LEFTIST PEDAGOGY AND ENLIGHTENMENT FAITH 1
Frank Margonis
University of Utah
Jean-Jacques Rousseau set the problem of personhood and citizenship
at center stage in the opening pages of Emile. In Rousseau’s
description, the problem is monumental. “Natural man,”
Rousseau states, “is entirely for himself. He is numerical
unity, the absolute whole which is relative only to itself or
its kind. Civil man is only a fractional unity dependent on the
denominator; his value is determined by his relation to the whole,
which is the social body.” And to build drama, Rousseau gives
us examples of the citizens he admires: the Spartan mother who
is more concerned with victory on the battlefield than the loss
of her five sons in battle; and the Spartan man who, after losing
an election to the council of three hundred, is elated that Sparta
has so many men better than himself. Is it possible, we are left
asking, to educate people to unite the Spartan’s devotion
to country with the self-reliance of Rousseau’s natural human?2
The challenge of the Emile is thus posed. After convincing us that uniting the good human and good citizen in one soul is all but impossible, Rousseau asks a question that betrays his own optimistic belief that he has solved this incredible problem: “But what will a man raised uniquely for himself become for others? If perchance the double object we set for ourselves” — rearing both a human and a citizen — “could be joined in a single one by removing the contradictions of man, a great obstacle to his happiness would be removed.”3 Rousseau believes that a natural education — rearing Emile for himself — will allow Emile to develop a character free of the divisions plaguing cityfolk, who are constantly torn between their own beliefs and the demands of opinion. Once firmly grounded in his own simple life, Emile will be prepared to be a dependable citizen — loyal, at once, to his conscience and the body politic.
This scenario gains us a glimpse of a fundamental enlightenment faith in operation: a natural education allows Rousseau to harmonize apparently irreconcilable differences because an underlying natural order stands waiting to be discovered and obeyed. There is a preestablished harmony between individual and social goods built into God’s design.4 This is a faith much like Adam Smith’s, who believed the competitive marketplace actually served individual good and social efficiency due to the beneficent laws of supply and demand.5 This is a faith much like Thomas Jefferson’s, who sought to develop an educational system that would simultaneously develop individuals to their appropriate levels and select the nation’s leaders in accordance with the natural allotment of talent in the population.6 Rousseau, like many enlightenment thinkers, was a deist; he believed in a God that had designed the universe so that apparently disparate or even conflicting elements actually were coordinated into a larger plan. Humans need only to discover the plan and arrange our practices and institutions in accordance with natural dictates.
While I find Rousseau’s solution to the problem of personhood and citizenship both fascinating and repugnant, I am — in this essay — more concerned with the problem itself. But, then again, problems and solutions are not easily separated, for problems anticipate solutions. Rousseau’s belief that he could solve the problem of personhood and citizenship surely accounts for his willingness to pose it. It’s the possibility of an answer that makes the relation of personhood and citizenship a problem rather than a dilemma or a predicament. Dilemmas force us to choose one value or direction at the expense of other values and directions; we uncomfortably attempt to reach existential decisions which pay due respect to our ethical commitments — acknowledging that some of those commitments must be sacrificed. Predicaments offer fewer possibilities for compromise in practice, but force us to endure an evil regardless of the decision made.
And it is Rousseau’s belief in a preestablished harmony, a universe at least in blueprint, that allowed him to believe that the relation of personhood to citizenship is a problem and not a dilemma or a predicament. Yet, this very belief in a preestablished harmony is no longer tenable. Nietzsche and others convinced many of us that human values are not found in the universe but are aspects of the practices and ways of thinking humans impose upon it.7 By invoking the path of nature, Rousseau — in effect — spoke his own words while claiming the authority of God. With God’s death, we are left merely with Rousseau’s relatively feeble voice and without the secure confidence that the relation of personhood to citizenship is a problem rather than a dilemma.
