The thesis of this dissertation is simple: liberal education is the proper model for all schooling. This conclusion proceeds from the following logic:
My argument will be that this would be true no matter the time or place, but that it is particularly true in the late 20th Century United States, where democracy, the form of political organization and practice most congruent with human nature, is under attack from both absolutists and relativists, from liberals and communitarians. I will argue that democracy itself, and its two most necessary components, individualism and communitarianism, rest on the authority that only the experience of liberal education can give; and that only schools based on the liberal education model can provide the understanding and wisdom necessary to actively and freely choose democracy, meaning a responsible individualism and an active communitarianism.
As I will demonstrate, utilitarianism in general and schooling for utility in particular are dangerous to the human enterprise, and American schooling has consistently chosen utilitarian goals as those general goals which motivate our systems of schools.
And, most important, I will demonstrate that liberal education is not only the model of schooling most congruent with human nature, but that it provides the only justification for democracy, and the only valid informing principles for democracy's two great components, individualism and communitarianism.
The schools, so important to the democratic experiment because of their role in child-rearing, must allow and encourage both individualism and communal responsibility; or, to put it more subtly, the schools must allow and encourage an authentic individualism that does not lead to radical relativism but that does lead to a freely chosen devotion to the community.
It will be my contention that none of the models for schooling that are currently in use can lead to these states of mind because they are all utilitarian, and, in their devotion to utility, necessarily avoid the deep philosophical questions of what it means to be an individual human and why an individual should be devoted to the community; and that it is only the answers to these questions that can justify, and vitalize, democracy.
Further, it will be my contention that the models for schooling that guide most of our current policy and practice are implicitly opposed to the democratic experiment because they emphasize training and socialization, rather than education, and that only education can prepare the individual for life in a democracy. In other words, I will contend that only an understanding of, and a submission to, certain universal principles regarding the nature of being human, the good life, and the good society, can allow for the authentic individualism and communitarianism necessary to sustain the democratic experiment.
My answer to the question of how schools can allow and encourage both individualism and communitarianism will be a call for a choosing of liberal education as the central element of all schooling. I will contend that only liberal education can encourage a genuine individualism and a responsible communitarianism, because only liberal education includes a study of the many varied, subtle, and complex questions regarding what it means to be an individual and what relationship an individual properly has to the community. Without such a study, preferably in one's youth, individualism can slip into emotivism, subjectivism, hedonism, and mere self-interest; and, on the other extreme, devotion to the community can easily become a mindless conformity to the security of the collective. The goal in a democratic society must necessarily be to avoid both.
In the current debate, liberal education is most often taken hostage by the conservative communitarians as a tool of enculturation into a particular group (a la Hirsch and Bloom(1)), or is taken out and shot, either by communitarians of the sort who see liberal education as a tool of the oppressive hegemonic majority (a la the multi-culturalists(2)) or by the philosophical liberals, who tend to see liberal education as a tool of the repressive, anti-individualistic forces of conformism. My contention will be that Aristotelian essentialism is correct, that liberal education is its proper form of schooling, appropriate for a mass, industrial, and urban society in the 21st Century just as much as for the society of Classical Greece, and that the effects of liberal education --- properly understood and properly enacted --- are effects that are most in line with genuine democracy (that is, democracy that includes both an authentic individualism and a thoughtful communitarianism) and will be, consequently, pleasing to both Aristotelian essentialists and to American philosophical pragmatists; that is, to both defenders of notions of essential humanness and to defenders of the democratic experiment.
II On the Possibility of Definition
When one begins to attempt the definition of a significant term in the late 20th Century, it is tempting to think of the famous passage Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected."When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master --- that's all."(3)
For one who is not a Carroll scholar, it is difficult to surmise just what level of irony is meant here. It could be that the society in which Carroll lived was so rational and realistic that Humpty's contention would have seemed ludicrous on its face; or it could be that it is more satirical than that, and that Carroll was poking fun at a subjectivist tendency in language that he saw before most others did. In any event, it is clear that Carroll was no fan of using a word to mean "just what I choose it to mean."
Some 130 years later, the dominant intellectual belief is that there is nothing more than the "use" of language: words mean things because we use them to mean things, not because of some inherent meaning, or because there is some actual thing standing behind the word.
I am about to attempt a definition of a rich, complex, and historically significant term, liberal education, and I am going to attempt this definition as if it were possible to separate the term itself from the mere use of the term. As with many words, terms, and phrases in the 20th Century, liberal education has been used by many different people to mean many different things. It is, for example, used synonymously with such terms as liberal arts education, core curriculum, general education, liberal studies, and so on, each of which has its own variety of meanings and understandings, depending on who is using it and who is hearing it. Liberal education, I will contend, is not as vague as these other terms; Liberal education is not a term that is merely used by a variety of people, with a variety of definitions (or non-definitions), for what are usually political purposes; it is, rather, a term grounded in a deep and long historical tradition, with a fairly narrow, exclusive, and prescriptive definition.
At the end of the 20th Century, we have given up on most conventional notions of history; it is Hayden White, not R.G. Collingwood, who is the leading contemporary philosopher of history.(4) So it is not surprising that we don't look to the history of "liberal education," but, rather, use the term as we see fit, in the moment, as part of the story we are making up.
