Defining education/Educators

[edit] 6. Who will educate educators?

What gives a professional the warrant to act on another's behalf?  This question, which naturally adheres to any pretense to expertise, became more difficult as dogmatic certainty broke down in the late 18th century.  Claims to an inherent authority, derived from the natural, divinely sanctioned order of things, diminished in their power to prepossess deference.  It was a virtuous question in the sense that asking it and having to answer it probably made elites associated with many functions more responsible and responsive in their ministration to human needs.  Across many professions the education of prospective members sharpened up, the recruitment of talent broadened, slowly but perceptibly, and attentive cultivation of the stock of skill and knowledge that gave it expertise deepened and improved.  With this situation, there arose the opportunity for significant disagreement, internal to each profession and elite, about the source of the authority with which its members could best develop their functions and assert their control over who could and could not perform them.

In late 18th-century Germany, such attention began to spread to the recruitment and preparation of teachers who would staff increasingly organized systems of schools.  This is not the place to recount these developments.  In the largest sense they are everywhere still unfolding and encompass many matters worthy of consideration.  Within the larger, ongoing movement, we need to narrow our attention to the milieu from which the founders of educational scholarship in the United States drew much of their inspiration, namely the professionalizing of education in 19th-century Germany.  That itself is an immensely complicated story, and within it, we can concentrate here only on the emergence of developments that deeply affected the way American educational scholars dealt with the historical aspects of education.  Many contributors to the movement of thought we have been calling Neuhumanismus, among them Basedow, Kant, Herder, Salzmann, Trapp, Campe, Villaume, Pestalozzi, Niemeyer, Wolf, Fichte, Niethammer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, participated in the early efforts towards developing the educational profession.^[1] Suffice it to say that by the early 19th century, they and their peers had amassed an extensive stock of well-described educational principles and practices with increasing attention to how to systematize it for effective presentation to prospective educators.  To be sure, writers would frequently work with it ad hoc, according to their personal convictions, justifying their version of the whole by dogmatic appeal to external authority, be it theological, political, or conventional — a perennial practice, still vigorous, of which Raumer's work is a good example. 

To sharper minds, however, it was (and is) evident that prestige, power, and positive effect would better accrue to those who could show convincingly that their organization of the field was fully consistent with rationally persuasive principles.  The essence of our story is simply this: from the give and take of intensive activity associated with Neuhumanismus, two essentially different ways of organizing acquired know-how and principles emerged, with both having distinctive strengths and values, and over time these have spiraled around each other, somewhat like a double helix, but with a tendency at times to conflict.  Let us concentrate here on identifying the modes of organization in these movements of thought in order to understand their interaction with each other and then to see what specifically happened as scholars founded the study of education in the United States, drawing important resources from their European peers and predecessors.  To avoid unnecessary complications, let us pick a starting point and follow only the main developments that ensued relevant to the founding of American educational scholarship.

At the end of the 1790s, August Hermann Niemeyer (1754-1828) published his Principles of Education and Instruction in 3 volumes and starting in 1802, Friedrich Heinrich Christian Schwarz (1766-1837) followed with the first volume of Erziehungslehre, completing it with publication of the 4th volume in 1813.  In 1806, a third educational theorist, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) published a slimmer, but equally important work, Allgemeine Pädagogik.  These works formed the intellectual foundations for the study of education in German universities.  In doing so, they set out two rather distinct paths for educational inquiry, one proceeding primarily through reflection on lived educational experience, (an historical-anthropological paradigm) and the other by deducing principles from the goals of education (an ethical-psychological paradigm).  Here were the roots of the two potential paths for American educational research that our colleague, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, has shown John Dewey and Edward L. Thorndike to have set forth, the one diffusely and the other with clear effect.^[2]  These two ways of thinking about education came to the United States in a condition of significant imbalance, which accounts substantially for why the history of education and related modes of inquiry have had a rather ancillary role in American educational scholarship.

