The Polemics of Education
Abstract
In his book, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, Wendell Berry describes two poles of how one understands “economy”: (a) “the kind of economy that exists to protect the ‘right’ of profit” and (b) “the kind of economy exists for the protection of gifts.” In this essay I describe a similar polemic in how one understands “education.” I suggest that, correspondingly, there are two kinds of education. There is (a) the education of commodity—the kind of education that seeks to produce persons who will maintain and increase the economy of profit. And there is (b) the education of community—the kind that seeks to foster persons who will maintain and preserve the essential characteristics ofcommunity. From the description of these two polemical views of education, it is clear which of them is the more favorable and sensible.
Introduction
In his marvelously lucid and nobly passionate essay, “Sex,
Economy, Freedom, and Community” Wendell Berry writes,
There are two kinds of human economy. There is the kind
of economy that exists to protect the ‘right’ of profit,
as does our present public economy; this sort of economy
will inevitably gravitate toward protection of the
‘rights’ of those who profit most. Our present public
economy is really a political system that safeguards the
private exploitation of the public wealth and health. The
other kind of economy exists for the protection of gifts,
beginning with the ‘giving in marriage,’ and this is the
economy of community, which now has been nearly destroyed
by the public economy. (Berry, 1993: 138)
What Berry describes in this passage are two poles of how one
understands “economy.” The effect of the description is to expose
which pole a person is drawn to and to thereby align the opposing
forces for battle, just as a magnet will expose and align the
opposing forces in a collection of iron filings. Any given
individual may have some attraction to both poles, but the effect
of being placed within the magnetic field is to show which pole
the individual is most attracted to, and therefore which pole he
will eventually get to. Thus, even for a person who finds himself
in sympathy with both of the economies described, the polemical
description serves to expose the strongest force within him; the
one that will, when faced with a situation that demands a show of
allegiance to one side or the other, expose his true bent.
In this essay, I want to describe a similar polemic, a polemic
of education that shadows—or perhaps foreshadows—Berry’s polemic
of economy. I will investigate the idea that, corresponding to
these two kinds of human economy, there are two kinds of
education. There is the education of commodity, the kind of
education that seeks to produce persons who will maintain and
increase the economy of profit. And then there is the education
of community, the kind that seeks to foster persons who will
maintain and preserve the essential characteristics of community.
Let’s look at each of these kinds of education more closely.
The Education of Commodity
The former sort of education—the kind that seeks to produce
persons who will maintain and increase the economy of profit—will
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inevitably gravitate toward the transmission and dissemination of
information, since information will be seen as a means to profit
and power. Information is the commodity an education provides in
exchange for tuition and taxes collected for the support of
public education. The education of commodity sees the student as
a consumer or a customer, the faculty member as a producer or a
distributor, and the various administrators as salesmen,
advertisers, accountants, retailers, inventory-takers, stockers,
transporters, customer-servicers, quality-controllers, and all
sundry ‘managers,’ including CEO’s. The product is “knowledge”
(i.e., information), and the market is all those who desire power
(“knowledge is power”) and/or profit (“it pays to think”). In
this sort of education—commodious education—it is natural to
speak of the educated as “productive members of society,” and to
measure the success of an educational institution by means of
“outcomes,” “exit interviews,” “placement,” “endowments,” and
“alumni support.” The guiding factor for educational institutions
under this kind of economy—an economy of profit—will be what
prospective consumers or customers (or their so-called parents)
want, rather than what they may need. Indeed, such an economy
maintains that there is no distinction between what is wanted and
what is needed: what was previously a want is now a need, and
what was previously needed is now a mere (and often an esoteric)
want. A primary tenet of this economy is that any commodity, no
matter how unnecessary, can (with persuasive advertisement,
constant repetition, and sex appeal) be made into, first, a want,
and then a need.
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In other words, fashion. Either by setting it or by following
it, the successful commodious educational institution must be in
fashion. It must have “the latest,” which is, so the assumption
goes, also necessarily “the best.” It must also seek to
entertain, for that is how you retain and attract new customers.
Consequently, there must be a continuous effort (and continuous
funding) for new programs, new projects, new innovations, new
equipment, new facilities, new ideas, new methods, and—above all—
new positions, filled with new people. This newness must be
maintained, even when things are the same. An old idea, for
example, must be newly “packaged”; a traditional method must be
“incorporated” into a new methodology; an old building must be
“renovated” (or, at the very least, renamed); there must be a new
“Center for _______ Studies” or a new “Institute for _______
Research” or a new “Center of _______ Excellence.” Implying, of
course, that this is the first or the most excellent time and
place that such studying or researching has happened. We must
have new positions for the same old jobs, and new names and faces
of people in those positions—who nevertheless turn out to be the
same ones we had before. Fashions, of course, often return, but
they return as “new” fashions.
