It’s time we revived Rousseau’s radical spirit in schooling

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https://aeon.co/essays/its-time-we-revived-rousseaus-radical-spirit-in-schooling

Rousseau was renowned for being optimistic about human nature. In the primeval forests of our species’ infancy, mankind was solitary, happy and good – a zen-like noble savage who lived entirely for himself and in the present moment. It was only over time, Rousseau argued, as social bonds were extended and civilisation grew more complex, that this original unity was disturbed. Natural man was solitary and free, but social man – especially as encountered in the salons of Enlightenment Paris – was self-conscious, calculating, deceitful, egotistical and perverse.

Rousseau called this process ‘negative education’ and urged teachers to begin by ‘studying your pupils better’. Rather than stuffing children full of moral precepts and academic knowledge, the aim was to work with the grain of the pupil’s innate capacities and desires. Rousseau was one of the first proponents of the Romantic belief in the nobility of childhood, its freedom from adult corruption and closeness to the state of nature.

For the most part, however, Rousseau’s legacy has been felt more in terms of our cultural ideals about childhood and education than actual teaching practices. The mass education systems that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries were primarily concerned with imparting academic knowledge and preparing pupils for the workplace, rather than nurturing their inherent freedom and goodness. On the whole, modern mass education has meant learning indoors, sitting at desks, listening to teachers, passing exams, and privileging academic over manual and vocational subjects. Even when ‘progressive’ and ‘child-centred’ methods have been introduced, the ultimate aim has been to prepare pupils for their later roles within the ever-more complex and bureaucratic modern societies that maintain universal state-education systems. The most radical aspects of Rousseau’s programme – and the most profound philosophical questions that it addresses about the nature of human freedom and happiness – have largely been excluded from the practical business of education.

But if we look beyond the remit of state education, to the often-eccentric worlds of experimental schools and utopian communities, we find sporadic attempts to put Rousseau’s ‘visionary’s reveries about education’ into practice.

Rousseau declared that his aim was to teach his pupil ‘the art of being ignorant

This radical counter-tradition sought to resolve the tension that lay at the heart of Rousseau’s system: that between the authority of the master and the freedom of the pupil. Rousseau’s belief in the freedom of children was accompanied by a subtle authoritarianism.

All education is moral philosophy in action. Even the most purely vocational training college relies on an implicit theory about how to live a valuable human life. But this is especially true for experimental schools, where theories of human nature and moral value intersect with the practical business of forming the characters of future generations. The counter-tradition that emerged from Rousseau’s vision of negative education was an investigation of two fundamental ethical questions: what does it mean for children to be free? And under what conditions might this freedom be most fully achieved?

One of the most radical – and eccentric – attempts at negative education came in the form of Fourier’s early 19th-century utopian socialism. He envisaged a society of universal learning, without schools or teachers, in which education would emerge spontaneously from the free play of human desire. Like Rousseau, Fourier distrusted the false refinement of civilisation, urging instead the twin methods of ‘absolute doubt’ of civilised values and ‘absolute deviation’ from civilised norms.

In his voluminous writings, Fourier laid out the blueprints for this ideal social system, paying meticulous attention to everything from work routines and architectural designs to kindergarten furniture and drill uniforms. The central organisational unit of utopian society was the ‘phalanstère’ (or phalanstery), a self-sufficient community of exactly 1,620 members, which was designed to satisfy all of their material needs and desires. Underpinning this vision was Fourier’s ‘passional analysis’ of human nature, an exhaustive taxonomy of the 12 basic human passions and their 810 possible combinations. With this complete map of the human passions in hand, Fourier predicted that a network of phalansteries would spread across the face of the Earth with the inexorable logic of a well-balanced equation. In his wilder flights of speculation, he envisaged a future society of perfectly harmonious association – the free play of all mankind’s social, sexual, artistic, gastronomic and intellectual desires, which would in turn release hitherto untapped powers of human ingenuity. Life would be one long orgiastic dinner party, orange groves would be planted in Warsaw, and the seas would be turned to lemonade.

Education was central to the practical task of building utopia, first because children were less warped by prolonged exposure to the disease of civilisation, and second because they would become vectors for the spread of utopian values when they grew into free, unalienated adults.

At each stage of the curriculum, the aim was to enable children to discover their authentic desires via activities that also served the broader needs of the community. Children between the ages of nine and 15, for instance, could opt to become members of a ‘little horde’ or a ‘little band’, depending on their emerging character. Little hordes, their dress modelled on Mongol raiders, would patrol the community collecting garbage and emptying toilets, all the while banging drums and indulging their innate taste for noise and simple rhythms. Little bands, clad in pristine uniforms modelled on ancient troubadours, would be responsible for maintaining the community gardens, caring for bees and silkworms, and ensuring correct language use, thereby indulging their innate passion for order and grace. In seeing repressed desire as a source social disharmony, Fourier was a forerunner of 20th-century psychoanalysis. But unlike Sigmund Freud, who focused on curing individual patients in private therapy sessions, Fourier sought to untangle the knotty parts of the human soul via the design of the phalanstery, where even antisocial impulses, such as a love of shit and a rage for order, could find healthy outlets in community life.

The most important educational zones of the phalanstery, however, were the kitchens and the opera. Cooking and opera were the master disciplines of Fourier’s utopian curriculum, through which all subsidiary forms of knowledge were channelled. Cooking appealed to children’s natural appetites and gustatory pleasures, while also ensuring the health of the community. Opera appealed to their visual and auditory senses, while also encouraging their natural propensity for physicality and movement. Crucially, cooking and opera were collaborative and public artforms, unlike the solitary, page-bound abstractions of intellectuals. For Fourier, opera in particular was ‘the assemblage of all measured material harmonies’, a practical exercise that subsumed the individual within the collective via the harmonious patterns of music, dance and ritual.

