The Demise of Authenticity

Frank Margonis
University of Utah

Progressive educators tend to use the term "authentic" as the highest form of praise, reserved for educational experiences which most capture their sense of what schools should do. Whole language teachers seek authentic writing experiences, and progressive evaluators now recommend "authentic assessment." However, the term authenticity has divergent meanings, and it is not entirely clear what progressive educators have in mind for their students. While the term authenticity, for some, evokes images of a rebel artist whose morally charged canvasses break the mold of convention, many contemporary educational uses of the term seem strikingly conformist and pedestrian.¹ For example, when Theodore Sizer proposes that students finish their term with an exhibition requiring a group of them to accurately fill out tax forms, he offers the reform as a type of authentic evaluation.² In this case, authenticity appears to have little to do with educating rebels. Presumably, the drudgery of completing tax forms is authentic because it is a real aspect of life; according to an old adage, all students will face tax forms.

Unfortunately, Sizer's employment of the term authenticity has abandoned the anti-assimilationist connotations so basic to early uses of the concept. Rousseau, for instance, would find little of value in the tax form exercise, for his authentic individual listens to his own heart, speaking and acting resolutely on its dictates. In the task of educating the authentic individual, the culture of the larger society operates as an obstacle, for it threatens to drown out the individual's felt judgments, so the student must be protected from the culture and people of his times. From Rousseau's perspective, Sizer's suggestion that students learn to accept social norms - such as IRS regulations and the opinions of their peers about those rules - is actually education into inauthenticity.³ The faint decrees of the student's heart would be decisively smothered in the effort to learn socially dictated patterns of turning money over to the government.

To understand the philosophical roots of Sizer's assimilationist conception of authenticity, we must look to the works of John Dewey. As Dewey brought the ethic of authenticity out of the contrived setting described in Rousseau's Emile and adapted it to mass urban education, the anti-assimilationist function of Rousseau's ideal was lost. In Dewey's pedagogy the child is not to be coerced, but Dewey hardly insists that she follows the path of her heart. Rather, Dewey hopes that years of group problem solving in school will prepare individuals to have a second-nature comfort with social norms and group processes of decision making. Moreover, Dewey placed a pronounced emphasis upon schooling involving real acts and students taking real responsibility; school was not to be the preparation for life, but life itself.⁴

Thus, where Rousseau might say that Sizer's pedagogy prepares the individual to ignore his conscience in slavish acceptance of the dominant ideology, Dewey would find Sizer's tax form exhibition to be valuable so long as the students found it engaging, learned group problem solving, and learned something about their role in the social whole. Even though Dewey's philosophy is superior to Rousseau's in numerous ways, the loss of the anti-assimilationist component of the ideal of authenticity in Rousseau's work is - to my mind - a serious problem. Insofar as Dewey and contemporary progressive educators lose sight of the anti-assimilationist strengths of early conceptions of authenticity, the threat that progressive pedagogy is a tool of colonization seems very real.

Progressive pedagogues might do well to search for an educational ideal which maintains the anti-assimilationist safeguards so critical to Rousseau's conception of authenticity while building in Dewey's sensitivity to the social construction of the self. As a step in this direction, I suggest we adopt Rousseau's ontological attitude towards understanding and respecting the child's nature and apply it to educational relationships. Instead of asking after the child's nature and its place in the providential order, the teacher - from this perspective - should ask, "What can the students and myself be, given who we are?" While such a question cannot lead to the full articulation of a teacher's educational aims, it might allow her to develop aims that are organic outgrowths of her educational relationships and prevent her from creating aims which ignore the students' ways of being in the world. If this path involves the abandonment of an ethic of authenticity, at least its anti-assimilationist aspects will be saved.