While philosophers like John Dewey and Paulo Freire abandon Rousseau’s solution to the problem of personhood and citizenship, they — like Rousseau — consider the relation of personhood and citizenship a problem and place that problem at the heart of their educational philosophies. Individual realization and social justice are viewed as pieces drawn from the same puzzle, and the philosophical trick is to find their appropriate relation to one another. In my opinion, Dewey and Freire erred in accepting Rousseau’s problem as a problem, for the very basis for focusing on the relation of persons and citizens has evaporated with the passing of the enlightenment faith. Oversimple problems lead to oversimple answers, and the leading solutions to the problem of personhood and citizenship threaten to militate in particular students’ favor at the expense of other students. Rousseau’s solution to the problem is the path of nature; Dewey’s is the scientific method; and Freire’s is praxis. My fear is that each of these is an oversimple answer which overshadows a multitude of questions that might better aid our educational endeavors.
We have grown so accustomed to viewing the relation of personhood and citizenship as a problem that it is worth noting some of the obstacles Rousseau overcame to found this world view. Rousseau’s task was to exonerate human nature and locate the source of evil in human institutions. In contrast to the Calvinism of Rousseau’s Geneva, evil appears in his work as a historical creation.8 Recall that Rousseau begins the Emile with the famous statement that “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”9 Where Calvinists placed the source of evil in the debased nature of humans and thus rendered oppression a fact of existence beyond human control, Rousseau argued for what might be called the social construction of original sin.10 The founding of property, and the hierarchy and privilege resulting from that decision, appear as the source of oppression in what Judith Shklar refers to as Rousseau’s genealogy of vices.11 In reformulating evil as a human creation, Rousseau offered subsequent thinkers the hope that oppression was a problem — ultimately within human control — so that a return to the path of nature might allow the equilibrium combining human growth and social justice to be reestablished.
Having shown that oppression was due to a historical act, Rousseau was able, in Arthur Melzer’s valuable interpretation, to demonstrate a thoroughgoing harmony between the twin goals of social justice and individual realization. Melzer reads Rousseau’s work partly as a response to Plato’s Thrasymachus; where Thrasymachus argues that injustice serves the individual good, Rousseau is set on showing that injustice is the source of evil, that only justice serves the cause of human fulfillment. Melzer believes that previous Western philosophers had all been unwilling to claim such a harmony:
Prior to Rousseau virtually all thinkers had, in a sense, granted something to the moral skepticism of Thrasymachus in their refusal simply to condemn oppression as the worst thing. But, Rousseau’s theory of society constitutes the most thoroughgoing refutation of Thrasymachus…the most radical statement of the harmfulness of oppression and the goodness of justice ever made. All corruption of soul, indeed “all the evils of the human race” result from oppression.12Melzer suggests that Rousseau’s radical critique of oppression founded what has come to be called the modern “left” — theorists who, despite their many disagreements, tend to see oppression as the root of evil. Whether in the form of liberalism or socialism, leftist thinkers have tended to argue that oppression is a humanmade phenomenon, due to unjust institutions. Pursuing the cause of justice — whether in the form of welfare reform or revolution — is accorded the powerful moral authority of pursuing the cause of individual freedom.
While explicit deistic claims of preestablished harmony are no longer offered by modern thinkers like Dewey and Freire, the fundamental assumptions established by Rousseau continue to reappear intact. While there are philosophical prohibitions against claiming, like Rousseau, that human nature is good, human nature appears as benign and perfectible in leftist thought. Humans, for Dewey, are a bundle of tendencies that achieve a specific shape only within a specific set of practices and culture.13 For Freire, human nature is humanization, the process of perfectibility itself.14 So the problem becomes one of developing institutional arrangements that facilitate growth for Dewey and humanization for Freire. While the overt theology of Rousseau has dropped out of the picture, his portrait of the choice facing humans continues to characterize the left. If we replace Rousseau’s word, “Providence,” with the secular term “history,” Rousseau’s belief that we need only choose liberation continues to shape our thought. According to Rousseau,
Providence does not will the evil a man does in abusing the freedom it gives him…. It has made him free in order that by choice he do not evil but good. It has put him in a position to make this choice by using well the faculties which it has endowed him.15In accepting the terms of the problem of personhood and citizenship as established by Rousseau, modern thinkers have already carried his enlightenment faith into the present. Where Rousseau believed that Providence gave humans the faculties to do good, Dewey and Freire had to find those faculties in history. Where Rousseau believed that the path of nature would lead Emile to be both a good man and a good citizen, Dewey and Freire had to show that individuals’ characteristics would simultaneously serve the common good. But, accepting Rousseau’s problem guarantees that its solutions that will not stray too dramatically from their origin.16
IN LEFTIST PEDAGOGY
Dewey and Freire’s solutions to the problem of personhood and citizenship carry with them the confidence of Rousseau’s deism, suggesting that the relation of the individual to the social is indeed a problem and not a dilemma or a predicament. The philosophical task for both Dewey and Freire is to develop a conception of the individual and society so that it is possible to serve individual realization and social justice at once. But, the solutions Dewey and Freire produce carry with them the universalistic character of the problem — the assumption that human nature is one set of properties, the assumption that all humans are fundamentally defined by their political role. Such universalistic assumptions are more the product of philosophical debate and political agendas than of the nature of teaching and learning.