We have also generally given up any belief in the authority of tradition, so the vitality of liberal education in the Western past (in fact, up to the end of last century) is not significant; as the popular saying goes, "just because we've always done it that way doesn't mean it's the right way to do it."
And liberal education, rightly, has been identified with a very real elitism, as we shall see; and such an elitism could not withstand, and has no place in, an ever-more democratic society.
For all these reasons, it is understandable that no historically grounded, fairly unshakable, and commonly understood definition of liberal education exists in either popular or academic discourse. The sad fact is that the term is little understood, badly used, and respected almost not at all. Those on the political and economic right have appropriated the term and try to use it as an intellectual bludgeon in order to further their political and economic agenda. Those on the left reject the term as inevitably the tool of the hegemonic oppressors, an accusation which --- if seen only in the context of contemporary culture wars --- is essentially correct.
But I want to argue that liberal education is not and cannot by definition be the tool of any oppressive regime, and that the term must be liberated from its capture by the elitist right; and that the left, to the extent that it is genuinely interested in promoting a proper individuality (liberation) and a genuine commitment (communitarianism), must necessarily support the means and the ends of liberal education.
III PRESUPPOSITIONS ON WHICH REST THE DEFINITION OF LIBERAL EDUCATION
As we begin an examination of the conceptual and historical development of liberal education, it is necessary, I think, to point out that notions of liberal education inevitably rest on the assumption that there is such a thing as an inherent nature of man; that is, an essential humanness common to all people, everywhere, at all times. It is also assumed that such a nature is discoverable and definable, and that an understanding of it can lead to proper definitions of the good life and the good society. As Jacques Maritain put it,
The job of education is....to shape a particular child belonging to a given nation, a given social environment, a given historical age. Yet before being a child of the twentieth century, an American-born or European-born child, a gifted or retarded child, this child is a child of man....nothing is more important for each of us, or more difficult, than to become a man. Thus the chief task of education is above all to shape man, or to guide the evolving dynamism through which man forms himself as a man.(5)
If such assumptions are accepted, the argument for liberal education will make sense, and arguments for any of the various utilitarianisms will be patently inhumane. On the other hand, if such assumptions are rejected, the argument for liberal education will not hold up, and the various utilitarianisms can legitimately compete with one another for public support.
To put it another way, either Maritain is correct when he contends that there is such a thing as "man," something which precedes nationality, social environment, or influence of a given historical age; or his opponents are right when they contend for some version of existentialism, dependent on will, depth psychology, culture, race, or gender. If Maritain is correct, then the following is also correct.
If a man has enjoyed the blessing of a good liberal education....he will not be directly qualified thereby to follow any particular profession. On the other hand, he will have been encouraged to develop himself more fully as a man. He will be well-read, informed, sensitive; he will have some appreciation of the fine arts, some understanding of the world and its history and its problems: his sympathies will be broad and his mind will be tolerant, and if there arises some question of the public or political kind, he will bring to the discussion of this something better than mere prejudice and self-interest. He will have some skill in the difficult arts of reading and writing and thinking; he will have inner resources, he'll be worth talking to.(6)
For if Maritain is correct, then there is a human nature, a part of which is rational, disinterested, and striving for truth; but if he is incorrect, then there is nothing more than "prejudice and self-interest," and any contention to the contrary is silly.
There have always been twin purposes to liberal education: the first is to discover the way the world really is; the second is to become fully human by conforming to that reality. This is what C.S. Lewis refers to as "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are."(7)
I have made this point so baldly and so briefly here, not to pretend that the argument has been made and the controversy settled, but to make clear what the stakes are when entering into a discussion of liberal education. As I have said previously, the term liberal education is not one which can be used to mean "just what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less." For a discussion of liberal education to be fruitful, the term must be used to mean what it always meant --- a study of what it means to be human, as part of the process of becoming human. Liberal education, despite the changes in its content and methods over the centuries, has always been grounded in Aristotelian essentialist foundationalism. Liberal education, properly understood, demands a telos. For if there is a telos, education becomes a process, not of invention, but of discovery; becoming human becomes a process, not of self-invention, but of conformity to one's nature. On such a view, history is the retelling of the story of humankind, not the making up of stories; aesthetics is the acknowledging of the beautiful, not mere opinion; and law is the codification of morality, not a substitute for it. On such a view, not all is politics, and not all politics is power.
Without doubt, these are peculiar ideas given the intellectual climate of the West in the late 20th Century, where the intellectual consensus is not essence, but existence; not humanity, but culture, race, or gender; not universal principles to be discovered, but social construction of knowledge; not education for becoming human, but schooling for some utility --- financial security, economic competitiveness, cultural aspiration, improving the world.
