Kieran Egan
Introduction
I will begin my critique of Spencer's ideas, and the forms they take today, by examining the three foundational ideas that he inherited. In this chapter I will consider each of the ideas &emdash; socializing, Plato's academic ideal, and Rousseau's developmental ideal&endash;&endash;taking them one at a time and showing that each is fatally flawed, and that together they are the source of the educational confusions and practical problems we face today. In subsequent chapters I will look in detail at some of Spencer's ideas, and how they juggle those three foundational ideas into a distinctive modern mix. I will consider also what has happened with Spencer's ideas during the twentieth century, their status at the beginning of the twenty-first, and how what he got wrong remains with us, diminishing the effectiveness of our educational institutions.
The job of examining foundational ideas can be a tad onerous because the ideas have wound around each other through centuries and have become complicatedly confused. It is onerous also because our job is not simply one of historical analysis; we still have not emerged from the ferment of educational ideas stirred into even more complicated confusion during the late nineteenth century. It is onerous to think about our ideas because they are the things we think with. They serve us like lenses that can greatly affect the image that we see. Mostly we take our lenses for granted and assume we see the world directly. We don't, of course, and it is useful frequently to try to reflect on our fundamental ideas about education because they more than anything else influence the things we do to children in its name.
The fatal flaws in each of the foundational ideas have been pointed out, one way or another, before&endash;&endash;usually by proponents of one or two of the ideas trying to undercut the value of the third. Educational practice in the twentieth century generally went forward under the assumption that the flaws in each idea would be compensated by the other ideas&emdash;that is, three wrong ideas can make a right idea. Alas, it doesn't work, and hasn't worked, that way.
Socialization is a great idea for hunter-gatherers
For the educationalist today, this first great educational idea we inherit comes as a good news, bad news, worse news, and really bad news scenario.
I suppose our educational troubles began around half a million years ago when our hominid ancestors ran into an evolutionary snag. Around that time, it seems, hominid brains were increasing in size quite rapidly. The snag was the limits to which the architecture of the female pelvis could be stretched to give birth to these larger brained babies while also allowing the women to walk efficiently. The remarkable evolutionary solution was to give birth to the babies while their brains were immature and let them do most of their growing outside the womb. So we are today born with brains of around 350 c.c., which is much the same as our chimpanzee cousins. Between birth and adulthood, chimpanzee brains grow about a further 100 c.c. whereas humans' brains typically grow more than 1,000 c.c., with most of that additional growth occurring by age four.
This peculiarity of human brains and human childhood created the need for that extended care and instruction that has become a part of what we mean by education. Along with the larger brains came language, and language was used prominently to tell stories (Donald, 1991, Ch. 7). The most important stories were designed to create for their hearers a conceptual image of what we may call the meaning of life. They gave to the young, and reinforced for the older, images of who "we" are and what we are doing here &emdash; in this forest, on this plain, by this sea-shore, among these hills, alongside these animals, under these stars &emdash; and where we are going next. The stories typically told about gods or sacred ancestors who warranted the norms and values that constituted the culture of the particular hunter-gatherer society.
The stories create conceptual images that serve as an explanation of the conditions we find ourselves in as we come to consciousness. The good news is that the techniques invented in hunter-gatherer societies to create an homogeneous image of "our" society, of "our" individual roles within it, and of the cosmos in which the drama of our lives is played out, have worked with great success for countless generations. The continuing good news is that the procedures we have inherited from ancient oral cultures remain today wonderfully effective in socializing our young.
The bad news is that our evolution has equipped us ideally to live in small, stable, hunter-gatherer societies. We are Pleistocene people, but our languaged brains have created massive, multicultural, technologically sophisticated, and rapidly-changing societies for us to live in. Now that's not so bad in itself, as our brains also can adapt to a huge range of social conditions. The bad news is tied into that ingenious evolutionary adaptation that led to the extended growth of our brains outside the womb. One result&emdash;wonderfully efficient for hunter-gatherer tribes&emdash;was to enable us to learn effortlessly in our early years a language, an image of our society and its norms and values, and images of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. We are equipped, that is, very early and quickly to orient ourselves conceptually. Whatever children learn from the stories they are first told becomes quickly fixed and serves as a template for future learning. This rapid and deeply-etched early learning served hunter-gatherer societies so well because their stability and solidarity was sustained by their members all sharing an unquestioned and homogeneous world-view or ideology.