In Dewey’s work, the relation of citizenship and personhood is often cast in terms of the problem of democracy. For example, Dewey states that “the unsolved problem of democracy is the construction of an education which will develop that kind of individuality which is intelligently alive to the common life and sensitively loyal to its common maintenance.”17 Dewey sought social institutions and a system of education that would combine individual growth with social commitment as an organic outgrowth of the processes of social experience. Democracy, he thought, embodies a commitment to the internal dynamic of the process of experience. “Every other form of moral and social faith,” he states, “rests upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some ‘authority’ alleged to exist outside the processes of experience. Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained.”18
Thus, the problem of personhood and citizenship takes a distinctive form in Dewey’s work. The question becomes, can a pedagogy be developed that remains faithful to the internal processes of the student’s experience while preparing her to play a role in a democratic society?19 The scientific method constitutes Dewey’s solution, because it is both a natural outgrowth of initial tendencies woven into the experience of every person and the best method of group decision making. The human organism’s attempt to maintain equilibrium with the environment supplies the dispositional structure that might be organically developed into tendencies to define problems, pose hypotheses, test predictions, and evaluate consequences.20 By structuring classroom activities around the scientific method, the teacher would enable students to develop habits of inquiry approximating the best of reflective thought.
Students trained in scientific inquiry would then be prepared to take their place alongside other citizens as co-inquirers in the Great Community. “The future of democracy,” wrote Dewey, “is allied with spread of the scientific attitude.”21 Envisioning a society in which citizens approached political decisions as problems to be solved in accordance with common interests, Dewey believed that society as well as education could be guided by scientific problem solving.
Unlike Dewey, Freire seems to suggest that the relation of the individual to the society is a predicament; the individual can choose subordination to an oppressive status quo or pursue the rigors of revolutionary liberation. One cannot — in capitalist society — have a harmonious fit between citizenship and personhood, for the basic rules of capitalism institutionalize the employer’s right to rob the employee. But, if our attention is turned from the individual’s relation to capitalism to the individual’s relation to post-revolutionary society, then Freire too falls comfortably into the problematic of personhood and citizenship. Freire’s solution to the problem, like Dewey’s, bares the mark of the universalistic assumptions framing the problem.
