The Adventure of Education Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research
VIBS Volume 204 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Harvey Cormier Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Daniel B. Gallagher Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling
Matti Häyry Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Peter A. Redpath Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višňovský Anne Waters James R. Watson John R. Welch Thomas Woods
a volume in Philosophy of Education PHED George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans, Editors
The Adventure of Education Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research
Edited by
Adam C. Scarfe
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2588-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands
CONTENTS ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
Introduction: The Adventure of Education Adam C. Scarfe 1. Who Was Whitehead? 2. Whitehead’s Articulation of the Analogy Between Education and Adventure 3. The Distinction Between Adventurous Teaching and the Mere Transmission of Inert Ideas 4. Adventure, the Vitality of Society, and Constructive Postmodernism 5. Adventure and the Rhythm of Education 6. The Context Surrounding the Origin of this Book 7. A Brief Synopsis of the Essays Contained in this Book The Missing Link: Whitehead and the Relation Between the Aesthetic and the Analytical in Education Pete A. Y. Gunter 1. The Problem of the Analytic and the Aesthetic in Whitehead’s Educational Theory 2. The Importance of Relating the Context and the Practical Significance of Curricula to Students 3. A Criticism of the Curriculum of the Contemporary University 4. Conclusion: A Challenge to Whiteheadians Helical Learning George Allan 1. Line, Circle, Helix 2. Civilized Virtues and Educational Stages 3. The Function of Art 4. Helical Learning 5. Educational Implications Education as a Process: Whitehead’s The Aims of Education Revisited Richard Penaskovic 1. Some Basic Themes in Whitehead’s Educational Theory 2. The Importance of Active Learning 3. Some Practical Whiteheadian Pedagogical Suggestions 4. Some Further Whiteheadian Observations
1 1 3 7 10 12 15 16
23
23 24 27 29 31 31 32 34 37 38
41 41 44 46 49
vi FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
CONTENTS The Importance of Big Ideas or How to Encourage Active Wisdom Marcus Ford 1. The Failure of Modern Universities to Focus on Big Ideas and to Promote Active Wisdom 2. The Three Forms of University: Civic, Research, and Entrepreneurial 3. Enter the Constructive Postmodern University 4. The Curriculum of the Whiteheadian University
53
53 54 56 59
Educating the Five-Minded Animal Bernie Neville 1. A Fractal Universe 2. The Rhythm of Life 3. Perception 4. The Flight of Discovery 5. Maturation 6. The Five-Minded Animal 7. The Evolution of Consciousness 8. Archaic Mind 9. Magic Mind 10. Mythic Mind 11. Mental Mind 12. Integral Mind 13. Conclusion
63
Steps to a Process Curriculum Hillel A. Schiller 1. A Cognetic Methodology and Basic Formative Processes 2. The Importance of Curiosity and the Imagination in the Educational Process 3. The Cognetic Process: An Antidote to Alienation 4. The Process of Contextual Perceiving 5. The Nature of Contextual Perceiving 6. Horizontal and Vertical Knowledge 7. The Three Perceptual Contexts 8. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy 9. The Extracted Fact and the Abstracted Fact 10. A Commentary Regarding the Nature of the Linguistic Symbol 11. Affordances
81
63 63 64 65 67 68 70 71 72 73 74 75 77
81 82 83 85 86 87 90 94 100 103 104
Contents 12. The Problem of the Ignorance of Scientific Knowledge 13. The AEIOU Curriculum Framework 14. Conclusion EIGHT
NINE
TEN
The Body as a Companion in Education: An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Notion of the Withness of the Body Jean-Marie Breuvart 1. Introduction 2. The Withness of the Body in Process and Reality 3. The Withness of the Body as Applied to Aesthetics 4. The Withness of the Body and Whitehead’s Educational Model 5. Education and Expression On Whitehead’s Thoughts Concerning Teaching, Learning, and the Way of Liberal Education Jean-Pascal Alcantara 1. Arendt and the Crisis in American Education 2. Liberal Education in Historical Context 3. The Three Characteristics of Liberal Education 4. The Usefulness of Liberal Education 5. Liberal Education’s Orientation in Respect to Time 6. Literature, Aesthetic Appreciation, and Whitehead’s Synthesis of Liberal and Technical Education 7. Conclusion: Some Further Metaphysical Reflections on the Meaning of Liberal Education Whitehead’s Prehending and Dewey’s Experimenting: Speculative Philosophy Versus Educational Theory in Twentieth Century One-Room Schoolhouses Kathleen Gershman 1. Introduction 2. Whitehead and Dewey 3. Prehending 4. Experimenting 5. Philosophical Commonalities 6. Concrescence Versus Growth 7. Relating Versus Cogitating in One-Room Schoolhouses
vii
106 107 112
117 117 117 119 121 123
127 127 128 131 131 132 135 137
139 139 139 141 141 142 143 144
CONTENTS
viii ELEVEN
TWELVE
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing: A Whiteheadian Perspective on Designing University Courses Robert Regnier 1. Brumbaugh’s Cosmic Vision: A Whiteheadian Framework for Learning as Valuing 2. Reductionism in Learning: Problems in Higher Education 3. The Notion of Value in Whitehead’s Cosmology 4. God in Learning as Valuing: The Primordial Lure and the Consequent Reality 5. Space and Time in Learning as Valuing 6. Transformative Praxis: Valuation in Course Redesign 7. Conclusion The Problem of the Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research: Whiteheadian Solutions Adam C. Scarfe 1. Academic Research as Interpretable Through Whitehead’s Theory of the Rhythm of Education and the Problem of the Overemphasis on Precision 2. Putting Romance and Generalization Back Into Research 3. The Teacher-Scholar Model, Research-Intensiveness, and the Bifurcation of Teaching and Research in the Academy 4. A Whiteheadian Conception of the Logical Contrast Between Researching and Teaching 5. The Integration of Learning, Teaching, and Research 6. The Relevance of Whitehead’s Theory of Prehensions to a Balanced Conception of Academic Research 7. Romance and the Research Process: Wonder, Curiosity, and Imagination 8. Precision and the Research Process: Analysis, Criticism, and Selectivity 9. Generalization and the Research Process: Connectedness, Synthesis, and Speculation 10. Conclusion: Research as Intellectual Adventure
147
147 150 153 156 158 160 165
169
169 173
174 178 185 188 189 195 202 208
About the Contributors
213
Index
217
ONE INTRODUCTION: THE ADVENTURE OF EDUCATION Adam C. Scarfe 1. Who Was Whitehead? Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), a chief originator of process-relational thought, was an eminent twentieth century mathematician, logician, philosopher of science, speculative philosopher, and educator. He is perhaps most widely known for his work with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910-1913). Whitehead’s intellectual interests turned to the philosophy of education while he was a professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. From 1910 to 1924, he published ten addresses and two essays on education. Many of these works were compiled into the books, The Aims of Education (1929) and Essays in Science and Philosophy (1941). In developing his process-relational philosophy of education, Whitehead relied on his own insights stemming from a wide experience in education, having taken on roles as a teacher and professor proper, as an official inspector, and as a chairman of various governing committees at the helms of a wide range of educational institutions. Accordingly, biographer Victor Lowe writes that due to his extensive experience in education, Whitehead’s views are relevant to the topic of education at “every place and time in any civilized country, and his criticisms are all too relevant to Britain and America in the twentieth century” (Lowe, 1990, p. 44). Close to retirement, in 1924, Whitehead departed from England in order to take up a teaching position in philosophy at Harvard. The position gave him an “opportunity of developing in systematic form [his] ideas on Logic, the Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, and . . . Education” (Hocking, 1989, p. 10). As a teacher, both in England and at Harvard, Whitehead was widely liked by his students. He encouraged originality and was never condescending or dogmatic (see Lowe, 1990, p. 64; Hocking, 1989, pp. 14, 16). He was compassionate, “sparing no pains to help his pupils,” and treating them “as his intellectual equals, which they were not” (Lowe, 1990, p. 65). Whitehead was also a self-reflective marker, being generous in interpreting students’ work and quick to identify defects in his own comments on it (see Hocking, 1989, p. 15). As a pupil of Whitehead’s, Russell said that he was a “perfect teacher” (in
2
ADAM C. SCARFE
Hartshorne, 1997, p. 170). In short, as an educator, Whitehead was truly a model of his own enlightened ideals. It was at Harvard that Whitehead forged his speculative cosmology, penning his major philosophical works, including Science and the Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929), and Adventures of Ideas (1933). In large part, Whitehead’s philosophical system is the product of a criticism of much of the modern philosophical tradition. In his writings, he takes issue with the rationalists, the idealists, and the empiricists, yet reformulates many of their basic conceptions. Whitehead was also inspired by the developments in biology and physics which occurred in the early twentieth century, but, at the same time, he was highly critical of the some of the reductionist and mechanistic assumptions that are prevalent in scientific materialism. Whitehead’s conceptual scheme is a philosophy of organism that is based on the notion that “the world is not made up of independent things, each completely determinate in abstraction from all the rest” (1941, p. 157). On the contrary, his speculative philosophical scheme is “a system of thought basing nature upon the concept of organism, and not upon the concept of matter” (1925, p. 75). Whitehead’s holistic, process metaphysical scheme constitutes a depiction of the relatedness, solidarity, complexity, and togetherness of all entities out of which nature is composed, each organism requiring others in order to exist, and each thoroughly engaged in life-processes of becoming. Whitehead’s conception of reality deviates sharply from Cartesian metaphysics, in which the basic units of reality are substances, a notion that implies that entities are static and dependent only upon themselves for their existence. In contrast to Descartes’ substance ontology, Whitehead postulates that the basic building blocks of reality are actual entities or actual occasions—finite beings which are engaged in creative processes of becoming and of self-realization. In addition, they are fundamentally constituted by their various relations with other actual entities. Each organism has a finite life history, enduring for a time and then perishing. Yet through their perishing, they may be said to realize values, ideals, as well as organic and evolutionary attainments. Many aspects of Whitehead’s cosmological scheme are supported by the collective findings of various scientific disciplines, albeit sometimes by alternative perspectives which deviate from the mainstream. His overall cosmological scheme is also characterized by openness to the possibility of creative revision and novelty. The foundation of Whitehead’s cosmology is the theory of prehensions, which is an ontology of feelings. It constitutes a description of the process by which consciousness may emerge from the welter of feelings and emotions that belong to organic experience. In the theory of prehensions, Whitehead is primarily concerned with how organisms feel, grasp, seize, receive, appropriate, and/or apprehend the data of experience, either consciously or non-consciously, which are the activities that exemplify what he means by the
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
3
notion of prehending. Organisms select, valuate, and creatively transform the various prehended elements of their experience. The data that are felt by creatures in the flux of their experience serve as the building blocks in the creation of ideas, aims, and novel potentialities for self-realization by which they organize and direct their lives. As many scholars point out in this volume and elsewhere, Whitehead’s epistemology, with its basis in key notions such as events, actual entities, creativity, prehensions, eternal objects, self-realization, and the process of concrescence (or growing together), lends itself well to being merged with his philosophy of education. While there is sometimes disagreement on the part of scholars in regard to how this integration ought to be carried out, it is clear that Whitehead’s philosophy of education is grounded in his speculative metaphysic, and therefore, it cannot be construed as a flimsy series of policy recommendations or pedagogical suggestions without foundation. At the same time, some scholars defend the thesis that Whitehead’s cosmology is, on the contrary, built upon his philosophy of education. They argue that his speculative descriptions of the prehensive character of experience and of the universal rhythm of life emerge from his concrete observations of learning processes. 2. Whitehead’s Articulation of the Analogy Between Education and Adventure Education is discipline for the adventure of life; research is intellectual adventure; and the universities should be homes of adventure shared in common by young and old. (Whitehead, 1929c, p. 98) The above quotation from Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education suggests that there is an analogy to be made between education and the notion of adventure. An adventure is a quest or journey, usually involving a party of companions, which is filled with feelings of wonder, excitement, intrigue, daring, danger, exploration, striving, and discovery. It typically involves risk to the protagonists, but the potential rewards of such a journey may include the overcoming of obstacles that stand in the way of their flourishing. So far is this from the everyday conceptions of K-12, college, and university education that it would seem to be utterly preposterous to want to associate the two terms. In the main, education is held to be work pure and simple, in which there is no enjoyment, and from which there is no escape and no relief. On the one hand, schoolchildren, high school students, and even college and university students relish the chance to miss or to skip class. Some students actively hope to get sick, so that they can stay home and play video games—games which may offer the veneer of excitement in comparison with the dreariness of school, but which remain inauthentic, pre-determined outlets in terms of adventure.
4
ADAM C. SCARFE
Still other students are playing the learning game and are forcing themselves to endure the monotony of schooling, memorizing and regurgitating the bits of information that they are required to know in order to pass standardized tests. Many students have rationalized their fate away as the only means to being hired into a well-paying job at some future date. From this perspective, students largely see their teachers as enemies, namely, as the disciplinarians who shackle them to their desks and steal their youthful freedom, as well as those who are responsible for any set backs that they may encounter in the course of their learning. On the other hand, it is easy to conjure up images of groups of tired high school teachers and college professors huddled around the water cooler, or convened at the pub, anesthetizing themselves from the tedium of the school day, commiserating with one another in relation to how burdensome their work or teaching loads are. They discuss how to alleviate the drudgery of their jobs, and how miserable their inattentive and uninterested students make their lives. In these discussions, it is normal for students and their parents to be seen as enemies, and the failures of teachers themselves are generally reasoned away as the deficiencies of students. The negative morale on the parts of both students and teachers in schools and universities is compounded by the fact that, today, education is being neglected and devalued by society. Education is no longer seen as a sure route to a better life, and in some quadrants of society, it is even treated with contempt. To make matters worse, public schools and universities in North America are consistently being underfunded, contributing to a downward spiral in the educational system. For example, in the United States, it is abundantly clear that the no-child-left-behind policy of the Bush Administration does not mean no-school-left-behind. The policy is essentially a mask for cutting funding and for making schools and student learning subservient to laws of economic competition. It is clear that some schools are unable to compete with others, largely because of economic, social, cultural, linguistic, and geographic factors which have very little to do with quality of education proper. As citizens, we ought to protest critically against policies that associate the notion of education with that of competition, so as to defend ourselves against the value program of the global economy, which would have the economic struggle for existence begin in the kindergarten year of life. Meanwhile, in California, the recent downturn in the economy has diminished state budget revenues on the order of magnitude of fifteen-totwenty billion dollars. This has lead to massive cuts in spending on education, increased tuition burdens on students, increased class sizes, faculty layoffs, and the elimination of programs and courses on subjects, such as environmental philosophy, which are deemed by administrators not to be what students really need to know. All the while, the budget for the prison system, namely, for more walls, more bars, and more bed spaces, keeps growing and is on pace to
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
5
supersede funding to public higher education in the next five years. Many young people feel a sense of alienation from school, which has contributed to high dropout rates, to an increased propensity for engaging in criminal activity, as well as to a cradle-to-prison pipeline. On this note, do political leaders not realize that investing in education, and preserving the quality and the affordability of education, offers an inoculation against skyrocketing crime rates and criminal recidivism? Education offers both the opportunity for people to accomplish life goals and to live meaningful lives, helping them to avoid the lure of a life of crime. At the same time, the private sector, largely by jumping in to fill the void that has been left over by underfunding, is increasing its hold over the curricula of public schools and universities, both in terms of what is taught and which subjects are researched. Universities are gradually being transformed into corporate research factories, faculty and students being the workers who are manning the machines. Scholarship and scientific research that is guided by corporate interests and by the prospect of gaining monetary profit, rather than by authentic human curiosity, creativity, and the sense of intellectual adventure, has become the norm in the academy. Given the current situation in the domain of education, as here described, one might ask: how could as great a philosopher as Alfred North Whitehead ever realistically claim that education could be associated with the notion of adventure? The easy answer would be to dismiss Whitehead’s claim as idealistic nonsense, completely detached from any sense of reality and, much less, from the economic realities of our age. However, the answer of the contributors to this volume involves taking the opposite tack. It is not that Whitehead is wrong, but that somehow we are going astray in the schools, colleges, and universities. We are missing something in the details of the frantic, hurried pace of our everyday lives, and of our school, teaching, and research careers. What we are missing is the zest of adventure, even despite underfunding, class sizes, diminishing pay, cutbacks on teaching supports, lacks of recognition on the part of administrators and superiors, and the other problems that we are confronted with in the educational environment. A teacher does much for his or her students by bringing an adventurous spirit into the classroom and by encouraging students to join and to share in the adventure of ideas. The sense that education is a relational adventure of mutual growth is the lance with which to penetrate any alienation, on the part of students, from schooling and from intellectual pursuits. It is my contention that one important part of developing and of maintaining an adventurous spirit is to reveal to students a sense of humility, based on the notion that as a teacher one is still a learner, and that our own research is an exemplification of our own process of learning. As Whitehead writes, “it should be the chief aim of a university professor to exhibit himself in his own true character—that is, as an ignorant man thinking, actively utilizing
6
ADAM C. SCARFE
his small share of knowledge” (1929c, p. 37). It is only in so far as teachers are humbled to their own finitude and their own limitations, namely, to the fact that they do not know everything, that they are being honest and authentic with students. Generally, students can detect when a teacher is being dishonest and inauthentic, which procures the feelings of alienation from schooling that lead to rebellion and to dropping out. Ironically, in my experience, some administrators baulk at the notion that even the best researchers, especially those who are considered world-renowned experts in their fields, are learners. They will also punish any admission on the part of faculty members that their teaching is still in the process of development, as if being a good teacher meant that one had reached a point of finality in terms of one’s teaching long ago. It is a widespread assumption that faculty are experts who possess static, unchangeable, and assumptionless knowledge that can merely be passed on to students. However, regardless of one’s reputation for being an award-winning researcher or a Research Chair, the number of letters that come after one’s name, the number of publications that one has, or the amount of money that one generates for the university, considering our condition as finite human beings in the face of the vast complexity of the universe, as researchers, we ought to still characterize ourselves as learners, albeit perhaps more curious than most. So far, to my knowledge, no one has come even remotely close to a satisfactory answer to the deep existential questions, such as “what is all of this, anyway?” or has come even 0.00001% of the way toward an adequate comprehension of the world. The truth is that we are far closer to nothingness than we are to being masters of nature. Of course there is genius in terms of research output, which clashes with the mediocrity, the laziness, and the jealousy of other faculty. But my point is that researching and learning are virtually synonymous terms, and that our research ought to be placed in context with our learning as finite human beings. The last time that I checked, our species was still a mere puff of existence in the far off reaches of the cosmos, and our research, which is a function of learning about the world, is still very much ongoing. The belief in the self-sufficiency of our own expertise and in the finality of our understanding of the world is both the height of dogmatism and the death of adventure. Certainly, recognition for research accomplishment is vital to maintaining morale, but to hold endless, self-congratulatory events for such blessed folk, without at the same time recognizing good teaching, good academic and community service, and the research accomplishments of lower faculty, leads to bitterness and does nothing to motivate others to share in the intellectual adventure that is research. My point is that the recognition of our limitations is what enables continual intellectual inquiry and adventure. Similarly, the endless promotion of the egos of expert researchers to the neglect of the intellectual growth of students is an exercise not in education, but in condescension.
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
7
Bringing a sense of adventure into the classroom does not mean that a teacher’s level of knowledge is simply to be considered the same as that of students, for it is generally not the case. Although some of the ideals that are associated with democratic education would have us embrace this assumption, it is the short road to relativism. Having an adventurous spirit in relating to students also does not mean discarding professionalism. It does not mean that teachers should treat lightly the fact that they are subject to norms, freedoms, and responsibilities which are distinct from those applying to the rest of society. It also does not mean eliminating limits, care, and wisdom in terms of the very serious impact that we can have on students, in relation to what we say and do both inside and outside of the classroom, including in the evaluation of students. Moreover, it does not mean bringing a false sense of enthusiasm for intellectual pursuits into the classroom. Rather, it means cultivating authentic interpersonal experiences, treating students as co-adventurers and/or as coinquirers, and a class as a party of companions in a journey of discovery. In this, I fail to see how the notion that there are institutional power differentials between teachers and students is incompatible with the potential for adventure. For the most part, university teachers are researchers, and hence, they are also learners. Adventurous teachers attempt to make connections with their students and to foster relationships with, and among, them, by modeling select aspects of their own quest for knowledge. Adventurous teachers give students a glimpse of how they use the knowledge of their disciplines to enrich their own experience, not only inviting students to share in their own adventure of ideas, but also luring them to develop their own insights into how the knowledge learned is to be used in life. Under the right circumstances, such insights can, in turn, be shared with peers, constituting a mutual participation in intellectual adventure which leads to mutual growth and contributes to the advancement of knowledge. As such, student learning can itself be considered research. 3. The Distinction Between Adventurous Teaching and the Mere Transmission of Inert Ideas It is through the spark of excitement of education, conceived as adventure, that teachers can arrest the debilitating vicious transmission of what Whitehead calls inert ideas, namely, “ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations” (1929c, p. 1). Inert ideas are bits of stale information which are acquired merely for the sake of testing purposes, and have no importance to, or usefulness in the lives of learners. This is not to say that whatever we teach must be prepared with sugar and spice, or that we must not ask tough questions. It does not mean that we should refrain from teaching difficult ideas, or ideas that are foreign to students. It is also not a suggestion that teachers should refrain from transmitting information and ideas to students. On the contrary, it means that
8
ADAM C. SCARFE
teachers need to get beyond the habit of engaging students in educational activities which only emphasize “the passive reception of disconnected ideas.” Especially, Whitehead repudiates the transmission of ideas which are “not illumined with any spark of vitality” and which are not useful to students and applicable to their lives and experience (1929c, p. 2). In relation to his criticism of inert ideas, Whitehead identifies “the central problem for all education” as “the problem of keeping knowledge alive, of preventing it from becoming inert” (ibid., p. 5). He states that “knowledge does not keep any better than fish” (ibid., p. 98), meaning that it is constantly in the process of becoming outmoded and/or stale. Novelty must somehow be introduced into existing knowledge in order to keep it alive. To make his point, throughout his corpus, Whitehead points out what education can and ought to be: a relational adventure, namely, a creative process of mutual growth that potentially leads to the ecstatic flourishing of both students and teachers. In some of his last philosophical reflections on his career as a teacher and as a researcher, Whitehead states that the vitality of thought is in adventure. That is what I have been saying all my life, and I have said little else. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. The idea must constantly be seen in some new aspect. Some element of novelty must be brought into it freshly from time to time; and when that stops, it does. The meaning of life is adventure. (Price, 1954, p. 254) If the meaning of life is indeed to be found in the notion of adventure, then our conception of education ought to be based on the aim of developing the learner’s critical insight into, and wisdom concerning, how the knowledge that is bestowed onto them is to be held and utilized in life. What is required is not only an understanding of how it “add[s] value to our immediate experience” (Whitehead, 1929c, p. 30), but also its potential impact on, and/or its creative application in, future experience. In other words, not only does adventurous education involve the relating of ideas to practice, but it also involves the marriage of thought and action. As Whitehead states, “education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge” (ibid., p. 4), by which he means, the ability to relate it to “that stream, compounded of sense perceptions, feelings, hopes, desires, and of mental activities adjusting thought to thought, which forms our life” (ibid., p. 3). While critical thinking and the ability to make value judgments is essential, the real goal is practical action (praxis), which may involve the intelligent intervention, by students, in problematic and oppressive real life situations. For Whitehead, education that only involves the passing on of information, without at the same time engaging students in activities which serve to exemplify the appropriate manners of utilizing such knowledge, is one of the
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
9
chief problems in schooling. Teachers should impart knowledge, but in treating students as co-adventurers, what they ought to truly seek is the development of wisdom in terms of its use. Adventurous teachers model how they use their knowledge in their practical lives and how they are thinking of using this knowledge in terms of future potentialities. Adventurous teaching puts students into contact with knowledge, but it also enables students to answer the following questions: (1) how has this knowledge been used by human beings in the past?; (2) how do we use this knowledge wisely in our present life?; and (3) how might we use this knowledge wisely in the future? Another way of stating this last question is: what are novel possibilities in terms of the appropriate application of this knowledge in our future life? From these premises, on the one hand, non-adventurous teaching involves the mere imparting of inert ideas. On the other hand, adventurous teaching aims at achieving a comprehension of the value of select knowledge for life, across the past, the present, and the future. For example, it may give students a glimpse of the uses of geometry in the past (for instance, architecture), in the present (for example, global positioning), and in the future (perhaps architecture and geographic positioning on Mars). It further engages students in creative activities that have the aim of developing viable, novel, and sound potentialities for the practical application of knowledge in life. The distinction between non-adventure and adventure in education could not be any greater. In summing up his arguments concerning the importance of adventure, Whitehead expresses what he sees as the nexus between the key notions of education, knowledge, wisdom, value, life, and adventure. He states that education is the guidance of the individual [toward] a comprehension of the art of life; and by the art of life I mean the most complete achievement of varied activity expressing the potentialities of that living creature in the face of its actual environment. . . . Each individual embodies an adventure of existence. The art of life is the guidance of this adventure. (1929c, p. 39) Here, Whitehead’s notion of the art of life may be interpreted as being partially synonymous with wisdom, namely, with an understanding of the potentialities in terms of the value and use of knowledge both to life and in life. Again, what is to be noted is that, for him, the acquisition of knowledge is not the ultimate meaning and goal of education. Thus stated, from a Whiteheadian perspective, it may be further concluded that the main purpose of teachers and of educational institutions in general, such as universities, is to “promote the art of life” (Whitehead, 1929b, p. 4). Educational institutions do so by assisting all within their walls to discover, to grasp, to evaluate, to select, and to realize novel life possibilities, thus enabling persons to grow and to experience a more “comprehensive life-range” (Woodhouse, 2001, p. 223), namely, a wider range of feeling, thought, and
10
ADAM C. SCARFE
action. In other words, the chief function of educational institutions is to empower human beings in the use of their own creative capacities, assisting them, progressively, “to live well, to live better, and to have an increase in satisfaction” (Whitehead, 1929b, p. 8). The recourse to the notions of living well and of satisfaction here is not to suggest that Whitehead is an individualistic humanist and/or that a person’s intellectual growth is potentially infinite. Considering the holism that he embraces in his speculative cosmology, and his emphasis on the notions that organisms are finite creatures and that they are mutually dependent on each other for their existence, Whitehead can be said to repudiate self-maximization, especially when such growth takes place at the expense of other people and other creatures. In truth, from a Whiteheadian perspective, the wellbeing of the one is thoroughly dependent on, and sustainable, only in so far as the living organisms in the total environment—the many—have a satisfactory degree of wellbeing. In any case, his overall point is that knowledge proper, without reference to how such knowledge may be wisely applied in life, cannot generate this increase in life satisfaction. Rather, hands-on adventure, in which students experience and participate in the creative journey first-hand, and have a stake in the outcome, is what promotes the development of such wisdom. From this perspective, educational institutions that uphold the ideal of the development of wisdom can indeed be described as “homes of adventure shared in common by young and old” (Whitehead, 1929c, p. 98). Educational institutions that either do not, or cannot, focus on this general ideal of adventure, but rather on knowledge transmission, money-generation, the development of articles of commerce, economic advancement, and on other abstractions to the neglect of life, are doing a disservice to their true purpose. They are not truly educating those within their walls. 4. Adventure, the Vitality of Society, and Constructive Postmodernism For Whitehead, the prospect of adventure not only enables the vitality of ideas in the minds of students, teachers, and researchers, but more broadly, it is the key to the “preservation and promotion of civilization” (1933, p. vii). After a period of expansion or of novel discovery, a society that is not plastic enough to throw off the inertia that is caused by a fixed recourse to outmoded ideas and to old habits, will not be able to sustain its rate of advancement, and may even perish. In the same way that an animal species which is not able to adapt by developing new habits of behavior is rendered extinct, a society that is stuck in the satisfactions of the past, resists new novelties, and clings to the safety of its traditions, can only refresh and sustain itself through novel feelings of adventure, which run ahead of any new development. Accordingly, Whitehead states that “to sustain a civilization with the intensity of its first ardour requires
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
11
more than learning. Adventure is essential, namely, the search for new perfections” (1933, p. 258, my addition). Often learning mere variations on old habits will not suffice. Rather, according to Whitehead, “bolder adventure is needed—the adventure of ideas, and the adventure of practice conforming itself to ideas” (ibid., p. 259), involving deeper modes of creativity. Whitehead’s point may be confirmed by a reference to the current Obamamania in the United States. While Barack Obama’s rhetoric surely needs to be critically scrutinized and teachers definitely need not mimic his methods, Obama has been successful in his Presidential campaign largely because he has sparked a spirit of adventure and solidarity in his speeches and in his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope (2006). He invites the American people to be companions on a journey in which they can overcome the tired old habits and the corruption of the previous administration, dream of novel possibilities for the future, change ideological directions, solve their collective problems, and climb to greater heights of civilization. Similarly, for Whitehead, adventure is requisite to the continual advancement and progress of a society. In terms of the importance of education in sustaining a society’s growth, Whitehead makes it clear that educational institutions, which inspire scholars, discoverers, and inventors, are the chief, but not the only places, where such progress is made possible (1929c, p. 98). According to Whitehead, while adventure “rarely reaches its predetermined end” (1933, p. 279), since life itself has much more imagination and complexity than a finite human being can carry in his or her dreams, education ought to be reconceived as a shared adventure of exploration and discovery of ideas. Such a standpoint stresses the importance of empowering learners to realize better ways to chart the course of their actual lives, and which, in turn, serves to recreate our societies by refreshing the ideals upon which they are founded. Some might claim that Whitehead’s philosophy of education, having its basis in the notion of adventure, and emphasizing the creative urge toward novel potentialities, is a recourse to naïve, metaphysical structuralism, which as Jacques Derrida characterizes it in Writing and Difference involves an “adventure of vision” (1978, p. 3) which must be deconstructed. However, in contrast to deconstructive postmodern philosophy in which difference and negativity are made central, and in which undecidability holds sway, leaving subjects unable to decipher meaning and to intervene in oppressive situations, Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy has been branded a form of “constructive” postmodernism (Griffin, 2004, p. xiii). Constructive postmodernism agrees with many of the criticisms of modernity which are waged by deconstructive postmodernism’s main thinkers, including their attacks on metaphysical essentialism, logocentrism, humanism, individualism, patriarchalism, and anthropocentrism. Yet at the same time, it is open to revisable philosophical construction and to the legitimate capacity of a
12
ADAM C. SCARFE
person to develop and to hold a worldview. The adventure that Whitehead emphasizes is not merely a subjective or substantialist one. It is not simply a quest on the part of an individual for Being. Rather, it is a collective, relational journey of Becoming, with multiple narratives, and with no static goal or fixed endpoint. As such, Whitehead’s constructive form of postmodernism stands refreshingly opposed to its destructive counterpart, especially in relation to the latter’s “supercalifragilisticexpialidoxic totalizing negation of modernism” (Neville, 1992, p. xi). Certainly, the ongoing endeavor to learn about, and to express, the character of reality involves the criticism of previous hypotheses, claims, understandings, systems, and paradigms. However, deconstructive postmodernism offers only a totalizing destruction of the creative urge, and it does so without at the same time offering the possibility of reconstruction. When applied as a pedagogical model for the education of the young, the deconstructive enterprise is akin to “soul murder” (Whitehead, 1929c, p. 57), for it can be said to rob “life of its zest for adventure” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 293). While deconstruction aims to undermine all philosophical and educational foundations whatsoever, Whitehead’s speculative philosophy sees such foundations as being in process, namely, in constant flux, and open to criticism and to reconstructive revision. The deconstructive habit, which dictates that negativity should have the final word, doing so to the neglect of any positive moment necessary for the advancement of knowledge, has become what Whitehead might call a “learned orthodoxy [that] suppresses adventure” (1933, p. 277). Given the wide and enduring sway of deconstructionism, we might recall Whitehead’s warning that “the more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.” But resisting the inertia toward decomposition, Whitehead writes, “life refuses to be embalmed alive” (1929a, p. 339). As a form of constructive postmodernism that emphasizes the importance of creativity and adventure, Whitehead’s philosophy can be said to reclaim the eros of life in education from the whirlpool of radical deconstructionism, which impedes its natural fluency and rhythm, and which leads to inertia and turbidity. 5. Adventure and the Rhythm of Education The analogy between the notions of education and adventure is exemplified by Whitehead’s doctrine of the rhythm of education, which is a central tenet of his philosophy of education. For him, the rhythm of education may be equally construed as the rhythm of life, since life involves rhythm and rhythm is a chief indicator of life. As he states, “life is the rhythm as such” and that “wherever there is some rhythm, there is some life” (1919, pp. 196-197). According to Whitehead, since a learner is a living, growing organism, the process of learning consists in the cyclic passage of phases of mental growth, in the same
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
13
sense that there is a naturally alternating cycle of waking, of activity, and of sleeping in everyday life. Whitehead states that these are consistent with the basic moments: Thesis, Anti-Thesis, and Synthesis which, together, constitute the Hegelian dialectic. More explicitly, as Hegel described, the advance of meaning making and of knowledge in general is subject to the concurrence of three moments: cancellation, preservation, and raising up, which together constitute the dialectical unfolding of the logical Concept (Begriff). That said, for Whitehead, the three stages belonging to the rhythm of education are not simply moments in a linear process. Rather, they are pulsating and alternating phases of freedom and discipline which run their course as a cycle of interconnected and overlapping eddies, and as eddies within eddies. First, for Whitehead, is the stage of romance, which involves an original first step in the process of inquiring into any subject matter. It is the stage of “first apprehension” (Whitehead, 1929c, p. 17), of the excitement of wonder and curiosity, of imagination, of the joy of discovery, and of first interrogative stirrings in the body and in the mind regarding a particular topic or subject matter to be investigated. At this stage, the student enjoys the freedom and the freshness of inquiry, and the feeling that he or she is about to embark upon a journey of discovery. There is the spark of excitement that one is about to take the steps necessary in order to understand what was previously not understood. Romance is the stage in which the imagination, belonging to the initial phases of the creative process, holds sway, in the same sense that our experience involves the visualization of future events. The stage of romance accentuates the affective dimensions of learning, involving bodily feelings and emotions in anticipation of making a discovery that is just over the next horizon, if we could only journey there. The stage of romance cannot be said to merely involve positive feelings, for learners may experience anxiety, or a tension between the safety of their subjectivity and the desire for new knowledge—the conflict between the ease of recurring to habit and the difficulty of having to accommodate new information. The student is potentially hanging on tenterhooks, often painfully so. Pervading the phase of romance is the question, what is this subject matter all about? And it involves the taking of the first, important steps without which the journey could not begin. Once the phase of romance has run its course, there is an appetite for the specific details surrounding the subject matter in question. There is the thirst for acquiring knowledge of the subject matter which is grounded by demonstrable fact. The hunger pangs belonging to the culmination of the phase of romance lead naturally into the second phase of the learning process, namely, the phase of precision. The stage of precision involves activities in which a learner gets their hands dirty and engages with the specific principles of the subject matter: its problems, its methods, its terminology, its concepts, its principles, and the chief controversies within it. The stage of precision consists in coming to a conscious awareness of the conceptual divisions within a body
14
ADAM C. SCARFE
of knowledge, and the grasping of its specifics and of its depths. Systematic thinking and comprehensiveness pervade the stage of precision. As Whitehead states, in the phase of precision, there is an emphasis upon the “exactness of formulation” and the “power of definiteness” (1929c, pp. 18, 37). The stage of precision involves the development of a specialized knowledge through analysis, critique, and judgment. It is also the stage in which the concentration and the self-discipline that is required to master any body of knowledge must prevail. Pervading the phase of precision is the active taking up of the trials and of the concrete steps along the way to any discovery as to what the subject matter in question is about, as well as how the knowledge therein is to be appropriately utilized. The stage of precision is representative of the creative journey itself to explain and to comprehend select phenomena in the world through a focused analysis. It is only through the stage of precision that the disclosure of what is behind the veil of appearance. In this way, precision is the phase of problem solving, detailed analysis, and critical thought. Third, for Whitehead, is the stage of generalization, involving the practical application of the specific knowledge and principles of the subject matter, which were grasped in the phase of precision, as well as the further creative modification of them. Here, the learner dispenses with “the precise knowledge of details . . . in favor of the active application of principles, the details retreating into subconscious habits” (ibid., p. 37). The stage of generalization is the phase of synthesis and of satisfaction of curiosity, involving the comparison and the synthesis of the feelings that were originally experienced in the stage of romance with the conscious awareness of the subject matter that was attained through the phase of precision. In other words, the stage of generalization is “built upon both the adventure of romance and the discipline of precision” (Scarfe and Woodhouse, 2008, p. 187). In so doing, generalization involves the development of wisdom in terms the relating of the principles of the subject matter to the concrete facts of experience, coupled with a broad understanding of it. The stage of generalization involves the completion and satisfaction of the creative process. Pervading the phase of generalization is the speculative question: what could this subject matter further be about? It involves the creative discovery of the further potentialities and variations for appropriate and novel application of the knowledge, as well as the anticipation of future journeys. Furthermore, analogous to the Hegelian notion that the arrival at a Synthesis implies the emergence of a new Thesis, Whitehead states that the stage of generalization involves a “return to romanticism,” (1929c, p. 19), and hence, it involves a return to a renewed sense of excitement at the possibility of novel adventures. According to Whitehead, generalization ought to belong to the spirit of university education. One of Whitehead’s general claims is that teachers must be attentive to each of the rhythmic phases, and must not neglect any one of them in navigating the learning process. As has been mentioned previously, in the rush
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
15
to transmit bits of information to students, there is a common tendency on the part of teachers to overemphasize precision at the expense of romance and of generalization, which amounts to the neglect of the sense of adventure. As Whitehead writes, “in my own work at universities I have been much struck by the paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized” (1929c, p. 37). The appetitive and anticipative feelings which accompany the phase of romance and the synthetic realizations that belong to the stage of generalization are vital elements in the educational process. Without them, learners cannot carry their learning to completion in any satisfactory way. For example, without passing through a romantic stage in which there is a real feeling of craving to satisfy curiosity about a subject matter, the learner will neither have desire, nor the drive to engage the subject matter head-on and/or to carry out a thorough, precise, and disciplined study of it, regardless of his or her own innate genius and/or intellectual aptitude. As such, Whitehead’s point is nothing other than just what has been said so far in terms of the importance of feelings of adventure in the classroom. In the learning process, the sense of adventure provides the necessary counterpoint to the acquisition of knowledge that belongs to the stage of precision. Precision is about the discipline required in taking the concrete steps necessary to analyze and to accurately comprehend the phenomena that we wish to understand and to explain. While precision belongs to the journey of learning itself, the sense of excitement at the prospect of adventure is the glue that holds together the specialized, yet fragmented, information which is acquired at the level of precision. The sense of adventure, with its emphasis on the potentialities of the future, allows students the freedom to wonder and to inquire, following from their own imaginative and creative impulses. It also allows learners to dream of as yet unrealized potentialities for knowledge, following from its acquisition in the stage of precision. From a Whiteheadian perspective, teachers who wish to truly inspire students to participate in the inquiries of their disciplines, need to weave the sense of adventure and the precision of analysis seamlessly into their pedagogical approaches. In chapter twelve of this book, I shall discuss the importance of the sense of adventure in relation to research. For now, however, I shall concentrate on familiarizing the reader with the context surrounding the origin of the contents of this book, and on providing a brief synopsis of the essays that are contained within it. 6. The Context Surrounding the Origin of this Book In early July 2006, the year which marked the two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, three hundred scholars from around the world traveled to the city of Salzburg, Austria, to engage in intellectual dialogues surrounding the works of Alfred North Whitehead and other Process
16
ADAM C. SCARFE
Philosophers. The Salzburg conference was one of the largest gatherings of enthusiasts of the Process-Relational paradigm ever, hosting over thirty-five distinct sections. Some of the sections focused on comparing Whitehead’s thought to that of other philosophers. Others highlighted its applications to a plethora of disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. The conference, entitled, The Importance of Process—System and Adventure, was the sixth in the series of meetings that have been organized by the International Process Network (IPN). The essays which are contained in this special volume of the Rodopi Value Inquiry Book Series were among those presented in the Education section of the conference. The section on Education, organized and chaired by the present author and other members of the University of Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit, was one of the largest of all sections of the conference in terms of number of presentations, hosting eighteen speakers. This confirms that there is a growing international interest in Process-Relational Philosophy of Education, which is largely the result of its promotion by key organizations such as the Association for Process Philosophy of Education, the International Process Network, the Center for Process Studies, the Society for the Study of Process Philosophies, the respective process societies in China, Korea, Japan, Australia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and North America, as well as through the initiatives of individual scholars. 7. A Brief Synopsis of the Essays Contained in this Book In Chapter Two, “The Missing Link: Whitehead and the Relation Between the Aesthetic and the Analytical in Education,” Pete A. Y. Gunter focuses on Whitehead’s statements, in The Aims of Education and elsewhere, that education has two distinct sides, namely, an analytic side, which consists in a stress on languages, and an aesthetic side, which emphasizes immediate experience. Gunter argues that while Whitehead, as a mathematician and a physicist, has no problem explaining the former side, deeming it necessary for the survival and the advance of the modern nation, he does little to explain how to work an aesthetic component into the curriculum of the modern university. While admittedly not finding a complete answer to this problem, Gunter suggests that some elements of the aesthetic can be imported into more analytic domains, such as into mathematics and science courses, by weaving a treatment of natural, psychological, and/or historical contexts into the teaching of these subjects. In Chapter Three, “Helical Learning,” George Allan notes that there is a tendency, on the part of readers and scholars of Whitehead’s writings, to dwell on the inadequacy of pedagogies which emphasize precision at the expense of romance. However, he argues that the overstatement of this critique leads to a linear view of the rhythm of education. Instead, by connecting Whitehead’s
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
17
doctrine of the rhythm of education to the civilized virtues of beauty, truth, and art which are taken up in Adventures of Ideas, Allan claims that the stages should be understood in a helical rather than linear manner. He further makes the case that academic disciplines ought to be taught in a helical pattern, in which there is a dialectical weaving of their closed and open features into a continuously self-transforming adventure. In Chapter Four, “Education as a Process: Whitehead’s The Aims of Education Revisited,” Richard Penaskovic shares some of his insights in relation to the important yet difficult task of how teachers may keep knowledge fresh and alive. He argues that while there is no pre-given recipe for doing so, teachers must, above all, promote active wisdom in the classroom. This starts by addressing the needs and wants of students themselves, and by including them in the selection of curricula. Penaskovic further provides several practical suggestions and observations concerning the types of pedagogical strategies which assist in the task of transforming students into active learners. In Chapter Five, “The Importance of Big Ideas or How to Encourage Active Wisdom,” Marcus Ford argues that in contemporary American higher education, the disciplinary structures of universities and their emphasis on preparing individuals for jobs has left little room for concentrating on the discussion of the bigger picture, and especially of contemporary global realities and problems. In addressing these lacunae, Ford proposes a novel curriculum for higher education, one which is not only based on Whitehead’s threefold account of the rhythm of learning, but also one which cultivates students’ abilities to discern patterns in history, to understand and be cognizant of the large multifaceted issues of the day, as well as to think critically and philosophically. Specifically, he focuses on the development of active wisdom in learners, from which concrete solutions to world problems could be generated and acted upon. From a Whiteheadian perspective, Ford further argues that if universities choose not to teach such skills, then they are complicit with the undermining of the very civilization they purport to serve. In Chapter Six, “Educating the Five-Minded Animal,” Bernie Neville explores the various connections between Whitehead’s writings and those of Kieran Egan, Robert Kegan, and Jean Gebser, especially in relation to the latter’s articulation that there are five minds: archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral, which are at work in human development and evolution. From a Whiteheadian point of view, Neville speculates that the physical and mental poles of each occasion, and each occasion’s satisfaction, are replicated in the experience of perception via its three modes: causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, and symbolic reference. He sees these three modes mirrored on a larger scale in Whitehead’s theory of the rhythm of learning, especially in relation to the physicality of romantic engagement, the mental activity of precision, and the synthesis that is generalization. Furthermore, according to Neville, not only can we find a similar pulsation in the cycles within cycles
18
ADAM C. SCARFE
which characterize the evolution of both consciousness and culture, but also, their rhythm is replicated in our experience of the cosmos. In Chapter Seven, “Steps to a Process Curriculum,” Hillel A. Schiller draws on the work of Lancelot Law Whyte and James J. Gibson, as well as on process-relational thought in order to introduce a novel pedagogical framework which emphasizes the importance of curiosity, of imagination, of developing a student’s ability to recognize the relationships among phenomena, and/or of connectedness in general. Schiller employs the notion of contextual perceiving, which is a perceptual process that enhances non-linear thinking and delineates horizontal and vertical forms of learning. He describes the empirical, process nature of learning via the notion of the Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy in which the basic concepts of motion, process, structure, and symbolics are related structurally in an evolutionary tetrahedronal model. For him, this unifying conception demonstrates how analysis can occur within synthesis. Finally, Schiller offers an outline of what he calls the AEIOU ecologically-based curriculum framework for early learning, one which has its basis in the notion of contextual perception. In Chapter Eight, “The Body as a Companion in Education: An Interpretation of the Withness of the Body,” Jean-Marie Breuvart employs concepts derived from Whitehead’s later works, such as from Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought, in order to analyze the meaning of the key notion of the withness of the body in his cosmological scheme. Breuvart outlines some of the ways in which this notion might modify our interpretation of Whitehead’s educational theory. For Breuvart, the best approaches to teaching will be those which: (1) best respect the rhythm of education, as conceived in relation to the physical aspect of experience; and (2) place emphasis on the body playing a role in the process by which the importance of the world is given its appropriate expression, as in a work of art. Subsequently, Breuvart’s analysis of the notion of the withness of the body provides a context for the claim that Whitehead’s educational theory is foundational for his overall cosmological scheme. In Chapter Nine, “Whitehead’s Thoughts About Teaching, Learning, and the Way of Liberal Education,” Jean-Pascal Alcantara takes up a famous paper that was written by Hannah Arendt in the 1960s, in which she discusses the crisis in American education. According to her, the crisis was the result of an overemphasis on, and a fundamental misinterpretation of, the democratic ideal in education. Since the ideas and the aims of liberal education pervade Whitehead’s philosophy of education, Arendt may be said to provide a challenge to it. For Alcantara, due to the historical period in which Whitehead was writing, he could not have been aware of the full extent of the shift in contemporary teaching and learning in America which brought about the crisis. However, drawing on the historical origins and underpinnings of the notion of liberal education and on Whitehead’s understanding of this term, Alcantara
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
19
elucidates the full nature of the discrepancy between Arendt and Whitehead in relation to the meaning of liberal education as well as its various pedagogical implications. In Chapter Ten, “Whitehead’s Prehending and Dewey’s Experimenting: Speculative Philosophy Versus Educational Theory in Twentieth Century OneRoom Schoolhouses,” Kathleen Gershman explores the question of whether the five remaining one-room schoolhouses in North Dakota, which are distinct from urban and suburban schools in that they are unencumbered by the burdens of mass schooling, can be viewed as places which approximate the educational ideals of Whitehead and Dewey. Such rural schools remain open at the insistence of parents, who believe that their children are receiving an excellent education. According to Gershman, in the one-room schoolhouses, there is a commonly-held sense of belonging among students and teachers, and their curricula are richly integrated. Furthermore, there is a strong sense of solidarity in the communities which support them. In the essay, Gershman compares and contrasts some of the main tenets of Whitehead’s and Dewey’s respective philosophies of education, and she inquires as to whether or not their theories are exemplified by the overall educational situation and environment pertaining to one-room schoolhouses. In Chapter Eleven, “The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing: A Whiteheadian Perspective on Designing University Courses,” Robert Regnier draws upon Whitehead’s philosophy of education and cosmology in advancing the thesis that learning is a valuing process. For Regnier, learning processes are consonant with the occurrence of events, the fundamental character of which is constituted by valuing. The notion that learning takes place in virtue of processes of valuation breaks with pedagogical approaches which are based in substance ontology and in the materialist view of reality, in which entities are held to be intrinsically valueless and human beings are said to be the only ones who confer value on them. Regnier further relates the notion of learning as valuing to the concept of valuing in an ecological framework. The chapter introduces the notion that the purpose of a university education is to develop visions of place and importance in the process of valuing. It reviews how the reduction of education to the transmission of knowledge in universities suppresses valuing processes. Regnier provides concrete suggestions as to how university instructors can design courses so as to assist learners to achieve prophetic visions in relation to the problems surrounding educational structures and methods, as well as actualizations of such visions, as meant by the Whiteheadian notion of learning as valuing. In Chapter Twelve, “The Problem of the Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research: Whiteheadian Solutions,” Adam C. Scarfe shows how the notion of academic research can be interpreted both through Whitehead’s conception of the rhythm of education, with its stages of romance, precision,
20
ADAM C. SCARFE
and generalization, and through his theory of prehensions. Scarfe observes that today there is an overemphasis on the phase of precision in academic research that leads to the perpetuation of inert knowledge and to a lack of recognition, on the part of researchers, of the abstractions and assumptions which underlie their research findings and knowledge claims. In addressing this problem, he argues that a novel balance between the three stages needs to be arrived at in the academic culture, and that this can be done by placing an equal stress on the importance of romance and generalization in the research process. Scarfe first makes the case that teaching is an important component in the process by which knowledge is generated and advanced, but that it is devalued by narrow understandings of notions such as research-intensiveness which currently hold sway in the academic culture. As a counterpoint to the precision of formal research activities, he shows that teaching offers the opportunity for wonder, curiosity, and imagination as well as speculation, connectedness, and synthesis, belonging respectively to the phases of romance and generalization, to enter into the creative process by which knowledge is advanced. Scarfe further arrives at an integrated conception of learning, teaching, and researching processes. Second, by focusing on the theme of prehensive selectivity, he sketches the relevance of Whitehead’s theory of prehensions to academic research. In so doing, Scarfe offers a novel conception of research, one that has its basis in the notion that research is intellectual adventure. In sum, a common thread that runs through all the papers in this volume, whether directly acknowledged by the authors or not, is the consideration of learning, teaching, and researching as irreducible, yet interrelated aspects of the adventure that is education. In other words, there is a fundamental consensus among the authors that the academic activities of learning, teaching, and researching are best conceived as rhythmic and relational processes, involving curiosity, imagination, valuation, selectivity, creativity, and self-realization. The authors are also in agreement that process-relational modes of thought can assist in revitalizing contemporary educational practices from the inertia resulting from the habitual recourse to pedagogies of mere information retention, as well as from the abstractions that accrue due to the overemphasis on analytic precision in contemporary schooling and academia. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Special thanks to Malcolm Evans and George Allan for their exceptional guidance, comments, and assistance in the preparation of this volume.
WORKS CITED Derrida, Jacques. (1978) Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Introduction: The Adventure of Education
21
Griffin, David Ray. (2004) “Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought.” In George Allan, Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. xi-xv. Hartshorne, Charles. (1997) The Zero Fallacy and Other Essays in Neoclassical Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. Hocking, William Ernest. (1989) “Whitehead as I Knew Him.” In Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy. Ed. George L. Kline. Lanham, Mary.: University Press of America. Lowe, Victor. (1990) Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. II: 19101947. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Neville, Robert. (1992) The High Road Around Modernism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Obama, Barack. (2006) The Audacity of Hope. New York: Crown Publishers. Price, Lucien. (1954) Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. Scarfe, Adam C. and Howard Woodhouse. (2008) “Whitehead’s Philosophy of Education: Its Promise and Relationship to the Philosophy of Organism.” In Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Vol. I. Eds. Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1919) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1955. ———. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929a) Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. ———. (1929b) The Function of Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. ———. (1929c) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1941) Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Woodhouse, Howard. (2001) “Ultimately, Life is Not for Sale.” Interchange, 32.3, pp. 217-232.
