Texts:Rom-E-80b-E-EnE-13

¶1

Enough with respect to my expecting the unexpected: Man and His Circumstances did not fully enter the circle of discussion I had, in my highest hopes, thought it might. There were, however, sufficient hints in diverse reactions to the work that knowledgeable people found enough to the book that it could have held up in that circle had it ever arrived there; with those hints, I could retreat, confident that at least I had not hoped for the absurd.

¶2

Next, I want to say a bit about the recognition of professional significance in the work. This, I suspect, may be a matter of concern to some. Where a functioning geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik exists, no question about the professional significance of Man and His Circumstances would arise. Thus Günther Böhme, a professor of pedagogy, opened his review: "among the many excellences of this, perhaps too ambitious, book belongs this one: it has a title that, with all desirable precision, tells the reader what to expect." To Böhme, I presented Ortega consistently, konsequent, as the educator and showed, konsequent, how the thinking person can not be sundered from his circumstances. To him, genau genommen, strictly speaking, it was a book on education. To some reviewers in American educational journals, the professional significance of the book seemed less evident: Merle L. Borrowman in the Comparative Education Review warned possible readers that "one learns virtually nothing about schools from either Ortega or McClintock," yet there was matter in it significant to educators; Christopher J. Lucas in Educational Forum was somewhat apologetic about my classical use of the term "pedagogy"; and Manuel Maldonado Rivera in Educational Studies was blunt, "the title notwithstanding, this is not a book in the Foundations of Education."

¶3

Where Schleiermacher can be recognized as an educational thinker equal to Pestalozzi, where Dilthey can be put on a par with Dewey, where Otto Willmann can be the peer of Cubberley, where Spranger can stand beside Thorndike, where Flitner can rank with Kilpatrick—there, no question of the professional significance of Man and His Circumstances will arise. In the draft of Rousseau and American Educational Scholarship I investigate the historical reasons why, among other things, the first named in these pairings are virtual unknowns to professional students of education in the English-speaking world, particularly in the United States. A copy of the draft of that study follows the reviews in Binder A, and I hope it will be considered if there are any doubts about the professional significance of Man and His Circumstances, for although far from complete, and much in need of expansion, tightening, polishing, it is adequate to indicate the trajectory of an argument, one upshot of which would be to suggest that any appearance of professional irrelevance to Man and His Circumstances evidences, not its lack of professional significance, but the existence of a deficiency in the profession. We have no geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, so the proper context of the professional significance of the book is not apparent to all. We do have, however, geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogen, whether we recognize them as such or not, and what I want to point out here is that all of them who made contact with the book asserted its professional significance.

¶4

Who are these geisteswissenschaftlichen Pädagogen who have made contact with my book: Henry Geiger writing in Manas, Karl Kroeber in the Teachers College Record, Michael J. Parsons in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, G.H. Bantock in the History of Education Quarterly, and Bernard J. Looks in the Teachers College Record. They all agree that there is something of professional significance in the book, much of professional significance, although they are not of precisely the same mind about what that is. Geiger and Kroeber may be characterized as men not of the educational profession in the narrow sense, but, from their respective life-situations, deeply concerned with it; while Parsons, Bantock, and Looks are, in their diverse ways, representatives of the geisteswissenschaftlichen outlook in the educational profession. Let me call attention to the professional significance they see in the work.

¶5

Years ago, Henry Geiger, one of the unsung heroes of American intellectual life, a self-educated printer, founded Manas, a weekly newsletter centrally concerned with education from the view-point of the humane, libertarian left. Plato and Ortega have always been among those thinkers from whom Geiger draws his inspiration. Manas reflects Geiger's continuous odyssey of self-development; it conveys to readers a conviction in limitless human potential, the joy and worth of cultivating it in oneself and others, and the importance of continuously reaching out to the cultural heritage for stimulation in that effort. Geiger aims his message at the educator in all of us and especially the educators in the schools, asking them not merely to do their jobs, but to do them well, with the highest values and deepest resources continually in mind. I am proud that early on Geiger discovered my work and has consistently given it resonance in Manas, which, if there was a geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik in the United States would be one of its acknowledged and respected clearinghouses for ideas and concerns. Geiger saw in Man and His Circumstances, not merely a book about one of his favorite thinkers, but a book that spoke well and movingly to the educational concerns inspiring his own life work: "this book might well be made the philosopher, guide and friend of every teacher." To him, at least, it was professionally significant.