For Freire, the central “problem” of existence is humanization.22 Human nature embodies an inherent drive towards humanization; it is only an oppressive social order that prevents humans from realizing this fundamental human “vocation.” In words to which Rousseau would give full agreement, Freire states that “dehumanization is not a given destiny, but the result of an unjust social order, which engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.”23 In thinking poorly of themselves, the oppressed have internalized the social relations surrounding them. Borrowing from existentialism, Freire believes that humans are their situations — that the political, economic, and social divisions of the society become divisions in the souls of the oppressed and oppressors.24
Freire’s solution to the problem of humanization is a pedagogy of praxis that simultaneously addresses the individual need for self-realization and the social need for a revolutionary movement. Teachers are called upon to pose problems for their students that focus upon the central contradictions in students’ lives.25 Since students’ own being is bound up with their historical situation, classroom techniques which tap into students’ experience and ask them to articulate the contradictions they experience will simultaneously serve the process of self understanding and societal understanding. The individual’s “fear of freedom” is bound up with the economic contradictions that place masters above workers. Through dialogue, students experience a relation of equality with the teacher, thus learning to respect themselves and abandon their own fear of freedom.26 Praxis, which includes problem oriented dialogue and practical efforts to act on the decisions emerging from that dialogue, supplies students with the opportunity to develop themselves and both understand and transform social reality.27
Praxis is thus Freire’s solution to the problem of personhood and citizenship. It at once aids the student’s process of humanization — allowing her to pursue her own realization — and aids the process of liberation, as students unmask and oppose the oppressive institutions of their society. According to Freire, praxis becomes “the new raison d’etre of the oppressed; and the revolution, which inaugurates the historical moment of this raison d’etre, is not viable apart from their concomitant conscious involvement.”28 Individual realization, self affirmation, and authenticity are promised the individual, while an end to exploitation is promised the society. Even the interests of the oppressors are addressed. As the universal class, the proletariat frees the oppressors at the same time they free themselves. The contradictions of society between oppressor and oppressed will be “resolved by the appearance of the new man: neither oppressor nor oppressed, but man in the process of liberation.”29
Freire then has continued Rousseau’s legacy. Where Rousseau turns to the path of nature and Dewey to the scientific method, Freire considers praxis the means of unifying individual and social concerns, and the universalistic assumptions in Rousseau and Dewey’s work appear once again with Freire. Humans are all thought to embody the drive to humanization and the contradictions of their society. Thus, praxis is thought to serve all oppressed students alike since it addresses their most basic needs. As with Dewey and Rousseau, Freire is willing to pose the problem of personhood and citizenship because he has an answer.
Rather than assuming that the individual and social are part of a larger plan, that by solving the problem of personhood and citizenship we can both educate and oppose oppression, I think we would do better to view the relation of personhood and citizenship as an existential dilemma where commitment to the twin ideals of citizenship and personhood might be successfully resolved in some cases, while in other cases, the teacher and student would do best to follow the direction supplied by the relationship itself.30 The faith that the problem of personhood and citizenship might be solved assumes an isomorphic relation between political and education issues — as if the dynamics of nation building were also the dynamics of teaching and learning. Leftist educators can maintain their commitment to social justice without assuming that student interests are in harmony with liberal or radical agendas. Educational relations with students take a diversity of shapes, and we have no reason to expect that they fit neatly within the bounds set by political struggles.
A priori rules concerning the need to educate citizens and humans obstruct the teacher’s most fundamental charge: developing a meaningful relation with students which calls out student abilities. Without the creation of a meaningful relation, the teacher’s acts are likely to have only a manipulative effect on students. Calling out students’ strengths is prerequisite to educating either good humans or good citizens, and the direction the educative experience should take depends upon the character of the relationship that develops. Perhaps the character of the relationship will support scientific inquiry, and perhaps it will support revolutionary commitment. The politically committed educator might look for such relationships, but to place her political agenda before the construction of relations will surely lead to disappointment on both students’ and teachers’ parts.
Meaningful educative relationships have characteristics that are visible to participants. All parties are actively engaged: students and teacher have intellectual commitments “called out” by the dynamic of the relationship. Students and teachers volunteer ideas — whether in speech or writing — without being self-protective, spurred by a concern for the project itself. The ideas considered and the tasks pursued are difficult and substantive, challenging the participants to reach insights beyond their previous considerations.
The absence of meaningful relations is also visible, such as in some classrooms studied by Shirley Brice Heath, where students commonly responded to teachers’ questions with silence, where teachers and parents all believed that there was “relatively little ‘real’ exchange of information, feeling, or imagination” between the Anglo teachers and African-American students.31 The absence of meaningful relations also appears in Linda McNeil’s study, where teachers and students respectfully meet for the “polite ritual of social studies,” where neither party asks much of each other and all participants limit the knowledge and commitment they bring to class.32 And we can be sure that a meaningful relationship is absent in the case of “the lads” studied by Willis, who punctuate lessons with spitballs and insults.33
Because Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire make the reconciliation of personhood and citizenship the focus of their attention, they are insensitive to the relational dynamics in specific circumstances and give general answers to general questions. Teachers would do better to develop specific questions, developed in context considering the specific students, teacher, their relations, and the institutional context. By focusing upon three aspects of the student-teacher relationship, I would like to give some initial indication of errors to which Dewey’s and Freire’s general answers to the problem of personhood and citizenship might lead.