Early in the 19th century, the work of Niemeyer and Schwarz had great prestige.  Adolph Diesterweg, the influential Prussian educator, called Schwarz and Niemeyer, "the Nestors of German pedagogy," and of the two, Diesterweg thought Niemeyer the more practical, but Schwarz the more important one, "deeper, many-sided."^[3]  Both were scholars of genuine stature, fully the peers of more famed figures from their era such as Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, or Schleiermacher.  It is important in approaching their work to do so with some self-awareness, suspending the tendency in present-day academia to denigrate a preoccupation with education as a peripheral, second-rate intellectual commitment.  The topic of education, of what people could and should make of themselves, stood at the center of serious cultural work.  First-rate intellects addressed it, not by the mere historical accident, which arose frequently enough as one or another of them happened to serve as a tutor or a school teacher while struggling through his studies.  Education was an important topic that no serious writer could wholly avoid and Niemeyer and Schwarz were the most respected writers to  concentrate fully on it.

Niemeyer was a theologian and educational reformer, who spent most of his career at the University of Halle.  His great uncle, August Hermann Francke, had founded in Halle an influential orphan asylum and associated schools early in the 18th century, which exerted considerable influence on educational practice and grew into a large, well-endowed complex. Niemeyer grew up in highly cultured surroundings and was at home throughout his life in the intellectual elite of the German world.  Trained in theology and philology, he started publishing, at 21, an influential, multi-volumed theological study, Charakteristik der Bibel, the fifth volume of which appeared in 1782, the whole thereafter going through several later editions.  At 23 he was appointed to teach theology and at 30 became ordinarius, a full professor, at the University of Halle, then one of the more progressive universities.  Niemeyer was a leader among his academic colleagues, a strong voice against Napoleonic expansion, and as a result he was remanded to Paris in 1807 as a kind of intellectual hostage when the French occupiers closed the University of Halle.  He became rector of it in 1808 on its reopening, serving in that role until 1816.  In 1784 he had started a life-long administrative career in the Francke Stiftung, of which he proved to be a most effective leader.

In 1796, Niemeyer published his Grundsätze der Erziehung und des Unterrichts, which became a very popular book on education, valued for its warm humanity and the wealth of educational experience it communicated. Starting with the third edition in 1799, Niemeyer appended to it an overview of educational history, concentrating on the 18th century.  To Niemeyer, his historical work was simply a start towards "a complete history of what, from earliest times up to our own, has been thought theoretically and done practically with respect to education and instruction, of the men who have had the most significant influence, of the institutions which have been dedicated to this end, of the literary works which have been written to this purpose. . . .  The materials for the whole lie dispersed in the most heterogeneous writings." Niemeyer suggested that educators would find his outline informative and that presenting it might occasion further investigation and treatment of the subject.^[4]

Education cultivated the moral and functional autonomy of the real person living in real conditions, and to do that well one had to work at each part of the process effectively, ever alert to the relation of particulars to the whole endeavor.  Hence Niemeyer concentrated on the principles of education, for by comprehending these, one would have the capacity to comprehend better how particular aspects of education related to the whole.  For instance, in his historical section on the 18th century, the most fully developed section, he first spoke about the general principles of pedagogy being developed in school contexts and then turned to the way four different types of schools — those of religious orders, of German Humanists, of the Philanthropists, and finally of what he called the eclectic schools, popping up here and there.  Although he did not develop his historical overview very fully, the way he approached topics in it suggests that he viewed the history of education as an opportunity to search out the principles of education as they operated in the real contexts of human experience and to learn how better to use such principles to understand the inter-working of pedagogical particulars in the whole of people's educations.  Thus he ended his historical overview with a sustained reflection on the larger human meaning of good educational practices.  "Head and heart, understanding and feeling in harmony — these constitute human fulfillment, happiness, and dignity."  These were the goals with each student shaping sound school practices.^[5]  Niemeyer had practical intentions, specifically addressing parents, tutors, and teachers but he did not aim to provide them with a set of readily applicable methods.  Rather he wanted to cultivate their capacity to think "as educators."  Hence, he introduced extensive annotations throughout his Grundsätze, giving readers access to regnant scholarship in classical and biblical philology, as well as cultural history.  He wanted to engage readers in a process of inquiry, not to communicate a conclusive set of findings and methods.