What a student learns from a commodious education, besides the
information it provides, is to erase from his mind the
possibility that there is any other kind of human economy except
an economy of profit. A student learns this by having the lesson
reinforced by the very system or institution he is in—a system or
institution where those who are paid most are taken to be the
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most important; where success is measured solely in quantitative
terms (e.g., how much outside funding did so-and-so raise for the
university, how many and how big were the grants he was awarded,
how many publications does he have, etc.); where honors and
public recognition are given to those who campaign for it, either
openly or by subtler, “friendlier” means; where a positive image
and favorable customer comments are more important than any tried
and true standard. Standards—especially academic ones, which are
less interesting and harder to define in quantitative terms—are
only as valuable as the profit they might bring. (In fact, if you
can convincingly say you’ve got standards without actually having
any, that would be the most profitable.) If a student sees these
things happening in the workings of the very educational system
or institution he is a part of, he will inevitably think less of
the possibility of there being any other kind of human economy.
The habits that he might have formed with a different sort of
education—habits such as thinking through and deliberating about
the possibility of other kinds of human economies, formulating
and clarifying to himself ideals of thought and conduct, making
distinctions between what is and what ought to be, asking whether
and to what extent he is responsible for the way things are:
habits that, when they become second nature, constitute the very
goal of a liberal education—these habits are mercilessly
squelched, if they were ever started to begin with.
In short, commodious education attempts to reduce all judgments
to judgments of quantity; to render students incapable of
qualitative judgment. And it does so both in its form—persons
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incapable of qualitative judgment are most often found in
positions of authority (they have actually been promoted there by
others incapable of qualitative judgment)—and in its content—the
more information, the better. And “the latest” information too;
after all, we live in a fast-paced, ever-changing world. The
“cutting edge” is the best edge—never mind anything away from the
edges. To the commodious, the old, simply because it is old, is
dull and boring.
The worst and most dangerous implication of this kind of
education is that, as in an economy of profit, human beings are
devalued. In commodious education teachers are, in principle,
dispensable, just as factory workers are in an economy of profit.
The most important people are the managers, those who
‘administer’ the business of education. As in any business, these
administers are supposed to do all they can to maintain and
increase as much as possible the profit margin. This entails such
ignoble tasks as advertising (i.e., finding the lowest common
appetite of your prospective customers—children and teenagers, in
the case of education—and tweaking it for all it’s worth),
recruiting (i.e., flattering), fund-raising (begging), finding
tax loopholes (cheating wherever you can get away with it),
haggling for bargains (including bargains in hiring), keeping the
customers happy (lying to them in order to insure that “the
customer is always right”), and, if things start to go bad,
getting out with as much as you can for yourself. Above all,
these people make it clear that administrative positions,
especially their own, are an absolute necessity (which is why
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they—the positions, not the manikins that commonly fill them—are
deserving of categorically higher salaries). These kind of
inhuman administrators will be more numerous and more prominent
in a commodious education.
As for teachers, the administrators of commodious education
know that, practically speaking, the time has not yet come to be
able to do without them, but they—the teachers—are thought to be
inefficient, compared to many of the more technologically
advanced tools we are now employing to transmit information. And
to the extent that teachers are still needed, the administrators
of commodious education will seek to use them in such a way as to
increase profits. In many commodious educational institutions
this means larger classes (e.g., lecture sections with perhaps
several hundred students), lots of low-paid part-time teachers
and graduate student teaching assistants, “distance learning”
(courses offered via satellite, cable, internet, etc.), extensive
use of multi-media, standardized textbooks and curricula, and a
constant mantra of one or more of the following expressions: “You
are not a teacher, you are a facilitator,” “Technology—computers,
the internet, videotapes, television—is just a tool,” “The times
are changing more rapidly than ever before and we must change
with them,” “A paradigm shift is taking place in education,” “The
virtual university is the university of the future.”
These expressions, and the frequency with which they are
bandied about, are indicators of a philosophy of education that
places education’s end squarely in the commode. Such an education
produces neither health nor wealth, only waste, even though it
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may be profitable—to those who promote it. The cost of this
profit to the few is the loss of humanity for all. Just as an
economy of profit inevitably looks upon other persons as mere
means to an end—thereby eliminating the virtues of generosity,
respect, gift-giving, and treating persons as ends in themselves—
commodious education teaches students that persons, too, are mere
tools to be used and managed for profit. This dehumanization is
implicit in the very language of educational administration:
personnel offices are now offices of “Human Resources”;
departments are now “educational units”; students are no longer
taught by teachers, they “access their own learning experiences”
with the help of “facilitators.” Mere tools. No matter the
euphemistic abstractions, they still reduce people to tools.
At many public Universities in the United States, including the
University where I teach, commodious education is the philosophy
of education held to by most of its administrators. Many Deans of
Colleges traditionally antithetical to the idea of commodious
education—Colleges of Arts, Humanities, or Fine Arts—have
swallowed the bait that would, if their faculty follows them,
spell the end of these Colleges. These Deans do not seem to
understand that there is no use for the humanities or for the
arts in a commodious education. Such studies serve no practical
end in a world of profit—they can be flushed. If they can be
salvaged at all, it will only be by turning them into social
sciences (for sciences can be used for profit) or businesses. The
study of literature, for example, could be transformed into a
branch of sociology or political science; the study of art could
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be shaped by its use as a means of advertising; the study of
music might be transformed into a preparation for entering the
entertainment business. These transformations are a reality at
the University and in the College where I teach. So it is not
surprising to find a local Dean of a College of Fine Arts and
Humanities saying,
If we are to succeed in attracting more and better
students this college has to be more entrepreneurial
collectively . . . There is a paradigm shift which is
occurring with increasing speed. This is the shift from
an emphasis from [sic] superior teaching to superior
learning. With the advent of the computer and other
technological milestones, the way we teach students is
changing. We can no longer teach them everything they
need to know. There is simply too much information at
their fingertips. We have to teach them how to access
their own learning experience to be successful teachers.