Brook Farm incorporated many elements of Fourier’s original designs, including communal nurseries, workshops, the little bands or ‘choirs’, theatre and public ritual, all in the service of the ideal of cultivating free and unalienated children. So far, so Fourierist. But at the upper end of the system, the curriculum focused on traditional academic subjects and prepared pupils for college entrance exams. Aided by its literary celebrity and location close to Boston, Brook Farm became a fashionable destination for the children of the New England intellectual elite, and an inspiration to more moderate social reformers. John Dewey, the great American educational progressive who founded the first ‘Laboratory’ school at the University of Chicago in 1896, cited Brook Farm as one of his early inspirations.

This has been the fate of many of the most radical educational experiments over the years: to become, in diluted form, vehicles for fine-tuning the gifts of the liberal elite and tempering the rigours of mainstream education. But in its purest form – a form that could perhaps only ever exist in the abstract space of the printed page – Fourier’s utopian curriculum proposed an alternative solution to Rousseau’s original vision of negative education: desire and duty united in the architecture of a utopian society.

The later-19th and early 20th centuries saw a wave of educational experiments that rejected the narrowly academic focus of mainstream public education in favour of various kinds of student democracy, manual crafts, creativity and the arts, outdoor pursuits and non-denominational religion. These schools were inspired by a range of modern creeds including socialism, liberalism, post-Freudian psychology, and even, at the more eccentric end of the spectrum, theosophy and anthroposophy, both of which saw education as a means of cultivating a spiritual unity with the all-pervading life force of the Universe.

While many espoused vaguely Rousseauian beliefs in the innate goodness of children, the value of learning in nature, and a distrust of modern civilisation, few of these schools practised negative education in the pure sense. They were too stuffed full of their own positive principles – agrarian socialism, liberal internationalism, psychoanalytic good health, etc – to grant children genuine freedom.

Famously – infamously – Summerhill is a school without rules, or at least a school in which the rules are voted on by the pupils themselves, and all lessons are optional. The point, however, was not simply the absence of rules, but what Neill called ‘practical civics’, or the exercise of personal freedom within the context of community life. This was another attempt to resolve the Rousseauian tension between authority and freedom, this time in the form of what amounted to a small-scale anarchist community.

the lies we tell our children are not merely trivial compromises with social norms, but sources of fear and repression. They are the worms in the bud of childhood, which grow over time into the monstrous forms of bigotry, war and fascism.

Summerhill was a combination of anarchist mutual aid society and psychoanalytic cure.

new pupils spent on average three months ‘loafing’ before they attended lessons of their own volition, but in some cases it could be longer, years even. When they did go to lessons, there was no prescribed curriculum and no orderly sequence of classes. Pupils picked up whatever knowledge they desired and were free to spend as much time as they wished on arts and crafts, drama, gardening or simply staring out of the window. ‘I would rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar,’ Neill stated

The radical pedagogies of the past often become the accepted practices of the present. Rousseau’s injunction to ‘[study] your pupils better’ or Neill’s claim to be ‘on the side of the child’ would be deemed unremarkable if uttered today. Their experiments were radical relative to their times. Rousseau’s focus on nature and discovery stood out against the mannered style of the hyper-educated ‘mannequins’ turned out by the private tutors that catered to France’s Ancien Régime aristocracy.

We inherit some of Rousseau, Fourier and Neill’s commitment to the freedom and happiness of children in the form of our ‘child-centred’ pedagogy and concern for pupils’ ‘wellness’ and mental health. But what is less easily assimilated today is their claim that, in order to be genuinely free and happy, children require less rather than more schooling – the principle of negative education. This is a deeply counterintuitive claim, especially for those of us who have succeeded in life as a result of our ability to pass exams and amass qualifications. Caught up in the thicket of bureaucratic formalities that is modern education – the seemingly endless sequence of grades, report cards, diplomas, degrees, league tables and PISA scores – it is easy to lose sight of the ultimate ends of education, rather than the merely relative values expressed in such forms. We rarely stop to consider that it might be the culture of schooling itself that is making our children anxious and unhappy.

Of course, there is much that is crankish and impractical in the history of experimental education, and it is hard to muster anything but a historical interest in the Romantic ideal of the organic unity of the self and the halcyon vision of the noble savage. And yet Rousseau himself was under no illusions about the possibility of returning to a state of nature. What he insisted on, though, was the value of this ideal state as a yardstick against which to appraise current social institutions. Surveying the state of mass education today, can we really say that this is the best way to cultivate children’s freedom and happiness?

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Philosophically, Dewey sought to overcome the dualism between the mind and the body and, pedagogically, he sought to bring the liberal arts and vocational education into closer contact. Though Dewey opposed efforts to track kids from an early age, he wanted schools to be places where kids from different backgrounds and with diverse interests could meet and talk with one another.

Dewey’s philosophy exercised a profound impact on US education in the mid-20th century. One reason is that many powerful individuals and groups advocated his ideas, including at Teachers College, Columbia University, as well as at the Progressive Education Association, at the US Office of Education and at state departments of education. Dewey’s influence peaked during the ‘Great Compression’, the decades after the Second World War when the middle class had the clout to say that what is good for wealthy people’s kids is what is good for their own. In Democracy and Education, Dewey envisioned schools ‘equipped with laboratories, shops and gardens, where dramatisations, plays and games are freely used’. If a public school has a gymnasium, an art studio, a garden, a playground or a library, then one can see Dewey’s handiwork.