And, while it is true that liberal education depends on a telos for its validity, the two great apologists for a telos to which we should conform are Plato and Aristotle, and neither is a believer in democracy. Both contended, each in his own way, that some kind of meritocracy should rule. And it is primarily out of the ideas of Plato and Aristotle that we can derive an argument for liberal education as the proper approach to schooling. Are, then, liberal education and democracy antithetical? As we will see, that is exactly what the reformers of schooling in 1918 argued as they produced the Cardinal Principles for Secondary Education. Is liberal education necessarily elitist and, therefore, anti-democratic? If there is a telos, some essential human nature, some reality that lies behind appearance, then some will perceive and understand that telos more accurately and more fully than others. Should these not rule, by virtue of their greater wisdom? Or, to come at it the other way, if democratic political theory requires egalitarianism, does the democratic experiment then require something like philosophical pragmatism, which has to do not with the essential nature of things, or conformity to that essential nature, but with how things work out in practice? If democracy does require something like philosophical pragmatism, then what came to be known as Progressive Education would also seem to be inevitable. The very fact that there are various strands of progressive education that are in conflict with one another supports the contention that it is the outgrowth of philosophical pragmatism: there is to be public debate over the desired outcomes, but "outcomes" is the goal. Apparently, then, liberal education depends on the existence of and conformity to a telos and is, therefore, elitist. Democracy depends on public debate, majority rule, and public evaluation of effects; democracy is, to use the term broadly, egalitarian and so, by definition, anti-elitist. Schooling in a democracy must not be elitist and, so, must not be grounded in liberal education. Is this radical opposition valid, or is there a way to harmonize the essentialist foundations of liberal education and the egalitarian positions of democratic political theory? That is the question to keep in mind as we review the history of liberal education in the West and its principal concepts; the rise to preeminence of philosophical pragmatism in the United States and its educational manifestation, progressive education; and the codification of the change in the Cardinal Principles.
IV The Greek Origins of the Western Tradition of Education
As Christopher Dawson has pointed out,
The tradition of liberal education in Western culture is practically as old as the Confucian in China and has played a similar part in forming the mind and maintaining the continuity of our civilization.(8)
So any discussion of liberal education must begin with the ancient Greeks, and with the philosophical analysis of education done by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in the hundred years before Aristotle's death in 322 BCE; or, rather, with the conflict between these philosophers and the Sophists. For while Aristotle and his predecessors argued for an education for morality and spiritual wholeness, the Sophists argued for an education for "goodness," a term not used in a moral sense but in a practical sense.
Socrates argued against the use of intellectual training for personal and material advancement as advocated by the Sophists. His goal was to get people to think philosophically, and his method was to question them about the very language they were using. To ask those with whom he was involved in dialogue, "What is the meaning of virtue, justice, piety, courage?" was to force them to confront their own ignorance and lack of understanding.
This is the Socratic method, but the Socratic goal was to drive his listeners to the understanding that genuine self-knowledge, the knowledge that reveals us to ourselves as beings of prejudice and irrationality, is the first step toward a moral life; for only after this kind of self-revelation can we realize how necessary reason is as a guide to life. For Socrates it was obvious that without reason as a guide, men would be led by self-interest and passion, a way of life that would not only destroy the individual but bring disorder to the polis. For Socrates, then, the first goal was to become a moral being, to live in harmony with our nature as intellectual and moral beings, not to merely succeed in material ways.
The educational emphasis that Socrates saw as incomplete was an emphasis on the "liberal arts," those abilities that allowed the free man to perform his function; that is, to take a full share in the life and government of the city. Primary among these "arts" were those involved with speech and persuasion, especially grammar, style, and rhetoric, abilities which could easily be turned to utilitarian ends and used for succeeding in the world.
It was Plato who raised and widened the Greek debate on education, and moved it from "civic education" to a higher education, in which science and philosophy would lead the individual to the final, spiritual, goal.
In the Republic, where he concentrates on the education of the Guardians, and in the Laws, where he deals with popular education, Plato talks about the necessity of integrating the three elements of human nature --- appetite, the spirited element, and the gentle or philosophic element. It is through philosophy that a man comes to "peace with himself," and such an integrated man is the "just" man:
The just man does not allow the several elements in his soul to usurp one another's functions; he is indeed one who sets his house in order, by self-mastery and discipline coming to be at peace with himself, and bringing into tune those three parts, like the terms in the proportion of a musical scale, the highest and lowest notes and the mean between them, with all the intermediate intervals. Only when he has linked these parts together in well-tempered harmony and has made himself one man instead of many, will he be ready to go about whatever he may have to do, whether it be making money and satisfying bodily wants, or business transactions,or the affairs of state. In all these fields when he speaks of just and honorable conduct, he will mean the behavior that helps to produce and to preserve this habit of mind; and by wisdom he will mean the knowledge which presides over such conduct. Any action which tends to break down this habit will be for him unjust; and the notions governing it he will call ignorance and folly.(9)
The emphasis on integration, on wholeness, is summed up in the word paideia, which Plato defined as "the education in arete (excellence) from youth onwards, which makes men passionately desire to become perfect citizens, knowing both how to rule and how to be ruled on the basis of justice."(10)
In The Republic, Plato describes the well-nurtured youth as one
who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age of reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.(11)
This is an attitude which would be condemned by the multi-culturalists, cultural relativists, whatever-centrists, and various other post-modernists as reflective of nothing more than a particular set of cultural biases, all of which could be explained by historical, economic, geographical, and psycho-dynamic peculiarities of that time and place. And they may be right.
The point to be made here is that Plato is proceeding from a reasoned belief in foundations, an essential humanness which is there for us to discover and to live by. The various skepticisms regarding this position are valid only if Plato's basic premise is incorrect; only if there is no essence, only existence. If Plato's essentialism is correct, then, I will argue, liberal education is the valid form of schooling for all, even in a democracy; if Plato's critics are correct, then liberal education can be defended only on pragmatic grounds, and then as only one of several competing views open for public debate and decision.
