was a young man sur-

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rounded by a group of loyal friends. Later in life, easy going friendships were still important but difficult to sustain. Presidents, governors, bishops, CEOs, and similar officials are isolated by their roles. The presence of a couple of honest and truthful confidants is usually the best that they can hope for. But even in his middle-age years Augustine was privileged to have “that most unfathomable of all involvements of the soul—friendship.”19 Especially in his early searching, Augustine delighted in friends and cherished their help. His early works were “reflections of his view that all thought is an effort best pursued with others.” In the ordinary play of friendly exchange they were “teaching and being taught by turns.”20 In his Soliloquies, he converses with his reason about the value of friendship. To reason’s question of why we want friends, he replies: “That we may together scrutinize our souls and God, so that whoever discovers anything can help the others to it more readily.”21 The third theme of interpretation is similar to friendship and dialogue in bringing out the relational character of teaching-learning. Someone who claims the role of teacher places himself or herself in the position of interpreting a relation. As soon as language plays a significant part in the relation, there is ambiguity. A teacher has to try to explain what the words mean, but learning depends on the response of the potential learner. For the knowledge encoded in books, the teacher needs rules of interpretation. Augustine developed rules that dominated education for a thousand years and some of those elements are still with us. A popular phrase such as “reader response theory” has its beginnings with Augustine. He recognized that the intention of an author to communicate knowledge to a reader has to be complemented by a reader’s interpretative ability and a readiness to be taught. Plato was hard on the Sophists for selling knowledge; Augustine is hard on audiences for wishing to be titillated by sophistical teachers.22 Many of the problems in the nineteenth century concerning the reliability of the Bible had already been wrestled with by Augustine fifteen centuries earlier. In his commentary on the Book of Genesis, he distinguished between what God’s intent is and the vehicle of human language.23 He readily acknowledged that creation in six days is a truth in the form of a story. God could not create light on the first day if the sun was not created until the fourth day.24 Always one has to go back to a “literal” meaning but then decide how to interpret the text on the basis of other texts, the work as a whole, and the divine purpose of love. Augustine drew on a legal tradition for interpreting texts that came down from Aristotle through Cicero, Quintillian, and Pliny the Younger.25 There could be a difference between what words seem to say and what the lawmaker

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intended. For Augustine, a Christian’s “spiritual reading” of the Old Testament finds a figurative meaning as well as a literal meaning in many texts. A neglect of the literal meaning leads to flights of allegory as happened in the Middle Ages. Augustine’s theory of interpretation was an extraordinarily complex mixture of literary and legal traditions. Most of his successors were not schooled in those traditions and so they read the Bible in a way that brought on a crisis in the nineteenth century and a fundamentalist reaction in the twentieth century.

METAPHORS FOR TEACHING As a skilled writer and orator, Augustine employed all sorts of literary devices, including puns, jokes, pithy sayings, irony, and a rich store of metaphors. For understanding teaching-learning, I comment on three of his metaphors. The first metaphor is feeding. A metaphor is an action rather than an image of a thing. In Augustine’s writing, teaching is compared not to food but to feeding. He describes his activity while bishop “as feeding men as much in need of nourishment as he now felt himself to be.”26 The Greeks, with their emphasis upon visual metaphors did not usually compare teaching-learning to feeding-eating. In Jewish and Christian traditions, however, it occupied a central place. Oral metaphors can refer either to speaking or eating—and occasionally to both. In the Old Testament, the prophets Ezekiel (33:1–9) and Jeremiah (1:9) are required to eat a text, and the strange act is repeated in the New Testament by the prophet in Revelation (10:1–11). In less direct fashion, reading during meals has always been a practice in monasteries. The monk digests with mind and body at the same time. In the Eucharist, the liturgy of the word, read and preached, is followed by the liturgy of the meal. For Augustine, therefore, it was an obvious connection to associate teaching with the provision of food. He points out that Jesus did so, distributing loaves and fishes along with his preaching to the multitude.27 The relational character of teaching-learning is again highlighted by this metaphor. The best cook cannot succeed unless there are eaters who can appreciate a wellprepared meal. Teaching is nourishing only if someone is nourished by digesting what is offered. Augustine accepted the human tendency to be attracted to tasty food that does not provide nourishment. A teacher has to cope with this weakness, sweetening the teaching with attractive side dishes. “There is a certain similarity between feeding and learning; so because so many people are fussy and

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fastidious, even those foodstuffs without which life cannot be supported, need their pickles and spices.”28 Augustine’s second metaphor is healing. Augustine, like the Sophists, imagined teaching as the treating of illness. The ultimate success of the treatment depends on how the body responds. More closely for Augustine than for the Sophists, this metaphor flows directly from his view of the humans’ wounded condition. Plato complained about the limitation of a medical metaphor because it presupposed knowledge of a standard of health. Augustine does not assume that some of us are healthy and some are sick. All teaching is therapy, not the recovery of a previously healthy condition but the stemming of disease. Peter Brown writes that “the amazing Book Ten of the Confessions is not the affirmation of a cured man; it is the self-portrait of a convalescent.”29 This attitude may seem to be negative and depressing, but Augustine is just trying to be realistic and also sympathetic to human weakness. The human situation is not merely ignorance that can be overcome with knowledge delivered by a skilled lecturer. On that score Augustine agrees with Socrates. But the way out of illusion requires healing by the medicine of friendship and love, accompanied at times by harsher tasting medicines of physical coercion. Augustine’s ultimate earthy image for teaching is spreading manure. I cited Protagoras’ use of this metaphor and his careful distinctions of how and when the manure is to be applied. This metaphor may seem too vulgar for a description of teaching-learning, but it is an appropriate relative to teaching as feeding. Humans are prone to forget or to deny that they live in a cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. As billions of humans now inherit the earth they are being forced to learn that excrement from living creatures cannot and ought not to be hidden away. It is integral to the cycle of life. Avoiding the subject of what to do with what is inaccurately called waste, leads to ecological and health disasters, starting with the pollution of drinking water. Augustine does not shy away from using earthy metaphors in his lofty sermons on the soul’s condition: “Dung heaped on a field brings forth shining wheat; penance heaped on the soul brings forth virtue.”30 Out of seemingly unlikely resources the teacher has to fashion growth, nourishment, and integration of life. Finally, there is one metaphor—ascent—that is so pervasive it may not be recognized as a figure of speech at all. “Higher is better” is deeply embedded in language. The assumption is that the movement toward truth and goodness is by way of ascent. Plato is not the only source for this imagery but he strongly reinforced in philosophy what may be a primitive feeling of looking skyward for help. The image is closely tied to a belief that in the experienced duality of human life the better and higher half has to keep down the lower

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half. Salvation is from the body not of the body. The spirit must eventually shed the body in order to ascend above. Jewish religion challenged this image by looking for the meaning of life in history, community, place, and memory. Sometimes this Jewish view of history is said to be horizontal as opposed to vertical but that can be just a ninetydegree change of vector. A more accurate contrast would be three-dimensional imagery as opposed to two-dimensional pictures. Space and time are easily represented with images on paper. Place and memory cannot be so imagined. Place is where a community has sunk roots, where babies have been born and the dead are buried. Memory swirls backward, downward, and inward. There are no “high gods” in Jewish religion; instead there is the God of our fathers who promises to be with the people in the future. The truth is to be found in the depths of the present. The Christian movement took over most of the Jewish imagery that gives strong affirmation of the human body and its place in the physical world. The Christian message proclaimed God to be “incarnate.” Like most religious reform movements, Christianity tried to simplify and interiorize religious practice. God is to be found in the movement of the heart; God is with us; God is within us. The sacramental life is a lifelong series of outward expressions of interior grace. The body is not to be escaped from but to be transformed, in St. Paul’s paradoxical phrase, into a “spiritual body.” Christianity’s problem from the start was how to convey this complex understanding of community, body, and memory. Without a long, disciplined education for its members, Christian religion tends to shed its Jewish roots and become a religion in which God appears in human disguise to leave a secret formula for the good life. The performance of magic-like rituals under the watchful eyes of those who preserve the formula promises a salvation of the soul rather than a transforming of the bodily self. Augustine was a meeting point of these two tendencies inherent in Christianity. He had first been attracted to Manichaeism with its dualism of body and spirit, evil and good. His escape was through Neoplatonism with its chain of being from the highest to the lowest. The suggestion in Plato’s Republic (509b) that there is a “beyond being,” which is the source of truth and being, found its philosophical expression in Plotinus’ One who is the source of all. The One overflows into mind, and the world soul participates in the divine ideas. The Neoplatonic language was almost irresistible for Christian writers who found the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation present in Neoplatonic philosophy. In Plotinus’ Neoplatonism there is movement inward as well as upward, but it was the latter that attracted philosophers for more than a thousand years.31 In the crudest application of this image, the world becomes a ladder of ascent to a realm above matter, community, and history.

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Some of Augustine’s best-known phrases refer to God being in the interior of the soul, “deeper than my most inward being.” “God was closer to me than I was to myself.”32 This language cannot be understood as literally referring to physical space. What can he mean by saying that he was “outside of himself,” or saying that God was within but he was far away? A modern reader does not have much trouble understanding the paradoxical image as a psychological feeling. A person “comes to his senses” in the experience of feeling he has not been “present to himself,” lost among trivial concerns. The journey to the truth therefore leads inward. “In the inward man dwells truth.”33 I earlier contrasted Augustine’s inwardness to Descartes’ isolation from an external world. Augustine’s autobiography is vibrant with details of his world. The process of teaching-learning would seem central to this kind of inward journey. The teacher working with external factors awakens an internal response. Augustine never left behind a philosophical assumption that the truth is “above” and therefore the movement inward is a first step on the way upward. God speaks to “that part of him by which he rises above the lower parts he has in common with the beasts.”34 Not only Neoplatonism but also a trace of Manichaeism remains in the disparagement of the human body. A wise man, according to Augustine, has to rise above material things to “an ineffable reality grasped by the mind alone.”35 Jesus had said, “my kingdom is not of this world”; Plato had said the same of his ideas.36 These two images—the interaction of outer/inner and the ascension from inner to above—are not complementary. The second overrides the first. The interior life is threatened by the glitter of the external world but it is also threatened by a world imagined above community, place, and history. When the interior life is itself transcended and God is found beyond the mere material world, there is no longer a need for the soul to be nourished by interaction with friends, memories, and bodily experiences. Caught within a lifelong struggle for the integrity of his life, Augustine’s failure to notice this conflict of imagery is not very surprising. What is surprising is that commentators on Augustine do not seem to notice the conflict. They follow Augustine in assuming that “the road from the lower to the higher, the crucial shift in direction, passes through attending to ourselves as inner.”37 The journey is assumed to be from outer to inner, and then inner to above. Such a movement is not a cyclical journey constantly renourished by teaching-learning. It is a straight line that includes a ninetydegree angle. The image of up and down may seem to be a minor issue but I think it explains a conflict in Augustine’s attitude to teaching-learning. Despite a rich flow of material on teaching and some good practical advice, he ends with a denial that so-called teachers teach at all.

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CHRISTIAN TEACHING The two main writings I will comment on were written, or at least begun, at about the same time. The Teacher was written in 393; Christian Teaching was begun in 397 and Augustine worked on it for three decades. With its positive assumptions about teaching, Christian Teaching might seem to provide Augustine’s more mature and considered opinion. However, in Reconsiderations, written at the very end of his life, Augustine strongly endorses his negative attitude toward teachers in The Teacher. Christian Teaching is a treatise addressed to preachers. For many people today, that fact would exclude it from a book about teaching. However, Augustine clearly envisions the preacher as needing to engage in an interaction with the minds of his hearers. He is not describing a man in elaborate dress declaiming from a high pulpit. As a preacher, Augustine dressed simply, sat in his chair (cathedra) facing at eye level the standing congregation.38 He did assume that behind the individual preacher was the church, the mother teacher.39 Nonetheless, the preacher was not a mechanical transmitter of preformed truths. The preacher had to engage in a performance art in order to enter the minds of his hearers and evoke a response.40 Christian Teaching consists of four books, the first three on teachings or the content to be taught. The fourth book is about how to teach (including preach) and is filled with down-to-earth suggestions based on Augustine’s own experience. Augustine also draws upon the tradition of Roman rhetoricians. Augustine quotes Cicero approvingly and uses a framework largely supplied by Cicero. He does retain an ambivalent attitude toward the techniques of the rhetorician. Augustine has been called an anti-rhetorical rhetorician, freely drawing from the tradition while downplaying rhetoric’s longterm importance. Augustine plays a significant role in undermining the meaning of the term rhetoric. Despite some twentieth-century efforts to rehabilitate the word rhetoric, a “rhetorical question” is still taken to be a question that does not invite an answer and “mere rhetoric” is a way of dismissing a person’s argument.41 Whatever the philosophical limitations of rhetoric might be, the teacher can learn much from the practices of the rhetorician. Augustine frames the discussion around three styles of preaching: grand, moderate, and plain. A teacher might use all three styles depending on the situation of the hearers and the purpose of the teaching. Cicero said, “that man will be eloquent who can talk about minor matters calmly, about middling ones moderately, about grand matters grandly.”42 Augustine combines that statement with another of Cicero’s that “to be eloquent you should speak so as to teach, to delight, to sway”43 (IV. 12).

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Augustine correlates a simple style with the wish to achieve understanding, a moderate style with the desire to delight an audience, and a grand style with the intention to produce action. In the simple style, a teacher persuades his hearers that what he is saying is true; in the grand style he persuades them to do the things they know should be done but are not being done (IV. 25.55). These two styles have a clear and legitimate basis depending on the setting. Today we would associate a calm style intent on understanding a text to belong in the classroom; a grand style trying to initiate action belongs in the church pulpit or at the politician’s podium. Augustine is skeptical of the second style—the intention to delight an audience. Today one might sympathize with his fear of turning teaching into amusement, living as we do in a world in which “entertainment” means endless trivial distractions. Despite his negative attitude to a moderate style operating on its own, Augustine does acknowledge its necessary part in a teacher’s striving for understanding. “After all we do not want even what we say calmly and plainly to bore people and thus we want it to be heard not only intelligently but also gladly, with pleasure” (IV.26.56). The right style is needed when the aim is to move the audience to act. In that situation, he thinks a simple style is inadequate and a moderate style is misleading (IV.13.29). Only a grand eloquence will do the job when action is called for. Perhaps unwittingly, Augustine helped to create the stereotypical preacher thundering from on high, denouncing sin, and demanding submission to the word of God. Most people today are steeled against the loud claims of television ads and other preaching. Perhaps plain speech laced with a touch of pleasurable irony is more effective in today’s world than is Ciceronian grand rhetoric. A teacher needs a clear, external sign that the hearer accepts teaching that aims at action. If one sets foot in a Christian church it is presumed that one is willing to be moved to action by the speaker. In contrast, crossing the threshold of a classroom is not a sign of such an agreement. Instead, one agrees to having one’s words examined but not to being told to go forth and change the world. Today’s reader might wish that Augustine had been clearer on this distinction among venues, instead of addressing teaching from the standpoint of preaching. Still, his view of teaching is open to distinctions among modes of teaching and different settings for different kinds of teaching. Although Augustine might have to rethink his three styles were he alive today, his fundamental principle remains true. Depending on whether the purpose of teaching is either understanding or action, one has to know the audience and use a variety of linguistic forms. Augustine says that a person teaching “will avoid all words that do not in fact teach” and use words that are understood, even “use words that are not so correct, provided the matter itself is being taught and learned correctly” (IV. 10.24).

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He thinks that the words of the teacher cannot be separated from the teacher’s life and good example. “For to be listened to with obedient compliance, whatever the grandeur of the speaker’s utterances, his manner of life carries more weight (IV. 27.59). For Augustine, the final word is always love rather than knowledge. His words on teaching link back to everything he said about friendship. The preacher, as well as other teachers, has to be joined to the learner by a bond of love.44 Augustine’s view of teaching in Christian Teaching is an interaction between teacher and learner. The teacher represents a community and embodies a tradition. The learner’s life has already been shaped by innumerable factors. Teaching does not begin with a learner’s blank slate on which the teacher can inscribe true knowledge. The teacher has to evoke a relation of loving trust so as to enter mind and heart. The main question is: Do you understand? If not, the burden is on the teacher to find the words that link into the hearer’s previous understanding. How does it come about, then, that he ends with a negative view of teaching in The Teacher? I think one gets a glimpse of that conclusion in a passage of Christian Teaching where he comments on St. Paul: “After saying that teachers are made by the working of the Holy Spirit, he [Paul] goes on to instruct them about what and how to teach.” While Paul does not think that the function of human teachers is cancelled out, yet “not one who plants or waters but God gives growth” (I Cor 3:7). Augustine adds that nobody can correctly learn unless “he has been made docile to God by God” (IV. 16.33). That still sounds as if humans are teachers while God supplies the potential in the learners. Augustine, however, then employs a comparison to medicine in a way that short-circuits teaching. “Medicines for the body, after all, only do good to those whose health is restored by God and he can cure without them while they cannot do so without him.” (IV.16.33). Notice that in his comparing healing to God’s action with or without a human physician Augustine has left out the healing potential of the human body itself. In Augustine’s version of the relations between physician, medicine, illness, body, and God, the interaction between the physician and the healing possibilities present in the body is subverted. God can cure without medicine, and learning can occur without human teachers.

THE TEACHER Augustine’s treatise, The Teacher, begins with a celebration of teaching and the centrality of dialogue to teaching. However, the affirmation of teaching through dialogue is immediately qualified and the dialogue ends with sour

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notes on the role of teachers. The dialogue is between Augustine and his sixteen-year-old son, Adeodatus, who died a year later. His serving as interlocutor in the dialogue may explain some of the contents and direction of the work. Garry Wills notes, “Augustine proudly shows off his son’s prowess in The Teacher while assuring us that he did not teach the boy. Boys learn with God’s own inborn instruments.”45 The most compact summary of the dialogue is by Augustine himself at the end of his life. In Reconsiderations (1:12), he writes: “I wrote a work entitled The Teacher. There it is debated, sought and found that there is no teacher giving knowledge to man other than God. This also is in accordance with what is written by the Evangelist: ‘Your teacher, Christ, is unique.’” Augustine’s view of teaching is here traced to Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew that there is no teacher except God. What Augustine derives from this New Testament passage is consistent with his Platonic assumptions. Whether his philosophy led to his interpretation of scripture or vice versa is not clear. In either case, he has taken a political dispute in the gospel as a basis for a philosophy of teaching. Contemporary exegetes of the passage in question agree that Jesus is speaking to an inner circle of his followers. He is warning them, the future leaders of the Christian community, to avoid the trappings and honorific titles current at the time. The leaders of the Jewish community were called “rabbis,” an Aramaic term meaning teacher. Jesus was himself commonly identified as a rabbi. But when the Jesus movement had separated from the synagogue, rabbi as a title for Jesus was played down. “To the Christian disciples of the first century the conception of Jesus as a rabbi was self-evident, to the Christian disciples of the second century it was embarrassing, to the Christian disciples of the third century and beyond it was obscure.”46 Matthew was writing his Gospel at the time of conflict between the leaders of the synagogue and the emerging church.47 He has Jesus forbid his disciples to take on the title of a Jewish leader, “teacher.” As sometimes happens in the New Testament, the statement is made twice in chapter 23, once with the Aramaic word, and once with the Greek: “You are not to be called teacher (rabbi), for you have one teacher, and you are all students” (v. 8). “And call no one your father on earth, for you have one father—the one in heaven” (v. 9). “Nor are you to be called teacher (didaskalos) for you have one teacher, the Messiah (v. 10).

Between the two warnings against the title of teacher, Jesus says that they should also avoid the title “father.” It seems unlikely that he was speaking of

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biological fatherhood. Like teacher, the term father could be an honorific title to express the superior status of a religious leader. Jesus wanted his disciples to be as “servants” within the community and not to be lifted above the community. The dialogue’s opening exchanges establish teaching and learning as reciprocal activities (1.1.5–1.2.45). Augustine’s first question is to ask what we seek to accomplish when we speak. Adeodatus’ reply is “either to teach or to learn.” Augustine then says that he understands that by speaking we may wish to teach, but how can it be to learn. Adeodatus’ clever reply is that we learn by asking questions. Augustine’s paradoxical reply to that is: “Even then I think we want only to teach. I ask you: do you question someone for any reason other than to teach him what you want [to hear]?” Augustine then distinguishes between speaking “undertaken for either the sake of teaching or reminding.” Adeodatus in reply says he is confused by the fact that prayer is speaking but we do not teach God or remind God. To that, Augustine answers that God is to be sought in the “inner man.” The dialogue then proceeds to a discussion of teaching with words in contrast to “the things themselves by means of the words.” The human teacher has only words to remind us of the reality within. Learning is not from the sign but from the reality. By making language only an instrument to signify things and ideas, Augustine makes teaching to be secondary to an examination of the truth within the soul. At best, teaching is a reminder, but it is not a reminder of truth but a reminder to look within. The treatise ends with a frontal attack on the schoolteachers of the time. “Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks?” (14.45.5). After the teachers “have explained by means of words the disciplines they profess to teach,” the students have to look upon the “Inner Truth,” according to their abilities. “That is therefore the point at which they learn” (14.45.10). A dialogue that seems to begin by joining teaching and learning as a single process ends with their complete separation. “Men are mistaken in calling persons ‘teachers’ who are not . . . they suppose that they have learned externally from the one who prompted them” (14.45.15). Augustine concludes that we can “begin to understand how truly it has been written on divine authority that we should not call anyone on earth our teacher, since there is one in heaven Who is the Teacher of us all (14.45.20). Adeodatus then sums up what he has learned, “that words do nothing but prompt man to learn. . . . It is He alone who teaches us whether what is said is true” (14.45.30).48 Augustine’s denial that so-called teachers really teach has had a powerful effect. In most religious traditions, the founder is called teacher and what is passed on by the tradition is teachings. The Greek “fathers of the church,”

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such as Clement of Alexandria or Gregory of Nyssa, refer to Jesus as teacher. By Augustine’s time, Jesus as teacher had been overshadowed by Christ as savior. The Christian life became skewed away from teaching-learning. The need for intellectually grappling with the paradoxical teachings in the New Testament became secondary to performing rituals for grace and redemption. Augustine’s separation of teaching and learning, together with subsequent Christian ambivalence about teaching, fed into a modern skepticism about the role of teaching. Augustine’s attitude is a comfortable fit with the twentieth century’s attention to learning together with its lack of interest in teaching. As in Augustine’s view, teachers have been seen at best as an added factor in learning; at worst they are seen as an obstacle to learning. The truth is found in the “inner man,” although in modern times Augustine’s God was replaced by the psychological drive to know. Students are thought to have a natural capacity for learning. Teaching is seen to be mainly a process of getting out of the way or one of using techniques that facilitate the student’s own process of self-learning. God was the only teacher left by Augustine. If God is found silent, then no one can teach anyone anything.

THOMAS AQUINAS Thomas Aquinas in his treatise Truth is directly concerned with Augustine’s denial that teachers really teach. In Question Eleven he asks: “Can a man or only God teach and be called Teacher?” His answer is a resounding yes, but as usual he goes about getting to an answer by carefully looking at all sides of the issue.49 In the asking of the question he has already conceded that Augustine is correct that God is the ultimate teacher. His concern is Augustine’s denial that a man is a teacher. Thomas’ view of the human teacher is the opposite of Augustine’s. But someone who quickly reads Thomas’ text without some background can easily miss that fact because Thomas is careful to avoid a direct contradiction. Augustine’s position is that God is the ultimate teacher; therefore no one else is. Thomas’ position is that God is the ultimate teacher; therefore everyone and everything can be a teacher. I note first some of the principles in Thomas’ philosophy that place him at odds with Augustine on the matter of teaching.50 Thomas created a philosophical synthesis of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian traditions. The Neoplatonic element came through a writer called Dionysius, whom Thomas cites seventeen hundred times, second only to Aristotle. The Neoplatonic framework lifts Aristotle’s distinctions of act and potency from the physical to a metaphysical level. Every question is raised to the level of “being.” Thomas

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composed the first metaphysics of knowledge in which to know is not simply a “remedy of nature” but the “presence of being to itself.” His philosophy is one of participation in “to be” (there is no simple way in English to distinguish “a being” from the “act of be-ing”). That means, for example, that a person not only has a nature which specifies what he or she is; a person has an act of being that distinguishes who he or she is. A distinction between nature and person came out of theological disputes in the early church, but Thomas puts the distinction to good use in philosophy. Augustine has human knowledge as a participation in divine ideas; Thomas has human knowledge participate in divine knowing. That makes a difference in the understanding of teaching. Humans and other creatures participate in divine creativity, including teaching. God works through what Thomas calls “secondary causes.” There is no competition, no zero-sum game, in the relation of divine and human causality. A human teacher is not the ultimate source of truth but is nonetheless a genuine teacher. Related to this metaphysical principle of participation is Thomas’ resistance to the dominance of up/down imagery. In Augustine, the movement to the inner is a first rung on a ladder leading upward. Knowledge is a search for the pure idea untarnished by a material element and the world of sensual experience. In contrast, Thomas’ image of the creaturely journey is movement out, around, and back. In one of his early works, he writes: “In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circulation in which all things return as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin.”51 In Thomas’ philosophy, a person exists only in the integrity of body and soul. Spirit did not have an original fall into matter. Earth is the home of the humans; human knowledge is never removed from the experience of the senses. Human knowledge is a constant circling outward and a return to the intellect. Understanding takes place in the passive or receptive intelligence, always fed by the “active intellect’s” return to sensual material. Knowledge is not the possession of ideas but the presence to oneself mediated by a constant dialogue with all creation. In the dialectical method that Thomas uses he begins with difficulties or objections to the position that he is about to take. After he states a view contrary to the objections, he replies to each of the previously stated objections. In question eleven of Truth, he lists eighteen objections to calling a man a teacher. Most of the eighteen have some reference to Augustine, but I will concentrate on those in which Augustine is explicitly named. In each of these points of disagreement, Thomas does his best to avoid a direct contradiction. The first objection cites the key scriptural text that Augustine used “do not call anyone a teacher.” Thomas’ response is in accord with the modern exe-

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gesis of the verse, namely, that the warning is to Jesus’ disciples not to take on the titles and trappings of high office. The second objection cites Augustine’s opinion that knowledge cannot be imparted through signs. Thomas agrees that the signs do not impart knowledge but maintains that “principles” of knowledge are proposed by signs. A teacher employing the signs of language does not convey knowledge but does evoke the principles of knowing. After the third through seventh objections that obliquely refer to Augustine, objection eight quotes Augustine: “God alone, who teaches truth on earth, holds the teacher’s chair in heaven, but to this chair another man has the relation which a farmer has to a tree.” Thomas’ response is typical of the way he expresses disagreement with Augustine. He simply says, “when Augustine proves that only God teaches, he does not intend to exclude man from teaching exteriorly, but intends to say that God alone teaches interiorly.” Such a distinction is not one that Augustine clearly intends. At least in The Teacher he excludes external teachers, affirming that teaching takes place only interiorly. Thomas could have questioned Augustine’s interpretation of this agricultural metaphor, which has been fruitfully used by numerous writers on teaching. The farmer’s cultivation of the tree is not in competition with God’s creation of the tree. A teacher “cultivates” a student according to the precise conditions in the environment and the readiness of the potential learner. The teacher does not only “prepare the mind” but acts on the mind to draw a response. Objection ten has another quotation from Augustine that wisdom cannot be changed. This objection is easily dismissed by pointing out the difference between divine and human wisdom. Objections thirteen and fifteen also refer to Augustine by name; the former refers to certitude not being attainable by signs, the latter says that only God can give form to the human mind. Both objections are answered by continuing the theme that the creative power of God invites rather than excludes human activity to realize or actualize the capacities of living creatures. After this long list of objections, most of them Augustinian in character, it is startling to find Thomas invoke Augustine for the contrary view. One might suspect it is an ironic joke to quote Augustine in support of the thesis that man as well as God can be called a teacher. But in typical dialectical fashion, Thomas is acknowledging that there is more than one side to Augustine and that, despite his sometimes dismissing human teachers, Augustine wrote many things supportive of human teaching and provided an example of a teacher by his own life. Thomas cites a text in which Augustine claims that before the Fall water was abundant in earthly fountains; after the fall, water comes from clouds and

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needs gathering by human effort. The logic here is not entirely clear but Thomas draws out Augustine’s distinction to mean that “at least since sin came into the world, man is taught by man.” Thomas probably believed that teaching would have been part of creation even before the Fall. He had described the vocation of a Christian teacher in his inaugural address at the University of Paris using the text which Augustine had in mind: “Watering the earth from his things above, the earth will be filled with the fruits of your work” (Psalm 103).52 At this point in the dialectical back and forth, Thomas shifts into his own language to affirm human teachers and teaching. He cites Aristotle as holding a middle position between knowledge as coming from a power beyond the human individual and knowledge as pre-established in human nature. For Thomas, “certain seeds of knowledge pre-exist in us”; these are principles of knowledge that require external actualizing. Although Thomas develops his view in Aristotelian language, one can find an echo of Plato’s middle works, such as Meno and Gorgias, in the need for a state between ignorance and knowledge. In the Republic the learner has a capacity for knowledge and the teacher has only to turn him or her toward the light. For Thomas, the truth is found not mainly in the image of light but in the word spoken and responded to. Thus, the teacher has a more active role of stimulating the learner’s capacities through bodily signs. Thomas introduces a helpful distinction between two kinds of capacities or “potencies.” Paradoxically, one can speak of passive potency as opposed to active potency. His example of passive potency is unfortunately unintelligible to a modern reader (“the internal principle does not have sufficient power . . . when air becomes fire”). A contemporary example of what he means would be the gasoline tank of an automobile in contrast to the engine. Both have capacities but the gas tank’s capacity is simply empty space while the engine has an “active power” which only needs to be put into use. Thomas’ own metaphor for active power is the human being’s natural power of healing. The external agent helps the internal agent, providing the means by which it enters into act. “Thus, in healing, the physician assists nature, which is the principal agent, by strengthening nature and prescribing medicines, which nature uses as instruments for healing.” Despite the chasm that separates thirteenth- from twenty-first-century medicine, Thomas’ principle of healing holds up remarkably well. The analogy between teacher and physician remains one of the most helpful comparisons for understanding teaching-learning. Thomas summarizes: “Just as the physician is said to heal a patient through the activity of nature, so a man is said to cause knowledge in another through the activity of the

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learner’s own natural reason and this is teaching. So, one is said to teach another and be his teacher.” Thomas Aquinas provides a modest but realistic place for teachers. Teaching is a humble activity, central to human beings and extending to at least every living being. The human teacher remains beholden to natural powers, listening and responding to learning situations. The teacher can only perform certain movements, none of which is guaranteed to bring about learning in the student. David Burrell, a commentator on Thomas, writes: “The temptation consists in taking credit not for the movements we may in fact have made, but the action we are prone to describe in terms far more inclusive than mere movements.”53 Burrell goes on to link this distinction between movement and action both to Wittgenstein in twentieth-century philosophy and to Hindu mysticism. A human teacher has to try his or her best and then let go. The “fruits of the action” are not his or hers to claim. The teacher cannot be puffed up if the student succeeds nor despair if the student fails. NOTES 1. Augustine, The Confessions (New York: Knopf, 2001). 2. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 130. 3. Augustine, The City of God (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2001). 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 92. 5. Augustine, The Confessions, 1.6; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), par. 43. 6. Augustine, Teaching Christianity (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1996). 7. Augustine, Against the Academics and The Teacher (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing, 1995). 8. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 29. 9. Garry Wills, St. Augustine (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 10. Augustine, The Confessions, Book 10. 11. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 12. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), viii. 24. 13. Epictetus, The Enchiridion (New York: Dover Books, 2004). 14. Augustine, Sermons (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1993), iii, 10. 15. Wills, St. Augustine, 102–4. 16. Augustine, Letters (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2001), 93.11.3. 17. Augustine, Letters, 93.2.4.

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18. Augustine, Confessions, 5.14. 19. Augustine, Confessions, 4.13. 20. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (New York: Dorset, 1986), 180. 21. Augustine, Soliloquies (New York: Migne, 1999), 1.20. 22. C. Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 204. 23. Augustine, Commentary on Genesis (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), 2:5. 24. Augustine, Commentary on Genesis, 1:17. 25. Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 26. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 278. 27. Augustine, Sermons, 95.1. 28. Augustine, Teaching Christianity, IV. 11.26. 29. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 176. 30. Augustine, Sermons, 254.3. 31. Plotinus, The Enneads (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). VI. 9. 32. Augustine, Confessions, 10.38, 3.11. 33. Augustine, Of True Religion (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959), 39:72. 34. Augustine, Teaching Christianity, IV.11.2. 35. Augustine, City of God, IX. 16. 36. Augustine, Against the Academics, III. 19.42. 37. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 129. 38. Frederick Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 405–67; Brown, Augustine, 251. 39. Brown, Augustine, 225. 40. Augustine, Teaching Christianity, IV. 12.22. 41. Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies. 42. Cicero, The Orator (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 29.1. 43. Cicero, The Orator, 21:69. 44. Augustine, First Catechetical Instruction (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1946), 12:17. 45. Wills, St. Augustine, 24. 46. Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 17. 47. Wayne Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1986), 137. 48. Augustine’s identifying of teaching with listening to God in the interior of the soul is suggested in other places. For example, in a letter to Gaius in 390 or 391, he wrote: “No one after all, sees in the book itself or in the author he reads that what he reads is true but sees it rather in himself if a certain light of truth is impressed upon his mind, a light which is not bright in the ordinary way and is most far removed from the impurity of the body.” Letters, 19.1. 49. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions: On Truth (Chicago: Regnery, 1951). 50. For Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy, see Mary Clark, An Aquinas Reader (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1972); John Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas (New

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York: Fordham University Press, 1982); Anthony Kenny, ed., Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Harper, 1969). 51. Thomas Aquinas, The Sentences of Peter Lombard, quoted in Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius Press, 1991), 101. 52. John Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 213. 53. David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1979), 172.

Chapter Three

Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie

If one could choose only a single book to understand today’s politics, ethics, religion, education, and sexual issues, a good choice would be Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book with the English title Emile; or, On Education.1 But when a book is thought to be obvious in meaning, people freely cite it without bothering to read it. The frequent references that are made to Rousseau’s book assume that the message of the book is obvious. Usually what is obvious is that the person either has not read the book or perhaps has read the first five pages and decided that further effort was not needed. Rousseau’s catchy epigrams (“I hate books”) serve him badly when it comes to understanding the book as a whole. The problem with this book starts with the title, which is nearly always shortened to Emile. A better title would be what was used for the English translation in Rousseau’s time: Emilius and Sophie.2 Emile seems mainly confined these days to schools of education where parts of it are assigned reading. While Rousseau’s influence on politics since the eighteenth century is analyzed and debated in a steady flow of scholarly literature, the educational theory that was integral to his political thinking is usually summarized in a few sentences. And what is assumed to be his educational theory makes no sense at all in relation to his political theory. A first fact to notice about Emile is that it was published in 1762, the same year as his Social Contract. Like Plato in the Republic, a work that Rousseau imitates and criticizes, Rousseau saw politics and education as a single project. Unlike Plato, Rousseau split the project into two books. The typical reference to Emile assumes that it is an apolitical book, which is concerned with letting a student grow up in a natural state. If the child is allowed to follow where nature leads, the result will be an “autonomous individual.” Learning 47

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is all, teaching is suspect, a message that has played well throughout the last century in the United States. Emile has thus been credited with, or blamed for, the origin of “progressive education.” That phrase itself suffers from stereotypes associated with it, a further complication in understanding Emile. What many people know about “progressive education” is that it is connected to John Dewey. Like Plato and Rousseau, Dewey saw education and politics as intimately related but the popular understanding of Dewey’s educational philosophy makes it apolitical. One reason, then, why Emile is not read is the assumption that Dewey says the same thing, but in twentieth-century English. Why bother with eighteenth-century French? Actually, Rousseau and Dewey seriously disagree in their educational theories. At the center of Emile is the conflict between the individual and the social. Although Rousseau helped to invent the modern meanings of society and social, he uses the words negatively throughout Emile. In contrast, Dewey’s insistence from beginning to end is that the individual is social and that education is always a social affair. Dewey is not Rousseau’s successor in the twentieth century; Piaget and Freud are. Writing in 1762, Rousseau thought of the social as conformist in character, an unwarranted restriction on the individual. His successors, Freud and Piaget, saw a conflict between the hidden world of the child and the social requirements of adult life. In Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, the conflict was inescapable and permanent. Rousseau did look forward to the overthrow of monarchy and a new kind of society in which the will of one would be the will of all. Dewey distrusted anything that sounded that mystical but he did think that a revolution had occurred since 1762; it had ushered in the United States. It is not clear how carefully Dewey ever read Emile. He does give Rousseau five pages in Democracy and Education and the first chapter of Schools of Tomorrow. Elsewhere, Dewey, like other writers, is prone to simplistic summaries of Emile. In a 1934 essay, Dewey writes: “Some of the early educational philosophers, like Rousseau and his followers, made much use of the analogy of the development of a seed into the full grown plant. They used this analogy to draw the conclusion that in human beings there are latent capacities that, if they are only left to themselves, will ultimately flower and bear fruit. So they framed the notion of natural development as opposed to a directed growth which they regarded as artificial.”3 I presume that grammatically Dewey meant “such as” rather than “like,” that he is referring to Rousseau himself as well as his followers. What Dewey says may be true of the followers, but the point that Dewey makes of natural

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development is one that Rousseau makes (that a plant has to interact with the environment in a direction that nurtures its growth in a proper direction) (39). The irony in Dewey’s criticism of Rousseau is that what he accuses Rousseau of holding is precisely what Dewey is still accused of, that is, advocating that children grow up according to nature without adult direction. A Herblock cartoon captured the popular image: A group of children are saying to their teacher: “Do we always have to do what we want to do?” The attack on Dewey was unfair and I would think that by the 1930s Dewey himself would have been careful not to attribute to Rousseau a simplistic understanding of education as natural. It is the usual fate of complicated theories to get reduced to slogans and two-sentence summaries. Most people are too busy with the necessities of life to read the stylish eighteenth-century prose of Rousseau or the not so stylish English of Dewey. But one expects better of historians, philosophers, and professional educators. Before I turn to the text of Emile, I cite one particularly surprising example of how Emile is treated. Diane Ravitch is a noted historian of education and a severe critic of sloppy educational reforms. Her book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform, is a five hundred-page criticism of twentieth-century attempts at reform in education. Only a few writers escape her biting attack.4 Ravitch finds one culprit in back of all the bad ideas of progressive reform: “The seminal text of the child-centered movement was Rousseau’s Emile. Since its publication in 1762, it has inspired educational reformers in Europe and the United States who sought alternatives to routinized and formal schooling.”5 In Left Back, Ravitch has three paragraphs on Rousseau, only the second of which summarizes Emile. Granted that Left Back is about twentieth-century education, but if Emile is “the seminal text,” one would expect at least a chapter about the book. Furthermore, the three footnotes in the three paragraphs are not to the complete text of Emile but to a book with selections from Rousseau’s text.6 Here is Ravitch’s complete summary of Emile: “Rousseau opposed teaching either habits or lessons: his pupil would learn by experience, and the role of the tutor was to ‘do nothing and let nothing be done,’ so that the child would learn whatever he needed to know without instruction, keeping ‘the mind inactive as long as possible.’ His pupil would never learn anything ‘by heart,’ nor would he learn to read until he needed to. ‘Reading is the greatest plague of childhood,’ wrote Rousseau. ‘Emile at the age of twelve will scarcely know what a book is.’ Rousseau’s strategy for learning was to rely on his pupil’s needs and interests: ‘If nothing is exacted from children by way of obedience it follows that they will only learn what they feel to be of actual and present advantage, either because they like it, or because it is of use to

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them. Otherwise, what motive would they have for learning? Present interest: that is the great impulse, the only one that leads sure and far.’”7 Ravitch’s carefully selected phrases from Emile are nearly all from very early in the book. In light of what the whole book is about, many of the statements are utterly misleading. By leaving out most of the book, there is no effort to understand what Rousseau argues is the direction or the purpose of education. My intention in what follows is not to puzzle out some hidden message, but simply to respect all of the book’s contents.

