Carl Rogers's book on education is called Freedom to Learn. I want to ask whether he has anything to say about the problem of teaching for freedom. To do this I will situate his book next to Maxine Greene's The Dialectic of Freedom so they might be allowed to interpret one another.
First, however, an anecdote: You know that we, at this College, have recently replaced our faculty's exchange of collegial evaluation letters with a peer review system. One faculty member read our account of this change and told me of a recent experience. One member of his teaching team was, according to him, having some difficulties in teaching. He had written a four-page letter evaluating his colleague's work with an eye to trying to say some helpful things. The deans told him that he could not deliver this letter under our current peer review system. It dealt too much with faculty development and not enough with the criteria for reappointment listed in the new policy. The new policy separates development from evaluation, he was told, and the policy requires one to comment only with respect to evaluation. "What do you do on your teams?" he asked me, expecting, I suspect, some fine little maneuver to get around the constraints of the new system. I told him of a recent team member who did his evaluations in what he called a "macro-language." Just have the computer list all the criteria in the new appointment policy; make a few banal comments under each one; make sure only that the comments sound like they are based in your work together; then have the computer add the sentence that the new policy requires: "So-and-so has met the minimum standards with regard to lecturing (or whatever the criterion happens to be)." I told him that this approach is very attractive to me because I have the idea that if we fashion ourselves a set of chains (and all it a "policy") we ought to find a way to live in full acknowledgement of them until the time we decide no longer to live in chains.
He got this twinkle in his eye. "And you know what we do?" he said, "We decorate our chains." "Or," I said, "we make them lighter, so we can forget they are there. But we make sure they are not less secure.... So what are you going to do?" "I think I'll go macro-ize this letter."
Freedom is a funny business. Also scary. I find Greene helpful in this territory. Maxine Greene is a professor of education and The Dialectic of Freedom is her Dewey Lectures from several years ago. It is remarkable that a professor of education would write a book about education that begins with the premise that "the orientation [of education] has been to accommodation, to fitting into existing social and economic structures, to what is given, to what is inescapably there" and that would unwaveringly make the jump-logical and simple for Greene but vertigo-inducing for most educators-from a concern with education to a concern with civic life: "There is almost no serious talk [today] of reconstituting a civic order, a community.... Messages and announcements fill the air, but there is widespread speechlessness."
It is remarkable that any professor of education would produce such a book, but maybe this remarkableness becomes a little less surprising when you remember Maxine Greene is a woman. The preface begins,
This book arises out of a lifetime's preoccupation with quest, with pursuit. On the one hand, the quest has been deeply personal: that of a woman striving to affirm the feminine as wife, mother, and friend, while reaching, always reaching, beyond the limits imposed by the obligations of a woman's life. On the other hand, it has been in some sense deeply public as well: that of a person struggling to connect the undertaking of education, with which she has been so long involved, to the making and remaking of a public space, a space of dialogue and possibility.
Greene argues throughout this book that it is only in the experiences of people who everyday and everywhere face limits on their freedoms that we can find hints of what freedom is about. It is in the experience of women and groups brought to this country (and those who still live) under conditions of less than full citizenship-those who, in Greene's words, take the obstructions in their lives personally-that we can learn something about what freedom might mean. Of women in particular, Greene writes,
[Women] could not find their freedom on Walden ponds or on whaling voyages.... The truth about themselves, when revealed, had to do with what it meant to struggle against confinement and constriction, usually against what Virginia Woolf was to call "the cotton wool of daily life."... It was, most often, the infinity of small tasks, the timeconsuming obligations of housework and child care that narrowed the spaces in which they could choose.
More generally on what she calls "enslaved populations" (including women):
[They] present a peculiar lesson in freedom: ... it is difficult to conceive of them achieving their freedom or emancipation through the securing of political rights alone. It is similarly difficult to conceive of them achieving their freedom without integrating the private and public realms of discourse, without including "the world of feeling" in what they were constituting as an alternative public sphere.
A free act, after all, is a particularized one. It is undertaken from the standpoint of a particular, situated person trying to bring into existence something contingent on his/her hopes, expectations and capacities.
Freedom is not something, Greene seems to be saying, that one can discuss in the abstract or in general. Freedom is not a matter of securing one's rights, even though the securing of rights in a republic where rights are unequally enjoyed is crucial to the possibility of freedom. Freedom, according to this view, is something that comes to make sense only in the context of constraint, and it is something that gains meaning only relative to "particularized acts," acts based in one's desires and that go against "the cotton wool of daily life."
Now I can turn to Carl Rogers's Freedom to Learn. Rogers came out of the Freudian tradition, a tradition based in the notion that it is possible to be in conflict with yourself. Rogers believed that many people live much of their lives conflicted over judgments made about them by others but introjected as if they had originated in the self. These judgments become part of the self, the conception of self, the "I," the "me," the "myself." The self formed by introjecting external judgments instead of forming them on one's own is open, always, to threat. Any experience that goes contrary to the sense of self is rejected as being "not-I" and the judgments that constitute the self harden against the acceptance of other experiences. The task of the therapist or the educator, according to Rogers, is to create a non-threatening environment, an environment in which all experiences can be assimilated into the self regardless of how much an experience conflicts with one's existing sense of self.