As if we—Arts and Humanities faculty—could ever teach the
students everything they needed to know: as if what they need to
know is “information”: as if the “success” of both teaching and
learning consists in producing androids that can “access their
own learning experience.” (Can anyone tell me what this means? Is
a computer—or any other ‘technological milestone’—like a bank
account, or a filing cabinet, full of ‘learning experiences’
which we simply have to help students learn how to ‘access’? Does
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it mean we can all quit teaching literature, philosophy, music,
dance, painting, etc. and become equipment operators, perhaps
‘specializing’ in ‘accessing’ websites and video catalogues
devoted to what we used to teach?) If this counts as “successful”
education, then the degrees conferred by this University—and in
the College of Fine Arts and Humanities—are really degrees in
Diddling for Profit and Pleasure. This is apparently how some
commodious educators think we will humanize and cultivate
students.
Nor is it surprising to find the Dean of Continuing Education
at the same local University speaking the same language. In an
article in the local newspaper she writes,
We are in the middle of a paradigm shift. Directly and
indirectly, technology has influenced education for the
better, and all indications are that the trend will
continue. . . .
. . . the ease of access to all sorts of information is
phenomenal. But is it “good” information or “bad”? A new
skill—or really a revised skill—we all need in this age
is the ability to evaluate what we find on the Internet
and determine whether we should believe what we read or
even act on it.1
1 This quote is from the local newspaper where this University is located. Theidentity of the University and its two Deans will remain anonymous, but they actually exist, and the quotations are accurate.
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She does not go on in the article to say anything more about
what this new (or revised) skill that we will all need consists
in, nor how such a skill will be taught. The assumption is that
this skill is currently being taught at her University (and
elsewhere). Clearly, such a skill will be the most important
skill of all in an age where any and all kinds of information is—
almost literally—at our fingertips. But just as clearly,
commodious education is, in principle, opposed to the acquisition
and development of such a skill. Such an evaluative skill
requires standards by which to make proper judgments. If, for
example, we are to judge whether or not the news report we are
reading over the internet is factual or not, we would have to
know what counts as a fact, and also what counts as reliable
reporting. We then are in a position to ask whether or not this
particular report is accurate. This seems to be the primary kind
of evaluation that this Dean of Continuing Education has in mind,
because the rest of the article takes education to consist
mostly, if not completely, in the acquisition of information. But
even this kind of discernment—knowing what to take as factual and
what not—is not advantageous to commodious education, because the
facts might show how unnecessary, costly, and extravagant are
many of the programs, courses, building projects, and
administrative positions that we currently have. In fact, facts
can hurt profits—tarnish images, lower self-esteem, expose
inefficiencies, lead to the elimination of certain positions,
etc. As you might expect, then, this Dean of Continuing
Education, being a proponent of commodious education,
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conspicuously avoids giving any sort of factual accounting for
her claims that “We are in the middle of a paradigm shift” and
that “technology has influenced education for the better.” What
‘facts’ could she give to support such sweeping claims? What
information has she been accessing? And how has she evaluated
this information for its facticity? Having some familiarity with
Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift, I am amazed that she is
able to escape the historical situation she and the rest of us
are in and say with such confidence that we are, indeed, “in the
middle” of such a paradigm shift in education. Either that, or
she’s just repeating the latest buzz. I’ll bet it’s the buzz.
But the evaluation skill must be more than just being able to
tell whether the information ‘accessed’ is factually accurate or
not. A more fundamental ‘skill’ is being able to distinguish
between information and a sales pitch. So called information can
be ‘given’ for a whole host of reasons, very few of which are
simply for the benefit of the one to whom it is given. A
salesman, for example, can give you perfectly accurate
information, but his purpose is to sell you something, usually
something you don’t need. Producing indiscriminate spenders is,
of course, the goal of a commodious education, so the development
of this evaluative skill—distinguishing between good and bad
information on the basis of its intended purpose—is not to be
encouraged. The development of such a ‘skill’ would require that
we ask students to consider questions like “What is the measure
of a good life?”; “Is there an order or a purpose to this life
that would constitute its true fulfillment?”; “What is the value
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of money, possessions, and time compared to the value of a fine
or virtuous soul?” and to seek the answers to such questions with
the fervor that is their proper due. Clearly, the development of
this kind of evaluative skill would be counterproductive to an
economy of profit, and would not be included in the curricula of
commodious education. Thus, as we find in the article written by
the Dean of Commodious Education, she manifests the symptoms of
this unused evaluative skill:
Practically every advertisement, TV commercial or piece
of information about anything has an Internet site where
you can get more information or, for that matter, buy
something. Think of the uses of the Internet for
learning. As a college student in apparel merchandizing,
my daughter went onto the Internet and visited the sites
of the French and Italian couturier houses. It would have
been months before she got access to those collections in
traditional print form.
