Restoring Soul, Passion, and Purpose in Teacher Education

Contesting the Instrumentalization of Curriculum and Pedagogy

Peter Grimmett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000520446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This text both challenges and traces the development of a culture of regulation, standardization, performativity, and governmentality evident in Anglophone teaching practice and education.

Framed by a brief history of teacher education research and policy in North America over the last six decades, the text argues that the instrumentalization of curriculum and pedagogy has robbed teachers of their pedagogical soul, passion, and purpose. Using a conceptual model, Grimmett forges a pathway for teachers to adopt a soulful way forward in professional practice, individually and collectively enhancing autonomy over programs, and protecting the public trust placed in them as educators.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in teachers and teacher education, educational policy and politics, and curriculum thinking and enactment more broadly. Those specifically interested in pedagogy, educational change and reform, and the philosophy of education will also benefit from this book.

1 Re-Enchantment Restoring Mystery and Wonder

DOI: 10.4324/9781003057345-2

The disenchantment with Western rationalism and intellectualization that Weber (1947/2004) so aptly characterized in 1917 actually took root during the period of German Romanticism¹ in the 18th and early 19th centuries that preceded the powerful writings of Friedrich Nietzsche² in the 1880s, whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western modernity. The first mention of disenchantment appeared in Schiller’s (1778) poem, Die Götter Griechenlands (the gods of Greece), where he talks of “die Entgötterung der Natur” (the removal of gods from nature) by which he identified the progressive removal of mind, or spirit, from the way the world is experienced through the senses, the materialist position that assumes the existence of an external world that is completely separate from the human mind³. Weber adapted Schiller’s phrase as “die Entzauberung der Welt” (the refutation and/or removal of magic), popularly translated as “the disenchantment of the world,” to document what he saw as the baneful predicament of humanity in the modern era; namely, that the reach of the scientific revolution, together with the Protestant Reformation, the rise of capitalism, and the breakdown of traditional forms of community had bled the world of its mystery—and, by outgrowth, its meaning—precipitating a disenchantment with the magical allure of the natural world and the way humans interacted with it:

Increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives, [but] the knowledge or belief that … one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.

(Weber, 1947/2004, p. 139)

Here, Weber was suggesting the impossibility of living in the refulgent “lights”⁴ of reason without recourse to magic, because it would inevitably lead to disenchantment. His use of “Entzauberung” represented a cultural critique that captured the drama of modernity and its consequences for the human condition well beyond that of the economy and organization, because it implied that the modernist worldview would colonize all spheres of social and political life. Hence, for Weber, the advent of modernity had brought about both the decimation of religion as a societal force and—important for the argument here—the disenchantment of the world.

There were compelling reasons for the disenchantment. The claims of the church and religious faith were in decline, secular law courts now adjudicated matters of morality, scientists undid miracles of nature, and cases of human derangement were surrogated to psychiatrists. Eliade (1959) argued that the old, magical world had been supplanted by one dominated by “industrial societies, a transformation made possible by the de-sacralization of the cosmos accomplished by scientific thought” (p. 51). As Landy and Saler (2009) put it, “Stone by stone, the more baroque buttresses on the cathedral of traditional belief were being carted away to the museum of cultural history” (p. 1). The increasing intellectualization and rationalization that accompanied the onrush of modernity led to an eventual and inevitable late 20th century emphasis on globalization, the building of transnational networks of trade, commerce, and exchange. Before the modern era, globalization had existed only around religion, with the church adopting a catholic view that proffered the vagary of a global community. During the modern era, the influence of the Enlightenment extended the focus of globalization beyond religion (based on the view that religion’s viability was questionable, if not moribund) to include other forms, such as capitalism and the advancement of secularity in society. In the period of late modernity, from about the 1960s on, globalization extended its transnational reach to include a heavy preoccupation with predatory capitalism, neo-liberal trade, and the free market organization of commerce and exchange, combined with the world-wide expansion of secularization through scientific advancement. This turn often permitted institutions and manufacturers to outsource the making of goods around the world in a manner that potentially became exploitative and oppressive. Hence, modernist rationalization spawned the advent of global exchange that subsequently waxed into the globalization of trade, capitalism, and secularity, ultimately accompanied in the 21st century by transnational migration.