But, as with most things in Western thought, it is Aristotle who most fully and forcefully argues for an education beyond utility, a learning which is "not only an instrument, but an end." Against the Sophists who argued for learning as a means to achieve certain worldly successes, Aristotle contends that the heart of learning is in learning for its own sake. The reason he gives is grounded in the notion that human life is meaningful, and that there is such a thing as wisdom; that is, it is possible to do things for the right reason or the wrong reason, and it is these reasons that are most important because they have to do with the meaning of our lives.(12)For Aristotle, the distinction between means and ends was most important, and he realized that while mistakes in the choice of means can become apparent relatively quickly, mistakes in the choice of ends --- the much more important choice --- can come to light much more slowly:
For that knowledge is the most commanding and in command of those subservient to it, which understands for the sake of what each thing must be done, that is, the good in each case, and, in sum, what is best in the whole of nature....It is through wondering that people both now and at first began to philosophize, wondering at the beginning about perplexities close at hand and then little by little advancing, and raising questions about greater matters....Therefore if it was to escape ignorance that they philosophized, it is clear that they pursued knowledge for the sake of understanding and not for some utility.(13)
To understand why something should be done is the key to being a rational animal. And to ask "Why?" is to ask "What is the good life?" The pursuit of answers to that question is the purpose of liberal education; on this view, there is no such thing as pure utility, for everything is always done for a reason, and it is the reason that really matters.(14)
For Aristotle, as for Plato, the aim of education was to get the student to like and dislike what he ought:
Pleasure induces us to behave badly, and pain to shrink from fine actions. Hence the importance (as Plato says) of having been trained in some way from infancy to feel joy and grief at the right things: true education is precisely this.(15)
"True education" is, on this view, the discovery of what it means to be human; the good life is to live in accord with one's human nature. Liberal Education is the attempt to discover what it means to be human, and how best to live that out. It is not indoctrination into codes and canons; it is, rather, the engagement of each individual, in each generation, with the wisest, most penetrating and enlightening thought about the profound questions of the meaning of being human (almost exclusively through books). In this way, it is both absolutely individualistic and devoted to the uncovering of absolute and immutable truth.
V The Christian Origins of the Western Tradition of Education
The military and political triumph of Rome led to an appropriation of Greek notions of education, but the Romans, as in all things, cared only about the practical; as a result, the "liberal arts" necessary for a civic education were continued by the Romans, as we can see in Cicero and Quintillian, but the higher learning, the learning which led to philosophy was not encouraged. If the Sophists were utilitarians to Plato's and Aristotle's liberal educators, then the Romans, almost entirely, were utilitarian educators until the revolutionary cultural change that came with Christianity. For, in a powerful way, arguably more powerful than the philosophic approach of the ancient Greeks, Christianity preached that life was not merely practical, but spiritual, and that meaning lay not in what one did but in what one was. If we can see the battle between utilitarians and liberal educators as an on-going dialectic, then Christianity as the established religion of the Empire becomes the latest defense for education as a way of learning to be human, not just learning how to be efficient and orderly. The life of Augustine is particularly illustrative of this change: trained as a rhetorician, Augustine converted to Christianity, a change which he saw as a move away from mere utility to a life of transcendent meaning, a moment which he referred to as "a soul set free."(16)
The history of Christianity's involvement with classical ideals in general, and with liberal education in particular, during the Middle Ages is a complex one, impossible to describe here in any detail. But the relationship between Christianity and liberal education is a profound one. As Christopher Dawson put it,
From the time of Plato the Hellenic paideia was a humanism in search for a theology....(17)
By the fifth century of the Common Era, a synthesis of classical education in the liberal arts and a specifically Christian learning, primarily biblical and theological, had been achieved; and it is this synthesis which provides the foundation of medieval culture.(18)
The preservation of classical texts in the monasteries, the conversion of the Western barbarians, the establishment of the universities in Paris, Bologna, and other places, and the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology were all of tremendous importance for the intellectual future of the West. But all through this time there are conflicts as well, between Aristotelian scholasticism and clerical utilitarianism, between the Latin ecclesiastical culture of the universities and the courtly culture of the vernacular, between the schoolmen and the humanists, between "Reason and the Word."
But while it is important to be aware of the intramural conflicts within Medieval Christendom, it is also important, for our purposes, not to lose sight of the essentialism of Christian theology and philosophy which underlay all theories of education. Although there was spirited disagreement over means, and even more spirited disagreement over how one was to live in the world, the given, the assumed, was that all were created by God, held in existence by His will, and that there was a "straight and narrow path" to be discovered, chosen, and walked as carefully as possible. On this view, human life was not to be invented; it was idiosyncratic only in (to use the Aristotelian term) accidental ways. The meaning of human life was there to be discovered, and education had that discovery at its heart.
The Thomistic synthesis between Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy is of the utmost importance in this context, for Thomas managed to demonstrate that it was possible to have, as the 12th Century English scholar John of Salisbury put it, "a sweet marriage of Reason and the Word." In our study, this is significant because it rejects the radical distinction between Belief and Rationality, between assumptions about the essential nature of things and the demands of Reason. Education can, on this view, be grounded in a belief in absolute Truth and in freedom for the faculty of Reason. And these two elements are at the heart of liberal education.
