Speaking of Teaching

Speaking of Teaching
Lessons from History

Gabriel Moran

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Moran, Gabriel, 1935–
Speaking of teaching : lessons from history / Gabriel Moran.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2839-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2839-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3118-3 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-3118-4 (electronic)
1. Education—History. 2. Education—Philosophy—History. I. Title.
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 Contents

Introduction vii

1 Plato and His Students 1

2 Augustine Despite Aquinas 23
3 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 47
4 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 67
5 Can Morality Be Taught? 95
6 Can Religion Be Taught? 121
7 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 143

Conclusion 163
Bibliography 177
Index 187
About the Author 195

v
 Introduction

Why is there almost no discussion of the activity of teaching in works of phi-

losophy and education? Why does the topic of teaching seem to be avoided?
My questions may seem preposterous. Are there not libraries filled with
books on teaching?1 Undoubtedly, there are numerous books and essays that
concern teaching and teachers. What is seldom asked is: What does it mean
to teach? What is the meaning of the verb “to teach?”
My interest is teaching as one of the most fundamental activities of a hu-
man being. In this introduction, I am not trying to set forth the meaning of
“teach.” Rather, I wish to call attention to the absence of the discussion in phi-
losophy and education books. If the act of teaching is not obviously a philo-
sophical question, it is surely central to education. And yet, the question of
teaching is seldom raised in books and journals on education. It would also
be difficult to find a school of education that has a course built upon the ques-
tion “what is the meaning of to teach?”2
One possible explanation for the absence of reflection on the act of teach-
ing is that the answer is so obvious that the question need not be asked.
Everyone has been exposed to the practice of teaching from an early age.
Most people have indelible memories of teachers they have met; usually it is
a mixture of good and bad memories, of good teachers and bad teachers. If
they are asked what made a particular woman or man a good teacher, they
tend to list a series of qualities, for example, fairness, patience, dedication,
humor. The bad teachers are thought to lack one or several of these qualities.
The people who enroll in a school of education have presumably decided
that they would like to follow in the path of the good teachers they have met.
Their “teacher training” aims to provide them with the skills to teach math,
science, literature, or history. If someone were to ask in a school of education

vii
viii Introduction

“what does it mean to teach,” the question would likely be dismissed as triv-
ial, a distraction from preparing the prospective teachers to manage a room
filled with children and to present lessons in their respective specialties. The
teachers in training have available to them many works on mastering their ar-
eas of concentration and the skills needed to teach U.S. history in P.S. 51 or
teach geometry to tenth graders.
The answer, then, to my question of why teaching itself is almost never dis-
cussed even in schools of education—or especially there—is that the answer
is already known. Perhaps that is true, that everyone does have some knowl-
edge of teaching. Nonetheless, it is still striking that books on education sel-
dom devote a chapter or even a paragraph to the meaning of teaching.3 Even
if everyone has an idea of what teaching is, some reflection on that idea
would seem helpful if one is asking about education. The educational spe-
cialist, however, tends to hand over such abstract-sounding issues to philoso-
phers. The people who write philosophy books these days are not inclined to
accept the offer.
A second answer to the question of why teaching is not discussed may lie
in almost the opposite direction. There could be a fear about what the ques-
tion would reveal, and it is therefore better to avoid asking the question. One
might suspect that many people—including people who are called teachers—
are uneasy with the idea of teaching. At some level they fear that if they did
think about the nature of teaching, they might conclude that “to teach” is (1)
impossible to do or (2) an unethical practice or (3) an unintelligible idea.
Occasionally, a “radical reformer” will bring the fear to the surface and
launch a direct attack on teaching. Ivan Illich was one of the many re-
formers who wanted to do away with schools. In his book, Deschooling
Society, he equated teaching and corruption.4 In his brief role as a celebrity
lecturer, he would develop the thesis “to teach is to corrupt” before an au-
ditorium filled with schoolteachers, after which the listeners would return
to their classrooms. A few may have quit their jobs in response, but those
who stayed did not get much help by being told that they were corrupting
youth.
Another example of a severe critic of teaching was Carl Rogers, a popular
writer in psychology. Rogers did not passionately attack teaching; instead, he
simply thought it was an obstacle to learning and he advocated trying to avoid
it. “There is no resemblance between the traditional function of teaching and
the function of the facilitation of learning.”5 Unlike Illich, whose broadside
against teaching left no discernible effects, Rogers’ advocacy of replacing
teaching with “facilitating” continues to influence books on education and
school practice itself. Rogers, of course, was not alone in his dismissal of
teaching as useless or worse. He would not have got a hearing except that
 Introduction ix

there were many other writers saying similar things. The ground had been
prepared during the previous century in the United States.
One place to get a glimpse of the negative meaning assumed for teaching
is found in adult education literature. Malcolm Knowles was a leading theo-
rist of adult education. He laid out a neat opposition between the way chil-
dren learn and the way adults learn (pedagogy versus andragogy).6 For ex-
ample, it was said that children study subjects but adult wish to know how to
solve problems. Central to the contrast of adult and child was the claim that
children should be taught but adults wish to have their learning facilitated.
Such a sharp dichotomy between child and adult is of doubtful validity, but it
provided a theory for why something called “adult education” exists.
What is revealed in these examples is an ethical ambivalence that teaching
has for many people. If teaching is assumed to be telling people what to think,
what is right and wrong, it seems to be a violation of individual freedom.
However, society is possible only if the young do conform to some accepted
norms, so therefore a group of adults is needed to oversee the maturing of
young minds. Teaching, it is assumed, is not possible before the age when a
young person has the power of rational thinking. Before that age, other con-
trols have to be used, especially by parents.
Although the standard rhetoric is to bow in the direction of parents as “the
first and most important teachers,” everyone knows who the real teachers are:
those who work with children in schools until they acquire the rationality and
experience to think for themselves. Society is confused about whether these
students become adults at age sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one. Wherever that
line is drawn, the assumption is that people who have become adults no
longer need teaching and it becomes unnecessary, ineffective, and insulting to
try to teach them.
Society thus seals off the meaning of teaching. It is what a group of people
certified as teachers do with children in elementary and secondary schools.
Colleges are sometimes included, but more often than not professors are not
counted as teachers. A National Education Association survey, which found
that only two out of ten teachers are men, obviously excluded college profes-
sors. The survey’s results were reported in the New York Times under the
headline “Men in Teaching Falls to a Forty-Year Low.”7 In the same week, the
Times carried a headline: “Professors Teaching? N.Y.U. President Says It Isn’t
Such a Novel Idea.”8 The idea is not entirely novel but different enough to
draw a feature story.
There are endless problems connected with how to teach children and there
is no shortage of reform measures to improve schools. What goes unques-
tioned is that teaching is an activity engaged in by a person called the teacher
with a group of pupils (often just called children). When writers go about the
x Introduction

serious business of discussing teachers and what they do, there is no ambigu-
ity in who they are referring to: the women and men who staff the elementary
and secondary schools of the country.

HISTORICAL WITNESSES

In this book I wish to question this assumption on which most educational

writing is based. The assumption is so deeply embedded in present educa-
tional literature, political discussion, and daily use that there is no direct way
to unearth it. Rather than presume that I can state an answer when the lan-
guage is not available to do so, I have called as witnesses some authors from
both the recent and the distant past. Although these authors have had a pow-
erful influence on our ideas of education, what they have to say about teach-
ing may not be immediately evident. It is necessary to attend carefully to what
they say, and more often what they imply, about teaching.
There are lessons to be learned from history. I have not chosen writers sim-
ply because they agree with me or because I can easily extract what I am
looking for from their writing. For the most part, I try to let the authors speak
for themselves, supplying interpretation only as needed. I do try in the con-
clusion to draw together some of what I have learned from these and other au-
thors about the nature of teaching.
I refer in this book to reading and misreading these authors. Although a va-
riety of interpretations is to be expected, what interests me is when views are
attributed to an author that are at variance with the author’s intention. When
writers are misread by intelligent readers, the one who is at fault might be the
writer. But readers do bring preconceptions to a book, and they are often un-
willing to let an unusual approach challenge those presuppositions.
Most schools of education used to have a course called philosophical foun-
dations of education. It usually covered Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey. Why
these three and only these three writers were studied was seldom explained.
The case could be made that each of them thought that there is an intimate
and essential relation between philosophy and education. More particularly,
Plato was studied because of his portrait of Socrates, assumed to be the model
teacher. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was studied as an impractical visionary but
someone who is still invoked as the model for rebellious reformers. John
Dewey was studied because his language dominates educational discussion in
the United States and is presented as liberating the learner from the domi-
nance of the teacher.
This book has chapters on Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey but with a differ-
ent twist on each of them. I make no effort to present their overall views of
 Introduction xi

education. I ask only what each says, or more often implies, about “to teach.”
For such an ambitious project, I have to rely on the body of scholarship that
surrounds each writer. But I am trying to get at a question seldom asked. I am
also trying to get at why distorted conclusions have been drawn from these
writings.
I have said that Plato is usually celebrated for giving us the model of a
teacher in Socrates. While I have no desire to belittle Socrates, I claim in the
first chapter that in the argument between Socrates and the Sophist named
Protagoras, the latter is more helpful for an understanding of teaching.
Socrates has much to teach us but his lessons are best learned in a larger con-
text of teaching and learning.
I make a somewhat similar case in the fourth chapter regarding Dewey and
his opposition to “traditional” education. Dewey’s unwillingness to discover
the value of the traditional was part of the reason that his ideas on “progres-
sive education” were (and still are) consistently misunderstood. Dewey’s idea
of teaching has to be dug out of more than sixty years of writing.
Rousseau’s Emile, which I examine in the third chapter, is a different kind
of problem. Emile is one of those books that people feel free to cite without
ever having read all the way through it. The strangest assumption is that the
book is an argument for “self-directed” learning without the need for a
teacher. If there is a central character in the book, it is the tutor.
Between the chapters on Plato and Rousseau is a chapter on Augustine of
Hippo. He is the founder of the Protestant and Roman Catholic theology that
remains the chief source of religious terminology in the United States. He is
also one of the most powerful influences in the history of Western education,
though his name seldom appears in histories of education today. I examine
Augustine’s denial of teaching in favor of interior reflection, a position that
has particular resonance in today’s educational literature. I conclude the chap-
ter with what I take to be Thomas Aquinas’ deliberate misreading of Augus-
tine’s position.
Chapters 5 and 6 test the meaning of “to teach” in two controversial and
confusing areas. Morality and religion run parallel in many respects though
they have a few crucial differences. The terms “moral education” and “reli-
gious education” were coined at the very beginning of the twentieth century,
signaling something new. Unfortunately, both terms have been used to avoid
asking in the areas of morality and religion what can and should be taught,
who should be taught, where and how the teaching should be done.
These two chapters are framed with the verb “can.” The question, Can
something be done? may elicit a logical, physical, educational, ethical, or le-
gal response. I break down the question of can it be done into can morality
or religion be logically taught, can it be taught in a classroom on sound ed-
xii Introduction

ucational grounds, and can it be taught in a public school classroom ethically

and legally?
Morality and religion involve contentious issues but that is a good reason
for each of them to be put into the classroom’s curriculum. Although confu-
sion in these areas is not surprising, I think the question of teaching morality
or religion reveals ambivalence about the very idea of teaching. More specif-
ically, many people are skeptical of teaching morality and their objection is
in part moral. Is not teaching morality an unwarranted intrusion on a person’s
conscience? Who gives a teacher the right to tell others what is and what is
not morally acceptable?
Religion is an even more complex issue because of a fundamental ambi-
guity in the meaning of “religion.” I explore in chapter 6 the ancient and the
modern meanings of religion. Religion in the sense of devotion does not be-
long in the classroom. Religion as a study of historical institutions is an ap-
propriate subject for the academic curriculum. If people think that teaching
religion in a public school is educationally and legally wrong, there may be
confusion about the meaning of religion. There may also be confusion about
what it means to teach anyone anything.
My seventh chapter is on Ludwig Wittgenstein. I could have placed this
chapter first rather than last. I think Wittgenstein is successful at showing why
we have a problem and where to look for help. I put him last because the
childlike questions he asks might not be appreciated unless one has previ-
ously struggled with the problem that Plato first articulated and has been with
us ever since. Wittgenstein does not supply the answer but if one follows the
“signals” he offers, interest might be sparked in discussing what teaching is,
the several languages of teaching, and the forms of teaching according to its
context.

IS GENDER SIGNIFICANT?

A further issue for this introduction may or may not strike the reader as sig-
nificant. The five main writers examined are men. I could offer as a defense
of my choice that theories of education until very recently were a male pre-
rogative. An attempt to correct that problem by adding some women (for ex-
ample, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Montessori, or Jane Martin) might only
result in tokenism.
More important, it might obscure what I take to be the heart of the prob-
lem: the absence of what women have known and done throughout history.
Every mother has been aware that the roots of teaching-learning lie not in ra-
tional explanation but in bodily movements by both teacher and learner. My
 Introduction xiii

suggestion that women know this area better than men does not impute any
deficiency in the rational intelligence of women; it does imply a general lack
of contact by men with the messiness of dependent bodily life, especially at
the beginning and at the end of life.
Instead of adding a woman writer to my list, I prefer to address the absence
of women and the absence of concerns of women in theories of teaching.
Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey are by no means the worst offenders in this area;
in fact, they do better in their writing than most discussions of education con-
ducted by men.
Plato is sometimes taken to be a proto-feminist because he included
women in his guardian class. He reduced the essential difference between
men and women to “one bears, the other begets.”9 That is a doubtful princi-
ple given our knowledge today. In any case, the composition of his guardian
class left marriage and family life without any traditional support. Plato is
rather vague about the young children of his superior class who are to be
cared for by nurses. That is no small problem in reference to what teaching
means.
Rousseau, who condemns Plato’s view of the family, gets a bad press
among women writers today. He was looking for a reform of family life in
which men and women would have different but complementary roles.
Rousseau, as a man who abandoned his own children and never had a healthy
relation with any woman, is not a good candidate for defending the family.
His complementary curricula for boys and girls do not have many takers to-
day. Some of what he says about women comes across today as outrageous.
Still, he actually addressed the question of the education of women, which
cannot be said about most writers until very recently. More important,
Rousseau attended to teaching-learning at its very beginnings, which cannot
be said of most other writers, including those who are writing today.
John Dewey, in contrast to Rousseau, is thought to be “progressive” in his
views on women. He was deeply affected by many women, starting with his
mother. His wife Alice, the young women he worked with in his laboratory
school, and his daughter Evelyn, who wrote with him, profoundly shaped his
mentality. After some early writing that asked about the differences between
boys and girls in education, Dewey joined the ranks of those who were de-
emphasizing differences in favor of equal rights. What Dewey said of “the
child” applies to both girls and boys. But it has to be asked whether the in-
sistence on equality had the unintended effect of obscuring an insight into the
nature of teaching that has been preserved in history more by women than by
men?
My suggestion that the place of women has been obscured may seem
trumped by a curious fact, namely, that the great majority of people called
xiv Introduction

teachers in the United States are women. What is also curious, and seemingly
opposed to my argument, is that the metaphor of “mothering” became central
to nineteenth-century images of teaching.10 In doing so, the nineteenth cen-
tury almost got it right but ended up making things worse.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, private and church-sponsored
schools generally employed men as the teachers. It was not a high status job;
teaching was viewed as an extension of the local constabulary. The Maryland
Journal in 1776 advertised products available for sale from a ship that had ar-
rived in Baltimore; the products included “various Irish commodities, among
which are school masters, beef, pork, and potatoes.”11
With the rise of a system of public or common schools, a remarkable
change occurred in who were the schoolteachers. Between 1840 and 1865,
those teachers shifted from a great majority being men to an overwhelmingly
large percentage being women.12 There was theoretical support for this shift,
especially in the writing of Johann Pestalozzi, who was both a follower and a
critic of Rousseau. Pestalozzi is not much read these days, but he was influ-
ential in the nineteenth-century schools. His best-selling book was a novel,
Leonard and Gertrude. That book, together with a treatise, How Gertrude
Teaches Her Children, put forth Gertrude as the model for teachers.13 The
way she conducted her household was the inspiration for the classroom in-
structor.
In the United States, Catherine Beecher was the leader of the woman’s
movement that viewed men and women as complementary. Woman’s place
was in the home. The vocation or profession of women was motherhood but
that profession could find extension in being a schoolteacher. As Beecher saw
it, “most happily the education necessary to fit a woman to be a teacher is ex-
actly the one that best fits her for that domestic relation she is primarily de-
signed to fill.”14 So much is school teaching women’s work that Beecher says
that one of the ugliest abuses women had to witness was children turned over
to “coarse, hard, unfeeling men, too lazy, or too stupid to follow the appro-
priate duties of their sex.”15
Teaching as an extension of mothering would seem to offer a fruitful path
of reflection. However, it did not happen that mothers brought their experi-
ence to the job of schoolteacher. Paradoxically, until almost the middle of the
twentieth century married women were banned from being schoolteachers.
When Harriet Brooks was married in 1906, she was dismissed from the fac-
ulty of Barnard College because, as Dean Laura Gill informed her, “a married
woman was expected to dignify her homemaking into a profession, and not
assume that she could carry on two full professions at once.”16
School teaching became not a continuation of mothering, as Pestalozzi’s
theory might have suggested; rather it was an alternative to motherhood. The
 Introduction xv

image of teacher was the young, unmarried woman, who was supplied with
some basic “teacher training” to oversee children in the classroom. Either that
or a teacher was often portrayed as the “spinster” who had never found a hus-
band to fulfill her true vocation of motherhood.
The explanation for this paradox—teaching as mothering but never by
mothers—is suggested in a report of the Boston School Committee in 1841.
Their reason for wanting unmarried women to staff the schools was because
they were “unambitious, frugal, and filial.”17 The teacher would take orders
from her male superiors. If a teacher should advise her superior “it is to be
given as the good daughter talks with the father.” The main mission of the
school was moral rather than intellectual. “Women’s weakness,” as a New
York legislator said, “makes them better teachers of children with their un-
derdeveloped intellectual faculties.”18
The idea of the schoolteacher as a substitute mother had a positive side, es-
pecially for kindergarten and the first years of elementary school. It does not
work as well when the student is older. There was also the danger of compe-
tition between school and family.19 Many parents had to be pressured to ac-
cept the school, because they were wary of the school taking over the life of
the child. The line between the family and the school has remained unclear
throughout subsequent history. It is tragic that the two institutions have not
been viewed as cooperating in the teaching of the children. We have had “par-
ent and teacher organizations” instead of organizations to discuss the joint
venture of parental teaching and school teaching.20
In the absence of clarity regarding complementary roles of parental teach-
ing and academic teaching, the parent’s role of teacher is almost completely
obscured. In their turn, the schoolteachers are then burdened with impossible
expectations, starting with being substitute parents. A good teacher becomes
identified as someone who gets along with children and can manage to keep
the attention of a roomful of youngsters.

