Kieran Egan
The ideal of development
I linked the two previous educational ideas/ideals with, first, the development of language and, second, the invention of literacy. For the sake of symmetry, it would be nice to link this third educational ideal with the invention of printing and the new learning and "Enlightenment" it seemed to many in Europe to promise. Even if the causal connection is not quite so easily made, the printing press was certainly importantly complicit in those intellectual changes which included the radical re-thinking of the nature of education in the work of John Locke (1632-1704), Etienne Bannot de Condillac (1715-1780), and, crucially, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
Their reconceiving of education seems, in retrospect, a part of the new learning most signally represented in Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) (Latin) Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). This work looked like the triumphant confirmation of the Enlightenment belief that scientific observation of nature could produce data that could, by the application of reason, disclose the laws according to which the whole cosmos worked. Rousseau argued that human beings also have a nature and a natural process of development that could be disclosed by careful observation aided by reason. As we can observe the body's regular pattern of development from birth to senescence, so we can, with more difficulty perhaps, observe the mind's regular pattern of development. Education was reconceived as the activity of supporting the fullest achievement of the natural process of mental development.
This idea came as good news for educationalists, but also &emdash; you guessed it &emdash; there is bad news, worse news, and really bad news that came with it.
The good news was that it promised to solve a problem that Plato's idea left us with. Rousseau acknowledged that Plato (hitherto) had been the greatest educational thinker. The ancient Greek had recognized how knowledge shaped the mind and how particular kinds of abstract knowledge, and the disciplines they required, shaped the mind to understand the world in more adequate and effective ways. But it had become clear that this wasn't enough. The common product of a Platonic education was asses loaded with books, informed pedantry without imagination, originality, or vigor. Rousseau proposed that the missing element was what we could deduce from careful observation of the natural course of development.
So Plato, Rousseau suggests, was right about the importance of knowledge in education, but his insight was of limited value without recognition of the stages at which the young can best learn the various kinds of knowledge. Plato failed to recognize the mind's autonomous growth, and so his conception of mental development was just a mirror-image of his conception of the logic whereby knowledge was elaborated. By understanding the autonomous growth of the mind, one could co-ordinate the logic of knowledge elaboration with the psycho-logic of mental development.
The continuing good news is that educationalists more or less universally now believe that it is important to attend to the nature of the child's learning at particular developmental stages, to different "learning styles," and to that range of sensitivities to learners that became a hallmark of progressivism. Once attention to the distinctive psychological development of the child was made central to educationalists' understanding of their task, a number of considerable benefits followed. The first and perhaps still the most important was the recognition that failures to learn the curriculum might be due to faults other than the child's recalcitrance. It might, for example, be due to the method of teaching, or the "stage" at which a topic was being taught. This recognition led to relieving children's school lives of the constant fear of violence for failures to learn. It took a long time from Locke's and Rousseau's formulation of the educational ideas from which this benefit followed, but we should not underestimate the importance of this humanitarian result of attending to the nature of the learner.
The combination of Plato's idea about knowledge and Rousseau's idea about the mind was launched by Rousseau with the promise of a revolution in learning. Through the twentieth century, each claim to have more adequately exposed the developmental process&emdash; as has been made most notably for the work of Jean Piaget&emdash;has led to renewal of the promise of a revolution in learning. The enterprise of psychological research in education that tries to discover the nature of learning, development, motivation, etc. etc., has gone forward on the promise&emdash;as one of its early prophets put it&emdash;of "pedagogical possibilities now undreamt of" (Hall, 1904, II, p. 222).
The bad news is that the revolution in learning has stubbornly refused to occur. It seemed, and still seems to many, that research that discloses increasing information about children's development and learning must lead to, at least, evident improvements in general education. The first detailed attempt to implement Rousseau's ideas was made by the Swiss educationalist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827). He first attempted to bring about the revolution at a school on his estate at Neuhof in 1774, which was abandoned after five difficult years; the next school, at Stanz in 1798, was broken up before the end of its first year; he entered the Berthand school in 1799 and was quickly ejected; and the school at Yverdon ran from 1805 to 1825 when it had to close as a consequence of his business incompetence. Even so, he began putting into practice new and important ideas, but it is less clear that he heralded a learning-revolution. Since Pestalozzi's day to the present we have seen thousands of "progressivist" projects. Some have, under the leadership of charismatic figures, had varying kinds of successes for a while. Despite the huge support for Piaget's theories, for example, the most systematic attempts to implement them produced no evident revolution and, in fact, rather less learning than occurred at regular "control" schools (Brainerd,1978).