VI Liberal Education as Process and Principle
There is no such thing as liberal education reified and unmodified over the centuries, unaffected by circumstance and personality, available as a packaged curriculum at your local educational services dealer. As John Henry Cardinal Newman put it,
A great idea changes in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be (mature) is to have changed often.(19)
This is why the good-hearted attempts in the 20th Century to create such a curriculum --- by Adler, Hutchins, Hirsch, and others --- are so seriously flawed; not because they provide lists of books to read or things to know about --- there is nothing inherently uneducational in reading classics or knowing and understanding already chosen events and concepts --- but because they attempt to package, in a very 20th Century way, what is by definition a set of principles, not a list of practices; like Aristotle's ethics, liberal education sets down no ad hoc rules of conduct but instead attributes being educated to the effects of habituated virtue. When E.D. Hirsch makes a list and presents it as the heart of a liberal education, no matter how sophisticatedly he talks about it, and when his critics condemn him for making a list, just because it's a list, they're both wrong.(20) When Mortimer Adler creates a list of the "great books," and suggests a programmatic way to present these works to a mass audience in The Great Books Program (or, in a slightly more sophisticated way, in The Paideia Proposal), he has attempted to bridge the gap between the tradition of liberal education and the social and cultural realities of modernity in a way that does not take into account the profundity of change in contemporary life. But when his critics sneeringly dismiss the prescription of certain books as those we should all read because there is no way to make any such judgment, they are also wrong.(21)
In other words, there is no current debate over the merits of liberal education as a central focus of schooling because the only two sides talking about it are both misrepresenting it: one side in its attempt to apply it to contemporary life in an unsophisticated way, and the other in its attempt to ridicule it out of existence.
It is the goal of this paper to avoid both these errors, and to demonstrate that liberal education is the best way to develop both a right individualism and a right commitment to the community, the best way to avoid both the mindless prescription of fundamentalist and absolutist pedagogies and the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the radical relativisms.
How can this be accomplished, if there is no reified, stable curriculum to teach? And how could there be such a curriculum under any circumstances if there are no ends in sight, if schooling is not a means to an end? Such a claim as I am making is disorienting to the modernist mind, for it emphasizes not utility, of any kind, but an education for its own sake, of value in itself, one that, paradoxically, will lead to right understandings and right actions, even though those understandings and actions are not the ends of liberal education.
VII Modernity and the End of Liberal Education
All who look back at the Middle Ages with a romantic fondness, are clear that the succession of cultural, intellectual, and political events between the middle of the fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century combined to break down the medieval synthesis. As G.K. Chesterton once put it,
In so far as there was ever a bad break in philosophical history, it was not before St. Thomas, or at the beginning of medieval history; it was after St. Thomas and at the beginning of modern history. The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from Pythagoras and Plato was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was only lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby; the habit of thinking.(22)
The growing importance of the cities, the ever-growing and ever more influential middle class, the literary influence of humanism, the invention of the printing press, the various manifestations of Protestant Christianity with its emphasis on personal spirituality and life in the world, the discovery of a "new world" with all its conceptual and economic ramifications, the first stirrings of nationalism, the Copernican revolution in cosmology, liberal political revolutions as early as 1688 in England, and the Enlightenment itself with its rejection of prejudice and ignorance and superstition (that is, "religion") and its embracing of science, rationality, individualism, and Progress --- all these, singly and in concert, tended to emphasize notions of individual autonomy and social utility in politics, ethics, and aesthetics.
Cartesian rationalism, Newtonian physics, and Lockian empiricism had crossed borders and joined in a synthesis that happened, for the most part, outside the universities, a synthesis which emphasized philosophical science and scientific technology. Metaphysics was nonsense, faith was mere superstition, and mystery was a bad excuse for ludicrous beliefs. The Enlightenment goal was to use education to make men reasonable, to provide enlightened government so that men could function freely and peacefully in an ordered world, and to free men's minds from superstition and prejudice so that political and economic progress could obtain. The outstanding example of institutionalizing education for these purposes was Napoleon's campaign of the early 1800's to establish a schooling system for the whole empire, entirely under the control of the state. "Of all political questions," he wrote in 1805, "education is perhaps the most important." (Italics added.) Schools were to be used to train young people in the proper political attitudes. It is no accident that this plan was coincident with the work of Jeremy Bentham in England, the greatest of the Utilitarian philosophers, and with Fichte's call in Germany in 1809 for universal national education aimed at utilitarian instruction in useful knowledge.
While it is true that American schooling had always been utilitarian, the establishment of the American nation during the last quarter of the 18th Century firmly established utility as the obvious and only goal of schooling. This was to have profoundly important consequences for the schools, for individuals, and for the polity.