THE BOOK The book Emile consists of five books that chart the educational development of the boy named Emile. Isolated phrases and sentences about the teachinglearning of Emile are unclear or misleading unless they are correlated with his age. Rousseau begins each of the five books with a precise noting of Emile’s age. That is a practice that one might expect in any attempt to describe the overall process of education. However, many writers, including John Dewey, simply refer to the student. And very often “student” and “child” are used synonymously. Rousseau was among the first writers on education to think developmentally. Human development begins no later than birth and continues until death. Rousseau was way ahead of his time on this point: “Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given by education” (38). “The education of man begins at his birth; before speaking, before understanding, he is already learning” (62). To this day, most uses of “education,” despite talk about “lifelong learning,” refer to elementary and secondary school. Attacks on Emile mostly employ quotations from book 1; occasionally the writer gets to book 2. Actually, book 1 made important contributions to the way young children have been subsequently treated. He opposed the practice of swaddling and the severe restriction of the child’s movement, practices common until the eighteenth century (43). Rousseau’s plea for the liberation of the infant from unhealthy constraints is the backdrop for people such as Benjamin Spock in the twentieth century. But it is crucial always to keep in mind that in book 1 Rousseau is speaking of the education of the infans (77). To assume that what Rousseau says of a six-month-old child is his educational strategy for a sixteen-year-old student indicates that one has not read the book. Even in books 1 and 2, the child is not left on its own but is carefully monitored by the teacher. At the beginning of book 1, Rousseau says there are

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three kinds of education: by nature, by things, and by men. Only the last is under our control. Nature, or the inner drive of the pupil, has to be respected by the human teacher. Early education is “negative,” meaning that the tutor has to set up a protective barrier around the child’s nature so that it is not distracted by such things as politics, sex, and religion (93). If the child’s early education is not distorted, reason will be able to govern later. The sharpest contrast in Rousseau’s theory of education is between the useless and the practical (68). The warnings to a teacher are not to impose anything on the pupil before its usefulness is evident. His dismissal of reading is aimed at attempts to get the child to read before the child sees any usefulness to it (117). If one relies on isolated phrases or sentences, it can seem that Rousseau is forbidding the tutor to teach, but it is the attempt on the teacher’s part to arbitrarily intervene that Rousseau opposes. “It is not by teaching the names of these virtues that one teaches them to children. It is by making the children taste them without knowing what they are” (131). Rousseau’s view of “habit” can be confusing. He says, “the only habit that a child should be allowed to contract is none,” but he advocates “leaving natural habit to his body” in the same paragraph (63). Toward the end of book 2 Rousseau says of Emile, “he does not know what routine, custom or habit is” (160). But in a footnote Rousseau adds: “The only habit useful to children is to subject themselves without difficulty to the necessities of things, and the only habit useful to men is to subject themselves without difficulty to reason. Every other habit is vice.” His view of habit here is similar to the medieval notion that natural powers require habits for their smooth execution. Habits that follow from nature are virtues; habits that do violence to nature are vices. For the child to submit himself “without difficulty to the necessities of things” may suggest that there is no effort, hardship, or pain involved. But there are aspects of Emile’s early education which are harsh. Rousseau wants his boy to become manly not effeminate. Emile needs training, for example, in listening to gunshots: “I accustom him to rifle shots, to grapeshot explosions, to canons, to the most terrible detonations” (64). Like Plato, Rousseau has nothing good to say of physicians. He prefers to “let the child know how to be sick” (55). The body has to be hardened by exposure to the cold and other inclement weather. If the child breaks a window in his room, he should learn to cope with the result. “It is better that he have a cold than that he be crazy” (100). The role of punishment is a good indicator of Rousseau’s overall theory of childhood education. In book 2 he says: “Inflict no kind of punishment on him, for he does not know what it is to be at fault” (93). The prohibition is clarified by a later statement that “punishment as punishment must never be

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inflicted on children, but it should always happen to them as a natural consequence of their bad action” (101). Still, a simplistic picture of just letting nature direct the child is not what happens when the child is out of line. In one example, a child in Rousseau’s care several times disturbs his sleep. When general admonitions do not work, Rousseau locks the child in his room and lets him holler until he is exhausted and falls asleep (123). The most striking example of how punishment is to be exercised according to nature is found in a footnote concerning corporal punishment. Rousseau and John Locke were opponents of physically beating the child, a common practice until the eighteenth century.8 Both authors, however, still accepted the need for sometimes hitting the child. “If he seriously dares to strike someone, be it his lackey, be it the hangman, arrange that his blows be always returned with interest in such a way as to destroy the desire to revert to the practice” (97). One of the things that nature teaches is that if you hit human beings they are likely to hit back. If the blows are “returned with interest,” the child will learn not to do that again. The nearly universal practice of quoting only from books 1 and 2 fits the stereotype of Emile but it is especially misleading because of the reversal of method in book 3. The last three books that do not fit the stereotype are therefore dismissed or not read at all. An early manuscript of Emile described birth to age twelve as the age of nature; the period after age twelve was called the age of reason. The full emergence of reason at about age twelve means an entirely different approach to teaching. “This is, therefore, the time of labors, of instruction, of study. And note that it is not I who arbitrarily make this choice. It is nature itself that points to it” (166). Thus, the teacher following nature after age twelve means that he or she has to rely on reason and reasoning. A sharp contrast of nature and reason by Rousseau could be misunderstood. For Rousseau, reason does not replace nature; instead, reason is an element of (human) nature but it emerges slowly and in stages (as Piaget showed). Rousseau first ridicules John Locke for saying that one should reason with six-year-olds: “I see nothing more stupid than these children who have been reasoned with so much” (89). Later, he qualifies that criticism by admitting that six-year-olds “can reason very well in everything they know that relates to their immediate and palpable interest” (108). Before age twelve, the child should be shielded as far as possible from the distractions of society. The task for the teacher is to lose time; learning has to be leisurely as the child interacts with the physical environment. By age twelve, the student has a clear sense of self and a control of his emotional life. Now the task of the teacher is to use time efficiently so that Emile can rapidly learn what he has to know about history, politics, science, religion, sex, and how to practice a useful trade.

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As the student gets older, the teacher continues to manipulate the physical environment, but now plenty of verbal instruction is needed: “Up to now our care has only been a child’s game. It takes on true importance only at present. This period, when ordinary educations end, is properly the one when ours ought to begin” (212). Anyone who has read that passage would not quote from books 1 and 2 as a summary of Rousseau’s view of education. Emile’s sexual education, which is unrealistically delayed until age fifteen, is found in book 5. In the same book, the educational pattern for Sophie is described. Much of what Rousseau says about the education of girls is dismissed these days as embarrassing, but it is a key to understanding Emile. I discuss this issue below. Throughout the stages of Emile’s development and the joining of Emile and Sophie, one character remains central: the tutor. It is ironic that Emile is said to be child-centered. The only one at the center of the book, who knows where both Emile and Sophie are going, and also knows the proper route to leave childhood behind, is the teacher. Of course, this teacher is no ordinary mortal. He spends twenty-four hours a day for over twenty years to see that Emile and Sophie become the perfect parents. At the least, that seems obsessive and unhealthy. What Rousseau imagines for a tutor is Plato’s philosopherking. Plato speculates that if only we could produce one such wise man, a whole society could follow.9 The problem for both Plato and Rousseau is where to get this first perfect model on which a whole new society can be constructed. The nearly omniscient tutor prepares Emile’s encounters with the physical world. Then, when Emile is ready, the tutor arranges social encounters (99, 174). Only in a few passages does the tutor tip his hand and reveal the nature of the game. Diane Ravitch, in the above passage, says that the role of the tutor was “to do nothing and let nothing be done.” Actually, the full sentence is a conditional not an imperative statement: “If you could do nothing . . .” (93). The quotation is from book 2 where the tutor is trying to create a safe cocoon of learning. The claim that the teacher does nothing is an ironic joke. As every expert teacher knows, the trick is to seem to be doing nothing while carefully arranging all the interactions in and with the environment. Emile, in the first few years of life, should discover himself away from people who would distract him with envy, jealousy, and other social vices. Freed from those influences, the child would develop a healthy self-love. The one social interaction allowed to Emile is with the tutor who is apparently free of vices. The tutor knows Emile’s nature better than Emile does. Thus, Emile can do as he wishes so long as his wishes are what the tutor wants: “Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants, but he ought to want only what you want him to do. . . . Let him always believe he is the master, and let it always be you who

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are. There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom” (120). How does the tutor guarantee that Emile will follow the program in every detail? Only once does the tutor candidly admit the basis of his control: “Do not command your pupil to do anything in the world—absolutely nothing. Do not let him even imagine that you claim any authority over him. Let him know only that he is weak and that you are strong, that from your respective stations, he necessarily lies at your mercy” (96). That basis of control works well when the learner is age six months or six years. At sixteen years old, when perhaps the student is as strong and tall as the teacher is, the basis of control will have to include reasoned argument. The teaching in books 3, 4, and 5 manifests this appeal to the student’s reasoning power. By the end of book 5, the tutor is a consultant to Emile and Sophie (480). He gives up control of their lives shortly after their marriage. The tutor continues to teach in a kind of grandfather role, but Emile asserts that he, the father, will be the teacher of his son. Robert Wokler blurs this point when he refers to “the gestation of a fresh pupil . . . whose care will be entrusted to a new tutor similar to his own.”10 It is true there will be a tutor for Emile Jr. but the father, Emile, will have been prepared to play this role.

HUMAN NATURE I said above that many people seem to be familiar with only the first few pages of book 1. That material is the usual source for quotations that are presumed to summarize Rousseau’s educational philosophy. At the beginning of book 1, Rousseau does set out some general principles. But given his dialectical method, some of these positions are almost reversed by the end of book 5. For example, in book 1, Rousseau attacks the patriotism that would place devotion to the fatherland over the life of the individual. One can educate either a citizen or a man but not both (39). Toward the end of book 5, after Emile has been required to travel to other lands, he concludes airily that he can be a free individual anywhere; the place one lives is unimportant. In one of his sharpest rebukes, the tutor tells Emile that his answer shows his immaturity. When Emile is a husband and a father he will appreciate the importance of where one lives (473). The tutor tells Emile that he should be grateful to the country that has nourished him and he should be ready to serve his country if he is asked to do so. (Rousseau was miffed at his countrymen for not appreciating him so he says that his talented and dedicated student is not likely to be called upon for service to his country)(475).

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The misreading of Emile is likely to begin with the book’s first paragraph. The famous first sentence begins: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things . . .” (37). The rest of the paragraph is a paradox. “Man” is accused of corrupting the pure good of creation. The natural things that are spoiled include man himself. The puzzle is how “man” can be both subject and object. “Man” would be good—except for “man.” The second paragraph adds to the paradox. Despite the fact that man turns everything bad, he must continue to do so because if he stopped things would get even worse (37). Today’s reader can be left confused by Rousseau’s conflict between man and nature. Starting with Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, “nature” came to mean what is outside human beings, or more exactly, what is confronted by individual, rational, controlling “man.” Today’s reader might think that a conflict between man and nature refers to human versus nonhuman. Rousseau is aware of this meaning of nature as what is opposite to man, what man has the vocation to conquer. Rousseau is also heir to the meaning of “nature” that the middle ages took over from Greek philosophy: Nature is the inner principle of a living being, including the individual human being. Most often for Rousseau, “nature” refers to what the human being is born with, the innate capacities of the individual. In Rousseau’s conflict of man and nature, “nature” is individual man, while “man” is human beings in the aggregate, that is, society. This clarification of man and nature does not dissolve the paradox of how man (society) corrupts nature (the individual). But Rousseau has located what he believes to be the central educational problem: how to resolve the conflict between individual and society. It is not a trick question that has a simple and clear answer. Rousseau takes five hundred pages to pursue an answer while holding on to both sides of his puzzle. For achieving a resolution of the problem, he relies on a psychological dialectic within the individual and a sexual dialectic between Emile and Sophie. The success or failure of the journey depends on the ethics and religion of book 4. Everything in Emile lives in the shadow cast by John Calvin, founder of Rousseau’s beloved Geneva. Rousseau was intent on eliminating the Christian doctrine of original sin, formulated by Augustine and applied with rigorous consistency by Calvin in sixteenth-century Geneva. The first sentence of Emile may seem to dismiss sin, vice, evil, and all the constraints of conservative religion. But Rousseau was no twentieth-century liberal; he was acutely aware of the evils men do. His dialectical approach is already evident in the first paragraph, which begins with the fact that everything is good and which ends with the horrors and crimes that human beings commit. The way to address the problem is by education, but it has to be an education that is always aware of humanity’s in-

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ner conflicts. And despite the best efforts of educators, humans cannot completely solve the problem because they, the humans, are at the heart of the problem. The Christian explanation of the problem was the doctrine called original sin. In Adam’s sin—or the result of that sin—all people share. Rousseau rejects this explanation but he is forced to do his own explaining of the origin of evil. The doctrine Rousseau supplies is actually very close to Christianity’s original sin. Thoughtful Christian commentators did not think of original sin as a black mark on the soul or a personal failing. In the Christian story, humans were originally born good, but every generation, after the first, has lived in a tainted world. Humans are born into a messy world because previous generations have messed up things and no one knows how to prevent bad consequences for today’s children. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theorists, including Rousseau, posited the myth of a state of nature that preceded historical experience.11 The biblical inspiration of these social contract theories is evident: an Eden before the conflicts of history. Neither the Bible nor any of the political theorists has a convincing explanation for why the human beings moved out of the state of nature but all agree that they did. The silliest summary of Emile is that the boy grows up in a state of nature and that he innocently avoids all conflict. Rousseau repeatedly tells the reader that Emile is not in a state of nature, that he is being prepared to live in society (202, 205) and he is going to have to deal with society’s corrupting ways. The obvious reason that Emile is not in a state of nature is clearly stated by Rousseau: “The man who speaks of ‘the state of nature’ speaks of a state which no longer exists, which may never have existed, and which probably never will exist.”12 Why do Rousseau and others talk about this nonexistent state? Because, says Rousseau, it is “an idea to judge correctly our present condition.”13 Influenced by the Christian belief of a three-stage story in which the last stage will be a restored paradise, Rousseau has Emile journey toward a new kind of society that is similar to the beginning stage, the imagined state of nature. His redemption depends on Sophie who embodies a human closeness to that imagined natural state. The psychological mechanism that operates throughout the whole of Emile is the conflict of two loves, one that is genuine—an immediate relation to one’s own bodily self—and one that is false—a relation to oneself dependent on the opinion of others (92, 214). Augustine had described the two loves as the love of God and the love of man. At his most dualistic, Augustine seems to hold that the love of oneself is opposed to the love of God and is the source of the evils in the “city of man.” When Augustine trusts his own psychologi-

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cal insight, he recognizes that there is a proper love of man and woman within the “city of God.” Both Augustine and Rousseau describe with keen insight the psychology of human love. To this day, the insights of both thinkers remain valuable. Rousseau goes beyond Augustine in providing an explanation of why humans create an illusion of the self separate from their actual bodily selves. Augustine presupposed this explanation—the awareness of mortality—as part of the Christian theology of death and redemption. Rousseau describes the psychological mechanism that follows from a fear of death. What lies at the root of the human incapacity to accept and to love oneself is the awareness of death. Human beings put up layers of defense to avoid this most obvious of facts. Rousseau posits that one of the two instincts we are born with is self-preservation or the fear of our own mortality.14 Every human vice is traceable to our inability to accept the fact that one out of one dies (92). Despite every advance in civilization the death rate is still one hundred percent. Crucial to Emile’s education is that the boy should learn to accept death as a part of life. Like today’s proponents of “natural death,” Emile is supposed to view death as simply a natural phenomenon (208). But here Rousseau slides too easily over the conflict. On Rousseau’s own principles, death is natural but human death is not, that is, human death is historical, moral, and religious. Human death is what all humans experience, but each human being experiences a personal search for the meaning of a life that includes dying. The problem of death for the young Emile cannot really be solved in book 3. Rousseau has to bring to bear the ethics and religion of book 4 to make the thought of death bearable.

ETHICS AND RELIGION Rousseau believed that besides the fear of mortality, the other instinct that humans are born with is pity (221). On the basis of pity, Rousseau builds his ethics and moves Emile into a kind of social responsibility. Pity is a welldefined idea, related to but clearly distinct from sympathy or compassion. These latter two words have a meaning of “suffering with someone.” Sympathy or compassion is likely to lead to action aimed at reducing the suffering that we share. Pity is a response to suffering, but it is a one-way reaction rather than a mutual relation. It is a feeling that a superior can indulge in while viewing a creature of lesser status. An animal often evokes more pity than a fellow human being because the animal is not suspected of being personally responsible for

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its plight. Human beings do not like to be pitied by other humans who consider themselves superior. Rousseau goes to great length in book 4 to describe the extent and the limits of pity (223–30). Because humans are born with an aversion to suffering and with pity for sufferers, pity is not itself a virtue. As an isolated reaction, pity is just an instinct that does not initiate action to relieve suffering. People are said to “wallow in pity,” responding to outside stimuli but in a way that turns inward. Having led a sheltered life until his teen years, Emile has a surplus of pity to direct toward others who have not had his privileged upbringing. He is like Gautama on his first trip beyond the comforts of his household, encountering the human situation of suffering and death. Like Gautama, Emile feels a call to serve suffering humanity, a vocation that is in tension with his first love of a human being, Sophie. On one occasion, when Sophie is upset that Emile is late, due to his helping someone in distress, he says to Sophie: “Do not hope to make me forget the rights of humanity. They are more sacred to me than yours. I will never give them up for you” (441). What Rousseau is suggesting here is that pity can be transformed so that it does lead to action. Emile’s innate feeling of pity has to be caught up into a large project; otherwise, it will corrupt the soul. “To prevent pity from degenerating into weakness, it must therefore be generalized and extended to the whole of mankind. . . . For the sake of reason, for the sake of love of ourselves, we must have pity for our species still more than for our neighbor” (253). Instead of just pitying one’s neighbor, the feelings have to be the driving power within a large-scale movement toward justice. A person has to learn how to be ethical, which in turn requires ethical models and teachers of ethics. Rousseau is one of a few thinkers who offer a bridge between two competing approaches in modern ethics. For David Hume, ethics was all about passion or emotion. Reason as the “slave” of passion was almost irrelevant. We are ethical only to the extent we can feel for the sufferings of those we know. In reaction, Immanuel Kant based ethics on abstract principles. Feelings are untrustworthy. What we need are universal maxims for our actions. We should not act according to feelings but from a requirement of duty. Contemporary ethics continues to be plagued by this dichotomy. Kant is popular with writers on ethics. It is unclear that Kant, or his successors such as John Rawls and Lawrence Kohlberg, have had much influence on business, politics, and the general public. In the United States, an ethic of pity dominates the news media and popular imagination. A lost child or a stray puppy can engender an outpouring of feeling and be the lead story on the nightly news. The concentration on an individual’s suffering can obscure

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policies in business and politics that devastate the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Rousseau recognized the problem of integrating big and small pictures, sensitivity on the small scale that is not lost in the grand designs of geopolitics. Rousseau wants his pupil to act ethically, to move from exclusive concern with his own desires and development. What motive does Emile have that would dislodge him from his comfortable self-satisfaction? While Hume’s metaphor of reason as a “slave” seems to give too little to rationality, Kant’s belief that reason can trump feeling seems unrealistic. Emile has to undergo a kind of conversion, what Christianity called a change of heart. For making such an ethical conversion, Rousseau has to turn to religion, his own version of Christianity. Why should Emile move out of his selfcenteredness? Rousseau provides this image: “The good man orders himself in the relation to the whole, and the wicked one orders the whole in relation to himself. The latter makes himself the center of all things; the former measures his radius and keeps to the circumference. Then he is ordered in relation to the common center, which is God” (292). This key passage in book 4 is the conclusion that follows from the religion that Rousseau calls “natural religion” which he equates with pure Christianity (294). This outlook of Emile’s place in the universe needs underpinning. For that purpose, Rousseau makes a radical shift in style to provide a forty-seven-page apologetic for natural religion. Rousseau puts a long sermon into the mouth of a disgraced but wise priest, the Savoyard Vicar (266–313). The convoluted style of presentation is presumably so that the views are not stated as Rousseau’s own (260). The ruse did not work; The condemnation of Emile by church officials centered on the exposition by the Savoyard Vicar. Rousseau expresses contempt for teaching religion through the lifeless catechism of the time (378). But the Vicar’s sermon is a mostly boring argument for religion based on seventeenth-century science. Famous scientists, including Isaac Newton, believed that the new science provided rich evidence for a God in the Christian image. “Nature” was the handiwork of God; we are born with a sense of the creator. “Natural religion,” a phrase coined at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was the source for God’s revelation. The Bible supplied additional information, especially for the uneducated. In the course of the seventeenth century, “natural religion” moved from innate sentiments to rational arguments for a first mover of the heavens. By Emile’s time in the eighteenth century, this kind of natural religion was in trouble. The Declaration of Independence still made appeal to “nature and nature’s God,” but most of the French philosophers saw redundancy in that formula. “Nature” became another name for God. The attributes thought to be divine— eternal, necessary, and immutable—were now a description of nature.15

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Rousseau, in his fights with Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, and Holbach, insisted on the need for a nature’s God but the best he could come up with was Paley’s “great watchmaker” in the sky to which the Vicar several times adverts (272, 275). A watchmaker would not inspire religious fervor, but Rousseau did succeed in employing Christianity in support of an ethic of pity. Rousseau thought that “the best way to protect that faith, and thus morality, is to reinterpret it in subjective terms and root it in our moral sentiments and conscience.”16 The Christian religion could lend itself to that interpretation insofar as it centers on the sufferings of the Christ. The emphasis after the twelfth century on the crucifixion, paired with the nativity scene, could convey a religion of pity. Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity as a glorifying of the weak was mediated through Rousseau’s version of Christianity. Part of the paradox of Rousseau is that he is also one of the main sources of the rationalistic theology of modern times. While Rousseau had a sentimental attachment to Jesus, his Christian religion was a dry system of rational arguments. Karl Barth, in his history of modern Protestant theology, had no doubt about its origin: “It is from Rousseau onwards and originating from Rousseau that the thing called theological rationalism, in the full sense of the term, exists.”17 Rousseau’s Emile was immediately condemned by the church. In the words of the Paris parliament, the book is “subversive of religion, morals and decency; seditious, impious, sacrilegious, besides much more.”18 Rousseau had to flee for his life and spent his remaining fifteen years as a wanderer. At first sight, the church attack on Emile seems to be out of proportion. In a letter to the Archbishop of Paris, Rousseau had asked a simple question, typically selfcentered but nonetheless legitimate: “Is it simple, is it natural that God should go in search of Moses to speak to Jean-Jacques Rousseau?”19 Instead of rethinking the idea of revelation—Did God speak to someone in the past and then retire in silence?—the church simply condemned Emile. Ironically, Rousseau has had the last laugh. Although he was condemned, his language has dominated Christian theology ever since. In particular, his contrast of “natural religion” and “revealed religion” was completely absorbed into Christianity. It is assumed by Christian writers to be traditional language, the obvious description of Christianity. In fact, “revealed religion” is a strange invention of the seventeenth century that cuts off Christianity from whatever is “natural” in religion. Before then, there was nothing called “Christian revelation.” Instead, there was a divine revelation embodied among other places in the objects and forces of the natural world. The God of “revealed religion” or “Christian revelation” is that of Herbert, Locke, Butler, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant. 20

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GENDER DIFFERENCE Emile was instructed in the “dogmas” of natural religion via elaborate philosophical reasoning. His partner Sophie gets a very different religious education, centered on family rituals and passed down by the mother. Rousseau gives too little detail of Sophie’s education, but he does make a point of describing her religious upbringing (377). Rousseau is widely condemned for describing Sophie as having an education in which her reason is not fully developed. The criticism is undoubtedly valid but on the religious issue Sophie gets the better of it. Religions, including Christianity, and more obviously Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, have not survived on dogmas taught in the classroom but on ritual, family, codes of conduct, and inspiring models of holiness. Sophie does not appear until book 5 of Emile, but she is integral to the nature and purpose of education. The reader cannot find out from book 1 what Rousseau conceives education to be; only at the end of book 5 is that clear. Some schools of education do not read book 5 because it is considered offensive to women. That is like reading a mystery novel but skipping the end where the murderer is revealed. Sophie is not a murderer but Rousseau’s portrait of her is thought to be egregiously condescending or worse. The first two pages of book 5 do seem to locate all women as inferior. And some of the subsequent catchy phrases—“she awaits the moment when she will become her own doll” (367)—seem to seal the case. However, book 5 recapitulates the whole book in having the form of a dialectical argument. In the course of book 5, weakness is revealed as the real power. The man who appears to be in control of the woman turns out to be the one who is controlled by the woman. “Everywhere men are what women make of them,” Rousseau wrote in a letter to Toussaint-Pierre Lenieps.21 Rousseau was always in search of human unity, and in Emile Sophie the woman holds the key to unity. She is the one who begins by seeming to be a slave but who knows how to turn the relation to her advantage. Rousseau was the source of Hegel’s and Marx’s parable of the master-slave relation. The dynamic of that relation leads to the slave triumphing by the clever manipulative tactics that slaves require for survival. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Rousseau was not seen to be misogynistic. On the contrary, he was, said Lord Byron, “the birthplace of love.”22 Couples came to him to have their love blessed. His romantic novel, La Nouvelle Heloise, was one of the best-selling books of the eighteenth century. Rousseau was a main inspiration for the “woman’s movement” of the nineteenth century, a reform in which the man would run the public world

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while the woman controlled the man in the private world. (There was also a women’s rights movement in the nineteenth century that opposed this romantic view). The problem with Rousseau’s romanticism was not that he considered women inferior. Dependent on strong women all his life, he held womanhood in awe, an attitude that did not exclude shabby treatment of Theresa, his common-law wife. In book 5, Rousseau propounds a sharp difference between boys and girls. The twentieth-century women’s movement was intent on emphasizing sameness, but recent decades have brought back a more complicated picture of sameness/difference. Rousseau tries to encompass the issue by saying: “In what they have in common, they are equal. Where they differ, they are not comparable” (358). Note that the choice is not between equal and unequal; the issue is a matter of equality and incomparability. For Rousseau, equal/unequal is too crude for describing the sexes. Nonetheless, he does proceed to say many things that would be outrageously offensive today. The fact that he presumes to toss out generalizations about women at all is his first offense. Book 5 provides a sketch of education for girls, an ideal education for a perfect young woman. Sophie as an ideal of womanhood is introduced before the girl, Sophie, appears. Anyone can argue with the details, but Rousseau deserves credit for acknowledging the existence of women. Until very recently, and even sometimes today, educational writers don’t ask the question of gender relations. One of Dewey’s first educational essays in 1885 was about differences between boys and girls. By 1911, however, he assumes that there is no significant difference.23 After that, he simply does not discuss the question. Maybe the later Dewey was right, but, as Jane Martin notes, you first have to notice the gender difference before deciding it is irrelevant.24 Even if Rousseau was right in emphasizing the difference, his dividing line is too crude. It opens him to the charge of making Sophie inferior. Although Sophie is said to be more precocious than Emile (368), she does not have her rational powers developed. Rousseau put great value on human emotion but he nonetheless thought that intelligence and freedom of choice were the distinguishing marks of human nature. Sophie remains childlike, which can be a compliment only if one’s adult capacities have already been developed. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written in direct opposition to Emile.25 Wollstonecraft criticizes Rousseau’s portrait of Sophie for her lack of rational competence. However, the positive qualities that he attributes to Sophie—patience, gentleness, zeal, affection—are ones that are indispensable to human families. Jane Martin writes that Mary Wollstonecraft’s attack on Emile is in danger of ignoring those qualities.26 Still, Wollstonecraft’s anger at Sophie’s undeveloped rationality is understandable. How to create whole persons in livable communities remains a problem to

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this day. To those who emphasize only sameness, Rousseau’s warning still has some force: “The more women want to resemble men, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters” (363). The dialectic of book 5, within the dialectic of books 1 to 5, has the intention of bringing about integral persons in a healed society. The project is stymied both by Rousseau’s confused sexual life that he brings to the study and philosophical presuppositions built into eighteenth-century language. Women are introduced as having no purpose in life except to serve man, but that quickly appears to be the cover story for how women manipulate men. Manipulation may be an effective strategy for women winning some battles, but it is not the basis of healthy, mutual relations. Sophie—the wise woman—rises above the common lot. Her parents say she may choose her own husband—while they do some manipulating of their own (401). On their wedding night, Sophie makes it known that she will be the decider (478). And finally, after the tutor discusses with Emile and Sophie true love and a happy marriage, the tutor makes Sophie the teacher of Emile. The tutor says to Emile: “Today I abdicate the authority you confided in me, and Sophie is your governor from now on” (479). Karl Barth is therefore incorrect in writing that Rousseau “believed that his Emile, having completed his education, will actually have become his own educator.”27 Emile remains in need of a tutor throughout his life and it is Sophie who will play the main role.

CONCLUSION Rousseau’s heart was in the right place, but joining two half persons, a public self and a private self, do not create a human unity. Unless the power relation can be conceived in another image than dominative power versus manipulation, there is no hope for human freedom. The starting point for Emile of one teacher/one student may sound like the perfect educational situation, but it is hopelessly distorted. Sophie comes to the rescue but she is too little, too late, and she also suffers from a similar isolation. Emile needs some classmates, both boys and girls. He also needs some other adult figures. Young children do need protection from bad example but the solution provided for Emile is unrealistic and unhealthy. The fact that Sophie is Emile’s first real encounter with a girl does not bode well for the marriage he immediately envisions. The tutor demands a three year separation to test their love (448), but both lovers need some friends. There is a beautiful passage on friendship in book 4 (220), but it is not exemplified in Emile’s actual education which is totally lacking in friends.

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Rousseau was right to criticize Plato for basing community on the dissolution of the family (362). In the polis envisioned by Plato, everyone would be called comrade.28 But Rousseau’s family unit of Sophie, Emile, and Emile Jr. is also too fragile a basis for a new society. Rousseau seemingly recognized that his story of Emile and Sophie would not have the happy ending suggested on the last page. Rousseau left an uncompleted manuscript of a sequel, Les Solitaires, in which Sophie becomes promiscuous and is pregnant with another man’s child. Emile, unwilling to accept this child, runs off. The two solitaries are still in search of the other half of their selves.29 Even for Rousseau, then, Emile seems to have been an ambitious failure. That may suggest it is not worth reading. The book is certainly not to everyone’s taste, and it is not an educational model to be applied in the classroom or anywhere else. People who wish to try radical experiments in education often invoke Emile as an inspiration and guide. The fact that such experiments usually end in chaos is not the fault of Emile. Part of the fault does lie with assuming that Emile is the story of a boy who discovers all by himself everything that he has to know. The assumption is that lacking all rules, habits, and authority, Emile becomes a free and autonomous individual. If that were the story of Emile, it would not be worth reading. But as an ambitious book about teaching-learning that includes struggles over politics, ethics, religion, and sex, Emile is revelatory of today’s struggles in all of those areas.

NOTES 1. All page references in the text are to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, intro. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 2. Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 37. 3. John Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” in Later Works (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1981), 9:195. 4. Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). She has kind words for Isaac Kandel, The Cult of Uncertainty (New York: Macmillan, 1943) and William Bagley, Education and Emergent Man (New York: T. Nelson, 1934). 5. Ravitch, Left Back, 169. 6. William Boyd, ed., The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971). 7. Ravitch, Left Back, 170. 8. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing, 1996), sec. 85. 9. Plato, Republic, 502b.

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10. Robert Wokler, Rousseau (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 101. 11. Other social-contract theorists include Thomas Hobbes and John Locke 12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (New York: Washington Square Books, 1967), 169. 13. Rousseau, Discourse on the Oroigin of Inequality, 169. 14. Rousseau, Discourse on the Oroigin of Inequality, 171. 15. Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 300. 16. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God (New York: Knopf, 2007), 125. 17. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (London: SCM Press, 1972), 233. 18. Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 346, 358. 19. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932), 46. 20. On the language of “revealed religion” and “Christian revelation,” see Gabriel Moran, Both Sides: The Story of Revelation (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), 75–101. 21. Wokler, Rousseau, 102. 22. Cranston, The Solitary Self, 37. 23. John Dewey, “Education and the Health of Women,” Science 6 (October 1885): 341–42; “Is Co-education Dangerous for Girls?” Ladies Home Journal, 28 (June 1911): 42–43. 24. Jane Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 195. 25. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 26. Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, 98. 27. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 223. 28. Plato, Republic, 463–64. 29. Cranston, The Noble Savage, 192.

Chapter Four

Dewey: Why So Misunderstood?

John Dewey, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is often cited for his view of education but, like Rousseau, Dewey does not seem to be much read. Like Rousseau, Dewey’s writing style is part of the problem—more on that shortly. However, much of the problem is that Dewey’s influence on U.S. education in the twentieth century is assumed to be obvious. Didn’t he give us “progressive education,” a phrase that can still divide writers on education, as well as the general population? While Rousseau’s view of education is largely captured in the single work, Emile, Dewey’s ideas are scattered throughout a prolific writing career of more than sixty years. Dewey is widely regarded as the preeminent philosopher in the history of the United States. He wrote dozens of books and hundreds of essays that did not have education as the main topic but might imply a theory of education. Two commentators on Dewey’s work say that the books, Experience and Nature and Quest for Certainty are his most lasting legacy.1 Dewey himself on his seventieth birthday referred to Democracy and Education as the place “in which my philosophy, such as it is, was fully expounded.”2 It is important to note Dewey’s belief that “philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education.”3 Like Plato and Rousseau, but unlike most philosophers today, Dewey did not think of “education” as a peripheral topic nor did he think of education as a place where philosophical conclusions are merely applied. For Dewey, education is at the center of philosophical reflection: “Education is the laboratory in which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are tested.”4 Of course, what the word education means is itself a philosophical problem. Some writers on education think that Dewey moved away from any intimate connection with education when he became a philosophy professor 67

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early in his career. Dewey surely did not think that being in the philosophy department of Columbia University rather than teaching philosophy of education at Teachers College Columbia excluded him from a realistic involvement in education. For anchoring this essay on Dewey’s view of teaching, I will use a 1900 essay, “The Child and the Curriculum,” and a 1938 book, Experience and Education. I will supplement these two works with material from other books and essays. The context of each of the two main texts is indispensable for understanding what Dewey was opposing and what he was offering as an alternative. One reason for choosing works that are thirty-eight years apart is to see how the author’s views have changed over time. Unlike some philosophers who do U-turns in the course of a long career, Dewey was generally consistent. One might even say that it is surprising how little he changed in his theory of education. The world changed dramatically in the first third of the twentieth century and Dewey’s political and economic thinking evolved considerably in that period; his view of education had a steadier course. My main interest in this essay is not Dewey’s idea of education but his meaning of teaching. Here the problem is not an excess of material but a surprisingly thin body of material. Of course, assumptions about teaching run throughout his writing on education. Similar to other writers, Dewey seems to think that with a good theory of education, teaching almost takes care of itself. It is surprising that a philosopher writing on education does not have any extended reflection on what it means to teach someone something. Even in Democracy and Education, which overflows with a multiplicity of angles and perspectives on education, the words teach, teaching, and teacher appear infrequently. Dewey does often use the word educator in referring to the professional schoolteacher. If that term were used to spell out a distinction between professional schoolteachers and other teachers, that language would have been helpful. No such contrast is drawn; “Educator” simply occupies the whole ground of teaching. Dewey casually refers to “parents and teachers,” a phrase that excludes parents from being teachers.

