Texts:Rom-B-05-Homeless

Homeless in the House of Intellect

Formative Justice and Education as an Academic Study

New York — Laboratory for Liberal Learning — 2005

Preface

¶1

In writing Homeless in the House of Intellect, I have three objectives.

• First, I aim to establish the intellectual context for a substantial work of scholarship on the concept of formative justice. The last third of this essay introduces that concept and the first two-thirds analyze the intellectual context for it.
• Second, through a critique of schools of education, I want to provoke serious discussion of two questions. What knowledge, skills, and understandings should professional educators hold in common and how can schools of education ensure that they acquire them? And should the dissertation, putatively an original contribution to knowledge but often far less, cease to culminate advanced professional preparation in education, replaced by a clinical internship, sustained and comprehensive, one like that concluding the preparation of medical doctors?
• Third, and most importantly, I strive to persuade university scholars and administrators to add education to the departments in the arts and sciences, as a field akin to political science, in order to secure a place for disinterested academic research and teaching about education at the graduate and undergraduate levels. American culture needs a renewed understanding of education as a deeply formative experience, one that will serve each person in a life-long aspiration to fulfillment. The educational profession, entangled in the status quo, cannot provide the necessary leadership. The university as a whole might project to the public a moving vision of formative education, a birthright of all, but to lead with effect it must strengthen its internal commitment to the study of education. This essay calls for that action.

¶2

These views have ripened slowly over 37 years as a member of the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University. I am deeply indebted to the College and to the University, and to numerous colleagues, both past and current, for intellectual stimulus and professional support across my career.

¶3

At Teachers College, I have had the opportunity to partici-pate closely in doctoral programs preparing both scholars for the academic study of education and practitioners for profes-sional work in schools. I have become convinced that a sharpening of the distinction between those purposes and the programs serving them would further the interests of students and the public they aim to serve. I fear that some colleagues may take affront at this view, and if they do, I apologize, for I intend no insult. I believe, however, that the blurring of aca-demic and professional purposes causes grave weaknesses in schools of education. Despite the immense talent, dedication, and effort of those working within Teachers College and other graduate schools of education, these weaknesses arise because the university supports the study of education poorly. We cannot improve the situation without speaking honestly about its destructive effects and calling vigorously for a decisive remedy.

¶4

I want to thank explicitly Rene Arcilla, John B. Black, Ste-ven Cohen, Lambros Comitas, James Fraser, Seth Halvorson, Floyd Hammack, Jennifer Hogan-Murphy, Andrew Light, Su-san Lowes, Maxine McClintock, Avi Mintz, Frank A. Moretti, James B. Murphy, Pat Nicholson, Thomas W. Pogge, Grace Goodyear Roosevelt, Mitchell Stevens, John Waterbury, and Jonathan Zimmerman for comments on presentations or drafts that have helped me sharpen points. They bear no responsibility, however, for my continuing lack of clarity or for the burden of the argument.

For Maxine, who brooked no discouragement.

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Putting a question

¶5

On the steps of Low Library in the warmth of a springtime sun, a friend surveyed the Columbia square and posed a question. Has the contemporary university fully developed its intellectual organization? A hundred years ago, Columbia was just moving here from midtown, with hardly anything yet built. Columbia was like others, a university in the making. Now it has filled out physically—and intellectually too. It offers several routes to the bachelors—Barnard across Broadway, Engineering back behind Low, General Studies there to the right, and the College proper over in Hamilton. It has the big professional schools, and some smaller, each with its special degree, and the graduate school in the arts and sciences grants the Ph.D. in most any specialty one can imagine, and all around, centers and institutes do research on matters of every sort.

¶6

Of course, relative to the generic university, the ideal-type that touches on all the possibilities, Columbia leaves out a few, like a school of agriculture. But who would go to an agschool on the Heights? Surely no single university has all the possibilities. That is not the point. The question is not—Which particular university is most complete? Rather—Is the model, the idea of the university, now intellectually complete? In principle, have the key academic disciplines and the professional schools, major and minor, developed fully with a rough working consensus among them about purpose and effort?

¶7

Agreed, some developments, despite the buzz, were not so pertinent. For instance, continuing education is growing, drawing in new participants, and organizational innovations may emerge from distance learning, but these changes have to do with the medium more than the message. New means to meet demands for learning fit within the established fields of study, tilting towards the practical end of the spectrum. The question has to do with the structure and scope of knowledge itself, not with techniques for its dissemination. Do the fields of study within the contemporary university organize its work in a way that is intellectually sound and complete?

¶8

Every school and every field still has much to accomplish. The question does not call for an inventory of all pending developments. Rather, is the university rightly organized to support these efforts? Is the research university rightly adapted to acquire, preserve, and disseminate the knowledge, skill, and understanding requisite in contemporary life? Taken together, universities are the novum organum made tangible, for they organizationally embody the advancement of learning that has taken place in the modern era. As they have developed to this point, do university structures rightly serve the intellectual functions active in twenty-first-century experience? Does the division of intellectual labor at work among the arts and sciences and the learned professions suit the major opportunities? If not, what reorganization of intellectual work might prove wise? This is the question.

¶9

In putting the question, let us set speculations about the peripheral emergence of new knowledge or skill to the side. A slow churn at the margins where research fields intersect will generate new subspecialties. For instance, nanotechnology is fast becoming a new applied science, not as a structural improvement correcting an evident deficiency in academic organization, but as an extension of well-established lines of inquiry within existing components of the university. Emerging subspecialties evidence a mature system at work, not a persisting immaturity of it. Rather than looking for novelties, let us restrict the question to issues with a long history in cultural experience. Is a core pursuit of the university still imperfectly institutionalized? Given the spectrum of disciplines in the arts and sciences, along with the range of human practice addressed through professional schools, is the study of something important still homeless in the house of intellect?

The professional and the academic

¶10

To start, consider the distinctive differentiation long distinguishing university organization. Surely the university has illustrated how "harmony consists of opposing tension," as Heraclitus long ago claimed. Almost always, cognate to each professional school, which prepares skilled practitioners in an important activity, one or more academic fields treat the domain as a subject for disinterested inquiry and teaching. In the professional schools, the interests of practitioners shape research and training, which are keyed to what those in the craft need to know. In the arts and sciences, scholarship and instruction are detached, drawn by curiosity, not driven by the imperatives of practice. All the same, the professional and the academic address the same realms of experience.

¶11

Whoever looks only at one or the other, either the professional or the academic, will find the concept of interested or disinterested knowledge difficult to grasp. Thus scholars often flounder in explaining what they mean by "knowledge for its own sake." The concept makes sense as one of two contrasting ideal-types—knowledge adapted to the interests of an organized profession counterbalanced by knowledge derived from the play of curiosity, the knowledge that springs from wonder, the knowledge motivated by no purpose outside itself. Professional schools and the academic arts and sciences do not deal with different human stuff; they overlap, dealing with a common substance in a distinctive way. The knowledge of most worth in the professional school is highly instrumental from the perspective of the skilled practitioner; that of most worth in the academic department is disinterested, value-free with respect to practice, which means neither uninterested nor irrelevant, and it takes the perspective of the inquisitive person, moved by simple curiosity, not that of the proficient professional.

¶12

Here is the key. The distinction between the professional and the academic provides a way to decide whether the university has reached its full development. The university structure will be complete if it provides both professional training and academic study for all major domains of experience and action. An opportunity to improve the organizational structure of the university exists where professional programs lack an academic correlate, or vice versa.

¶13

A harmony of opposing tension in the university between the professional and the academic is neither a recent accident nor the happenstance of inefficient management. From its earliest origin, the university housed both liberal education in the arts and sciences and specialist preparation in learned professions, the two sides often locked in creative conflict with one another. The opposing tendencies arose early on, nascent in the different forms of reasonableness that tradition attributed to the pre-Socratic sages. The lore about early thinkers celebrated both their gift for detached reflection with their paradoxes and obscure definitions and their shrewd acumen as they used their knowledge to corner markets for olive oil, to lay out well-ordered cities, and to promulgate effective laws. Soon, ancient centers of learning supported both Socratic and sophistic schools, the one dedicated to philosophic learning, the other to practical rhetoric.

¶14

Such early tensions, maturing into the academic arts and sciences and the major professional schools, became an essential organizational characteristic of the modern university. Because of it, the twenty-first-century university includes numerous overlapping units: a department of economics and a school of business; a department of sociology and a school of social work; a department of politics and both a school of public affairs and a law school; a department of biology and a school of medicine; departments of physics, of chemistry, and of other sciences of matter and energy and a school of engineering, a department of religion and a theological seminary; departments of literature, of music, and of art history and schools of the arts, architecture, and journalism.

¶15

Why does the university foster so much overlap in its intellectual organization between academic departments and professional schools? We can imagine a corporate apostle of productivity insisting that intellectual institutions use precious resources more efficiently by situating the preparation of professionals in academic departments or, better yet, by locating disinterested scholarship, if needed at all, in the appropriate professional school. We can hear the directives. Have prospective executives take graduate degrees in economics. Better, close the economics department and move the faculty to the b-school. But then, we also hear the complaints. With the one, the economics courses are too ivory tower, divorced completely from real-world, managerial imperatives. With the other, the b-school gives short shrift to high-level researchers, it won't tenure macroeconomists, and it dumbs down anything mathematical to what distracted executives would find easy and relevant. Who knows, relegated to the b-school, research economists might lobby to move en masse to the school of public policy where rational choice theories receive a bit more respect. Corporate restructuring, doing away with inefficient redundancies between academic departments and professional schools, would prove ineffective, for the overlap arises from real differences in the uses of knowledge generated and disseminated by each.

The anomaly in education

¶16

Consider whether the opposing tension in the university between academic disciplines and professional schools characteristic for economic, political, social, religious, biologic, artistic, and material experience holds with the study of educational experience. Does the professional school of education stand without a clear departmental complement in the arts and sciences? The ostensible, organized study of education is pervasively professional. To be sure, sometimes it is situated in the faculty of the arts and sciences, but it nevertheless specializes in preparing practitioners. At the undergraduate level, students can often major in education, but in doing so, they are usually taking a program of professional preparation leading towards initial teaching credentials. Thus they study education in an interested, not a disinterested, manner, seeking status as certified practitioners.

¶17

Occasional exceptions appear to exist—perhaps. For instance, Stanford's Undergraduate Honors Program in the School of Education, which "is not a preparation for teaching," offers instead an opportunity to do research on educational topics that honors students could not do within a regular discipline. This program confirms the rule, however, for it describes itself as "unique in the nation," and even at that, most "educational research" is not uninvolved, instead comprising a set of inquiries highly responsive to the imperatives of the profession. Perhaps more significantly, Brown University has broadened its undergraduate education offerings to include a concentration "designed for students seeking a broad liberal arts background in the field of education." But it is a small department supporting only an M.A.T. at the graduate level.