Since Dewey and Freire strive to reconcile ideals of personhood and citizenship, their pedagogies embody a public-realm orientation that is unlikely to serve all students’ projects. We might better understand this issue by focusing upon one aspect of educational relationships, the relation between students’ projects and the projects implicit in educational programs. Sartre characterizes individuals by their fundamental projects, that is, their long-term direction in life,34 and education appears to the student as a avenue through which certain life projects might be advanced while others will be neglected. An incongruence between students’ projects and the life put before the student in the school is likely to preempt meaningful relations between teachers and students, leading to listless students who go through the motions with divided attention.
Now Dewey and Freire are clearly committed to engaging students’ projects; students must sense a congruence between their projects and the possible projects implicit in particular teaching methods and educational institutions. Since citizenship is assumed to be a fundamental educational goal, the projects set before the student in Dewey’s and Freire’s pedagogies have a definite focus on public realm activity: representing one’s own interests politically or joining a revolutionary movement. Since political action involves asserting one’s rights, the attitudes assumed are aggressive. Dewey asks that citizens be willing to form self-conscious publics, abandoning hypotheses as soon as they no longer solve the problems of concern.35 Freire asks that students come to see their world as one of domination — in need of active resistance.36
While I wholeheartedly affirm Dewey’s and Freire’s commitments to social justice, given the inegalitarian societies we find ourselves in, the assumption that political motivations can be unproblematically reconciled with pedagogical motivations fosters an insensitivity to those students likely to recoil from the aggressive political projects implicit in the method of inquiry and praxis. Consider, for example, the projects of the Anglo working-class women McRobbie studied. Most of the students she talked to aspired to be wives and mothers, and the school simply did not speak to their interests.37 These young women, as McRobbie says, “were in school but not at the school,” because their foremost concerns — the demands of womanhood and their emergent sexuality — were ignored in classes.38 The orientation towards the public realm found in Dewey’s and Freire’s works similarly threatens to neglect the projects of some young women. The educator working with the women in McRobbie’s study might do best to seek meaningful relations before any citizenship aims might be considered. Students who enter the school with a domestic orientation may indeed respond to a pedagogy with a public orientation, but they may not. Either reform or revolution may turn out to be inconsistent with the dynamic of the relationship that develops.
Dewey’s and Freire’s attempts to solve the problem of personhood and citizenship lead to insensitivities in regard to a second aspect of student-teacher relations, the nature of classroom interaction. Both men attempt to stipulate the most emancipatory types of classroom interaction, prescribing the method of inquiry and dialogue respectively. While the project of reconciling personhood and citizenship requires that a suitable method of interaction be found, the shape of discussions in specific classrooms is often at odds with these prescriptions, and the teacher would do better to pursue interactional styles sensitive to students’ cultural backgrounds and to the power relations in the classroom and community.
Interaction among students and teachers coming from different linguistic communities often falters. Shirley Brice Heath describes the ways in which students from an African-American community grow silent and resistant when faced with an Anglo teacher’s questions. Heath believes the teachers asked questions assuming the analytical frameworks of the Anglo community; students were expected to give one-word answers, isolating a specific idea from social circumstances and the larger story giving the idea meaning. Since these analytical expectations run contrary to the linguistic practices of the students’ community, where rich and humorous narratives are valued — not isolated ideas — the students balk at the teacher’s pedagogy.39
Dewey’s pedagogical focus upon isolating a problem to be solved — an approach closely tied to the decisive role of the citizen — is likely to recreate the divisions between students and teachers reported in Heath’s work. The analytical emphasis of even a flexible conception of the scientific method stands in contrast to the interactional styles of some communities, and the relations between students and teachers are likely to founder where analysis is made more basic than the relationships themselves.
Freire’s work is more sensitive than Dewey’s to the process of slowly building analytical thought into discussions that begin with the students’ own ways of organizing their understanding. By showing students pictures or describing circumstances and asking the students to talk about them, Freire does not assume an analytical way of thinking.40 However, as feminist writers have argued, Freire does rely upon the egalitarian structure of dialogue.41 Through reciprocal interaction students come to see themselves as historical subjects. By describing the ways in which interactional dynamics are infused with power relations privileging the dominate gender, ethnicity, and class, feminists have suggested that students may be led to radical conclusions largely through deference to the teacher’s authority. Thus, Freire’s pedagogy may end up enforcing a radical citizenship program without fully engaging the beliefs of students.
