A&HH6577/A&HH6577-description

From Studyplace

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.

1. ↑ 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.