Defining education/Schleiermacher

4. Who was Schleiermacher?

Pick up a German Geschichte der Pädagogik and peruse the contents.  The cast of characters will largely be familiar from most any History of Educational Thought, except for the chapter on Schleiermacher, prominent in the German histories and absent in the American.  Chances are, unless interested in Protestant theology, an American educator will have no inkling who Friedrich Schleiermacher was.^[1]  Interest in many educators who wrote in German, especially Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Froebel, came to the American schools of education as these developed in the decades before and after 1900, largely by importing German pedagogical thought and practice.  Schleiermacher did not make the crossing because Americans imported a particular historical variant of the available German repertoire, one in which Schleiermacher, and a few others as well, were persona non grata.  The issue in contention had to do with the role of educational history in the proper study of education, an issue not irrelevant to the story that Bailyn told.  And the issue that was in contention may still be relevant to the study of education, and to the study of much else of human import as well.

To describe Schleiermacher as a key founder of liberal Protestant theology is accurate but unsatisfactory, for that description leaves much out.  He absorbed, integrated, and advanced the powerful thinking of his time, acting as a many-sided public intellectual, sometimes in official favor and sometimes not.  He won a diverse audience as a writer and preacher who proved inwardly meaningful to many persons with diverse casts of mind. He secured important advances in the theory of interpretation and translation and applied his ideas about these in practice, not only on religious texts, but on the classics as well, translating almost all of Plato's dialogues into German versions that still stand as among the best.^[2]   He collaborated in effecting major educational reforms in both secondary and higher education.  For many years a prominent professor at the most innovative university of his time, he taught engaged students in tension with the likes of Fichte and Hegel across a repertoire of big subjects — the major branches of theology (philosophical, historical, and practical), dialectics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, ethics, pedagogy, and on. If his ideas did not make his time, they did move his time in a humane, constructive direction, helping people to find and nourish meaning in their lives.^[3]

It may seem to some to be an oxymoron to call Schleiermacher a great humanistic theologian, but that oxymoron arises only when overly circumscribed views of the human and the divine fail to overlap.  In a doctrinaire sense, Schleiermacher was neither a believer nor a skeptic; the starting point was not a matter of belief or non-belief, but a simple recognition — he found himself living a life that was somehow given, he knew not how or why, and it required him to act, to engage in a process of determining the doing of something that moves from the future, through the present, and into the past.  I might next write any one of many words — perhaps with some hesitation, I think this and then that, but then the fingers start to move in the active present, and then, looking now at what I did, the determinate words are there, fixed by the active present for past time from the indeterminate future.  Schleiermacher thought all people sensed their life in such a way.  We recognize ourslves dependent on making all sorts of irrevocable determinations in the midst of an encompassing unknown.  He understood that this recognition was the source and substance of all experience and most importantly of religious experience in the historical reality of life, and the source and substance of any organized religion would be the historical actuality of the lived experience that resulted as people determined their lives, coping with their unique circumstances while sensing their contingency as a living element supporting itself in the given world.  In this way, from his initial success in 1799 with On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher offered a wide channel for thinking seriously about lived experience in which neither doctrinaire belief nor adamant denial, those imaginary poles grasped at by all those who need certain knowledge, would take precedence over sound understanding as the basis for lived fulfillment.^[4]

Historical life, sustained by groups and experienced by individuals, preoccupied Schleiermacher.  In living a historical life, the basic challenge was interpretive, hermeneutical, to find oneself having to make sense within an immense and powerful otherness, having in endless ways to determine the indeterminate and to suffer the consequences.  Each person faced the vital imperative inherent in the condition of finding oneself alive in a complex world: develop some understanding with which to act, to endure, perhaps to flourish.  This imperative was not an external ought, but an immanent necessity.  As interpretation was essential in writing history and in reading texts, it was even more omnipresent and inescapable in living life.  Within philosophy, Schleiermacher gave hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, greater importance relative to epistemology, the theory of knowledge.  In theology, revealed doctrine did not define a church; a church, understood as a historical, social interaction of living persons, revealed its doctrines through the meanings its members manifested in the historical experiencing of their lives.^[5]  These lives incarnated their interpretation of their religiosity, of their feeling of contingency within the mysterious givenness of their lives and the world in which they live them.  A historical theology emerged into history through the cumulative experience of the members of an historical church.  This vital situation was circular, as it must be, for interpretation works on and through reciprocal interactions, which were what the given life consisted in: to live is to cope continuously with all the circumstantial reactions to every action that one takes.  Fulfillment and decline come, not through direct progressions, but through spirals of interaction that prove virtuous or vicious in their cumulative effects.^[6]

This primacy of historical life and the concomitant centrality of interpretation in it led to a distinctive understanding of educational relationships between persons, who constituted in their sphere of shared life a commonality of differences, each the source of an increment of pedagogical potential.  Schleiermacher found that what educated came from within the living person through their continuous acts of interpretation by means of which the person contended with others, who were like but different, and in doing so disclosed and brought his or her potentialities into actuality.  Through formative interaction with specific circumstances, a person could actualize himself only through a bounded set of possibilities suited to those circumstances, but the actualizing was immanent, from within, for the drive and impetus to make sense of those possibilities came not from those circumstances, but from within each living person.  Among other things, Schleiermacher was a great translator of Plato because he brought to fruition in himself a deep and profound interpretation of the difficult, important understandings of life and education embedded in Plato's thought and work. 