Two THE MISSING LINK: WHITEHEAD AND THE RELATION BETWEEN THE AESTHETIC AND THE ANALYTICAL IN EDUCATION Pete A. Y. Gunter 1. The Problem of the Analytic and the Aesthetic in Whitehead’s Educational Theory In a recently published essay, “Whitehead’s Struggle Against Inert Ideas,” among various positive assessments of Whitehead’s ideas, I urged what I took to be serious criticism of Whitehead’s philosophy of education: Most of Whitehead’s essays on education deal primarily with mathematics and/or were delivered to mathematics educators. In reading Whitehead, therefore, even if we pay attention to his discussion of the romantic phase of education and his admission of the dialectical, even Hegelian, component in his philosophy, we may detect a scientific or even positivistic bias in his thought. Thus, his essay, “Mathematics and a Liberal Education,” simply excludes liberal education as a topic and deals only with mathematics. “Science in General Education” (1941, pp. 140147), deals with science alone, leaving general education to fend for itself. Beyond this strong emphasis on scientific education (which, after all Whitehead was trying to reform in Great Britain) there are also claims in his writings that seem to limit philosophy to science and mathematics, or to logical / mathematical methods. In his essay on Whitehead’s approach to education, Victor Lowe, a Whitehead biographer, cites the following passage from “The Mathematical Curriculum” (1913): [Mathematical] training should lie at the base of all philosophical thought. In fact, elementary mathematics, rightly conceived, would give just that philosophical discipline of which the ordinary mind is capable. (1929, p. 122) The problem here lies not in the presumed importance of mathematics per se, but in the universal quantifier, all. Possibly, Whitehead means that philosophy must nowhere pass beyond the boundaries of mathematics. If so, mathematics, on his terms being reduced to logic, philosophy would be
24
PETE A. Y. GUNTER constrained never to go beyond the bounds of mathematical logic. This would enroll him in the ranks of analytical philosophy, following Russell, and place him close indeed, at this point, to logical positivism. (Gunter, 2005, p. 219)
Now it is clear that Whitehead is no positivist, and that his approach to philosophy ranges far beyond the confines of philosophical analysis. This said, his treatment of the philosophy of education seems to me to be severely truncated. In a nutshell, how can we join to an education, whose backbone is linguistic and analytical, an aesthetic component which involves the richness and the particularity of the world, namely, of organisms in their natural context and in their dynamism? We might wish to do so. But Whitehead gives us no means to do so. In his lectures on education, moreover, he points in the opposite direction. What, then, might be done? In this essay, I will give two possible answers to this question. The answers will be incomplete and they will be scarcely sufficient in comparison with the breadth of the question. They will be: (1) an historical and psychological approach to the teaching of the sciences, especially to nonscience majors; and (2) the use of environmental education as a way of relating the analytic side of education to the concreteness of the experience of being-inthe-world. The remaining question which I shall raise will be: how can the aesthetic be added to the analytic, given education as it is now? As I will point out repeatedly, this question assumes that our present educational system contains either an aesthetic or analytic side. 2. The Importance of Relating the Context and the Practical Significance of Curricula to Students I will perhaps be forgiven for bringing up an example from my own life. As a high school student, I took several algebra courses from the same teacher. Each of these courses consisted of the same procedure, repeated for a year and a half. Every day we would be given a set of problems and told to solve them. Every morning, we would go over those problems and be given another set to be solved that night and checked the next day, and so on. We were not told that algebra came from the Arab civilization, or that it was first formulated by a man named Al-Khawarismi, or that it was resisted for a long time by Western mathematicians because it was held to be a heathen science. We were not told how it was taken up by Descartes and made part of analytical geometry, which many of us were to study later. No one suggested that analytic geometry is important to the study of motion, or to Western mathematicians’ conceptions of analysis. No one said any of these things, probably because the teacher, being the product of a school of education, had never heard of them. And so, we
The Missing Link
25
trudged through course after course, scarcely knowing what algebra was about, except that we could crank out answers with varying success. Those reading this essay paper could surely provide their own examples of engrained academic tedium, based on their own experiences. My point is not that a mathematics teacher should refrain from giving out problems and insisting on solutions. It is rather that in the midst of doing the problems, it is easy to weave in history and the historical significance of what we were doing with a nice gain and no loss to the student. For students who are destined to be scientists, no terrible loss will accrue to them if they learn also that there are abstract algebras and non-commutative algebras. For the rest, little harm will be done if a few fleeting moments are spent on some of René Descartes’ ideas and on his vision of a new science. With such historical and personal elements in the course, the humanities students might even remember some of the stuff that they learned, and may even gain some sense of its significance with respect to the unfolding of human experience. The future scientists in the class will not be ruined. What is true of high school mathematics could be true of the rest of the curriculum in K-12 and beyond. The study of biology, presented against the tableau of history, could include not only a survey of a few of Aristotle’s ideas, but perhaps even accounts of his embryology, as well as some of his ideas that we might find to be far-fetched. It could include mention of some of the phenomena (metamorphosis, embryogenesis) which seemed to justify vitalism in the nineteenth century and which, even now, provide a challenge to science. A brief look at Hans Driesch’s experiments or at regeneration phenomena generally, might raise students to a fearsome level of conceptual excitement. Administrators will object, of course, but the students will survive. The few examples that have been given here are intended only as examples. They do indicate a suggestion of the endless possibilities that the history of the sciences, including some conception of the psychology and the personal history of the scientists, which were omitted in the previous sketch, provide the science teacher. However, it is not only the sciences, but literature, as well, which can profit from the presentation of historical and personal factors. The humanities have often taken advantage of such possibilities. Especially, the teaching of regional literatures could be accompanied by visits to the places which are described in novels, poems, paintings, and plays. In short, when handled rightly, a provision of the historical, physical, and/or personal contexts of curriculum topics can increase the interest on the part of students and may also allow a course to linger in students’ memories. This can be done all without detracting from the course’s basic content, leading students to see the vividness of the subject matter in its living context. The mention of the physical context of literature relates quite naturally to the second suggestion, namely, that the study of the physical and biological environment provides an excellent way to add the aesthetic element to the
26
PETE A. Y. GUNTER
linguistic-analytic center of education. As Susan Armstrong-Buck (1986; 1991) and David Ray Griffin (1993) see clearly, there is a kind of evolutionary convergence, or a pre-established harmony, which is already present between Whitehead’s philosophy and both scientific ecology and, more generally, environmentalism. After all, Whitehead constructs his entire cosmology in terms of systems of organisms and their relations. The move from Whitehead’s cosmology both to ecology (see Gunter, 1996) and, beyond that, to his aesthetics of nature (see Gunter, 2004) is a short one. It is natural, therefore, to use environmental education in a broad sense to bring together the vividness of nature and the abstractions of analysis (see Gunter, 2006). But what would this involve? A junior high school or a middle school near my university provides innumerable examples. Coming into possession of a small plot of land that had been used, not very kindly of course, by a cement company, generations of students have brought that land, with its pond and small creek, back from the wreckage and they have restored its watercourse and its native plant growth communities. The students are very proud of their achievement. But in the process, they have studied botany, zoology, the structure of the plant growth communities, and restoration ecology. They have employed arithmetic and geometry in application to problems of sustainable planting and fertilizers, not to mention chemistry, in studying the acidity and the mineral content of the creek water. Their more general and abstract ideas have been wedded to the living integument of land, water, prairie, and forest. The university has also been able to use a nature preserve, of over two thousand acres, along a local creek in order to train graduate students in watershed management and to teach K-12 students and undergraduates about creating wetlands, replanting forests and grasslands, understanding bird nesting and migration, identifying plants, mammals, water, and insects. I will not go further in describing the details of these and other programs in the nature preserve. Success in environmental education could be broadened out to include the teaching of biology generally, chemistry, geology, and parts of mathematics, not to mention local and regional history. In all of this, there is no attempt to sentimentalize nature, or to instill some kind of environmentalist dogma. Rather, the openness of experience is the undergirding factor. A third and final example involves the elevated and somewhat thin air of graduate studies. Our university has recently been awarded a doctoral program in philosophy, making possible for the first time in American history a Ph.D. in environmental ethics. I do not wish to go into the details of this program, but only to point out one of its aspects, namely, the exchange of graduate students in philosophy with graduate students in environmental sciences and vice-versa. That is, philosophy graduate students take courses in environmental science and environmental science students take courses in philosophy. The virtue of this procedure would in principle be Whiteheadian. On the one hand, philosophy students would confront the variety of nature and of the sciences
The Missing Link
27
which deal with nature directly. On the other hand, science students would have to learn something about the general viewpoints through which nature can be approached and valued (see Gunter, 2006). Many other examples might be given of the way in which knowledge of the environment, and the experience of it, could, on a very wide basis, bring together the abstract and the concrete, the relational and the particular, as well as the aesthetic and the analytical. But how far will all such examples, including those utilizing the historical context of science, take us? I fear that they will not take us far enough. Hence, the next section of this paper’s puzzlement regarding what Whitehead might suggest, if confronted with the actual situation of education today. 3. A Criticism of the Curriculum of the Contemporary University In preparing this essay, the author made the mistake of working his way through a contemporary university catalogue. Why should this have been such a discouraging exercise? One reason is obvious: the university now extant is so different from the Cambridge University of Whitehead’s experience as to be in many respects unrecognizable, because, for most majors in most schools, both sides of Whitehead’s duality have declined, and in some cases they have even disappeared. Mathematics requirements are softened, appeals to the aesthetic side of experience are liable to be limited to literature or to history courses, themselves in need of the kind of exposure to concrete reality that Whitehead is after. Or, there are art or music appreciation courses, earnestly taught, but often devoid of cultural, historical, and psychological background. These changes all point toward a single tendency, namely, to turn universities away from what commitment they have had concerning knowledge per se, and point them in the direction of becoming white collar trade schools. It might be said that, since he had delivered a celebratory address at the founding of the Harvard Business School (1929, pp. 136-152), Whitehead had seen this trend coming and adapted to it. To what extent he had adapted to the coming changes in higher education is not clear. Also, it is not clear to what extent he had foreseen them. It is interesting that only a few years before Whitehead’s talk, his companion in process philosophy, Henri Bergson, had written a similar paper proposing the creation of an elite business degree in France (see Gunter, 1995). However, we do not know how far he might have gone with this. His views on this matter are much less developed than Whitehead’s. One way of resolving this dangerous entropy of the human intellect would be to divide universities per se from trade schools, justifying and making explicit the trends already in place toward trade education. Universities per se would then be able to reinstate strong mathematics and language requirements
28
PETE A. Y. GUNTER
across the board. I will return to this point briefly, but here it will be useful to look at the actual content of today’s curriculum. An ordinary state university today would probably have the following colleges: a college of music, a college of visual arts, a college of business, a college of education, and if we are lucky, a college of arts and sciences. In some universities, the sciences will be separated from the arts, making two colleges. Here are the titles of some of the courses offered in this academic wonderland: understanding art museums, history of prints, art in New York, visual display of business information, visual programs for business applications, public speaking, nonverbal communication, storytelling, gender and communication, beginning pointe, costume I, scene painting for theater, principles and practice of rhetoric, real estate law and contracts, employee benefit programs, introduction to groundwater hydrology, the old South, the new South, and photojournalism. I will here stop and confess my sins. This selection of courses is prejudiced, since it leaves out much in the curriculum that is foundational: solid stuff, recognizable as such. Even so, given these and similar courses, how is Whitehead’s approach to education to be applied? My suspicion is that it cannot. In addition, the selection is made without mention of the sheer proliferation of subject matter and course contents typical of today’s universities. I doubt that kinesiology, merchandizing, hospitality management, social work, or leisure studies were even conceivable by Whitehead as university programs. Yet such programs exist, each bringing with it a colorful coterie of courses. I have not done justice either to the fundamentals covered in some programs, in particular the arts and sciences, or to the sheer proliferation of course and subject areas. Nonetheless, at this point, I will ask my Whiteheadian readers and colleagues the following question: how, in any way, can Whitehead’s concepts and methods apply here, if at all? Lest the author should seem to have lost his way in a series of disjointed reflections on abstraction, concreteness, and education, he wants to allow Whitehead to reiterate his claims. Explaining the need for all students to pursue a specialized, professional training, based significantly, as we have seen, on language acquisition, including mathematics, Whitehead persists: this professional training can touch only one side of education. Its center of gravity lies in the intellect, and its chief tool is the printed book. The center of gravity of the other side of training should lie in intuition without an analytical divorce from the total environment. Its object is an immediate apprehension with the minimum of eviscerating analysis. The type of generality, which above all is wanted, is the appreciation of variety of value. . . . What is wanted is an appreciation of the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment. (1925, p. 199)
The Missing Link
29
I have tried to suggest two ways of bringing the organism, its environment, and their vivid many-sided values into education, without undermining the quest for the mastery of analysis or, should I say, of various modes of analysis. The inclusion of historical context and natural context (and of psychological context, not developed here) are two. The imaginative may think up others. I have concluded, however, that in the contemporary university, such suggestions and indeed Whitehead’s method generally are hard, and sometimes impossible, to apply. 4. Conclusion: A Challenge to Whiteheadians This essay thus ends where it began: with perplexity, and with a challenge. It seems an easy thing, to add the aesthetic, that is, “intuition without an analytical divorce from the total environment” to education. In fact, Whitehead nowhere tells us how to do this. But let me add one more difficulty. We note, in delving through university catalogues, that almost always, sandwiched between other more important programs, there is some sort of philosophy program: a sort of orphan amongst more resplendent endeavors. Nowhere in Whitehead’s writings is there the slightest suggestion of what role philosophy should play in education, either in particular or in general. Should there be a philosophy department? Should a collection of people calling themselves philosophers, rather, be scattered in different schools and departments? Should philosophy be analytic, and if so what should it analyze? Should it be aesthetic, and if so, how is this (I started to say, this miracle) to be accomplished? Is it to be both, and in what way? To begin to answer such questions would take up more time than an essay of this kind makes possible. Perhaps Whitehead thought that the answer is obvious. As is often the case in the history of thought, obviousness may require explanation. WORKS CITED Armstrong-Buck, Susan. (1986) “Whitehead’s Metaphysical System as a Foundation for Environmental Ethics.” Environmental Ethics, 8.1, pp. 241-261. ———. (1991) “What Process Philosophy Can Contribute to the Land Ethic and Deep Ecology.” Trumpeter, 8.1, pp. 29-34. Griffin, David Ray. (1993) “Whitehead’s Deeply Ecological Worldview.” Bucknell Review, 37.2, pp. 190-206. Gunter, Pete. A. Y. (1995) “Bergson’s Philosophy of Education.” Educational Theory, 45.3, pp. 379-394. ———. (1996) “Process-Relational Philosophy: The Raw, the Unabashed Cash Value of Mere Metaphysical Speculation.” In Frontiers of American Philosophy, Volume 2. Eds. R. W. Burch and H. I. Saatkamp. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, pp. 277-282.
30
PETE A. Y. GUNTER
Gunter, Pete. A. Y. (2004) “A Whiteheadian Aesthetics of Nature: Beauty and the Forest.” Process Studies, 33.2, pp. 314-322. ———. (2005) “Whitehead’s Struggle Against Inert Ideas.” Process Studies, 34.2, pp. 193-223. ———. (2006) “Whitehead and Environmental Education.” In A Different Three R’s for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm. Eds. George Allan and Malcolm. D. Evans, New York: Rodopi, pp. 75-86. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1941) Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
Three HELICAL LEARNING George Allan 1. Line, Circle, Helix In discussing the three stages in Whitehead’s theory of the rhythm of education, our tendency is to focus on the inadequacy of pedagogies that emphasize precision at the expense of romance. We are rightly angered by those whose teaching is exclusively about facts and systems of facts, or about things we can observe with a bare or instrument-assisted eye and theories that organize those experienced particulars into intelligible wholes. We attempt to correct this bias by extolling the importance of romance, and by encouraging students to explore aspects of their world that are not certified facts and that escape the confines of any particular system. We want students to immerse themselves in the unsystematized wonders of the concrete, and to let their imaginations wander adventurously. Our argument is that students will gain from those romantic experiences the healthy motivation they need in order to undertake the rigors of precise analysis and systemic interpretation. Generalization, Whitehead’s third stage, is then taken to involve a return to the world, initially explored in romance, but now coming to it equipped with the tools of precision. We claim that our students so prepared will be able to penetrate the worldly mysteries that had originally stimulated their curiosity, and to solve the problems they had previously posed. Notice how this standard scenario is a linear progression. Romance is about our naïve responses to a confusing cacophony of sights and sounds; it is a time of surprise and bewilderment. The point of precision is to carry us beyond such things, to set aside our childish ways for the sophistication provided by systemic understanding and control. Generalization is the capstone, the theorizing put practically to work in solving real life problems. We are supposedly led upward and onward, from romance through precision to generalization; from primary education through secondary education to higher education; from the general basics to a disciplinary specialization to the mastery of a career vocation. Whitehead is partly to blame for this linear view. He refers to the stages as “first apprehension,” “precise progress,” and “final success” (1929b, pp. 1719), and associates them with, respectively, early education, middle schooling, and the university. He explicitly rejects this linearity, however, arguing that the
32
GEORGE ALLAN
stages of education have a cyclical rhythm, and that “education should consist in a continual repetition of such cycles” (1929b, p. 19). But the cycles are what is repeated, not their content. The stages of education are helical in the sense that they transform as they return, spiraling into learning contexts that are always different and sometimes more adequate. Learning is an adventure down into, and therefore out beyond, the known. I think we can best appreciate why Whitehead’s stages of education should be understood in a helical rather than in a linear manner, by associating them with the civilized virtues of beauty, truth, and art discussed in the last section of Adventures of Ideas. 2. Civilized Virtues and Educational Stages Let me begin with precision, which I propose to associate with the notion of truth, since they are both about the careful correlation of symbols with what they symbolize. A theory, in the somewhat idiosyncratic terminology of Adventures of Ideas, is an appearance, a purported image or picture of reality. It is true if it actually does what it purports to do. According to Whitehead, “Truth is the conformation of Appearance to Reality” (1933, p. 241), where to conform means to provide us with a coherent and consistent framework that is applicable to some identifiable region of the world, depicting that region adequately. Coherence, consistency, applicability, and adequacy are the four standards for judging a metaphysical theory, as famously identified in the first chapter of Process and Reality (1929a, p. 3). True theories are well ordered appearances. They are rational systems that clarify by their unambiguous precision the vaguely felt world around us. In learning how to think systematically, we become skilled at distinguishing what is apparently true from what is actually true, distinguishing mere appearances from true appearances. The stage of precision is where we acquire the tools for making accurate interpretive maps of the world, namely, intellectual road atlases which can guide us effectively toward what is objectively important, thereby giving meaning to our thoughts and purpose to our actions. Any rational system is necessarily inadequate, however. No matter how well organized and useful it may be, it leaves things out. It is an abstraction, and as such is adequate only with respect to some purpose. A road map leaves out vast riches of fascinating information about an area, limiting itself to describing minimally the things that we need to know in order to drive through the area without confusion. If everything were somehow included, the result would be an unintelligible and therefore useless mess. The coherence essential to any well ordered system requires the elimination of incommensurate factors, a process Whitehead calls “anesthesia” (1933, p. 256). Absolute truth is an oxymoron. A theory can be true only in the limited sense achieved by including some things and excluding others. The various scientific disciplines are examples of these limited kinds of
Helical Learning
33
perfection. Their coherence is typically achieved by attending solely to the quantifiable features of the world, features that can be measured unambiguously, and therefore can be precisely described and predicted in a publicly verifiable manner. Scientific disciplines formulate systems of truth which involve a double constriction of experience. They create a vertical constriction, because their truths are abstractions from the unsystematized complexity of the concrete. They also create a horizontal constriction, because those truths are limited to a narrow slice of the whole of that concreteness. Scientific truths are closed systems. Their perfection is constrained within boundaries, based on a decision to exclude certain kinds of things in order to achieve a systematic understanding of what remains. The precursor to truth is beauty. It is akin to romance because it has to do with imagination, with exploring possibilities and unearthing interesting facts and novel patterns of relatedness. Whitehead writes that “Beauty, so far as concerns its exemplification in Appearance alone, does not necessarily involve the attainment of truth” (1933, p. 267). It is an appearance that is appreciated just for what it is, without any regard for whether or not it is true. We enjoy the beauty of things, reveling in their exquisite sensual presence. The romantic stage of learning has this character of direct appreciation. It is like reading a novel without filtering it through the lens of some literary theory, or delighting in a rainbow without asking for a scientific explanation of why its colors are arranged as they are, or taking part in a protest march without having weighed the moral and prudential reasons for doing so. We respond spontaneously to the beauty of the occasion, to its vivid and vital immediacy. Our imaginative engagement with the bounty of the world in which we are immersed comes first; the analysis, the theorizing, and the rational account come later. Generalization, understood as part of a linear sequence, is a return to romance armed with the tools of precision. In turning our attention back to the concrete world and its delightful experiences, we put to work the methodological techniques learned from our disciplined training in a specific science. We come ready to explore the uttermost limits of the world as our science defines it, to uncover new facts and fashion new theories, but only those which presume the boundary conditions scientific inquiry requires. Our task is to test these theories under practical conditions, and to undertake the reforms and improvements suggested by these applications. We engage in what Thomas Kuhn called normal science and in the technologies it fosters. Generalization, in this sense, is the way by which we are able to perfect a limited perfection, even to expand the umbrella of its theory, the extent of its application, to new subject matters and concerns. It carries us to the apex of adequacy, providing us with a complete and fully sophisticated understanding of the world. But this understanding is of the world as our closed system discloses it. We remain bound by its boundary conditions. Generalization, taken as the final stage of learning, may perfect but it does not transform our
34
GEORGE ALLAN
accepted ways of thinking and acting. It is not able to guide us through a paradigm shift from one form of normal science to a successor form. Returning to romance, guided by generalization of this linear sort, we might even be able to recover the emotional aspects of experience from which the quantified precision of a scientific system abstracts. But these recovered emotions are then easily bound to that system, clothing its presupposed worldview in vivid but narrow intensities of belief and commitment. The clarity and convenience of a well ordered system of ideas, or of a smoothrunning social institution, is invested with an unjustifiable significance, an import and value that it does not deserve and cannot control. Emotions bound to closed systems are blind. They are most familiar to us in the form of religious fanaticism and political jingoism, which are instances of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness at its most virulent. Whatever Whitehead may have meant by generalization, surely it was not this. 3. The Function of Art We can escape this capstone view and its implications if we think of art as crucial to the move from precision to generalization. Generalization is not merely a process by which we take the fruits of some precise system-building effort and put them to work in the wider concreteness from which they were initially derived. It also involves disclosing the limits of that precision and providing us with the resources and motivation for building a better system to replace it. And it involves disclosing the limits of our original romantic experience, critiquing our imaginative powers as well as our rational skills, questioning our feelings as well as our concepts. Artistic symbols are like scientific symbols; both of them abstract from concrete reality. But, Whitehead argues, an artistic symbol intensifies rather than eliminates our felt sense of that reality’s significance. He states that it “unlooses depths of feeling from behind the frontier where precision of consciousness fails” (1933, p. 271). Scientific symbols, such as Newton’s laws and Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, pare away the details of what we experience in order to emphasize useful patterns of systemic relatedness. The rich diversity of physical objects, bumping into each other in confusingly varied ways, are shown by Newton to illustrate the simple general rule that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. To argue, as Whitehead does, that the nature of any being is to be a potential for every becoming is a metaphysical prescription for interpreting these multifarious interactions among objects as always and necessarily involving internal relations, even when they appear to be related only externally. In contrast to these scientific and philosophical theories, a Jackson Pollock canvas or a Mahler symphony abstracts from experience in order to concentrate its disparate aspects. The artist formulates a specific symbol that manages to bring together the wider
Helical Learning
35
whole it symbolizes into one specific event. The painting or chordal sequence is a means by which to experience that wider reality more fully; to appreciate its subtleties and nuances, its hidden depths and complexities. Artists fashion open symbols rather than closed ones. They create symbols that call our attention to neglected features of what we experience, inviting us to embrace a world more complicated than any finite system could ever encompass. The created appearance that is a work of art, says Whitehead, evokes “new resources of feeling” lying beyond the “stale presuppositions of verbal thought.” An artistic symbol is an individual thing, “detailed from the vague infinity of its background,” that sends us a “message from the Unseen” (Whitehead, 1933, pp. 267, 271). To appreciate Whitehead’s point, we need to understand why he says that an aesthetic symbol is a “bare It” (ibid., p. 254; also see pp. 262–264). Consider an everyday experience, such as our being visited by a friend whom we have not seen for many years. In recalling our previous times together, in anticipating his arrival, in being with him once again, we take our friend as an enduring person whose qualities are a distillate of all the things we have done together, the good times we have had, the common efforts we have undertaken, the counsel he has provided or sought, the sorrow he has borne on our behalf or we on his. This multitude of particular experiences, each imbued with their distinctive value, are compacted into one reality: this friend of whom those memories, those expectations, and this presence are expressions. Our friend is a lifetime of our friendly exchanges, his importance so great because so much has been concentrated into our sense of him, and is then evoked in all its complicated fullness whenever we are together. We have fashioned an enduring “It” we call our friend and we have filled it with a wealth of significance far greater than the mere sum of the value of our various interactions. Our national flag is another example of an aesthetic symbol. The flag is a bare “It” not only displaying a distinctive pattern of bright colors as it flutters in the wind, but also displaying the story of our nation, its victories and defeats, its glorious ideals and its betrayal of ideals—emotions and beliefs far beyond the poor power of words adequately to express. Whitehead’s example is of a stone we touch that was inscribed under the eyes of Sennacherib, precious to us not only because of the importance of the original reason for its having been inscribed and its direct influence on subsequent events, but also because of the long centuries of human history that have elapsed since then, across which we reach when we stretch out our hand to touch it. By comparison, according to Whitehead, “a really admirable replica by a modern workman lacks interest” (ibid., p. 262), for it does not exude the history with which the actual stone is imbued. Everyday aesthetic symbols such as these fill our cultural lives to the brim. A work of art differs from these symbols because it is fashioned explicitly to evoke in those who experience it the complex repertoire of feelings and
36
GEORGE ALLAN
thoughts that are masked by our everyday taken-for-granted experiences and the well ordered systems of established truth they presuppose. The polyglot richness of these neglected aspects of our familiar world are unified and intensified by the artist’s craft, melded spatially into the bare “It” of a painted canvas or a formed piece of baked clay, shaped temporally into the bare “It” of a musical trajectory or a pattern of ritual enactment. The closed frameworks which are created by our scientific and commonsensical symbols have not eliminated this richness. They have only hidden it, pushing it into the background. They have constructed boundary walls over which we cannot see, but what lies beyond these walls is not nothing. The familiar aesthetic symbols which dominate the foreground of our everyday experience, of our established ways of thinking and feeling, although creatures of that framework, often exude a whiff of something more, a hint of their limited effectiveness. Those “Its” which condense our individual and collective memories and hopes—a dear friend, a revered flag, treasured bits of memorabilia—are so very important for us because they manage to preserve the emotional features not only of that foreground but also of what has been relegated to the background. They embody not only the explicit meanings crucial to the framework governing them but also the intangible meanings associated with realities lurking in the background, just beyond the reach of our comprehension. If that fuller reality can be evoked by a new symbol in a particularly efficacious manner, these forgotten possibilities will rise to the surface and become available for fashioning novel perspectives, innovative systems of interpretation, new ideals of perfection. A great artist crafts symbols in paint or marble, in words or gestures. And upon our seeing or hearing them, their impact can be transformative. Our eyes are opened, our ears scoured, our emotions shaken. For behold, all things have been made new. Artistic symbols evoke in an especially efficacious manner these neglected aspects of reality because they are open-ended, because they do not respect systemic boundaries. Their unity is expressed in terms of balance and contrast rather than coherence and consistency, in terms of intensity and importance rather than adequacy and applicability. And so they invite us to overrun what is explicitly there. A great work of art, “as if by the wand of an enchanter,” calls into being “a beauty beyond the power of speech to express” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 283). Its beauty suddenly makes present the deeper, contextualizing reality upon which the regnant system of established truth rests, from which it has been abstracted. The artistic masterpiece releases a tidal wave of novel feeling along with a conflicting welter of previously unnoticed particular facts and possibilities, all of them become resources upon which our imaginations can draw. Art liberates us from the old and increasingly stifling boundaries of our familiar world with its familiar sense of what counts as a truthful appearance. We are plunged
Helical Learning
37
headlong into aspects of reality previously beyond our imagining. We are henceforth free to draw on these exhilarating novelties in order to create a different appearance, one never seen before on land or sea. This novel beauty may also be true in a way we had never before understood or even imagined. If so, it beckons us and our collaborators to fashion some new scientific system able to harmonize effectively the facts and possibilities it has revealed. In doing so, however, we will have to exclude a cacophonous welter of other things, pushing them into the background. Unavoidably, therefore, our success will eventually prove inadequate to its task, and our successors will need once again to fashion fresh artistic symbols capable of transgressing the constraints of that better truth we had worked so hard to establish. 4. Helical Learning Art, understood as functioning in this way, explains why generalization is not the final stage of a linear progression. It is a crucial phase in the open-ended cyclings of a helix. Learning is a process that begins with romance, with exploring unfamiliar facts and novel possibilities. It matures into the phase of precision where fresh interpretive schemata are proposed and deployed, where their implications are tested and their usefulness fully exploited. Generalization then emerges as the critique of these schemata, the claim that their boundary conditions are too constricting. Art is the way by which the positive side of this critique is accomplished. Art provides us with access to the resources able to occasion a new round of exploration, interpretation, and evaluation. The openness of romance leads to the closure of precision, but generalization fosters, with the aid of art, a freshly insightful openness, making possible the creative invention of a new closure more adequate to the existing conditions. In the first part of Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead offers an account of how an idea about the supreme worth of every human soul came to be concretely actualized in the beliefs and institutional habits of civilized Westerners. This story might suggest that the helix of human history is a complex form of linearity, that history is progressive, that the path is upward, even if it involves momentary setbacks. It might suggest that, ideally at least, our educational journey likewise should traverse a continuing spiral of gathering, making, critiquing, gathering more effectively, perfecting the making, deepening the critiquing. On this view, the movement of learning and history rises slowly but steadily from lesser to higher values, from the good to the better and toward the best. The last part of Adventures of Ideas, however, repudiates this view. A new achievement is not necessarily better than what it has replaced, and even where it is an improvement the gain has been at the price of other viable possibilities that were ignored or suppressed. The helical movement of the whole of history
38
GEORGE ALLAN
and of each individual’s learning is forward, but not upward. The process is not a climb toward an all-encompassing absolute perfection. It is an adventure beyond the known. Whitehead says that the final truth is that of tragic beauty. It is the realization that our best efforts are necessarily bounded and so always needing to be unbound. Our aim is toward the better, but our journey always ends in shipwreck. He states, “at the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy” (1933, p. 296). There is always the fecund dream, the transcendent aim, but also always the fracturing evil, or the tragic harvest. Peace is the recognition, however, that failed ideals are still ideals. He continues, “each tragedy is the disclosure of an ideal:—What might have been, and was not: What can be. The tragedy was not in vain.” Peace is an intuition that “sees the tragedy as a living agent persuading the world to aim at fineness beyond the faded level of surrounding fact” (ibid., p. 286). And so, hope abounds and new journeys await us if we dare to undertake them. 5. Educational Implications The practical implications of this interpretation of Whitehead’s phases of education are manifold. Most crudely, the helical character of learning suggests that the arts and sciences always need each other. We must reject the debilitating Cartesian dichotomy between the mental and the physical, the emotional and the rational, which underlies how most curricula are organized. The purview of the arts is not limited to expressions of personal feeling and subjective preference; its concern is not solely with truths of the heart. The purview of the sciences is not limited to publicly verifiable hypotheses about the objective world; its concern is not solely with truths of reason. Rather, science has to do with closed symbols and systemic hierarchies of interpretation that are immensely useful, the arts with open symbols and boundary-transgressing concrete particulars of immense importance. Both kinds of symbols encompass the subjective and the objective dimensions of experience and reality. Both science and the arts use reason and feeling and both inquire into the nature and meaning of things. These two kinds of discipline, the arts and the sciences, need each other. They are intellectual siamese twins, polar tensions in a single dialectic. To be properly educated, we need to study art history as much as economics. We need to spend as much time in studios learning how to paint still-life compositions as we spend in laboratories learning how to conduct chemistry experiments. Less crudely understood, the helical character of learning means recognizing that both the arts and the sciences are composed of disciplines, each of which has a tradition of acceptable standards regarding methods and results. Each is a closed system, successful within its boundaries and so resistant to having them challenged. And obversely, both the sciences and the
Helical Learning
39
arts are creative endeavors, each of them nurturing practitioners who become impatient with the constraints of their discipline, who break through its conventions, who invent new disciplinary paradigms and whole new disciplines. The arts and the sciences, each in its own way, are open systems. Therefore, each academic field of study, each course in a program of study, each classroom session of a course, needs to have a romantic moment, a period of precision, and a generalizing critical transcendence in a way appropriate to the occasion. Students in literature courses should be encouraged to read joyously, to delight, for its own sake, in the world to which an author has introduced them. They need also to learn rigorous procedures for sorting out sloppily subjective readings of that author’s text from warranted interpretations, and they should learn from these experiences how to glimpse in the shortcomings of a text the fresh possibilities other authors have explored, innovations in content and style to which they too might aspire. Students in biology courses should not only become familiar, specifically and concretely, with the organisms they wish to study, but become well informed about their behaviors and the ecologies that support and threaten them. They should then learn the theories that explicate the nature of those organic processes and the methods by which these theories have been formulated and validated. They need also to find themselves perplexed by serious problems about these matters for which the available formulae and methods of inquiry are seemingly inadequate, and for which new lines of research by others, themselves included, might be undertaken. Every academic discipline should be taught as a helix, dialectically weaving its closed and open features into an interesting, because constantly self-transforming, adventure. The romance, provided by an artful intrusion of other disciplines into this dialectical process is an effective way, maybe a necessary one, for prodding a discipline into generalization, especially when it begins to be blinded by the closure inherent to its phase of precision. The pernicious consequence of the isolation of the disciplines is obvious when courses of study are fashioned, as they are in most of our colleges and universities, so that entering an academic major means bidding goodbye to other ways of learning. For Whitehead, the rhythm of education is helical. And thanks to the function of art, which constantly speaks beauty to the currently reigning truth, we should no longer think of generalization as the capstone to mastery of a discipline. It is, rather, the transformative realization that this mastery has come at an unacceptable price, that there is more in heaven and earth than that discipline has ever conceived. Generalization is the recognition that to truly master a discipline means persistently to rethink its conditions, to re-conceive its theories, and to redesign its methods. To master a discipline is to perfect the world it fashions by surpassing it, and to do so again and again, worlds without end.
40
GEORGE ALLAN WORKS CITED
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929a) Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. ———. (1929b) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
Four EDUCATION AS A PROCESS: WHITEHEAD’S THE AIMS OF EDUCATION REVISITED Richard Penaskovic Imagination is a contagious disease. It cannot be measured by the yard, or weighed by the pound, and then delivered to the students by members of the faculty. It can only be communicated by a faculty whose members themselves wear their learning with imagination. (Whitehead, 1929, p. 97) Unless forced to become active learners, most students will neither engage themselves in the content of a course nor develop their thinking skills. (Michalak, 1986, p. 256) 1. Some Basic Themes in Whitehead’s Educational Theory Some books are not intended to be merely read. Rather, they are meant to be pondered, assimilated intellectually, and savored for a lifetime. Such a book is Whitehead’s The Aims of Education. I first read this book about twenty years ago and found it resonating deep within me. Some lines struck a nerve with me, for instance, the phrase “learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe” (Whitehead, 1929, p. 27). In writing this essay, I reread The Aims of Education and was impressed by the profundity of Whitehead’s thought. I found myself underlining entire sections that, on a previous reading, I had often overlooked. I became aware that I have changed over the years and was reminded of John Henry Newman’s words: “in a higher world it may be otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often” (1891, p. 40). For the most part, Alfred North Whitehead’s ideas on education were developed early on in his career, with one notable exception. After he came to the United States, Whitehead returned to the theme of education in the last chapter of his book, Science and the Modern World. His ideas on education are grounded in his highly technical and idiosyncratic philosophy. Whitehead’s metaphysics and his thoughts on education are commensurate, although that is
42
RICHARD PENASKOVIC
not the thrust of my thesis here. Rather, I focus on education as a process in Whitehead’s seminal book, The Aims of Education. For Whitehead, education has to do with keeping knowledge alive, with preventing it from becoming inert. Inert ideas are the bane of self-development. By the phrase inert ideas, Whitehead means those ideas received into the mind without being used, tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. For Whitehead, the central problem for education at all levels is that of keeping knowledge alive, for it “does not keep any better than fish” (1929, p. 98). Hence, as Whitehead notes, it must be “drawn out of the sea with the freshness of its immediate importance” (ibid., p. 98). This chapter deals with the notion of keeping knowledge alive. How do we accomplish this tall objective? The teacher must evoke curiosity, interest, and good judgment. There are no set formulae for achieving these objectives, because we are dealing with the human mind, rather than with dead matter. As Whitehead observes, the mind is never passive but is, instead, in perpetual activity, “delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus” (ibid., p. 6). Every time I teach the same course, I find it helpful to change books. I also read the textbooks selected for the course in tandem with my students. In this way, I can get excited and enthused by what I read and my enthusiasm bubbles over to my students without any direct effort on my part. The successful teacher in his or her own mind knows what students must know. The underlying theme running beneath the surface of Whitehead’s book, The Aims of Education, is that education is a process rather than a product. Why do I say that Whitehead sees education as a process? The entire discussion about the three stages of mental growth has to do with understanding education as a process. Whitehead calls the first stage that of romance (ibid., p. 17; also see Gershman, 1988, pp. 215-225; Goodkin, 2001, pp. 17-23; Hamrick, 1988, pp. 232-247). At this stage, the student experiences the thrill of discovery. I can speak about this stage in terms of my own life. At age seventeen when I was a high school senior, I had an exceptional teacher by the name of Father Gervase Beyer, a Franciscan priest. Father Gervase violated some of the most fundamental pedagogical rules. He used sarcasm and ridicule to get students to do their homework and to be prepared for class. If students were unprepared, he might have as many as five or six of them sit apart from the others and would not call on them for the entire class. They would be, in fact, ostracized. Father Gervase also had a sharp tongue. He would say things like “Penaskovic you won’t have to come up for your grade, I’ll roll it down to you,” thus implying I had received a zero for my efforts. He once said to a student, “I’ll flunk you so low a pancake will look like the Empire State Building.” Despite his gruff disposition and wit, Father Gervase had a soft spot in his heart and his students could not help but discover this. He worked us hard but helped students reach their potential. A “B” from him was equivalent to an “A”
Education as a Process
43
from any other professor I ever had. He taught me Logic, Latin, and Persuasive Speech when I was a college freshman. Since that time, I have had some worldrenowned professors as my teachers and mentors, but none of them had quite the same impact on me as did Father Gervase, who possessed just a Master’s degree in Philosophy. What was the key to Father Gervase’s influential teaching? Two points come to mind. First, he helped me discover my own mind or what Whitehead calls “romantic emotion,” namely, “the excitement consequent on the transition from the bare facts to the first realizations of the import of their unexplored relationships” (1929, p. 18). He also spurred me to find out things for myself. In this connection, I am reminded of Whitehead’s words that a living organism grows by its own impulse toward self-development. He adds that the creative impulse toward growth comes from within the individual (ibid., p. 39). You see, Father Gervase read widely in many fields. His knowledge emanated from him like gamma rays. He increased my vocabulary by using unfamiliar words and then having us look them up in a dictionary. I once had to write the definition of the word “concatenation” one hundred times for not knowing it after he had once explained it in class. In Chapter Three of The Aims of Education, Whitehead argues that there can be no mental development without interest. He adds that “the natural mode by which living organisms are excited [toward] suitable self-development is enjoyment” (ibid., p. 31). I think Whitehead is onto something here. I found what I call “intellectual joy” as a result of the classes I took from Father Gervase. Just as a person experiences a natural high after doing physical exercises, so too can one experience an intellectual high when writing an essay that completely absorbs one’s mind. Second, the books that Father Gervase referred to were gems. These included masterpieces such as Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand, and Stars or Werner Heisenberg’s work on the uncertainty principle in atomic physics. I fell in love with these books and found true intellectual joy in reading them. Once I had started reading a book which fascinated me, I had a difficult time putting it down. I often read a book a day out of sheer enjoyment. As Whitehead puts it, “joy is the normal healthy spur for the élan vital” (ibid., p. 31). Whitehead’s view of education was totally at loggerheads with those in his own day (and today) where students’ heads are crammed with facts or throwaway knowledge, that is, facts which students study to pass a test and then are quickly forgotten. The best teachers are creative or, in Whitehead’s words, imaginative. Imagination and creativity transform knowledge. Whitehead calls imagination “a way of illuminating the facts” (ibid., p. 93). This can only be communicated by a faculty whose members wear their learning with imagination. Father Gervase encouraged his students to think outside the box. He did not tell us to
44
RICHARD PENASKOVIC
be imaginative or creative in our thinking. Rather, he taught us to think imaginatively by modeling thinking outside the box himself. 2. The Importance of Active Learning It is my contention that Whitehead’s ideas concerning education go hand-inglove with the critical thinking movement in education, particularly with the emphasis on active learning. Active learning must be distinguished from passive learning, which occurs when students are merely receptacles of knowledge as they listen to a lecture. Lecturing focuses on recall and often fails to provide students with opportunities to search for insights on their own or to perceive meaning (Huang, 2006, p. 32). Accordingly, Huang (2006) argues that students learn effectively when they discover their own answers. For him, constructivist learning is about the construction of knowledge, rather than its reception (also see Marlowe and Page, 2005). Active learning occurs when students do something besides listening to the teacher (Penaskovic, 1997, pp. 57-60; also see Sutherland and Bonwell, 1996; Bean, 1996; Michalak, 1986, p. 256). Active learning puts a premium on the development of students’ intellectual skills, particularly for higher order thinking tasks such as analysis, synthesis, critical judgment, and evaluation. Active learning requires professors to be leaders as they invent work at which students experience success so that classrooms become student centered. As a process, active learning has the following characteristics. First, active learning starts with the needs or desires of the students themselves. Instructors have to constantly ask themselves: what are the students’ needs today? The answer to this question changes from semester to semester depending on the makeup of the class. A particular class may have a large number of freshmen and sophomores. They usually demand more direction than a class composed of juniors and seniors. My classes are open to all majors. If a particular class has a number of religious studies majors, I may be able to skip some of the introductory material I usually use at the beginning of a course (Penaskovic, 1997, p. 59). In some courses, it makes sense to give students an opportunity to provide input into the course syllabus. An introductory course in religious studies has no definite content. A lot depends on how the instructor sees the course and on whether introductory textbooks in this area of study show a high degree of divergence from one another. On day one, I give students a very tentative course outline and then have them work in groups of four or five to add or subtract topics from the course outline. This strategy has a downside, in that it takes time to work out a satisfactory course outline. I find that the benefits outweigh the negatives because once students have input into the design of the course outline, they have a much greater ownership of the course. Another
Education as a Process
45
added bonus is that they will not want to miss those classes in which the topics that they have suggested are discussed. Allowing students to help with the design of the course has symbolic value for several reasons. First, it empowers students through actively engaging them in learning and making them responsible for their own learning. Second, students are recognized by the instructor to have a positive contribution to make to the learning process, based on their knowledge, experience, and abilities. I find that this exercise also makes students feel good about themselves, and helps to develop the self-confidence necessary for active participation. As the instructor, I also find out what topics students really care about when it comes to the academic study of religion. Third, I find it important to constantly ask for feedback from students to see if the course meets their needs and expectations. Instead of asking for feedback at the end of the semester, I ask for an evaluation after the first test, which comes about four weeks into the course. I ask: what good is an evaluation at the end of the course? Each class has its own personality. What works for one class may not work for another. For this first evaluation I ask students to comment on any aspect of the class. Everything is fair game for students to critique. Verbally, I give them an open-ended set of questions to consider guiding them as they write their critique, such as: has this course challenged you? Has it made you think? Do I have any annoying mannerisms? Comment on the textbooks used in the course, are they helpful? If you were teaching this course, what would you do differently? Was the test fair? Would you recommend this course to others? Why or why not? What suggestions can you make for improving this course? (Penaskovic, 1997, p. 59). The responses are then tabulated and put into three distinct columns labeled: (1) positive comments, (2) negative comments, and (3) suggestions for improvement. Each student receives a copy of the comments by the time of the next class. Then I go through the comments orally and at the same time ask students if they want to voice their opinion on any of the comments made, including my own. Student feedback is useful because I can then make adjustments to the course. For example, a student commented that I need to speak slower so that she could take better notes. I often find confirmation in the way that I conduct the class. At times, students comment on the clothes I wear to class. I was once told that my ties are too emotional. I was not sure what to make of that remark. The fact that I ask for feedback three times during a given semester has symbolic value. It tells students that I care about them and that I am interested in making this the best course possible. Fourth, the teacher becomes a catalyst for learning. Several times during the semester I ask students to reflect on this question: how do you learn best? I ask them to write out their answer in about two hundred words. We then discuss their responses together. Some learn best by hearing what I say. Others
46
RICHARD PENASKOVIC
are more visually oriented and they suggest that we should make more use of audio-visual aids. About twenty percent of my students learn best by working together on a project (Penaskovic, 1997, p. 83). I encourage students to be active learners by having them work together on projects that are worth ten percent of their final grade. For the actual in-class presentation of their projects, students receive five percent of their final grade. I also have students write a brief summary of their project or research that includes a list of three hard sources rather than sources taken from the Internet. I insist on three hard sources in order to force students to get acquainted with the library. I talk up the projects on the first or second day of class. I explain some of the projects that were done in the past and I ask students who have taken a class with me before to talk about the project they worked on in a previous semester. Usually projects are done in small groups of two to six students. Each student receives an individual grade for the project. A student may get a “B” for the project, while another may get a “C,” if they fail to list three hard sources that they used as part of their research. This past semester, five students in one of my introductory courses in religious studies completed an unusual project. Their topic was the temple at Jerusalem. They went to Home Depot and bought enough plastic to construct an imitation of the temple at Jerusalem that was about fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. The mock temple was set up on a lawn near the classroom on campus. Students had to receive special permission to set up the temple, and they could not call it a temple because of the separation of church and state, and since the grounds were public property. They used duct tape to hold the model together. They brought in several large circulating fans so that the air inside each section was not stagnant, but circulated throughout the section. There were three sections to the design and one member of the group did research on each section, leading the class in a tour of that particular section. These kinds of projects appeal to students who have a practical nature and/or technological expertise. I have no doubt that the students who carried out this particular project will remember this experience forever. Several of the students who worked on it were really enthusiastic about it for the rest of the semester. In fact, their excitement made them work harder on the other parts of the course throughout the rest of the semester (ibid., pp. 83-85). 3. Some Practical Whiteheadian Pedagogical Suggestions In The Aims of Education, Whitehead does not speak directly about active learning, nor does he give us practical strategies for its implementation. The following comments are entirely commensurate with Whitehead’s dictum to keep knowledge alive. The practical suggestions that I will now mention have
Education as a Process
47
to do with keeping knowledge alive by turning passive students into active learners. I would note that active learning can be used in conjunction with the lecture method. A teacher can fruitfully use the guided lecture where students are told to listen for ten minutes without taking any notes. They are then instructed to write down what they remember, spending then a few minutes in small groups clarifying the material and discussing its importance. Students are often taken aback when this format is suggested. However, it helps me to understand what students see as important in what I have said. It also allows students to obtain from their peers some of the salient point I made while lecturing that may have slipped by them. I can then ask for a volunteer to summarize what I said in two or three sentences. Such an exercise forces students to think and to come to terms with the material themselves. It also forces students to express themselves first in writing and then verbally (Penaskovic, 1997, p. 68; also see Kraft, 1985, pp. 149-154). The best way for me to pique the curiosity of students has to do with getting them to ask questions. This is an art form and it does not happen spontaneously. Rather, it has to be well planned. I begin the process on day one when I challenge students to ask me the hardest questions they can imagine. I also set the tone by explaining to them what I call the Smile and Pass Rule. This means that if I ask students a question by name, they may, if they do not know the answer, smile and I will go on to another student. In this way, students are not made to feel stupid. At the same time, however, if students are chatting to one another in the back or if I feel a particular student is inattentive or daydreaming, I can bring that student back to reality by calling out that student’s name and asking a direct question. Students love the Smile and Pass Rule because it gives them a way out when they do not know the answer, thus allowing them to save face (Penaskovic, 1997, pp. 69-71). Another strategy that works for me is the game of twenty questions. I will come into a class and ask the students to put their desks in a circle. I then allow them to ask me any question at all concerning the study of religion. No question is out of bounds, not even those questions that are outside the subject matter of this particular course in religious studies. If I do not know the answer to a particular question, I will admit to the class that I am at a loss, but that I will look it up and answer it during the next class. Students appreciate the fact that I admit my ignorance and admire me for my humility (ibid., p. 68). I have found that writing is the most powerful tool in a teacher’s repertoire to aid students to think for themselves. Whitehead speaks of this in terms of the “cultivation of mental power.” Whitehead writes that the “really useful training yields a comprehension of a few general principles with a thorough grounding in the way they apply to a variety of concrete details” (1929, p. 26). Whitehead insists on the importance of teaching students to think when he says that
48
RICHARD PENASKOVIC your learning is useless to you till you have lost your textbooks, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination. . . . The function of a University is to enable you to shed details in favor of principles. (1929, p. 26)
When Whitehead speaks of principles he does not mean verbal formulations. Rather, he bespeaks of a mental habit, that is to say, the way the mind reacts to the appropriate stimulus in the form of illustrative circumstances. What Whitehead means is that no one goes around with his or her knowledge clearly and consciously in tow. Whitehead believes that it is more important to be able to think on the spot, applying general principles to specific situations. He writes that “mental cultivation is nothing else than the satisfactory way in which the mind will function when it is poked up into activity” (ibid., p. 27). There seems to be an affinity here with the views on education that are espoused by John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University (1873). Newman remarks that there are individuals who embrace in their minds a plethora of ideas, but with little understanding about their real relationship to each other. He adds that if they are nothing more than well read individuals, “they have not what specially deserves the name of culture of mind, or fulfills the type of Liberal Education.” For Newman, a great memory does not make a philosopher, any more than “a dictionary can be called a grammar” (1873, p. 121). I want to expand on Whitehead’s ideas by giving some further practical suggestions. I find that writing is the most powerful tool available to help students think clearly and effectively. Writing forces students to come to terms with the material in a highly personal way. In sum, writing makes students think their way to understanding. One of the ways to get students to think, while at the same time interesting them in the course, is to have them analyze the news. The act of writing about the news increases students’ abilities to think critically as opposed to simply reading about the news. According to Nancy L. Malcom (2006), four steps are involved in this particular process. First, students are asked to find a very recent newspaper or journal article relating to the material covered in class. They are then asked to summarize the article in seventy-five to one-hundred words. This process forces students to recognize the main ideas and key arguments in the news. Second, students are asked to identify a key concept or theory that pertains to the content of the course. In a course on the sociology of religion, it may be the term secularization. In a course on religious tolerance, prejudice may be the key concept. Students are told to select only one key concept or theory to analyze. Students are then asked to explain the key term or theory in their own words without regard to the news article they have chosen to analyze. Third, students are instructed to explain the link between the news article and the key concept or theory they have chosen to identify. Fourth, a teacher can have students
Education as a Process
49
explain how the event depicted in the news article differs from the key concept they have identified. Finding what may be called the point of divergence may be the most challenging part of this exercise. However, if students are able to do this part well, they are on their way to becoming critical thinkers (Malcom, 2006, p. 146). It is helpful to have an in-class workshop in order to guide students through these four steps. On the first day of the workshop, the teacher might have the students bring to class a journal article or a newspaper story relating to a religious issue. The teacher can help them identify the theory or the key concept and explain it in their own words. As part of the workshop, it is useful for the teacher to give students several examples from past semesters that they can use as models for their own analyses. Since step four may be the most difficult part of the process, it is also helpful to place stress on demonstrating how this can be done using several examples. Furthermore, it will be helpful for them to practice the articulation of reasons for why a particular example of the theory or the key concept, whatever it may be, is not “perfect” (Malcom, 2006, pp. 143-149). 4. Some Further Whiteheadian Observations Several more important Whiteheadian insights come to mind. First, Whitehead is correct when he states that the central problem in education is the challenge of keeping knowledge alive. The process of exhibiting the application of knowledge depends on the imagination and the creativity of the teacher. I understand creativity as the ability to go beyond the confines of convention. I see each of my classes as a huge learning laboratory, where I can modify the conditions each semester in order to see what works and what does not work, using a trial and error approach. In my efforts to be creative, I get excited when each semester begins. I enjoy experimenting with different teaching strategies. I find that if I am enthused about my course, so will my students be enthused. As Whitehead remarks, there exists no royal road to learning. Rather, as every teacher must know, one must travel down a bumpy road, one that is sometimes filled with potholes. Second, Whitehead speaks of three stages of mental growth. I have already alluded to the first one, namely, the stage of romance, where the subject matter has the vividness of novelty. Whitehead calls the second stage that of precision. In this stage, appeal is made to the intellect. It is the stage where students perfect their writing, spelling, arithmetic, and lists of simple facts (1929, p. 22). In the stage of precision, width of relationship remains subordinate to exactness of expression or formulation. The third stage is that of generalization. Whitehead calls this stage “a return to romanticism with added advantage of classified ideas and relevant technique” (ibid., p. 19).
50
RICHARD PENASKOVIC
To some extent, these three stages correspond to the three purposes of classical rhetoric. The first aim of classical rhetoric may be summed up in the Latin word, delectare, meaning “to delight” or “to attract.” This signifies that orators ought to dazzle their audience with the beauty of their words. Words are the wrapping or shell surrounding the nuggets of wisdom found within. This stage corresponds to the stage of romance in Whitehead’s terminology. The Latin word, docere, meaning “to teach,” best expresses the second aim of classical rhetoric. Here, in the second stage of classical rhetoric, appeal is made to the reason or intellect. Whitehead refers to this stage as that of precision. It is the stage of grammar, the grammar of language, and the grammar of science. The third stage of classical rhetoric is summarized in the Latin word, movere, meaning “to move.” In this stage, an appeal is made to the will. The goal remains that of persuasion. For example, a salesperson aims at persuading the consumer to buy a particular item using the beauty of words and appealing to the customers’ reason and to their wills at the same time. The correspondence with Whitehead’s terminology is less pronounced in this stage, although we may find a hint of it in Whitehead’s remark that the final stage of generalization “is the fruition which has been the goal of the precise training” (1929, p. 19). Third, what can we say of Whitehead’s ideas in light of cognitive psychology? This is a huge area of scholarship. Allow me to make a few pertinent observations here. Today’s cognitive psychologists distinguish between three levels of learning: declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and meta-cognition. Declarative knowledge has to do with facts and information. Many professors are content to teach entirely on this level. Procedural knowledge involves knowing how to use declarative knowledge in order to execute a skilled performance, for instance, how to write a critical book review. Procedural knowledge deals with skills or “how-to” knowledge such as piloting an airplane as opposed to knowing a lot about the dimensions of the plane, its speed, etc. Last, meta-cognition, or a literacy of thoughtfulness, includes such control strategies as taking notes, asking questions, making plans, setting goals, observing the effectiveness of our work, and making corrective changes. Of course, Whitehead does not speak explicitly about the three levels of learning. To his credit, when he speaks about style, he is referring to what cognitive psychologists would today call meta-cognition. An expert in a particular discipline, such as an artist, uses meta-cognitive strategies unconsciously and intuitively. One usually thinks of style in reference to writing. In this connection, style means a “thinking out into language.” For Whitehead the meaning of the notion of style is much broader than that. Style is the love of a subject in and for itself; the last acquirement of the educated mind, pervading a person’s entire being (ibid., p. 12).
Education as a Process
51
Style concerns the fashioning and restraining of power. It is the exclusive privilege of the expert. Style increases our power by the very fact that our minds are not distracted by irrelevancies, but, rather, remain focused. For Whitehead, style characterizes the expert in a particular field. Whoever heard of the style of an amateur painter, poet, or writer? Experts in a particular field use meta-cognitive strategies unconsciously and style follows them around like a shadow. If the amateur is understood as a person who has an immense versatility in mastering a given routine, then an expert has the foresight and the intuitive sense which comes from special knowledge. Experienced teachers, for example, are not thrown for a loss if they walk into a classroom and soon discover that they have left their lecture notes at home. They are able to improvise on the spot, in contradistinction to a novice teacher who might be easily rattled in such a predicament. Veteran teachers have been there before and can usually take from their vast store of knowledge and speak knowledgeably for an hour extemporaneously. They have a certain style or flair that allows them to be relaxed, even though they are not as well prepared for class as they may prefer. WORKS CITED Bean, John C. (1996) Engaging Ideas. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Gershman, Kathleen. (1988) “To and Fro: Education for the Art of Life.” Process Studies, 17.4, pp. 215-226. Goodkin, D. (2001) “Orff-Schulwerk in the New Millennium.” Music Educators Journal, 88.3, November, pp. 17-23. Hamrick, William S. (1988) “Postliterate Humanity.” Process Studies, 17.4, pp. 232247. Huang, G. H. (2006) “Informal Forum: Fostering Active Learning in a Teacher Preparation Program.” Education, 127.1, pp. 31-38. Kraft, Robert. (1985) “Group Inquiry Turns Passive Students Active.” College Teaching, 33.4, pp. 149-154. Malcom, Nancy L. (2006) “Analyzing the News: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in a Writing Intensive Social Problems Course.” Teaching Sociology, 34.2, pp. 143149. Marlowe, Bruce A. and Marilyn L. Page (2005) Creating and Sustaining the Constructivist Classroom, 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Michalak, Stanley J. (1986) “Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills in Traditional Liberal Arts Courses: Report on a Faculty Workshop.” Liberal Education, 72.3, pp. 253262. Newman, John H. (1873) The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. London: Longmans, Green, And Co. ———. (1891) An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Penaskovic, Richard. (1997) Critical Thinking and the Academic Study of Religion. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
52
RICHARD PENASKOVIC
Sutherland, Tracy E. and Charles Bonwell, eds. (1996) Using Active Learning in College Courses: A Range of Options for Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
Five THE IMPORTANCE OF BIG IDEAS OR HOW TO ENCOURAGE ACTIVE WISDOM Marcus Ford 1. The Failure of Modern Universities to Focus on Big Ideas and to Promote Active Wisdom Universities, in their current form, are failing modern society because they are not enabling students to understand the most pressing issues of the day. This is not to say that highly motivated students are unable to find resources within the university that will allow them to understand almost any issue. They certainly can, but modern universities are not structured in such a way so as to assure that all students will be encouraged to wrestle with big ideas and the complex issues of the modern world. A university that took the writings of Alfred North Whitehead seriously would not be open to this criticism. According to Whitehead, there is a threefold rhythm to education involving the stages of romance, precision, and generalization, or, to use more organic language, fermentation, precision, and fruition (1929, p. 18). For the purposes of this essay, I will simply assume that he is correct. And while there are rhythmic patterns within each phase—cycles within cycles within cycles—I will overlook this complexity. I am interested here in focusing only on the wider pattern. I will also overlook the fact that much education takes place outside of formal schooling, and I will focus only on the institutional aspect of learning. In the United States, we have three levels of instruction: elementary school, high school, and university. In general, I would say that the rhythm we have adopted, across these three levels, is one of precision, more precision, and even more precision. This is not exactly true, but it is generally true. Schools see their task as first teaching basic skills, followed by more advanced skills, followed by even more complex skills. And the skills that are particularly stressed are those that will help to create a world-class work force. The ability to discern patterns in history, to understand multifaceted issues, and to think philosophically, for example, are not cultivated because they are not highly valued. A Whiteheadian model for American education would be one in which elementary school emphasized the sheer joy of learning—discovery, pondering, cogitating, playing with ideas; high school focused on precision—precision in
54
MARCUS FORD
language, mathematics, science, and history; and university focused on generalization—discerning patterns, extrapolating information, and engaging in metaphysical reflection. According to Whitehead, at the university level, it is possible to shed the details in favor of principles, and start from general ideas to apply them to concrete cases (1929, p. 37). The goal of this kind of education is not theory for the sake of theory. Learning, according to Whitehead, should culminate in the achievement of active wisdom, which is a “preparation for battling with the immediate experiences of life, a preparation by which to qualify each immediate moment with relevant ideas and appropriate actions” (ibid., p. 37). Reality, in all of its complexity, is too overwhelming. In order to act wisely in the world, we need to be able to make valid generalizations. In other words, we need be able to see the forests as well as the trees. In this essay, I will focus on higher education and precisely on what the university is today in the United States and what it should be. Let me be clear, the university today is so far from what Whitehead thought it should be that this proposal constitutes a radical break from the status quo. The disciplinary structure of the university and the emphasis on preparing individuals for jobs have left little room for big ideas. Any serious attempt to implement a curriculum that dealt with timely and important issues should expect resistance from almost all quarters. Although many people, both inside and outside the university, see it as the last bastion of liberalism, in point of fact the university is a very conservative place. Major changes are almost always unwelcome. Whitehead once said that “the pure conservative is fighting against the very essence of the universe” (1933, p. 274). If so, for most of its career the university has been fighting against the essence of the universe. 2. The Three Forms of University: Civic, Research, and Entrepreneurial As I have, to some extent, discussed in my book, Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University (2002), the modern university has three pure forms: the civic university, the research university, and the entrepreneurial university. The first civic university was established in Halle in 1694; the first research university was established in Berlin in 1809; and the largest and most famous entrepreneurial university, the University of Phoenix, was founded in 1979 in California, but now exists mainly in cyberspace. It is to be noted that although the University of Phoenix has its main office in the city of Phoenix, Arizona, and although it recently bought the naming rights to a professional football stadium in Glendale, Arizona, the university takes its name from the mythical bird, not the city, and moved to Phoenix in order to bypass accreditation issues in California.