THE DISTANT BACKGROUND OF “THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM” Before examining the text of “The Child and the Curriculum,” it is necessary to comment on a few European theorists that Dewey was familiar with and to take note of what was happening to education and schools in the nineteenth

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century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau hovers over the century-and-a-quarter between Rousseau’s Emile and Dewey’s early writing on education. Writers in the nineteenth century generally credit Rousseau with influencing their thinking, even when taking a critical distance from him. The development of a state school system, especially in the United States and France, created a narrower focus for educational writing than at the time of Emile. Johann Pestalozzi, for one key example, did not have much success at running schools for poor children but he highlighted the possibilities and difficulties of the classroom.5 Another writer to whom Dewey gives some credit is Johann Herbart who concentrated very specifically on the classroom instructor’s procedures and lesson plan. Instruction, Herbart argued, builds on the foundation of experience already gained in or out of the school. In practice, that usually meant reviewing the previous day’s lesson. Dewey insisted that education in the classroom should start from “life-experience,” by which he seemed to mean anything outside the classroom. Despite this difference with Herbart, Dewey generally praises him. In one of his infrequent uses of “teaching,” Dewey says “Herbart’s great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the region of routine and accident.”6 Dewey inherited an educational language that was being shaped by the ideal of “universal education,” that is, a school-based education for every child. In the United States, this kind of education was dominated by the need to “Americanize” millions of immigrants and prepare them for productive work in their new country. Dewey’s attitude to the school was decidedly mixed. He opposed an educational institution separate from the rest of life but he accepted the school’s mission to prepare children for the new world of the twentieth century. In an early and popular book, School and Society, Dewey looked back nostalgically to a few decades previous when the family, apprenticeship, and religious communities had formative influence.7 He believed that all of those forms of education had lost their power in a fast changing world. In his “Pedagogic Creed” of 1897, he announced that “education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”8 Correlated with this article of faith about education (=school) is an even more grandiose belief that ends his creed: “I believe that the teacher is the true prophet and the usherer in of the kingdom of God.”9 Was that last phrase meant to be tongue in cheek? If by “teacher,” Dewey was referring to Moses, Jesus, Socrates, Gautama, and other “prophets,” the case might be made. There is no sign here that “teacher” means anybody other than an elementary schoolteacher in the U.S. state school. It was an unsupportable burden, as Dewey later realized, that a young woman, in addition

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to preparing and presenting a lesson for a few dozen school children in P.S. 121, should also have to usher in the kingdom of God. Having dismissed other educational institutions as irrelevant, Dewey had to identify education with school. He expected great results from the disciplined work of schoolteachers and a sophisticated school curriculum. It is something of a mystery why Dewey’s name is so often linked to Rousseau’s. Both men are often categorized as romantics who thought that the teacher’s job is to get out of the way. Rousseau did speak negatively of the colleges of his day, but his alternative was a carefully structured curriculum that started at birth and was directed by a nearly omniscient tutor. Dewey disparaged what he called “traditional” schools, but he wished to replace them with better schools and with teachers trained in science. Dewey’s most extensive treatment of Rousseau is in Schools of Tomorrow. The entire first chapter of that book is filled with excerpts from Emile, and Dewey credits Rousseau with being “just about the first person to realize that education is a developmental affair.”10 If one stops at the first chapter, one might think that Dewey is following Rousseau. But by the fourth chapter, Dewey is dismissive of Emile: “If Rousseau himself had ever tried to educate any real children he would have found it necessary to crystallize his ideas into some more or less fixed program.” Rousseau’s book, according to Dewey, is “his account of the impractical methods he used to create that exemplary prig—Emile.”11 Dewey faults Rousseau for neglecting curriculum. Rousseau in fact has a detailed curriculum of education, starting at birth, but he does not have a school curriculum, which is what Dewey was looking for. The starkest contrast between Dewey and Rousseau is their attitude to the “social.” Rousseau regularly uses the term negatively; the social is the enemy of individual development. In Dewey’s writing, there is no word used more frequently or more positively than “social.” He never tires of saying that the aim of education is the “socializing of intelligence.” He wrote that way in the 1890s and by the 1930s he was even more insistent that “it’s [education’s] end is social and . . . the criterion to be applied in estimating the value of the practices that exist in school is also social.”12 It was a continuing struggle to socialize individuals into American democracy but that was precisely the point of education in school. Children had to be convinced that their interests were best served by cooperating with their neighbors in a democratic way of life. By 1890, a science of society had been born. Eventually, “society” would become a big container within which politics, economics, education, and religion are particular aspects. How could education be anything other than learning to be social or becoming a productive member of something called society.

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THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT OF “CHILD AND CURRICULUM” The “progressive movement” in the United States coalesced about the year 1900. John Dewey’s name became intertwined with progressivism and progressive education. The progressive movement was concerned with economics and politics before it included education. But the phrase “progressive education” held on long after the political/economic movement had flamed out. World War I gave a fatal blow to the progressivists who naively thought that the expansion of government for the war effort would later be turned to progressive, domestic programs. After World War I, “progressive education” took a sharp turn away from urban reform and toward experimental schools in the suburbs. A simplistic opposition between traditional and progressive has survived to the present, at least in schools of education. The progressive movement in the United States was not homegrown. The United States was somewhat late in picking up the themes of economic and political reform from England, France, Germany, New Zealand, and elsewhere.13 The main concern of the movement was that many of the poor were being left behind in the technological and corporate revolutions. Two nearly opposite solutions appeared in the United States under the rubric of progressive. One route was for the corporate business world to control and discipline workers so that they would be efficient cogs in the new industrial machine. The other route, which eventually got control of the term progressive, thought that government had to intervene and provide protection for workers and for people displaced by progress. What had up to then been called “liberal” nearly reversed direction. In the nineteenth century, liberals believed that government was the enemy from which individuals needed protection. Suddenly, they realized that industrial trusts, the power of capital, posed the greatest threat to individual liberty. The only force able to withstand this threat was the state; government became the protector of liberty. It had not been inevitable that “liberal” and “progressive” would become synonyms. To this day liberalism remains in tension with government programs to help the needy. Right-wing Republicans who are always calling for less government are the original liberals, that is, believers in the liberalism that preceded its confusing reversal under the tag of progressivism. John Dewey occupied a central position in this confusion. He was at the center in trying to reconcile the tension between liberal and progressive. Educationally, this tension is between the wisdom which the older generation wishes to transmit and the novelty-seeking younger generation who are sure that they can do much better than their elders. It has been said that the 1950s was the last decade in which children still looked to adult models. While the

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1960s did embody a dramatic revelation of the split between generations, the rebellion was there from the beginnings of the United States, even at the time of its colonial period. The start of the twentieth century was when the split became evident. Emile Durkheim stated the classic or traditional view of education: “Education is the influence exerted on children by parents and teachers.”14 The adult world passes on its wisdom to children; thus, the aim of education is the socialization of the young. Dewey, as I have indicated, accepted this traditional meaning of education; it was embodied in the educational vocabulary of the time. And yet, he realized it was not working, particularly in the United States with its advertising slogan of “progress is our most important product.” In his early writing, Dewey does not refer to traditional versus progressive but simply to old versus new. Dewey put his own stamp on what the “new education” was, but there were sharp differences among writers of the time as to what this new direction should be. An aspect of the progressive movement often downplayed but now explored by many historians is the religious roots of the progressive movement.15 This theme is relevant for getting at Dewey’s meaning of teaching because of Dewey’s personal religious search that intersected with progressivism. Dewey assumed a meaning of teaching that came from Christianity even though Dewey rebelled against the church. Dewey’s mother, it has often been noted, was an evangelical Christian whose concern was that her son “would be right with Jesus.”16 In today’s context, that image can be misleading. Evangelical Christianity was a driving force of social reform in the late nineteenth century. True, by the 1920s, evangelical Christianity had shifted toward fundamentalism (a word coined in 1920), but before that there was the “social gospel” movement on the side of compassionate programs of political and economic reform. William Jennings Bryan epitomizes what happened to the evangelical movement and the way that its history has been distorted. Bryan is most identified by his role in the Scopes trial of 1925. As reported by H. L. Mencken and portrayed in the play and movie, Inherit the Wind, Bryan was an ignorant and reactionary fundamentalist who opposed evolution. But in a fuller picture of history, Bryan had been a leader in progressive reforms (social security, disability benefits, direct voting). His opposition to evolution had little to do with biological theories. He rightly feared that “social Darwinism” (which Mencken embraced) represented a vicious attack on the poor. Bryan’s disgrace at the Scopes trial—at least as northern newspapers judged it—drove evangelical Christianity underground for half a century.17 Dewey’s religious journey, which at the beginning was similar to Bryan’s, quickly veered off into a non-church religiosity. Several of his philosophy

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professors at the University of Vermont were products of Union Theological Seminary.18 A philosophy not entirely distinct from theology allowed Dewey to move toward a philosophical absolute in place of the Christian notion of God. Dewey seems to have remained a practicing Christian up to his time at the University of Michigan in the late 1880s. By the mid-1890s he was still using most of the same religious vocabulary, but he was by then outside the boundaries of the Christian church. His wife, Alice, was no doubt a major factor in that move.19 “Religion” became for Dewey a negative term but the adjective “religious” remained a positive description that could be applied almost anywhere. “The opposition between religious values as I conceive them and religion is not to be bridged.”20 The fact that he thought the public schools should be religious is something of an embarrassment to today’s opponents of all things religious in the public school.21 Whether or not his sharp opposition between “religion” and “religious” makes logical sense, it allowed Dewey to cling to a sense of the unity of all things while criticizing the church as an obstacle to progress. Dewey’s lifelong religion/religious conflict affected his belief about the purpose of education and the place of the teacher. Dewey absorbed the progressivist assumption about the passionate preaching of reform. At the same time he came to distrust the preacher who tells people what to believe. He repeatedly says that the teacher’s job is not to tell the pupils what the truth is.22 What was the alternative? He suggests bringing “things” into the classroom, material different from words.23 The teacher should talk less and let pupils work out the truth for themselves. He also thought that the school’s walls should be permeable if not removed entirely. The pupil could then be dealing with real “life-experience” and the teacher in the classroom could imitate Emile’s tutor in arranging and guiding life experiences. Dewey railed against the school as an institution separate from ordinary life, and having a distinct character of its own.24 He seems not to have considered the possibility that without walls the classroom’s fragile relation of teacher and students might be overwhelmed by “ordinary life-experience.” Bringing things into the classroom (today it would be the computer, the cell phone, and accompanying technology) can sometimes be helpful, but words are unavoidably at the center of what the classroom can do. Words in a carefully prepared conversation can be powerful, but, like others of his time, Dewey tended to identify verbal teaching with preaching. Teaching in the schools of the Middle Ages included lecturing (reading a text, usually the Bible), followed by the “disputation” (interpreting the text), and then the preaching of the text (application to life situations). By the nineteenth century, the academic lecture had absorbed both interpretation and preaching. Instead of reading from sacred scripture, the professor read his lecture from his

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notes on modern science. The student’s job was to copy what the lecturer said. The classroom was always part-theater and the teacher’s acting style was part of the package. It was not only a reading of science; it was a preaching of science as the way to truth. The lecture took over the U.S. university in the late-nineteenth century. It has never had the strict liturgical formality of the German university but it still occupies the center of classrooms in the universities of the United States. In elementary and secondary schools, reading at students is more difficult. The preaching format is challenged when a classroom teacher is confronted by a couple dozen squirming youngsters. Nonetheless, teaching understood as lecturing seeps down into high schools in a modified form. Dewey is not the only culprit in the lack of imagination concerning teaching but he never directly challenges the assumption of what teaching means either in the old or the new education. He did praise Johns Hopkins University where “the student is treated not as a bucket for the reception of lectures nor as a mill to grind out the due daily grist of prepared textbook for recitation.”25 He likens the old education’s teaching “to inscribing records upon a passive phonographic disc to result in giving back what has been inscribed when the proper button is pressed in recitation or examination.”26 He advocated as an alternative that “our schools truly become laboratories of knowledge-making.”27 What he was opposed to is fairly clear; but whether “knowledge-making” says much about teaching is not clear. Reforms in the twentieth century that began by opposing teachers as the tellers of truth have most often ended in disillusion on discovering that students either are unwilling or unable to discover the truth (or “make knowledge”) on their own. Before looking at an essay in which Dewey does wrestle with the issue of teaching, a few words are needed about his writing style. Dewey, like Rousseau, had a problem with people misreading him. Rousseau’s problem was his use of pithy phrases that are assumed to summarize his views. Furthermore, reading five hundred pages of eighteenth-century French prose requires a commitment from today’s reader. Dewey’s problem is different, a case of tangled syntax. Dewey’s friends made fun of his writing style but without giving us much insight into the cause and nature of the problem. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said that Dewey wrote “as God would have spoken had he been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.”28 William James commented that “Dewey’s style is damnable; you might even say God-damnable.”29 H. L. Mencken, no friend of Dewey’s, engaged in some hyperbole when he wrote of Dewey: “I believe he is the worst writer ever heard of in America, and probably the worst philosopher known to history.”30

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Dewey’s defense of his writing style was to claim that other writers “achieve a specious lucidity and simplicity by the mere process of ignoring considerations which a greater respect for concrete materials of experience would have forced upon them.”31 Dewey has a point here that his style is complex because his thinking is complex; but as a total justification for his style, the argument is not persuasive. Dewey’s form of arguing is not so different from many other philosophers. He uses a dialectical form of arguing, as does Rousseau (“on the one hand, but on the other hand”). Dewey’s dialectical format, however, is much more compressed than Rousseau’s. Dewey’s movement from one side of an argument to the other is not spread over hundreds of pages but is within a few paragraphs or sometimes within a single sentence. And when he moves from one side to the other, he very often does not tell the reader he is doing so. In Dewey’s way of thinking, if “a” and “b” are opposed to one another in an argument, the answer is: “c.” However, the road to “c” is a convoluted journey; it is not the middle of the road. People who say that the answer is “both/and” instead of “either/or” simply restate the problem. Instead, in Dewey’s dialectical movement, when the choice is assumed to be either “a” or “b,” Dewey negates both “a” and “b”; the answer is on neither side of what is being argued. Dewey’s next step is that the resulting “not a” and “not b” are also negated. The negation of the negation of both “a” and “b” has the effect of restoring “a” and “b” but now in new meanings which are compatible and which constitute “c.” I will illustrate how this method functions in “The Child and the Curriculum.” Jay Martin says that Dewey always tried to go beyond his teachers, with the result that he is driven to negative solutions.32 I don’t think Dewey saw it that way. He did try to supersede other writers by negating the opposite views in an argument. The result was not a negative solution but a double negative solution, which is Dewey’s way of being positive. Still, it must be admitted that Dewey’s complexity often seems unnecessary and the writing cries out for an editor. He sometimes uses a quadruple negative where a double negative would seem to be just as precise.

“THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM” I turn to a particular instance of Dewey’s style of argument. The essay “The Child and the Curriculum” has some helpful comments on the role of the schoolteacher and the nature of academic teaching. It is also an essay that helped to fix the public image of Dewey as educational reformer. The mystery that needs explaining is why Dewey to this day is assumed to be the main

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source of the “child-centered movement,” even though that is not what the essay advocates. There are sentences or fragments of sentences that are quoted to support the view that in a choice between child and curriculum Dewey took the side of the child. One might guess, even before reading the essay, and it should be abundantly clear after reading the essay, that Dewey’s answer to the question of child or curriculum is: neither. If he does unwittingly tilt in one direction it is toward curriculum but that is a defect in his terms not his intention. I would add, however, that Dewey is not entirely blameless in the fact that his essay is misread. I think he makes a bad choice within the essay in describing the role of the (school) teacher. First, however, is the question: why the question? Why would Dewey write an essay on child and curriculum? It is not obvious that education should be described as a conflict between these two. In the first four paragraphs, Dewey refers to a dispute in the 1890s, but as is common with Dewey, he does not name names. The essay quickly jumps to an abstract level where Dewey appears to be engaged by a solely logical problem instead of his trying to mediate a political dispute that was occurring between some of the country’s intellectual leaders. On one side of this debate in the 1890s were William Torrey Harris and Charles Elliot. On the other side were G. Stanley Hall and Francis Parker. The usual typecasting of conservative versus liberal does not do justice to the debate. If the terms that were emerging at the time are used—traditional versus progressive—traditional as a description for Harris and Elliot cannot be equated with reactionary or thickheaded opponents of progress. William Torrey Harris was one of the leading U.S. philosophers, as well as U.S. commissioner of education. Charles Elliot was the dynamic president of Harvard University. Their concern was “curriculum,” a fairly new term for what the school teaches. Elliot headed a committee that published a report on curriculum in 1893. The report has often been ridiculed, and it does sound rigid and reactionary today. The report says that “every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be or at what point his education is to cease.”33 The concern that prompted this statement was that students judged to be less capable were shunted off to vocational schools and not given the challenge of intellectual study. The committee was defending the right of access to good school-based education for all pupils, whatever the expectations for their social class. On the other side of the debate was the “new psychology” most notably led by G. Stanley Hall. He had received the first U.S.-based Ph.D. in psychology from the new kind of university, Johns Hopkins. Psychology was seen as the

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key to unlocking the mysteries of the human mind, a breakthrough of incalculable importance for education. Comenius, Rousseau, Locke, and others had offered their insights into human development, but the new psychology promised to chart in detail exactly how a child progresses into adulthood. Educational psychology was child psychology. Speaking before the National Educational Association in 1901, Hall said: “The guardians of the young should strive to keep out of nature’s way and to prevent harm; they should feel profoundly that childhood, as it comes from the hand of God, is not corrupt. . . . We must overcome the fetishes of the alphabet, of the multiplication table. . . . There are many who ought not to be educated and who would be better in mind and morals if they knew no school.”34 Aligned with this new scholarship was the work of Francis Parker, one of the most famous educators in the country. He was showing in practice that if the school removed artificial constraints, the child’s natural appetite for learning could lead the way. He agreed with Hall that “The spontaneous tendencies of the child are the record of inborn divinity. We are here, my fellow teachers, for one purpose, and that purpose is to understand these tendencies and continue them in all these directions, following nature.”35 John Dewey recognized what would be evident to many outsiders to this conflict, namely, that child and curriculum need not be opposing terms. Why couldn’t psychological insight be at the service of an intellectually challenging curriculum? Dewey’s response to the debate is that there should not be a conflict between child and curriculum but, since a conflict is perceived to exist, it is necessary to “reconstruct” the argument. Thus, there is a real problem in the statement of the problem. “Solution comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to see conditions from another point of view, and hence in a fresh light.”36 That is just what he tries to do in this essay. Notice that he says “getting away from the meaning of terms that is already fixed.” He does not offer new terms but new meaning(s) of the terms already in dispute. One can immediately see from this principle of Dewey’s why he was often misunderstood, with both sides claiming his support. He was on neither side of the argument while at the same time he was using the terms of both sides—the terms but not the meanings of the terms that the debate assumed. His principle is a good one for theorizing but not always applicable. Sometimes the term itself may be wrong. In the case of child and curriculum, he is able to change the meaning of the second. Curriculum, argues Dewey, is not school subjects but the “mature experience of the race” which is partially embodied in school subjects. In contrast, the word “child” did not offer the same

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ambiguity. He needed a different, more flexible word; “learner” or “student” would have been an improvement. In the third paragraph of the essay he writes: “The fundamental facts in the educative process are an immature, undeveloped being, and certain social aims, meanings, values incarnate in the mature experience of the adult” (92). The word child does not appear here. An immature, undeveloped being could be twenty-five or fifty-five years old. But if one were to call into question “child” as the recipient of education, it would also force a rethinking of “adult” as the end of education. Dewey does not pursue another word for “immature, undeveloped being” and reverts to using “child” throughout the essay. When only a small fraction of students went beyond elementary school, equating “child” with learner or student was somewhat understandable but nonetheless unfortunate. Educational writers today who continue to refer to the recipient of education as the child, when six out of ten students go to college and tens of millions engage in adult education programs, is scandalous. Instead of changing the meaning of child, Dewey’s solution is to speak of the child’s “experience.” The word experience is one of Dewey’s richest and most ambiguous terms. Education, as Dewey describes it in this essay, is a movement from the experience of the child to the experience of the adult. But what is lacking here is the “interaction” that Dewey thought was at the heart of education. The movement in his solution is all in one direction. I said above that if there is a bias in his comparing child and curriculum it is toward curriculum. The child disappears; curriculum is forever. That is, the movement is from immature experience (embodied in the child) to mature adult experience (embodied in the curriculum). A frequently quoted passage in this essay is “The child is the starting point, the center and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. It alone furnishes the standard . . .” (95). One author who quotes this passage then follows with the comment: “In theory, this ideal is unassailable. In practice it has proved largely unattainable.”37 She apparently thinks these words are Dewey’s view of education although it is one side of the debate that Dewey is criticizing. The problem is not that the theory has not been put into practice but that the theory is in fact very “assailable.” In this quotation from “The Child and the Curriculum,” Dewey is putting forth the “child” side of the argument in preparation for negating it. The assertion that “the child is the starting point, the center and the end” does not make much logical sense.38 For Dewey, the child—or rather, experience embodied in a child—might be called the chronological starting point. But the child cannot be the end because, as I have noted, the child disappears in the end. As for the child being the center of education, that is a different

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image from starting point and end. If there is a center for Dewey it is not the child but “experience,” which functions as bridge, mediator, or gap closer for the perceived conflict. The most fateful sentence in “The Child and the Curriculum” is: “It may be of use to distinguish and to relate to each other the logical and the psychological aspects of experience—the former standing for subject-matter in itself, the latter for it in relation to the child” (102). At first glance, the contrast of logical and psychological may seem to be an example of the dialectic that runs throughout the essay: the psychological is on the side of the child, the logical is on the side of curriculum; the two need to be united. But that is not what is said here. Dewey has indeed placed logical on the side of curriculum material, but he says that “psychological” is that material in relation to the child. In other words, psychology is not on one side of child versus curriculum; it is the solution to the problem. Dewey then offers an extended metaphor for relating logical and psychological. Logic provides a map of experience whereas psychology provides the notes for the mapmaker. Psychology might seem to be preparation for the logical. But then, as Dewey continues the metaphor, psychology is also the use of the map to lead back to life-experience. He concludes that “it [curriculum] needs to be psychologized; turned over, translated into the immediate and individual experiencing within which it has its origin and significance.” As he succinctly puts it, “the logical standpoint is itself psychological” (104). One might say without irony that this statement is not logical. A logical statement would seem to be that the psyche-logical is one form of logical, along with arthropos-, socio-, thanatos- and many other -logicals. Dewey proceeds immediately to use this contrast of logical and psychological to compare scientist and teacher. The teacher is concerned “not with subject matter as such, but with the subject-matter as a related factor in a total and growing experience,” that is, the teacher’s concern is psychology. What is the teacher’s task in relation to curriculum? “To see it is to psychologize it” (105). Dewey believed that this description of the teacher overcomes a perceived conflict of child and curriculum. Introducing the teacher into the debate was surely a good move. But he has made the teacher a psychologist and subordinated all subject matter to psychology. Teacher preparation would not require mastering physics, math, or history. The teacher’s knowledge of psychology implicitly includes all those areas; teachers have to concentrate on the psychology of learning. My highlighting of what could be construed as a momentary slip in logic may seem exaggerated. It would be except that this passage is symptomatic of a shift that happened to educational language in the twentieth century and Dewey’s contribution to that shift. Psychology almost completely absorbed

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the language of education. If education is a topic to be explored, would one not study how education involves politics, economics, ethics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and religion? That does not appear to be the case in schools of education. “Teacher preparation” consists mainly of learning a method prescribed by the psychologists’ study of learning. There is no denying that psychology has in fact discovered many helpful things about learning. Unfortunately, psychologists have had little interest in teaching, other than in “behaviors” that would bring about learning. Dewey’s essay did not cause the takeover of education by psychology. Nonetheless, Dewey was enamored of this new science that promised to finally turn education into a science. Dewey does not show familiarity with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, published at the same time as his essay. In any case, Freud would not have been scientific enough for him. Although Dewey constantly put forward the scientific method as the only valid way to knowledge, his version of psychology was still supported by his philosophy. William James was Dewey’s inspiration for the meaning of psychology and James was as much philosopher as psychologist. When Dewey was at the University of Chicago during the 1890s, psychology was still part of the philosophy department. In imagining the teacher as psychologist, Dewey was assuming a philosophical outlook on human experience buttressed now with careful reflection on the workings of that experience.39 Dewey was successful in having education become absorbed into psychology. But it turned out to be a different psychology than Dewey had envisioned. Psychology in the United States became an experimental science oriented to quantitative study. The scientific method that Dewey advocated was applied to external data and statistical conclusions were the result. This kind of psychology in the early twentieth century of the United States was led by Edward Thorndike who celebrated the fact that education was finally a science. Writing in 1913, Thorndike confidently predicted that “through the knowledge of the science of human nature and its work in the industries, professions and trades, the average graduate of Teachers College in 1950 ought to be able to give better advice to a high school boy about the choice of an occupation than Solomon, Socrates and Benjamin Franklin all together could give.”40 Ellen Lagemann, a historian of education, has written that although Dewey is revered in many places, it is Edward Thorndike who set the research agenda and influenced practice in the public school. She writes, “one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.”41 Quantitative studies of learning have triumphed in educational theorizing and in the preparation of schoolteachers.

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Because Dewey makes the teacher to be a psychologist, readers assume that Dewey—his protests notwithstanding—comes down on the side of the child. The conclusion of “The Child and the Curriculum” is either skipped or completely misread. That is unfortunate because Dewey introduces here one of his best descriptions of teaching. He writes: “The value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may enable the educator to determine the environment of the child, and thus by indirection to direct. Its primary value, its primary indication, is for the teacher, not for the child” (110). Dewey states clearly here what his third gap filler is in addition to experience and psychology: the teacher. The reason there is no essential gap between child and curriculum is the role that the teacher plays. Curriculum is first for the teacher, and the teacher teaches by changing the environment of the child. By environment here, one should understand all the physical and social surroundings of a child. A teacher cannot directly transmit knowledge into the head of the student. Almost the whole history of philosophy testifies to that principle. But that does mean the teacher cannot teach. As Emile’s tutor knew, the teacher has to arrange the physical and social environment in a way that will issue in “learning experiences.” Like Emile’s tutor, Dewey’s teacher knows where the child’s education should take him or her: “See to it that day by day the conditions are such that their own activities move inevitably in this direction” (110). The next to last paragraph of the essay begins: “Let the child’s nature fulfill its own destiny revealed to you in whatever of science, and art and industry the world now holds as its own” (111). It is Dewey’s typical dialectical way of saying things, the second clause a near reversal of the first. But sometimes the first half of the sentence is cited as evidence for Dewey’s position on the teacher and the child. Richard Hofstadter, for example, quotes Dewey’s words, “let the child’s nature fulfill its own destiny,” and then severely criticizes Dewey for not giving direction to the child’s development.42 But that is just what is in the second half of the sentence: “revealed to you in whatever of science, and art and industry the world now holds as its own.” For Dewey, the teacher provides the direction that the child needs; the teacher knows from a study of art, science, and industry where the child’s nature leads. Why would anyone quote the first half of a sentence by Dewey when the second half of the sentence is often almost the opposite of the first half? The only conclusion one can draw in this case is that Hofstadter either did not read the passage carefully or he deliberately misconstrued it by cutting the sentence midway. Neither conclusion is an admirable explanation for an historian who was in the midst of criticizing the anti-intellectualism of the country.

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Dewey’s claim that the child’s destiny is revealed in science, art, and industry is a remarkable assumption. There is no mention of psychology here, although it is presumably included in science. The child’s destiny is revealed to the teacher by art, science, and industry. The child does not know its own destiny; only the teacher does. Perhaps that is true but listening to a student might have been mentioned as a help to understanding not human destiny but the individual journey of a particular student. That fact becomes more obvious if one talks of student, pupil, or learner rather than child. Six-year-olds, though they should be listened to by teachers, may not be able to articulate much about human destiny. Sixteen- or sixty-year-olds surely have something to say for themselves about their respective destinies. In the last paragraph of the essay there are three sentences that summarize his dialectic. This conclusion of his argument has constantly been misread. The first sentence is a peculiar fragment that reads in full: “The case is of Child.” That sentence is often quoted, apparently on the assumption that Dewey’s last word is child rather than curriculum. But that sentence is the lead into the second sentence of the paragraph: “It is his present powers which are to assert themselves; his present capacities which are to be exercised; his present attitudes which are to be realized.” That is Dewey’s statement of the case on the child’s side. The third sentence of the paragraph and the final sentence of the essay goes back to curriculum but now as understood by the teacher: “But save as the teacher knows, knows wisely and thoroughly, the race-experience which is embodied in that thing we call Curriculum, the teacher knows neither what the present power, capacity, or attitude is, nor yet how it is to be asserted, exercised, and realized” (111). Unfortunately, this last sentence is one of his quadruple negatives that lose all but the most determined reader. If Dewey wished the reader to grasp his final statement of a solution to child versus curriculum, he should have tried a simpler syntax. I have often asked students to put into their own words what Dewey says in the last two sentences of “The Child and the Curriculum.” I did that with hundreds of intelligent students who were preparing to be schoolteachers. Most of them would come up with almost the opposite of Dewey’s meaning. They presumed that Dewey was saying the child is more important than curriculum. When I would diagram the two sentences—one line under the subject, two lines under the predicate, dependent clause slanted down from independent clause, and so forth—it would be clear to them what Dewey’s meaning was. Dewey’s conclusion places the burden on the teacher as psychologist and as an expert in art, science, and industry. The difficulty of understanding Dewey’s prose makes one wonder if it is worth bothering with. Certainly, it makes no sense to have students skim

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through his books. Nevertheless, much of Dewey’s language floats through discussions of education in the United States even if the speaker has never read Dewey. Whatever one thinks of Dewey, it is impossible to make sense of contemporary educational debates without understanding Dewey’s part, for good or ill, in what the early twentieth century has given us.

THE CONTEXT OF EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION One of Dewey’s books that is assigned to students and is taken to be a compact summary of his educational theory is Experience and Education, published in 1938.43 The book is a cry of frustration on Dewey’s part, an impatient and all too brief summary of what he really meant. This hundred-page book makes little sense unless one knows the context of the 1930s and the history of “progressive education.” By the 1930s, Dewey felt pressed from all directions in his role of grand theorizer of education. The book Experience and Education arose from an invitation by Kappa Delta Pi to address their annual meeting and critique his own philosophy of education. An author criticizing his or her own philosophy may seem like admirable candor but it is not generally a good idea. Why supply help to one’s opponents with a negative statement of one’s own work. Experience and Education is mostly a negative book. Dewey’s harshest criticism is for those who profess to be following his philosophy. The strange thing about the book is that Dewey writes as if he were still a disinterested spectator viewing a philosophical debate. In 1900, Dewey was a relative newcomer offering to mediate a debate between his elders. By 1935, Dewey was in his seventies and was one of the most famous people in the country. He gives no indication in the book that the progressive education he is criticizing is something directly attributed to him in the popular imagination. The audience that heard him deliver the lecture could be assumed to know that he was not an outsider to the argument, but generations of readers since then have a quite different context. The “progressive movement” had suffered a fatal blow with its support of World War I.44 (F.D.R. would retrieve some of its political and economic causes in the 1930s). Progressive education, on the other hand, only gelled after World War I. William Kilpatrick at Teachers College gave practical shape to the progressive method. He articulated his method before thousands of prospective and practicing schoolteachers. Kilpatrick assailed the old education: “Our old-type school, with its formal subject-matter, remote from life, made us think of the learning process as laborious and repellent.” Fortunately, the new-type school shows that “life’s inherent learning comes in fact without

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effort, comes in fact automatically and stays with us.”45 In the progressive school, according to Kilpatrick, the pupils control the method, “Pupils must propose what they actually do. . . . All learning should be done only if it is necessary for what pupils have actually proposed.”46 The ideology of “the child-centered school” was the basis of the Progressive Education Association founded in 1919. The organization lasted until 1955 (though it temporarily abandoned its name in 1944 for “American Education Fellowship”).47 In his 1930 presidential address, Burton Fowler stated the principle of the group: “We do endorse by common consent the obvious hypothesis that the child rather than what he studies should be the center of all educational effort.”48 So much for Dewey’s solution to the false opposition of child and curriculum. Two years before this address by Fowler, Dewey had been honorary president of the Progressive Educational Association and he had offered criticism of the child-centered ideology. But criticizing an organization’s founding principle is a hopeless undertaking.49 Dewey’s frustration at people who claimed to be implementing his philosophy can be seen in his blunt statement of 1926 on the child-centered school: “Such a method is really stupid. For it attempts the impossible, which is always stupid, and it misconceives the conditions of independent thinking.”50 Dewey continued to offer criticism of the lack of subject matter in schools that invoked his philosophy.51 Even to the very end of his life in 1950, Dewey was complaining to a friend: “Why do writers and teachers insist on saddling me with the ‘child-centered’ school. Anyone who has read me knows it is the socially-centered school that I have sought.”52 True, anyone who read Dewey would know he was not a proponent of the child-centered school, but Dewey assumed too much in thinking that his “socially-centered” school was an easy-to-grasp alternative. There was a movement in the 1930s that claimed to be socially centered, but Dewey had problems with that reform, too. The “social reconstructionists” reacted against the child-centered school and proposed to make the school a force for social reform. The Depression of the 1930s made clear that society was not going to be radically reconstructed by letting children run free in school. George Counts, in an electrifying speech that was published in 1932 as a small book, Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order, called on schoolteachers to take power away from the “practical men”—politicians, financiers, and industrialists—so as to change the country. “The profession should rather seek power and then strive to use that power fully and wisely in the interests of the great masses of the people.”53 Counts was not calling for an end to “progressive education.” On the contrary, he was claiming to take back the movement that had moved

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out to the complacent suburbs and had fallen under the direction of psychologists instead of political activists.54 Counts preached, “if the schools are to be really effective, they must become centers for the building, and not merely for the contemplation of our civilization.”55 It was a thrilling but ultimately delusional idea that the young women who were the schoolteachers, together with the children in their charge, could seize power from the politicians and industrialists. Dewey had some sympathy for the aim of the social reconstructionists. Thirty-five years before Counts’speech, Dewey had called upon teachers to usher in the kingdom of God. But if Dewey had called teachers “prophets,” he had perhaps not considered that prophetic speech can clash with the role of schoolteacher. While Dewey may have shared Counts’ desire for social reform, he rebelled at the means that Counts proposed. Counts called for progressive education to “become less frightened than it is today at bogies of imposition and indoctrination.”56 Although Dewey had expressed some admiration for the “cultural promise” of the Soviet Union’s schools,57 he could not accept a bald endorsement of “indoctrination” in U.S. schools. It might be argued that school children were already being indoctrinated by the political establishment on the right. The temptation on the political left was to fight fire with fire, imposing true doctrine in place of falsehood, but indoctrination ran up against the fundamental principle of liberalism. Dewey always remained skeptical of Marxism and other ideological doctrines. By the 1930s, Dewey’s interest had moved to the political arena and economic theories. He still thought of education as found in school, a place where adults shepherded children into society. In 1933 he wrote: “The purpose of education has always been to everyone, in essence, the same—to give the young the things they need in order to develop in an orderly, sequential way into members of society.”58 That is a remarkable claim about what the “essence” of education is and must be. Education is equated with school; school is equated with children. What else then can education be other than keeping society in order? Dewey had not changed his educational language since the 1890s but his hope that education (school) can be the agent of social change had been dashed. By the late 1930s, Dewey wrote that the schools cannot “in any literal sense be the builders of a new social order,” though he still hoped that they could “share in the building of the social order of the future.”59At other times, Dewey was more pessimistic of the school’s part in creating a new social order. He wrote: “It is unrealistic in my opinion, to suppose that the schools can be a main agency in producing the intellectual and moral changes, the changes in attitudes and dispositions of thought and purpose, which are necessary for the creation of a new social order.”60 If Dewey had

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said that the school couldn’t be the main agency, the statement would be a realistic assessment of the school’s limits. But in saying that the school cannot be a main agency, the statement reflects a despair of education. Having placed education in the school and having assumed schools are for socializing children, Dewey’s idea of education had no chance up against the social problems of the 1930s or any other decade.

EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION Experience and Education brims with impatience and frustration. In the preface and in the conclusion, Dewey proposes getting rid of “progressivism” and “progressive” as descriptions of education. Strangely, he does not take his own advice, and he structures everything in between the beginning and the end of the book as a conflict between traditional and progressive. In the introduction he adverts to another movement of the time, one that shadows the discussion in the book. He refers to “the attempt to revive the principles of ancient Greece and of the middle ages” (6). The reference is specifically to Robert Hutchins, the brilliant young president of the University of Chicago, and his associate, the prolific philosopher, Mortimer Adler. They had initiated the Great Books Program, which, like the program of social reconstruction, was a reaction against child-centered programs. While George Counts wished to turn the school into a revolutionary vanguard, Hutchins and Adler saw the school as a contemplative place to immerse young people in the wisdom of great minds from the past. Dewey would have agreed that a solid intellectual curriculum made logical sense, given his own criticism of schools, but he was upset by Adler’s rigid adherence to his version of great books. Dewey’s exchanges with Hutchins and Adler were remarkably vituperative.61 Did he really think that their Greek, Latin, and medieval texts threatened the U.S. public schools? In any case, Dewey’s portrait of the “traditional” school did not give any ground to a value in the traditional. In the nineteenth century, traditional education meant Greek and Latin for an elite, along with basic literacy and job training for the masses. By the 1930s, nineteenth-century traditional education had largely disappeared, replaced by a variety of educational theories and practices in a massive school system. The schools under Roman Catholic auspices may have gloried in being traditional. The public schools were trying to be up to date, despite being burdened with economic problems, including inadequate pay for the young women who staffed the schools. From the first page of Experience and Education, Dewey is a harsh critic of schools that claimed to be progressive. Despite his stated wish to get rid of

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the term, he seems instead to be intent on correcting what progressive means. As usual, he announces on the first page that “instead of taking one side or the other,” he will “indicate a plan of operations proceeding from a level deeper and more inclusive than is represented by the practices and ideas of the contending parties” (5). Unlike “The Child and the Curriculum,” where Dewey as outsider could logically proceed to undercut the debate, in Experience and Education he is clearly and deeply involved on one side. His argument is a messy complaint about the inadequacies of progressive schools, but at the same time there is no dialectical interplay between “traditional” schools and “progressive” schools. Dewey could not reconstruct a meaning of “progressive” unless he also rethought the meaning of “traditional,” something he was unable or unwilling to do. If one wished to explore “traditional,” the first step would be to recognize that traditional education—encompassing the last few thousand years—was not mainly about schools at all. To reexamine tradition, Dewey would have had to reconsider his dismissal of the family and the religious community as educational forces. He would have had to rethink education in relation to a new world of work and lifelong development. Dewey often dropped hints of an education beyond a schoolteacher’s efforts with children.62 But he could not get free of the educational language that dominated the late nineteenth century—nor have we yet found a consistent way out of it. Mortimer Adler’s Great Books Program proved to be only a small blip in the attempted reform of education, an attractive alternative for a select few college students. However, some of the “traditional” ideas in those books might have some relevance to our continuing problem of what education is. Dewey’s concern in Experience and Education, as indicated by the title, is the relation between experience and education. That was certainly a worthwhile concern for any writer on education, and especially for Dewey. In the present, just as in the 1930s, there are people who enthusiastically announce a grand new discovery: experience-based education. Dewey takes dead aim at this cliché by pointing out that all education is based on experience. What else could it be based on?63 While Dewey has little good to say for “traditional” education, he does remind his would-be progressive disciples that “it would be a great mistake to suppose, even tacitly, that the traditional classroom was not a place in which pupils had experiences” (26). Even though he uses one of his double negatives here, he does acknowledge that traditional schools dealt in experience. Unfortunately, everything else he has to say about traditional schools is simply negative. Lacking any dialectical partner for the progressive side, Dewey could not succeed in sorting out the good and the bad in progressive schools.

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Dewey had been writing about “experience” for almost fifty years. Much of Democracy and Education in 1915 was about experience. One of his finest books in the 1920s was entitled Experience and Nature. And in 1934, he published Art as Experience, which has a systematic explanation of experience in relation to art. Experience and Education was Dewey’s last, exasperated attempt to explain what experience means in the context of education. However, I doubt that there are many readers who on finishing the last page of Experience and Education say: Now I finally understand what Dewey meant by experience. Dewey writes as if the reader is already familiar with his meaning of experience and needs only a few reminders or some course corrections. Many of his audience for the original address might be presumed to have known about his previous writing on experience. Most readers of the book since then, hoping to get Dewey’s idea of experience, find themselves in a tangle of criticisms directed at progressive schools. Experience is a topic addressed only obliquely in this book. A reader might expect a first chapter laying out exactly what he means by experience. Instead, Dewey proceeds to talk about the quality of experience, aspects of the quality, interpreting experience, and the interplay of conditions of experience forming a “situation.” He might have begun with at least the kind of straightforward statement found in Democracy and Education: “Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations subsisting between a human being and his natural and social surroundings.”64 That is not a complete picture (“primarily consists”) because he did not have adequate words for what is his last word before silence. In Experience and Education, he should have emphasized to his readers that “experience” includes all the relations you can imagine, and also those you cannot imagine. Dewey argues that the human mind thinks about “objects” but that actual existence (experience) is relational. There are no objects but there are objective and subjective poles within experience. Education, therefore, is always about “interactions”65 within experience: teacher–learner, man–woman, adult–child, thinking–feeling, active–passive, human–nonhuman, school–family, tradition– progress, and so on without end. Dewey does have scattered comments on many of these relations within experience but, lacking a firm overall meaning of experience in which to situate the relations, the reader may miss the educational significance of these interactions. Among the endless relations within experience, there is one that cries out for discussion if education is to be clarified. I refer to the relation of teachinglearning. Dewey frequently has indirect references to this relation but never systematically explores it. He could have been helpful in undercutting many of the fruitless assumptions about teaching.

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In most writing on education, teaching is assumed to involve a human individual (the teacher) and another human individual who is young but not too young (the child). The assumed context is almost always a classroom. The question posed or more likely hovering in the background is: What does the teacher say and how does he or she say it so that the learner will take in that information? That question has no answer; there simply is no way for the teacher to transmit his or her knowledge into the head of the learner. While Socrates is celebrated for showing this to be the case, schoolteachers are still expected to transmit their knowledge to their students. Dewey offers the possibility of a different question that does have an answer or has many answers. Teaching-learning is what goes on all the time within experience. Learning is what happens when humans, and other animals that are receptive to development, receive direction from those living or nonliving forces that show them a way of life. Thus a teacher can be a human, either a living person or someone who is still present in memory. A teacher can also be a group of human beings; a community that is no longer alive makes up tradition. Finally, a teacher can be other than a human being; if humans are receptive to the teaching, animals and, by extension, objects, such as air, light, oceans, and deserts, are capable of teaching. One could go on indefinitely naming those who can play teacher. The more important point not to be lost sight of is that teaching-learning is a single relation seen from opposite ends. Dewey compared teaching and learning to buying and selling. “No one can sell unless someone else buys. There is the same extant equation between teaching and learning that there is between selling and buying.”66 He could have used any number of relations as analogies for teaching-learning. What is taken to be a truism in current educational writing—that learning is separate from teaching—is an impossibility within Dewey’s philosophy. If one starts with Dewey’s meaning of experience, the question for the classroom instructor is, How do I join the other teachers? The teaching has been going on in a person’s life since birth The most important individual human teacher is usually the mother (the father may be a close second). A person who is assigned the term “teacher” in the context of school can only try to gently reshape whatever teaching-learning has already occurred and is continuing to occur in the student’s life. Dewey was insistent that the school should be in continuity with out-ofschool experience. That would mean that the parents and the professional educator should provide a continuity of teaching-learning, within which the family’s teaching and the school’s teaching have distinguishable areas of concern. For Dewey to make that point effectively, he would have had to give attention to the parent as teacher but he never does that. Like other writers on

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education, he casually refers to “parents and teachers.” Nearly all educational literature, after a rhetorical gesture toward parents, explicitly denies that parents are teachers. The loss here is not just for parents but also for the people carrying the impossible burden of being called “the teacher.” The important but limited possibilities of classroom teaching are hidden beneath unrealistic pressures for success on test scores and overwhelming problems of classroom management. The work is extremely difficult and the public does not show much respect for the job. Politicians and parents deep down believe that “anyone can teach.” They are right; every human being is a teacher. But unless one has dealt with the expectations and limits of the classroom on a daily basis for many years, he or she is unlikely to grasp how difficult the job is. Dewey’s progressive schools were looking for a way to ease the burden. Why not talk less, do less, have fewer rules, and let children follow their interests? Dewey describes progressive schools that had no subject matter, no rules of conduct, and no adult authority. Dewey warned that such schools are headed for chaos, which is one of the worst enemies of freedom. The school is a game that has to have rules. No rules, no game, Dewey says (52). He positions the classroom teacher as a member of the community but also the game’s umpire. That is not a bad image for thinking about classroom management. However, the umpire in this case first has to design the environment so that student interactions with each other and their engagement with learning materials provide a firm basis for authority. Controlling environmental interactions in a classroom requires someone who can provoke intellectual questioning. People who try to survive in the role of schoolteacher with clever tricks have a limited career span. As Dewey said in the conclusion of “The Child and the Curriculum,” what is required is that the classroom teacher be excited about the art, science, and industry that the past has given us. The schoolteacher also has to learn about the teachinglearning already present in the prospective learners’ lives. Success at the game requires intelligence, hard work, patience, humor, and luck.

NOTES 1 Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995), 181; Robert Westbrook John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 320. 2. John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” Later Works (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1981), 5: 150. 3.John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1966), 388.

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4. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 384. 5. John Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow (New York: Dutton, 1915). 6. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 70–71. 7. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 9–10. 8. John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” in Dewey on Education, ed. Martin Dworkin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1959), 30. 9. Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” 32. 10. Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, 2. 11. Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, 45. 12. John Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” in Later Works, 9:202. 13. For the best treatment of this history, see Daniel Rogers, Atlantic Crossings (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998). 14. Max Weber, Education and Sociology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956), 91. 15. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America 1890–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003). 16. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 3. 17. Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 18. Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 37. 19. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 36. 20. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934), 28. 21. John Dewey, “Religion and Our Schools,” in Characters and Events, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: Holt and Company, 1929), II, 514. 22. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 38. 23. Dewey, School and Society, 22; Democracy and Education, 161. 24. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 8, 38; Dewey, School and Society, 75. 25. George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 29. 26. Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” Later Works, 9:197. 27. John Dewey, “Science as Subject Matter and Method,” in John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, ed. Reginald Archambault (New York: Modern Library, 1964), 192. 28. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, xiii. 29. Quoted in the introduction to Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, xxv. 30. Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 501. 31. Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” Later Works, 5:151. 32. Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 53. 33. Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958 (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 11. 34. Lawrence Cremin, Transformation of the School (New York: Knopf, 1961), 134. 35. Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 134.

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36. John Dewey, “Child and Curriculum,” in Dewey on Education, ed. Martin Dworkin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1959), 91. Page numbers in the text refer to this edition of Dewey’s essay. 37. Silvia Farnham-Diggory, Schooling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 22. 38. John Dewey, “How Much Freedom in New Schools?” Later Works, 5:319: “I do not mean, of course, that education does not center in the pupil. It obviously takes its start with him and terminates with him. But the child is not something isolated.” Dewey is here inconsistent in speaking of education terminating in the child; a major theme of his is that education does not terminate. 39. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958, 44–45. 40. Harvey Kantor and David Tyack, eds., Work, Youth and Schooling (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982), 39. 41. Ellen Lagemann, “The Plural Worlds of Educational Research,” History of Education Quarterly 29 (1989): 185. 42. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 375. 43. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier Books, 1963). Page numbers in the text are from this 1963 edition. 44. Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” in Untimely Papers (New York: Huebsch, 1919). 45. Samuel Tennenbaum, William Heard Kilpatrick: Trailblazer in Education (New York: Harper, 1951), 243. 46. William Heard Kilpatrick, introduction to An Experiment with a Project Curriculum by Ellsworth Collings (New York: Macmillan, 1923), xvii. 47. Patricia Graham, Progressive Education from Arcady to Academe: A History of the Progressive Education Association 1919–1967 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967), 20. 48. Cremin, Transformation of the School, 258. 49. Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 502. 50. Cremin, Transformation of the School, 234. 51. John Dewey, “How Much Freedom in New Schools?” Later Works, 5:319–25. 52. Letter to Bob Rothman, in Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 498. 53. George Counts, Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? (New York: Arno Press, 1932), 29. 54. Cremin, Transformation of the School, 259. 55. Counts, Dare the Schools, 37. 56. Counts, Dare the Schools, 9–10. 57. Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 66. 58. John Dewey, “Why Have Progressive Schools?” Later Works, 11:147. 59. John Dewey, “Can Education Share in Social Reconstruction?” Later Works, 9:207. 60. John Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” Later Works, 11:414.

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61. John Dewey and Robert Hutchins exchanged a series of strident essays starting with Dewey’s review of Hutchins’ book, Learning in America in Later Works, 11:391–96 and Hutchins’ response in Later Works, 11:592–97. 62. For example, Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” Later Works, 9:195: “An educated person has the power to go on and get more education, to grow and expand his development.” 63. One must note, however, that Hutchins contrasted the “work of the intellect” as opposed to “mere experience.” See Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 281. 64. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 274. 65. Dewey uses as his key word, interaction; late in life he thought he should have used “transaction” though the advantage of the latter is not obvious; see John Dewey, The Knowing and the Known, with Arthur Bentley (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1949). 66. John Dewey, How We Think (New York: Lexington, Ky.:D.C. Heath, 1933), 34–35.

Chapter Five

Can Morality Be Taught?

This chapter is a condensed history of the movement known as moral education and its attitude toward teaching. I date the beginning of the movement from 1900 with the publication of Emile Durkheim’s book, Moral Education.1 The concern with moral education throughout the past century provides a special insight to society’s ambivalence about teaching. If teaching is thought to be a questionable practice—a necessary imposition on children of a certain age—then the problem of teaching would be especially acute in the area of morality. Can anyone teach morality? Should anyone try to teach morality? If teaching itself is not a moral act, how can morality be taught? Two diametrically opposed approaches wind through the history of moral education. On one side are people who have felt increasingly beleaguered. Their regular cry has been “tell them what to do and make sure they do it.” On the other side are people who prefer to talk about learning and development. They think that education should facilitate the personal journey but teachers should not be in the business of telling people what to think or how to behave. Unfortunately, the idea of teaching is seldom explored on either side. The term teaching is readily used by proponents of “just tell them what to think and what to do.” In this case, the assumed notion of teaching is rather primitive. Their opponents, instead of examining a full range of teaching practices and teaching languages, prefer to talk about other things. The year 1900 is, of course, somewhat arbitrary. The concern with the moral had been voiced throughout much of the preceding century. However, Durkheim’s book signals the creation of a moral domain separated from the rest of education. It is not at all clear that Durkheim intended that development with his book, but his title, Moral Education, conveyed to people that there is a subject matter called moral education that can be distinguished from 95

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education in general. Is such a separate entity called moral education legitimate and desirable? Is it possible that there is no answer for moral education because it does not, or at least should not, exist? In questioning whether moral education should exist, I am not suggesting that education should be either amoral or immoral. Rather, throughout most of history, “moral education” would have sounded like a redundancy. It was assumed that education is neither an amoral or immoral venture; the adjective moral was unnecessary for describing education. But that is just what some people in the nineteenth century thought was changing. As the school took over control of “education,” and the school was intent on preparing its pupils for a scientific and industrialized world, there was fear that moral concerns would be obscured if not entirely eliminated. From the beginning of the public school system in the United States, the moral concern could not be avoided. In the United States, the special role of the school was to “socialize” the flood of immigrants. One of the reasons for replacing men with women teachers in the newly founded common schools was that women are better examples and teachers of morality.2 The teachers were to provide mothering and gentle understanding while the male administrators of the system saw the job as providing strict controls. The Boston School Committee saw the schools as populated by children “with the inherited stupidity of centuries of ancient ancestors.” The teacher’s job with such students was “forming them from animals into intellectual beings; and as far as a school can do it, from intellectual beings into spiritual beings.”3 Urbanization and industrialization created a continuing sense of moral crisis. When John Dewey in the 1890s declared that the family and the church were no longer influential as moral guides, he was enunciating what had become a common fear.4 There was no moral compass for society unless the school could offer it. Well before Dewey’s time, it was being said that the school has responsibility for “the whole man,” which in practice meant a greater concern for the moral than the intellectual.5 Dewey, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, did not agree with that assessment but there was enough ambiguity in his language that he could be quoted in support of the moral at the expense of the intellectual emphasis in the school. The United States concern for turning millions of immigrants into upstanding citizens was different from concerns in France, Germany, or England. The United States may have been all too willing to import theories of moral education into the schools rather than examine whether the school was already doing more than its share of educating in morality. Another aspect of the question in which the United States contrasted with Europe was that of religion in the private lives of its citizens and the expression of religion in public places, including public schools. In chapter 6, I ad-

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dress the struggle over religion and the schools that continues to the present. Here I note that European theorists of moral education were aggressively antireligious in the articulation of their theories. It is probably not a coincidence that “religious education” as a term designating a distinct area was coined at almost exactly the same time as “moral education.” The weakening of religion—more precisely, the Christian religion—was a large part of the reason for the conceptualizing of moral education. In France, the questioning of (Christian) religion as the basis of morality went back to the eighteenth century. Voltaire feared that there would be a collapse of morality without religion as a control upon people; Diderot was confident that there was no necessary connection.6 Writing in 1900, Emile Durkheim looked back only twenty years to when “we decided to give our children in our state-supported schools a purely secular moral education. It is essential to understand that this means an education that is not derived from revealed religion, but that rests exclusively on ideas, sentiments, and practices accountable to reason only—in short, a purely rationalistic education.”7 All adjectives in front of “education” have the danger of cutting off a sector of education rather than emphasizing or reintegrating that concern within education itself. Thus, adult education, political education, drug education, sex education, or environmental education find their respective passionate advocates but the call for each of these educations may succeed in isolating the concerns from the meaning of education in relation to power, people, and money. Moral education, environmental education, sex education, and other educations, might have been better served by not separating them from education as a whole. Then moral or environmental or sexual education would be recognized as a redundancy but one that could be temporarily useful as a reminder that any education worthy of the name cannot neglect its moral dimension, environmental context, or sexual implications.

EMILE DURKHEIM Emile Durkheim and Jean Piaget are the grandfathers of twentieth-century moral education. The two of them shared an antipathy to mixing religion into moral education, but on most issues they were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Durkheim wrote as a sociologist, looking at moral education as an issue of achieving social conformity. Piaget, as a psychologist, was interested in moral judgment as it emerges in the development of the child. Not surprisingly, they disagreed about the role of the teacher and the nature of teaching. Durkheim gives an exalted place to the teacher—that is, the schoolteacher— but his view of teaching needs scrutiny.

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Durkheim begins his Moral Education on a note of modesty: “In this book, our aim is not to formulate education for man in general; but for men of our time in this country” (3). Many of the people who advocated moral education in the twentieth century laid claim to universality for their theories. Durkheim’s emphases reflected concerns in France at the threshold of the twentieth century. To be fair, one has to take account of his limited aim when offering a criticism of his theory. While some of his emphases would no doubt change with time, I think his succinct definition of education was assumed to be perennial. “Education is the influence exerted on children by parents and teachers.”8 Some people might take this definition to be self-evident, but three of his elements should be noted. First, education is given an unusually wide meaning with the vague but comprehensive word “influence.” Second, the recipient of education is “children,” an assumption common at that time but one that became increasingly inaccurate in the course of the twentieth century. Third, referring to “parents and teachers” is standard rhetoric to this day, but logically it is an assertion that parents are not teachers. Usually when someone is challenged on this point, he or she will deny intending that (“You know what I mean”). However, in Durkheim’s case the phrase carries significance. He really does want to give teaching to the schoolteachers when the issue is moral education. The split of family and school is at the heart of Durkheim’s moral education theory. He distinguished two stages of childhood, the first within the family, the second, in the elementary school. “We shall focus on it [the second] in discussing moral education. This is indeed the critical moment in the formation of moral character” (17). He has little to say about the first stage within the family and most of what he does say is dismissive of the family’s contribution. He acknowledges that his view contradicts much of standard rhetoric. “Contrary to the all too popular notion that moral education falls chiefly within the jurisdiction of the family, I judge that the task of the school in the moral development of the child can and should be of greatest importance (18). His attitude to the family as educational might seem similar to Dewey and others of that time who were bemoaning a recent decline in the family, as when Durkheim says that “the center of gravity of moral life, formerly in the family, tends increasingly to shift away from it. The family is now becoming an agency secondary to the state” (75). But his view of the family’s loss of influence runs counter to the view of many others who talked of the family’s decline. Durkheim’s problem is that “family relationships have lost their earlier impersonality and have a personal and quite volitional character which does not fit regulation very well” (147). Note that he thinks that by becoming more “personal” the family has lost its moral influence.

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For Durkheim, regulation and carrying out one’s duties are what moral education is for. All that the modern family can give birth to is “altruistic inclination,” which is based on emotion and sentiment. Much of the writing on morality today, especially among writers who are influenced by evolutionary psychology, equates morality and altruism. For Durkheim, the two are very different. In feminist writing at the end of the twentieth century, a common complaint was the neglect of compassion and care in theories of moral education. Durkheim is aware of these “sentiments.” He just does not think they are relevant to moral education. The school is for Durkheim not an extension of the family but its opposite in moral education. The school is “the locus, par excellence, of moral development for children of this age” (19). “We have thought the school the means of training the child in a collective life different from home life” (235). The reason why the school stands at the center of moral education follows from Durkheim’s definition of morality. “We can say that morality consists of a system of rules of action that predetermine conduct. They state how one must act in given situations; and to behave properly is to obey conscientiously” (24). If the school is the place for moral education, then the schoolteacher is the primary agent for conveying those rules of conduct. “A rule can scarcely have any authority other than that which the teacher invests in it—that is to say, the idea of which he suggests to the children” (154). The schoolteacher is not only affirmed by Durkheim, he is placed on the high altar. “Just as the priest is the interpreter of God, he [the teacher] is the interpreter of the great moral ideas of his time and country” (155). I imagine that many schoolteachers would be amused by the sacred aura that Durkheim attributes to the school and its teachers. The school can exercise authority, he says, because of “the feeling that the children have for it; the way in which they view it as a sacred and inviolable thing quite beyond their control” (165). Perhaps children approach their first day in elementary school with reverential awe, but it is difficult to match this attitude with the ordinary running of schools and the daily toil of its teachers. It can seem at times that for Durkheim the teaching in school is simply a priestly overseeing of the ritualistic imposition of rules. But Durkheim thinks that these rules can be explained and that they make good sense. His notion of (school) teaching is therefore on the side of rationality and set against religion: “To teach is neither to preach nor indoctrinate but to explain” (120). The teacher has to rationally convince the students that the individual is meant for society; the rules that seem to put limits on a person’s desires actually lead to fulfillment for the individual. “The school has, above all, the function of linking the child to this society” (79). Education is not

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aimed at individual development; “it is the means by which society perpetually recreates the conditions of its very existence.”9 There is a remarkable assumption here by Durkheim; it is similar to Dewey’s that there is a neat correspondence between individual and society. At times he refers to “societies” as simply groups of individuals (57), but he also thinks of societies “as empirical and natural as the minerals and organisms” (266). They provide the object for moral action. “To act morally is to act in terms of the collective interests” (59). While there may be many societies, Durkheim usually refers to three that are part of social and moral evolution: family, nation, and humanity. These three “may be super-imposed without excluding one another. Just as each has had its part to play in historical development, they mutually complement each other in the present” (74). The problem with the reality of these three societies is that on one side of the nation is the family, which is inadequate and is subordinate to the next level; on the other side of the nation, “humanity” seems only to be the name of an idea or an ideal. There is no “empirical and natural group” called humanity to which the nation bows. That leaves only the nation as the object of moral devotion. Durkheim should not be burdened with the horrors of twentieth-century nationalism. Nevertheless, his apotheosis of society and the identification of society with the nation did not provide protection against the clash of two or more nations, each claiming a sacred aura. I have introduced religious terms because Durkheim constantly returns to the need to replace the sacred with a “quasi-religious” character to morality. He asks what is it that “merits the respect that the faithful of all religions reserve for their Gods?” His answer seems clear and forthright: “One of our fundamental axioms—perhaps even the fundamental axiom—is that the human being is the sacred thing par excellence” (107). One final testing of Durkheim’s view of what moral education is and what acts as a teacher is his attitude to art and play. It is a point that is in sharp opposition to Jean Piaget’s starting point for the study of moral development. Durkheim’s attitude to art is particularly blunt: “If art has a part to play in moral education, it is an entirely negative role. Art does not contribute to the formation of moral character” (274). What separates art and morality is the difference between play and work. Art is merely a game whereas morality is life in earnest (273). Durkheim was probably reacting against the German romanticism of the nineteenth century. A writer such as Friedrich Froebel regarded play as a kind of mystical experience that taught the mysteries of life. The kindergarten was Froebel’s invention, a place for the child to play. Maria Montessori, writing just after Durkheim, agreed with him that play is not a proper educational tool. The child must learn to work; the human being is homo laborans.10 For

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Montessori, life is about labor; for Durkheim, life is following the rules of society. “Not therefore by learning to play that special game, art, will we learn to do our duty” (173).

JEAN PIAGET Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, is probably the most important figure in the twentieth-century history of moral education. A paradox arises from the fact that Piaget never professed to be writing about “moral education.” He wrote, “I have no opinion on pedagogy. . . . It’s the pedagogue’s job to see how he can use what we offer.”11 His self-description was genetic psychologist, a combination of biology and psychology. His constant focus was the parallel development of the child’s physical and psychological powers. As one aspect of that work, he wrote a book entitled The Moral Judgment of the Child.12 Moral judgment is distinguishable from moral development, and, even more clearly, from moral education. Why then did Piaget become a dominant figure in moral education? The cause was partly Piaget’s own doing and partly that of his enthusiastic disciples. On his side, he insisted that his study was restricted to following changes in the child’s logic. But there was no way for him to avoid philosophical and educational implications of that work. While he claimed to have a “method of inquiry that was independent of all philosophy,”13 it is not difficult to identify Immanuel Kant’s philosophy underlying his assumptions. And while having little or nothing to say to “the pedagogue,” he does make comments on education. Once Piaget’s work had left his hands, pedagogues, psychologists, linguists, ethicists, and others drew out their own conclusions. The lines separating moral judgment, moral development, and moral education became blurred. One of Piaget’s own principles was that all knowledge is practical. People who were looking for practical answers in regard to children’s moral behavior found answers in Piaget even though he did not intend to supply such answers. We will see that Lawrence Kohlberg, Piaget’s main successor in the United States, was prominent among those who slid across the boundaries from moral reasoning to moral development to moral education. The Moral Judgment of the Child is an attempt to trace the developing child’s notions of morality. It is dependent on Piaget’s main body of research concerning the biological/psychological capacity to make abstract judgments. In Moral Judgment there is a simple two-stage development of “two moralities”: heteronymous and autonomous (335). At first, the child thinks of rules as eternal and imposed on humans; therefore the activity of obeying the rules

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has a sacred character. Later, the rules are understood to be humanly invented and to serve the purpose of justice. Rules are now accepted because the child wills and freely consents to them. Running through Piaget’s text is a fierce opposition to Durkheim’s Moral Education. I have said that they agreed on some things, such as an antipathy toward religion. At first glance, they seem to agree on morality as governed by rules. Piaget begins his book with the assertion that “all morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules” (13). That sounds similar to Durkheim’s system of rules that a child must learn in order to become a good member of society. However, Piaget takes the rules in a nearly opposite direction. Rules deserve respect, but ultimately the rules have to be created by oneself (in cooperation with others). The rules that Durkheim endorses lead to conformity. Piaget does not say it directly, but he implies that Durkheim is stuck at the level of the ten-year-old’s attitude to rules. In one of the places that Piaget makes a general comment about education, he says that “education for most people means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society. . . . But for me, education means making creators, even if there aren’t many of them, even if the creations of one are limited by comparison with those of another. But you have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.”14 Piaget’s animus toward Durkheim comes out in relation to schools and schoolteachers. Piaget writes that “the school, according to Durkheim, is a monarchy founded on divine right. We have seen that children are capable of democracy” (366). For Durkheim, “all authority comes from Society with a big S; the schoolmaster is the priest who acts as an intermediary between society and the child” (361). The metaphor of “priest” is not unfairly introduced here by Piaget. Durkheim had sacralized Society and its authority embodied in the school. The schoolteacher was to be respected as a priest who guards Society’s secrets. Piaget ridicules this idea: “A priest is the last thing a schoolmaster should be” (361). Piaget’s own choice of metaphor may sound naïve to many schoolteachers: “[The teacher] should be an elder collaborator, and if he has it in him, a simple comrade to the children” (364). Despite his previously cited claim that he has no opinion on pedagogy, he offers a firm opinion here. In the previous chapter, Dewey described the schoolteacher as one of the group—a comrade or collaborator. Such a role might sometimes be desirable but would require special conditions including the size of the group, the age of the students, and the educational environment. The teacher as a collaborator in a doctoral seminar makes eminent sense. But one need not disagree

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with any of Piaget’s finding’s to think that it is a bad idea for a tenth-grade teacher in an urban high school to try to be a comrade to the students. The basis of his attack on Durkheim is Piaget’s study of children’s groups. Moral Judgment opens with a hundred pages of children playing at marbles. (So much for Durkheim’s morality as serious work rather than play). For the moral development of the child, Piaget found spontaneously formed children’s societies more important than family, school, or nation. It is in children acting with children that “true discipline comes into being—discipline that the children themselves have willed and consented to” (364). Durkheim had said that the individual as such has no authority. Piaget counters with the claim that the child develops respect for a fair-minded companion in a match of marbles” (362). Out of that mutual respect is born a legitimate form of authority. Piaget thus saw his method as preparing children to live in a democratic society. “The essence of democracy resides in an attitude towards law as a product of the collective will, and not as something emanating from a transcendent will or from the authority established by divine right” (363). The antireligious formulation of this statement could limit the imagination as to alternative forms of government. Piaget’s democracy requires children to accept rules only if they have been “willed and consented to” by themselves. Piaget’s politics here seem heavily dependent on Rousseau and Kant. In this philosophy, each man wills his own good as a universal law that everyone can agree to. The role of a pedagogue in Kant’s philosophy is to bring the child to the point where he or she can “dare to be wise,” throwing off the pedagogue’s control.15 The schoolteacher’s job, beyond arranging groups to facilitate learning through cooperation, would be to get out of the way so that the child can be free. “One could develop a marvelous method of participating education by giving the child the apparatus with which to do experiments and thus discover a lot of things by himself.” Piaget adds: “Guided, of course.”16 Piaget’s undercutting of the schoolteacher’s role might suggest a more prominent role for parents. However, that does not follow. He is skeptical, as well, of the role that parents play. “The majority of parents are poor psychologists and give their children the most questionable moral training” (191). Like many other psychologists of the twentieth century, Piaget seemed to think he could do a better job of parenting than any parents. Piaget believed that he had penetrated the secret life of children. In agreement with Freud, he thought that childhood is a closed world to adults, unless they retained an unusual attitude of childlikeness. “That’s the ideal I personally strive for, to remain a child to the end.”17

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At the end of Moral Judgment, Piaget suggests that there might be a development of morality beyond where children take it. He thinks that children go through a stage of thinking that justice is a simple equality: What is done to me I should do in return. But some children come to realize the inadequacy of this logic. One precocious ten-year-old, when asked why he does not retaliate for being hit, replies, “there is no end to vengeance” (323). Perhaps other categories, such as care and compassion, apology and forgiveness, are part of the moral life. Piaget acknowledges other possibilities but stays with the children. He is sure that, while morality may develop further, no new mental “operations” will emerge beyond the power of formal abstraction. The feminist criticism that began with Carol Gilligan’s work had its roots in this acknowledgment by Piaget of another language of moral education.18 Piaget’s insistence on staying within the age limits of his study is his strength but also a danger when others take this part for the whole. Of course, the tendency to equate education with what happens between the ages of six and sixteen did not originate with Piaget. There is a problem, nevertheless, if Piaget’s focus on logical-mathematical judgments between the ages of seven and twelve is taken to be the whole of “moral education.” Piaget offers some brilliant insights into the child’s capacity to make abstract judgments and to understand logical principles. Carried into the arena of moral judgment, he may be right that the best teachers are other children. But a disparagement of adult influence and adult teaching is not helpful. The moral life of the child is largely formed before the age of seven. Parental teaching is never perfect, but it is the major part of early moral development. Dismissing the parents as poor psychologists does not improve the situation. Taking seriously the rhetoric that parents are the first and most important teachers might spark some social, political, and economic help for them and for their teaching. One of Piaget’s important assumptions is that language follows upon logic not vice versa. “Linguistic progress is not responsible for logical or operational progress. It is rather the other way around. The logical or operational level is likely to be responsible for a more sophistical language level.”19 It is a principle that cannot be proved and one that is the basis for widespread criticism of Piaget’s work. His primacy of logic has reverberations in what he omits and how his studies are carried out. Of the criticism of his work on this point,20 I note only that Piaget’s assumption downplays the parent’s role as moral teacher. Other researchers argue that what happens to a child before it has developed any logical powers is crucial. How the child learns language from the parents is a major part of moral education. Within the question and answer method itself, Piaget’s assumption of logic’s primacy has been criticized.21 Questions addressed to a child are, of

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course, stated in language and the language has connotations and affective meanings for different children. Some researchers have tried replicating Piaget’s experiments with language that is more child-friendly, and they achieved different results. For example, asking a child whether a policeman could see a child in a pictured situation rather than asking whether A is visible to B makes more sense to the child.22 When the child is given a picture of six horses and two cows and is asked if there are more horses or animals, the child’s problem may not be its lack of logic. It may be wondering why this adult is asking such a senseless question. A teacher who knows the student well and has plenty of experience with the child’s language would be in the best position to ask questions about logic. The need for teachers does not end at age twelve, sixteen, or twenty-one. Rousseau said that the main work of the teacher begins at about age twelve. As I noted in chapter 3, Emile’s education hinged on the ethics he would learn at about age fifteen. Piaget may be right that moral instruction to eightyear-olds is ineffective or obstructive. But that tells us very little about the role of the teacher and the place of teaching in a person’s moral education. Good examples are powerful teachers throughout life. And when ready for it, instruction in ethics and moral philosophy can help a person to decide how to live.