The connection here between “getting information” and “buying
something” is telling, as is the unquestioned assumption that
apparel merchandizing is an academic subject. (Like many other so
called areas of study, it cannot be found in the university
before about 1950. That is, it only appears in less than two
percent of the history of higher learning since the Greeks. The
figure goes down if you include oriental cultures.) There is
little doubt in anyone’s mind that by far the most common use of
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the internet is not simply to “get information”—not for the sake
of the learner as a human being who by nature (as Aristotle says)
desires to know—but, rather, it is to buy and sell. Everything
from batteries to bombs to babes. The most common internet suffix
is .com. The sites with the most hits invariably have something
to do with sports, or sex, or both. The internet is primarily a
marketplace, not a school. Unless, of course, you think of school
as a kind of marketplace too—a place where we instill the
practices and the ‘skills’ of buying and selling. Commodious
educators serve their cause by making this false identity between
school and marketplace, and making it in such a way as to present
it as something we ought to be cheerful about.
Of a piece with the devaluing of human beings by seeing them as
both users of commodities and as commodities themselves, is the
commodious educator’s speaking of them as objects in general—
complex objects, to be sure, but objects nonetheless. Not only
does this remove all moral and ethical questions from the commode
of education, it also removes the mystery and wonder of what it
means to be human and the joy that can come from contemplating
the beauty of Creation. By considering the human organism an
object, we make it both explainable and usable—explainable by
modern neuro-psychology (or some other variant of the sciences),
and usable by the politically powerful (both within the microcosm
of an educational institution and within the macrocosm of the
public economy). For the commodious educator, this is a source of
optimism: the more science tells us about the human organism, the
quicker and more effectively “we”—those select few who are in the
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know—can use it to complete the educational goal of turning out
“productive citizens” to serve the economy of profit. Once again,
the Dean shows her commodious colors:
Indirectly, technology has helped us understand better
how humans learn. Through technology that scans the brain
in action and other research that is being reported with
greater frequency, scientists have learned how the brain
receives information and then processes it. Using this
information, teachers can more effectively and
efficiently facilitate learning for all sorts and kinds
of students.
Noticeably absent from this effervescent passage are any
specifics that might help us understand it. Any (noncommodiously)
educated reader will want to have certain expressions clarified,
such as “how humans learn.” How they learn what? Which humans
does she have in mind? Another puzzling expression is “the brain
in action.” Is the brain ever inactive? And what, precisely, is the
connection between brain activity and learning? I can think of
many examples of someone whose brain activity might be very high,
but who fail to learn much at all. What do these scientists—the
ones who have “learned how the brain receives information and
then processes it”—what do they take to be the “information” that
the brain receives? And what makes them think that the “brain
processes” they observe constitute “learning”? (Wouldn’t you
already have to know what learning is in order to associate or
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identify a brain process with it?) When they “learned” that this
is what the brain does when someone learns, what “information”
did their brains receive and what “processes” did their brains go
through in order to determine that they were discovering the
secret machinations of “learning”? (Did they learn this, or did
their brains learn it? Or was it cooperative learning? And was it
“brain friendly” learning?) It is hard to imagine a more stunning
piece of nonsense than this passage. Or a clearer indication of
how commodious education wastes the intellect.
As in our current public economy where we have a political
system that safeguards the private exploitation of the public
wealth and health, a commodious education exists to safeguard the
private exploitation of our nation’s greatest wealth and future
health: our youth.
The Education of Community
I now want to move to the other pole: the education of community.
To clarify the coordinates of this pole, it’s perhaps best to
begin with a practical and particular case. At the University
where I teach, as well as in the schools where my children
attend, one of the recent changes in the curriculum has been the
elimination of what we used to call Home Economics, and the
introduction of a new “science”: Family and Consumer Science.
Now, this may seem to be merely a change in nomenclature, but the
truth is that Home Economics has been eliminated from the
curriculum. It is true that many of the same skills that used to
be taught in Home Economics—sewing, cooking, money management,
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child care, and so on—are now taught in Family and Consumer
Science, but what is missing from the “science,” because it is
now a science, are the underlying but invisible attributes that
once made these skills valuable to the home. (The same attributes
that have been eliminated in making sex education a matter of
merely “informing the public” so that we all can practice “safe
sex.”) By teaching these skills as part of learning a “science,”
we necessarily leave out any question or discussion about the
humanizing (or dehumanizing) effect in the practice of these
skills. There is a sense in which they are quite different from
other skills, such as accessing the web or learning to program
your VCR. For the skills associated with home economics have
always been learned and practiced with the aim of serving others
rather than one’s self alone. To view these skills as part of the
practice of a “science” is to ignore or misunderstand their
uniquely human purpose, and to leave out of one’s economy those
invisibles that make it an economy of the home.
