A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Contemporary Landscape

Anna Pagès

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350074583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This volume traces the history of Western philosophy of education in the contemporary landscape (1914-2020). The volume covers the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the events of May 1968 in Paris, the Zapatista Revolution in 1994, and the Arab Spring revolutions from 2010 to 2012. It also covers the two World Wars, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the triumph of science and technology until the hegemony of post-liberal societies. The philosophical problems covered include justice, freedom, critical thought, equity, philosophy for children, decolonialism, liberal education, feminism, and plurality. These problems are discussed in relation to the key philosophers and pedagogues of the period including Jacques Derrida, Paulo Freire, Simone De Beauvoir, Judith Butler, R.S. Peters, bell hooks, Martha Nussbaum, Matthew Lipman, Giorgio Agamben, Maxine Greene, and Simone Weil, among others. About A History of Western Philosophy of Education: An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students of education, this five-volume set that traces the development of philosophy of education through Western culture and history. Focusing on philosophers who have theorized education and its implementation, the series constitutes a fresh, dynamic, and developing view of educational philosophy. It expands our educational possibilities by reinvigorating philosophy's vibrant critical tradition, connecting old and new perspectives, and identifying the continuity of critique and reconstruction. It also includes a timeline showing major historical events, including educational initiatives and the publication of noteworthy philosophical works.

CHAPTER ONE

Education, Pluralism, and the Dynamics of Difference

CHRIS HIGGINS

INTRODUCTION

There is a remarkable irony in our frequent discussions of education and pluralism: they are neither fully educational nor particularly pluralistic.¹ Our focus has narrowed to the question of how schooling must evolve to deal with problems of cultural difference. This is an undeniably complex and pressing issue. How can schools become more inclusive and equitable to redress historic exclusions and bias, to cope with shifting demographics, or to prepare students for life in the global village? Indeed, is it even possible to retrofit an institution designed for nationalism and cultural assimilation, social sorting and workforce development, with genuine affordances for undoing the structures of oppression and combating the resurgence of xenophobia? To notice our myopia is not to deny the importance of the object under our magnifying glass. Nonetheless, when we equate education with schooling and reduce pluralism to intergroup difference, something crucial gets lost: far from being a special problem of schooling, difference is the very catalyst of education in all of its forms. It is the aim of this programmatic chapter to substantiate this claim, re-clearing the overgrown paths leading out into this wider territory so that we can think more pluralistically about pluralism and more dynamically about education.

EDUCATION IN AN ERA OF SCHOLASTICISM

If someone told us that the terms “pizza” and “round things” were synonymous, we would find this very odd. Have you never seen square pizzas, we might ask, or frisbees? And yet it has become natural for us to equate education and schooling when it is the case neither that only schools educate nor that schools only educate. Schools are one among myriad formative influences and arguably not the most important. Family, religion, friendship, media, work, the built environment, and other informal educational forces likely shape us in more fundamental and lasting ways. The claim that schools only educate is equally suspect. As David Labaree (2008) observes, we have “educationalized” a dizzying array of social problems, burdening the schools with an ever-growing list of competing mandates. We ask schools to interrupt prejudice and rectify past discrimination; distribute educational and economic opportunities on the basis of merit; provide the private sector with the employees they need; shape the economy of the future; ensure social mobility in the face of widening income equality; enhance international economic competitiveness; counter food insecurity; strengthen herd immunity; foster sexual responsibility; advance safe driving; cultivate healthy eating; promote recycling; and so on. Even if the schools only had to deal with the subset of these social problems with a genuine educational dimension, they would be schizophrenic. But the fact is that in feeding and vaccinating, sorting and credentialing, and just plain keeping the kids off the streets, the business of the school extends well beyond education into the spheres of human resources, policing, food service, and health care.

