Defining education/Humanity

[edit] 5. How does humanity educate itself?

Schleiermacher explained his understanding of education with minimal reference to the thought of others, but his views were representative of a movement, often identified in German as Neuhumanismus, a humanism that was new relative to that of the Renaissance.  For those of us interested in education, the term Neuhumanismus serves a useful purpose, for it permits attending to a movement of thought and experience in a way that draws attention to a sphere of human activity that would otherwise disperse across several of our more familiar retrospective groupings such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism.  Neuhumanismus centers on the advanced German humanism of Schleiermacher's time, ideas and activities schooled in Kant's critiques of reason, inspired by the revolution in France, awakened by Napoleon to an awareness at once national and cosmopolitan, enthused by a romantic sense of the past, and supported by bourgeois civic involvements.^[1] 

Pressed by many commitments and demands, preoccupied by other writing projects, Schleiermacher left his main educational works unpublished among his papers.  But he was not without pedagogical influence in his time.  He had a concrete role in the Prussian educational reforms early in the 19th century, working with Wilhelm von Humboldt and others, and he became one of the most prominent examples of the new professorial ideal associated with the University of Berlin, conscientiously exercising his Lehrfreiheit, a freedom to teach, through which he set forth in course after course his considered views of many subjects to those who wished to attend to them.  Such teaching, in combination with that of peers such as Hegel, had significant influence on the the professionalization of education through the work of Adolf Diesterweg and others.^[2]  And like the whole thrust of his thought, Schleiermacher's  posthumously published ideas about education provided a representative summation of the pedagogical ideas that he and his contemporaries had been forming.

Here we can make only a cursory inventory of Neuhumanismus, which drew on important ingredients from across enlightened Europe and emerged powerfully in the late 18th century.  These ideas flourished as writers, primarily German Protestants, advanced a critical pedagogy in the Kantian sense, asking how the self-determination of mankind was possible.  Currents of advanced thought coursing through Europe, particularly Hume's skeptical arguments about causality, awakened not only Kant from dogmatic slumber, but others as well, undercutting the assurance that mankind generally and oneself specifically enjoyed a secure place in a providential chain of being.  18th-century German rationalism had held that human reason, for some by itself and for others with the aid of divine revelation, attained certain knowledge that redemption and salvation in a transcendent eternity was a real prospect, open to each, regardless of his or her present station in life.  This assurance came into general doubt, forcing even those who decided like Kant's colleague, Johann Georg Hamann, to believe nonetheless, to entertain deep uncertainties about the powers of human reason.  Such an awakening was taking place all over Europe and to some degree it came a bit late to German areas, but when it came there the conditions were both somewhat peculiar and ripe.  A reading public, a salaried economic base and little prospect for political influence channeled its awakening awareness into directions more cultural and pedagogical than political or entrepreneurial.  It did so at a time when a quickening of communications invigorated life in towns and the many small cities dotting the German lands and a stronger trade in books, journals, and pamphlets, diverse tools for cultural and pedagogical action, were emerging as significant means for realizing human aspiration.  The upshot was a bright fluorescence of intellectual and cultural striving that took as a point of departure the recognition that to be human entailed living as a self-directing, indeterminate actor in a big, recalcitrant world.  Finding ourselves in this situation, can we understand what makes it possible for us to do what we seem able to do?  And with that critical self-awareness, can we soundly select from among all the possibilities which ones are the ones that we should rightly pursue? 

Thinkers, poets, writers, critics, teachers, preachers, scholars: all faced up to problems of human freedom, no longer assured of a benevolent deity, providentially succoring and guiding them.  The movement of thought, which we can call Neuhumanismus drew together one of those unusual concentrations of concern and capacity that occasionally arise in history and to sample their achievements well we need to adopt a careful perspective.  In college and beyond, students like ourselves almost always experience the work of past thinkers as a name with some tags attached, and if we inquire further, we usually encounter a summative discussion of a thinker's life and work, as if it had sprung forth all at once, a completed corpus of thought for study in and for itself.  When we think about influence on or by such a finished figure, our retrospection creates the impression of ideas transmitted from one historical bucket to the next, Fichte getting Kant whole, and Hegel Fichte whole, and with others standing by as mere onlookers, performing, if at all, the role of a chorus.  In such a view, influence and originality seem only to flow forward in time from source to destination, much like typical school instruction in which teachers teach and students learn.  The actualities of people thinking together under the conditions of their lived experience are very different, however. 

Each person crafts and projects a mix of originalities and appropriations within an encompassing field of shared, active thinking, extended in scope and duration, where ideas and concerns of confused paternity circulate in complicated interactions, actual and potential.   We technologists are learning to see such interactions as being endowed with "affordances," potentialities for insight and action for those who will use them.  Within a living, historical locus of concern, participants use the affordances they find in and about them to labor at works, large and small, struggling to say what they have to say within the murmur of many voices, uncertain, uncaring about the mix of novelty and repetition in it, as long as it bears with some fit and effect within the flow of interaction into which it projects.  When the affordances derived from their concerns are unusually powerful and their work coheres with extensive communicative interactions among them, a movement of thought can become unusually extensive in scope and strong in power.  Schleiermacher lived and worked as a late representative of such a field of effective intellectual interaction, one of the great ones, an important one for thinking about what educates.