IS TEACHING A PROFESSION?

Many of the schoolteachers surmount the stereotypes and enthusiastically

teach their pupils both school lessons and lessons in life. It is difficult work
for which they do not get much support. There is regular talk of a teacher
shortage in the country. Actually, there is no shortage of people who go into
school teaching but there is a big exit by the fourth or fifth year. Despite the
relatively low pay, the main reason why most of them leave school teaching
is not money but the lack of support they have received from administrators,
colleagues, politicians, parents, and society in general.21
xvi Introduction

My approach in this book may seem to be an attack on the one sure thing
that schoolteachers have, namely, the title of teacher. My claim is that we
avoid asking what teaching is by segregating a group of individuals and call-
ing them “the teachers.” Then teaching is their problem not ours. To some ex-
tent, this ordaining of a group of experts is what happens in all modern pro-
fessions. Many areas of modern life are just too complicated for ordinary
people. We are pleased to have airline pilots, tax accountants, and civil engi-
neers who master the details of their respective professions and are dedicated
to doing good work.
Teaching-learning, however, is not just another specialized activity to be
handled by experts. What underlies much of the criticism of schoolteachers is
a belief that anyone can teach. The popular belief is correct, that is, every hu-
man being can and does teach. For the teaching-learning that occurs in the or-
dinary course of a day, we do not need specialists. As long as human beings
are alive, they continue to learn because they encounter human and nonhu-
man teachers. It is a mark of adolescent immaturity when someone thinks that
he or she is no longer in need of teaching and teachers.
Schools of education and educational literature talk incessantly about the
“teaching profession.” There is indeed a need for professional experts to teach
calculus, medieval literature, how to build a skyscraper, or how to teach a young
child to read. Understandably, schoolteachers desire to have the status and perks
of a modern profession from which they have been unfairly excluded. But talk-
ing about “the teaching profession” says both too much and too little.
It says too much because a test of all genuine professions today is that they
try to teach their clients rather than exploit the clients’ lack of knowledge.
Every genuine profession is a teaching profession. Even the physicians, who
got their status by rising far above the lay person, have been discovering that
hoarding all the medical knowledge eventually causes serious problems for
themselves. The physician’s role today has to include teaching healthy peo-
ple how to prevent illness and teaching sick people how to aid the body in
restoring itself. The title of “doctor,” which means teacher, can then be an ap-
propriate description of the physician.
Just as a medical doctor is not simply a doctor in general, a professional
classroom instructor is more than a teacher in general. In this sense, the
phrase “teaching profession” says too little. It does not indicate the kind of
preparation and commitment that school teaching involves. The work of a
first-grade teacher or a teacher of Ph.D. candidates requires professional
training and dedication. A profession of academic instruction deserves recog-
nition and public support.
The “professional” preparation of schoolteachers in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries was scandalously inadequate. Today’s “teacher
 Introduction xvii

training” that concentrates on methods for classroom management is still in-

adequate. Schoolteachers need to be lifelong learners whose professional
preparation stimulates their own intellectual excitement. And the continuing
stimulation of their minds through books, conversations with colleagues, and
substantive in-service programs, is indispensable for retaining knowledgeable
and dedicated schoolteachers in the classroom. Professional people have to
keep learning on the job, not just keep repeating the same patterns.
One aim of this book is to provide support and encouragement to school-
teachers, but I cannot do that without first prying away the idea of teaching
from the professional problems of schoolteachers today. This is not a book on
the “profession of teaching.” I want to explore why our view of teaching is
blocked to such an extent that the activity of teaching, including but not re-
stricted to the specialized work of schoolteachers, is almost never discussed.
I invite the reader to reflect on what some of the great minds in Western his-
tory have had to say about teaching and why it is necessary to challenge the
deeply rooted language of education today.

NOTES

1. Amazon.com currently lists more than half a million books under “teacher.”
2. There are books that ask about the nature of teaching, but they almost inevitably
revert to the classroom for the main meaning of teaching and consider other uses of
“teach” as an extension. Examples of books that ask the question are: John Passmore,
The Philosophy of Teaching (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980);
Thomas Green, The Activities of Teaching (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971); C. J. B.
MacMillan and Thomas Nelson, Concepts of Teaching (Chicago: Rand McNally,
1968); R. S. Peters. ed., The Concept of Education (New York: Humanities Press,
1967).
3. A typical case is Philosophy of Education, ed. Randall Curren (Oxford: Black-
well, 2007). In a book of almost six hundred pages, there is a thirty-page section on
teaching, within which all four of the essays are about school teaching. While other
essays do speak of teaching, there is not a single entry that philosophically reflects on
what teaching is.
4. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
5. Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn for the 80s (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1983),
135.
6. Malcolm Knowles, The Modern Practice of Adult Education: From Pedagogy to
Andragogy (New York: Follett Publishing, 1980).
7. New York Times, 29 August 2003, 26.
8. New York Times, 3 September 2003, B1; of course, there are college professors
who take teaching seriously: Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
xviii Introduction

9. Plato, The Republic, 454e.

10. Redding Sugg, Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978).
11. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage
Books, 1963), 313.
12. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1977), 76.
13. Johann Pestalozzi, Leonard and Gertrude (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger,
2004); How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2007).
14. Sheila Rothman, Woman’s Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices
1870 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 57.
15. Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1978), 123.
16. Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars
(New York: Times Book, 1995), 168.
17. David Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1974), 62.
18. Tyack, The One Best System, 60.
19. Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1968), 86; Dan Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
20. There are some excellent books on the relation of school teaching and parental
teaching, such as Robert Evans, Family Matters: How Schools Can Cope with the Cri-
sis in Childrearing (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004); Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot,
The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2002).
21. C. M. Guarino, L. Santibanez, and G. A. Daley, “Teacher Recruitment and Re-
tention: A Review of the Recent Empirical Literature,” Review of Educational Re-
search, 76, no.2 (2006): 173–208; D. N. Harris and S. J. Adams, “Understanding the
Level and Causes of Teacher Turnover: A Comparison with Other Professions,” Eco-
nomics of Education Review, 26 (2007): 325–37.
 Chapter One

Plato and His Students

The students referred to in the title of this chapter are all of us. Alfred North
Whitehead once said that all of Western philosophy “consists of series of
footnotes to Plato.”1 Whitehead added that he did not just mean the kind of
“Platonism” found in textbooks. There are easily two or three if not a dozen
philosophical outlooks traceable to Plato. Even people who attack Plato can-
not entirely escape from his initial shaping of the philosophical language we
still speak.
Plato’s own mentor was Socrates. At least Socrates is presented that way in
Plato’s writing. In the dialogues written early in Plato’s career, the portrait
seems to be of a real, historical character. Later, Plato seems to use Socrates
as a literary creation, an instrument for articulating Plato’s philosophy. There
has been a never-ending debate about where to draw the line between the real
person and the literary figure. However, there is a general consensus that
Socrates in the early dialogues is close to the historical person, while the lit-
erary Socrates is found by the time of what is called Plato’s middle period.
Socrates, real and fictional, occupies a special place in educational history.
He comes as close as anyone does to being a secular saint. Paraphrasing
Whitehead, one might say that all of Western writing on teachers and teach-
ing consists of footnotes to Socrates and Socrates’ work. As with Plato, even
when writers try to get around Socrates, they find it necessary to tangle with
this model of the teacher. His rational approach to philosophy and teaching
seems impossible to reject without landing in irrationalism.
Some philosophers in modern times are fascinated by Socrates while at the
same time they express ambivalence about the path which he offers. Niet-
zsche is perhaps the most famous critic. Socrates seemed to be a physician
and a savior, wrote Nietzsche, and therefore, “one must imitate Socrates and

1
2 Chapter One

counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight—the daylight of

reason.” Otherwise, “every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads
downward.”2 But Nietzsche has doubts about anyone producing a permanent
daylight.
Many writers in the twentieth century shared Nietzsche’s intimation that
reason’s rejection of the “dark desires” cannot triumph. It must be added,
however, that a popular assumption that Plato simply pits reason against emo-
tion is an unfair characterization. Certainly by the middle period Plato has a
much more complex psychology of the individual.3 Nevertheless, my main
interest in this chapter is what Plato’s students—all of us—have taken from
him about teaching, especially from the Socrates of the early and middle
works.
On the meaning of “teaching,” people seemed to have taken two nearly op-
posed lessons from Socrates. The two conclusions roughly correspond to the
Socrates of the early works and the Socrates of the middle works, although
that distinction is not always introduced in this discussion. The lesson learned
from the early Socrates is that no one can teach anyone anything.4 The lesson
drawn from the later Socrates is that the “Socratic method” is the only way to
teach.
Neither of these conclusions is especially helpful to teachers in their efforts to
teach. The first conclusion is an obvious dismissal of that very effort. There are
numerous books on education today whose message to the teacher is: Get out of
the way so that the students can learn. Teaching is not the way to learning.
The second conclusion, which takes a method from Socrates, is, at best,
highly reductive by fitting all teaching into one narrow mold. “Socratic
method” may signify a genuine searching by teacher and student, but it is also
the case that the popular version of getting to the answer by asking a series of
questions can be as heavy-handed as simply telling people the truth. Alexan-
der Nehamas, a Plato scholar, writes: “No mode of teaching is more dogmatic
than what goes by the name ‘Socratic method’ today.”5 This form of teaching
is not a complete denial of teaching, but it fails to recognize that teaching is
more than a clever set of questions leading to a rational piece of knowledge.

EARLY SOCRATES: THE APOLOGY

For my purposes, I will concentrate among Plato’s early works on The Apol-
ogy and Protagoras. The first is a literary gem that portrays Socrates before
the court in Athens in 399 B.C.E. fighting for his life. He was accused of cor-
rupting youth by his teaching. Athens had experienced twenty-seven years of
war and political turmoil. An attempt at democracy had been overthrown by
 Plato and His Students 3

a group of thirty oligarchs. The two urgent questions at the time of Socrates’
trial were “Who is responsible for the immediate past?” and “Who is to im-
prove the young?” Socrates was associated by many people with a group
called the Sophists. He was intent on drawing a sharp contrast between him-
self and this group.
The trial became a forum for the question “Who is the true teacher?” One
can puzzle out what the question means by listening to what Socrates denies.
The fundamental charge, he says, is that “I am a teacher and take money”
(19d). That is not so, he says, “anyone whether he be rich or poor may ask
and answer me and listen to my words” (33b). Because Socrates makes no
claim to teach virtue, he cannot be held responsible for anyone else’s moral
failings, that “whether he turns out to be a bad man or a good man, neither re-
sult can be imputed to me, for I have never taught nor profess to teach any-
thing” (33b).
The case, then, seems clear that Socrates does not consider himself to be a
teacher. But then he slyly adds in reference to the Sophist claim to teach:
“Happy is Evenus, I said to myself, if he really has this wisdom and teaches
at such a moderate charge. Had I the same, I should have been very proud and
conceited, but the truth is that I have no knowledge of the kind” (20c). Here
the question of being a teacher is directly connected with charging money.
Socrates claims that not even his accusers say that he sought pay from any-
one. “I have a sufficient witness to the truth of what I say—my poverty”
(31b).
Actually, the Sophists’ fee for teaching was sizeable. Socrates’ ironic ref-
erence to their “moderate charge” has led some commentators to conclude
that Socrates’ denial that he is a teacher is an ironic attack on the people who
claim to be teachers. Since he is the opposite of what is false about the
Sophist claim, he is claiming to be the true teacher. Thus, he says he is not a
teacher; he ironically means he is the true teacher. The great scholar Werner
Jaeger draws that conclusion: “Socrates was right to say that he did not teach
men—not by giving them information. But by asserting that virtue must be
knowledge and making his way toward that knowledge, he took the place of
those false prophets of wisdom as the only real educator.”6
Gregory Vlastos, like Jaeger, thinks that irony is a sufficient explanation
for Socrates’ denial that he is a teacher.7 Part of this issue concerns the nature
of irony. Before Socrates, “irony” simply meant deception and lying. In
Socrates’ hands, irony became an assertion of a conventional truth together
with a sign that the speaker questions the truth of the statement. The sign can
be a peculiar detail in the story line, the tone of voice used, or a raised eye-
brow. The speaker playfully conveys to listeners that the truth may be quite
different—even the very opposite of what is being said.
4 Chapter One

Although the term “irony” is overused and misused today, we are still heirs
to the word and the idea that Socrates shaped. Ironic humor is indispensable
for digging at hard truths. The playfulness hides the deadly seriousness of the
matter at hand. Like oppressed people who use irony as a form of mockery
together with a means of communication to those on the inside of the joke,
Socrates was defending his life. On the surface, it seems a negative attitude.
The speaker is not claiming to know the truth, only puncturing the pompous
claims of self-satisfied people.
Not all Plato scholars are convinced. They insist that Socrates should be
taken at his word, and he says in several dialogues, in addition to the Apol-
ogy, that he is not a teacher (Protagoras 348c; Gorgias 506a). Gregory Vlas-
tos and Alexander Nehamas disagree about the nature of irony and therefore
whether Socrates considered himself to be a teacher. Their disagreement has
its nub in this statement of Vlastos’: “In the sense which he would give to
‘teaching’—engaging would-be learners in elenctic argument to make them
aware of their own ignorance and enable them to discover for themselves the
truth the teacher had held back—in that sense of ‘teaching’ Socrates would
want to say that he is a teacher, the only true teacher.”8
Nehamas zeroed in on the phrase “the truth that the teacher had held back.”
Irony does not suppose that the truth is already in the teacher’s possession and
that the teacher simply withholds the truth as a pedagogical tactic.9 Irony sim-
ply undermines someone’s pretension to possess the truth. I think that Vlas-
tos is vulnerable on the point. All that irony does is let the listeners become
aware that there are other possibilities. The speaker does not claim to know
the whole picture.
Although Vlastos has claimed too simple a reversal of meaning, his more
general point can perhaps still stand. Socrates is—in some sense—a teacher.
He was perceived that way by his contemporaries and described himself as
driven by a more than human source to engage others in dialogue.
People who say that Socrates did not engage in teaching find it difficult to
hold to that line all the way. For example, in an essay entitled “Nonteaching
and its Significance for Education,” James King argues that Socrates is not a
teacher: “I have taken Socrates at his word that he was not a teacher and
found in the theory of teaching presented in the Gorgias confirmation of this
fact.” Yet in the course of the article, King has to acknowledge that “we
would misunderstand Socrates should we fail to recognize that by his exam-
ple, his exhortation and relentless critique of beliefs, he strove to be a teacher
of the love of truth. In most respects it is true to say that Socrates was not a
teacher, but it would obscure the truth to say in this respect.”10 This “one re-
spect” that King states as an exception would seem to be central to affirming
or denying that Socrates is a teacher.
 Plato and His Students 5

Sometimes authors introduce questionable distinctions so as to maintain

the thesis that Socrates was not a teacher. Solomon Scolnicov writes that
“Socrates saw himself as an educator. But unlike the Sophists, he did not con-
sider himself a teacher, he professed to know nothing, hence to teach noth-
ing.”11 It is unclear what connotations Scolnicov gives to the term educator.
But since that modern word is used for today’s “professional” teachers, I
would think it easier to argue the opposite case, that is, Socrates considered
himself a teacher of some kind but not a professional teacher or “educator” in
today’s language.
Authors regularly ascribe the term professional to the Sophists. “Profes-
sional” is a Latin-derived word without a Greek equivalent, but it is used to
indicate two things about the Sophists: they claimed to have special knowl-
edge and skill and they required pay for their services. That seems to be the
common meaning of “professional” in today’s world and it fits the Sophists.
An older meaning of “professional,” still evident in most professional codes
of ethics, emphasizes the dedication of the professional beyond monetary val-
ues. Ironically, professional meant not being paid. The professional was to
serve the community and be supported in ways other than by salary. In the
twenty-first-century meaning of professional, the Sophists are professionals;
in the twelfth-century meaning, Socrates is the professional. The question of
money plays a central role in Protagoras to which we now turn.

