EmiliaW1a

     In developing Emilia, or, The City as Educator, we seek to renew the tradition of the Bildungsroman in the context of Web 2.0 and social software.  In naming our heroine, Emilia, we indicate that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his great work, Emile, or, On Education, continues to inspire us.  Unlike Emile, with its scope from infancy through early adulthood, however, Emilia concentrates on the transition to adulthood from about the age of sixteen on. 

     Given our concern for this transition, instead of naming Emilia Carlyle as we did, we might have called her Willa Masters in recognition of another novel of formative education of great importance to us, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.  We chose not to do so because we want to signify a linkage, not to a single work, but to the broad tradition of literature of self-formation.  As a tradition, the Bildungsroman is a rich genre filled with well-known exemplars, among them Austen's Emma, Brontë's Jane Eyre, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Chopin's The Awakening, Butler's Way of All Flesh, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Mann's Magic Mountain, McCarthy's The Group.  These, and others in the genre, and on its periphery, illuminate how a person forms and pursues his or her self-expectations under given cultural circumstances, which frustrate and further his or her development. 

     Literary creations about how young men and women form themselves through the personal experience each has of people, place, thought, and culture inform the project of Emilia, without any one providing a direct model.  In addition, two biographical forms close to the Bildungsroman are important resources for Emilia.  First, autobiographies provide important opportunities to observe the formative education of people who learned much in the course of life.  These, among them The Autobiography of Henry Adams, Edith Wharton's A Brachward Glance, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and M.F.K.  Fisher's Among Friends or Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama, vividly present the interaction between emerging self-expectations and life circumstances, essential background for Emilia.  Second, educators have much to learn from biography, especially ones that probe the relation of the subject's formative years and his or her subsequent work, and excellent example being Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.

     Bildungsromane, novels of formative education, are particularly important in the present context of educational research.  They draw students of education into reconstructing through imagination the formative experiences that persons enjoy and suffer in the immediacy of their lived lives.  This reconstruction of experience provides a corrective to the prevailing depersonalization of education.  Formative education, in its full, experiential sense, is a major component of the life that each of us lives, our prime preoccupation during the first quarter or third of our lives, and a recurrent dimension of our sustained experience thereafter.  Yet in public and professional discourse, "education" has been desiccated into a sterile synonym for schooling.  And prevailing talk about education as schooling has further shrunk it, twice over.  First, public leaders further reduce it to a concern for schooling, not in a full spectrum of capacities, but in those few skills they deem essential for economic competitiveness or social success.  Second, researchers and policy makers abstract it away by attending exclusively to statistics about the extrinsic characteristics of classificatory cohorts.  The statistical representation of contrived performances generated from incessant tests of this class, that grade, every district, and numerous local, state, and national age groups does not represent the lived education of any person.  It shadows forth nothing but ciphers. 

     As thinking about education concentrates on how large groups learn the standard subjects taught in classrooms, schools, and throughout the system, people increasingly ignore the personal, inward experience of education.  Testing misses it.  Pedagogy ignores it.  Parents lose sight of it.  Youths miss out on it.  The capacity to think about formative education risks becoming a skill near extinction, an endangered art.  Formative education, lived educational experience, has been stolen from persons and a simulacrum has been ascribed to cohorts, large and small, from the class, the recipient of the teacher's planned lesson, to whole populations, whose indicators of educational attainment become part of the basis for policy decisions, in both government and commerce.  Up and down the system, educational policy aims to change the statistical characteristics of these cohorts, with ciphered percentiles providing the "empirical" basis estimating the "results," with which the public can account for educational efficiency and achievement. 

     In contrast to "education' as the statistical results of schooling, education, real education, takes place in the real experience of real persons, thoroughly ramified, like the nervous system through the living body, through all the particulars of their lives.  One of the best ways to learn to think about our real experience as real persons is to enter into powerful, well-crafted fictions about human lives.  These interior dialogs enable us to engage in examining life in the world of thought and then to translate the skills formed within the inner life of the mind to coping with actualities in the life of experience.  This is precisely what toddlers are doing for themselves as they invent imaginary friends and companions and talk incessantly with these sidekicks, seemingly so childish, about their perplexities and pains, as they seek to form and pursue their intentions with effect in a vast, bewildering world.  With Emilia we want to renew our child-like capacity for intelligent make-believe in a world of dour, dessicated practice.

     In an illuminating essay, Mikhail Bakhtin defined the Bildungsroman as a novel of emergence in which the character of the hero undergoes a process of development. He observed importantly that the characterological development involves an engagement by the hero with historical time and substantive changes in the social context. The development of the hero in a Bildungsroman meshes with developments of historical significance, with the changes the hero instantiates often indicating the emerging human possibilities hidden in the froth of historical flux.