ROUSSEAU'S ANTI-ASSIMILATIONIST CONCEPTION OF
AUTHENTICITY AND THE ONTOLOGICAL ATTITUDE

Believing that the drawing rooms of Paris were populated with people who had long-ago said farewell to their conscience, Rousseau viewed the dominant culture of his society as a powerful threat to an authentic existence. Consequently, his conception of authenticity is distinctively anti-assimilationist. He wished to outline a pedagogical approach that would maintain the individual's connection to his own basic sentiments, and authenticity became an ideal dedicated to buttressing the individual in the face of bourgeois culture. Basic to Rousseau's philosophical task was an ontological description of the child's nature and his place in the providential order, for it is only by knowing the laws of human development that we might follow God's path and not the debased direction indicated by prevalent beliefs. The teacher's role is to observe and follow the path of nature, for Emile - says Rousseau - is not his pupil, but nature's.⁵

Because authenticity is devoted to buttressing the individual in the face of bourgeois culture, Arthur Melzer refers to it as a counter-cultural ideal.⁶ The person who stays in touch with his most fundamental sentiment, his "sentiment of existence," remains aloof from the push and pull of contending egos in the public realm.⁷ He alone acts as he feels, instead of adopting the duplicitous logic of a public order where one strives to out maneuver others in a quest for self gain.⁸ The struggles and false appearances of the public world make humans appear "only as specters and phantoms which strike the eye for a moment and disappear as soon as one tries to touch them."⁹ While the bourgeoisie strive to impress one another without ever revealing their true judgments, the authentic individual speaks simply from the heart. Rousseau says:

I distinguish between that which is founded on public opinion and that which is derived from self-esteem. The first consists in vain prejudices no more stable than a ruffled wave, but the second has its basis in the eternal truths of morality. The honor of public opinion can be advantageous with regard to fortune, but it does not reach the soul and thus has no influence on real evidence.¹⁰

Thus, Rousseau's ethic of authenticity is based partly on a sociological analysis of his society, but also on an ontological characterization of the human soul and its relation to a larger providential order. A key aspect of Rousseau's ontological attitude is the belief that the forces of nature are greater than the student and teacher, that the best education will adapt itself to those forces. The worst education will violate those forces and pay the price. If, for example, we ignore Rousseau's insistence that the student be taught to discover truths for himself, and we teach students to memorize words independent of experiences, we will alienate the individual from the most dependable source of morality and truth: the sentiment of existence.¹¹ We will create a person shot through with contradictions. Swept along in contrary routes by nature and men, a composite impulse which leads us to neither one goal nor the other. Thus, in conflict and floating during the whole course of our life, we end it without having been able to put ourselves in harmony with ourselves and without having been good either for ourselves or for others.¹²

Thus, the prescriptions which determine the tutor's role are not mere human conventions, but are human interpretations of the natural order. For instance, it is natural, from Rousseau's perspective, that Emile not engage in conflicts with other wills, because this is the state experienced by the mythical (and ethnocentric) "savage" - the human standard preceding the conventions of society.¹³ Similarly, it is natural that Emile grows up to listen to his most basic sentiments, for these are the tools God has given humans to lead a good life.¹⁴ These are truths the tutor has learned via observation and judgment.

Thus, Rousseau's pedagogical principles are offered from the humble stance of the ontological attitude. Rousseau has sought to understand the basic character of the universe and humans' place within it. Feeling that the oppression humans now suffer is largely due to our deviations from the providential order, Rousseau has attempted to determine how an individual might remain in harmony with God's plan even though the course of Western history shows a steady movement away from nature. The principles articulated in the Emile are thus an attempt to describe traits of humans and learning that will operate independent of human will. We can ignore them, but will then suffer the consequences.

DEWEY'S OPERATIONALIZED/ASSIMILATIONIST CONCEPTION OF AUTHENTICITY

Even though Dewey endeavored to reconstruct Rousseau's conception of authenticity, he abandoned the anti-assimilationism so basic to Rousseau's perspective. The ontological perspective which undergirds Rousseau's anti-assimilationism is swept away, in Dewey's work, by an unremitting commitment to scientific epistemological standards. Rousseau's pronouncements in favor of preserving the individual's relation to his own sentiment of existence emerge as nonsensical in a world view committed to testing hypotheses and observing consequences. Despite the soundness of Dewey's arguments opposing Rousseau, the pedagogical result is an assimilationist conception of authenticity offering the student no protection from cultural imperialism.