¶18

At the graduate level, the study of education is almost entirely contained within the schools of education, where research and instruction primarily concerns the needs of schools and those who run them and those who teach and learn within them. Work there is professional, not academic and overall sets the tone for the study of education throughout the university. One exception arises because graduate schools of the arts and sciences are paying much more attention to the quality of teaching in their various fields at both the graduate and undergraduate level. This is a major positive development in higher education over the past decade or so backed by major associations in higher education. It introduces systematic work on instructional practice into the arts and sciences, significantly preparing the way for the disinterested study of education there. The academic study of education might build on these developments, but it would differ in one significant way from them, for it would look outward to education in the world generally, not inward to the process of teaching and learning on the local campus. In the end, needed attention to the preparation of graduate students as prospective college and university instructors is not the same as a field of inquiry devoted to the academic study of education in the way political science approaches politics or sociology social life and conditions.

¶19

So, my friend observed, if a differentiation between professional preparation in education and the academic study of it does not hold, introducing it may be an opportunity for further developing the intellectual organization of the university. But is the tension between the academic and the professional actually absent in way the university organizes work on education? Do not departments of psychology in the arts and sciences stand to schools of education as departments of biology and related life sciences stand to medical schools? In part, they do, but imperfectly so, for psychology as an academic correlate to the professional study of education has two limitations. First, a weak differentiation of the academic from the professional in the study of education deeply affected the way the university institutionalized the study of psychology itself. The upshot: psychology has been co-opted by the professional school of education. Universities appoint a high proportion of academic specialists in psychology as faculty members in the professional school of education, not in the arts and sciences. Although psychology may partially serve as an academic correlate to the professional school of education, in doing so, it shows how weakly the university differentiates the academic and the professional in education. By co-opting major parts of psychology, the professional school of education has enveloped parts of the academic field, making the interests of the profession primary in major sectors of the academic subject.

¶20

A second, still more important limitation on psychology as the academic correlate to the professional study of education arises because psychology, in its various forms, is mute about much that is at stake. Education involves more than the psychological, for through it the cultural experience of humanity is at work. Education comprises cultural processes, immeasurable and intricate, vital to all, spawning complex institutions, guzzling material resources, with experiential consequences for persons and for publics. The disinterested, academic study of educational experience as it might be conducted within the arts and sciences contains much that lies outside the purview of psychological inquiry. In short, psychology speaks to part of the how and to part of the when in education. Does an academic correlate address well the rest of the how and the when, and also, the what, the who, the where, and the why of education?

¶21

In the nineteenth century, philosophy served as the academic correlate to the professional study of education, at that time spanning both the psychological and cultural sides of it. Philosophy had this role, not only in Germany, but also in the United States, for German influence in American philosophy, from Transcendentalism through Dewey, was significant. By World War I, psychology had largely separated from philosophy and, like their peers in England, American philosophers largely abandoned detached reflection on the cultural aspects of education. As a freestanding subfield, the philosophy of education, Dewey notwithstanding, had migrated to the schools of education, which co-opted it as the "philosophical and historical foundations of education" to serve an explicit role in the professional preparation of teachers and other educational specialists. Through most of the twentieth century in the arts and sciences, philosophers have rarely written about education overtly.

¶22

Recognizing the limitations of psychology and philosophy as academic complements to the professional study of education implies a definition of education, which deserves to be explicit. Education occurs through complex interactions under concrete circumstances as persons or groups perceive, activate, develop, and combine natural capabilities and nurtured possibilities, thereby acquiring and realizing their determinate attributes. This definition avoids the verb, to be, refraining from saying what education is, for education does not exist passively like a stone; it takes place actively, as a result of which persons or groups achieve significant accomplishments. Educative agents acquire their characteristics through an interactive process that takes place in an actual environment replete with constraining and enabling conditions. Education viewed from past towards future accounts for stabilities of personal character and the weight of social reproduction; viewed from future to past it projects the aspirations and hopes, which persons and peoples work to achieve.

¶23

Looking at the interactions through which it takes place, education comprises reciprocal determinations between an autonomous agent, possessing natural and cultural potentials, and a range of circumstances, all co-existing within an extended time and place that both limits and enables the actualization of potential. Through education, homo sapiens becomes the Lamarckian species capable of developing and passing on acquired characteristics. Disinterested scholarship on education would study, in a variety of ways under diverse conditions, how educational interactions bring natural potentials and nurtured achievements to fulfillment and affect the quality of personal and public life.

¶24

So defined, inquiry into education considers many matters, some pertinent to professional work and some not, but all susceptible to detached scrutiny. Universities institutionalize support for the disinterested study of education as a cultural endeavor poorly, however, with no organizational center in the arts and sciences and an uncertain rationale within schools of education. To be sure, from time to time, at one or another university, in this or that academic department, a scholar thinks deeply about one or another cultural component of education, but nowhere do such thinkers draw together into an effective department of education in the arts and sciences where they can plumb, as a community of peers, the human experience of education in an objective manner. With respect to historical, cultural experience, the university has situated dispassionate scholarship on education in its professional school, and there academic inquiry has lacked the critical mass and resources to remain true to its intellectual mission in the face of steady pressure to prove its relevance to the imperatives of preparing practitioners. In short, the disinterested study of education in American universities has an anomalous organization. Does this anomaly matter? Does it indicate a potential for further development in the organizational structure of the university?

¶25

By preparing both academic scholars and professional practitioners, perhaps the schools of education demonstrate how corporate rationalization can improve results and lower costs. Certainly, the peculiar situation in the study of education has had discernible effects on educational scholarship and the advanced preparation of professionals. Whether the effects improve results or lower costs is a question.

¶26

In most fields, the Ph.D. is the highest academic degree, with advanced professional degrees given a distinctive identification—M.D., M.B.A., J.D., etc. In the field of education, universities have confused the situation, however. Early in the twentieth century, the first major graduate school of education, Teachers College, used the Columbia University Ph.D. as both the highest degree for academic work in education and psychology and for the most advanced level of professional preparation. By the 1930s, Teachers College students were earning an unseemly proportion of Columbia's Ph.D. degrees. To correct that situation, Teachers College and Columbia adopted the Ed.D., ostensibly a distinctive degree for advanced professional preparation in education, restricting use of the Ph.D. in education to strictly academic programs. By this time, however, many other universities had adopted the early usage at Teachers College for their own schools of education, granting the Ph.D. indiscriminately to signify both advanced academic and professional preparation. And at Teachers College, a clear distinction between the academic Ph.D. and the professional Ed.D. proved hard to uphold, for many students wanted a Ph.D. on completion of their professional preparation and many faculty members wanted to give Ed.D. programs a more academic cast, aiming to gain status as research scholars thereby.

¶27

Consequently, whether a doctorate in education, be it Ph.D. or Ed.D., is an academic or a professional degree has long been ambiguous. A symptom of this ambiguity: official, nation-wide statistics have counted both degrees in determining the number of academic doctorates awarded each year by the nation's universities. As indicators of academic attainments, peculiarities resulted. In 2000–01, American universities awarded just under 45,000 doctorates, of which 15%, a bit over 6,700 were in education. The number of doctorates earned in education was 1.7 times greater than all those in the physical sciences, 1.5 times greater than those in the biological and life sciences, and 1.7 times those in all the social sciences and history. For every doctorate in economics, 7.9 were awarded in education, for history, 7.2, for politics 9.8, and for sociology 12.3. Furthermore, these proportions have been roughly constant for the past fifty years or more.

¶28

Consider some implications of these gross numbers. Each doctorate indicates completion of a dissertation, an original contribution to knowledge, and each contribution to knowledge should have at its generative source a significant question, one worthy of serious inquiry. Does educational experience, year after year, generate nearly ten times the number of significant questions, each meriting an original, consequential study, than political experience generates? As a field of disinterested inquiry, education is neither more nor less protean than politics; rather, it generates so many more doctorates because both prospective academic researchers and professional practitioners are seeking the degree, whereas in most other fields, only the prospective academics seek the doctorate. Is this situation efficient or effective?

Models of advanced study

¶29

By separating the academic and the professional, the university has developed a model for supporting advanced academic education that differs significantly from the one sustaining professional preparation. Each model includes distinctive ways to establish and enforce standards of excellence and expectation.

¶30

On the professional side, different types of schools implement the professional model in distinctive ways. Nevertheless, they share a general pattern. In most fields, the professional school primarily provides intensive, formal instruction in the base of knowledge and stock of skills requisite in the profession, for which students pay a high tuition and struggle to master fully in a limited period of all-out study. In this model, through an additional period of interning or on-the-job learning, students recoup somewhat their cost of tuition in knowledge, skill, and understanding, while they master their prescribed learning in actual practice. On the successful completion of their paid, clinical practice, they are inducted, more or less formally, into full professional status. Throughout the process, the major bodies of professional self-governance directly set and legitimate standards of expectation, or indirectly influence them significantly, ensuring that the interests of the profession control the program of preparation. Standards are relatively clear-cut and high; and both professional schools and professional groups cooperate to enforce them with rigor.

¶31

On the academic side, with the doctorate in the arts and sciences, the model of advanced education de-emphasizes formal instruction in the knowledge of the field and apprentices the student to an extended process of appropriating the state of the field and generating new knowledge, involving proposals, research, and publication, with standards throughout set and enforced by the dynamics of peer review. The more elite the university, the more it, not the student, bears the student's costs and subsistence. With reliance on peer review, expectations are often unclear and the enforcement of standards can sometimes appear dysfunctional, but the process has deep roots in the idea of academic freedom and it advances the research mission of the university well. It stokes the advancement of learning. High-level academic apprenticeship teaches by doing and inducts the prospective academic into the advancement of learning, developing an impassive resistance to the idols against which Bacon warned. By keeping the professional model and the academic model largely distinct, the modern university has simultaneously cultivated both advanced professional preparation and disinterested scholarship in the arts and sciences.

¶32

In education, the professional school primarily uses the academic model in preparing advanced practitioners in educational administration, curriculum and teaching, and other specialties, areas where one might reasonably expect to find the professional model in use. In individual cases, in which a strong student meets up with an effective advisor within a program where support is sufficient, results exemplify the best of academic standards. But systemically, the academic model works poorly in professional situations where the knowledge of most worth is clinical, rooted deeply in the particularities of practice in this or that place under these or those conditions. Systemic reliance on the academic model conflates the trappings of academic scholarship with substantial professional learning. As a result, schools of education too often nurture well neither excellence in scholarship nor prepossessing competence among licensed practitioners.

¶33

Although the academic model for advanced work predominates in schools of education, it does not result in strong disinterested scholarship there. Strong norms of original scholarship should prevail, but within the cluttered doctoral instruction in schools of education, the practices of peer-review become unusually muddled. Over-academicized professionalism has spawned a myriad of methodologies as professors in schools of education have sought ways to enable prospective professionals to produce passable dissertations, even though their talents, skills, and interests often have little to do with serious scholarship. In the professional schools of education, academic norms have controlled recruitment, promotion, and tenure for decades in areas that one might expect to be grounded in clinical expertise and the scholarly process has churned on eclectically within a diverse world of practice. A great incoherence has resulted with too much written about too little, virtually none of it conclusive. With too much written, there has been thereby too much to teach in an environment riven by overspecialization. Hence, schools of education communicate little consensus about what constitutes the shared knowledge and set of skills requisite across the educational profession. Without a consensus on essentials, programs and courses proliferate in schools of education and the field has a jumble of professional standards poorly enforced. External certification procedures are equally fragmented and multiple accrediting agencies dart incessantly, here and there, through the schools of education.