If one were to try to model human intellectual development, it would be tempting to say that evolution equipped us with two kinds of learning. There is, first, that largely effortless learning of our early years, which we use to pick up a language and those images of our society and the cosmos. It seems to work a bit like cement or plaster-of-Paris; at first it is enormously flexible, able to adapt to widely varied external constraints, and then gradually it sets and becomes rigid. It also seems to be focused on very specific objects &emdash; like language, or social behavior, etc. The second kind of learning remains flexible throughout our lives and is a kind of all-purpose utility, but it is much more laborious and slow. The difference between the two is often said to be evident in the efficiency with which we learn a language and adapt to social customs in our early years, in contrast with the relative difficulty and inefficiency with which we learn a new language and adapt to new social customs later in life.
Jerry Fodor (1983) suggests we might see the mind as having particular input systems and a somewhat distinct central processor. The input systems are relatively specific to particular parts of the normal brain, they are focused on such things as touch, hearing, seeing and language, and they are fast and "stupid"&endash;&endash;we can't not hear or not learn a language in normal conditions. The central processor is "smart" and is slow and general in both brain location and operations. This allows very fast responses to some things by the "stupid" brain systems and slower contemplation and analysis by the other. Fodor notes that "it is, no doubt, important to attend to the eternally beautiful and true. But it is more important not to be eaten" (1985, p. 4).
Well, we might wisely be cautious in inferring such a sharp distinction in kinds of learning as we are still unsure about the underlying cognitive reality such distinctions refer to. It's an issue we'll return to in later chapters, but for now it helps to clarify the bad news that comes along with inheriting the idea of socialization as a part of education.
Socialization relies heavily on the earlier kind of learning and the commitments it forms. If told that the earth is a flat disk that rests on the back of a turtle, nearly everyone will believe this and see the earth in terms of this belief. (An earthquake? The turtle shifted.) If told that it is a huge ball that turns on its axis at high speed while also travelling unimaginably fast around the sun, people will believe this, and see their experience in terms of their belief. The cement-like learning of our early years can accommodate almost anything, then it fixes, and becomes almost immovable. The other, general-purpose, learning capacity can, of course, accumulate knowledge that contradicts the first-formed beliefs, and we know that we can, as a result, change our earlier beliefs and commitments. We also know that this is rare and difficult for most people. The stories we are first told, and the other techniques of socialization deployed early, pretty well fix the values people hold until their death. They become the things people think with, not the things they think about.
The bad news, then, is that we live in a society that requires flexibility in adaptation to changing norms, beliefs, and values, and evolution has equipped us to be socialized in a manner that creates rigidity and unquestioning commitment to unchanging norms, beliefs, and values.
The worse news, which follows from the bad news, is that if we are really successful in socializing, we get someone who is indoctrinated. Now most people tend to be very acute at recognizing the ways in which "others" indoctrinate their children, but are largely oblivious to the forms of indoctrination they deploy themselves; "they" indoctrinate, "we" educate. Of course, "they" think we indoctrinate and they educate&emdash;but that's only because they have been indoctrinated to think so. Five year olds in Teheran, Baghdad, St. Petersburg, Winnipeg, San Francisco, New Guinea, and so on across the disk on the turtle's back, have already learned complex sets of beliefs and patterns of behavior whose validity they will never seriously question. We label as indoctrinatory those that are most in conflict with our own.
This leads to a conundrum. "We" distinguish indoctrination from education on the open-ness of inquiry the educator encourages about the values taught, whereas the indoctrinators teach "their" values as unquestionable truths. But we do not typically encourage our children to question the value of our kind of "open-ness of inquiry"&emdash;we teach its value as an unquestionable truth. We'll return to this after considering the really bad news, which results from one of the effects on our thinking that comes along with language.