LAWRENCE KOHLBERG For some decades of the twentieth century in the United States, the name of Lawrence Kohlberg was practically interchangeable with “moral education.” So much was this true that those who opposed Kohlberg were hesitant to call what they were doing moral education. That hesitancy persists to today even though the “cognitive-developmental theory” of Kohlberg has long since given up its dominance in this area. Kohlberg only claimed to be “putting patches” on Piaget’s theory.23 However, he engaged in a much more ambitious project than Piaget and he made more grandiose claims. In one respect, Kohlberg was just extending Piaget’s theory through the teen years but that was something that Piaget thought was not possible. Piaget had relied on there being two stages in the child’s ability to make abstract judgments. After that there would be no new cognitive “operations.” Kohlberg’s aim was to construct a system that applied to human development as a whole. That would include an individual’s lifelong development. It also meant a claim to “cultural universality.” Kohlberg was a cognitive psychologist, but he did not shy away from commenting on moral development,

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moral behavior, and moral education. That meant blithely disregarding the boundary between moral reasoning (that is, reasoning about moral issues) and other aspects of human life. When questioned about the scope of his claims, he pointed to research that he hoped would eventually support his claims. “Although we cannot yet be sure that the stimulation of the development of moral judgment will result in moral conduct, research indicating considerable correspondence between level of judgment and conduct in children provides some optimism on this score.”24 This presumed connection seemed to disregard several millennia of human experience of people who could see the good but did the opposite. For the “stimulation of the development of moral judgment,” Kohlberg saw the school, as central. He was closer to Durkheim than to Piaget on the mission of the school, but he sided with Piaget in thinking that the role of the schoolteacher should be reduced. He did not think that it was necessary to introduce moral education into the school because it is already there. He claimed that “the school cannot be ‘value neutral’ but must be engaged in moral education. . . . All schools are necessarily involved in moral education.”25 The school’s mission is the “transmission of the values of justice on which the society is founded,”26 but the school is not currently fulfilling that mission. Kohlberg said there were two ways that schools were already engaged in inadequate moral education; he offered a third way that would be effective. The first approach depended on the “moralizing” of teachers. Every schoolteacher exemplifies a moral stance in life. The teacher also carries into his or her instruction references to morality. While students might be positively influenced by such moralizing, the approach was haphazard and unfocused. Moral education ought not to be dependent on the views of one or another teacher.27 A more systematic approach constituted a second form of moral education but Kohlberg had no use for it. He called it the “bag of virtues” approach. The usual way to refer to this approach was “character education.” There had been great enthusiasm for character education in the early twentieth century. By 1960, it had almost disappeared. As I describe later, character education has also been enthusiastically endorsed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Proponents of the new character education either think that the twentieth-century’s disillusionment with it can be overcome or else many people are unaware of the earlier history. Kohlberg did not have much difficulty in shooting holes through character education. It consists, he said, in a list of virtues: honesty, truthfulness, responsibility, loyalty, and so on. Almost everyone agrees on the desirability of these traits. But as soon as one comes to concrete cases, there is no agreement as to what these high-sounding words mean in practice. More important, try-

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ing to instill individual virtues has little discernible effect on the development of character. Kohlberg regularly cited the major study at the end of the 1920s, Studies in the Nature of Character, which sought to establish the basis of character education but came up empty.28 There was never the same enthusiasm for character education after that, but the school was still thought to be the place for instilling virtues. From the time of his doctoral dissertation in 1958, Kohlberg presented a new approach to moral education. He believed that his approach would be effective and measurably so. Theories that allow for a neat classification of everyone are almost irresistible to administrators. Furthermore, Kohlberg’s theory promised to overcome a liberal/conservative split in dealing with morality, a split that was widening in the 1960s. Kohlberg’s content appealed to conservatives; at least there was content. One might think it was a minimum of content but the crucial point was that the system steered people to a well-defined endpoint. In contrast, what attracted liberals was Kohlberg’s open-ended method. The point of discussing moral dilemmas was not to find the right answer; it was to develop one’s reasoning powers. The teacher’s moral views became irrelevant. Everyone could endorse Kohlberg’s theory. Of course, a system that is approved by strongly disagreeing groups can also draw the most disappointment as the different aspects of the theory become evident. Kohlberg’s writing was a stream of essays that reiterated the basic theory. I will note a few essays that carried surprises, but even these essays did little to shake up the Kohlbergian system as it was elaborated in the early 1960s and was repeated in essays until his untimely death in 1987. The theory posited three levels of moral development, each divided into two stages. The first two levels roughly corresponded to Piaget’s two moralities without the strict correlation to age level that concerned Piaget. Kohlberg was concerned with how people actually thought about justice rather than whether they were just capable of thinking that way. He claimed that once a person reached a particular level of thinking, he or she would not regress to a lower state. As was constantly said, the stages were hierarchical and differentiated. “Stages form an order of increasingly differentiated and integrated structures to fulfill a common function. Accordingly, higher stages displace (or rather, reintegrate) the structures found at lower stages.”29 He assumed that this movement up a ladder is what is common across cultures. “A culturally universal definition of morality can be arrived at if morality is thought of as the form of moral judgments instead of the content of specific moral beliefs.”30 The universality thus turns out to be the increasing isolation of a principle of justice or equality: “Treat every man’s claim impartially regardless of the man.”31

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The value of life has to be disentangled from all its relations, not only those of status and property values (stage one) but from “the actual affection of others for him (stage three).32 The theory here comes close to ancient Stoicism in which Epictetus cautioned: “If you kiss your wife or your child, say that you are kissing a human being, for when it dies you will not be upset.”33 The Kohlbergian system would seem to be culturally universal in breadth but not so in depth. As it widens in concern it becomes thinner in content. Kohlberg acknowledged that “preliterate villages” and “tribal communities” fell off his scope of universality.34 I would guess that those people were more interested in caring for a family member than taking a stand on human rights. Perhaps Kohlberg was right in claiming that individuals and societies develop together “moving toward greater justice in terms of equity or recognition of universal human rights.”35 But it is at least debatable whether acknowledgment of human rights and morally good behavior go together, either for nations or for individuals in those nations. I have said that Kohlberg’s essays were highly repetitive. The essays on the theory rolled out the predictable, standard phrases. Occasionally, however, there was a surprising admission as, for example, in the essay just cited in which he acknowledged that his universal system was tied closely to a Western idea of democratic progress. Sometimes what is more amazing than the admission itself is that Kohlberg and followers went on as if nothing surprising had been admitted. I offer a few key examples. Kohlberg always insisted that his stages went straight up. If you get to a higher rung on the ladder, you do not go back down. With that assumption, Kohlberg had to confront an anomaly. When some students that he had identified as stage four changed, they did not go to stage five but seemed to regress to stage two. Some of the hedonism of stage two reemerged, but structurally they were still at or beyond stage four. What the data called into question was the very image and idea of progress on which the theory was based. Perhaps the cognitive and affective did not fall into place together. Is it possible that moral development can have a cyclical character? Could the medieval principle be correct that the further along toward moral perfection you go, the more danger you meet, making the corruption of the best the worst?36 Rather than entertain any drastic change in imagery, Kohlberg invented a stage four and a half. The apparent reversal of stage four is to a stage four and a half rather than to stage five. The logic was not clear, but it was needed to shore up the system.37 A second surprise in Kohlberg’s string of essays was a short piece in The Humanist entitled “Moral Development Reappraised.”38 After two decades of denouncing religious indoctrination, Kohlberg decided that a little indoctrination might not be a bad thing for some people. He seemed surprised to dis-

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cover that some young people with developed moral reasoning powers would still lie and steal. In a world of lying and stealing, he wrote, not many people are going to arrive at universal morality. The role of the schoolteacher is here reversed from facilitator of group discussions to one who enforces the truth. Kohlberg had discovered what most religions are keenly aware of, namely, the frailty and imperfection of all human morality. A closer study of religion, however, might have revealed that indoctrination is not the primary instrument for moral influence. Religious communities use a variety of rituals that link individuals to the community. The sermon as a way of instilling doctrines or teachings is only a secondary instrument. The reaction of some of Kohlberg’s disciples to this essay was shock and disbelief. One of his best known followers, James Rest, described his reaction this way: “You are the first mate on a ship, taking your tour of duty at the wheel; you have been alerted that your course is about to take you into stormy seas, and then you hear that the captain of the ship has just jumped ship and is headed in another boat in the opposite direction.”39 James Rest rather quickly reconsidered the whole scene and decided that Kohlberg’s cognitive developmental theory was still his main concern. Rest developed an operational way to evaluate Kohlberg’s stages, an instrument used in many doctoral dissertations. The 1978 essay did not come completely out of nowhere. In the late 1970s, Kohlberg had begun to talk about the environment that has to embody justice. He began speaking about the need for a school to be a “just community.”40 This step required a change of approach to teaching: “Our cluster approach is not merely Socratic and developmental; it is indoctrinative.”41 Kohlberg saw himself moving from the Socrates of The Meno to the Socrates of the Republic.42 Creating ways to make the school and classroom be teachers of justice increasingly occupied Kohlberg. He had discovered the limits of psychology, but his talk of “just community” did not easily flow from his psychological theory. He continued to put forth his theory of stages and that continued to be the interest of most of his followers. A final surprise from Kohlberg was the sudden appearance of a stage seven. The answer to the question “why be moral” was answered at each stage by the rung above. The logical problem was how to answer that question at stage six. In a few essays in the 1980s, Kohlberg proposed that above the morality of individual rights was an all embracing cosmic unity. Stage seven was “the sense of being a part of the whole of life and the adoption of a cosmic as opposed to a universal humanistic Stage six perspective.”43 The troublesome word in that description is “opposed.” Instead of extending the straight line of development a rung higher, this new stage reverses and

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undercuts the movement in the other six stages. Not only are the rights of the individual not given further protection, the individual disappears. There is once again a touch of Stoicism here; the individual has to accept its place in the great cosmic unity. Not surprisingly, the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius is one of the thinkers that Kohlberg invokes in support of his seventh stage. Kohlberg is not the first rationalistic thinker to end in mysticism. In his system, the individual had already been submerged within a principle of justice. It is an understandable step for the process to end up in complete unity, as in Stoicism or Buddhism. It is surprising, however, that the one writer Kohlberg cites at length is Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest who tried to join evolutionary science and mystical theology. Kohlberg’s reading of one of Chardin’s many works, The Divine Milieu, is skewed by his own interest. Chardin pointed out in the introduction that the whole of the book is based on theology. His talk of cosmic unity revolved around the Christ figure and the individual’s relation to Christ. Kohlberg might have been wiser to stay with Marcus Aurelius or with Benedict Spinoza whom he also refers to but only in passing. Like his other surprises, Kohlberg’s dabbling in religious mysticism did not have much impact on people who were enthusiastic about “moral development” as Kohlberg had first conceived it. Kohlberg continued to practically own the term moral education until his death. The most formidable challenge Kohlberg faced in his later years was the feminist criticism that started with Carol Gilligan’s book, In a Different Voice. The book obviously struck a chord among many women. Kohlberg’s theory of development, which tended to find women at lower stages than men, was seen as male-biased. Other writers joined Gilligan in claiming that women spoke with a moral voice different from that of men. Gilligan retained some of Kohlberg’s language, at least at the beginning, but she contrasted her concern with responsibility to Kohlberg’s emphasis on rights.44 Gilligan’s original study was based on interviews with women who were considering abortion. She derived from her interview data a three-stage theory of development, a movement not up a ladder but a circling toward an integral self. At the first level, women have a tenuous concept of self; the question is how to get rid of a problem. At a second level, goodness is defined by self-sacrifice. At a third level, the principle is care for everyone—including oneself.45 Gilligan could not replace Kohlberg’s stages. The greater significance of her work was to open the door to women writing on morality and ethics with a new set of categories. Care, compassion, and a different sense of responsibility began to be taken more seriously in ethical discussions.46 We are prob-

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ably still at an early stage of a revolution in the very meaning of ethics which will eventually reflect women’s experience as much as men’s. The new concerns helped in the transition to a post-Kohlberg idea of moral education.

FROM VALUES TO CHARACTER EDUCATION Kohlberg’s interest in “just community” schools formed a link to the next wave of moral education that began emerging in the 1980s. This part of the story is more difficult to recount because it is less dependent on a single theorist. Partly for that reason it is a more diffuse movement that goes under the name of character education. Thomas Lickona, perhaps the best known advocate, proclaimed in the 1990s that “the deliberate effort to teach right and wrong—through good example, the curriculum, and the total school ethos— is called ‘character education’, arguably the fastest-growing education reform movement in America today.”47 Lickona’s writing, starting in the early 1980s, was a point of origin for the movement. William Bennett’s surprising bestseller, The Book of Virtues, was a sign that a cultural shift had occurred.48 The character education movement is usually interpreted as a conservative reaction that fitted snugly with the political change embodied in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. There is some truth in that association, but the history is more complicated. Proponents of character education do not see their work as a simple reaction or a swing of the pendulum. Instead, while they do see the movement as restoring past wisdom, they also see it as a comprehensive, if somewhat eclectic, approach to moral education. “Character development is ready to select from many disciplines and use many metaphors—the growth metaphor, the Skinnerian metaphor, the fill-the-jug metaphor.”49 The attempt to include disparate approaches from the past can be seen in the movement’s embrace of both “virtue” and “value,” two terms with very different histories. Recent history involved a curious and radical shift in the meaning of “value,” so that it has become a synonym for “virtue” rather than an alternative. Virtue is an ancient term traceable back to Plato and Aristotle, with translation by Cicero. In the middle ages, Christian thinkers bought into the whole Greek package of virtues. As a result, many people today have a religious connotation for the term virtue. All talk of virtue raises suspicions that religious advocates are trying to reimpose a Christian moral code on the whole population. The 1960s was in one way the rebelling against a remnant of the moral code that still held sway. The most obvious and dramatic revolt concerned sexual morality, but there was a general questioning of all forms of authority. Rather than one virtue being under attack, the very concept of virtue

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was often ridiculed. Kohlberg’s reference to the “bag of virtues” was a dismissal of an idea whose time, he believed, had come and gone. As I noted earlier, Kohlberg often referred to the Hartshorne and May study that could not find any connection between the attempt to instill virtues and the development of character. Specific habits learned in relation to specific situations did not carry over.50 Toward the very end of his life, Kohlberg was willing to reopen the question of habit as conceived by Aristotle, but he still opposed the idea of a bag or long list of virtues.51 The alternative to virtue in the 1960s was value, a peculiar word with a much shorter history than virtue. Some German philosophers in the nineteenth century had used the word in contrast to “fact.” Many other philosophers adopted this contrast between fact and value. The world of modern science may have control of the facts, but it cannot touch values which depend on the will rather than the mind. The obvious danger in making moral values impervious to scientific criticism is to isolate morality so that it has no give and take with an individual’s ordinary concerns and with the politics, economics, and science of the public world. Value has a history that precedes its philosophical adoption. The word was largely under the control of economists who to this day presume ownership of the term. For example, in the New York Review, economist Robert Solow commented, “everyday life is about prices, not values.” A letter writer objected, recounting how he had paid a higher price for a Honda than a Ford because he judged the Honda to be a better value in that class of car. Solow replied that the letter writer “did not make his judgment by comparing the number of hours of standard labor embodied directly or indirectly in the Honda and the Ford, nor would he have changed his mind if the Ford had turned out to represent more labor.” Solow concluded: “As we know, to our political sorrow, a word like ‘value’ can have many meanings and nonmeanings.”52 Solow bemoans the fact that the rest of us do not know the economist’s meaning of value which indeed does go back many centuries. The letter writer may have been employing a less precise meaning of value, but it is a clearer meaning in contemporary speech. Solow’s meaning stems from the attempt of economists to tie the subjective act of valuing to objective criteria. “The number of hours of standard labor” embodied in a product does not make as much sense as it once did. What is the replacement? Is there something in the world of objects called “values?” The act indicated by the verb valuing, or evaluating, is clear enough but what is to be made of the noun? The struggle of economists to provide a quantitative anchor for value is relevant to the philosophical and educational use of the term. There was a dramatic eruption of talk about values in the 1960s. Everyone was called upon

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to create his or her own set of values. Gertrude Himmelfarb, gazing back wistfully at the nineteenth century, complained: “So long as morality was couched in the language of virtue, it had a firm resolute character. . . . One cannot say of virtues, as one can of values, that anyone’s virtues are as good as anyone else’s, or that anyone has a right to his own virtues.”53 Lawrence Kohlberg used the word “value” fairly frequently but without any special attention to its meaning. It simply functioned in his vocabulary as an alternative to virtue. He did resist being grouped, as he sometimes was, with a movement called “values clarification” because he insisted that his cognitive developmental theory referred to a natural development, not simply subjective attitudes. A “values clarification” movement was all the rage for a few years in the 1960s.54 The second word in the phrase, clarification, was as important as the first. Everyone has his or her own values; they cannot be taught. But each student can and should clarify what values they have. Becoming conscious of the values one is acting on is a main task of education. Any educational movement based on that premise was bound to be thin and brief. With just one trip around the lecture circuit, advocates of values clarification exhausted what was to be said. A book entitled Values and Teaching provides a summary of the short-lived movement. The book has a chapter on “teaching for value clarity,” but there is not much there on teaching. In contrast, values are everywhere in the book. Values are whatever students choose. The authors go so far as to say that “it is entirely possible that children will choose not to develop values. It is the teacher’s responsibility to support this choice also.”55 Apparently, choosing not to have values is a value, too. The authors do reach a limit to their openness with the question “what if a student values intolerance or thievery?” They reply “we have to respect his right to decide upon that value . . . but we must often deny him the right to carry the value to action.”56 Their admission that some behavior cannot be permitted because it interferes with the freedom or rights of others seems to undermine the whole point of clarifying the values embodied in one’s actions. If the student says, “I like to steal candy from the store,” the teacher has to say that’s a good value for you but just stop doing it. When the authors reach this limit to the clarification of values they do not reconsider their assumptions about teaching. They do not conclude that, while students clarifying what they value in life can be a helpful pedagogical technique, it has to be set within a discussion of judging right from wrong or teaching people how to distinguish right from wrong. In the 1960s, “value” resided on the left side of the political spectrum. The fact that it could mean anything you choose was seen as liberating. It represented freedom from the encumbrances of religion, tradition, and any moral

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code. Of course, with that much openness any group could take hold of the term and make it theirs. A few clever tacticians on the political right saw that opening. Why not take this favorite word of the left, which has no content, and fill it with our meaning? The left will be left speechless up against their own word. And so the word values made its journey across the political world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The change was signaled by often adding the adjective “family.” That word was highly ambiguous in the setting, but it was simply a stand-in for a clearly defined political agenda (abortion, homosexuality, prayer in school, respect for the flag, and so on). The move was successful beyond what anyone could have imagined. Today, any organization with the word values in the title is likely to be on the conservative right; while on the left, political leaders keep fidgeting over their values problem, still not sure what the term means. The character education movement in embracing both virtue and value uses a rhetoric that is difficult to penetrate. It tries not to repudiate anything except sin, but the result is a laundry list of values/virtues. No one is likely to object to what the Character Counts organization calls the “six pillars”: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. Likewise, the eleven principles of the Character Education Partnership do not evoke controversy.57 But what is one to make of the interrelation of these virtues/values/principles? What is the basis of judgment when there are difficult choices? Most human choices are not between the good and the bad, but between the greater of two goods or the lesser of two evils. The character education movement lives on the computer more than in books. One of the striking features of the many websites is the selling of booklets along with CDs, films, banners, and anything else a school might need for a successful program. The word “free” is liberally used, but the price tag eventually shows up. Perhaps slick advertising and big money are unavoidable today, but there does seem to be a tension for organizations so insistent on their guardianship of morality. Surely a subject for moral education is the place of big corporations and their control of personal life. At some point, character education’s cozy relation to the corporate world becomes a conflict of interests. The connection of value to money has never disappeared and may have reasserted itself in recent years. In the 2004 presidential campaign, Al Gore said in an interview: “If the only tool you use for measuring value is a price tag or monetization, then those values that are not easily monetized begin to look like they have no value.”58 Gore was right but he should not have been surprised that our values are “monetized” since that is the origin of the term value.

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It would be unfair to characterize the whole movement and its sincere advocates of being subservient to economics. Still, the lists of the six, ten, or twelve rules, pillars, or principles often seem innocent of the bruising economic struggles that are the context of education. True, the terrible crime statistics and divorce rate are regularly cited to show the need for character education. But the response is in a rhetoric that seems to turn inward on individual virtue. As an example, take the term responsibility, one of the favorites that shows up on everyone’s list. Is there anyone arguing for irresponsibility? It would appear that there is no need to raise critical questions about this idea that everyone agrees upon. But is it possible that responsibility is mainly a nineteenth-century virtue that politicians and business leaders love to talk about as a way to avoid doing anything to improve the lives of people. Is it possible that many people are already trying to take too much responsibility urged on by religious and secular preachers that say we should be responsible for ourselves, for others, for the whole world? When a politician says, “I take full responsibility for my action,” it is usually a sure sign that no actions will result. The Character Counts booklet says, “being responsible means being in charge of our choices and thus, our lives.” Really? Is anyone in charge of all his or her choices? Does that mean that choice puts one in charge of his or her life? Thomas Lickona’s Educating for Character is subtitled How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility. There is barely a paragraph in which the meaning of responsibility is set out but that is about par for the literature.59 The point is not to be cynical about responsibility and all the other prized virtues/values. On the contrary, asking provocative questions is the way to honor such ideals rather than assuming that “implementation” is the problem. Especially when everyone seems to agree on the “value” of a proposed idea, suspicions should be aroused. Thomas Lickona admirably wrote a book about character education in the family before writing a book on the school.60 Anyone who is serious about the formation of character would look mainly at the family and the social and economic pressures on parents in today’s world. If like Piaget and Kohlberg, one’s interest is moral reasoning and judgment, then the family plays a secondary role. The character education movement wisely tries to include the parents as cooperators. The language, unfortunately, is still against real partnership. The movement has restored an active role to teachers, but that means schoolteachers. The eleven principles of Character Education Partnership include: “A school’s character education mission must state explicitly what is true: Parents are the first and most important educators.” That is the standard rhetoric

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of our society, but it does not carry over into talking about parental teaching and school teaching as a partnership.61 The movement remains schoolcentered and the result is that the schoolteacher is given an impossible task. The school is still assumed, as it was for Durkheim, the “locus par excellence” of moral education. But whereas for Durkheim teachers were simply to explain morality with their aura of authority, today’s teachers are asked to be parent, friend, guide, collaborator, teammate, and counselor. Any of these roles may come into play, especially with very young children. But what is put forward as the soft, all encompassing mission of the school does not specify what teachers should and should not do in the classroom.

ACADEMIC SUBJECT? Is “character education” a course that can be taught in the classroom? The literature sometimes seems to say so, though more often than not there is no distinction made between what the school is doing and what is appropriate as subject matter for academic study. In his 1997 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton said: “Character education must be taught in our schools. We must teach our children to be good citizens.”62 Did he mean the schools should teach character or character education? Certainly it is desirable that schools turn out “good citizens,” but can that be done by “teaching character education”? In the 1890s when the country was especially concerned about the schools turning out good (hard working, tax paying) citizens, a subject called “civics” was invented and put into most school curricula. A course on civics was usually a set of sermons that probably turned away many people from engagement in civic affairs. Good citizenship is more likely helped by worthwhile courses in history, literature, politics, and other topics that are not so easily subject to sermonizing. The classroom instructors need some substance to work on, material that invites critical questions and different points of view. Thomas Lickona writes, “in its underlying philosophy character education reasserts the idea of objective morality. . . . That adultery, infanticide, torture, date rape, and cheating are morally wrong is objectively true—even if many people don’t realize it.”63 Perhaps, as he says, we need “objective” morality, but it cannot be taught while pretending that the twentieth century did not happen. Does “objective” in his statement refer to “objects,” such as rules that are separate from human beings or does “objective” mean the external pole of a subjective-objective relation? If one assumes the latter meaning, then all moral rules require (subjective) interpretation. Adultery, infanticide, and so

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forth are in most people’s vocabulary wrong by definition but that does not get us far educationally. Here is where a clear distinction between different kinds of teaching is crucial. The school and its faculty may be trying to provide morally good examples and a morally uplifting atmosphere. That is the way a school might be able to teach morality. But classroom instruction in morality has a different form and purpose. Classroom teachers have to engage in the politically volatile practice of raising questions about the supposed social consensus on values, virtues, and vices. Until recently, for example, “everybody knew” that homosexuality is wrong. The classroom is a place to explore the history of moral rules about abortion, drugs, torture, or pornography. The nineteenth century gave us a separate part of life called “morality” and with that many of our names for what is “objectively” bad. Of course, letting young people find out that “morality” involves class, racial, and gender biases can be dangerous. But a moral education that wishes to get good behavior without acknowledging the ambiguities in a society’s judgments of “objective” morality is not facing today’s problems. The most commonly used term for an academic study of morality is “ethics.” There is an ambiguity in the meaning of ethics that goes back as far as Aristotle; originally, the word simply meant practices or customs. Variations on that meaning have never disappeared. However, in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century, ethics has been the name for an academic subject in colleges and professional schools. A full course in ethics might not be warranted in high school, but some academic inquiry into ethics can begin these days in the fourth grade. In teaching ethics the point is not to tell students what is right and wrong but to help them to understand morality. A course in ethics might raise questions about what business or political leaders are doing; it might even raise questions about what the school is doing. The character education movement may represent progress in giving more respect to teaching and teachers. But it still lacks some of the most elementary distinctions about the different forms of teaching. NOTES 1. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education (New York: Free Press, 1961). 2. Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 72. 3. Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools (New York: Praeger, 1971), 40. 4. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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5. Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 125. 6. Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 116. 7. Durkheim, Moral Education, 3. Numbers in parentheses within the text in this section are from this work 8. Emile Durkheim, Education and Sociology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956), 91. 9. Durkheim, Education and Society, 79. 10. Maria Montessori, Education for a New World (New York: ABC–Clio, 1989). 11. Jean-Claude Bringuier, Conversations with Jean Piaget (University of Chicago Press, 1980), 131. 12. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: Collier Books, 1962). Numbers in parentheses in this section are from this edition. 13. Jean Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (New York: Meridian Books, 1965), 24. 14. Bringuier, Conversations, 132. 15. Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (London: Collier Books, 1990). 16. Bringuier, Conversations, 131. 17. Bringuier, Conversations, 115. 18. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 19. Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder The Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 14. 20. Susan Sugarman, Piaget’s Construction of the Child’s Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Linda Siege and Charles Brainerd, eds., Alternatives to Piaget (New York: Academic Press, 1978). 21. See Margaret Boden, Jean Piaget (New York: Viking, 1980), 159–60. 22. Margaret Donaldson, Children’s Minds (New York: Norton, 1978), 68. 23. A speech before the American Psychological Association in 1978; see Psychology Today, 12 (Feb. 1979): 57. 24. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education and the Public Schools: A Developmental View,” in Religion and Public Education, ed. Theodore Sizer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 179. 25. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 166–67. 26. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 165. 27. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 167. 28. Hugh Hatshorne and Mark May, Studies in the Nature of Character, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1928–1930). 29. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Continuities and Discontinuities in Childhood and Adult Development Revised—Again” in The Psychology of Moral Development (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper and Row, 1984), 14. 30. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 178. 31. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Education for Justice: A Modern Statement of the Platonic View,” in Moral Education: Five Lectures, ed. Theodore Sizer and Nancy Sizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 70.

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32. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 178. 33. Epictetus, The Enchiridion (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983), no. 3. 34. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 170. 35. Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Future of Liberalism as the Dominant Ideology of the West,” in Moral Development and Politics, ed. Richard Wilson and Gordon Schochet (New York: Praeger, 1979), 62. 36. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II. 73. 10. 37. Kohlberg, “Continuities and Discontinuities,” 192. 38. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Education Reappraised,” The Humanist, 38 (Nov. 1978): 13–15. 39. James Rest “Basic Issues in Evaluating Moral Education Programs,” in Evaluating Moral Development, ed. Lisa Kuhmerker and others (Schenectady, N.Y.: Character Research, 1980), 5. 40. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Just Community Approach to Corrections (Cambridge, Mass.: Educational Research Foundation, 1973); see also “High School Democracy and Educating for a Just Society,” in Moral Education, ed. Ralph Mosher (New York: Praeger, 1980), 20–57. 41. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Educating for a Just Society: An Updated and Revised Argument,” in Moral Development, Moral Education and Kohlberg, ed. Brenda Munsey (Birmingham, Ala.: Religious Education Press, 1980), 457. 42. Clark Power, Ann Higgins, Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Habit of the Common Life: Building Character through Democratic Community Schools,” in Moral Development and Character Education: A Dialogue, ed. Larry Nucci (Berkeley, Calif.: McCutchan, 1989), 137. 43. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Thinking and the Question of a Seventh Stage,” in The Philosophy of Moral Development (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 311–72. 44. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 73. 45. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 75–82. 46. Examples of how women are changing the face of ethics are: Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Eve Browning Cole and Susan Coultrap, Explorations in Feminist Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999); Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007). 47. Thomas Lickona “The Case for Character Education, Tikkun, 12 (1997): 22. 48. William Bennett, The Book of Virtues (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). 49. Kevin Ryan, “In Defense of Character Education,” in Moral Development and Character Education, 14. 50. Hawthorne and May, Studies in the Nature of Character, III, 373. 51. Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg, “The Habit of the Common Life.” 52. Robert Solow, “Letters,” New York Review of Books, 11 November 2006: 26.

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53. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 54. Sidney Simon, Leland Howe, and Howard Kirschenbaum, Values Clarification (New York: Hart, 1972). 55. Louis Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sidney Simon, Values and Teaching (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1966), 47. 56. Raths, Harmin, and Simon, Values and Teaching, 227. 57. Michael Josephson, Making Ethical Decisions (Los Angeles: Josephson Institute of Ethics, 2002); Thomas Lickona, Eric Schaps, Catherine Lewis, Eleven Principles of Character Education (Washington, D.C.: Character Education Partnership, 2007). 58. Interview with David Remnick in The New Yorker, 13 July 2004, 67. 59. Thomas Lickona, Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility (New York: Bantam Press, 1992), 41. 60. Thomas Lickona, Raising Good Children: From Birth through the Teenage Years (New York: Bantam, 1994). 61 William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 255–56. 62. New York Times, 5 February 1997, A21. 63. Thomas Lickona, “The Case for Character Education,” 23.

Chapter Six

Can Religion Be Taught?

Two facts about the United States are widely acknowledged: First, on any scale of national religiosity (belief in God, prayer, attendance at religious services), the United States ranks near the top; second, there is a scandalous ignorance of religion, both an individual’s own religion and the religion of others.1 This combination is dangerous in relation to public policy. For example, a president could plunge the country into war under the cover of religious rhetoric. Carey McWilliams has written: “In an era when religion and morals are less a matter of habits and givens, religious education is a critical part of civic education; secularity calls for schooling in the sacred.”2

THE PROBLEM A major part of the problem is that a comprehensive religious education does not exist. Furthermore, there is no discussion of religious education in the public arena. When religious education is referred to, it is assumed to be the task of church, synagogue, mosque, and temple, but those institutions do not use “religious education” for the formation of their members. Each of the religions has its own intramural language of education. This focus of religious groups on the beliefs and practices of their own members is understandable. But where then are the other key elements of education in religious matters that today’s enlightened citizen needs? The logical answer would seem obvious: Schools that are called public. The immediate reaction to this suggestion is likely to be that religious education in state schools is unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court has never addressed the topic of religious education. While some elements of religious 121

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education do not belong in state schools, the same is true of education in most of the important areas of life. The public school cannot and should not try to be the sole educator in politics, sex, morals, economics, and much else. Cooperation between the school and other educational agencies, starting with the family, is indispensable. The classroom is only a part of education, but it is a crucial part for today’s citizenry. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many leading educators and politicians recognized the need for something new: religious education. It would encompass the several major religions of the United States. Equally important, it was to include public education along with education by religious institutions. The impressive gathering of four hundred national leaders in 1903 included forty-five university presidents, prominent politicians, many public school administrators, and religious officials. The ambitious project of the Religious Education Association was “to inspire the educational forces of our country with the religious ideal; to inspire the religious forces of our country with the educational ideal.”3 For a variety of reasons this religious education has remained an unrealized ideal. At its earliest stage of development, the Religious Education Association absorbed the assumptions of liberal Protestantism, something that tended to drive away Roman Catholics, Jews, and conservative Protestants. Later, it was the economic depression in the 1930s that undermined hopes for the “professionalization” of religious education in both church and public schools. And then the reaction against liberal theology that hit the United States after World War II all but ended the movement. For the past sixty years, as the need for a religiously intelligent citizenry has become increasingly evident, there simply has been no discussion of religious education within which the public school would have its appropriate role of academic instruction in religion.

A COMPREHENSIVE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Religious education is probably the best single place to test the adequacy of a comprehensive meaning of “teach.” And conversely, religious education can only truly exist if the full range of teaching languages is recognized. The twentieth-century project to establish religious education ran into numerous obstacles. I concentrate on the meaning of teach/teaching as one manifestation of the problem of the relation of religion and education, and, more generally, the relation of religion and the contemporary world. From the beginning of the Enlightenment the expectation was that religion would soon disappear. Rationality would dissolve religious myth. That as-

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sumption held true even up to the 1960s when many scholars were convinced that the secularization of the world was almost complete.4 That opinion is no longer common in the twenty-first century. Even the recent books on atheism are an acknowledgment of religion’s continuing influence. The denunciation of religion or attacks on its logical consistency has little effect on its practice. The alternative, which has not yet been tried, is education from within particular religious groups, combined with an education from outside the group. The outsider’s perspective would include both the challenge of other religious groups than one’s own and the world of secular education. Such a comprehensive religious education is indispensable for future world peace. Our contemporary idea of teaching suffers from a dichotomy that accompanied the revolt against religion in the Enlightenment. The word teaching (doctrine) was closely associated with religion, especially Christianity. The emerging secular world tried to shake itself free of “magisterial” authority, traditional beliefs, and every kind of teaching other than rational explanation. Clearing away ignorance and superstition was a healthy step forward, but a world built exclusively on rational propositions was not an adequate alternative. In H. G. Gadamer’s clever formula, “the fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment was the prejudice against prejudice.”5 On the religious side, the intramural language of religious groups was not subjected to critical challenge from the outside. In the short run, a religious group can thrive by turning its back on the tools of secular education. But unless the group wishes to secede from the modern world, its own vitality needs the challenge of rational criticism. On the secular side, the forms of teaching-learning have suffered from the overly rationalistic reaction in modern education. Even the assumption that teaching happens primarily if not exclusively in schools reflects an antireligious bias. Religious life has subsisted across the generations with only minor help from the classroom. It has relied on the influence of family in early childhood, followed by a caring attitude and good example within the religious community. The verbal teaching has typically been through story and song, set within a ritual that binds together centuries of practice. Within the ritual or liturgy, preaching exhorts the members to live up to what they have promised. A coherent universe sustains the members in their joys and sorrows. Rational explanations within the religious group do not claim to be more than a clarifying of lived mysteries. A modern secular world was skeptical of every one of those forms of teaching. These forms did not disappear, but they were not given much attention in modern education. Religious teaching is most often dismissed as “indoctrination.” If rational explanation is the only recognized form of teaching, then these strange religious groups must be using an inverted rationality. Indoctrination is

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a despair of other kinds of teaching; it does affect religious groups but it is also found in secular ideologies. Secular educators who dismiss religious teaching as indoctrination are in danger of missing the main forms of teaching that have sustained the human race. I indicated above that the encounter of religious groups and secular education is mediated by the religious groups encountering each other. In the past, there were occasional meetings of two religious groups; violent conflict was the most common result. Today for the first time in history, a regular and worldwide interaction of religions is occurring. The only choice now is between violence and a degree of mutual understanding. If, for example, Muslims and Christians are to live peacefully in the same country, city, or neighborhood, the capacity to take the view of the outsider is a necessity for members of both communities. “Religious education” is a term that connotes more than one religion; it is not the first language of any religious group. That is a present weakness but it also a possible future strength. Each group has its own educational language. Even within Christianity, a world of Roman Catholic catechetics seldom meets the Protestant world of Christian education. A Jewish way of forming its members mainly through family practices, holy day rituals, and dietary laws is almost unrecognizable to most Christians. Even more puzzling would be Muslim, Buddhist, or Sikh languages of teaching-learning. A religious group, for its own well-being, needs the perspective from the outside. Meeting other religious groups can be a context for that to happen. So also the schooling that a group offers to its own members provides another perspective. Unless all the books are in-house apologetics, the students get to test their religious stance in relation to a larger world. The composition of the student body and faculty, however, tends to limit the view, not because the teacher intends to exclude other views but because of the absence of people having other views. Nevertheless, there are schools under Jewish or Christian auspices where serious academic instruction occurs, where Jewish or Christian religions are studied with the aid of scholarly history and social analysis. Despite the best efforts of these teachers, “religious education” is still inadequate when the only perspective is from within one religious group. We need in addition educational settings where religion and religions are seriously attended to and not just explained away. The teacher need not be a practicing member of any religious group, but he or she needs an open attitude to religion and sensitivity for its many forms of teaching. Emile Durkheim wrote: “What I ask of the free thinker is that he should confront religion in the same mental state as the believer. . . . He who does not bring to the study of religion a sort of religious sentiment cannot speak about it. He is like a blind man trying to talk about color.”6 We need in the public arena teachers

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who know the language and logic of a particular religion in relation to the larger world of religion and the world of secular education. That means the teaching of religion in the state school.

LEGAL ISSUES Before I look specifically at the school and religion, I must briefly mention a topic that has obstructed discussion of religion in its relations to religious institutions, the public arena, federal and state governments, and the individual citizen. These many issues are constantly subsumed under a doctrine called the “separation of church and state.” I would argue that this language of church and state has always been an inappropriate metaphor for the United States. For discussing the teaching of religion in the public school, the doctrine is irrelevant. We do need some careful distinctions concerning what is appropriate in the public school. I am not at all siding with religious groups who want to put (their) religious practices into the schools. Religious practices are rightly banned from state-sponsored schools, although the doctrine of church-state is no help in explaining why. The issue of teaching religion in the public school is an educational and curriculum question. Despite its inappropriateness, separation of church and state has become deeply embedded in the national consciousness since the 1940s. Even people who should know better refer to this doctrine as if it were in the U.S. Constitution and as if it has always been the framework within which the country has operated. The European language of church and state was inadequate—and was avoided—in the eighteenth century when the United States was founded. It is patently inadequate in the twenty-first century. However, I have no illusions about the phrase disappearing. Even when its inadequacies are acknowledged, there is usually reluctance to simply stop using the phrase. Martha Nussbaum in her careful study of religion and public life argues, “separation of church and state should be seen as posterior to ideas of equality and liberty.”7 She retains the church-state metaphor, even while pointing out its inadequacy in numerous court cases. The United States in its founding document attempted something new: It tried to remove the federal government from involvement in people’s practice of their religion. For establishing a legal framework, the authors used two clauses in the first amendment referring to religion. Both clauses are negative: no “establishment of religion” and no prohibition of “the free exercise” of religion. The wording is far too cryptic. Perhaps the authors simply wished to provide flexibility so that future generations would have room to maneuver. The

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language, however, is not so much flexible as confusing and inconsistent. The regular references today to the “establishment clause” and the “free exercise” clause only further obscure the confusion built into the amendment’s language. The intention of the authors, it seems, was to create a tension between what is asserted in the two clauses. A logical tension would have required a clear meaning of religion in each clause. As I will presently trace, “religion” has two almost opposite meanings and it is not clear in the first clause which meaning of religion is intended. The second clause in the amendment does not even use the word religion; it simply refers to “the exercise thereof.” James Madison had originally proposed for the first clause that “there should be no national church.”8 That would have been clear, though then the second clause’s reference to “free exercise thereof” would be unintelligible. Instead, the word “church” was avoided. Did they in the final wording simply mean “church and other similar religious bodies?” Perhaps they had that in mind but, if so, saying “religion” instead of a religion was a peculiar choice. If, as some people argue today, they meant that government should not prefer religion over non-religion, the retention of “establishment” (as in “established church”) was peculiar. In any case, “establishment of religion” was and is a peculiar phrase. When “free exercise thereof” is paired with it, the result is not clear at all. Madison seemed to think that the first clause referred to religious institutions. He acknowledged “that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority, with such distinctions, as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points.”9 For negotiating the relation of civil authorities and religious institutions, Madison’s “tracing of a line” would have been a more helpful metaphor than the one that Thomas Jefferson provided. Jefferson, in an 1801 letter, translated the first amendment by reintroducing the word church. And Jefferson added another layer to the metaphor of “church and state,” saying that the purpose of the founders was to erect “a wall of separation between church and state.” The Baptists of Danbury Connecticut had asked Jefferson’s opinion about the state of Connecticut paying the salaries of Protestant ministers. Jefferson’s letter to the Baptists was “a statement delimiting the legitimate jurisdiction of the federal and state governments on matters pertaining to religion.”10 Jefferson was mainly concerned with the state of Connecticut; in Jefferson’s view, the federal government had no jurisdiction in the matter. Interestingly, the Baptists never published the letter. Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” did not seem destined to have a future.