PROTAGORAS

Plato’s dialogue Protagoras is a portrait of a respected Sophist with that

name. Plato seems to have a grudging respect for Protagoras, who is Socrates’
opponent in the debate. As I indicate later, Plato may have incorporated some
of Protagoras’ educational program into his later writing. In Protagoras, how-
ever, the sympathy is with Socrates’ side of the debate.
One should not forget that all of the Sophists’ writings have disappeared
and we have only second-hand knowledge of their views. Plato is a main
source of this knowledge and a somewhat biased reporter. The term “sophist”
is derived from the word for wisdom which also gives us the word for phi-
losophy, a love of wisdom. But “sophist” has had a meaning almost the op-
posite of wisdom. In Plato’s view, the sophists were not lovers of wisdom but
deceptive rhetoricians. Plato triumphed insofar as “sophist,” “sophistry,” and
“sophistical” have had negative meanings throughout history.12
A ray of difference may have emerged, however, in the twentieth-century
use of the term “sophisticated.” It shifted in meaning from deceptive and mis-
leading to smart and elegant. The Sophists made a comeback in the twentieth
6 Chapter One

century. Nietzsche was prescient in saying that “every advance in epistemo-

logical and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists.”13 Nietzsche’s am-
bivalence about the rationalism of Socrates naturally led him to wonder
whether the Sophists were the bad guys as they were portrayed by Plato.
My own judgment in what follows is that on the question of teaching Pro-
tagoras is more helpful than Socrates. I acknowledge that Protagoras proba-
bly made unwise and indefensible claims about his own teaching. Neverthe-
less, his approach to education properly situates the question of teaching. The
way that Socrates isolates the issue of “teaching virtue” makes it almost im-
possible to attend to teaching as it emerges in early life.
The debate over who is the true teacher is in many ways diversionary.
Whether or not Socrates considers himself to be the true teacher supposes that
there is a class of people called teachers. If one can identify them, then the
question of teaching is answered because what do teachers do but teach. And
the standard for a true and genuine teacher is having both the knowledge of
virtue and the skill to communicate it to others.
The criticism of the Sophists is that they claimed to be such a class of indi-
viduals. They taught or claimed to teach only paying customers, while Socrates
talked to everyone. But the charge against the Sophists in ancient texts is that
they sold their wisdom to all customers. By charging fees, they failed to dis-
criminate and they lectured “before all kinds of people.”14 The democratic im-
pulse in their approach was part of what made them suspect. The question of
“who is the true teacher” is moot if everyone and everything teaches.
The specifically Socratic question is not how to teach but how to teach
virtue. After reviewing the debate on whether Socrates was or was not a
teacher, Nehamas concludes: “I still believe that he was not—that he was not,
that is, a teacher of virtue.”15 Teaching and teaching virtue may be one ques-
tion for Socrates, but there is no reason why one has to accept that premise.
Part of what Protagoras offers is that there is another place to start. Before one
asks about teaching virtue, one can ask about teaching. And the most obvious
place where humans are taught—and taught with success—is at the beginning
of life. They are taught how to eat, how to point, how to talk, how to walk,
and hundreds of other actions that are necessary for a full human life.
The peculiar conflating of teaching and teaching virtue is still with us in
books on education and assumptions about teaching. Contemporary writers
do not use the term virtue, but they have inherited Socrates’ question and a
variation on his answer. That is, they assume that teaching is the conveying
of rational knowledge, what Socrates thought to be the basis for a good or a
virtuous life.
It is surprising that there is not much discussion about the translation of
arete as virtue. Gregory Vlastos says that there is no doubt about the transla-
 Plato and His Students 7

tion because whenever Socrates scrutinizes the teachability of arete he as-

sumes it includes courage, justice, temperance, piety, and wisdom.16
The problem, however, is not in the Greek but in the English. “Virtue” had
almost disappeared from scholarly discussions until recent decades when it
has made a comeback of sorts. Even now its use is favored in select political
circles and it has nowhere near the comprehensive meaning that it had in ear-
lier centuries. After Cicero coined the Latin virtus with its echoes of strength
and manliness, the Christian Church came to control the term. By the nine-
teenth century “virtue” was applied to women more than to men.
A more literal translation of arete as “excellence” comes closer to what
unites the ancient Greeks and us: a search for a satisfying human life that is
of the best quality. Socrates wins the argument if one asks whether anyone
can directly transfer rational knowledge from one person to another. But the
Sophists are not vanquished if one starts with teaching not as rational expla-
nation but as showing someone how to do something. Perhaps in showing a
small child how to dress himself or how to eat certain foods one is already en-
gaged in teaching a child excellence, “the good life.”
Protagoras begins with two premises about teaching. First, teaching starts
very early in life. Second, teaching is done by a community and by all the indi-
viduals in the community. “Beginning from their earliest youth and continuing
so long as they are alive, [parents] both teach and admonish them” (325c). Pro-
tagoras locates the beginning of teaching when the child can understand the spo-
ken word. He might have begun even earlier, right at birth, when a person’s na-
ture begins to be shaped and reshaped. “As soon as he understands the spoken
word, nurse and mother and attendant and the father himself earnestly strive to
see to it that the boy will be the best possible, teaching and demonstrating with
regard to every deed and speech that one thing is just, another unjust, and that is
noble, that shameful, and that this is pious, that is impious” (325d).
Protagoras’ conclusion to this passage sounds harsh to our ears: “If he will-
ingly obeys [fine], but if not they threaten him with threats and blows”
(325d). It should be noted, however, that Protagoras speaks of punishment as
having value only if its purpose is educational. He is the first writer in history
to clearly distinguish punishment and revenge (324a–c).17 Protagoras was
way ahead of his time and still ahead of ours in grasping that while revenge
solves nothing, punishment can be salutary if it teaches the miscreant to be-
have better in the future.
A lifelong education does not cease with childhood. Protagoras thought
that reading the poets was central to education for the good life. The young
person should memorize the poetry and come to imitate the wise elders
(325e). The law itself is a teacher that guides the behavior of everyone in the
community (326d).
8 Chapter One

The heart of Socrates’ attack on Protagoras is that a wise man cannot be-
stow virtue on his son. Socrates uses as an example the revered Pericles
(320a). His two sons did not acquire the wisdom of their father. As for teach-
ing wisdom or virtue, Socrates says to Protagoras, “I don’t hold it to be teach-
able, nor something that humans can bestow on other humans” (319a). In-
stead of meeting Socrates’ argument head-on, Protagoras tells a long story
about the origin of the human race. Humans could not live together so Zeus
sent Hermes to distribute conscience and justice to everyone (322c). Virtue is
possessed to some degree by everyone, and everyone can be a teacher of
virtue. People do not always teach by conscious and deliberate intention.
Most teaching is done by community action. “You are spoiled, Socrates, be-
cause all are teachers of virtue, insofar as each is able, and none is apparent
to you. Well, just as if you should inquire who is a teacher of Greek, no sin-
gle one would be apparent” (328a).
His example of the teaching-learning of Greek is telling. To the question of
who teaches a child to speak, there are two answers that can be given: Either
no one teaches the child or else everyone and everything in the environment
teaches the child. The latter answer is more persuasive in that little German
children learn German; little French children speak French. The human mind
has a capacity for language, but the particular language (or languages) a child
learns depends on the child hearing what is demonstrated and then respond-
ing to that particular way of speaking. Saying that everyone and everything
can be a teacher means that the teacher shows how to do something and the
learner responds to what has been shown by trying to do that in his or her own
way.
Protagoras is most famous for a line cited by Plato and other writers: “Man
is the measure of all things, of things that are as to how they are and of things
that are not as to how they are not” (Theaetetus 161c). Plato’s problem was
not “man” being the measure but that measuring is done by “man as user”
rather than “man as contemplator.”18 Protagoras has been condemned with a
string of accusations. He is called a subjectivist, a relativist, a denier of truth,
and the ancestor of modern education that makes social adjustment its aim.19
Protagoras was famous for teaching people to argue on both sides of a ques-
tion. It is claimed that he could not teach people the truth because he did not
think there was any truth. Plato, it should be noted, also thinks that one can
argue on both sides of an issue. However, Plato, at least in his later work,
thinks that one has to push beyond the way things appear so as to grasp how
things are in themselves, that is, the ideas or forms for which Plato is famous.
A lot of ink has been spilled over what kind of relativist or subjectivist Pro-
tagoras was. The proper context for understanding him is not Plato’s meta-
physics but Protagoras’ educational framework. His metaphors for teaching
 Plato and His Students 9

come from farming, husbandry, and medicine. In caring for a plant, one is not
interested in the idea of plant but in the particular conditions of a particular
plant. The knowledge of how to aid the plant in its growth to maturity is re-
lational; it includes a human subject’s response to another living being.
The derogatory terms subjectivist and relativist do not apply. The farmer
has to act in relation to this plant under these conditions. For example, Pro-
tagoras says that manure in relation to a plant can be good or bad depending
on how and when it is used. For the root, manure can aid growth; on the
shoot, it is bad because it hinders growth. In an agricultural metaphor, a
teacher deals with the true and the good, but they are found in relational and
practical knowledge.
This metaphor for teaching as the taking care of a plant is useful and in-
sightful. It has been used by numerous writers since Protagoras. Johannes
Comenius, the first great writer in modern educational theory, uses more than
a dozen metaphors for teaching-learning. But his favorite is a man cultivating
a tree. Comenius carefully distinguishes between a wild tree that grows on its
own and a fruit tree that is cultivated so as to bring forth abundant fruit.20
Jean-Jacques Rousseau toward the beginning of Emile writes: “Plants are
shaped by cultivation, and men by education.”21 Rousseau was referring to
Comenius’ metaphor. However, because of the modern bias against teaching,
Rousseau’s line has been cited numerous times in support of the view that
Rousseau thought that the teacher should just get out of the way and let the
child grow “naturally.” His use of “cultivation” and everything that follows
the opening page show that Rousseau, like Comenius and Protagoras, argues
that the teacher has to shape the behavior of the student.
The human–human interrelation is more complex than the human–plant re-
lation. The metaphor of cultivating a plant or tree is limited, as all metaphors
are. Nevertheless, it is better than the seventeenth-century metaphor of writ-
ing on a slate. The assumption in that image is that the teacher says things or
writes them on the blackboard and the student by copying the words receives
knowledge impressed upon the mind. Most university professors would claim
to have rejected that image of teaching, but quite obviously it can still be
found in practice.
Another of Protagoras’ metaphors—from medicine—has some advantages
but also some drawbacks compared to farming. A teacher is like a physician
who is trying to restore health to the organism.22 But this metaphor should not
be reduced to the supplying of medicine. This metaphor should focus not on
medicine but on the care of the body that sometimes needs to be restored to
health. The knowledgeable person can help to bring out the possibilities
within the organism itself. In this way, the physician’s work offers a helpful
way to think about teaching. As we will see, Thomas Aquinas uses the body’s
10 Chapter One

healing of itself with the help of a physician as a metaphor for teaching-

learning. Protagoras and Thomas Aquinas fit in with current practice in health
care, which includes but is not limited to handing out medicine.
This distinction between medicine and health care is relevant to the use of
medical metaphors by the Sophists. Hippocrates is the most famous of the group;
his oath for physicians is still taken seriously. Socrates voices what is Plato’s ob-
jection to using the physician’s work as a model for teaching. For Plato, medi-
cine is a corrective art; one must first establish the proper state of the body. Oth-
erwise, the teacher will substitute the actually desired for the desirable.23
Plato is right that the physician should understand health before assigning
medicines. Plato’s physician of the soul has to distinguish between immedi-
ate and urgent desires that are detrimental and the deeper desires that are for
the long-term good of the soul. Plato’s warning is well taken, but Protagoras
thinks that we all have some sense of our own health without waiting for med-
ical experts to tell us what health is.
We are often unsure of what enhances health but we can usually get signs
of what is destructive of health. The standard of health necessary is mainly set
by a community’s experience and the best insights of individuals. We do need
“professional physicians” with specialized knowledge of medicine and skill
at surgery. Protagoras readily granted the need for this advanced knowledge
but it is only a part of health and health care. Socrates in his formulation of
the question wins the argument; but Protagoras, Gorgias, and Hippocrates are
the bigger help in pointing out the teaching that happens every day in every
community.
A final significant point in Socrates’ attack on Protagoras concerns money.
What Socrates implies in the Apology and what runs throughout other dia-
logues is that the payment of money for teaching inevitably corrupts the
process. After his effective description of how everyone in a community
teaches to whatever degree they can, Protagoras concludes with a dubious
claim. Within a community, he says, some people have specialized knowl-
edge and “I am one of those who can advance toward virtue and therefore I
am worthy of the fee” (328b).
He is surely right that some people are more advanced in virtue and be-
come teachers of virtue to a degree beyond the average citizen. It is obvious
that outstanding citizens inspire others to live differently. We learn to become
virtuous, Aristotle would later say, by growing up in a virtuous community.24
Not everyone learns the lesson; or rather, they learn other lessons. Teaching-
learning requires an openness on the part of the would-be learner. As for the
teacher, the teaching is not under his or her direct control. Paradoxically, the
attempt to make oneself an exemplar of virtue is likely to be an obstacle to
the teaching of virtue.
 Plato and His Students 11

Protagoras is not claiming to be an outstanding example of virtue but to be

someone who can instruct in virtue. That claim makes him vulnerable to the
criticism that he is selling what is not his to sell. He establishes a contract
with the student that guarantees knowledge of virtue in exchange for a fee.
But no teacher can guarantee that result. Aristotle did not think that his work
called Ethics would make a bad person into a good person.25 He did think that
with instruction a good person could be helped to pursue the good more in-
telligently. Protagoras should not have claimed more than Aristotle did. Pro-
tagoras could have stated his case more modestly as “I try to instruct people
who are on the way toward virtue but the effectiveness of the instruction de-
pends on the receptivity of the student.” Admittedly, that is not a good adver-
tising slogan.
Protagoras’ restating of the contract would not likely have satisfied
Socrates, who seems to reject the element of money altogether. Teaching is a
gift offered to another. Demanding payment is proof that it is not a gift at all;
what is most valuable is priceless. Love is not for sale and neither is the teach-
ing of virtue. In back of this principle is a key premise of Socratic teaching,
namely, that human beings find it painful to give up their illusions. They have
to discover that they do not know what is for their own good. The road to true
virtue is “ascetic,” a fundamental reorienting of one’s life. When the teacher
is dependent on the student’s fee, the hard truths will be avoided. The teacher
will pander to the comfort zone and preconceptions of the student (Gorgias
521e).26 The teacher will not wish to drive away the paying customers.
Although the Sophists were vulnerable to the charge that money can cor-
rupt the process of teaching, I do not think that Socrates’ premise is com-
pletely accurate. The teaching of virtue challenges the comfortable illusions
of the learner only after those illusions have been learned. The oft-repeated
principle of Socrates’ followers that learning has to begin with unlearning is
not true of the first learning.27 The young child who is learning to eat with a
fork or move on two legs experiences a physical struggle but the child’s prob-
lem of learning is not the presence of preconceived ideas or self-deception.
Undoubtedly, the illusions start early in life but for teacher as well as stu-
dent, life is not simply illusion versus truth. Teachers should not pander to the
self-deceptive illusions of the students but they also have to be concerned
about their own illusions. Who can certify that any teacher is free of self-
deception and can be trusted to deal only in truth, goodness, and the ultimate
welfare of the student? Whatever the age or the condition of the student, both
teacher and student start with a mixture of truth and falsity, unexamined prej-
udices and rationally affirmed prejudices. Unlearning and learning is not a
single sequence in the learner; it is a continuing process in both teacher and
student. The teacher who does not learn from the student is not teaching well.
12 Chapter One