Niemeyer based this undertaking on an important conception of the relation between history and education. Education took place in concrete situations in which an extremely complicated repertoire of developing personal capacities for both good and bad interacted with the manifold particulars of the surrounding cultural environment, which particulars were likewise an all-too-human mix of the constructive and the destructive.  To be helpful in this process, the educator needed experience and insight, which one built up from three sources, first, from pedagogical introspection concerning one's own educational situation as it had unfolded in one's experience, second, from pedagogical reflection on the historical experience of the educational process that had been accumulated, observing how individuals and groups had, faced with diverse cultural configurations, succeeded and failed to make these conduce to their human development, and third, from pedagogical consideration of whatever other thinkers one could find who had thought deeply about educational experience, their own and that of others. Thus history was an essential source of knowledge for the educator. Basic pedagogical principles existed, but they could not be understood in the abstract, for they were principles that existed and functioned only in the full texture of historical life.^[6]

A few years later, Friedrich Heinrich Christian Schwarz started to fulfill Niemeyer's hope that the "Uberblick" might engender further efforts, for Schwarz wrote the first full and coherent history of education in German. Like Niemeyer, Schwarz was both theologian and educational reformer, the first Protestant theologian at the University of Heidelberg and he founded there a successful seminar for teachers.  He acquired extensive experience as a pastor, teacher, and professor; he possessed learning, both deep and broad; he had a mind at once clear, deeply religious, open, suffused with a simple optimism about human potentiality.  In 1804 Schwarz became a theology professor at the University of Heidelberg, where for many years he ran the pädagogische Seminar, which for the first ten years or so met jointly with the philology seminar.  In 1808 he spent some time visiting and working with Pestalozzi, whose pedagogy he greatly respected, albeit with some reservation for its excessive reliance on method.  Schwarz was a person not entirely free of the Biedermeier sentiments so strong in Raumer, but one whose religious beliefs were fully integrated into his commitment to thoughtful inquiry and intellect.  He died in 1837, after having, from 1834, served briefly as the successor to Schleiermacher at the University of Berlin.  Schwarz left behind a variety of theological writings and the most respected treatises on education at the time, works of very substantial scholarship.

Schwarz fully stated his pedagogical views in Erziehungslehre, originally published between 1802 and 1813, and then in a somewhat reworked 1829 edition.  This version began with an 1100 page volume on the Geschichte der Erziehung, which Schwarz intended as foundation for the whole work.  By current standards, the historical substance of his coverage was quite thin, for he had few predecessors upon whose work he could build.  But he was seeking to make history an effective way to ground and nurture pedagogical thinking.  He tried to touch on everything — India, China, the ancient world, medieval and modern Europe.  He sought to find and understand differences, to explore how practice linked with purpose, and to set the reader thinking by showing how different educators differed from and with each other.  Schwarz thought that a sound theory of education should be based on a historical foundation, on the cumulative educational experience of mankind, in which the "Geschichte der Erziehungsidee," the idea of education, was essential.  The history was not to be the history of educational ideas in their multiplicity, but of one idea, the idea of education.  The human capacity to educate had unfolded in history as people had acted, generation after generation, in manifold concrete situations, guided by the idea of education. What the achievements and possibilities wrought with reference to this idea might eventually be were never immediately manifest to anyone.^[7]