But an economy of community—and the home is a community—by
definition includes these invisibles and gives to them their
proper place in the hierarchy of goods. It can easily be seen
that if these invisibles—i.e., the virtues of trust, mutual
respect, diligence, patience, thrift, discipline, forgiveness,
and so on—are included in an economy, they will occupy a higher
place than the material goods with whose management they are
concerned. For example, in an economy that includes thrift, how
money and material goods are managed will be far more important
than how much there is to manage. The spirit of gift-giving will
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be far more important than the gifts themselves. To give an
example of pertinence to those who teach the humanities,
developing a student’s ability to read literature will be more
important than the particular works of literature you read with
them. This is not to say that material possessions, gifts,
certain works of literature, etc. are unimportant, nor that some
are not better than others, but only that their importance as
objects is less than the moral and intellectual virtues by which
they are judged and used.
And there is another aspect to the logic of invisibles that
justifies their high place in any economy that includes them. It
is in the peculiar nature of these invisibles that they can only
increase by their being expended, not by being saved or hoarded.
Aristotle perhaps says it best: the virtues are acquired through
practice. A man becomes courageous by practicing acts of courage.
He becomes just by practicing just actions; kind by practicing
acts of kindness. Aristotle admits that he does not know the
causal connection between the practicing of these virtuous acts
and the acquisition of these virtues—it is not a science of
material or efficient causes—but he does know that there is a
connection, and that it is in the person’s power to choose to
perform these acts. This is why it is possible for us to fail to
become virtuous, and why we are also culpable in this failure.2
The important thing to see here is the way in which these
invisibles grow: they increase by being expended. The more they
are distributed, the more numerous they become and the stronger
they become. They are not “commodities,” for there is no limit to
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them. And if they were commodities, it would make no sense to
compete for them; they would destroy the commodity market by
making it irrelevant. Thus, a commodious education, like an
economy of profit, necessarily excludes these invisibles from its
curriculum. But an education (and an economy) of community
includes in its curriculum both the visibles and the invisibles;
both wisdom and knowledge. It exists to both form and inform. It
is, in a word, humane. This “home economy” is the economy of
community Berry has in mind.
It is ironic—but not unexpected—that the term “community” has
become the political byword of the very people it was intended to
separate out. Commodious educators are, of course, aware of the
rhetorical power of the language of community, and, like full-
blooded profiteers, trumpet their allegiance. I see no way to
prevent this. But it does point out the need for clarification of
the concept of community, so that we can have some way of
distinguishing the Sophists of Education from the philosophers of
education (i.e., those who merely talk about it versus those
whose talk is mimetic of what they also do).
As that last sentence implies, the right place to start is with
Plato’s Socrates. And, since I have also made use of Wendell
Berry’s distinction between two kinds of economy, it is natural
to first look at the different constitutions Socrates discusses
in the Republic. I will start with Socrates’ discussion of the
oligarchy, for it provides a point of departure for the
clarification of “community” and “an education of community.”
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In Book 8 of Republic, Socrates says of the oligarchic
constitution, that “it is the first to admit the greatest of all
evils.” “Which one is that?” asks Adeimantus. And Socrates
replies:
Allowing someone to sell all his possessions and someone
else to buy them and then allowing the one who has sold
them to go on living in the city, while belonging to none
of its parts, for he’s neither a money-maker, a
craftsman, a member of the cavalry, or a hoplite, but a
poor person without any means. . . . this sort of thing
2 See Aristotle (1962), Bk.2, ch.1; Bk.2, ch.4; Bk.3, ch.5.
References
Aristotle (1962) Nicomachean Ethics, Martin Ostwald (trans.). New York: Macmillan.Berry, W. (1993) ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community,’ in Sex, Economy, Freedom &
Community, pp. 117-173. New York: Pantheon Books.Cowper, H.S. (1899) Hawkshead: Its History, Archaeology, Industries, Dialect, Etc.
London: Bemrose and Sons.Lewis, C.S. (1996) The Abolition of Man. New York: Touchstone.Plato (1992) Republic, G.M.A. Grube (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett.Plato (1989) Symposium, Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (trans.). Indianapolis:
Hackett.
David RozemaDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of Nebraska at KearneyKearney, NE, 68849, USA
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is not forbidden in oligarchies. If it were, some of
their citizens wouldn’t be excessively rich, while others
are totally impoverished. (Plato, 1992: 552a-b)
The context of this passage is a discussion Socrates has with
his young companions about the various types of unjust
constitutions and the various types of unjust souls that
correspond to these constitutions. These unjust constitutions are
discussed in descending order, from the least unjust,
aristocracy, to the most unjust, tyranny. The oligarchic
constitution lies halfway in between, and it is significant that
the oligarchic constitution is the first constitution to be
completely materialistic, for it holds wealth to be the highest
good and the measure of worth for all other things. It is
identical with an economy of profit, and its manifestation in
education is what I have been calling “commodious education.” But
the oligarchic constitution is also “the first to admit” this
“greatest of all evils”: allowing someone to “go on living in the
city, while belonging to none of its parts.”
Now why would Socrates call this “the greatest of all evils”?