The Importance of Big Ideas
55
The civic university, which in the United States took the form of the Land Grant colleges and universities, exists to serve the interests of the state. It was to be an affordable alternative to the liberal arts college which was to emphasize the practical arts, such as mining, animal husbandry, and engineering, alongside the liberal arts. Today, the practical arts include accounting, dental hygiene, and computer programming. Originally, civic universities were funded mostly by the state because they were regarded as a public good. An educated public benefited everyone, especially when that education consisted in a balance between the practical and the liberal arts. Many public universities now receive less than thirty per cent of their funding from the state, some as little as ten per cent. This shift in funding suggests that many no longer regard public education as a public good. The research university was established as a reaction to the civic university. In its original conception, it did not have any practical benefit to the state. It served only the intellectual interests of the scholar and, much more generally, human culture. One of the great ironies in the history of higher education is that, although research universities were created with great disdain for all useful knowledge, research has in some cases, and especially in the sciences, proved to be of immense usefulness. Today, a great deal of money comes to a relatively small number of major research universities, precisely because the knowledge that is discovered there is so useful. Much of the research, needless to say, is related to the military. Much federal funding is also expended in the areas of agricultural research, medicine, and information technology. Although some funding is available in the arts and the social sciences, the amount pales in comparison to the sums spent elsewhere. It is important to distinguish briefly between the entrepreneurial university and the civic university, insofar as they both tend toward the practical as opposed to the theoretical. On the one hand, the civic university exists to serve society’s needs. Some of those needs are task oriented, such as growing food and building bridges, but others are not. Society also needs well-informed and engaged citizens. The civic university seeks to attend to all of society’s needs insofar as they have an intellectual component. The entrepreneurial university, on the other hand, in its purest form, exists only to make a profit for its stockholders by producing a marketable product. Insofar as there is no market for citizenship, it has no interest in producing citizens. There is, however, a market for job skills, and therefore it puts its attention there. Today, most universities are hybrids of these pure forms, emphasizing perhaps one aspect more than the others, but including elements of all three. Because of the costs associated with scientific research, most universities in the United States combine elements mainly of the civic and the entrepreneurial models, shifting ever closer to the entrepreneurial ideal as public funding diminishes. It is possible to argue that the University of Phoenix, and other schools like it, has been so financially successful mainly because of its
56
MARCUS FORD
singularity of purpose. It has never had a research agenda, and does not aspire to one. Nor has it any pretense of educating for citizenship or serving the general good. Insofar as it has had, from the beginning, a clear business model and a single focus, it has tended to outperform its public counterparts when measured in strictly financial terms. 3. Enter the Constructive Postmodern University The kind of Whiteheadian university that I am suggesting is one that emphasizes generalization or synthetic thought, differing from all three forms of the modern university, as well as the premodern form of the university, in this respect, and therefore could be called postmodern. However, the term postmodern should not be construed in the manner in which it is usually understood, namely, as a mode of deconstructionism, but rather in the constructive sense. Its purpose would be to serve human societies and the earth itself, upon which the former depends. In relation to the emphasis on generalization at the university that I am defending, it must be said that there are an infinite number of generalizations, many of which have no importance. As such, we must ask: which generalizations might serve as the basis for a university curriculum at this time in human history, in the United States? Here are five generalizations worth thinking about as we begin the twenty-first century: (1) the universe has a moral core to it, although there are many culturally-distinct formulations of moral principles; (2) although past civilizations have collapsed, our civilization, as it currently exists, is sustainable for the foreseeable future; (3) the United States is not a global empire and has no intention of ever becoming one; (4) the best hope for alleviating global poverty, and poverty within advanced industrial nations, is unfettered capitalism; (5) societal problems in the United States, such as failing public schools and a high rate of imprisonment, are neither the result of the disintegrations of neighborhoods and families, nor are they the result of economic and public policy. Rather, they are the result of poor choices made by individuals. For reasons that are obvious, each of these five broad propositions, whether they are true or false, is extremely important. Needless to say, there are other ways of stating these same propositions. The proposition that there is a moral core to the universe, for example, could also be stated in the negative: that there is no moral core to the universe. And there are other propositions that may well be deserving of a similar consideration. For example, there is the proposition that a lack of potable water poses a very serious threat to the welfare of billions of human beings. The list is not meant to be exhaustive. Rather, it is illustrative of the kinds of big ideas that could form the basis of a university curriculum. Perhaps every five years or so a college or university could decide, in some kind of democratic process, which generalizations should
The Importance of Big Ideas
57
be a part of the curriculum and how to frame these ideas. This alone would be an important exercise that is now completely absent from higher education, a discussion among faculty about what should be central to education. And there is no need for every college or university to have the same curriculum. Universities outside of the United States might choose to focus on other issues. The modern university has put far too much emphasis on uniformity. This is partly due to external agencies of accreditation. No doubt there is some role to be played by such external agencies, but they have clearly exerted too much power in the recent past. What is the evidence supporting each of these general claims? What is the evidence against them? To what extent does the contradictory evidence undermine the overall validity of the generalization? It takes only one white crow to dethrone the idea that all crows are black, but how many non-black crows are needed to disprove the generalization that most crows are black? It would be wrong to teach these generalizations dogmatically and to penalize students who disagree or who agree only partially. The goal would be to consider carefully these general ideas in light of the evidence. Nothing is gained by forcing students to come to a conclusion that they do not believe in. What would a curriculum based on these kinds of generalizations look like and how would students be evaluated? It is not possible to answer these questions in detail, but they cannot be avoided. Take the generalization that, although past civilizations have collapsed, our civilization, as currently constructed, is in no immediate danger. We can imagine a course that carefully considered this generalization. It would involve some reading of history and anthropology and the natural sciences, and it would involve considering the evidence both for and against the notion that our civilization is in grave danger. The World Watch Institute publishes a yearly State-of-the-World volume, and the CIA, the United Nations, and the Department of Defense also produce reports on the foreseeable future. A fair sampling of these reports could provide the basis for an interesting examination of the most likely threats to our civilization and the interconnectedness of some or all of these threats. Students could write papers, make films, or produce some other kind of work in which they demonstrated their understanding of the issues. Or they could reflect on the underlying causes and possible solutions. Such a course would not differ very much from some courses that already exist, but which few students take. A course or a program of study dealing with the idea that the United States is not a global empire, and has no aspiration of ever becoming one, would want to carefully consider mostly American history and foreign policy, as well as some of the more contemporary kinds of evidence that would either confirm or deny this thesis. In addition to looking at American history from American sources, it would make sense to consider evidence, both for and against this thesis, from outside the United States. American actions in Panama or Vietnam look differently when viewed from the perspective of individuals within those
58
MARCUS FORD
nations than they do when viewed from an American vantage point. Again, there are courses like this that already exist, but they are not required of all college students. The vast majority of individuals graduate from college without ever having given careful consideration to this proposition. Without a doubt, after looking at all the evidence, not everyone would agree on whether the proposition in question is entirely true, mostly true, or mostly false. It would be unfair to grade students in terms of how closely their views mirrored the views of their professor. In these kind of courses, perhaps students would not receive grades at all. In any event, it is important that universities do not become a place where students are coerced into holding one view or another. The job of the university, from this perspective, is not to indoctrinate students, but rather to make them wrestle with the complexities of the world and to encourage them to think critically about big ideas. The proposition that the universe has, or does not have, a moral core to it, despite the fact that morality is clearly shaped by human culture, is obviously a metaphysical question. More specifically, it is the kind of metaphysical question that is now decidedly out of fashion with contemporary philosophy. That being said, it is arguably a very important issue to address at this point in history, especially when all of the cultures of the world are in almost daily contact with one another, and when modern science has led many to believe that the universe is morally neutral, or, to put it differently, that moral beliefs have no objective standing. If there is no objective basis for moral principles then how is it possible to argue for human rights generally, or more specifically for women’s rights or the rights of ethnic minorities? How is it possible to make claims as to the rights of future generations to inherit a world that is not polluted or so degraded that it is not capable of sustaining life, or to argue for the rights of nature itself? On what basis can a person claim that democratic forms of government are morally superior to autocratic forms of government? We live in a world in which we must, for better or for worse, make moral judgments. Devoting some part of a university curriculum to examining the basis for our moral claims is, arguably, time well spent, especially in light of the diversity of cultures within the United States. Some people are more at home with generalized thinking than others. Some individuals would find the kind of curriculum that I am suggesting a great adventure of ideas. Others are less comfortable with big ideas and generalizations. Whitehead was clearly someone who was quite at home with big ideas, but this was not the basis of his recommendation. The purpose of generalized thought is its usefulness. “Pedants,” he says, “sneer at an education which is useful. But if education is not useful, what is it? . . . Of course, education should be useful, whatever your aim in life. . . . It is useful, because understanding is useful” (1929, p. 2). What are the uses of education in our time? When Whitehead says that education “was useful to Saint Augustine and it was useful to Napoleon” (ibid.,
The Importance of Big Ideas
59
p. 2), he is clearly acknowledging a wide range of uses. The list of generalizations that I have put forth suggests that the most pressing uses for education in our time are social, political, moral, and environmental. If a university education cannot help us to think through issues such as those we have mentioned, then it is of very little use to anyone. 4. The Curriculum of the Whiteheadian University One way to structure the curriculum that I am proposing is to emphasize general ideas in the first two years of college, and to emphasize skills related to problem solving in the last two years. If high schools stressed attention to details, the first two years of college would be a welcome relief. Students and faculty together could step back from detailed information and seek to discover the big picture: the historical trends, the overriding patterns, the metaphysical implications, and the overall assessments. Sometimes there is an attempt to do this in a senior capstone class. In the nineteenth century, it was a class in moral philosophy, but such an approach is too little and too late. Moreover, many professors feel unqualified to speak outside their own academic discipline, such that these capstone courses are typically seen as the big picture within the confines of their disciplines, which is to say that the picture is not very big at all. When speaking about metaphysical speculation, Whitehead employed the metaphor of an airplane that begins on the ground, soars into the sky, and then must return safely to the ground. Too much philosophy, he suggested, is like a plane that never lands. It is one thing to explore general ideas, but it is quite another to test these ideas against the facts of the world and to provide concrete solutions to real problems. If, for example, modern agricultural practices are not sustainable, what would sustainable agriculture look like? If unfettered capitalism is not the best way to address the needs of the poorest and of the powerless, what is the best way? A university education must go beyond general ideas, which are themselves useful, in order to seek out and to formulate concrete solutions, if it is to be useful to individuals and to society as a whole. The widespread belief that the most practical purpose of a university education is to prepare students for the kinds of jobs that currently exist is an assumption that is highly questionable, given what scientists are telling us about environmental issues such as global warming and peak oil, for example. There is every reason to believe that the economy of the future will bear little resemblance to the present economy. It will probably be much less global and much less robust. Even if the economy continues for some time more or less along its current lines, there is a tremendous need for American citizens to think though the moral and political issues of our day. Is the current direction of American foreign policy morally defensible and is it financially affordable?
60
MARCUS FORD
Can we, as a nation, afford to devote as much money as the rest of the world combined does for national defense, while still meeting all of our other societal obligations? What are our moral obligations to future generations, to the earth, and to the poor? It is easy to forget that a civilization is not simply an economy and a military. At its root, a civilization rests on a shared set of values, a shared history, and a common way of understanding reality. To the extent that universities choose not to engage in a discussion of big ideas, and to the extent that they do not encourage students to actively evaluate their own civilization and their own understanding of the world around them, they are undermining the very civilization they purport to serve. The kinds of changes to the curriculum that I am proposing are so radical that it is hard to imagine them being adopted anywhere. One possibility is that it could first come into being somewhere outside the United States, in Germany, China, or Cuba, for example. Although the United States likes to see itself as the center of innovation, many innovations occur elsewhere. There is today much interest in Whitehead in China. Perhaps this is because, traditionally, education there has been deeply philosophical, and the Chinese see in Whitehead a way to recapture aspects of their own educational tradition. It is possible that the first university to deal with both general ideas and active wisdom will be Chinese. It is also possible that in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe, a university would come into being that resembled the kind of institution that I have discussed. Insofar as both the civic and the research university were first conceived in Germany, it is possible that a truly postmodern university would also arise there. The intellectual and political climate in Germany is significantly different than the situation in the United States, and it is possible that, once again, real educational reform will happen there, and then, hopefully, it will be imitated in America and elsewhere. A third possibility is that in a nation that openly rejects American domination, such as Cuba or Venezuela, a university like the one I am proposing could come into being, specifically because it is so antithetical to the idea of a university which emphasizes personal economic benefit, as is the case in American schools. I can also imagine the possibility that a university in the United States, devastated by a hurricane or some other environmental tragedy, might seek not simply to rebuild but to rebuild a new kind of university, one that took environmental and social issues much more seriously. Sometimes tragedy is the precondition for real innovation. What is much harder to imagine is a successful university, or even a marginally successful university, adopting a new curriculum. What I mean by the word “successful” here is one that is financially secure or one that is growing. In this situation, it is difficult to convince anyone that there is need for change. Change is unlikely in this situation since there is typically too much vested interest in the status quo, than when good reasons are given for change.
The Importance of Big Ideas
61
Yet another possibility is that change will occur in a piecemeal fashion. It is very common for universities to give thirty hours or so to liberal studies or general education. Typically, these requirements are little more than a selection of courses which were created to serve academic majors. It would be possible, although not without cost and effort, to create a liberal studies curriculum that dealt with big issues, leaving the university still divided in terms of academic disciplines. This kind of piecemeal approach has both advantages and disadvantages. Its major advantage, depending on our perspective, of course, is that it is considerably less radical than a full-blown reformulation of the university as it now exists. This can also be seen as its major drawback. If a crisis is upon us, piecemeal solutions may prove inadequate. Whitehead once said that “the proper function of a university is the imaginative acquisition of knowledge. . . . A university is imaginative or it is nothing—at least nothing useful” (1929, p. 96). A university given to big ideas and to active wisdom would be extremely useful at this point in world history. Indeed, I cannot imagine a more useful kind of institution. WORKS CITED Ford, Marcus. (2002) Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
Six EDUCATING THE FIVE-MINDED ANIMAL Bernie Neville 1. A Fractal Universe Whitehead’s solution to the mind-body problem was to postulate that each actual occasion has a physical and a mental pole. The initial phase of each event’s becoming is the physical pole where the past is experienced as definite, concrete fact. The mental phase is where the subject creates itself out of what it has included in the initial phase. The subject is both self-caused and caused by past occasions. In the physical phase of experience, the subject feels the past. In the mental phase of experience, it fashions itself out of these experiences. Each actual occasion emerges from the sum of all previous actual occasions, reaching its satisfaction and perishing, thereby becoming part of the reality out of which the next actual occasion emerges. The ongoing life of the universe consists in these pulses, these “throbs of experience” (Whitehead, 1929a, p. 190), each of which includes the whole world. Whitehead’s universe is a fractal universe, although the language of fractal geometry had not yet developed at his time to allow him to describe it in this way. I suggest that we can see the physical and mental poles of each occasion and each occasion’s satisfaction replicated in the experience of perception: via causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, and symbolic reference which connects the first two. We see these three replicated on a larger scale in Whitehead’s theory of the rhythm of learning: the physicality of romantic engagement, the mental activity of precision, and the synthetic, getting-it-alltogether of generalization. What we see at the microscopic level in each moment of learning, we also see replicated on a larger scale in each extended learning experience. We find a larger replication in Whitehead’s image of human development. But we can go beyond Whitehead to find the same rhythm in the evolution of consciousness and culture. One may even speculate that the three modes of perception are replicated in the experience of the cosmos. 2. The Rhythm of Life Whitehead argued that life is essentially rhythmical. He states that “our bodily life is essentially periodic. It is dominated by the beatings of the heart, and the recurrence of breathing. The presupposition of periodicity is indeed
64
BERNIE NEVILLE
fundamental to our very concept of life” (1911, p. 122). We now know more than Whitehead did about our biological rhythms: monthly, daily, and ultradian. We know that our organisms cycle from a state which can be imagined as dark, slow, blunt, and physical to a state which appears to be at the opposite pole, namely, light, fast, sharp, and mental. We experience these polarities in a ninety minute or ultradian cycle, within a daily or diurnal cycle, within a monthly cycle, and within an annual cycle. If we sense it at all, we may sense the ultradian cycle as a personal one, but we cannot avoid the sense that our daily, monthly, and annual cycles are embedded within a larger system over which we do not appear to have much control. It seems that the ultradian cycle continues through both sleep and waking. In sleep, we move between a state of deep unconsciousness to a state of almost waking. In waking, we move between a state of mental wakefulness and a state of almost sleeping. This movement between slower and faster brain rhythms is associated with a shift of electrical brain activity in the right cerebral hemisphere to a concentration of activity in the left (see Rossi, 1986). Franz Riffert expands on this image of rhythms or cycles, as he writes of “the pulsating micro-processes [that] stretch throughout the universe and become especially obvious in living organisms” (2005, p. 90). He argues that the rhythmic pulsations that characterize processes at the microscopic level must pervade reality at all levels. Similarly, Whitehead himself suggests that the pulse of each micro-event of individual human experience, in which physical and mental perception are integrated in the imaginative leap which connects them, is replicated in each conscious experience of learning and is potentially replicated again throughout the various stages of human life. It is evident that Whitehead’s language changes as he moves between his theories of perception, of learning, of child development, and of the evolution of thought. Nevertheless, in his descriptions, we find a consistent pattern of contrasts, moving from a depiction of experience as dominated by the physical pole, to a depiction of experience as dominated by its mental pole, to a description of the holistic integration of the two. The pattern is simultaneously representative of the divisions of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, and symbolic reference in our perception; romance, precision, and generalization in our learning; the confluent, discernment, and spiritual modes of experience in our maturation; and instinct, intelligence, and wisdom in the evolution of thought. 3. Perception In human becoming, we are inclined to distinguish between what we experience as body and what we experience as mind. In relation to our body, we simply receive the past, whereas in our mind we are aware of both the past and the possibilities for the future. Whitehead proposes that there are three
Educating the Five-Minded Animal
65
modes of perception: causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, and symbolic reference. These may be instantaneous in any moment of experience. We perceive the world through our senses, usually visual or aural. We experience, in our bodies, our direct connection with it. And we integrate the two to give meaning to the sensory input. The actual occasion has a physical pole, experienced through causal efficacy, a mental pole, experienced through presentational immediacy, and a unifying dimension, namely, symbolic reference. In my normal experience, I simply see a table. Presentational immediacy gives me sensory data regarding color, shape, and maybe odor and texture. Causal efficacy allows all my past experiences of tables to flow into my body. Through symbolic reference, I connect the two, construct a meaning for the particular color and shape, and see a table. What occurs in the micro-event occurs also in our conscious experience of perception. The three modes of perception are distinct, and may be divided as distinct phases of our experience. Not every sensory experience connects immediately with a felt sense of which we are aware. It may take time to experience causal efficacy through intuition or felt sense. And it may take time to find meaning and words for whatever it is that we have perceived. For example, we may be confronted with an abstract painting and find in it nothing but colors and shapes. We can leave it at that point and declare that it is meaningless. However, if we stay with the painting, get in touch with our felt sense of it, and stay there for awhile, we may find that meaning emerges, even if we have trouble finding words for it. The micro-moment of concrescence is replicated in the experience of learning. 4. The Flight of Discovery We find rhythm in Whitehead’s image of the flight of discovery. As he states, the true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization, and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. (1929a, p. 5) In this image of learning, we find a movement from the physical pole of groundedness to the mental pole of imaginative generalization and back to the physical pole again. Only we are now in a different airport, ready to take off again. We are starting from a new groundedness which has been enhanced by imaginative generalization. As Heraclitus might have said, “you cannot land twice at the same airport.” While on the ground, we can only make what Whitehead calls, perceptive propositions. That is, we can only describe what we observe. At the top of our
66
BERNIE NEVILLE
flight, however, we can make imaginative propositions. In other words, we can suggest possibilities. The integration of physical and mental experience gives us a new physical starting point for the next cycle of learning. Of course, we can abort the process and fail to complete the cycle, thus condemning ourselves to a replication of the past. However, insofar as we are engaged in the creative advance into novelty, our voyage of discovery—both personal and collective— will proceed through the integration of our particular observation and our rational interpretation. Whitehead rejected linear models of learning. He insists that learning is a rhythmic process. We do not learn by accumulating information in a sequential manner. We are transformed by spiraling through our experience at increasing levels of awareness. In The Aims of Education, he uses the image of eddies within eddies to relate this notion. He states, “there are minor eddies, each in itself a threefold cycle, running its course in each day, in each week, in each term” (1929b, p. 38). Whitehead was convinced that there must be a rhythmic dimension within each instance of learning. One manifestation of this rhythm is in the alternation between the concrete and the abstract. Another rhythmic fluctuation is that between the joy of discovery and the consolidation of accumulated knowledge and skills. The common elements are the physical, the mental, and the integration of the two. He writes that “from the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery,” a discovery that general ideas give us an understanding of the “stream of events that pours into his life” (ibid., p. 2). Whitehead distinguishes three stages of the educational process: romance, precision, and generalization. Each learning event begins with curiosity and engagement, proceeds through the accumulation of information and the learning of technique, and is made integral through personal discovery and insight. For him, “there is a general apprehension of some topic in its vague possibilities, the mastery of the relevant details, and finally the putting of the whole subject together in the light of the relevant knowledge” (ibid., p. 38). Whitehead also gives us an image of cycles within cycles within cycles, or eddies within eddies within eddies, as he writes, “the development of mentality exhibits itself as a rhythm involving an interweaving of cycles, the whole process being dominated by a greater cycle of the same general character as its minor eddies” (ibid., p. 27). We will find this cycle in a particular learning moment, extended in a particular event, and extended still further in the life cycle. Accordingly, he states, the whole period of growth from infancy to manhood [sic] forms one grand cycle. Its stage of romance stretches across the first dozen years of life, its stage of precision comprises the whole school period of secondary
Educating the Five-Minded Animal
67
education, and its stage of generalization is the period of entrance into manhood. (1929b, p. 25) 5. Maturation Riffert (2005) develops the notion of the cyclic nature of learning at some length, and there is no need to expand it further here, except to point out, as he does, that within each stage of the life cycle, there are minor eddies. Whitehead argues that there are sub-stages of romance, precision, and generalization in childhood and the same sub-stages are reiterated in adolescence. He was inclined to claim a similar cycle existed, at least potentially, in adulthood, but he felt he could not maintain a credible argument. His suggestion that there are overlapping cycles challenges Piaget’s notion that cognitive growth proceeds in a linear manner by fixed stages. It is a notion that is challenged also in the models of growth to which I refer later in this chapter. The three phases of development from infancy to maturity replicate the oscillation between the physical and mental poles in each moment of creative experience, including in physical sensation, in mental observation, and in the imaginative leap that connects them. They are replicated in each experience of transformative learning, instantly in a moment of insight that shapes our behavior, or extended over time in life-changing events. Whitehead distinguishes between three phases in the development of a mature human being, each characterized by a different mode of being. Children experience the world through the confluent mode, which is essentially physical. All past experience of the universe flows into the present moment. As adults, we still experience life in this way, although it is no longer always the dominant mode. We sometimes experience vague sensations and/or gut feelings that do not seem to be related to immediate experience. We sometimes experience intense emotions that are not under our control. We sometimes feel that things are happening to us, rather than that we are in command of our lives. We sometimes feel immersed in something bigger than ourselves. We sometimes sense the sacred in events and places. We are tuned in both to our personal and collective past, as well as to our environment. The second phase is dominated by the discernment mode. This mode is dominated by the experiences of detachment, of separateness, and of discrimination. Instead of being absorbed and controlled by the physical world, older children and adolescents are able to consciously observe it, to organize their experience, and to make choices. While the confluent mode gives us a sense of oneness with the universe, the discernment mode gives us a sense of otherness, and a capacity to choose. While the confluent mode gives us a sense of being caused, the discernment mode gives us a sense of causing ourselves. The third phase is dominated by what Whitehead calls the spiritual mode of being. It is the experience of the relationship between the two other modes.
68
BERNIE NEVILLE
As mature adults, we are able to reflect on the way in which what we experience through our senses is related to the meanings, feelings, and images that it triggers in our brain and body. The spiritual mode allows us to distinguish between the world as it is, and the world as it might be. It allows us to construct meanings and to imagine possibilities. This is the imaginative generalization that distinguishes the high point of each flight of discovery and enables us to return to earth in a new place and as a new person. It is the symbolic reference that gives meaning to our observations. The same rhythm can be detected in the course of human history. As Whitehead states, our consciousness does not initiate our modes of functioning. We awake to find ourselves engaged in process, immersed in satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and actively modifying, either by intensification or by attenuation by the introduction of novel purposes. This primary procedure which is presupposed in consciousness, I will term Instinct. It is the mode of experience directly arising out of the urge of inheritance, individual and environmental. Also, after instinct and intellectual ferment have done their work, there is a decision which determines the mode of coalescence of instinct with intelligence. I will call this factor Wisdom. It is the function of Wisdom to act as a modifying agency on the intellectual ferment so as to produce a self-determined issue from the given conditions. Thus for the purpose of understanding human institutions this crude three-fold division of human nature is required: Instinct, Intelligence, Wisdom. (1933, pp. 4647) Whitehead’s picture of the mode of instinct, the mode of intelligence, and “the coalescence of instinct with intelligence” here is reflected in the image of individual cognitive development which we find in both Kieran Egan’s fiveminded animal and Robert Kegan’s orders of thinking. 6. The Five-Minded Animal In The Educated Mind, Kieran Egan argues that we are five-minded animals. He states, “we have, you might say, a fivefold mind, or, more dramatically, we are a five-minded animal, in whom different kinds of understanding jostle together and fold on one another, to some degree remaining ‘somewhat distinct’” (1997, p. 80). Developmental psychologist, Robert Kegan, and historian of consciousness, Merlin Donald, have argued along similar lines and they have provided evidence from their own fields for the notion that we have a fivefold mind. Our consciousness and our understanding appear to be shaped by somewhat different structures of mind. The schemas and the language do not match perfectly between them, but the images of mind which emerge are strikingly similar.
Educating the Five-Minded Animal
69
Kegan and Egan build on Piaget’s model of cognitive development, identifying five phases of development that provide a capacity for five kinds of thinking. Kegan labels them simply from first-order thinking to fifth-order thinking. Egan writes about five-minded animals, capable of thinking in five distinct ways, which he calls somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic. Both developmental psychology and evolutionary psychology start with a notion of sequential progress from the simple form of consciousness which characterizes infants and the earliest humans, to the more complex consciousness which characterizes mature adults in a postindustrial age. Egan and Kegan want us to understand that, as we develop new ways of thinking and understanding through the course of childhood and adolescence, we do not outgrow and leave behind our earlier ways of understanding. As children, we show some evidence of the cognitive skills that we usually associate with adults. As adults we continue to think in mythic and romantic (Egan) or second- and third- order (Kegan) ways, as well as developing both philosophic and ironic understandings of the world (Egan) and engaging in both fourth- and fifth- order thinking (Kegan). From childhood to adulthood, we are fiveminded animals. In Egan’s model of the sequence of developmental phases that mark our passage from infancy to mature adulthood, human life starts in the physicality of somatic consciousness, and if the environment supports it, matures to the mentality of philosophic consciousness. The next development is not one of ultramentality, but rather of the integration of mental and somatic consciousness in a new kind of consciousness. He points to the emergence of an ironic mode of consciousness that experiences the relationship between individualistic, philosophic consciousness and the simpler modes, explaining that somatic understanding provides to ironic understanding something beyond language, something foundational to all later understanding. It is not the kind of metanarrative foundation sought in the philosophic understanding. The tension between the somatic foundation of consciousness and the ironic, flexible, linguistic superstructure allows to the ironic language-user an understanding of ultra-linguistic experience; this somatic experience provides us with something below language that our language can strive to be true to, and that truth can be something more Rortyesque than agreements with fellow language-users. (Egan, 1997, p. 170) Kegan (1994) defines the stages of cognitive development in terms of increasingly complex subject-object differentiations: between sensations and environment (first-order), between experiencing self and sensations (secondorder), between thinking self and experiences (third-order), between critical
70
BERNIE NEVILLE
self and the contents of mind (fourth-order), between transcendent self and mode of thinking (fifth-order). In first-order consciousness we identify with our sensations. In second-order consciousness we identify with our experiencing. In third-order we identify with the contents of our minds. In fourth-order we identify with our capacity for critical reflection. In fifth-order thinking, this very capacity becomes the object of our knowing. Our way of thinking, our way of determining the truth, is relativized as only one of many ways of constructing reality. We cease to see either ourselves or our truths as complete. In these models, we find not only a move from collective, physical identity to individual, mental identity, but a move beyond individual identity toward greater complexity and wholeness. There is some evidence from a number of sources that these phases are also replicated on a larger scale—in the experiences of the species. There is also an acknowledgment that while these different structures may represent phases in biological and cultural history or individual cognitive development, we bring them all to our daily experience of the world. 7. The Evolution of Consciousness The most comprehensive model of the evolution of consciousness is that of Jean Gebser (1949), who distinguishes between the archaic consciousness of the first hominids, the magical consciousness of the stone age, the mythical consciousness that emerged after the ice ages, the mental consciousness which emerged after 1000 B.C.E., and the integral consciousness which he claimed was emerging in the mid-twentieth century. Merlin Donald (1991) writes of the consciousness evolving through four key states: episodic mind, mimetic mind, mythic mind, and theoretic mind. Paul MacLean (1990) examines the structure of the human brain and finds it to be triune, comprising a reptilian brain (the brainstem) that experiences the world physically and instinctually, a mammalian brain (the limbic system) that feels and relates, and a neomammalian brain (the cerebral cortex) that observes and reflects. These have evolved in turn and now contribute simultaneously to our experience and behavior. MacLean finds in us a limited capacity to integrate the activities of our three brains. In these models, which have been constructed on the basis of very different evidence from very different disciplines, there is a suggestion of an evolution or development, both in the species and in the individual, from a physical experience of the cosmos, with little individual awareness, to a fully conscious experience in which a sense of oneself as an individual is central. However, this is not the end of evolution or psychological development. Gebser looks at the evolution of culture and sees the emergence of the integral structure of consciousness in which all the earlier, simpler structures are transcended in an integrative or spiritual mode of experiencing the universe, a mode that
Educating the Five-Minded Animal
71
integrates mental consciousness with the earlier, simpler structures. Here it is to be noted that Gebser’s model is not based on an assumption of progress from a deficient to a more adequate experience of the universe. On the one hand, the earlier, simpler structures provide just as valid a way of experiencing the everpresent origin as the later, more complex structures. On the other hand, the experience of time as linear and sequential, and consequently modern science’s notion of evolution, belongs to a specific structure of consciousness, namely, the mental-rational structure, and is in no way an essential attribute of time. Gebser’s model of structures of consciousness is not a psychological one that is based on the experience of the egoic individual. Rather, it is a cultural one, based on the emergence of increasingly complex structures of consciousness through human prehistory and history. Egoic individuality is itself relativized, as a feature of the mental-rational structure. Archaic consciousness is not something that the individual hominid had. It is a way of being which belongs to the species, and our earliest ancestors lived their lives embedded in it. And so do we, although it may no longer be dominant most of the time. We have a very dim archaic mind that we share with the species, a magic mind that urges our clan to use spells and incantations to stop bad things happening to us, a mythic mind that embeds us unreflectively in the narratives of our tribe, a mental-rational mind by which we separate ourselves from our environment and collectivity, becoming capable of observing the world critically, and an integral-spiritual mind through which reality can become transparent to us. Although I have taken the title of this paper from Egan, I will use Gebser’s labels and definitions to expand on the implications of this model for education. 8. Archaic Mind The archaic consciousness that Gebser imagines to have been dominant in the first humans is presumed to be somewhat dim, being essentially a very physical sense of aliveness, without language or a sense of self. It is an experiencing of drives and appetites, but it does not involve the awareness of this experiencing or the distinguishing of the self from the environment. This structure still operates in us, although it is overlaid by more complex structures. Our primary experience of the world is physical and collective. It is the understanding that we feel in our bodies: an organic, somatic, pre-linguistic understanding that we cannot readily put into words. Infants are born in a state of harmony with nature, one aspect of which is their total dependence on others. Our challenge as teachers is to guide their development through increasingly complex ways of thinking without having them lose their simple grounding in nature. This is made very difficult by the fact that they live in a culture that is not in harmony with nature and they belong to a species whose powerful elites have spent centuries wiping out
72
BERNIE NEVILLE
cultures that are in such harmony. In order to preserve a child’s grounding in nature teachers must keep them alive to the experience of nature. For some children, the only opportunities to have a rich experience of the natural world are the ones provided by the overworked teachers in their underresourced schools. Theodore Roszak argues that our identification with the Earth is the source of the empathic rapport with the natural world which is reborn in every child and which survives in the work of nature poets and landscape painters. Where this sense of shared identity is experienced as we most often experience it, person to person, we call it “love.” (1995, p. 16) When we watch our students grow, we are observing much more than their individual development. Their individual growing is an element in a much larger process. Growing is a cosmic process in which they participate. Until they are taught otherwise, they feel it in their bodies and they express it in their rhythms. Their teachers also feel that sense, although they may have learned to keep it out of their awareness. Our bodily sense of the Earth and the cosmic system to which it belongs may be the source not only of our attachment to place, but also of our relationships with people. 9. Magic Mind Magic mind is both unreflective and collective. When we think about a teaching interaction between a teacher and a student, we conventionally think of it as something that takes place between individuals. The teacher may say something that is interesting and useful, and the student may listen to it and may think and act in a slightly different way as a consequence. However, rather than see an item of information passed from teacher to student, it makes just as much sense to see it in process terms, namely, as a simultaneously experienced occasion of tuning in to the world that the teacher and the pupil are sharing at that moment. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1983) writes about the phenomenon of syncing. When two people talk to each other, their movements are synchronized in barely perceptible ways. This phenomenon also can be observed in groups. We know that our bodily rhythms sync with the rhythms of nature, that women who live together tend to sync their periods, and that patients in hospital wards tend to sync their metabolisms if they are together long enough. Being in tune with each other comes to us naturally. Children seem to be able to do it more readily than adults. The private emotions they bring into the classroom tend to become collective emotions. Their private
Educating the Five-Minded Animal
73
rhythms tend to become collective rhythms. The shared rituals of the magical classroom bind them together and shape their learning. Merlin Donald uses the word mimesis to refer to the kind of communication that preceded the development of spoken language. Children acquired the skills and the rituals they needed by copying their parents and other adults. Culture was developed and maintained by everybody unconsciously copying everybody copying everybody copying everybody. Donald argues that we are still doing this, even though we have long ago found additional ways to think and communicate. There is still “a vestigial mimetic culture embedded within our modern culture, and a mimetic mind embedded within the architectural structure of the modern human mind” (1991, p. 163). Donald points out that there is a strong connection between our tendency to communicate through mimesis and our tendency to tune in to the rhythms that surround us. Good teachers learn to tune in to the rhythms of a group, across generations or across cultures, whether working with children or adults. They know how much of a creative environment a class can be when students are tuned in both to each other and to the teacher. They know how to achieve this by modeling it in their own behavior and by developing routines and rituals that provide children with a sense of safety in an unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous, world. 10. Mythic Mind At each instant, our students’ experiences are shaped by all their previous experiences, not just by their previous personal experiences but, however faintly, by all the previous experiences of humanity. Their connection with the personal and collective past is experienced physically rather than intellectually, in emotions and physical sensations rather than in thoughts. It is also experienced imaginally, in the stories that they inherit from their families and their cultures. While our biological rhythms may bind us to the organism that is our species, it is our shared rituals and our shared stories that bind us to the organism that is our tribe or our cultural group. We are still enmeshed in particular stories about the world, and these are the collective stories, the major narratives and stories belonging to our tribe. Mythic mind was characteristic of prescientific people and it is characteristic of children now. It came with the capacity to talk. The development of an oral culture brought with it a new kind of knowledge. People repeated stories that provided them an understanding of who they were and what their place was in the world. We still think mythically a good deal of the time. Although we can think abstractly, we do so within the limits of a story that we have absorbed from those around us, a story that tells us who we are and what life is about, a story that we take for granted most of the time,
74
BERNIE NEVILLE
because the people around us take it for granted too. As adults, we may be able to reflect critically on our experience, but our default position is the narrative that tells us who we are and what is important. When we are confronted with new information that challenges the taken-for-grantedness of our inherited myth, we are likely either to reject it or to distort it. There is a constant tension between the past, which gives us continuity, identity, and meaning, and the present, which provides an opportunity for novelty. Mimesis and myth make for a very stable culture and a stable personality, but they do not make much room for change. Where people keep repeating the stories that illustrate the way things are supposed to be, change can only come from random events that provide something new to copy. 11. Mental Mind Developmental psychologists are able to set out the phases of cognitive development in a neat sequence, but we know that, in reality, it is a lot more complex and messy that that. There are times when adults gladly let go of their sense of separateness and immerse themselves in the flow of collective emotion. And we find children showing a capacity to distinguish between what is actual and what is possible. However, we do have different expectations of children, adolescents, and adults. When teaching children, we may be disposed to focus on the confluent or magic mode. We expect our adolescent students to operate in the discernment or mental mode much of the time. We may expect even more of adults. One of the things teachers try to do is to teach their students to observe the world critically and objectively and reach rational conclusions about it. We expect our students in late adolescence to be capable of standing outside of their thoughts and of reflecting on them critically. We encourage them to think abstractly about the world, to look at the evidence and to decide what is most likely to be true. We find that not all of them can manage it. If we think of knowledge as a thing to be transmitted, possessed, measured, and traded for a prosperous life, we may be condemned to deal in inert ideas, as Whitehead calls them. Teachers conventionally pass on ideas to their students, but their students may not be the least interested in whether these ideas are true or not. Society, or a handful of politicians and bureaucrats, may be obsessed with what they call educational outcomes and their measurement, but we should not be surprised to find that many young people are reluctant to accept this nonsense. There are many young people in our schools who are not the least interested in accumulating the facts and skills that society thinks are important. However, they are interested in experience and are apt to be engaged by an education that takes their experience seriously. We can teach them to look carefully and critically not only at the taken-for-granted truths of their society but also at their taken-for-granted truths about themselves. The
Educating the Five-Minded Animal
75
invitation to engage in this kind of reflection comes through the kind of teaching that starts with experience, goes on to the discovery of the principles that might explain it, and then tests these principles out through new experience. What this kind of teaching allows is the joy of discovery that the young person finds not in the discovery of new facts that are important to himself but rather in the discovery “that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through his life, which is his life” (1929b, p. 3). 12. Integral Mind Magic and myth enable us to live in a world that does not have to be constructed again at every moment. Together they give us a culture, a system of assumptions, behaviors, and attitudes which we share with our tribe and rarely question. But a rational, individualistic consciousness enables us to detach ourselves from our physical experience, our culture, and our environment, and to have ideas about them. We need all three kinds of consciousness—magic, mythic, and mental—for a full and rich life. Gebser goes further by suggesting that we have access to a structure of consciousness in which all of the simpler structures of consciousness are integrated into something new: an integral or spiritual consciousness. In the mid-twentieth century, Gebser wrote with a sense of urgency of the need for new ways of thinking. He writes, the crisis of our times and of our world is in a process—at the moment autonomously—of complete transformation, and appears headed [toward] an event which, in our view, can only be described as “global catastrophe.” . . . We must soberly face the fact that only a few decades separate us from that event. This span of time is determined by an increase in technological feasibility inversely proportional to man’s sense of responsibility—that is, unless a new factor were to emerge which would effectively overcome this menacing correlation. (1949, p. xxvii) More optimistically, he went on to provide evidence from the arts and sciences, in order to make the case that his new factor was emerging. Gebser observed that not only were the magic and mythical modes of perceiving the world being once again accepted as legitimate by the intellectual culture, but that the magical and mythical structures of consciousness were being integrated with rational consciousness, producing a totally new way of perceiving and thinking. Here it is to be noted that when Gebser was writing in the 1940s, it was in the context of an apparent breakdown of the mental structure and a regression to magical and mythical consciousness, manifested in Nazism, fascism, and tribalism. He argued then, as he would no doubt argue
76
BERNIE NEVILLE
today, that the breakdown of one dominant structure (the mental) signals the possibility of a mutation to a more complex structure (the integral). It is central to Gebser’s understanding that all the structures are co-present in us. However, the integral structure of consciousness is not merely the simultaneous and collaborative functioning of the four previous structures. It is an entirely new structure which enables us to apprehend not just the parts but the whole. Gebser argues that “it cannot dispense with the foundation of the mental structure any more than the mental structure can dispense with the mythical, and the mythical with the magic” (1949, p. 299). The teacher’s success in facilitating the emergence of integral consciousness in children depends on assuring that the child does not lose his archaic, magical, and mythical identification with planet, species, and community. One of the key features of integral consciousness, as Gebser imagines it, is the transcendence of the dualism which is at the core of rational thinking. Twentieth century science has lead inexorably to the conclusion that the rules of rational, dualistic thinking which have been so useful for us in the past may not be universally applicable. Gebser warns us against assuming that the only alternative to rational thinking is irrationality. Egan suggests that there is more to human experience than the evidence of our senses and the rational conclusions we draw from it. A mature ironic consciousness enables us to integrate our somatic experience with our capacity to think, as in Whitehead’s notion of the “coalescence of instinct and intelligence” (1933, pp. 46-47). Kegan argues that just as a modern society demands of its members that they be capable of fourth-order (rational-critical) thinking, and expects teachers to develop it in adolescents, a postmodern society demands fifth-order thinking, but few of us appear to be capable of the complex subject-object differentiation involved. On this note, only fifth-order thinking can meet the requirement of a postmodern culture that “the epistemological construction of system, form or theory be relativized, moved from subject in one’s knowing to object in one’s knowing” (Kegan, 1994, p. 321). Postmodernist theories postulate that we have many selves, actual and potential, through which we may express the fullness of our being. They hold that rigid identification with a single self is a significant obstacle to our becoming what we can be. The unfolding of integral consciousness in children demands a classroom that encourages and honors plurality in children’s expressions of their personality and talents, in contrast to the increasingly narrow and instrumental vision of mainstream education. However, integrality in education is not just a matter of facilitating the child’s becoming all that she is capable of becoming as an individual. In Gebser’s understanding, this elicitation of integral consciousness inducts the child / adolescent / adult into awareness of a transparent whole.
Educating the Five-Minded Animal
77
13. Conclusion In Gebser’s model, the ever-present origin is sensed by the archaic structure, felt by the magic, imagined by the mythical, conceptualized by the mental, and concretely perceived by the integral. A curriculum for the good of the world will attend to the unfolding process of the child as it attends to the sensing, feeling, imagining, conceptualizing, and to the concrescing of a truth that is neither one, nor many; a truth, we may speculate, that will become transparent to us as we learn to see not only through the fragments of sensory and imaginal reality but also through our ways of seeing. We like to think of teaching as a conscious and purposive act. We like to think of learning in similar terms. However, in Whitehead’s philosophy, conscious and purposive acts are surface phenomena. Beneath them lies a prehended world that remains below the level of consciousness, yet participates in every moment of experience. We might like to think of the occasion of teaching and learning as a moment of consciousness and purpose, but below the surface of this moment are several layers of awareness, from the unconscious physical to the self-conscious conceptual, that bring us this momentary experience of consciousness and purpose. And it is not only our personal experience that is embodied in this moment, but the becoming of the cosmos. When we share a moment of consciousness and purpose with our students, we need to remember that they are five-minded animals. In their archaic, somatic mind, they are one with their physical experience, united in experience with the species, creatures of instinct and habit. In their tribal, magic-mimetic mind, they share the collective emotion of the tribe and try to keep it safe through magic and ritual. In their mythical mind, they live embedded in the stories that carry their culture’s values and attitudes, and they experience the world imaginatively. In their mental-rational mind, they know themselves as individuals who seek to know the truth about the world. In their integral-ironicspiritual mind, they are capable of transcending the subject-object, self-other, truth-fiction, material-spiritual dualisms that shape rational consciousness. In this progress from the past to the future, all five minds of the fiveminded animal are involved. Archaic mind experiences the past through its identification with the physical world; magic mind is emotionally engaged with the past and carries this emotion into the present experience; mythical mind shapes its perceptions of the present experience according to the tribal narratives in which it is embedded; and mental mind has the capacity to escape from instinct, ritual, and tribal narrative in order to see the past and the present world objectively. Integral mind incorporates all of the older and simpler minds in a time-free, non-perspectival, a-rational, pluralistic, ecocentric, constructive, and creative experience of the world. For our integral mind, not only are my truth and your truth incomplete without each other, but “I” and “you,” person and planet, self and society, are likewise incomplete without each other.
78
BERNIE NEVILLE
For Whitehead, creativity is the ultimate principle of the universe. He was convinced that as creativity operates in living beings, it aims at the enhancement of life. What we experience from moment to moment is creative process. Process moves toward beauty, harmony, complexity, peace, adventure, and greater aliveness. It is going from instinct to wisdom; from the confluent mode to the spiritual. For Gebser, creativity is a visibly emerging impulse of origin which “is” in turn timeless, or more accurately, before or “above” time and timelessness. And creativity is something that “happens” to us, that fully effects or fulfills itself in us. (1949, p. 313) Gebser and Whitehead are not thinking of creativity anthropocentrically, namely, as something peculiarly characteristic of human beings, or a quality attributed (or not) to particular individuals. Creativity, in this way of thinking, is not something that we possess, but it is something which acts through us. One manifestation of it, for Whitehead, is the emergence of novelty in the human experience of learning. And its manifestation, for Gebser, is the emergence, in our time, of the integral structure of consciousness, the means of our engagement with the spiritual. Where Whitehead’s focus is primarily on the actual occasion in the microsecond of its concrescence, Egan and Kegan look at the journey of discovery as it unfolds in each maturing human being, and Gebser observes the cosmic pulse of life which is satisfied in the evolution of our species. It is my contention that they all find essentially the same pattern. WORKS CITED Donald, Merlin. (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (2001) A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: Norton. Egan, Kieran. (1997) The Educated Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gebser, Jean. (1949) The Ever Present Origin. Trans. N. Barstad, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985. Hall, Edward. T. (1983) The Dance of Life. New York: Anchor Books. Kegan, Robert. (1994) In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacLean, Paul. (2003) The Triune Brain in Evolution. New York: Springer. Riffert, Franz. (2005) “Whitehead’s Cyclic Theory of Learning and Empirical Research.” In Alfred North Whitehead on Learning and Education. Ed. Franz Riffert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roszak, Theodore (1995) “Where Psyche Meets Gaia.” In Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Eds. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner. San Francisco: Sierra Club.
Educating the Five-Minded Animal
79
Rossi, E. (1986) “Altered States of Consciousness in Everyday Life.” In Handbook of States of Consciousness. Eds. B. B. Wolman and M. Ullman. New York: Van Nostrand Rheinhold. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1911) Introduction to Mathematics. London: Williams and Norgate, 1992. ———. (1929a) Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. ———. (1929b) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
Seven STEPS TO A PROCESS CURRICULUM Hillel A. Schiller 1. A Cognetic Methodology and Basic Formative Processes The notion that there exists a formative process in nature is not a parochial idea. Lancelot Law Whyte (1896-1972), a Scottish physicist, historian of science, and process philosopher, provided a modern conception of the idea, hypothesizing that there exists a universal principle of development at the heart of nature’s evolutionary creativity. Whitehead alludes to the existence of a similar process in The Function of Reason where he offered a broad generalization of “the originative element in history” (1929a, p. 1). But he characterized that reason was the agency which guides growth and development rather than natural forces. The educator who designs instructional methods knows that there are various understandings of formative processes, which, in terms of their focus, range from the teacher’s direct instruction to what is going on in the brains of students when they are actively learning. Initially, what is crucial to the teacher and to the learner is the perpetuation of accurate perception, entailing strength in terms of intellectual effort as well as active curiosity and imagination. Being humanity’s most influential formative process, it is clear that education in general, in respect to both formal schooling and the informal learning that occurs outside of school, must be taken more seriously than our culture approaches it presently. But what is the true nature of the formative process, as pursued by the teacher? Teaching is the only profession that has for its generic role the assistance of students to make connections, for example, between diverse sets of existing knowledge, old and new information, their perceptions, their thoughts, and the thoughts of others, leading to self-knowledge. Because the ability to make connections is at the root of learning, teaching involves interacting with students in the classroom in order to build continuities of knowledge—and not just any old knowledge, but the knowledge most worth knowing. Teaching, in both its formal and informal senses, can be considered a formative process which is crucial to self-discovery and to the development of wisdom in relation to the application of knowledge. Teaching is the cognetic process proper, and the teaching profession, at every level, is the active facilitator and the effective conditioner of civilization. But there is a potentially
82
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
disastrous problem. For the most part, today’s teachers do not firmly understand the importance of stimulating curiosity and of encouraging the use of imagination in the classroom. A stipulative definition of curiosity is: a motivating process by which a creature desires to know and to learn. Imagination represents humanity’s creative power. It is the ability to visualize, namely, it is a process of forming images and ideas in the mind, especially of things never experienced directly. Teacher-training programs certainly do not stress their importance. The modern emphasis on cognitive learning and the focus on a pre-structured curriculum are the roadblocks to the use and the development of the psychological powers of natural curiosity and fruitful imagination, which cannot be over-emphasized. As Whyte writes, “the human imagination is incomparable . . . no other animal possesses it, and all that man possesses comes to him from it. It is more than divine” (1974, p. 57). 2. The Importance of Curiosity and Imagination in the Educational Process The prime enemy that inhibits the effective use of the processes of curiosity and imagination is anxiety. According to Jones (1968), anxiety is the emotional response that undermines their efficacy. As examples of pedagogies which suppress the use of curiosity and imagination, we might think of what goes on in classrooms that are controlled by authoritarian teachers, and/or those that are guided by the legislative edict that dictates rigid, periodic testing, under a naïve rubric in which it is assumed that testing can establish accountability. Whitehead wrote that “no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste” (1929b, p. 13). What is accomplished by the latter view of educating, however, is an attack on the teaching profession whose only defense is to teach narrowly to the test. This creates a distracting effort which undermines the larger mandate to assist in developing open, healthy, and informed human minds. I can remember sadly my own experience as a student, of a feeling of dread when an upcoming test or testing schedule was announced in class. For some learners, a test may have a motivational effect, but I believe that the majority of students experience a rising anxiety that is akin to an anticipation of a knife being plunged into their cognitive abilities. Both John Dewey and Whitehead urge teachers to pay attention to the importance of the use of curiosity and imagination in their writings (see Schiller, 1999). Whitehead makes it abundantly clear that curiosity needs to be respected, protected, and cultivated whenever it arises. He makes the point that teachers are dealing with “human minds, not dead matter” and that there is a need for the “delicate adjustment of many variable factors,” if they are to promote the curiosity that is necessary to untangle complex situations (1929b, p. 5). According to Whitehead, human beings have only been able to survive
Steps to a Process Curriculum
83
the forces of nature because they “have been lured to discovery by an insatiable curiosity” (1929b, p. 31). He observes that the teacher has a double function: to draw forth enthusiasm by virtue of his or her own personality, and to create an environment that implicates the existence of broader knowledge and of a larger purpose for learning. He calls for the elimination of waste by avoiding trivialities and inert ideas. For Whitehead, the ultimate motivating power resides in making visible both the value and the sense of importance in what is to be learned. It also involves promoting wonder, curiosity, and a reverence for—and even the worship of—the desire to merge personally into something new and beyond itself. Whitehead also has much to say about the use of imagination. He recognizes how significant it is for both the teacher and the student to utilize its power. He believes that creativity can only be explained with reference to the notion that the imagination needs the freedom to express itself. It is only once interest and curiosity are inspired that the imagination can go to work. Whitehead insists on paying attention to the psychological worth of the imagination in education. He even describes imagination as a “contagious disease” that cannot be measured and that can be encouraged only by a faculty that “wears [its] learning with imagination.” Whitehead states emphatically that the combining of imagination and learning normally needs “leisure, freedom from restraint, freedom from harassing worry, some variety of experience, and the stimulation of other minds diverse in opinion and diverse in equipment” (ibid., p. 97). In light of these Whiteheadian insights, we can ask, is there a specific instructional methodology that can displace the traditional pedagogical aversion to curiosity and to the use of the imagination? I believe that there is, and it is to be found in the instructional mode that I term the cognetic process. 3. The Cognetic Process: An Antidote to Alienation The teacher is the main generator of the formative processes of instruction. The teacher is the crucial agent who puts students in contact with the knowledge most worth knowing (see Schiller, 1998). In this regard, teaching “above everything else . . . is a connective activity” (Bennett, 2006, p. 179). To be sure, the master teacher Parker Palmer claims that “to teach is to weave a continuity of relationships between my students, my subject and myself, to the end that students will develop their own capacity of connectedness” (Palmer, 1994, pp. 1-2). Everyone lives in a unitary, yet complex world of objects and processes. Interactions and connections among them must not be sundered, either artificially or arbitrarily, in order to make them easier to teach or to understand. They ought not to be taught about subject matters in narrow terms, but in broader ones, within their contexts of course. This is the only way that they can
84
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
realistically be made understandable. Contextualization will demonstrate how and why things function efficiently in their characteristic forms. Teaching, as a formative process, should now be emphasized as a cognetic process—a process in which students are assisted to make connections. The term “cognetic,” in contradistinction to “cognitive,” is a neologism. It is a compound word formed by joining “cog” and “net,” which are two entities that have the function of making connections. A cog or a gear’s purpose is to transfer power in a power train. A net catches and keeps things together and has the further capacity for one strand to offer a connecting path to all other strands. It provides nodes for the teacher to offer differing paths of disclosure, leading to other contents within a network of established knowledge. The view that teaching is a cognetic, formative process should be made endemic in teacher-training programs. Cognetic teaching—teaching that helps students to make connections—is natural to the authentic teacher. As Palmer writes, “good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that the students can learn to weave a world for themselves” (1998, p. 11). As John B. Bennett further suggests, “the most basic framework for understanding the self and the world portrays reality as a vast web of connectivity” (2006, p. 179). And in respect to twenty-first century education, George Allan and Malcolm Evans add that “our schools should teach students a more complex way of reasoning, one that is holistic, that emphasizes systems of connection” (2006, p. 3). Making connections advances and enhances what Dewey defined as the two major characteristics of the authentic educative act— those being the necessity of creating interaction and continuity (1938, p. 42). The essence of both of these conditions is connecting. For example, encouraging dialogue among students or questioning a textbook’s statements involves interaction. And heating a gelatinous egg, creating a scrambled or hard boiled one, demonstrates both interaction and the effect of continuity. Traditional pedagogy, with its emphasis on cognitive learning as well as its dependence usually on rote memory and on the lecture format, infects America’s school districts. The scheduled division of limited classroom time in terms of a separation among disciplines guarantees that there is minimal interaction between teachers and students. There is little continuity and integration among the isolated subject matters which are permitted by the cognitive learning paradigm. The procrustean bed of the Carnegie Unit has had an insidious influence on curriculum building because it places limits on the pedagogical duration of a subject for one year. This has had a depressing effect, particularly on science teaching in America. For as knowledge across the sciences has accelerated, curriculum developers have had to force more knowledge into the same time units. However, other countries have adjusted their schedules so as to allow for more expansive teaching of scientific subjects. It is no wonder that our students no longer top the lists in terms of
Steps to a Process Curriculum
85
scientific achievement worldwide. We may create Nobel Prize winners as science advances, but our science education falls behind. The purposeful thrust to ascertain and to establish connections involves the recognition, at the outset, that any elemental fact to be learned about—any object, property, idea, or emotion—can survive meaningfully only insofar as it is placed in its wider context, namely, within a larger system and/or a hierarchy of systems. Furthermore, every subject has evolved in terms of developmental contexts and relationships by means of which it has achieved its current, characteristic form. As such, a cognetic process displaying that meaningfulness in general is conditioned on an actual interdependence of one element on another. It is a form of empirical or intellectual synthesis. For instance, a grain of sand can be seen as a unit in a pile of sand, a sandbox, a beach, a sand dune, a sand storm, a desert, or as a component of concrete. A claw can be recognized as part of a lobster, a mole, a cat, an eagle, a praying mantis, or even as a part of a construction crane. Similarly, the number “two” can be understood as the second place in the numerical sequence of one to ten. It is one characteristic of human beings to have two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, etc., thereby establishing the fact of balance because of symmetry. As an elemental process in human emotion, anger can be caused by an individual being ignored, by a verbal affront, by a physical blow, or by an avoidable accident created by circumstances. Since no object or thing exists in isolation or in a vacuum, a necessary step in the growth of meaningful knowledge is to recognize the connections between one thing and another. And since all knowledge must be contextual, I propose a way for the teacher to utilize this fact methodologically as a cognetic process. I call this process, contextual perceiving. 4. The Process of Contextual Perceiving Contextual perceiving serves the cognetic purpose, namely, the conscious search for significant connections. This process fills gaps and uncovers unknowns that can make some thing, idea, or emotion more meaningful to the observer. Thus, contextual perceiving can be seen as a formative process that is part of the cognetic role of instruction, namely, to assist the student not merely to know facts, but also to seek connections among them. This process activates Dewey’s emphasis on the need for interaction and continuity in education. The interaction, of course, is the purposeful search for more information. The continuity is fostered by making connections that enrich some aspect of knowledge. The contextual perceiving process shows a fact to be significant only within a system of related elements that are important to its existence and relevance. Such a teaching procedure, activated among teachers and students, could begin to eliminate both stereotypic thinking and the habitual recourse to pedagogies emphasizing rote learning.