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A “wall of separation between church and state” only got its legs in the 1870s. The language emerged in relation to the Catholic school system. The underlying meaning of the doctrine, Nussbaum notes, was “don’t let the Pope take over our government and schools.”11 The doctrine seemed ready-made to keep the Catholic Church from receiving aid for its schools. At the same time, it did not touch Bible reading in the public schools because that was the work of “people” rather than a church. This contrast was made explicit in the Blaine Amendment, which was defeated at the national level but adopted by several states. It prohibited any kind of aid to religious schools while encouraging Bible reading in public schools.12 If the reference for “church” was not clear in the late nineteenth century, it certainly was in the 1940s when a national system of Catholic schools lobbied for various kinds of aid, including bus transportation for the students. At that point, the language of church and state entered into Supreme Court decisions. Opponents of the Catholic Church, such as Paul Blanshard and “Protestants and Others United for the Separation of Church and State,” celebrated the limiting of the Catholic Church’s power.13 Many of the people who were delighted by the separation of church and state were stunned in the 1960s when the Supreme Court interpreted the doctrine as prohibiting prayer and Bible reading in the public school. Their surprise was understandable. History and logic were on their side. There was no church involved. Of course, a metaphor can have indefinite extension, but the Court has continued to extend a metaphor that was inappropriate from the beginning. There is usually recognition that “wall” is a metaphor. Arguments that then ensue are all about the wall: “Can it be lowered or raised?” “Is the wall being breached?” “Should the wall be permeable?” and other metaphorical questions. In an influential Supreme Court decision, Justice Warren Burger said that the relation of church and state “far from being a ‘wall’ is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship.”14 What gets lost in such discussions is that the governing metaphor is not “wall of separation” but “wall of separation between church and state.” A wall that separates makes no sense unless church and state make sense. What are supposedly separated are two entities: state and church. The term state in the United States has a built-in ambiguity. It would be clearer to refer to civil authorities or governments of various kinds. But the ambiguity of “state” is completely overshadowed by the misleading use of “church.” Obviously, “church” only includes Christian bodies; there are hundreds of religious institutions in the United States that are not included. Jews, for example, are content with talking about church and state; it does not affect them except by a metaphorical stretch.

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Even among Christians, the reference for “church” is not always clear. Protestants most often use the term for a local congregation, which is not the locus for church-state talk. Jefferson did not write his letter to the Baptist church (there is no such state or national institution) but to a Baptist association. When right-wing religious groups have engaged in political lobbying, they have been accused of violating the separation of church and state. Their logical response has been: we are not a church. During the past forty years the Court has continued to try to extend the metaphor of church-state beyond all logic. The concerns of Jews, Muslim, or Buddhists cannot be addressed as “church-state” issues. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist made this point in no uncertain terms: “The ‘wall of separation between church and state’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”15 It is noteworthy that Rehnquist properly refers to the whole metaphor, not the wall of separation but the wall of separation between church and state. It is also noteworthy that this firm assertion by a Chief Justice is seldom quoted compared to some seemingly casual statements by judges that are quoted as dogmas.

THE LEGAL ISSUE: RELIGIOUS EDUCATION The idea of religious education was still alive in the 1940s, as evidenced by a report from the American Council on Education. The Committee on Religion and Education, made up of a distinguished group of educators, was chaired by F. Ernest Johnson. He was the primary author of the report, “The Relation of Religion to Public Education.” Published in 1947, the report formulated the issue quite well: “One must either accept the patent inference that religious education is relatively unimportant and a marginal interest or assume that religion is a matter so remote from life that it admits of no integration with the general educational program.”16 At that time, the metaphor of “wall of separation between church and state” was finding legal definition but the report insisted, “this doctrine may not be invoked to prevent public education from determining on its merits how the religious phases of the culture shall be recognized in the school program.”17 Unfortunately, that is just what happened as legal jargon edged out genuine educational discussion. A Supreme Court decision in 1948 forbade religious instruction that was given by various religious groups in public school buildings. In the decision and in two of the opinions, the term “religious education” is used to refer to this practice. Justice Robert Jackson admitted that the Supreme Court was in

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no position to solve the overall relation of religion and public education. He worried that the Court would become entangled in endless local disputes. While siding with the majority in this case, Jackson said: “One can hardly respect a system of education that would leave the student wholly ignorant of the currents of religious thought that move the world society for a part in which he is being prepared.”18 Jackson’s rhetoric here seems to echo the report from the American Council on Education.19 An even clearer connection to that report is found in the key decision of Abington School District v. Schemmp in 1963.20 That decision, along with Engel v. Vitale in the previous year, set the direction for future discussions of religion and public education. Abington forbade reading the Bible and saying the Our Father in the public school. Engel outlawed a state-mandated prayer that the New York State Regents had recommended for public schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.”21 These two decisions angered many Protestant groups who had never dreamed that the metaphor of church-state separation could apply to the Our Father and the reading of scripture and even to an innocuous prayer composed by committee. A cartoon by Herblock showed a man angrily throwing down a newspaper and shouting: “What do they expect us to do, pray at home?” Yes, that was pretty much the general idea. In some regions of the United States, the Court’s decisions were simply disregarded. In other places, there began an endless series of court cases concerning what does and does not count as a religious practice. Is a moment of silence constitutional? When there is no clear intent of the state to sneak prayer in, silence is allowed. In an Alabama case, however, a moment of silence was found unconstitutional.22 Debate and controversy in this area are inevitable in this most litigious of countries. However, the courts, including the Supreme Court, do not have a clear idea of “religion” or any idea of religious education. Efforts have been made in the Congress to go around Engel and Abington with a Constitutional Prayer Amendment. In November 1971, it narrowly missed the needed two-thirds majority. Interestingly, the opposition that time was led by Father Robert Drinan.23 When the same issue resurfaced in 1984, the opposition was lead by another clergyman, Senator John Danforth, who said: “Prayer should not be cheapened. It must not be trivialized. . . . To many religious people God is not dependent on the Supreme Court or the Congress. Objects may be kept out of the classroom, chewing gum for example. God is not chewing gum. He is the Creator of Heaven and Earth.”24 A practice that has concerned the courts during the last decade has been the “posting of the ten commandments” in public places, especially in public

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schools.25 The school shooting at Columbine gave impetus to this movement. Liberals pushed for stricter gun control laws; conservative Christian groups seemed to think that a list of the Ten Commandments on school property would dissuade shooters. Both the local supporters of the postings and the American Civil Liberties Union, their regular opponent in court, assume remarkable educational effect from what is posted on a school wall. The Supreme Court has attempted to make distinctions regarding when and how the Ten Commandments may be posted. In 2005, the Supreme Court allowed a posting of the Ten Commandments in Austin, Texas, where the display was one of seventeen monuments and twenty-one historical markers that surround the state capitol. On the same day, the Court struck down the display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses because it promoted religion. The New York Times editorial hailed the twin decisions under the title: “The Court Affirms Separation of Church and State.”26 This legal hair-splitting might make sense within a clear framework of religion and religious education, but that is what is lacking. Congress has stayed up all night debating prayer in school. What it has never discussed and lacks the language to raise the question, is the issue of the school doing with religion what schools are for, namely, to teach it.

THE MEANINGS OF RELIGION For a meaning of religious education that would include teaching religion in state schools, one has to recognize the ambiguity of the term “religion.” The problem cannot be cured by a definition. Nietzsche said that any word that has a history cannot be defined. That is, no definition can cover the historical shifts in the meaning of such terms. The result of those shifts is often sharply divergent meanings within a single term. “Religion” is a term coined by Cicero who boasted concerning the Romans that “in religion and the worship of the gods we are pre-eminent.”27 The Christian church took over the term, reshaping Cicero’s meaning. Augustine describes religion as existing from the beginning of the world and finding fulfillment in the “true religion” of the Christian church.28 This meaning of religion, genuine devotion, held the field until the sixteenth century. Thomas Aquinas treats religion under the virtue of justice. Martin Luther and John Calvin still used religio for practices or devotions directed toward God.29 A different meaning of “religion” emerged when “the Christian religion” (true devotion) was rocked by division, and opposing groups claimed to be the possessors of true religion. The first hint of tolerance after the Reforma-

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tion is found when there is a reference to the “Catholic and Protestant religions.” Rather quickly, these two religions were folded into the “Christian religion” but “religion” used this way was now available to refer to Judaism, Islam, and, more doubtfully, to other groups. “Religion” has a Western (or even Christian) bias, but it is the best available word to try to encompass the beliefs, rituals, and codes of the institutions studied by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. This second meaning of “religion” has obvious roots in the first, but there are stark oppositions as well. In the ancient meaning, religion was singular; genuine devotion was opposed to false. The modern meaning necessarily implies diversity even when used in the singular. A reference to “the Christian religion” today, unlike its use in the fifteenth century, carries comparison of one religion to others in its class. This sketch of the history of “religion” might be merely a curiosity except that the two meanings continue to appear in the present. As regularly happens with other important old words, the second meaning did not replace the first but instead created a word of rich ambiguity.30 The two meanings mix together uneasily in the First Amendment. As I pointed out earlier, the first clause seems to be referring to religions in the modern meaning of the term; if so, “establishment of a religion” would have been clearer. The second clause seems to refer to beliefs and practices of a religious nature but “free exercise thereof” was hardly a clear way of putting the matter. In discussions of religion and public education today, the two meanings are regularly conflated leading to endless confusion. The ancient meaning of “religion” lives on in referring to devotions and practices in a generalized way, even though no one practices religion; people follow the gospel, observe Passover, pray facing Mecca, and so forth. “Religion” can also refer to the historical systems that include but are not limited to acts of religious devotion. Religion(s) in this sense cries out for intellectual inquiry so as to relate religion(s) to other important aspects of the world. The subject matter for academic curricula is any human phenomenon that has a tradition of rational inquiry and a universe of discourse. “Religion” in the second sense has better academic credentials than many other subjects. “Sociology,” for example, was coined in the 1840s; psychology, as an estranged relative of philosophy, is mainly a twentieth-century product. It is true that “religion” cannot shake off its ambiguity. Religion as meaning practices of a particular religion should be barred from the public school. Religion, referring to the many religions that now more than ever are in contact with each other, deserves intellectual inquiry. Ambiguity in the meaning of religion as an academic subject is similar to many other subjects, especially those that do not end in -ology. “Theology,”

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at least as used in the United States, does not substitute for an “objective” study of religion. “Religiology” has seemed too clumsy. “Religion” is a word comparable in ambiguity to art, history, mathematics, or ethics. “History,” can be the name for actual events in the past. That does not prevent the word history from being used for the academic study of those events. Of course, “religion” raises suspicions that “history” does not. The discussion of religion in state schools continues to be a confusing mess. The periodic headline “Does God belong in the classroom?” is a silly if not blasphemous question. As Danforth said in the above quotation, a discussion based on that question trivializes both meanings of religion. In a Supreme Court decision of 2004, allowing “under God” to remain in the pledge of allegiance, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor defended the phrase on the basis that it is “ceremonial Deism” which “cannot be seen as a serious invocation of God.”31 Justice O’Connor was cautioning the Court not to try removing all religious language. But approval of “ceremonial deism” is not what the classroom needs. What the classroom is suited for is a serious intellectual encounter with religion(s). The Supreme Court has allowed “under God” to be part of a classroom ritual of saluting the flag. But in what course can the question be raised of whether the pledge of allegiance is itself a piece of religious idolatry. As I indicated above, religious education has to include formation in the practice of a particular religion (or a personal choice to abstain from such practice) and some minimum competence in understanding the phenomenon of religion, comparing the religion closest to home with other religions. The first element of religious education does not belong in the state school; the second element is needed there. Without a language of religious education, including recognition of religion as a subject for intellectual inquiry, discussions of religion in state schools become bogged down either in fighting over devotional practices or by including religion in ways that avoid teaching an understanding of it. In recent years there has been considerable enthusiasm for “religious literacy.” There is little opposition to the idea but little success in achieving literacy. Even Richard Dawkins in his assault on religion bemoans the fact that students cannot recognize biblical references in Shakespeare.32 Stephen Prothero in Religious Literacy has ninety pages of religious references that citizens should be able to recognize.33 Such factual knowledge might be desirable, but it is not likely to come from piling up facts about religion. Surveying all the religions of the world can be a way to avoid actually inquiring into the complexity of the logic and history of a particular religion or understanding the relation between different religions. Prothero, like other writers on the topic, repeatedly says that the Supreme Court has pronounced

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the teaching of religion in state schools to be unconstitutional. That assumption has been the unchallenged legal dogma that prevents an educational discussion of teaching religion in state schools.

TEACH AND TEACH ABOUT The supposed proscription of teaching religion is derived from the Supreme Court’s ruling in Abington v. Schemmp. Two key passages from that ruling, one by Justice Arthur Goldberg and one by Justice Tom Clark, are cited in almost every discussion of religion and public education. The two passages result in a confusing combination of a call to put religion into the curriculum and at the same time the insistence that religion cannot be taught. It is no wonder that only a small group of people feel at home in the convoluted language that is used. Stephen Prothero’s book, Religious Literacy, embodies the logical conflict. He says that “many states and school districts now have standards and policies that at least in theory carve out a place for religion in public school curricula.”34 At the same time, he insists that the teacher cannot legally teach this curricular subject. There is confusion, he says, “about the crucial distinction between theology and religious studies—between what the Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg called the “teaching of religion” (which is unconstitutional) and the “teaching about religion (which is not).”35 Prothero here equates teaching religion and teaching theology, which would be news to professors of religion in universities. What one must do with religion, according to Prothero, is “teach about” it, but not teach it. Not surprisingly, most school administrators and schoolteachers find this contrast an unworkable puzzle which they prefer to avoid. The strange dichotomy of teaching religion versus teaching about religion is lifted from a comment in Justice Goldberg’s concurring opinion in Abington v. Schemmp. What Goldberg said was: “It seems clear to me that the court would recognize the propriety of teaching about religion as distinguished from the teaching of religion in the public school.” That statement is not exactly a firm and definitive ruling by the Supreme Court. This one justice says that he thinks the “court would recognize the propriety” of one but not the other of his contrasts. In Martha Nussbaum’s comprehensive study of first amendment cases on religion, she does not mention this comment of Goldberg’s. It would not seem to have much importance except that it was seized upon and has become unchallengeable doctrine in literature on the public school and religion. Goldberg expressed a tentative opinion that the court would find propriety in teaching about religion. He need not have been so tentative on that point.

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A teacher can teach about anything that happens to show up in the course of teaching his or her subject in the curriculum. One can teach about mass murder in sociology, sadomasochism in psychology, or cannibalism in anthropology. Religion shows up in all those places and many others, and then, obviously, one has to teach about it. The problem is not an approval of teaching about religion. It is that Goldberg contrasted that to the teaching of religion. The affirming of the first was connected to the negating of the second. Ever since then, it has usually been assumed that this distinction is a neat and clear dichotomy. Instead of challenging or at least questioning this legal formula, educators set out to put religion into the curriculum while avoiding teaching it. Pennsylvania and Florida worked at early projects that soon met with obstacles.36 States continue to work within impossible restrictions and with nervous insistence on words such as secular, neutral, objective, and equal. In California, “Guidelines for Teaching about Religion” say that a teacher can instruct about religion but can emphasize no particular religion. Apparently, every time a teacher mentions one religion he or she must refer to every other religion. But a teacher cannot seriously examine religion without examining a particular religion. A course on sixteenth-century European history would presumably have to emphasize what happened to the Christian religion. In one California case, the teacher, Stephen Williams, used disputed material that highlighted the role of Christians in the nation’s founding.37 The lawyer from the Alliance Defense Fund reasonably noted that “You’re not going to find a lot of Muslim Founding Fathers.”38 From what was published about this California case, I think that the teacher was in fact proselytizing. He made some good points about the illogic of the state’s guidelines but that does not prove that his own position was academically sound. As a recently converted Evangelical Christian, Stephen Williams used “supplementary material” that was skewed toward making the case for Christianity. Some people inclined to be evangelical preachers are attracted to programs for “teaching about religion.” They figure that they can get their message across while going about and around religion.39 If states exclude on principle teachers professionally prepared to teach religion in an academically sound manner, the field is left open to people who see the classroom as a pulpit. Where did Goldberg’s strange but catchy contrast come from? Most likely it was directly or indirectly from F. Ernest Johnson. In the 1947 report, “The Relation of Religion to Public Education,” Johnson made reference to teaching about religion. Time Magazine, summarized that document as saying: “The committee proposed to teach about religion, but not to teach religion itself in the schools.”40 Actually, that contrast is not explicit in the document

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but was deduced by Time. Their insertion of the word “itself” is to make clear that religion should not be the subject of inquiry. In 1951, a report from the Educational Policies Commission, Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools, says: “The public school can teach objectively about religion without advocating or teaching any religious creed.”41 What “teaching objectively” means can be debated at length but one cannot quarrel with the prohibition of “advocating a religious creed” in the public schools. Johnson used the distinction of “teach” and “teach about” in other essays and books. In responding to the question of whether “studying about religion is not studying religion,” he says that is true but “studying about is the beginning of study.”42 That is, Johnson made a distinction within a single process: the way into understanding something is to become acquainted with some external facts about it. Unintentionally, Johnson’s description of steps in the process of understanding may have helped to create a dichotomy of teaching religion versus teaching about religion. In addition to confusion about the meaning of religion, the misunderstanding of “teach religion,” is based on a stereotype of teaching. In this country, learning and studying are effusively praised but teaching is suspect. Not many people go so far as Ivan Illich’s formula that to teach is to corrupt.43 But there are authors who, while having no experience in academic teaching, assume that schoolteachers are big people telling little people what to think. The Hollywood image of a schoolteacher is a man standing on a desk and giving an impassioned sermon on the meaning of life to students who sit in rapt attention. The actual work of classroom teaching is more prosaic, trying to provoke people to think carefully about something they have read for that day’s meeting. The insistence on “teach about” instead of “teach” is to keep schoolteachers from telling students what to believe. Teach when applied to religion is assumed to mean indoctrinating children into the particular beliefs of the teacher. That assumption makes one wonder what people assume is being done when teachers teach history, economics, or literature? Does teaching economics mean indoctrinating students into one school of thought? Do teachers tell students what to think about literature rather than help them to understand particular poems? Statements that are routinely made about teaching religion are a slander on the profession of school teaching.

STUDY BUT NOT TEACH The uneasiness with “teach” leads authors to talk about “studying religion” instead of “teaching religion.” Students are allowed to study religion; teachers are not allowed to teach religion. This way of speaking shows up in

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Supreme Court decisions and in the literature of the last forty years. The use of “study” to avoid “teach” is found in the widely quoted passage in Abington by Justice Tom Clark: “Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education may not be effected consistently with the first amendment.”44 In saying that religion should be presented objectively, Justice Clark sounds like he is talking about teaching. But he studiously avoids the term teaching and refers to the study of religion. Actually, it is easy enough to imagine students studying religion or anything else they fancy. The question is whether teachers can teach religion. On that point, Justice Clark slides around the issue, leaving to Justice Goldberg the opinion that the teachers cannot teach religion. The opinion of the Court, therefore, is that in state schools studying religion is constitutional but teaching religion is not. Religion should be in the curriculum, presented objectively, but it cannot be taught. In 1987, a document with great promise was published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. The document’s title is “Religion in the Curriculum” and its contents include excellent historical and religious material. But despite advocating that religion be put in the curriculum the report cannot draw the obvious conclusion that religion should be taught. It is tied to the Supreme Court phrase that undermines the whole discussion. In the sixth chapter, a section headed “including religion in the curriculum” begins: “The proper role of religion in the school is the study of religion for its educational value. The task is to teach about religions and their impact in history, literature, art, music, and morality.”45 Religion should be studied for its educational value but it cannot be taught. It is difficult to see how one can understand the impact of religion on all those areas without understanding religion itself. The American Council of Education report was one source but not the sole source of the Clark-Goldberg contrast and its use since then. However, what is noteworthy about the Council report on this point was that the authors were clearly aware of why people say “study” rather than “teach.” They address directly the nature of academic teaching, something actually rare in educational literature. Their advocacy of religion in the curriculum clearly entails that the teacher would teach it. But in the end they back away from defending what they know to be the correct position. A paragraph in the Conclusion of the document embodies their inconsistency. The first sentence reads: “Fundamental to the proposals we have set forth is an interpreting of ‘teaching’ which distinguishes it from indoctrination in the ordinary sense of that word.”46 Their distinction between “teach”

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and “indoctrinate” is certainly acceptable, although apparently to some people it is not obvious. But if the Committee’s use of “teaching” is fundamental to what they are proposing, they should have vigorously defended it. Indeed, in defense of every schoolteacher in the public and private schools of this country, their distinction should have been insisted upon. However, the last sentence of the same paragraph says: “We have frequently used the phrase ‘the study of religion’ instead of ‘teaching religion’ because the latter so commonly implies indoctrination.”47 That is precisely why they should have insisted on what they have said in the first sentence. Using “study of religion” for “teaching of religion” is not the substitution of a synonym; it is giving in to the stereotype that they know is the obstacle to their proposals being heard. The committee failed to stand by their convictions and became part of the confusion that swirls about the issue of teaching religion.

TOWARD WORLDWIDE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Any attempt to revivify the twentieth-century project of religious education may seem to be a hopeless undertaking. However, just as the term religious education was falling out of a public use in the United States, it was being given a legal meaning in the United Kingdom. Religious education in England and Wales was to include religious instruction in every state and county school.48 For reasons quite different from those in the United States, religious education in the U.K. has not lived up to the hopes of those who coined the term in 1944 (probably borrowed from the United States).49 Nevertheless, it has retained its meaning to include state schools and there is a substantial body of literature on religious education in the state school. Today there is some fairly serious discussion of religious education within the European Union and especially within the Council of Europe. One of England’s leading religious educators writes: “Issues about the study of religion in public education are being discussed internationally as never before. The discussions include specialists in religion, but also many outside the professional field of religious education—politicians, civil servants, NGOs and other groups within civil society as well as educators concerned with fields such as citizenship and intercultural education.”50 In other words, the Council of Europe is engaged in a project similar to what the United States started in 1903. One weakness of the British usage of “religious education” had been that not only was it allowed in the state school but also that was the only place it applied. In British usage, especially after the 1960s, religious education became the name of an academic subject. The result was that the work of

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church, synagogue, mosque, and temple was excluded from the meaning of religious education. That usage was almost a mirror image of language in the United States. By locating religious education in the state school the British were following modern educational language. That is, if the question is understanding math, then mathematical education in the school is the answer. If you want to understand religion, you put religious education in the school. The analogy does not hold all the way. Religion is more like politics, morality, or sex than math, physics, or chemistry. The school has a crucial job of providing understanding of religion, morality, politics, or sex but it cannot provide the whole of education in those areas. The family begins the education to which the school can contribute. For receiving a fuller education, a person’s engagement in politics or religion is necessary. The British way of speaking is now challenged by assumptions in the usage of other European nations and Asian countries.51 In some countries the state has a very limited role and in other places the state has a lot to say about religion in the state schools. Many countries continue to force the religion of the majority on minorities in their schools.52 No country offers an ideal solution that the United States can follow but that is a reason for dialogue. The United Nations has expressed concern with religious education. Unfortunately, the U.N. has only dealt with religious education under the rubric of parental rights.53 Eventually, the U.N. may have to see itself as a religious educator. That is, the U.N. constantly finds itself trying to mediate conflicts in which the misunderstandings of religion play a key role. In such international clashes, the alternative to violent conflict is an educational approach that produces some understanding of cultural and religious differences. Worldwide religious education is still in its formative stage.54 The United States, given its religious diversity and its commitment to schools, should be a leading participant in these discussions but it is absent. Ironically, the impetus for European discussion of religious education was the attack on the United States in September 2001. The question now is whether the United States will join the rest of the world in developing adequate programs of religious education. For the country to confront its political, ecological, and economic problems, the academic examination of religion is a needed part of education. NOTES 1. Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy (Harper San Francisco, 2007), 21–38; George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90s (New York: Macmillan, 1989).

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2. Carey McWilliams, “American Democracy and the Politics of Faith,” in Religion Returns to the Public Square, ed. Hugh Heclo and William McClay (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 154. 3. William Rainey Harper, “The Scope and Purpose of the New Organization,” Proceedings of the First Convention (Chicago: Religious Education Association, 1903): 230–40. 4. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1966) was the most famous but only one example of this writing. 5. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1982), 239. 6. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995), xvii. 7. Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 20. 8. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 110. 9. Daniel Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 88. 10. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State, 60. 11. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 178. 12. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 23. 13. Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950). 14. Lemon v. Kurtzman 403 U.S. 602 (1970). 15. Wallace v Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 92, 106–7 (1985). 16. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Education (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1947), 10. 17. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Education, 25. 18. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948). 19. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Education, 19. 20. Abington School District v. Schemmp 374 U.S. 203 (1963). 21. Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 438 (1962). 22. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. (1985). 23. James Wood, “Religion and Education in American Church-State Relations,” in Religion, the State and Education, ed. James Wood (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 1984), 33. 24. Joan DelFattore, The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America’s Public Schools (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 197. 25. Gabriel Moran, “Politicizing the Ten Commandments,” Living Light, 36 (Summer 2000): 6–14. 26. New York Times, 28 June 2005, A1; Roger Trigg, Religion in Public Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 226. 27. Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book II, 7–9.

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28. Augustine, Of True Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). 29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a, 2ae, 81. 4; 2a, 2a, 49–55. 30. John Bossy, Christianity in the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 170; Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 185. 31. Newdow v.U.S. Congress 292 F, 3D 597(9th Cir. 2000); Newdow, 124 S.Ct. at 2321–27 (2004). 32 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 340–44. 33. Prothero, Religious Literacy, 141. 34. Prothero, Religious Literacy, 131. 35. Prothero, Religious Literacy, 53. 36. John Whitney and Susan Howe, The Religious Literature of the West (Philadelphia: Augsburg, 1971). 37. Stephen J. Williams v. Patricia Vidmaar et al., USDC North District, San Jose Div No. CO 44946. 38. Peter Boyer, “Jesus in the Classroom,” New Yorker, 21 March 2005, 71. 39. William Becker, “A History Lesson for the Cupertino Union School District,” American Thinker, 15 December 2007. 40. Time Magazine, 21 August 1947. 41. Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: Educational Policies Commission, 1951); for Johnson’s comments on this document, see “Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools,” Religious Education, 46, no. 4 (1951): 199. 42. F. Ernest Johnson, The Social Gospel Reexamined (New York: Harper and Row, 1940), 188. 43. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 44. Justice Tom Clark, Abington School District v. Schemmp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963). 45. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Religion in the Curriculum (Alexandria, Va.: ASCD, 1987), 27. 46. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Education, 51. 47. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Education, 51. 48. A. G. Wedderspoon, Religious Education 1944–1984 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964). 49. Jack Priestly, “A New Era—Beginning from Jerusalem? Some Reflection from 1928 on Matters Pertaining to 1988,” British Journal of Religious Education 13 (Summer 1991): 143–51. 50. Robert Jackson, “European Institutions and the Contribution of Studies of Religious Diversity to Education for Democratic Citizenship,” International Seminar on Religious Education and Values (Amsterdam: ISREV, 2006). 51. Robert Jackson, Religious Education in Europe (Munster, Germany: Waxman, 2007).

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52. Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Commission of Human Rights on Freedom of Religion or Belief (New York: United Nations, 1994). 53. Covenant on Political and Civil Rights and Covenant on Economic Social, and Cultural Rights. 54. Gabriel Moran, “Religious Education and International Understanding,” in Religion, Education and Society, ed. Dennis Bates (London: Routledge, 2006), 38–48.

Chapter Seven

Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences

Ludwig Wittgenstein is a controversial thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. From my point of view, this chapter is the most important one for getting at why there is a problem at all with teaching. From the side of the reader, however, this might be a frustrating chapter because Wittgenstein’s style determines how this chapter can be written. That is, no book or set of essays can be summarized to convey his system of thought. Like a number of other writers in the past century, he is sometimes ridiculed or dismissed. This chapter, in accord with Wittgenstein’s work, proceeds with “remarks,” “signals,” examples, and paradoxes. I am interested in the meaning of “to teach” but Wittgenstein never attempts to state that. It is important to note from the beginning that he does not claim to solve the problem but to show why we have a problem. That John Dewey did not develop a philosophy of teaching is surprising, perhaps even scandalous. That Wittgenstein has no philosophy of teaching is not surprising at all. Although Wittgenstein does not have any extended treatment of teaching, it is possible to see much of what he wrote as an example of teaching. He tries in every which way to teach the reader about the paradoxes of language by using paradoxes. The way he says things is as crucial as what he says in conveying a meaning of teaching. I am interested only in his view of teaching, but it is not possible to get at it without some appreciation of his overall project. One thing that seems clear is that there is an early Wittgenstein and a later Wittgenstein. A contrast of early and late is true of many thinkers and it always raises the question of how the younger and the older thinker are related. It can happen that the older man contradicts his youthful self; at least he sees a repudiation while commentators on the work may see continuity. At other times the writer may see continuity while outsiders see wholesale rejection. 143

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TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS Wittgenstein himself commented on the relation between his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his last book, published after his death, Philosophical Investigations.1 He says that the two books should be read together; the second book gets much of its meaning from being a commentary on the first (Investigations preface). At times, he makes fun of the author of the Tractatus, his younger self (Investigations 119). Ultimately, as we shall see, he does not repudiate or contradict the early work but places it in a larger context that changes its meaning. The style of the two books is radically different; they are alike only in that each has a puzzling format. The Tractatus is a series of numbered propositions by which Wittgenstein laid claim to completely representing the world that can be known. Like bright young mathematicians of the seventeenth century, such as Descartes and Leibniz, he ambitiously thought his system included all philosophical knowledge in its proper order. Only at the end of the book is there an abrupt admission that there might be a whole realm that his logical statements cannot encompass. His admission almost seems an afterthought, but it was actually his aim from the beginning. To a prospective publisher he wrote that his work had two parts, the part he had written and the part he had not written; the second part was more important.2 That was not a very good argument to convince a publisher but it was prophetic. The later book includes much of what he could not find a way to express in the first book. The Tractatus ends in what he calls “the mystical” (Tractatus. 6.522). That is not an uncommon journey for many mathematicians when they reach the limit of their rational formulas. Beyond rational knowledge is silence. However, as Wittgenstein once said of his critics, “the difference is that I have something to be silent about.”3 Beyond the representation of the world in logical sentences is the realm of aesthetics, ethics, and religion. The image at the end of the book is of a man going up a ladder and then pulling up the ladder after him. Everything that can be said can be said clearly; beyond that is what cannot be said but is nevertheless more important. The famous last line was translated: “Of that whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent” (Tractatus 7). This unspeakable realm shows or manifests itself in silence. Reality is thus divided into what can be said and what must be shown. Wittgenstein could not have been satisfied with this conclusion. Simply to be left speechless about what one considers the most important areas of life has to be frustrating. A group of philosophers in England and Germany disregarded the mystical ending of the Tractatus and were quite content with an empirically

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based logic. The group was called Logical Positivists. They thought that what cannot be said clearly is simply nonsense.4 Wittgenstein, from the late 1920s until his death in 1950, struggled with how to speak about the unspeakable. The Investigations, published in 1953, is his report of that journey. A biographical note here might be appropriate before examining the contents of the Investigations.5 Although Wittgenstein had grown up with wealth and privilege, he experienced a quasi-religious conversion during World War I when he nearly died. After the war, he gave away all his money and for the rest of his life he lived a simple life with few possessions. He became a gardener in a monastery and considered becoming a monk. Silence became a central theme of his work. He then trained to become a schoolteacher and spent six years teaching in elementary schools for peasant children in southern Austria. He does not seem to have had much success in the job and had to resign. He then returned to Cambridge where he had shown great promise as a student before the war. During subsequent decades he was a professor at Cambridge University but he never could quite fit the role of professor. He was especially uncomfortable at being a “lecturer” in the classroom. No doubt he confused or infuriated some students by his long stretches of silence in which he was trying to think out a problem.6 He was more at ease meeting with a small group of students in his room. It is hardly surprising that the university lecture was not his appropriate format. Universities then and now simply assume that the job of professors in the classroom is to read aloud from their written text or notes.

