Defining education/Barnard
From Studyplace
5. What was Barnard thinking?
These changes — the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the industrial revolution, the struggle to correlate the state with the nation — perturbed the optimistic foundations for self-reliant self-cultivation. Traditional households had a Janus-faced unity, serving internal and external functions simultaneously, both the site of outward activity — work, the interaction with public authority — and of internal support — day-to-day routines, bearing and rearing children, sociability. Increasingly, people were occupying two independent realms: an important external world for work and civic engagement in office, factory, and public spaces counterbalanced by an increasingly private home, a remnant after the economic and political functions of the household had been wrenched away into public space. From the early 1800s on, the European bourgeoisie imposed upon itself a more cautious, self-repressive sensibility, familiar in its Anglo-American variant as Victorianism and its German as Biedermeier.
Overall, this was an indoor world, which was often portrayed by contemporary artists in the evening, when the lamplight could be used to provide a warm, diffuse glow to people and things. The Biedermeier was a comfortable, cosy style, perhaps best captured in one of this characteristic terms, Gemütlichkeit, which J. P. Stern defines as a "curious and unique configuration of time-honoured habits, rich meals, ancient or at least old-fashioned furniture, solid broadcloth and solid moral maxims . . .".[1]
Some of us of a certain age will have experienced in childhood the remnants of Biedermeier as we curled up in a thickly upholstered living-room chair after a long Thanksgiving dinner with a few family and friends to read reassuring stories in the Saturday Evening Post with all the appropriate sentiments visualized on its Norman Rockwell cover.
In 1843, Karl von Raumer published the first two parts of his Geschichte der Pädagogik, a typical Biedermeier book, and a few years later he followed it with Die Erziehung der Mädchen, which epitomized the Biedermeier ideas about womanhood. Let us consider it briefly for it gives a sense of the pedagogical reaction that had taken place, and exemplifies a style of educational history that would have influence in the United States. Raumer began his short treatise satirically criticizing efforts to educate girls to be fashionable, and then he turned to his own views, starting with a paean to marriage, emphasizing the responsibility of the father to take an active part in educating his daughters through the home. "Girls belong to their own families; family life is their school; their own father is the normal father, their own mother the normal mother; such is the ordinance of God. The older girls, in assisting their mothers in housekeeping, in teaching the younger children, &c., learn in the simplest and most natural way what they will subsequently need to know, as housewives; without being pedantically and coarsely instructed about their future duties as mothers. . . ." Raumer continued with advice about how to avoid defects in home life that would miseducate girls and he then turned to a key division, "Religious and moral culture," addressing many enumerated topics, number 17 among them being, "Relations of the sexes":
If girls ask, . . . how do little children come? they may be told, that the good God gives the little child to the mother, and that its guardian angel is in heaven, . . . but that they, the inquirers, need not know, and can not understand, how God gives the children. . . . The mother's duty in this particular is, to keep her daughter's thoughts so fully occupied with what is good and beautiful, that she will have no leisure for curiosity about such matters. A mother whose mental authority over her child is what it ought to be, will only need to say once, seriously, "It would not be well for you to know about it; you must avoid hearing it spoken of." . . . That girl is fortuante whose mind remains a genuinely childlike mind until she becomes married.
After a long section on the pedagogical value of holiday celebrations, Raumer arrived at the next substantial division, "Household occupations, higher culture," in which the latter was carefully modulated to complement the former. "A Christian and educated housewife, whose judicious and patiently efficient industry proclaims itself in but few words . . . ; whose virtues and talents render her home a more pleasant and peaceful spot to her husband than any other; who trains up her children in Christian simplicity and piety . . . ; — such a housewife should be the ideal result sought for by female education." And a bit below, "Culture, in young women, should never develop into learning; for then it ceases to be delicate feminine culture. A young woman can not and ought not to plunge with the obstinate and persevering strength of a man into scientific pursuits. . . . Only an entirely unwomanly young woman could try to become thoroughly learned, in a man's sense of the term; and she would try in vain, for she has not the mental faculties of man."[2]
If a single theme runs through Raumer's counsel about the education of girls, it is the primacy of the father's role, combined with the duty of the mother to follow his lead, with both together creating educative surroundings filled with a carefully controlled version of the culture, replete with that which is best in it after its pernicious elements have been carefully edited out. Throughout, Raumer voices an imperative: daughters, throughout their educations, should encounter only edifying influences. Raumer was the paternalist throughout, selecting out everything that might be unsuitable. For instance, Goethe was clear a German classic to be included, but only his safer work, with the result that Goethe frequently says his lines on Raumer's pages, always sounding serene, sentimental, uplifting, and safe, but the Faustian side is unwelcome. As Raumer neared his conclusion, he wrote about recreations. After the little ones had gone to bed at 6:00 and those not yet fully grown up at 8:00, parents and older children would relax together, perhaps with family friends as well. "This is the time for conversation, music and reading. The father may read aloud the greatest masterpieces of Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, &c.; and particularly such as the girls ought not to read for themselves, because they contain passages which should be omitted." The good father, ever vigilant and caring, will read the great masterpieces, and voice aloud what is left on passing over all that others ought not read for themselves. Here, in a nutshell, was Raumer's method operative in writing his history of pedagogy.