As with most things, it was Aristotle who best explained the problem with schooling for utility:
It is therefore not difficult to see that the young must be taught those useful arts that are indispensably necessary; but, those pursuits that are liberal (eleutheron)having been distinguished from those that are illiberal, it is clear that they should not be taught all the useful arts, and that they must participate in such among them as will not make the participant a philistine (banauson).(23)
And in the United States of the 1830's, Ralph Waldo Emerson inveighed against the temptation to become one's work:
The state of society is one in which....Man is metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food....sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.(24)
Put simply, schooling for utility means schooling to achieve some other end. Consider the utilitarian language of the following passage from the United States Education Commissioner in 1974:
Today we in education must recognize that it is our duty to provide our students also with salable skills....To send young men and women into today's world armed only with Aristotle,Freud and Hemingway is like sending a lamb into the lion's den....But if we give young men and women a useful skill, we give them not only a means to earn a good living, but also the opportunity to do something constructive and useful to society.(25)
Or the following passage from what was arguably the most influential of the many influential books and reports focusing on reform of schooling in the 1980's, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform:
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being over-taken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility....the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people....If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.(26)
Or consider how even Mortimer Adler, the contemporary champion of Aristotelian essentialism, writing in The Paideia Proposal, emphasizes the utilitarian when he contends that we should provide the best education to our children in order to guarantee the "proper working of our political institutions, the efficiency of our industries and businesses, the salvation of our economy, the vitality of our culture...."(27)
As we will see later in this paper, the view of schools as utilitarian institutions, of schooling as means to an end, has dominated schooling theory in the 20th Century; the Cardinal Principles of 1918, George Counts' "reconstructionism" in the 1930's, the "life-adjustment" curriculum of the 1940's and 1950's, James B. Conant's reconfiguration of the high school in the early 1960's, and society-wide racial integration through school desegregation in the 1960's and 1970's are only the most visible examples of using the school as a "lever of social reform."
This emphasis on the utility of schooling is not unique to the 20th Century, and did not spring full-grown into our midst; like all complex and important notions about the human condition, it evolved over time. A true and inclusive genealogy of such a phenomenon is beyond the scope of this paper, but John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill are certainly influential. Consider three sayings of Locke with regard to the relative importance of various subjects of study:
Methinks the Parents should labour to have (poetry) stifled, and suppressed, as much as may be: And I know not what Reason a Father can have, to wish his Son a Poet. And I have, among Men of Parts and Business, so seldom heard commended, or esteemed for having an Excellency in Musick, that amongst all those things, that ever came into the list of Accomplishments, I think I may give it the last place.(28)
I have mentioned mathematics, wherein algebra gives new helps and views to the understanding. If I propose these, it is not, as I said, to make every man a thorough mathematician or a deep algebraist; but yet I think the study of them is of infinite use even to grown men.(29)
The latter contentions are particularly ironic, and pertinent, since music and mathematics were seen by the ancients as two of the most valuable modes of learning. Plato, for example, contended that "Geometrical inquiry....then, will be that which draws the soul to truth and produces a philosophical disposition for tending upward where we now tend downward, as we ought not".(30)The proper study of mathematics, that is, will lead ultimately to philosophy.
Jeremy Bentham, the most influential theorist of 19th Century Utilitarianism, the man whom J.S. Mill called one of "the two great seminal minds of England in their age," contended that "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."(31)On this view, schooling would necessarily be for the purpose of encouraging such "happiness." Bentham's intellectual descendant, John Stuart Mill, in defining political and social liberalism identified happiness with the maximization of pleasures or satisfactions:
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.(32)
One can see that Tyrell Bell, David Kearns,(33)the authors of A Nation at Risk, and other similar theorists are, very probably in an ahistorical ignorance, mimicking the contentions of the Utilitarians: that thing is good when the thing it accomplishes is good; which, by implication, contends that no thing is good in itself. Leaving aside for the moment the problems inherent in not defining "good" or "happiness," except to identify them with "pleasure," the contention that schooling is only a means, not an end is itself deeply problematic.
Why do Aristotle and his intellectual descendants decry so heartily against utilitarianism? What is the problem? Why, especially, is schooling for utility a bad thing?
The first point to be made is that the notion of liberal education does not exclude being able to function successfully in the world. As Aristotle says in the above, the "young must be taught those useful arts that are indispensably necessary;" and Emerson does not argue against farming or manufacturing or preaching or selling, all of which depend on acquired skills, but only against having one's humanity become subject to the function one performs. As Emerson says about the Scholar, "In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state....he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking."(34)
What is the meaning of this distinction? What is the matter with being a "mere thinker," or, for that matter, with being "the parrot of other men's thinking"? Why, to use a distinction made carefully by Thomas Green, is there a qualitative difference between "training" and "education"?(35)Why does Emerson consider "....consistency the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines",(36)when consistency in social relationships is obviously both a necessity and a virtue? Why does Charles Dickens include in Hard Times, one of his most powerful attacks on those Victorian types he characterized as "philistines," that ultimate utilitarian of schooling, Mr. Gradgrind?(37)
The answer must lie in the rejection of the notion that one's value as a person proceeds from what one does; that is, from the utility --- variously understood --- of one's actions. But if one's value does not proceed from what one does, then the logical possibilities are only two: either there is no value at all, only functions which garner more or less pleasure and power, or there is an inherent value in being human. If there is such an inherent value, it must be based either on essence, a shared humanness to which we have an obligation to conform, or on the peculiarities of our own existences, where our very uniqueness is considered a value. If it is the latter, there is no possibility of transcending the radical relativism in politics, ethics, and aesthetics that follows; and, therefore, there is no possibility of defining the good life, the good society, or good schooling, except in radically idiosyncratic ways. It is in this case that utilitarian notions of schooling flourish: since there is no "right" way to be human, there is only what we choose to do; and those choices will be more or less inducing of pleasure, satisfaction, happiness. The rational among us, when faced with such a reality, will opt for something like "the greatest good for the greatest number," which is turning the principle of "enlightened self-interest" into a social ethic.
