A&HH6577
From Studyplace
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Teachers College • Columbia University
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- Robbie McClintock, Instructor
- Office hours @ 334G Horace Mann, Tuesdays 5:00-6:30 p.m. or by appointment
(Please email me to schedule a specific time slot)
- Office hours @ 334G Horace Mann, Tuesdays 5:00-6:30 p.m. or by appointment
Course overview
During the 2007/08 academic year, participants in the Topics in American Educational Thought will concentrate on ideas about the historical role of education in the 20th century. Social and educational critics often advance views about what will prove educative, or fail to do so, within the context of the prevailing historical circumstances. At any historical juncture, no one knows for sure what will effectively educate persons and groups as they cultivate their capacities to cope with unfolding historical circumstances. Much criticism, reflection, and speculation sets forth ideas about what knowledge, skills, and values will prove most effective or worthwhile as people pursue their fulfillment in the face of historical uncertainty. What knowledge, values, beliefs, and skills do people need in order to flourish as they cope with their historical circumstance? That question is the pedagogical problem.
Over the past century, many have thought deeply about the pedagogical problem, seeing it to be essential to the full, formative education through which persons, individually and collectively, struggle to realize their potentials. This formative education is continuous, pervasive, ubiquitous — a comprehensive process in which formal schooling embeds as an important, but limited episode. Currently, however, explicit discussion of education has narrowed markedly, privileging the vicissitudes of schooling. Both the profession and the public largely limit their concern to the learning outcomes schools are producing, or failing to produce, as measured through short-term tests.
No child will be left behind, our leaders stipulate, but no one is saying much about where they might be going, or about how they might really get there. Sometimes broader ideas about the pedagogical problem tacitly structure debate over school programs, practices, and policies, but rarely in a full, explicit way. Usually, in discussing formal instruction, educators and public leaders ignore the pedagogical problem and take the established ends-in-view of schools and colleges as given, unquestioned objectives, relative to which their leadership may succeed or fail. With attention blinkered, a simplistic, narrow understanding of the pedagogical problem comes to dominate educational thinking, for instance, in the way commentators have drawn connections between mastering a few basic skills, enforced through incessant testing, with the American capacity to compete in a high-tech, global economy.
Such considerations do not do justice to the power and complexity of the pedagogical problem as people actually sense it in the circumstances of their lives. The culture at large pulsates with people struggling to find what information, ideas, values, and skills they need, personally and in common with others, in order to achieve competence and worth — fulfillment in life. The vital drama in life, conveyed by history and biography, cultural criticism, novels, plays, and film, the stuff of comedy and tragedy, turns largely on the pedagogical problem, the human struggle to master in life those cultural keys to the fulfillments that persons seek. When educational leaders purvey simplistic, sterile prescriptions through stunted visions of the pedagogical problem, the public will sense incompetent futility and withhold commitment and resources while students will sense pretentious hypocrisy and channel their aspirations away from officious studies. Educational leaders frequently complain that the popular culture undermines educational authority, but they would be wiser to hypothesize that they generate little authority because they voice an understanding of the pedagogical problem that is egregiously limited relative to the perception of its depth and difficulty that people intuit through the culture at large. To strengthen their educational authority, public leaders and educators need to engage the pedagogical problem in its fullness. During the 2007/2008 academic year, we will pursue that goal through Topics in American Educational Thought.
A structure of inquiry
People experience an urgency to the pedagogical problem because they feel themselves fated to suffer its consequences, and perhaps to enjoy them.[1] What common knowledge — what information, ideas, values, and skills do people need to share, with what degree of commonality, in order to form the capacities to achieve fulfillment in their lives? We will seek to understand the pedagogical problem in 20th-century American thought in relation to the need for common knowledge in the historical experience of recent generations. We will engage it through a set of humanistic studies in a digital commons, a group inquiry structured by short weekly readings and driven by independent research and writing within a digital commons, www.studyplace.org.
StuidyPlace is an open wiki where anyone who is interested can join to respond in diverse ways to the question, What educates? Each week during the 2007/08 academic year, participants in the inquiry will start off discussing an article or book section by or about someone who has contributed in interesting ways to thinking about the pedagogical problem in its American context. We will group these readings and discussions around six significant challenges, long-term historical contingencies that carry in them both opportunities for meaningful betterment and for vital degradation.
Over two semesters we will study what keen observers have said about the pedagogical problem, sampling six overlapping ways of viewing it, and we will try to understand the means with which people might attain the knowledge, values, beliefs, and skills requisite to meet this problem.
- In the Fall semester, we will start with the persisting concern that the members of advanced societies are caught in an historical change of phase, driven by unprecedented developments in demographics and material life, fundamentally ignorant of what they need to know in order to live well in the emerging phase of historical life. We will turn then to the question whether contingent, self-governing polities can effectively mobilize sound public judgment to manage their internal and external interactions with sufficient foresight and competence. Then we will close the Fall semester considering the pedagogical problem as it arises as people try to realize their hopes and aspirations while coping with currents of political angst, fear, terror, and paranoia that diverse groups propagate for diverse reasons.