Raumer's History of Pedagogy strongly reflected these commitments. It grew to four volumes, the first two consisting of compact biographies of influential educators, starting with Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, continuing through the Pantheon of major pedagogues, ending with Pestalozzi. In his third volume, he surveyed historical examples of good instruction in the major branches of the school curriculum as he evaluated practice exemplified in a selective history of schools and teaching. The fourth volume, which appeared some years later, was really a separate book on the History of German Universities. In it he looked at university development from the 14th into the 19th centuries, taking Halle, Göttingen, and Breslau as his main examples, followed by an overview of characteristic academic practices.[3] The first two volumes read as a collection of separate essays. Great men lurch upon the stage, each in his individuality, and the coherence of the whole story derived, not from Raumer's capacity to explain the interconnections, but from the consistent pattern of evaluation that he applied to each figure with whom he dealt. Each oriented his work according to some pedagogical ideal, but what really interested Raumer was the resulting repertoire of practice for he held that even those pursuing dangerous ideals could hit upon worthwhile principles of practice. He summed up this repertoire in the third volume, and the work as a whole reflects an important change from the view of historical life held by Schleiermacher and his colleagues. To them historical life was the experiential ground for human creativity and the study of experience generated through it was an arena of inquiry into the open-ended question of what people could and should make of themselves. One wrote history in order to make sense of a contingent life and world and to construe what might be possible within it. In contrast, Raumer had a definite set of convictions, developed not from his study of history, but brought to his study of it.
Karl von Raumer was a mineralogist by profession who in his youth become intensely interested in Pestalozzi. Thereafter, he achieved considerably more success as a writer on education than as a professor of natural history. He was a patriot who fought against Napoleon and as he matured his cast of mind, reflecting his time, became increasingly committed to a conservative, rather fundamentalist Lutheranism. Raumer's older brother, Friedrich, was a successful jurist and academic historian. He was a distinguished professor of political science at the University of Berlin from 1819 until he served as a conservative member of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848. He wrote objective, well-documented political histories of law, statecraft, and politics in Europe since the 15th century and was the exponent of historical probity until Leopold von Ranke supplanted him in that role.[4] Karl von Raumer's introduction to his History of Pedagogy is especially interesting when read with some knowledge of what his brother stood for. In it, Raumer explicitly acknowledged the principles of an scholarly historiography. Readers normally expected an objective presentation from a historian, he observed, especially a presentation "free from love and hate." Objective history required the historian to refrain from expressing his personal opinions about the actions he sought to explain. But reader be warned, Karl von Raumer would have none of that. "Free from love and hate am I not, nor will I be; I will by my best knowledge and scruple hate evil and adhere to the good, just as I call neither the sweet sour nor the sour sweet." Raumer's History of Pedagogy was full of explicit judgments of right and wrong handed down on past practitioners, judgments sometimes about pedagogical worth, more often about moral and theological rectitude, or the lack of such. Luther's doctrines provided the foundations of good practice; secularizing pedagogues such as Montaigne or Basedow merited wary recognition for the advances in practice they might have made; and Rousseau, close to the anti-Christ in Raumer's view, should be studied with the utmost caution.
