WHAT ARE SCHOOLS FOR?
The previous day we had stacked 300 bales of hay. On this day we had dug the potatoes and carrots for the weekend farmers' market. Chip Conquest, a student in the Masters in Teaching Program 5 years ago, has been working this 50 acre farm in Wells River, Vermont, since he graduated with his teaching certificate and masters degree. He was cleaning the carrots; I was resting. He asked, "So, what do you think schools are for?"
Chip was always a fairly quiet and very modest guy. In fact,
I hadn't known, before this visit, that at age 16 he and a friend
bicycled 10,000 miles around the country. He had worked in the
locals schools, private and public, for the years he had lived
in Vermont. He had done a good job and was happy with long term
substitute positions. Now, with his two children approaching
school age, he had started to think about starting his own school.
I had seen all the books we used in the program strewn about
the house. He hadn't a lot of time for reading during the summer,
but he was thinking more quickly now as the prospect of sending
his children to the school in which he taught approached. So,
in his quiet and modest way, Chip asked, "What do you think
schools are for?"
I reminded him that I was more of a social critic than a philosopher
of education or schooling. I started to remind him how I had
talked about things in the teacher education program. Criticism,
I had said many times then, meant "saying what one sees
using a language that forms a judgmental matrix but that strives
always and only for precision of description that can move one
to respond well in a set of specific circumstances." I told
him that I thought it was more important to talk carefully about
what schools actually do, do that talking together and publicly,
and to begin that thinking with provocative descriptions of what
one sees in the schools, than it was to make proposals about schools.
Of course he had remembered this line, and of course he knew
who he was talking to. Chip kept cleaning the carrots, smiled
a little, and looked up at me. "So, what are schools for?"
Because resorting to being Chip's teacher again failed (he was, after all, no longer a student), I tried being an academic. I told him what others said schools are for. There's the academic left who think that schools are for individuals. Schools are for arming people against society. Schools are for the people, these academics, starting with Rousseau, say. On the other hand, the academic right think that schools are for society. Schools are for people to attend so they can become educated and learn what they need to know in order to become fully functioning citizens of the society of which they are members. I told him about something I didn't think he had read, something the philosopher Richard Rorty said about education:
When people on the political right talk about education, they immediately start talking about the truth. Typically, they enumerate what they take to be the familiar and self-evident truths and regret that these are no longer being inculcated in the young. When people on the political left talk about education, they talk first about freedom. The left typically views the old familiar truths cherished by the right as a crust of convention that needs to be broken through.... The right usually offers a theory according to which, if you have truth, freedom will follow automatically.... On the leftist's inverted version of Plato, if you take care of freedom-especially political and economic freedom-truth will take care of itself.
Because I'm a good academic I even gave him the footnote so he could add another book to the stacks he didn't have time to read.
Chip kept cleaning the carrots, but he got a little more serious.
"It seems to me," he said, "that if someone if going to teach in a school and if one is going to send his children to a school, both of which you do and both of which I will do, he ought to have an idea of what schools are for."
He wanted me to stop saying what others, including the teacherly I and the academic I, thought. He wanted to have a conversation with me about this topic. So I thought a bit and then did the only responsible thing I could. I told him about the conversation Bernie Bergen and I had had for the previous two days down in West Lebanon, NH. Bernie is a colleague of mine from Dartmouth. He's retired from Psychiatry and Sociology and he's writing a book on Hannah Arendt and the Final Solution. I had read Bernie's chapter on Arendt's view of "the political" before getting to Lebanon, and he and I had had a little talk about it. I thought the only responsible thing to do was to continue the conversation, this time with Chip.
