Texts:Rom-E-68b-E-Pur-4

Purposes
Eight Reflective Essays

4—On Pedagogy and Student Power: A Proposal

4:¶1

To comprehend student discontent and thus to revitalize the university, we might note with Heraclitus that "people do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre."

4:¶2

Preeminently, the university is the institution whose harmony consists of opposing tension; the school properly pits the young against the old, the learned against the ignorant: through their struggle, in which the students and the teachers are two opposing, equal forces, the university causes the free, open distribution of accumulated knowledge to the community. When either the students or the teachers can effectively dominate the opposite group, there is no spontaneity or liberality in the allocation of learning; there is instead an imposition of the dominant group's judgments upon its opposite and upon the community at large. But with a balance between its two essential parts, the university occasions an open, cooperative competition, as the result of which the body of knowledge at hand in the community is continually reshaped. This reshaping accords not with the plans proclaimed by the knowing few on high, but with the general will implicit in the diverse, clashing wills of all who teach and study. Here, as John Stuart Mill showed from a different perspective, is the sense and safeguard of liberty.

4:¶3

But only when its parts are balanced is the community of scholars free and effective. Both the student and the teacher have a will of their own; the one selects what he will try to teach, the other what he will try to learn; and as each independently seeks to assert his will and to make his choice prevail, the educational accomplishment of the university unfolds. It is a liberal accomplishment, for no part directs the whole; the balanced, harmonious opposition of the learner and the learned causes more than a mechanical transmission of culture; it elicits a continuous transformation and rebirth of culture as both the experienced and the hopeful have their chance to select among the manifold possibilities. The greatest service the university can render society is to occasion such a continuous renaissance.

4:¶4

The opposing tension between student and teacher, which is the true harmony of the university, differs fundamentally from the divergent tensions that are presently dissipating the university. The difference is symbolized by the sites at which wills clash: recently conflicts have occurred in the administrative offices, places that are incidental to academe, whereas properly the opposition of intention should take place quietly but seriously within the classroom.

4:¶5

In the past, productive discord between the learned and the learner was created on the one hand by maintaining a marked difference of authority between the two groups and on the other by having an approximate balance of power between them. Thus, the teacher was the classroom autocrat who could motivate youths by driving home to them, with the rod all too frequently, that they were still immature; yet this autocrat was rarely a match for the concerted wit of his wards. In addition, the official curriculum was then sufficiently circumscribed that each student could learn, with leisure to spare for self-set tasks, all that his masters proposed to teach. Academic paternalism was not yet dominant. The teacher's task was not to educate the whole man so that he even makes love by the book; it was to ensure that the student acquired certain rudimentary tools and standards, which would hopefully facilitate and elevate the man's independent tutelage in the school of life. With the natural nobility of youth, the student could tolerate, and even appreciate, his temporary masters, for he knew that in the debating societies he could learn what he would while needing to please only his peers, and he was further aware that soon, after commencement, he would have plenty of time to go it alone. Consequently, in the classroom both the teacher and the student were in a productive balance in which neither could ignore or dominate the other.

4:¶6

But every balance is struck temporarily. We have had a century and a half of incessant instructional reform; this reform has fabulously enhanced the teacher's power while the student has remained in his primitive innocence. At every level, the curriculum has burgeoned; schooling has been extended so that it spans from infancy to senility. Throughout, the student meets mainly trained teachers who match him in ability and have the advantage in knowledge and experience; youths can no longer build their egos by besting an Ichabod Crane. Furthermore, although teachers still have to manage with rather large classes, each student has to deal daily with a succession of teachers and he does not spend enough time with any one of these to take the true measure of the man. On the higher1 levels, the elective system and the purported explosion of knowledge have loosed a barrage of course fragments, each taught by an able specialist; to the beleaguered student such massed intellect, which completely overwhelms his power of absorption, amounts to an insolent sneer from the faculty—"young man, you shall always be ignorant." To this insult, add the injury of asking the student to choose among the proffered plethora without even initiating him into the principles that might inform his choice and enable him to make it his own. Hence, he puts together a program—a major, a minor, and assorted irrelevancies. Then, instead of looking forward adventurously to the school of life, the student must beg admittance to graduate or professional school, which will be followed by special courses in the army, in business, and in the adult education program sponsored ironically by the local "Y". Thus, today's students are no match for their masters, and we are beginning to witness the resultant resentment.