86
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
In “My Pedagogic Creed,” Dewey felt that it was important to evoke imagery that could foster the acquisition of deeper forms of knowledge and an understanding of how knowledge is actually attained. In this regard, a concern for epistemology is important, including the comprehension of how we perceive the realities of our physical existence in a complex world of elements, systems, hierarchies, and their observable properties, some of which can be elucidated through Gibson’s (1966) differentiation between extracted fact and abstracted fact. I have already discussed the importance of curiosity and imagination in the promotion of learning. When these processes are working for both the teacher and the student, knowledge is created by means of experiencing the connections and the relationships among concepts and imageries. An extraordinary example that can integrate all of these ideas is George Gaylord Simpson’s (1951) illustration of the evolution of the horse, from its diminutive beginnings as the dog-sized Eohippus some seventy million years ago to today’s enlarged and differentiated breeds. Examples from Simpson’s book can be used even in the early learning classroom. They provides evidence for an evolutionary progress that should put all arguments for intelligent design into the wastebasket. It is my contention that the practice of contextual perceiving provides a new method for synthesizing a teacher’s overall pedagogical approach with the enriching instructional moments in the classroom setting. 5. The Nature of Contextual Perceiving Contextual perceiving is the process that actually implements, or gives life to, the idea of relationality, a notion that is at the heart of empirical, process thinking. How can this new process take place? And how can its importance be better understood? No subject exists in isolation, since all topics in any curriculum have contexts and interrelationships with others. Indeed, if a person does not become both aware of, and involved with, the relevant connections surrounding a subject matter, not only can he or she miss out on some of the various aspects of its nature, but he or she can also remain ignorant of the interrelationships that are significant to it. Without an awareness of such connections and without further curiosity about influences and connections, we can neither penetrate beneath the surface of appearance, nor can we know how something came to be what it is. Learning about these conditions and relationships provides new information and creates enrichment. This brings me to another of Dewey’s insights, the one that led me to describe this new methodology. In one of his early essays, Dewey notes that we cannot understand the nature of a triangle until we know how to put three lines together. Even Whitehead understood the deep meaning here. He writes, “if you want to understand anything, make it yourself, is a sound rule” (1929b, p. 53). But more importantly, Dewey (1891) suggests, in an almost offhand
Steps to a Process Curriculum
87
manner, that a person cannot understand the nature of a maple tree until he or she understands how it became a maple tree, even beyond its characteristics as a plant; or in other words, how it evolved to be a deciduous tree rather than an evergreen. Now that is asking for a lot. But he is expressing an important insight here. I interpret him to mean that there are two kinds of knowledge that a person must acquire if he or she is to develop a comprehensive understanding of any subject. One can classify them as forms of horizontal knowledge and vertical knowledge. 6. Horizontal and Vertical Knowledge On the one hand, horizontal information subsumes the current structure of a subject matter and its surroundings—what attaches to it and what it attaches to, namely, its place in a systematic environment. This environment actually contains it as a recognizable entity which has been given a name in order for us to identify it, and to pass on information about it. Horizontal information may include environmental knowledge that reveals the juxtaposition of ecological elements that fosters the sustainability of an ecological niche or destroys it. On the other hand, vertical information deals with temporal development and the coordinative conditioning requisite to the evolution of an object or a system. It tells us how the thing became what it is within a developmental hierarchy of physical, biological, or ideational longevities. The melding of these two forms of learning reveals the agency and the power of epigenesis—how forms change and grow via mutational alteration, and build new, more complex structures due to outer influences. Gathering information in these ways creates forms of nonlinear learning. So, for example, when a language-arts teacher instructs his or her students to either write a descriptive essay or an analytical one, an autobiographical piece or an argumentative opinion composition, there is a lot for them to consider. What can a teacher tell them about how to go about it? How can a teacher facilitate their thinking? How can a teacher stimulate engines of personal curiosity, imagination, and memory which are so essential to learning, thinking and self-expression? My response is that we can both ask them and show them how to pursue contextual perceiving, namely, to focus on the subject with the realizations that it exists currently in a specific environment, with particular relationships affecting it, and that it is connected to a history of development through time (see Schiller, 2006). The most complex of our personal communication systems is writing. To be meaningful, writing entails thinking. And besides ordering ideas so as to express them coherently, in order to use it to creative purpose, we must also contend with our imaginations. Additionally, at the outset of writing something meaningful, we must contend with our emotions. We must hope that feelings will be motivational, rather than inhibitory, such as those conditioned by
88
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
anxiety, issuing from some outer source or from some interior concern. Such a negative condition could create a disjunction of thoughts and feelings to the detriment of the expressive process, and it may even have the effect of corrupting the intended discourse. Contextual perceiving calls for the refocusing of acts of instruction so that the student develops a new perceptual set, and observes no thing or contemplates no idea without remaining curious to see or to search for the conditions and contexts that created it—contexts that affect it and that it affects. This mode of learning motivates both the seeking of, and finding of, connections, including larger, coordinative relationships, namely, as David Orr (1992) might suggest, those integrative conditions which ecologists implore the public to consider. Contextual perceiving is a conscious process that is engineered to look for the significant connections that affect the relationships among things, be they spatial, temporal, historical, genetic, developmental, or conceptual. It assumes beforehand that connections exist and that they can be sought out. It seeks connections that can create new, significant, and more informed understandings of the things in question. Contextual perceiving must become a skill that students can be encouraged to adopt and to impose on themselves. It becomes a motivating process that engages their natural curiosity in a purposeful manner. Contextual perceiving can be explained as a process that can both enrich their learning capacities and expand their perceptual grasp. This new mode of contextualizing has nothing to do with being more or less intelligent. It is an active, facilitating process. It offers new opportunities for teachers to use the Socratic method to provoke a student’s curiosity. It urges students to seek connections within the self, the environment, and among ideas. Contextual perceiving is a mode of active learning that can improve anyone’s ability to acquire new and relevant knowledge. It is a new manner of paying attention to life, to things, and to existence in general, for it becomes a search for relationships that may not be immediately evident. Contextual perceiving can build a deeper understanding of how elements, systems, and hierarchies relate to each other, either in space or through time. Such a perceptual process shows how knowledge is generated and advanced. Psychologically, it promotes a point of view that cherishes an expansive rather than a narrow focus. It cultivates the holistic skill to look for connections, not only the obvious ones but also the surprising ones. In a real sense, contextual perception is a form of ecological perception, a notion that has been elucidated in all its parameters by James J. Gibson (1966; also see Reed, 1988). To espouse the process of contextual perceiving is to fight the fragmentation of knowledge. As the psychologist, Akhter Ahsen (1968) demonstrates in relation to his delineation of the eidetic image, an image’s emotional effect can be explored, as well as its particular meaning, which may be of minimal or of exaggerated significance to the individual. Ultimately, contextual perceiving can result in the use of more effective
Steps to a Process Curriculum
89
language, because it gives new depth to intentionality, to thinking more deeply about things. It reveals a new power for expressing thoughts about facts and feelings with logical coherence. It has the potential to reinforce the use of broadly relevant information and to simulate critical thinking, which of late has been so difficult to inculcate in students. Contextual perceiving would permit the enhancement of sensible questions, and it would promote the discovery of appropriate facts which could put to rest the problems and the questionable ideas of the past in a satisfactory manner. Perhaps there is another important goal that can be achieved by developing this habit of automatically searching for larger and deeper contexts. Could it not foster a critical desire to find out why humans so avidly attach positive or negative symbolic value to reasons? For example, we might ask what caused the twin towers to be destroyed in the way that they were. In conjunction with this new prescription for a concern with contexts, I shall now identify and elucidate humanity’s three perceptual contexts.
Fig. 1: Humanity’s Three Perceptual Contexts
Results 1. SELF CONTEXT
Contextual Perception
2. PROXIMITY CONTEXT
or
3. UNIVERSAL CONTEXT
Restricted Perception
90
HILLEL A. SCHILLER 7. The Three Perceptual Contexts
The three perceptual contexts are: (1) the self context; (2) the proximity context; and (3) the universal context. These three major contexts account for what we know and how we access knowledge. I designate them as perceptual contexts because they have perceivable boundaries. These perceptual contexts encompass domains of knowledge and behavior both within which and about which all perceiving, symbolizing, comprehending, and activities take place. Their boundaries create limited forms that provide structure to the perception of regions with characteristic qualities and properties. These contexts encompass entities, processes, and ideas which are created by the imagination and which are describable in systematic terms by the sciences. Their synthesizing effects create universally relatable, understandable, and meaningful heuristic wholes. Their cognetic capacities are inherent. But the boundaries of these contexts are not separators. Rather, they are pervious to the others in spite of their morphological limits. They interpenetrate each other and they influence each other. As enveloping contexts, they harbor the formative processes which assure the development of teaching, learning, and human behavior. This includes, for example, Susan Blackmore’s notion of meme-gene coevolution (2000, p. 93), a concept that will be dealt with further below. First, the perceivable boundary of the self context is the surface of the human body: the skin, the body’s largest organ. The skin is the defining outer limit of the organism. It is a protective barrier, yet at the same time, it contains entry ways for information. It encompasses and reveals the human shape. It contains all the characteristics of a personal human form in all its variety. In addition, it is the means by which each of us can be visually and psychosocially identified. The self context is the most mysterious of the three contexts. It is the seat of all subjective or personal feelings and meanings. Under its commanding organ, the brain, emotions and meanings are registered, selected, recorded, as well as unconsciously and consciously filtered. As a self, every person strives for the development of an identity. He or she discovers interests, and seeks significant meanings, comforts, and satisfactions. The self context molds every aspect of the information exchange that occurs among humans and it is central to the quality of the critical intellectual skills anyone develops. The self becomes an emotionally-laden entity whose subjective identity can be judged to harbor open or closed systems of information and belief. From these systems, personal behavior is extruded. Whitehead acknowledged this reality, but put it differently, by stating “I lay down as an educational axiom that in teaching you will come to grief as soon as you forget that your pupils have bodies” (1929b, 50). Second, the perceptual boundaries of the proximity context are constituted by everything we can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear with our naked senses, from the rough bark of a tree to the twinkling of a far-off star. It involves the
Steps to a Process Curriculum
91
physical world with all its forms, qualities, and events. As Gerald Edelman describes it, “events in this world detected without the aid of instruments are ‘at scale’ with percipient organisms and are parallel, numerous, and dense” (1989, p. 255). In a similar manner, Edward Hall presents strong arguments for the overpowering influence that culture has on perception and behavior, in suggesting that “one of the functions of culture is to provide a highly selective screen between man and the outside world. . . . What one pays attention to or does not attend [to] is largely a matter of context” (1966, p. 101). We experience the proximity context directly, as our sensory systems extract from the outside world the characteristics of actual objects, processes, and the individuals that we observe. We can detect with remarkable accuracy their shapes, colors, textures, movements, and relationships, but we cannot always do so clearly because, for example, of bad illumination or of confusion. Physical environments provide the contexts for our experiences. They are the major sources of stimuli, and they create most of the content of our internal imageries. As Whitehead states, “the problem of education is to make the pupil see the wood by means of the trees” (1929b, p. 6). Thus, the proximity context provides the essential ground for the self. It constantly feeds in environmental information, mainly by means of our sense of sight. What happens here circumstantially can be said to affect profoundly the scope and the scale of a developing subjective experience. It also contributes in many different ways to the success or the failure of a human being’s potential. Here is where the meme fits in. The observable world is neither a flux nor an anarchy. Rather, it is a continuity of naturally and artificially created unified objects, processes, and events. It is not a random variety of events. Objective reality is organized and structured in spite of, or because of, itself. Its temporality has been characterized by Whyte (1961) as development, despite the contingencies that exist. Reality exhibits change as processes and memetic forms in development, and it displays systems in transformation within larger tendencies, as they are affected by circumstances. Reality provides a systematically and hierarchically organized foundation which nurtures human growth, thought, and behavior. We strenuously try to describe and to understand it by means of the universal context. Third, the perceptual boundaries of the universal context are defined by anything we can see, smell, touch, taste, and hear with the help of tools. Molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles are made visible by electron microscopes and cyclotrons. Planets and galaxy clusters are brought closer to us by the use of telescopes, and the white light of the sun and the stars can be turned into rainbow colors by prisms and spectrographs. As Whitehead writes, “the peculiar merit of a scientific education should be that it bases thought upon first-hand observation” (ibid., p. 51). Of course, first-hand observation of the world by human beings can be enhanced by various tools and technologies.
92
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
Language too must be considered as a significant and remarkable universal tool. At the center of all human communication, there is a language hierarchy consisting in gestures, speech, writing, and reading. Languages, with their multiple symbol systems and modes of expression, including numeration, have dramatically and universally extended the range of discovery, record keeping, and information exchange through space and time. Language is our major cognetic instrument, and creating communicable knowledge is a time-binder, as Alfred Korzybski (1924) might suggest. However, in the process by which it classifies the entities of the world, language affects our perceptions via processes of conceptualization. Abstraction is a basic aspect of the linguistic process. Abstraction, by means of a mental form of association which we call symbolization, established initially the process of denoting. Denoting is symbolizing. Denoting creates names that stand for things. These things can be external, isolable entities with describable and validatable physical attributes, or they can be internal emotions and ideas which we call concepts. These usually reside in meaningful, intellectualized beliefs and are themselves considered to be facts. Through the use of language, names as expressible words became highly maneuverable mental events of great associational versatility. It is for this reason that names, as expressible linguistic symbols, became dominant in human evolution. The plasticity of the brain allowed for the symbolic function through semantic differentiations, which became expressible by means of the developing vocal sound tract throughout some six thousand years, leading to the invention of graphic pictorial and alphabetic symbol systems. By way of further grammatical and syntactic structuring, words as named concepts, with their extra-symbolic baggage derived largely from the emotions, became the meat chewed over by the intellectual efforts of thinking, questioning, guessing, imagining, and concluding, just to mention a few of the complex mental processes that human language facilitated. As language evolved, memetic experiences became more complex. Literary forms were created, ranging from myths to documentaries. These forms were filled with stories, thoughtful metaphors, thoughtless stereotypes, appropriate or inappropriate analogies, as well as many modes of description and explanation, including the emergence of the investigative sciences, and empirical interpretations of objects, events, ideas, and feelings. These literary forms also encompassed the evolution of a meshwork of religions and philosophies. Symbolic language produced songs, poetry, fiction, drama, sermons, editorials, propaganda, advertising, political slogans, and artistic manifestos. As memes, these purposeful genres influenced the world views of literate and illiterate societies. Molding the various interpretations of our human experience, these characteristic forms of symbolic expression belong to the somatic domain that perfuses the human brain. The word “somantic” designates the synthesizing of the concepts “somatic” and “semantic,” and it
Steps to a Process Curriculum
93
refers to “knowledge in the body.” But most importantly, the major characteristic relative to each of the three contexts is their interpenetrability. Differentiated as they are both perceptually and categorically, these contexts interpenetrate one another in the form of the meme. They encompass holistic, aesthetic, and intellectual-developmental conditions, or rather cognetic conditions, at every level of human epigenetic, biological, and culturally accumulated experience. Thus, the environment cannot be considered as something entirely outside of us. To be sure, Dewey provides the insight that the environment is not something around and about human activities in an external sense; it is their medium or milieu, in the sense in which a medium is intermediate to the execution or carrying out of human activities, as well as being the channel through which they move and the vehicle by which they go on. Narrowing the medium is the direct source of all unnecessary impoverishment in human living. (1948, p. 4) All learning takes place chronologically. But it is a blend of both diachronic and synchronic processes. These are its vertical and horizontal dimensions. Intellectual development and the growth of knowledge is built up by means of educational experience. We can visualize contextual impingements upon the self by way of the following diagram.
Fig. 2: The Embedded Self and Our Contextual Memetic Molders Family Language Religion Friends Neighborhood Media Teachers Cultural Norms Sense of the Nation the Humanities the Sciences Philosophies
94
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
In the diagram, the continuous graphic circles are not to be taken literally. To be sure, in relation to it, George Allan pointed out the obvious fact that the various roles of family members, religionists, neighbors, workers, etc. produce overlaps and overlays among the circles. This, of course, is the interpenetration of effects. 8. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy The nature of education can be better understood by considering the Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy. Epigenesis is a concept that needs to be defined. It is one of the major processes upon which memetic development depends. The learned roles of horizontal and vertical knowledge exist in the forms of the memes that civilization has developed. Memes are replicators (Blackmore, 2000, p. 6) that function as the forms of social evolution. Memes are units of cultural inheritance, but they are not biological units. Memes are spread culturally by imitation and they are learned as skills and as patterns. Memes are transmitted and are reproduced by the process of teaching, by copying and/or by following a model of constructed human experience. Memes create new spaces for habitual activity and human creativity. Epigenesis proceeds by building on what is already there. Memes are altered by epigenesis, which occurs everywhere in inorganic, organic, and supra-organic development. As Edward O. Wilson defines it, as recognized in biology, epigenetic rules comprise the full range of inherited regularities of development in anatomy, physiology, cognition, and behavior. They are the algorithms of growth and differentiation that create a fully functional organism. (1998, p. 150) Epigenesis is truly a fundamental formative process. It engineers the social formation of cultural memes in a basic way. Both epigenesis and memetics are cognetic processes in which connections are made. In geology, epigenetic change or growth indicates that a new form is created subsequently by a process that affects an existing structure. For example, many lakes have been formed by the cutting off of a river’s elbow bends, its course being altered by some natural phenomenon. Epigenesis carries a special connotation for education. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy that is proposed here offers a new empirical framework for re-ordering, in a more coherent way, the fundamental processes inherent in teaching and curriculum revision. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy can move education in a new direction. As far back as 1966, John Goodlad cautioned that in respect to the curriculum,
Steps to a Process Curriculum
95
the selection of the most significant bits of content no longer is difficult, it is impossible. Consequently, teachers and pupils must seek out those fundamental concepts, principles, and methods that appear most useful for ordering and interpreting man’s inquiries. (in Mayshark and Irwin, 1968, p. 161) Below, I suggest two sets of fundamental concepts. Memetics becomes important because decisions must be made in regard to the forms of new memes, which are to be originated and copied in revising and improving the curriculum. Whitehead states that in order to understand better the properties of reality, we need a concrete, balanced foundation for scientific literacy, one that the Socratic method alone cannot provide. Embracing holism involves more than a concern for the minds of the teacher and the student. It must include the external reality that these minds must contend with, and it must do so seriously. Francis Bacon argues that the mind “is not a wax tablet. . . . On a tablet you cannot write the new till you rub out the old; on the mind you cannot rub out the old except by writing the new” (in Wilson, 1998, p. 21). Today, the new is represented by advancing scientific knowledge. According to Wilson, science is not marginal. . . . Like art it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species’ repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. (ibid., p. 268) Science can be a humanizing subject when it is properly presented to students. And it would be tragic to divide it from the humanities, thereby depriving them of any opportunity to arrive at a synthesis of aesthetic intuition and exact scientific observation and reasoning, which are both necessary for the construction of a global society. The knowledge that is the most worth knowing is the knowledge of how processes work, how they are properly managed, connected, and related to the wider processual nature of the universe, a point which demonstrates the importance of instruction in contextual perceiving. In the late 1960s, during a debate at a liberal arts conference celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the undergraduate college of the University of Chicago, Richard McKeon suggested that general education consists in a search for principles or structures underlying all knowledge. This is truly the universal quest that both science and philosophy are pursuing. In a similar spirit, Whitehead writes that “there are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some embodiment, whatever field we explore—the spirit of change and the spirit of conservation” (1925, p. 201). I accept the fact that education, and curriculum building in particular, must deal with change or transformation and structure or form, implying conservation.
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
96
Whitehead’s view here was developed further by Whyte (1961) in reference to his definition of form as recognizable continuity. Change and structure are unified by the concept of process. The most stable state of process was defined by Whyte as “symmetrical static form” (1961, pp. 313-314). The word, “static” here should not be misconstrued. It means structural stability, and it does not necessary imply any form of permanence. Both the ideas of conservation and of continuity service the concept of memetics. Furthermore, the process of imitation, which reproductive development fosters, is molded by forms of symmetization, the deep morphic, formative process in nature that is delineated by Whyte—its ultimate forms being translational, rotational, and bisymmetric symmetries which are observable throughout the universe. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy is a heuristic framework. The schema’s empirical thrust is instrumental in helping us to describe, in concrete contextual terms, all the forms of reality surrounding us. Whyte writes, it is sometimes necessary to make explicit what is obvious. . . . The great inorganic hierarchy and the myriads of hierarchically structured organisms are very different. But the prevalence of this type of spatial ordering is one of the most general characteristics of the universe, and the least understood. (1970-1971, p. 621) The following schema presents the key concepts belonging to the Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy, which I believe are the most significant for today’s educators to understand. The concepts are not merely ontological. Rather, they stand for exacting processes, the concrete manifestations of which can be creatively incorporated into forms of interdisciplinary, contextualized curriculum.
Fig. 3: The Key Concepts of the Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy Phenomena
Key Concepts
Significant Educational Need
Change Perceiving Forms Meanings
Motion Process Structure Symbolics
Understanding transformation as development. Understanding growth, behaviors, generativity. Understanding units, systems, hierarchies. Using language to describe, explain, demystify.
These concepts are universals which offer the following implications: (1) Every change implies Motion requiring direction; (2) Every motion implies Process requiring context; (3) Every process implies Structure requiring pattern; (4) Every structure implies Symbolics affording representability.
Steps to a Process Curriculum
97
Each of the key concepts (motion, process, structure, symbolics) can be used to guide the composition of semantic and aesthetic units of instruction for any subject matter. They are highly relevant concepts because: (1) they do not denote abstractions; (2) their dimensions are continua along which degrees of difference or similarity can be denoted and identified linguistically; (3) they are integrative, since each can be related to the others via developmental rules of transformation; and (4) they are connective, associable, and interdisciplinary. These key concepts can also be used to synthesize thinking in relation to the enormous diversity that is found throughout reality and which is observable throughout the three perceptual contexts of personal experience. The key concepts (motion, process, structure, symbolics) may be synthesized by constructing a Tetrahedron of Knowledge (see Schiller, 1998).
Fig. 4: The Tetrahedron of Knowledge
Each face of the tetrahedron connects these concepts as a viewpoint plane or lens. The various forms of subject matter range along polarized continua and can be named, described, and evaluated relative to their degrees of motion,
98
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
kinds of processes, and levels of structure. By looking from above through the symbolic lens of the model, we can name any of the forms: the events, the processes, the objects, and the memes that are encountered in human experience, and we can describe their characteristic properties at whatever developmental level that we choose. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy is epigenetic in that it can raise to awareness the transformational nature of reality levels. It can lead to a processrelational perspective and to cumulative learning. All processes and structures can be understood to range from simple to complex, least stable to most stable, regular to irregular, invisible to visible, whereas all symbolisms range from meaningful to a-meaningful. Another way of relating these generic concepts is by recognizing the dynamics of the educative act. These concepts are to be found in the truths that motions catch attention, processes guide attention, structures fix attention, and symbolics transform attention into awareness. Awareness of all these perceptually oriented processes raises our consciousness of the world’s realities. This hierarchy of concepts represents a minimal set, and yet it is the broadest and the deepest conceptualization of universal properties. It involves perceptually related principles for referencing the phenomena they label. Learning about specific phenomena is a chronological process that incorporates both vertical and horizontal contextualization, and that focuses on developing individualized and cumulative acts of perceiving, of experiencing, and of expressing memes in the student. Of course, this involves thinking, but not the kind of thinking that is surrounded by mental vacuums, thereby forcing a person to absorb strenuously fragments of knowledge which are akin to the inert ideas that Whitehead admonished us to avoid. As such, we can characterize change as motion, which has been studied seriously from Galileo on, and contexts in terms of processes, which have been investigated in the organic domain as growth and transformation. Then, we come to recognize the forms of physical, social, cultural, and even intellectual structures as memes, ranging from the stone axe to ritual dances and from the pyramids to systematically organized governance concepts. Such concepts are expressed in symbolic language, the pragmatic function of which is to communicate, to describe, to explain, and to organize both physical and memetic information. In this way, with reference to the tetrahedron of knowledge, I have unified their interrelationships in a holistic way, which, in turn, demonstrates the recognition of their dependence upon each other. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy lays a foundation to support the ideas that underlie what Orr (1992) describes as ecological literacy, constituting an educational perspective that calls for an elevation of the knowledge that would enable developmental sustainability in our world of diminishing resources. Orr writes that “the failure to develop ecological literacy is a sin of omission. Not only are we failing to teach the basics about the earth and how it works, but are
Steps to a Process Curriculum
99
in fact also teaching a large amount of stuff that is simply wrong” (1992, p. 85). As we shall see, Gibson’s ecological optics helps to redeem an errant stimulusresponse psychology. And the AEIOU curriculum approach that I shall present later in this essay begins to bring our theorizing back down to earth. In order to make holistic thinking effective, the processual nature of reality must be accepted by educational establishments. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy supplants traditional, discipline oriented curriculum structures and enables teachers to use nonlinear, cognetic approaches in order to contextualize their pedagogy. This perspective can advance the use of thematic, interdisciplinary, integrative contents and techniques. It is a synthesis of truly fundamental principles which can incorporate many of the positive educational practices already employed. The Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy is a theoretical framework—a universal generic schema—which, along with the idea of contextual perception, can begin to guide the development of curriculum content and teaching methodology in a direction that can unify educational thinking internationally. I believe that the world’s educators and legislators must enlarge their aspirations so as to achieve their goals for the good of the world beyond ideologies (see Allan and Evans, 2006, p. 27). Humanity everywhere exhibits similar human characteristics. As such, educating needs the unifying social psychology that a process-relational educational theory can provide, and which can transcend national and regional boundaries. Toward this end, the Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy offers a truly fundamental model. The epigenetic thrust exists throughout nature and civilization. Thus, it is appropriate and natural for us to strive to better understand its effects within the domain of teaching. Taken together, the four basic concepts of the Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy represent a perceptually based intellectual platform. The initial goal is to focus on acquiring an accurate description of basic facts within the reality of each perceptual context. But how do we perceive facts that can be called basic, as well as those by which memes are characterized? How do facts arrive within the somantic domain so as to become knowledge? How do we assure the perception of what may be for each of us the factual knowledge most worth knowing? Subjectively, this is not an easy task because of the influence of the imagination and the emotions, as well as of the promulgation of biased, faulty, confusing, or inaccurate knowledge and beliefs which are conveyed by ignorance and by antiquated traditions. The assimilation and accommodation of knowledge takes place in two ways. These are described by the psychologist James Gibson in his books, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). We acquire perceptual meanings initially from birth via the information that our senses bring in, consisting mainly in light, as Gibson describes through the notion of ecological optics. Subsequently, there
100
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
develops the cultural meanings, both verbal and conceptual, which are provided by the socializing context that we experience. 9. The Extracted Fact and the Abstracted Fact I believe the image is the great instrument of instruction. (Dewey, 1897, p. 14) The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name. (Confucius, Analects, 13:3) The problem concerning Confucius’ claim above is to understand what the word “things” stands for. There are things that are tangibles, namely, sensorially identifiable things or material, isolable entities and processes. And there are also ideational processes and emotions that we give names to in order to identify, describe, and discuss them. Both forms of information conveyance entail the cognetic, somantic processes of reference, of representation, or of standing for something. Concepts are names. They are linguistic abstractions which convey meaning. They are merely labeled ideas, the meanings of which permit human beings to describe and to discuss. Unless we wish to claim their neuronal cell assemblies, concepts have no physical reference. For the most part, such named meanings stand for conceptualizations. They have no tangible external referents, except that they can be spoken or written down as words. However, if some concepts are taken as objectively real, it is only in virtue of the linguistic process of reification or hypostatization. They make an ontological leap. This is a linguistic phenomenon that is utilized mostly by religious or philosophic imagination. Reification must be recognized and accepted as a process conducive to, and creating, a form of psychological security, engendering belief in a transcendental unity. The referent is only a subjective, intuited idea and not a validated, objective fact. Psychologically, it is a personal reality, but also a collective, spiritual one. Belief in this spiritual reality has been reinforced symbolically throughout the ages by being pictured and sculptured imaginatively by artists in every society. But all names, no matter what they are used to denote, whether they are objects, processes, ideas, or feelings, are linguistic symbols. They are abstractions, mere labels the meaning of which is most often being dependent on their contexts, or their memetic environments. Whether it is about a chunk of direct knowledge of a physical reality, a mental conceptualization, or merely a figment of the imagination, these contexts are informative. Yet how does the rightness of a name get recognized? Who establishes this? Is there a rightness to a named image? And what about Ahsen’s (1973) inclusive eidetic image?
Steps to a Process Curriculum
101
If the importance of the image for learning is what Dewey deemed it to be, what is an image actually? From whence does an image arrive within us? Here are enigmas to be solved with the use of the idea of contextual perception. What is the context in which, and from which, an image is produced? And what is the context out of which the linguistic symbol is constructed? Both, of course, are produced by the three dimensional plasticity of the brain’s cerebral cortex. The depth and the scope of neuronal levels of networks and patterns of associational circuits form a psychoneural intimacy (Honderich, 1995, p. 616). The dynamics of these cortical networks center on the work of synapses. The synapse is a cognetic process that fosters information exchange at electrochemical levels among the dendritic networks of the closely packed neurons. This highly integrative and differentiating process fosters forms of patterned knowledge that Joaquin Fuster (2002) terms cognits, a concept that involves a generalization of forms of knowing that are generated from the lowest to the highest levels of complexity in cerebral activity. It can include, for the first time, a foundation for the forms that we call images and linguistic symbols. We cannot here further investigate Fuster’s hypotheses. Neuroscience is currently in full flower in its attempts to disentangle and to identify these processes and their patterns, although the latest cranial imaging techniques can only go so far. Nevertheless, at least one major form of information carrier—an image—can be identified as springing initially from an exterior source. The other form of information carrier, the abstract noun for example, is an interior construct that we identify as a meaningful, linguistic symbol. In its characteristic form, it stands for, and labels, ideas and emotions. The abstract noun is a mental, abstracted patterning which can only convey meaningful information of a different sort than the structural information conveyed by the sensorial image. As Gibson (1966) maintains, all sensorial images are derived directly as extracted facts. They are cognetic percepts—perceptions that make specific connections between experienced stimuli which are impressed in memory in modal forms. Visual imageries, in particular, are evidential connections by being representations. They correspond to and represent physical realities. They are sets of factual information which are directly received, whereas, because of their symbolic nature, abstracted facts present us with arbitrary or isolated information. Symbols merely stand for their meanings. They do not represent them. Rather, they are completely dependent on their contexts for their meaning. They are derivative facts. Linguistic symbols always necessitate interpretation. They are the secondary intellectual support process that we call thinking about. Some thinkers still believe that there can be no direct knowledge of their environment, the world, or the universe, holding that such knowledge is unfathomable and/or that it can never be arrived at, due to the intermediation of our nervous system which must convey information in its different modalities. Yet evolution has constructed our peripheral and central nervous systems so as
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
102
to be able to engage directly with our Proximity Context. Evolution has produced the two ways of describing it, namely, directly (structurally) via imageries and symbolically (abstractly) via language. Consequently, perceived images are not unfathomable. Not only do they correspond with tangible realities, but they also represent or describe their stimuli accurately, the properties of which are often measurable. Perceived images extract information, and they represent directly contacted fact, namely, physical structures which are sensorially detected as modal imageries that the cerebral cortex registers by means of corresponding neuronal and synaptic patterns. These are networks or circuits which illustrate isomorphically for us the outer world, namely, our experience of it. Perhaps the best way to convey this distinction is diagrammatically, as Gibson (1966) has done, by differentiating between perceptual meaning and verbal meaning (also see Schiller, 2000).
Fig. 5: The Difference Between “Perceptual” and “Verbal” Meaning Extractive Meanings: Perceptual Meaning ENVIRONMENTAL SOURCE →→→→→→ (Parts, Wholes, Physical Situations) Law
STIMULUS INVARIANT (Patterns “Represent”)
→→→→→→ Psychological Resonance
PERCEPT (Imageries)
Abstractive Meanings: Verbal Meaning REFERENT (Parts, Wholes, Situations)
→→→→→→ Social Convention
SYMBOL / WORD (Substitutes “Stands For”)
→→→→→→ Psychological Association
CONCEPT (Categories)
What is meant by all of this? Extracted fact is empirical knowledge, whereas abstracted fact is subjective, socialized, and universalizable knowledge. The latter’s symbolic nature makes it highly valuable in terms of its comprehensive usefulness, but also dangerous because of egregious social misuse. Both forms of knowledge harbor and convey information, but of different sorts.
Steps to a Process Curriculum
103
10. A Commentary Regarding the Nature of the Linguistic Symbol It is of crucial importance for a teacher to understand the nature of the symbol. And it is significant for the teacher to know the parameters of symbolic knowledge. Whitehead makes this clear in Introduction to Mathematics (1911) and in Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927). Symbolic knowledge has always motivated the highest levels of inspirational respect and devotion, but, because of enshrined dogmatic and ideological beliefs, it has initiated and supported levels of human hatred and cruelty leading to the kinds of barbaric behaviors that are evident even today. Included in Dewey’s “My Pedagogic Creed” (1897), is the following statement: symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place for economizing effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without. (in Dworkin, 1959, p. 28) Elsewhere, Dewey calls attention to what he characterizes as context words, such as “drinking,” “pursuit,” “entanglement,” “enterprise,” “undergoing,” “nailing,” etc. None of these words can be comprehended without ample description or demonstration of the concomitant processes or environments in which they take place. Dewey’s emphasis on context supports my view of the importance of revitalizing pedagogical methodology by means of encouraging contextual perception. Now, more than ever, as language learning develops in the individual, it becomes a necessity to understand more deeply the purpose and the uses of linguistic symbols. For it is either the judicious or mischievous use of the linguistic symbol that can produce constructive, reasoned, coherent, and critical thinking, or irrational, prejudiced, stereotypic, outrageous, and destructive human actions. The invention of language through the evolution of linguistic symbolization created a highly versatile, intellectual process. It provided a second way of recording and remembering experiences by means of the creation of names and memes both seen and not seen. Can we relate this process to the idea of original intent, a notion developed by some conservative legislators in order to account for how our founding fathers presumably conceived our basic laws in the first place? What was the original intent of the invention of the common noun? The linguistic symbol evolved essentially as an agent of utilitarian social communication. But we might ask: what was this public communication about? Most of these whats can be identified by the names created for the objects and the processes found in the environment, including the bio-psychological aspects of human feelings and behaviors. All of these factors were objects of intense, natural curiosity and many were manifested to serve human survival.
104
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
Therefore, we can assume that the original intent of symbolization was a conscious and pragmatic psychosocial development of a public medium in order to promote a more comprehensive understanding of realities. In order to guarantee survival, it was crucial to identify and to utilize particular things, for example, to eat safely, to protect against the cold, to find safe havens, and to ward off predators or hostile tribes. As such, a fundamental purpose of accurate perception was of a decidedly contextual nature. There was also a need to develop a memory of such objects and processes conducive to survival. These experienced needs, in addition to the usefulness of their recognition in the field, were reinforced by being recorded symbolically, specifically, by means of scribed pictures on cave walls and, for example, by way of ascribing names to spiritual forces which were believed to influence the fortunes of people. Motivated by a form of foresight in which there was an appeal to gods, symbols made communication and cooperation with peers possible, for example, so as to organize cooperative hunting parties. The anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) observed that early man’s propensity to name everything in sight facilitated survival and enhanced life. 11. Affordances Springing from his own perceptual psychology, Gibson (1966) classifies a contextualized form of perception as an affordance (also see Reed, 1988). Gibson advocates a broader, integrative focus that is offered by his idea of ecological perception. The object of this psychology is to modify the traditional, analytic paradigm in science that stresses measurement in space and time. Gibson, through his theorizing and experimentation, explores phenomena in a more holistic, integrative, and synthesizing way. He investigates both the persistence and the invariance of phenomena, which offers to us an intuition about the significance of the notion of form. I cannot here go into depth about his original approach. Nevertheless, one of his conceptions is important for today’s educator to understand, namely, his theory of affordances. An affordance is a new class of integrative knowledge. The niche that evolution carved out for the survival of the human species is filled with affordances. An affordance is the recognition of something in the human environment that can satisfy a need or a purposeful human behavior. Gibson writes, an important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But actually an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally
Steps to a Process Curriculum
105
a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. (1986, pp. 128-129) Hence, the concept of an affordance implies the complementarity of humanity with its diverse environments, which is a view that Dewey also held. Affordances are utilitarian, practical, visual saliences, which permit purposeful behaviors—selectable behaviors—that are afforded by an object or condition in the proximity context. Water, for instance, affords the possibility of drinking, pouring, washing, and spraying a garden. A chair, or any number of flat horizontal surfaces, like a bench, a stool, a chest, a crate, a ledge, or a step, affords the possibility of sitting. And stairs afford the possibility of going up or down. The affordances can be seen as a source for the origination and the establishment of memes. A stone, for example, affords a number of behavioral actions which are dependent upon a human context. Stones can be thrown, used as hammers, paperweights, bookends, or to plug a hole. Stones can be piled to make a cairn, to line a well, to make a wall, or to create pathways and roads. All of these effects resulted in their social manifestation and were copied or imitated after their initial appearance. Gibson states that “the medium, substances, surfaces, objects, places, and other animals have affordances. They offer benefit or injury, life or death. This is why they need to be perceived” (ibid., p. 143). Gibson believes that the possibilities in the environment and in the way of life of the person go together and are inseparable. His is a unifying, gestaltic form of psychology. Gibson points out that there is information about the physical properties of things and about environmental properties in sensory stimulation. His hypothesis is that there is information in ambient light that specifies affordances. It is the culmination of his description and his definition of the notion of ecological optics. Gibson holds that “the notion of invariants that are related at one extreme to the motives and needs of an observer and at the other extreme to the substances and surfaces of the world provide a new approach to psychology” (ibid., p. 143), which exemplifies a cognetic conception. The notion of invariance contributes to the development of the idea of memetic imitation. What is interesting about the turn in psychology, which began with Gibson’s unique concerns some fifty years ago, is that it moves the scientific paradigm in the direction that Whyte called for more than sixty years ago. Whyte called for a shift in paradigm toward a more morphological thrust in scientific investigation. Indeed, Whyte’s (1961) definition of form as recognizable continuity relates easily to Gibson’s concern with perseverance and invariance. Clearly, continuity involves perseverance and the recognizability of similar forms and processes encompasses invariance. There
106
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
is a deep truth here that is now receiving confirmation and emphasis. We are witnesses today to the emergence of the new modern sciences of nanotechnology, proteomics, genomics, memetics, the advances of neuroscience, and even the desire for more active stem-cell research. In all of these developments, there is a serious, scientific concern to describe the nature, the kinds, the uses, and the activities of forms. Nanotechnology deals with establishing the shape, the content, and the relationships of nature’s microscopic and subatomic forms. Proteomics deals with discovering the shapes of protein molecules and their folding propensities that create specific functions or organic developmental consequences. Genomics studies the relationship between gene structure and the biologically functional forms in organisms. Memetics offers the agency for promoting recognizable continuity via the civilizing process of copying or replicating social forms. The neurosciences now explore the forms and the functioning of neurons, dendrites, and synapses. They study the patterns of brain activity across levels of the cortex which indicate the actions of cellular, modal forms, or mirroring cells, and they study other patterns or networks that manifest human perceptions, feelings, and thinking (Fuster, 2003). Stem-cell research attempts to ascertain how undifferentiated cellular materials can reorganize so as to function as characteristic forms of cells in the biological maturation of specific bodily organs. Thus, the scientific paradigm is shifting to morphological understandings, as called for by Whyte (1974). 12. The Problem of the Ignorance of Scientific Knowledge With the constant modernization that is occurring in the sciences, concomitant modernization becomes mandatory in education, especially as it relates to curriculum design. Enough has been written about the poor quality of teaching in the schools, in respect to reading, writing, mathematics, and the sciences. The ongoing controversy in the schools over teaching intelligent design, as a valid alternative to evolution, has muddied the waters even further. What it serves to prove is that the understanding of the nature of science and its role in civilized societies is abysmally low. This frightening fact does not bode well for the future of scientific knowledge in America, and indeed in the world. The acceleration of the growth of scientific knowledge is so far ahead of the penetration of much of its crucial information into populations that it has created a dangerous, intellectual gap in the public mind. This gap represents an astounding ignorance, and it is being filled unfortunately and almost routinely by outrageous, unsubstantiated ideas, including flights of warped imagination, which are often couched in the fantasies of religious extremism. The ignorance of scientific knowledge presents a formidable challenge to educational communities world wide, but it should not be allowed to continue, especially given the distressing ecological,
Steps to a Process Curriculum
107
economic, and governance problems facing our planet. The ignorance of scientific knowledge in populations, combined with the extraordinary dependence on extreme beliefs so as to secure psychosocial comfort in times of stress, as well as the lack of legislative and corporate social responsibility, put reasonable, practical efforts to solve global problems at grave risk. Teaching methodologies and curriculum contents need a heuristic reordering, especially in terms of their efficacy in providing students with a sense of the interrelationship between the human and the physical environment. New pedagogical thought is needed to establish a better balance between knowledge and behavior. The reorganization of method and the reception of accurate information can make for a more coherent understanding of the connection between human needs and the ecological balance. Clearly this advance would serve the larger needs of civilized survival in a constructive manner. For these reasons, here, in accordance with my call to stimulate contextual perceiving in both teacher and student, I offer a novel framework that will serve to improve instructional strategies. Contextual perceiving is the process that can activate a deeper understanding of relationality, an important concept that is now at the core of comprehending authentic process thinking. 13. The AEIOU Curriculum Framework It is clear that the current generation of teachers must reorganize the curriculum so as to spark curiosity and imagination in the student, and the sense of adventure in education. The fragmented knowledge which is afforded by the separate disciplines is failing modern education, particularly, but not exclusively, in the aesthetic domain. The traditional, rigid curriculum, involving detached or isolated information that is organized into time-limited lessons, reduces the meaning of knowledge to cognitive snippets that wander through the cortex and seek connections. As Whitehead writes, “one of the ways of encouraging general mental activity is to foster a special devotion. You may not divide the seamless coat of learning” (1929b, p. 11). It is for this reason that I offer the Advanced, Ecologically, Integratively Ordered, Unity (AEIOU) approach to curriculum revision. Standing in contrast to a pedagogy that is focused on cognition, this approach is constituted by an empirically focused, content development model for illuminating real world experience. In relation to my proposed model, we might ask the following questions: what are the real properties of the environment that early learners and their teachers face? Which curriculum contents have significant value and should be embraced? What is the knowledge most worth knowing—the knowledge that is relevant to a person’s and the environment’s most important needs? This instructional model begins with play—the basic activity which engages the child’s natural curiosity, imagination, and the need to deal with physical
108
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
materials—in the most immediate manner. Here is where cognetic learning truly begins. Play puts young minds instantly in touch with the entities of, and the epistemological processes involved in, concrete experience. In play, children begin to experiment with the properties and the relationships that make the world’s natural forces work for them, and they learn to control them. This early level of affordances, engaged by forms of sensorial and behavioral fulfillment, teach children about what can be accomplished by their own efforts. Here, very early, a child’s serious education about the natural order of things and about his or her own powers begins. Activities, such as playing with water, sand, and colors, manipulating blocks to build towers, cutting shapes to make collages, planting seeds, and having to deal with their peers, provide experiences that stimulate curiosity, motivate imagination, and call for emotional response and purposeful behavior. None of this fits into a traditional discipline’s track. Yet teachers must have a model to guide their pedagogy—a model that both retains the wholeness of these early learning experiences and maintains the holistic values which are embedded in a child’s connection to his or her environment. In this case, holism signifies the recognition of the connectedness inherent to nature’s entities and processes, a unity that was accepted by early man, as Lévi-Strauss (1966) and Whyte (1961) respectively point out. Nature is a whole in which its variant forms are described authentically by the sciences. Nature’s facts, recognized and interpreted also by the humanities, by philosophers, and by the public, either wisely or fantastically, are real and immediate to comprehend, misconstrue, or ignore. Pete Gunter claims that what is needed ideally is a “vivid sense of the environment” (2005, p. 220). What will be the focus of a curriculum to support such an approach, namely, one that can help the teacher to organize a form of contextual thinking which presents an ecological thematic content, even at the early learning level? I suggest that the AEIOU curriculum approach offers a heuristic opportunity to cultivate holistic thinking in teachers. It calls for a more comprehensive awareness of the properties, processes, and relationships belonging to nature, which, in turn, can procure deeper insights into how nature and society work, as well as knowledge that can help to fulfill human potential. The overall educational goal is to create students who think holistically. Contextual perceiving can assure that they acquire the information that is both salient to themselves and conducive to systematic knowledge. What becomes fundamental while learning to read, to write, and to think is the absorption of the characteristic forms and the interrelationships of a reality that they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. The AEIOU model offers to teachers the opportunity to connect what is meaningful for students personally to the imageries which are engendered in purposeful play. This approach offers
Steps to a Process Curriculum
109
a synthesizing, interdisciplinary curriculum design that connects the ecological viewpoint with the instructional processes right where it begins. Below, I provide an initial outline of The Advanced, Ecological, Integratively Ordered, Unity (AEIOU) curriculum approach. Maybe this is a mouthful, but the acronym’s succinctness carries the weight of its meaning. Every word in the English language needs these vowels to be meaningful. This framework is presented as a tentative outline. It involves the notion that empirical content is relevant subject matter for the early childhood teacher. The model can be expanded systematically in relation to the child’s progress through the grades, through the depiction of more complex relational concepts and contents in the form of a spiraling curriculum, as suggested by Jerome Bruner (1960). This plan offers a clear way to connect the basics of concrete, physical materials, played with initially, to their characteristic forms and processes, as well as to the more complex structures and patterns that are found in nature and in a memetic society. These forms can be seen, described, collected, and manipulated. These stable materials, concepts, and processes, all in dynamic relationships with each other, can be named, visualized imaginatively, played with creatively, and discussed energetically. Education begins with the direction of the young child’s experiences toward the goals of enhancing visual discrimination, eye-hand coordination, and vocabulary building. In these initial stages, play is the most important process that will assist the child to make connections with the real world and with adult experience. As such, we might ask what natural things are young children given to play with aside from specially made toys, which today might include mobile phones? Our posited AEIOU schema can be characterized as a neoclassical, ecological, process-relational approach to curriculum building. The term neoclassical is here neither proposed in jest, nor is it a regression to the ancient Greek conception of what constitutes basic matter. As an advanced ecological, integratively ordered, unifying curriculum plan, it presents an empirical way to help the student to become familiar with, and to utilize, fundamental knowledge most worth knowing about. The four components Water, Earth, Air, and Fire constitute and are integral to the physical planet on which we live. They relate intrinsically to all life forms that it supports or destroys. My model is organized into three inclusive categories which display their cognetic affinities. Indeed, many overlap. They offer a holistic advantage in that they imply contextual connections, such as a beach and an ocean, or air and breathing. These interrelated categories emphasize: (1) characteristic forms with their distinctive features; (2) contexts or systems in which these forms are found or used; and (3) the life concerns of human beings, with reference to affordances. When we focus on these contents or subjects by means of these three major areas, imagine what distinctions, connections, and interrelationships can
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
110
be observed, discussed, and dealt with within the classroom and elsewhere. I call special attention to the third category: life concerns, which characterizes complex contextual processes. What is even more important is the realization that these words are Deweyan context words, as was described previously in section ten of this chapter. In order to grasp the existential meaning of such words, a person must partake of them in order to relate to their contexts. “Drinking,” for example, necessitates the presence of a safe fluid, a container such as a cup, a mug, a glass, the hands, and a conveyer, such as a straw, sipping, sucking, slurping, gulping, and spitting. In relation to the young child, all of these elements are significant, as is tasting juice in order to ascertain sweetness, or milk in order to judge its freshness. The difference between swallowing, gagging, choking, or hiccupping are also significant in the context of drinking. As Hans Christian von Bayer writes, “any intellectual endeavor, scientific or otherwise, begins with identification of its ‘coherent structures,’ namely, the simplest components that preserve their identity and recur time and again” (1999, p. 13). The following schema serves to illuminate these notions.
Fig. 6: The Basic Concepts and Their Forms WATER
EARTH
AIR
FIRE
1. Characteristic Forms drop
grain
gas (O2)
energy
wave foam stream clear cloudy fresh salty steam ice etc.
sand dirt mud clay pebble rock boulder cliff lava etc.
breath breeze wind jet stream hazy smoky hurricane typhoon monsoon etc.
heat light electricity spark flame burn melt fuse harden etc.
2. Environmental Conditions cloudy
beach
atmosphere
sun
mist fog hail rain shower
sand bar top soil silt hill slope
sky gases CO2 breathing lungs
rays heat match candle stove
Steps to a Process Curriculum storm puddle pond lake brook river fjord bay ocean glacier iceberg solutions tsunami etc.
field prairie ridge mountain rock face avalanche mud slide quarry volcano continents planet ores etc.
bubbles winds gusts hurricane tornado etc.
111 fireplace fireworks forest fire lightning volcano etc.
3. Life Concerns or Affordances drinking planting growing purifying cleaning irrigating fire control etc.
plowing farming mining building tunneling damming burying etc.
breathing blowing burning pollution aerating sailing diving etc.
cooking heating lighting smelting burning hardening etc.
These basic concepts and their forms, among others, constitute the AEIOU curriculum framework. They can be organized into major educational themes to begin the study of the most significant interrelationships among four of the most common and fundamental natural elements that human beings have both to experience and to deal with intelligently. These basic concepts can be related contextually by means of their positions, in terms of where they can be pinpointed in the tetrahedron of knowledge in relation to their degrees of motion, process, structure, and symbolics. For example, in dealing with the significance of motion as an empirical property, the actions of waves in the ocean can be demonstrated visually by media. Their constant repetition of pounding on the shores of the continents demonstrates the process of making the sand or the smooth pebbles intrinsic to the structure of the world’s beaches on the coastlines of certain regions and islands, such as Bermuda or Australia, and in Japan where the appearance of tsunamis can be noted and their causes identified. Informed discussion, or symbolics, can relate these geographical facts in many ways, as suited to their placement in an interdisciplinary curriculum and to the level of interest that is expressed by students.
112
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
Discussion of the forms, contexts, and connections belonging to such concepts can lead to the holistic illumination of the myriad natural systems that compose all flora and fauna, as well as of the natural environments that students are a part of, and in which they need to survive. Dealing with them sees directly to the acquisition of basic knowledge. It is also an easy way for the young to assimilate important information about the kinds of human interrelationships that are crucial for successful and satisfactory living. This schema can be succinctly displayed, discussed, and organized imaginatively into curriculum segments for use in teacher training programs. Furthermore, it can be used to emphasize the importance of the notion of epigenesis. Understanding the concept of epigenesis is especially important to educators. Epigenesis is central to all growth and development. It is most evident in the evolution and succession of three dimensional transformations, namely, the process of development of physical form and of all memes. Epigenesis occurs in different ways and at every level of reality that is affected by circumstances, such as changes in temperature, pressure, elevation, climate, light source, and other elemental events, including those processes that go on in the human brain during chronological education efforts of all sorts. An example of how an epigenesis of matter occurs can be demonstrated dramatically to teachers. The following schema shows what basic developmental changes happen to water, as circumstances alter environmental conditions.