Indeed, this suggests not only that schools do more than educate but that they inevitably miseducate. While a definitive proof of this proposition would require a settled understanding of what it means to be an educated person, it is not hard to mount a prima facie case as follows. Given its core task of social sorting, intensified by the advent of high-stakes testing, contemporary schooling has become a ruthless process of selection for a highly particular skill set: the ability to recall information and manipulate verbal and mathematical symbol systems under intense time pressure and threat of failure. Even while debates about the exact nature of the educated person continue, we can agree that this is not an institution designed to educate well even the intellect alone, let alone the whole person.

If schooling is a strange mix of the educative, the non-educative, and the mis-educative, why are we so prone to mistake it for the whole of education? John Dewey foresaw this strange state of affairs over a century ago, opening Democracy and Education (1916) with a warning about our growing scholastic bias. Though the project of mass compulsory schooling was still gearing up—for example, in the United States fewer than 60 percent of the school-aged population attended school in 1910 (Snyder 1993, table 2, p. 14)—Dewey could already see us forgetting just what a recent and peculiar educational invention this was. Kieran Egan offers this nice, defamiliarizing description: “The young of each country became captives within specially designed buildings, sitting more or less docilely in age sets, available for whatever the state or influential interest groups wanted to try” (2008: 6–7). Both Egan and Dewey acknowledge that this new educational modality has powerful affordances. What worries them is our amnesia about its contingency and its limitations. When it comes to schooling, we are like the proverbial person who, having found that hammers are useful for driving nails, starts trying to hammer everything. To counter this tendency, Dewey (1916: ch. 1) reminds us that social life itself is the great educator and that, regardless of their other functions, all institutions shape our dispositions, making them educative in this broad sense. “The measure of the worth of any social institution,” he writes, “is its effect in enlarging and improving experience” (p. 6). If this notion now seems strange to us, Dewey points out, our ancestors would have found it “preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn” (p. 7). However, once we had created an institution that only educates (or so it seemed) we began to leap illogically to the conclusion that only schools educate. This has led us, Dewey suggests, to neglect the educative work of other institutions and to become muddled in our understanding of learning. We have come to overvalue what we are “aware of having learned … by a specific job of learning” and to devalue “what [we] unconsciously know because [we] have absorbed it in the formation of [our] characters by intercourse with others” (p. 9).

This scholastic myopia limits our understanding of educational pluralism, for it is only when we recall the great domains of informal education—culture, language, the inner life, and history—that certain core dynamics of educative difference come into view. In what follows, I explore these dynamics, drawing on Michael Oakeshott, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. However, we must first free ourselves from another form of myopia. What narrows our vision is not only the reduction of education to schooling but our strangely monolithic view of pluralism.

PLURALISM IN AN AGE OF IDENTITY POLITICS

At first glance, our discussions of difference might seem less reductive than our assumptions about education. After all, with the turn toward identity politics, we have learned to locate inequality and oppression along multiple axes of difference including race and religion, language and culture, gender and sexuality, and ability status. These are sites where differences are transmuted into hierarchies, where some identities are treated as the rule and others as the exception, where some ways of being are lionized and others marginalized, pathologized, or criminalized. While the critical work of exposing the dynamics of power and privilege along each of these axes is undeniably rich and important, the turn toward identity has also meant a turn away from other important aspects of difference. Contemporary discussions typically reduce difference to intergroup difference, and even here identity politics appears to have a troubling blind spot around issues of class.

There is no logical reason why class analyses cannot be conjoined with those focused on race, gender, sexuality, and so on. Indeed, it is just this that the concept of intersectionality demands: that privilege and oppression occur in varying degrees at the intersections of the vectors of power/difference. Consider the intersectional politics of language and class in the United States. The hegemony of English means that, even in a country that is home to 40 million native Spanish speakers, speaking Spanish is treated variously as an annoyance, an inability to speak English, a lack of intelligence or culture, or a subversion of “Americanness.” To understand which discourses come into play, and to what degree, we must consider other facets of identity. For example, adding class to our analysis explains why, when both are speaking Spanish, the working-class immigrant encounters more virulent prejudice than the wealthy expat.

