RESPONSE TO “EXCELLENCE AS A GUIDE TO
EDUCATIONAL CONVERSATION”

Barbara Arnstine
California State University, Sacramento

Every structure has a facade — the side of it which first meets the eye. But facades can be deceptive. They can attract us to something which will disappoint us, or turn us away from something rich and valuable. I think the facade, the organizational surface of President Noddings’s paper may lead us away from some rich and valuable ideas behind it. So I will first address briefly some of the difficulties I see in the facade of this paper — its apparent purpose and focus. Then I will spend the rest of my time on the provocative insights and suggestions that lie behind the facade.

I. The Facade

The stated purpose of Nel’s paper is “to explore the possibility of expanding educational vocabularies and resisting the power of literal vocabularies.” This is a worthy aim, and it creates some expectations. For instance, we would expect that the literal meanings of educational concepts would be consistently resisted, and the reasons for expansion of those meanings would be carefully developed.

However, this is not what happens in the paper. Some concepts, like excellence, are expanded. Others, like learning and citizenship, are treated as if they only had narrow, literal meanings. The absence of reasons for these different treatments makes them seem arbitrary, and the arbitrariness makes the listener uneasy.

On the one hand, Nel wants to expand the concept of excellence to include the concept of equity. This expansion does serve her purpose in showing us how a narrow conception of academic excellence works against the interests and talents of a great many students. But this linguistic gambit also papers over the very real dispute between proponents of excellence and of equity that are part of our educational literature. The question, “Can we be equal and excellent, too?” no longer has any meaning, simply because a new meaning for excellence has been created.

On the other hand, Nel treats the concepts of learning and citizenship as if they were incorrigibly narrow and not amenable to expansion. For example, I am not sure whether Nel wants to say that learning is a narrow term or whether she simply wants to emphasize that the slogan, “All children can learn,” can have some dangerously narrow outcomes. She never talks about the process of learning but only about the outcomes demanded by the curriculum. Therefore, she assumes that learning is a very limited event confined to school subjects. But in ordinary language we use the term learning much more broadly — we talk about a process that is connected to an endless array of activities that are not always associated with schooling. “I learned to ride a bike “I learned to be more patient.”

The literature of the hidden curriculum is based on the idea that students learn much more than the formal curriculum of schools. Critics argue that the repressive conditions of a predetermined curriculum foster a lot of undesirable learnings. While using her own curriculum — producing a Christmas play and a school newspaper, reading favorite stories and making murals — Nel says her students accomplished a great deal, but they weren’t “learning.” But many writers would argue that the hidden curriculum in Nel’s classroom fostered many desirable learnings. What is Nel’s point in demanding such a narrow meaning for the term “learning”?

Nel would answer that a broad definition of the term learning is “expanding — perhaps even revolutionizing the concept.” But her belief that the meaning of “learning” is restricted to the acquisition of standard school subjects is not supported by any argument or evidence; it surely cannot be supported by appeals to ordinary usage. It seems to me that a lot of people are going to have a hard time talking if learning only means acquiring the required curriculum. Must we say, “I went to school and studied art, which is not required. I enjoyed myself, beautified the environment, developed my talent and expressed myself, but I wasn’t learning.” And what of the teacher who worked very hard to foster all this? Is she too required to say, “Yes, my student wasn’t learning.”?

Nel urges us to resist expanding the concept of learning because once we call these desirable outcomes learning, someone will come along and want to measure them. She argues that educational reformers were “sucked into a conversation dominated by learning” and that is how we lost many of their wonderful practices. But I don’t think we will recover those practices by agreeing to a narrow definition of learning. For, according to a narrow definition, the schools — established to foster learning — would have to give up the Christmas plays, the school newspaper and the murals. Teachers and children would have to seek their cooperation, their enrichment and their joy someplace outside of school.

Perhaps the most confusing narrowing of meaning occurs in Nel’s discussion of citizenship. She states that we have a great deal more in common with each other than our citizenship — parenting, homemaking, being friends and lovers. Those activities are excluded from Nel’s idea of citizenship “because of its association with the public realm and I want a vocabulary that will include the private.” But Nel offers no reason for excluding private concerns from the concept of citizenship, and she speaks as if welfare has only a public, not a personal meaning. Yet later in the paper she says, “We should also teach homemaking in such a way that students become competent homemakers and also so that they can see both the personal and global tragedies of homelessness whether that homelessness is caused by poverty, psychological neglect or war.”

This growth of understanding from personal concerns to common concerns is what many people would call the development of citizenship. I am not sure what is to be gained by calling it something else. If what Nel says about the progression from personal homemaking skills to a world view about homelessness is not the development of citizenship, then most state curriculum frameworks and a lot of social studies educators have been misled. If one could not use this progressive method to develop citizenship from the narrowly personal to the more broadly public, how else would we go about it?