While Dewey does not articulate an explicit ideal of authenticity, his work embodies an operationalized version of the ideal. He argues that educational experiences ought not be an external imposition on the child, but ought to develop understandings "inherent within" the student's experience.¹⁵ This position emerges from Dewey's fundamental agreement with Rousseau that education should be "based on the native capacities of those to be taught." "Education," he says, "is not to be forced upon children and youth from without, but is the growth of capacities with which human beings are endowed at birth."¹⁶ And despite his allergic reaction to metaphysical inquiry, he often uses a type of metaphysical talk clearly reliant upon a conception of authenticity. For example, Dewey complains that "enforced quiet and acquiescence prevent pupils from disclosing their real natures. They enforce artificial uniformity. They put seeming before being."¹⁷

Dewey's use of terms such as "artificial" - and its antipode, "natural" - recall the thought of Rousseau. Just as Rousseau exhorts teachers to allow students to discover truths using their own senses and reason, Dewey believes powerful learning involves a student who is actively developing her powers in the process of investigation. Students should be engaged; they should voluntarily pursue a task because they are interested in understanding the matter under study. Dewey says,

The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends.¹⁸

When this criterion is not achieved, Dewey refers to the educational process as "external," "imposed," "artificial," or "mechanical."¹⁹

However, Dewey's reconstructed conception of authenticity comes without Rousseau's ontological safeguards against assimilation to the dominant culture. Dewey's commitment to the epistemological standards of science prevents his acceptance of Rousseau's conception of authenticity. Talk of the "sentiment of existence," "inner light," the "voice of nature," and "conscience" - as well as the belief that these sentiments connect us to a larger providential order - must all bow in the face of the scientific scruples of Dewey's time. For all these terms refer to inner states and Dewey - like many of his philosophical contemporaries - adopted a method which focuses on observable behaviors rather than introspective claims.²⁰ Statements about private thoughts are considered too speculative to allow for defensible philosophical reasoning. And the speculative suggestion that these inner states follow God's will does not allow the observability and testing that Dewey considers fundamental.

Moreover, Dewey is profoundly suspicious of Rousseau's ontological individualism, the belief that individuals are fundamentally constituted independently of one another. From Dewey's perspective, this is another nontestable claim. Since all the humans we meet are complex combinations of their particular culture and natural "tendencies," Dewey can find no empirical evidence to support Rousseau's belief that individuals are most naturally related to their own basic passions.²¹ Consequently, Rousseau's monumental efforts to shelter Emile from the encroachment of social relations makes little sense from Dewey's perspective. While Dewey agrees with Rousseau that the individual's natural "tendencies" should be engaged, he views these traits as ill-defined - needing social relations to be brought to fruition.

Dewey's empirical standards thus entirely undercut the division between internal and external so basic to the anti-assimilationist components of Rousseau's conception of authenticity. Experience, for Dewey, is composed of factors both "internal" and "external" to the person (if we use enlightenment terminology). "Experience," says Dewey, "does not go on simply inside a person." Experience includes the "external" characteristics of "roads, of means of rapid movement and transportation, tools, implements, furniture, electric light and power."²² In short, internal and external no longer draw lines between that which is "inside" and that which is "outside" the individual. There is, in classic Deweyan talk, an interaction between the individual and her environment.²³

While I am among the many philosophers who believe Dewey's redefinition of internal and external stems from sound epistemological concerns, the unfortunate result of this redefinition is that Rousseau's safeguards against assimilationist encroachment are lost. In Rousseau, the individual's internal states - his sentiments and conscience - are granted an ontological and epistemological primacy requiring respect from educators. For Dewey, the conscience of the individual is not given this sort of primacy. The only check against pervasive cultural norms in Dewey's work lies in the individual's voluntary engagement; if the student is engaged in solving a problem, Dewey would say the lesson is internal to the student's experience.