In a vocabulary suited to thinking about lived experience, substituting gerunds for abstract nouns leads to greater clarity, for meaning inheres in the acting.  Thus, educating happened in experiences lived by active, thinking persons engaging in forming themselves by pursuing fulfillment, by developing skills, and by construing intentions within all the key domains of life — familial, social, political, and intellectual.  What educated was participating in a common, shared life that arose as persons of different ages, capacities, and characteristics interacted across all their differences.  Engaging in all the constituent elements of life was what educated, a process by which each differentiates and incarnates his or her unique personhood.  Educating would take place pervasively through all the main components of the common life — family, language, community, civic association, the state, religion, thought and knowledge.  Additionally, educating occurred through participating in specialized instructional arrangements, which served special purposes within the encompassing educative sphere: what these arrangements could and should offer and how they could best offer it depended significantly on the circumstances with which each participant coped and how each understood what he could and should make of himself. 

For Schleiermacher, each person lived a pedagogical drama by striving towards a human fulfillment through an interpretative interaction between Fertigkeit, realized skill, capacity, accomplishment, and Gesinnung, motivating disposition, intention, sentiment, conviction.  One had some skill and acted with it according to some motivation and the experienced results gave clues about what might follow, with it all orienting itself by a longing for a fulfillment that was always a real feeling, however variable and subject to reinterpretation its object would always be.  Educating was an ongoing, ubiquitous hermeneutic activity, continuously interpreting oneself and the world, through which persons living in a given world formed their capacities to anticipate and act within it.  A protean intention would lead to a tentative forming of a skill and the new skill would enable intention to differentiate and concretize in a drama of pedagogical contingencies.  Geist or spirit — living intelligence and thought — must pervade all instruction: beware method lest it become mechanical, for "the mechanical is death."^[7]  In scant outline, these were the educational views that the founders of the study of education in the United States did not incorporate into the repertoire of educational ideas they derived from their European heritage. 

Let us pause for a moment to orient ourselves within our own inquiry.  We began by recognizing the importance and timeliness to the way Lawrence Cremin used a broad, inclusive definition of education to structure his extensive inquiries into the history of American education.  Conceiving of educative experience comprehensively would more effectively contextualize educative work through formal arrangements such as schools, channeling more effort to the improvement of informal educational arrangements in our culture and encouraging work within formal structures to proceed with a stronger sense of purpose and a greater capacity to take the differing circumstances of different individuals into appropriate educative consideration.  We observed that Cremin's broad definition of education, however sound, has had little effect on the historical practice of education in American life over the past fifty or so years and that it has largely been abandoned by current historians of education.  We took a first step in trying to resuscitate it by suggesting that the broad definition of education that Cremin used might not have been, as critics have alleged, the source of the evident deficiencies that they perceived in Cremin's writings.  Instead, we suggested that those deficiencies arose because Cremin evidenced a strong disposition to confine his scholarship to historical description, not exposing the reasoned grounds for his historical judgments or joining in debate about the soundness of them.  This reticence, we suggested, made his work far less interesting and compelling that it might have been and we attributed the reticence, not to a quirk of Cremin, but to norms characterizing the historical profession during the late 20th century.  Bernard Bailyn, the other great exponent of the broad definition of education, also manifested this reticence, which was evident in his critique of the educational history written in schools of education early in the 20th century.  As a result of that reticence, Bailyn had been content merely to identify and describe the deficiencies in the work, not to interpret how and why the work had come to be deficient beyond saying that it was in the nature of that kind of historian to write that kind of history, a classic virtus dormativa.

In search of a better explanation, we compared American histories of educational thought with those written in Germany, the place from which the founders of American educational scholarship, so denigrated by Bailyn, were drawing their inspiration.  We noticed a difference: from the early 20th-century on, American educational historians have said virtually nothing about Schleiermacher, whereas German educational historians have said, and still say, a lot.  We have taken a superficial look at what Schleiermacher had to say in general and more specifically about education.  We now need to carry our inquiry to its conclusion by asking three questions.  First, was Schleiermacher representative of anything of substance and importance and does it have potential intrinsic interest to those of us concerned with education?  Second, how and why did it happen that Schleiermacher's work, and the movement of thought and experience that it might represent, did not get incorporated into the American study of education and does that have anything to do with the sort of histories that American educators wrote?  And third, what agenda of scholarship might lead to our recovering the possibilities the work of Schleiermacher and his peers might bring to us and would the benefits of recovering it commensurate with the scale of effort it would entail?  With these questions, let us resume our inquiry, having sampled Schleiermacher, still uncertain what his life and work might represent.