¶34

Having spent my career on the faculty of a major graduate school of education, I have little desire to perpetuate the long-standing art of bashing schools of education. The university, not the school of education, is at fault. The university has created serious problems by mingling the academic with the professional in its work on education. This weakens schools of education, where the forms of advanced scholarship receive undue emphasis in the processes of professional preparation, and it leaves a gap in the arts and sciences, which accord no place to the disinterested study of education.

¶35

With a weak differentiation between academic and professional work, the university inadequately institutionalizes the study of education. Noble exceptions may exist within an imperfect system but university authorities should not point to these and insist that they can and should become the norm without any change in the flawed system. Over time, heroic effort cannot substitute for good organization. As the university squeezes everything into the professional school, irrelevant norms exert excessive influence in developing practical expertise. Academic procedures dominate advanced professional preparation; most students engaged in the time-consuming, resource-intensive process of writing dissertations have no real reason to do so. Would-be practitioners spend their time, effort, and money seeking to satisfy inappropriate standards of research scholarship, which gives them little opportunity for paid, on-the-job learning through interning and clinical practice. This situation raises the costs that students must bear while straining the resources for the support of students engaged in genuine academic inquiry through the schools of education.

¶36

Like most other professional schools, schools of education are tuition-dependent. Schools of education need lots of students paying for lots of courses, and they have relatively few resources to support detached scholarship. In the current situation, they must spread those scant resources thinly across an inflated number of doctoral candidates, each of whom must try to do good research on a shoe-string. With too many poorly supported doctoral students struggling to make "an original contribution to knowledge," it proves hard to insist on exacting standards. Pseudo-scholarship comes to pervade the preparation of professionals in education even though the world of practice continually calls for leaders endowed with less academic paraphernalia and with a fuller repertoire of effective skills. Excessive academic accouterments distort professional preparation, while a demand for direct relevance to the needs of professional educators chronically challenges academic inquiry.

¶37

With all its effort concentrated in the schools of education, the university serves the field of education less effectively than it does in areas where a potent academic organization in the arts and sciences stands in creative tension with a strong separate school dedicated to the task of professional preparation. The anomaly in the study of education matters enough to merit change.

Building a case for change

¶38

As an obvious solution, the university could do what it did in other fields: institute academic departments of education in their undergraduate and graduate schools of the arts and sciences to complement the professional school of education. In the arts and sciences, students and scholars would address education in an impartial, comprehensive way with no presuppositions about professional practice. Disinterested, academic scholarship about education would improve. Pressure to use an academic model in professional preparation would diminish. Schools of education might restructure to be more like medical schools, developing a program of professional education combining rigorous formal instruction with clinical practice and overlaying that with an ancillary program of externally funded educational research responding to clearly defined needs for improved professional knowledge. This fix is easy to state, but hard to effect.

¶39

Critics have published a steady din calling for an improved study of education. Some hostile, some sympathetic, they all assess professional education and appraise research in the field. Overwhelmingly, the needs of professionals dominate the analyses. What are and are not professionals doing? How are they recruited and trained? And how do they generate the knowledge of potential use in practice serving students and society? The critiques are high-minded; whether harsh or supportive, they seek ways by which the educational system and those who labor through it can better serve society and its progeny. All this is important, but it is not what is here in question. It does not tackle the basic reform that the university must make in the way it organizes the study of education. The basic reform does not have to do with success or failure within the professional school, but with the absence of the study of education in the arts and sciences. That absence weakens disinterested inquiry and distorts professional preparation.

¶40

By itself, no amount of reform in the professional schools will bring about a sound demarcation between the academic and the professional in the university study of education. The trouble with ed schools does not cause the weak differentiation; the trouble is its symptoms. The cause is that the academic arts and sciences never made a formal place for the objective study of education within their precincts. And the current difficulty will not be easy to correct, for universities are unlikely to create academic departments of education simply because their schools of education are burdened with a confusion of functions. To bring such a step about, scholars and university leaders need to perceive how they can strengthen the arts and sciences themselves, and the university as a whole, by making a place for detached, academic work on education independent of the professional school. They naturally ask, Why should we change the given situation?

¶41

A good answer is not easy. Historically, the arts and sciences have denigrated educational scholarship and resisted including a department of education in their midst. The arts and sciences are now unlikely to welcome the disinterested study of education spontaneously, for they have a well-ingrained habit of rejection and the field comes freighted with the peculiar pathologies of a stunted history. The university will adopt the strategy of differentiating the academic and the professional for its work in education, if the advantages are clear within the context of the arts and sciences themselves. We shall see that the arts and sciences can reap many advantages as we pursue answers to two questions. First, does the absence of the characteristic differentiation in the study of education have adverse consequences within faculties of the arts and sciences that might motivate a change? And second, more positively, would academic scholars in the arts and sciences reap benefits were they to add a department of education within their schools?

¶42

Effective answers, that is answers that do change the situation, however, must cross a threshold of resistance. It is not hard to win tepid assent, followed sotto voce, "Is it worth the trouble?" Academics of influence need to reflect and come to strong assent, after which they know what to do and act to do it. Let us not, therefore, minimize the issue. The university should adopt differentiation not simply to shift a few scholars and their programs from one school to another in order to make arrangements in education more consistent with those in other fields. That is a mere argument of symmetry, which mathematicians may take as grounds for strong assent, but not most academicians and certainly not university administrators. The motive needs to be stronger: making a proper place for the study of education in the arts and sciences will set the conditions for a further, important advancement of learning. Organizational change is worth the trouble when it leads to intellectual results of vital consequence. Might the disinterested study of education do so? Can adding the study of education to the arts and sciences appreciably advance the work of impartial scholarship, its power and substance, not merely in a new specialized niche, but across the full scope of academic work as a whole?

¶43

Consider a two-fold response. It will explain why the arts and sciences could become more productive by making a place for disinterested work on education. One part, the positive, will show that through the academic study of education important advances in the work of the arts and sciences are feasible. The other part, the negative, will show that the current organization for the study of education holds back good academic work, on both education and other important matters. Let us take the negative up first: conditions in the arts and sciences and the plight of academic scholars in schools of education both currently inhibit the academic enterprise. Let us then turn to the positive, more important part: envisioning what the academic study of education might become on achieving fuller development. Together, the reasoning will make evident, not only that the disinterested study of education would develop more fully as part of the arts and sciences, but other fields, and their combination as a whole, would benefit from this advance and the results would have significant value in the conduct of life, both individual and collective.

What the university has lost

¶44

We start with the negative, weaknesses in the arts and sciences and the disinterested study of education induced by the current situation. Insofar as it exists in the arts and sciences, the academic study of education is dispersed as a subsidiary interest in many different departments. Insofar as it exists in the schools of education, disinterested inquiry is subject to strong professional imperatives. Both conditions narrow the scope and diminish the quality of the resulting scholarship and detract from the arts and sciences as a whole.

¶45

In the arts and sciences, scholars in a variety of departments publish work of high quality that bears significantly on educational experience. For instance, within economics, Amartya Sen's work concentrates on how subtle incentives under conditions of autonomy can significantly change the informational base from which people make choices, and with that, whole patterns of human capital formation change, deeply altering, for better and for worse, patterns of economic development. Or within political thought, in recent years theorists have contemplated declining rates of citizen participation in democratic polities and resuscitated interest in civic republicanism as a potential ethos more effective at forming engaged citizens. Likewise, significant contemporary philosophers, among them, J. Peter Euben, Alexander Nehamas, and Charles Taylor, have concentrated on the formation of the self as a culturally endowed source of action in an historical world. Such studies, and much, much more, illuminate the embedded role of educational experience in core activities interpreted through the arts and sciences.

¶46

Not infrequently, a problem of context weakens work pertinent to education dispersed in the arts and sciences. Good interpretation arises from the tension between text and context. Often scholars in the arts and sciences seem to write about education by stealth, perhaps not wanting to appear too interested in a suspect subject. A risk for stealthy scholarship on education is not simply, like all scholarship, that someone will take it out of context; rather critics can too easily put it in the wrong context and as a result evaluate it poorly. If education had a more visible, legitimate place in the arts and sciences, much work, now shunted into a context fruitless for interpretation, might be taken up in a more enlightening way.

¶47

Take the philosopher, Stanley Cavell, as a case in point. Education is a central theme throughout his work, finally made explicit in his recent book, Cities of Words, which his subtitle describes as "pedagogical letters." With this book, as with most of his writing, it is sometimes hard to say exactly what Cavell is writing about, in part because he always writes "as educator," not stating conclusions and giving, ex post facto, his neatly edited reasons for them, but engendering ideas, exemplifying the power of conversation to induce them, by setting before his readers his inner conversations, his internal dialogues, parenthetical jump within parenthetical jump, so that they will see for themselves how the exchange of words and the association of images will enrich their thought. Cavell has written extensively about the importance of an Emersonian perfectionism for current philosophy and he objects when critics question his ideas about Emerson, and with them about Nietzsche, as a form of anti-democratic elitism. The critics, pre-eminent among them, John Rawls, interpreted perfectionism as a political philosophy, the wrong context. Cavell's ideas, along with most perfectionist thought, should be interpreted as educational philosophy, with perfectionist prescriptions having less to do with the presumed prerogatives of elites and more to do with the self-educative opportunities facing each and every individual and the struggle to fulfill them.

¶48

Problems of context go beyond the proper interpretation of certain ideas and works about them. Without a formal place in the arts and sciences for the disinterested study of education, it is sometimes difficult to find the proper context for whole careers that are life-long efforts in education in a broad and fundamental sense—that of Jacques Barzun, for example. Through a full, productive life, he has won note in many ways, as historian, stylist, critic, academic leader, and educator. In each domain, however, he shares the spotlight with others, also of substantial note. To recognize the full force and stature of his accomplishments, the central commitment informing them all needs to be seen as that of the educator deploying scholarship and criticism, persuasion and action, exhortation and advice to engender awareness, rigor, precision, discrimination, and thought. In the twentieth century, few can match his pre-eminence as a many-sided educator, but in the professional schools he is unlikely to be remembered as anything but a bête noir and in the arts and sciences there is not an arena of study within which to appreciate his central accomplishment. In this way, the arts and sciences lack the context for doing full justice to some of their greatest exemplars.

¶49

In addition to problems of context, educational inquiry within the arts and sciences suffers from dispersal and the isolation of parts. Within diverse fields, scholars thinking about education often have to struggle for the recognition for their ideas, which may appear peripheral to their colleagues. Thus preoccupied, they do not draw potential connections with related work in other fields. Without a standing discourse about the disinterested study of education, the connections between diverse contributions to it are more likely to go unnoticed. To be sure, to evidence the absence of something is difficult, but we can note opportunities for exchange that have failed to develop. For instance, there seems to be a paucity of exchange between students of human capital formation and students of citizenship education even though the educational dynamics studied by both may be closely related. Likewise, literary critics writing about the Bildungsroman seem to interact little with philosophers concerned with the cultural formation of the active self.