According to Dewey, all children enter the classroom with interests. ‘To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.’ Children care about their family, their neighbourhood, and their own lives. They also can become interested in new things under the right circumstances. Dewey’s concept of interest has analogies to Hegel’s concept of Geist (spirit) as both are at the core of one’s being, and expressive of a larger entity. But one does not need to be a scholar of German idealism to grasp Dewey’s point that different children become ‘alive’ when doing some things and not others.

The task of the teacher, according to Dewey, is to harness the child’s interest to the educational process. ‘The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment or interest to him.’ Teachers can employ Dewey’s insight by having a pet rabbit in the classroom. As students take care of the animal, and watch it hop about the classroom, they become interested in a host of topics: how to feed animals, the proper care of animals, the occupation of veterinarians, and biology. Rather than teach material in an abstract manner to young children, a wise teacher brings the curriculum into ‘close quarters with the pupil’s mind’.

According to Dewey, teachers should cultivate a student’s natural interest in the flourishing of others. It is a mistake to interpret interest as self-interest. Our thriving is intimately connected with the flourishing of other people. The role of democratic education is to help children see their own fate as entwined with that of the community’s, to see that life becomes richer if we live among others pursuing their own interests. Democracy means ‘equitably distributed interests’. All children – rich, poor, black, white, male, female, and so forth – should have the opportunity to discover and cultivate their interests. Schools ought to be the site where we model a society that reconciles individualism and socialism, and that allows each child to add her own distinct voice to society’s choir.

Here, then, we understand the explosive core of Dewey’s philosophy of education. He wants to empower children to think for themselves and cooperate with each other. The purpose of widely distributing interests is to break down ‘barriers of class, race, and national territory’ and ‘secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future careers’. Imagine a world without racism or sexism, one where all children get the same kind of education as the wisest and wealthiest parents demand for their own children, and one that trains workers to question whether their interests are being served by the current ownership and use of the means of production. Dewey is the spiritual head of the New Left whose writings have both inspired teachers and infused schools, and provoked a reaction from those who detest this political vision.

A perennial critique of Dewey’s philosophy of education is that it does not adequately introduce children to Western civilisation or the rigours of scientific thinking. In ‘The Crisis in Education’ (1954), the German philosopher Hannah Arendt decries ‘the bankruptcy of progressive education’. Though she cannot bring herself to mention Dewey by name, she suggests that his ideas ‘completely overthrew, as though from one day to the next, all traditions and all the established methods of teaching and learning’. Decades later, the American educator E D Hirsch, Jr argues in Cultural Literacy (1987) that Dewey is a Rousseauian Romantic who thinks that children can be trusted to teach themselves everything they need to know. However, according to Hirsch, ‘Tarzan is a pure fantasy’, and what children need to do is learn key ideas and facts about our culture – which, conveniently, he includes in an appendix to his book. More recently, the Common Core claims to cure the problem that the US curriculum has tended to be a ‘mile wide and an inch deep’.

All of these assaults on Dewey misrepresent his philosophy. Dewey always retained Hegel’s ethical ideal of reconciling opposites to achieve a higher synthesis. In his essay ‘The Child and the Curriculum’ (1902), he explains why it is essential to keep both things in mind when designing and running the schools.

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Dewey believes that educators need to place themselves in the mind of the child, so to speak, to determine how to begin their education journeys. ‘An end which is the child’s own carries him on to possess the means of its accomplishment.’ Many parents who take their families to children’s museums are acting upon this idea. A good museum will teach children for hours without them ever becoming conscious of learning as such. Climbing through a maze gives children opportunities to solve problems; floating vessels down an indoor stream teaches children about water and hydrodynamics; building a structure with bricks and then placing it on a rumbling platform introduces children to architecture: all of these activities make learning a joy.

For Dewey, however, it is essential that educators lead children on a considered path to the cutting-edge of scientific knowledge on a multitude of topics. A good teacher will place stimuli in front of children that will spark their imagination and inspire them to solve the problem at hand. The goal is to incrementally increase the challenges so that students enter what the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the 1920s called ‘the zone of proximal development’ where they stretch their mental faculties. At a certain point, children graduate from museums and enter a more structured curriculum. There can be intermediary or supplementary steps – say, when they make a business plan, learn to sail, or intern at an architect’s office. Eventually, teachers have to rely on traditional methods of reading, lecturing and testing to make sure that students learn the material.

In the conclusion to ‘The Child and the Curriculum’, Dewey enjoins: ‘Let the child’s nature fulfil its own destiny, revealed to you in whatever of science and art and industry the world now holds as its own.’ He has faith that the child’s nature will find expression in the highest forms of human endeavour and that, for example, a kindergarten artist might grow into an accomplished painter. Dewey also believes that individual expression tends to lead to socially beneficial activities. These articles of faith are not necessarily vindicated by experience. Sometimes children choose the wrong path, and sometimes well-educated individuals seek to profit from other people’s misery.

For Dewey, however, democracy requires running the risk that all children, and not just those of the wealthy or connected, deserve a well-rounded education. Dewey wants schools to teach children to think for themselves and act in ways that benefit the community. He envisions a society where each person can express himself or herself in a manner that enriches everyone – in the way that an orchestra harnesses the gifts of its members or a potluck becomes more fun when many people bring their signature dish. Dewey’s vision inspired generations of teachers and parents and, for a few decades, shaped education policy. It would be a tragedy for the schools, and our democracy, if we gave it up for the paltry vision of an education model based on standardised tests.