WHAT’S IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS? Wittgenstein said that he tried to write a book in the standard form but realized that the only thing that fits his conclusions is a series of “remarks” (preface). He wishes the reader to become the writer of the book, that is, to force upon the reader a journey similar to his own. His purpose is to initiate a new “sensibility” in the reader brought about by “conversion.”7 Wittgenstein considered using as a motto for the book the phrase in the title of this chapter, “I’ll teach you differences.”8 Philosophical Investigations is a book that is loaded with questions, many of them not answered by the author, at least directly. Wittgenstein said that mathematicians did not like his work because he asked the simple questions that a child asks. “I trot out all the problems that education represses without solving.”9 The whole book can be read as reflections on how a child comes to learn a language and how grownups lose their first exuberant encounter with

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language. The adult comes to take language “for granted” as a set of names for labeling the things that make up the world. Wittgenstein tries to provoke the reader into recognizing that language is more mysterious than pictures for things. The way we usually think of language “casts a spell”; we are “bewitched” by language (109). On occasion people meet with what Wittgenstein calls “conceptual puzzles,” words that have conflicting meanings.10 At that point, people may go to a dictionary to get the “correct” meaning. They then settle back with confidence that their word is the right representation of the thing. I earlier quoted Nietzsche that any word that has a history cannot be defined. That is, definition is a setting of limits; a board of experts hands down a ruling on how the word is properly used. But every old word is ambiguous in meaning; the older and simpler the word, the more ambiguous. Wittgenstein agrees with Martin Buber that this ambiguity is not a defect of language; it is the basis for the richness of language.11 Dictionaries are for the most part a cover-up of the process that leads to definition (415). The Oxford English Dictionary, the most ambitious project on language ever attempted, makes a great effort to unveil the cover-up by showing how a word has been used throughout its history. When the OED was begun in the nineteenth century, it was a Herculean task to track the uses of a word through centuries of usage. Now the computer makes it a much easier job but even the best computer cannot give us a record of every time a simple, old word has been used. If it could, then we would have the meaning of the word. We would find a pattern of different contexts in which the word has appeared. The OED does provide rough approximations of the contexts. But we lack and always will lack what Wittgenstein calls a “perspicuous” view, that is, a comprehensive view of how language functions in use (122). Wittgenstein could be said to have written a commentary on what the OED does. One of his best-known principles is “let the use teach you the meaning” (212). It is important to understand this principle as embracing the history of language, not just current use. The etymology of a word throws some light on why the word was thought to be needed. Someone at some time conceived the word as a helpful contribution to the language. Although the etymology does not settle disputes about the meaning of a word, it can never be dismissed as irrelevant. Words wander in meaning as they are used in various contexts. That is hardly surprising. What is truly puzzling and causes endless disputes is when a word has nearly opposite meanings.12 Wittgenstein says that if our opponent in an argument is saying something that seems completely absurd, perhaps he or she is legitimately drawing upon a meaning of the word that is the opposite of the meaning we are assuming.13

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Words abstracted from a context of use do not have a meaning, but we imagine that some words can simply be used as labels for naming things. We have a strong tendency to change verbs to nouns so that an activity then appears to be a thing that can be labeled. Wittgenstein uses as a metaphor that words, when they are not acting in statements, are like an engine idling; they are simply static. (132). Or to use another of his metaphors, words are like tools in a tool box. One has to see the tool acting within what he calls a “form of life” (11). We think of words as the outer expression of our inner thoughts, the means by which we communicate our ideas. But words are also our chief obstacle to understanding the world and conversing with others. It is in speech that we agree or disagree (241). If he is right that we are “bewitched” by language, living in illusion, then no words are up to the task of ending the spell. Every word that we use threatens to entangle us further in confusion. There is no way to directly address the problem by starting with agreed upon premises and arguing on the basis of evidence to a firm conclusion. Modern philosophy began with a search for an unambiguous premise, a truth that no one could deny. But if such a premise is put into language it is going to be ambiguous in meaning and not do what is asked of it. The search for unambiguous truth leads to higher and higher levels of abstraction that eliminate human meaning as they eliminate ambiguity. Dean Rusk, a Secretary of State in the 1950s, described his experience of policy disputes in government circles. He said that arguments moved to higher and higher levels of generality until everyone could agree; they could agree because the agreement no longer meant anything. Of course, outside the dispute altogether, some official was actually deciding policy, perhaps with no recognition of the ambiguity involved. Or if a new policy was not pressing, the former policy stayed in place which itself was a decision not subjected to criticism. Wittgenstein warns that the only way we can get at the problem is by examples, by showing how language works in practice. That is not the inclination of the human mind or the direction that philosophy has taken in its imitation of (mathematical) science. Wittgenstein refers to a “contempt for the particular,” by which he means our wish to create general categories that are completely under our control.14 Wittgenstein refused to move away from the particulars. What G. K. Chesterton wrote of Francis of Assisi could apply to Wittgenstein: He refused to see the wood from the trees.15 We—the human race—lack a comprehensive view of language. We have to work with the simple words of ordinary life and pursue clarifications one case at a time. In Hanna Pitkin’s apt metaphor, we are fisherman at sea who cannot put into port to fix our nets.16

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When we talk about language we have only language to work with. Abstracting words from a living context to give us unambiguous constructs only further obscures the puzzles of meaning. Wittgenstein’s “remarks” on language received two main responses, one negative and the other laudatory. He did not make himself a friend to modern philosophers by constantly attacking modern philosophy or philosophy itself. He sometimes says that he is trying to put an end to philosophy (336). On his own principles he could have tried to recover the root meaning of philosophy—love of wisdom—and use that meaning against the present captivity of the term in the university. In any case, many philosophers and nonphilosophers think that his work is somewhere between inanity and fraud. They think that what he said is too obvious for saying or else is just rambling comments that go nowhere. In the other direction, Wittgenstein generated some loyal disciples, especially among a number of his Cambridge students. A small library of books has been devoted to an exposition of his philosophy (or anti-philosophy).17 The danger here is “Wittgensteinism,” which would be a system of abstract ideas. The name often given to this school is “ordinary language philosophy.” His point was that we are stuck with words as we use them in everyday life for dealing with puzzles and disputes; no set of abstractions can save us. We do not need a philosophical system of “ordinary-langugageism.” These opposite responses to Wittgenstein—his work is trivialities that any fool knows versus a difficult system that only expert philosophers can master— have a similar effect. They both lead to an avoidance of the difficult but simple puzzles that profoundly affect life and death. “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. . . . One is unable to notice something because it is always before our eyes” (129). Since the seventeenth century, philosophy had been involved in a search for the “foundation” of knowledge. In the twentieth century the idea of a stone structure on which a building is erected was a metaphor that had problems. One approach to criticizing the metaphor would have been to separate “foundation” from the picture of a house sitting on concrete. Another approach would have been to argue that modern philosophy applied the metaphor of foundation where it did not belong. That is, philosophers were not in search of a foundation; they were actually in search of a roof from which to hang other knowledge. A third way of criticizing the use of the metaphor of foundation is that philosophers did not consider that something other than one piece of knowledge can be the foundation for the rest of knowledge. There may be a foundation for knowledge that is not knowledge. Instead of criticizing the metaphor, many twentieth-century thinkers declared themselves to be against “foundationalism”; they invented anti-

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foundationalism. This language lifts the question into a stratosphere where only a few people, comfortable in a world of -isms carry on a debate between foundationalists and anti-foundationalists. The idea of something being foundational or fundamental in human thinking is probably unavoidable but the word is ill-served on both sides of the debate. The simple questions of what do we know, how can we be certain, and what is fundamental to knowing are not likely to get clarified in a battle of -isms Wittgenstein transformed the question of foundation. In an early formulation, he wrote in opposition to the “atomic facts” of the Logical Positivists: “What has to be accepted, the given—it might be said—are facts of living.”18 By the time of the Investigations, he had come to refer to “forms of life” as the given. The phrase has caused some confusion but he simply meant the various ways we use language in our daily lives. “Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing” (25). He does not begin from “the epistemological solitude of the individual consciousness” but from human speech in a multiplicity of situations. “Nothing is more fundamental to the whole human enterprise than the community we create in our natural reactions to one another as they have been cultivated and elaborated in a very contingent, historical tradition.”19

CONCEPTUAL PUZZLES The “conceptual puzzles” that Wittgenstein refers to are terms that have nearly opposite meanings. The meanings are not contradictory; some underlying link prevents the two meanings from simply being equivocal. The double meaning emerged in the course of history, and the second meaning, almost the reverse of the first, does not entirely replace the first. Both meanings remain, creating ambiguity and endless disputes involving the correct meaning—“the definition”—of the word. If people consciously carried on that argument it would be confusing enough. In most disputes, however, the two meanings float through the argument without debaters recognizing that the ambiguity of the word is a problem at all. Wittgenstein, in describing teaching, says that the teacher provides examples and at some point the learner can “go on in the same way as those who are teaching us” (31–32). I wish to cite some examples, not those that Wittgenstein used but ones that go on in the same way. In pointing out the ambiguities of the following words I am trying to show a form of teaching. I will use three examples of “conceptual puzzles” before turning to the examples of education and teaching.

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Culture Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the biological metaphor “culture” was used to indicate a person with superior taste. Culture was almost synonymous with education. A person was either cultured or not. Culture was what the superior class defended against attempts to coarsen society. In the late nineteenth century, anthropology nearly reversed the meaning. From now on, there were many cultures and an enlightened person was forbidden to judge any one of them superior to others. Instead of a judgment of excellence, one was now to be “non-judgmental.” The two meanings are almost opposites, but one can trace the movement between the two meanings in a work such as Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas in 1870 which advocates a “program of culture” open to everyone. The anthropologist in the 1880s was drawing on a tendency already at work in a democracy where “culture” was to be made available to all. In the late twentieth century, “multiculturalism” was a favorite word of people who thought it was obvious that the country contains many cultures. Their opponents, whether or not they were conscious of drawing upon an older meaning of culture, defended educational standards against the multiculturalists. Russell Baker wrote that he thought the schools should try to get one culture before claiming to cover many. I was once on a panel for an audience of U.N. diplomats. The question of the day was whether the United States should be exporting its culture around the world. After the predictable complaints about McDonalds, Coca Cola, and Hollywood movies by many of the diplomats, the French diplomat said: “I don’t think this country has any culture.” Everyone looked at him, everyone understood exactly what he meant, and then they went back to discussing the bad influence of Hollywood. Religion I noted in chapter 6 that the term “religion,” similar to culture, nearly reversed its meaning. Up to the sixteenth century there was true religion or false religion. There could not be many religions. Even as late as John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, which could be alternately translated as “Practices of Christian Devotion,” this meaning of “religion.” was in place. A different meaning of religion had begun to emerge in the fifteenth century, but what brought about a fundamental change was the split of Christianity at the Reformation. Late in the sixteenth century, as Protestants and Catholics fought to a standstill in some places, one finds reference to the “Catholic and Protestant religions.” The invention of this new meaning for religion was a big step on the way to tolerance. It was quite novel to suggest that there might be more than one set of practices deserving of the name religion.

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Now the word was available for referring to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and so forth. People who actually engage in practices of devotion do not think of themselves as “having a religion.” They may object to the word being applied to them while at the same time they may join anthropologists or sociologists in describing other people as having a religion. For most Jews, Jews don’t have a religion; Jews think that Christians have a religion, but being Jewish is a way of life. The final ironic twist is when Christians distance themselves from religion by contrasting, “Christian faith” and “world religions.” Revolution The term “revolution” is a common metaphor with an unusually clear history. The term used by Copernicus in On the Revolution of the Heavens provided the image of a circling back to beginnings. The term entered political language in 1689 with the Glorious Revolution that secured the rights of Englishmen. The revolution restored rights that went back as far as the thirteenth century but had been disrupted. When the British American colonists declared independence in 1776, their document, with an eye to 1689, appealed to parliament for redress from abuses by the king. Subsequently, when they wrote a constitution they laid claim to a “new order,” but they looked for models in the ancient world. The French Revolution, in some ways a sequel to the one in North America, nearly reversed the meaning of revolution. A violent disruption was at its heart; a new calendar with the year one was to be adopted, signifying a break from monarchy and priesthood. In British America, the main revolution was, as John Adams said, in the hearts and minds of the people; the violent war was a sequel to the more important revolution. The French Revolution began in violence and the revolution picked up more violence as it proceeded. The more common meaning of “revolution” since then has taken the French Revolution as its model. A series of bloody revolutions cut across the nineteenth century, culminating in the MarxistLeninist revolution establishing the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, John Kennedy and later Bobby Kennedy talked of a new kind of peaceful revolution needed in Latin America. Their intention was admirable but they may not have realized how difficult it would be to bring the older meaning of revolution back to center stage.

EDUCATION The term education is also a kind of conceptual puzzle. The way that school is related to education seems to be a simple omission or a use of a part for the

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whole. People regularly say “education,” when they mean school. If challenged, they will say obviously education goes beyond school. What is usually unrecognized is that school and education are not different in extension but two different kinds of things. “School” is a word that evolved into meaning a place, an institution, or a system. Education is an ancient word for a process that especially applies to children but can be used of all human beings and in the past was used of animals and trees. The almost complete collapse of education into school could not have occurred before the middle of the nineteenth century. The advent of an ideal of “universal education” (that is, school for every child) in France, the United States, and throughout much of the world, was not greeted with joy by the laboring classes. Their resistance was worn down, though never entirely eliminated, by the fact that society rewards those who “finish school” and are properly credentialed (eight years at the beginning of the twentieth century, sixteen years today). Some of what schools are for is undoubtedly valuable for a flourishing human existence. Some parents did need persuading about their children’s education. But the new class of educators not only won the game; they all but eliminated their linguistic opponents. School was the victor over the ways people had been educated for millennia, but it may have been a pyrrhic victory. When the classroom is part of an educational pattern, it can be a place of hope and revolutionary power; that is the reason why it is both glorified and feared. But as the sole “deliverer” of education, the classroom is hopelessly overmatched. The school’s teacher is burdened by both rhetorical praise and carping criticism. Taxpayers routinely complain: why don’t these teachers do their job and turn out smart, knowledgeable, and well-behaved citizens? Whenever it begins to surface that school cannot be the whole of education, the issue is quickly pushed out of sight with a distinction between “formal education” and “informal education.” The school is the formal education; informal education is anything else anyone cares to name. Since education is not thinkable without form (of time, place, material, recipients), the distinction between formal education (school) and what has no form (amorphousness) reinforces the assumption that whatever education is it belongs in school. Despite the fact that the whole idea has badly broken down over the last half century, the language has not changed from what the early twentieth century gave us. Given assumptions in the way “education” is used, the teacher is the obvious actor in the middle (or the bottom) of the picture. What do teachers do? They teach. While the schoolteacher is profusely praised at ritualized moments, he, or more likely she, does not have much status and is not paid in the same league as lawyers, bond salesmen, or CEOs. Not many university pro-

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fessors list their occupation as schoolteacher; it would mean a reduction in status if they did.

TO TEACH How then do we find a wider, deeper, richer meaning of “teach?” Wittgenstein provides several “signals” for responding to the question: What does it mean to teach? In asking for meaning, Wittgenstein says, one should ask: How does the child come to use the word (208)? Another key question for Wittgenstein is whether the activity is exclusively human or does its “grammar” allow for its use beyond humans? One of his examples is that we know a machine cannot have a tooth ache; that is not part of the grammar of pain.20 Does the grammar of teach allow us to say that communities of people teach? Do people unintentionally teach? Do cats, birds and elephants teach? Do trees, oceans, or deserts teach? The answers to those questions are debatable. One can assemble examples that, after a while, are persuasive—or not. The English word “teach” has been spoken and written millions of times. If one could Google all those millions of times over the centuries, only a small minority of cases would refer to what a person called the teacher does in a classroom. The word “teach” shows up to describe the first moments of life and continues in use to the very end of life. Throughout life teaching cuts across every “form of life”; that is, its use is both lifelong and life wide. Wittgenstein’s question of when and how the child first encounters the word does not admit of a general answer. What is certain is that a child, even before speaking, encounters someone showing them how to do something, to which the child responds. Wittgenstein says that teaching begins as training (5). Giving an explanation to the learner comes later. Numerous books on education blithely assert that to teach is to give reasons or to explain. These discussions of teaching simply dismiss what happens in early childhood as training, not teaching.21 One’s grammar can simply oppose teaching and training or one can include training as a form of teaching. The preferable choice is suggested by the practical results. Excluding training from teaching creates a shriveled up meaning for teaching and it leaves reasons and explanations without a human leg to stand on. A schoolteacher who does not include training as a subordinate but indispensable part of teaching-learning is going to find classroom teaching ineffective, unwieldy, and discouraging. The young child encounters teaching as a training in human basics (5, 208). Most of the time the teaching is not verbal and it is not intentional. The child is

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taught how to do things by being shown how to do them. At an early age, the teaching is similar to the teaching of nonhuman animals when young. Children feel sympathy with (the other) animals that are similarly being trained. Children can recognize fear or pain in their next of kin, an awareness that adults may lose. It takes several years for the child to acquire the verb “teach,” but it is acquired well before “school age.” Once the child is aware of learning things, its vocabulary soon includes “teach me to do that”—whether the request is to tie a shoelace, blow bubbles, or learn to ride a bicycle. In the 1940s and 1950s researchers were interested in the link between teaching and learning. “To simplify the research task, teaching was reconceptualized as a variety of acts performed by individuals called teachers as they work in classrooms with the intention of promoting learning.”22 The assumption in such research was that classroom instruction is the primary form of teaching and that teaching and learning are separate activities. The search was for surefire behaviors that would effectively connect teaching and learning. It was confidently said that “since it may be assumed that whatever effect a teacher has on pupils must result from behaviors, it is only necessary to identify the crucial behaviors, record them, and score them properly to measure effectiveness in process.”23 This research never produced much fruit.24 Many researchers concluded that teaching and learning have no necessary connection. But it could be that isolating a (school) teacher’s behaviors to understand teaching is the wrong place to start. Wittgenstein begins with teaching-learning as a single relation. Learning is always a result of teaching but a pupil in the classroom learns from many teachers. The academic instructor, mainly using words, has no guaranteed way to succeed. There is always a gap. The gap is not between teaching and learning but between what an individual human teacher intends to teach and what pupils actually learn. The skillful teacher in the classroom accepts this frustrating fact and does not try to fill the gap with more explanations or threats of punishment. The effective teacher uses language that points, suggests, provokes, and leaves the learner to respond. When people do not learn what someone is intending to teach, the fault may lie with the person trying to teach, with the one who is to be a learner, or with conditions that are not entirely under the control of either. The question to ask is not why they cannot learn but what are they in fact learning and how can one influence that teacher. A child in a ghetto school has many teachers. The lessons taught by the country, the neighborhood, and the school may drown out the lesson that the hard-working instructor at the front of the room is trying to teach. An examination of who or what teaches raises the issue of whether the grammar of teach-learn extends beyond the human world. I have suggested

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that a focus on teaching as the giving of reasons unduly restricts teaching to “children of school age” and undermines even that one form of teaching. Teaching that is humanly most helpful begins with training which can be examined in the interaction of mother and offspring in many species. The pattern that humans follow quickly veers from the rest of the animal world but, when humans take the time to look, they can still learn much from the teaching-learning among other animals. The teacher of an animal can be another animal or the teacher can be a human. Some of the best writing on “animal training” does not hesitate to use the verb teach.25 If you wish an animal to conform to human wishes, you have to respect its ability to learn and show it to do so in ways that do not violently intrude on what it has already learned. Its basic learning has come from its tribe and its parent. Other animals have a more restricted pattern of learning than do humans, but like humans they learn because they have been taught. The grammar of teach-learn extends beyond the human world and even beyond the nonhuman animal world. One can say that the ocean taught the fishermen, the mountain taught the climber, or that the earth is our teacher. The question is where the metaphorical extension of teach-learn no longer makes sense. On the learner’s side, there has to be a being who can respond; teaching a rock or an automobile does not make sense. On the teacher’s side, teaching is to show how to do or not do something. Within that meaning, intention is not an indispensable element. Calling the universe and everything in it our (potential) teachers seems to some people to make the word do too much, evacuating any useful meaning. But so long as one holds to the core meaning of to teach as to show someone how to do something, the metaphorical extension does not become empty of meaning. One theme implicit in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy but which requires emphasis is that he moved from using visual metaphors for knowledge to a variety of oral/aural/tactile metaphors. At least he tried to make that move although his language (whether German or English) resists giving up the primacy of the visual. Equating knowing with seeing goes back as far as Plato and was reinforced in modern times by the metaphor of “enlightenment.” In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein came to the limits of knowledge as a picture of an object. His attempted alternative was a realm that shows itself. Although this realm is unspeakable, it is still visual in character. In the Tractatus, his real alternative to a picture is silence, which is an oral/aural metaphor but it does not change the character of knowing insofar as the silence is above all language. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein has language play a variety of games which do not need pictures attached. Silence now finds its place not above the world of language but at its center. Most teaching in life is nonverbal. Speech for a child emerges out of silence. The earliest form of speech in teaching is

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directions for moving the body. The shift is from showing to showing how. It is easy to miss how crucial the difference is between these two verb forms. It is the difference between, on the one hand, trying to teach swimming by holding up a picture of a swimmer and explaining the dynamics of swimming and, on the other hand, teaching someone to swim by getting into the water, putting a hand under the learner’s body, and saying “kick,” “breathe,” “turn.” In a classroom, it is the difference between trying to show people the truth by telling them, as opposed to a conversation in which a student is shown how best to use language in the search for truth. Wittgenstein often slips back into talking about a view or a vision of things. He also uses a distinction between “image” and “picture” in order to free thinking from a pictorial bias (301). But at least in English, “image” is still a strongly visual metaphor. An important point he does make with this distinction is that we get free from identifying knowing and a picture when the images are multiple. It is doubtful that the human mind can think without images of some kind. Wittgenstein had a fondness for Western movies and incorporated them into his image of knowing. The “moving pictures” provide not a picture or several photos but an experience of movement. In trying to transcend knowledge imagined as a snapshot, he sought alternatives in mathematical formulas, architectural plans, and portraits.26 He also considered music to be a key to human understanding. Understanding a sentence is much like understanding a piece of music. A person who wishes to signify understanding may say “I see.” But the sign that the person has understood is that he or she can use the right word in context (531). Hanna Pitkin gives an example of a three-year-old who is told by her mother to put her blanket back on the bed. The child responds: “But mother, I simply can’t function in the morning without my blanket.”27 The adult may laugh that the child has imitated a statement of her mother’s. But the child did not just repeat her mother’s words. She used the sentence in the appropriate human situation, and she is responding to the mother’s (unintentional) teaching by example. What clinches the fact that the child understands is that she has precisely substituted “blanket” for “coffee.” She understood the statement within her own context. If she were asked the meaning of the word “function,” she probably would not even know that it is a word. She was shown how to use language, and she responded with her own proper use of language. In this kind of teaching, “seeing the truth” and giving reasons do not play a prominent part. The learning of language is the most obvious example of how teachinglearning occurs for humans. The child is surrounded with teachers and responds to the teaching. A child learns French or Spanish or Russian depending on which language is spoken in the environment. The child can also learn

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a second language from its immediate surroundings before self-reflection fully emerges. After that time, the person may try to remember rules, memorize words, and compose sentences, all of which get in the way of speaking a language. A classroom is a good place for reflecting on language that has already been learned; it is not designed for acquiring a language. Rather than teach a person to speak, a classroom teacher can teach a person to speak better. The usual way to learn a language is in a wide variety of situations in which the person has little choice but to respond in speech (“Where is the bathroom”). The teachers are everyone and everything in the vicinity. Steven Pinker has written, “let us put aside the myth that mothers teach their children to speak.”28 What he is opposing is a special language of “motherese,” but he badly overstates his case. Mothers most surely teach their children to speak. They are only one of many teachers, but they are one of the most important. The reason, I suspect, that writers on education are dismissive of parental teaching is not that the teaching is ineffective but, on the contrary, because it is so powerfully formative of a person’s life. Later in life, when other people teach by giving reasons and explaining, the teaching is likely to go nowhere if it conflicts with the teaching-learning of early childhood. The leaders of the French Enlightenment proclaimed that the purpose of education is to free the child from the prejudices of the father (they could have added mother). But the most that the schooling part of education can do is examine those prejudices and help a person to decide which ones should be affirmed and which ones might possibly be shed. “Prejudice” now has a completely negative meaning; but we all begin with pre-judgments, what the human race offers us as a gift before we can do much rational judging on our own.

WITTGENSTEIN, SOCRATES, FREUD At first glance, Wittgenstein is simply a follower of Socrates, another master of clever insights into the puzzles of language. But Wittgenstein, like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, has an ambivalent relation to Socrates. Yes, Socrates is a playful ironist punching through the illusions of knowledge to make real knowing possible. But to take Socrates as the model of all teaching can itself be an illusion. The reason why Socrates is dangerous is that the individual needs a surrounding community, reason needs the context of the nonrational in life, humor needs something serious about which to make jokes. Socrates in complete isolation, wielding his confident arguments, has too many rationalistic

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and dangerous men as his successors. As G. K. Chesterton said, rationalism is that peculiar form of insanity in which one has lost everything but one’s mind.29 Wittgenstein’s crucial difference from Socrates is that his meaning of “teach” is rooted in the body, the emotions, the human community, and the life around humanity. For Socrates, to teach is to show; for Wittgenstein, to teach is to show how. The early Wittgenstein was intent on stating true propositions that accurately describe the world. The later Wittgenstein was interested in how a child acquires language and how the many “families” of language operate in everyday speech. The early Wittgenstein imagined silence as an unspeakable realm above the ordinary. The later Wittgenstein understood silence as the center of ordinary life. One cannot understand language without the silence from which words emerge. Language itself is a syncopation of sounds and silence. Socrates is a master of verbal explanations, but that kind of teaching presupposes a great variety of other kinds of teaching, both verbal and nonverbal. Teaching begins as training in a community. “We master routines that do not depend on understanding; our understanding depends on this. At the bottom is not thinking but doing.”30 The “foundational” question is not finding one piece of knowledge that is the basis for all the rest; it is the question of who and what do we trust. Wittgenstein’s answer to the question of trust is that a child does not begin as a doubter, doubt presupposes belief. A child begins by trusting the teacher and the most basic teaching occurs as the child encounters the physical environment; other humans provide a kind of padded cell for the encounter. Wittgenstein’s description of the ultimate basis of knowing and teaching is simple and homey: “It is just like directly taking hold of something as I take hold of my towel without having doubts.”31 Wittgenstein often refers to what he is doing as therapy: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness” (255). That description of philosophy strikes many people as peculiar. Wittgenstein was influenced by his Viennese contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Wittgenstein even calls himself a disciple of Freud whom he praised for looking at the connection among things rather than looking for causes. However, he criticized Freud for attempting to find a single pattern of meaning in dream interpretation: “Freud wanted to find the essence of dreaming.”32 Both men had an interest in therapy and Wittgenstein was actually more comfortable with the term. Freud says that his main interest is a theory to change the world. Freud says that he does therapy for two reasons: to test his theory and to make a living. Freud was concerned that his theory would be taken over by therapists in the United States.33 He feared that they would turn

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psychoanalysis into a therapy to adjust rich people to the existing world. His fears were well-grounded. Freud was a source of brilliant figures of speech, using insights from mythology, hunches, guesses, and stories. He did not discover the unconscious but he named it. His language stayed close to ordinary speech, although his English translators created a thicket of Greek-derived words.34 Freud’s weakness, which has badly hurt his reputation, was that he wanted to be accepted as a real scientist, with science understood in its nineteenthcentury mold. Psychoanalysis has not held up well as a scientific theory of the workings of the mind; as therapy it does better. However, without the provocation of continued theorizing, the therapy cannot extend beyond “adjustment” to the surrounding political and economic culture. Wittgenstein is vulnerable to the same domestication. His therapy can be reduced to an amusing little word game. But his journey from the Tractatus to the Investigations was a move away from a theory encased in the trappings of mathematical-empirical science to recognition of a kind of theorizing that requires a commitment. This theorizing has to move away from the role of a play’s spectator to being the play’s writer/director/actor. The play is always fragmentary because the author cannot see the ending. The relation between theory and therapy is part of a larger relation between theory and practice.” Theory versus practice has been a favorite contrast in modern times. “Theory” is a visual term; it means to look. Given that the Greek image for truth is a coming to the light, theory plays a central position. The best or most certain knowledge is theoretical, looking upon the truth. In Aristotle there is also “practical knowledge,” but it suffered from an inferior status. It almost disappeared from modern philosophy until the twentieth century. Popular speech as well as contemporary institutions and professions embody a vertical split between theory and practice. The theorists are on top; the job of “practitioners” is to “implement” the theory. “Think tanks” produce reports that are peppered with high-flying abstractions. If anyone complains about the impenetrable prose of the visionaries, the standard response is that “someone can clean up the language later.” Ideas are what count; words are just disposable outer covers. It is the practitioners who will be left with having to put the ideas “into practice.” Wittgenstein was part of a twentieth-century attempt to redo the relation between theory and practice. “Practice” has almost opposite meanings. It can mean getting ready to do something; it is not the real performance, just preparation for it. Practice also means the very stuff of living, what we are engaged in from birth. In this latter meaning, practice precedes theory; theorizing is itself one of life’s practices; it is the practice of trying to bend thought back on

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itself. The chief material it has to work with is language. A slight shift in language can reverberate throughout practice. This kind of theorizing is based not on assembling facts and using a chain of reasoning. It is mainly an altering of metaphors. Theorizing of this kind can have profound effects, but it is always frustratingly incomplete. It does not end in a theory but in further theorizing. In a reform of language there is a mutually enforcing relation between the words and the behavior of the participants. Wittgenstein’s “let the use teach you the meaning” applies to how behavior at any time in history is expressed in language and how expression of language changes behavior in the future. Wittgenstein was interested in behavior in a special sense “for it includes in its meaning the external circumstances—of the behavior in a narrower sense.”35 The beginning and the end of his theory are the practices of human life. Wittgenstein’s statement that philosophy” leaves everything as it is” may apply to current behavior, but in a longer run of history, philosophy is capable of changing everything by disrupting the closed circuit of behavior and language (124). Marx complained that “up to now philosophers have only tried to understand the world; the point is to change it.” Both halves of his statement are true, but the second part follows from the first rather than contradicts it. Wittgenstein’s philosophy, he says, allows him to stop philosophizing when he wishes to do so and contemplate the simple joys of life (133). A good teacher knows that one can only make one’s best effort to show how to act, including how to speak. Then one has to let go, realizing that at least for now the student may just not get it (143). Neither agonizing over one’s failures nor pressing harder on the student is likely to bring success. Dialogue is endless; tomorrow is another day. As Wittgenstein said, “in philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly.36

NOTES 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971); Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953). Numbers in parentheses refer to paragraph numbers in each book. 2. Letter to Ludwig von Ficker in G. H. von Wright, Prototractatus (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1971), 16. 3. Letter of Paul Englemann in Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 220. 4. A. J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 5. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: His Life and Work (New York: Penguin Books, 1991) is the most complete biography.

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6. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 16, 26. 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper, 1969), 612. 8. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: His Life and Work, 537. The line is from King Lear, act 4, scene 1. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 382. 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 18. 11. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man (New York: Harper, 1966), 115. 12. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 20. 13. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 29. 14. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 18. 15. G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1954), 87. 16. Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 297. 17. A few of the better known studies are Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: Nothing is Hidden (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Rush Rhees and D. Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); John Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); James Edwards, Ethics without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1982); Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (New York: Routledge, 1997). 18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), I, 630. 19. Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (London: SPCK, 1997). 76. 20. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 16. 21. R. S. Peters, Concept of Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 19. 22. Elliot Eisner, Educational Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 157. 23. D. H. Medley and H. E. Mitzel, “Measuring Classroom Behavior by Systematic Observation,” in Handbook of Research on Teaching, ed. N. L. Gage (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), 258. 24. For a critical summary of the research, see Alan Tom, Teaching as a Moral Craft (New York: Longman, 1984), 53–73. 25. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Random House, 1986); Monty Roberts, The Man Who Listens to Horses (New York: Ballantine, 1999). 26. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 182. 27. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 57. 28. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: Morrow, 1994), 39. 29. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1959), 16. 30. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 204.

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31. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 204. 32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 49–50. 33. Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (New York: Norton, 1950). 34. Freud, The Question, 16; Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Knopf, 1982). 35. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 314. 36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Values (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 34.

Conclusion

The reader who has got this far may be inclined to conclude that the only lesson to be drawn from history is confusion about the meaning of teaching. Certainly, there is no easy consensus that emerges from the previous pages but there are lessons to be learned. Perhaps the most important lesson is that history is not a straight line of progress and that the relation between teaching and learning remains problematic. The purpose of engaging a variety of writers from other times and other places is not to find confirmation of what the reader already thinks. It is rather to make the reader aware that there may be other ways of seeing the issue that are worth considering. Sometimes undergraduates who are assigned to read classic texts only want to read what agrees with their opinions. That attitude could always be found among students, but it seems more prevalent today. A history, literature, or philosophy instructor finds it difficult to convince students that encountering writers you do not agree with has great educational potential. This book has raised questions about the meaning of “teach.” A difficulty in this inquiry is that in contemporary language “teach” seems to be a clear idea. Teaching is what teachers do. The teachers are people who have a certain kind of training in working with young people in places called schools. Their job is thought to be one of transmitting the knowledge that they possess to the students in their charge. While the teacher needs skill and various methods to succeed, the process does not seem mysterious. Of course, everyone recognizes that the teacher sometimes fails to transmit the knowledge. One thing that all of the authors discussed in this book agree upon is that no one can transmit knowledge to another. Numerous other writers agree. If they are right, then society at large expects the people called teachers to do 163

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the impossible. The teachers themselves may come to suspect that what is expected of them cannot be done. Some classroom instructors may decide that their survival depends on dismissing the paradoxes of Plato and the puzzles of Wittgenstein. In much of educational literature there seems to be an unspoken agreement not to bring up the question of the possibility of teaching. Raising doubts that anyone can teach anything to anybody is not helpful for the morale of people who are called to teach. Asking what it means to teach is taken to be a distraction from practical questions, such as how to teach tenth-grade geometry. What would help the people who are called teachers is that people who do not think of themselves as teachers would recognize that the question of teaching applies to them. The discussion of classroom teaching in relation to other forms of teaching has to include the teaching by parents, politicians, artists, business leaders, physicians, athletes, and others.

TEACHING AS SHOWING HOW Teaching is a fundamental activity of all human beings and at least some other animals. Etymologically and historically, “teaching” is showing someone how to live, including how to die. (Rousseau recognized what all religious traditions have known: teach people how to die or they will never learn how to live).1 A human community does that through a wide range of its representatives. For society to ask a few people who work with youngsters in schools to be the teachers is an impossible burden to lay on any group. For beginning an inquiry on teaching, Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most helpful of the authors I have considered. Wittgenstein has nothing to say about school teaching but much to say about how human beings learn because they are taught. For Wittgenstein, there is no point in trying to define the word “teach,” but it is helpful to explore how the word emerges in a person’s life. The human animal is born with few if any instincts but with a capacity and readiness to learn. As Rousseau said, everything not given by birth has to be given by education. The infant responds to being taught. From the first moments of life, teaching-learning is a relation of giving and receptiveness. It becomes a fully dialogical relation as soon as the infant can express the rudiments of human speech. The fundamental form of speech in teaching is choreography, that is, direct and precise instruction on how to move the body. Good teachers know when to say “push” or “move your hand an inch further.” A good teacher can break down an activity into “executable commands.” That is, the teacher must know exactly what to say and when to say it.2

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Teaching-learning between human beings can be broken down into four steps: (1) student acts, (2) teacher contemplates the act, (3) teacher proposes modifying the act, and (4) student tries out the proposed change. The sequence can be repeated indefinitely forming a circular movement. The student’s response helps to teach the teacher what is the next step in teaching. Interestingly, the term “instruct,” which is used for direct, bodily commands, reappears in classroom teaching when bodily commands are all but suspended and the mind is the focus. A classroom instructor has to consider what can be learned about instruction from a parent teaching a child to eat at the table or put on his shoes. “Executable commands” are not just for infants. Every teacher of ballet, baseball, or baton twirling knows that teaching involves training the inherent learning ability of the student through precisely guided instruction and then repetition of the action. Modern educational literature not only neglects drill, training, and memorization but tends to attack them as the enemy. The word memory is usually preceded by the adjective rote. A basketball student’s reluctance to spend hours practicing foul shots may be understandable. But educational literature’s disparagement of training, repetition, and memory is an overreaction to misuse of these practices. George Steiner has often pointed to the absence of learning “by heart” as one of the greatest weaknesses of modern education.3 Books on teaching simply announce that training is not a part of teaching. It is assumed that teaching is explaining or giving reasons. As soon as children can understand explanations, they should indeed be given reasons, but reasoning is never more than a part of teaching. Instead of a conveyance of reasons or ideas, teaching-learning is always a bodily encounter in which the teacher shows someone how to do something. In a classroom, the doing something usually refers to speaking and writing, public behavior that a teacher can contemplate and then suggest how the action can be improved. Fundamental human activities, including standing, walking, talking, eating, and bathing are learned early in life because other human beings have taught the learner by example. Sometimes the giving of example is intended, more often it is not. The child, who has become comfortable at creeping, first stands up because the physical and social environment says, “if you wish to live in this humanly arranged world, you have to learn to perform this action.” When a child is learning to walk, the teacher is likely to be an appreciative observer who says a few words and provides a safe and encouraging environment. Humans have innate talents that can be developed by teaching. The teacher may have less of a particular talent than the student does. Most good athletic coaches were not the best athletes. They were often second-stringers who had the opportunity to study the game and the players while sitting on the bench.

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The best athletes know that they can always learn to be better at what they do; they are willing to be taught. I often wonder what reaction Tiger Woods’s coach gets when asked: “What do you do for a living?” Answer: “I teach golf to Tiger Woods.” Even if you are unarguably the best in the world at what you do, you can be taught to improve your performance. Almost certainly, Tiger Woods’ most important teacher of golf was his father; the teacher was obviously not as talented as the student. As is true of most cynical slogans, the saying “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” has an element of truth. One of the worst assumptions in modern education is that teaching is only for children. I noted in the introduction that the literature of adult education has actually reinforced this bias. The mark of an adolescent is to think that he or she no longer needs to be taught. Thus, much of the writing on education suggests an adolescent culture in which individuals no longer need good example, intellectually stimulating conversation, and occasional corrective criticism. The ideal of adulthood is a projection of this adolescent attitude: Since I am a healthy, rational, self-sufficient individual, I am beyond the need for being taught.