¶50

Conceptually, we can see what happens. Educational work within the arts and sciences is largely encapsulated within each originating discipline, there being no group to draw different inquiries together, concentrating a sustaining attention on what is common among them. Scholars such as Charles Taylor in The Sources of the Self, Alexander Nehamas in The Art of Living, and J. Peter Euben in Corrupting Youth separately work from a distinctive background and interest, with its unique integrity, and that is as it should be. In addition to the integral value each achieves, however, their separate works potentially inform a common discourse about education, and it is the absence of a systematic centering of that discourse in the arts and sciences that we must lament. To begin, a department of education need not be large and it could start usefully by drawing a few initial faculty members from schools of education and a few from existing departments of the arts and sciences. But by starting to work, beginning to prepare advanced students in the disinterested study of education, it would strengthen currently disaggregated contributions from within the arts and sciences by providing them with a coherent context and by educing productive connections among them.

¶51

More is at stake. To put ideas and careers in their proper context is important. To draw fruitful connections between separate strands of work is too. Beyond all that, detached inquiry about education has importance for the fundamental mission of the arts and sciences themselves. Intellect leavens experience in three ways—with scholarship, research, and criticism. In lived experience, scholarship, research, and criticism overlap and in the person they combine to make the complete academic, yet conceptually they have significant differences, which become clearer if we think about them as ideal-types. Scholarship begins from the cumulative state of a field, the broader the better, and integrates findings, new and old, addressing a fundamental concern by crafting a coherent understanding of the whole. Research starts with a well-defined, specific question, to which the researcher seeks a clear and definite answer using peer-sanctioned methods and techniques. Criticism addresses a spectrum of aims and accomplishments and informs selection among them, strengthening assent, deepening appreciation, provoking doubt, channeling attention and energy.

¶52

In practice, research is taking on a role, central yet problematic. Research is an important means in the conduct of scholarship and criticism, for scholars and critics alike must answer numerous particular questions in the exercise of their craft. In addition, research is also an important purpose, one that is ever more central in academe: not a means, but an end, the dominant purpose defining elite effort—the essential character of the research university itself. Leading universities have become research universities because they depend financially on funded research and their faculty members rely on the publication of peer-reviewed research for promotion and tenure. Such activity is a great source of intellectual energy in the arts and sciences. As researchers bring their specific results together as the basis for theoretical abstraction, they energize scholarship, and as they uncover unexpected specifics they empower criticism. In addition, research powers much professional work, as distinct from the academic, for good research tends to be use-driven, conducive to interested, not disinterested, results, and it accentuates findings with instrumental value directly applicable to a specific form of activity. In contrast, scholarship and criticism, even when energized by significant research programs, often have less direct instrumental value. Instead, they leaven experience substantially through their capacity to have lasting educative effects as a student uses them to define her values, standards, and skills. The pay off is neither direct nor immediate, and consequently the arts and sciences need recurrently to explain the educative value of reflective scholarship and critical discourse with care, which disinterested scholarship on education can help to do.

¶53

With respect to the educative power of the arts and sciences, the ascendance of research in academic culture presents important, but subtle difficulties. The prestige of research conduces to instructional practices that differ in important ways from those that would pertain with scholarship, research, and criticism in a proper balance. Pedagogically, the distinction between the professional and the academic relates closely to a distinction between the applicable lessons and the formative education. In her studies, a student seeks both applicable knowledge and formative experience, one problem being that the former is relatively easy to identify and assess while the latter can be obscure and hard to measure. Formative education is all that which a student builds up over time by way of characteristic interests, proclivities, hopes, skills, considered purposes, attachments, and a unique, dynamic mix of knowledge, lore, information, and experience.

¶54

A subtle problem is now building because it arises, not directly, but as a side effect. All three—scholarship, research, and criticism—offer students significant formative experience. Whenever a student is learning by doing, the process is deeply formative, and as a student learns to be a researcher, as all students should, she does so by doing research, a deeply formative engagement. In this sense, the formative induction into the activities of scholarship, research, and criticism are all of one piece. The difference arises with the way the results of research enter into education in comparison to those of scholarship and criticism.

¶55

Whatever the field, the accomplished contributor deploys all three—scholarship, research, and criticism—in a well-unified effort. Maintaining the balance becomes more difficult, however. Within the arts and sciences, the prestige of research as an end product grows and that of scholarship and criticism shrinks, for research produces the coin of tangible worth, applicable answers to evident questions. Education as accumulating applicable knowledge gains prestige at the expense of education as formative experience. This makes the formative tasks of scholarship and criticism much harder and detracts from the education of researchers as well. Doctoral students perceive the instrumental value of research work and readily plunge into it, accepting unreflectively the constraints of one or another formal methodology that they find at hand, eager to produce some results. In this process, moreover, they are often impatient with the scholarly effort required to base that research on a well-developed theoretical grounding and to extract its full, critical implications for theory and practice. In this way, research itself as a formative educational experience suffers from the prestige of its results. With such influences steadily shaping educational practice at every level, the measurement of recollected information, research findings at one or another remove, and some superficial skills, increasingly mark educational attainment.

¶56

An education in the results of research alone does not suffice; the disinterested mission of the arts and sciences thrives through formative engagement in scholarship, research, and criticism, the power of which is more enlightening than instrumental. How does this formative enlightening take place? By sustained engagement in scholarship, a student develops a large conceptual framework with which she can judge the importance and plausibility of diverse ideas and assertions. By actively doing research, a student forms habits of testing how well different claims are grounded and perceives the strengths and weaknesses in assertions of validity. By producing reasoned criticism, a student acquires a considered structure of priorities to draw upon in the endless process of making choices in response to all the claims upon her attention and commitment. The arts and sciences populate a thoughtful public as a steady stream of university students form their intellectual standards by engaging in the work of scholarship, research, and criticism for substantial periods. And the arts and sciences nourish that thoughtful public through a continuing flow of publication, renewing and extending the scholarship, research, and criticism active in the different realms of public discussion.

¶57

Traditionally, the formative role of scholarship, research, and criticism seemed self-evident or relatively easy to uphold. As professionalism has spread into the arts and sciences, the rationale for more and more work appears to be instrumental, if not to high public purpose, at least to the interests of academics themselves. Under such circumstances, the mission of the arts and sciences, exercised through the formative uses of scholarship, research, and criticism, becomes less self-evident. More and more, academics have difficulty showing employment conscious students, their parents, and the public how study in the arts and sciences should differ from gaining marketable skills through professional preparation. And ironically, the university reinforces this instrumental bias by treating the subject of education itself as strictly an instrumental subject. Currently, the university proclaims through its actions with respect to the study of education that only professional preparation is of value. As the arts and sciences face an insistently market-conscious clientele, they give short shrift to the disinterested study of education. Yet it should be serving as a valuable resource in developing a more compelling rationale for a formative education throughout the arts and sciences. Thus, it may prove deeply imprudent to ignore the study of education in the arts and sciences at a time when the claim that scholarship and criticism have self-evident value as formative educators carries ever less weight.

¶58

Experience in schools of education shows that belief in self-evident values poorly supports impartial scholarship and doubt-provoking criticism. Academic work on pedagogical themes scattered through the arts and sciences has little resonance in schools of education. As we have seen, conditions in those schools pressure academic scholars to make their work instrumental in the professional preparation of teachers and other practitioners. Mid-twentieth-century efforts to resist this pressure had hopeful beginnings but proved unsustainable. In the late 1950s, critics attacked schools of education as hotbeds of anti-intellectualism. The attack stung scholars in schools of education and they responded by trying to connect more closely to key departments in the arts and sciences, inspired by Bernard Bailyn's analysis, Education in the Forming of American Society. Bailyn showed how historians of education had failed to ask productive questions because they were preoccupied with the interests of the profession, working to build the morale of prospective teachers. They had neglected to pursue disinterested topics of research and thereby missed the opportunity to clarify the role of education in the forming of American society.

¶59

Academics in schools of education de-emphasized the needs of the profession and took their cues about what to study and how to study it from cognate disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. They became professors of a discipline "and education"—anthropology and education, or history and education, or sociology and education, and so on. In this role, they taught with a rigor characteristic of the arts and sciences. They prized recognition by peers there and paid less attention to the relevance of their courses in the preparation of practitioners. Good doctoral programs spread and disinterested scholarship about education strengthened. The effects of the movement persist to the present, but ever more faintly.

¶60

Fortuitously, the cultivation of the disciplines and education had initially taken hold in a period of academic expansion. While resources were flush, the effort succeeded. It did not, however, come to grips with the fiscal organization of professional schools, which differ significantly from schools of the arts and sciences, a reality that became inescapable as contraction beset universities in the 1970s. Schools of education are tuition-dependent, that is, dependent on tuition paid by students who do not seek knowledge for its own sake, but for its professional relevance. Despite a concerted effort by those appointed to a discipline and education, tuition-dependency progressively eviscerated the academic study of education in the professional school. The disciplinary study of education has often persisted nominally, but in a tuition-dependent professional school it cannot be genuinely robust and detached. The cumulative degradation has been marked.

The educational and the political

¶61

To gauge how marked, compare scholarship on the heritage of political thought, securely situated in the arts and sciences, with research on the legacy of educational ideas, conducted almost exclusively by specialists in schools of education. Students of political thought and of educational thought deal with essentially the same resources and often themes of politics and education intertwine in the very same historical texts. Consequently, one might expect scholarship in the two fields to be similar in scope, intensity, and quality of results. In actuality, scholarship on political themes in the historical record differs astonishingly from that on educational themes, with work on political thought dynamic and deep and that on educational thought static and thin.

¶62

Let us survey some evidence. In English, educational thought lacks a distinguished series like the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. As the study of education in Germany has increasingly come under the influence of American professional practices, the excellent collection, Schöninghs Sammlung Pädagogischer Schriften, has been significantly cut back. And the contrast reaches further than the publication of sources. A startling disjunction in the range and depth of studies separates the two bodies of scholarship. Political theorists substantively engage their past; educational theorists do not. For instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a seminal thinker generating important concepts about both politics and education and one would expect theorists in both areas to produce studies about his ideas. In accordance with that expectation, students of political theory have published a steady stream of thoughtful studies about Rousseau's work, while scholars in schools of education have produced virtually nothing since the early twentieth century. Such a disparity holds, not only for Rousseau, but for nearly all the historical record.

¶63

Important work in political philosophy sustains creative dialogue with the historical sources, which John Rawls exemplifies in A Theory of Justice. Rawls constructed his theory starting with concerns initially defined by Aristotle; he drew heavily on Kant; and he worked out his ideas by improving step by step on utilitarian theory. The basic commitment to democratic participation running through Benjamin R. Barber's work derives in significant part from a life-long dialogue with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Likewise, C. B. Macpherson shaped his basic views through reflection on contract theory from Hobbes to Locke and the influence of Aristotle in the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre is fundamental. Isaiah Berlin pioneered writing the history of political thought as a way to contribute substantively to present-day political thinking, and J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner have extended those beginnings into a major way of developing the field.

¶64

In contrast, insofar as philosophers of education work in dialogue with past thinkers, they generally look back little further than John Dewey and write obsessive commentaries on his educational ideas. In political thought, the depth and variety of scholarship in turn leads to a far more vibrant set of instructional resources. A steady flow of quality textbooks and anthologies, up to date with the academic scholarship, equips the field to serve as an important component in general education. In education, fewer texts and anthologies, too often backed by static, older scholarship, cycle through successive editions to serve staple courses that have been required, largely unchanged, since teacher education programs took form early in the twentieth century. In short, the study of educational thought is a declining service component in professional education, while the study of political thought is a dynamic research and teaching field in the arts and sciences.

