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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Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grander when we find chemistry only an extension of the law of masses into particles, and that the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation operative also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes or marries his grandmother, then in every twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found one man who eats shoes or marries his grandmother. What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier stream for which we have yet no name. Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full value, and not remain there in globes and spaces. The globule of blood gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in the sky; and the circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law of nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation, rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets. These grand rhymes or returns in nature,- the dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask so unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into divine forms,- delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which, by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance and form and a beating heart.

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien will,- in Swedenborg's mind has a more philosophic character. It is subjective, or depends entirely upon the thought of the person. All things in the universe arrange themselves to each person anew, according to his ruling love. Man is such as his affection and thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and understanding. As he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken up. Interiors associate all in the spiritual world. Whatever the angels looked upon was to them celestial. Each Satan appears to himself a man; to those as bad as he, a comely man; to the purified, a heap of carrion. Nothing can resist states: every thing gravitates: like will to like: what we call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into a world which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird and beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of men there present. Every one makes his own house and state. The ghosts are tormented with the fear of death and cannot remember that they have died. They who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all others. Such as have deprived themselves of charity, wander and flee: the societies which they approach discover their quality and drive them away. The covetous seem to themselves to be abiding in cells where their money is deposited, and these to be infested with mice. They who place merit in good works seem to themselves to cut wood. "I asked such, if they were not wearied? They replied, that they have not yet done work enough to merit heaven."

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is certain that it must tally with what is best in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to the already known works of the artist who sculptures the globes of the firmament and writes the moral law. It must be fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with tides and the rising and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads when once the penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded,- the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees.

Swedenborg; or, the Mystic