- In the Spring semester, participants will reflect on the pedagogical challenges arising as the members of a polity confront disjunctions between the working principles implicit in their prevailing patterns of action and their professed ideals, wondering whether their city on the hill might be a work of hypocrisy, self-deception, and fraud? Then we will take up the question of what knowledge, skills, and values people need to master as they find themselves coping with risks and uncertainties that may be hard to perceive, exaggerated, or far off in time or space, nevertheless having to act in these situations aware that the consequences can potentially be costly, disruptive, and difficult. Lastly, we will close the course examining the pedagogical problem posed by conditions of decadence in which people find themselves enervated, unable to muster the will and energy needed to meet evident challenges that they face with decisive collective action.
By no means do these six matters constitute the whole of the pedagogical problem as people have experienced it over the past century. But these matters set enough of the pedagogical problem before us to begin putting ideas about education, formal and informal, into a realistic, more bracing context. Full and clear ideas about the pedagogical problem are crucial because they define the state of mind in which individuals and the society as a whole will engage in educative work. The level of effort that persons and polities can put into their educative work varies immensely according to whether they perceive it to be worth great effort, whatever the difficulty, or meaningless trouble, even when easy. Our leaders have been complacent about education, not because they pay it no attention, but because they pay attention to it, over-simplifying complexities, ignoring refractory challenges, and trivializing what is at stake. Humanistic studies in a digital commons aims to shake such complacency.
- ↑ In the face of inordinate difficulties, people will often feel the urgency of the pedagogical problem, yet believe it to be such that they cannot deal with it satisfactorily. In such a condition, they will often react to seeming opportunities with a fatalistic nonchalance and hostility, convinced that the larger situation will undercut whatever efforts they make.
Course grading
Topics in the History of American Educational Thought is a 'pass/fail course; if you want a letter grade, take some other course. I am not interested in how participants perform relative to each other or relative to some abstract norm of expectation. Participants will pass the course by constructively engaging in the work of building a digital commons – reading reflectively, discussing thoughtfully, and contributing effectively to the StudyPlace wiki.
As graduate students, participants should rely on their capacities for self-evaluation. Evaluative grades may make modest sense as useful feedback in courses through which one acquires certain structured skills, say how to do factor analysis, yet even with such skills, actually using them effectively for significant purposes is the best feedback. In actuality, evaluative grades probably have more to do with motivating students to overcome their recalcitrance in working through material they perceive to have little intrinsic interest. Participants in Humanistic studies in a digital commons should anchor their work in their personal academic interests, bringing those to bear in advancing collaborative inquiries. Students interested in the instructor's basic expectations about graduate work should read "Some thoughts on graduate study" by Robbie McClintock (http://studyplace.org/files/transfer/2003_on_doctoral_study.html)
This course does not offer a variable point option.
Meetings
Introductory
- What are the basic concepts and resources we will use throughout the course?
Sep 06: Common Knowledge and the Pedagogical Problem
Sep 13: Henry Adams and the Contingency of Education
- Discussion Reading:
- Becker, Carl. “The Education of Henry Adams.” The American Historical Review. vol. 24, no. 3 (April 1919): 422-434. Online.
A Change in Historical Phase as the Pedagogical Problem
- When something changes from one state to another, as water does when liquid water freezes into solid ice or boils away as gaseous steam, a change of phase occurs. Historical observers sometimes describe far-reaching developments as changes in historical phase in which the conditions before and after seem to have undergone a transformation, a change of state, with problems and possibilities emerging in the new state that were wholly different from those characteristic in the old. Human demographics, economic and technical productivity, cultural and educational participation, and social and geographical situations have all displayed unprecedented changes starting roughly in the mid-nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century, awareness took hold that these changes presented an unusual pedagogical problem, inducing deep uncertainties about traditional verities, and still these uncertainties have yet to be dispelled. more. . . .
Sep 20: Jane Adams and the Urban Immigrant
- Discussion Reading:
- Addams, Jane. “A Function of the Social Settlement.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 13 (May 1899): 33-55. Online.
Sep 27: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on the Interests of Women
- Discussion Reading:
- Kimmel, Michael, and Amy Aronson. “Introduction to the 1998 Edition.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Online.
Oct 04: Robert E. Park and the Study of Urban Life
- Discussion Reading:
- Park, Robert E. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment.” The American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 20, no. 5 (March 1915): 577-612. Online.
Oct 11: Thorstein Veblen on Changing Economic Categories
- Discussion Reading:
- Veblen, Thorstein. “Industrial and Pecuniary Employments.” Publications of the American Economic Association. Vol 2, no. 1 (February 1901): 190-235. Online.
