The Parochialism of the Present

Contemporary issues in education

G. H. Bantock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315413358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

In this controversial and challenging book, first published in 1981, the author calls for a restoration of the humanistic literary and historical balance in our educational thinking. He argues that the philosophy of education, seeking to emulate the precisions of science, concerns itself more with the analysis of words than with the real problems encountered in the educational world. Social science itself, he argues, would benefit by the promptings of literary insights. These essays constitute a systematic indictment of the narrowness of contemporary thinking about education, and will be of interest to students of education, philosophy and sociology.

Chapter 1

The parochialism of the present:
some reflections on the history of educational theory

I do not intend, in this discussion, to get myself involved in the Hirst-O’Connor imbroglio over the different significances which can be attached to the concept ‘theory’.¹ I shall simply stipulate that educational theory is to be regarded as essentially prescriptive by nature, concerned to draw on such understanding of a pupil and his circumstances as may seem relevant with a view to pedagogic action; it is, in effect, systematic thought about how to educate people.

In the past, many books have appeared which have taken this as their aim; and the study of some of these works formed part of the initiation of the student teacher into his professional life. Latterly such study has been dropped, partly no doubt because the proliferation of contemporary information arising out of the application of social science techniques to education has produced a seemingly more relevant introduction to the work of the practising teacher. Courses on great educators have, indeed, never been popular; and yet properly handled they can provide an indispensable enrichment to those considerations of value which all teachers, whether they are consciously aware of it or not, must face. That in the past a very different set of teaching priorities prevailed, as is made clear in these important historical documents, challenges the self-evident correctness of current acceptances, at least for the thoughtful. Whereas it is true that social changes enforce some degree of reorientation, there persists at the deeper level a continuity of human problems that makes historical ways of tackling them as ‘relevant’ as could be wished for. At the very least, they challenge current assumptions and enforce justification rather than mindless acceptance; they constitute an enlargement of pedagogic experience.

In addition, these books have an intrinsic historical interest and help to amplify our specifically historical understanding by revealing the cultural priorities of former times. This is immediately noticeable in the concepts in terms of which they chart their recommendations. Thus, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries words like ‘reason’, ‘understanding’, ‘discovery’ and ‘method’ have a modern ring about them. But prior to that attention was to ‘words’ rather than ‘things’ and this fostered a very different set of organising principles.

Words, indeed, were the essential items in the humanists’ bill of fare. It is hardly surprising that in a world before movable type had been invented matters relating to communication should have been at the core of the curriculum. The foundations of medieval education had been defined in the trivium – grammar, logic and rhetoric. Initiation was through grammar – Latin grammar of course – which dealt with the basic structural aspects of the language; then the scholastics had stressed logic as the means by which the frequently disparate though ancient authoritative pronouncements (in terms of which the Middle Ages defined their understanding of man and God) could either be reconciled or decisively adjudicated between.

It was, however, the study of rhetoric that the humanists stressed in their criticism of the logic-chopping of the scholastics. The boundaries between logic and rhetoric are not always clearly marked; both are concerned with problems of communication and both are intended to assist the maintenance of a specific stance in discourse. In general, however, rhetoric was more popularly oriented, and its highest purpose was to persuade contemporaries to moral truths with a view to the harmonious and fruitful conduct of civic and political life. Whether the political system was oligarchical or princely a training in rhetoric afforded skills considered necessary in the conduct of affairs – as bureaucrat, in the law courts, as courtier, or in local government, in ambassadorial functions, in any social or civic position where words written or spoken had the power to activate, the humanist, in an increasingly politicised society, might find employment. Rhetoric, of course, was initiated in relation to the spoken word and retains its close affiliation with speech during the Renaissance period.²

I stress this centrality of the rhetorical training, its growing political importance in the gradual evolution of the increasingly secularised nation or civic state, to emphasise how wrong Durkheim was to see in it little more than a dilettante concern for elegance.³ Its ideal remained morality in action, whether in the chancelleries of city states or the courts of absolute monarchs, through skill in the persuasive power of language informed by morality. What was the specifically educational implication of the training necessary for so crucial a role?

Clearly it derived from the classical model of the orator explicit in the writings of Cicero and Quintilian; furthermore its central energising discipline was that classical and patristic literature (which included history and political writings) from which were to be derived both moral content and stylistic purity. As a technique intended to train in the art of discourse it was especially influenced by Cicero. The Renaissance study of rhetoric usually involved an analytic approach which examined composition (spoken or written) from the point of view of invention (the process of discovering valid arguments to render a case plausible), arrangement (the structuring of a discourse), style, delivery and memory.