Fig. 7: The Epigenesis of Matter GAS……………………….LIQUID………………………SOLID Motion…………………….…………...…………………...Stability Formlessness……………….……........................................Form Asymmetry………………….……………………...............Symmetry Simplicity…………………….…………………………….Complexity Heat……..……….….......Temperatures……….…………..Cold Steam..….….Vapor.……....WATER……….Snow…..........Ice
14. Conclusion Development and growth indicate processes of transformation, which implies that as affordances are recognized, they can lead to new purposeful behaviors and to the creation of new memes. As things, processes, activities, and ideas change, new forms emerge. Observing their significance broadens one’s understanding of how formative processes alter the self, which itself is both
Steps to a Process Curriculum
113
subject to, and an instrument of, environmental change. Memetic behaviors change presumably for ultimate human benefit, namely, for the survival of the person, society, and humanity. However, today, we can question this. What has become visible, as the breadth of contextual perception advances, is the harm that accrues to persons and society from ignorance, as well as from stereotypic and meaningless manners of thinking. Harmful behaviors also issue from selfishness, emotional excesses, and they emerge from the influence of anachronistic traditions and the pursuit of vested interests. Psychological, physical, and social damage is habituated and it occurs in almost all fields of endeavor, and especially where positive and creative thought is inhibited and where the imagination is stifled or misused. Damage is also inflicted when facts are ignored by arrogant, shallow, ideological, or corrupt leadership. The public becomes unwitting victims of what Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacity” (1914, p. 347), meaning an inability to recognize orchestrated attacks on their own welfare by propaganda or lies. The toleration of such negative conditioning stems from the failure of educational and religious systems to encourage critical thinking and to influence ethical and empathic concerns in many of those whose ambitions propel them to leadership positions. Yet, it is also the historic, economic, and political parameters that mold how rising leaders take on their roles. Clearly, the personal, psychological goal is to be successful. But the real problem here is the judgment of what constitutes the nature of success in a particular society. What is chosen as constituting success and imitated by the young? Is it just to enhance personal satisfaction in terms of the power that is able to be exerted over others, be it spiritual, political, or corporate power? Or can this success be judged more broadly in terms of a leader’s influence and fairness in terms of the wellbeing of the full community that he or she serves? Unfortunately, around the world today we see the abject misuse of education, the control of millions by extreme, dogmatic religious influences, and the corruption of corporate and governmental powers. The forces for good struggle valiantly, although often fruitlessly, to protect communities and environments. Nevertheless, this struggle for the good is heightened when the virtuous common person, whose efforts are humanitarian, is included. But his or her power to influence leadership can only be made effective by means of the organized, democratic conditioning of a broadly educated public. How far are we from this goal? The problem facing humanity is whether the political thrust toward democratic beliefs and proximity contexts can rout the forces that have no respect for such virtues, processes, and ways of thinking. As such, without a doubt, this depends on education, but not any sort of education. Proper ways to educate human beings are known. In my view, the goal is to eventuate a spiraling process curriculum. This curriculum must enhance a moral, economic
114
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
drive to allow all human beings, in their lifetimes, to believe that they will be treated fairly by the powers that they must be allowed to elect. Whitehead wrote that “education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and some thing he can do well” (1929b, p. 48). Yet it is more than that. As the brilliant Czech educator-monk John Amos Comenius counseled in the seventeenth century, we do not demand for all men exact and deep knowledge of all the arts and sciences. . . . It is the principles, the causes, and the uses of the most important things in existence that we wish all men to learn. . . . For we must take strong and vigorous measures that no man in his journey through life, may encounter anything so unknown to him that he cannot pass sound judgment on it. (1963, p. 27) WORKS CITED Ahsen, Akhter. (1968) Eidetics: A Visual Psychology. Yonkers, New York: Eidetic Analysis Institute. ———. (1973) Basic Concepts in Eidetic Psychotherapy. Yonkers, New York: Brandon House. Allan, George and Malcolm D. Evans. (2006) “Introduction: A Different Three Rs for Education in Context.” In A Different Three R’s for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm. Eds. George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans. New York: Rodopi, pp. 1-15. Bayer, Hans Christian von. (1999) “Catch the Wave.” Sciences, 39.3, pp. 10-13. Blackmore, Susan. (2000) The Meme Machine. New York: Oxford University Press. Bruner, Jerome. (1960) The Process of Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bennett, John B. (2006) “Educational Spiritualities: Parker J. Palmer and Relational Metaphysics.” In A Different Three Rs for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm. Eds. George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans. New York: Rodopi. Chan, Wing-Tsit, trans. (1963) “Confucius: the Analects.” In A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Comenius, John Amos. (1963) “To Teach All Things to All Men.” In The Teacher and the Taught: Education in Theory and Practice from Plato to James B. Conant. Ed. Ronald Gross. New York: Dell Publishing Co. Ltd, pp. 22-39. Dewey, John. (1891) “How Concepts Arise from Percepts.” In John Dewey: Philosophy, Psychology, Social Practice. Ed. Joseph Ratner. New York: Capricorn Books, 1963. ———. (1897) My Pedagogic Creed. New York: E. L. Kellog and Co. / Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, 2005. ———. (1938) Experience and Education. Indianapolis: Kappa Delta Pi, 1998. ———. (1948) “Common Sense and Science: Their Respective Frames of Reference.” In Knowledge: Critical Concepts, Volume II—Knowledge and Society. Eds. Nico Stehr and Reiner Grundmann. New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 3-13. Dworkin, Martin, ed. (1959) Dewey on Education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Steps to a Process Curriculum
115
Edelman, Gerald. (1989) The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books. Fuster, Joaquin. (2002) Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press. Gibson, James J. (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. (1986) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Goodlad, John. (1967) A School Health Education Study. Washington, D.C.: Education Press. Gunter, Pete A. Y. (2005) “Whitehead’s Struggle Against Inert Ideas.” Process Studies, 34.2, pp. 193-223. Hall, Edward T. (1976) Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Books. Honderich, Ted, ed. (1995) Oxford Companion to Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, Richard Matthew. (1968) Fantasy and Feeling in Education. New York: New York University Press. Korzybski, Alfred. (1924) Time-Binding: The General Theory. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1966) The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Mayshark, Cyrus and Leslie William Irwin. (1968) Health Education in Secondary Schools. New York: C. V. Mosby Co. Orr, David W. (1992) Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. Palmer, Parker J. (1994) “The Loom of Teaching.” National Teaching and Research Forum, 3.3, pp. 1-3. ———. (1998) The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Reed, Edward S. (1988) James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Perception. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schiller, Hillel A. (1998) “The Knowledge Most Worth Knowing.” Process Papers, 3, pp. 98-108. ———. (1999) “Teaching and Learning Whitehead’s Way.” Process Papers, 4, pp. 7793. ———. (2000) “The Nature of Perception Relative to Learning.” Process Papers, 5, pp. 97-109. ———. (2006) “Contextual Perception: A New Teaching and Learning Process.” Process Papers, 10, pp. 64-69. Simpson, George Gaylord. (1951) Horses. New York: Oxford University Press. Veblen, Thorstein. (1914) The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. New York: Macmillan / Cosimo Classics, 2006. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1911) Introduction to Mathematics. London: Williams and Norgate, 1992. ———. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1927) Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Fordham University Press, 1985. ———. (1929a) The Function of Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. ———. (1929b) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
116
HILLEL A. SCHILLER
Whyte, Lancelot Law. (1961) The Next Development in Mankind. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003. ———. (1970-1971) “Toward a Science of Form.” The Hudson Review, 22.4, pp. 600625. ———. (1974) The Universe of Experience: A World View Beyond Science and Religion. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003. Wilson, Edward O. (1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Eight THE BODY AS A COMPANION IN EDUCATION: AN INTERPRETATION OF WHITEHEAD’S NOTION OF THE WITHNESS OF THE BODY Jean-Marie Breuvart 1. Introduction While Whitehead’s advances his philosophy of education in The Aims of Education, his discussion is not in the same metaphysical spirit that pervades his magnum opus, Process and Reality. Here, I propose to bridge this gap and to show how the concept of the withness of the body (Whitehead, 1929a, pp. 81, 333), which is present in the latter text, enhances the presentation of Whitehead’s educational model. In turn, this analysis will enable a consideration of the notion that the content of Whitehead’s philosophy is itself contained by an educational process. In other words, the educational model that Whitehead defines is not only constitutive of a specific pedagogical practice. Ultimately, I shall demonstrate that it allows us to understand what philosophical discourse is all about. Here, I shall refer to Whitehead’s later works, particularly, Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought, in order to illustrate these theses. 2. The Withness of the Body in Process and Reality The concept of the withness of the body concerns a macroscopic approximation of reality, having the scale of a human life, conceived in relation to how it is spread out through space-time. More exactly, it connects with the conception of the extensive continuum, which designates the “one relational complex” that underlies “the whole world, past, present, and future” and involves “the property of indefinite divisibility and the property of unbounded extension” (ibid., p. 66). The body is compositional of the extensive continuum, there being “no definite boundary to determine where the body begins and [where] external nature begins” (Whitehead, 1938, p. 161). But it is with reference to the notion of the extensive continuum that Whitehead shows how the realization of an entity generates a new scale of measurement within the spatiotemporal continuum. If the actual entity is indeed incurably atomic, then
118
JEAN-MARIE BREUVART
it is preceded by a datum which generates it, and it is followed by a new datum for subsequent occasions. In both cases, it receives its form from the extensive continuum. Pointing to the meaning of the notion of the withness of the body, Whitehead writes that in human experience, a “fundamental fact of perception is the inclusion, in the datum, of the objectification of an antecedent part of the body with such-and-such experiences” (1929a, p. 118). In other words, the perception of the withness of the body consists in a local delimitation of the spatiotemporal continuum, which includes the sensory organs and their causal transmission of feelings. Let us take Whitehead’s analysis of perception in the chapter, “The Extensive Continuum” (ibid., pp. 61-82), as an example. There, Whitehead seems to provide a phenomenological analysis of perception as he writes, we see the contemporary chair, but we see it with our eyes; and we touch the contemporary chair, but we touch it with our hands. Thus, colors objectify the chair in one way, and objectify eyes in another way, as the elements in the experience of the subject. (ibid., pp. 62-63) The expression “the withness of the body” is referred to directly a little further along in Whitehead’s analysis. Whitehead attributes the term to Hume, but he points out that neither Descartes nor Hume drew all the necessary logical consequences from it in their respective philosophies. He further charges that both philosophers dropped their considerations of the body out of their respective epistemologies, confining their attention to immediate experience and assuming consciousness in the process. As such, for Whitehead, they did not recognize the true importance of the feeling of the withness of the body. It is not until Santayana that animal faith was recognized as the very basis upon which clear perceptions can appear. Whitehead, in his analysis of the notion of the withness of the body, incorporates the notion of animal faith into his metaphysics by evoking two hypotheses that clarify its general meaning. According to Whitehead, such a conception is based on two principles: first, that of a delimitation of each actual occasion to its effective datum, and, second, that of an extensive frame in which this limitation operates (ibid., pp. 65-70). Each human body illustrates this delimitation of the datum and its general frame at the same time. The first principle is easier to understand than the second. It refers to an essential delimitation of the human body in a definite spatiotemporal location, in accordance with the principle of concretion that Whitehead alludes to in Science and the Modern World. The feeling constituting the withness of the body belongs precisely to the individual who manages to cultivate it by perceiving things with his eyes or with his ears. But it also occurs in the space of a definite body, lived as a closed field in which every psychic event will have to emerge. As for the second metaphysical principle, namely, that of the
The Body as a Companion in Education
119
general spatiotemporal frame, we might ask: is not this principle just an abstraction from that withness, or an extrapolation from it? Actually, the withness of the body, when conceived as the feeling in which all perceptions are rooted, is open to a wider potentiality, constituting the frame in which this feeling of withness can appear. In this way, Whitehead’s metaphysics is a rejoining of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, according to which the perceiving subject builds its own field of perception. Nevertheless, a major difference between them is evident. Specifically, the frame that is mentioned by Whitehead is not exactly bounded by the experience of an individual perception. On the contrary, it is defined as the general spatiotemporal continuum in which the general potentiality of the world becomes the real potentiality of perception. Even though the withness of the body is always something particular, namely, belonging to somebody, the general spatiotemporal scheme in which it can arise is received, at once, as a common space that is co-perceived by others. Here again, some linkage could be made with phenomenology, such as that of Husserl, especially in his Cartesian Meditations. But once more, we would need to acknowledge Whitehead’s distinct contribution to such an analysis, namely, that the faith in the production of a spatiotemporal continuum, in which past and future occasions are related, is necessary for a person to have any particular experience in general. The events which are linked in the human body can thus be characterized as a coherent set, or more exactly, in Whiteheadian terminology, as a society of occasions, aiming at the same abstract reality, which is then seized as such. In other words, it is thanks to my body that I become aware of realities which, in the same moment, are already there and transcend this very moment. What then is to be retained from this interpretation of the notion of the withness of the body? In response to this question, we might assert that this concept is at the root of all experience of reality in general, in accordance with Whitehead’s ontological principle. It is in virtue of the notion of the withness of the body that we can discover the origin of the process of conceptualization, namely, the production, together with the spatiotemporality, of the capacity to articulate concepts in unified vision. This vision, which is rooted in the diffuse presence of the body in the world, is really the result of a causal chain of physical feelings of which the body is the ultimate foundation. 3. The Withness of the Body as Applied to Aesthetics In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead stresses the importance of aesthetic activity in the advance of civilization. Here again, there is a similar reference to the body as that articulated in Process and Reality, but it is here no longer considered as the personal access to some individual metaphysical vision. On the contrary, it is placed in the context of a wider human society, in which
120
JEAN-MARIE BREUVART
aesthetic activity plays an essential role. Returning to our initial point, according to Whitehead, the origin of artwork lies in multiple strands or webs of feeling which pulse through the body. This role of the body in contemplation and in aesthetic production illustrates, in my view, the meaning of the conjunction of the mind and body. For Whitehead, the meaning of the human body in the realization of any work of art consists in the notion that it is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul. It concentrates upon those elements in human experience selected for conscious perception [which are] intensities of subjective form derived from components dismissed into shadow. It thereby enhances the value of that appearance which is the subject-matter of art. (1933, p. 271) Moreover, this appearance is enjoyed as an emotion that is lived for itself, apart from any particular need. It is even this presence of free emotion within beauty that characterizes all the arts of the civilized world. This emotional tone reveals the ultimate value of human existence, which is expressed by Whitehead as the “intimate, absolute Truth regarding the Nature of Things” (ibid., p. 272). Not only do we experience the truth of particular realities, but we also experience that of the whole, which appears to us when our emotion is detached from any immediate need and absorbed into a superior harmony, defining the nature of all existence. The work of art here reveals the reality of the world by means of a physical emotion. Whitehead writes, the work of art is a message from the Unseen. It unlooses depths of feeling from behind the frontier where precision of consciousness fails. The starting-point for the highly developed human art is thus to be sought amid the cravings generated by the physiological functionings of the body. (ibid., p. 271) In order to understand the role that Whitehead assigns to emotion, as lived by the body, it is necessary to articulate the idea that the life of the individual body is part of a social adventure. In other words, the field of appearance should not be restricted to that of an individual horizon. According to the cosmological perspective that is laid out in Process and Reality, any individual achievement is immortalized in the world from which it first emanated. Art, in its sociological dimension, offers an illustration of this immortality. The feeling of the various elements entering into an artist’s perception are synthesized in an aesthetic emotion, which thereby opens the door to possibilities for novel expression, and which is indefinitely accessible to others through his or her work of art. For Whitehead, such a re-creation is due to creative consciousness. He writes,
The Body as a Companion in Education
121
the factor in experience that renders Art possible is consciousness. Of course consciousness, like everything else, is in a sense undefinable. It is just itself and must be experienced. But, also like other things, it is the emergent quality illustrated in the essence of a conjunction of circumstances. It is a qualitative aspect of that conjunction. (1933, p. 269) In other words, art generates consciousness and consciousness generates art. Consciousness of beauty emerges from one datum and restores it as a novel imaginative consciousness. Whitehead states, “consciousness itself is the product of art in its lowliest form. . . . But consciousness having emerged from Art at once produces the new specialized art of the conscious animals—in particular human art” (ibid., p. 271). After all, the work of art, rooted in the emotional life of a subject, in virtue of the feeling of the withness of the body, offers the privileged status which reveals a reality that transcends the visible, although it shows itself in and through what is visible. From this perspective, a true work of art refers to the invisible in a double way. It points to the invisible as related to the intimate consciousness of the beauty felt through the body, and the invisible as present in the spatiotemporal relation of art with the sociopolitical environment. 4. The Withness of the Body and Whitehead’s Educational Model The capacity of the body to express the importance of the world, and in particular by and through the work of art, allows us to redefine the meaning of Whitehead’s educational project as formulated in The Aims of Education. There are several allusions to the body in this work. Especially, there is reference to the notion that in teaching you will come to grief as soon as you forget that your pupils have bodies. . . . The connections between intellectual activity and the body though diffused in every bodily feeling, are focused in the eyes, the ears, the voice, and the hands. (Whitehead, 1929b, p. 50) However, I would like to point out the implicit connection here to his articulation of the rhythm of education. The theory of the three stages in the rhythm of education appears in chapters two and three of The Aims of Education. In chapter two, Whitehead gives a definition of those stages and, in chapter three, he applies them to the conditions of life and existence of the child. His description of the first stage of romance gives rise to many differing interpretations. The example that is given by Whitehead refers to Daniel Defoe’s classic, Robinson Crusoe. The conditions for the possibility for the story arose when some elements which were at first separated—the man, Robinson Crusoe, Europe, an island, the sand,
122
JEAN-MARIE BREUVART
the footprint, etc.—were assembled, when, that is, a whole world of possibilities gave rise to a fermentation of the imagination. The second stage, that of precision, transforms this field of possibilities, defined and fermented by an activity of the imagination, and applies them to life and reality, resulting in a coherent set of interconnected facts. Whitehead tells us that precision is the grammatical stage, which has a dual meaning, involving the notions of a language grammar and a science grammar. At this stage, algebra can play an important role in detecting those coherent structures in the imagined reality which allow us to manage this reality and to perform actions. It remains then to make a synthesis of the two preceding stages, specifically involving the phase of generalization. Whitehead defines it by way of a rather problematic reference to Hegel (1929b, p. 17). This last stage is elaborated in chapter two of The Aims of Education, but it can be best understood via the subsequent chapter, where it is related to “generalization in language” (ibid., p. 24). The integration of scientific data into a unique general scheme shows us the importance that Whitehead attributes to language in order to solve the difficulties which are generated by overspecialization. This third stage aims at what Whitehead calls an “active wisdom” (ibid., p. 37). The knowledge which is acquired during the stage of precision must be stimulated by a creative activity, thereby reintroducing the imagination which was at work in the stage of romance. Actually, we can only understand Whitehead’s intention here when we give each of those stages a human interpretation, namely, by placing them in the context of personal development. We can say that the child’s development is only a reflection, on a macroscopic scale, of the development of a prehension of potentialities on the elementary scale. Nevertheless, the linkage between the general cosmological process and the educational process is hardly possible, unless we keep in mind two essential elements. First, the educational process, considered in its generality, finds its best exemplification in the figure of the living organism which assimilates the given (ibid., p. 33). This context gives us a better understanding of the whole contribution of the human body in defining both its spatiotemporal duration and its essence or soul. Second, in the educational process, the living human body produces novel potentialities for consciousness (ibid., pp. 50, 123-124). Here, art and imagination exemplify this fact, especially in respect to the example of a literary creation that is encouraged by the educator (ibid., pp. 57-58). Artistic creation emerges from physical dynamics that begin in the phase of romance, and it cannot become viable without passing through the stage of precision, or, more exactly, by way of a study of grammar. Grammar is not only a structure that must be built up. It is, above all, a dynamics which is lived by every human being, and which enables us to give order to the data of the external world. At this second stage, Whitehead refers to the double grammar
The Body as a Companion in Education
123
which was mentioned above, namely, the grammar of common language and the grammar of science. We could conclude that this second grammar is a grammar of the second order that aims at a better mediation between the particular experiences of a person and their universalization, within a coherent discourse. Finally, any real education has to be grounded in its phase of precision, particularly, in the procession of three complementary elements: first, that of literature, so that we may learn all the implications of a common language; second, that of science, so that we may better appreciate the common reality; and third, that of technique, extended to artistic fields and aiming at creation (1929b, pp. 48-50, 53). All three of these elements are so interwoven that any education which neglects one of them would be a complete failure. Whitehead writes, “each of these curricula should include the other two. What I mean is that every form of education should give the pupil a technique, a science, an assortment of general ideas, and aesthetic appreciation” (ibid., p. 48). These notions also apply to philosophical discourse, which I shall discuss next. 5. Education and Expression Philosophical discourse follows the same pattern as any other form of education. Philosophical language, worked out especially in the phase of precision, allows us to draw better on our primitive physical experience which offers its data as potentialities for expression and creation. The mediatory function of philosophical language, such as it appears during the stage of precision, rests on a general conception of the potentialities thus opened up to us by the words. We know how much importance Whitehead places on philosophical language in the beginning passages of Process and Reality. But we might ask, what about the relation of the stage of romance to philosophy? If we refer to Whitehead’s outline of his categorical scheme, we could consider that the category of the ultimate, which involves an emphasis on the concept of creativity, belongs to romance. In contrast, we might suggest that the category of existence and the category of explanation express the stage of precision, and the categoreal obligations express the phase of generalization. Moreover, if the third stage, as was discussed above, truly involves the development of an active wisdom, then it is all the more the stage of philosophy as confronted with the “boundaries of finitude” (Whitehead, 1938, p. 172). In mentioning a concept derived from Modes of Thought, I am here observing that, in this book, Whitehead grants the same role to language as he grants to the phase of precision in The Aims of Education. In both cases, language, starting from the diffuse presence of the body, is the very basis of wisdom. I shall only mention here, if I dare say it, the importance of the concept of importance in Modes of Thought. Importance is what every actualization presupposes. That is to say, the obscure presence of the world,
124
JEAN-MARIE BREUVART
taken in its most massive character, and revealed to us by the withness of the body, is expressed by Whitehead’s notion that “the Human Body is that region of the world which is the primary field of human expression” (1938, p. 22). Now, what I said about education—in particular, what was inferred about the phase of precision in which the different grammars of our language are examined—leads us to think that this obscure awareness of the body is the basis from which a more or less adequate expression of how this presence reaches consciousness. It is thus necessary to parallel the role that Whitehead assigns to grammar in The Aims of Education with the role he grants to language in the expression of importance in Modes of Thought. Certainly, this expression is not simply the privilege of human beings. It is a universal phenomenon which pervades even the smallest realities of microphysics. But with human language, which is, as Whitehead tells us, the gift of God on the sixth day (ibid., p. 41), this diffuse presence of the world becomes conscious, and thus allows an expression to all typically human productions, for example, to the works of art, science, or religion. All those productions are indeed rooted in a body testifying to the importance of the world. According to the educational aim, it is then enough, between those expressions, to assure a coherence which shows their different ways of functioning. From this analysis, the educational program, as sketched in The Aims of Education, finds its widest meaning in Modes of Thought. Indeed, the philosophical discourse ultimately founds the educational pattern as it appears in the former text. But we could invert this proposition as well, and say that Whitehead’s educational model really makes the philosophical discourse understandable. In other words, the ultimate purpose of philosophy is to educate, while also being the royal road to the “morality of outlook,” which, as Whitehead tells us in Process and Reality, is synonymous with the “generality of outlook” (1929a, p. 15). Hence, the philosopher appears to be the educator par excellence, drawing the elements of a universal rhythm of creativity from reality itself, that is, a rhythm of a romanced reality, translated into actual and precise concepts, and then integrated into the most general scheme. From these considerations, the educational model that is expressed by Whitehead in The Aims of Education appears to extend beyond the narrow perspective of education in its strictest meaning. As such, we discover that the origins of Whitehead’s deep philosophical intention are found in the notion that philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern. (1938, p. 174) Conceived in this way, philosophy defines itself as a process which expresses the real world, starting from a romanticized view. It then takes the
The Body as a Companion in Education
125
mathematical road. And finally, it adopts a metaphysical perspective. Fundamentally, this process is the same as that advanced in Whitehead’s threefold theory of the rhythm of education. Thus, it might be said that Whitehead rediscovers the truth of Kant’s Reflections on Education, namely, that the only possible education is the one that grants an opening to the moral sense of a complete world. Moreover, prior to Kant, it is Plato, in Books VI and VII of the Republic, who should be mentioned as the first to open this mathematical avenue toward the illumination of the human mind. WORKS CITED Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929a) Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. ———. (1929b) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1968.
Nine ON WHITEHEAD’S THOUGHTS CONCERNING TEACHING, LEARNING, AND THE WAY OF LIBERAL EDUCATION Jean-Pascal Alcantara 1. Arendt and the Crisis in American Education Hannah Arendt’s famous paper, “The Crisis in Education” (1958), has been very influential in many recurring controversies about educational organization in France. In it, she uncovers many problems in the education system of the United States and she suggests that there is a crisis in American schooling. According to Arendt, this crisis has issued from the spirit of democracy that has been thrown precisely into contexts where it did not belong, especially among the natural relationships between grown-ups and children, as well as teachers and pupils—relationships which have traditionally been asymmetrical. Furthermore, Arendt holds that the understanding of educational processes that underpins this crisis deviates from common sense, having been diverted by the educational theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, more recently, of John Dewey, whose Pragmatism can be exemplified by his well known slogan, learning by doing. Consistent with democratic ideals, la passion de l’égalité (the love of equality), to quote Alexis de Tocqueville, was introduced into the classroom, resulting in a weakening of the importance of the difference in the knowledge level of pupils and teachers. Arendt criticizes the main tenets of modern child psychology for confusing learning with playing, and she takes issue with the assumption that modern pedagogy is a science of teaching in general, without any connection to a particular subject matter. We might suggest that the crisis is summed up by the newspaper headlines: “little Johnny does not know how to read anymore.” During the Cold War, the American government became alarmed about the educational levels of pupils, most notably after hearing the “beep-beep” of Sputnik, and again in 1983, following a pessimistic official report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, entitled A Nation at Risk. These trends may also have been spurred on by the privileging of whatever is new, in accordance with the traditional American project of founding a new world against the old. Although Arendt neither brought the ideals of liberal education into focus, nor explicitly made reference to them, according to her, these problems follow
128
JEAN-PASCAL ALCANTARA
from the defeat of their aims. However, the ideals of liberal education are likely to bestow on us the standards which are necessary to discriminate between “secondary schools, in the European sense” and high schools existing in the New World, which are “a kind of continuation of primary school” (Arendt, 1954, p. 179). Arendt was surely not wrong in noting the differences between secondary schools since the European Renaissance, namely, between Grammar schools, Gymnasiums, Jesuit colleges in Catholic countries, and the new middle schools which were founded on educational beliefs stemming from the idea of the welfare state after the Second World War. Like Arendt, but for quite dissimilar reasons, less tragic ones, Whitehead was an immigrant to the New World. But I am not here making a bitter remark about the American educational system. Indeed, the majority of the essays in The Aims of Education are exceptional in terms of helping to address and to overcome the lacunae inherent in the American system, apart from the lecture entitled “Universities and their Function,” which was an address for the launching of Harvard Business School. Perhaps the situation surrounding education in 1927 was not the same as in 1954. In any case, Whitehead could not have been aware of the importance of the changes in contemporary teaching and learning at the time when he came to America. Nevertheless, Dewey’s ideas relating to the importance of pupils governing themselves in the classroom were probably well known. For even in Russia, a project pedagogy, which was another of Dewey’s main ideas, had been implemented on a large scale at the beginning of the Revolution. But it may be that the distinctness in terms of mental attitude surrounding the American way of schooling had more deeply rooted philosophical grounds, for even Arendt’s and Whitehead’s own approaches to education were impressed with the ideals and the aims of liberal education. Here, I intend to demonstrate that differences in Arendt’s and Whitehead’s respective understandings of past, present, and future contexts surrounding teaching and learning entail a discrepancy between them concerning the relevance of the traditional way of schooling and the meaning of the notion of liberal education. In order to arrive at this thesis, however, it will be necessary to remind ourselves briefly how the concept of liberal education has been shaped in the history of educational thought. 2. Liberal Education in Historical Context Nowadays, the notion of liberal education seems to entail a refusal of reductions of education to training that is useful merely in the economic sense. This concept, of course, is dependent on a long history, which mainly results from the revival of Greek and Latin humanities during the Renaissance. In 1529, Erasmus published a philosophical and practical reflection concerning schooling and education, which was entitled, A Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children. First of all, the word “liberal” was meant
The Way of Liberal Education
129
in the sense of proclaiming the unworthiness of violence in a free man’s education, in contrast to that of a slave’s or an animal’s training. But we must emphasize that the theological side of the concept of liberal education also related to the free will of a Christian man, which was contrary to Jewish prohibitions deriving from the Old Testament. Essentially, from this point on, Saint Paul was held not to have advocated in favor of determinism, but rather for having put the spiritual above all literal interpretations of the holy writings. What ensued consisted in fostering training in old languages, because when we know them we gain the self-confidence to understand the meaning of the sacred texts directly, namely, beyond the dryrot, to use a term employed by Whitehead at the beginning of The Aims of Education, of commentaries. The result led to a new conception of the nature of the human being, namely, one grounded more upon language than upon reason. Of course, from a Greek conception, setting language against reason seems to be quite odd. Notwithstanding, for Erasmus, this contrast was likely to have been conceived out of two elements: rhetoric, on the one hand, and dialectic, on the other. From this conception, the style of a liberal education could be postulated as commensurate with a curriculum that is focused on learning to write and to speak gracefully, with a noticeable reluctance for an inclination toward the types of controversies which occupied the logicians and the philosophers of the Middle Ages. This current of thought was somehow initiated by Quintilian in the first century A.D., and some of its features were later merged with the educational thought of the Renaissance, as well as that elaborated by John Locke in his influential book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). According to Locke, the concept of liberal education connotes avoiding harsh corporal punishment. From this understanding, we find a similar recognition of the specificity of childhood, entailing the recognition of play as a helpful procedure of learning. More philosophically, through this understanding, the old Platonic metaphor of imprinting on a wax block as representative of the educational process was overcome. If a child has a specific nature, then he has, in the same sense, an individual nature. The task of the educator becomes the function of recognizing the clues emerging from the pupil, such that there is a stress on the prominent notion of aptitude, which implies the rejection of a bare potentiality without hint of content. The French philosopher, Claude Lefort, who was a disciple of MerleauPonty, once made a perspicacious comparison between this new function of the teacher and the bearing of the philologist scrutinizing a text in order to interpret it. This is perhaps a good metaphor to supersede the analogy to the wax tablet, and according to Lefort (1992), it was originally articulated in the work of the Italian humanist, Leon Battista Alberti. Each child becomes something like a text, whereas each educator is a reader who has to construe meaning on the basis of clues which indicate, to him or her, what is suitable in the educational process. Thus, at this point, the conception of education is no longer dependent
130
JEAN-PASCAL ALCANTARA
on the so-called hylemorphic scheme, namely, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of the metaphysical duality of form—in this case, the learner’s spiritual soul—and matter. The hylemorphic scheme was also dismissed by Arendt in her political philosophizing, but probably not in the same way that she might have done when dealing with educational subjects. In any case, it is apparent that there are two main streams of thought concerning the nature of a liberal education. The first one belongs to a tradition of linguistic learning, which is more accepting of play. The second trend is the one that was embraced by Kant and Hegel. Both Kant and Hegel were probably not supporters of rigid discipline and strictness. However, it is clear that Kant conceived education as restraining the animal ingredient of human nature. Hegel once said that the better children are focused on their toys, but he also described the task of enculturing them as hard work, akin to the negativity of the Concept (Begriff) (see Hegel, 1821, §177). We might notice that the relevant German word here, Bildung, has obviously something to do with the hylemorphic scheme as applied to education. Willingly I admit that it is more difficult to comprehend the philosophical situation in relation to Arendt’s ideas on education. Yet, we can generally admit that some features of her educational preferences, such as her contempt of playing, create a path conducive to a conservative mentality, which, from our standpoint, diverges somehow from the spirit of liberal education. As was mentioned above, Whitehead himself held that liberal education was mostly a style of teaching and learning, rather than a special content. More accurately, for him, it is something like a synthesis of style and content, akin to the liberal arts of the Middle Ages, corrected with the linguistic turn of the Renaissance. From this perspective, Arendt belongs more to what I call the dialectical trend in education. I mean this in the sense of Erasmus’ opposition of the two kinds of attitudes: dialectical and rhetorical, the former calling eventually for a rough manner of learning without moderate care of the learner’s human frailty, whereas the latter conceiving learning as a meeting between a tendency on the learner’s side and an ability to discern it on the teacher’s side. But the point worth noticing is that this leads to an alteration of the very concept of liberal education, such that it is focused solely upon curricula, even if liberal education, as it has historically been shaped, has enabled the approval of a determinate content. While Arendt criticized hylemorphism for being contrary to the essential nature of political relationships, since it involved co-being and co-living, she does not have the same purpose as when she writes about education. Owing to her philosophical anthropology, Arendt leaves it to some natural feature of the human condition, altered insofar as we muddle through political and educational relationships. I shall now return to Whitehead’s thoughts on these topics, but rather than attempting to focus his main ideas concerning education on either of the
The Way of Liberal Education
131
aforementioned trends of interpretation in relation to the nature of liberal education, it will be better to inquire into the treatment of the notion of liberal education that he gives in his writings. 3. The Three Characteristics of Liberal Education Any reader of The Aims of Education has probably noticed a few scattered references to the notion of liberal education. But we might ask, what is, more accurately, the overall significance of liberal education from a Whiteheadian perspective? Indeed, for him, liberal education involves several chief characteristics: (1) a particular recourse to the notion of usefulness, which is connected to a particular orientation in relation to time in the educational process; (2) a partiality toward generality in the curriculum, which may be said to weaken the role ascribed to precision; and (3) an emphasis on literature and aesthetic appreciation. In relation to the third characteristic, it should be noted that Whitehead also acknowledges the importance of technical training and handicraft, which highlight the practical, and argues for a synthesis of liberal and technical education. 4. The Usefulness of Liberal Education With respect to the first characteristic of usefulness, what we generally mean by it, logically speaking, contrasts sharply with the notion of uselessness. What we deem to be useless, nowadays, tends to include those things and subject matters which are not connected to economics and finances. The strict economic interpretation of the notion of usefulness is more common today in light of the pressures of the global economy. For Whitehead, a liberal education is a useful education, but this notion is not merely to be construed in the economic sense. Rather, he emphasizes a more general notion of usefulness which has the connotation that education should be strongly applicable in the practical lives of learners. He states that pedants sneer at an education which is useful. But if education is not useful, what is it? Is it a talent, to be hidden away in a napkin? Of course, education should be useful, whatever your aim in life. It was useful to Saint Augustine and it was useful to Napoleon. It is useful, because understanding is useful. (1929, p. 2) It may be observed that contemporary writers, in France and elsewhere, who question the economic usefulness of liberal education, forget an obvious historic fact. Precisely, the sense of liberal education which is grounded on training for writing in ancient languages was really a professional apprenticeship for teachers, lawyers, clergymen, and political staff.
132
JEAN-PASCAL ALCANTARA 5. Liberal Education’s Orientation in Respect to Time
In Europe, throughout the middle ages, the notion of liberal education was aligned with the Platonic ideal of an aristocratic education, determined by a peculiar way of life that entails some leisure. Here we must deal with the second characteristic of a liberal education, namely, a certain orientation in respect to time. The Greek concept of ή (Latin: otium) is here relevant. This term originally means a “liberal manner,” namely, not “being rushed” or “concerned by time.” It is to be noted that this meaning of the notion of liberal education does not describe, as is commonly assumed, a specific type of institution that is isolated from the rest of society and that enables the reproduction of knowledge, where the length of study justifies the confinement of youth in a particular space-time (Hoffmann, 2005, p. 19). Rather, in order to illuminate this etymological meaning of the notion of liberal education, we might recall a passage of Plato’s Theaetetus (172a-173a), where Socrates is conversing with Theodorus on the nature of wisdom. Socrates states, “I see, Theodorus, that we are becoming involved in a greater discussion emerging from the lesser one.” Theodorus replies, “well, we have plenty of time, haven’t we, O Socrates?” Socrates then states affirmatively that “we appear to [have time]” (Cooper, 1997, p. 191). Further on in the passage, Socrates distinguishes between the person who has been educated by frequenting the law courts and the individual who has been brought up in philosophy. Specifically, he differentiates the contexts in which they employ their rational faculties. Socrates suggests that it is surely like comparing the upbringing of a slave with that of a free [person] . . . because the one [person] always has what you mentioned just now—plenty of time. When [the latter] talks, he talks in peace and quiet, and his time is his own. . . . But the other—the [person] of the law court— is always in a hurry when he is talking; he has to speak with one eye on the clock. Besides, he can’t make his speeches on any subject he likes; he has his adversary standing over him. (ibid., pp. 191-192) The more relaxed and theoretical way of life that is alluded to here was also promoted after Plato by Aristotle, as evident in the tenth book of the Nichomachean Ethics, and probably due to the stress he gives on aesthetics. Whitehead ascribes to the former the main merit for having launched these ideals. In a passage of the fourth chapter of The Aims of Education, entitled “Technical Education and Its Relation to Science and Literature,” he does not spare his praises. He states, the mythical figure of Plato may stand for modern liberal education as does that of St. Benedict for technical education . . . In its essence a liberal
The Way of Liberal Education
133
education is an education for thought and for aesthetic appreciation. It proceeds by imparting a knowledge of the masterpieces of thought, of imaginative literature, and of art. The action which it contemplates is command. It is an aristocratic education implying leisure. This Platonic ideal has rendered imperishable services to European civilization. It has encouraged art, it has fostered that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the origin of science, it has maintained the dignity of mind in the face of material force, a dignity which claims freedom of thought. Plato did not, like St. Benedict, bother himself to be a fellow-worker with his slaves; but he must rank among the emancipators of mankind. (1929, pp. 45-46) These praises do not prevent Whitehead from being more critical of Plato in some of his other judgments. Indeed, it must be considered that for the supporters of Arendt, it was not suggested that liberal education was a kind of education among the others. Rather, it was an ultimate criterion to judge them all. Whitehead protests strongly against that claim. He warns that the ideal to possess an exhaustive knowledge is not attainable for human beings (ibid., pp. 46-47). Now, is this really the ambition of liberal education? In fact, a liberal education is not one that demands encyclopedic knowledge. Whitehead is aware that a liberal education implies a sorting and a choice, because of the limitations imposed on us by the finite temporality of a human life. For him, what is meant by a liberal culture is nothing so ambitious as a full acquaintance with the varied literary expression of civilised mankind from Asia to Europe, and from Europe to America. A small selection only is required; but then, as we are told, it is a selection of the very best. I have my doubts of a selection which includes Xenophon and omits Confucius, but then I have read through neither in the original. The ambitious programme of liberal education really shrinks to a study of some fragments of literature included in a couple of important languages. (ibid., p. 47) But from other interpretations, liberal education means advancing the high ideals of an all-comprehensive achievement. From these perspectives, human limits in relation to time are not considered, and the orientation to time consists in a boundless eternity, for example, as in Plato’s eternal contemplation of the Forms. This rejoins the theoretical way of life that is privileged by Aristotle. It could also be construed as being commensurate with the contemplative ways of life that were embraced by some of the monastic orders of later Christendom. In contemporary schooling, we do seem to promise an access into eternity, since the lives of students are planned in accordance with the needs of the schooling timetable, rather than vice versa. But having acknowledged human finitude in the grasping of topics in education, we really must limit ourselves to
134
JEAN-PASCAL ALCANTARA
the poverty of a few selected pieces in a textbook. Consequently, in developing the curriculum, we cannot avoid weighing subject matters and the topics inside them carefully. In a very important address, “Mathematics and Liberal Education,” Whitehead articulates this observation as a leading motive. He states that “lack of time is the rock upon which the fairest educational schemes are wrecked” (1941, p. 131). And he wonders whether pupils could be spared from various parts of the mathematical curriculum, in conformity with the true spirit of liberal education, which, from our perspective, considers the pupils’ ages, their levels of development, and their future needs in life. In a somewhat provocative manner, Whitehead invokes Caliph Omar’s injunction to cut down on “the silly mathematical problems which cumber our text-books” (ibid., p. 134). Elsewhere, when discussing what the mathematics curriculum should look like, Whitehead suggests that I would utterly sweep away all prolonged multiplications and divisions, and the theories of greatest common measure and least common multiple, and complicated forms of linear and quadratic equations. They lead to nothing important in the boys’ minds and consume a vast amount of valuable time. (ibid., p. 134) Whitehead further states that elements of mathematics which cannot be considered “fundamental ideas, the importance of which the student can immediately appreciate,” should be “ruthlessly cut out” and that “the time thus gained” (ibid., p. 139) could be put to use in enlarging treatment of such fundamental ideas. As such, if liberal education consists in imparting the best, it is, in truth, not absolutely the best but, rather, it is a curriculum weighed in relation to the real limitations of the learner in grasping such topics. In any event, these remarks concerning the second character of liberal education, namely, the emphasis on the notion of usefulness in connection with a certain orientation in relation to time, disclose a tension between the aspiration toward eternity, which originates in Plato’s philosophy, and the acknowledgment of temporal finitude. It may be that for Whitehead, in relation to its orientation in relation to time, the ideal of liberal education is exemplified by the Renaissance doctrine of the Golden Mean, which is an idea rooted in the Aristotelian doctrine of virtue. Another main point concerning Whitehead’s understanding of the notion of liberal education involves his observation that it is unworthy to promise enjoyment in a remote future. In an address entitled “Education and SelfEducation” he writes, the first thing that a teacher has to do when he enters the classroom is to make his class glad to be there. . . . This doctrine of enjoyment bears
The Way of Liberal Education
135
decisively on the meaning of a liberal education. Such an education is not characterised by its subjects, or by the number of subjects. It all depends on how they are treated. (1941, p. 127) In The Aims of Education, the same fiery orientation toward the present, which is seen as the horizon or the limit of the educational enterprise, is emphasized. This is a topic quite unusual for a pedagogic theory, and, in relation to the topic of the nature of liberal education, it is generally held that the past is an object of reverence, or a source of all worth. But for Whitehead, the only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by a depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future. (1929, p. 3) In other words, in liberal education, enjoyment must not be delayed to an improbable future. The value of the present is stressed as Whitehead emphasizes the importance of firsthand experience in general, asserting that mankind is born for action, and that the natural intellectual stimulus is through action and reaction, in contrast to the current view, according to which education is not in itself a vivid experience but a mere preparation to an effective experience in later life (1941, p. 172). 6. Literature, Aesthetic Appreciation, and Whitehead’s Synthesis of Liberal and Technical Education The third main characteristic of liberal education is articulated in the fourth chapter of The Aims of Education. Here, Whitehead intends to reject the common antithesis between liberal and technical education, a duality which certainly originated in Plato, in accordance with the idea that merely knowing would be better than knowing how. Whitehead writes, the antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision. In simpler language, education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well. This intimate union of practice and theory aids both. The intellect does not work best in vacuum. (1929, p. 48) In education, it is a great mistake to separate ourselves from that what is called in Process and Reality the withness of the body. The removal of the body was achieved with the practice of liberal education, but in a very different way from
136
JEAN-PASCAL ALCANTARA
the Greek approach, in spite of the claim to athleticism in the English public schools. Certainly, the notion of liberal education risks being associated with the fallacy of overly intellectual people. But when Whitehead recognizes the worth of training in handicraft in respect to every kind of curriculum, he cannot be said to have drawn out the aims of a liberal education. Nevertheless, we can agree with him in saying that liberal education is likely to incorporate some technical goals which are congenial to practical action. Erasmus once wrote a textbook, entitled On the Twofold Abundance of Words and Ideas (1512), for his friend John Colet, the founder of the Grammar schools in England, in order to teach some procedure of extending and improving a text in a very concrete way (1991, pp. 233-258). Even nowadays, bridging literature and technical training—for instance, learning to write short novels in the classroom, or using technical words to describe how a text is built up—is sometimes rejected for the sake of liberal education. It is as if the very lesson of literature training would be to impart a feeling of the absolute superiority of literature above all other topics. Whitehead did not miss his chance to challenge this intellectual prejudice, as he wrote, “literary people have a way of relegating science to the category of useful knowledge, and of conceiving the impress on character as gained from literature alone” (1941, p. 143). We seem to be returning constantly to the same stumbling block, namely, to the “erroneous analogy of the intellectual organism with some kind of mechanical instrument” (ibid., p. 140), which is an unavoidable outcome as soon as we discard practice indefinitely after the full mastering of theory. In his address, “Mathematics and Liberal Education,” Whitehead wonders how this situation has been made possible. First of all, he observes the loss of the sustained reference to classical literature that had dominated Europe since the time of the Renaissance, and he judges that such literary ideals are doomed. Before, only classical languages were able to be the vehicles of a liberal education. Consequently, both mathematics and the sciences were deprived of all liberal scope and reduced to a set of practical devices. For Whitehead, liberal education is not, to some extent, definitively connected with classical languages. There is something very liberal in mathematics, as, for example, in Euclid’s fifth book of the Elements, which is very close to Weierstrass’ style in his theory of the limit, or one can also allude to Cantor’s sets of points. But we can easily miss the fact that this selection of masterpieces does not belong to a mere technical training, which enables us to then return to the issue of whether or not liberal education is useful. Indeed, Whitehead’s proposal for reforming mathematical training looks to be two-sided, emphasizing, at the same time, the most beautiful abstract theories as well as its practical usefulness, since he states that “geometry is the queen of physical sciences” (ibid., p. 138). My last remarks are conducive to a synthetic view of Whitehead’s perspectives concerning the notion of liberal education. According to him, it
The Way of Liberal Education
137
would be difficult not to agree, as any teacher might, with the aims of liberal education, which, in its essence, “is an education for thought and for aesthetic appreciation” (1929, p. 46). While Whitehead did not speak about a crisis as did Arendt, he willingly admitted that “undoubtedly, something has come to an end” (1941, p. 113). Now this would neither be cause for an endless sorrow nor a justification of barbaric enjoyment. 7. Conclusion: Some Further Metaphysical Reflections on the Meaning of Liberal Education Here it is convenient to dare to engage in some further metaphysical reflections. From the perspective of process philosophy, it is obvious that education cannot wholly consist in a mere replication of the past. We know that for the lower organisms pure conformal feelings are most significant during the primary phase of concrescence. For human experience, however, “the present reacts upon the past” (ibid., p. 202). Reflection on education meets the unavoidable contradiction between the notion that culture is the imitation of the best in the past, a thesis that may agree with the main principle of liberal education, and the antithetical notion, namely, that of the stubborn fact of universal process. Process philosophy of education is likely to incorporate what is best in liberal education into itself, without venerating the past simply for the sake of it being the past. Comprehending this, we can understand why Whitehead was more attentive than Arendt to novelties in education, and to the notion that they do not simply entail a loss of the ideal of the development of critical thinking. At the same time, Whitehead did not blame liberal education for failing to provide for the “marriage of thought and action” (ibid., p. 172), as the Pragmatists had emphasized. For Whitehead, it is important to “scan the past, in order to conjecture the boundaries of possibility” (ibid., p. 206). As teachers, we must remember that for the learner the holy ground is the present, but that perhaps some of the details of the past touch his or her ends. But we might here ask: how could a process philosophy of education balance the aims of liberal education, as reformed by Pragmatism, with the principle of process? WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah (1954). Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Philosophy. New York: Viking Press, 1993. Cooper, John M. (ed.) (1997) “Theaetatus.” In Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Erasmus, Desiderius. (1991) Oeuvres choisies [Selected Works]. Trans. J. Chomarat. Paris: Livre de Poche. Hegel, G.W.F. (1821) Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [Elements of the Philosophy of Right]. Berlin: Nicolai, 1970.
138
JEAN-PASCAL ALCANTARA
Hoffmann, Philippe. (2005) “Formes de culture, programmes et pensée pédagogique à la fin de l’Antiquité” [“Forms of Culture: Programs, and Pedagogical Thought at the End of Antiquity”]. In La Crise de la Culture Scolaire: Origines, Interprétations, Perspectives [The Crisis of Academic Culture: Origins, Interpretations, Perspectives]. Eds. François Jacquet-Francillon and Denis Kambouchner, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 15-44. Lefort, Claude. (1992) “Formation et autorité: l’éducation humaniste.” In Écrire à l’épreuve du politique [Writing: the Political Test]. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, pp. 209226. Locke, John. (1693) Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: A. and J. Churchill. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1941) Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
Ten WHITEHEAD’S PREHENDING AND DEWEY’S EXPERIMENTING: SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY VERSUS EDUCATIONAL THEORY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSES Kathleen Gershman 1. Introduction Although people in education use the terms interchangeably, there is a distinction between philosophy and educational theory. A philosophy refers to a complete body of thought that presents a worldview. A philosophy contains an epistemology which can become a theory of education. So for example, pragmatism gives rise to experimentalism, a theory that seeks to educate the individual to be a problem solver. Educational theories evolve into normative movements that come in like waves replacing each other. As such, open classrooms becomes back-to-basics which, in turn, becomes no-child-leftbehind. This essay addresses some Whiteheadian philosophical and Deweyan theoretical generalities, considered in relation to some school-related developments in the remaining (blessedly and blissfully unreformed) one-room schoolhouses in rural North Dakota. 2. Whitehead and Dewey I admit that I did recognize myself in George Allan’s unforgettable characterization of readers of Whitehead. Allan says that the history of Whiteheadian scholarship is strewn with the bleached bones of scholars who have failed in trying to apply what is said of actual occasions that endure for nanoseconds to features of the everyday world in which schoolchildren must attend classes that seem to endure forever. (2005, p. 61) Henry Holmes points out that speculative philosophy is extremely limited as a model for education, claiming that “the number of persons who can or should
140
KATHLEEN GERSHMAN
attempt constructive thinking of the speculative sort is so infinitesimally small that no claim can be made on their behalf for educational opportunity” (1941, p. 628). Whitehead himself warns that speculative philosophy is not intended to have what he calls base alliances, or alliances with current modes of behavior. For him, the importance of speculative philosophy is its disengagement from such modes which allows us to guard our higher intuitions. Despite these admonitions, many in education persist in trying to convert a speculation into a pedagogy. It is no wonder that our bones are bleached. It is possible that we try to do this because we seek a loftier rationale for grasping, for example, the role of individual growth in education, the centrality of participating in a community in education, or the importance of creative advance in the world, perhaps in respect to the place of art in the curriculum. In between the construction of his impressive dual reputation, the first in mathematics and the second in philosophy, Whitehead published a small collection of essays in which he advances some general ideas regarding teaching and the development of curricula. And although his exhaustive Principia Mathematica (1910) and his revolutionary Process and Reality stand as twin monuments to his mind’s adventures, it is likely that the sensible and clearly articulated The Aims of Education can claim a wider readership over the years than the other two volumes combined. After The Aims of Education was published in 1929, Whitehead did not write in a direct, scholarly manner about education, save for in his addresses, such as “Harvard: the Future” (1936), and in a few scattered pages in Adventures of Ideas. In fact, the major cosmological books he wrote later in his career, from 1929 to 1938, have virtually no reference to the exigencies of daily living, let alone to teaching and learning. Sometimes it seems as though Whitehead is most noted for being unintelligible. It is a reputation to which he did not aspire, although in something of a paradox, he constructed it with careful intentionality. Both his student, Bertrand Russell, and his contemporary, Albert Einstein, said that they simply could not understand him. When Process and Reality was published, a dismayed John Dewey, who is no stranger to dense prose himself, proclaimed that it was a “tough nut to crack” (1933, p. 285). But Whitehead’s incomplete and fragmentary language is unavoidable and purposeful, given that he is speaking of “ideas just beyond consciousness most of the time.” Philosophy is like poetry, he tells us, because there is “reference to form beyond the first meaning of words” (1938, p. 174). John Dewey’s long life started in 1859, a year before Lincoln was elected, and it ended in 1952, when Eisenhower was elected. Dewey and Whitehead were contemporaries, but they had important educational, social, and political differences. For example, Dewey attended a public high school, graduating at the age of fifteen. Dewey was just one year older than Whitehead was when the latter first started formal schooling at Sherborne. The cultural context of this early preparation might account for the different definitions each had of the
Whitehead’s Prehending and Dewey’s Experimenting
141
aims of education. For Whitehead, whose childhood was spent on the White Cliffs of Dover, the aim of education is to “produce a person of culture, one who has a receptivity to beauty and humane thought” (1929b, p. 1). For Dewey, who traveled with his mother to the battlefields of the American Civil War to visit his soldier-father, the aim of education is to create power of control over future experiences (1938, p. 64). Beside their differences in relation to their respective definitions of the aims of education, there is another contention between them. Whitehead tells us that “the accurate expression of the final generalities is the goal of discussion, not its origin” (1929a, p. 8, my emphasis). He deplores the dogmatic fallacy that many philosophers commit when they attempt a discussion from a base of clear and distinct ideas, in claiming that “philosophy is explanatory of abstractions, not of concreteness” (ibid., p. 20). But Dewey disagrees. If Whitehead’s broad descriptions are starting points for more speculation, Dewey sees philosophy as the perfect vehicle for a prescriptive pedagogy. He believes that the purpose of metaphysics is to discover a cognitive object, so to speak, that could serve as the foundation for knowledge. 3. Prehending I would like to suggest that the effort to transmute Whitehead’s philosophical adventures into the genesis of the three stages in the rhythm of education— romance, precision, and generalization—is a formidable task, if not actually contrary to his intent. When we reconcile Whitehead’s metaphysics with education, instead of seeing the philosophy as ultimately definitive, it might be more useful to consider it as a metaphor that will generate more speculations at the conclusion of a discussion than when we started. If we consider his notion of actual entities as a metaphor, then we see that the most productive perspective is that of the student. Dunkel calls it the “congenial point of view” (1965, p. 149). The student is the phenomenon undergoing the experience of creating him- or herself. In the prehending of relationships, the student is, at once, the occasion and in the occasion. Whitehead says that the individual is composed of his relationships to things. And no matter what political issues may come and go in education, the student will be the center of the learning situation and the reason for its existence. What is more, the student’s own active participation is the essential ingredient to his or her learning experience. 4. Experimenting We do not have to transmute Dewey’s theory of growth into a theory of understanding. He does that for us. Dewey derives the theory that knowing results from the interaction of the student with her environment from people
142
KATHLEEN GERSHMAN
like James and Darwin. When we reconcile the Deweyan epistemology with pedagogy, a useful metaphor is the child as scientist. His scientific method is still taught in schools of education. It consists of five steps that result in new understandings of the world, involving: forming ideas, acting upon ideas, observing conditions that result, and organizing facts for future use. As the student solves a problem, he or she adds to the repertoire of experience— which, in turn, leads to increased freedom of judgment, and of power to carry deliberately chosen ends into execution. For Dewey, effective schooling is scientific, democratic, and social. At school, the student learns problem-solving skills, society’s rules and norms, and the rights and responsibilities which belong to the great polity. He believes that a child’s own interests need to be the basis of the curriculum. He recognizes the power of learning such things as negotiation skills, cooperation, and respect for the rights of others. Dewey pointed out that the creation of a community out of a population of individuals was the first function of public schooling. 5. Philosophical Commonalities In terms of educational theory, as distinct from cosmological theory, Whitehead’s three stages in the rhythm of education and Dewey’s five stages of learning, while disparate in terms of goals—since one actualizes the student’s innate creativity while the other promotes cognitive growth—demonstrate a similarity in terms of pedagogical approach. Both Dewey and Whitehead have: (1) a sequence of stages that is required and irreversible; (2) a belief that age appropriateness is important; and (3) a recognition that the individual will eventually need to act freely. And as someone who has taught both educational theories to preservice teachers, I can assure you that both the rhythm method and the scientific method are easily apprehended because of their clarity. In fact, they are received with relish by students who are insecure at the prospect of keeping the attention of restless adolescents. But can we assert that Whitehead, the speculative philosopher who attempts to provide a descriptive account of experiences—for instance, prehensions—that last for nanoseconds, and Dewey, the educational theorist who deals with the need for vocational education, building on experience and on democratically run schools, have anything in common? The answer is: yes, but only insofar as we stretch the language to suit our discussion. We find that in Whitehead’s thought, the learner-as-concrescer, and in Dewey’s philosophy, the experiencer-of-the-concrete, have two commonalities that cross their widely separate starting points. The first commonality is movement. By my informal calculation, “activity” is the most frequently used word in Whitehead’s educational writings. What is more, in his philosophy, reality is not a thing but an act. The final real things are in the process of becoming something new. It is more appropriate to say that the real entity as a unit is
Whitehead’s Prehending and Dewey’s Experimenting
143
itself a process of becoming-real. Whitehead’s metaphysics of creativity holds that the entity has its own integrity and has relationships because of an inherent resistance to stasis. It is not that the entity needs improvement, but that it has movement. And this movement is self-impelled. Dewey is, as always, more prosaic. He asserts that “the child has a body and he brings it to school along with his brain.” Dewey advocates freedom of what he called outward action, because human experience, especially including education, is ultimately social. Specifically, it requires contact and communication (Dewey, 1938, p. 38). Dewey (1916) advocates for experiences of vital conditions that make us hunt for connections. And for those of us who need modern scientific affirmation of ideas that have been articulated even a hundred years ago, twenty-first century researchers have found that the part of the brain that processes movement is the same part of the brain that processes learning (Middleton and Strick, 1994, pp. 266, 458-461). The second commonality that they share is a rejection of duality and an endorsement of continuity. Whitehead’s philosophy describes an entity that extends itself from the center of its identity which holds together, or prehends, its perspectives that simultaneously spread out into the places of other persons and things. Similarly, Dewey disparages arbitrary separations that he sees as artificial, for instance, in the bifurcations of mind and body, work and leisure, means and ends, school and life. 6. Concrescence Versus Growth The notions of movement and monism aside, I would like to suggest that the Whiteheadian and Deweyan theories have some drastic divergences that make them operationally incompatible. The fundamental difference is that Whitehead sees the entity as always complete but changing. Dewey views the student as always growing, or in other words, always in need of improvement. The former conjures up flowing phases whereas the latter involves different stages. I agree with John Cobb who claims that the phases of concrescence cannot be strictly separated (2005, p. 19). To be sure, there is a difference between the metaphysical notion of relating-to the past and educational theory involving the experience-of the past. In relation to the former case dealing with Whitehead’s metaphysics, the entity or student is already related to her past and is already in the process of choosing among alternatives that may make up her future. The implications of this for education are that sensitivity to this movement’s tentativeness and complexity is the primary responsibility of the people in charge. In the case of Dewey’s epistemology, the student is building on her successful problem-solving past, the experience-of-it being the basis of new understanding. The implications of this for education are that the recognition of the need to build educational experiences upon what has gone before is the primary responsibility of the people in charge.
144
KATHLEEN GERSHMAN
This is not a difference of degree but of kind. One is a case of being in the moment, in process, alive and moving; it is a philosophical attitude. And the other is the case of constructing problem-solving activities as a means to an end, going from one stage to the next; it is a pedagogical design. The language that these philosophers use demonstrates their contrasts. While Whitehead makes process ultimate, Dewey makes fact ultimate. One uses a language of verbs, as exemplified by the use of notions such as: relating, prehending, concrescing. The other uses a language of nouns, employing words such as “problem,” “past,” “task.” One speaks of phases which are guided by choosing and moving, while the other speaks of stages which are composed of hypotheses and results. One eludes cause and effect completely. The other relies completely on cause and effect. One says how a thing becomes constitutes what it is, while the other says that what one becomes, for example, a problem solver, constitutes the lesson. One is about ongoingness. The other is about cognition. And finally, Whitehead is about being, while Dewey is about growth. 7. Relating Versus Cogitating in One-Room Schoolhouses In the United States, there are approximately three hundred one-room schools that are still in operation. By way of comparison, in 1898 ninety-eight percent of North Dakota’s schools were one-room schoolhouses. Today, there are five in the state, with a total enrollment of forty, and an average enrollment of eight. Although the schools are remotely located, all of the students who are presently enrolled receive the services of a counselor, and of specialists in learning disabilities, speech therapy, music, and art. The teachers are always female, ranging in age from forty to forty-nine years old, and they have spouses who are either engaged in agriculture or in ranching. They typically have ten to fourteen years of experience, three to five years of it having been spent in their present one-teacher schools. Last year, I discovered some patterns of experience that would not typify larger urban or suburban schools. First, the teacher understands her students because they share continuity in terms of their relationship across the years. Second, the teacher has the rare luxury of integrating curricula not only across subjects but also across grade levels, so that there is a genuine relationship with what has been learned previously. Third, the students frequently have to take the initiative. Every one of them gets to—and, in fact, is required to—sing solo. Fourth, although they are independent learners, students feel an obligation to have everyone succeed in their education. In order to accomplish this, they regularly involve themselves in peer tutoring. These four aspects—(1) understanding students; (2) curriculum integration; (3) initiative taking; and (4) a sense of belonging—make for an experience that is so educational that parents will fight all attempts to close these schools. They
Whitehead’s Prehending and Dewey’s Experimenting
145
prefer to have the small class size and the close quarters, rather than long hours on buses and larger, bureaucratized places where the emphasis on cogitation is observable, the teaching is more sequential and more fragmented, and the results are considered measurable. Modern-looking schools are not progressive in their sense of being child-centered and constructivist, but they are Deweyan in their emphasis on problem solving. One-room schools are Deweyan, not only in the practical sense but also in the theoretical sense. Specifically, these schools are developing pedagogies of place. This means that curriculum and instruction start where the student is, not only developmentally but also geographically and socially, which is a Deweyan value. Furthermore, they satisfy Dewey’s prescription for vital conditions, all “genuine education com[ing] through experience” (1938, p. 25). Finally, successful one-room schools demonstrate a Whiteheadian quality in the cosmological sense. Particularly, these schools are in reciprocal, mutually reinforcing relationships with their communities. They sit in the midst of their rural communities, and not apart from them. In other words, the school doors swing open in both directions. On the one hand, the school cannot survive without communal support, and, on the other hand, without its school the community will experience a diminishment in terms of reasons for identifying itself as one. Expressing a similar sense of connectedness, Whitehead writes that “in all of nature there is no possibility of a detached, self-contained existence” (ibid., p. 138). Successful one-room schools exemplify this Whiteheadian emphasis on the connectedness of existence, because their geographic centrality and their small size help to establish and to maintain healthy community linkages. Whitehead said that “geography is half of character” (1941, p. 27). Ties to community, to place, and to family are often strong in rural communities, and it is in the schoolhouse that many of these ties are formed and solidified. At the risk of sounding a little sentimental and backward looking, I might add that the academic skills and values that are emphasized today often run counter to the values of place and community. Rather than criticize the small schools as being inadequate in comparison to the successes of large schools, I suggest that we take a closer look at their more modest goals and that we speculate as to how we might emulate them. WORKS CITED Allan, George. (2005) “Whitehead’s Modes of Experience and the Stages of Education.” In Whitehead on Learning and Education. Ed. Franz Riffert. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Cobb, John B. (2005) “Education and the Phases of Concrescence.” In Whitehead on Learning and Education. Ed. Franz Riffert. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.
146
KATHLEEN GERSHMAN
Holmes, Henry W. (1941) “Whitehead’s Views on Education.” In The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Ed. Paul A. Schilpp. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Dewey, John. (1916) “Learning as Experiencing.” In Teaching and Learning: Readings in the Philosophy of Education. Ed. D. Vandenberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969. ———. (1933) “The Adventures of Persuasion,” The New Republic, 74. ———. (1938) Experience and Education. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977. Dunkel, Harold. (1965) Whitehead on Education. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Middleton, F. and O. Strick. (1994) “Anatomical Evidence for Cerebella and Basal Ganglia Involvement in Higher Cognitive Function.” Science, 266.5184, pp. 458461. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929a) Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. ———. (1929b) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1968. ———. (1941) Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
Eleven THE COSMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING AS VALUING: A WHITEHEADIAN PERSPECTIVE ON DESIGNING UNIVERSITY COURSES Robert Regnier The peculiar cosmic role of each human individual can be seen in the responsibility of each as creative agent. It is by an appreciation of value as future, selection of it as present, and conservation of it as past that we as individuals achieve our cosmic importance. (Brumbaugh, 1994, p. 128) 1.