4:¶7

Student restiveness in the present-day university signifies, among other things, that the harmony of opposing tension between the learned and the learner has disappeared. The teachers have overwhelmed the students, and the balance of power has been upset. Contemporary academic deficiencies have arisen not from the sacrifice of teaching to research, but from the encompassing, monolithic scale of the university's teaching function. The craze for research results ultimately from the frantic effort to find sufficient new fodder to feed the didactic dinosaur. Those who wish to pursue the effects of this scale on the quality of college teaching will find them well analyzed by Jacques Barzun in The American University. Here the effects upon the student are more germane.

4:¶8

On the side of the learner, the present imbalance makes many students eschew their office; instead of independent inquiry, they are content with one of three responses—collaboration, apathy, or resistance. It is rare that one now meets a serious student, a person bent on pursuing the problems that he personally finds meaningful wherever they lead him. Rather, one finds first, and in numbers, the collaborator who has been overwhelmed by his masters and who hopes to join them through servile emulation. Second, there is the drifter who finds himself at the university for reasons beyond his ken and who slides through program after program by being quick to feign what seems to be expected. Third, there is the rebel who, at least, has perceived that there is scant place in the present university for the student qua student and who desperately, resentfully strikes out against the instructional monolith. These rebels, not all of whom can be dismissed as unkempt, have sensed that the imbalance of power in favor of the teachers has made it possible for extra-university groups to gain control of the teaching apparatus and to harness it to the service of expediencies that have little in common with the free pursuit of knowledge. They have a point in demanding a change, but granting that, we need not agree to the changes they demand.

4:¶9

Significant change will not come by mere tampering with the formal governance of the university. In the great din about relevance, the least relevant thing is the widespread expectation that students can attain salvation by having representatives on every university committee from those of the trustees to those of the custodians. The university does not really need restructuring; it needs re-vitalization, a revitalization of its substantive activity, the transformation of culture. To revitalize this activity, we need to find a way to restore the balance between the teachers and the students, to redevelop the harmony that consists of their opposing tension. There can be, of course, no going back to the simplicities of the old-time college; after all, we have not dwelt above on its insufficiencies. Encompassing, specialized, omnipresent, professional instruction is here to stay; there is nothing to gain by trying to cut back the teacher's present power. Instead, let us seek ways by which students can reform the art of studying in order to offset, without diminishing, the extensive reforms that teachers have made in the art of teaching; it has been these reforms that have brought about the unbalanced aggrandizement of the teacher in our time.

4:¶10

It is easy to call for a reform of the art of learning; it is not so easy to propose what this reform should be. The efficient acquisition of knowledge depends on certain age-old abilities—intelligence and concentration, imagination and diligence—these are hard enough to find, let alone reform. Moreover, most so-called study aids are pernicious, for they further increase the student's dependence on his teachers. Thus, speed reading works if one merely wishes to acquaint oneself with things one is supposed to be familiar with; it allows a student to skim adequately the distended texts his teachers present to him. But the true student takes nothing important on authority, for he must consider all to the point at which he understands and is ready to defend with reasons his decision to accept or reject the point in question. Woe to him who makes such considerations on the basis of a subliminal glance at every other word. Sitzfleisch is a far better study aid than reading dynamics.

4:¶11

But if reform in the art of learning is not to come by trying to increase its efficiency, what else can be done? Before answering, let us look again at the problem. The classroom should be the place where a teacher with a definite conception of what it is that he should teach meets a student with an equally resolute idea of what it is that he should learn. It is not essential that both teacher and student have the same aim, but it is essential that both have coherent goals: the vitality of education arises as those aims clash and coincide, as they reinforce and qualify each other. In the present university, the teachers' goals have become so diverse and complicated that they overawe most students. Today, students do not bring into the classroom a set of personal, independent intentions that can serve as a framework by which they can organize the instructional fragments they encounter; instead, they come into each classroom ready merely to respond either by adopting the teacher's intentions in varying degrees of sincerity or by rejecting them in varying degrees of outspokenness. Hence, in short, the problem in reforming the art of learning is not one of increasing the amount the student can learn, it is one of strengthening the student's capacity to choose, intelligently and independently, what it is he seeks to learn. What will strengthen this capacity?

