Texts:Rom-E-68b-E-Pur-5

Purposes
Eight Reflective Essays

5—Pedagogical Praxis

5:¶1

The threat of ignorance should make us cautious of proposals to enlist educational institutions in all-out efforts to solve issues here and now. The educator, whether teacher or student, is responsible not only to the present, but to the future as well.

5:¶2

Inevitably, some will find these reflections to be a retreat from reality. So be it; let them err. Their error will be in not adding time to space in conceiving of reality. Men must deal not only with the problems around them; they must deal with a succession of problems as these stretch over time. Life is a matter of endurance; this fact does not let us off the hook of a single immediate issue, but it does add another dimension to our efforts to cope with the world. In an historical sweep, a temporal specter rises before the practical life—the specter of ignorance. A people can surmount great issues one after another as it rises to heights in a series of extraordinary efforts to perform the tasks at hand, and then this people can destroy itself by being unable to solve a minor matter, having previously expended its powers without cultivating adequate replacements. This deficiency of disciplined ability is ignorance, and its absurdities are the very stuff of history. The threat of ignorance should make us cautious of proposals to enlist educational institutions in all-out efforts to solve issues here and now. The educator, whether teacher or student, is responsible not only to the present, but to the future as well.

5:¶3

We have passed through the industrial and scientific revolutions, which have together been created by technical praxis, by the systematic application of quantifiable knowledge about man and the world to the manipulation of the things around us. Technical praxis will preserve and probably expand its usefulness; but it has already attained an established place in our lives, and although it will continue to cause changes, it has ceased to initiate revolutionary transformations in human organization, automation notwithstanding. Those who look at technology as the shaping force of our future will be surprised by tomorrow's history. Despite contrary signs, another fundamental transformation of the West is underway; this educational revolution, which may prove as significant as the industrial, will be based on pedagogical praxis, on the autonomous use of qualitative judgments about our personal possibilities in order to cultivate the best man within each of us.

5:¶4

Pedagogical praxis is only incidentally the didactic disbursement of universal literacy and sophisticated skills. In a fuller sense, it is the systematic effort that each man can make to form his personal character, to cultivate his intellect and emotions, to choose personally and freely to stand for particular values in the course of a life mysteriously given to him. We are in the midst of an educational revolution in which the education traditionally open only to the gentleman is being demanded as the prerogative of all. To remind ourselves of precisely what this education is, let us turn to the words of a great gentleman, Montaigne. "Bees pillage the flowers here and there, but they make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme and majoram; so the fragments borrowed from others the student will transform and blend together to make a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment. His education, labor, and study aim only at forming that."

5:¶5

Efforts to encourage all men to transform the fragments they encounter into independent, personal patterns of judgment have merely begun. Most schooling entails only training, and popularization usually aims to preclude rather than provoke personal judgment. Be that as it may, contrary forces have been set in motion. Where skills are present, men will experiment with their uses out of exuberant curiosity. Information, literature, whole new forms of art are omnipresent, challenging us all to create and appreciate; and anyone with a keen ear and eye will be endlessly surprised at how frequently one encounters interesting, cultivated capacities dispersed through a seemingly banal populace. For better or for worse, men are seeking to live in the Athenian manner. In result, much of the extreme, the radical, the bizarre in youth stems from the general rush to live by one's own judgment, regardless of whether it is good judgment or poor. As long as the young take the lead in this way, their elders cannot help but take up the challenge and offer the young the closest to a gentleman's education they can. This response is simply a function of the truth in Jefferson's quip that a people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be. Thus, spontaneous initiatives have committed us to trying to carry the development of popular education through to completion, whether to success or chaotic destruction or to muddled endurance we cannot know.

5:¶6

Such uncertainties often elicit exertion, however; and rather than here forecast the facade of the future, let us concentrate on understanding the processes at work, for each of us has the option, even the responsibility, to decide whether the processes are such that we should work to facilitate or impede their operation. Fichte best envisaged the educational revolution that is upon us. The idea of training the skills of the populace and indoctrinating the citizenry in patriotic virtue had recently taken hold in France, and the ideal of the on-going cultural development of an excellent person had been inherited from the upper classes of Europe. In his Addresses to the German People, Fichte combined these and proposed a national educational effort aimed not at spreading skills and patriotism, but at maturing the philosophic and literary independence of each person. As Fichte saw it, Germany's greatness would be cultural, not political; and in contrast to the French armies of conscripted citizens, the German schools and ethos would inspire the world by educating each person in the community to full cultural autonomy.

5:¶7

Fichte's thought had many foibles, for instance, Froebel; more seriously, his theory of language and the relation of a national ethos to personal development were at once difficult and dangerous when misunderstood. But in the goal that Fichte set, he was centuries ahead of his time. In the short-run, he erred. Might overpowered right; empirical science, not speculative philosophy, moved events and won the popular imagination; and the military state, which Fichte abhorred, nevertheless found strange, terrible uses for his fine hopes. Yet all the while, beneath these events that technical praxis made possible, various visionaries slowly strengthened the more speculative, human sciences, and they looked forward to the day when these might be the basis of an alternative praxis. Thus, in the exchanges between two men whose importance we have yet to appreciate, Count Paul Yorck exclaimed to Wilhelm Dilthey: "The reproach is entered against us that we do not make good use of natural science! To be sure, presently the sole justification of all science is certainly that it makes practice possible. But mathematical praxis is not the only one. From our standpoint, the practical aim is pedogogical in its widest and deepest sense. Pedagogical praxis is the soul of all real philosophy and the truth of Plato and Aristotle."