I told Chip that I had been talking with Bernie and the conclusion of that conversation might go something like, "Schools are for providing the opportunity for people to find out that they don't know some things." I don't mean that in the trivial sense that you go into a class and take a pre-test and both you and the teacher find out what you don't know so that at the end of the ten weeks, when you take the final, it will be clear to everyone that you have learned something. And I don't mean this as an opposition to the stupid statement made by one of the candidates for SPI who said every sixth-grader has a right to be ignorant (like every kid should go to school and have his relative level of ignorance certified and permitted). I mean this in the divine sense that you encounter in Plato's Republic, Book II. There, after those who are not capable of inquiry have withdrawn from the scene, Adeimantus gives a long argument in favor of injustice, but he admits that he is not quite sure of himself; he has stated his case with vehemence, he says, only because he wants Socrates to be clear with him. Socrates says, "there is something truly divine in being able to argue as you have done for the superiority of injustice, and remaining unconvinced in your own arguments." Schools are for people who would aspire to this sort of divinity: where they can know an argument so well that they can state it clearly and with passion and yet remain unconvinced; where they can then encounter others who know other arguments equally well; where people can try out ideas, together and publicly. Schools are for those who want to have the vitalizing experience of uttering that destabilizing phrase, "I don't know," but doing so in the best company.
Now you know the punch line. Schools are places where people have the chance to say what they know and where they encounter others who induce in them the experience of doubt; schools are places of encounter that lead people to experience the fact captured in the phrase, "I don't know." Now that you have the last line, I can tell you, as I told Chip, about the conversation that led to this simple idea.
Bernie Bergen finds the best articulation of Arendt's view of "the political" in her final work, The Life of the Mind. For her, the life of the mind consisted in three separate activities: thinking, willing, and judging. As Bernie puts it, "Thinking corresponds to the experience of withdrawing from the world to contemplate events that are past; willing to the experience that nothing compels me to do the very project I have already willed myself to do; judging to the experience that without knowing why, I know the difference between what is beautiful and ugly, good and bad, just and unjust, etc." Arendt describes these activities of the mind in unusual ways, but in a way that leads, eventually, to a social, public conceptualization of "the life of the mind." It is a conceptualization of the life of the mind that would make a wonderful bedrock on which to build an answer to the question, "What are schools for?" I'll give you a brief overview of my understanding of each of these activities.
Thinking, according to Arendt, is an unworldly activity. Schools will tell you that they are there to help you learn to think, to make meaning of the world, to give meaning to life. Bergen says that, for Arendt, thinking "is a dismantling of the meaning of the self." "We are thinking," Bergen writes, "when we withdraw from the world into a soundless dialogue with ourselves whose subject is the representations of memory, and whose purpose is a quest for the meaning of what no longer exists: the appearance of the self in the manifold scenes of life." This is an endless, slippery, never finished quest, that is, if one is thoughtful. Arendt's model of thoughtfulness is Socrates who claimed "the right to go about examining the opinions of other people, thinking about them and asking his interlocutors to do the same." And the Socratic dialogues never get anywhere. You never get a definition of virtue or justice or knowledge. "This kind of pondering," Arendt says of Socrates, "does not produce definitions and in that sense is entirely without results.... Thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements of good and evil, in short, on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics. These frozen thoughts, Socrates seems to say, come so handily that you can use them in your sleep; but if the wind of thinking, which I shall now stir in you, has shaken you from your sleep and made you fully awake and alive, then you will see that you have nothing in your grasp but perplexities, and the best we can do with them is share them with each other."
Thinking is solitary, unworldly, disruptive, destructive. When you say, "I know...," you are only uttering a "frozen thought." Thinking, in Arendt's terms, warms things up, brings on a thaw, and ideas begin to crack.
Willing.
Most teachers would be very happy if they saw their students experience a difficulty in the world, reflect on it, then willfully go about their lives in a better way. Some would think of this as development; others would think it a change in cognitive structure; others would see a complex chain of behavioral cause and effect. Almost everyone would be inclined to call a close, observable connection between reflection (thinking) and willful action elicited by an encounter with the world "education."
Arendt does not envision that sort of connection between thinking and willing. In fact, she doesn't even think willing has that dimension of purposefulness about it that most educational theories require it to have. "The hallmark of willing," she writes, "is our power to initiate something altogether new, something that we realize every instant we can also leave undone. Our will is the originator of actions that are not explicable by preceding causes. Such actions spring from the incalculable power of willing and are as spontaneous and unpredictable as life itself, which the will closely resembles. In contrast to reason, the will is our organ for the future; it possesses the power to make present to the mind the not-yet dimension of reality." ["Dare to be a beginner." Rilke] Willing is the expression of freedom. Willing is the capacity to begin anything anew, including a understanding of the self, and to not continue that which we have willed to begin.