Possibilities inhering in the idea of education would endlessly unfold.  To bring an optimal repertory of these possibilities to bear in educational effort, to define the problems of education and to extend and improve the work of education, people needed to engage the idea of education historically, to reflect on the sum of activity that had been guided by it.  People could learn to think "as educators" by thinking about past educational experience, not to find in it repeatable methods, but to develop the insight and skill to interpret educational possibilities in complicated, concrete situations of life.  The history of education did more, for Schwarz, than illustrate sound and unsound methods; it did more than inspire educators with professional pride. The history of education empowered people to think and act educationally; it enabled people to grasp the range of educational possibilities that had been given life and to realize that any further possibilities to be achieved would be done as further extensions of educational history.  Schwarz tried to touch on all the different times and peoples, refraining from from saying that this was good and that was bad, instead giving something of a conceptual framework for thinking about forms of historical experience in education, social reproduction, emerging efforts to understand the child as a potentially autonomous being, and more fully developed conceptions of education that did not simply end in freedom, but worked with it throughout the educational experience of each person.  For Schwarz, educating took place in history and was to be studied through history and one had to be careful not to impose ideas external to the history in trying to understand it.

Like Niemeyer, Schwarz thought that history was the source of knowledge from which the educator could gain real insight into his endeavor. Men did not discover or derive the idea of education from reflection or speculation, from acquired knowledge or science. The idea of education was implicit, inherent in the human condition.  The possible concretizations of the idea of education have come into being, not through thought alone, but through human experience, through thoughtful action. Pedagogical surprise will always be possible, and the full potentiality of the idea of education will come only when the history of man's self-creation has reached a completion in eternity.  We are ever on the way, creating ourselves anew, and the end cannot be known, only past achievements can at best be understood, to be drawn on creatively in our own task of self-creation.  It was insufficient to turn to the history of education simply to draw inspiration for a predetermined course:

In its scope and depth, education is a task whose completion lies in infinity.  It began with humanity and can only reach a level of perfection when mind and spirit reach complete fulfillment.  Man can raise the idea of education only to the height to which he is educated, or better, only to the height to which his education enables him, through the full depth of his being, to indicate what a further elevation of humanity over himself would require.  For that, a history of education serves two uses.  First, at any time it precisely indicates the level at which humanity stands.  Second, it shows, not simply that history teaches about the past, but also, submitting everything to reflection, that it yields new insight into present educational activity.  Here the case inescapably arises: history can directly become an expositor of truth and a teacher of formative education.^[8]

Schwarz gave a significant start to historical pedagogy, an effort to form a sound theory of education by means of thorough inquiry into the history of education and careful reflection on the results of this inquiry. Such a history of education was more than an ancillary specialty within the broader, university level study of education; reflective inquiry into the historical experience of Bildung, education, and instruction provided the grounding for the academic study of education.  Through education, human persons, living under specific historical conditions, acquired the particular resources of body and mind requisite for self-determination through the course of life.  To facilitate that process in the lived experience of other persons, educators needed to develop skill in perceiving human potentialities across wide diversities, the sum of which constituted the character of the human community, and to understand how different conditions affecting different persons could make the outcome of well-practiced procedures in some cases predictable and in some cases not.  Educating was an art, a skill, which thoughtful cultivation could develop, even though it could not be reduced to a set of methods applicable with predictable results.  With such views, Niemeyer and Schwarz wrote long texts on education and instruction.  In these, they took into account numerous particulars within a practical framework.  For education, Schwarz used the developmental course, physical and intellectual, and the numerous exceptions to it occurring among a collection of individuals, as the framework, and the educator needed to learn to work with the autonomous child, to facilitate his or her movement along it.   For instruction, Schwarz used the broad scope and sequence of curricular studies appropriate in different types of schools and educational situations, not to propound favored methods for use in all its parts, but to discuss the types of interaction between instruction and education that would arise along the way.  Schwarz, who could craft a tight phrase, expressed the concept of education, "Die Erziehung is die sich entwickelnde Menschheit", "Education is humanity, self-developing." He then went on for a page or so, unpacking the phrase, and then turned for several pages to indicating the role conditions played and the difficulty of understanding how the particularity of those would interact with the particularity of each person's potentials.^[9]  In his third volume, Schwarz concentrated on the concept of instruction, indicating that instruction was good insofar as it worked towards the goals of education in the sense indicated in the previous volume.  His idea of instruction aimed, not to cause learning as it might show up in the scores generated by cohorts of students, but as it might be appropriated by each student, person by person.  His concluding part on Paedeutics, showed how instruction had simultaneously to be pedagogical and serve the individual child well, political and serve a people, a folk, as a collectivity well, and cosmopolitan and serve humanity as a whole well.^[10]