Brumbaugh’s Cosmic Vision: A Whiteheadian Framework for Learning as Valuing
In order to improve the quality of higher education at universities, instructors need to employ pedagogies in undergraduate and graduate courses that: (1) “end in and include a vision of our place and our importance”; (2) provide students with opportunities to develop a “cosmic vision of human collective and individual importance and immortality”; and (3) bring students into “aesthetic satisfaction which should be the final moments of education” (ibid., pp. 6, 127). It will be necessary for them to move readily beyond the dominant notion of learning as the acquisition of information, theories, and values, and to embrace a view of learning as valuing in which aesthetic appreciation gives rise to individuality, through relationality and moral apprehension. Robert Brumbaugh recognizes that the need in education is not to give learners vision, but for institutions to provide processes which allow learning to end in or include visions of place and importance. Here, Brumbaugh is not interested in mere appearances or in fantasies that have no actualizable possibility. He is not referring simply to the adoption of visions formulated by others. Rather, by the notion of vision, he is referring to the formulation, valuation, and selection of the best ideal possibilities that have actualizable potential in real situations. This education requires insight into the features of what is, combined with discernment of what ought to be. Within the Whiteheadian worldview in which Brumbaugh makes his recommendations, each occasion of life and learning offers an indeterminate range and variety of possible ideals that can shape our situations. Accordingly,
148
ROBERT REGNIER
“there is a kingdom of heaven prior to the actual passage of actual things, and there is the same kingdom finding its completion through the accomplishment of this passage” (Whitehead, 1926, p. 87). The achievement of the kingdom may be found in the likes of students writing research essays on the philosophy of education. As they proceed from one thought to another, one careful word to the next, they are lured by the heaven of ideal possibilities to select the best direction in which to move. Challenged to maximize the value of what they have written and what is yet possible to write, students create texts that conserve and incorporate the character of what they have already written into what has not yet appeared. As new ideal possibilities emerge and as ideals are continuously selected and actualized in their essays, incorporated ideals become a base of accomplishment that enables them to project further possibilities for actualization. Not all possibilities are ideal. Some are superficial. Some are irrelevant. Some relate only obtusely and awkwardly to the topic, contrasting with the broader range of ideals that relate to our life situations. However, in the ongoing process in which feelings emerge, learners appropriate what is most valuable and they calibrate the pitch, tenor, and weight of the next word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and section into the complex scope of the project as a whole. The kingdom of heaven prior to writing each part of the essay is the lure of an ideal possibility for the essay, which eventually “find[s] its completion through the accomplishment of its passage” (ibid., p. 87). In an essay, the practical formulation and explication of ideal possibilities results in a definitively completed vision. As such, ongoing reconciliation between possibility and achievement is at the core of learning as valuing. Throughout the writing process, each student estimates the importance or the worth of one idea against another, discerns the relative suitability of expressions to convey ideas, sorts style and grammar to force meaning, and appraises nuance by finely tuning the quality of their expression. The operations of judging whether to develop one theme or another more or less extensively and of grading the utility of examples, or of interpretations, involve processes of valuing comparative worth and quality. These valuing processes transform diverse contrasts into harmonious accords where “parts contribute to the massive feeling of the whole and the whole contributes to the intensity of feelings of the parts” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 252). Through this process of creative synthesis, meaning and purpose emerge in the psyches of students as aesthetic satisfaction, intellectual comprehension, and moral insight. Learning proceeds as a continuous valuation. New feelings create contrasts which alter initial feelings. Arriving at finer designations of unity rendered through broader ranges of diversity requires more effort of thought in terms of conceptualizing how discordant terms agree. The more penetrating the disclosure is, and the broader its scope, all the more beautiful is the achievement. Increased comprehension, greater sensitivity to nuance, and
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
149
moral perceptivity are achieved by virtue of comparative intensity and complexity. Elaborated accounts of complex issues with finer forms of reconciliation of discordances and argumentation provide a farther reaching, more insightful, and discriminating learning. Strengthening the beauty in learning, therefore, consists in increasing students’ capacities to more imaginatively and comprehensively harmonize such contrasts into definitive valuations. To strengthen students’ capabilities for realizing this harmony, it is imperative to challenge them with a sufficient “variety of detail with effective contrast” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 253), through pedagogical supports which expand students’ capacities to engage both complexity and ambiguity. It is a teacher’s work to attend to complexity and to ambiguity by teaching to goals, through pedagogical designs and supports that intensify challenges progressively, so as to assist students to emerge from limited learning structures and processes. Achieving intensity is at the heart of this learning, and making this intensity possible is at the heart of teaching. Through intensification, increasingly broad ranges and diversities of contrasting feelings, emotions, and thoughts become reconciled in self-creating subjectivity. Through intensification, each event of learning is both conditioned and shaped by vector influences of past occasions which project their influence into the future. For Whitehead, the activity of projecting purposes into the future belongs to the superjective character of an organism. To ensure that universities facilitate this intensification, programs and courses should be designed so as to emphasize the operations of selectivity which lead to a discernment of the importance of valuing. Brumbaugh calls for cosmic vision which relates the self to the wholeness of the universe, where the uni-verse is the one unifying story of the world. The university is a place where students and faculty ought to explore the emergence of each other’s quests for importance in the interconnected fabric that is the universe. Each learner is constituted by a subjective process of self-creating value that weaves self into the continuously emerging fabric of the universe. Universities fail when they offer only “splintered and fractioned world view[s] . . . for want of larger and more comprehensive context[s]” (O’Sullivan, 1999, p. 101). Finding place and importance means finding purpose within the context of all that is, was, and can be. In this Whiteheadian view, importance is tied to immortality. As Brumbaugh states, our choices bring value into the world. We are a bridge between timeless forms, in a domain of possibility, and the irreversible actuality which our creative actions establish in history. The quality of the cosmos, its value, is contributed to by our own value selections. (Brumbaugh, 1994, p. 126)
150
ROBERT REGNIER
Learning occurs through the continuous transformation of feelings and ideas into patterns of connectedness. Value emerges subjectively via prehensions of past influences in relation to current possibilities. Transcendence and immortality emerge in the novel value that is particular to the character of what is achieved in each learning event. The learning that is accomplished in writing an essay, for example, transcends the individual value of those divergent and disparate feelings, influences, and ideas present in it. In the writing process, these are gathered together creatively. In the finished work, they constitute a novel creation that transcends what previously existed. In this way, operations of valuation are central to bringing new realities into being. It is through the selection of value possibilities and their transformation into irreversible actualities that “the ideals of human individuals are made into concrete choices and events” (Brumbaugh, 1994, p. 128). Each learning occurrence shapes the future and its possibilities. For example, we might think of a particular research project that consists of the work of several scientists, who, over time, build it creatively through many interrelated events. Past research events make subsequent research events possible by helping to project what is valuable from one related event into the next, even when what is intended is not successfully achieved. Each new learning occasion is constituted by the definitive concrescence of aspects of past events with ideal possibilities, issuing in learning achievements that are projected into the future to shape new events. According to Whitehead, “the ultimate motive power [in intellectual endeavor], alike in science, in morality, and in religion, is the sense of value, the sense of importance” (1929, p. 40), where by the notion of morality he means “the control of process so as to maximize importance” (1938, p. 19). In order to maximize student learning in university courses, instructors can both design their courses and employ pedagogical approaches which empower students to engage in learning as valuing. The following essay will first criticize the contemporary situation in which universities are increasingly designing courses within reductionist frameworks that preempt learning as valuing. It will then explore the meaning of the notion of value in Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology, including an examination of it with reference to his notions of God and of time and space. Finally, I shall provide an example of a university course framework—one that is constructed and designed on the basis of the foundational assumption of learning as valuing. 2. Reductionism in Learning: Problems in Higher Education According to Whitehead, education that is centered on the transmission of inert ideas “is not only useless: it is above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessism” (1929, pp. 1-2). In his condemnation of education that leads to “mental dry rot,” Whitehead reinforces the view that “ideas which are not
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
151
utilized are positively harmful” (1929, p. 3). Education that tries to teach too much too quickly, only to snuff out the élan vital (ibid., p. 31), the divine spark or life force of learning, should be the subject of a critical, passionate protest. Characteristically, dryrot in educational institutions is harmful since it causes the passion and the protest that is required to penetrate meaning and to assess the worth of ideas to decompose and to deteriorate. Today, in the academic culture, it is evident that there is a reversion to systems and frameworks that conceptualize learning as a product, an understanding that does violence to the creative process of self-realization that learners undergo in their quest for place and importance. Outcomes of university courses are deemed to be measurable in the scientific sense, and they are typically referred to as learnings, or as bits of information that have been successfully stuck in the student’s mind, and that can be recalled. As a result of the preponderance of such understandings, increasingly, teachers are focusing merely on the effective control of the transmission of ideas within the confines of programs which merely attempt to ensure that what is presented is retained by the learner. In many educational institutions, systems of assessment determine the readiness of students to comprehend or to retain what is transmitted. Materials are constructed to fit agendas of knowledge transmission. The presentation of formulas, information, and theories are paced so as to accommodate acquisition rates. Evaluation structures check how much is retained. And reporting mechanisms record student retention achievements. In this paradigm, learning is dominated by teaching, and value is reduced to the measurement of what students retain from what is transmitted. While many institutions of higher education remain wedded to conceptualizations of learning that reduce what is ultimate to the measured and to the static, reversion to these models threatens the search for wisdom, hinders the development of aesthetic sensibilities, and blunts moral visioning. Just as the mechanisms of global capitalism atomize production and consumption into measured packages of efficiently maximized profits in a hegemonic “money code of value” (McMurtry, 1998, p. 27), university programs are reproducing knowledge and reconstructing student subjectivities to fit into reductionist value codes. The economistic turn in education promotes the view that world culture in terms of what is marketable, and it presents learning as the acquisition of abstractions in the form of theories, formulas, and studies which project value on external reality only through criteria of measured and tabulated utility. Under it, the meaning of the notion of value and of all valuing processes involves reference solely to monetary value and to market choice. The materialist foundations of such conceptualizations of learning reside in the seventeenth century belief in the detailed order of nature, comprehended through the study of fact by empirical experiment and by inductive reasoning. Even theory is represented as the reconstruction of concepts without the impetus or desire to interpret, to criticize, or to re-imagine them. While the
152
ROBERT REGNIER
commodification of learning may well serve bureaucratic and commercial interests, it does little to help students to formulate principles and landscapes that make their own experiences vivid. Nowhere is it more important for educators to move beyond these assumptions than in universities, and in particular, in colleges of education which prepare learners for teaching in the schools and for intellectual leadership. The move, on the part of universities, to increase research-intensiveness, and to do so with reference to models and conceptions of research in which there is an emphasis on commercialization and commodification, has promoted a thorough neglect of both teaching and the possibility of improving undergraduate learning. In a newspaper article that was written on an address by Queen’s University’s Kim Richard Nossal, the President of the Canadian Political Science Association, Jeffrey Simpson reported that from 1976-77 to 2003-04, full-time university enrollments in Canada almost doubled, whereas full-time faculty barely increased. In political science, enrollment rose from 5000 to 13,890, but full-time political science professors increased from 675 to 702. To return to that ratio (7.4:1) would require . . . hiring 1,200 more professors at a cost of $110 million … for political science alone. This kind of cost spread across the system, would mean an investment of about $2.5 billion. (2006, p. A19) As the article points out, “budgets have not kept pace with enrollment.” The result of this underfunding of university teaching is “large increases in class sizes for undergraduates.” Part of the reason for these increases in class sizes is that teaching has yielded to research, for “research and publication, not teaching, [are today] the pathways to tenure, promotion, and preferment.” To be sure, governments are “pouring money into research, creating more incentives to chase research dollars.” Kim Nossal reports that professorial teaching loads have been reduced over the last three decades, while new hires are often given multi-year course-load reductions to do research and to build publication agendas for tenure. Furthermore, Canada Research Chairs and senior professors are increasingly being given reduced teaching loads. The article reports that, increasingly, departments are becoming places where “well paid senior researchers [have] limited teaching exposure, and many more less well paid instructors, part-timers, and junior faculty [are] doing the bulk of undergraduate teaching.” The narrow manners of rationalizing and interpreting the meaning of learning, which are evident in reductionist frameworks that are in currency today, ensures that course purposes are articulated within constricted limitations rather than broader visions. Course objectives are formulated to pass the scrutiny of administrative monitoring rather than to serve as lures for creative potential. Course syllabi are designed to meter out contents rather than
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
153
to inspire imaginative engagement. Assignments are constructed to facilitate grading against a scale to render grades. Instruction is modularized for effective transmission of preset ideas. And grading systems are geared toward comparing student success rather than toward assessing possibilities. The narrow provisioning of educational programs and courses that is occurring today takes a toll on each student’s psyche, and limits the learning subject to passive receptivity, to a forced adoption of relativism, and it can even be said to constitute “soul murder” (Whitehead, 1929, p. 57). The impetus toward self-development on the part of students is neglected. Creative potential remains undeveloped; and self-discipline is unexploited. Reductionism congests learning with inert ideas and fragments knowledge into externally related course and program components. Within such arrangements, the factvalue dichotomy prevails, and learning becomes the process of determining how many facts have been retained for the purposes of grading, to the neglect of any authentic process of valuing. In addition, the current situation reinforces the view, in students’ psyches, that valuing is either unimportant in the learning process, or it is reducible to the comparison of one grade score with others or against an external standard. 3. The Notion of Value in Whitehead’s Cosmology Value is inherent in actuality itself. (Whitehead, 1926, p. 100) An organism is the realization of a definite shape of value. (Whitehead, 1925, p. 194) There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality. (Whitehead, 1926, p. 80) In Whitehead’s cosmology, the universe is not a universe of mere existence, but rather of “value-existence” (Jones, 1996, p. xxv), where “self value is the unit fact which emerges,” and “actuality is the enjoyment [of] . . . the experiencing of value” (Whitehead, 1926, pp. 101, 100). The value-existence that constitutes the fabric of the Whiteheadian cosmos is composed of selfcreative occasions. Each occasion involves subjective emergence from indeterminate possibility into definite determined reality, just like the learners—discussed above—who discriminate among, and select possibilities in the process of incorporating definitive words, sentences and paragraphs into their work. Valuing involves both operations of prehensive selectivity and the concrescence of various kinds and grades of relations and influences which result in unifications specific to the event of each occasion. In the valuing
154
ROBERT REGNIER
process, there is the combination of “various elements into aspects of each other” (Whitehead, 1926, p. 100), just as the writer combines new thoughts and words, developing and expressing his views on issues, problems, and important matters of concern. In the background of all authentic activities of expression, there is valuing. Concretized value achieved through the process of valuing is inherent in the specific particularity of each unique actualizing occasion. To say that value is inherent in the world, therefore, is to say that value is identical with the process of actualization in an occasion. Value arises “from the specific mode of concretion of the diverse elements” (ibid., p. 103) and is inseparable from what an entity is. Value, therefore, characterizes the “intrinsic reality of an event” which is an “achievement for its own sake” to the exclusion of other possibilities. Each event exists and passes into objective immortality as a “value and [an] achievement” (Brumbaugh, 1994, p. 127). Value is maximized when entities combine the most ideal possibilities in the best ways, including prehensions and recollections of previous experiences which are deemed important to the subject matter, in order to enhance self-enjoyment and satisfaction. This maximization is possible because purposes or aims which have the potential to make life richer, fuller, and more satisfying lure entities and occasions toward a richer, fuller, and more satisfying reality. Whitehead’s cosmology of valuing is reflected in Bruce Morito’s understanding of the ecological foundations of the notion of valuing. In his book, Thinking Ecologically, Morito advances a process model of valuing where all valuations and valuers, being consequences of evolutionary and ecological processes nested within different levels of organization of valuation activity, are parts of a valuational network such that it becomes impossible to separate the valuer from this network in any radical way. (Morito, 2002, p. 111) The valuations of human beings take place as ecological processes, which comprise one mode of a more comprehensive, valuational activity. Values are processes. They are “not objects” (ibid., p. 112). As such, Morito calls for a theory of valuing which is expressive of the processes that underlie valuational activities, rather than for some theory of values. Notions of value change according to worldview and cosmology. In some worldviews, it is believed that values were conferred “by the divine or gods and that the role of humanity was to recognize these values and then complete and develop them,” and that the detachment of mind from matter and the rise of rationality displaced God as the ground of valuing. Morito states that
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
155
coupled with the objectification of nature, assumptions of detachment opened the way to thinking about the environment as value neutral, or at least not valuable until some rational agent (God or man) takes an interest in it and proclaims it to be good. (2002, p. 98) Whereas intrinsic value in the early Greek and Christian worldviews was considered to be value bestowed by God, in modernity “rational human beings assumed that role.” Morito argues that in modern liberal democracies human beings do not acquire value. Rather, they “are inherently valuable.” With Kant, this standpoint became entrenched in the perspective that “[t]he value of human beings cannot be explained by reference to anything external to them, while non-human beings acquire value only by reference to some external valuer” (ibid., p. 102). Morito contests the liberal view that the environment is valueless, that there is a fundamental separateness between the valuing agent and the object valued, and that “value-conferring activity is [only a] one way” relationship, namely, moving from rational humans to the environment. He challenges the notion that “values in nature are conferred by human rational agents,” because “what we truly value often overrides what we explicitly and deliberatively value.” He further takes issue with the idea of “objective intrinsic value in nature” because, again, objective value cannot be said to be merely derived from human rationality which posits value. Instead, Morito supports the standpoint that human values “ultimately derive from evolutionary and ecological relationships,” and that “values are often deeply hidden, motivating factors in thought and action; they operate independently of any explicit acknowledgment, deliberate act or work to produce value” (ibid., pp. 110-111). Furthermore, he contends that valuational processes precede and underlie the emergence of rational interest-driven behavior and that their function is to orient the rational agent toward taking an interest in particular elements constituting the environment. Valuational activity, therefore, may be amenable to rational deliberation, but it is not fundamentally the result of it (ibid., pp. 111-112). The possibility of a substantive turn away from reductionism in education requires a re-conceptualization of the natures of both reality and value. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead criticizes how seventeenth century materialist science views value in terms of the bifurcation of mind and matter. In this view, bodies and minds came to be viewed as separate substances with “independent substantial existence” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 195). The mind was considered as “a private world of passions,” while bodies, nature, and matter became divorced “from values altogether” and “degenerated into a mechanism entirely valueless.” He describes how science eventually “gave stability and intellectual status” to the doctrine of minds as “private worlds of experience” where moral intuitions meant “making the most of your own individual
156
ROBERT REGNIER
opportunities.” These views supported modernity’s turn from aesthetics and “led to the lack of reverence in the treatment of natural or artistic beauty” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 196). For university courses to move beyond mechanistic ascriptions of value, their modernist roots need to be deconstructed. With the modernist turn away from aesthetic apprehension, Whitehead recounts how professional training became committed to specialization that increased knowledge in limited areas and produced “minds in a groove . . . contemplating a given set of abstractions” which are inadequate for “the comprehension of human life” (ibid., p. 197) and for addressing progress and novel situations. He describes how overspecialization in the professions weakened the “directive force” of reason, because it rejected more complete understandings of human existence and of human knowing, essentially rejecting intellectual plasticity. Following from his criticism of how the scientific materialist worldview devalues the environment, how it reduces the fundamental activity of human valuing to an isolated, self-interested individualism, and how education was turned away from appreciating aesthetic values, Whitehead advanced his own ontology of value and of valuing, which forms the ground of the conceptualization of learning in terms of valuing. For example, in his alternative philosophy of science, he replaces the notion of matter with the notion of organism as “the realization of a definite shape of value” (ibid., p. 194), where value is the central force in the process of self-realization of the organism. Whitehead understands that to recognize this value, one-sidedness in professional training needs to be balanced by the recognition of “intuition without an analytical divorce from the total environment.” He recommends aesthetic comprehension, which offers “perception of the concrete achievement for a thing in its actuality.” Aesthetic comprehension of value involves an “immediate apprehension with [a] minimum of eviscerating analysis” as well as “habits of concrete appreciation of individual facts in their full interplay of emergent and diverse values,” so as to be able to appreciate “the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment” (ibid., p. 199). 4. God in Learning as Valuing: The Primordial Lure and the Consequent Reality The notion of learning as valuing in Whitehead’s philosophy assumes a cosmology in which there is a primordial creativity at the root of things, and that moves from the freedom of indeterminateness to determinateness. Learning would not be possible in a world of completely chaotic and random relations in which there was no potentiality for conformal transition from indeterminate freedom to determinate reality. Learners could not learn how to
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
157
write if they lived in a cosmos where there was no possibility of relationship between what they think in one instance and what they think in the next. Even if my thoughts are radically different and the ideas are radically different from instant to instant, the differences in thought in this cosmos are never totally unrelated. Likewise and in contrast, in a completely determined world, one that was frozen into definite sameness, no creativity or learning would be possible. If the writings of learners were completely determined, they would not be able to entertain any possibilities and possibilities could not be transformed into actualities. Learning requires the conditions for the conformal transformation of immanent relations through which what is not known can become known, where what is not included can become included, and where what does not yet exist can come into existence. For university courses to accommodate this conformality, where each learning process moves through the particular immediacies of conservation and change, courses need to be conceptualized and designed to reflect and foster such processes. It is possible, for example, to design courses so that students learn to retain facts, theories, formulas, and objectified values that are presented, but in them student learning does not proceed from and build on the subject core of student interests or assessments of value. From this framework, learning is conceived as the repetition of the same processes of maximizing retention without providing for the qualitative growth of new capacities. However, the world is constituted neither merely by determinate conformity nor merely by unbounded possibility that remains indeterminate. Instead, the world is a place which ensures a consistent, ordered balance in every ongoing phase of conformal synthesis. As Whitehead writes, “any such phase is determinate[,] having regard to its antecedents, and in this determination exhibits conformity to a common order.” The world, in which every “creative indetermination attains its measure of determination” (1926, p. 94), is the self-consistency of ordered balance which Whitehead refers to as God. This self-consistency, in every phase of every occasion of learning or otherwise, is the basis of the possibility of processes of creative determination and of valuing in which one possibility of actualization is selected and is included while others are rejected and excluded. Valuing is possible in each event because of the primordial and consequent order within which creativity is realizable. The primordial order consists of an immanent lure of ideal possibilities for each occasion. The consequent world is the reality produced through actualization of ideals in continuously emergent occasions which become the basis for the continuous, conformal actualization of future ideals. For Whitehead, these primordial and consequent conditions are part of the nature of God—the immanent source of creation and freedom in every instance. Each course in which instructors seek to afford a productive learning process of valuing requires a structure and a design that offers the selfconsistency of ordered balance and makes conformal requirements of learning
158
ROBERT REGNIER
possible. Learning itself is possible because of the primordial and consequent characters of learning, through which the actualization of selected ideal possibilities in a learning occasion becomes the basis for subsequent learning. In Whitehead’s cosmology, valuation is constituted by the gradation and the selection of variable ideal possibilities for future actualization. The driving force behind such selectivity is the continuous lure of the ideal possibilities in relation to inherited conditions in each context. Unlike ontologies in which entities are considered to have been created ex nihilo by an external creator with an essentialist objective, in Whitehead’s cosmology, intrinsic reality is constituted by interconnecting events in virtue of the conformal selection and transformation of intrinsic subjective relations. Creativity is not an option. Rather, it is compulsive emergence through the lure and the negation of possibilities. As Whitehead writes, “the purpose of God is the attainment of value in the temporal world” (1926, p. 100), and, as such, God serves the ultimate purpose of maximizing value. University courses can be designed so as to ensure that these primordial and consequent requirements of learning are upheld. 5. Space and Time in Learning as Valuing Learning as valuing involves the emergence of novelty in the patterns of internal relatedness which constitute space-time. Space and time vary according to how events are constituted, which is the “reason why a [learning] event can be found only just where it is and how it is … in just one definite set of relationships” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 123). The space of learning is found in the continual emergence and evolution of the learner as a subject-superject, much like the tennis player who strategizes in regard to his or her play in the ongoing context of a match. Engaged in the game’s action, players are in a constant process of learning and relearning how to identify the weaknesses of their opponent in order to outfox him or her. A player’s subjectivity is transformed through the games that they play, and each player seeks to learn increasingly complex patterns of play, doing so ever more coherently and with greater recognition of contrasts. Learning capacities are not static. Rather, they emerge and evolve according to relations in context with the selection and the honing of dispositions and skills that allow the greatest achievement. While a tennis match can occur within the perimeter of a tennis court, the court does not constitute the actual place or space of tennis play. Each game creates a used space according to the history of how the ball is actually played. The values that constitute the quality of each game are a function of how tennis players create the space of their play by their movements to place the ball out of the reach of their opponents, for example, just over the net or just inside the corners of the court. Through the internal relationships created by returning the ball back and forth, tennis players create the space of the game.
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
159
Analogously, learning is the space created by learning events. Good teachers facilitate learning processes that inspire and build pathways for students far beyond initial insights. More importantly, they ground learning in the interior potential of each learner’s character as a subject-superject, constituted by the rich history of events, by the selection of ideals for potential actualization, and by the creative synergies of feelings to which they can become open. Teachers, for example, help to create spaces in which students can learn, by inspiring them to be curious and imaginative, and by facilitating structures that allow for the evolution of self-discipline. They can help this creation by designing supports to learning processes that recognize the potential for contrasts and harmonies. The more there are contrasts, the more expansive is the learning. Confronted by the need to limit their investigations in order to discern what is most interesting and what is most important, learners are continuously engaged in the valuation of each grade and variation of contrast, in the process of harmonizing them in some unified determination of value. From the scientific materialist standpoint, learning is conceptualized in the same way as one thinks of bits of matter with the property of simple location, namely, here in space, here in time, or here in space-time. In this characterization, learning exists through a period, and is not subdivided by time, which, like matter, is “fully itself at any sub-period however short.” And “without transition, since the temporal transition is the succession of instants” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 50), learnings are reduced to being conceptualized as entities that exist without duration, and are considered to be devoid of reference to anything like prehensive operations, the process of concrescence, and the arrival at satisfaction. The measurement of time is an abstraction that is secondary, rather than essential, to the conformal relations of learning in time as duration. The empirical notion of time only offers an external framework for learning, which can be scheduled in a succession of minutes and hours and at a time and place. In this model, the aforementioned learnings are only related externally. One learning can be sequenced in external relation to another, but from this perspective, just like matter, the substance of materialist philosophy is incapable of emergence or of evolution because “there is nothing to evolve” (ibid., p. 107). An understanding of learning that is based on materialist foundations lacks a basis for the emergence of new possibilities and for transmuting such possibilities into fact. Instead of affording aesthetic appreciation of the duration of occasions of learning, a strict recourse to empiricism and to induction measures learning in terms of the successive acquisition of separated bits of information. In this conceptualization of learning, the task of teaching is the construction of processes to transfer and/or to transmit information. For Whitehead, time is duration. The duration of learning processes emerge through their own internal relationality to constitute the time of
160
ROBERT REGNIER
learning. Accordingly, he states that “time is sheer succession of epochal duration,” where duration is what is required for the realization of a pattern in an event. Time is “not realized via its successive divisible parts, but is given with its parts” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 125). Duration is the conformal processes of emergence in which there are no separations, such as there are in positivist notions of time that only capture slices of existence. In other words, one drop of the learning process relates fundamentally to, and ingresses into, the next. By way of the superjective character of events, learning advances by way of the interrelationship of events, one event emerging out of another. The notion of a learning event offers a radical departure from traditional ideas concerning learning. As conceived in Whitehead’s cosmology, each learning event is an ultimate unit of reality, made up complexly of other events, and related to “all that there is.” Each learning event moves conformally in a trajectory from past events to future events. The substantiveness of learning “is definiteness,” where “all the elements of a complex whole contribute to one effect, to the exclusion of others,” and in which there is “passage into novelty” (Whitehead, 1926, p. 113). University courses and pedagogies can be designed with the recognition of the intrinsic space and time of learning in mind. 6. Transformative Praxis: Valuation in Course Redesign For several years, I have incrementally redesigned undergraduate and graduate university courses in educational foundations in light of the notion of learning as valuing. I have done so by reassessing and reconstructing course purposes, goals, content, assignment structures, instructional strategies, and evaluation processes. Critical self-reflection by university instructors on their own learning within the university context is a necessary part of maintaining and advancing ideals that serve to liberate university education from the domination of technical-rational assumptions concerning education and how instructors ought to approach teaching. Such reflection should be a focal point of research for faculty who are interested in advancing transformative possibilities in the learning of university students. Students need learning structures and conditions that maximize opportunities for valuing, including those which emphasize broader frameworks of analysis, more refined forms of writing, and more complex forms of research. Below, I relate how I design courses in philosophy of education in light of the foundational assumption of learning as valuing. A. Course Purpose The broad, ultimate purpose of all of my courses is to provide an inspiring and supportive framework that allows students to pose questions about education and about life, ranging from the most general to the most perplexing, which
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
161
may be based on their own feelings about what is ultimately most interesting and important to them. This purpose, formulated within the terms of each course’s description and goals, is constructed on the basis of two underlying premises. First, posing and investigating questions of ultimate interest and importance have the greatest resonance and significance for each learner. The more that they are investigated, such questions combine the passion of interest, which has the potential to increase and to expand learning, with the assessment of importance, the lure of which has the potential to become even more alluring as the significance of this lure is studied. This ultimacy in terms of the purpose of a course needs to be acted on throughout the course. As Whitehead points out, with reference to his golden rule of education, whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exercised in the here and now. (1929, p. 6) The second assumption is that value needs to be allowed to emerge within a philosophical discourse, and not just within a discourse that transmits theory, because the ultimate purpose is to have students seek wisdom rather than knowledge. The self-interested, and even passionate, pursuit of importance is philosophy, the love of wisdom, that is, the passionate interest in what is most important or what constitutes the greatest good. Attention to the importance of valuing in learning, in turn, offers recognition of the individuality of each student, located in the widest ken of ideal potentialities for actualization that each learner can pursue. Wisdom, involving the “utilization of well understood principles,” emerges from the apprehension of life in all its multifariousness, yet it is developed in education, which is “the guidance of the individual [toward] a comprehension of the art of life” (ibid., pp. 37, 39). B. Main Course Goal The ultimate purpose in these courses is achieved through an assignment structure which has students hypothesize a prophetic vision of education that is based upon their valuation of interest and their assessment of importance within the terms of the individual course descriptions. The formulation of this prophetic vision by each student is the ultimate goal of the course. The goal is to have students question what they consider to be ultimately important, and consequently, what is of most value to them and what they regard as the common good. This goal, as articulated, provides an impetus for students to consciously recognize and assess the value patterns of their own intellectual (and other) feelings, in relation to the subject area of the course. This very
162
ROBERT REGNIER
hypothesis, which is at the center of their assessment of value and of worth, becomes the very curriculum of the course. C. A Course Objective The main objective that I set for students is for each of them to do research and to prepare an Advocacy Essay that advances a compelling and defensible resolution concerning a problem in education, and in which they propose educational policy to an educational agency or to a civil society organization. This strategy stands in contrast to the typical, laissez-faire approach in which students are instructed to pick a topic of interest and write an essay on it. This requirement means that students have to formulate and justify their assessment of what is of value in their private experience within a public discourse. The focus on a single topic throughout the course, while they are engaged in reading educational theory, makes it more feasible for them to investigate some matter of importance and interest in a thorough way. The selection of this assignment follows Whitehead’s admonition “not to teach too many subjects” and “to teach what you teach thoroughly” (1929, p. 2). Teaching too many subjects often means teaching to cover ground, without allowing students to value what is taught in a meaningful way. Covering ground becomes the transmission of abstractions that displace the development of student interest and the assessment of importance. The sheer demand of doing too much too superficially kills interest. In contrast, the Advocacy Essay requires students to generate a coherent unifying hypothesis, akin to a zen koan, in order to guide their work. The assignment takes learning as valuing, and the process of considering what value is, off the page and into the experience and the feelings of students. The assignment locates learning processes in students as subject-superjects who are engaged in processes of valuing through their own physical, conceptual, transmuted, propositional, and intellectual feelings, and through creative processes which are, in general, akin to Whitehead’s descriptions in his theory of prehensions. D. Assignment Structure Many, if not most, students need structure in order to support their aim to develop clearly articulated hypotheses, to explicate issues of importance, to fashion key theoretical ideals from which to construct arguments, and to propose practical responses. In attempting to provide this structure, I have developed a straightforward assignment format which has each student carry out research for their own Advocacy Essay, with reference to a four-part argument. They must: (1) explicate a problem; (2) describe the context of the problem; (3) propose a theoretical foundation for addressing the problem; and (4) offer a practical response to the problem in light of the theory. Students
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
163
harmonize the four distinct sets of contrasts into a reconciling thesis. This structure has become the practical, aesthetic crucible for generating feelings of contrast and of importance, through which to conformally articulate a vision. It provides a reassuring framework through which students can select the most accommodating focus which will serve to broaden their perspectives and to expand their abilities to deal with complexity, without being confined by determinism and/or lost in the chaos of discordant thoughts. In my experience, while students have some experience at carrying out research, many students need to broaden the range of contrasts through which they formulate a research initiative. They also need to develop those contrasts more completely if they are to grow in their research capacities. For example, while students might be able to identify an issue worth addressing, they may not be able to sufficiently problematize, specify, or otherwise formulate the constituent characteristics of an issue that makes it worthy of attention or manageably addressable. Many students may be able to identify a problem worthy of addressing, but they have difficulty differentiating it from a whole subset of problems and the context within which it arises. They may be able to suggest practical and technical strategies for addressing a problem without providing a framework, a theory, or a ground to justify them as solutions to the problem. Or they may be able to structure their research to critically analyze a problem, but they are not able to imagine or offer a solution to it. By providing a framework for addressing problems related to the complexity and the variety of possible topics, this assignment has students developing an intensive focus on some aspect of what is important and interesting to them. E. Assessment as Evaluation In order to provide students with a developmental framework where the primordial and consequent meet and intensify the process by which the indeterminate can become the determinate, I have designed the assignment in terms of three interrelated learning events. The assignment involves: the preparation and presentation of a Concept Essay, then a Proposal Essay, and finally a complete Advocacy Essay, respectively in the fifth, eighth, and twelfth weeks of a thirteen week course. Each event structures the interrelated set of learning occasions cumulating in the final draft, so as to have students experience vivid feelings of contrast and of unity in relation to their own respective research projects, as well as to the research of other students. Throughout the course, students assess what they are genuinely interested in. They reflect on what they consider to be of greatest importance for them in relation to the valuations of other students, and they determine how they could most substantively and effectively advance their inquiry. The assignment to prepare a Concept Essay engages students in an initial valuation process through which they consider possible topics for their research
164
ROBERT REGNIER
and then select a single topic, to the exclusion of all others. In so doing, students arrive at the satisfaction of a preliminary plan that helps them to project the development of a more definitive proposal as well as the structure and content of their final research essay. The whole valuation process, which involves making and justifying a selection, intensifies the subjective experience of selecting, from all ideal possibilities, what are the most interesting and important issues for them to address. The learning event in which they develop their Concept Essay consists of immersing students in an array of valuational processes. The Concept Essay sees to it that students: (1) survey their own area of interest in a serious manner, such that they select a research topic partially on the basis of a review of the kinds of essays that have been written by students in previous sections of the course; (2) select and justify a research topic in a short essay, with reference to contrasting feelings, in relation to the exclusion of options and their deciding on a definite topic; (3) present their essays orally to a group of colleagues in the class, so as to provide an opportunity to communicate their ideas in their own voice to others; (4) participate in the presentation of the essays of other students, so as to help them appreciate and assess the experience of others and their feelings as to what significant; (5) question and comment on the essays of their peers, so as to engage all students in an intersubjective plurality of contrasting subjective-superjective perspectives; (6) write an appreciative comment on a peer’s Concept Essay, so as to practice solidarity and mutual assessment in a democratic learning community; (7) receive written comments from peers on their own essays, thereby enabling students to make deliberate improvements to them; (8) reread and revise their essays in light of the comments of peers, so as to improve both their writing in general and its conceptual clarity, prior to submitting it to the instructor; (9) receive formative assessment from the instructor which can provide much more valuable practical direction than if the essay was simply handed in later on in the course; (10) have the opportunity to revise and to resubmit the essay, so as to ensure prospects for developing a compelling and defensible argument in the Proposal and Advocacy Essays. Each of these micro-learning occasions constitutes an intensification that spurs the imagination to new valuations through feelings that appraise combinations of contrasts, varieties of ideals, and variations on such ideals. The learning events that are related to the development of the Concept Essay aim at creating experiences that intensify students’ feelings in regard to the validity and the value of the first approximations of a prophetic call, at the same time as broadening and highlighting the comparative limitations of their own prophetic visions. In addition, each event develops the fabric of a social learning context within which students may formatively assess each other’s work. Through this cumulative Concept Essay event, each student projects aesthetically prehended
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
165
intuitions and formulations into the next learning event—the Proposal Essay event. The mandate for completing the Proposal Essay is much more complex than that of the Concept Essay. Each student prepares a fifteen hundred word proposal, which consists of: (1) a statement and an explanation of a resolution (which is the thesis); (2) a four part outline of an argument to support the resolution under the headings of Problem, Context, Theory, and Solution; (3) an abstract; and (4) an articulation of an imaginative two-part title as well as the inclusion of subheadings for each section of their overall argument that will be contained later in their Advocacy Essays. Students present and comment upon the proposals of other students in in-class group sessions, as they did for their Concept Essays. Then, they revise and submit them to the instructor. Students are challenged to broaden the problematic of their essays into four distinct parts that allow them to engage in an assessment of importance with increasing deliberation, precision, and cogency. With a clearer trajectory in mind about how to investigate a topic, students then begin to research the content of their Advocacy Essays, a draft of which they present and discuss with a group of peers in one of the last sessions of the course. The essay is later submitted to the instructor for grading. Some of the students’ essays are selected by the instructor, with their approval, and are assembled into a compilation that is placed on reserve in the library for subsequent students to read. F. Course Pedagogy and Course Content The instructional strategies for the course consist of processes that are designed to have students actively participate as agents in the learning process. Students: (1) report to their peers on selected readings; (2) teach each other in small groups; (3) engage in debate, story telling, and collective improvisation; (4) engage in cooperative games so as to build solidarity; and (5) read critically, write essays, and develop communicative competencies and social skills that allow for the building of a scholarly community. The content of each course follows the course description requirements and often includes readings that challenge student identities, develop critical learning processes, expose hidden curricula, and critically scrutinize learned orthodoxies, as a means to project new possibilities for student learning. 7. Conclusion The purpose of designing courses in this way is to have students participate as agents of valuation, enabling them to discern what is most important for them as self-creating subjects. What comes into existence as value through this model are the subjective and intersubjective capacities and relations which are created in each learner’s own real life. Furthermore, through such a design,
166
ROBERT REGNIER
students decide what constitutes the greatest common good in their researches, and they build the capacities for communities of solidarity that foster deliberative, democratic discourses among themselves, as they consider the canon of educational theories that are studied in the course. These assignments enable students to examine the underlying assumptions of their own subjective worldviews, and to arrive at novel possibilities for practical action (praxis). Moreover, they help students to examine how the policies and the practices in public education are shaped by philosophical, political, social, and cultural influences, as well as assist them to consider possibilities for the advancement of more humanizing educational structures and foundations. The overall pedagogical approach that is supported by this design engages students in processes of valuation in which they are challenged to build on what is important to them and to formulate critically why it is important. The merit of this approach is that it provides an opportunity for students to deal directly with problems which have impacted their experience as learners and/or will impact them as prospective educators, so that they may overcome such obstructions to educational flourishing. As a result, this pedagogy increases the intensity and the breadth of each student’s learning and inquiry, empowering them to develop a penetrating capacity to define and address critical issues in an insightful way. Lastly, it provides students with a helpful framework for formulating coherent and thoroughgoing formulations of their interests which, in turn, offers substantive, direct support for addressing the problems of their own learning, as they seek their place and importance in the world. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This essay was written with much appreciation for the collegial support of Howard Woodhouse, Mark Flynn, Ed Thompson, and Adam Scarfe of the University of Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit.
WORKS CITED Brumbaugh, Robert S. (1994) Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Education. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. Jones, Judith. (1996) “Introduction.” In Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan Co. / Fordham University Press, 1996. McMurtry, John. (1998) Unequal Freedoms: The Global Marketplace as an Ethical System. Toronto: Garamond & Westport. Morito, Bruce. (2002) Thinking Ecologically: Environmental Thought, Values, and Policy. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. O’Sullivan, Edmund. (1999) Transformative Learning: Educational Vision for the 21st Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Regnier, Robert. (2005) “Prophetic Visions for Professional Teachers: A Whiteheadian Perspective on Designing University Courses.” Interchange, 36.1-2, pp. 95-120.
The Cosmological Foundations of Learning as Valuing
167
Regnier, Robert. (2005) “Cosmological Foundations of Imagination in Learning: A Whiteheadian Perspective,” Process Studies, 34.2, pp. 178-191. Simpson, Jeffrey. (2006) “The ‘Flight From the Classroom’ Leaves Undergrads Behind.” The Globe and Mail, June 28, A19. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1926) Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan Co. / Fordham University Press, 1996. ———. (1929) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1968. ———. (1941) Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
Twelve THE PROBLEM OF THE OVEREMPHASIS ON PRECISION IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH: WHITEHEADIAN SOLUTIONS Adam C. Scarfe Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art, Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives. (Wordsworth, 1888, p. 145) 1. Academic Research as Interpretable Through Whitehead’s Theory of the Rhythm of Education and the Problem of the Overemphasis on Precision As it pertains to Alfred North Whitehead’s outline of the threefold rhythm of education, the preceding stanzas from William Wordsworth’s poem The Tables Turned exemplify the transition from the stage of precision to the phase of generalization. The line, “we murder to dissect” is analyzed by Whitehead in Science and the Modern World as a summary of the meaning behind Wordsworth’s poetry as a whole. For him, the passage both discloses “the intellectual basis of [Wordsworth’s] criticism of science” in respect to “its absorption in abstractions” and highlights that “important facts of nature elude the scientific method” (1925, p. 83). While Whitehead judges that Wordsworth was “a genius,” he claims that the latter “weakens his evidence by his dislike of science.” But in citing Wordsworth, what Whitehead is trying to express is our tendency to “forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern science imposes on our thoughts.” He adds that Wordsworth “expresses the concrete facts of our apprehension, facts which are distorted in the scientific analysis” (ibid., pp. 83-84), a point that illuminates the transition from the stage of
170
ADAM C. SCARFE
precision to that of generalization in his theory of the rhythm of education. Whitehead agrees with Wordsworth in respect to what scientific analysis, especially that carried out under the materialist rubric, generally fails to express—an attribution of value to nature and to the entities within and compositional of it. In sharp contrast to the purview of scientific materialism which considers that the world is composed of bits of matter, purposeless, valueless, and hurrying through empty space, Whitehead writes that if an inquirer wants to arrive at an adequate conception of things, “the element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted” (1925, p. 93). His speculative philosophy is largely dedicated to restoring a sense of the intrinsic value of the organisms that help to compose the world from rigid, materialistic scientific and philosophical outlooks. The above passage from Wordsworth is later employed by Whitehead in Process and Reality (1929a, p. 140), as a description of the underlying principles both of Humean skepticism and some of the reductionist methods which are employed in scientific analyses. In particular, the unmitigated Hume’s skeptical method was based on the notion that “it is an infinite advantage in every controversy to defend the negative” (Hume, 1993, p. 331), and that it is the power of unbridled critical interrogation that allows us to reveal and to explain natural phenomena, as well as to draw out the aims, insights, and intimately held beliefs of others in philosophical discussion. More evidently, corresponding to Whitehead’s rhythmic phase of precision, the line “we murder to dissect” is descriptive of some of the objectifying research methods of the natural sciences and of engineering, by which the phenomena and organisms studied are made available to disclosure for human cognition, analyzed, explained, packaged, and made ready for human use. Reductionism, which assumes that “all apparent ‘wholes’ are in principle are reducible to their parts” (Griffin, 1988, p. 144), involves the notion that the complex problems and the subject matters of our inquiries can be broken up into smaller, more manageable, more basic elements, so as to enable precision in analysis that can disclose the real. In other words, reductionism is an analytical methodology in which it is assumed that “by finding the parts that construct the whole, we [can] explain everything about the whole, including how the whole functions” (Gilbert and Sarkar, 2000, p. 1). However, the abstractions that are created by such reductionism are highlighted by Wordsworth’s statement, “Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things.” For Whitehead, when such abstractions go unrecognized, a researcher commits what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The major problem, according to Whitehead, is that scientific observations require the lens of a conceptual and linguistic order that is inadequate to the expression of the true complexity of nature. For example, he states that “observational discrimination is not dictated by the impartial facts. It selects
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
171
and discards, and what it retains is rearranged in a subjective order of prominence” (1933, p. 155). As a result, “we habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature” (ibid., p. 154). However, in contrast to philosophical and scientific researches that unconsciously assume materialism and/or substance ontology, in which it is presupposed that things are dependent only upon themselves for their existence, Whitehead’s process-relational cosmology of organism is based on the notion that “the world is not made up of independent things, each completely determinate in abstraction from all the rest” (1941, p. 157). In contradistinction to overt scientific reductionism and to substance ontology, he states, connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involving the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself . . . in every consideration of a single fact there is the suppressed presupposition of the environmental coordination requisite for its existence. (1938, p. 9) That is to say, reductionism and the overemphasis on analytic precision does violence to the infinite complexity and connectedness of nature, something that even the staunchest empiricist, Hume, never grasped (see Scarfe, 2006). But the whole of Wordsworth’s stanza speaks of transcending these exemplifications of Whitehead’s stage of precision. Wordsworth says, “Enough of Science and of Art, / Close up those barren leaves,” and he points to a renewal of curiosity and romance, as well as a return to a focus on the whole, in the statements, “Come forth, and bring with you a heart / That watches and receives.” Whitehead would agree with Wordsworth here, but he would claim that this closing up of barren leaves is momentary, rather than final. From the perspective of Whitehead’s notion of the rhythm of education, as merged with his theory of prehensions, the transition from the stage of precision to generalization is largely constituted by an overcoming of the misplaced concretenesses—the sharp negations, the selections, the judgments, the exclusions, the eliminations, the divisions, the bifurcations, the reductionism, the taxonomies, the classifications, the decisions, the discriminations, and the other abstractions of consciousness attributable to the phase of precision, some of which serve to carve up reality, or to dissect it, for the sake of analysis, and a reconnection to the whole. Generalization is the synthetic and speculative stage of education. Generalization may involve the conversion of “exclusions into contrasts” (Whitehead, 1929a, p. 223), by which he means the reconciliation of one-sidedness and/or the synthesis of opposites into holistic unities-in-difference. It also involves correcting “the initial excess
172
ADAM C. SCARFE
of subjectivity” that may be developed in the phase of precision, and recovering “the totality obscured” (Whitehead, 1929a, p. 15) by the sharp negations, eliminations, and selections which are characteristic of it. In the educational process, the stage of generalization further involves a return to a new phase of romance, and to renewed curiosity about the phenomena that we encounter in the world, after our development of a conscious awareness of the underlying workings of the objects of our study. It must now be evident that I am here applying the doctrine of the rhythm of education and the theory of prehensions to interpret not only learning and teaching processes but also research processes. It is not that the stage of precision should always and immediately be overcome by generalization, or that it should be closed down altogether, as Wordsworth might want us to do. The overall point of Whitehead’s theory of the rhythm of education is that teachers must pace themselves, so that they do not neglect any of the rhythmic phases of learning. Romance, precision, and generalization are each essential and irreducible stages in the learning process, for intellectual progress requires balance, and is “a step by step process, achieving no triumphs of finality” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 145). Analogously, researchers, and administrators who preside over researchers, should also heed the same message. The stage of precision, in which human beings reduce phenomena and problems down to their basic building blocks so as to analyze and to resolve them, is an essential phase of academic research. Precision, involving the analysis of select questions and of delimited phenomena, is absolutely necessary in academic research. No one should welcome imprecise or vague knowledge claims, and not all concretenesses are misplaced. As such, we would do well to consider Daniel Dennett’s (1995) claim that precise explanatory cranes are to be preferred to lofty, speculative skyhooks (see pp. 73-80). Furthermore, we should not merely accept any old inquiry or discipline as serious research, no matter how many baskets are weaved. However, my point is that a researcher, especially after performing an eviscerating analysis of some phenomenon or after waging a sharp criticism of some body of doctrines, should be able to put the world back together again, and to realize the abstractions that have been created as a result of the methods of inquiry and the limitations of the concepts that have been employed. The move to generalization after a stage of precision may also involve the transformation of one-sidednesses, imbalances, and the exclusions of research findings into contrasts. It also means recognizing the limitations of our researches in the context of the vast interconnectedness of the world, namely, “of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts” (Whitehead, 1925, pp. 83) and its unfathomable complexity, potentially leading to novelty in terms of perspective, as well as to further adventures of learning and research. All in all, my point is that it is important to give romance and generalization their due season in research. Otherwise, our researches may be
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
173
said to be exercises in the reproduction of inert knowledge, rather than in the generation and advancement of genuine knowledge. To be sure, we might ask just how many new research findings, in the forms of statistical information, of medical and psychological trials, and even of abductive speculation, have enduring value, and how many of them are judged to be inadequate and are overturned upon further investigation. 2. Putting Romance and Generalization Back into Research In The Aims of Education, Whitehead warns us against the overemphasis on precision in education. He states that in our average conception of education “we tend to confine it to the second stage of the cycle; namely, to the stage of precision.” In contrast, Whitehead was concerned to emphasize equally “the ferment,” “the acquirement of precision,” and “the subsequent fruition” (1929c, p. 18), by which he means the phases of romance, precision, and generalization in the rhythm of education. Today, it is evident that precision dominates research at the university to the point of overemphasis and to the death of the sense of adventure. This can be seen in: (1) the increasing reductionism of academic research, which is, to some extent, a product of the emphasis on notions such as research-intensiveness; (2) the emphasis on money-driven research, and the erosion of academic freedom due largely to the increasing oversight that funding agencies, corporations, and administrative structures are gaining over the selection of what constitutes valid research; (3) the demands of the knowledge economy in terms of the buying and selling of research, in contrast to a system of open and free exchange of ideas; (4) the increasing specialization and fragmentation of the disciplines; (5) the emphasis on the researches of the natural sciences and the marginalization of the humanities; and (6) the devaluation of teaching. Overall, in this essay, in conjunction with Whitehead’s emphasis that “a spirit of generalization should dominate a University” (ibid., p. 25), not only as construed in regard to teaching and learning but also in relation to academic research, I argue for a fundamental re-conceptualization of academic research that has its basis in the notion of “intellectual adventure” (ibid., p. 98) and that is inclusive of the stages of romance and generalization, thereby overcoming the all-out focus on the stage of precision that is prevalent in our contemporary academic culture. Such a direction in higher education is currently necessary in order to prevent the fossilization of academic research in the stage of precision, the continued reproduction of inert knowledge, and the perpetuation of unrecognized abstractions. This novel direction will serve to refresh existing knowledge, to relieve the current unrelenting tendency toward the production of ever-increasing modes of mechanistic and technical understanding of the world, and to restore fertility to the creative process by which knowledge is generated, advanced, and disseminated.