To appreciate the radical character of this conception of the mind, conduct a little thought experiment. Imagine a student, let's think him a second grader, who knows that the next moment in his school day is radically open possibility, and nothing else. That as he approaches that moment, he knows that he is not bound by anything-not the rules on the blackboard, not his first grade teacher's evaluation of him, not his name, not his sense of self, not his race/class/gender. Imagine a student who knows he is free. Then-and this is the experiment-imagine how the teacher will look at this student.
"Thinking is a quest for the meaning of what was. Willing is action toward a future which is not yet," Bernie Bergen writes. With thinking and willing, Arendt says, "we are dealing with matters that never were, that are not yet, and that may well never be." Thought experiment #2: Try to imagine yourself writing catalogue copy for a course called, "Thinking and Willing."
Judging is the activity of the mind where the individual reencounters the world and the other people in it. It is the activity around which the 2nd grader who know himself free and the teacher engage. Thinking and willing are limitless activities. There is no limit to the degree to which thinking can dismantle all previous thoughts. Willing knows no limit because it acts toward a future that is not yet. Both of these activities encounter no limits in the world. But when you make a judgment-this is good; that is bad-you are likely to encounter an other who will say, "No, that is good and this is bad." Judgments always are limited; they are limited by the judgments of others in the world. Judging relies on you sharing the world with others. "The power of judgment," Arendt says, "rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought processes of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity. This means, on the one hand, that such judgment must liberate itself from the 'subjective private conditions,' that is, from the idiosyncrasies which naturally determine the outlook of each individual in his privacy and are legitimate as long as they are privately held opinions, but which are not fit to enter the market place, and lack all validity in the public realm." Judging does not require one to know the Truth of the Overarching, Underlying Form of Justice; judging involves one in the public discussion about the guilt or innocence of this or that person accused of this or that crime. Judging does not require prior agreement on the Truth of What Is Beautiful; judging is a public discourse about this or that piece of art. Judging does not require wisdom; judging involves one in the common sense. "Common sense," Arendt says, "which the French so suggestively call the 'good sense' ... discloses to us the nature of the world in so far as it is a common world.... Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass."
It ought to be immediately clear that a world in which the life of the mind, as conceived by Arendt, is active is not today's commonplace educational world. Students often think that schools are for learning to express themselves and their opinions (and for finding out the range of possible opinion on every possible topic). Teachers encourage students to tell their stories, to express themselves, to form and have opinions; and they protect those who do this successfully from any wandering Socrates who might think about things. Education seems to encourage people to develop their own senses of things and discourages people from forming common sense. Commplace schooling seems to value the privatizing of the individual and the protection of people's frozen thoughts, not public engagement with others who might induce doubt.
But there are some places left where you can still have the experience of encountering the judgments of others which induces doubt in you, where you can have the divine experience of making an argument passionately, vehemently, and yet not being sure of yourself. Here at this college and in this program, for example, is one place. In books, you encounter others' arguments about the good of this or that, the beauty here or there. In class-this class-you encounter embodied arguments of scholars. The British educator Michael Oakeshott says of his education,
When I consider ... how I first became dimly aware that there was something else in learning than the acquisition of information, that the way a man thought was more important than what he said, it was, I think, on the occasions when we had before us concrete situations. It was when we had, not an array of historical 'facts,' but (for a moment) the facts suspended in an historian's argument. It was on those occasions when we were made to learn by heart, not the declension of bonus (which, of course, had to be learned), but a passage of literature, the reflection of a mind at work in language. It was on those occasions when one was not being talked to but had the opportunity of overhearing an intelligent conversation.
Here, in lectures, in seminars, in the library, you get to be like Plato watching Socrates: you get to see minds at work. You get to see arguments form and reform. You get to audit conversations in which people say, "This is what I've read; this is what others say; this is the best argument that can be made for this position; but finally I don't know how best to think," the beginning of an intelligent conversation. And, eventually, once you renounce the impulse merely to express yourself and once you give up the having of opinions, you get to carry on the conversations that matter. You get to be like Chip, out there cleaning the carrots and demanding that his former teacher, now his friend (not to mention guest), say what he thinks and see where that leads.