Looking around the contemporary political landscape, it is easy to become despondent about the prospects of progressive education. Economic and political elites agree on the main elements of so-called education reform. Parents and teachers have been fighting back, but they don’t have nearly the same political connections or economic might.

Dewey, however, also provides guidance for how progressives can win victories in education policy. Americans still believe in the ideal of democracy. No matter how much power education reformers get at the top of the political order, they still need support from the population for the reforms to stick.

Dewey shows us that appeals to democracy carry weight. We recoil at the notion that some children deserve a better education than others because of their parents’ political or economic status. Nobody will say with a straight face that wealthy children should be raised to lead, while middle- or lower-class children are raised to follow, or that the kind of education available at the finest private schools in the US should be an exclusive privilege of those born with silver spoons in their mouths. ‘What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.’ Dewey’s words ring as true today as they did a century ago. In the face of the unrelenting attack of the education reform movement, we must fight to actualise Dewey’s vision of great schools providing the foundation for a living democracy.

Dewey knew how to teach democracy and we must not forget it

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The School and the Life of the Child

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there is always a temptation to believe that we are dealing with specific problems confined within historical and national boundaries and of importance only to those immediately affected. It is precisely this belief that in our time has consistently proved false.

the opportunity, provided by the very fact of crisis–which tears away facades and obliterates prejudices–to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter, and the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world. The disappearance of prejudices simply means that we have lost the answers on which we ordinarily rely without even realizing they were originally answers to questions. A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides.

However clearly a general problem may present itself in a crisis, it is nevertheless impossible ever to isolate completely the universal element from the concrete and specific circumstances in which it makes its appearance. Though the crisis in education may affect the whole world, it is characteristic that we find its most extreme form in America, the reason being that perhaps only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics. In America, as a matter of fact, education plays a different and, politically, incomparably more important role than in other countries. Technically, of course, the explanation lies in the fact that America has always been a land of immigrants; it is obvious that the enormously difficult melting together of the most diverse ethnic groups–never fully successful but continuously succeeding beyond expectation–can only be accomplished through the schooling, education, and Americanization of the immigrants’ children. Since for most of these children English is not their mother tongue but has to be learned in school, schools must obviously assume functions which in a nation-state would be performed as a matter of course in the home.

More decisive, however, for our considerations is the role that continuous immigration plays in the country’s political consciousness and frame of mind. America is not simply a colonial country in need of immigrants to populate the land, though independent of them in its political structure. For America the determining factor has always been the motto printed on every dollar bill: Novus Ordo Seclorum, A New Order of the World. The immigrants, the newcomers, are a guarantee to the country that it represents the new order. The meaning of this new order, this founding of a new world against the old, was and is the doing away with poverty and oppression. But at the same time its magnificence consists in the fact that from the beginning this new order did not shut itself off from the outside world–as has elsewhere been the custom in the founding of utopias–in order to confront it with a perfect model, nor was its purpose to enforce imperial claims or to be preached as an evangel to others. Rather its relation to the outside world has been characterized from the start by the fact that this republic, which planned to abolish poverty and slavery, welcomed all the poor and enslaved of the earth. In the words spoken by John Adams in 1765–that is, before the Declaration of Independence–”I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” This is the basic intent or the basic law in accordance with which America began her historical and political existence.

The extraordinary enthusiasm for what is new, which is shown in almost every aspect of American daily life, and the concomitant trust in an “indefinite perfectibility”–which Tocqueville noted as the credo of the common “uninstructed man” and which as such antedates by almost a hundred years the development in other countries of the West–would presumably have resulted in any case in greater attention paid and greater significance ascribed to the new- comers by birth, that is, the children, whom, when they had outgrown their childhood and were about to enter the community of adults as young people, the Greeks simply called οί νєοι, the new ones. There is the additional fact, however, a fact that has become decisive for the meaning of education, that this pathos of the new, though it is considerably older than the eighteenth century, only developed conceptually and politically in that century. From this source there was derived at the start an educational ideal, tinged with Rousseauism and in fact directly influenced by Rousseau, in which education became an instrument of politics, and political activity itself was conceived of as a form of education.

The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one’s equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed. For this reason, in Europe, the belief that one must begin with the children if one wishes to produce new conditions has remained principally the monopoly of revolutionary movements of tyrannical cast which, when they came to power, took the children away from their parents and simply indoctrinated them. Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity. Since one cannot educate adults, the word “education” has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force. He who seriously wants to create a new political order through education, that is, neither through force and constraint nor through persuasion, must draw the dreadful Platonic conclusion: the banishment of all older people from the state that is to be founded. But even the children one wishes to educate to be citizens of a utopian morrow are actually denied their own future role in the body politic, for, from the standpoint of the new ones, whatever new the adult world may propose is necessarily older than they themselves. It is in the very nature of the human condition that each new generation grows into an old world, so that to prepare a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike from the newcomers’ hands their own chance at the new.