Informing Public Judgment as the Pedagogical Problem
Changes in communication, production, and management that took hold early in the twentieth century became starkly apparent in the historical experience of World War I. Thoughtful observers realized that very powerful means of public mobilization had become available. Circumstances would force the all-out deployment of these capacities with unpredictable consequences for governance and public life. What were the implications for democratic principles and practices?
Oct 18: George Creel and the Committee on Public Information
- Creel, George. “Public Opinion in War Time.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 78, Mobilizing America's Resources for the War (July 1918): 185-194. Online.
- Vaughn, Stephen. “First Amendment Liberties and the Committee on Public Information.” The American Journal of Legal History. Vol. 23, no. 2 (April 1979): 95-119. Online.
Oct 25: Walter Lippmann and the Phantom Public
- Lippmann, Walter. “The Press and Public Opinion.” Political Science Quarterly. Vol. 46, no. 2 (June 1931): 161-170. Online.
- Lippmann, Walter. The Phantom Public. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, (1925) 1993. Chapters IX-XVI. Online.
Nov 01: John Dewey on the Problems of the Public
- Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1927. Chapters 4-6. Online (Later Works, Vol. 2).
Nov 08: General Education in a Free Society
- Harvard University. General Education in a Free Society; Report of the Harvard Committee. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945. Chapters I & II. Online.
Overcoming Fear and Paranoia as the Pedagogical Problem
As the collective circumstances of life become more organized, more stabilized, their possible breakdown becomes potentially more and more catastrophic. Historical contingency means that breakdowns in the order of things will occur, some historically fast moving like a hurricane or a world war and others drawn out like the Cold War or the onset of global warming. How can people, living under ordinary circumstances, enjoying security and stability, prepare themselves to cope with unimaginable emergencies?
Nov 15: Eric Fromm and the Fear of Freedom
- Fromm, Erich. The Fear of Freedom. 2nd Ed, Routledge, 2001. (Definitely Chapters 4 & 5; Chapters 6 & 7 if you have time)
Electronic reserve: Chs. 4 & 5; Chs. 6 & 7.
eBray Online (You need to install a free eBrary reader in your browser).
Nov 29: Harold D. Lasswell and the Garrison State
Please Remember: We meet this week back on the 7th floor of Thorndike Hall.
- Lasswell, Harold D. “The Garrison State.” The American Journal of Sociology. 46.4 (1941): 455-468. Online.
- ---. “Does the Garrison State Threaten Civil Rights?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 275. Civil Rights in America (1951): 111-116. Online.
Dec 06: From Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis
- George, Alice L. Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. pp. xiii-xxiii, 1-41, & 115-170. eBrary.
Dec 13: McCarthyism and "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"
- Richard Hofstadter. "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." In Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1965. pp. 3-40. [Online]
Interlude
Dec 19: Contingent Education and the Pedagogical Problem 2
Jan 17: Contingent Education and the Pedagogical Problem 3
Achieving Professed Ideals as the Pedagogical Problem
Jan 24: The problem of professed ideals 1
Jan 31: The problem of professed ideals 2
Feb 07: The problem of professed ideals 3
Feb 14: The problem of professed ideals 4
Judging Risk and Uncertainty as the Pedagogical Problem
Feb 21: The problem of risk and uncertainty 1
Feb 28: The problem of risk and uncertainty 2
Mar 07: The problem of risk and uncertainty 3
Mar 21: The problem of risk and uncertainty 4
Reversing Decadence and Enervation as the Pedagogical Problem
Mar 28: The problem of decadence 1
Apr 04: The problem of decadence 2
Apr 11: The problem of decadence 3
Apr 18: The problem of decadence 4
A Look Back and a Look Ahead
Apr 25: The Owl of Minerva 1
May 02: The Owl of Minerva 2
The grade of Incomplete is to be assigned only when the course attendance requirement has been met but, for reasons satisfactory to the instructor, the granting of a final grade has been postponed because certain course assignments are outstanding. If the outstanding assignments are completed within one calendar year from the date of the close of term in which the grade of Incomplete was received and a final grade submitted, the final grade will be recorded on the permanent transcript, replacing the grade of Incomplete, with a transcript notation indicating the date that the grade of Incomplete was replaced by a final grade.
If the outstanding work is not completed within one calendar year from the date of the close of term in which the grade of Incomplete was received, the grade will remain as a permanent Incomplete on the transcript. In such instances, if the course is a required course or part of an approved program of study, students will be required to re-enroll in the course including repayment of all tuition and fee charges for the new registration and satisfactorily complete all course requirements. If the required course is not offered in subsequent terms, the student should speak with the faculty advisor or Program Coordinator about their options for fulfilling the degree requirement. Doctoral students with six or more credits with grades of Incomplete included on their program of study will not be allowed to sit for the certification exam.
The College will make reasonable accommodations for persons with documented disabilities. Students are encouraged to contact the office of Access and Services for Individuals with Disabilities for information about registration (166 Thorndike Hall). Services are available only to students who are registered and submit appropriate documentation.