However, there is a difference between factoring social class into our calculations of privilege and making political economy our starting point. Identitarians are not wrong, for example, to note that what working-class people say is often discounted because of how they say it. The worry is that their ambition only extends as far as rectifying this indignity. In their utopia, working-class speech is no longer deemed inferior to that of the rich and highly schooled, but we are not actually emancipated from plutocracy, alienated labor, and our soul- and planet-destroying cycles of commodity bulimia. The capitalist is happy to celebrate working-class speech if it will help stimulate new appetites for another round of overconsumption.

Thus, it is not only class that looks different from identitarian and Marxian perspectives. A growing chorus of scholars has begun to suggest that identity politics itself looks like a mixed blessing through the lens of political economy. Without denying the persistence of unacceptable discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and so on, such critics argue that identity serves a reactionary role in our contemporary politics. We can distinguish weak and strong versions of this argument. The weak argument is agnostic about the progressive potential of identity. It claims only that identity politics has been pressed into ideological service in this late phase of capitalism, distracting us from and legitimating economic inequality (e.g., on legitimation, see Benn Michaels 2016: 212). David Blacker (2019) finds it telling how happily academic and financial institutions structured to preserve our economic caste system have embraced identity and diversity talk. Behind the rhetoric, Blacker sees “virtue-signaling” (p. 92) and “trough jostling” (p. 90), as stressed elites maneuver to increase their proximity to the flow of capital:

The glaring lack of concern with economic class among the identity crowd has led only to a “diversity bureaucracy” which is, as bureaucrats typically are, far more concerned with self-perpetuation rather than the achievement of any external aims—whatever the official rhetoric … : simply get in position above all else, in part by ensuring that previous position holders “check their privilege,” i.e., relinquish their reserved trough positions. (pp. 89–90)

In some contexts, identitarians do speak truth to power; in others, they are simply solidifying power by speaking about “speaking truth to power.”

Against this weak argument, identitarians could retort that virtually anything can be leveraged for power and profit. After all, at this very moment Amazon.com is doing a brisk business in books about commodification, exploitation, carbon emissions, and the death of small businesses. Here is where the strong argument comes in, proposing that identity politics is actively ideological, constituting “the left-wing of neoliberalism” (Reed 2015; building on Benn Michaels 2016: 75, 101, 109, and passim). For Adolph Reed Jr. (2015), far from being passively conscripted, the new politics of identity is “the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature.” Paradoxically, though it stresses group membership, identity politics can be seen as undermining collective agency by subscribing to the “radical individualism that virtually everything else in our society encourages” (Lilla 2017: 87). Consider that, once we map intersectionality finely enough, what we find at each node is remarkably akin to that supposedly discredited modern fiction, the distinctive individual (since no one else occupies this exact locus of cross-cutting subject positions). But it is not only that the subjects of identity politics happen to be distinct: they seem to be actively bent on drawing ever finer, invidious distinctions. Thus, Blacker points to the “raging sanctimony” of the new call-out culture (2019: 230n12), and Mark Lilla derides the turn to identity as a “pseudo politics of self-regard,” as “narcissism with attitude” (2017: 10, 95). Blacker offers an interesting analysis of this endless splintering (2019: see esp. ch. 3). Instead of devoting itself to the construction of a new, livable social imaginary, the contemporary Left dissipates its energy in a perverse form of perfectionism. Beneath the egalitarian drive for inclusion, Blacker finds a second hidden motor of identity politics: the need for ever new moral rejects, excluded paradoxically for their failures to include, for their lack of the “moral-perceptual apparatus” characteristic of the now more clearly defined elect (p. 131).