174
ADAM C. SCARFE
I must here note that I am not arguing for the type of overstatement of either romance or generalization that would involve the censuring of scientific research that chiefly involves precision and a move toward a dogmatic emphasis on poetry. Rather, I am defending a restoration of creative fluency in the rhythm of the three phases: romance, precision, and generalization as they pertain to research. I do not expect that my arguments will provoke a paradigmatic shift in the academic culture that will see to the decentering of the focus on precision in scientific researches. However, I do hope that they contribute to the restoration of some small crumb of a balance between romance, precision, and generalization, to a sense of the value of teaching, which is an activity that is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge, and the well-reasoned speculations of some of the deeper humanities, in contrast to their literal exclusion. In addressing the overemphasis on precision in academic research from a Whiteheadian perspective, in this essay, I first make the case that a revaluation of teaching, conceived as a valuable part of the process by which knowledge is advanced, is a first, chief step in the endeavor of putting romance and generalization back into research. Second, I show that Whitehead’s theory of prehensions is well suited to be employed as an interpretive framework that can assist in the project to re-conceptualize the notion of academic research in a manner that restores balance to the stages in its rhythm. 3. The Teacher-Scholar Model, Research-Intensiveness, and the Bifurcation of Teaching and Research in the Academy Many of the debates surrounding the integration of teaching and research in Canada’s public university system have been framed in terms of two seemingly incompatible, hyphenated concepts: (1) the teacher-scholar model; and (2) research-intensiveness. On the one hand, the teacher-scholar model is a conception of scholarship in which the teaching role and the research role of professors are considered to be interdependent and of equal priority in terms of what it means to be a scholar. As defined by Lynn Taylor, the “TeacherScholar” model advances academic values that are based on the notion that “scholars in the university setting share a dual trust: to contribute to the development of their disciplines through research and scholarly writing, and to maintain the integrity of their discipline through teaching” (1993, p. 65). On the other hand, a stipulative definition of the notion of research-intensiveness might be the heightening of faculty’s research activities and productivity in relation to the development of new knowledge. To unpack this term fully, I remark that the word “intensity,” as in the notion of research-intensiveness, meaning “a deeply felt strengthening of effort,” has the same Latin root, intensus, as the words “intention” or “intentionality,” designating “being set upon [or concentrating upon] some end
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
175
or purpose,” potentially to the exclusion of other purposes. Presumably, the “intention” behind research-intensiveness is to be set even more strongly upon research projects and goals than before, possibly to the exclusion of a reference to the teaching role of faculty. The term may also connote an emphasis on the seriousness of exactitude, rigor, and precision in academic research, to the exclusion of more aesthetic and humanistic researches and domains of inquiry. Moreover, the increasing emphasis on research-intensiveness can be said to lead to a heightened demand for technical-rational knowledge (see Grundy, 1987; Habermas, 1971), to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. The concept of research-intensiveness has also been associated with the Canadian federal government’s Innovation Agenda, which involves the idea that one of the primary purposes of universities is to carry out research that will bring “new goods and services to market” (Woodhouse, 2001, p. 228), thus placing an emphasis on commercialism, money, and instrumentality in what it means to do research. The increasing motivation for research that can generate money profit, rather than for curiosity-based research, can also be said to help perpetuate the current overemphasis on precision. Not only are romance, which involves wonder and imagination, and generalization, which involves the recognition of the abstractions of research and emphasizes synthesis, deemed to be irrelevant to the demands of the monetary bottom line, but the more speculative disciplines are marginalized and deemed to be irrelevant to the demands of innovation. In this situation, the creative life-processes of human beings that are behind any innovation are treated as irrelevant for the attainment of the end, which is a marketable product or service. As such, the overriding concern for the generation of revenue attributes instrumental value, rather than intrinsic value, both to the objects of inquiry and to the creative process that constitutes research. As an aside, it is clear that the market model of education has permeated universities in other parts of the world. In places such as the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, governments today have implemented standardization practices and/or external, centralized schemes so as to maintain control over the research that is carried out by the faculties of public universities. Bureaucratic procedures of measurement and assessment have been established in order to allocate limited resources and funding in a strategic manner. In the United Kingdom, these externalized selection and control procedures are known as the research assessment or research selectivity exercises. The research selectivity exercises are “a periodic exercise conducted nationally to assess the quality of UK research and to inform the selective distribution of public funds for research” (Jenkins, 2001, p. 1). They take place “every four or five years and [are] the basis on which funds are allocated selectively to universities for their research” (Dodsworth, 1999, p. 1), yet they omit considerations of teaching quality. While the need for such selective
176
ADAM C. SCARFE
assessment has been defended as the only means to “improve research quality” and “to ensure that resources are used to best advantage” (Humphrey, 1995, pp. 19, 5), it is perhaps really a mask for the underfunding of public university systems. Such codified and calculative external systems of bureaucratic control selectively discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate research, as well as dictate what types of research can take place and what counts as new knowledge, doing so on the basis of abstract criteria of assessment. Such systems of control also typically include, for example, top-down decision making as to which academic journals researchers must publish in if they want to maintain their positions and their research grants. They also place an emphasis on technical-rational forms of knowledge which allow human beings to control their environment, rather than, for example, on deeper, more holistic, and more ecologically oriented understandings of it. Critics of the research selectivity exercises further claim that instead of talking of academic freedom of thought, an open exchange or sharing of ideas and the need to build a sound, scholarly basis for a university career, research selectivity is promoting the language of selfinterest, marketing, and entrepreneurship. (ibid., p. 26) By selecting research programs, departments, and universities in terms of their fitness (according to abstract criteria of assessment), such external evaluations have the effect of: (1) heightening the emphasis on precision in research even further; (2) generating technical-rational forms of knowledge to the neglect of other ways of knowing, for example, those belonging to practical-hermeneutic and critical-emancipatory interests (see Grundy, 1987; Habermas, 1971); (3) discriminating against those programs and institutions that are most in need of support; (4) eliminating curiosity-based or romance-initiated research; (5) legitimizing managerialism and commodifying academic labor; (6) heightening competition but damaging collegiality; (7) facilitating abdications of personal responsibility on the part of faculty with respect to the methods and the repercussions of their research; (8) diminishing academic freedom; and (9) separating research from teaching, thereby devaluing teaching and contributing to the promotion of two-tiered higher education systems, one tier oriented toward research and holding most of the resources, the other oriented toward teaching and holding few resources. Returning to the situation in Canada, it is evident that there is an imminent tension between the teacher-scholar model, in its conception of the interdependence and the equality of the teaching and research roles of faculty, and the notion of research-intensiveness, as a concentration on research and on the heightening of research productivity. Since the inception of educational development in Canadian institutions of higher education in the mid-1970s, many theorists have pointed to the existence of both a conceptual prioritization
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
177
and an actual imbalance on the part of faculty, in relation to their research and teaching roles and activities. Particularly, Bernard Trotter (1974) was among the first instructional developers in Canada to articulate that there was an imbalance between the three roles of professors, namely, between research, teaching, and academic and community service. According to him, professors overwhelmingly valued their research more highly than their teaching and their duties to institutional service, and they found it more rewarding and enjoyable. Since then, little has changed. Let me cite several prime examples of the emphasis on research to the neglect of teaching. First, there is the widespread employment of the term teaching load by faculty, as if teaching is something burdensome to them, in contrast to research, which is generally considered to be liberating and more rewarding. At the same time, few faculty members, if any, complain of a research burden (Boyer Commission, 1998, p. 15). Second, the number, the scope, and the dollar amount of the research grants available to professors dwarfs any comparison with awards for teaching. In this way, funding agencies motivate research rather than teaching. As an immanent counterclaim to these notions, one might suggest that professors receive salaries on the basis of how many courses they teach. However, in truth, this is only the case for sessional instructors and for junior faculty, who are increasingly taking on the lion’s share of teaching duties in North American universities. The salaries of senior research faculty are inflated when compared to the number of courses that junior faculty teach. Third, recently, in North America and the United Kingdom, there have been proposals to divide institutions of higher education into two classes: research institutions and teaching institutions. From these examples, it is clear that there is both an actual and conceptual bifurcation of the activities of researching and teaching, and that, in general, the academy values research more highly than it does teaching. However, instructional developers have encouraged a more unified conception of scholarship, as in the teacher-scholar model, in which it is maintained that the three scholarly activities—research, teaching, and academic and community service—have equal priority in what it means to be a scholar. The teacher-scholar model is derived, in part, from the late Ernest Boyer’s work, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990). In it, a holistic notion of scholarship is advanced. In Boyer’s conception, the teaching role and the research role are interpreted as being interdependent equals in terms of priority. And Boyer argues for a definition of scholarship that is more inclusive of teaching. He writes, “what we urgently need today is a more inclusive view of what it means to be a scholar—a recognition that knowledge is acquired through research, through synthesis, through practice, and through teaching” (Boyer, 1990, p. 24). Boyer’s stance seems to have become influential in the domain of educational development and in institutions of higher education across North
178
ADAM C. SCARFE
America, as demonstrated by the work of the Boyer Commission in the United States, and by the formal adoption of the teacher-scholar model on the part of various Canadian educational agencies, as a means to improve the quality of teaching. For instance, in a 1991 report, the Association of the Universities and Colleges of Canada concluded that “teaching is seriously undervalued in Canadian universities and nothing less than a total recommitment to it is required” (Wright and O’Neill, 1994, p. 28). The report further pointed to the need to “include teaching, as well as research activities, in the conceptualization of scholarship” (Taylor, 1993, p. 76), as Boyer suggests. Nevertheless, in many cases, institutions have paid lip service to Boyer’s theoretical model in their foundational documents, all the while maintaining a continued emphasis on research that undermines the possibility of arriving at a real balance between research and teaching. To be sure, the many incentives and distinctions that are provided to support research at the university are not, to the same extent, provided in support of teaching, and there is now an overriding expectation to acquire and to maintain externally-funded research programs. For instance, at many Canadian universities, while one criterion for receiving a Master-teacher award is a good research and publication record, the criteria for receiving a Master-researcher award includes no reference to a professor’s teaching record. Increasingly, the success of research programs, especially those with a high potentiality to generate money revenue, is becoming the major priority of professors and of universities alike, in abstraction from teaching. Another widespread presupposition regarding the logical relationship between research and teaching, which prioritizes the first and devalues the second as well as leads to the bifurcation of the two terms, is the widespread notion that the research of professors informs their teaching, whereas the teaching of professors does little to inform their research. According to Becker and Kennedy (2005), in almost all of the scholarly literature and policy documents hitherto written on the subject, the relationship between research and teaching is posited “all in terms of research enhancing teaching, ignoring any possible causality in the other direction” (p. 172). The premise here is that by doing good research, professors are able to transmit the best information to students through teaching. Thus, it is assumed that the best researchers are the best teachers. This, however, is an unproven and a highly debatable claim. Nevertheless, it is held to be the case in many policy proposals and documents concerning teaching which are disseminated by institutional administrations. 4. A Whiteheadian Conception of the Logical Contrast Between Researching and Teaching Whitehead’s 1927 address, “Universities and their Function,” responds directly to the question of the relationship between teaching and research in institutions
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
179
of higher education. In it, he offers a balanced conception of the research and teaching roles of faculty, and thus, his philosophy of education offers us novel insights which are helpful for developing an enlarged and renewed teacherscholar model. By way of four interconnected claims, Whitehead articulates how teaching substantively informs research. First, Whitehead commends faculty members who concentrate on teaching, in contrast to those who focus on academic research. He states that “it would be the greatest mistake to estimate the value of each member of a faculty by the printed work signed with his name” (1929c, p. 99), explaining that it must not be supposed that the output of a university in the form of original ideas is solely to be measured by printed [essays] and books labeled with the names of their authors. . . . In every faculty you will find that some of the more brilliant teachers are not among those who publish. Their originality requires for its expression direct intercourse with their pupils in the form of lectures, or of personal discussion. Such [teachers] exercise an immense influence; and yet, after the generation of their pupils has passed away, they sleep among the innumerable unthanked benefactors of humanity. (ibid., pp. 98-99) Here, Whitehead is challenging the assumption that the best researchers are the best teachers, simply because they are able to transmit the wealth of the knowledge that they have gained through research to students. In the passage, Whitehead is also placing into question the tendency to measure the quality of a professor’s scholarly contribution by the sheer quantity of their publications. His comments can further be extended to include assessments of their quality by the sheer dollar amounts that they have been awarded in terms of research grants. His stance might also be interpreted to raise the question as to whether incentives should be given to professors in order to improve their teaching, or to carry out research on university teaching. Certainly, a more inclusive system of promotion and remuneration might produce better teaching practices, an increase in interest in instructional development activities, and perhaps even a change in the academic culture toward an attribution of as much value to teaching as to research. Second, Whitehead makes the case that the function of faculty members is to be found neither one-sidedly in research, nor one-sidedly in teaching. He writes that universities are schools of education, and schools of research. But the primary reason for their existence is not to be found either in the mere knowledge conveyed to the student or in the mere opportunities for research afforded to the members of the faculty. . . . [Rather,] the justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between
180
ADAM C. SCARFE knowledge and the zest for life, by uniting [students] and [professors] in the imaginative consideration of learning. At least, this is the function which it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence. This atmosphere of excitement, arising from the imaginative consideration of learning, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a fact: it is invested with all its possibility. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energizing as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes. (1929c, pp. 92-93)
By the notion of the imaginative consideration of learning, Whitehead not only means the assessment of what is in actuality, for example, of fact established by past research, but also the consideration of alternative possibilities or what might be, namely, novel potentialities for knowledge, research, learning, and self-realization. And his notion of imagination here also constitutes a reference to the notion of adventure, which bespeaks of the inclusion of the phases of romance and generalization in the rhythmic educational process. One of Whitehead’s unstated premises in the passage is that the consideration of creative possibilities in terms of the development of new knowledge is the domain of the imagination. One of the main tenets of his epistemology is that while it is only by way of the conceptual reenactment of past experience that we have any imagination at all, it is the imagination that enables us to participate in “the creation of the future” (Whitehead, 1938, p. 171) and to develop alternative potentialities for the application of knowledge. A second unstated premise here is that, for the most part, the imaginative capacities of students are at their youthful prime, while professors are experienced in terms of their formal research, their thought patterns having been maturely established by their previous research. From these premises, he draws the conclusion that a university performs its function by bringing students and professors together, which generates an atmosphere of excitement that welds “together imagination and experience” (Whitehead, 1929c, p. 93). In other words, teaching provides an opportunity for researchers to step back from the precision of their more formal research activities and to be confronted by the imaginings and the impulsive speculations of students, which are essential components of the phases of romance and generalization. Hence, teaching is an important part of the creative process by which knowledge is advanced. Third, it is by way of the adventurous fusion of experience and imagination, which occurs in the interaction of professors, with their fixed intellectual habits stemming from their researches and inquiries, and students, with their plastic and imaginative minds, that existing knowledge is reconfigured and transformed, and that new knowledge is created. In short, for Whitehead, teaching is not merely the imparting of the knowledge contents of research to students. The very assumption that it does echoes the banking model of education that is much maligned by Paulo Freire. Instead, Whitehead
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
181
urges teachers to move beyond pedagogies of passive appropriation and rote learning, and must assist students, in a genuine manner, in their respective processes of educational self-realization. Whitehead is, above all, making the case that students, in learning, can and do contribute to the process by which new knowledge is generated, thrown into fresh combinations, and prevented from becoming inert. Not only that, but they teach their teachers how to be imaginative and creative in their research. In order to further clarify how this is the case, Whitehead writes, do you want your teachers to be imaginative? Then encourage them to research. Do you want your researchers to be imaginative? Then bring them into intellectual sympathy with [students, who are] at the most eager, imaginative period of life, when intellects are just entering upon their mature discipline. Make your researchers explain themselves to active minds, plastic and with the world before them; make your . . . students crown their period of intellectual acquisition by some contact with minds gifted with the experience of intellectual adventure. (Whitehead, 1929c, p. 97) Here, Whitehead is pointing out that, through teaching, the challenge for professors to explain themselves to students can lead to a reconsideration of the basic presuppositions of their disciplines, potentially leading to further inquiries. The requirement to explain, whether it comes in the form of teaching students or of responding to the evaluation and criticism of our research by scholarly peers, is a chief vehicle by which intellectual progress is made. In all instances, the challenge posed by the requirement to explain may reveal previously unscrutinized presuppositions in our own manners of thinking and previously unrealized connections between concepts and phenomena. The requirement to explain ideas to students also forces teachers to connect their disciplines and their research with life, potentially leading to novel insights in relation to their practical application. Furthermore, every repetition on the part of a teacher in terms of the presentation or explanation of even the fundamental concepts of a discipline is never exactly the same, and hence, teaching is an opportunity for the development of novel variations on existing knowledge. Again, teaching refreshes the precision of formal research by allowing romance and generalization their due season in the creative process by which knowledge is advanced. Fourth, and most importantly, is the notion that it is through professors interacting with students that their knowledge is kept fresh and alive. According to Whitehead, “knowledge does not keep any better than fish” (ibid., p. 98), meaning that knowledge, including that derived from our own researches, is continually in flux and in danger of becoming inert, namely, irrelevant, outmoded, stale, and/or rotten. Students, for whom imagination,
182
ADAM C. SCARFE
curiosity, and romance are at their prime, inject potentiality into existing knowledge, thereby preventing it from becoming inert. If given the opportunity, through their learning and their class work, students assist in the analysis, the criticism, and the synthesis of concepts, as well as in the transformation, the reconfiguration, and the creation of knowledge. They do so by interpreting imparted knowledge in light of their own lives and experience, by utilizing it, by testing it, by looking at it from a novel perspective, and by “throwing it into fresh combinations” (1929c, p. 1). Many professors, all too readily, dismiss the impulsive nature of some undergraduate learners in the articulation of their ideas. From a Whiteheadian perspective, it is precisely these rash impulses, spontaneities, and recurrences to the educational stages of romance and generalization, regardless of how preposterous they may initially seem to be, that represent the wellspring of creativity. For Whitehead, while the skill of the experienced researcher “demands repetition . . . imaginative zest is tinged with impulse” (1929a, p. 338). He suggests that “new directions of thought arise from flashes of intuition bringing new material within the scope of scholarly learning. They commence as the sheer ventures of rash speculation” (1933, p. 108). Moreover, students may take away with them selectively appropriated knowledge contents stemming from the articulations of teachers as well as the passion they have for their disciplines. But professors, in turn, appropriate students’ imaginative capacities and their fresh interpretations of past facts, research, and knowledge. From a Whiteheadian outlook, the experience of teachers and students alike has value in the process by which new knowledge is created. Teaching and learning are relational occasions in which the fusion of the perspectives of the participants generates novel potentialities for inquiry and for research. For Whitehead, students and teachers grow together and learn from each other, a process that not only contributes to the generation of knowledge, but constitutes research. As such, teaching cannot be divorced from research, and it is an important part of the process that is the advancement of knowledge. Moreover, as has been shown, teaching is an activity that provides an opportunity for the phases of romance and generalization to have their due season in the rhythm of research, in abstraction from the formal research activities of professors. These Whiteheadian claims regarding how teaching informs research are loosely supported by a survey of faculty members in economics that was carried out by Becker and Kennedy (2005). In it, faculty members were interviewed in respect to the question as to how their teaching informs their research. The responses illuminated a general consensus that teaching substantively informs research. The following responses were given. [Teaching] stimulates ideas for research. Whenever you have to explain something to someone . . . you have to think it through more thoroughly
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
183
than you otherwise would. [It] reveals holes in one’s understanding, [and] gives us ideas for [our] research. Teaching keeps research in perspective—I can think of several instances in which teaching has forced me to come to my senses and give up on a topic because I couldn’t explain why it was important. Some of my best research definitely grew out of teaching the area and having to think about how to present ideas to students in as clean and simple a way as possible. The best way to learn something is to attempt to teach it to others. There are a number of occasions when my teaching lead to research, particularly when I made statements to my class, confident of my assertion, only to discover that it did not hold up [to scrutiny], and needed full rethinking. Students [are part] of a team effort, helping me to work out my own ideas as these develop. Questions from students, both shrewd and ignorant, have led to substantive research. A bright student protested that the explanation seemed self-contradictory. On reflection, I tended to agree. Every hour spent interacting with students in the classroom makes me rethink my current research. (Becker and Kennedy, 2005, pp. 172-176) Similarly, along these lines, as one instructional development document suggests, the nexus of teaching and learning is to be considered “a process of inquiry where [teachers] and students work in partnership in the construction and dissemination of new knowledge and understanding and its application to real life situations” (Wills, 2004, p. 1), which also bespeaks the importance of treating students as co-inquirers or co-adventurers in the journey of mutual growth that is education. While Whitehead can be said to go further than these statements in making the link between teaching and research, could it be that many professors do not value their teaching because it is yet another layer in the critical scrutiny of knowledge? Teaching forces us to justify our research to active, plastic minds. It requires professors to explain themselves, to consider alternative rationalizations and explanations, as well as to descend from the ivory tower
184
ADAM C. SCARFE
and to connect the findings of their research with life. It is also these requirements that preserve and keep knowledge fresh and alive. Often, since research may be isolating, teaching is one of the only opportunities for professors to discuss and to test the hypotheses of their formal research with the help of others. In my own experience teaching critical thinking courses, I have learned quite a lot about other domains of inquiry by way of a writing exercise in which students are required to proofread, discuss, evaluate, and hand in essays from courses in other disciplines, pointing to the notion that teachers and students grow together in the educational exchange. While I have here provided a brief analysis of Whitehead’s outline of how teaching informs research, it must be asserted that teaching has intrinsic value, beyond the mere instrumental value that it has in terms of the research of professors. It would be a mistake to suggest that teaching only has value in terms of its benefits to some static notion of research that includes only the formal and privileged research of professors, where students are relegated to being a labor force in the advancement of the professor’s research program. Rather, what is important is for students to have the opportunity freely to carry out their own research, as in the notion of research-based learning, as will be alluded to in the next section of this chapter. In Whitehead’s philosophy of education, teaching and research form what he calls a logical contrast, implying that certain concepts which are said to be opposed are exhibited in their relationship in virtue of a common factor belonging to both. For him, a logical contrast involves the notion of creative synthesis and points to the idea that seemingly “opposed elements stand to each other in their mutual requirement” (1929a, p. 348). Contrary to the widespread conceptual bifurcation of the notions of teaching and researching, from a Whiteheadian perspective researching informs teaching and teaching informs researching. Researching and teaching are two pillars forming a nexus in which both activities inform, and are dependent on, each other in logical contrast. In similar fashion to Plato’s cave analogy, which is a direct analogy to education, the escaped prisoners find that there cannot be further progress in the intellectual world without returning to the cave to teach and to help liberate other prisoners. It is in virtue of the notion that researching and teaching are logically contrasting terms that a new conception of research-intensiveness may be founded. Whitehead defines the notion of intensity in his cosmology as a drive to adjust “inhibitions of opposites . . . into the contrast of opposites” (ibid., p. 109). Correspondingly, from this definition, a novel understanding of researchintensiveness might be said to emerge, one that stands in relation to Boyer’s basic conception of the teacher-scholar model. Such a novel conception of research-intensiveness might be said to provide a description of a deeply held motive on the part of professors to adjust the inhibitions of the conceived opposition between teaching and researching into a logical contrast. Like
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
185
Boyer, Whitehead emphasizes the notion of scholarship in his writings. He states that “the condition for high achievement is scholarship” (1929a, p. 338) and he argues that the faculty [of a university] should be a band of scholars, stimulating one another, and freely determining their various activities. . . . The whole point of a university . . . is to bring [students] under the intellectual influence of a band of imaginative [or adventurous] scholars.” (1929c, pp. 99-100) Here, I have presented teaching, in which professors and students are engaged in the imaginative consideration of learning, as a key opportunity for researchers to immerse themselves in the phases of the research process which exemplify the sense of adventure. In other words, teaching offers the opportunity for wonder, curiosity, and imagination, as in the phase of romance, as well as for speculation, connectedness, and synthesis, as in the phase of generalization, to enter into the process by which knowledge is generated, advanced, and disseminated. In sum, from a Whiteheadian perspective, the notions that: (1) teaching and research are mutually dependent terms; (2) they are of equal importance in the academic enterprise; and (3) teaching is an essential part of the process by which new knowledge is generated and advanced, are central in the effort to transcend the current overemphasis on precision in higher education. Teaching, especially where the emphasis is on a shared sense of adventure and on the imagination consideration of learning, belongs to the phases of romance and generalization in research, potentially bringing freshness to the knowledge that is generated by faculty in their formal researches. As such, a substantial revaluation of teaching on the part of faculty and a change in the academic culture that respects the importance of teaching is essential, if today’s all-out emphasis on precision at the university is to be overcome. 5. The Integration of Learning, Teaching, and Research In the previous section, it was shown that Whitehead’s philosophy of education provides a framework which posits not only how teaching informs and enhances research, but belongs to the process by which knowledge is generated and advanced. In this section, I demonstrate that from the basic definitions of the terms learning, teaching, and researching, we may arrive at a valid argument that provides further insight into how to conceptualize the various interconnections between these three terms. The integration that is outlined here is a further key to overcoming the overemphasis on precision in academic research. My first premise is that researching and learning are activities that
186
ADAM C. SCARFE
mutually imply one another. This is because doing research both results in learning and is itself a cumulative process of learning. At the same time, learning, and especially active learning, can be construed as an activity of seeking out new knowledge that is akin to research. On the one hand, it is by way of carrying out research that new knowledge is gained and/or learned, such that research can legitimately be viewed as a process of learning. The purpose of research or inquiry into some subject matter is to learn about it. Research involves investigation or experimentation that is aimed at the discovery and the interpretation of facts, a conscious awareness of the workings of various phenomena, and/or a revision of accepted theories or laws in the light of new facts. On the other hand, learning is a process of gaining knowledge or of understanding, usually involving active study, instruction, or experimentation, which may be construed as research. Thus, researching and learning are activities which are fundamentally intertwined. To be sure of the mutual implication of the notions of learning and researching, a scholar is commonly said to be a learned person, namely, someone who has reached some advanced stage in their researches. Whitehead refers to the notions of “scholarly learning” and “progressive learning,” (1933, p. 108) by which, for the most part, he means academic research. The interconnection between learning and researching may be said to hold regardless of whether or not research hypotheses are found to correspond with what is actual. Even if our hypotheses are falsified through experimentation, we are still learning and/or becoming conscious of the fact that a theory does not present an adequate explanation of the phenomena under consideration. My second premise is that the meaning of teaching is to assist students to learn. This understanding of what teaching is stems from an amendment to the dictionary definition of teaching as “causing another to learn.” The word “cause” implies that instrumentality is of the essence of teaching and that there is some manipulation of the learner toward some pre-specified goal, rather than involving the agency of students as participants in the process. Because the word “assist” does not have that unfortunate connotation, I am thereby using it here. The conclusion to my argument is that the meaning of the notion of teaching is exemplified in the assisting of students to do research. This conclusion also relates well to Whitehead’s statement that “education should begin and end in research” (1929c, p. 37). From this perspective, by including students in the category of people who do research, teaching can be construed as an activity that can heighten the research profiles of universities. Teachers can encourage and assist students to learn in the process of doing research, either independently or otherwise. By employing teaching methods that harness students’ own independent interests, professors can encourage higher forms of learning which may be characterized as research. Research-, inquiry-, or problem-based learning overcomes learning as
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
187
mere appropriation, memorization, and regurgitation of knowledge contents. Research-based learning aims at the development of critical consciousness. Standing in contrast to mere appropriational learning, research-based learning is self-realizational learning, in which learners are engaged in relation to subject matters of inquiry that matter to them. In research-based learning, the onus is, to a greater degree, placed on students as agents in the learning process. Students become active participants in the development of the questions of inquiry and in the answering of such questions, thereby satisfying their own curiosity. In research-based learning, because the questions of inquiry are derived, in part, from their own interests and valuations of what is important, students share in what is at stake in respect to such research. Selfrealizational or self-developmental learning, involving research, is intellectual adventure. In contradistinction from mere appropriational learning, students become set strongly upon ends or purposes of their own selection and design, and thus there is a heightening of intensity in the learning process. Certainly, learning activities which are appropriational in nature cannot be forgotten, but higher education must also move beyond them by engaging students in research in which they identify, value, and pursue their own interests, as well as develop wisdom in relation to the appropriate application of knowledge gained. Particularly, dialogical pedagogies and methods, in which the curriculum contents of courses, objectives, and assignments are, in part, selected and determined by a negotiated consensus between teachers and students, should be employed in a more widespread manner. It might further be suggested that in order to truly intensify research, institutions of higher education should become more inclusive of the valuable research that is carried out by students in the process of their learning. This means that they need, in turn, to intensify teaching by valuing teaching as the equal of researching, and as an activity that contributes to the advancement of knowledge, as well as by supporting and advancing educational development activities. It is true that “the expertise of most teaching faculty lies outside the study of human learning” (Wright and O’Neill, 1994, p. 67), but instructional development can advance teaching practices that focus on, encourage, or direct students toward critical inquiry and to do research, potentially leading to the transformation of existing knowledge and/or to the creation of new knowledge. In this way, professors can more fully incorporate research into what it means to learn, thus enhancing the holistic integration of the academic activities of teaching, learning, and researching. However, at the same time, the type of research that ought to go on in the classroom should not be the type in which there is an overemphasis on precision. Teachers must still orient themselves, in their approaches, toward maintaining a balance between the stages of romance, precision, and generalization. Furthermore, institutions of higher education should not reduce their student body into a labor force for the advancement of the research of professors or of commercially driven research interests. Rather,
188
ADAM C. SCARFE
students ought to be treated as co-inquirers and companions in the intellectual and relational adventure that is education. 6. The Relevance of Whitehead’s Theory of Prehensions to a Balanced Conception of Academic Research Another way in which to resolve the problem of the overemphasis on precision in academic research, and to put romance and generalization back into it, is to re-conceptualize the notion of research in the light of Whitehead’s theory of prehensions. The theory of prehensions involves an epistemological description of the creative life-process of organisms, and it presents an analogy to the creative process that underlies the process by which knowledge is generated and advanced, and/or the research process. In previous publications, I have argued that both learning and teaching processes can be interpreted via the theory of prehensions (see Scarfe, 2003; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c) and with reference to its description of the phases of concrescence, or of the growing together of actual occasions. It is my contention here that by interpreting Whitehead’s notion of prehending subject as “researcher,” the theory of prehensions can also assist in the elucidation of a balanced conception of research, one in which all three stages—romance, precision, and generalization—are seen to play vital roles in the creative advancement of knowledge, and in which none of the stages are neglected. From this perspective, academic research, by which new knowledge is generated, advanced, and disseminated is to be viewed as a creative process of selfrealization—an adventure of ideas that is carried out by finite human organisms, and which is to be construed as having aesthetic and intrinsic value, rather than merely instrumental or monetary value. The theory of prehensions reveals that there are three basic phases in the research process: (1) the selective appropriation of existing knowledge; (2) the creative transformation of knowledge; and (3) the self-realization and the satisfaction of curiosity. In addition, Whitehead’s theory of prehensions, in its outline of the phases of concrescence, offers much in the way of an analogy to the theory of the rhythm of education. It begins with (1) feelings of wonder and curiosity akin to the phase of romance; leading to (2) a phase of precision involving the discipline and the selectivity by which a researcher develops a conscious awareness of the workings of the phenomena in question and/or arrives consciously at the resolution to a problem; leading finally, to (3) a stage of generalization and the satisfaction of the creative process, in which there is a synthesis of the two previous stages, a recognition of the logical contrasts, and a reconnection to the whole. Here we must remind ourselves that, according to Whitehead, neither the stages pertaining to the rhythm of education, nor the phases of concrescence are to be construed simply as in a linear progression, and/or happening in time,
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
189
and/or having a specific temporal duration (see Whitehead, 1929a, p. 283). Rather, they are descriptions of the ultimate generalities of experience. It is also to be noted that there are minor eddies of each of the rhythmic phases occurring in the others, and each phase of concrescence is not to be considered strictly separate from the others (see Whitehead, 1929c, pp. 22, 27, 38). However, by focusing on the central theme of prehensive selectivity, I provide a general sketch of the relevance of the theory of prehensions to a novel conceptualization of the research process as well as to the resolution of the problem of the overemphasis on precision in research. As will be shown, the theme of prehensive selectivity pervades all three phases—romance, precision, and generalization—but operations of prehensive selectivity are at their most intense in the stage of precision, and thus exemplify it. 7. Romance and the Research Process: Wonder, Curiosity, and Imagination A. Physical and Conceptual Experience In relation to the possibility of interpreting the notion of academic research in light of the initial, romantic phase of the creative process that is described by Whitehead via the theory of prehensions, the notion of a prehension, as a feeling, an appropriation, a reception, a seizing, a grasping, a taking in, or a taking account of the data of experience, points largely to the fact that new knowledge is not generated in a vacuum. Rather, the research process starts with physical experience and with the feelings of things seen, touched, tasted, heard, and smelt. It also starts with emotional feelings, such as frustration, fear, glee, pain, pleasure, previously felt, and especially with feelings of curiosity and the ravenous hunger to satisfy it. Whitehead writes that “the objective content of the initial phases of reception is the real antecedent world, as given for that occasion [which] … is the ‘reality’ from which the creative advance starts” (1933, p. 210). The data of experience are selectively appropriated, via the fluctuating operations of positive and negative prehensions. Generally, data that claim our attention are positively prehended, and/or enter into potential contribution to our processes of self-realization, while data that do not claim our attention are negatively prehended, and/or are eliminated from further contribution to our processes of self-formation. Conceptual experience is largely the byproduct of the selective appropriation, reenactment, and reproduction of past physical experience, yet it is through the entertainment of conceptual data that novelty can be introduced. Analogously, research hypotheses are largely developed by first having selectively appropriated or prehended existing knowledge or data within a domain of scholarship. Research hypotheses are potentialities for actualization and for self-realization which may emerge from instincts, initial intuitions,
190
ADAM C. SCARFE
flashes of insight, impulses, physical experiences, and initial assessments of interest. Furthermore, research may either extend existing knowledge that is inherited from the past, or it may transform it creatively. In the creation of new knowledge, standing in contrast to the mere perpetuation of inert ideas, existing knowledge is selectively gathered, defended, criticized, overthrown, or synthesized together with other existing knowledge, or it is at least thrown into fresh combinations. In utilizing the theory of prehensions as a conceptual framework for interpreting research processes, several of the key epistemological notions that Whitehead advances are especially important to descriptions of the initial, romantic phases of the research process. B. Conceptual Valuation Whitehead’s notion of conceptual valuation is helpful in describing the processes by which scholars determine their research interests. Researchers may become aware of problems to be resolved, and/or phenomena in need of explanation, and/or they may develop their hypotheses and research aims, largely on the basis of the feelings, emotions, wonderings, and curiosities that are garnered in relation to existing knowledge, including their previous research. Conceptual valuation involves the weighing of potentialities for research and the selection of what is important, namely, what should occupy the attention of the scholar or the scientist. Conceptual valuation involves the researcher’s weighing of the value and importance of such potentialities for research in relation to their relevance for themselves, their institution, their community, their nation, and for the human race, in light of collective questions, problems, and aspirations. Some research potentialities are valued highly and are selected for investigation, while others are eliminated by negative prehensions. However, operations of conceptual valuation are sources of abstraction, since through the process of valuating and selecting research potentialities a researcher is selectively attending to a certain phenomenon or topic to the omission of an infinite welter of alternative possibilities. Contrary to the popular belief that expert researchers are omniscient, researchers have finite minds and they can neither know everything nor attend to everything. Hence, because they cannot have an exhaustive knowledge, they must select and discard. Their researches can only take into account a finite snippet of existing knowledge, and the specialization of disciplines revolves around this fact. Much is overlooked, and much remains on the peripheries of a researcher’s knowledge. Whitehead writes that “intellectual freedom issues from selection,” where “‘selection’ requires the notion of ‘this rather than that’” (1938, p. 7). However, such selectivity abstracts from an infinite, interconnected backdrop of possibilities. For the most part, a person’s first engagement with the meaning of academic freedom is the selection of a particular research focus at the outset of
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
191
writing a Masters’ or Ph.D. thesis. For some graduate students, the need to select a topic out from the vague continuum of possibilities is a long, tedious, and even debilitating one. Nevertheless, it is through processes of feeling, valuation, and selection, involving the fluctuating interplay of positive and negative prehensions, that they freely choose their subject matter of inquiry out from the infinite multitude of possible topics. This potential for scholars and inquirers to freely select their subject matters of inquiry is at the root of the notion of academic freedom. Academic freedom is the notion that inquiry can take place on most any topic of interest, chosen by way of a researcher’s own volition, within certain limitations of course. Academic freedom means the right of a scholar to express his or her ideas without constraints, which ensures the open intellectual exchange that is necessary for the advancement of knowledge. However, today, there are increasing impositions being placed on academic freedom that constrain the ability for researchers and teachers to select their topics of interest, and that diminish the sense of research as a creative process of selfrealization and/or as intellectual adventure. As mentioned previously, by tying money and promotion to the process by which research topics are selected, current external research assessment procedures, such as the research selectivity exercises in the United Kingdom, can be said to restrict the research potentialities and subject matters that scholars and scientists can decide upon and inquire into. In many respects, they interfere with academic freedom in that they diminish the advancement of curiosity-based research initiatives, thereby undercutting the necessary phase of romance in the process by which new knowledge is generated, advanced, and disseminated. The research selectivity exercises force prospective inquirers into an immediate moment of precision and they favor the technical-rational knowledge that is derived by the natural sciences over the ways of knowing in the social sciences and the humanities. This is the case since technical-rational knowledge is deemed to be the most practical and useful for society, and, hence, it is the most highly valued. Technical-rational knowledge is that form of knowledge that is largely “congruent with the agenda of the empiricalanalytical sciences” (Grundy, 1987, p. 11). It is also that form of reason by which human beings direct their “attack on the environment” (Whitehead, 1929b, p. 8). Technical-rational knowledge enables human beings to increase their control over their environment and it is the form of knowledge from which new goods and services can be most readily developed and brought to market. For example, new technological devices are generally of more interest and value to the average consumer, in terms of making life easier, than the printed, scholarly book, as well as being more lucrative. The favoritism toward technical-rational knowledge and toward marketable applications of that knowledge, to the neglect of the ways of knowing which are exemplified in the humanities, goes hand-in-hand with the overemphasis on precision in research,
192
ADAM C. SCARFE
as does the stress placed on money-based research. Undoubtedly, money influences the process by which research foci are selected. Many researchers who rely on external grants appease the type of research that is desired by corporations and by governments, rather than satisfying their own curiosity, since, in respect to the selection of research potentialities, the prospect of money may lead researchers to become inauthentic and self-interested rather than genuinely curious. The impulse to accrue money profit affects the prehending subject or the researcher in his or her valuation and selection of particular subject matters of inquiry. For example, recently a public university in Canada has supported a research project to discover methods to spot the bacterial and genetic indicators of beer spoilage. The research stands to be profitable if accurate methods are discovered and sold to private corporations so that they can, in turn, increase their own profits. While such research is not intrinsically evil, we might inquire into whether it constitutes curiosity-based research, and/or whether the knowledge that is generated from it is for the common good of the nation, and/or whether public support in the form of the use of public facilities to carry out such research is warranted. As a result, the romantic ideal of the scholar or scientist who was authentically interested and dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. The prospect of money profit potentially overrides the genuine aim of resolving humanity’s collective problems, since it may steer the attention of researchers away from such considerations. Furthermore, it must be said that the dominant forms of research today involve the intermixture of money, instrumentality, and entrepreneurship, thereby diminishing the sense of research as intellectual adventure. Conceiving value only in the economic sense, the economic model of research considers that neither the toil, the blood, the sweat, and the tears of the researcher, nor the particularities of the knowledge that is generated in the research process, add any value to the monetary bottom line. When romance, wonder, curiosity, and imagination are diminished through the overemphasis on precision, the research process ceases to be construed as a creative process of self-realization or as intellectual adventure, and instead is conceived as a static, instrumental, and mechanical enterprise without value in itself. Today, increasingly, many scholars and scientists seek to maximize their total number of publications so as to satisfy external evaluative requirements, standards for employment, and other economic and financial motivations, rather than out of any creative interest or of an authentic desire to contribute to the advancement of knowledge or to resolve collective problems. Scholars typically amass voluminous numbers of publications, many of which constitute a rehashing of previous writings—generating endless spinoffs from spinoff publications—with little in the way of creative novelty being introduced, thereby perpetuating inert knowledge. In contrast, a Whiteheadian conception of research, as interpreted through the lens of the theory of prehensions,
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
193
namely, as a creative process of self-realization and/or as intellectual adventure, offers the opportunity of restoring authentic, curiosity-based research to prominence. The notion that research is a creative process of self-realization, or, alternatively, an intellectual adventure, is not to be construed as a deviation from the scientific ideal of disinterested curiosity. According to Whitehead, there can be no intellectual progress without interest, for “interest is the sine qua non for attention and apprehension” (1929c, p. 31), and as such, no academic research can be carried out with complete indifference. Curiosity implies interest, and researchers, as finite human beings, must select their areas of inquiry, largely doing so on the basis of their own intellectual interests. Furthermore, without romantic wonder and curiosity, there would be little motive to carry out research and to pursue intellectual endeavors to begin with. As Whitehead writes, “disinterested scientific curiosity is a passion for an ordered intellectual vision of the connection of events. But the goal of such curiosity is the marriage of action to thought”—a marriage that is exemplified in the phase of generalization in which practical wisdom is developed. He continues, “no man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover” (ibid., p. 48), pointing to an underlying motivation for inquiry that is often overlooked and/or subjectively suppressed with the stress on objectivity. Since from a Whiteheadian perspective, human experience is fundamentally rooted in physical and conceptual feelings, and given that human beings, including the ones who carry out research and interpret its results, are finite creatures, researchers will undoubtedly be curious and/or passionately interested in some way. Absolute objectivity in research is impossible, but with the current overemphasis on analytic precision we often overlook this fact, and/or pay lip service to the notion of disinterested curiosity. The notion of disinterest means that research is being carried out without an excess of subjectivity. It means letting the scientific method take its course, without conscious interference, for example, by inputting unwarranted data into the results. It signifies that individual researchers should not skew their findings on the basis of what they stand to get out of them, and they ought not to be overly attached to the arrival at particular research results. It also means that the knowledge that is generated is for knowledge’s sake and for the satisfaction of curiosity. In other words, it means treating knowledge and the process by which it is advanced as ends-in-themselves, rather than as a means to some predetermined subjective end, such as personal money profit. Especially, researchers ought to remain disinterested in the economic sense. But with the rise of corporate science, today, much research is being guided and scrutinized with economic interests in mind. Increasingly, research findings are being selectively edited by corporate officials so that they support the interests of their companies. When economic interests are at stake, corporate
194
ADAM C. SCARFE
officials may feel compelled, for example, to minimize the appearance of the ecological impact of their industrial practices, to downplay the validity or the scope of the findings, and/or to falsify data outright. In sum, there is no conflict between the notion of adventure and disinterested inquiry, taken in the realistic sense that I am describing here. The notion of adventure should not be interpreted to imply an excessive input of subjectivity into the research process. The notion that research is intellectual adventure, namely, a creative process of self-realization involving operations of valuation and selectivity, is, rather, a simple statement that researchers choose their own subject matters to investigate, that they are innovative organisms who help to advance knowledge, and that they strive to satisfy their own human curiosity in the process. C. Conceptual Reversion Whitehead’s notion of conceptual reversion applies to the understanding of how novelty is introduced into existing knowledge and how it is thrown into fresh combinations. By way of the notion of conceptual reversion, Whitehead shows how some data are kept by the prehending subject as potentialities for actualization, some are modified with reference to component elements derived from other sources, while others are eliminated outright. The notion of conceptual reversion can be said to provide a description of how research potentialities are conceptually felt and are synthesized with other data to form research potentialities of even higher value. In other words, it may involve the merging of existing sets of knowledge and information, or the modification of hypotheses with reference to other prehended data, information, and/or research findings, in order to achieve research potentialities of higher value which are, for the most part, selected over potentialities of lower value. Conceptual reversion is the shuffling of the conceptual deck of knowledge into a novel order, so to speak, and it is an essential activity in the prevention of the perpetuation of inert knowledge. It may be described as the creative injection of alternative contents and imaginative possibilities into existing knowledge and/or the weaving together of existing and potential knowledge in order to form novel hypotheses. It is through processes which are akin to conceptual reversion that researchers can add value to research potentialities, although this is not to be construed in the economic sense of this term. It may be through rash trial and error, random speculation, discussion with others, or through imaginative reflection that novelty is injected into research hypotheses. Without the allowance for a substantive, imaginative phase of romance, in which processes of conceptual reversion take place, the hypotheses that are formulated tread the same old tracks as existing knowledge and little innovation and creativity is injected. Moreover, as was argued in a previous section of this essay, teaching, involving the adventurous fusion of the
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
195
researcher’s experience and the active imaginations of students, can be said to be a means by which to stave off inert ideas and to throw existing knowledge into fresh combinations, analogous to operations of conceptual reversion. The current devaluation of teaching can be said to detract from the possibility of developing richer potentialities for research and knowledge, thereby contributing to the undercutting of romance and of generalization in research and to the overemphasis on precision. At the same time, without an engagement in a subsequent phase of precision, in which focused analysis and experimentation take place, the hypotheses and the theories which are generated in the phase of romance cannot be verified as either true or false, and the advancement of genuine knowledge cannot take place. 8. Precision and the Research Process: Analysis, Criticism, and Selectivity A. Transmutation In relation to the phases of concrescence that correspond with the phase of precision, the notions of transmutation and of transmuted feelings are a key to understanding why the current overemphasis on precision in research leads to the generation of abstractions, which ought to be recognized in a subsequent stage of generalization. The notion of transmutation is explained by Whitehead as the process by which a prehending subject ascribes selected conceptual data and/or eternal objects to actualities and/or sets of actualities. In other words, it is the attribution of concepts to entities in the actual world, thus acquiring them as referents, namely, as the logical subjects of investigation. The notion of transmutation is suggestive of the mental operations which underlie taxonomical classification, by which research objects are organized via categories and are thereby analyzed with reference to such concepts. It is also an explanation of how abstractions, which accrue as a result of inductive reasoning and of the working out of the universal / particular dichotomy, may enter into our inquiries. In transmutation, there is the conceptual elimination of the welter of differences and discordances between individual entities, as well as of their relationships to others, operations which are at the root of what is meant by reductionism. For example, for an entomologist, members of the species of moth called Enargia decolor have genitalia that enable them to reproduce with each other, to the exclusion of members of other species. In this way, we consider each individual to belong conceptually to one class of entities. But the particular members that are said to make up that class or species are not all exactly the same in respect to other essential and accidental characteristics, for instance, in terms of wingspan, color, and size. There are also hybrid moth varieties, which are intermediates between distinct classes, and which are more
196
ADAM C. SCARFE
difficult for entomologists to classify. For the most part, an individual moth is a distinct instantiation of its species, but in reality it is not simply identical with all other members of its species, just as no two human beings are exactly the same. In any case, operations of transmutation involve the unification of diverse individuals into a conceptual whole. The many are conceptually morphed or reduced into a unified whole and are thereby experienced as one. At the same time, transmutation involves the elimination of the differences between such individuals, and is a source both of instrumentality and of the abstractions of essentialism in research. Through operations of transmutation, particular phenomena are experienced via the mediation of concepts, rather than directly. In research in which there is an overemphasis on precision, the operations of transmutation create abstractions which may go unrecognized by researchers. As Whitehead writes, modern scholarship and modern science “canalize thought and observation within predetermined limits, based upon inadequate metaphysical assumptions dogmatically assumed” (1933, p. 118). For Whitehead, every science presupposes a metaphysic. But scientists rarely critically interrogate the metaphysical presuppositions that linger in their imaginations (ibid., p. 129) and which underlie their methods of inquiry and their research findings. As such, Whitehead warns that we risk committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when we confuse our constructed, conceptual schemas with the way things are, and when we neglect the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely insofar as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored [when] . . . we restrict [our] thought to these categories. (1929a, pp. 7-8) Overall, research and intellectual endeavor cannot take place without operations of transmutation. Such operations are the means by which the objects of inquiry are objectified. Whitehead writes that “apart from transmutation our feeble intellectual operations would fail to penetrate into the dominant characteristics of things” (ibid., p. 251). But transmutation inevitably distorts the way that things are in and of themselves. In other words, the scientific analysis of phenomena via the mediation of conceptual schemes, in which certain metaphysical assumptions hold sway, is one of the chief ways by which research, as Wordsworth suggests, “Misshapes the beauteous forms of things” (1888, p. 145). Researchers must further recognize the abstractions caused, for instance, by the assumption that the world can be adequately described with reference to the metaphysical concepts of substance, accident, essence, and matter.
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
197
B. Propositions and Propositional Feelings Whitehead’s notions of propositions and of propositional feelings lend themselves well to considering some of the abstractions that are created by way of the use of language in research. Propositions are initially potentials for objectifying actual entities with reference to certain qualities and relations. Propositions link the logical subjects, which are indicated through transmutation, to selected predicates. For Whitehead, a proposition is “the possibility of that predicate applying in that assigned way to those logical subjects” (1929a, p. 258). All knowledge claims are advanced by way of symbolic and linguistic expression in the form of propositions. In inquiring, writing, and publishing, researchers must construct and coordinate a multitude of propositions. Propositions are used by researchers as building blocks for hypotheses, syllogisms, deductive and inductive arguments, experimentation, and the testing of theories. To be sure, Whitehead claims that “an argument consists in a preliminary grouping of propositions, together with a deduction of other propositions” (1941, p. 96), and much of the work of research consists in the testing of the truth or falsity of initially hypothetical propositions and the weighing of the soundness or cogency of arguments. For Whitehead, language is the vehicle of expression and/or the articulation of meaning. Language constitutes the storehouse of knowledge, but it is also the result of a high level of abstraction from immediate experience. Language is the most important tool in research, but Whitehead makes the case that, in many respects, it is extremely vague and/or “hopeless[ly] ambiguous” (1929a, p. 196). He states that even “the little words ‘is,’ ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘together,’ are traps of ambiguity” (Whitehead, 1941, p. 96). The use of language further presupposes particular manners of division and decision of the extensive continuum that constitutes our world, some of which verge on doing violence to its true character. Whitehead states, “there is not a sentence which adequately states its own meaning. There is always a background of presupposition which defies analysis by reason of its infinitude” (ibid., p. 73). Research could not occur without language, but its use also implies that metaphysical abstractions and assumptions, for example, substance-accident metaphysics, enter into the research process. As such, from a Whiteheadian perspective, when it comes to evaluating the intellectual rigor of the precision of language, logic, and mathematics, the pretense to “exactness is a fake” (ibid., p. 74), especially when such limitations and abstractions go unacknowledged. With the current overemphasis on precision in research, there is need to recognize the limitations and the abstractions created by language, so as to arrive at a more adequate description of the phenomena that are studied. However, from the Whiteheadian perspective, which recognizes clearly such limitations and emphasizes that the stages of romance, precision, and generalization must have their due season in the rhythm of education, there is
198
ADAM C. SCARFE
no need to embrace the radical deconstructionist project of dismantling the possibility of arriving at any stable knowledge whatsoever. C. Prehensive Selectivity and Critical Consciousness The advancement of knowledge is largely made possible through the activities of selection, of criticism, and of judgment. In the theory of prehensions, Whitehead describes such operations as occurring at the higher levels of experience. His definition of the notion of consciousness highlights the abstractions inherent to the overemphasis on precision in research. Consciousness has its basis in what he calls intellectual feelings, and, more accurately, in comparative feelings and in negative intuitive judgments. For Whitehead, consciousness is “the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base” (1929a, p. 267). It is the height of experiential awareness, although it involves the mediation of what is experienced by concepts and propositions. As Whitehead describes, intellectual feelings are comprised of feelings of “the contrast between a nexus of actual entities and a proposition with its logical subjects members of the nexus” (ibid., p. 266). Consciousness implies the judgment of the contrast between potentiality and actuality, namely, between propositions and the actualities or the logical subjects indicated. For him, operations of negation, negative prehension, elimination, exclusion, and selectivity, are “the particular characteristic[s] of consciousness” (ibid., p. 274). Operations of prehensive selectivity are at their most intense at this level, as exemplified by activities of criticism and judgment of propositions and knowledge claims. With reference to comparative feelings, propositions are judged to be true or false on the basis of whether or not they correspond with what is actual. Whitehead defines truth as the absence of incompatibility between, or of the conformity of a proposition to, the actualities that are being referred to. A false claim is one in which there is a reasoned judgment of incompatibility between propositions and the objectified nexus. A true claim is generally one in which there is a reasoned judgment that there is a correspondence between the proposition and the actualities in question. Or, there may also be a suspension of judgment where the proposition remains untested and/or is untestable in respect to its potential correspondence with the actualities in question. Whitehead writes that suspended judgments are “weapons essential to progress” (ibid., p. 275), especially where no contemporary experiment is available or can been carried out that can prove whether the hypotheses are true or false. Abductive reasoning in the sciences occurs in this spirit. In any event, the theory of prehensions is extremely useful in terms of its examination of the nature of the various theories of truth, such as correspondence, coherence, and consensus theories, which are criteria of selection in the advance of knowledge. And the culmination of a scientific research project may involve the
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
199
development of novel consciousness in terms of understanding the workings of the phenomena in question or in terms of a falsification of hypotheses. The operations of judgment, selectivity, and criticism are the crux of the moment of precision in the advancement of knowledge. In fact, from the perspective of the phase of precision, such operations can be considered the efficient cause of the advance of knowledge. Whitehead writes that “criticism is the motive power in the advance of thought” and that the “business of universities is . . . its activity of criticism” (1941, pp. 87, 148). Criticism is the driving force in scholarship. It is central to all analysis. Without criticism there would be no motive power for inquiry, no way to determine which knowledge claims are true and which ones are false. Criticism is essentially a process of selection of ideas, and it is by way of operations of negation, and of negative prehension, that researchers make the discriminations, divisions, decisions, distinctions, and classifications which are central to the meaning of knowledge. The word “criticism” is derived from the Greek root, krinein, meaning “to separate, decide, or judge,” and “to sieve, discriminate, or distinguish,” pointing to the intensity of negative prehensions at this level. However, with the overemphasis on precision in research, when such critical judgments are held to be the final word, or when the truth is held to be nothing but the content of such judgments, abstraction, oversimplification, rigidity, narrowness, and one-sidedness are typically present, which do violence to what is. Pointing to the necessity of a subsequent stage of generalization in which such abstractions and one-sidednesses are overcome, Whitehead writes that while the right coordination of negative prehensions is one secret of [intellectual] progress, . . . unless some systematic scheme of relatedness characterizes the environment, there by will be nothing left whereby to constitute vivid prehension of the world. (1929a, p. 254) Although the intellectual operations of criticism and judgment play a leading role in the advancement of knowledge, they are not the only factors. The overemphasis on critical negativity, to the neglect of any constructive thought, as exemplified by radical deconstructionism, cannot of itself generate new knowledge. Rather, the advancement of knowledge depends on the creation of hypotheses and the construction of theories in the first place, as well as on positive valuations of data and of truth claims in the overall selection of ideas, pointing to the importance of the phases of romance and generalization in the rhythm of research. As with any knowledge claim, there is also need for the evaluation of counter-claims and alternative perspectives, as well as to adjust onesidednesses into logical contrasts, so as to give a more accurate and fair picture of reality, such syntheses taking place in a subsequent phase of generalization. This does not imply that no judgment is stable and that we should always
ADAM C. SCARFE
200
embrace the grey areas in research, but it does mean that researchers needs to carry out a further step of recognizing the limits of their claims in light of the vast complexity of the world that confronts us. Not only does the individual researcher engage in his or her own operations of selection in the process of generating new knowledge, but also there is an assessment by his or her peers in the intellectual community, and by society in general. As such, the advancement of knowledge is a thoroughly relational endeavor. New ideas always undergo critical scrutiny both by peers and by society. Ideas, hypotheses, theories, and claims that survive are “selected and preserved” (Richards, 1987, p. 576), while the ideas, hypotheses, theories, and claims that do not survive are held as irrelevant and/or are eliminated and discarded. The process of selection, both in intellectual and social spheres, that is part and parcel of the phase of precision in academic research, is described lucidly by Robert Richards (1987). Richards is a proponent of an evolutionary interpretation of intellectual progress which has its basis in organic selection, a notion that appears to be commensurate with Whitehead’s concept of prehensive selectivity. Richards states, rational appraisal by the scientific community tests the mettle of new ideas. The survivors are incorporated into the advancing discipline. The social and professional conditions of the discipline also work to cull ideas, sanctioning some and eliminating others. Both of these selection processes—selection against intellectual standards and against social demands—may act either in complementary fashion or in opposition. But both must be heeded . . . if one is to understand the actual history of a science. (ibid., p. 577) Richards continues, ideas and ultimately well articulated theories are originally generated and selected within the conceptual domain of the individual scientist. Only after an idea system has been introduced to the scientific community . . . does public scrutiny result. To the extent, however, that the problem environments of the individual and the community coincide, individually selected ideas or theories will be fit for life in the community. (ibid., p. 582) We might cite the discrepancies in terms of the reception of global warming science in the intellectual and social spheres as an illustration of the distinct levels of selection that are at work in the process by which knowledge is advanced. Furthermore, there is fallibility in respect to judgments as to which research findings are to be received more favorably than others. Even when some findings are widely received, valuable alternatives and minority
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
201
perspectives are always being generated, and are sometimes suppressed. We might cite the fact that the significance of Gregor Mendel’s genetic experiments was not widely recognized by biologists until well after his death. Or we may cite the fact that today biologists are only beginning to understand how the widespread adherence to the synthesis of natural selection and Mendelian genetics, alternatively known as the modern synthesis, which has held sway since the 1930s, has served to omit alternative researches, for example, into the potential directive influence of the behavior of individual organisms on the subsequent course of morphological variation in their species (see Baldwin, 1902). While Darwin himself was open to such researches, some neo-Darwinists have sought to stifle these investigations, through a rigid and dogmatic adherence to a single perspective, to the exclusion of all others. The point is that even the most well established knowledge claims, namely, those which are held to be the most accurate and precise, as well as the paradigms that are in vogue in any discipline, should not simply be recognized as the truth, inertly construed. Research would not ever occur if researchers were contented that the final word had been arrived at in any given domain of investigation. Researchers do well to develop novel hypotheses which challenge the respective dogmas of their disciplines and to investigate phenomena from a variety of different perspectives, but to do so requires phases of romance and generalization, and not merely precision. Not only are ideas always in perpetual process, but the criteria by which they are evaluated are also in flux. Richards writes, in construing the acquisition of knowledge in science . . . one must suppose that selection components operate in accord with certain essential criteria: logical consistency, semantic coherence, standards of verifiability and falsifiability, and observational relevance. These criteria may function only implicitly, but they form a necessary subset of criteria governing the development of scientific thought throughout its history. Without such norms, we would not be dealing with the selection of scientific ideas. . . . It should be stressed, however, that these selection criteria are themselves the result of previous idea generation and continuous selection, processes by means of which science has descended from protoscience. . . . The complete set of selection criteria define what in a given historical period constitutes the standard of scientific acceptability. (1987, p. 582) This passage, with its focus on intellectual selection processes, further illuminates Whitehead’s descriptions of the intensity of operations of prehensive selectivity at the higher levels of experience. The selection criteria, referred to above, are standards for the judgment of whether new claims to knowledge are based on sound or cogent argumentation, and whether or not they genuinely constitute new knowledge. It must be recognized that such
202
ADAM C. SCARFE
selection criteria are themselves claims to knowledge that are both developed and are potentially fallible. They are, to a certain extent, normative, differing in the intellectual and social realms. And they are both subject to, and dependent on, the process by which knowledge advances. Moreover, sometimes they are in need of adjustment, especially when they create abstractions, pointing to the importance of the phase of generalization in academic research. 9. Generalization and the Research Process: Connectedness, Synthesis, and Speculation The phases of concrescence that pertain to the satisfaction of the creative urge can be said to be analogous to the stage of generalization in the research process. For the most part, the phase of generalization involves a step back from the specialized focus of our inquiries toward considerations of the bigger picture. The phase of generalization involves an overcoming of the abstractions which arise as a result of the sharp selections, divisions, decisions, and distinctions that are generated in the phase of precision. In the phase of generalization, there is a transition from analysis, exactitude, criticism, and selectivity to synthesis, speculation, and connectedness. The contribution to knowledge that a new discovery makes in that it satisfies the demands of both intellectual and social scrutiny is generally nonregressive, meaning that it cannot be overturned. New ideas are not static. They can be further modified, improved, and they are in constant need of refinement. However, an idea that satisfies the established evaluative criteria and is selected or accepted by the intellectual and social communities generally means that it constitutes genuine knowledge. While Aristotle’s Categories, Copernicus’ heliocentric thesis, Kant’s system of transcendental idealism, or Darwin’s theory of natural selection are all intellectual developments which are well over a hundred years old, they represent instances of genuine knowledge. That is to say, they are part of the canon of humanity’s intellectual achievement and its understanding of the world. However, they cannot be said to represent the whole story. Rather, they offer partial truths that are dependent on the contexts within which they were developed. To some extent, if they are to retain their relevance, such knowledge requires continued scholarship and scientific research which reinterprets them in light of new findings, throws them into fresh combinations, and injects them with creative novelty. A. Satisfaction and Objective Immortality Whitehead uses the notion of objective immortality to designate the notion of the general irreversibility of any attainment of value in the temporal world, which is the culmination and the satisfaction of the process of self-realization of an organism. The concept of objective immortality can also be used to depict
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
203
the status of the discovery as a stubborn fact, and the attainment of genuine knowledge in the research process and, to some degree, the satisfaction of the researcher’s curiosity. It can further assist in the description of the processes by which researchers make their findings public, publishing them in journals and books, as well as by giving presentations. As objectively immortal, the researcher’s work “becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming” (Whitehead, 1929a, pp. xiii-xiv). As such, the researcher’s “own activity in self-formation passes into its activity of other-formation” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 193), and it becomes “a datum for succeeding generations” (Sherburne, 1966, p. 206) of researchers. Their scholarship may be utilized by subsequent inquirers in their research. By making their knowledge public and by imparting their knowledge to others, researchers contribute to the process by which further novelties are generated by others, pointing the notion that the advancement of knowledge involves mutual growth. This relational perspective on research contrasts sharply with the mechanical view of the research process in which academics compete with one another, amassing publications only for the sake of satisfying external evaluation standards and for gaining financial rewards, rather than out of a desire to satisfy their own curiosity and to contribute genuinely to the advancement of knowledge. In today’s knowledge economy, it is common for academic journals to sell the published work of researchers. The increasing drive toward the marketization of knowledge in academia contributes to the problem of the overemphasis on precision. This is the case since it makes knowledge increasingly less accessible to other researchers and to the rest of society, as well as diminishes the possibility of an open exchange of ideas to occur, which is so vital to the advance of knowledge. It also dampens the possibility for a stage of generalization to take root. The overemphasis on precision has led to a situation where specialization and insularity dominate today’s academic culture, rather than joint adventure and collective realization. Increasingly, knowledge is kept only in the treasure chests of the ivory tower, locked and heavily guarded. Typically, the specialized knowledge that is generated by the researcher is only available, accessible, and understood by a handful of other specialists. It may cost in excess of thirty dollars to access a single scholarly journal article of five pages online, and it is estimated that the average journal article is read seriously only by about six people. Obviously, if the aim is the creative advancement of knowledge, then this is not a healthy state-of-affairs. Just like gold, when it is not attended to, knowledge can become tarnished, and it is next to useless when it is not accessible to the wider public. The lack of a phase of generalization is perhaps a main reason why, for example, global warming science has not been presented to society in a coherent manner, or why proposals to deal with the problem of global warming, such as by cap-and-trade systems or carbon taxes, are so foreign to
204
ADAM C. SCARFE
the average citizen. Without a phase of generalization in research, average citizens cannot penetrate the precise, technical language of academic research and they are largely alienated from the advance of knowledge. Average citizens are so alienated from the meaning of scholarship and from new knowledge that they may instead embrace ignorance, subjectivism, relativism, nihilism, consumerism, and/or archaic or reactionary systems of belief in order to fill the vacuum. Precise academic research is largely deemed to be irrelevant to the life of the average citizen, because its importance is not communicated to the public with an adequate spirit of generalization. To make matters worse, most researches, and the earmarked funding which supports them, involve inquiries into the macroscopic and microscopic levels of reality, and not in the everyday, practical realm of average persons who have nine-to-five jobs and who struggle with their finances. Most scholarly and scientific inquiries simply do not touch their lives and, as a result, they are useless to them. For these reasons, the average person is not able to participate in the grand adventure of wonder, curiosity, and inquiry in which academics are so privileged to participate and that is part of the enduring character of humanity. A reemphasis on generalization in the academic culture would involve a reconnection with the notion that faculty should engage in service to the public as a requirement of their profession. Exemplifying the stage of generalization, public occasions, such as philosophy cafés and other outreach events in which researchers seek to communicate their ideas to the public, are prime instances where researchers can engage with members of the community in relation to the knowledge that they generate, its practical application, and the implications of its application. However, today, it is clear that expert scholars and scientists are given awards for their specialized research, without ever having to engage the rest of society as to its relevance. For researchers, such community engagement may involve a further confrontation with the wonder, the curiosity, the imagination, and the rash speculations of plastic minds, refreshingly giving romance and generalization their due season in the research process. B. The Importance of Connectedness, Holistic Reflection, and Philosophical Speculation As it pertains to academic research, it is in the stage of generalization that the following questions are asked. What does this specialized research all come to? What has been left out in the analysis? What are the limitations arising from the abstractions that have been assumed in the research? What conceptual frameworks and/or metaphysical assumptions have been present in the analysis? How does this finding connect to the findings of other disciplines and to the whole picture of reality that our patchwork of knowledge seeks to paint? What is the usefulness of this knowledge in practical life? What ethical questions arise in the process of this research or as a result of it? However,
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
205
today, it is commonplace for research to begin and end in precision. And, as such, these more holistic questions, belonging to the stage of generalization, tend to be omitted. The conscious attention to a subject matter and the reductionism requisite for its analysis, which are part and parcel of the stage of precision, often preclude any further stage of generalization. Today, it is the norm for researchers to avoid any demand for reconnecting their new knowledge to the whole, any inkling of a suggestion of the limitations of their claims, any synthesis with the findings of other disciplines, or any speculation as to the larger importance of the findings. For Whitehead, “the essential connectedness of things can never be safely omitted” (1933, p. 154), because every entity or phenomenon studied requires its environment in order to exist, and every environment is the product of an infinitude of concurrent factors that a finite mind cannot fully take into account. Since the reductionism belonging to the stage of precision involves delimiting and objectifying phenomena, both spatially and temporally, it severs, conceptually, the interrelational and extensive processes among entities, and it narrows the evidences entertained. Researchers can study a phenomenon in its individuality and particularity, but to do so generally implies that they are abstracting from the totality. In addition, the physical sciences have a habit of reducing the workings of the entity to selected components, and of omitting any consideration of factors beyond them. One such omission, previously cited, is in the field of biology. In the twentieth century, the dominance of the neo-Darwinist interpretation that evolutionary processes involve nothing but the concurrence of genetic mutation and natural selection, to the elimination of any consideration of the potential influence of the behavior of individual organisms on the course that morphological variation will take in subsequent generations of their species. The employment of reductionist methods, without any reflection beyond them, also contributes to the advancement of a mechanistic understanding of the world. The analytic divisions belonging to such methods are conceptually grafted onto the world in the process of research and they do not in fact exist as realities. Furthermore, causal explanation, especially via simple one-to-one causal correlations, assumes a metaphysical view of the world as primitively divided, instead of as a relational continuum or as a causal nexus. As Whitehead observes, even the notion of “‘causal connection’ is merely one typical instance of the universal ruin of relatedness” (1919, p. 12), pointing to the fact that we do not observe separations between entities (this point being a reversal of Humean skepticism), yet such key concepts do not get properly scrutinized by science (see Scarfe, 2006). Rather, they are tacitly assumed in science. Furthermore, according to him, it is because of the reductionism of the technical-rational sciences and the neglect of connectedness that “the concrete world has slipped through the meshes of the scientific net” (1933, p. 18). A reemphasis on connectedness and on reflection on the whole would help to
206
ADAM C. SCARFE
alleviate some of the abstractions arising from the overemphasis on precision and the neglect of generalization. The importance of allowing for a due season of generalization in research, after the phase of precision has run its course, is further summed up by Whitehead’s statement that human knowledge is a process of approximation. In the focus of experience there is comparative clarity. But the discrimination of this clarity leads into the penumbral background. There are always questions left over. (1941, p. 93) In other words, the sheer complexity of the world makes all pretenses to absolute mastery vacuous, and the arrival at new knowledge means, at its best, that we have arrived at a partial knowledge of the workings of things. Our finitude is why we inquire in the first place. In relation to the fragmentation of knowledge occurring as a result of the overemphasis on specialization and precision, Whitehead writes, the tone of mind [typically found in scholarship] leans [toward] a fundamental negation. For scholars the reasonable topics in the world are penned in isolated regions, this subject-matter or that subject-matter. . . . Your thorough-going scholar resents the airy speculation which connects his own patch of knowledge with that of his neighbor. (1933, p. 108) However, Whitehead’s emphasis on connectedness in his philosophy of education and in the theory of prehensions bespeaks the importance of fostering interdisciplinary scholarship, namely, a bringing together of inquirers and of academic domains, thereby arresting the perpetuation of the fragmentation of domains of investigation which is occurring today. Especially, interdisciplinary study and a unification of domains of scholarship, bringing the distinct knowledge and perspectives of all the various disciplines to bear on issues of global concern, such as on the environmental crisis, is what is desperately needed. The prospective unification of the various disciplines for the sake of a joint adventure to tackle collective problems would be an essential element in any transition from the all-out focus on precision and specialization to a phase of generalization. While specialization is essential in intellectual endeavor, the phase of generalization ensures that disciplinary specialization and/or “specialism” (Whitehead, 1929c, pp. 10, 13, 49) is not a synonym for narrowness of focus and of evidence. Rather, it ensures the collective intellectual adaptability that is essential to address real human challenges. Whitehead believes that the natural sciences should operate conjointly with philosophy. He writes that the typical “exclusion of [philosophical] inquiry is such a pity” since philosophical inquiry constitutes “a necessary critique of the
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
207
worth of science, to tell us what it all comes to” (1929c, p. 121), and that “even from the point of view of the special sciences, philosophic systems with their ambitious aims at full comprehensiveness are not useless. They are the way in which the human spirit cultivates its deeper intuitions” (1933, p. 144). An engagement with philosophy on the part of the natural sciences can help to challenge and to diminish the abstractions that arise in scientific research. As Whitehead writes, philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double one, first of harmonizing them by assigning to them their right relative status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe, and thereby the formation of more complete schemes of thought. . . . [Philosophy] confronts the sciences with concrete fact. (1925, p. 87) The importance of philosophy and of the deeper humanities to the sciences is also defended by Whitehead as he writes that “the science of the future depends for its ready progress upon the antecedent elucidation of hypothetical complexities of connection, as yet unobserved in nature” (1933, p. 152). Certainly, given today’s ecological imperative, philosophy can assist the sciences to consider the wider impacts that technical-rational knowledge and its various applications might have on the interconnected whole that constitutes the biosphere. For instance, we might ask: how does the genetic modification of crops and the use of terminator seeds impact upon the environment and our health as consumers of food? Can it be considered genetic pollution, which is akin to the other types of pollution of our air and water? Because technology has evolved to the point where anyone can essentially blow up the world with the click of a switch, either accidentally or intentionally, scientific knowledge needs to be scrutinized in terms of the potential impacts of its use. And this requires recourse to the complexities of connection among entities and among phenomena. While science and engineering are consistent in developing new marketable technologies, philosophical inquiry into the ethical questions which need to be considered in accompaniment with their advent and their use, is essential. However, today, it is typical for research that is carried out under the rubric of the overemphasis on precision to be able to answer the “can we?” question, to the omission of the “should we?” question by which wisdom in relation to the appropriate use of knowledge is developed. The interpretation of the research process via the theory of prehensions and with reference to the notion of adventure, can be said to conceive it as inseparable from the researcher’s own creative process, rendering personal abdications from ethical responsibility on the part of researchers for their researches inauthentic. In further emphasizing the importance of the stage of generalization elsewhere, Whitehead claims that both precise scholarship and adventurous
208
ADAM C. SCARFE
speculation are necessary for intellectual progress. He writes that “pure speculation, undisciplined by the [precise] scholarship of detailed fact or the scholarship of exact logic, is on the whole more useless than pure scholarship, unrelieved by speculation,” thereby giving precision its due. However, his overall argument is for a “proper balance of the two factors” which ensures “progressive learning” (ibid., p. 108). Whitehead argues that “one aspect of the adventure of ideas is [the] story of the interplay of speculation and scholarship” and that “for progress, both are necessary” (ibid., pp. 109, 108). He further suggests that “the world will again sink into the boredom of drab detail of rational thought,” rather than being lifted up by the excitement of adventure, “unless we retain in the sky some reflection of light from the sun of [speculation]” (1933, p. 118). As such, a renewed emphasis on speculation is another key component both in the overcoming of the endless reproduction of inert ideas by way of the continual emphasis on precision, and in the effort to put romance and generalization back into research. Again, with reference to the finitude of human comprehension and to the limitations of any knowledge claim in expressing the real, as well as to reflections on the whole and the novel speculations belonging to the phase of generalization, the satisfactions of the research process are inevitably fleeting. As such, the phase of generalization leads naturally to further hunger pangs of wonder and curiosity, to a renewed phase of romance, to a craving for answers to questions extending from the research just carried out, to a renewed impetus for further inquiry, and to renewed adventures of creativity and research. The preceding sketch has demonstrated that the creative process by which knowledge is advanced and/or the research process can be interpreted in light of the theory of prehensions. Such an interpretation solidifies the conception of research as an intellectual adventure of self-realization, in contrast to a mechanical exercise in the reproduction of inert knowledge, which ensures its importance, in the Whiteheadian sense of the term. It assists in the recognition of the limitations and the abstractions that are produced as a result of the overemphasis on the phase of precision in research, and which arise largely as a result of the intensity of the operations of prehensive selectivity therein. Furthermore, the interpretation of the research process via the theory of prehensions assists in the endeavor of arriving at a novel balance of romance, precision, and generalization in the rhythm of research. 10. Conclusion: Research as Intellectual Adventure As part of the effort to transcend the overemphasis on precision in research that is present in today’s academic culture and which leads to the death of adventure, this essay has drawn upon Whitehead’s philosophy of education and his process-relational epistemology. It first made the case that teaching is an important component in the research process by which knowledge is generated
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
209
and advanced. As a counterpoint to the precision of formal research activities, teaching offers the opportunity for faculty and students to be immersed in the imaginative and speculative phases of romance and generalization—phases that are just as vital as that of precision in the creative process by which knowledge is advanced. It has also argued that the scholarly activities of learning, teaching, and researching form an interconnected triad, the realization of which further assists in the project to arrive at a greater balance of the rhythmic phases of romance, precision, and generalization in academic research. Second, through an interpretation of the research process via Whitehead’s theory of prehensions, I have advanced a re-conceptualization of the notion of research, one that can assist both in the overcoming of the all-out focus on the stage of precision that is prevalent in contemporary academic culture and in the restoring of its three rhythmic phases to balance. By focusing on the theme of prehensive selectivity, this interpretation has elucidated many of the limitations and abstractions that are created as a result of the overemphasis on precision— on analysis, criticism, and selectivity—in the process by which knowledge is generated and advanced. In so doing, it has pointed to the need for recognizing the importance of wonder, curiosity, and imagination, as well as connectedness, synthesis, and speculation, in research, which are respectively exemplified in the phases of romance and generalization. In sum, the Whiteheadian re-conceptualization of academic research that has been proposed here, which has its basis in the notion that research is a creative process of self-realization, or an intellectual and relational adventure, offers to inquirers an inoculation against the disease that is the perpetuation of inert ideas. Furthermore, it constitutes a protest against the view that the growth of knowledge is secured by the precise measurements of indifferent cyborgs, and/or by the precise calculations of economically self-interested individuals, and/or by the totalizing negativity of radical deconstructionism, and/or by an all-out focus on analytic precision that omits reference to curiosity, imagination, valuation, speculation, and self-realization. Rather, such a conception is inclusive of the important factors and aspects of research which have their exemplification in the phases of romance and generalization, in addition to those belonging to the phase of precision, pointing to the notion that the growth of genuine knowledge is secured only insofar as it is an “incident derived from [the] active adventure[s] of thought” (Whitehead, 1929c, p. 37), which are embarked upon, waged, and carried out by finite, human organisms. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Special thanks go to Howard Woodhouse, Bob Regnier, Mark Flynn, and Ed Thompson of the University of Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit, without whom this essay could not have been written.