First, note that the evil is a composite: it isn’t just that the
oligarchy allows someone to sell all his possessions, nor is it
just that someone else is allowed to buy all these possessions,
and neither is it only that this person without means is then
allowed to go on living in the city. The evil is all of these
things put together. Second, remember that this is the evil of
the oligarchic city, not just a person in the city. This means
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that it is the city as a whole that will suffer from the evil,
not just certain parts of it. Obviously, there will be many
individuals in the city who will have no objection to this
practice: nobody else is forcing them to buy or sell all their
possessions, so they must desire to be either excessively rich
(the buyers) or totally impoverished (the sellers, who then feed
off the public coffers). The question is whether or not the
allowance of such a thing is good for the city as a whole.
Now we can answer this last question in two ways: by
investigating the consequences of allowing this buying, selling,
and then accommodating, or by investigating what a whole (or
wholesome) city is. The former investigation takes it as a
premise that there could be a city in which such a thing is
allowed, and then asks whether or not it would be good to allow it.
The latter investigation premises that such a thing might be
good, but then asks whether or not it would be good for a city. In
either case, the investigation reveals a resounding ‘No!’
Berry gives several examples that illustrate the detrimental
consequences of an oligarchic view of economy. He cites the
destruction of the local wool economy of the parish of Hawkshead
in the Lake District of England, where, due to the introduction
of machinery for looms and for spinning by the large corporate
manufacturers,
idleness took the place of thrift and industry among a
naturally industrious class, for the sons and daughters
of the estatesmen, often too proud to go out to service,
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became useless encumbrances on the estates. . . . The
estates became mortgaged and were sold, and the rich
manufacturers, whose villas are on the margins of
Windermere, have often enough among their servants the
actual descendants of the old estatesmen, whose
manufactures they first usurped and whose estates they
afterwards absorbed. (Cowper, 1899: 209)
This pattern has been duplicated in countless other settings,
from the displacement of laborers in 19th century England that
precipitated the Luddite rebellion, to the economic destruction
of the high-altitude barley fields and grazing pastures of
Ladakh, to the rapid disappearance of family farms in the
midwestern United States. Of the Luddites, Berry says,
These were people who dared to assert that there were
needs and values that justly took precedence over
industrialization; they were people who rejected the
determinism of technological innovation and economic
exploitation. In them, the community attempted to speak
for itself and defend itself. . . The Luddites did, in
fact, revolt not only against their own economic
oppression but also against the poor quality of the
machine that replaced had them. (Berry, 1993: 130)
But let us be clear here. In speaking of the “poor quality of
the machine,” Berry does not mean that a machine might not be
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efficient, accurate, reliable, fast, or powerful. What a machine
lacks is something that lies outside the rhetoric of an economy
of profit: it lacks the care, the deliberation, and the aim that
lies behind the work of a workman. A machine can ponder neither
the value of any product, service, or endeavor, nor the best,
most beneficial means to those ends. And a machine cannot find
joy or fulfillment in excellent and significant work. But an
economy of community places these strictly human values and
abilities at the top of the economic scale. An oligarchic
constitution—i.e., one that follows an economy of profit—does not
even recognize these elements, and thereby prevents the city from
even its own kind of “success”: it is a city divided with itself
and will eventually lead to a war over wealth and possessions.
This might lead us to ask whether or not the allowance of
idling is something we’d find in a true city. That is, would it
truly be a city if it allows such idling? Of course, we can easily
imagine a place where such idling is allowed, and we can see that
such a place would have the appearance of a city. There would be
houses, businesses, hospitals, parks, shopping centers, roads,
schools, governmental offices, a library, and so on. Would this
be enough to make it a city? Geographically, politically,
sociologically, forensically, and nominally, yes. But if a city
is an idea—or, perhaps better, an ideal—what then? Socrates’ words
give us a clue: in a true, ideal city, its citizens recognize
each other as human beings, not as objects to be used for
material gain. In a true city, no one would be allowed to sell
all his possessions, for this would mean depriving another person
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of his right and obligation to become virtuous, and his vocation
and joy in becoming human. Likewise, in a true city no one would
be allowed to buy all the possessions of another because it
tacitly legitimizes treating others as a means to one’s own ends,
and spoiling—literally spoiling—those who are allowed to be idle.
We can at least begin to see, then, that the consequences of
allowing the complete buying and selling of a person’s
possessions will not be good for the city, but will only fill the
coffers of a few at the expense of dehumanizing others. We can
also begin to see that, even if we were to admit that this
allowance might be good for some, it is not good for the whole—
i.e., the city. Such an allowance would disallow us calling the
oligarchy a community, for a person in such a constitution will
not be a subject to be communed with, but rather an object to be
used.
But to prevent the argument from inclining too much towards the
metaphysical, the practical problem is this: the oligarchy is the
first constitution whose continued existence depends on its
leaders—whether they are the parents in the home, the political
leaders of the city or country, the CEO’s of the corporation, or
the teachers and administrators in the schools—teaching and
fostering in their children, citizens, employees and students a
way of life that is contrary to their own. For example, on
university campuses across the nation you will find
representatives from VISA, MasterCard, Discover, and many other
credit companies. Class schedules are printed with dollars
contributed by these companies so that they can advertise their
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easily acquired credit cards to university students. It is
concentrated, deliberate marketing aimed at members of an age
group typically lacking in self-control and having both the new
opportunity to satisfy their sensual and consensual pleasures.