¶65

As human experience, educational experience is on a par with political experience: both are pervasive, complex, and imperative. Nothing intrinsic to the subject explains why scholarship about educational theory should so lag the study of political theory. In the nineteenth century, German academics produced extensive, deep work on education and Bildung, as did American intellectuals from the Transcendentalists through Dewey. In potential, the field of education can match that of politics, but the results do not. The differences stem primarily from disparities in supporting institutional arrangements and constraining purposes. There is no lack of support, but a poor organization of it.

¶66

In total, the university recruits and trains many more educational researchers than political researchers. Those who study education include people fully as capable as those who study politics. Nevertheless, scholarship in education lags because reliance in the university solely on the professional school overwhelmingly turns intellectual attention to the pursuit of interested, instrumental knowledge, serviceable in the organized work of the profession. Far too much is thus ignored. Good educational scholarship should have roots in the daily work of education. Surely that work, in school and out, provides the empirical data to be considered in thinking about education. This means that scholarship in education faces the challenge of understanding it as a full, formative experience lived by each person, who finds herself plunged into a cultural system of global scope, historical depth, and intricate rigor, having to acquire from it the personal resources with which she will seek fulfillment. In actuality, this educational challenge is far fuller, more difficult, and more many-sided than the concerns the educating profession takes as its ends in view. A full-blooded scholarship about education must speak, with depth, with intellectual substance, and with humane purpose, to every dimension of the educational challenge. It is not the subject, but the institutional arrangements supporting its study that account for the differences in the scholarship about education and other great concerns of human life.

¶67

Scholars trying to consider education in a detached manner have found themselves pressured by the institutional realities of the professional school to concentrate, not on knowledge for its own sake, but to confect syntheses satisfying to recruits for the profession. Interested knowledge about education is important and necessary, but not sufficient. Seeing its insufficiency, peers in the arts and sciences, haughty from accidental superiority, treat education as a matter unworthy of organized study. That prejudice ought to be brought to the bar of critical examination. Poor conditions for educational scholarship have weakened development of the field. In what might that development consist? Is the disinterested study of education actually unworthy of inclusion in the arts and sciences? Do the potentials of education as an academic study merit serious effort to include it within the arts and sciences? These questions confront, not the schools of education, but the university as a whole.

What the university will gain

¶68

Note that we are moving here to the positive from the negative part of our two-fold response to the question whether the arts and sciences should make a place for impartial inquiry about education. The positive task is to show that education as an academic study, properly developed, can substantially contribute to the work of the arts and sciences, and through that, to the work of the university as a whole.

¶69

To begin, let us consider further the differentiation between interested and disinterested scholarship. A subtle shift, I think, differentiates professional from academic investigation, namely whether the upshot of the work, its pragmatic cash value, will be a thing or action on the one hand or a concept or theory on the other. Interested inquiry, even when it addresses a great matter with Olympian scope, starts by examining chosen instrumentalities or actions. It becomes interested at its origin because it defines a domain of objects or actions and receives the interest, which will guide the inquiry, as it takes on the purposes that give rise to the objects or activities in question, taking as its justification its capacity to further those purposes. Professional knowledge usually becomes highly interested knowledge because it generally starts out from what members of the profession and their clients do, internalizing their purposes as the purposes to be served by the inquiry.

¶70

With the professional, definitions of the professional activity, or components of it, define the interest that controls the inquiry. Education is schooling; education is formal instruction, the work of teachers; education is construction of the common school, the public school, education promotes equity, driver safety, social mobility, the national defense. With each such definition delimiting the sphere of action as the subject of study, the inquiry takes on the purpose of its subject, aiming to enhance the action in question—to strengthen schooling, to improve formal instruction, to perfect the skill and art of teachers, to reform the public school, to promote all manner of goals that people may seek through the work of education. Of course, these are worthy ends and the knowledge achieved as a result can be highly instrumental, but the instrumental results differ from the results that disinterested inquiry into education would achieve. The two enterprises are not the same.

Concept formation

¶71

Disinterested inquiry starts, not with what people do, or even with what the stuff of nature does, but with concept formation, Begriffsbildung, the postulation of an idea, an abstract proposition, from which the scholar can build a conceptual framework with which to interpret or explain an element of experience. As with interested inquiry, disinterested scholars generally start concept formation with a definition, but the object of the definition is not some concrete thing or set of actions, but a concept, an idea, an intellectual proposition, something that exists in thought and words. Concepts are intellectual objects and detached inquiry concerns ideas, not things or activities. The ideas may be about things or activities, but the inquiry is about the ideas, which must not be confused with the things or activities to which they might refer. And frequently, perhaps always rigorously speaking, the objects to which they refer are imaginary, conceptual, ideal, not the tangible actualities themselves. Consequently, as a noun, the term "gravity" refers to a theoretical concept accounting for countless phenomenal behaviors, not to an objective force, but to a conceptual explanation.

¶72

To find excellent examples, consult Galileo's Two New Sciences. In that work, Galileo gave many powerful, conceptual definitions. One started the "fourth day's dialogue," investigating the motion of projectiles: "imagine any particle projected along a horizontal plane without friction; then we know, from what has been more fully explained in the preceding pages, that this particle will move along this same plane with a motion which is uniform and perpetual, provided the plane has no limits." This particle is thoroughly conceptual, patently counterfactual with respect to the world of experience, with proofs in thought, explained in prior pages, accounting for the imagined behavior of the postulated objects. The word "any" here is deeply significant, and earlier, at the start of the "third day's dialogue" on uniform motion, Galileo significantly called attention to its importance as he explicitly inserted it into the traditional definition of uniform motion—motion in which equal distances are traversed in equal times becoming motion in which equal distances are traversed "during any equal intervals of time." Any here drives the definition out of the realm of particular instances and locks it securely in the conceptual realm, with the proposition applying, not to this or that perceived motion, apparently uniform, but to any conceivable motion, any thinkable one. Whether it touches on moving objects or cultural events, detachment works to generate in thought a conceptual understanding or explanation that will hold as an intellectual proposition about any conceivable instance.

¶73

Intellectual, not material, action is at stake in concept formation. A well-formed idea may or may not serve a concrete, tangible interest; it does not exist, however, for that purpose. With instrumental inquiry so widespread, people become far too crass in the way they understand the pragmatic cash value of ideas; their payoff is properly, not material, but intellectual in disinterested thought. With well-formed concepts, thought grasps meaning and explains causalities intelligible in actual experience. Concepts serve in thinking, in reflecting on experience, not in experience itself.

¶74

Good concept formation is disinterested because what is at stake in thinking effectively is of a different order, an ideal order, than the tangible interests at stake in the actual experience. Whether or not the interpretations or explanations achieved through good concept formation further the interests of a privileged group is immaterial—in both senses of the word, irrelevant and ideal, not material. Concept formation has powerful uses, however, in that it empowers people to query experience, to ask how and why and with what significance the actual differs from the ideal—the ideal, not in the sense of the perfect or most desirable, but in the sense of the conceptual, the theoretical, what thought leads us to expect.

¶75

As the Stoics realized, conceptual thinking is a great locus of freedom and control because it allows an actor to bring concepts and experience together, disclosing numerous options. The discrepancies between idea and actuality permit one to improve the concepts, or to change concrete actualities, or to do both. Interested inquiry is unidirectional, defined by the vector of interest. Disinterested inquiry is omnidirectional, responsive to the play of concept formation, which allows for the critique of established ideas and the unexpected construction of improved conceptual frameworks for thinking about experience anew. Thus, detached inquiry tends to be less instrumental in its results and more critical. We may say that theory is critical, not by the intention of the theorist, but by the character of theory itself. Theory becomes uncritical only when people hypostatize it, taking it out of the conceptual realm and putting it there in the world as a self-subsisting entity, like other actors, acting and being acted on. Keeping to the realm of the ideal, of thought, disinterested inquiry proceeds through concept formation to create coherent ideas, with reference to which people can ask questions about the source and significance of their concrete experience.

¶76

Standing back from the rough and tumble of political action, political thinkers have engaged in dispassionate, detached reflection and formed numerous, powerful concepts—justice, equality and equity, legitimacy, obligation, freedom, liberty, property, rights, the state, democracy, representation, power, and on. Present-day thinkers in the field engage productively with past thinkers as they try to further develop, expand, and correct key concepts formed by their predecessors in it. The concepts take on great significance for human life, not as they are used mechanically to shape behavior to their putative specifications, but as they are used critically to understand why behavior, in its divergent particularity, is the way it is, and to disclose creatively what it can become, what perhaps it should become.

¶77

Likewise, significant educational concepts have been formed within the historical record, but these have not been as fully developed in modern scholarship. Hence, there are fewer powerful concepts for thinking about education and much writing on education is therefore descriptive, not conceptual. This relative paucity of significant concepts generated through the disinterested study of education may have much to do with two salient absences in current discussions of education. One is the degree to which educational leaders have surprisingly little to say about the educative work of the university. The other is the degree to which academic leaders fail to take part in the public discussion of educational issues. Universities have a weak voice in matters concerning education because too few within them engage in disinterested concept formation about it, and those who do are too dispersed. At its source, this situation has probably arisen because scholars in the arts and sciences have generally believed that there is nothing of substance about education worthy of study outside of its professional concerns for the work of schools. Are there opportunities for concept formation in reflecting on education of a value similar to those arising from reflections on politics or economics or social action? Would more robust concept formation with respect to education be worth the trouble? That is the question we are now addressing.

¶78

Were it to come into being as a field of academic study, education would be somewhat similar to political science, for it would include distinct component areas—for starters, let us say, educational theory, American education, comparative education, and cultural change, with each area seeking to provide a general public with conceptual interpretation and impartial explanation pertaining to its core concerns. Powerful concept formation should go on through all its components in the same way that each of the various components of political science generate important concepts with which to explain and interpret political experience.

¶79

Here, we can merely sample what might result through the academic study of education, were it organized in this way. To do so, let us engage in some concept formation to assay intellectual possibilities in the component concentrating on educational theory. We can sample what education as an academic study might become by going back into the historical record to look at the formation of one powerful educational concept and to sketch significant ways in which later thinkers have used it to put to themselves and to others important questions about concrete human experience. In doing so, we will see that the concept has had powerful historical uses, ones which have fallen into abeyance. We will also see that although in abeyance, if revived, it will have important implications for contemporary educational concerns. Hence, let us reflect on one example, seeing what it offers. From it, each must extrapolate to a sense of the possibilities for the field, sensing them to be somewhere between the jejune and the seminal. Here is an example, an invitation, to those who will, to develop and expand a much fuller agenda, not a prescription for the whole undertaking.

Formative justice

¶80

Ancient texts have unusual significance for scholars engaged in concept formation, for in those texts many powerful ideas have their initial formulations. We go back to them to engage the ideas themselves in the form in which they were first set out, not through later descriptions of them. As we do so, we find that the formation of many key concepts precedes the adjectives describing them as belonging to one or another domain of thought, be it biological, geological, social, historical, political, or educational. Thinkers simply formed concepts, constructing illuminating bodies of thought and critiquing experience with them. Labeling came later as commentators drew ideas together and described them as part of one domain or another. Retrospectively, some ideas became political, and others educational.