But let us consider for a moment the possibility that such utilitarianism is nothing more than a best possible response to a faulty perception of what it means to be human. If that is the case, what are the epistemological and pedagogic errors made by utilitarian educators?
The first and worst is the perversion of schooling into a series of forms and functions, wherein education is rejected in favor of academic achievement, the receipt of honors and awards, movement to the next step of the schooling ladder, and, ultimately, some kind of certification or credentialing. This is not some kind of reactionary diatribe, nor is it a mere social-science generalization; those of us who have taught in the best private independent schools in the country over the last fifteen years will testify to a conspiracy between teachers and students to construct "fair" exercises, ones that can be completed successfully with real effort but without imagination or daring or real understanding, so that students can move on and teachers can avoid being harassed, bullied, and pressured. It is no secret that parents actively support this view of schooling, and that administrators --- to their credit, usually unwillingly --- support it too. Such a process requires a debasing of the subject matter and an avoidance of the particular "structure of the discipline," since such understandings are not useful and usually require a kind of intellectual engagement that tends to separate the active learner from the performer of assigned tasks. If there is some inherent value to education because there is an inherent value in being human, such a process is a corruption.
The second, and even more common error, is the notion of schooling as preparation for work, a narrow vocationalism. This can take many forms, active and passive, conscious and unconscious. On any sophisticated view of developmental psychology, preparing students to perform a certain task at too early an age is foolish at best. In an economy as dynamic as that of the 3rd Industrial Revolution, to prepare for today's task is to guarantee obsolescence tomorrow. The irony of the institutional arm of a free society helping to lock people into a slot in the economic, and, therefore, social system is both obvious and frightening. But perhaps the worst element of this error is that young people are not educated, a lack which often does not show up until middle age, when a paucity of intellectual resources can turn into boredom, frustration, and worse.
The third error is more subtle and would not be considered an error at all by most people; that is, that schooling should make one useful to others, one who improves society. There are two problems with this conception. The first is that the schooling goal of improving the world requires an emphasis on "problems" and their "solutions." This requires that curricula be grounded in those situations, trends, and events which are seen to be problematic; and to focus on how we can solve these problems. But on what basis is something determined to be a problem? And on what basis are decisions made to choose solutions to the problem? Current school curricula which emphasize impending ecological disaster or alleged political oppressions or inequity in a free society force students to concentrate on situations they cannot hope to comprehend, and to grope for solutions they have no basis for suggesting. The result is a kind of intellectual vacuum which various indoctrinators are only too willing to fill. So not only is this schooling for utility, it is also a validation of indoctrination and training, the antithesis of education.
But the second problem with this error is that it confuses very important categories. In the Ethics, Aristotle makes the distinction between thinking about truth and ends, and deliberating about ways and means.(38)Such curricula as those for problem-solving, affecting others, and changing the world, concentrate on the latter. Education, on the other hand, concentrates on the former, on thinking about truth and ends. It will be the contention of this paper that a concentration on truth and ends, a development of intellectual individuality, is the proper object of education, and that such a process would better prepare persons to engage the problems of the world they inhabit.
The fourth problem is that such a view of schooling formulates all social difficulties as "problems" which can be "solved." This is not merely contemporary arrogance; it comes out of the Enlightenment combination of the scientific and the social. For most Enlightenment thinkers, morality was a social issue; Hume, for example, saw "benevolence" as the first virtue; that is, the willingness to satisfy the needs and desires of others. And science would provide the means of solving most problems. So there is both the means --- science --- and the end --- benevolence. Current theorizers about schooling who emphasize problem solving are part of a long tradition.
But the ancient Aristotle and the medieval Aquinas and Maimonides saw virtue as a condition of the soul, a balanced way of being, a right way of reasoning.(39)Something was a problem because it was out of line with nature, and the solution was to realign oneself, or one's society, with right reason; in other words, to be in tune with nature. To put it another way, there was a way of determining whether something was in fact a problem, and not just a personal annoyance, and there was a way of determining what to do about it. Current utilitarian notions of schooling for solving problems allow for no informing standard against which to measure something as a problem, and no informing standard to which one could look for possible methods of solution; except for the classic utilitarian standard of "happiness" and "the greatest good for the greatest number," a standard which these days is often replaced by a purer-self-interest or the immediate political interests of one's group.
Schooling for utility is problematic if one posits a universal human nature, conformity to which is the real happiness. Liberal education comes out of the tradition that held as true the contention that there is such a human nature, that reason (and, later, revelation) could inform us as to the nature of being human, and that education should be the embodiment of the search for a true understanding of that nature.
But, if one were to posit a schooling for utility for the late 20th Century, schooling that would be aimed at problem-solving, what would be its focus? I would offer that, like Robert Bellah and his colleagues, we would decide that democracy was a basic good and that some new, righter balance between individualism and communitarianism should be established.