However, the standard of engagement and voluntary compliance offers little protection for the student in the face of a dominant culture. People choose from within a range of circumscribed options and thus voluntarily engage with many experiences which do not serve their interests. Students have voluntarily agreed to go along with many educational events which we later call acts of colonization or cultural imperialism. When African American students at Tuskegee in the late nineteenth century learned to accept segregation and subordination to Whites, they did so voluntarily.²⁴

Dewey shows his knowledge of the ways in which voluntary compliance might be fostered in the well-organized classroom. Individual engagement, he argues, might emerge through the dynamics of the whole group. He argues for a group-oriented form of classroom discipline, where the individual's decisions concerning the desirability of tasks is continually framed by group concerns. In a well-ordered classroom, Dewey suggests that the:

control of individual actions is effected by the whole situation of which they are cooperative and interactive parts....[T]hose who take part do not feel that they are bossed by an individual person or are being subject to the will of some outside superior person.²⁵

While Dewey's judgment of the way in which group dynamics may serve to engage many students without a sense of imposition is certainly sound, it highlights the absence of safeguards allowed for in his pedagogy.

Thus, Dewey's proposals to continually place students in contexts where they learn to solve problems in groups may both engage students and teach them the method of inquiry, but there are no checks to insure that the method of inquiry is congruent with the student's culture and circumstances. For those students who - due to personal, cultural, economic, or gender background - do not think in ways harmonious with the posing of problems and testing of hypotheses, the educational experiences Dewey recommends may operate to contradict and disconfirm the individual's already-developed ways of thinking. Students who bring a narrative style of thought to the classroom or other students who adopt a humble orientation towards life, specifically avoiding efforts to control their environment, could easily find themselves in opposition to the procedures of group problem solving that Dewey prescribes.²⁶

We can see the consequences of Dewey's absence of safeguards in his infamous lapse, where he argued that assembly line workers who had benefited from a project-oriented curriculum would understand and appreciate the process at a deep level.²⁷ Instead of considering the resistance that working class people have shown to assembly-line work as a sign of insight and wisdom, Dewey hoped, in this instance, that schooling in the scientific method might prepare students to embrace the aims of efficient production in the larger society and - with it - some rather oppressive working conditions.

It appears as though Dewey's operationalized conception of authenticity actually defined the ideal out of existence. Dewey's failure to find means of protecting working-class people against the encroachments of capitalistic rationality makes me yearn for the anti-assimilationist safeguards of Rousseau's conception of authenticity. However, I am quite willing to follow Dewey's lead in abandoning authenticity itself.

TRANSFERRING THE ONTOLOGICAL ATTITUDE TO RELATIONSHIPS

We might reclaim the anti-assimilationist protections provided by Rousseau's conception of authenticity, within the socially-constructed worldview of Dewey, by adopting an ontological attitude towards educational relationships. By asking humbly, "What can the students and myself become, given who we are?" the teacher trains her attention on the many aspects of educational relationships to which she must adapt. She acknowledges that an interactional dynamic will shape both herself and her students in ways that she cannot foresee. She seeks first to attain a relationship that will call out students' intellectual and creative abilities.

In contrast to Rousseau, who seeks to describe the student's nature and place in God's universe, an ontological approach to relationships would focus merely on capturing the dynamics of educational encounters. In keeping with Dewey's empiricism, study of relationships is a this-worldly endeavor which does not - like Rousseau's path of nature - straight-forwardly yield educational aims. An understanding of relational dynamics, instead, offers parameters within which educational aims might be successfully developed. While indispensable, our understanding of relationships will seldom attain standards of perfect clarity; the only knowledge available is interpretative, often intuitive, and shrouded in ambiguity.

Even though our knowledge of educational relationships will forever remain partial and limited, even though we will only gain glimpses of students' distinct historical paths, we do know enough to see that students and teachers act in ways that are profoundly connected: Teachers who hold high expectations for students often see the most impressive student gains;²⁸ teachers who withdraw effort often see students who withdraw effort;²⁹ teachers who set students on open-ended projects often see students who respond with heightened maturity and initiative;³⁰ teachers who represent a racist segment of the population in symbol and act often face stern resistance from those students who resent the exclusionary strategies of the dominant group.³¹ In each case, the students and teachers are in a relationship that is larger than either of them.