¶6

Kroeber, Parsons, and Bantock all recognized the value of "exemplarity and aptness," the central concepts in my analysis of Ortega's conception of the pedagogical relationship, civic and personal. They all recognized these concepts as very helpful in defining what, in geisteswissenschaftlicher Pädagogik, is called das pädagogische Problem, the pedagogical problem that must be solved in a culture if the humane educational possibilities open to it are to be achieved. Kroeber drew attention to my exposition of these concepts and then asserted the professional significance—"the principal attraction of McClintock's exegesis will be the fashion in which he extends it into a critique of current American cultural-educational circumstances." Parsons did the same, although within greater constraints of brevity. So too did Bantock. Bantock is probably the most konsequent thinker in the tradition of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik writing in English, grounded in the austere literary criticism of F.R. Leavis, consistently dedicated to uncovering the implications for humane life in educational thought and practice. He did Man and His Circumstances the honor of taking it seriously, of calling attention to the importance of "exemplarity and aptness" as a conception of the pedagogical relationship fundamental to the liberal tradition in Western experience, and of raising important questions about whether the conception of it that I and Ortega share is adequate for the current cultural juncture. I think there can be no question from Bantock's review that to him at any rate, the work addressed, in a basic way, what should, perhaps, be recognized as, not merely an issue of professional significance, but the issue of professional significance.

¶7

This brings me to the final matter I want to speak about with respect to the reviews, namely, how the course I have chosen to follow over the past ten years relates to a basic question eventually raised in the critical reaction to Man and His Circumstances. This question first began to appear in the review by the political theorist, Benjamin R. Barber, and it became relatively well defined in the disagreement articulated between G.H. Bantock and Bernard J. Looks. This question centered on the problem of power and effective leadership. Bantock put the question best, if I understand him correctly. Yes, he granted, a non-coercive relationship of exemplarity and aptness has been the fountainhead of historic initiative in the Western tradition of liberalism in pedagogy and politics. But, he noted, the crisis of the twentieth century, as he sees Ortega and I diagnosing it, with his own concurrence, has been one in which the spirit of aptness has deserted people, with the result that there are no effective exemplars and historic initiative shifts to those eager to wield coercive power. Bantock is not convinced that the ideal of Europe will create a new context of exemplarity in which the spirit of aptness will return to people, and he concludes that liberals in politics and pedagogy must therefore recognize the realities of power and consider resorting to means they have always tried to eschew: "paradoxically, to preserve itself, liberalism must risk using those weapons which constitute a seeming negation of its principles—or else it is lost anyway."

¶8

Looks found Bantock's conclusion troubling and sought another way to respond to the difficulty. In his view the problem of liberalism in its best sense in the twentieth century has not been a failure of aptness on the part of the many, but a miscalculation of major proportions by reforming elites, namely their proclivity to by-pass the established institutions, to contrast a "new politics" to the "old politics," with the result that they polarize efforts to initiate concrete improvements in pedagogical and political life. He saw Ortega exemplifying this miscalculation and he thought I was too sympathetic to it. Rather than resort, as Bantock suggested (although as Looks pointed out, Bantock has not himself yet done) to an authoritarian politics and pedagogy, exponents of a non-coercive leadership should, in Looks' view, concentrate on working within, not outside, established institutions, which offer, however imperfectly, effective modes of organized action for those seeking to improve pedagogical and political life.