Berman (1981) suggests that the problem is that

the modern scientific paradigm has become as difficult to maintain in the late twentieth century as was the religious paradigm in the seventeenth … [hence] we are again destabilized, cast adrift, floating. We have … awoken to find ourselves in a dark woods.

(pp. 22)

But, he argues, while we cannot go back to alchemy or animism, the alternative is the “grim, scientistic, totally controlled world of nuclear reactors, microprocessors, and genetic engineering” (p. 23) that is virtually upon us already. Thus, in attempting to move away from modernist rationalization and the effects of global secularization for which the market has become a powerful force, however, we would do well to avoid a romanticized reversion to a patriarchal medieval theocracy. This is not to deny the evidence of religious populism in parts of the world; for example, the explosion of Christianity in the global South, or the continued expansion of Islam, or the curiously bizarre role that so-called fundamentalist Evangelicals play in American politics. It is, however, to question and critique all forms of ideological fundamentalism, including that of secularization, that are supported epistemologically by a perspicuously modernist and Enlightenment premise of rationality as a value-free and objective way of viewing the world. In a very real sense, the postmodern critique of how knowledge is created represents here a post-secular construction of the public sphere, one that includes teaching and teacher education. But it is not to pave the way for the resurgence in postmodernity of a pre-modern form of serfdom resulting from yet another theocracy. Rather, as Ward (2003) suggests, “Even today it might be remarked that in certain countries of the world a good dose of secularism would break the repressive holds certain state-ratified religions have over people’s lives” (p. 1). Hence, the argument here is about the need to dismantle the reductionist tendencies of both religion and secularism in favor of a postmodern re-enchantment of the world of teaching and teacher education. Put differently, it is to “cultivate those fugitive spaces of enchantment lodged between theistic faith and secular abstinence” (Connolly, 1999, p. 15), a form of non-theistic enchantment in which both theologian and atheist could work together in resisting the secular disenchantment of the world.

In his analysis of modernity as being on endless trial, Kolakowski (1990) suggested that Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” essentially represented “the revenge of the sacred in the secular” in that, although one might initially see it as freeing, the rejection of the sacred that emerged in writings based on Nietzsche’s (1874/2004) dramatic pronouncement that “God is dead” (p. 199), carried a heavy cost:

Culture, when it loses its sacred sense loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is “in principle” an endlessly flexible thing.

(p. 72)

In North America, we are currently witnessing what happens when there are no limits to the power of the profane. Similar to the events of the 1930s in Germany when the church was seduced into supporting the evil machinations of Adolf Hitler, the so-called American evangelicals, during 2016–2020, supinely removed all limits on President Trump’s power in a manner that fulfills Nietzsche’s declamation that the sacred is no longer relevant. In so doing, these Americans have become evangelists of the “gospel” of intemperate and grandiose political power, a state of affairs that, for Weber, brings about “the disenchantment of the world” because the political, artistic, and social phenomena of life do not in themselves render a rejoinder to the question of whether such cultural experiences have been and are worthwhile. Weber (1947/2004) thus concludes that “in its core [science is] hostile to God and, in its innermost aristocratic [rationalist] spirit, hostile to the brotherhood of man [sic]” (p. 144) because the world manifested by science does not inspire the human spirit at the deepest level and cannot replenish the spiritual poverty created by the recoil of religion. Kandinsky (1947/1963), who looked to art as a possible catalyst to redress this situation, commented somberly on the lack of spirituality in life to counter the disenchantment:

Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim. The nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game, is not yet passed; it still darkens the awakening soul. Only feeble light glimmers, a tiny point in an immense circle of darkness.