210
ADAM C. SCARFE WORKS CITED
Baldwin, James Mark. (1902) Development and Evolution. New York: The Macmillan Company / Elibron Classics, 2005. Becker, W. E. and P. E. Kennedy. (2005) “Perspectives on Teaching and Research in Economics: Does Teaching Enhance Research in Economics?” The American Economic Review, 95, pp. 172-176. Boyer Commission. (1998) Report on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University: Inventing Undergraduate Education—A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities: http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/. Boyer, Ernest. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dennett, Daniel. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster. Dodsworth, Martin. (1999) “Education: Tell Them All the Same—The Research Assessment Exercises Reconsidered.” The English Association Newsletter, Autumn-Winter, http://www.le.ac.uk/engassoc/info/he3.html. Gilbert, Scott F. and Sahotra Sarkar. (2000) “Embracing Complexity: Organicism for the 21st Century.” Developmental Dynamics, 219, pp. 1-9. Griffin, David Ray. (1988) “Of Minds and Molecules: Postmodern Medicine in a Psychosomatic Universe.” In The Reenchantment of Science. Ed. David Ray Griffin. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 141-163. Grundy, Shirley. (1987) Curriculum: Product or Praxis? New York: Falmer Press. Habermas, Jürgen. (1971) Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Humphrey, Christopher, Peter Moizer, and David Owen. (1995) “Questioning the Value of the Research Selectivity Process in British University Accounting.” Accounting, Auditing, and Accountability Journal, 8.3, pp. 141-164. Jenkins, Alan. (2001) “How (or Whether?) to Integrate Research into Classroom Teaching for All Students and All Higher Education Institutions.” Schreyer National Conference: Innovations in Undergraduate Research and Honors Education, Pennsylvania State University, March 30, http://www.brookes.ac.uk/genericlink/documents/Penn%20State%20Handouts.do!. Richards, Robert J. (1987) Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scarfe, Adam C. (2003) “Whitehead’s Theory of Prehensions as Inclusive of, and Conducive to a Philosophy of Education.” Process Studies Supplements, 4, pp. 128, http://www.ctr4process.org/publications/PSS/. ———. (2005a) “Selectivity in Learning: A Theme in the Application of Whitehead’s Theory of Prehensions to Education” Interchange, 36. 1-2, pp. 9-22. ———. (2005b) “On Selectivity in Teaching: Toward a Method of Consensual Curriculum Selection in the Emancipatory Interest (with Reference to Whitehead and Habermas),” Process Papers, 9, pp. 27-45. ———. (2005c) “Prehensive Selectivity and the Learning Process.” In Alfred North Whitehead on Learning and Education: Theory and Application. Ed. Franz Riffert. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 123-158.
The Overemphasis on Precision in Academic Research
211
Scarfe, Adam C. (2006) “On Determinations of Causal Connection with Respect to Environmental Problems: Hume, Whitehead, and Hegel.” Process Studies Supplements, 9, pp. 1-55, http://www.ctr4process.org/publications/ProcessStudies/PSS/. Sherburne, Donald W. (ed.) (1966) A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, K. Lynn. (1993) “The Role of Scholarship in University Teaching.” The Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 20.3, pp. 64-79. Trotter, Bernard and H. M. Good. (1974) “Accountability for Efficient and Effective University Teaching.” The Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 4.1, pp. 43-53. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1919) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1955. ———. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929a) Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. ———. (1929b) The Function of Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. ———. (1929c) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1968. ———. (1941) Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Wills, Sandra, et al. (2004) The Nexus Project. Center for Educational Development and Interactive Resources, University of Wollongong: http://cedir.uow.edu.au/nexus. Woodhouse, Howard. (2001) “Ultimately, Life is Not for Sale.” Interchange, 32.3, pp. 217-232. Wordsworth, William. (1888) “The Tables Turned.” In William Wordsworth: The Complete Poetical Works. London: Macmillan and Co, 1999. Wright, Alan and Carol O’Neil. (1994) “Perspectives on Improving Teaching in Canadian Universities.” The Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 24.3, pp. 2657.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS JEAN-PASCAL ALCANTARA is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Université de Clermont-Ferrand in Mâcon, France. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure (Saint-Cloud) and wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Leibniz’s natural philosophy. He is author of Sur la second Labyrinthe de Leibniz: Mécanisme et Continuité (On Leibniz’s Second Labyrinth: Mechanism and Continuity) (2003) and has published numerous articles concerning classical philosophy, the history of science, as well as education. <
[email protected]> GEORGE ALLAN is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Dickinson College, having served both as a faculty member and academic dean. Professor Allan is the Founding Editor of Process Papers journal, and has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE). Professor Allan is co-editor, with Malcolm Evans, of A Different Three Rs for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm (2006). He is the author of Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon (2004) and of Rethinking College Education (1997). Professor Allan has published articles on a wide range of topics, such as metaphysics, social philosophy, philosophy of history, and philosophy of education. JEAN-MARIE BREUVART is a past director of the Institut de Philosophie at the Université Catholique de Lille in France. He is affiliated with the “Whitehead Psychology Nexus” and his main research interest involves comparisons between phenomenology and process philosophy. Professor Breuvart is the editor of Les rhythmes éducatifs dans la philosophie de Whitehead (The Rhythms of Education in Whitehead’s Philosophy) (2005), which is Volume III of the “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes” series of scholarly works. He is also assisted the translation of Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas into French. <
[email protected]> MARCUS FORD is Professor in Humanities at Northern Arizona University and is President of its Faculty Council. He teaches both in the Environmental Studies major and the Liberal Studies graduate program. Professor Ford is the author of Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University (2002) and a co-author of Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne (1993) with David Ray Griffin, John Cobb, and Pete Gunter. <
[email protected]>
214
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
KATHLEEN GERSHMAN is Professor of Educational Foundations and Research in the department of Teaching and Learning at the University of North Dakota. She graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1984, having written a dissertation on the implications of Whitehead’s cosmological and educational theories for educational theater. Professor Gershman is the author of They Always Test Us on Things We Haven’t Read: Teen Laments and Lessons Learned (2004) and the co-author, with Donald Oliver, of Education, Modernity, and Fractured Meaning: Toward a Process Theory of Teaching and Learning (1989). PETE A. Y. GUNTER is Professor in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of North Texas. Some of his main areas of teaching and research expertise include environmental ethics and ecological education. He is the President of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE). Professor Gunter is the author of The Big Thicket: An Ecological Reevaluation (1993) and is a co-author of Texas Land Ethics (1997). He penned the “Introduction” to the Library of Essential Reading Series edition of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (2005). Professor Gunter is well known for his books on Bergson’s philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, such as Bergson and Modern Thought (1987). BERNIE NEVILLE is Associate Professor and the Preservice Coordinator in the School of Educational Studies at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. Some of his main areas of research interest involve the use of archetypal psychology in order to interpret organizational culture, the interpersonal aspects of teaching and learning, the application of counseling theory to education, as well as classroom processes. Professor Neville is a co-author of Olympus Inc.: Intervening for Cultural Change in Organizations (2004) and the author of Educating Psyche: Emotion, Imagination, and the Unconscious in Learning (2005). RICHARD PENASKOVIC is Professor of Religious Studies and Program Director for Religious Studies at Auburn University in Alabama. He obtained his doctoral degree in theology magna cum laude from the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. Professor Penaskovic is the author of Critical Thinking and the Academic Study of Religion (1997). Professor Penaskovic has published over a hundred articles, some of which have appeared in The Heythrop Journal, Theological Studies, and Louvain Studies.
About the Contributors
215
ROBERT REGNIER is Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. As a founding board member of the International Process Network (IPN), he has also served as the organization’s Executive Director from 2006-2009. Professor Regnier is also a co-director of the University of Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit. He is the coauthor of Making the Spirit Dance (1997) and his research interests include process philosophy of education, ecological education, critical pedadogy, and Indigenous education. ADAM C. SCARFE received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Ottawa, Canada in 2001, having written a dissertation on the nature and function of skepticism in Hegel’s and Whitehead’s respective speculative philosophies. He completed postdoctoral graduate study in Educational Foundations in 2006, under the supervision of the University of Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit. From 2006-2008, Dr. Scarfe taught as a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at California State University, Bakersfield. He is on the editorial board of Process Studies journal and is the Secretary on the executive board of the International Process Network (IPN). HILLEL A. SCHILLER completed his graduate studies in Linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1951. He is affiliated with the Institute of General Semantics, and is a member of the John Dewey Society. Professor Schiller has taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and at the Bernard Baruch College of the City University of New York system. He is a regular contributor to Process Papers journal and has authored numerous articles, including “Advancing Process Metaphysics,” which was published in Process Studies in 2004.
INDEX abstraction, 10, 20, 26-28, 32-33, 92, 97, 100, 141, 151, 156, 159, 162, 169-173, 175-176, 178, 182, 190, 195-199, 202, 204-209 academic service, 6, 177 actual entities / actual occasions (Whitehead), 2-3, 63, 65, 78, 117118, 139, 141, 188, 196-198 See event See organism adventure / adventurer / adventurous, 3, 5-12, 14-15, 17, 20, 31-32, 3839, 58, 78, 107, 120, 140-141, 172-173, 180-181, 183, 185, 187188, 191-194, 203-209 AEIOU curriculum framework, 18, 99, 107-109, 111 aesthetics / aesthetic, 16, 23-27, 29, 56, 95, 107, 119-120, 123, 131-133, 135-137, 147-148, 159, 163-164, 175, 188 See a. symbol See a. value affordance, 104-105, 108-112 Alberti, Leo-Battista, 129 algebra, 24-25, 122 analysis / analytic, eviscerating a., 28, 156, 172 See a. and precision scientific a., 104, 169-170, 196 a. side of education, 16, 23-29 animal faith (Santayana), 118 anxiety, 13, 82, 88 apprehension, 13, 28, 31, 66, 147, 156, 161, 169, 193 Arendt, Hannah, 18-19, 127-128, 130, 133, 137 Aristotle, 25, 132-133, 202 Armstrong-Buck, Susan, 26 art / arts / artist / artistic, language-a., 87 liberal a., 55, 61, 95, 130 See a. of life work of a., 18, 35-36, 120-122 Bacon, Francis, 95
balance, 20, 36, 55, 85, 95, 107, 137, 156-157, 172, 174, 177-179, 187188, 208-209 beauty, 17, 32-33, 36-39, 50, 78, 120121, 141, 149, 156 becoming, 2, 12, 34, 63-64, 76-77, 142-143, 203 Benedict of Nursia, St., 132-133 Bergson, Henri, 27 bifurcation, 171 b. of mind and body, 143 b. of mind and matter, 155 b. of teaching and research, 174, 177-178, 184 big ideas, 17, 53-54, 56, 58, 60-61 biology, 2, 25-26, 39, 64, 70, 73, 87, 93-94, 106, 201, 205 Blackmore, Susan, 90, 94 brain, 64, 68, 70, 81, 90, 92, 101, 106, 112, 143 Brumbaugh, Robert, 147-150, 154 Bruner, Jerome, 109 Cambridge, 27 Cantor, Georg, 136 capitalism, 56, 59, 151 causal efficacy (mode of perception), 17, 63-65 cave analogy (Plato), 184 choice, 56, 67, 133, 149-151 Cobb, John, 143 cognetic, 81, 83-85, 90, 92-94, 99-101, 105, 108-109 cognition / cognitive, See consciousness Colet, John, 136 community, 19, 76, 106, 113, 145, 190, 200, 202, 204 c. engagement, 204 intellectual c., 165, 200, 202 learning c., 140, 142, 164-166 plant growth c., 26 scientific c., 200 c. service, 6, 177, 204 conceptual reversion (Whitehead), 194-195
218 concrescence (Whitehead), 3, 65, 7778, 137, 143, 150, 153, 159, 188189, 195, 202 concreteness, 14, 24, 27-28, 31-34, 3739, 47, 63, 66, 108-109, 118, 141142, 154, 156, 169, 172, 205, 207 See fallacy of misplaced c. Confucius, 100, 133 connectedness, 7, 13, 18, 20, 57, 65, 73, 81, 83-88, 94-95, 97, 101, 107-109, 112, 121-122, 127, 131, 136, 143, 145, 149-150, 158, 171172, 180-181, 184-186, 189, 191, 193, 202, 204-209 See relatedness consciousness, 2, 13-14, 34, 48, 50-51, 63-71, 73-78, 85, 88, 90, 98, 104, 118, 120-122, 124, 140, 161, 171172, 186-188, 193, 198-199, 205 archaic c., 17, 70-71, 76-77 creative c., 120 See criticism / critical thinking development of c., 68-70, 74 evolution of c., 18, 63-64, 70 imaginative c., 121 integral c., 17, 70-71, 75-78 ironic c., 69, 76-77 magical c., 17, 70, 75 mental c., 17, 69-71, 74-75, 77 See mind mythical c., 17, 70, 73, 75-77 negation and c., 172, 198-199 precision of c., 34, 120 rational c., 71, 75, 77 somatic c., 69, 77 spiritual c., 75 structure of c., 70-71, 75-76, 78 constriction of experience, 33 context / contextual, cultural c., 140 developmental c., 85 historical c., 16, 27, 29, 128 learning c., 32, 164 natural c., 24, 29 c. perception, 18, 88-94, 97, 99, 101, 103, 108, 113 proximity c., 89-91, 102, 105, 113 self c., 89-90
INDEX universal c., 89-91 contrast, 36, 64, 129, 144, 148-149, 158-159, 163-164, 171-172, 198 See feelings of c. logical c. (Whitehead), 179, 184185, 188, 200 See synthesis Copernicus, Nicolaus, 202 cosmology / cosmological, 2-3, 6, 10, 18-19, 26, 40, 63, 70, 77, 120, 122, 140, 142, 145, 147-150, 153154, 156-158, 160, 171, 184 creativity / creative / creative process (Whitehead), 2-3, 5, 8-15, 20, 37, 39, 43-44, 49, 66-67, 73, 77-78, 81-83, 87, 94, 96, 109, 113, 120, 122-124, 140, 142-143, 147-153, 156-159, 162, 174-175, 180-182, 184, 188-195, 202-203, 207-209 critical-emancipatory interest (Habermas), 176 criticism / critical, 1-2, 4, 11-12, 23, 27, 39, 44, 50, 53, 69, 71, 74, 89, 127, 130, 133, 145, 150-151, 155156, 163, 165-166, 169-170, 172, 176, 181-184, 187, 190, 195-196, 198-200, 202, 207, 209 meaning of c., 199 c. as motive power, 199 c. thinking, 8, 14, 17, 40, 44, 48, 49, 58, 70, 74, 76, 89-90, 103, 113, 137, 160, 165, 184, 187, 198 curiosity, 5, 13-14, 18, 20, 31, 42, 47, 66, 81-82, 86-88, 103, 107-108, 133, 171-172, 182, 185, 187-194, 203-204, 208-209 disinterested c., 133, 193-194 c.-based l., 187 c.-based research, 175-176, 187, 191-193 satisfaction of c., 14-15, 83, 187189, 192-194, 202-203, 208 curriculum / curricula, c. development, 84, 95, 99, 106, 109, 134, 140, 142, 145 c. integration, 144-145 c. revision, 94-95, 107 See selection of c.
Index Darwin, Charles, 142, 201-202, 205 deconstructionism / deconstruction, 11-12, 56, 156, 198-199, 209 See postmodernism decision, 33, 68, 95, 171, 176, 191, 197, 199, 202 Defoe, Daniel, 121 Dennett, Daniel, 172 Derrida, Jacques, 11 Descartes, René, 2, 24-25, 38, 118-119 Dewey, John, 19, 82-86, 93, 100-101, 103, 105, 110, 127-128, 139-146 dialectic, 13, 17, 23, 38-40, 129-130 discipline, 3, 13-15, 23, 33, 99, 130, 153, 159, 181, 188 division, 13, 64, 68, 84, 134, 171, 197, 199, 202, 205 dogmatism, 1, 6, 26, 57, 103, 113, 141, 174, 196, 201 Donald, Merlin, 68, 70, 73 Driesch, Hans, 25 ecology / ecological, 18-19, 26, 39, 8788, 98-99, 104-109, 154-155, 176, 194, 207 See environment economy / economic, 4-5, 10, 38, 56, 59-60, 103, 107, 113, 131, 151, 182, 192-194, 209 global e., 4, 131 knowledge e., 173, 203 e. usefulness, 128, 131 Edelman, Gerald, 91 education / educational, e. as adventure, 1, 3-15, 20, 107, 179, 188, 209 American e., 18, 53, 127-128 aristocratic e., 132-133 banking model of e., 181 crisis in e., 18, 61, 127-128, 137 democratic e., 7, 18, 56, 127, 142, 164, 166 e. development, 176, 178, 187 early e., 18, 31, 86, 107-109, 128 environmental e., 4, 24, 26 e. foundations, 12, 160, 166 general e., 23, 61, 95
219 goal of e., 8-9, 12, 50, 54, 57, 108-109, 113, 141-142, 145, 149, 160-162, 193 golden rule of e., 161 higher e., 5, 17, 27, 31, 54-55, 57, 108-109, 113, 142, 145, 149, 160162, 186, 188, 193 liberal e., 18-19, 23, 48, 127-137 market model of e., 54-56, 151, 175-176, 191-192, 203, 207, 209 See philosophy of e. primary e., 31, 128 e. policy, 3-4, 162, 178 e. process, 15, 66, 82, 117, 122, 127, 129, 131, 172, 180 public e., 4-5, 55-56, 113, 137, 140, 142, 166, 174-176, 192, 203204 e. reform, 23, 60-61, 136-139 See rhythm of e. school of e., 24, 28, 142, 152, 180 secondary e., 31, 66-67 e. system, 4, 24, 113, 127-128 technical e., 131-132, 135 trade e., 27 university e., 3, 14, 19, 59, 160 usefulness of e., 7-8, 37, 47, 55, 58-59, 61, 72, 128, 131-134, 204 vocational e., 142 Egan, Kieran, 17, 68-69, 71, 76, 78 Einstein, Albert, 140 Eisenhower, Dwight, 140 élan vital (Bergson), 25, 43, 151 emotion / emotional, 2, 13, 34-36, 38, 43, 45, 67, 72-74, 77, 82, 85, 8788, 90, 92, 99, 100-101, 108, 113, 120-121, 149, 189-190 See feelings enjoyment, 3, 13, 33, 39, 43, 53, 66, 75, 120, 134-137, 153-154, 177 environment / environmental, attack on the e., 191 e. change, 113 control over the e., 6, 176, 191 e. crisis, 61, 75, 206 See ecology See e. education e. ethics, 26, 207
220 e. issues, 59 natural e., 25, 72, 112 See e. philosophy e. science, 26 epigenesis, 87, 93-94, 98-99, 112 Epigenetic Learning Hierarchy, 18, 94, 96, 98-99 epistemology, 76, 86, 108, 118, 139 Dewey’s e., 142-143 Whitehead’s e., 3, 180, 188, 190, 208 Erasmus, Desiderius, 128-130, 136 essay, 43, 87, 148, 150, 162-165, 179, 184 eternal objects (Whitehead), 3, 195 Euclid, of Alexandria, 136 evaluation, 7, 9, 37, 44-45, 57-60, 97, 151, 157, 160-165, 175-176, 179181, 184, 190-192, 197-203 Evans, Malcolm, 84 event, 3, 19, 63-67, 74-75, 91-92, 98, 112, 118-119, 150, 153-154, 157160, 193 See actual entities / occasions learning e., 19, 66, 149-150, 158160, 163-165 evolution / evolutionary, 2, 17-18, 26, 63-64, 69-71, 78, 81, 85-87, 90, 92, 94, 101-104, 106, 112, 155, 158-159, 200-201, 205 See e. of consciousness e. processes, 154, 201, 205 See e. psychology exactitude / exact / exactness, 49, 95, 114, 175, 197, 202, 207 See precision experience, concrete e., 24, 108, 142 conscious e., 64-65, 70, 76-77, 198 creative e., 67, 77 educational e., 1, 93, 144-145 fusion of e. and imagination, 180 higher levels of e., 198, 201 immediate e., 8, 16, 28, 54, 65-67, 108, 118, 156, 197 e. in research, 163-164, 180, 182 mental e., 63, 66, 77
INDEX personal e. 73, 77, 97 physical e., 7, 18, 63, 66-67, 70, 75, 77, 123, 189-190 somatic e., 69, 76 e. of students, 39, 44-46, 73-75, 82, 109, 141-142, 152, 162-166, 182 vivid e., 108, 135, 152, 163, 199 extension / extensive continuum (Whitehead), 117-118, 197, 205 fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead), 34, 170-172, 196 feeling / feelings, f. of adventure, 3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 107, 173, 185 f. of alienation, 5-6, 83 bodily f., 13, 64-65, 90, 118-121 comparative f., 198 conceptual f., 193 f. of contrast, 149, 163-164, 198 intellectual f., 162, 198-199 See intensification of f. ontology of f., 2 physical f., 66-67, 73, 119, 162, 189-190, 193 See prehension See propositional f. f. of students, 5-6, 162, 164 See transmuted f. fragmentation, f. of knowledge, 15, 88, 98, 107, 133, 153, 206 f. of disciplines, 32-33, 37-39, 59, 61, 84, 107, 190, 204-206 freedom, 4, 7, 13, 15, 37, 83, 120, 129, 132-133, 142-143, 156-157, 173, 184-185 academic f., 173, 176, 190-191 Freire, Paulo, 181 Fuster, Joaquin, 101, 106 Gebser, Jean, 17, 70-71, 75-78 generalization, 54, 56-59, 65, 68, 81, 101, 122 generalization (stage in the rhythm of education), 14-15, 17, 20, 31-34, 37, 39, 49-50, 53-56, 63-67, 122-
Index 123, 141, 169-175, 180-182, 185, 188-189, 193, 195, 198-209 genetics / genetic, 88, 90, 192, 201, 205, 207 geometry, 9, 24, 26, 63, 136 Gibson, James, 18, 86-88, 99, 101-105 global warming, 59, 200, 203 God, 104, 124, 150, 154-158 Goodlad, John, 94 Griffin, David Ray, 11, 26, 170 Hall, Edward T., 72, 91 Harvard, 1-2, 27, 128, 140 Hegel, G. W. F., 13-14, 23, 122, 130 Heisenberg, Werner, 43 helical learning, 16-17, 31-32, 37-39 Heraclitus, 65 holism, 2, 10, 31, 33-35, 64, 70, 76, 84, 88-90, 93-95, 98-99, 104, 108-109, 112, 117, 148-149, 160, 170-172, 176-177, 187-189, 196, 204-207 Holmes, Henry, 139 humanities, 16, 25, 93, 95, 108, 128, 173-174, 191-192, 207 Hume, David, 118, 170-171, 205 Husserl, Edmund, 119 image / imagery, 32, 68, 82, 86, 88, 91, 100-102, 108 eidetic i., 88, 100 imagination / imaginative, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 31-37, 41-44, 49, 61, 64, 67-68, 73, 77, 81-83, 86-87, 9092, 99-100, 106-109, 112-113, 121-122, 133, 149-153, 159, 163165, 175, 180-182, 185, 189, 192196, 204, 208-209 i. consideration of learning, 180, 185 i. generalization, 65, 68 i. proposition, 66 i. scholars, 185 wearing learning with i., 41, 43, 83 i. zest, 182 Imperial College of Science and Technology, 1
221 importance, 7, 18-19, 35-36, 38, 42, 53, 56, 83, 121, 123-124, 147151, 161-166, 190, 204-205, 208 assessment of i., 161-165 maximization of i., 148, 150, 154, 158, 160 inert ideas / inert knowledge (Whitehead), 7-10, 15, 20, 23, 42, 74, 83, 98, 150, 153, 173, 181182, 190, 193-195, 201, 208-209 innovation, 36, 39, 60, 175, 194-195 intensity / intensification, 10, 34, 36, 68, 103, 120, 149, 163-164, 166, 175, 184, 187 i. of emotions, 67 i. of feelings, 148-149 i. of operations of prehensive selectivity, 189, 198-201, 208 research-i., 20, 152, 173-176, 184-185, 187 i. of teaching, 187 interest, 33, 35, 39, 42-43, 55, 60, 72, 83, 90, 113, 142, 152, 155, 159166, 176, 180, 188, 190-194 research i., 190-193 self-i., 156, 161, 176, 192, 209 i. of students, 4, 25, 48, 72, 74, 111, 142, 157, 161-166, 187 invariance, 104-105 Kant, Immanuel, 125, 130, 155, 202 Kegan, Robert, 17, 68-69, 76, 78 al-Khawarismi, Muhammed, 24 knowledge, acquisition of k., 8-9, 15, 61, 86, 112, 147, 151, 159, 181, 201 advancement of k., 7, 12-13, 20, 85, 88, 93, 95, 106, 166, 173-174, 180-182, 185, 187-189, 191-195, 197-205, 208-209 application of k., 8-10, 14, 26, 3233, 49, 81, 131, 180-181, 183, 187, 192, 201, 204 k. as an approximation, 206 See critical-emancipatory interest declarative k., 50 See fragmentation of k.
222 horizontal and vertical k., 87-88, 93-94, 98 imparting / transmission of k., 7, 9, 15, 74, 94, 133-135, 151, 159, 161, 178-179, 181-182, 203 See inert k. keeping k. alive, 8, 42, 46-47, 49, 182-184 k. most worth knowing, 81, 83, 95, 99, 107, 109 novelty in k., 8-9, 14, 180-182, 189, 193-194, 202-203 See practical-hermeneutic interest precise k., 14-15, 172, 201 procedural k., 50 reproduction of k., 132, 173, 208 scientific k., 95, 106-107, 207 specialized k., 14-15, 156, 202204, 206 See technical-rational interest tetrahedron of k., 18, 97-98, 111 transformation of k., 43, 172, 180-182, 187-188, 190 usefulness of k., 7-8, 24, 26, 32, 34, 37-38, 47-48, 55, 58-59, 61, 72, 95, 102, 104, 128, 131, 134136, 150, 191, 203-204, 206-207 utilization of k., 5-10, 14-15, 27, 42, 50, 87, 89, 109, 134, 142, 150-151, 161, 182, 207 Korzybski, Alfred, 92 Kuhn, Thomas, 33 language, abstractions of l. 197-198, 203 l. acquisition, 28, 103 classical l., 129, 131, 136 grammar of l., 50, 122-124 philosophical l., 120-121 spoken l., 73 learning, active l., 44-47, 81, 88, 186-187 l. as adventure, 20, 32, 172 appropriational l., 187 l. disabilities, 144 l. by doing, 127 early l., 18, 86, 107-108 See l. event
INDEX l. experience, 63-65, 78, 108, 141 See helical l. informal l., 81 linear model of, 13, 16-18, 31-34, 37, 66-67, 87, 99, 189 imagination and l., 41, 43, 86, 180, 185 measurement of l., 74, 151, 159 l. process, 3, 5, 12-15, 19, 45, 153, 157-162, 165, 172, 186-188 research and l., 6-7, 185-188 rote l., 84-85, 181 space and time in l., 158-160 transformative l., 36, 39, 67, 160 l. as valuing, 19, 147-166 learnings, 151, 159 Lefort, Claude, 129 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 104, 108 liberalism / liberal, 54 See l. arts See l. education life, adventure of l., 3, 8-9, 114, 120 art of l., 9, 161 connect research with l., 180-181, 184, 204 l. cycle, 66-67 enhancement of l., 9-10, 74-75, 78, 104 l.-process, 2, 171, 177, 179, 183 See rhythm of l. zest for l., 175 Lincoln, Abraham, 140 literature, 25, 27, 39, 123, 131-136, 178 logic, 1, 23-24, 43, 89, 118, 129, 131, 178, 195, 197-198, 201, 207 Lowe, Victor, 1, 23 MacLean, Paul, 70 Mahler, Gustav, 34 Malcom, Nancy, 48-49 mastery, 29, 31, 39, 66, 206 mathematics, 1, 16, 23-28, 54, 106, 124-125, 134, 136, 140, 197 McKeon, Richard, 95 McMurtry, John, 151
Index meme / memetics, 90-100, 103, 105106, 109, 112-113 memory / memorization, 4, 25, 35-36, 48, 84, 87, 101, 104, 180, 187 Mendel, Gregor, 201 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 119, 129 metaphysics / metaphysical, 1-3, 11, 32, 34, 41, 50, 54, 58-59, 117119, 125, 130, 137, 141, 143, 196-197 m. assumption, 196-197, 204-205 m. of creativity, 143 m. essentialism, 11 substance-accident m., 197 mimesis, 73-74 mind, 7, 10, 13, 17, 23, 42-43, 48, 5051, 63-64, 68-75, 77-78, 82-83, 95, 106, 108, 120, 125, 133-135, 140, 143, 151, 154-156, 160, 206 See consciousness finite m., 133-134, 190, 205 ideas received into m., 7, 42 plastic m., 181, 184, 204 money, 6, 10, 55, 60, 152, 173, 175, 178, 191-193 m. code of value, 151 See m.-based research morality, 26, 33, 56, 58-60, 113, 124125, 132, 147-151, 155, 204, 207 Morito, Bruce, 154-155 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 15 nature, 2, 6, 12-13, 16, 24, 26-29, 58, 71-72, 81-84, 91, 94-96, 99, 106109, 111-112, 117, 145, 151, 155156, 169-171, 201-202, 205, 207 Newton, Isaac, 34 nexus, 9, 198, 205 n. of teaching and research, 183184 nihilism, 204 no-child-left-behind policy, 4, 139 norms, 7, 93, 139, 142, 201-202 novelty / novel, 2-3, 8-11, 14, 17-18, 20, 33, 36-37, 66, 68, 74, 78, 120122, 137, 150, 156, 158, 160, 166, 172-173, 180-182, 189, 193-194, 199, 201-203, 208
223 Obama, Barack, 11 objective immortality (Whitehead), 120, 147, 149-150, 154, 202-203 Omar, Caliph, 134 organism, 2-3, 10, 12, 24, 26, 28-29, 39, 43, 53, 64, 71, 73, 90-91, 94, 96, 98, 106, 122, 136-137, 149, 153, 156, 170-171, 188, 194, 200201, 203, 205, 209 See actual entity See philosophy of o. Orr, David, 88, 98 passion, 151, 155, 161, 182, 193 pedagogy / pedagogical, p. approach, 15, 18-19, 23-24, 28, 49, 86, 99, 107-109, 128, 142, 150, 160-166, 188 p. design, 144, 149 Dewey’s p. creed, 86, 103 dialogical p., 187 p. of appropriation, 181, 187 p. of place, 145-151, 166 perception / perceptual, 8, 17-18, 6365, 77, 81, 88-93, 97-99, 101-104, 106, 113, 118-119, 120, 149, 156 See causal efficacy See cognetic See context See presentational immediacy See symbolic reference phenomenology, 119 philosophy / philosophical, analytic p., 24 p. of education, 1, 3, 11-12, 1819, 23-24, 117, 137, 139, 148, 160, 179, 184-185, 206, 208 environmental p., 4, 26 p. of organism, 2 p. of science, 1, 156 postmodern p., 11 process (-relational) p., 1, 11, 16, 27, 81, 98-99, 107, 109, 137, 171, 208 speculative p., 1-3, 10, 12, 19, 139-140, 142, 170, 175, 204 Piaget, Jean, 67, 69 Plato, 40, 125, 129, 132-135, 184
224 poetry, 51, 72, 92, 124, 140, 169, 174, 180 Pollock, Jackson, 34 positivism, 23-24, 160 postmodernism / postmodern, 76 constructive p., 11-12, 54 deconstructive p., 11-12 p. university, 54, 56, 60 potential / potentiality / potentialities, p. for actualization, 3, 147, 159, 161, 189-190, 194 creative p., 152-153 p. of the learner, 42, 91, 108, 159 research p., 180, 182, 190, 192, 194-195 practical-hermeneutic interest (Habermas), 176 practice / practical, p. application of knowledge, 8-10, 14, 26, 36, 48-49, 54, 81, 121122, 131, 180-181, 187, 193, 204 See praxis (p. action) p. reason, 40 pragmatism (Dewey), 98, 104, 127, 137, 139 praxis (practical action), 8, 136, 160, 166 precision / precise, 15, 34, 50, 53, 120, 124, 165, 172, 175, 201, 204, 207, 209 analysis and p., 15, 20, 28, 31, 156, 170-171, 193, 209 See exactitude See p. knowledge p. of language, 53, 197, 204 precision (stage in the rhythm of education), 13-17, 19, 29-32, 35, 37, 47-48, 51, 61-62, 64-65, 119121, 129, 139, 162, 165-172, 176177, 180-209 overemphasis on p., 15-16, 19-20, 31, 53, 169, 171-176, 185-189, 192, 195-209 prehension / prehensions / prehending / prehensive (Whitehead), 2-3, 19, 77, 122, 139-144, 150, 154, 159, 164, 189-190, 194, 199 negative p., 189-191, 198-199
INDEX positive p., 189 See p. selection / selectivity p. subject, 188, 192, 194-195 theory of p., 2, 20, 162, 171-172, 174, 188-190, 192, 198, 206-209 presentational immediacy (mode of perception), 17, 63-65 problem-solving, 14, 59, 139, 142-145 process, See creative p. formative p., 81-85, 90, 94, 96, 112, 164 See learning p. See p. (-relational) philosophy See research p. See teaching p. See p. of valuing professional training, 28, 131, 156 propositions / propositional feelings (Whitehead), 56, 58, 65-66, 162, 197-199 psychology, 16, 24-25, 27, 29, 71, 8283, 88, 90, 99, 100-105, 107, 113, 148, 153, 173 child p., 127 cognitive p., 50, 74 developmental p., 69-70, 74 evolutionary p., 69-70 perceptual p., 104 social p., 99 publication / publishing, 6, 152, 176179, 192-193, 197, 203 Queen’s University, 152 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 129 reality, basic building-blocks of r., 2, 160 consequent r., 156-157 processual nature of r., 95, 99 reductionism, 2, 19-20, 23, 136, 150155, 159, 170-173, 188, 195-196, 205 relatedness / relations / relational / relationality / relating, r. adventure, 5, 8, 188, 209 r. versus cogitating, 144-145
Index r. between events, 150, 158, 160, 163-164, 193 external r., 34, 153, 159 internal r., 2-3, 34, 157-159 organic r., 26, 205 r. between research and teaching, 20, 179-189 systematic scheme of r., 2, 199 r. between teachers and students, 127, 130, 141, 144 research / researching / researcher, conceptions of r., 152, 172-174, 176-179, 184-186, 188-190, 193, 207-209 commercialism and r., 5, 10, 152, 175-176, 188, 192, 194 curiosity-based r., 175-176, 191193, 203 experience and r., 152, 180-182, 195 r. findings, 172-173, 194, 196 formal r. activities, 20, 174, 177178, 180-182, 184-185, 203, 209 r. grants, 175-178, 192 r. hypotheses, 186, 190, 194, 201 r.-intensiveness, 20, 152, 173176, 184-185, 187 r. and adventure, 3, 6, 8, 10, 15, 20, 172-173, 180-181, 183, 185, 187-188, 191-195, 203-209 r. and learning, 5-7, 20, 46, 148, 160, 162-166, 172-174, 179-182, 184-187 money-based r., 152, 173, 175, 178, 191-193 potentialities for r., 182, 189-195 r. process, 172-173, 175, 185, 188-195, 197, 199, 202-209 r. productivity, 6, 176 See rhythm of r. scientific r., 5, 55, 106, 143, 150, 171, 173-174, 193-194, 198, 202, 205, 207 r. selectivity exercises, 175-176, 191 See r. university rhythm, biological r., 64-65, 72-73
225 collective r., 72-73 r. of creativity, 124 r. of education (Whitehead), 1219, 31-32, 39, 53, 121, 125, 141142, 169-173, 180, 188-189, 197 r. of learning, 17, 20, 63-66, 172 r. of life, 3, 12, 61-63, 68 r. of nature, 12, 18, 72 r. of research, 20, 169-209 Riffert, Franz, 64, 67 romance (stage in the rhythm of education), 13-17, 19-20, 23, 31, 33-34, 37, 39, 42-43, 49-50, 53, 63-64, 66-69, 121-124, 141, 171176, 180-182, 185, 188-195, 197199, 201, 204, 208-209 Roszak, Theodore, 72 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 127 Russell, Bertrand, 1, 24, 140 Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, 43 Santayana, George, 118 satisfaction, 10, 14, 17, 63, 68, 90, 113, 147-148, 154, 159, 164, 187189, 192-194, 202-203, 208 scholar / scholarly / scholarship, 5, 11, 50, 55, 82, 165, 174, 176-179, 181, 185-186, 190-192, 202-209 adventurous s., 185 s. learning, 182, 186 teacher-s. model, 174-179, 185 school / schools / schooling, democratically run s., 142 s. of education, 24, 28, 142, 152, 180 elementary s., 53 formal s., 53, 81, 140 Grammar s., 128, 136 high s., 3-4, 24-26, 42, 53, 59, 128, 140 middle s., 26, 31, 128 one-room s., 19, 139, 144-145 primary s., 128 public s., 4-5, 56, 136, 140, 142 rural s., 19, 139, 145 secondary s., 128 science / scientific / scientist, s. analysis, 169-170, 196
226 arts and s., 28, 38-39, 55, 75, 114, 169, 171, 206-207 See s. community s. disciplines, 2, 16, 32-33, 38-39, 206 s. education, 23, 85, 91 empirical-analytic s., 104, 191 s. experimentation, 25, 38, 104, 108, 139, 141-142, 151, 186, 195, 197-198, 201 grammar of s., 50, 122-123 history of s., 25, 27, 81, 200-201 ignorance of s., 106-107 s. materialism, 2, 19, 151, 155156, 159, 170-171 s. method, 142, 169, 193 natural s., 16, 57, 170, 173, 191, 206-207 neuro-s., 101, 106 s. observation, 95, 170 political s., 152 See philosophy of s. physical s., 2, 43, 124, 136, 205 precision of s., 54, 95, 104, 175 s. research, 5, 55, 171, 174, 199, 202, 207 social s., 16, 55, 191 s. students, 24, 26-27 s. teaching, 23-25, 84 selection / selectivity, 3, 9, 20, 28, 4142, 48, 61, 90-91, 95, 105, 120, 133-134, 147-149, 158-159, 162165, 171-172, 175-176, 182, 187188, 190-202, 205, 209 criticism as process of s., 199-202 s. of curricula, 17, 42, 48, 61, 95, 133, 136, 162 natural s. (Darwin), 201-202, 205 operations of s., 149, 153, 189, 194, 198-201, 208 prehensive s., 20, 153, 182, 188191, 198, 200-201, 208-209 See research s. exercises s. of research potentialities, 164, 173, 175-176, 190-194 s. of value potentialities, 149-150, 153, 157-159, 164 self-development, 42-43, 153, 187
INDEX self-realization, 2-3, 20, 151, 156, 180181, 187-194, 203, 208-209 Sennacherib, Akkadian, 35 sensation, 8, 65, 67, 69-70, 73, 77, 91, 105, 118 Simpson, George Gaylord, 86 skepticism, 170-205 smile and pass rule, 47 Socrates / Socratic method, 88, 95, 132 space / spatiality, 36, 88, 92, 96, 104, 117-119, 121-122, 132, 150, 158160, 170, 205 speculation / speculative, 3, 14, 20, 40, 50, 59, 140-141, 171-175, 180, 182, 185, 194, 202, 204-209 See s. philosophy substance, 2, 12, 105, 155, 159, 197 s.-accident metaphysics, 197 s. ontology, 2, 19, 171 superject (Whitehead), 149, 158-160, 162, 164 symbol / symbolics / symbolization, 18, 32, 34-36, 38, 45, 89-90, 92, 96-98, 100-104, 111 artistic / aesthetic s., 34-37 linguistic s., 92, 98, 100-103, 197 symbolic reference (mode of perception), 17, 63-65, 68 synthesis, creative s., 148, 184 s. of liberal and technical education, 131, 135-137 modern s. (biology), 201 s. in phase of generalization, 14, 17, 20, 56, 63, 122, 171-172, 175, 185, 188, 200, 202, 205, 209 teacher / teachers / teaching, adventurous t., 5, 7-9, 185 authoritarian t., 82 awards for t., 177-178 See bifurcation of t. and research devaluation of t., 20, 173, 176178, 195 early childhood t., 109 experienced t., 51 good t., 66, 73, 84, 159, 178 t. informs research, 182, 184
Index integration of learning, t., and research, 5-7, 19, 174, 178-188 intensification of t., 187 t. load, 4, 152, 177 neglect of t., 152, 177 t. process, 172, 188 t. profession, 81-82 quality of t., 106, 176, 178 See t.-scholar model sessional t., 152, 177 t. style, 50-51, 129-130 t. training programs, 82, 84, 112 valuing t., 173-178, 182, 184-187 technical-rational interest (Habermas), 160, 175-176, 191, 205, 207 thinking / thought, See consciousness creative t., 44, 113 See criticism / critical t. holistic t., 99, 108, 204-205 orders of t., 69-70, 76 rational t., 76, 208 t. skills, 41 time / temporality, 36, 71, 75-78, 84, 87-88, 91-92, 104, 107, 117-119, 121-122, 131-134, 149-150, 158160, 189, 202, 205 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 127 transmutation / transmuted feelings (Whitehead), 159, 162, 195-198 ultradian cycle, 64 underfunding, 4-5, 152, 176 United Nations, 57 university, u. courses, 19, 147, 150-151, 153156-158, 160 u. curriculum, 27, 56-58 entrepreneurial u., 54-56 function of the u., 48, 61 idea of a u., 48, 60 justification of the u., 180 modern u., 16, 54-57 premodern u., 56 u. programs, 28, 151 See postmodern u. public u., 4-5, 55, 174-176, 192 research u., 54-55, 60
227 University of Phoenix, 54-55 value / valuing / valuation, 2-4, 8-9, 19-20, 27-29, 53, 60, 77, 83, 102, 104, 107-108, 120, 134-135, 145164, 173-179, 182-187, 191-192, 194, 199, 201-202, 209 aesthetic v., 156, 188 v. agent, 154-155, 165 conceptual valuation, 190-191 v.-existence, 153 instrumental v., 175, 184, 188 intrinsic v., 19, 155, 170, 175, 184, 188 v. judgment, 8 learning as v., 19, 147-148, 150, 156-162 maximization of v., 148, 154, 158 monetary v., 188 See money code of v. process of v., 19, 148, 151, 153154, 157, 162-164, 166 symbolic v., 45, 89 v. program, 4, 151 vision, 11, 19, 76, 119, 135, 147-149, 151-152, 163, 193 prophetic v., 19, 161, 164 von Bayer, Hans Christian, 110 Weierstrass, Karl, 136 Whitehead, Alfred North, 1-3, etc. Whyte, Lancelot Law, 18, 81-82, 91, 96, 105-106, 108 Wilson, Edward O., 94-95 wisdom, 7-10, 14, 50, 54, 64, 68, 78, 81, 100, 108, 123, 132, 151, 161, 187, 193, 207 active w., 17, 53-54, 60-61, 122123 withness of the body (Whitehead), 18, 117-119, 121, 124, 135 wonder, 3, 13, 15, 31, 83, 175, 185, 188-190, 192-193, 204, 208-209 Wordsworth, William, 169-172, 196 Xenophon, 133
VIBS The Value Inquiry Book Series is co-sponsored by: Adler School of Professional Psychology American Indian Philosophy Association American Maritain Association American Society for Value Inquiry Association for Process Philosophy of Education Canadian Society for Philosophical Practice Center for Bioethics, University of Turku Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Central European Pragmatist Forum Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire Centre for the Study of Philosophy and Religion, University College of Cape Breton Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil College of Education and Allied Professions, Bowling Green State University College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference of Philosophical Societies Department of Moral and Social Philosophy, University of Helsinki Gannon University Gilson Society Haitian Studies Association Ikeda University Institute of Philosophy of the High Council of Scientific Research, Spain International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein International Association of Bioethics International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry International Society for Universal Dialogue Natural Law Society Philosophical Society of Finland Philosophy Born of Struggle Association Philosophy Seminar, University of Mainz Pragmatism Archive at The Oklahoma State University R.S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology Research Institute, Lakeridge Health Corporation Russian Philosophical Society Society for Existential Analysis Society for Iberian and Latin-American Thought Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust Unit for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Autonomous University of Barcelona Whitehead Research Project Yves R. Simon Institute
Titles Published Volumes 1 - 166 see www.rodopi.nl 167. Leszek Koczanowicz and Beth J. Singer, Editors, Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 168. Michael W. Riley, Plato’s Cratylus: Argument, Form, and Structure. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 169. Leon Pomeroy, The New Science of Axiological Psychology. Edited by Rem B. Edwards. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 170. Eric Wolf Fried, Inwardness and Morality 171. Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 172. Charles C. Hinkley II, Moral Conflicts of Organ Retrieval: A Case for Constructive Pluralism. A volume in Values in Bioethics 173. Gábor Forrai and George Kampis, Editors, Intentionality: Past and Future. A volume in Cognitive Science 174. Dixie Lee Harris, Encounters in My Travels: Thoughts Along the Way. A volume in Lived Values:Valued Lives 175. Lynda Burns, Editor, Feminist Alliances. A volume in Philosophy and Women 176. George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans, A Different Three Rs for Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 177. Robert A. Delfino, Editor, What are We to Understand Gracia to Mean?: Realist Challenges to Metaphysical Neutralism. A volume in Gilson Studies 178. Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson, The Curve of the Sacred: An Exploration of Human Spirituality. A volume in Philosophy and Religion
179. John Ryder, Gert Rüdiger Wegmarshaus, Editors, Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Three. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 180. Florencia Luna, Bioethics and Vulnerability: A Latin American View. A volume in Values in Bioethics 181. John Kultgen and Mary Lenzi, Editors, Problems for Democracy. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 182. David Boersema and Katy Gray Brown, Editors, Spiritual and Political Dimensions of Nonviolence and Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 183. Daniel P. Thero, Understanding Moral Weakness. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 184. Scott Gelfand and John R. Shook, Editors, Ectogenesis: Artificial Womb Technology and the Future of Human Reproduction. A volume in Values in Bioethics 185. Piotr Jaroszyński, Science in Culture. A volume in Gilson Studies 186. Matti Häyry, Tuija Takala, Peter Herissone-Kelly, Editors, Ethics in Biomedical Research: International Perspectives. A volume in Values in Bioethics 187. Michael Krausz, Interpretation and Transformation: Explorations in Art and the Self. A volume in Interpretation and Translation 188. Gail M. Presbey, Editor, Philosophical Perspectives on the “War on Terrorism.” A volume in Philosophy of Peace 189. María Luisa Femenías, Amy A. Oliver, Editors, Feminist Philosophy in Latin America and Spain. A volume in Philosophy in Latin America 190. Oscar Vilarroya and Francesc Forn I Argimon, Editors, Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition. A volume in Cognitive Science 191. Eugenio Garin, History of Italian Philosophy. Translated from Italian and Edited by Giorgio Pinton. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy
192. Michael Taylor, Helmut Schreier, and Paulo Ghiraldelli, Jr., Editors, Pragmatism, Education, and Children: International Philosophical Perspectives. A volume in Pragmatism and Values 193. Brendan Sweetman, The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human Person, the Transcendent. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 194. Danielle Poe and Eddy Souffrant, Editors, Parceling the Globe: Philosophical Explorations in Globalization, Global Behavior, and Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 195. Josef Šmajs, Evolutionary Ontology: Reclaiming the Value of Nature by Transforming Culture. A volume in Central-European Value Studies 196. Giuseppe Vicari, Beyond Conceptual Dualism: Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle’s Philosophy of Mind. A volume in Cognitive Science 197. Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 198. Randall E. Osborne and Paul Kriese, Editors, Global Community: Global Security. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 199. Craig Clifford, Learned Ignorance in the Medicine Bow Mountains: A Reflection on Intellectual Prejudice. A volume in Lived Values: Valued Lives 200. Mark Letteri, Heidegger and the Question of Psychology: Zollikon and Beyond. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 201. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Editors, A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 202. Amihud Gilead, Necessity and Truthful Fictions: Panenmentalist Observations. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 203. Fernand Vial, The Unconscious in Philosophy, and French and European Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 204. Adam C. Scarfe, Editor, The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research. A volume in Philosophy of Education