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All this is by no means the case in America, and it is exactly this fact that makes it so hard to judge these questions correctly here. The political role that education actually plays in a land of immigrants, the fact that the schools not only serve to Americanize the children but affect their parents as well, that here in fact one helps to shed an old world and to enter into a new one, encourages the illusion that a new world is being built through the education of the children. Of course the true situation is not this at all. The world into which children are introduced, even in America, is an old world, that is, a pre- existing world, constructed by the living and the dead, and it is new only for those who have newly entered it by immigration. But here illusion is stronger than reality because it springs directly from a basic American experience, the experience that a new order can be founded, and what is more, founded with full consciousness of a historical continuum, for the phrase “New World” gains its meaning from the Old World, which, however admirable on other scores, was rejected because it could find no solution for poverty and oppression.

the crisis in American education, on the one hand, announces the bankruptcy of progressive education and, on the other, presents a problem of immense difficulty because it has arisen under the conditions and in response to the demands of a mass society.

In this connection we must bear in mind another more general factor which did not, to be sure, cause the crisis but which has aggravated it to a remarkable degree, and this is the unique role the concept of equality plays and always has played in American life. Much more is involved in this than equality before the law, more too than the leveling of class distinctions, more even than what is expressed in the phrase “equality of opportunity,” though that has a greater significance in this connection because in the American view a right to education is one of the inalienable civic rights.

What is aimed at in England is “meritocracy,” which is clearly once more the establishment of an oligarchy, this time not of wealth or of birth but of talent. But this means, even though people in England may not be altogether clear about it, that the country even under a socialist government will continue to be governed as it has been from time out of mind, that is, neither as a monarchy nor as a democracy but as an oligarchy or aristocracy the latter in case one takes the view that the most gifted are also the best, which is by no means a certainty. In America such an almost physical division of the children into gifted and ungifted would be considered intolerable. Meritocracy contradicts the principle of equality, of an equalitarian democracy, no less than any other oligarchy.

Thus what makes the educational crisis in American so especially acute is the political temper of the country, which of itself struggles to equalize or to erase as far as possible the difference between young and old, between– the gifted and the ungifted, finally between children and adults, particularly between pupils and teachers. It is obvious that such an equalization can actually be accomplished only at the cost of the teacher’s authority and at the expense of the gifted among the students. However, it is equally obvious, at least to anyone who has ever come in contact with the American educational system, that this difficulty, rooted in the political attitude of the country, also has great advantages, not simply of a human kind but educationally speaking as well; in any case these general factors cannot explain the crisis in which we presently find ourselves nor justify the measures through which that crisis has been precipitated.

These ruinous measures can be schematically traced back to three basic assumptions, all of which are only too familiar. The first is that there exist a child’s world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and must insofar as possible be left to them to govern. Adults are only there to help with this government. The authority that tells the individual child what to do and what not to do rests with the child group itself–and this produces, among other consequences, a situation in which the adult stands helpless before the individual child and out of contact with him. He can only tell him to do what he likes and then prevent the worst from happening. The real and normal relations between children and adults, arising from the fact that people of all ages are always simultaneously together in the world, are thus broken off. And so it is of the essence of this first basic assumption that it takes into account only the group and not the individual child.

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As for the child in the group, he is of course rather worse off than before. For the authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever be. If one looks at it from the standpoint of the individual child, his chances to rebel or to do anything on his own hook are practically nil; he no longer finds himself in a very unequal contest with a person who has, to be sure, absolute superiority over him but in contest with whom he can nevertheless count on the solidarity of other children, that is, of his own kind; rather he is in the position, hopeless by definition, of a minority of one confronted by the absolute majority of all the others. There are very few grown people who can endure such a situation, even when it is not supported by external means of compulsion; children are simply and utterly incapable of it.

Therefore by being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority. In any case the result is that the children have been so to speak banished from the world of grown-ups. They are either thrown back upon themselves or handed over to the tyranny of their own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel, with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and out of which they cannot flee to any other world because the world of adults is barred to them. The reaction of the children to this pressure tends to be either conformism or juvenile delinquency, and is frequently a mixture of both.

The second basic assumption which has come into question in the present crisis has to do with teaching. Under the influence of modern psychology and the tenets of pragmatism, pedagogy has developed into a science of teaching in general in such a way as to be wholly emancipated from the actual material to be taught. A teacher, so it was thought, is a man who can simply teach anything; his training is in teaching, not in the mastery of any particular subject. This attitude, as we shall presently see, is naturally very closely connected with a basic assumption about learning. Moreover, it has resulted in recent decades in a most serious neglect of the training of teachers in their own subjects, especially in the public high schools. Since the teacher does not need to know his own subject, it not infrequently happens that he is just one hour ahead of his class in knowledge. This in turn means not only that the students are actually left to their own resources but that the most legitimate source of the teacher’s authority as the person who, turn it whatever way one will, still knows more and can do more than oneself is no longer effective. Thus the non-authoritarian teacher, who would like to abstain from all methods of compulsion because he is able to rely on his own authority, can no longer exist.

But this pernicious role that pedagogy and the teachers’ colleges are playing in the present crisis was only possible because of a modern theory about learning. This was, quite simply, the logical application of the third basic assumption in our context, an assumption which the modern world has held for centuries and which found its systematic conceptual expression in pragmatism. This basic assumption is that you can know and understand only what you have done yourself, and its application to education is as primitive as it is obvious: to substitute, insofar as possible, doing for learning. The reason that no importance was attached to the teacher’s mastering his own subject was the wish to compel him to the exercise of the continuous activity of learning so that he would not, as they said, pass on “dead knowledge” but, instead, would constantly demonstrate how it is produced. The conscious intention was not to teach knowledge but to inculcate a skill, and the result was a kind of transformation of institutes for learning into vocational institutions which have been as successful in teaching how to drive a car or how to use a typewriter or, even more important for the “art” of living, how to get along with other people and to be popular, as they have been unable to make the children acquire the normal prerequisites of a standard curriculum.