Thinking in language leads us to recognize and name things as distinct from all other things&emdash;x is what not-x is not, goes the logic. Whether this results from the hard-wiring of our brains or from the way language shapes our consciousness, we have a powerful tendency to construct our conceptual grasp on the world in terms of opposites. Our sense of "good" is tied to our sense of "bad", big to little, brave to cowardly, safety to security, and so on. When hunter-gatherers distinguished who "we" are, the distinction was with who "they" are. This characteristic of socialization we have also inherited. For the hunter-gatherers, "we" are recognized faces and are treated as friends; "they" are unknown, potential enemies, and one must be prepared to kill them before they kill "us." As Jared Diamond puts it: "With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them" (Diamond, 1997, p. 273).
Our seemingly inescapable tendency to oppositional thinking produces a horrible result when it works in socializing. It sets people against each other in greater or lesser degree. The trick, as Richard Rorty suggests, is to increase the range of people we include as "we," thus widening our solidarity with others (1989). But our history suggests that we then will begin to make divisions within the group rather than, or in addition to, with outsiders. Even the local stamp club or choir develops factions with bewildering ease, not to mention such seething snake-pits as university English departments. For much of the time, in groups, we are a contentious animal.
Now this is all a bit odd, as we can't give up socializing our children despite these problems. Even if socialization does require some degree of indoctrination, some homogenizing, some degree of fixing certain beliefs and values beyond the easy reach of rational reflection, as long as those beliefs and values are decent, we can surely do nothing else but go along with the process? If our values include tolerance and a positive attitude to other races and cultures, socialization that fixes these values firmly will surely prepare our children well for these complex multicultural societies we have made? If the indoctrination part of socializing discourages our children from questioning the value of tolerance, how can that be so bad?
Socialization as an educational ideal worked well in hunter-gatherer tribes. But today we can't easily avoid squirming a little about the dilemma it creates for us. On the one hand, for our children to become familiarly at home in our society, we have to allow considerable scope for socialization to occur unimpeded, and, on the other, our commitment to rationality in our everyday affairs is affronted by the indoctrinatory element in successful socialization. On the third hand, to fail to socialize adequately produces alienation. Our general solution to the dilemma has been to recognize that single-minded socialization&emdash;à la Hitler Youth&emdash;is unacceptable, and that we need, double-mindedly to give rational reflection a large role in the process.
You know the seventeen-year-old, recognizing the inadequacy of parents' values and norms of behavior, who rebels against them, who matures and marries and starts a career at twenty-seven, and at thirty-seven is struggling with a mortgage and disturbed by changes at work and the kind of TV shows and movies the children watch, and at forty-seven is bewildered and angry at the children's rebellion against home and its values, and at fifty-seven and thereafter bemoans the modern world's lack of values and its accumulating chaos?
That trajectory of confident hope in the well-socialized young to disappointed age is a caricature of a bourgeois norm for much of this century&emdash;hardly applicable to everyone but true to so much experience that it is easily recognizable. But it isn't just the bourgeois mainstream that is vulnerable to the inadequacy of successful socialization in a changing world. The trendy sub-cultures are even more vulnerable and even more quickly disappointed. The alert young can become socialized to a set of fashionable norms of clothing, styles of behavior and language, and so on, and for a few years feel&emdash;to use a once fashionable, now embarrassingly unfashionable term&emdash;"with it." Within a decade or so they find themselves gradually without it, elbowed aside by new fashions and styles. One still sees victims of this trend&emdash;the "hip" 1960s male academic, whose pony-tail is now gray but still held in place with the colored band he got in Berkeley, once confident energy now somewhat febrile or fading, and the students whom he thinks still find him "hip" see him and his language as museum-pieces, and snicker. Too easy to characture others; we are all victims of change to some degree. The old are no longer elders with accumulated experience in a stable tradition; they are products of socialization to norms and values whose relevance changes to irrelevance as society changes.
The difficulty of building flexibility into socialization creates this discarding of generations as the conditions they were conditioned to deal with change under their feet. The flexibility was to come from being able rationally to reflect on events and adapt to them where appropriate. And that's where we try to plug Plato in.