Of the 100 aphorisms in Lessing's Education of the Human Race, one of the founding documents of Neuhumanismus', the 4th had gone as follows:Education gives the individual nothing which he could not also acquire by himself; it merely gives him what he could acquire by himself, but more quickly and more easily. Thus revelation likewise gives the human race nothing which human reason, left to itself, could not also arrive at; it merely gave it, and gives it, the most important of these things sooner.[5]
At the end of the third volume of his History of Pedagogy, Raumer summed up the first three volumes by harkening back to Lessing's work in a declaration that had a Lessing-like aphoristic ring:
God is the educator of the human race; from Him and for Him is man created; the beginning, progress, and perfection of humanity is God's work. Let the educator know: for his human work to endure, he must look to God's work, to the Godly "education of the human race."[6]In short, Raumer's work was a major example of the reaction against the concern for the self-determination of historical life. Molding humans in the image of god, made possible through divine revelation, replaced the human self-education, the making of themselves what they could and should become, prized in the new humanism. The paternal historian was reading the great masterpieces with due diligence, writing to suppress what others ought not read for themselves. He did it by concentrating narrowly on the specific instructional practices developed by the tradition of humanistic education that stretched from the Renaissance to the early 1800s, accumulating the practices and deciding whether to let the associated purposes shine through by judging those against his understanding of their theological orthodoxy. The chief test was the degree to which a pedagogue upheld the doctrine of original sin.
We have seen to what absurd conclusions Rousseau was pushed by this unchristian premise [that man is by nature good]; to what unnatural views, by his constant reference to nature; to what sophistries, by his attempt to show that all wickedness is first implanted in the child, originally as pure as an angel, by adult persons. Luther's sound and healthy pedagogy is precisely the opposite of Rousseau's. The comparison of the two must convince any one that the division of educators into Pelagian and anti-Pelagian is a fundamental one, and of the greatest practical importance.[7]
Among the writers contributing to Neuhumanismus, few founded their expectations about human potentiality on the intervention of God's grace as the only means to avoid the doom of original sin. For the most part, following Rousseau, they were deeply Pelagian, taking as a starting point the hypothesis that insofar as humans are capable of the good, they are capable of it without the intervention of divine grace. Raumer's history was diametrically opposed to their efforts and ideas. In 1857, Henry Barnard started publishing translations of Raumer's four volumes on the history of pedagogy, and his treatise on the education of girls, in the American Journal of Education, a journal which stands, along with Horace Mann's Reports, as the foundation of educational scholarship in the United States. In German, Raumer's Geschichte had little influence, for it stood in a line of historical scholarship in which works before and after it were clearly less tendentious and more substantial. In English, Raumer's influence was great. Barnard published translations of historical materials, but nothing on the scale of what he published by Raumer. Within the American Journal of Education, the provenance of everything Barnard published was confused and jumbled, each volume a large pot purri of diverse materials from which readers might fish morsels to their taste.
Within the jumble of Barnard's journal, Raumer's work had enough form and substance for others to go back to it as a ground for further inquiry. For them, it would exemplify work hostile to important educational aspirations in the European heritage in two ways. On the substantive level, it conveyed outright hostility to views expressing strong optimism about human educability without intervention by a deus ex machina. And on a methodological level, it exemplified a way of using history, not as a source from which understanding of human options could be intelligibly developed, but as a copious collection of exempla with which truth, derived by other means, might better be exposited to those who were less mature and more naive. We have already encountered a variant of this methodological outlook in Cremin's interpretation of John Herman Randall's theory of history. The historian cannot find sound explanations for historical events immanent in the historical experience but must look to a body of theory derived from elsewhere, in Cremin's case, not from Luther, but "from George Herbert Mead and John Dewey in philosophy, Ruth Benedict and Ralph Linton in anthropology, Gordon Allport and Gardner Murphy in psychology, Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton in sociology, and Arthur F. Bentley and David B. Truman in political science, among others." The historian then describes the stuff of history as examples, in this case, of the interactionist conception of education that Cremin based upon this eclectic collection of ideas.
We can rest assured that this methodological practice did not come to Cremin direct from Raumer. But it is an understanding of good method that developed and spread through the 19th century by those who did not share Raumer's continuing faith in divine grace, but who did think it improbable that humans could educate themselves through an immanent understanding of their engagement with their surroundings. They wanted to find a way to generate valid direction from a source guaranteed by something external to human self-reflection.