I was a somewhat involved observer of one of the 1960/70s "free schools" in New York State. It, too, began with promises of a revolution in students' learning. It was dissolved after about four years. In part this was due to the results of comparative tests among a set of local schools and the "free school." It became clear that the longer students had been at the "free school" the worse they compared with students at the regular schools. More important, though, was the students' sense, and claims, of betrayal by the school. It had not delivered what it promised. Defenders of the school argued then that they were not trying to compete with the regular schools, and that they were achieving more important educational results that were not shown by the narrow tests. The trouble with promising a revolution in learning is that people expect to see some evidence of it in the learners.
What did become evident was that the commitment to freedom for natural development didn't take one very far. As an educational idea, it makes it difficult to determine a curriculum, and tends to leave the selection open to local prejudice, charismatic enthusiasts, or blind chance. To keen progressivists, this doesn't matter that much because the curriculum isn't the point. We have had a century of fairly intensive experiment in implementing varied forms of the idea we have inherited from Rousseau, and progressivism's interpretations of it, and educational psychology's attempts to flesh it out scientifically. It seems fair to observe at this point that something is still missing: Plato's and Rousseau's ideas together are not able to bring about for most children the kind of learning we see in some, and the kind of learning that it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect from hugely expensive schools. The promise of Rousseau's idea has not been delivered.
The worse news ... What? &emdash; there is worse news than that it hasn't worked? Yes, that it can't work. The worse news follows the observation that human beings don't have a nature. There are obviously regularities in human mental development but they are so tied up with our social experience, our culture, and the kinds of cognitive tools we pick up that we can't tell whether the regularities are due to our nature, to our society, to our culture, to our intellectual tools, or what. We can't simply measure the regularities, which turn out to be pretty irregular from person to person, and see through them to our nature, or to some autonomous developmental process. Vygotsky pointed this out as a fatal flaw in Piaget's theory in the 1920s, but it is only now, with the generally-recognized foundering of Piaget's theory, that the force of Vygotsky's criticism is coming home to many. It's a bit like Gertrud Stein's Oakland, there is no nature of mental development there.
The really bad news is that Rousseau put in place for the modern educational world a binary distinction between an autonomously developing mind and an "external" body of knowledge. Once education became thought of in terms of knowledge and mind (content and method, curriculum and instruction, product and process), the problem became how to get them back together again. The history of educational thinking in the twentieth century prominently involved a bizarre war between these two&emdash;between those who were "child-centered" and those who were "subject-centered," between progressivists and traditionalists. This was aided by John Dewey promoting progressivist ideas always in opposition to his image of European "traditional", élitist education.
If you begin to think of education as facilitating the ideal development of individuals' minds, you have the problem of dealing with the role knowledge is to perform in this process. Progressivism was set up, by Spencer and then by Dewey, with the mind/knowledge distinction to the fore. Both emphasized the general uselessness of the "traditional" classical curriculum and the value of useful knowledge that responded to current social needs. That is, Rousseau's dichotomy undermined Plato's epistemological mind, in which particular kinds of knowledge were learned because of the benefits that accrued from them to the mind. Now the mind is assumed to go through its own autonomous process, given "natural" interactions with its environment, and knowledge is selected for the curriculum based on its social utility. Tatters of the old classical curriculum hang around, partly out of an intuition that there might be something in Plato's idea and partly to satisfy the minority who still want that old-style "ornamental" education. For the core of the new progressive curricula, however, utility trumps transcendence every time &emdash; Career and Personal Planning or Drug Education or Economics for Everyday Living trump Latin hands down in the competition for limited curriculum time.
The public schools thus came to life with the idea that their educational job was primarily to ensure that the process of individuals' psychological development was to be fulfilled as much as possible, and that knowledge should, firstly, be made to fit the student's stage of development and, secondly, should comprise material derived from the social environment that would prepare the student to be effective citizens in the future society to which she or he would belong. So John Dewey writes that the "ultimate problem of education is to coordinate the psychological and social factors" (1972, p. 228), or, as he puts it in "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897), "I believe that ... this education process has two sides&emdash;one psychological and one sociological&emdash;and that neither can be subordinated to the other, or neglected, without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis" (1964, p. 428).
Rousseau's dichotomy, adopted by Spencer, Dewey, and pretty well all other progressive educationalist, has given us a century of polemical battles between supporters of "child-centeredness" against "subject-centeredness." They have been, and continue to be, battles instigated and largely won by those who drew from the mind/knowledge dichotomy a psychological banner under which to fight. We are, of course, suckers for a neat dichotomy&emdash;why else do we go to war? Am I suggesting that we have been enduring a century of educational polemics fruitlessly and unnecessarily? Yes. That's one product of the really bad news resulting from Rousseau's idea.
All together now!