In the ontological attitude, the teacher reflects a humble assessment that there are patterns at play which are greater than individual students and teachers, patterns which operate regardless of whether we know and heed them. Some of the patterns which shape the educational interaction are beyond the school itself: the respective economic locations of the student and teacher, the cultural and race background of each, the gender positions they each inhabit. Other aspects of the educational relationship are created in the school by the overarching interactions of students and teachers, the degree of cohesiveness or polarization amongst students and teachers, the academic ethic set partly by systems of tracking and the school's sense of mission.³² Other aspects of the educational relationship occur in the classroom with the face-to-face engagement of students and teachers. Each class has its own ethos, and each teacher-student relationship its own character. Students have complex ways of understanding, shaped both by their subject position and by their distinct ways of interpreting experience. The teacher's distinctive role is in calling out those traits of every student which will strengthen each one's intellectual engagement and enhance each life.

So the teacher has the responsibility of setting the appropriate educational tone in the classroom, but she or he will succeed only if the relationships are conducive. What can be said and what cannot be said - what is powerful and what is not - depends partly on the character of the relationship. Preset plans to educate students in the method of inquiry may run aground for the student who finds the teacher offensive, the subject matter inconsequential, the scientific method foreign and assaultive, or the institution of the school a false promise in an unjust society. In such cases, the relational prerequisites for good pedagogy are unlikely to emerge.

Sometimes, the teacher may be able to build the relational prerequisites by showing the student the situationally appropriate sort of attention, by altering subject matter, or by changing the method of investigation pursued in class. For instance, when Eliot Wigginton's students set fire to his podium, he took it as a clue that his didactic style of instruction was integrally tied to his students' resistance, and he responded by developing a project style of instruction that altered his relationship with students and set them on projects that called forth their strength and intelligence. Pre-set subject matter was abandoned in favor of a classroom format allowing students to teach him as he taught students. Together they devised literacy projects which connected students to local artisans and placed them in the position of making important and difficult decisions that extended their imagination.³³

The sort of flexibility demonstrated by Wigginton is self-consciously provided for in Theodore Sizer's educational reform proposals. Even though Sizer's tax form exercise symbolizes the abandonment of the traditional conception of authenticity - and I completely share Rousseau's likely abhorrence of this bit of curriculum - most of his policy recommendations demonstrate an impressive sensitivity of the need to honor educational relationships. Sizer's reform proposals are among a small number that take the dynamics of relationships seriously. Even though no educational reform can create good educational relationships, his proposals are intended to supply the space and time for real understanding and negotiation to emerge among students and teachers.³⁴ Sizer insists that teachers should see far fewer students for longer periods of time in contexts where teachers can coach students; this basic concept shows a keen sensitivity to the needs of relationships in the present high school and the difficulty of creating good relationships in a polarized society. His support for heterogeneous grouping prevents the school from buttressing social inequities which plague educational relationships. His suggestion that cumbersome and prescriptive core curricula be replaced with open-ended core curricula focused on "essential questions" allows for the incorporation of a wide variety of subject matters; such flexibility allows teachers to respond to student cultures in a basic way - building curricula out of students' and teachers' relational dynamics. Such curricula not only embody a respect for students but also allow critical issues, such as the nature of justice, to be pursued in ways that the students find meaningful.³⁵

To the degree that teachers adapt instruction to the relational dynamic occurring between themselves and their students, a crude assimilationism is prevented, for the students' worldviews and life practices - whether they be sharply critical of dominant group perspectives or blandly accepting of the world as it is - must be given basic respect in the process of building meaningful educational relationships. When educators in Rock Point, Arizona designed a bilingual project curriculum for Navajo students, they took great pains to set up conditions for good relations between students and teachers. Navajo students learned from Navajo teachers, avoiding the Navajo-Anglo division plaguing many reservation schools, and setting up the circumstance in which teachers would have a more intimate understanding of student acts. School projects often tied students to their communities, asking them to interview and report on elders or local sports heroines and then return to the school to educate their peers and community. Students wrote newspaper articles in both Navajo and English. Hence, respect for Navajo culture and for the students themselves was built into the pedagogy, and student successes surpassed other schools.³⁶