5:¶8

It is time for this alternative to flourish. When we learn to make full use of pedogogical praxis, our educational institutions and agencies will assume an unprecedented place in human experience and become perhaps the basis of a cosmopolitan life and culture.

5:¶9

Yet in the present chaos, how sanguine it seems to speak of the spread of culture and to dream of the day when schools and universities will be the institutional framework of a world community! Many doubt and a few deny that intellect should even maintain its present place in the world. Initiative seems to lie with those content to question and negate. The prestige of mind appears to be deflating as puffed-up reputations are pierced by incompetent performances. On many campuses, quiet scholars find themselves the objects of vocal scorn. The will weighs reason down, and the urge to act possesses the humble thinker. The temper of the time shows itself as Goethe's dictum—"to act is easy, to think is hard"—appears frequently transposed in student essays—"to think is easy, to act is hard." Thus we instinctively denigrate fine intellection and rush, not to judgment, but to commitment, for we feel that the way to mastery lies in the triumph of the will.

5:¶10

As discontent dominates the campuses, one can see a glow of satisfaction spread through the hurried hordes, the sated consumers who find that happiness is to rely on common sense and to suspect subtlety. Having felt threatened by the critics' barbs, they find proof in the turmoil that when the chips are down the presumptuous professors cannot even run their own shop, let alone counsel the workaday world. And further, the sad fact simply is that the prosaic here have reason, as the French would say; the present situation is a serious portent for both the pretensions and the destiny of intellect. Force of mind seems unlikely to shape the future if one judges by present trends.

5:¶11

Real abuses exist. Academics are easily rebuked for fiddling on the Heights while Harlem burns; intellectuals expose themselves rushing to advertise opinions they have not yet formed; scientists progressively loose the power to direct the uses of their knowledge as the worldly-wise-man has realized that, verily, their knowledge is power. These and numerous other abuses cause righteous outrage in sensitive spirits; yet the house of intellect does not yield to instant reform. Hence, frustration has built up, and the tension may well tear the fabric of mind. In such circumstances, the cautious course would be to meditate on the gloom. But of this we can be sure: things will get worse unless we make them better; and to make things better we need to dwell not only on our problems, but on our possibilities as well. Rather than despair of improvement, let us balance Hegel's sad irony—"the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk"—with a more hopeful one—"the satyres of Dionysus dance mainly at the coming of the dawn."

5:¶12

In anticipating the dawn, we accomplish little by noting the dark; it is all around us. In the same way, abuses are irrelevant; what matters are the uses of culture, for a new day will rise only as a significant number find these positive possibilities and develop them. In truth, then, we have but one mission: to find what should be done and to do it well. This mission brings us back to pedagogical praxis; the rest is self-gratifying indulgence.

5:¶13

What we should do seems clear enough: the function of educational institutions is teaching and learning. Our mission is to devote ourselves to pedagogical praxis. This task involves more than disseminating accumulated knowledge and taking in ready-made skills. Real teaching and learning involves the inner man; one must put one's self into the matter: to teach is to take a public stand exemplifying convictions, judgments, and values; to learn is to internalize and make part of one's self those convictions, judgments, and values that one meets and that stand up in the face of critical evaluation. In this sense, teaching and learning cannot be isolated from each other, for to learn something is to recognize that it is worth trying to teach, and to teach something is to put what one has learned to public test. Consequently, professors and students are not divergent groups; as has been said elsewhere, they should stand against one another in a respectful, balanced tension. Both professors and students need simultaneously to teach and to learn; the capacity of the former to continue learning through the free pursuit of curiosity constitutes the growing edge of the cultural system, whereas the ability of the latter to teach by reinforcing among their peers certain lines of development and to discourage others is the subtle source of orientation that keeps the system pointed towards the light.

5:¶14

These remarks describing the educational mission are unlikely to be controversial. Each person has a rather clear, intuitive grasp of pedagogical praxis; after all, it is an integral part of our inner lives. The controversial point will be in taking this private, albeit general, phenomenon, and making an active, public mission of it. There is in the foregoing a claim that the effort to develop human character—our own and that of others—is a significant form of practical action, an important mode of doing something in the world.

5:¶15

Resistance to saying that what we should do is teach and learn stems mainly from the conviction that to do these things is to do something selfishly personal and not to do anything productive in the world. Beneath all the compromises and evasions there is among both professors and students a clear comprehension of their pedagogical mission; what is lacking is the will to perform it, and this failure of will is supported and rendered tolerable by the rationalization that what we ought to do is not a real form of doing in the contemporary world. As long as we let this rationalization seem persuasive, pedagogical praxis will not come into its own and the incipient educational revolution will die aborning as the industrial revolution would have died if medieval ideas about usury had not changed.

5:¶16

From every quarter, one hears that ours is a time of crisis and that we must devote all our energies to solving our palpable difficulties now or else they will destroy us. This reasoning puts such a premium on perfecting technical praxis that concern for pedogogical praxis seems to be an improper luxury. Little hope can at first be found for solving immediate issues with a set of indirect means for shaping the community through the aggregate of our individual efforts to form our own characters. Hence, our pedagogical mission seems frivolous, and we turn away from it to one of the many perils impinging on us. But the very diversity of these finalities should make us pause. Each different doomsdayer is driven to frenzy by a different problem, ranging from the conservationists' paradoxical outcries against the pollution of streams and the purification of swamps to the familiar standbyes of race, war, population, and nuclear armageddon. Without forgetting for a moment the seriousness and merit of these causes, let us be equally sure not to forget the temporal specter: ignorance is always ready to ravage the exhausted victors.

Robert Oliver
Teachers College Record (vol. 70, no. 5, February 1969)