II. It’s Only a Facade

Nel invited us at the close of the paper to “think about what we want excellence to mean.” This did not strike me as a particularly attractive invitation because of what she said in her paper. I think that the paper’s facade, which is the pursuit of the conversational possibilities of excellence, learning and citizenship, is a distraction from the ideas contained in it.

I don’t think that Nel really wants us to sit around talking about what excellence ought to mean. This is not based solely on my years of admiration for,and friendship with her. I infer this from the paper itself. Nel may want to get our conversations going, but not for the purpose of improving our conversational abilities. She hopes that we will do something about schooling and the lives that teachers and children lead in the classroom.

The key to Nel’s paper is its focus on the quality of experience in schools; on the experience of schooling itself not just its outcomes. And she shows, by example, the connections between school experiences and their outcomes, the interrelationships between the present life in classrooms and the educational aims they are supposed to achieve.

This focus on experience and its quality is part of a rich pragmatic tradition. In noting the contribution of feminist thinkers in reconstructing curriculum content, Nel speaks out against a fixed and rigid universal curriculum, echoing Dewey’s argument that, “We cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies. It is futile to attempt to arrange them in an order, beginning with one having least worth and going on to that of maximum value”¹

Nel’s discussion of the quality of experience leads to an exploration of children’s talents and their development through specialization. Now “talents” and “specialization” as educational concepts often provoke a certain intellectual wariness, but Nel’s discussions are quite captivating. They are not discussions about conceptual meanings, they are careful considerations of ordinary experience and its implications for educational practice.

In discussing talents, Nel goes right to the heart of the matter in considering what people are interested in. She does this by raising the wonderfully provocative question, “Why do all sorts of people have to fail at school for twelve years before they get to exercise their talents?” She also forthrightly considers her own field of mathematics and asks whether all that time and all that failure is necessary.

In her consideration of the role of interest in the development of young people’s talents, she uses interest as a criterion in examining the quality of present experience in the classroom. The richness of her descriptions and the sting of her questions as they resonate with our own experience reminds us that going to school for many youngsters can mean cruel and unusual treatment.

Acting on one’s interests results in a very natural kind of specialization. Nel answers the charge of narrowness by showing that interest in a particular activity can lead to broader inquiries under the right educational conditions. A rich literature by pragmatic philosophers and progressive teachers supports this claim.

Nel notes that when specialization develops out of children’s natural interests, the consequences are the development of competence and a sense of confidence. Just the opposite results when interests are ignored and their development is denied. When my son was in high school, he told me that he hated survey courses, and he told me why he thought they were taught. He said, “They always want to have power over you. In a survey course, the teacher always knows more than you do. Survey courses put you in your place. They make you feel dumb.”

The narrow and bureaucratic purposes of public schooling have reduced specialization to the selection of a vocation or at least an academic major. Nel reminds us that specialization is the outgrowth of interests that one is encouraged to pursue. And when one is specializing, her experience is enriched by the competence that develops from it, and by the confidence that attends any growth of competence.

In analyzing concepts and slogans, all we can hope to become is more precise. But by offering a picture of experience, Nel gives us an opportunity to become more imaginative — to see more clearly the quality of experience that our educational aims ought to achieve.

For instance, if we simply analyze the slogan, “You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink,” our attention can easily be focussed on the stubborn nature of the horse. Since we believe horses need water, we can then set about developing strategies to overcome reluctant drinkers.

By turning our attention to the quality of the experience that the horse and his groom are having, Nel reminds us that narrow interpretations of need may be operating here, and that drinking at will and drinking on command are two very different experiences.

Nel recreates for us the pain and confusion of thirst unquenched while we are being stuffed with things we don’t want. She then urges us to meet the interests and desires of the student, not just with caring, but with deliberate efforts to cultivate those interests. In so doing, she promises that we will discover what Dewey so aptly described:

as long as any topic makes an immediate appeal, it is not necessary to ask what it is good for….To a hungry, healthy child, food is a good of the situation; we do not have to bring him to consciousness of the ends subserved by food in order to supply a motive to cat. The food in connection with his appetite is a motive. The same thing holds of mentally eager pupils with respect to many topics. Neither they nor the teacher could possibly foretell with any exactness the purposes learning is to accomplish in the future; nor as long as the eagerness continues is it advisable to try to specify particular goods which are to come of it. The proof of a good is found in the fact that a pupil responds; his response is use.²

Nel argues that our discussions about the aims of schooling are misdirected when we assume that all children must drink from the same bucket at the same time. Our present difficulties are not the result of genuine needs and reluctant learners — they are the disastrous effects of a predetermined curriculum on those who must teach it and on those who must submit to it. What we can learn from the experience of horses and children is that needs and interests are not predetermined — they must be followed and cultivated, rather than assumed or demanded.

What Nel wants excellence to mean has reference to the quality of experience in the classroom. Excellence can be present only when an experience is valued by those who are having it. This conception of excellence comes from an examination of experience itself. It is the quality of school life that falls short, not the language we use to describe it.

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¹ John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1916), 281.

² Ibid., 283.