Greene provides another idiom in which to cast Rogerian thinking. Rogers, I think I could argue, sees the modern self as constrained by the sense of self that most of us have. Part of that sense of self comes in the form of judgments that originate in political institutions like the modern family, schools, the media, and so on. Rogers is less concerned about the origin of the constraints than he is with the fact of them, because he believes that people can, in their relationships to others, create circumstances for acting against the constraints that everyone experiences. That is, he believes one can create circumstances for others to act into freedom. Rogers, like Greene, is not terribly interested in the abstract meaning of freedom. Freedom is something realized in the particular. The assimilation and accurate symbolization of one experience that would have been otherwise rejected into the sense of self, that is freedom. The ability to see that I replaced the spark plug wire-not out of dumb luck, and not because the wire suggested to me that it should be attached there, but because I thought about where the wire should be and I replaced the wire-that simple act against my conception of self as mechanically inept is freedom.
Is it possible to teach for freedom? Rogers would say, I think, yes, but he would insist that we be very careful with such big words. What a teacher can do is create conditions that make possible the freedom to learn. But this involves the teacher in deliberate, highly self-conscious acts.
In order for there to be the freedom to learn, there can be no curriculum, no course which must be run by students followed. The teacher who would teach freedom must first recognize that most education is based in a curriculum, a predetermined course. Then she must reject that course as the safe haven it is for most teachers. Greene says that the choice of educational materials that will serve the cause of education for freedom is arbitrary. "An education for freedom must move beyond function, beyond the subordination of persons to external ends. It must move beyond mere performance to action, which entails the taking of initiatives." Rogers's student-centered education puts the initiatives of the students at the center of everything. And if they take no initiative, the teacher must respect that and not do something merely to fill time. To teach for freedom, students must be free to be bored, if that is the consequence of how they pass their time in school.
Rogers says that true learning must be pervasive, that it must involve every aspect of the person. This is a fact that makes true learning scary to many teachers. Much of what comes under the rubric of classroom management is the proper orchestration and channeling of only certain aspects of students' experiences. Eroticism and desire are two words that are generally banned from the vocabulary of teachers and are two facts of life that never enter the well-managed classroom. But if learning is to be pervasive, eroticism and desire have to be acknowledged and admitted, even into the classroom. Greene says that education brings together "need for wideawakeness with the hunger for community, the desire to know with the wish to understand, the desire to feel with the passion to see." These are strong words but they only acknowledge what is true, that life is full of strong facts, and they say that true learning does not dampen desire or deny hunger. If a teacher is going to teach for freedom, she must freely admit all aspects of living into her classroom.
Rogers says that the essence of learning is meaning. Students have to be "onto something." Greene again,
Without being "onto something," young people feel little pressure, little challenge. There are no mountains they particularly want to climb, so there are few obstacles with which they feel they need to engage.... Visible or invisible, the world may not be problematized; no one aches to break through a horizon, aches in the presence of the question itself. So there are no tensions, no desire to reach beyond.
There is no effort to make something mean something. For both Greene and Rogers, making the world mean something is a never-ending activity. The free person never gets to Meaning but she engages constantly in the making of meaning.
The fact that Rogers and Greene believe that people are making meaning no matter what does not mean that they believe in a "let it all hang out" approach to education. To Read Rogers as suggesting that one should "let it all hang out" is, I think, too simple. Learning, even learning under the conditions of freedom to learn, always takes place within a set of constraints. In a good classroom (by which I mean a classroom in which students have the freedom to learn) there are always limits. A good teacher, in my view, will ask herself two questions (and try to answer them honestly). First question: What can I do?; what can I not do? Second question: What will I do?; what will I not do? In these questions one encounters the constraints of the classroom. But in the honest answers to these questions (and honesty begins, in my view, in knowing the difference between matters of capability, capacity and franchise, on the one hand, and matters of volition and tolerance, on the other) both teacher and students encounter these constraints with open eyes. A teacher might think, "If I refuse to give this standardized test, I will lose my job. I will not give up my job for this. Therefore, I will give this test. [And I will not tell anyone that I am giving it because the district requires me to give it. I will acknowledge that this is a matter of not being willing to lose my job for this.]" Or, "I do not like cleaning paint from the floor. I will make it a rule that students cannot paint the floor. [And I will tell them why this is a rule: because of my likes/dislikes.]" Freedom requires limits. But freedom requires open-eyed acknowledgement of the true sources of all limits.
A member of our faculty teaches "psychological counseling" by having students counsel one another. He allows students to use only Rogers's client-centered therapy because, he says, "it's the only therapy that can do no harm." I would encourage you to think about a student-centered approach to education because it can do no harm. A student-centered approach to teaching would require you, as a teacher, to engage in a close and honest inquiry into the kinds of limits you wish to impose on your students. It would require you to give up any inclination to find answers to the question, "How best to teach?" in techniques or in lesson plans or in prefabricated approaches to education. It would require you, instead, to confront the limitations on your own life and to embrace the questions that might lead you beyond those limits in your own personal quest. It would require you to look at the chains you have fashioned for yourself and to the decorations you have put on them to make them more sightly. A student-centered approach to education discourages you from finding ways to weasel into the lives of your students, and, instead, encourages you to find the things that you really want to be onto. If you approach your work in this way, you would have to acknowledge your own desires and look desire in the face as it shows up in those beings you will call your students. But saying that a student-centered approach to education would require you to focus so much on yourself is just another way of saying that it is an approach to education that will do no harm. It is a way to teach for freedom and a way to provide students the freedom to learn.
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