¶81

In Western intellectual history, educational concepts were initially formed in essentially the same texts as major political ideas, the difference being that political thought, having developed more fully as an academic subject, has labeled the key texts as primarily political. Hence in engaging in educational concept formation, we need to appropriate resources claimed as parts of other fields, not to take them away from those other fields, but to find the educational concepts that may be latent there. Further, we need to be ready to make such excursions, not only into historical texts, but into current contributions as well. A passing difficulty in a prominent work of political philosophy may indicate a lacuna arising because educational concept formation has been weak, allowing readers to gloss over an important idea.

¶82

A careful reader will encounter such a passing difficulty in John Rawls' Theory of Justice. His work is a marvelous exercise in concept formation and it awakened political thought from a long analytic slumber by taking the principle of distributive justice to be the generative principle of political economy and setting forth a tight reconstruction of that principle—justice as fairness—as a more coherent construction of it.

¶83

To set up his theory of distributive justice, Rawls used a distinction between formal justice and substantive justice. In Rawls' view, formal justice describes the situation in a polity whenever a set of principles, good or bad, is in force, whenever "impartial and consistent administration of laws and institutions, whatever their substantive principles," are in actual operation. Rawls put questions of formal justice to the side and restricted his inquiry to the problem of substantive justice, to a search for those principles that would provide substantive, real justice to the members of a polity. He then restricted the problem of substantive justice to questions of distributive justice, finding those principles for the distribution of public goods among members of a polity that would lead to a substantively good distribution. The important issue, the substantive issue, was for him, not whether or not a principle was adhered to, but whether or not, if adhered to, the principle of distributive justice would be substantively correct, the sound and true principle of justice, the one that rational persons ought to accept.

¶84

Rawls sought to think out which principles would best achieve substantive justice, at least in the domain of distributive justice, and he left the matter of formal justice—whether there was "adherence to principle," "obedience to system"—largely to the side, even a bit mystified. Within Rawls' theory, formal justice either exists in a polity or they does not, for reasons that he left unexamined. There is adherence to principle or there is not, and Rawls did not seek to construct concepts for thinking about the process by which adhering to principle might or might not come about in the experience of a person or a polity.

¶85

A lacuna arises here because "formal justice" is not really a satisfactory concept, but merely a descriptive term. The theoretical principle of interest is not formal justice, a mere description of the condition of one or another polity, but rather formative justice, a concept that enables thinking about how people come to adhere to principle, to accept and to expect "the impartial and consistent administration of laws and institutions" or other restrictions on possible behaviors, and even further, to shape the world and their conduct within it by reference to this system of thought. Formative justice is an important educational concept, one still insufficiently developed. Formative justice—like distributive justice and retributive justice—is an important part of justice, which deserves far fuller attention than it receives.

¶86

A concept of formative justice stands to the disinterested study of education as that of distributive justice stands to the dispassionate study of politics. As Aristotle provided the first full conception of distributive justice, so Plato initiated and gave a first full conception of formative justice. Present-day students of education, however, are not developing his idea very well, for they too often cram his idea into the wrong conceptual context. We immediately encounter here another instance of the contextual problem arising from the absence of an academic discourse about education. Commentary on Plato's Republic normally lacks sympathy because commentators take it to be a work primarily about politics, not education. To be sure, the city, the polis, from which our term "politics" derives, was a central concern in the work. But consider what Plato held to be the primary meaning or significance of the polis in human experience. In describing his city of words in the Republic, Plato conceptualized educational relationships and actions not political arrangements, and elsewhere, as in the Crito, Socrates based his respect for the norms of the city, neither on the realities of power nor on legislated legitimacies, but rather on the educative, formative ethos those norms had provided.

¶87

If taken as a set of socio-political restrictions prescribed for objective polities, Plato's division of his postulated city into three functional castes, sharply differentiated from each other, strikes present-day readers as profoundly reprehensible. But Plato was not prescribing political arrangements; he was explaining an educational concept. And few would dispense with the educational concept that he was there forming. The castes were a conceptual fiction, like Galileo's particle, counter factual and confined to thought. The thought constructed an educational concept: the idea that human potential has multiple components, each overflowing with possibilities, with each needing to be developed and brought into an appropriate balance and order, one unique to each person, which it is the person's vital challenge to sustain and fulfill. Is this a reprehensible concept? Is this not the concept that Howard Gardner has been elaborating, to considerable acclaim, through his theory of multiple intelligences?

¶88

Issues of justice arise when a need or desire for something exceeds its supply, forcing deliberation about what each recipient is due. Issues of distributive justice stem from having to allocate a finite supply of public goods among a larger multiplicity of claimants. Issues of formative justice have to do, not with public goods, but with human potentials. In education, possibilities exceed feasible achievement, forcing choices. A person cannot actualize all her possibilities; nor can a group. Which ones will receive what effort? By exercising formative justice, a person selects among her possibilities and allocates a finite supply of talent and energy, of motivation and discernment, in pursuing these chosen goals. Formative justice thereby determines the mix of potentials that a person or group will effectively act to achieve.

¶89

Guided, well or poorly, by formative justice, each person exerts educational effort to bring his or her mix of aptitudes to their full employment in pursuit of sustainable fulfillment. "Be all you can be": this is the problem of formative justice that each youth must ultimately solve for herself. What do you want to become? What should you become? What can you become? How will you integrate the imperatives of desire, upbringing, and reason into a secure and fulfilling self? There is one life to live and a multiplicity of possibilities in it. Which merit realization, how, when, where, and why? This is the question of formative justice and good educational concepts, sound pedagogical principles, enable people to think about and act on such fateful choices.

¶90

Twentieth-century public discourse, obsessed with material externalities, has obfuscated issues of formative justice by degrading them into concerns of distributive justice. Education collapses into schooling, so much seat-time devoted to this or that, with the only issue of justice being one of access to formal opportunities, which get counted up among the cornucopia of public goods. Who will get so much of what kind? In the course of developing his conception of formative justice, Plato spun his myth of the metals to explain why a person would accept the idea that her potential was not some fated absolute, but a complex whole made of many parts that she had to develop and form. Sober literalists among us condemn this myth and its ironies—which Plato at least labeled as myth and spun in discourse for purposes explicitly not to be put into practice. Yet those same literalists collaborate now in our endless testing, with the Educational Testing Service and other authorities propounding our myths of metals, only for us not as myth, but as objectivities legitimated by statistical arcana and an obliging quest for bias-free phrasing. The Republic propounded an early theory of formative justice, a conceptual construct, and a major activity in the disinterested study of education should be the continuous development of that construction, as well as others, and their use in asking difficult questions about educational experience.

¶91

We can return to Plato. Let us first sharpen the distinction between formative and distributive justice. Remembering Galileo's caution about the importance of "any," let us meditate briefly about how we might use the two concepts to think about a trivial, but widely documented matter—the doings of professional sport. Take your favorite football team, it does not matter whether it plays the global or the American game, for me the Jets or Giants will do. The front office deals with distributive justice, at least within the tiny universe of the team, in negotiating salaries and other terms of player contracts. The issue of distributive justice here—we will not dwell on your salary or mine—is to justify differentials in compensation, working with players and their agents to achieve agreement through judgments about the market and putative skill and drawing power and other measures of worth, whereby some players will make millions for showing up and others will labor at a base pay of several hundred thousand. If the front office mismanages the valuation of worth and the distribution of resources, with too much here leaving too little there, jealousies and resentments can wrack the team and the stable of players will fall short on talent, leading fans to rail at the front office. If the distribution is astute, the team can thrive. But will it?

¶92

This question raises the issue of formative justice. By itself, a great collection of talent, richly remunerated, may achieve consistent success—damn those Yankees—but it does not guarantee it, as at last the Red Sox showed. A coaching staff must use principles of formative justice to bring each player up to his full potential and to integrate them all into a resourceful, winning team. The issue here is to get each player into optimum condition for the roles he has to play, to build the determination and élan of the group so that each plays with full intensity, and to develop and communicate to each player an astute game plan that takes into account the unique capacities of key personnel and the vulnerabilities of opponents. Finally, formative justice here consists in putting all these activities together, each in its proper measure, so that on the day of the crucial game, the whole team is strong, intense, and shrewd together, winning in a commanding performance.

¶93

As in sport, so in the great game of life—the challenge of formative justice abounds. Football is a microcosm of passing import, personal or historic, but even with more complex, fateful situations, formative justice perfects the unique excellences of diverse components and integrates them into an optimal performance, on pain of suffering the consequences. Whatever the domain of experience, the theory of formative justice enables a person to think about how to bring a diversity of potential capacities to a combined fulfillment. For distributive justice, the conceptual telos is equality in one sense or another. Or perhaps, as Rawls reasons, fairness is the goal, equality being too simplistic. For formative justice, fulfillment is the controlling goal. Formal justice, as Rawls understood it, describes the end state of the process of formative justice and it consists in laws and institutions, "whatever their substantive principles," that people have brought to fulfillment in practice, effectively instituting diverse efforts motivated by a suitable integration of interest, pride, and principle.

¶94

Fulfillment is a goal that excites powerful human sympathy. We want our own fulfillment and thus exercise effort to develop and use our natural capacities, and we want the fulfillment of others, taking care to educate others. We feel spontaneous admiration for exemplary achievement by others and regret when circumstances force someone to desist from significant effort. Thus fans will acknowledge with respectful applause an opposing star, suddenly injured and forced out of a game, for the potential of the game itself became less fulfilling when injury forced his withdrawal. The goal of fulfillment even translates into a powerful directive norm for political economy. Not growth, stoking the ever-insatiable few, but full employment is the goal, the right of each person to creative work and, further, to the full employment of his or her unique mix of potentialities for the benefit of self and others. Full employment in its fullest sense is a truly challenging, and worthwhile goal of public policy. Aristotle defined a city as the shared pursuit of the good life. In this view, human fulfillment becomes the fundamental purpose of a polity. With fulfillment as the purpose the polity, the test of legitimacy comes through the educative work of its ethos, norms, and principles.

¶95

With respect to formative justice, the legitimacy of a regimen—something we educators will not confuse with the regime of a state—turns on judgments of whether or not it rightly brings potentials to full realization, whether or not it respects and nurtures the conditions of fulfillment. Were this not an essay, but a full study of formative justice, we would need to develop here the concept of authenticity in dialogue with Rousseau and others; and likewise, the concept of autonomy with Kant, and that of its fruition in spirit, Geist, or culture with Hegel. In doing so, we would see that many issues of political theory can be clearer and easier to manage when the educational concepts embedded in them are adequately differentiated and kept distinct, yet related, in thought. Moving complaints about the deficiency of substantive justice show how the formative influence of a political or moral order distorts the character and expectations of those subject to it. Both the right of rebellion and judgments that a given order is basically legitimate turn in large part on whether one feels that formative justice is attainable under the conditions that prevail.