Glance over the appended table of names, dates, and tags: it crudely displays the overlap of interaction of a sampling of participants in this discussion of what educates called Neuhumanism.  Let us allow ourselves a historical hypothesis here, for after all we are still discussing Bailyn's hypothetical history: like its great predecessor in Classical Athens, where an unusual concentration of good thinkers joined to worry the question whether virtue, arete, human excellence could be taught, here an unusual grouping of good minds gathered over several generations to argue out what would best educate, recognizing, as J. G. Herder put it, that "each can contribute to the betterment of humanity only what he himself makes of what he can and should become."^[3]  Singly and together, what can and should human persons make of themselves?  Here was a shared search for the educative capacities that were immanent in human persons, singly and collectively.  Here was the living source of critical philosophy and its follow through in critical idealism (Kant, Fichte, etc.), of the poetic and artistic celebrations of self-constituting selves (Goethe, Schiller, etc.), of fast-spreading historical inquiry into the many-sided human capacity for creative self-differentiation (Lessing, Herder, etc.), of the deep probing about how the human uses of language in their different varieties and forms generate cultural traditions flourishing across time and space (Hamann, Wilhelm von Humboldt, etc.), of the phenomenological reflection on the unfolding of human possibility through the self-creation of Geist, that is, spirited thinking by persons alive in a world (Hegel).  Let us try to grasp this concern in its full complexity as best we can in order to weigh what may have been at stake by leaving it behind as American educators constructed a pedagogical past for use in schools of education.

One might object that in a larger sense the work grouped as Neuhumanismus has not been left behind at all, for students of literature, poetry, drama, history, philosophy, linguistics, religion, and even education are likely to study works by a few of those listed and in the cases of literature and philosophy, by many of them.  Remarkably few on the list are thoroughly obscure; remarkably many are highly preeminent.  One can too easily break this grouping apart under separate headings of philosophy, poetry, the novel, history, criticism, politics, pedagogy, and on.  That may be fine for different purposes.  But for our purposes, for educational purposes, that would arbitrarily break apart what holds together.  The ideas gathered together as Neuhumanismus concern constitutive educational experience, the formative self-determination of human possibilities.  All this work cohered around the historical actuality of a comprehensive, ubiquitous educational experience self-activated through philosophy, poetry, the novel, history, criticism, politics, pedagogy, and all of social life.  Our hypothesis here is simply that the challenge of fulfilling oneself through human self-formation within one's historical life was not only a frequent topic within all this work, but was the generative principle giving rise to and running through it all, the experience out of which its creators brought their work into being and the context of concern from which its most important meanings flow.^[4]  Can humans, living historical lives, dependent on themselves and human peers, achieve a meaningful fulfillment?  This question puts the challenge of modernity.  And it put it as a challenge ultimately both historical and pedagogical in character.

While the parts of what Schleiermacher represents have a presence in various components of American cultural life, that presence is dispersed and decentered.  All of it together was an important movement of thought and concern about the immanence throughout historical life of all that educates and about the historical imperative of human self-determination.  What can I make of what I can and should become?  What can we make of what we can and should become?  Breaking it all apart had direct costs for incorporating the pedagogical past into the American schools of education.  The few components that were appropriated were taken out of context.  For instance, American and British educational scholars produced a spate of books about great educators, and among them they wrote about Kant as a great thinker who addressed education, attending primarily to Über Pädagogik.  By narrowing Kant's educational significance to that text, a commentary narrowed the understanding of the whole movement, for a major strand developed out of Kant's whole practice of critical philosophizing, asking how different forms of reason were possible in order to determine how persons could and should try to reason about their world and their potentialities for action in it. 

Likewise, scholars constructing the American variant of educational history avidly imported Pestalozzi, but his work cannot stand in isolation as an adequate representative of the movement of which he was a part.  Broken from the context of Neuhumanismus, Pestalozzi too easily became another Swiss curiosity, like Edelweiss at home in rarefied places, tinged with a nostalgia for a village pedagogy best suited to a world we have lost.^[5]  Additionally, they attended to the work of Rousseau, but its educational implications had been most fully examined in the context of Neuhumanismus, and without that context, his pedagogy seemed awkward to implement on first impression.  Uncertain what to make of it in practice, they attended to Rousseau's person, which invited a din of ad hominem attack by straight-laced Victorians ever on guard against seduction by a dissolute soul.  Finally, much in American transcendentalism and in the British movement of thought from Wordsworth through Coleridge and Carlyle to Newman and Arnold would have gained both sense and import had it been seen in interaction with the writers of German Neuhumanismus.  By glossing over the German background of transcendentalist ideas, American educators diminished the richness of our own traditions.^[6]

In these ways, American educators incurred costs in leaving Schleiermacher and his contemporaries behind.  Unfortunately by the late nineteenth century when the development of American educational scholarship got seriously underway, it had become easy to misconstrue the work of Neuhumanismus, mainly for two reasons.  To concentrate on historical life, and to become preoccupied with the task of the new humanist, contributing to humanity what one makes of what one can and should become, requires a minimal sense of affluence and security, a willingness to put economic and political worries in the background while concentrating on creative choices.  A sense that one could not assume a sustaining order immediately at hand, from which to manage the unexpected, and a feeling that the future was open, replete with positive possibilities, relative to which one had not yet fully achieved or exhausted one's potential efficacy, were important characteristics shared by persons like Kant, Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Pestalozzi, Goethe, Fichte, von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and on.  Generalizations about such dispositions always turn on marginal differences and ecological shifts in which small changes in external circumstances trigger a displacement of dominant types.  Events conspired to convert the eighteenth-century experience of nationality as a cultural and educational experience into nineteenth-century experience of it as a matter of large-scale political mobilization.  Those primarily concerned with historical life as the ground and locus of human existence very literally shifted their attention, ceasing to perceive the essential process in it to be the phenomenological self-creation of the creative spirit and asserting that the key to what human beings can and should make of themselves lay in the historical interworking of labor and capital.