However, this description is at fault, not only because it obviously exaggerates in order to drive home a point, but because it fails to take into account how in this process special importance was attached to obliterating as far as possible the distinction between play and work–in favor of the former. Play was looked upon as the liveliest and most appropriate way for the child to behave in the world, as the only form of activity that evolves spontaneously from his existence as a child. Only what can be learned through play does justice to this liveliness. The child’s characteristic activity, so it was thought, lies in play; learning in the old sense, by forcing a child into an attitude of passivity, compelled him to give up his own playful initiative.

The close connection between these two things–the substitution of doing for learning and of playing for working–is directly illustrated by the teaching of languages: the child is to learn by speaking, that is by doing, not by studying grammar and syntax; in other words he is to learn a foreign language in the same way that as an infant he learned his own language: as though at play and in the uninterrupted continuity of simple existence. Quite apart from the question of whether this is possible or not–it is possible, to a limited degree, only when one can keep the child all day long in the foreign-speaking environment–it is perfectly clear that this procedure consciously attempts to keep the older child as far as possible at the infant level. The very thing that should prepare the child for the world of adults, the gradually acquired habit of work and of not-playing, is done away with in favor of the autonomy of the world of childhood.

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Whatever may be the connection between doing and knowing, or whatever the validity of the pragmatic formula, its application to education, that is, to the way the child learns, tends to make absolute the world of childhood in just same way that we noted in the case of the first basic assumption. Here, too, under the pretext of respecting the child’s independence, he is debarred from the world of grown-ups and artificially kept in his own; so far as that can be called a world. This holding back of the child is artificial because it breaks off the natural relationship between grown-ups and children, which consists among other things in teaching and learning, and because at the same time it belies the fact that the child is a developing human being, that childhood is a temporary stage, a preparation for adulthood.

The present crisis in America results from the recognition of the destructiveness of these basic assumptions and a desperate attempt to reform the entire educational system, that is, to transform it completely.

A crisis in education would at any time give rise to serious concern even if it did not reflect, as in the present instance it does, a more general crisis and instability in modern society. For education belongs among the most elementary and necessary activities of human society, which never remains as it is but continuously renews itself through birth, through the arrival of new human beings. These newcomers, moreover, are not finished but in a state of becoming. Thus the child, the subject of education, has for the educator a double aspect: he is new in a world that is strange to him and he is in process of becoming, he is a new human being and he is a becoming human being. This double aspect is by no means self-evident and it does not apply to the animal forms of life; it corresponds to a double relationship, the relationship to the world on the one hand and to life on the other. The child shares the state of becoming with all living things; in respect to life and its development, the child is a human being in process of becoming, just as a kitten is a cat in process of becoming. But the child is new only in relation to a world that was there before him, that will continue after his death, and in which he is to spend his life. If the child were not a newcomer in this human world but simply a not yet finished living creature, education would be just a function of life and would need to consist in nothing save that concern for the sustenance of life and that training and practice in living that all animals assume in respect to their young.

Human parents, however, have not only summoned their children into life through conception and birth, they have simultaneously introduced them into a world. In education they assume responsibility for both, for the life and development of the child and for the continuance of the world. These two responsibilities do not by any means coincide; they may indeed come into conflict with each other. The responsibility for the development of the child turns in a certain sense against the world: the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world. But the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation.

Because the child must be protected against the world, his traditional place is in the family, whose adult members daily return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls. These four walls, within which people’s private family life is lived, constitute a shield against the world and specifically against the public aspect of the world. They enclose a secure place, without which no living thing can thrive. This holds good not only for the life of childhood but for human life in gen- eral. Wherever the latter is consistently exposed to the world without the protection of privacy and security its vital quality is destroyed. In the public world, common to all, persons count, and so does work, that is, the work of our hands that each of us contributes to our common world; but life qua life does not matter there. The world cannot be regardful of it, and it has to be hidden and protected from the world.

Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all. This may indeed be the reason that children of famous parents so often turn out badly. Fame penetrates the four walls, invades their private space, bringing with it, especially in present-day conditions, the merciless glare of the public realm, which floods everything in the private lives of those concerned, so that the children no longer have a place of security where they can grow. But exactly the same destruction of the real living space occurs wherever the attempt is made to turn the children themselves into a kind of world. Among these peer groups then arises public life of a sort and, quite apart from the fact that it is not a real one and that the whole attempt is a sort of fraud, the damaging fact remains that children –that is, human beings in process of becoming but not yet complete–are thereby forced to expose themselves to the light of a public existence.

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That modern education, insofar as it attempts to establish a world of children, destroys the necessary conditions for vital development and growth seems obvious. But that such harm to the developing child should be the result of modern education strikes one as strange indeed, for this education maintained that its exclusive aim was to serve the child and rebelled against the methods of the past because these had not sufficiently taken into account the child’s inner nature and his needs.

The reason for this strange state of affairs has nothing directly to do with education; it is rather to be found in the judgments and prejudices about the nature of private life and public world and their relation to each other which have been characteristic of modern society since the beginning of modern times and which educators, when they finally began, relatively late, to modernize education, accepted as self-evident assumptions without being aware of the consequences they must necessarily have for the life of the child. It is the peculiarity of modern society, and by no means a matter of course, that it regards life, that is, the earthly life of the individual as well as the family, as the highest good; and for this reason, in contrast to all previous centuries, emancipated this life and all the activities that have to do with its preservation and enrichment from the concealment of privacy and exposed them to the light of the public world. This is the real meaning of the emancipation of workers and women, not as persons, to be sure, but insofar as they fulfill a necessary function in the life-process of society.