A few years after the first edition of Erziehungslehre began to appear, Johann Friedrich Herbart, published his Allgemeine Pädagogik, a very different book.    Herbart stood in contrast to Niemeyer and Schwarz.  He was born in 1776, and had a precocious childhood and a good gymnasial education, which ld to the University of Jena where he became for a time an enthusiastic student of Fichte.  Herbart soon turned away from Fichte's idealism and strong use of transcendental freedom by granting real objects a determining role in the shaping of reason than was usual in post-Kantian philosophy, developing modern realism thereby.  At 20, Herbart became tutor in a Swiss family, an experience at which he was highly successful and from which his educational ideas developed, expressed in initial educational publications at the turn of the century.  In 1802 he completed his doctorate in philosophy and started university teaching, and began in earnest his prolific career publishing a steady series of works in education, philosophy, and psychology.  As a practitioner in education, Herbart thought Homer's Odyssey was a work of great usefulness.  As a think, he had a liking for concision and rigor of a mathematical sort.  Herbart was a successful German professor, called in 1809 to assume the chair Kant had held at Königsberg.  There, he increasingly concentrated on developing his psychological ideas through philosophical reflection, not the sorts of experimentation to become popular later in the century.  At Königsberg, Herbart also developed a pedagogical seminar, which was important, but not as well-known as those of Niemeyer and Schwarz.^[11]

Allgemeine Pädagogik is short, whereas the works of Niemeyer and Schwarz were long.  Herbart's text reflected his literary style — hard-edged, conveying a sense that he was right and the views of others were generally not worth discussing, whereas those of Niemeyer and Schwarz were copious and generous in their references to the work of others.  In his "Preface" to the second edition of Levana, Jean Paul Richter displayed his charming style in acknowledging Herbart's book as one of four that he had recently read: "In the Allgemeine Pädagogik of Herbart the beautiful language beguiling with brilliancy and charms cannot, however, divert the wish that he had not used the title-privilege 'universal' so universally, and carried it throughout, so that the reader is obliged to fill in the too spacious forms with supplementary contents.  In a philosopher, if he be a teacher, one finds often enough, to be sure, only the polar star which, it is true, serves well for a long voyage round the world, but not for a short one in the world. . . ."^[12]  Richter touched on two matters that had eventual historical significance.  First, Herbart left a lot to be filled in within the interstices of his principles.  Somewhat unusually within the ambit of Neuhumanismus, Herbart's ideas were strongly teacher-centered, as distinct from child-centered.  Most of Herbart's peers started with the assumption of an inalienable autonomy in each person from birth on, with education consisting then in efforts to anticipate the student's willed actions and reactions.  Herbart held that will to be, not the condition of the teacher's work, but the key fruit of it.  Herbart advanced these ideas leaving a lot of room for later interpreters to fill them out, which they eventually did, and since those who filled them out were less many-sided thinkers, they did so by elaborating Herbart's reflections into a far more systematized set of methods by which teachers could deliver a Herbartian program of instruction, often with more fidelity than understanding. 