I give this truncated account because I am particularly interested in one feature of it – what is called ‘invention’, the discovery of appropriate material from the point of view of both style and content. Vergerius had urged that ‘thought without style’ was not ‘likely to attract much notice or secure a sure survival’;⁴ and indeed, the humanists initiated a revolution in classical studies which was eminently stylistic. But content was equally important: ‘Nothing is more admirable’, proclaimed Erasmus, ‘than discourse abounding in a certain rich copia of words or ideas, like a river of gold.’⁵ To modern ears, the notion of ‘invention’ suggests the finding out of something new; to the humanist it implied mainly a searching out of appropriate material from the sources of classical and patristic literature mentioned earlier, literature which formed a repository from which the humanist was usually content to draw both material and form in imitation of past models.

The point I wish to establish is that at the centre of the humanists’ educational concern was the notion of the ‘commonplace’, the Latin locus communis, the Greek topos or topic. Now there are several features of these topoi to which I would draw attention. They were, to begin with, essentially moral in character, their most frequent use being in the praise of virtue or the repudiation of vice. In general they comprised storehouses or thesauri of sayings, figures of speech, moral sentences, aphorisms or proverbial saws culled from a variety of sources — but especially, of course, classical authors — which could help sustain or embellish a persuasive argument intended to induce a moral, social, political or legal outcome. Numerous books of such adages arranged under appropriate headings — including Erasmus’s own Adagia — appeared, and students in schools spent long hours memorising, paraphrasing and amplifying such extracts (as well, of course, as fuller texts) so that they would always provide a ready source of material of use in both the matter and manner of discourse. Thus a typical preface to a commonplace book described it as a ‘magazine of choice moral Precepts, grave Admonitions, divine Sentences, with abundance of very edifying and political Maxims for the true regulation of Life and Behaviour’.⁶

This, very briefly and inadequately, is something of the reality which lay behind the humanists’ pleas for eloquence and philosophy — by which, of course, they always implied moral philosophy. What I am particularly concerned to bring out is its basic unoriginality, its essentially derivative character, despite the fact that what was intended by ‘imitation’ was not a slavish copying.⁷ In this way, the mind was prepared for experience; it was not considered that experience should precede instruction. As Erasmus put it, doctors do not learn on their patients how to distinguish between poisons and healing drugs, neither should sailors acquire the art of navigation as a result of shipwrecks. Knowledge of words (verba) should take precedence in time over the knowledge of things (res). The humanists were responsible for a profound revolution in the education of the ruling classes, for they made literacy and knowledge essential to the arts of government; but knowledge they conceived of primarily as a repository to be acquired rather than as a tool for testing. True, their aim was practical life as they conceived it; but in their view the ‘nature’ of man was such as to require nurture, and that of a very specific kind. Above all, no time was to be wasted, Erasmus urged, in terms which gave the lie to Rousseau’s subsequent injunction; for all humanists saw the need for induction into an historic culture — they were emphatic about history — while Rousseau tried to avoid historical contagion until the last possible moment.

Humanist education, then, as advocated by its theorists and as practised to a considerable degree in its schools, was highly derivative; primarily it involved an induction into a heritage, an assimilation of both the minutiae and content of previous discourse — of word, phrase, sentence, structure and sentiment. It is the opinion of good critics that this intense linguistic training profoundly influenced their practice in, for instance, the arts. Thus the art historian Dr M. Baxandall considers that during the humanist revolution ‘experience was being recategorised — through systems of ideas dividing it up into new ways — and so re-organised…. They let verba influence res to an extraordinary degree.’⁸ This influence on the actual transitions in painting between the beginning of the fourteenth and that of the sixteenth centuries he traces in his fascinating little books Painting and Experience and Giotto and the Orators. Hence the emphasis in Renaissance education on imitation and the formation of habits. Hence, too, its sanctification of the notion of artifice. (Puttenham, the literary theorist, regarded ‘artificial’ as a word of praise: in the Renaissance ‘to imitate the excellent artificiality of the most renowned work-masters that antiquity affordeth’ constituted the pre-eminent ideal.)⁹ Certainly the humanists endorsed the notion of individual differences — ‘nihil Minerva invita’ — nothing contrary to one’s natural bent — came aptly to Erasmus’s mind as a topos worthy of repetition.¹⁰ Furthermore they initiated the belief in man’s powers of self-determination apart from the supernatural intervention of grace. But above all, the Renaissance was strongly of the opinion that it is ‘natural’ to human beings to be artificial, and that the particular form of their self-determination was to be achieved through saturation in an historical culture. This deeply affected their conception of the pedagogic function. It made them unrepentant in their view, derived from a phrase of Cicero’s, that the function of education, as of all human impact on the natural world, was to form a ‘second nature’ different from and superior to the endowments of primitive nature. Hence the unashamed employment of metaphors such as ‘moulding’ or ‘shaping’; hence too their profound appreciation of the need for culture to triumph over the primitive, the given in nature. They had not yet imbibed reductionist notions of ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity’; instead they conceived of the world as a stage, and unashamedly sought to present the self in everyday life as a manifestation of artifice. (Stephen Greenblatt in his study of Sir Walter Raleigh provides an excellent picture of how this ‘fashioning of the self as a work of art’ affected the career and behaviour of his subject.)¹¹