¶96

Where the justice at issue is primarily formative, relationships of subordination, coordination, and control may have valences different from what they would have if principles of political power and authority were directly at work. What may be highly repressive in politics may be liberating in education, particularly as the person sets herself a regulative regimen for bringing a favored potential to fruition. A regimen may be demanding in ways that a regime may not. Things that are negative and destructive when done to us as passive objects by an external agent can be positive and fulfilling when we do them actively by and for ourselves. The marathon runner pushes herself through a discipline of painful training to achieve her goal. Were such a discipline imposed by an external power, it would stultify and suppress the spirit, but self-set, it is part of the path to fulfillment.

¶97

Ironically, students of education too often read Plato as if he is talking politics, not education, proposing external authorities. Not liking what they thus hear, they turn away. Thus, by mistaking the context, educational thinkers have impoverished their resources. Plato described in speech a highly formative, but authoritarian city, a hypothetical city that he did not seek to found in fact, in order to illustrate an educative discipline by which persons could put formative justice into practice in the living of their lives. By seeing politics where education should be found, interpreters diminish the developmental potentialities of the person. And they compound this weakening by attributing pedagogical initiative, efficacy, and responsibility, not to the person acquiring her education, but to her external teachers. Confined to the externals, to the apparent surfaces, education becomes superficial and lax. Beneath the surfaces, the unexpected, difficult achievements arise from self-discipline, willed subordination to a goal, and extraordinary effort.

¶98

Within his effort at concept formation, Plato used three ideal-typical concepts in constructing his concept of formative justice. These described in thought how people adhered to a system of law and even more generally how they willingly constrained their behavior. In Plato's view, people voluntarily obligated themselves and adhered to purposes in response to motivating capacities, which he conceptualized as being of three types—responses to appetite, to honor or spiritedness, or to reason. People want, believe, and think, and in so doing choose their ends in view. Formative justice, or simply justice as he put it, constituted a fourth ideal-typical concept, which consisted in bringing the other three into an appropriate relation with one another such that each separately, and all together, would be fully employed performing their proper functions in a way optimal for the whole person. For Plato, this optimality meant achieving a stable, self-sustaining harmony, that is, fulfillment, in the conduct of a person's life within the flux of his or her actual circumstances.

¶99

It is not appropriate here, within the scope of this essay, to try to construct a full theory of formative justice, either through an extended commentary on Plato or by taking the concept up and constructing a new theory of it, as Rawls did for distributive justice. Here, we seek to indicate what the academic study of education might become in the arts and sciences and can do so by following a few further hints from Plato to see how those might lead us further into subsequent work, most of which merits being interpreted as educational, among other things. Plato advanced concepts, under a heading which we are calling formative justice, that grasped in thought, in discourse, the way people constrained their actions and adhered to a purpose or principle, and he gave that, as theorists often do, a normative dimension enabling him to interpret both human fulfillment and human degradation. Plato achieved a theoretical account of how people adhere to principles in the course of living their lives, and with it, he illuminated significant consequences for conduct as people under differing conditions adhered to particular principles in different ways. He used it to put quite clearly two very important questions that should be major concerns in the academic study of education.

¶100

Consider first Plato's wonderful passage at the conclusion of the allegory of the cave. "Education is not what some people proclaim it to be, . . . that they are able to put knowledge into souls where none was before. Like putting sight into eyes which were blind." People learned by exercising their capacity to find and know their own good, their own fulfillment, a capacity that was their human dignity, one that Plato asserted to be a universal—"this capacity in every soul." He then gave a powerful statement of the educative function of formative justice: "Education . . . would be the art of directing this instrument, . . . not the art of putting the power of sight into it, but the art which assumes it possesses this power . . . and contrives to make it look in the right direction."

¶101

This passage culminated Plato's critique of the sophists, which had stretched through several of his dialogues, for they were the teachers who professed to put sight into blind souls. The sophists had begun to offer instruction in the rhetorical and related arts that promised to give power to those who would live by the exercise of persuasion and leadership. Conditions had put conventions and circumstances in flux, and with an insouciance that some thought disruptive and others unwise, the sophists prepared young men on the make to gain an edge in pursuing pleasure and power. And immediately both cultural conservatives and philosophic critics then queried whether the proffered instruction could deliver the promised results: truly knowledge is power, which will mean that "a little learning is a dangerous thing," as Alexander Pope many centuries later restated a Socratic ploy. If power is mistaken, it wreaks harm, not good. Thus the paradigmatic culture war began around a great question, one that still echoes into our time and times to come. As the classical Greeks put it—Can arête be taught? Or the Romans—Can virtus be taught? Or as the moderns, from the Renaissance to now, have been putting it, Can virtue, can excellence, can power be taught?

¶102

This question persisted, recurrently demanding answers. The cultural conservative answered then, and answers now, that arête, virtus, virtue, excellence, power need not be taught, for it was given by tradition and convention, ascribed to the young as a matter of course in a well-ordered community. The sophistic pedagogue answered then, and answers now, that indeed they teach it, for they have devised a program of instruction that leads to "sound deliberation, both in domestic matters—how best to manage one's household, and in public affairs—how to realize one's maximum potential for success in political debate and action." The philosophic critic demurred then, and demurs now, questioning the strong claim that "every day, day after day, you will get better and better" and suggesting that with sustained effort one might develop the rational skill to figure out in the flux of circumstance what principles and skills may prove best suited to the situation, that is, as Plato put it, being able, as occasion required, to "look in the right direction."

¶103

Let us take a conceptual risk and agree that in contemporary parlance the best way to translate arête is not its common translation, "virtue," or even the better but less common, "excellence," but the one insinuated here, "power"—Can power be taught? Power, like arête, has a range of component capacities—strength, skill, courage, knowledge, wisdom, compassion. Like arête, we can speak of the power of persons and of collectivities, and we see it as a concept for thinking both about the special capacities of some and simultaneously about qualities universally possessed in some measure by each and every person. Furthermore, like arête and virtus were in their original contexts, power as a concept applies not to an abstract attribute inhering separately in the person, but to a complex quality perceived to arise at the juncture where the active person interacts with his or her conditioning circumstances. One cannot speak about the power of a person without taking into account the context in which the power is manifest.

¶104

Can power be taught? People hope that education will culminate in power—for the conservative, reproducing it through ascription, for the sophistic, disbursing it through instruction, for the Socratic, mastering it through learning and study. If the hope is that education will culminate in power, the importance of formative justice becomes inescapable and a major debate running historically through consequential sources emerges into clarity as an examination of education. In the Platonic construct, by definition, the good was the object of power, the ability to act with effect, and in this sense, the Socratic position—that no person knowingly, intentionally did evil—made necessary sense, for every act aimed to accomplish the good. But it meant that the problem of formative justice was pervasive and ominous, posing a difficult question: given the complexity of power and the many goods that were its object, how should one order these so that each, and their resultant combination, could all work rightly, consistent with fit goals?

¶105

In the face of this question, many people make, as they should, very difficult demands on themselves. And they easily over-reach. The autonomous acceptance of difficult expectations must not serve to legitimate dehumanizing authority over others, be it religious, economic, political, emotional, or educational. Formative justice works through the self-formation of each person. That is the source of the fundamental dignity of each, shared by all humans. It is what Plato celebrated in the greatest of all his myths, the coda at the end of the Republic in which the human souls chose their lives, in which there were numerous possibilities for each. "Responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice. . . . There is a satisfactory life rather than a bad one available even for the one who comes last, provided that he chooses it rationally and lives it seriously. Therefore, let not the first be careless in his choice nor the last discouraged." Here is the inalienable humanistic condition, celebrated by Socrates and Plato, and many after them.

¶106

Many past thinkers wrote for people engaged in pondering the question of formative justice, the question of their regimen of self-formation. What should be the purposes of your power and how should you direct your power to pursue them? Ancient ethical writers, as Pierre Hadot and Martha Nussbaum have been reminding present-day readers, tried less to desiderate on the substantive question of what the good is, but spoke more to themselves and others pursuing the formative question, trying to develop a rational self-discipline for selecting purposes and shaping their capacities to achieve them. They were students, less of substantive justice, more of formative justice. Their work is one major strand in a literature the aims of which are essentially educative.

¶107

Another strand filled out an emerging gap in the Platonic agenda. In view of subsequent history, Plato's tripartite schema of the human constitution took the role of belief in the formation of power too much for granted. He had assumed that acculturation in one or another city-state would provide each person's spirited element with a set of honored attachments more elevating than the appetites but less open to doubt than the objects of reason. Imperial hegemonies, especially the Roman, soon created a syncretism of different beliefs as Rome became intensely multi-cultural. A diversity of acculturating conditions confounded the unselfconscious honoring of belief, for with so much diversity it was impossible to not question conventional local norms. People found themselves with few unquestioned convictions, and pained by that deficiency, a growing number of sensitive, self-aware persons felt that the rational disciplines of the Stoic, Epicurean, and skeptic, did not suffice for their formative needs. Increasingly, they concentrated on achieving conscious acts of faith as the basis for their forming their purposes and powers. We might say that the challenge of formative justice shifted from the plane of reason to that of belief. People no longer found their chief problem to be their rational understanding of the good, but their ability to honor truly, to revere something with unquestioned faith.

¶108

Let us leave, for this essay, the discussion of how to shape one's power to live rightly and well in the face of unknown circumstance, which caught reflective attention from the ancients to the present. It is a matter that merits greater attention in the study of education than it is now receiving. Recognition that power is an educational concept, as much as a political one, is essential to making sense of many important developments in current public life. Nation-states came into being as much through the conscious pursuit of an educational ideal as through the constitution of political institutions, and as that aspiration fragments into numerous movements of group identity and assertion, from Black Power in the 60's to the many variants now in action in the national and global arenas, it is wrong to view these solely, even primarily, as political movements. If seen as strictly political, they feed into the Hobbsian war of all against all. These movements pursue power as the construction of identities and the vision of fulfillment through them. Thus these movements are in large part educational, feeding not the war of all against all, but the many-sided affirmation of human potential. Without the study of education, and the place of power within it, fully developed, we hear many assertive discussions of power without discernment and react with repressive incomprehension, tragically exacerbating the tensions of our world.

¶109

Our aim here is simply to see what the academic study of education might involve, and around problems of power, it might enable us to convert more political conflict into pedagogical effort. Hence, we should realize that the first question—How can the person best master his or her power to seek fulfillment?—has been a question of seminal importance in our cultural history and one that continues to be at the heart of contemporary dilemmas. Reflection on it should lead to the conceptual critique of educational effort, not to ever more astute answers to the how of education, but to the reflective examination of the what and the why of education, on the who¸ and the where, and the when. On these issues, public discourse is appallingly inert. To what degree do our immense educational efforts further the human fulfillment of those involved? Why, in a world so full of resources, do so many find themselves in a state of deprivation, depression, and doubt, disposed to rancor and resentment? What are the discrepancies between contemporary practices and the ideas of formative justice and what might educators do to diminish those discrepancies? We have probed far enough to recognize that education as an academic study must address these questions, but there are others as well. Let us sample them by looking at the other fundamental educative problem that Plato grasped with his concept of formative justice.

¶110

In Books 8 and 9 of the Republic, where Plato traced the cycle of transformation from the rule of the best to that of the worst, subtly charting the interplay of formative influences on the character of the polity and the person, he anchored the second educative question of continuing importance. Two dimensions of it are critical in a disinterested study of education. One accounts for the formative influences that differentiate one person or polity, one regimen or regime, from another; the other concerns the sources of historic stability and change working upon the unique person or polity, the question about the contingency of personality and community in time. Both inquiries intertwine through the historical resources and spread out into different domains of modern scholarship. The academic study of education could do much to give them better unity and focus.