4:¶12

Unnoticed possibilities often become apparent when we ask the question "Why?" Why is it that only putative teachers study pedagogy? The best answer is simple: because life is full of absurdities. To be sure, an historical tome might be written explaining how it happened that the study of pedagogy became confined to the schools of education and how the schools of education came to be set apart from the rest of the university, but that tome would record a series of historical accidents. To be sure also, many a critical essay has been written explaining that, given the state of the subject, the study of pedagogy is not worth anyone's time, certainly not the time of our best students; but the cogency of such critiques would immediately disappear with an improvement in the state of the subject. The facts can be rationalized in many ways, but there are no good reasons why only teachers should study pedagogy; and as soon as we look into the nature of the subject, we will find that pedagogy may be the key to that reform of learning through which the student can regain his proper power.

4:¶13

Americans have inveterately confused pedagogy, the science or theory of education, with didactics, the theory of teaching; we have thus mistaken the whole for one of its parts. This mistake explains why it seems strange to us that pedagogy might be a subject useful to students. Moreover, that the theory of education should be generally equated with the theory of teaching signifies the degree to which the balance between teachers and students has been upset. But if we look at the real concerns of pedagogy, we will find that the student, not the teacher, is the essential figure in any sound conception of education. The German philosopher and historian, Wilhelm Dilthey, once put the matter well: "the blossom and goal of philosophy is pedagogy in its widest sense—the formative theory of man." Acquaintance with this theory may enable the student to formulate his intentions sufficiently to become again an independent power within the classroom.

4:¶14

Students are demanding that their studies be made more relevant. It is no accident that this demand has arisen at a time when the student's power in comparison to his teachers' is nil; the demand that studies be made more relevant signifies the student's total surrender: all is left up to the teacher. No faculty should permit itself to be so deified; at most it should help the students find meaning for themselves in their studies. Thus, the question of relevance should be left up to the student; and with respect to it, his first task is to make what he chooses to study relevant to himself, to the self he seeks to be. To articulate to himself the value of various subjects for his self-development, he needs a formative theory of man, a nascent conception of what he as a man can and should become; hence, he needs to address himself to pedagogy.

4:¶15

This rationale for the student's interest in pedagogy, derived from reflection on the current academic situation, accords perfectly with the function of the subject defined in the seminal treatise, Plato's Protagoras. Plato suggested that, above all, pedagogy was the topic on which the student should meditate. The student could learn many things without knowing anything about pedagogy; and because of this fact, he should seek first to learn about pedagogy, for only then could he choose intelligently what other things to learn. By ignoring pedagogy, the student risked harming himself, for he would learn many things without having any inkling of what sort of person these things would make him become. Such reflections led to the dialogue recorded in Protagoras. Recall how the young man, Hippocrates, was going to study with Protagoras without having considered what effects on himself such learning would have. Socrates pointed out the foolishness of such an action, and the two together decided instead to ask Protagoras to explain what sort of persons his students would become by accepting his teachings. With that, all three were launched on an inquiry into whether excellence could be taught, and the resultant discussion is still relevant to anyone who wishes to find a formative theory of man that he can use to help guide his own pursuit of excellence. Present-day youth might follow Socrates and Hippocrates in asking its would-be teachers to explain how the various matters taught will form the man who studies them. Such a request would lead to general courses on pedagogy.

4:¶16

Already, however, the curriculum is over-crowded. But the difficulty of finding room in the curriculum for the study of pedagogy should not be as great as it would at first seem. The subject matter dealt with in the study of pedagogy is much the same as that touched on in so-called general education. If pedagogy began with Plato's Protagoras, it has followed steadily through the important books of our tradition; these works have proved to be great because they have contributed significantly to our formative theory of man. Thus, we find in pedagogy not a new subject that must be squeezed into the curriculum, but a solution to a problem manifest in an established subject, namely general education. The problem has been pointed out well by Daniel Bell in The Reforming of General Education: there seems to be little way to put into practice what is learned in the survey of our civilization. There is however, a far simpler solution to this difficulty than that which Professor Bell proposed. We need to change not the program of study, but our conception of practice. To put our knowledge to work, we do not always need to turn to the world outside the university. Certain principles become practical as we use them as a guide directing our attention to other principles. If we encourage students to put general education into practice in this manner, we will have, in effect, made room for the study of pedagogy in the contemporary curriculum, and we will have further encouraged the particular form of student power the exercise of which is essential to the future of our educational institutions.

4:¶17

Consequently, let us reform general education by making it the study of pedagogy, the formative theory of man. Such a reform would be the fundamental step towards the revitalization of the university, for with it, students would have a better opportunity to become once again an independent, countervailing power to their teachers. To institute this reform we do not primarily need new programs; we need rather a new type of practice, one suitable to the student qua student.

Robert Oliver
Teachers College Record (vol. 70, no. 4, January 1969)