Addressing Education: Purposes, Plans, and Politics (Vol. I)
INTRODUCTION
Addressing Education asks readers to consider the purposes, plans, and politics informing educational theories offered by western thinkers from Plato (ca. 375 B.C.E.) to Paolo Freire (1968). The selection includes primary texts from classical, early modern European, South American, and American educators whose ideas have helped give form and substance to current educational practices. Each theoretical position bears the signs of its own historical, political, and sociological moment, addressing a particular, culturally-situated, educational problem, directly or obliquely.
The educational plans emerge out of a wide variety of political institutions: classed monarchies, dictatorships, republics, and democracies. They come from within old nations and new, from cultures experiencing the weight of oppression, the anxiety of turbulent change, or the waste produced by outdated systems and institutions. They seek to maintain the status quo, to imagine improved nations, or to make demands for radical new practices. Educators in this volume speak from their experiences as teachers and administrators, legislators, concerned citizens, social activists, theorists, and philosophers—some are simply revolutionaries. Together their ideas trace a path of western social and political change, economic development, and shifting cultural perspectives on education as it addresses poverty, race, gender, religion, class, and ideology.
With this selection, the editors have sought to bring together ideas that resonate not only in current thinking but with other selections as well. While Aristotle clearly has Plato in mind when he writes about education in Politics, he does not wholly accept Plato’s ideas. Montaigne’s opinions (1590) show up, in part, in John Locke’s lengthy and detailed plan (1693), as do some ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Locke’s work serves as either a touchstone or lightning rod, for his contemporaries—Mary Astell (1694) and Daniel Defoe (1697)—as well as for others in later centuries. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) creates his pedagogy in opposition to Locke’s, while in the 20th century, Stringfellow Barr (1950) uses Locke’s firm belief in educating through the authority of historic texts as the basis for Great Books programs. Critiquing Locke’s theories, Mary Astell initiates a mainstream discourse in English concerning the education of women, on which Defoe (1697) and Rousseau elaborate (and which is also challenged by Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolfe, John Stuarrt Mill, and others). By 1854, girls are included in England’s classrooms, but the problem then had become the influence of industrialization, efficiency at the cost of real learning, and dehumanization of the poor, as Dickens so pointedly critiques.
Thomas Jefferson’s work during the American revolutionary period and after (1767, 1818) brings different issues into the discussion, as can be expected in the shift from European forms of inherited power to a newly created representative democracy sorely in need of educated pofessionals and leaders. Jefferson extends the educational purposes of Aristotle and Plato to include opportunity for men other than those of the elite class. Jefferson’s plans provided access to professional education for any intelligent man who had the time and the support he required to spend his time studying instead of working to meet his own basic needs (1767). In a later writing, Jefferson offers a plan for free public education, leading to free university education, through a selective testing system that creates what may be the first model of "high-stakes testing." While Jefferson makes some headway toward greater inclusiveness, his plan does not offer opportunity to everyone in Virginia. During the 17th century, the Massachusetts public school system creates the model for non-discriminatory opportunity, which the work of Horace Mann (1848) compelled into a clear separation of church and state, although the effort made him extremely unpopular in some circles. John Dewey’s educational philosophy (1916) sounds the notes for inclusiveness again.
Contemporary with Jefferson, Heinrich Pestalozzi applies Rousseau’s principles of a "natural" education to teaching poor children in the Belgian countryside (1776). Much later (1912), Maria Montessori transforms the work of Rousseau and Pestalozzi into a program for the educating the urban poor in Italy. Her passionate commitment to truly public education and to her model of the most effective teacher finds reiteration in the teacher modeled by Highet’s The Art of Teaching (1950). Ironically, in the United States Montessori’s plans for educating the poor become the basis for a system of private schools for children whose families could afford to pay tuition. Currently, Montessori’s ideas provide the basis for home-schooling programs.
The childhood education of W.E.B. DuBois in the 1880s was provided by Horace Mann’s non-discriminatory Massachusetts public school system. Later, as a college student in Tennessee, DuBois was shocked to discover the condition of education for black children in the South. He spent his life trying to correct the injustices of public education in the United States, beginning with what he saw as the misguided leadership of Booker T. Washington. DuBois’s extensive world travel, along with his disciplined research in anthropology and sociology, led him to look beyond educational structures for causes of the Negro condition: in the United States, he saw a program for failure, institutionalized by the nation’s political-economic-educational systems. Carter G. Woodson, engaging some of DuBois’s concerns, changes the debate by proposing creative and insightful ways to help alleviate the problems (1933)—his Mis-Education of the Negro, however, calls for intervention in American life with a broadly directed, critical discourse aimed at establishing a program for producing "the new Negro."
Until the 20th century, public education made little effort to address the needs of the handicapped or disabled. The experiences of blind and deaf Helen Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, transformed the hard-working teacher and her intensely focused student into much celebrated examples of human triumph over physical obstacles to education. Their writings provide a fascinating account of how a severely handicapped child was taught to process language and communicate her experiences to others, to the extent that she could attend college, write books, and learn to speak well enough to give public lectures all over the world. Keller’s example inspired education for the handicapped throughout the globe, by both public and private means. Her incomparable ability to carry her message personally, around the world, moved human understanding of the disabled into totally new political, social, and philosophical territory.
In the latter half of the 20th century, Paolo Freire (1968) carried the principles of Pestalozzi, Montessori, and Mann into the impoverished, illiterate populations of Brazil and other countries, where he created programs to address education of the poor and adult literacy. Freire was jailed in 1964 in Brazil for his political views and charged with subversive activities. He was released and exiled to Chili where he continued his work.
The selections in this volume should provoke thought that challenges and clarifies how readers think of education today, in the United States and in other parts of the world. Perhaps such activity will aid in thinking about the educational programs that the United States seeks to impose on other populations. Most importantly, the selections should help readers explore their personal understanding of educational purpose, the relationship of educational plans to those purposes, and how political power—or simply the force of cultural tradition—can either facilitate or obstruct effective education. As students, educators, parents, and voters, everyone needs to address contemporary issues in education with a critical eye.
Peggy Pittas, Ph. D.
Katherine Gray, Ph. D.