If Socrates is correct—that teaching is a gift offering which money cor-

rupts—what of today’s professional teachers? The fact that it was considered
a scandal in the twelfth century when teachers began to be paid may be met
with a smile today.28 But the underlying issue is a serious, unarticulated prob-
lem for today’s schoolteachers. To some extent it is a problem shared with
other “helping professions” but for school teaching it is more severe. The per-
son who comes to a law office or a physical therapy clinic really wants the
services of a lawyer or a therapist. It cannot be said that millions of sullen
youngsters in classrooms experience teaching as a gift that they are seeking
to receive.
Even college students may feel coerced despite the fact that their parents
are paying an exorbitant tuition for the privilege of their children attending a
famous university. Before World War II, one out of ten students got to college
and generally these lucky ones were grateful for the privilege of exposure to
college teaching. Today six out of ten students go to college and many of
them feel coerced into undergoing this ritual for the purpose of getting a good
job. The high school diploma has been replaced by the college degree.
The system that has grown up quickly and somewhat haphazardly is in
need of reform, and there is no shortage of reform packages on the market.
Much of the sloppy reform goes in the wrong direction. It tries to overcome
the boredom and/or rebellion by letting students study whatever they think
they want to study and in no particular order. Learning is made entertaining,
something pleasant and unthreatening. The inflation of grades is the way to
keep everyone content; no low grades mean no complaints to the teachers and
administrators. The teacher is considered an entrepreneur trying to sell a
product; the student is the skeptical consumer. Teachers can be judged by how
many satisfied customers they attract, especially as indicated by student eval-
uations.
Genuine reform would go in almost the opposite direction. There should be
some freedom of choice throughout the school system that might lessen the
feeling of being coerced into a particular learning environment. Nonetheless,
there is a discipline to learning anything; a definite sequence of steps is usu-
ally needed. Internship could be an option in more settings than it currently
is. Internship for a job would be a more sensible outlet for many youngsters,
at least in college if not senior high school. They might appreciate the uni-
versity classroom when they are age forty or sixty.
The school system should provide a protective barrier so that teaching-
learning is not reduced to commodity exchange. In the actual encounter of
teacher and learner, money ought not to be an issue. If the teacher of biology,
medieval history, or statistics is to be prepared for the work and to persevere
in doing it well, money is indispensable. But the teacher is not paid by the stu-
 Plato and His Students 13

dent. The student pays the institution which provides many services and pays
many bills besides the teacher’s salary.
A tax-supported school is an admirable way for a community to provide a
buffer between teacher offering and student paying. Even in an institution
where student tuitions pay most of the bills, the faculty need not be seen as
being paid on a per-capita basis by students. That is, a course on Greek liter-
ature or Chinese philosophy that attracts a handful of students can be sup-
ported by courses that have large enrollments. That is what a university is
supposed to be: the defense of important but unfashionable learning against
the ravages of the market. There are “universities” today that have no cam-
pus, no library, no faculty, whose advertising pitch is send us money and you
can get a degree with a minimum of effort. If universities continue in that di-
rection of providing only courses that are bestsellers taught by popularly ap-
proved teachers, then we will have not learned much since Plato warned
about the selling of knowledge.

MIDDLE WORKS

Among the works attributed to Plato’s middle period, I will concentrate on the
Republic. However, one should note that there are works that are transitional
to the mature politics, metaphysics, and educational theory of the Republic. I
will refer here to Gorgias and Meno. In the early dialogues, Socrates seems
content to leave the student frozen in a conceptual puzzle. Perhaps there is an
implication that Socrates knows the right answer; nonetheless, he professes to
know only his own ignorance.
In Gorgias and Meno there is at least the beginning of a theory that the
truth can be found within a person who digs deeply enough. To this day, many
of our terms concerning knowledge reflect this Platonic premise: remember,
recollect, realize, remind. The knowledge is a going back to something that
has been misplaced or not noticed (Symposium 208a). What is needed is a
method to get behind everyday impressions and discover what has been cov-
ered. Socrates’ attack on rhetoric in Gorgias is based on rhetoric’s incapacity
to get at hidden truths.29 Only dialectic or philosophy can lead the learner to
the higher reaches of the mind.
The presence of knowledge which has to be recovered can suggest that
knowledge is innate, that is, given at birth (Phaedo 73b). The Timaeus in-
cludes a scene (27d–29d) in which the forms or ideas are inserted by the gods
at birth. However, one need not take this myth as Plato’s final version of
where knowledge comes from. A theory of knowledge as remembrance might
also suggest metempsychosis—remembering what happened in a previous
14 Chapter One

lifetime. Here, too, Plato offers a myth at the end of the Republic (614–16)
that describes souls choosing new identities after crossing the river of forget-
ting. Rebirth explains the forgotten knowledge in this lifetime but not the ul-
timate origin of knowledge.
The dialogue, Meno, also suggests that knowledge is innate, perhaps from
a previous existence (81c, d). The focus of the work, however, is not the ulti-
mate source of knowledge but a teaching method to recollect it. Meno asks,
“Do you think there are no teachers of virtue?” to which Socrates replies, “I
have often certainly inquired whether there are, and taken great pains to find
them, and have never succeeded” (89c). Despite this seeming denial of teach-
ing, Socrates proceeds to argue for the recovery of forgotten knowledge.
The way to knowledge is by way of right opinion, which is a state in be-
tween ignorance and knowledge. Meno had posed the dilemma that one can-
not learn because if you already know something you cannot learn what you
already know, and if you are ignorant you don’t know what you are looking
for. Socrates’ solution to that dilemma is “he who does not know may still
have true notions of that which he does not know (85c). He says at the end of
the dialogue that statesmen are guided by right opinion (99c).
A centerpiece of Meno is a dialogue within the dialogue. Socrates questions
a boy who is identified as one of Meno’s slaves. Socrates wants to show that
even such an uneducated boy has knowledge that he is unaware of. Geome-
try is the crucial choice of topic for the conversation. For Plato, the royal road
to knowledge is mathematics which disciplines the mind by way of abstrac-
tion from concrete phenomena and which leads to the intellectual forms.
Socrates first asks if the boy knows Greek (82b). That issue is more than a
simple factual question. The learning of a language is the first great specifi-
cally human step in learning. The person who knows any of the world’s de-
veloped languages implicitly knows a great deal that he or she cannot imme-
diately articulate. It is not surprising that a slave boy has a world of
knowledge inside his mind. Greek or a similar language embodies centuries
of learning.
Socrates asks a series of questions about mathematical figures (rectangles,
circles, triangles). The boy is able to respond, indicative of quite complex
learning that preceded his encounter with Socrates. The boy might not have
engaged in much mathematical reasoning but he has a grasp of mathematical
shapes that are exemplified in the world of passing phenomena. For Socrates,
the knowledge is both recognition and the connections between things that re-
quire abstraction from individual cases.
The conclusion to the dialogue still has a tentative quality to it. Socrates
would seem to have demonstrated the power of a teacher to bring out knowl-
edge in contrast to mere opinion and to show how ideas can be remembered
 Plato and His Students 15

in recollection. Yet, he seems again to deny the role of the teacher by saying
“virtue is neither natural nor imparted by teaching but an instinct given by
God to those to whom it is given” (99c).
Socrates realizes that this conclusion is unsatisfying and leaves open future
progress in understanding. “We shall never know the certain truth until, be-
fore asking how virtue is given, we inquire into the actual nature of virtue. I
fear that I must go away, but do you, now that you are persuaded yourself,
persuade our friend Anytus” (100b). The teacher leaves the student neither
too exhilarated by success nor exasperated by the incompleteness of the
process. For Plato, teaching virtue still requires a metaphysical explanation of
the source of our ideas.

REPUBLIC30

The Republic is our best source for Plato’s mature ideas on politics and educa-
tion. Socrates is still the main interlocutor in the dialogue. But while Socrates
is playful and clever with the language, he seems intent on convincing others of
the truth of Plato’s metaphysics and its related educational theory.
The first book of the Republic, which some people think was a separate
treatise from an earlier period, raises the question of what justice is. Socrates
and his opponent, the Sophist, Thrasymachus, differ strongly. Thrasymachus
says that justice is the rule of the stronger, a phrase that can be taken either as
a realistic description of the way things are, or as a commentary on the mis-
use of the word justice. Socrates argues against a conventional meaning of
justice as giving everyone his due, but he also criticizes Thrasymachus’
meaning. The remaining nine books of the Republic lay out what justice
means for a community and for an individual. The realization of the just po-
lis or community depends on education so that Plato develops a quite detailed
curriculum. Some of the early educational curriculum may show traces of
Protagoras and the Sophists but Plato still speaks disparagingly of them
(493).
It has to be constantly kept in mind that Plato views the education of the
individual as penultimate to the formation of the perfect community. He sim-
ply states that he will study the community or society rather than the individ-
ual because the society is the individual “writ large.” It is a premise readily
agreed to by his hearers but one that can be doubted. His interest, in any case,
is how the polis is constituted.
Plato does not cite numbers or percentages but it is obvious that the great
majority of individuals in his society will receive only the most basic ele-
ments of education, enough to fit in as farmers, nurses, tailors, tradesmen, or
16 Chapter One

builders. The full curriculum is only for guardians, a political, administrative

class that is supported by auxiliaries, a second class that is both police and
military force (415a–c). Plato elaborates a myth that will justify where each
person fits in society. According to the myth, people are born as gold, silver,
or bronze and that usually determines their place in life. The possibility of
movement between classes is acknowledged but no mechanism is in place
that would suggest that it is a regular occurrence. When he is asked whether
people will believe this fanciful story, he answers somewhat ominously “not
in the first generation but you might succeed with the second and later gen-
erations” (415d).
The first stage of education, which was apparently to be provided for
everyone, is a combination of physical and mental education. “We shall be-
gin by educating mind and character” (376c). He wants a guardian class in
which individuals will have a harmonious balance of self-control and brav-
ery. Nonetheless, the aim of both physical and “literary” education is “to train
the mind” (410c). His section on physical education is disappointing. It is im-
mediately made clear that he is referring to military training, which comes af-
ter literary education. He wants a physical training that is simple and flexible,
particularly in its training for war (404c). And then he goes off on a rant about
physicians and makes harsh judgments about the sick (405–8).
Although he begins and ends the section on early education by speaking of
a harmony of the physical and mental, a systematic look at the physical edu-
cation of young children is missing. He thinks of physical education as some-
thing for eighteen-year-olds but not for eighteen-month-olds. One of his best
lines plays upon the common derivation in Greek of the words child, play, and
education. Accordingly, he says that the education of a child is play rather
than compulsion. However, there is no description of the child learning at
play (537a).
“Literary” is the usual translation of Plato’s word which describes a main
part of education. It is the word from which we get the word music. The lit-
erary education of a child could include both poetry and playing a musical in-
strument. Education as a whole must have the harmony of music.
Plato is aware throughout the Republic that rational knowledge can be
overwhelmed by other forces within the soul (588). Plato is a strict censor of
the stories told to children and what we call “plays.” He wished to protect
children from errors about the gods, telling children only stories about what
is good. But keeping young people away from poets who offer a variety of
stories about the gods and away from actors who portray unsavory characters
does not seem to be an educational shaping of human thought and emotion.
A crucial proposal of the Republic is the elimination, or at least the radical
reform, of the family. Plato does not exclude women from the guardian class
 Plato and His Students 17

even though he seems to forget that fact in some of his references to the
guardians. The best offspring will be produced by matching guardians at mat-
ing festivals. To enforce the control of sex during the childbearing years,
Plato refers in veiled ways to abortion and infanticide (461). He is also vague
about the care of the superior children born to the properly mated guardians.
The nurses and surrogate mothers would seem to be in powerful positions of
teaching and yet Plato has nothing to say about the preparation of these teach-
ers and the performance of their work. His main educational interest remains
the ascension of the mind to the world of unchanging forms.
The guardians have an education that is nearly lifelong. After the early pe-
riod that has no direct correlation to age, Plato helpfully sketches his curricu-
lum from about age eighteen to fifty-years-old and beyond. When the future
guardian is eighteen, he or she is given military training for two years. Then
the student spends ten years in mastering the existing branches of mathemat-
ics. Plato notes that studying math is not for practical purposes but to prepare
the mind for philosophy proper (521c). At about age thirty the student would
be ready to master the tools of philosophy with the study of dialectic. Plato
holds off on philosophy until this age because, he says, younger students who
learn to argue become arrogant (539b).
The thirty-five-year-old man or woman, now having a vision of the good,
is required to give something back to the community. This service takes the
form of what seems to be low-level administrative positions. Today’s com-
mon meaning of “community service,” unfortunately, is court-imposed pun-
ishment. Plato would like his guardians-to-be to recognize that their mission
in life is to serve the needs of a just community. When Socrates is asked
whether the guardians will be happy, his brusque reply is that their happiness
is not his concern (519e). His interest is a community in which justice will
reign because each individual attends to his or her business. In this way the
three classes in the community will play their respective proper roles.
Only after the long internship of service does the philosopher-king emerge
to serve in the top position and guide the community. A kind of rotating sys-
tem will include the guardians continuing to study philosophy and being the
“watchdogs” endowed with both strength and gentleness. Eventually, they
will retire to the land of the blessed, a place sufficiently attractive that they
willingly give up the perks of high office.
The journey of this curriculum is beautifully captured in the famous alle-
gory of the cave, (514–17) at the conclusion of which Plato offers his most
precise description of teaching. Plato recounts a myth or story of prisoners
who are chained in a cave. All that they can see are shadows thrown upon the
wall by an unseen fire. Various games are played by the prisoners concerning
the movement of the shadows.
18 Chapter One

Then one prisoner is freed, or more exactly, is dragged upward into the
light of day. At first he finds the light blinding but gradually he adjusts and
begins to see people. Eventually, he grasps a world of realties that is so dif-
ferent from mere shadows. He feels bad for his former comrades who are
caught up in illusions. But he is fearful of returning to the cave because he
would be blinded by the darkness and would no longer have either the skill
or the interest in playing their games. So resentful would the prisoners be of
someone trying to enlighten them that they might kill him.
Despite the danger to the liberated prisoner, Plato wants the best minds in
the community to return to the prisoners in the cave and “share their labors
and rewards, whether trivial or serious” (519d). Coercing the best and the
brightest to be leaders seems strange in our world where politicians are sup-
posed to have “fire in the belly,” a willingness to sacrifice everything to their
desire for high office. There were societies like that in Plato’s time where it
was thought desirable that leaders struggle to attain power. Plato says “the
truth is quite different: the state whose prospective rulers come to their duties
with least enthusiasm is bound to have the best and most tranquil government,
and the state where rulers are eager to rule the worst” (520d).
From the myth of the cave, Plato derives a precise description of teaching.
He begins that description with a denial of a false idea of teaching: “We must
reject the conception of education professed by those who say that they can
put into the mind knowledge that was not there before—rather as they could
put sight into blind eyes.” He then states his own premise for teaching: “The
capacity for knowledge is innate in each mind.” Not knowledge but a capac-
ity for knowledge is universal and given at birth. The capacity needs actual-
ization. Like the eye being turned to the light, the mind has to be turned from
a world of change and after a while it will be able to perceive what is truly
real.
Finally, Plato gives his description of the act of teaching: “This turning
around of the mind itself might be made a subject of professional skill which
effects the conversion as easily as possible. It would not be concerned to im-
plant sight, but to ensure that someone who had it already was not either
turned in the wrong direction or looking the wrong way” (518 c, d). This idea
of conversion became a central idea in Christian history.31 Philosophically, it
returns in Wittgenstein’s idea of knowledge.
In one respect, the teacher has a great responsibility to oversee the conver-
sion of the mind to truth. From a different angle, the teacher’s job is minimal:
simply make sure the body is not turned in the wrong direction. Turning the
whole body in the right direction implies more than either a passive looking-
on or a forceful shove. As Plato notes, it requires a skill or art to gradually
move the student to look in the right direction.
 Plato and His Students 19

The ultimate teacher is the sunlight or the light that goodness casts in the
interior of the student’s mind. The human teacher has to lead the body in its
external activity. Plato’s own description of teaching seems to point up his in-
adequate treatment of physical education in childhood. Although the teacher
cannot put knowledge into the mind, teaching can discipline behavior so as to
make possible the mind’s recognition of the truth.
In the Republic, Plato seems to play down language in the description of
teaching. Silence precedes verbal instruction and silence is at the end of
speech. In between the silences, dialectic is integral to directing the forces of
the soul and body. Plato indicates in the Republic and the Symposium
(211a–e) that the truth is beyond words, a contemplation of eternal forms.
Speech is what leads up to the speechless.32