¶9

To my mind, Looks made a valid point, but did not quite meet Bantock's argument. I do not want here to debate the appropriateness or inappropriateness of Ortega's nueva for Spanish circumstances to my mind, one must take whatever routes open within or outside of established institutions. Thus, the clearest answer I could give to Looks would be to note that his article greeted me on my return from an eight-month effort to bring "civic pedagogy" to bear, on and through, HEW. At least one Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, saw Man and His Circumstances to be fundamental to his long-term agenda for the leadership of that Department and sought me out as a central member of his immediate staff because of that. My articulation within my context of this relevance, along with annotations by Secretary Mathews, can be found in my memo—oh, how horrible a title—"Organization of a Network for Collecting and Refining Ideas" (B30). To be sure, the long-term agenda, like all long-term agenda's for HEW, got cut short. Nevertheless, this undertaking shows, pace Looks, that the book has not necessarily been taken by all to prescribe a course eschewing action through established institutions, and it should show, pace those who would hold the book not to be professionally significant, that it has been recognized as otherwise by someone occupying one of the citadels of professional significance.

¶10

Bantock's question remains, however. It is a question that faces us all whether we are working inside established institutions or outside them. A problem of power does exist; of this I have been long aware, from long before Bantock wrote, for since 1968, I have been sure that I must address myself in a sustained way to the topic of Power and Pedagogy (see B1 & B2), and my search over the past ten years has been largely a search for a way to do this effectively. I agree with Bantock when he observes that "the blunt fact is that both politics and pedagogy constitute forms of power." I do not agree, however, with the implication that there must be, therefore, a dimension of arbitrary coerciveness in either politics or pedagogy. This is a profound difficulty that could take us through all the central questions of political and educational theory. Suffice it for here to note a few points relative to Bantock's argument. He emphasized the failure of aptness in setting up his question, and surely such a failure is a fact of life, and if the difficulty is simply and solely a failure of aptness in the many, then his conclusion, that recourse to arbitrary coerciveness in the conduct of politics and education is necessary, follows ineluctably as an unfortunate necessity. What he did not consider, in setting up his argument, however, is the possibility of a consistent, repeated failure of exemplarity on the part of public leaders in politics, culture, and education.

¶11

To me, the problem of liberal power, something that must be at once truly liberal in its respect for the dignity and autonomy of every person, and at the same time effective power in its capacity to shape the course of events, may not lie primarily in the decline of aptness, but rather in the absence of genuine exemplarity. Have the putative exemplars been sufficiently exemplary in the twentieth century to extend the liberal tradition in politics and pedagogy effectively? Liberalism, when in form, has been a creative, inventive tradition; it has emerged in history as men have found unexpected solutions to their pressing problems. This is the way; inventiveness, the creation of unexampled exemplarity, is the task of liberal power. To Bantock's conclusion, "to preserve itself, liberalism must risk using those weapons which constitute a seeming negation of its principles—or else it is lost anyway," I counter with the alternative conclusion, "to preserve itself, liberalism must invent and use new weapons which constitute an effective extension of its principles—or else it is lost anyway." Since well before finishing Man and His Circumstances, I recognized that, for me, this task leads inexorably to another work, Power and Pedagogy. But I have come more and more to take Ortega's words to heart with which I closed the first book:

We have arrived at a moment, ladies and gentlemen, in which we have no other solution than to invent, and to invent in every order of life. I could not propose a more delightful task. One must invent! Well then! You the young—Lad and lasses—Go to it!

¶12

We must invent—Power and Pedagogy. Under that imperative I have seen that this work can not merely be about power and about pedagogy; rather it must somehow become a powerful pedagogy in the fullest, most liberal sense—thus the twelve-year evolution recounted above of a work, perhaps now conceived, but yet to be begun. Pace Bantock, the present juncture requires, not coerced aptness, but an unexampled exemplarity. That is the liberal road; it is better than the authoritarian inn.