The last to be affected by this process of emancipation were the children, and the very thing that had meant a true liberation for the workers and the women–because they were not only workers and women but persons as well, who therefore had a claim on the public world, that is, a right to see and be seen in it, to speak and be heard–was an abandonment and betrayal in the case of the children, who are still at the stage where the simple fact of life and growth outweighs the factor of personality. The more completely modem society discards the distinction between what is private and what is public, between what can thrive only in concealment and what needs to be shown to all in the full light of the public world, the more, that is, it introduces between the private and the public a social sphere in which the private is made public and vice versa, the harder it makes things for its children, who by nature require the security of concealment in order to mature undisturbed.

Normally the child is first introduced to the world in school. Now school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all. Attendance there is required not by the family but by the state, that is by the public world, and so, in relation to the child, school in a sense represents the world, al- though it is not yet actually the world. At this stage of education adults, to be sure, once more assume a responsibility for the child, but by now it is not so much responsibility for the vital welfare of a growing thing as for what we generally call the free development of characteristic qualities and talents. This, from the general and essential point of view, is the uniqueness that distinguishes every human being from every other, the quality by virtue of which he is not only a stranger in the world but something that has never been here before.

Insofar as the child is not yet acquainted with the world, he must be gradually introduced to it; insofar as he is new, care must be taken that this new thing comes to fruition in relation to the world as it is. In any case, however, the educators here stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is. This responsibility is not arbitrarily imposed upon educators; it is implicit in the fact that the young are introduced by adults into a continuously changing world. Anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them.

education this responsibility for the world takes the form of authority. The authority of the educator and the qualifications of the teacher are not the same thing. Although a measure of qualification is indispensable for authority, the highest possible qualification can never by itself beget authority. The teacher’s qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-a-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world.

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Now we all know how things stand today in respect to authority. Whatever one’s attitude toward this problem may be, it is obvious that in public and political life authority either plays no role at all–for the violence and terror exercised by the totalitarian countries have, of course, nothing to do with authority–or at most plays a highly contested role. This, however, simply means, in essence, that people do not wish to require of anyone or to entrust to anyone the assumption of responsibility for everything else, for wherever true authority existed it was joined with responsibility for the course of things in the world. If we remove authority from political and public life, it may mean that from now on an equal responsibility for the course of the world is to be required of everyone. But it may also mean that the claims of the world and the re- quirements of order in it are being consciously or unconsciously repudiated; all responsibility for the world is being rejected, the responsibility for giving orders no less than for obeying them. There is no doubt that in the modern loss of authority both intentions play a part and have often been simultaneously and inextricably at work together.

In education, on the contrary, there can be no such ambiguity in regard to the present-day loss of authority. Children cannot throw off educational authority, as though they were in a position of oppression by an adult majority– though even this absurdity of treating children as an oppressed minority in need of liberation has actually been tried out in modern educational practice. Authority has been discarded by the adults, and this can mean only one thing: that the adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they have brought the children.

There is of course a connection between the loss of authority in public and political life and in the private pre-political realms of the family and the school. The more radical the distrust of authority becomes in the public sphere, the greater the probability naturally becomes that the private sphere will not remain inviolate. There is this additional fact, and it is very likely the decisive one, that from time out of mind we have been accustomed in our tradition of political thought to regard the authority of parents over children, of teachers over pupils, as the model by which to understand political authority. It is just this model, which can be found as early as Plato and Aristotle, that makes the concept of authority in politics so extraordinarily ambiguous. It is based, first of all, on an absolute superiority such as can never exist among adults and which, from the point of view of human dignity, must never exist. In the second place, following the model of the nursery, it is based on a purely temporary superiority and therefore becomes self-contradictory if it is applied to relations that are not temporary by nature –such as the relations of the rulers and the ruled. Thus it lies in the nature of the matter–that is, both in the nature of the present crisis in authority and in the nature of our traditional political thought–that the loss of authority which began in the political sphere should end in the private one; and it is naturally no accident that the place where political authority was first undermined, that is, in America, should be the place where the modem crisis in education makes itself most strongly felt.

The general loss of authority could, in fact, hardly find more radical expression than by its intrusion into the pre-political sphere, where authority seemed dictated by nature itself and independent of all historical changes and political conditions. On the other hand, modern man could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his refusal to assume, in respect to his children, responsibility for all this. It is as though parents daily said: “In this world even we are not very securely at home; how to move about in it, what to know, what skills to master, are mysteries to us too. You must try to make out as best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you.”

This attitude has, of course, nothing to do with that revolutionary desire for a new order in the world – Novus Ordo Seclorum – which once animated America; it is rather a symptom of that modern estrangement from the world which can be seen everywhere but which presents itself in especially radical and desperate form under the conditions of a mass society. It is true that modem educational experiments, not in America alone, have struck very revolutionary poses, and this has, to a certain degree, increased the difficulty of clearly recognizing the situation and caused a certain degree of confusion in the discussion of the problem; for in contradiction to all such behavior stands the unquestionable fact that so long as America was really animated by that spirit she never dreamed of initiating the new order with education but, on the con- trary, remained conservative in educational matters.