CONCLUSION

I began this chapter by pointing out the centrality of Socrates to most writing
on teaching. Or, rather, most writing is about the teacher because one of the
results of Socrates’ dominance in the area is that educational literature is more
concerned with teachers than the act of teaching. And in an irony worthy of
Socrates, most educational writing identifies the teacher with the professional
educator. Most writing that purports to be about teaching is actually about the
professional problems of schoolteachers. To be sure, those problems are real
and complex; and an analysis of teaching would not solve all of those prob-
lems. Still, there should be room for asking what it means for humans to en-
gage in the activity of teaching.
A response to the question “what is teaching?” would start from an earlier
time and a wider world than the faculty lounge of the local high school. Such
a discussion could eventually provide some help to elementary and high
schoolteachers but the Sophists as well as Socrates need to be allowed into the
conversation. Protagoras may have been corrupted by arrogance and money,
which was Plato’s view of the Sophists, but he was on the right trail by saying
that teaching is done by a community and each individual in the community.
One can understand from the Sophists that most teaching is nonverbal;
when speech does emerge from the silence, it is in the mode of storytelling,
poetry, and the commands of a parent or the law. Virtue or excellence of life
is taught by example and everything of value that a person learns from child-
hood onward. Socrates’ questions are important provided they a superstruc-
ture on a variety of virtues and several kinds of knowledge.
It is surprising that Aristotle has not exercised more influence than he has
on the understanding of teaching. He articulated one version of Plato, but in
20 Chapter One

his self-description, said he was more down to earth than Plato in philosoph-
ical speculation. While Aristotle, like Plato, does not have much good to say
of the Sophists, his distinctions among the virtues and his emphasis upon
practical knowledge have definite echoes of sophistic teaching.
“The object of our inquiry,” Aristotle wrote “is not to know what virtue is,
but to become good men” (Ethics 1103b27). And to become a good man, one
must develop the right habits. “If anyone wishes to make a serious study of
ethics, or of political science generally, he must have been well trained in his
habits” (Ethics 1095a29). The habits that we form from the earliest age make
“a vast difference, or rather all the difference in the world” (Ethics 1103b25).
Aristotle implies a preference for Gorgias rather than Socrates in his enumer-
ating separate virtues and a multiplicity of goods (Politics 1260a25).33
In his ethical, social, and political writing, Aristotle does not demand
demonstrable proofs. He says that to demand logical proof from a farmer or an
orator makes no more sense than accepting persuasion from a mathematician
(Ethics 1094b25). Aristotle escapes the accusation of “relativism” because he
accepts the possibility of a theoretical knowledge based on fixed forms.
Nonetheless, for the practice of teaching, one is faced with a world of relativ-
ities and questions of making and doing in a relational context. “Anything that
we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it” (Ethics 1103 a14).
The process of showing how to do something always depends on the concrete
conditions of the learner and the kind of knowledge that is at stake.
The political philosopher, Michael Oakshott, writes: “Practical knowledge
can neither be taught nor learned but only imparted and acquired. It exists
only in practice, and the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a mas-
ter.”34 That is a strange contrast. The relation of master and apprentice surely
qualifies as a teaching-learning relation. Oakshott is defending other kinds of
knowledge besides the only kind that modern rationalism accepts. But in the
process he relinquishes teaching-learning to rationalists. A more effective ap-
proach is to question whether rational concepts can be taught except on the
ground of practical knowledge.
In the course of his writing, Plato moved away from a world in which only
absolutes counted as knowledge. He seemed to recognize that most people do
not live in a heady world of eternal forms (Symposium 202a). Although we
hear little in the Republic about the education of the “third class,” the labor-
ers, there can be no justice or peace unless the whole community and the
whole individual embody virtue. Plato’s description of the teacher as one who
turns the whole body toward the light is a description that can include farmer,
shoemaker, tradesman, politician, and nurse, as well as the skilled speaker.
The metaphor for teacher that Socrates applies to himself in Theaetetus is
“midwife” (150c–51e). Like the Sophists’ use of agriculture and medicine,
 Plato and His Students 21

Socrates’ midwifery image has rich possibilities. Not surprisingly, the

metaphor has attracted feminist writers in recent years. The authors of
Women’s Ways of Knowing appeal to that image: “Mid-wife teachers help stu-
dents deliver their words to the world.”35 The link between giving birth to
knowledge and giving birth to a child is an ancient one that has continued
throughout history. Knowledge is conceived and the result is concepts.
Socrates is more than just an example of those who spoke of the birth of
ideas. The Hellenistic Age, so rich in philosophical concepts, was itself the
birth of a new order in which individual, rational man would ascend. Aeschy-
lus signifies this new order in having the god Apollo declare Orestes innocent
though he murdered his mother Clytemnestra: “The mother of what is called
her offspring is no parent but only the nurse to the seed that is implanted. The
mounter, the male, is the only true parent. She harbors the bloodshoot, unless
some god blasts it. The womb of the woman is a convenient transit.”36
Like Plato’s advocacy of sexual equality, Socrates’ claim to be a midwife
is suspect. A comparison of knowledge and newborns is an attractive idea that
can bring together intellect and emotions, individual and community, men
and women. But Socrates is portrayed as giving birth to ideas and definitions
of words. Immortality is now sought in the ideas that men conceive.
It seems that Socrates’ midwifery became interpreted not as an application
of a metaphor but a replacement of the primary meaning of midwifery. Ra-
tionalistic philosophers and university professors have been comfortable with
being at the birth of grand ideas so long as the messy details of a baby com-
ing forth are not included. Socrates without the Sophists can be dangerous.
Socratic dialogue can be a powerful teacher if all the other teachers, starting
with mothers, are recognized.

NOTES

1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 39.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (New York: Penguin Books, 1990),
#10, 11.
3. Plato, Republic, 588–89; Phaedrus, 246–57.
4. Wilfred Wees, Nobody Can Teach Anyone Anything (Garden City, N.Y.: Dou-
bleday, 1971).
5. Alexander Nehamas, “What Did Socrates Teach and to Whom Did He Teach
It?” Review of Metaphysics, 46, no. 2 (1992): 288.
6. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1971), II, 171.
7. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991), 33.
22 Chapter One

8. Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 32.

9. Nehamas, “What Did Socrates Teach,” 295.
10. James King, “Nonteaching and its Significance for Education,” Education
Theory, 26 (Spring, 1976): 230, 228.
11. Samuel Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education (New York: Routledge,
1988), 16.
12. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968),
par. 428.
14. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), 25, 144.
15. Nehamas, “What Did Socrates Teach,” 284.
16. Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 200.
17. Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 25.
18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1998), 157. Arendt translates the saying of Protagoras as “man is the measure of all
things for use.”
19. Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 7.
20. Johannes Comenius, The Great Didactic (London: Russell and Russell, 1967), 26.
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education (New York: Basic Books,
1979), 38.
22. Guthrie, The Sophists; or, On Education, 168–69.
23. Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 35.
24. Aristotle, Ethics, 1103a14.
25. Aristotle, Ethics, 1095a29; 1179a20
26. Gary Alan Scott, Plato’s Socrates as Educator (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 2000), 25.
27. Scott, Plato’s Socrates, 41.
28. Jacques Goff, The Birth of Europe (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 121.
29. Samuel Ijssling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1975), 7.
30. Numbers in the text refer to Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (New
York: Penguin Books, 1987).
31. Jaeger, Paideia, II, 295.
32. Arendt, Human Condition, 291.
33. Gilbert Ryle, “Teaching and Training,” in The Concept of Education, ed. R. S.
Peters (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), 109. Ryle complains that Aristotle’s
ideas are “grossly translated” by “habit.” One certainly has to resist a common mean-
ing of “habit” as a mindless repetition that restricts freedom; however, the ambiguity
seems built into the idea.
34. Michael Oakshott, Rationalism in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 11.
35. Mary Belenky and others, Women’s Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic
Books, 1986), 219.
36. Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philoso-
phy (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 72.
 Chapter Two

Augustine Despite Aquinas

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) form an in-

tellectual bridge between ancient and modern worlds. Their contrasting views
on teaching are still with us. Augustine is the more complex character and he
more directly influences modern thinking; I will focus attention on him.
Thomas Aquinas is one of the most profound thinkers in history, but I will
deal only with his essay Truth in which he responds to Augustine’s essay, The
Teacher.
Most histories of philosophy and of education omit a discussion of Augus-
tine and Thomas. The reason is that both men wrote within the framework of
Christian theology. They believed in a God revealed in the history of the Jew-
ish people, culminating in Jesus, called the Christ. Unlike some Christians
they do not describe faith as a substitute for reason. Nor was their writing of
theology simply an exercise in applying reason to “revealed truths,” or
“Christian revelation,” modern phrases that collapse the tension between faith
and understanding.
What makes both authors interesting is that they bring together a long reli-
gious tradition and the resources of classical philosophy. Augustine worked
his way through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism before becoming Christian.
He never left behind his immersion in the rhetoric of Cicero and the philo-
sophical imagery of Plotinus’ Neoplatonism. Thomas Aquinas is known for
his integrating Aristotle into Christian thinking but his dependence on Ploti-
nus is just as profound. The Augustinian and Thomistic ideas of teaching are
inspired by the New Testament but they are given expression in the images
and concepts of Greek philosophy.
I wish to show that Augustine and Thomas agree that God is the ultimate
teacher but they draw sharply divergent conclusions about human teaching

23
24 Chapter Two

from that principle. That fact is not immediately evident in reading Thomas’
comments on Augustine’s The Teacher because Thomas always tried to avoid
contradicting Augustine who was and is revered as the father of Western the-
ology. Nevertheless, the difference is profound.
The neglect of Augustine is a barrier to understanding modern thinkers
from Descartes to Wittgenstein. Augustine has been called the first modern
man. He was a man at war with himself and he possessed the talent and orig-
inality to reveal the personal struggle in his writing, especially in the Confes-
sions.1 Plato had described philosophy as a conversation that the soul has with
itself and Socrates emerges from the dialogues as a reflective individual. Au-
gustine represents what Charles Taylor calls “radical reflexivity,” in which
the individual not only thinks profoundly but thinks about the origin and na-
ture of thinking.2
Augustine, however, is not a Cartesian, though he is often seen to be a
predecessor of the French thinker of the seventeenth century. Descartes iso-
lates thinking from the world of objects and even doubts the existence of
“world.” Augustine in his Confessions is a man turning inward and wrestling
with his memory, but the book is also a rich source for our knowledge of the
late fourth-century Roman Empire.
Much of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writing is unintelligible without some
knowledge of Augustine. Rousseau was intent on getting rid of the doctrine
of “original sin,” first conceptualized by Augustine. Rousseau was well aware
of Augustine’s place in the history of Western ideas of freedom, knowledge,
sin, guilt, grace, politics, and apocalypticism.
In one of Augustine’s most famous books, The City of God, he built a con-
trast between two cities around the “love of God” and “love of man.”3
Rousseau adopted the idea of conflicting loves but made them into a true and
a false love of oneself.4 And toward the end of his life, Rousseau wrote his
own Confessions in imitation of Augustine. However, the meaning of “con-
fession” had shifted from Augustine’s testimony before God and praise of
God’s blessings to Rousseau’s and our more modern meaning of confession
as telling secrets, admitting faults, and settling some scores along the way.
Wittgenstein begins his major work, Philosophical Investigations, with a
long quotation from Augustine’s Confessions.5 Augustine is describing how
as a small child he came to know the names of things. Wittgenstein uses that
description to set off his own understanding of language. Wittgenstein does
not entirely disagree with Augustine. But what Augustine uses as background,
such as the bodily gestures of the adults, is what Wittgenstein brings to the
foreground. Given that Augustine does think that ideas are more important
than words and that words are expressions of inner ideas, Wittgenstein has
some basic differences with Augustine.
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 25

I will use two of Augustine’s works to examine his view of teaching. The
first is entitled De Doctrina Christiana which exists with several English
translations of the title. Its literal translation On Christian Doctrine does not
convey the purpose or content of the book nor does an edition with the title
Christian Instruction. A recent edition has the title Teaching Christianity
which has the virtue of indicating it is about teaching, but the object “Chris-
tianity” is an unhelpful anachronism.6 I think the most accurate title, and the
one I will use, is Christian Teaching. The first three books of the work are
about the teaching(s) of the Christian Church. The fourth book, the most rel-
evant for my purposes, is on how to teach.
The second work that I focus on is entitled De Magistro which is ade-
quately translated as The Teacher.7 It covers the same ground more briefly
than Christian Teaching but has a more pointed opinion about the people in
Augustine’s day who were called teachers. Christian Teaching had more
prominence in the Middle Ages, appealed to by opposing schools of thought
in the early Renaissance.8 Nevertheless, the brief treatise, The Teacher, is the
one that resonates today on the possibility or impossibility of teaching.

LIFE AND THEMES

Augustine was an African living in the waning days of the Roman Empire. He
spent some time in Rome and Milan but he spent most of his life in a back-
water place in northern Africa, Thagaste, removed from Carthage, which was
the metropolitan center. Through his nearly one hundred books and numerous
letters and sermons, he shaped Christian theology with reverberations that
continue to the present. It was not a triumphant theology, confident of Chris-
tian success. It was seemingly a cramped view of human possibilities, em-
phasizing sin, guilt, and the desperate need for outside help.
This outlook reflected his personal conflicts as well as the cultural collapse
occurring in his lifetime. As a young man, he assumed that the empire was
eternal. In his later years, as he wrote The City of God, Rome was being ran-
sacked. In that work, he pictures all human cities as ephemeral; only the City
of God is permanent. The book fed into apocalyptic tendencies several cen-
turies later.
Much of Augustine’s life as a churchman was taken up with fighting intra-
church battles against groups called Donatists and Pelagians. I will not at-
tempt here to explain the subtleties of these Christian heresies but a person’s
writings usually reflect what he or she is opposing. Augustine, for example,
has a bad reputation for his views on sexuality, but as Garry Wills points out,
he was defending the “liberal” position against his opponents.9 Reading his
26 Chapter Two

sermons, one finds much more concern with greed than sexual sins. It is true
that he thought that the human inability to control sexual desire was a sign of
disorder, but the problem was the lack of control not the sex itself.
The doctrine of an original fall is at the heart of Augustine’s writing. He is
credited with or blamed for inventing the doctrine of “original sin.” While he
was the major force in conceptualizing the doctrine, he was bringing together
elements of Christian belief that include the Genesis story of Adam and Eve;
the denunciation of moral failures by the prophets of ancient Israel; the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; and the formation of the church
as an ark of salvation in a world of violent conflicts.
Augustine’s personal struggle to come to grips with his own past and with
the conflicts that surrounded him is recounted in one of the great works of all
literature, The Confessions. This book invented the genre of autobiography,
the search in memory for the key events of one’s life. Without knowledge of
its context, some readers are put off by his giving importance to seemingly
trivial incidents. But for Augustine, these flaws in his own character are
symptomatic of human failings on a larger scale. The reflection on his past
leads to a brilliant reflection on the nature of time itself.10
I will not use The Confessions as a main source for my reflection on teach-
ing. However, the work is unavoidable for what it implies about philosophy
and education. Most relevant for my concern is his concept of memory that
links him to the Platonic tradition. Like Plato, Augustine thinks of knowledge
as recollection, a locating of ideas buried deep in consciousness.11 He thinks
that these ideas are divine in origin; human ideas participate in God’s ideas.
Plato’s Timaeus has a picture of ideas being inserted in each newborn human.
The Timaeus was favorite reading among early Christian writers and led them
to believe in a neat fit between Platonism and Christianity.
According to Augustine, humans are born with “seminal reasons,” that
need actualizing. One could imagine an educational program of Augustine’s
similar to Plato’s Meno in which the young boy is shown to possess pre-ex-
isting knowledge of geometric shapes. Augustine even has some of the Pla-
tonic-Pythagorean fascination with numbers as pointers to eternal truth.12 Au-
gustine pushes beyond the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions when he posits
God as the principle of knowing, the healer of a wounded faculty. For Pla-
tonists, the human being can turn toward the light and be confident of grasp-
ing the truth; for Augustine, the humans are in need of a “grace” (gift) to over-
come their penchant for disordered desires that block a clear view. Education
thus takes on the character of therapy. Augustine does not separate knowledge
and love.
A Socratic view of education is usually described by referring to an oppo-
sition between knowledge and ignorance. The concept of “will” had not been
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 27

developed. At the end of the Republic Plato does have the myth of the man
confronted by a tiger and a hydra. The hydra needs to be kept in check lest its
multiple graspings bring down the man. The faculty of knowing operates
within conflicting elements of a human life.
The idea of the will emerged with the Stoics and their fatalistic percep-
tion of the human condition. The human’s one choice is to assent or not to
assent to what nature dictates. Humans will be happier if they simply accept
what is, instead of being dragged kicking and screaming by nature.13 Au-
gustine agrees that the range of freedom is narrow; nonetheless he has a
more expansive idea of will than the Stoics. His is a wounded will, one that
is not as free as it is imagined by deluded human thinking, but it is a free
will nonetheless.
Augustine does not take choice to be the essence of freedom; in fact, choice
is a sign of the fragmenting of one’s perception of the good.14 The modern at-
tack on free will glances off Augustine whose idea of freedom is the coalesc-
ing of knowledge and love. The separating of freedom and choice may seem
Orwellian if one does not understand that Augustine is taking a view from the
end of history. The saints in heaven do not have choices because they finally
have what they have been seeking.
Even with this proviso that knowledge and love perfectly fuse only beyond
history, Augustine’s view of freedom is vulnerable to authoritarian abuse.
Governments, civil and ecclesiastical, are inclined to distrust the choices of
people who are not rationally competent to exercise freedom. Augustine has
often been invoked in defense of repression, censorship, and corrective pun-
ishment.
Augustine did develop a theory to justify repressive activity. Garry Wills
notes that others were practicing repression but Augustine gets the oppro-
brium for trying to explain it and justify some forms of religious coercion.15
Augustine may not have been familiar with Protagoras’ distinction between
revenge and punishment, but he was in agreement that punishment is accept-
able only when it has an educational purpose. “For if they were only being
terrorized and not instructed at the same time, this would be an inexcusable
tyranny on our part.”16 Although he rebelled against the physical beatings he
received in his early schooling, he believed that the will needs some coercing
to settle into the hard work of learning.17
Before I examine my two main texts on teaching, I will comment on a few
practices and themes relative to teaching that frequently occur in The Con-
fessions and elsewhere in his writing. I will comment on dialogue, friendship,
and interpretation; these themes run throughout his work. I will then examine
three metaphors for teaching and Augustine’s image for the human journey
that encapsulates a meaning for teaching.
28 Chapter Two