¶111

Events, as events do, had raised these issues. For long, Homer's listeners had learned to think about themselves through the contrast between the Greek and the other. Greek cities constituted a cauldron of political experimentation, each coping with its internal conflicts, each engaged in external competition and conflicts among them, and many sending citizens forth in a practice of founding new cities according to a plan. The relative merits of different formative principles in the organization of a polis were significantly contested and debated. People experienced the question. Caught in contingent times, they began to write history, seeking to understand whether and how knowledge and culture determined the power of persons and of polities.

¶112

Over centuries, successive thinkers have sought to form ideas and principles with which they could account for the relative success of one power system vis-à-vis another. Herodotus began the inquiry, suggesting that the principle of participation among Greek citizens enabled them to withstand Persian subjects, who were governed by a principle of subordination that neutralized their superior material strength. Thucydides pulled back from the contrast between the Greek and the other and contrasted the two poles within the Greek ethos, the plodding power of Sparta versus the Odyssean sea-wit of Athens, concentrating on the genius and self-destructive volatility of the latter, thereby greatly deepening insight into the interplay between character and command. Plato and then Aristotle turned further inward to reflect on how internal conflicts within Athens and other cities led to a change in governing constitution, and such inquiries have matured into more modern ideas about checks and balances and the separation of powers. One can understand these constitutional principles as principles designed to ensure that each of the different forms of political power keeps to its proper business so that the whole can function in effective harmony, which is precisely the fundamental concept of formative justice. As political theorists have often explored "political education," in which they reflect on the kind of education that will best lead to good political outcomes, so a full consideration of formative justice would lead to ideas about "educational politics," constructing concepts about how political arrangements force educational, formative results, for better and for worse.

¶113

How formative influences shape the members of a polity, and hence collectively its power and stability, is a large question, dangerous yet imperative. With respect to the influences shaping people in a polity, there is, first, what we might call the pedagogy of events. Henry Adams pointed to the awful costs of this pedagogy, early in his Education, as he looked back on the outbreak of the Civil War. Adams' autobiography and its companion reflection on Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres were great literature. Unfortunately, they were too indirect to provide well-formed, effective concepts for interpreting the pedagogy of events. Earlier Machiavelli had come closer in his Discourses to creating a conceptual framework for interpreting the pedagogy of events as he reflected on how the Romans preserved, through diverse vicissitudes, their capacity to extend and maintain their governing principles. Later students of Rome took Machiavelli's question rather for granted and concentrated more on its sequel, the decline and fall, without as much educative insight. Hence, the pedagogy of events is still a matter in great need of clarification, especially as it is going on all about us, rampantly since 9/11. We have virtually no good concepts with which to analyze or explain what is happening as public leaders and their followers become willing to compromise their governing principles in angst at apparent life dangers.

¶114

A second type of influence forming political character arises through the ethos of a given polity, through its historical or political character. Which types of regimes educate the best and which regimes can best draw strength from the education of their members? What educational arrangements will best accord with the character of a given regime and what educational strategies will best strengthen and enhance the regime? Some modern responses have probed how education has shaped and been shaped by the principle of nationality, with Lawrence Cremin's American Education perhaps the pre-eminent example. Emerging debates about multiculturalism in education may be the harbinger of an historic dissociation between education and nationality, which could have significant effects on whether people identify with and recognize the nation-state as the dominant center of political authority. Instead of concentrating on the concept of nationality, other modern responses have examined the interactions between democracy and education, with John Dewey's work, and more recently Amy Gutmann's, pre-eminent.

¶115

Finally, a third modern response broadens out in the manner originated by Herodotus, comparing the formative ethos of civilizations, exemplified by Max Weber's incessant investigation and by numerous post-Weberians trying to understand "the great divergence" as Kenneth Pomeranz has recently put it. Such comparative inquiry into the formative power of an interacting cultural system is fraught with dangers, for many people misconstrue ideas developing conceptual differences and take the thought to signify objective inferiorities and superiorities. Here are the roots of genocide, a terrible twentieth-century degradation. It threatens to be a twenty-first-century scourge as well, as globalism intersects with terrorism, as high technology and Midas wealth mingle with massive poverty in a world where the supply of resources shrinks rapidly relative to the demand. Arrogant power meshes with the belief that one's own civilization beneficently imparts full humanity to its members, while that of one's enemies molds depraved beings, less than human. The interplay of self-aggrandizement and the degradation of the other makes it imperative to achieve a dispassionate, value-free understanding of how different systems of formative justice work in the present-day world.

¶116

Enough. Were this essay intended to present fully the opportunities for concept formation in education, it would need to deal with much more than the discussion of formative justice touched on here. The historical record is rich in educational concepts, but their current development and use are sparse. Disinterested formation of educational concepts deserves serious academic study. Within the arts and sciences, the study of educational concepts, such as formative justice, would be a fit enterprise, one worth exerting significant effort to introduce.

¶117

Looking back on the historical record, we see that it provides a profuse heritage of concept formation, offering influential ideas for thinking critically about educational experience. The claim is not that inquiry about such concepts should become, within the arts and sciences, exclusively an educational inquiry, or even primarily educational, but that, in addition to the economic, social, political, religious, ethical, even literary dimensions of the inquiry, it should consistently have an educational dimension. The educational dimension of concepts like formative justice has been of peripheral import in schools of education, although it would be of central import were education a disinterested study in the arts and sciences. Further, the claim goes beyond recognizing the value in developing the educational import of concepts such as formative justice in itself. The educational dimension of such ideas often constitutes the nexus relating all their other dimensions to each other. With the nexus absent in the arts and sciences, their ability to do justice to the theme, however productive their separate contributions may be, is significantly reduced. The need for the academic study of education is real.

¶118

Clearly, the contemporary university has not developed its intellectual organization fully. To complete development of it, the university needs to provide the differentiation characteristic in other fields for the study of education. The university needs to recognize education as a field of academic study, as a body of autonomous inquiry in the arts and sciences.

¶119

In doing so, there is no need to make education into a tightly unified discipline, whatever that would be. Basic forms of human activity generate broad, diversified fields of study. The study of politics provides the closest analogue to the study of education. As a field, political science includes significant subdivisions—political theory, American politics, comparative politics, international relations. The academic study of education would as well—educational theory, American education, comparative education, cultural change. Each area itself would be substantial, welcoming methodologically diverse contributions to the conceptual explanation and understanding of educational experience in its fullness. To be sure, contributions to such work take place in schools of education and the object would not be to empty it out of those institutions, but, in a small yet significant way, to fill out and complete the arts and sciences with a group of scholars dedicated primarily to disinterested concept formation about education.

¶120

A department of education in the arts and sciences would strengthen and focus university scholarship on education. That step would relieve distorting pressures on schools of education. It would help them, and the educational research establishment, to concentrate more effectively on the instrumental goals essential to the work of professional education. By including a department of education in the arts and sciences, dedicated to disinterested scholarship and teaching, the university can take a concrete step to develop its intellectual organization further. That step would strengthen the university and enhance its human worth.

Some concluding questions

¶121

All this, the negative and the positive responses building the case for education as an academic study, might persuade academic leaders inside the university. But what about the academic patrons and the public? Here the university must lead. Someone, somewhere must take a risk, staking resources to change the given situation. That risk devolves upon the university, for ideas precede their payoff. And this brings us to the close, finally, with one last point—the payoff will be real. In fostering the disinterested study of education culminating in the formation of concepts such as formative justice, the university would not be turning away from human experience and flesh and blood needs. The arts and sciences, properly pursued and practiced, are no ivory tower. Too the contrary: the absence in the university of education as an academic study contributes to the woes of our world.

¶122

An absence of education as an academic study is not simply an intramural problem within the university. With education in the university confined to the professional school, in public discourse education has become synonymous with the work of schools. This creates a profound irresponsibility as prominent people in other walks, who should be caring for their educative effects, blithely act as if they have none. The young, indeed everyone, need strong, formative examples across the full spectrum of action—effort, honesty, wisdom, self-sacrifice, recognition of complexity, generosity, confident humility, intelligent purpose, courage, and on. Instead, they get heedless leaders in politics, commerce, and the media who shirk the responsibility to cultivate public principles through the formative effects of their actions. The principles through which we live are not given, dependable realities, etched in history; our principles are not transcendent necessities that need no formative care. They are contingent. They exist only to the degree that we exemplify them for each other and enable ourselves, ever anew, to form and fulfill them.

¶123

Dishonest corporate executives profoundly miseducate the public, as do the rapaciously overpaid. So do political leaders who lie and deceive in the pursuit of power; they destroy the bonds of community, mutual trust among people, each of whom is unique and different. Politics is not corrupt; our politicians are corrupting. A putative leader cannot excuse deception on his behalf by saying that his guy must twist truth because the other guy's guy is worse, and then follow it up, dismissing the complex temptations the young experience with the complacent cliché, "just say no." Greed and the lust for power are such strong motivations that even if we recover a public understanding of education, such destructive drives will not disappear. Nevertheless, were educational discussion to assume again its proper scope, those blind to their duties would find it harder to pass as persons of probity.

¶124

Close readers of Plato know that the concept of formative justice will not be toothless with respect to the important concerns of social justice. In thinking about formative justice, scholars can put critical questions that they are unable at present to put with effect. To some the questions will seem merely rhetorical—"but of course." In that case, one has already persuaded oneself of the point. But to others, concepts of formative justice and the questions put through them may provoke searching inward inquiry, empowering reflections that lead to altered action. That is how detached, impartial inquiry makes a difference in the world and that is why we need education as an academic study.—

• Do parents commit a grave formative injustice when they bequeath to their children resources of wealth and power of such scope that life appears to present the children with no element of circumstantial risk or challenge?
• Do proponents of a belief system commit a grave formative injustice when they set its adherents apart from other people in such a way that they can no longer recognize the full humanity of those others?
• Does a society characterized by extremes of inequality, such that the least favored cannot possibly aspire to realize the capacities that the most favored can easily develop, commit a grave formative injustice, hurting not only the least favored, but also the most, and those between, diminishing the sum of accomplishments to be enjoyed by all?
• Do principles of formative justice pertain on the level of global interactions, the environment, and intergenerational time and how should they operate to prevent the excessive development of a geographic, environment, or generational component to undermine the harmony and stability of the whole?
• Can principles of formative justice show whether the curricula, the delivery of instruction, and the methods of assessing aptitudes and achievements in use in the provision of formal education are most likely to enable students to develop their powers and purposes to achieve fulfillment in an uncertain world?
• When teachers and schools fail to speak with conviction and meaning to the formative choices that each and every student must uniquely make, do they do justice in their work?
• Respecting education and formative justice, should people reassert a politics of humane full employment?

¶125

And so, we end. Let us do so by returning full-circle to the question with which my friend began, now restated in a language newly learned.

• Has the university, considering the powers and purposes of its parts, brought each to its full potential and put them all in relation to each other so that each serves its proper business, forming the whole to the fullness of its possibility? Is the university an exemplar of the formative justice for which it should stand?