When the reconciliation of personhood and citizenship is elevated above the existential decisions devoted to attaining meaningful relationships, teachers’ interactions with students are likely to exclude or subvert some students’ ways of talking and thinking. The most fundamental questions for the teachers Heath studied must concern the process of bridging linguistic communities. And the most basic questions for the feminist teachers critical of Freire must concern pedagogical means of avoiding the dynamic of control found in interactional patterns. Dilemmas of personhood and citizenship are best posed after meaningful relations are in process.
The attempt to solve the problem of citizenship and personhood has also led Dewey and Freire to be insensitive to a third aspect of the student-teacher relation, the institutional context. Students’ relations with teachers are powerfully influenced by the institutional context bringing meaning to the face-to-face classroom relations. In working-class schools where students sense little potential for mobility via education, some students respond to teachers with resistance.42 In African-American schools, where students know that a racially constructed job ceiling will prevent them from gaining meaningful opportunity, some students respond by withdrawing from pedagogical encounters.43 And in American Indian schools, where the school system is accurately seen as a historic agent of colonization and indoctrination, many students develop projects in reaction to the endeavors of white teachers.44
Dewey’s reconciliation of personhood and citizenship relies upon the possibility that institutional divisions of the larger society might be overcome in the classroom, as students and teachers develop a community of inquiry; and given the right teacher, students, and circumstances, Dewey’s hopes might well be vindicated. However, Dewey probably underrates the power of institutionalized divisions.45 His theory focuses upon reconciling the methods of individual thinking with a general method of thinking — without consideration for the ways in which individuals are differently situated economically, socially, and politically. In many cases, a Deweyan educator will have no means of getting beyond the distrust African-American or Sioux students bring to the classroom. Indeed, Dewey’s interest in unifying all students into thinking scientifically might, quite appropriately, be viewed as one more form of assimilatory education.46
Even where classroom inquiry unifies students despite economic or racial polarization, the results are problematic, since good pedagogy cannot erase economically, politically, and socially structured divisions of interests. The appearance of common interests created in the classroom is likely to work against the students suffering political or economic inequality, obscuring the differences at stake. Where fundamental differences of interest emerge in the process of teaching and learning, educators may be best off following those differences, sacrificing the citizenship of unity for one of difference.
In straightforwardly acknowledging the different interests in the classroom and suggesting that liberatory educators should serve the oppressed, Freire denies the all-too-easy harmony created in Dewey’s vision of community. However, Freire too believes that a trusting teacher-student relation can be developed so long as teachers approach the endeavor with commitment and humility, with true generosity.47 In many cases, Freire is probably right to believe that activist teachers might be able to gain the trust of oppressed students, but the historical construction of inequality in the U.S. will surely prevent such a development in numerous cases. For example, some American Indian and African-American students have a persistent distrust of educators, since teachers have historically represented the process of colonization. Teachers facing such student resistance may be best off acknowledging the impossibility of Freire’s vision. By posing the question of relationship first, the educator may well decide that such students are better taught by someone else, that a meaningful relationship presupposes a degree of social justice that simply is not present. Viewing the reconciliation of personhood and citizenship as a dilemma, dependent upon the character of the relationship that develops, includes the possibility that neither personhood nor citizenship might be pursued.
For all their liberatory intent, in assuming that all students should reconcile the demands of personhood and citizenship, the theories of Dewey and Freire represent one form of assimilatory theory. Like gross forms of assimilatory theories, they privilege one set of attributes, taken from particular groups of people and ways of life, and universalize those standards. Instead of following preset definitions of the good person and citizen, we might be better off taking Mike Rose’s suggestion; he advises teachers that if you “set up the right conditions, try as best you can to cross class and cultural boundaries, figure out what’s needed to encourage performance, that if you watch and listen, again and again there will emerge evidence of ability that escapes those who dwell on differences.”48
For a
response to this essay, see Leach.
1 I would like to thank several people for their insightful and critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper: Heather Brunjes, Donna Deyhle, Kathy Girton, Andrew Gitlin, Harvey Kantor, Larry Johnson, Sharon LaSalle, Mary Leach, Suzanne Rice, Audrey Thompson, and Bill Watkins.