These companies know that many of these students will, if given
the means, spend indiscriminately and lavishly. They promote and
encourage such a way of life. But do the owners and CEO’s of
these companies live this way themselves? We might on first sight
think so, but for all the spending they do, it is all done for
profit more than for pleasure—or, their profit is their pleasure.
Such a businessman cannot continue to be a businessman unless he
simultaneously does these two things: (1) encourage, entice,
persuade or program others to spend indiscriminately and lavishly,
and (2) not live like this himself.
Other examples quickly come to mind, from the politician who
loudly and proudly condemns the shameless self-promotion of his
rival, to the thoroughly modern administrator who constantly
speaks of the need for “quality teachers,” “more efficient
spending,” and “academic standards.” It is ironic that, if the
goal in education were to teach students to be wise and prudent
consumers, the surest sign of success would be their refusal to
pay tuition and taxes for most of the education they are getting.
And how does this oligarchic constitution get instantiated in
the context of education? We might imagine Socrates saying:
“Commodious education is the first to admit the greatest of all
evils inflicted upon children.” “Which one is that?” “Allowing a
student to completely give up his will, thought, and character
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into the hands of someone else and allowing that person to
control him, and then allowing the one who has given them up to
go on attending classes, while contributing nothing to the
shaping of his soul or his community, for he’s neither a student,
a teacher, a citizen, a leader, an honest worker, an artist, nor
a guardian, but a poor person without any means of reflection and
thoughtful action . . . this sort of thing is not forbidden in a
commodious education. If it were, some of its members wouldn’t be
excessively vain and selfish, while others are extremely
credulous and apathetic.”
We cannot honestly deny that commodious education has allowed
the continued presence in our schools of both idle students and
idle “educators.” What conscientious teacher has not been
frustrated by the overwhelming flood of forms and other kinds of
paperwork needed for “assessment,” “tracking,” “strategic
planning,” and so on; or by the irrational belief that the
quality of a teacher cannot be determined by simply watching her
teach? We must, it seems, give the idlers some idling to do so
that they do not appear to be idlers. Non-idling students suffer
from this idling, too. With idlers in the classroom, they suffer
by not being challenged and cared for. Is it any wonder that
tensions are so high in our schools today?
And who profits most from the presence of these idlers in the
educational system? As in the oligarchic constitution, it is the
idlers themselves (supported by the public coffers), and those
who can make money off of them by convincing these idlers that no
real progress can be made in education without them, the
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profiteers. This last group includes both businesses and
commodious educators. The oft-heard cry that the public
educational system is a drain on the country is thus not without
some basis. A commodious educator, by seeing students as
customers, and knowledge as a commodity which he can or must
market and sell, is in the position of having to always entice,
persuade, and attract. There is no concern to actually shape and
develop the student’s mind and character (through intellectual
exercise and discipline, and through passional catharsis) so he
can graduate into a reflective, responsible, and right-spirited
human being, for such a result would be the death-blow to the
commodious educator. Not because he would be out of “customers”
(there is always another young generation), but because it would
mean that the graduate would no longer feel the need for the
educator. The graduate may be grateful to the educator, but he
would no longer be beholden. The “deal” would be terminated,
unless the commodious educator can somehow convince the student
that she needs to come back for more of what only he, the
commodious educator, can offer. This convincing takes many forms—
there is “new information” that is essential, or “new techniques”
that are on the cutting edge, and only the educator can provide
it; the educator is an “expert” and will always remain so; more
attractive facilities, and more entertaining programs; etc.—but
it always proves to be contrary to what many of those same
commodious educators pronounce: that an education is liberating
and humanizing. Thus, the long-term consequence of commodious
education is the gradual dissipation of the heart and the mind.
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It is not an education for freedom, but an education for slavery.
It is the mere appearance of education. Properly speaking, this is
no education at all.
Contrast this with an education that primarily aims at the
development of individuals—human beings—who are thoughtful,
cultivated, and independent. An educator with this aim cannot see
the student as an object, but only as a subject. And, as a
subject, someone like himself, possessed of a will, an intellect,
and a heart, and therefore capable of success or failure. Such an
educator will not see his teaching as a business deal, an
exchange of goods or services from which he seeks to benefit
himself or “society,” but as the privileged task of passing on a
gift to another soul. C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, describes
the contrast this way:
Where the old [education] initiated, the new [education]
merely “conditions.” The old dealt with its pupils as
grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to
fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper
deals with young birds—making them thus or thus for
purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the
old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to
men: the new is merely propaganda. (Lewis, 1996: 34)
Although Lewis is here speaking primarily of the formation and
transmission of proper passions, the principle applies across the
curriculum. For one of the goals in, say, the sciences is to form
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and transmit orderly and critical thought. Both the mind and the
heart are in need of this formation; but in either case, the end
is not to produce well-built machines or even well-informed
decision-makers, but well-formed souls. Education-as-propagation
can therefore take place only if that education is a
manifestation of practical love.