We haven't inherited these three great educational ideas in the more or less discrete packages described above. We don't, of course, think of our conception of education as a composite, but rather as a unitary idea. But those three ideas have become entangled with each other through the centuries, and have produced our contemporary schools and curricula and teaching practices.
When we do note differences between the competing demands of these three ideas&emdash;when, for example, politicians or business people demand from the schools more relevant social knowledge or work-skills or when some neo-conservatives demand we concentrate on developing excellence and academic knowledge&emdash;we say that there are "tensions" among the requirements of the various "stakeholders." The job of the good educational administrator is to balance these tensions, so that the requirements of all the major stakeholders are met to an adequate degree. We have come to live with these "tensions" so long that most see them as inevitable and as a management problem. This is how we disguise confusions from ourselves, conceptually papering over deep fault-lines in our thinking.
Each of our three ideas, then, is really bad news left to itself. Well, of course&emdash;has been the response since the mid-nineteenth century&emdash;that's why we put them together. Judicious application of one or another of the ideas supports or constrains the third; each solves problems created by the others. The academic idea has been used to provide support for individual development and to put a brake on excessive socialization; socialization has been used to give individual development a sense of direction and to provide a check on the élitism of the academic idea; and individual development has been used to check the excessive intellectualism of the academic idea and to enrich, enlarge, and diversify socialization. Ah, the best of all possible worlds!
Another way of putting it, of course, is to say that our three defective ideas prevent each other from doing too much damage. So, we socialize, but we undercut indoctrination by the academic program calling society's values into question and by the commitment to individual development reducing society's claims on any particular individual; we pursue an academic program, but we undercut intellectual development by egalitarian pressures from socialization and attention to other forms of individual development; we encourage individual development, but we undercut its fulfillment by the homogenizing pressures of socialization, and by the standardizing brought about by a common academic curriculum. Ah, what a wonder of compromise is our modern conception of education!
Can it really be true that our conception of education has three main components, each one of which leads to undesirable results by itself, and which work together only by each one interfering with the adequate implementation of the other two? Surely this is a pessimistic fantasy? Do the schools that have been built on this tripartite conception of education&emdash;that is, nearly all modern schools&emdash;fail to provide students with an adequate academic education? Well, there has certainly been a chorus of critics who have vociferously argued over the years that typical schooling leaves students woefully ignorant of their cultural heritage. Do they provide inadequate socialization? Certainly critics have constantly complained about students' alienation on the one hand and their common lack of civic values on the other. And do they provide inadequate individual development of students' potential? We do still hear loud criticism about the rigidness and irrelevance of much schooling to students' individual needs.
Well, of course there are such criticisms, you might reasonably complain. This is a democracy, after all. Even optimists didn't expect perfect implementation of all three ideas. And those critics echoed in the previous paragraph have usually been fanatical proponents of just one of the ideas, unable to recognize that the great success of our education system is to have achieved and generally held a balance among three somewhat distinct aims. Schools provide an exposure to academic material to all students, and clearly allow some to excel in academic work; they socialize all students in a basic way while avoiding fanatical extremes; and they attend to the general development of all children and provide special help to some who clearly need it. Of course there are tensions among the three general educational ideas that drive our schools &emdash; successful education is achieved by finding the right community-supported balance.
I think this complacent view is mistaken, and that the three ideas undermine each other rather than complement each other.
Consider this scenario: Let us say you are a movie fan and enjoy going out to a cinema once each week, and you also rent and watch a video on another evening. Instead of these actions being carefree entertainment, the government imposes a new requirement on cinemas and video-stores. As you come out of the cinema or when you return the video, you will be required to take a test on the movie you have just seen. You will be asked the color of the villain's car in the chase scene, or the adequacy of the motivation of the leading woman's sister, or the gist of the alien's speech before it transmogrified, or the name of the brother-in-law's pet dog, and so on. Your score on the test will determine your salary for the next week till the next movie, when you will face another test and another salary adjustment. Consider for a moment how such tests and their consequence would likely influence your watching movies. At the very least, they would change what was carefree entertainment into anxiety. You would spend a lot of effort watching movies trying to second-guess the kinds of questions you are likely to be asked and the focus of your attention would be shifted to fit your expectations of the test.
What does this remind you of? Right: School. The above absurd scenario creates a social institution&emdash;with, no doubt, huge testing services and solemn officials and entrepreneurs setting up test-coaching companies&emdash;which confuses two conflicting aims. There is no problem with having two aims for an institution, except if the aims conflict with each other. If one of our aims for an educational institution is the pursuit of academic knowledge, we will interfere with that in all kind of destructive ways if we then impose a social sorting role on the institution, and use academically inappropriate testing to do that social sorting. Also the social sorting role would be confused because academic prowess&emdash;which we are only marginally testing for any way&emdash;is hardly the most important determiner of social value. That is, this kind of undermining of separate and conflicting aims is precisely what we get if we try to make the school an institution that tries both to socialize and implement the academic ideal at the same time. The result is that neither is adequately or sensibly achieved, as, in the cinema scenario, neither carefree entertainment nor an appropriate manner of determining salaries is achieved.