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 39-40.
3 Rousseau, Emile, 41.
4 Rousseau, Emile, 277.
5 “Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I (London: Dent, 1977), 398. See also, Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1976), 235-37.
6 Crusade Against Ignorance, ed. Gordon Lee (New York: Teachers College Press, 1961), 162. On Jefferson’s deism, see Daniel Boorstein, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), ch. 1.
7 See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random, 1967), 149-50.
8 On Rousseau’s relation to the Calvinism of Geneva, see Maurice Cranston, Jean Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 26-28.
9 Rousseau, Emile, 37.
10 A classic statement of the doctrine of original sin appears in Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University, 1991).
11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger and Judith Masters (New York: St. Martins, 1964), 141-42. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 33.
12 Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 84.
13 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 114-15.
14 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1970), 28.
15 Rousseau, Emile, 281.
16 This claim is something like that made by Louis Althusser in using the concept “problematic.” For Althusser, “problematic” invokes a traditional rationalist position suggesting that people within capitalist society are confined to the assumptions at the root of bourgeois ideology. See, for example, “Ideology and Ideological state Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 146, 167; and For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1977), 67-69. By using the term “problematic,” I do not intend to imply, like Althusser, that thought is locked within the parameters of a small set of assumptions. Without attempting to explain why particular questions continue to shape philosophical discourse, I am merely attempting to suggest that some combination of political institutions, social practices, and philosophical debates about those practices enshrine particular questions which then play an important role in shaping philosophical discussions.
17 John Dewey, “Education and Social Direction,” in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, V. 11 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 57.
18 John Dewey, “Creative Democracy — The Task Before Us,” in The Later Works, 1925-1953, V. 14 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 229. See also with John Dewey and James Tufts, Ethics in The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 7 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 348-49.
19 On Dewey’s interest in remaining true to the internal processes of experience, see John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 35.
20 John Dewey, How We Think (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1933), 35-54; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1938), 23-41.
21 John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: Capricorn, 1939), 148-49.
22 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 28.
23 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 28.
24 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 84-5; Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Continuum, 1973), 102.
25 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 85.
26 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 32-35, 54-56.
27 The Politics of Education, trans. Donaldo Macedo (South Hadley, 1985), 84-85.
28 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 53.
29 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 42.
30 Larry Johnson suggested the idea to me that the relation between citizenship and personhood should be viewed as a dilemma.
31 Shirley Brice Heath, “Questioning at Home and at School,” in Doing the Ethnography of Schooling (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 107.
32 Linda McNeil, Contradictions of Control (London: Routledge, 1988).
33 Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (Westmead: Saxon, 1977), 11-32.
34 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 588-89.
35 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow, 1927), 158-60, 177-78.
36 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 92-93.
37 Carole Pateman has persuasively argued that liberal and radical political theory focuses upon the public realm, assuming a silent and supportive private realm. This dynamic is apparent in both Dewey’s and Freire’s interest in reconciling personhood and citizenship. See Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) and The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
38 Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 42-43, 51, 58.
39 Brice Heath, “Questioning at Home and at School,” 105-27.
40 See, for example, Paulo Freire, “Education as the Practice of Freedom,” in Education for Critical Consciousness.
41 See, for example, Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?” Harvard Educational Review 59 (1989): 297-324.
42 See, for example, Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Making It (Boulder: Westview, 1987), 91-96.
43 See, for example, John Ogbu, The Next Generation (New York: Academic, 1974), 81-101.
44 Murray Wax, Rosalie Wax and Robert Dumont, Formal Education in an American Indian Community (Prospect Heights: Waveland, 1964); Donna Deyhle, “Break Dancing and Breaking Out,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 17 (1986): 111-27.
45 Dewey has commonly been criticized for neglecting institutional influences. See, for example, Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 17; A.J. Damico, Individuality and Community (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1978), 61-62.
46 I take this to be Walter Feinberg’s argument in discussing Dewey’s relation to the Polish community of Chicago in Reason and Rhetoric (New York: Wiley, 1975), 103-08.
47 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 29, 34-35.
48 Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary (London: Penguin, 1989), 222.