THEMES

The first theme is dialogue, a practice that implies an attitude to teaching-

learning. The teacher and the learner are within a process in which their re-
spective roles can be reversed. Dialogue as a literary form is artificial unless
it is the actual report of an oral exchange. If a writer is taking both sides of
the conversation, a give and take in argument is mostly pretense. Still, a
thinker who writes dialogues is making an attempt to understand what a
reader may be thinking. The give and take within the writer’s own mind is a
sign of respect for another point of view besides the one that the writer deems
to be true.
During his first ten years of writing (387–397), Augustine’s chief literary
form was the dialogue. Similar to Plato’s early dialogues, Augustine seems to
use a genuinely dialectical approach for trying to get at the truth. Plato had
Socrates on whom he was reporting; Augustine has friends, patrons, col-
leagues, and church officials in the company of whom he was working his
way toward a synthesis of a philosophical position and Christian teaching.
The later works of Plato use dialogue more as a literary instrument to convey
Plato’s mature thinking. Once Augustine is a bishop, his style of teaching,
while still indicating a searching within, often takes the form of homily or ser-
mon.
Before Augustine was a church official he was a schoolteacher for more
than ten years in Rome, Carthage, and his hometown of Thagaste. He appar-
ently was not very successful as a classroom instructor. He describes one dif-
ficult environment in Carthage: “Outsiders, looking almost crazed, barge
shamelessly into classrooms and dispel any atmosphere for learning the
teacher may have established.”18 Under such conditions the student may not
learn much about school subjects but the teacher is forced to confront some
realities about teaching. Naïve assumptions about transmitting knowledge to
waiting minds are quickly undermined. Minimal conditions need to be estab-
lished for teaching-learning.
A second theme—friendship—is related to the first. One of the most obvi-
ous characteristics of friendship is conversation, a less technical term than di-
alogue. Conversation suggests some degree of friendship while dialogue need
not. A friendly conversation has a much looser form than the dialogue of
diplomacy. Much of the conversation between friends has no purpose beyond
itself. Close friends sitting in the same room can be said to converse even
when no words are being spoken. Both dialogue and friendship point to the
relational character of teaching-learning.
Friendship was a major theme in Augustine’s life and he regularly refers to
it in his writings. That was especially true when he was a young man sur-
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 29

rounded by a group of loyal friends. Later in life, easy going friendships were
still important but difficult to sustain. Presidents, governors, bishops, CEOs,
and similar officials are isolated by their roles. The presence of a couple of
honest and truthful confidants is usually the best that they can hope for. But
even in his middle-age years Augustine was privileged to have “that most un-
fathomable of all involvements of the soul—friendship.”19
Especially in his early searching, Augustine delighted in friends and cher-
ished their help. His early works were “reflections of his view that all thought
is an effort best pursued with others.” In the ordinary play of friendly ex-
change they were “teaching and being taught by turns.”20 In his Soliloquies,
he converses with his reason about the value of friendship. To reason’s ques-
tion of why we want friends, he replies: “That we may together scrutinize our
souls and God, so that whoever discovers anything can help the others to it
more readily.”21
The third theme of interpretation is similar to friendship and dialogue in
bringing out the relational character of teaching-learning. Someone who
claims the role of teacher places himself or herself in the position of inter-
preting a relation. As soon as language plays a significant part in the relation,
there is ambiguity. A teacher has to try to explain what the words mean, but
learning depends on the response of the potential learner. For the knowledge
encoded in books, the teacher needs rules of interpretation. Augustine devel-
oped rules that dominated education for a thousand years and some of those
elements are still with us.
A popular phrase such as “reader response theory” has its beginnings with
Augustine. He recognized that the intention of an author to communicate
knowledge to a reader has to be complemented by a reader’s interpretative
ability and a readiness to be taught. Plato was hard on the Sophists for selling
knowledge; Augustine is hard on audiences for wishing to be titillated by so-
phistical teachers.22
Many of the problems in the nineteenth century concerning the reliability
of the Bible had already been wrestled with by Augustine fifteen centuries
earlier. In his commentary on the Book of Genesis, he distinguished between
what God’s intent is and the vehicle of human language.23 He readily ac-
knowledged that creation in six days is a truth in the form of a story. God
could not create light on the first day if the sun was not created until the fourth
day.24 Always one has to go back to a “literal” meaning but then decide how
to interpret the text on the basis of other texts, the work as a whole, and the
divine purpose of love.
Augustine drew on a legal tradition for interpreting texts that came down
from Aristotle through Cicero, Quintillian, and Pliny the Younger.25 There
could be a difference between what words seem to say and what the lawmaker
30 Chapter Two

intended. For Augustine, a Christian’s “spiritual reading” of the Old Testa-

ment finds a figurative meaning as well as a literal meaning in many texts. A
neglect of the literal meaning leads to flights of allegory as happened in the
Middle Ages. Augustine’s theory of interpretation was an extraordinarily
complex mixture of literary and legal traditions. Most of his successors were
not schooled in those traditions and so they read the Bible in a way that
brought on a crisis in the nineteenth century and a fundamentalist reaction in
the twentieth century.

METAPHORS FOR TEACHING

As a skilled writer and orator, Augustine employed all sorts of literary de-
vices, including puns, jokes, pithy sayings, irony, and a rich store of
metaphors. For understanding teaching-learning, I comment on three of his
metaphors.
The first metaphor is feeding. A metaphor is an action rather than an image
of a thing. In Augustine’s writing, teaching is compared not to food but to
feeding. He describes his activity while bishop “as feeding men as much in
need of nourishment as he now felt himself to be.”26 The Greeks, with their
emphasis upon visual metaphors did not usually compare teaching-learning to
feeding-eating. In Jewish and Christian traditions, however, it occupied a cen-
tral place.
Oral metaphors can refer either to speaking or eating—and occasionally to
both. In the Old Testament, the prophets Ezekiel (33:1–9) and Jeremiah (1:9)
are required to eat a text, and the strange act is repeated in the New Testament
by the prophet in Revelation (10:1–11). In less direct fashion, reading during
meals has always been a practice in monasteries. The monk digests with mind
and body at the same time. In the Eucharist, the liturgy of the word, read and
preached, is followed by the liturgy of the meal.
For Augustine, therefore, it was an obvious connection to associate teach-
ing with the provision of food. He points out that Jesus did so, distributing
loaves and fishes along with his preaching to the multitude.27 The relational
character of teaching-learning is again highlighted by this metaphor. The best
cook cannot succeed unless there are eaters who can appreciate a well-
prepared meal. Teaching is nourishing only if someone is nourished by di-
gesting what is offered.
Augustine accepted the human tendency to be attracted to tasty food that
does not provide nourishment. A teacher has to cope with this weakness,
sweetening the teaching with attractive side dishes. “There is a certain simi-
larity between feeding and learning; so because so many people are fussy and
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 31

fastidious, even those foodstuffs without which life cannot be supported, need
their pickles and spices.”28
Augustine’s second metaphor is healing. Augustine, like the Sophists,
imagined teaching as the treating of illness. The ultimate success of the treat-
ment depends on how the body responds. More closely for Augustine than for
the Sophists, this metaphor flows directly from his view of the humans’
wounded condition. Plato complained about the limitation of a medical
metaphor because it presupposed knowledge of a standard of health. Augus-
tine does not assume that some of us are healthy and some are sick. All teach-
ing is therapy, not the recovery of a previously healthy condition but the stem-
ming of disease. Peter Brown writes that “the amazing Book Ten of the
Confessions is not the affirmation of a cured man; it is the self-portrait of a
convalescent.”29
This attitude may seem to be negative and depressing, but Augustine is just
trying to be realistic and also sympathetic to human weakness. The human sit-
uation is not merely ignorance that can be overcome with knowledge deliv-
ered by a skilled lecturer. On that score Augustine agrees with Socrates. But
the way out of illusion requires healing by the medicine of friendship and
love, accompanied at times by harsher tasting medicines of physical coercion.
Augustine’s ultimate earthy image for teaching is spreading manure. I cited
Protagoras’ use of this metaphor and his careful distinctions of how and when
the manure is to be applied. This metaphor may seem too vulgar for a de-
scription of teaching-learning, but it is an appropriate relative to teaching as
feeding. Humans are prone to forget or to deny that they live in a cycle of
birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. As billions of humans now inherit the
earth they are being forced to learn that excrement from living creatures can-
not and ought not to be hidden away. It is integral to the cycle of life. Avoid-
ing the subject of what to do with what is inaccurately called waste, leads to
ecological and health disasters, starting with the pollution of drinking water.
Augustine does not shy away from using earthy metaphors in his lofty ser-
mons on the soul’s condition: “Dung heaped on a field brings forth shining
wheat; penance heaped on the soul brings forth virtue.”30 Out of seemingly
unlikely resources the teacher has to fashion growth, nourishment, and inte-
gration of life.
Finally, there is one metaphor—ascent—that is so pervasive it may not be
recognized as a figure of speech at all. “Higher is better” is deeply embedded
in language. The assumption is that the movement toward truth and goodness
is by way of ascent. Plato is not the only source for this imagery but he
strongly reinforced in philosophy what may be a primitive feeling of looking
skyward for help. The image is closely tied to a belief that in the experienced
duality of human life the better and higher half has to keep down the lower
32 Chapter Two

half. Salvation is from the body not of the body. The spirit must eventually
shed the body in order to ascend above.
Jewish religion challenged this image by looking for the meaning of life in
history, community, place, and memory. Sometimes this Jewish view of his-
tory is said to be horizontal as opposed to vertical but that can be just a ninety-
degree change of vector. A more accurate contrast would be three-dimensional
imagery as opposed to two-dimensional pictures. Space and time are easily
represented with images on paper. Place and memory cannot be so imagined.
Place is where a community has sunk roots, where babies have been born and
the dead are buried. Memory swirls backward, downward, and inward. There
are no “high gods” in Jewish religion; instead there is the God of our fathers
who promises to be with the people in the future. The truth is to be found in
the depths of the present.
The Christian movement took over most of the Jewish imagery that gives
strong affirmation of the human body and its place in the physical world. The
Christian message proclaimed God to be “incarnate.” Like most religious re-
form movements, Christianity tried to simplify and interiorize religious prac-
tice. God is to be found in the movement of the heart; God is with us; God is
within us. The sacramental life is a lifelong series of outward expressions of
interior grace. The body is not to be escaped from but to be transformed, in
St. Paul’s paradoxical phrase, into a “spiritual body.”
Christianity’s problem from the start was how to convey this complex un-
derstanding of community, body, and memory. Without a long, disciplined
education for its members, Christian religion tends to shed its Jewish roots
and become a religion in which God appears in human disguise to leave a se-
cret formula for the good life. The performance of magic-like rituals under
the watchful eyes of those who preserve the formula promises a salvation of
the soul rather than a transforming of the bodily self.
Augustine was a meeting point of these two tendencies inherent in Chris-
tianity. He had first been attracted to Manichaeism with its dualism of body and
spirit, evil and good. His escape was through Neoplatonism with its chain of be-
ing from the highest to the lowest. The suggestion in Plato’s Republic (509b)
that there is a “beyond being,” which is the source of truth and being, found its
philosophical expression in Plotinus’ One who is the source of all. The One
overflows into mind, and the world soul participates in the divine ideas.
The Neoplatonic language was almost irresistible for Christian writers who
found the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation present in Neo-
platonic philosophy. In Plotinus’ Neoplatonism there is movement inward as
well as upward, but it was the latter that attracted philosophers for more than
a thousand years.31 In the crudest application of this image, the world be-
comes a ladder of ascent to a realm above matter, community, and history.
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 33

Some of Augustine’s best-known phrases refer to God being in the interior

of the soul, “deeper than my most inward being.” “God was closer to me than
I was to myself.”32 This language cannot be understood as literally referring
to physical space. What can he mean by saying that he was “outside of him-
self,” or saying that God was within but he was far away? A modern reader
does not have much trouble understanding the paradoxical image as a psy-
chological feeling. A person “comes to his senses” in the experience of feel-
ing he has not been “present to himself,” lost among trivial concerns.
The journey to the truth therefore leads inward. “In the inward man dwells
truth.”33 I earlier contrasted Augustine’s inwardness to Descartes’ isolation
from an external world. Augustine’s autobiography is vibrant with details of
his world. The process of teaching-learning would seem central to this kind
of inward journey. The teacher working with external factors awakens an in-
ternal response.
Augustine never left behind a philosophical assumption that the truth is
“above” and therefore the movement inward is a first step on the way upward.
God speaks to “that part of him by which he rises above the lower parts he
has in common with the beasts.”34 Not only Neoplatonism but also a trace of
Manichaeism remains in the disparagement of the human body. A wise man,
according to Augustine, has to rise above material things to “an ineffable re-
ality grasped by the mind alone.”35 Jesus had said, “my kingdom is not of this
world”; Plato had said the same of his ideas.36
These two images—the interaction of outer/inner and the ascension from
inner to above—are not complementary. The second overrides the first. The
interior life is threatened by the glitter of the external world but it is also
threatened by a world imagined above community, place, and history. When
the interior life is itself transcended and God is found beyond the mere mate-
rial world, there is no longer a need for the soul to be nourished by interac-
tion with friends, memories, and bodily experiences. Caught within a lifelong
struggle for the integrity of his life, Augustine’s failure to notice this conflict
of imagery is not very surprising.
What is surprising is that commentators on Augustine do not seem to no-
tice the conflict. They follow Augustine in assuming that “the road from the
lower to the higher, the crucial shift in direction, passes through attending to
ourselves as inner.”37 The journey is assumed to be from outer to inner, and
then inner to above. Such a movement is not a cyclical journey constantly re-
nourished by teaching-learning. It is a straight line that includes a ninety-
degree angle. The image of up and down may seem to be a minor issue but I
think it explains a conflict in Augustine’s attitude to teaching-learning. De-
spite a rich flow of material on teaching and some good practical advice, he
ends with a denial that so-called teachers teach at all.
34 Chapter Two