As Berry points out, practical love begins and is rooted in the
“giving in marriage.” The same kind of trust, commitment, and
mutual care that exists in marriage—or ought to exist in marriage
—is present in any communal relationship. He says:
[T]he fall of community reveals how precious and how
necessary community is. For when community falls, so must
fall all the things that only community life can engender
and protect: the care of the old, the care and education
of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing
down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature
and the lives of wild creatures. . . .And so here, at the
very heart of community life, we find not something to
sell as in the public market, but this momentous giving.
If the community cannot protect this giving, it can
protect nothing—and our time is proving that this is so.
(Berry, 1993: 138)
But
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[M]arriage, family life, friendship, neighborhood, and
other personal connections do not depend exclusively or
even primarily on justice—though, of course, they all
must try for it. They depend also on trust, patience,
respect, mutual help, forgiveness—in other words, the
practice of love, as opposed to the mere feeling of love.
(Berry, 1993: 139)
Included in this list of “personal connections” is also that of
teacher to student. Not that a teacher is to “have feelings” for
all of her students, but rather that teaching is an exercise in
practical love. Commodious education, however, in “liberating”
students and teachers from the principles inherent in community
life (for remember that it allows for deception, conditioning,
propaganda, and indoctrination), has inevitably become a matter
of mere political power. Just as the widespread loss of trust,
patience, respect, and forgiveness has increasingly reduced
marriage to a political institution and made marital disputes
into matters for the courts to decide, we find that public
education has turned down the route of attempting to correct bad
character and low motives by means of pseudo-scientific
“counseling” and simply handing out “information.” We also are
seeing an alarming increase in lawsuits against schools from
parents (and sometimes even from students) claiming that the
schools have not “educated” their children. That this path is no
longer the last, saddest, and least taken resort in trying to
find the fault behind a mean or broken spirit, reveals how far we
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can travel down the wrong path “exploiting and spending the moral
capital built up by centuries of community life.” (Berry, 1993:
142)
So now, with these coordinates clarified, we can better see the
pole we are at. We can see that the second sort of education—the
kind that corresponds to this second kind of economy in seeking
to foster persons who will maintain and preserve the essential
characteristics of community—will inevitably gravitate towards
the practice and personification of proper care: care for one’s
family, friends, neighbors, countrymen—even one’s enemies. In an
education of community, knowledge-as-information will be
subservient to knowledge-as-practice; good character will be even
more important than accurate information; power will be governed
by practical love. What gets taught, and how it gets taught, will
be determined and shaped by the idea that an education—like
friendship, citizenship, or marriage—cannot be bought or sold,
only given and received. Unlike commodities—which have a price,
and are finite and temporary—the elements of an education of
community will be taught and arranged in order of their
universal, infinite, and eternal value; their pricelessness. In
an economy that includes such priceless things, there is no
danger and no fear of these things being inequitably distributed,
because a universally valuable, infinite, and eternal good can
not be diminished by its distribution, even a universal,
infinite, and eternal distribution. And any attempt to make such
priceless goods unavailable to anyone, or to hide them, or to
deny their existence is a confession of the worst sort of
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ignorance: ignorance of even the possibility of love. In an
economy of community, practical love for others is itself the
highest virtue because without it no community is possible, no
matter what other virtues or goods might exist. Thus, in an
education of community, this virtue is the foundation of both the
content and the form of education. Practical love—actions,
principles, and knowledge undertaken, instilled, and taught for
the good of others—is not only the first and foremost idea
taught, it is also the essential form of a true teacher. Unlike
commodious education, an education of community will be one whose
content fits its form: what gets taught will be commensurate with
the character of those who teach it. And it will be those who
care for their students, can ably teach them, and are committed
to doing so—the very ones who would not willingly do anything
else—who will determine what gets taught.
As Socrates says in Plato’s Symposium, love is not itself
divine, but it becomes divine when it is rightly directed and
when it is rightly given: for the good of our fellow man. So it
is in the shaping of this spirit of love—to love what is worthy
of our love and to hate what is worthy of our hate; to desire
what is most desirable and to abhor what is most horrible—that
the humanities and the fine arts can be most affective. (Plato,
1989: 201d-212c) In these arts we are shown the possibilities of
good and evil, even the uneasy mixture of them within an
individual soul or community. But these things are shown in such
a way as to test and to shape our passional responses to them. As
Plato has shown us, the civil war between our reason and our
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appetites will be decided by the disposition of our spirit. The
danger in commodious education, as it is in an economy of profit,
is the shriveling of the spirit. A commodious education produces
spiritless people: “men without chests.” (Lewis, 1996: 35-36)
Only a passionate desire for the good will ensure a victory for
an economy of community. It is that passion, that desire for the
good (and that hatred for evil), that can (and ought to be)
evoked and shaped in the study and practice of the arts and the
humanities. But such practical love can only be taught in an
education of community.
With respect to these two poles, it is time for us to ask
ourselves where we are, and where we ought to be.
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