IX Individualism, Community, and American Schooling
There is a conflict in the on-going debate over schooling in America that, at the risk of over-simplifying, can be referred to as a conflict between the traditional and the progressive; or, perhaps, between the foundational and the experimental. As we can see in the following quotations, this debate can be on a very high level:
Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics is the only sound, practical, and undogmatic moral philosophy in the whole Western tradition.(40)
Or, contrarily,
It is argued that science and its method must be subordinated; that we must return to the logic of ultimate first principles expressed in the logic of Aristotle and St. Thomas, in order that the young may have sure anchorage in their intellectual and moral life, and not be at the mercy of every passing breeze that blows....(an) emotional appeal (that comes out of) general insecurity, emotional and intellectual as well as economic.(41)
Ever since I began teaching, I have been bewildered by the popular and practiced version of these two extreme and foolish poles of thinking with regard to a wide variety of schooling questions. Virtually everyone I worked for, worked with, or who worked for me, would take either what we can call, for lack of better terms, the traditional or the progressive position and then apply it relentlessly to the situation at hand. Rule-breakers were to be punished by the book or to be "understood;" academic standards were to be upheld or mitigated by the "human factor." Tardiness was a serious breach or an expression of individuality. Principals were to be academic leaders or facilitators of communal activity. Moral education was to be prescriptive or clarifying. And so on, seemingly ad infinitum. And while these debates, while they are going on in the school, are deeply engrossing and seem to be rooted in the moment, the reality is that the positions from which the antagonists are proceeding are important philosophical and theoretical positions which are never articulated, much less examined. What these debates in school reflect is a much larger conceptual conflict implicit in the very nature of democracy itself: the conflict between the individualism that is so obviously necessary for democracy in theory, and the communitarianism that is equally necessary for democracy in practice. The unfortunate thing is that the conceptual tension between individualism and communitarianism, which tension is necessary for democracy, too often turns to conflict between positions which are reified, unreflective, and starkly contrasting.
American life, by virtue of its devotion to the democratic experiment, is caught between notions of individual freedom and communal responsibility, or as Robert Bellah and his colleagues put it, a tension between individualism and commitment.(42) Pure abstract notions of individual freedom, if pushed to their logical conclusions, lead to a radical relativism, the kind that one can see articulated by ordinary citizens every day on television talk shows; pure and abstract notions of responsibility to the community, if pushed to their logical conclusions, lead to conformism and the loss of individuality. The problem is that democracy requires both, each mediating the other, and cannot long tolerate deep conflicts between the polar extremes.
The current debate in political theory between liberalism and communitarianism, a debate which spills over into all other social sciences, includes a battle in which both camps claim Alexis de Tocqueville(43) for their side, because it was Tocqueville who saw the dangers implicit in American individualism (which dangers are emphasized by the communitarians) and the necessity of individualism to the democratic experiment (which philosophical position is emphasized by the liberals). As Tocqueville said, "Democracy does not create strong attachments between man and man, but it does put their ordinary relations on an easier footing."(44) This lack of strong attachments, coupled with a tendency to "clutch everything and hold fast,"(45) endangered traditional social relationships of all kinds. Alexis de Tocqueville:
Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.(46)
But while Tocqueville was content to view the tension and to write eloquently about it in a disinterested way, remaining more-or-less confident in the vitality of American life because of the existence of strong mores, or what he called "habits of the heart", theorists in our time in all areas of social analysis are faced with what appears to be a breakdown of social norms (mores), social institutions, and social cohesion of any kind, as well as what seems to be a splitting of the population into radical relativists on one hand and theological and political absolutists on the other.
It appears that the uniquely American attempt to create and sustain mass democracy depends on allowing --- even encouraging --- the theoretical tension between these two poles, and somehow living somewhere between the two, but contemporary life seems more and more to be gravitating toward one or the other of the two poles, thereby engendering and encouraging intra-polity antagonisms that threaten the very democratic experiment itself.
In questions of schooling, on all levels, this dilemma is played out on a number of fronts every day. Urban public schools are dangerous places for those who teach and learn there, and solutions to this problem tend to fall into one polar camp or the other: understanding, counseling, and development of self-esteem, all grounded in a deep respect for the rights of the individual; or, conversely, prevention, apprehension, dismissal, and punishment, just as deeply grounded in an obligation to the community.
Curriculum theory and practice offer another example. Curriculum is to be tailored to the individual, whether that means that individual's level of cognitive ability, his racial or ethnic background, his socio-economic status, his physical environment, his predicted future, or simply his interests; or, curriculum is to be tailored to meet some abstract definition of being American, or being human, or being educated, or meeting the needs of the community, primarily economic.
Questions about leadership in schools provide one of the most clear cut examples. Literature on the role of the principal encourages either academic leadership or the principal as facilitator of community deliberation. Some theorists on educational leadership unthinkingly propose that he or she be both, a recipe for both personal failure and institutional chaos, but a wonderful example of the conceptual confusion that currently reigns.
In Chapters Two and Three I will review a number of significant events in the history of American schooling, events in which a schooling for utility was chosen. It will be my contention that this American devotion to utility not only cannot provide answers to the above questions, but that it itself is the cause of most of these dilemmas.