This view of the dynamics of the human situation — that the development of consciousness inevitably encompasses a potential for self-consciousness and hence for self-projection, but that that self is best expressed through an internalisation of traditional models as an essential propaedeutic to self-expression — characterises the greatest educational treatise of the Renaissance, The Book of the Courtier.

The central core of the Courtier is concerned with the process by which the main characteristic of the ideal courtier, ‘grace’ (grazia) is transmuted through art into a natural feature of his behaviour — that ‘second nature’ of which Cicero had spoken. A key passage, spoken by Count Ludovico, runs as follows:¹²

having already thought a great deal about how this ‘grace’ is acquired … I have already discovered a universal rule which seems to apply more than any other in all human actions and words: namely to steer away from affectation at all costs … and … to practise in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does uncontrived and effortless…. So we can truthfully say that true art is what does not seem to be an art….

The highest art, then, is that which hides art, an art which is manifest in the permeation of the whole behaviour by a grace assumed with an apparent effortlessness (sprezzatura). Thus is offered for our consideration a possible consummation of a human, secularised nature which sets out to achieve rather than to express what it terms ‘naturalness’: as I indicated earlier, man’s ‘nature’ is expressed through artifice, the artificial.

I think that this account is worth pondering for several reasons. It reveals, to begin with, an ambiguity at the heart of the concept of ‘naturalness’, a concept which plays a crucial role in so many theories of education. ‘Naturalness’ is today often equated with the artless rather than, as in Castiglione, the artful. (I use ‘artful’ to imply simply the product of artifice without any of those pejorative overtones the word has today — perhaps symptomatically — with implications such as ‘they must be taking us in’, ‘too clever by half’.) Behind these differences lie two opposed conceptions of ‘nature’, one teleologically conceived, the other deliberately denuded of certain qualitative attributes so as to make quantitative scrutiny more possible; these latter procedures are inevitably reductionist, for the phenomena must be stripped of certain distinguishing differences, so as to enable a formulaic abstraction to be made. The former view is inevitably normative, the other intentionally neutral.

Furthermore, ‘effortlessness’ is intended to imply mastery through effort, ‘spontaneity’ arising out of a highly wrought discipline, not that of primitive impulse. Nothing in Castiglione would encourage the notion that ‘the first impulses of nature are always right.’¹³ Hence we find in Castiglione’s methodology a surprising paradox — these attributes of the courtier, so expressive of something liberated, free flowing, stem not from the triumph of impulse but the constrictions of ‘imitation’:¹⁴

Therefore anyone who wants to be a good pupil must not only do things well but must also make a constant effort to imitate and, if possible, exactly reproduce his master. And when he feels he has made some progress it is very profitable for him to observe different kinds of courtiers and … take various qualities now from one man and now from another.

It is not that judgment has no role to play — the courtier’s assimilation must be ‘ruled by the good judgment that must always be his guide’ — but to achieve the highest human attribute of ‘grace’ it has to be exercised within a limited area of choice and depends on assimilation to a previous model. This is not the autonomous judgment but one which makes discriminations within the area of the ‘given’.

It is interesting that contemporary theories of painting employed very much the same set of concepts to distinguish excellence as Castiglione used to distinguish the finest attributes of man. Thus Vasari found in Michelangelo’s statutes ‘the most graceful of all grace’ and in Leonardo a grazia divina.¹⁵ Similar notions of ease and facility and similar ideas of drawing on attributes from several sources in order to correct the imperfections of individual appearances mark both the art of making images and pictures and that of making men, so that the result in both cases at once exploits a common experience and yet produces something which transcends the everyday. Put another way, these ways of fashioning both absorb the given and yet seek to transcend it. It is not simply that man is to become a work of art — it is that in the process he is to surpass the primitive and the mundane. In this way he could actualise his ‘nature’, either as painter or as man. Yet in both cases he depended on processes of imitation. In both cases he merited the definition of his activities in the words of the mid-sixteenth-century theorist of art as ‘an artificial imitation of Nature’.¹⁶

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The parochialism of the present: some reflections on the history of educational theory
• 2 literature and the social sciences: with particular reference to the sociology of education
• 3 Discovery methods
• 4 The idea of a liberal education
• 5 The arts in education
• 6 The death of Bazarov
• 7 Equality and education
• Notes
• Index