CHRISTIAN TEACHING

The two main writings I will comment on were written, or at least begun, at
about the same time. The Teacher was written in 393; Christian Teaching was
begun in 397 and Augustine worked on it for three decades. With its positive
assumptions about teaching, Christian Teaching might seem to provide Au-
gustine’s more mature and considered opinion. However, in Reconsidera-
tions, written at the very end of his life, Augustine strongly endorses his neg-
ative attitude toward teachers in The Teacher.
Christian Teaching is a treatise addressed to preachers. For many people
today, that fact would exclude it from a book about teaching. However, Au-
gustine clearly envisions the preacher as needing to engage in an interaction
with the minds of his hearers. He is not describing a man in elaborate dress
declaiming from a high pulpit. As a preacher, Augustine dressed simply, sat
in his chair (cathedra) facing at eye level the standing congregation.38 He did
assume that behind the individual preacher was the church, the mother
teacher.39 Nonetheless, the preacher was not a mechanical transmitter of pre-
formed truths. The preacher had to engage in a performance art in order to en-
ter the minds of his hearers and evoke a response.40
Christian Teaching consists of four books, the first three on teachings or
the content to be taught. The fourth book is about how to teach (including
preach) and is filled with down-to-earth suggestions based on Augustine’s
own experience. Augustine also draws upon the tradition of Roman rhetori-
cians. Augustine quotes Cicero approvingly and uses a framework largely
supplied by Cicero. He does retain an ambivalent attitude toward the tech-
niques of the rhetorician. Augustine has been called an anti-rhetorical rhetori-
cian, freely drawing from the tradition while downplaying rhetoric’s long-
term importance. Augustine plays a significant role in undermining the
meaning of the term rhetoric. Despite some twentieth-century efforts to reha-
bilitate the word rhetoric, a “rhetorical question” is still taken to be a question
that does not invite an answer and “mere rhetoric” is a way of dismissing a
person’s argument.41
Whatever the philosophical limitations of rhetoric might be, the teacher
can learn much from the practices of the rhetorician. Augustine frames the
discussion around three styles of preaching: grand, moderate, and plain. A
teacher might use all three styles depending on the situation of the hearers and
the purpose of the teaching. Cicero said, “that man will be eloquent who can
talk about minor matters calmly, about middling ones moderately, about
grand matters grandly.”42 Augustine combines that statement with another of
Cicero’s that “to be eloquent you should speak so as to teach, to delight, to
sway”43 (IV. 12).
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 35

Augustine correlates a simple style with the wish to achieve understanding,

a moderate style with the desire to delight an audience, and a grand style with
the intention to produce action. In the simple style, a teacher persuades his
hearers that what he is saying is true; in the grand style he persuades them to
do the things they know should be done but are not being done (IV. 25.55).
These two styles have a clear and legitimate basis depending on the setting.
Today we would associate a calm style intent on understanding a text to be-
long in the classroom; a grand style trying to initiate action belongs in the
church pulpit or at the politician’s podium. Augustine is skeptical of the sec-
ond style—the intention to delight an audience. Today one might sympathize
with his fear of turning teaching into amusement, living as we do in a world
in which “entertainment” means endless trivial distractions.
Despite his negative attitude to a moderate style operating on its own, Au-
gustine does acknowledge its necessary part in a teacher’s striving for under-
standing. “After all we do not want even what we say calmly and plainly to
bore people and thus we want it to be heard not only intelligently but also
gladly, with pleasure” (IV.26.56).
The right style is needed when the aim is to move the audience to act. In that
situation, he thinks a simple style is inadequate and a moderate style is mislead-
ing (IV.13.29). Only a grand eloquence will do the job when action is called for.
Perhaps unwittingly, Augustine helped to create the stereotypical preacher thun-
dering from on high, denouncing sin, and demanding submission to the word of
God. Most people today are steeled against the loud claims of television ads and
other preaching. Perhaps plain speech laced with a touch of pleasurable irony is
more effective in today’s world than is Ciceronian grand rhetoric.
A teacher needs a clear, external sign that the hearer accepts teaching that
aims at action. If one sets foot in a Christian church it is presumed that one is
willing to be moved to action by the speaker. In contrast, crossing the thresh-
old of a classroom is not a sign of such an agreement. Instead, one agrees to
having one’s words examined but not to being told to go forth and change the
world. Today’s reader might wish that Augustine had been clearer on this dis-
tinction among venues, instead of addressing teaching from the standpoint of
preaching. Still, his view of teaching is open to distinctions among modes of
teaching and different settings for different kinds of teaching.
Although Augustine might have to rethink his three styles were he alive to-
day, his fundamental principle remains true. Depending on whether the pur-
pose of teaching is either understanding or action, one has to know the audi-
ence and use a variety of linguistic forms. Augustine says that a person
teaching “will avoid all words that do not in fact teach” and use words that
are understood, even “use words that are not so correct, provided the matter
itself is being taught and learned correctly” (IV. 10.24).
36 Chapter Two

He thinks that the words of the teacher cannot be separated from the
teacher’s life and good example. “For to be listened to with obedient compli-
ance, whatever the grandeur of the speaker’s utterances, his manner of life
carries more weight (IV. 27.59). For Augustine, the final word is always love
rather than knowledge. His words on teaching link back to everything he said
about friendship. The preacher, as well as other teachers, has to be joined to
the learner by a bond of love.44
Augustine’s view of teaching in Christian Teaching is an interaction be-
tween teacher and learner. The teacher represents a community and embodies
a tradition. The learner’s life has already been shaped by innumerable factors.
Teaching does not begin with a learner’s blank slate on which the teacher can
inscribe true knowledge. The teacher has to evoke a relation of loving trust so
as to enter mind and heart. The main question is: Do you understand? If not,
the burden is on the teacher to find the words that link into the hearer’s pre-
vious understanding.
How does it come about, then, that he ends with a negative view of teach-
ing in The Teacher? I think one gets a glimpse of that conclusion in a passage
of Christian Teaching where he comments on St. Paul: “After saying that
teachers are made by the working of the Holy Spirit, he [Paul] goes on to in-
struct them about what and how to teach.” While Paul does not think that the
function of human teachers is cancelled out, yet “not one who plants or wa-
ters but God gives growth” (I Cor 3:7). Augustine adds that nobody can cor-
rectly learn unless “he has been made docile to God by God” (IV. 16.33). That
still sounds as if humans are teachers while God supplies the potential in the
learners.
Augustine, however, then employs a comparison to medicine in a way that
short-circuits teaching. “Medicines for the body, after all, only do good to those
whose health is restored by God and he can cure without them while they can-
not do so without him.” (IV.16.33). Notice that in his comparing healing to
God’s action with or without a human physician Augustine has left out the heal-
ing potential of the human body itself. In Augustine’s version of the relations
between physician, medicine, illness, body, and God, the interaction between
the physician and the healing possibilities present in the body is subverted. God
can cure without medicine, and learning can occur without human teachers.

THE TEACHER

Augustine’s treatise, The Teacher, begins with a celebration of teaching and

the centrality of dialogue to teaching. However, the affirmation of teaching
through dialogue is immediately qualified and the dialogue ends with sour
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 37

notes on the role of teachers. The dialogue is between Augustine and his six-
teen-year-old son, Adeodatus, who died a year later. His serving as interlocu-
tor in the dialogue may explain some of the contents and direction of the
work. Garry Wills notes, “Augustine proudly shows off his son’s prowess in
The Teacher while assuring us that he did not teach the boy. Boys learn with
God’s own inborn instruments.”45
The most compact summary of the dialogue is by Augustine himself at the
end of his life. In Reconsiderations (1:12), he writes: “I wrote a work entitled
The Teacher. There it is debated, sought and found that there is no teacher
giving knowledge to man other than God. This also is in accordance with
what is written by the Evangelist: ‘Your teacher, Christ, is unique.’”
Augustine’s view of teaching is here traced to Jesus’ words in the Gospel
of Matthew that there is no teacher except God. What Augustine derives from
this New Testament passage is consistent with his Platonic assumptions.
Whether his philosophy led to his interpretation of scripture or vice versa is
not clear. In either case, he has taken a political dispute in the gospel as a ba-
sis for a philosophy of teaching.
Contemporary exegetes of the passage in question agree that Jesus is
speaking to an inner circle of his followers. He is warning them, the future
leaders of the Christian community, to avoid the trappings and honorific titles
current at the time. The leaders of the Jewish community were called “rab-
bis,” an Aramaic term meaning teacher. Jesus was himself commonly identi-
fied as a rabbi. But when the Jesus movement had separated from the syna-
gogue, rabbi as a title for Jesus was played down. “To the Christian disciples
of the first century the conception of Jesus as a rabbi was self-evident, to the
Christian disciples of the second century it was embarrassing, to the Christ-
ian disciples of the third century and beyond it was obscure.”46
Matthew was writing his Gospel at the time of conflict between the lead-
ers of the synagogue and the emerging church.47 He has Jesus forbid his dis-
ciples to take on the title of a Jewish leader, “teacher.” As sometimes happens
in the New Testament, the statement is made twice in chapter 23, once with
the Aramaic word, and once with the Greek:

“You are not to be called teacher (rabbi), for you have one teacher, and you are
all students” (v. 8).
“And call no one your father on earth, for you have one father—the one in
heaven” (v. 9).
“Nor are you to be called teacher (didaskalos) for you have one teacher, the
Messiah (v. 10).

Between the two warnings against the title of teacher, Jesus says that they
should also avoid the title “father.” It seems unlikely that he was speaking of
38 Chapter Two

biological fatherhood. Like teacher, the term father could be an honorific ti-
tle to express the superior status of a religious leader. Jesus wanted his disci-
ples to be as “servants” within the community and not to be lifted above the
community.
The dialogue’s opening exchanges establish teaching and learning as re-
ciprocal activities (1.1.5–1.2.45). Augustine’s first question is to ask what we
seek to accomplish when we speak. Adeodatus’ reply is “either to teach or to
learn.” Augustine then says that he understands that by speaking we may wish
to teach, but how can it be to learn. Adeodatus’ clever reply is that we learn
by asking questions. Augustine’s paradoxical reply to that is: “Even then I
think we want only to teach. I ask you: do you question someone for any rea-
son other than to teach him what you want [to hear]?”
Augustine then distinguishes between speaking “undertaken for either the
sake of teaching or reminding.” Adeodatus in reply says he is confused by the
fact that prayer is speaking but we do not teach God or remind God. To that,
Augustine answers that God is to be sought in the “inner man.” The dialogue
then proceeds to a discussion of teaching with words in contrast to “the things
themselves by means of the words.” The human teacher has only words to re-
mind us of the reality within. Learning is not from the sign but from the real-
ity.
By making language only an instrument to signify things and ideas, Au-
gustine makes teaching to be secondary to an examination of the truth within
the soul. At best, teaching is a reminder, but it is not a reminder of truth but a
reminder to look within. The treatise ends with a frontal attack on the school-
teachers of the time. “Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school
to learn what the teacher thinks?” (14.45.5). After the teachers “have ex-
plained by means of words the disciplines they profess to teach,” the students
have to look upon the “Inner Truth,” according to their abilities. “That is
therefore the point at which they learn” (14.45.10).
A dialogue that seems to begin by joining teaching and learning as a single
process ends with their complete separation. “Men are mistaken in calling
persons ‘teachers’ who are not . . . they suppose that they have learned exter-
nally from the one who prompted them” (14.45.15). Augustine concludes that
we can “begin to understand how truly it has been written on divine author-
ity that we should not call anyone on earth our teacher, since there is one in
heaven Who is the Teacher of us all (14.45.20). Adeodatus then sums up what
he has learned, “that words do nothing but prompt man to learn. . . . It is He
alone who teaches us whether what is said is true” (14.45.30).48
Augustine’s denial that so-called teachers really teach has had a powerful
effect. In most religious traditions, the founder is called teacher and what is
passed on by the tradition is teachings. The Greek “fathers of the church,”
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 39

such as Clement of Alexandria or Gregory of Nyssa, refer to Jesus as teacher.

By Augustine’s time, Jesus as teacher had been overshadowed by Christ as
savior. The Christian life became skewed away from teaching-learning. The
need for intellectually grappling with the paradoxical teachings in the New
Testament became secondary to performing rituals for grace and redemption.
Augustine’s separation of teaching and learning, together with subsequent
Christian ambivalence about teaching, fed into a modern skepticism about the
role of teaching. Augustine’s attitude is a comfortable fit with the twentieth
century’s attention to learning together with its lack of interest in teaching. As
in Augustine’s view, teachers have been seen at best as an added factor in
learning; at worst they are seen as an obstacle to learning. The truth is found
in the “inner man,” although in modern times Augustine’s God was replaced
by the psychological drive to know. Students are thought to have a natural ca-
pacity for learning. Teaching is seen to be mainly a process of getting out of
the way or one of using techniques that facilitate the student’s own process of
self-learning. God was the only teacher left by Augustine. If God is found
silent, then no one can teach anyone anything.

THOMAS AQUINAS

Thomas Aquinas in his treatise Truth is directly concerned with Augustine’s

denial that teachers really teach. In Question Eleven he asks: “Can a man or
only God teach and be called Teacher?” His answer is a resounding yes, but
as usual he goes about getting to an answer by carefully looking at all sides
of the issue.49
In the asking of the question he has already conceded that Augustine is cor-
rect that God is the ultimate teacher. His concern is Augustine’s denial that a
man is a teacher. Thomas’ view of the human teacher is the opposite of Au-
gustine’s. But someone who quickly reads Thomas’ text without some back-
ground can easily miss that fact because Thomas is careful to avoid a direct
contradiction. Augustine’s position is that God is the ultimate teacher; there-
fore no one else is. Thomas’ position is that God is the ultimate teacher; there-
fore everyone and everything can be a teacher.
I note first some of the principles in Thomas’ philosophy that place him at
odds with Augustine on the matter of teaching.50 Thomas created a philo-
sophical synthesis of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian traditions. The Neopla-
tonic element came through a writer called Dionysius, whom Thomas cites
seventeen hundred times, second only to Aristotle. The Neoplatonic frame-
work lifts Aristotle’s distinctions of act and potency from the physical to a
metaphysical level. Every question is raised to the level of “being.” Thomas
40 Chapter Two

composed the first metaphysics of knowledge in which to know is not simply

a “remedy of nature” but the “presence of being to itself.”
His philosophy is one of participation in “to be” (there is no simple way in
English to distinguish “a being” from the “act of be-ing”). That means, for ex-
ample, that a person not only has a nature which specifies what he or she is;
a person has an act of being that distinguishes who he or she is. A distinction
between nature and person came out of theological disputes in the early
church, but Thomas puts the distinction to good use in philosophy.
Augustine has human knowledge as a participation in divine ideas; Thomas
has human knowledge participate in divine knowing. That makes a difference
in the understanding of teaching. Humans and other creatures participate in
divine creativity, including teaching. God works through what Thomas calls
“secondary causes.” There is no competition, no zero-sum game, in the rela-
tion of divine and human causality. A human teacher is not the ultimate source
of truth but is nonetheless a genuine teacher.
Related to this metaphysical principle of participation is Thomas’ resist-
ance to the dominance of up/down imagery. In Augustine, the movement to
the inner is a first rung on a ladder leading upward. Knowledge is a search for
the pure idea untarnished by a material element and the world of sensual ex-
perience. In contrast, Thomas’ image of the creaturely journey is movement
out, around, and back. In one of his early works, he writes: “In the emergence
of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circulation in which
all things return as to their end, back to the very place from which they had
their origin.”51
In Thomas’ philosophy, a person exists only in the integrity of body and
soul. Spirit did not have an original fall into matter. Earth is the home of the
humans; human knowledge is never removed from the experience of the
senses. Human knowledge is a constant circling outward and a return to the
intellect. Understanding takes place in the passive or receptive intelligence,
always fed by the “active intellect’s” return to sensual material. Knowledge
is not the possession of ideas but the presence to oneself mediated by a con-
stant dialogue with all creation.
In the dialectical method that Thomas uses he begins with difficulties or
objections to the position that he is about to take. After he states a view con-
trary to the objections, he replies to each of the previously stated objections.
In question eleven of Truth, he lists eighteen objections to calling a man a
teacher. Most of the eighteen have some reference to Augustine, but I will
concentrate on those in which Augustine is explicitly named. In each of these
points of disagreement, Thomas does his best to avoid a direct contradiction.
The first objection cites the key scriptural text that Augustine used “do not
call anyone a teacher.” Thomas’ response is in accord with the modern exe-
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 41

gesis of the verse, namely, that the warning is to Jesus’ disciples not to take
on the titles and trappings of high office.
The second objection cites Augustine’s opinion that knowledge cannot be
imparted through signs. Thomas agrees that the signs do not impart knowl-
edge but maintains that “principles” of knowledge are proposed by signs. A
teacher employing the signs of language does not convey knowledge but does
evoke the principles of knowing.
After the third through seventh objections that obliquely refer to Augustine,
objection eight quotes Augustine: “God alone, who teaches truth on earth,
holds the teacher’s chair in heaven, but to this chair another man has the rela-
tion which a farmer has to a tree.” Thomas’ response is typical of the way he
expresses disagreement with Augustine. He simply says, “when Augustine
proves that only God teaches, he does not intend to exclude man from teach-
ing exteriorly, but intends to say that God alone teaches interiorly.” Such a dis-
tinction is not one that Augustine clearly intends. At least in The Teacher he
excludes external teachers, affirming that teaching takes place only interiorly.
Thomas could have questioned Augustine’s interpretation of this agricul-
tural metaphor, which has been fruitfully used by numerous writers on teach-
ing. The farmer’s cultivation of the tree is not in competition with God’s cre-
ation of the tree. A teacher “cultivates” a student according to the precise
conditions in the environment and the readiness of the potential learner. The
teacher does not only “prepare the mind” but acts on the mind to draw a re-
sponse.
Objection ten has another quotation from Augustine that wisdom cannot be
changed. This objection is easily dismissed by pointing out the difference be-
tween divine and human wisdom. Objections thirteen and fifteen also refer to
Augustine by name; the former refers to certitude not being attainable by
signs, the latter says that only God can give form to the human mind. Both
objections are answered by continuing the theme that the creative power of
God invites rather than excludes human activity to realize or actualize the ca-
pacities of living creatures.
After this long list of objections, most of them Augustinian in character, it
is startling to find Thomas invoke Augustine for the contrary view. One might
suspect it is an ironic joke to quote Augustine in support of the thesis that man
as well as God can be called a teacher. But in typical dialectical fashion,
Thomas is acknowledging that there is more than one side to Augustine and
that, despite his sometimes dismissing human teachers, Augustine wrote
many things supportive of human teaching and provided an example of a
teacher by his own life.
Thomas cites a text in which Augustine claims that before the Fall water
was abundant in earthly fountains; after the fall, water comes from clouds and
42 Chapter Two

