Forms of Education

Rethinking Educational Experience Against and Outside the Humanist Legacy

Emile Bojesen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351060653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Forms of Education analyses the basic tenets of the humanist legacy in terms of its educational ethos, examining its contradictions and its limits, as well as the extent of its capture of educational thought. It develops a broader conception of educational experience, which challenges and exceeds those limits.

This book deflates the compulsion to educate. It delegitimises the imposition of any particular practice in education. It defines education, openly and non-restrictively, as the (de)formation of non-stable subjects, arguing that education does not require specific formations, nor the formation of specific forms, only that form does not cease being formed in the experience of the non-stable subject. Exploding and pluralising what amounts to 'education', this book rethinks what might still be called educational experience against and outside the ethos of the humanist legacy that confines its meaning.

This book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, educational theory, history of education and sociology of education.

Part I

Against

Chapter 1

Legacy

The humanist legacy

This book is less concerned with the humanist educational legacy as an object of enquiry or critique than with the elaboration of theoretical resources that might assist in evading, resisting, and, where possible, scuppering and obviating its influence. However, to make clear the stakes involved, this chapter outlines its key features as relevant to my arguments. Its disposition, as stated in the introduction, is manifested in many guises, but its fundamental traits remain the same, in that it is always manifested as a particular form of education, abstracted from the majority of possible experiences; its indispensability is, for its advocates, often unquestionable because subjection to its processes will necessarily, as far as they are concerned, result in the objective improvement of its subjects and usually also society; for this reason some of its more scalable forms are also often made compulsory.

Even beyond its more obvious historical origins in Ancient Rome, humanist education's redemptive philosophical origins go at least as far back as Plato. Adriana Cavarero shows how the myth of the cave in Plato's Phaedo concludes by presenting the ‘philosopher's theoretically correct vertical posture,’ which figures the image, in all its symbolic power, of ‘the philosopher straightening up according to the perpendicular line of truth.’¹ This theme of rectitude also has moral as well as epistemological corollaries in other more explicitly educational sections of the Republic, where correct shaping of children's souls is discussed,² and where the interlocutors agree that ‘the final outcome of education […] is a single newly finished person, who is either good or the opposite.’³ This is seen as an educational rather than legislative task, though the latter remains in play, legislating the soul. Plato also outlines the kind of person this education is intended to produce, which is ‘a decent person who is most self-sufficient in living well and, above all others, has the least need of anyone else.’⁴ This sets the tone for the kind of posture that is at the heart of most formal education in the West. Plato's self-sufficient person, who has the least need of anyone else, and is nonetheless subservient to the interests of the state as a good citizen and cognisant of social and educational hierarchies (as implied by the Republic's social order), could be updated to describe what is desired in contemporary mass education, at least in as far as successive government and much institutional policy is concerned.

Despite this seemingly clear line straight from Plato to the present, the educationally informed posture of rectitude was most influentially developed later in Ancient Rome, first by Cicero and then by Quintilian, both of whom were central to humanist education from its earliest manifestations in fifteenth-century Italy. As Margo Todd shows, this was as much of a practical development as it was a result of ideological influence:

The demand for practical moral and ethical instruction in both grammar schools and universities gave rise to a ‘textbook revolution’ consisting in a revived use of ancient moralists and an enthusiastic adoption of new humanist textbooks. The most admired classical writers were used both as pedagogical guides and as instructors in virtuous behaviour. Plutarch's treatise on the upbringing of children (first translated from Greek by Guarino in 1411). Quintilian's Education of the Orator (first published in full by Poggio in 1417), and Cicero's De Oratore (rediscovered in 1422) were among the most popular of the dual purpose manuals.⁵

Their rhetorical posturing was practical and symbolic, and, although predominantly focused on performance and persuasion, was also – at least in theory – seen as a means to developing a socially active, morally good persona. While both Cicero and Quintilian are wary of the possible abuse of eloquent oratory, their engagement with that problem only stretches as far as a few pages. Notably in Cicero's De Oratore⁶ and De Inventione, where, in the latter, he states that ‘men ought none the less to devote themselves to the study of eloquence although some misuse it both in private and in public affairs.’⁷ And while Quintilian, in his Institutio Oratoria, argued that the perfect orator could ‘not exist except in the person of a good man’⁸ he goes on to state that while they should ‘be the sort of man who can truly be called “wise,” not only perfect in morals […] but also in knowledge and in his general capacity for speaking. Such a person has perhaps never existed; but that is no reason for relaxing our efforts to attain this ideal.’⁹ Thus, if students were, predictably, unable to attain sufficient moral and epistemological rectitude, they should at least be able to attain the posture which suggests it. The majority of their rhetorical texts, and certainly the aspects of their texts that were taken up in the Renaissance, were explicitly dedicated to rhetorical practice qua practice rather than relational responsibility, precisely because it was assumed that a concentration on the former would best guide and serve the ends of the latter.

