Defining education/Prolegomenon

[edit] 1. A Prolegomenon

In history and education, Lawrence Cremin mentored and taught me.  His persona charmed me, the reach of his ready recall awed me, his embodiment of prudent judgment joined to a demanding vision won my allegiance.  Over the years, I felt humbled, a bit shamed, by his extraordinary ability to get his work done — so many books well crafted, so many students well taught, so many initiatives well directed.  I came into his circle at the age of 21 with an educational purpose of my own, which closely converged with his.  He helped me thread my way into academic life and promoted my prospects.  During the rest of his life, and my years since his death, I have remained within his circle, content to probe its boundaries at points of special interest.  But eventually, move on, one must.

Throughout his career, Cremin worked to nurture and strengthen the common school and the common weal by broadening and deepening the controlling meaning of education.  Historically, as nation-states have been building systems of universal education, the meaning of education for most persons has come to signify the work of those institutions, especially the work of their most universal component, the system of elementary and secondary schools.  This meaning leads to a portentous reification, to overlooking the real recipient of education: education ceases to be an experience of persons, and becomes a characteristic of cohorts, statistical groups whose tested attributes augur success or failure.  All of this is the rank superstition of our putatively enlightened age.  Écrasez l'infâme!  Cremin tried to counter the superstition by addressing the definition of education head on: "education is the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, skills, values, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended."^[1]

This definition was implicit in his history of progressive schooling and explicit in most of the many books that followed, three large and several small.  Peers responded on both sides of the conjunction of history with education.  From the side of history, they awarded him both the Bancroft and the Pulitzer, and from that of education, they appointed him to the presidencies of Teachers College and the Spencer Foundation, influential roles he fulfilled with distinction.  But his ascendancy with living peers has not translated well into lasting change.  On one side, his books went quickly out of print, and historians have reverted back to dealing with education overwhelmingly as the work of schools, while on another, some institutional arrangements that he put in place persist nominally, although they now serve purposes contrary to his own, and others have been dismantled, their parts strewn, languishing in uncertain use.  One may rightly say that we, who followed, fumbled.  But to recover, we must look wide and deep at what went wrong.

An early diagnosis has some truth, but it serves poorly as a ground for attempting to recover critical leverage on the historical problems of thinking about education as a more comprehensive experience than the part of it consisting in instruction through the schools.  According to this diagnosis, Cremin rose in a fortuitous period of expansion in schools of education, which were pressing to meet teacher shortages while raising educational standards, and he tooled his powers to assert a more bracing vision on a senescent profession by converging the opportunities of expansion with those of the normal transfer of positions from elders to the young.  But fortuna granted fickle favor.  As he gained sufficient influence to exercise this strategy in the 1970s, the demographics of expansion became those of contraction, and the expected multiplier effect became a divider, seriously reducing his options for influence on becoming president of Teachers College in 1974.  To worsen matters, intellectually to his left, as he won public attention, Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis, Michael Katz, Joel Spring, and others fashioned a mode of revisionist criticism different from his own, asserting a negative version of the old celebration of education as universal schooling.  This change in the prevailing historical interest siphoned off potential recruits who might have carried on in developing further histories informed by his very broad assumptions about the nature of the task. Such changes left Cremin caught, both within the profession and the society at large, between a prevailing culture and its counter, both locked in argument over whether the historical and social consequences of education, understood as school instruction, were positive or negative.  Cremin had to carry on with neither the intention nor the substance to contribute much to that altercation.  In this view, his later writings, doggedly produced, reflect the tenuousness of his position: the shorter books provided an Olympian perspective in place of a call to action, and the three tomes of American Education, ground out over a quarter century according to a fixed plan that had become a duty, not a work, stupefy readers with far too much detail.

This critique, most articulately expressed by Sol Cohen, another of Cremin's students, regretfully holds Cremin's vision of education and his sense of what a historian could do with that definition, to have been a delusion of hubris.  As he attempted a vain task under distracting conditions, Cremin made himself a critic of the profession with which he ought to have more narrowly identified and an author of a work beyond the scope of possibility, an approximation of which no one would really want to read.  Cohen's tone towards Cremin is obnoxiously condescending, posthumously hectoring "Larry" for making life decisions that Cohen believes to have been misguided.  Voiced after Cremin's death, these are immaterial, for they should have been raised in such a fashion to Cremin at a point in his life when the decisions were still open.  But Cohen voices his critique of Cremin's definition of education to living readers, successfully raising for them the question whether writing educational history should proceed from a broad or narrow conception of its subject.  Cohen, along with many peers contributing to the voluminous literature on educational historiography, have objected that Cremin's definition encompasses too much, leading in consequence to historical incoherence, evident in the literary muddiness of American Education, and to a productive paralysis, evident in the lugubrious pace with which Cremin completed his opus.^[2]  This criticism is important for it explains on the one hand real weaknesses in Cremin's American Education while  it counsels us, in its net effect, as educators and as scholars to get about the business of schooling without much attention to all that is peripheral to it.  This is a counsel of renunciation and we who held a different vision need to find a more vital diagnosis, one that we can offer, as we age, to those with the strength of youth to act upon the complacencies of these times. 

Cohen and and his colleagues center their critique of Cremin's work on the unfortunate effects of his definition of education, which they believe will diffuse historians' attention to an impossibly inclusive configuration of educative agencies, transforming educational history into a jabber of cultural history.  Occasionally, they suggest, work written according to an all inclusive idea of education may have some topical interest, but in the end it is unilluminating, touching on everything in general and not coming to grips with anything in particular.  They adduce his work itself as evidence of these dangers, suggesting that Cremin's definition led him to include far too much in American Education, three big tomes packed with mounting detail, deficient in narrative coherence and engaging tension.  Presently the consensus of contemporary history and of educational historians stands with Cohen: neither puts education as Cremin defined it front and center.  In the historical present, both the public and practitioners deal with education as if it is a synonym for schooling to the point, even, of calling a growing movement to educate children outside of schools "home schooling," as if one cannot imagine anything that educates without somehow equating it to schooling. 

As for educational history, the bulk of work, and the best of works, now concentrate on the history of schooling,^[3] and while a few historians of education still hold positions of influence in schools of education, the field has not acquired a strong presence in mainstream history departments and the subject has fallen into desuetude in schools of education.^[4]  There are a few topics in the history of schooling that may bear fresh treatment, but the area has long since ceased to be under worked. And these days, the royal road to educational knowledge calls for the complete depersonalization of educational experience through double-blind experiment with the resulting pedagogical prescriptions to be confirmed or questioned according to the outcomes evident through massive testing programs in which millions of pupils are merely incidental means for assessing the schools.  With the lived educational experience of particular children so completely in pedagogical abeyance, let us hypothesize that far from including too much, Cremin at least included a vast panorama of real human activity, but for some reason or other, something of great importance was still missing.