When educators plan the school program to relate meaningfully to students and develop a fruitful relationship between student and teacher, the possibilities for meaningful educational interchanges multiply. For the educator's primary charge is to engage the ways of thinking the student brings to the classroom, not to initiate her into a preset way of thinking such as a particular discipline or the scientific method. While initiation into the method of intelligence or the disciplinary knowledge exalted in liberal arts curricula may well form an invaluable aspect of particular educational relationships, it is the character of the relationship itself that makes such learning possible.

For a response to this essay, see Hutchinson.

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I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Audrey Thompson for insightful comments she made on an earlier draft of this essay and also for our countless discussions on Rousseau and authenticity.

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1. Lionel Trilling argues that authenticity involves a somewhat unpopular artistic expression which violates convention. See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 94.

2. Theodore Sizer, Horace's School (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 38-39.

3. Marshall Berman describes inauthenticity in The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Anthem, 1970), 268-69. Berman's interpretation of Rousseau is distinctive - and at odds with mine - in suggesting that Emile's education is for inauthenticity.

4. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 185-86.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 119.

6. Arthur Melzer, "Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity," in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 278. My use of the pronoun "he" is in recognition that Rousseau's conception of authenticity is distinctively male; although one might argue that Rousseau has a conception of authenticity for females, its characteristics are quite different and not obviously in keeping with "being oneself."

7. Several interpreters stress the central place that the "sentiment of existence" plays in Rousseau's conception of authenticity. See, for example, Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 2 and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 361-62.

8. Allan Bloom, "Introduction" in Rousseau, Emile, 5.

9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, Or the New Heloise, trans. Judith McDowell (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 197.

10. Rousseau, Julie, 67.

11. Rousseau, Emile, 116, 118-19; Berman, The Politics of Authenticity, 268-69.

12. Rousseau, Emile, 41.

13. Judith Sklar, Men and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 36.

14. Rousseau, Emile, 281.

15. John Dewey, Experience and Education, in The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 8.

16. John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Schools for Tomorrow, in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 8, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 211.

17. Dewey, Education and Experience, 39.

18. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 139.

19. Ibid., 134, 142, 149, 162-63.

20. H.S. Thayer, Meaning and Action (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 182.

21. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture, in The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 84-87.

22. Dewey, "Experience and Education," 22.

23. Ibid., 24.

24. See the discussion in James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), chaps. 2 and 3.

25. Dewey, Experience and Education, 33.

26. Shirley Brice Heath describes an African-American community in which students tend to think in stories and resist the teacher's efforts to isolate variables. See "Questioning at Home and at School," in Doing the Ethnography of Schooling, ed. George Spindler (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982). Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorthea Leighton describe a traditional Navajo perspective which proscribes attempts to control one's environment. See The Navaho (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 303-9.

27. John Dewey, The School and the Society, in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 16.

28. This seems to be the lesson provided by Mike Rose's teacher Jack MacFarland, who captured his students' interests with a demanding curriculum. See Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary (New York: Penguin, 1989), 32-37.

29. Linda McNeil, Contradictions of Control (New York: Routledge, 1988).

30. George Wood, Schools That Work (New York: Plume, 1992).

31. Donna Deyhle, "Navajo Youth and Anglo Racism," Harvard Educational Review 65, no. 3 (1995): 403-44.

32. Reba Page, Lower-Track Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).

33. Eliot Wigginton, Sometimes a Shining Moment (New York: Anchor, 1986), 246-54.

34. Alexander Sidorkin, "The Pedagogy of the Interhuman," in Philosophy of Education: 1995, ed. Alven Neiman (Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society, 1996), 412-19.

35. Sizer, Horace's School and Theodore Sizer, Horace's Compromise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).

36. Daniel McLaughlin, When Literacy Empowers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).