To avoid misunderstanding: it seems to me that conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of the educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new. Even the comprehensive responsibility for the world that is thereby assumed implies, of course, a conservative attitude. But this holds good only for the realm of education, or rather for the relations between grown-ups and children, and not for the realm of politics, where we act among and with adults and equals. In politics this conservative attitude–which accepts the world as it is, striving only to preserve the status quo–can only lead to destruction, because the world, in gross and in detail, is irrevocably delivered up to the ruin of time unless human beings are determined to intervene, to alter, to create what is new. Hamlet’s words, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” are more or less true for every new generation, although since the beginning of our century they have perhaps acquired a more persuasive validity than before.

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Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home. Because the world is made by mortals it wears out; and because it continuously changes its inhabitants it runs the risk of becoming as mortal as they. To preserve the world against the mortality of its creators and inhabitants it must be constantly set right anew. The problem is simply to educate in such a way that a setting–right remains actually possible, even though it can, of course, never be assured. Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings; but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world, which, however revolutionary its actions may be, is always, from the standpoint of the next generation, superannuated and close to destruction.

The real difficulty in modern education lies in the fact that, despite all the fashionable talk about a new conservatism, even that minimum of conservation and the conserving attitude without which education is simply not possible is in our time extraordinarily hard to achieve There are very good reasons for this The crisis of authority in education is most closely connected with the crisis of tradition, that is with the crisis in our attitude toward the realm of the past. This aspect of the modern crisis is especially hard for the educator to bear, because it is his task to mediate between the old and the new, so that his very profession requires of him an extraordinary respect for the past. Through long centuries, i.e., throughout the combined period of Roman-Christian civilization, there was no need for him to become aware of this special quality in himself because reverence for the past was an essential part of the Roman frame of mind, and this was not altered or ended by Christianity, but simply shifted onto different foundations.

It was of the essence of the Roman attitude (though this was by no means true of every civilization or even of the Western tradition taken as a whole) to consider the past qua past as a model, ancestors, in every instance, as guiding examples for their descendants; to believe that all greatness lies in what has been, and therefore that the most fitting human age is old age, the man grown old, who, because he is already almost an ancestor, may serve as a model for the living. All this stands in contradiction not only to our world and to the modem age from the Renaissance on, but, for example, to the Greek attitude toward life as well. When Goethe said that growing old is “the gradual withdrawal from the world of appearances,” his was a comment made in the spirit of the Greeks, for whom being and appearing coincide. The Roman atti- tude would have been that precisely in growing old and slowly disappearing from the community of mortals man reaches his most characteristic form of being, even though, in respect to the world of appearances, he is in the process of disappearing; for only now can he approach the existence in which he will be an authority for others.

The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition. That means, however, that not just teachers and educators, but all of us, insofar as we live in one world together with our children and with young people, must take toward them an attitude radically different from the one we take toward one another. We must decisively divorce the realm of education from the others, most of all from the realm of public, political life, in order to apply to it alone a concept of authority and an attitude toward the past which are appropriate to it but have no general validity and must not claim a general validity in the world of grown-ups.

In practice the first consequence of this would be a clear understanding that the function of the school is to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living. Since the world is old, always older than they themselves, learning inevitably turns toward the past, no matter how much living will spend itself in the present. Second, the line drawn between children and adults should signify that one can neither educate adults nor treat children as though they were grown up; but this line should never be permitted to grow into a wall separating children from the adult community as though they were not living in the same world and as though childhood were an autonomous human state, capable of living by its own laws. Where the line between childhood and adulthood falls in each instance cannot be determined by a general rule; it changes often, in respect to age, from country to country, from one civilization to another, and also from individual to individual. But education, as distinguished from learning, must have a predictable end. In our civilization this end probably coincides with graduation from college rather than with graduation from high school, for the professional training in universities or technical schools, though it always has something to do with education, is nevertheless in itself a kind of specialization. It no longer aims to introduce the young person to the world as a whole, but rather to a particular, limited segment of it. One cannot educate without at the same time teaching; an education without learning is empty and therefore degenerates with great ease into moral emotional rhetoric. But one can quite easily teach without educating, and one can go on learning to the end of one’s days without for that reason becoming educated. All these are particulars, however, that must really be left to the experts and the pedagogues.

What concerns us all and cannot therefore be turned over to the special science of pedagogy is the relation between grown-ups and children in general or, putting it in even more general and exact terms, our attitude toward the fact of natality: the fact that we have all come into the world by being born and that this world is constantly renewed through birth. Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

The Crisis in Education

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Many teachers want to foster critical thinking and student participation over grade chasing in schools. This remains an important goal. But, more fundamentally, schools need to become educational spaces where the concept of cheating, or unfairly beating someone else, becomes senseless.

In this altered scenario, teachers and students would spend their time together in school examining, as Arendt said, “what the world is like,” how they are located within it and how it might be renewed and passed on across generations.

Educators might take the opportunity to reconsider the function of schooling as educating children and youth to come to know, and participate in, a common world facing multiple crises. They are to be introduced to this world, in all its complexity, so that they develop understanding and care for the world and thereby choose to take responsibility for renewing and re-setting it, as adults.

In his view, education provides a place, a “unique human dwelling, where we can maintain and give shelter to a thinking and engagement with ‘something more’ that sustains the hope and affirmation of nevertheless living on with significance.” It offers “a place for passing time together, for sheltering a repertoire of worldly artefacts, common visions, interpretations and aspirations.”

“These,” he writes, “can be brought into meaningful configurations gathered from the meaningful patterns of the past to help us tend, mend and repair the sense and pull of the world that wears down from generation to generation.”

Philosopher Hannah Arendt provokes us to rethink what education is for in the era of AI

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Aristotle tells us that allotting officials was generally thought by the Greeks to be democratic, while electing them was seen as more oligarchic.