Yet we have created such an institution and keep trying to make it work to realize conflicting ideals. Adequate socialization requires successfully inculcating a set of beliefs, values, and norms of behavior in the growing child. The academic program is specifically designed to enable the growing child to question the basis for any beliefs, values, and norms of behavior. The two aims pull against each other: the more successfully one socializes, the less one achieves the academic ideal; the more successfully one inculcates disciplined academic thinking, the less easy it is to socialize successfully. Socialization requires acceptance of beliefs, values, and norms that the disciplined academic mind sees as stereotypes, prejudices, and homogenization.
Consider this scenario: You are fifty-five and have had a successful career as a lawyer. You have a spouse and two successful children. You are a pillar of the community, active in church, community center, and children's sports activities. But it has recently become disturbingly clear that you will not remain vigorous forever, and that time is closing in. Something in you is unsatisfied, like a distant echo from a life-path you somewhere missed taking, like a call from another you who was not realized&emdash;but still might be. It is a disturbing call, a distressing echo, which grows louder day the day. Increasingly you feel it is a call from the real you, a call from your buried life; from the you who somehow got lost in all those legal tussles and in the social round and the kids' soccer and ballet and then their colleges and marriages, and now that ghostly you calls to be recognized and brought to life. Well, fortunately, you can enroll in the required government program, ReTRY. ReTRY &emdash; an acronym for Realize the Real You &emdash; is slickly operated by the country's best and most expensive psychologists. It is mandated by law to assist citizens' psychological adjustment to later middle-age. Success in the program is measured by the degree to which people return satisfied to their old routines of life.
Hang on! How can an institution designed to help you find the real you measure success by convincing you that the old you is the real you? Shouldn't you be encouraged to head out yonder to the pearl seas or the South Pacific, or at least take up kayaking or building a Zen garden? Socializing strives to homogenize; individual development strives to bring out the uniqueness of each person. Hard to aim for both in the same institution and expect success. They constantly pull in opposite directions&emdash;the more you do one, the harder it is to do the other. And we expect our schools to do both successfully.
Consider a third scenario: It is twenty years in the future and the government's educational authorities have become convinced that the route to the fullest development of each individual's potential is to design different kinds of schools to support the main styles of learning and kinds of intelligence people deploy. There are&endash;&endash;shall we hazard?&endash;&endash;ten kinds of schools, each designed for one of the ten distinct intelligences now identified by Dr. Gardner at ground zero. Enormously sophisticated testing apparatus and procedures are applied to children to determine which school would most fully develop their particular strengths. Huge amounts of money have been spent on designing the schools, outside and in, to respond to, and stimulate, the needs of the kinds of students they house. The curriculum in each kind of school is, however, identical. The children follow a rigorous academic program designed to carry their minds from the ignorance and confusion of their originally unschooled condition towards a disciplined understanding of their cultural heritage. There are no electives, until university specialization, because the authorities have also been convinced that the only proper aim of education is to empower children's minds with the best material human beings have created, and that is precisely what the disciplined forms of understanding provide.
Now such a system would surely be self-contradictory. The academic commitment to shaping the mind by teaching disciplined forms of understanding isn't compatible with the belief that the minds of different people can be optimally developed by knowledge chosen to suit their particular style of learning, kind of intelligence, needs and interests. One cannot have two masters, especially when both mandate different things. We can't construct a coherent educational institution using radically different criteria.
But, of course, that's precisely what we require of our schools today. We require that they acknowledge, and accommodate as far as possible, different styles of learning and different ends of the process for different people. "Education" for one child may have a quite different character from that attained by another; quite different "potentials" might be developed and each be an example of successful education. We require also that the academic ideal be acknowledged, which recognizes education only in the degree to which minds are shaped by progress in understanding the range of disciplines. The result, of course, is not a coherent curriculum, but one that tries to accommodate both conflicting principles. The result, also, is perpetual strife by adherents of the conflicting principles, fighting about which should have greater influence over children's education.
Conclusion
We have inherited three foundational ideas about education. Each one of them has flaws, at least one flaw in each being fatal to its ambition to represent an educational ideal we might reasonably sign on to. And the worse news is that each of the ideas is incompatible with the other two. These warring ideas hovered around the cradle of the public schools, proffering their gifts. Now I want to go on to look at how Spencer helped to make matters even worse with his gift, and how the new schools eagerly took them all.
Go on to Chapter 2: Part 1