To claim that identity politics in its current form actively or passively vitiates class politics is not to argue that one cannot work simultaneously for racial and economic justice. We need only recall that the architect of the civil rights movement was also the man behind the “poor people’s campaign.” For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., social justice was a unified battle against the “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism” (King 1967, quoted in Laurent 2018: 26). Still, the fact remains that the ascendance of identity politics in educational discourse has been mirrored by a decline in class analyses. Liston and Murray observe that, over the last twenty-five years,

Neo‐Marxist examinations of public schooling have diminished … Agency and empowerment, not structural constraints and reproductive correspondences, have become the overarching concerns. Today talk of oppression rarely highlights class inequities but instead underscores a list of very real injustices, including gendered, sexual, racial, and other cultural ills. (2015: 225)

Thus, while a two-fisted approach might seem both possible and desirable (see, e.g., McCarthy 1988), the fact remains that we have tended to let go of the “correspondence hypothesis” (Bowles and Gintis 1976/2011: ch. 5) to pick up the “invisible backpack” (McIntosh 1989).

However, let us assume that we need not choose between the lenses of identity politics and political economy. With this stipulation, we arrive at something like a complete view of intergroup differences. As noted, educational pluralism is typically understood as a call to deal with the problems of power and privilege surrounding such differences. Every educational initiative can be shown to rely on an idea of the educated person, and every image of the educated person can be unmasked for its partiality. “The educated person,” it turns out, has been until recently actually the educated man (Martin 1981); or more specifically, the gentleman (e.g., Newman 1891/1996: 83). It is these false universals that underwrite acts of exclusion, marginalization, and assimilation. The pluralistic ideal in education could, then, be stated in this way: it is time to make the common school truly common.

FROM DIVISIVE SCHOOLING TO DEEP PLURALISM

The common school ideal has two facets. First is the idea of a common level of provision. Regardless of the color of your skin, the wealth of your parents, the language you speak at home, the god you worship, and so on, you should have access to schools of comparable quality to those available elsewhere. Notice, though, that one could theoretically satisfy this criterion with a system in which each school enrolls a homogeneous demographic. In the real world, “separate but equal” is dangerous doublespeak. Since Brown v. Board (1954),² we have recognized that separation is experienced as subordination in a structurally racist society (for a defense of separation in the name of social justice, see Merry 2013; Merry and New 2014, 2016). However, let us imagine a society with homogeneous schools that has nonetheless outgrown racism. Imagine further that they employ an army of perfectly perceptive school inspectors constantly making the rounds to ensure that all of their schools boast equally strong faculties, substantive curricula, rich extracurriculars, supportive communities, pleasing architecture, and so on. Even in this alternative universe, where genuinely equal separate schools offer a common level of educational provision to students from all sectors of society, something crucial is still missing.

This brings us to the second facet of the common school ideal, which flows from the need to find common ground in a pluralistic, democratic society. The common school works against the fracturing of society into races, creeds, and classes. It is a place where we learn together across differences. That this ideal has been hard to realize is an understatement. Consider the example of the United States. The episodes of outright exclusion that litter our history are only the most obvious failures. Genuine inclusion must be expansive. Students should be invited to join not a predefined collective identity but a collective process, one in which a new sense of “we” only emerges over time. By contrast, many gestures of inclusion are assimilative, offering subaltern students access at the impossible price of renouncing central aspects of their identities. In the meantime, separation continues in thinly veiled forms. Residential segregation has largely picked up where de jure segregation left off. In schools that do manage to enroll a diverse student body, separation reappears in the form of curricular tracking, which maps with depressing predictability onto race (see, e.g., Welner 2001) and class (see, e.g., Lucas 1999).

The first problem of common or democratic schooling, then, is the basic one of actually creating plural educational spaces in the face of segregation, assimilation, and stratification. Were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Series Introduction
• General Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Volume Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 Education, Pluralism, and the Dynamics of Difference
• 2 Feminism within Philosophy of Education
• 3 Analytic Philosophy of Education
• 4 A Philosophy of Hope: Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy
• 5 The Changing Landscapes of Anarchism and Education
• 6 Philosophy for Children and Children’s Philosophical Thinking
• 7 “Teachers, Leave Them Kids Alone!”: Derrida, Agamben, and the Late Modern Crisis of Pedagogical Narrative
• 8 Decolonization, Indigenous Peoples, and Philosophy of Education
• 9 Liberal Education and Its Existential Meaning
• Notes On Contributors
• Index
• Imprint