(p. 23)

What then would replace the buttresses of traditional belief in a secularized world to act as ballast to rein in such burgeoning disenchantment and re-enchant a world that had been de-sacralized by science? Could it be that history would repeat itself with a return to a pre-modern form of religiosity? It was George Santayana⁵ who first said that, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In other words, history repeats. So, are we continually condemned to repeat what has gone before? No, Ehud Barak⁶, the former Israeli Prime Minister, countered, “History never repeats itself in the same way.” In teaching and teacher education, that may give us hope. Why? Because its history, that is in grave danger of being blindly repeated, needs to be re-invented in imaginative ways if we are to avoid what Karl Marx⁷ declaimed: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

It is hard to disagree with the sentiment that history repeats. For example, after repeated 19th century wars between Germany and France, France still demanded that confiscatory terms of surrender be imposed on Germany after the 20th century’s First World War. Then the Second World War happened. After failing to invest in education and infrastructure in Afghanistan after arming the Mujahideen⁸ (the force that later helped the Iranians overthrow the Shah) against the invading Soviet Union in the 80s, America neglected to make the same investments after later Middle Eastern military campaigns. Then rose The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS. In the 21st century, specific events in Syria have proven a repeated lesson about civil wars, similar to the Vietnam War, that when great powers intervene to fight proxy battles, conflict becomes protracted. But after the tragedy of 20th and early 21st century wars, we have entered the farce of the latter part of the second decade. Suddenly, narcissism is rampant, there is no distinction between truth and deceit, and anything that we do not wish to hear or disagree with is dismissed as “fake news.”

What I want to characterize in this book is how the re-imagining of teacher education can and must avoid not merely a repeat of prior experience but, more importantly, the farcical repetition of a previous, more liberal phase in the history of teacher education in our attempts to counter and oppose the current policy preoccupation with competency standards that derive from a predatory neo-liberalist emphasis on measurement of human capital as a commodity. Landy and Saler’s (2009) rejoinder to the question of what would replace traditional belief in arresting the disenchantment of the world is that progressive disenchantment has always been accompanied by progressive re-enchantment where philosophers, artists, architects, poets, magicians, and ordinary citizens make it possible for human beings to enjoy the benefits of religion without having to subscribe to a creed. By that, they do not import the supplanting of old creeds with intermittently generated new ones, e.g., spiritualism or New Age spirituality, which Camus (1942) dubbed as the absurdity of changing the terms of the creed on the sly; nor do they endorse what Adorno in his discussion of ethics (see Bernstein, 2001) labeled insidious re-enchantment, that is, the purported exploitation of naïve people’s penchant for investing in media and markets with a mystical aura, so as to sustain the greed of capitalism. Rather, they argue for the use of de-sacralized, conscious strategies to affirm a fully alive human existence that does not involve credulity, misguided thinking, or dissembling. They continue:

If the world is to be re-enchanted, it must accordingly be re-imbued not only with mystery and wonder but also with order, perhaps even with purpose; there must be a hierarchy of significance attaching to objects and events encountered; individual lives, and moments within those lives, must be susceptible again to redemption; there must be a new, intelligible locus for the infinite; there must be a way of carving out, within the fully profane world, a set of spaces which somehow possess the allure of the sacred; there must be everyday miracles, exceptional events which go against (and perhaps even alter) the accepted order of things; and there must be secular epiphanies ⁹, moments of being in which, for a brief instant, the center appears to hold, and the promise is held out of a quasi-mystical union with something larger than oneself.

(p. 2)

The re-enchantment that is thus sought is one that enchants but also (eventually, if not simultaneously) disenchants; one that brings us small felicities, instances of delectation, and joie de vivre but in so doing neither beguiles nor dupes us. Such re-enchantment will be different from any association with the ghettoes of popular culture in the 17th and 18th centuries and mass culture in the 19th and 20th centuries (see Strinati, 1995) where enchantment was associated with the mindsets of groups traditionally viewed as inferior within the dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 Re-Enchantment: Restoring Mystery and Wonder
• 2 The Current Conditions of Teacher Education: Neo-Liberalism as a Prevailing Force
• 3 The Current State of Teacher Education in the Anglophone World: Hyper-Rationalization and the Question of Re-Enchantment
• 4 Myths—Lies That Mislead or Stories That Reflect a Fragment of Light?
• 5 Extirpating Harmful Historical Myths
• 6 Current Counter-Veiling Neo-Liberalist Myths
• 7 Missing Myths of Teaching: Re-Mystifying Teacher Education
• 8 Finding the Source of Pedagogical Inventiveness Within
• 9 A Soulful Response to External Pressure
• 10 The Ultimate Soulful Response: Living a Fulfilled Life with Abandon
• Conclusion
• Index