Richter's second point suggested that Herbart's influence might be slow in coming, which proved prescient.  By formal criteria, Herbart pursued a successful career, but there was not much warmth or recognition attached to his success.  His ideas seemed a bit idiosyncratic and his tone unfriendly.  With respect to other educators, Herbart broke away from his aloofness in 1831 with a long review of the 2nd edition of Schwarz's Erziehungslehre.  Herbart took it to task on methodological grounds, a critique that was not very influential at the time, but one that is instructive about the tensions affecting the ensuing development of historical pedagogy and the methodological grounding of the study of education in the United States. ^[13]  It is interesting that according to the brief biography for Schwarz in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, his mother followed the educational ideas of Locke and Rousseau so that, until he went to the gymnasium, he learned with a great deal of autonomy, whereas Herbart, after near death from an accident as an infant, had an intensively managed childhood and a great deal of early instruction.  As educator, Schwarz assumed the autonomy of each person's will and sought to work with and through it, whereas Herbart believed that education was possible only by virtue of the person's Bildsamkeit, his plasticity, an assumption shared with Fichte, "an assumption without which no educator can tackle his work."  With this "first postulate" firmly in mind, all pedagogues then ask a double question: "first, for what should the pupil be formed? second, through what means?  Consequently, pedagogy calls for help on one side from ethics and on the other from psychology."^[14]  Herbart began and ended his review by stating his conviction that education uses instruction to shape each new born human, helpless without a will, but plastic, receptive of forming influence, to become an autonomous person in the mold of his upbringing.  The two systematic disciplines were helpful in constructing a sound pedagogy for this task: ethics, which gave guidance concerning educational ends, and psychology, which helped determine sound educative means. This in a nutshell was Herbartianism, voiced by the master in rather ill-tempered opposition to Schwarz.^[15]

Herbart recognized, very grudgingly at times, that Schwarz had something to contribute to both pedagogical ethics and psychology, but contended that the usefulness of these contributions was marred by the empirical density of Erziehungslehre, with its extensive historical inquiry that often "contributes neither to the resolution nor even to the illumination of present-day pedagogical questions."^[16]  Herbart found that Schwarz not only spent precious time with irrelevant matters, but that Schwarz was often insufficiently critical where matters were relevant, that he did not explain past errors in the light of later findings clearly enough.  It was not that Schwarz was uncritical of past pedagogical thinkers, but that he explained their failings historically, when, in Herbart's view, "the deficiencies of previous sepeculative knowledge largely bore the guilt. "^[17]  For Schwarz, one turned to history to understand and interpret the manifold ways in which the human will, striving for autonomous self-definition, interacted with conditions created by the facticity of the world and the opacity of human actions impinging from without.  For Herbart one turned to history for illustrations of what results when people act upon principles that the observer knows independently to be correct or incorrect.

Herbart and Schwarz basically disagreed over the function of educational history within the study of education. Both recognized education to be a practical endeavor that could never be reduced to a closed, internally consistent, abstract system. Both recognized that some kind of coherence in the complicated texture of educational experience should be sought. Herbart suggested, however that they disagreed over the intellectual source of that coherence. "Pedagogy is a practical science in which it is important that one recognize the continuity of its development so that no unnecessary mistrust of it works against it. The continuity that is important for pedagogy, however, is not so much the historical, but the psychological.  For pedagogy, however, there is a different continuity that is still more important for it than any historical continuity, namely, the psychological."^[18]  Herbart welcomed a useful history of education, but he criticized Schwarz's for excessive detail and scope, which would divert the attention of the practical educator from more important matters, and he suggested that Schwarz failed to make his history as practically useful as it might have been had he been more active in turning past practice into exempla of psychologically sound and unsound procedures.  For Schwarz, education was a human activity that unfolded in history and had ultimately to be understood through history, without reference to suprahistorical constructs valid for all times and places; for Herbart, in contrast, ethics and psychology, properly pursued by speculative reason, could yield a suprahistorical pedagogical knowledge, which then could be applied to history to demonstrate its relevance and value for the present. Herbart's criticisms would have marked effects on German students of education and educational history, and through them on the founding of educational scholarship in the United States.