LANGUAGES OF TEACHING4 Teaching-learning begins at least as early as birth and continues at least until death (I have occasionally been challenged by religious believers when I have limited the span from birth to death). I have often marveled at the work of physical therapists as they teach people who are physically disabled or who are very old. The therapist is precise in commands based on knowledge of the human body. The learner has to cooperate and be willing to repeat an action hundreds of times. The physical therapist exemplifies a form of teaching that was pointed out by many ancient writers. It is not an accident that the physician came to be called “doctor” or teacher. Therapy is one of the first forms of teaching (“mommy will kiss it and make it better”) and, if we are fortunate, it will be one of the last. Therapy in human life involves a “family” of therapeutic languages, forms of speech that are directed at healing.5 Throughout our lives, teachers praise, forgive, console, comfort, and otherwise try to heal the hurts that can obstruct learning. In contrast to these therapeutic languages, a second family of languages can be called rhetorical. In this family of languages, teachers say with more or less directness how the world is and what human nature is. Story telling, preaching, and lecturing are rhetorical languages that are appropriate for teaching when the conditions are right. The stories that last for generations are about human destiny but leave room for the individual to decide where he or she fits in the big picture. When

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an adult composes stories for children, the adult often makes the “moral” of the story too obvious. W. H. Auden writes that “there are books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.”6 Most adults have had the excruciating experience of sitting through a movie aimed at children, as opposed to a movie that the adult and child can appreciate at different levels. We are taught by stories throughout our lives. What is learned as a child in school should be a help to appreciating the stories that can nourish the imagination and intellect. The trouble with standard textbooks is that they have no texts, no artistic, idiosyncratic, surprising crafting of language that would lead a reader to cherish the book. Preaching and lecturing are closely related rhetorical languages. Both are effective only if the teacher has carefully prepared what is to be said and the learner has chosen to share in this instance of teaching-learning. One often hears the criticism that a speaker is “preaching to the choir” but that is exactly who should be preached to, that is, an audience that shares the beliefs of the preacher and wishes to know the implications of those beliefs. Outside that context, preaching is boring or insulting. Our main preachers are politicians whose text of belief may be the U.S. Constitution, the Republican platform, or House Bill 250-17. Most politicians today are not very good at preaching because they seem ashamed to preach. They even leave the composition of the speech to someone else. Can anyone imagine a team of speech writers assembling Lincoln’s Second Inaugural? Sermons can shade into lectures, but a lecturer is allowed a wider circle of belief that is shared with an audience. Lecturers, like preachers, ought to take plenty of time to prepare. Most of us are not up for delivering a worthwhile lecture (or listening to a lecture) more than a few times a year. The speakers who “have lecture, will travel” are only in the entertainment business. The audience for a real lecture has to share with the speaker an appreciation for words well crafted and expertly delivered. A lecturer relies on facts and tries to persuade the listeners by his or her arguments. With today’s media, sermons and lectures are more important than ever; the Internet has not killed spoken and written words. But as Plato found with writing and Martin Luther with the printing press, the instrument for spreading the word can increase the quantity of the teaching at the expense of the quality. We have more than enough talk but not enough high quality preaching and lecturing. Rhetorical languages and therapeutic languages are languages of teaching from infancy onward. Every parent both soothes and sermonizes, adjusting the language for age, past performance, and dozens of environmental conditions. Later in life, friends, coworkers and public figures largely replace the

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parents, although one can find ninety-year-olds preaching to their seventyyear-old children. While therapeutic language is still obviously related to the choreographing of the body, rhetorical language can seem to be a teaching by words alone. Humans share with other animals a teaching in which adults show the young how to survive. Nonhuman animals have their own language to demonstrate activities of finding food or spreading one’s wings to fly. Humans seem to be the only earthlings who can abstract language from the body and choreograph speech itself. This power of abstract thought and abstract speech is the great achievement of the humans and their greatest danger. Abstract language is a force for good or ill. The classroom within the school is invented for one, very unusual kind of teaching-learning. The classroom is a padded cell in which to play with the power of language. Rhetorical or therapeutic languages are not appropriate for the main language of academic teaching. Of course, since both the wouldbe teacher and the potential learner are human, some of those languages are part of the classroom mix. Academic teaching cannot work if physical or psychic hurts are blocking the way. And classroom order and course management require some firm rhetorical directives. Conditions for classroom instruction are seldom ideal. A little therapy may be needed to create an open atmosphere. A sermon or lecture may be needed for basic orientation, but if so it should be less than a minute in length. I would wager that most third-graders can recognize that the main classroom teaching should be neither therapy nor preaching. What then is the nature of academic language? In one respect, it pushes beyond rhetorical language to be not only abstract language but abstract language that bends back on itself. In contrast to rhetorical language, which is aimed at changing bodily behavior, academic speech is limited to changing speech. The classroom is mainly for talk about talk. But the speech in the classroom returns to the bodily roots of speech, which is why it is called instruction. The meaning of a word, as Wittgenstein many times said, is found in examining how it is used, that is, the bodily, communal, practical performance of language. Academic teaching is not pulling ideas out of students’ heads; it is rather a conversation in which the words help to give birth to ideas. A main characteristic of academic language should be ironic humor. The teacher is not earnestly leading the student to the desired answer. Where the conversation goes is not completely under the control of the teacher; the results are unpredictable. The student, as I indicated above, takes the first step in teaching-learning. In a classroom that usually means speaking or writing. The teacher’s main

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question is “What do you mean?” What the teacher has to contemplate is how the student’s speaking and writing can be improved by connecting the words to the history and geography of the language. The history is the etymology and how the word has been used. The geography refers to current conditions of its usage. Academic teaching is the providing of a use of speech that helps the student to join a human conversation and articulate his or her wellgrounded views of a subject. A scholar, writes Northrop Frye, “lays down his hand and remains dummy, so to speak, while the reader plays it.” Especially in the university, teaching gets confused with doing scholarly research. All academic teaching presupposes study and research by the teacher, but acting as a scholar and as a teacher is not the same. University professors are inclined to tell students what they know instead of engaging in a structured conversation in which the teacher’s greater knowledge will help the student to go on in his or her own way.7 To teach is to show someone how to do something. In a classroom, the showing how is mainly linguistic. Try out this way of speaking that the teacher exemplifies and advocates; see if it produces greater understanding. The classroom teacher should be a passionate advocate—but only of linguistic clarity and depth. The connection between the words and the student’s ideas remains under the student’s control. A conversation in depth about history, poetry, or physics may produce beliefs in a student different from the teacher’s. If there is factual error, the teacher has to point that out or lead the student to recognize it. In the vast majority of cases, however, differences between people are differences of interpretation. Since no language captures the whole truth, differing opinions may both be right or at least neither is completely wrong. The successful academic instructor neither expects nor desires that every student will emerge with ideas and beliefs that are identical with the teacher’s. This whole process of talking about talk may seem suited only for graduate students in linguistics or communication theory. Actually, seven-year-olds are often better at this game than university students who have spent many hours being lectured at. The child can still be excited by words and enthusiastic about what words can do. The child cannot grasp theories that require Piaget’s “formal operations” but, as Rousseau said, the child is quite capable of reasoning about “immediate and palpable interests.” Rousseau, however, had a strange block when it came to the child’s ability to understand one or several languages.8 A young child who is treated with respect can engage in academic conversations that unlock the power of language. I suggested in chapter 1 that Socrates can lead us astray. His dazzling discourse has made him a dominant figure in the history of education. Socrates

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is the master of asking probing questions and of getting people to recognize that their supposed knowledge is just mere opinions. A Socratic method is often understood to be a tactic of drawing out answers from the student instead of putting answers in. Teaching of this kind, however, is concerned with ideas that presuppose a world of bodily and communal teaching. I argued that to get a full picture of teaching-learning we have to listen to Socrates and his much maligned opponents, the Sophists. To Socrates’ claim that he could not find a teacher of virtue, Protagoras, the Sophist, replies: “You are spoiled Socrates, because all are teachers of virtue, insofar as each is able, and none is apparent to you.”9 Socrates may be right that the Sophists were corrupt because they took money for selling knowledge. Nonetheless, Protagoras recognized that the teaching of virtue or excellence is the work of a community in which everyone teaches “insofar as each is able.” In chapter 2, the difference between Socrates and Protagoras is reflected in the disagreement between Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For Augustine as a Platonist, God is the teacher who puts ideas into the soul; no human should be called teacher. In contrast, Thomas has every creature participating in divine creativity; everyone and everything is capable of teaching. In contemporary educational writing, Augustine’s view is easy to recognize; but if one takes account of all forms of teaching-learning in the world, Thomas has the better case. These two thinkers represent the ultimate choice for the possibility of teaching: When teaching is limited to an individual trying to transfer knowledge, teaching is not possible; when teaching-learning is basic to human and nonhuman life, everything is a potential teacher. Rousseau and Wittgenstein agree that teaching begins in infancy with the training that every young animal requires. The physical environment shares in the teaching of a child. Tradition and the present community introduce the child to the range of human practices. Language and reason only slowly emerge from within human nature’s bodily experience. Reason and rational discourse become central in specifically human teaching. Teaching-learning continues throughout a human’s lifetime but always on the ground of bodily performance. The only author examined here who practically equates teaching and school teaching is John Dewey. He does not state that equation but, given what has happened in the last 150 years, Dewey’s failure to clearly affirm other kinds of teaching, results in his laying the burden of teaching on schoolteachers. That explains Dewey’s impatience with the school as cut off from “real-life experience,” and his subsequent criticism of his would-be disciples who thought that children should just have “experiences” rather than be taught. Dewey constantly complained about the classroom being a special place and speaking a language that is not found elsewhere.10 Since then, partly under

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Dewey’s influence, the walls came tumbling down. The result is more difficulty for the classroom teacher. What should be a privileged space and time where a special kind of teaching occurs is often overwhelmed by the outside world. The school should not be isolated from the rest of life but classroom teaching should be a clearly distinct form of teaching that complements other forms of teaching. In addition to the five chapters on historical figures, I have included two chapters on specific problems: moral education and religious education. These two chapters might seem out of place. They do interrupt my story line, but I have included them precisely because they do not fit within the modern school curriculum. That fact is what makes them revelatory of the problem with “teach” as a whole. A serious grappling with moral education and religious education would force recognition of the need for different languages and different forms of teaching. That means on the one hand the clear recognition of teaching that is other than classroom teaching and on the other hand the affirming of a distinct form of teaching for the classroom. Classroom teaching in the areas of moral education and religious education would be an utterly crucial but very narrow part of the whole task of teaching. At present, there is not even an agreement on what those two forms of classroom teaching should be called. Teaching outside the classroom gets little attention while the classroom’s role is comprehensive but vague. Moral education’s problem with “teach” is based on a suspicion that teaching is itself not quite moral. The activity of teaching, which would otherwise be a violation of personal autonomy, is allowed to be practiced on children who are not yet ready to think for themselves. Durkheim’s schoolteacher as high priest of society’s rules does not have many takers today. Starting with Piaget, moral education was given over to psychology; the answer for moral education was looked for in the development of reasoning about moral rules. Teachers should keep out of the way. After a few decades in which Kohlberg had supposedly discovered that moral reasoning was sufficient to produce a morally educated person, the reaction of “character education” has tried to turn back the clock. Its concern with the “whole person” has possibilities, but the literature is fuzzy about teaching. Character education, like other kinds of moral education needs a clear distinction between the many forms of moral teaching, one of which is classroom instruction. Lacking distinctions the whole of moral education can end up in the classroom but without the schoolteacher’s part being circumscribed. When we are unsure of something fitting in the classroom curriculum, we nervously attach the word education to it (sex education, drug education, environmental education, physical education, moral education), which only further weakens the subject.

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For example, we ask schoolteachers to teach “sex education” which makes no logical sense and causes unending disputes. We should ask: What part of a person’s sexual education should academic teaching deal with and what is that subject called? More than a hundred years of arguing over “sex education” has not clarified what the question is.11 Moral education, which overlaps but does not subsume sexual education, likewise remains cloudy as to what part of a person’s moral education should be taught in the classroom and what the subject is called. The term ethics is available as the possible name for an academic subject, but moral education literature does not often refer to the teaching of ethics. Religious education is even more confusing and contentious than moral education. The need for some distinctions about teaching is the more urgent. The solution in the United States has been to declare the whole area out of bounds for a public education. In some countries “religious education” is the name of a school subject, which is no more logical than “moral education” as the name for what can be taught in a classroom. Religious education, like moral education, begins at birth and at least some elements continue for everyone until death. Whether or not one practices religion (devotion) one’s education is incomplete without knowledge and understanding of religions (the historical and social phenomena). No one should be subjected to the teaching of religious practices unless he or she has some choice in the matter. Parents substitute for that choice when the child is very young. While parents necessarily teach by example and instruction, the direction should still allow a personal choice later in life by the young person. There should be a place for a thoughtful and knowledgeable examination of religion as a phenomenon and religions as historic realities. The classroom is the logical place for an intelligent conversation on the matter. Academic teaching-learning should be shielded from political passions and charged emotions. A student picking up numerous facts about all the religions of the world is not the same as, for example, asking why there has been such conflict between Christian and Jewish religions, or how a form of Christian religion intertwines with a religious meaning of “America.” A serious examination of religion as it impinges on student’s lives may not be politically feasible in most places. But the denial that religion can be taught reveals an assumption that classroom instruction is simply preaching. Teachers of every school subject have a stake in the legitimacy of teaching ethics and teaching religion. The frequent reference to something as “merely academic” is an insult to classroom teachers. I noted earlier that Wittgenstein’s assertion that talk about talk “leaves everything as it is” applies to the immediate situation. Classroom teaching is a suspension of everyday concerns for the purpose of narrowing

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the mind on to a few words. But academic teaching that can change how questions are asked has unpredictable results that frighten people whose power depends on not asking questions outside preestablished lines. These people’s dismissal of the “merely academic” is a way of saying that academic teaching is not “real life.” They prefer to have reality defined by generals, CEOs, or political leaders. Academic teaching is the potentially revolutionary practice of questioning the assumptions of what is called real.

TEACHING-LEARNING The most important question about teaching is whether it is continuous with learning or whether teaching and learning are two separate activities. The significance of this question may not be immediately apparent. What is the difference between saying “I taught them but they did not learn” and “I tried to teach them but they did not learn (that)?” In the first case, teach and learn function independently. Teaching does not guarantee learning; and it seems obvious that people can learn without being taught. In the second case, teaching and learning are necessarily connected. I tried to teach, but since I did not succeed at teaching, they did not learn; at least they did not learn what I was trying to teach. Some authors think there is no problem in speaking both ways.12 More often, it is assumed that people who think there is a continuity of teaching and learning are confused. They have mistaken a “task” word for an “achievement” word. Teaching is sometimes used for learning (the achievement) and therefore people talk about the performance of the task as if it were the achievement.13 John Passmore writes: “It is a very important fact that there can be learning where no one teaches.”14 But this is not a question of fact. It is a question of what Wittgenstein calls grammar, which in this case underlies a whole worldview. The assumption that teach and learn are separate and only contingently related identifies teaching with what a human individual called the teacher does. In this view of the world, it is obvious that the teacher sometimes fails to convey, instill or transmit what the teacher intends to convey, instill, or transmit. It is also obvious that people learn when there is no teacher in the vicinity. The main setting assumed for this conjunction of teacher and learner is a classroom. The alternative worldview is one in which teaching-learning is fundamental and constant for living beings. From the first moment of life, animals survive because they learn and they learn by being taught. Humans have a wider range of learning possibilities than other animals. Human speech becomes

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central to teaching, but to be effective it has to involve a human body in a physical, historical, and social environment. Passmore is right in one respect: Learning may occur where no one teaches because the learning occurs where a community or physical environment does the teaching. Most teaching, in fact, is done that way. A legitimate question that can be addressed to anyone who claims to be a teacher is: What community do you represent? An individual human teacher comes with a cloud of witnesses, both living and dead. In a Peanuts cartoon, Lucy says she has taught Snoopy to whistle. Charlie Brown says he has never heard Snoopy whistle. Lucy replies: I said I taught him to whistle, not that he learned. The joke is obvious. In teaching someone to whistle, walk, swim, use a fork, tie a shoelace, ride a bicycle, and hundreds of similar activities the teacher and learner are engaged in a common activity. They succeed together or they fail together. No one comes into the living room and announces: I taught Jimmy to ride the bicycle, but he did not learn. How then explain that the students in a classroom do not always learn what the teacher teaches? The students in a classroom are constantly learning, but the teacher at that moment may not be the person at the front of the room. More precisely, what is learned may not be what the person at the front of the room intends to teach. Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas point out that there is always a gap between the intention of the individual teacher and the learning. When the learning is a physical skill, the gap is filled by physical actions. When spoken words are the medium of teaching, the teacher can shorten the gap between intention and learning but some gap remains. The experienced teacher knows that more and more talking will not entirely fill the gap. Clear and pointed speech is a main way to fill the gap; so are the physical movements of a teacher, the comfort of a chair, the fresh air in the room, the time of day, and other factors that a person may hardly be aware of. Each of those teachers closes or widens the gap between the individual’s intention to teach and the learning of the student. An institution’s reward system may be a more powerful teacher than the words of an instructor within the institution. A person’s behavior may be teaching something that the person does not intend to teach. When the potential learner does not learn what someone is intending to teach, the task of a would-be teacher is to find out who the teacher is and what is being taught. A schoolteacher has to engage the teaching-learning already in play. The schoolteacher may see this approach as subverting his or her work. But school teaching would be enhanced by opening up a dialogue with other teachers, starting with parental teachers and moving on to all the other teachers, both human and nonhuman. Recognition of these other teachers would relieve schoolteachers of all the other forms of teaching-learning that a school

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is not equipped to handle. They could concentrate on engaging students in a conversation that can change the way both teacher and student experience the world.

NOTES 1. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 42, 82, 131. 2. Richard Burton, John Brown, and Gerhard Fischer, “Skiing as a Model of Instruction,” in Everyday Cognition, ed. Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave “ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 139–50. 3. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 107; Lessons of the Masters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 4. For a detailed exposition of the languages of teaching, see Gabriel Moran, Showing How: The Act of Teaching (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1997), 83–145. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 66, 31. 6. Gareth Matthews, Philosophy of Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 103. 7. Northrop Frye, The Great Code (New York: Harvest Books, 2002), xv. 8. Rousseau, Emile, 73–74, 108–9. 9. Plato, Protagoras, 327e. 10. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 14; Democracy and Education, (New York: Free Press, 1966), 8, 38. 11. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 186–211. 12. Elliot Eisner, Educational Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 158. 13. The language comes from Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), 149–52. 14. John Passmore, The Philosophy of Teaching (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1980), 24.

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Index

Abington School District v. Schemmp, 139, 140, 177 adult education, attitude to teaching, ix, 166 allegory of the cave, 17 Amendment, First, 125–28 American Council on Education, 128, 129, 139, 178 animals, as teachers, 89; education and, 155, 173 Apollo, 21 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas Arendt, Hannah, 22n18 Aristotle, and Augustine, 29; and Protagoras, 10; and Thomas Aquinas, 39; ethics in, 11; practical knowledge in, 22; virtue in, 111 Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 177 Auden, W. H., 167 Augustine, 23–36; as theologian, 23; ascent as metaphor in, 32–33; Christian Teaching of, 34–36; City of God of, 24; concept of will in, 26–27; Confessions of, 26; denial of teaching in, 37–39; friendshp as theme in, 28–29; healing as metaphor in, 31; interpretation in, 29–30; metaphors for teaching in,

30–33; relation to modern philosophy, 24; Rousseau and, 55–57; styles of preaching in, 34–35; The Teacher of, 36–38; Thomas Aquinas and, 39–43; two loves in, 24 authority, Dewey and, 90; Durkheim and, 99; Piaget and, 102–3; religion and, 123; religious and civil, 126 Bacon, Francis, 55 Baier, Annette, 119n46 Barth, Karl, and Emile, 63; theological rationalism of Rousseau, 60 Belenky, Mary, 22 Blanshard, Paul, 127 Boden, Margaret, 118n21 Bossy, John, 140n30 Boston School Committee, xv, 96 Bourne, Randolph, 92n44 Boyer, Peter, 140n38 Bringuier, Jean-Claude, 118n11 Brooks, Harriet, xiv Brown, Peter, 31 Bryan, William Jennings, 72 Burrell, David, 43 capacity, for knowledge, 8; in Dewey, 82; of mind in Plato, 18; Piaget and,

187

188

Index

101, 104; two kinds of, 42; Wittgenstein and, 164 Caputo, John, 44n50 Cavarero, Adriana, 22 Character Counts, 114, 115 character education, 106, 107, 111–17 Character Education Partnership, 114 Chardin, Pierre Teilhad de, 110 Chesterton, G. K., 147, 158, child, and curriculum, 75–83; as recipient of education, 78; Augustine and, 24; Durkheim and, 97–98; encounter with language, 152–53; excluded from education, 166; learning of, 165; physical punishment of, 52; Protagoras and, 7–19; Rousseau on, 48, 50–54 choreography, teaching as, 164 Christian Teaching, 25, 34 Christianity, conversion, 18; doctrine of orginal sin, 55–56; education, 124; influence on progressivism, 72; morality and, 97, 111; pity and, 60; religion and, 130–31 church: ambiguity of, 127; and religion 130; and state, 125–28; Catholic, 127; condemnation of Rousseau, 60; Dewey’s rebellion against, 73. See also Christianity City of God, 24, 25 civics, 116 Civilization and its Discontents, 48 Clark, Justice Tom, 133, 136 Clark, Mary, 44n50 Clement of Alexandria, 39 Comenius, Johannes, 9, 77 community, Aristotle and, 10; as teacher, 8, 164, 170; Christian, 38; Jewish, 32; professionals and, 5; religious, 109, 123; Rousseau and, 64; service, 17; tradition and, 89 compassion, 57, 99, 104, 110 Confessions of Augustine, 24, 26, 27, 31

conversion, ethical, 59; in Plato, 18; in Rousseau, 59; in Wittgenstein, 145; of the mind, 18 Copernicus, 151 Council of Europe, 137 Counts, George, 84, 85, 86 Cox, Harvey, 139n4 Cranston, Maurice, 64, 65 Cremin, Lawrence, 91, 92 culture, as adolescent, 166; conceptual puzzle of, 150; religion and, 124, 138 Curren, Randall, xviin3 curriculum, child and, 75–83; in Emile, 70; in Republic, 16–17; progressive schools and, 90; religion and, 134–36; report on, 76 Danford, John, 161 Danforth, John, 129, 132 death, education and, 164; Emile and, 57 DelFattore, Joan, 139n24, democracy, and culture, 150; Dewey and, 70; in Greece, 2; Piaget and, 103 Descartes, Rene, 24, 33, 144 development, educational, 50, 70 development, moral, in Kohlberg, 107–8; in Piaget, 101–2 Dewey, John, 67–90, and George Counts, 84–85; and William Jennings Bryan, 72; career of, 68; Child and Curriculum, 75–83; Democracy and Education, 68; description of teaching, 74, 81, 89; dialectical method of, 75, 77; experience, 78, 87–89; Experience and Education, 86–90; Hutchins and, 86; James and, 80; mother of, 72; Pedagogic Creed, 69; philosophy of education, 67; progressive movement and, 71; progressive schools, 86–87; psychology and, 79–80; religion and

Index

religious, 73; School and Society, 69; social aim of education, 70; teacher in, 68, 81; traditional education, 87; traditional school, 86; Thordike and, 80; women and, xviii; writing style of, 74 dialectic, in Dewey, 75, 77; in Rousseau, 55, 61 dialogue, about religious education, 138; Augustine’s use of, 28; between schoolteachers and other teachers, 174; in Augustine’s Teacher, 36–37; in Meno, 14; in Republic, 15–19; within a dialogue, 14 Diderot, 60, 97 Dionysius, 39 Donaldson, Margaret, 118n22, Dreisbach, Daniel, 139 Drinan, Robert, 129 Durkheim, Emile, 97–101; art and, 100–101; family and school in, 98–99; Froebel and, 100, Moral Education, 97–100; nation and, 100; Piaget’s criticism of, 102–3; schoolteachers and, 99; teaching as rational explanation, 99 economics, 70, 71, 80, 112, 115, 122, 135 Eden, Kathy, 44, 56 Edwards, James, 161n17 Eisner, Elliot, 161n22, 175n12 Elliot, Charles, 76 Emile, 50–64; age of reason in, 52; conflict of man and nature in, 55; criticism by Diane Ravitch, 49–50; criticism by Mary Wollstonecraft of, 62–63; death in, 57; Dewey’s reading of, 48–49; dialectic in, 55, 61; epigrams in, 47; ethics in, 57–59; habit in, 51; human nature and, 54–57; nature and, 55; patriotism in, 54; pity in, 57–58; punishment in, 51–52; Savoyard Vicar, 59; serving

189

humanity in, 58; Sophie and, 53, 55, 61–63; state of nature in, 56; tutor’s control, 53–54; two loves in, 56–57 Epictetus, 43, 108, 119 ethics, Aristotle’s, 11; in Emile, 57–58; modern dichotomy of, 58–59; teaching of, 117 experience, as relational, 88; child’s, 78; community, 10; in Emile, 49, 53–57 Experience and Education, 86–90 family, in character education, 115; of languages, 166; Plato and, 16–17; Rouseau and, 61, 64 Farnham-Diggory, Silvia, 92 forms, of education, 69; of life, 149; of speech, 35, 164, 166; of teaching 123–24, 171; Platonic, 8, 13, 20 foundationalism, 148 Fowler, Barton, 84 Freud, Sigmund, 48, 80, 103, 158, 159 friendship, in Augustine, 27–29, 31; in Emile, 63–64 Frye, Northrop, 169 Gadamer, H. G., 123, 139 Gautama, 58, 69 gender, 62, 117 gift, 11, 12, 26, 157 Gilligan, Carol, 104, 110 Goff, Jacques, 22 Goldberg, Justice Arthur, 133, 134, 136 Gore, Al, 114 Gorgias, 4, 10, 11, 13, 20, 42 gospel, 37, 72, 131 Graham, Patricia, 92n47 grammar, 153, 154, 155, 173 Great Books Program, 86, 87 Gregory of Nyssa, 39 Guthrie, W. R., 22 habit, Aristotle and, 20, 22n33; Kohlberg and, 112, 119n42; Rousseau and 49, 51

190

Index

Hall, G. Stanley, 76, 77 Hamburger, Philip, 139n12 Harper, William Rainey, 139n3 Harris, William Torrey, 76 healing, as a language of teaching, 166; Augustine and, 31, 36; Protagoras and, 10; Thomas Aquinas and, 42 Hearne, Vicki, 161n25 Herbart, Johann, 69 Higgins, Ann, 119 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 113 Hippocrates, 10 Hofstadter, Richard, 81, 92 Hutchins, Robert, 86, 92, 93 Illich, Ivan, 135, 140 indoctrination, George Counts’ advocacy of, 85; Kohlberg acceptance of, 108–9; religious use of, 123–24; school teaching and, 136 irony, Augustine’s use of, 30; in classroom teaching, 168; nature of, 3–4; of Dewey’s criticism of Rousseau, 49; Rousseau and, 53; Socratic, 3 Jackson, Justice Robert, 128, 129 Jackson, Robert, 140n50 Jaeger, Werner, 3 James, William, 74 Jefferson, Thomas, 126, 128 Jenkins, John, 45n52 Jesus, as a teacher, 37–38; Dewey’s mother and, 72; feeding as metaphor, 30; original sin and, 26; Rousseau and, 60 Jews, 122, 127, 128, 151 Johns Hopkins University, 74, 139 Johnson, F. Ernest, 128, 134, 135, 140 Josephson, Michael, 120 justice, community and, 109; development toward, 108; in Kohlberg, 110; in Piaget, 102; in Republic, 17, 20; in Rousseau, 58;

school’s mission of, 106; Thrasymachus and, 15 Kant, Immanuel, 58, 59, 60, 101, 103 Katz, Michael, xviiin19, 117n3 Kenny, Anthony, 45n50 Kerferd, G. B., 22 Kerr, Fergus, 161 Kilpatrick, William, 120n61 Kilpatrick, William Heard, 83–84 King, James, 4, 22n10 Kliebard, Herbert, 91, 92 knowledge, as innate, 13, 14; Augustine and, 24, 26; capacity for, 18, 26, 41, 42; forgotten, 14; foundations of, 148, 158; ignorance and, 3; inner, 36; love and, 27; making, 74; practical, 20; religious, 132; Sophists and, 10; teacher’s, 79, 81; Thomas Aquinas and, 43; Tractatus and, 144; transmission of, 74, 81, 89, 163 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 105–11; habit and, 112; indoctrination in, 109; just community and, 109; Piaget and, 101, 105–6; seventh stage, 109–10; stage four and a half, 108; universality of stages, 107–8; virtue, 106–7. Lagemann, Ellen, 80 language, academic, 168–69; behavior and, 160; families of, 166; in Augustine, 38; in Republic, 19; knowledge of, 14; logic and, 104–5; metaphors for, 155–56; of education, 69; of religious education, 121, 123, 132; of teaching, 154, 166–69; paradoxes of, 149–53; rhetorical, 167–68; therapeutic, 166 Larson, Edward, 91 Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sarah, xviiin20 lecture, as rhetorical language, 167; Dewey’s, 83; in Middle Ages, 73; in nineteenth century, 74; in the

Index

university, 74, 145; Wittgenstein and, 145 Lickona, Thomas, 111, 115–16; character education and, 111, 115–17; family in, 115; objective morality and, 116; responsibility and, 115 Lilla, Mark, 65 Locke, John, 52, 60, 77 Luther, Martin, 130, 167 Madison, James, 126 Martin, Jane, 62 Martin, Jay, 75 mathematics, Augustine and, 26; in Meno, 14; in Republic, 17; religion and, 132; Wittgenstein and, 144–45 Matthews, Gareth, 175 Meeks, Wayne, 44 memory, in Augustine, 26; in Jewish tradition, 32; in Plato, 13–14; in teaching, 165; teacher present in, 89 Mencken, H. L., 72, 74 Meno, 13, 14, 26, 42, 109 metaphor, cultivating plant as, 9; feeding as, 30; foundation as, 148; healing as, 10; in Augustine, 30–31; in Dewey, 79; in Piaget, 102; in Rousseau, 9; in Thomas Aquinas, 42; mothering as, xiv; of church and state, 125; Protagoras’ use of, 9; Socratic, 21; wall of separation as, 127; Wittgenstein and, 147, 155–56. midwife, 20, 21 money, character education movement and, 115; for teaching, 12, 13; professionals and, 5; Socrates and, 3, 11; Sophists and, 3, 10, 11, 170; value and, 114. Monk, Ray, 160n5, 161n8 Montessori, Maria, 100, 101 morality, character education and, 111, 116–17; Durkheim and, 97–99; Kohlberg’s stages of , 107;

191

nineteenth century and, 116; objective, 116; Piaget’s stages of, 101-02; teaching of, 95, 109; U.S. schools and, 96. Moran, Gabriel, 139n25, 141n54, 65n20, 175n4 Moran, Jeffrey, 175n11 mother, as teacher, xiv, xv, 157; Dewey and, 89–90; in Emile, 61; in Piaget, 103; in religious education, 123; of Dewey, 72; Protagoras and, 7 mothering, as metaphor xiv, 96 music, in Plato, 16; in Wittgenstein, 156 mysticism, Kohlberg and, 110; Wittgenstein and, 144 myth, human nature and, 27; of cave, 17; of classes in society, 16; of mother as teacher, 157; of social contract, 56 National Educational Association, 77 natural development, 48 natural religion, 60 nature, age of 52; conflict with man, 55; following, 44, 77; habit and, 51; human, 54–57; state of, 56 Nehamas, Alexander, 2, 4, 6 Neoplatonism, 23, 32, 33 New York Times, 120, 130, 139 Newton, Isaac, 59 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 2, 6, 60, 130, 146, 157 Nussbaum, Martha, 119, 125, 127, 133 O’Connor, Justice Sandra Day, 132 Oakshott, Michael, 20 Orestes, 21 original sin, in Augustine, 24, 26; in Calvin, 55; in Rousseau, 55, 56 parents, as teachers, 7, 89–90, 115–16, 157; character education and, 115–16; Dewey and, 89; Durkheim on, 72, 98; Emile and Sophie as,

192

Index

63–64; Piaget’s criticism of, 103; school and, 115, 152; teachers and, 68 Parker, Francis, 76, 77 Passmore, John, 173, 174, 175 patriotism, 54 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 44 Pells, Richard, 92 Pericles, 8 Pestalozzi, Johannes, 69 Peters, R. S., 22, 161 Philosophical Investigations, 24, 43, 144, 145 physicians, 10, 16, 51, 164 Piaget, Jean, 101–5; critics of, 104–5; Durkeim and, 103; Kant and, 103; Kohlberg and, 101, 105–6; logic and language, 104; Moral Judgment of the Child, 101–5; rules in, 102; stages of moral development, 101–2 Pinker, Steven, 157 Pitkin, Hanna, 147, 156 pity, 57, 58, 60 Plato, 1–22; Apology of, 2–5; critics of, 1–2; curriculum of, 16–17; description of teaching in, 18; family and, 16–17; irony in, 2–4; justice and, 15; mathematics and, 17; middle works of, 13–19; Meno of, 14–15; midwifery in, 20–21; myth of the cave in, 17–19; philosopher-king in, 17; polis of, 15; Protagoras of, 5–11; Republic of, 15–19; Rousseau and, 47; teaching as medicine in, 9–10; trial of Socrates in, 1–2; virtue and, 6–7; women and, xiii, 16–17 Plotinus, 23, 32 politics, 13, 15, 24, 47, 48, 51, 52, 58, 59, 64, 70, 71, 80, 103, 112, 116, 122, 138 practice, Aristotle and, 20; of the classroom, 69, 77, 117; of a useful trade, 52; religious, 123, 125, 129, 132; theory and, 159–60 prayer, 38, 114, 121, 127, 129, 130

Priestly, Jack, 140 professional, in religious education, 137; prepared as, 134; schoolteacher as, xv–xviii, 68; skill in teaching, 18; sophists as, 5, 12 progressive education, 48, 67, 71, 83, 84, 85 Progressive Educational Association, 84 progressive movement, 71, 72, 83 Protagoras, 2, 4, 5–11, 15, 19, 22, 27, 31, 170 Prothero, Stephen, 132, 133, 138, 140 psychology, 2, 57, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 99, 101, 109, 131, 134, 171 purpose of education, in Dewey, 85; Enlightenment’s, 157; in Plato, 15; in Rousseau, 50, 61, 64 rabbi, 37 Raths, Louis, 120 rationalism, 6, 20, 60, 158 Ravitch, Diane, 49, 50, 53 religion, academic study of, 131, 172; Christian adoption of, 32; conceptual puzzle of, 150–51; Dewey and, 72–73; Enlightenment view of, 123; establishment of, 125–26; Kohlberg and, 110; morality and, 97, 99; natural, 59; religious and, 73; revealed, 60; Sophie’s, 61; teach about, 135; two meanings of, 130–33 religious education, and the public school, xii, 122, 128–33, 138; and the Supreme Court, 121; and teaching, 123, 128; British, 137–38; comprehenisve, 121–24; elements of, 132; Emile’s, 59–60; Sophie’s, 61; worldwide, 137–38 Religious Education Association, 122 Republic, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 32, 42, 47, 64, 65, 109, 117 Rest, James, 109, 119 revolution, conceptual puzzle of, 151; Dewey’s assumption of, 48; in ethics, 111; political, 48

Index

Rhees, Rush, 161 rhetoric, Augustine and, 34; character education’s, 115; inadequacy of, 13; styles of, 35–36 rhetorical lanaguages, 167 Roberts, Monty, 161n25 Robinson, Fiona, 119n46 Rogers, Carl, viii Rogers, Daniel, 91 Rothman, Sheila, xviiin14 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 47–64; Augustine and, 56–57; church condemnation of, 60; criticism by Diane Ravitch, 49–50; developmental theory of, 48; Dewey and, 48–49; dialectic and, 55, 61; Freud and, 48; Les Solitaires of, 64; natural religion in, 59–60; on death, 57; oppostion to original sin, 56; opposition to swaddling, 50; psychology of love in, 56–57; relation to John Locke, 52; Social Contract of, 47, 56; theological rationaslism of, 60; Wollstonecraft and, 62–63; woman’s rights movement and, 61–62; women and, xiii, 61–64 Rummel, Erika, 43 Ryan, Alan, 90n1 Ryan, Kevin, 119n49 Ryle, Gilbert, 22n33, 175n13 schools of education, 47, 61, 71 Scolnicov, Solomon, 5, 22 Scott, Gary Alan, 22, 184 separation of church and state, 125, 128 sexual education, 53, 97, 172 silence, 19, 60, 88, 129, 144, 145, 155, 158 Simon, Sydney, 120n54 social contract, 56 Social Contract, 47, 65 social Darwinism, 72 society, conflict with, 48, 55; Dewey and, 70; distractions of, 52;

193

individual and, 99–100; origin of, 56; Plato and, 15–16; reform of, 85; Rousseau and, 48; teachers and, 164 Socrates, 1–15; as teacher, 3–5; irony in, 3–4; lessons from, 2; midwife in 20–21; money and, 3, 10–12; sophists and, 3; teaching as gift in, 12–13; trial of, 2–3; Wittgenstein and, 157–58 Socratic method, 2 Soliloquies, 29, 44 Sophists, Aristotle and, 20; Augustine and, 31; criticism of, 3, 5–11; in Republic, 15; Nietzsche and, 6; Socrates and, xi, 3, 170 Steiner, George, 165, 175 Stoicism, and Kohlberg, 108, 110 Stoics, 27 story, Christian, 56; Genesis, 26,29; in Emile, 64; in teaching, 166–67; religious, 123 style, 28, 35, 59, 67, 74, 75, 143, 144 subject matter, 79, 84, 90, 95, 116, 131 Supreme Court, 121, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136 swaddling, 50 Symposium, 13, 19, 20 Taylor, Charles, 24 The Teacher, 24, 25, 34, 36, 37, 41 Teachers College, 68, 80, 83 ten commandments, 129 Theaetetus, 8, 20 theology, 23–25; Augustine as 23; teaching of, 133; Thomas Aquinas and, 39–40 Thomas Aquinas, 39–43; dialectical method of, 40; disagreement with Augustine, 39–41, 170; healing as a metaphor of teaching in, 42–43; philosophical themes of, 39–40; two potentialities in, 42; Wittgenstein and, 43, 174 Thorndike, Edward. 80 Thrasymachus, 15

194

Index

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 143–45 traditional education, 86, 87 training, animal, 155; as teaching, 153; child and, 165; habit and, 51; physical, 16–17; school and, 99 Truth, 39–43 Tyack, David, xviiin17, 92n40 United Nations, 138, 141 values, character education and, 111, 114; clarification, 113; economists and, 112; fact and, 112; family, 114; in the 1980s, 114; Kohlberg and, 106, 113 virtue, and value, 111–12; Aristotle and, 20; as habit, 20, 51; character education and, 114–15; Christian church and, 7; in Kohlberg, 106, 113; in Rousseau, 51; Socrates’ teaching of, 6, 8 Vlastos, Gregory, 3, 4, 6 Voltaire, 60, 97

Weber, Max, 91 Westbrook, Robert, 90, 91 Whitehead, Alfred North, 1 Williams, Stephen, 134 Wills, Garry, 25, 27, 37 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 143–60; Augustine and, 24; Cambridge University, 145; conceptual puzzles, 149–51; early and late, 143–45; foundationalism, 148; Freud and 158–59; grammar of teaching, 153–57; Logical Positivists and, 144–45; metaphors in, 154–55; mysticism and, 144; Philosophical Investigations, 145–57; practice and theorry in, 159–60 ; reactions to, 148; Rousseau and, 170; silence in, 144–45; Socrates and, 157–58; therapy in, 158–59; training and teaching in, 153–54 Wokler, Robert, 54, 65 Wollstonecraft, 62, 65 woman’s movement, 61, 62

About the Author

Gabriel Moran is the author of twenty previous books on education, community, and religion. Titles include: Showing How: The Act of Teaching; A Grammar of Responsibility; Uniqueness: Problem or Paradox in Jewish and Christian Traditions. He has been a professor at New York University for the past twenty-nine years where he has taught courses in the philosophy and history of education, international education, and religious education. He has lectured throughout the United States and in many other countries, including England, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Australia. He and his late wife, Maria Harris, coauthored several book and often taught together. Professor Moran splits his time between New York City and Montauk, Long Island.

195