In a sense, Plato's notions of the proper deportment of the soul and the models of Renaissance humanism have been inherited as superstitions which frame particular, but extremely widely practiced and understood, conceptions of learning. Despite the origins of humanism in the studia humanitatis of classical antiquity, preoccupied with activities ‘including grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy,’ as Donald R. Kelly puts it, in the Renaissance (perhaps echoing a phase of its imperial Roman history) it became ‘an imperialistic as well as a revolutionary movement.’¹⁰ The humanists of the Renaissance ‘went beyond their ancient models in appreciating the deeper implications and potentials of the studia humanitatis.’¹¹ The development of Renaissance humanism was responding to the ‘needs and aspirations of a secular, commercial, expanding urban society that most directly promoted the arts of communication and, in this connection, literacy, literature, and their attendant cultural attitudes.’¹² Writing specifically on the English history of humanism, Todd pinpoints education as central to its mission and its impact, arguing that

If a single area of reform can be isolated as that in which Christian humanists had their greatest effect on sixteenth century English society, that area would be education. In their authorship of new pedagogical theory and in their participation in concrete reforms, they acted upon their conviction that a good education is the best means to combat social evil. Sin, they argued, springs at least partly from false opinions; therefore education is requisite for the installation of virtue, whether individual or social.¹³

As much, though, as this form of education was developed to combat social evil, it was also intended to develop sensibilities. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine are clearer than Kelly and Todd on the elitist and hierarchical impositions this development facilitated, arguing that

The older system [scholasticism] had fitted perfectly the needs of the Europe of the high middle ages, with its communes, its church offices open to the low-born of high talents and its vigorous debates on power and authority in state and church. The new system, we would argue, fitted the needs of the new Europe that was taking shape, with its closed governing élites, hereditary offices and strenuous efforts to close off debate on vital political and social questions. It stamped the more prominent members of the new élite with an indelible cultural seal of superiority, it equipped lesser members with fluency and the learned habit of attention to detail and it offered everyone a model of true culture as something given, absolute, to be mastered, not questioned – and thus fostered in all its initiates a properly docile attitude towards authority.¹⁴

This ‘indelible cultural seal of superiority’ operates as a form of social signalling, still conveyed today by those who attend prestigious schools or universities, where the ‘content’ of the learning is secondary to the social cipher it produces as a means of recognising an individual's higher status. The cipher is not empty, though, as it requires validation through assumptions about the type and quality of education received, ensuring its value as social currency.

The imprint of this seal has been exponentially multiplied and expanded through the advent of compulsory public education and can be found even in the most democratic and emancipatory approaches to education. It implies an original sin of educational lack that only education can redeem. The implication of this lack in its subjects obscures the lack at the core of its mission. Unlike the delimited form of education promoted by Renaissance humanists, who were clear and forthright about their mission, contemporary education in keeping with the humanist legacy not only obscures its origins but also their purposiveness. For the most part, the necessity of the imposition of compulsory education is no longer in question. As Ansgar Allen and Roy Goddard put it:

Reliant as it is on modern humanism that can only justify itself by reference to its unplumbed depths, modern education is cast adrift, and hence left uncertain of its mission and purpose. It can only grasp on to the one thing it knows to be certain, which is itself, its own practices and procedures. Almost all that remains of education, then, is the reality of its existing techniques and methods. Consequently, these techniques and methods are held very close indeed. One might say, they are the ‘heart and soul’ of education today.¹⁵

The dilution of the mission and purpose of humanist education provide ample resource for educational philosophers, theorists, and activists, as well as those simply disappointed in contemporary education, to make stands for a return to something like its founding principles, often updated to be aligned with the latest philosophical or psychological trends. This step back from the emptiness of ‘techniques and methods’ (nonetheless always implying particular techniques and methods) cannot avoid the hierarchical, redemptive logic extant in the origins of humanist education.

The rhetorical posture figured in the works of Cicero and Quintilian represents a performative moral rectitude, while making sure to display its authenticity, as well as the authenticity of the education that has provided it. The false logic of the relationship, between performative wisdom and authority through eloquence to moral goodness, persists to this day. The sense also pervades that good education (whatever that might be represented as in whatever instance) is not only edificatory but also easily perceivable; usually through which school and university were attended and which subject was studied and what grades conferred, and also often through the accent, vocabulary, and manners of the individuals, which is to say, their rhetorical disposition. The experience and personal consequences of the education received often only matter in terms of how they can be presented, either through ones' actions or ones' certificates and curriculum vitae.

As Kelly argues, ‘In a very general sense Renaissance humanism was a form of civic ideology, and it never lost these birthmarks.’¹⁶ This civic ideology was, in the name of the educational development of individuals' virtue, elitist, hierarchical, and implemented precisely to legitimate the control of large populations:

From fifteenth-century Italy to late-sixteenth-century England, wherever humanist educators set about providing further education for a minority of the population, the goals of that education were set as Cicero had defined them: the production of a small, politically active minority who were heirs to a mature foreign culture, and who were thereby (it is claimed) hallmarked as of the requisite moral and intellectual calibre to make substantial contributions to their own developing communities.¹⁷

This immense influence of the humanist logic of education as a means to moral and intellectual betterment and signifiable superiority precipitated a cultural shift, foreshadowing a way of thinking about education and culture that continues to return, re-inform, and underpin educational thought and practice. Tracing a further shift in this direction, from the eighteenth-century Romanticism of Friedrich Schiller, through modern criticism, to the modern school, Ian Hunter explains:

Culture ceased to be a leisurely nurturing of faculties already given in an unproblematic human nature: a nurturing typified in the formation of ‘clear and distinct ideas’ of the rules of taste. Redeployed as a means of reconciling his divided ethical being, culture imposed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Against
• PART II Outside
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index