needs gathering by human effort. The logic here is not entirely clear but
Thomas draws out Augustine’s distinction to mean that “at least since sin
came into the world, man is taught by man.” Thomas probably believed that
teaching would have been part of creation even before the Fall. He had de-
scribed the vocation of a Christian teacher in his inaugural address at the Uni-
versity of Paris using the text which Augustine had in mind: “Watering the
earth from his things above, the earth will be filled with the fruits of your
work” (Psalm 103).52
At this point in the dialectical back and forth, Thomas shifts into his own
language to affirm human teachers and teaching. He cites Aristotle as holding
a middle position between knowledge as coming from a power beyond the
human individual and knowledge as pre-established in human nature. For
Thomas, “certain seeds of knowledge pre-exist in us”; these are principles of
knowledge that require external actualizing.
Although Thomas develops his view in Aristotelian language, one can find
an echo of Plato’s middle works, such as Meno and Gorgias, in the need for
a state between ignorance and knowledge. In the Republic the learner has a
capacity for knowledge and the teacher has only to turn him or her toward the
light. For Thomas, the truth is found not mainly in the image of light but in
the word spoken and responded to. Thus, the teacher has a more active role
of stimulating the learner’s capacities through bodily signs.
Thomas introduces a helpful distinction between two kinds of capacities
or “potencies.” Paradoxically, one can speak of passive potency as op-
posed to active potency. His example of passive potency is unfortunately
unintelligible to a modern reader (“the internal principle does not have suf-
ficient power . . . when air becomes fire”). A contemporary example of
what he means would be the gasoline tank of an automobile in contrast to
the engine. Both have capacities but the gas tank’s capacity is simply
empty space while the engine has an “active power” which only needs to
be put into use.
Thomas’ own metaphor for active power is the human being’s natural
power of healing. The external agent helps the internal agent, providing the
means by which it enters into act. “Thus, in healing, the physician assists na-
ture, which is the principal agent, by strengthening nature and prescribing
medicines, which nature uses as instruments for healing.” Despite the chasm
that separates thirteenth- from twenty-first-century medicine, Thomas’ prin-
ciple of healing holds up remarkably well.
The analogy between teacher and physician remains one of the most help-
ful comparisons for understanding teaching-learning. Thomas summarizes:
“Just as the physician is said to heal a patient through the activity of nature,
so a man is said to cause knowledge in another through the activity of the
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 43

learner’s own natural reason and this is teaching. So, one is said to teach an-
other and be his teacher.”
Thomas Aquinas provides a modest but realistic place for teachers. Teach-
ing is a humble activity, central to human beings and extending to at least
every living being. The human teacher remains beholden to natural powers,
listening and responding to learning situations. The teacher can only perform
certain movements, none of which is guaranteed to bring about learning in the
student. David Burrell, a commentator on Thomas, writes: “The temptation
consists in taking credit not for the movements we may in fact have made, but
the action we are prone to describe in terms far more inclusive than mere
movements.”53
Burrell goes on to link this distinction between movement and action both
to Wittgenstein in twentieth-century philosophy and to Hindu mysticism. A
human teacher has to try his or her best and then let go. The “fruits of the ac-
tion” are not his or hers to claim. The teacher cannot be puffed up if the stu-
dent succeeds nor despair if the student fails.

NOTES

1. Augustine, The Confessions (New York: Knopf, 2001).

2. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989), 130.
3. Augustine, The City of God (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2001).
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education (New York: Basic Books,
1979), 92.
5. Augustine, The Confessions, 1.6; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investi-
gations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), par. 43.
6. Augustine, Teaching Christianity (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1996).
7. Augustine, Against the Academics and The Teacher (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hack-
ett Publishing, 1995).
8. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Re-
formation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 29.
9. Garry Wills, St. Augustine (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
10. Augustine, The Confessions, Book 10.
11. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
12. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), viii. 24.
13. Epictetus, The Enchiridion (New York: Dover Books, 2004).
14. Augustine, Sermons (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1993), iii, 10.
15. Wills, St. Augustine, 102–4.
16. Augustine, Letters (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2001), 93.11.3.
17. Augustine, Letters, 93.2.4.
44 Chapter Two

18. Augustine, Confessions, 5.14.

19. Augustine, Confessions, 4.13.
20. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (New York: Dorset, 1986), 180.
21. Augustine, Soliloquies (New York: Migne, 1999), 1.20.
22. C. Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 204.
23. Augustine, Commentary on Genesis (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), 2:5.
24. Augustine, Commentary on Genesis, 1:17.
25. Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1997).
26. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 278.
27. Augustine, Sermons, 95.1.
28. Augustine, Teaching Christianity, IV. 11.26.
29. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 176.
30. Augustine, Sermons, 254.3.
31. Plotinus, The Enneads (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). VI. 9.
32. Augustine, Confessions, 10.38, 3.11.
33. Augustine, Of True Religion (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959), 39:72.
34. Augustine, Teaching Christianity, IV.11.2.
35. Augustine, City of God, IX. 16.
36. Augustine, Against the Academics, III. 19.42.
37. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 129.
38. Frederick Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop (New York: Sheed and Ward,
1961), 405–67; Brown, Augustine, 251.
39. Brown, Augustine, 225.
40. Augustine, Teaching Christianity, IV. 12.22.
41. Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies.
42. Cicero, The Orator (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 29.1.
43. Cicero, The Orator, 21:69.
44. Augustine, First Catechetical Instruction (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1946),
12:17.
45. Wills, St. Augustine, 24.
46. Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 17.
47. Wayne Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians (Louisville, Ky.: West-
minster/John Knox, 1986), 137.
48. Augustine’s identifying of teaching with listening to God in the interior of the
soul is suggested in other places. For example, in a letter to Gaius in 390 or 391, he
wrote: “No one after all, sees in the book itself or in the author he reads that what he
reads is true but sees it rather in himself if a certain light of truth is impressed upon
his mind, a light which is not bright in the ordinary way and is most far removed from
the impurity of the body.” Letters, 19.1.
49. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions: On Truth (Chicago: Regnery, 1951).
50. For Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy, see Mary Clark, An Aquinas Reader (Gar-
den City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1972); John Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas (New
 Augustine Despite Aquinas 45

York: Fordham University Press, 1982); Anthony Kenny, ed., Aquinas: A Collection
of Critical Essays (New York: Harper, 1969).
51. Thomas Aquinas, The Sentences of Peter Lombard, quoted in Josef Pieper,
Guide to Thomas Aquinas (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius Press, 1991), 101.
52. John Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997), 213.
53. David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame, 1979), 172.
 Chapter Three

Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie

If one could choose only a single book to understand today’s politics, ethics,
religion, education, and sexual issues, a good choice would be Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s book with the English title Emile; or, On Education.1 But when a
book is thought to be obvious in meaning, people freely cite it without both-
ering to read it. The frequent references that are made to Rousseau’s book as-
sume that the message of the book is obvious.
Usually what is obvious is that the person either has not read the book or
perhaps has read the first five pages and decided that further effort was not
needed. Rousseau’s catchy epigrams (“I hate books”) serve him badly when
it comes to understanding the book as a whole. The problem with this book
starts with the title, which is nearly always shortened to Emile. A better title
would be what was used for the English translation in Rousseau’s time: Emil-
ius and Sophie.2
Emile seems mainly confined these days to schools of education where
parts of it are assigned reading. While Rousseau’s influence on politics since
the eighteenth century is analyzed and debated in a steady flow of scholarly
literature, the educational theory that was integral to his political thinking is
usually summarized in a few sentences. And what is assumed to be his edu-
cational theory makes no sense at all in relation to his political theory.
A first fact to notice about Emile is that it was published in 1762, the same
year as his Social Contract. Like Plato in the Republic, a work that Rousseau
imitates and criticizes, Rousseau saw politics and education as a single proj-
ect. Unlike Plato, Rousseau split the project into two books. The typical ref-
erence to Emile assumes that it is an apolitical book, which is concerned with
letting a student grow up in a natural state. If the child is allowed to follow
where nature leads, the result will be an “autonomous individual.” Learning

47
48 Chapter Three

is all, teaching is suspect, a message that has played well throughout the last
century in the United States.
Emile has thus been credited with, or blamed for, the origin of “progressive
education.” That phrase itself suffers from stereotypes associated with it, a
further complication in understanding Emile. What many people know about
“progressive education” is that it is connected to John Dewey. Like Plato and
Rousseau, Dewey saw education and politics as intimately related but the
popular understanding of Dewey’s educational philosophy makes it apoliti-
cal.
One reason, then, why Emile is not read is the assumption that Dewey says
the same thing, but in twentieth-century English. Why bother with eigh-
teenth-century French? Actually, Rousseau and Dewey seriously disagree in
their educational theories.
At the center of Emile is the conflict between the individual and the social.
Although Rousseau helped to invent the modern meanings of society and so-
cial, he uses the words negatively throughout Emile. In contrast, Dewey’s in-
sistence from beginning to end is that the individual is social and that educa-
tion is always a social affair. Dewey is not Rousseau’s successor in the
twentieth century; Piaget and Freud are.
Writing in 1762, Rousseau thought of the social as conformist in character,
an unwarranted restriction on the individual. His successors, Freud and Pi-
aget, saw a conflict between the hidden world of the child and the social re-
quirements of adult life. In Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, the con-
flict was inescapable and permanent. Rousseau did look forward to the
overthrow of monarchy and a new kind of society in which the will of one
would be the will of all. Dewey distrusted anything that sounded that mysti-
cal but he did think that a revolution had occurred since 1762; it had ushered
in the United States.
It is not clear how carefully Dewey ever read Emile. He does give
Rousseau five pages in Democracy and Education and the first chapter of
Schools of Tomorrow. Elsewhere, Dewey, like other writers, is prone to sim-
plistic summaries of Emile. In a 1934 essay, Dewey writes: “Some of the
early educational philosophers, like Rousseau and his followers, made much
use of the analogy of the development of a seed into the full grown plant.
They used this analogy to draw the conclusion that in human beings there are
latent capacities that, if they are only left to themselves, will ultimately flower
and bear fruit. So they framed the notion of natural development as opposed
to a directed growth which they regarded as artificial.”3
I presume that grammatically Dewey meant “such as” rather than “like,”
that he is referring to Rousseau himself as well as his followers. What Dewey
says may be true of the followers, but the point that Dewey makes of natural
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 49

development is one that Rousseau makes (that a plant has to interact with the
environment in a direction that nurtures its growth in a proper direction) (39).
The irony in Dewey’s criticism of Rousseau is that what he accuses Rousseau
of holding is precisely what Dewey is still accused of, that is, advocating that
children grow up according to nature without adult direction. A Herblock car-
toon captured the popular image: A group of children are saying to their
teacher: “Do we always have to do what we want to do?” The attack on
Dewey was unfair and I would think that by the 1930s Dewey himself would
have been careful not to attribute to Rousseau a simplistic understanding of
education as natural.
It is the usual fate of complicated theories to get reduced to slogans and
two-sentence summaries. Most people are too busy with the necessities of life
to read the stylish eighteenth-century prose of Rousseau or the not so stylish
English of Dewey. But one expects better of historians, philosophers, and pro-
fessional educators. Before I turn to the text of Emile, I cite one particularly
surprising example of how Emile is treated. Diane Ravitch is a noted histo-
rian of education and a severe critic of sloppy educational reforms. Her book,
Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform, is a five hundred-page criti-
cism of twentieth-century attempts at reform in education. Only a few writers
escape her biting attack.4
Ravitch finds one culprit in back of all the bad ideas of progressive reform:
“The seminal text of the child-centered movement was Rousseau’s Emile.
Since its publication in 1762, it has inspired educational reformers in Europe
and the United States who sought alternatives to routinized and formal
schooling.”5 In Left Back, Ravitch has three paragraphs on Rousseau, only the
second of which summarizes Emile. Granted that Left Back is about
twentieth-century education, but if Emile is “the seminal text,” one would ex-
pect at least a chapter about the book. Furthermore, the three footnotes in the
three paragraphs are not to the complete text of Emile but to a book with se-
lections from Rousseau’s text.6
Here is Ravitch’s complete summary of Emile: “Rousseau opposed teach-
ing either habits or lessons: his pupil would learn by experience, and the role
of the tutor was to ‘do nothing and let nothing be done,’ so that the child
would learn whatever he needed to know without instruction, keeping ‘the
mind inactive as long as possible.’ His pupil would never learn anything ‘by
heart,’ nor would he learn to read until he needed to. ‘Reading is the greatest
plague of childhood,’ wrote Rousseau. ‘Emile at the age of twelve will
scarcely know what a book is.’ Rousseau’s strategy for learning was to rely
on his pupil’s needs and interests: ‘If nothing is exacted from children by way
of obedience it follows that they will only learn what they feel to be of actual
and present advantage, either because they like it, or because it is of use to
50 Chapter Three

them. Otherwise, what motive would they have for learning? Present interest:
that is the great impulse, the only one that leads sure and far.’”7
Ravitch’s carefully selected phrases from Emile are nearly all from very
early in the book. In light of what the whole book is about, many of the state-
ments are utterly misleading. By leaving out most of the book, there is no ef-
fort to understand what Rousseau argues is the direction or the purpose of ed-
ucation. My intention in what follows is not to puzzle out some hidden
message, but simply to respect all of the book’s contents.

THE BOOK

The book Emile consists of five books that chart the educational development
of the boy named Emile. Isolated phrases and sentences about the teaching-
learning of Emile are unclear or misleading unless they are correlated with his
age. Rousseau begins each of the five books with a precise noting of Emile’s
age. That is a practice that one might expect in any attempt to describe the
overall process of education. However, many writers, including John Dewey,
simply refer to the student. And very often “student” and “child” are used
synonymously.
Rousseau was among the first writers on education to think developmen-
tally. Human development begins no later than birth and continues until
death. Rousseau was way ahead of his time on this point: “Everything we do
not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given by ed-
ucation” (38). “The education of man begins at his birth; before speaking, be-
fore understanding, he is already learning” (62). To this day, most uses of “ed-
ucation,” despite talk about “lifelong learning,” refer to elementary and
secondary school.
Attacks on Emile mostly employ quotations from book 1; occasionally the
writer gets to book 2. Actually, book 1 made important contributions to the
way young children have been subsequently treated. He opposed the practice
of swaddling and the severe restriction of the child’s movement, practices
common until the eighteenth century (43). Rousseau’s plea for the liberation
of the infant from unhealthy constraints is the backdrop for people such as
Benjamin Spock in the twentieth century. But it is crucial always to keep in
mind that in book 1 Rousseau is speaking of the education of the infans (77).
To assume that what Rousseau says of a six-month-old child is his educa-
tional strategy for a sixteen-year-old student indicates that one has not read
the book.
Even in books 1 and 2, the child is not left on its own but is carefully mon-
itored by the teacher. At the beginning of book 1, Rousseau says there are
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 51

three kinds of education: by nature, by things, and by men. Only the last is
under our control. Nature, or the inner drive of the pupil, has to be respected
by the human teacher. Early education is “negative,” meaning that the tutor
has to set up a protective barrier around the child’s nature so that it is not dis-
tracted by such things as politics, sex, and religion (93). If the child’s early
education is not distorted, reason will be able to govern later.
The sharpest contrast in Rousseau’s theory of education is between the
useless and the practical (68). The warnings to a teacher are not to impose
anything on the pupil before its usefulness is evident. His dismissal of read-
ing is aimed at attempts to get the child to read before the child sees any use-
fulness to it (117). If one relies on isolated phrases or sentences, it can seem
that Rousseau is forbidding the tutor to teach, but it is the attempt on the
teacher’s part to arbitrarily intervene that Rousseau opposes. “It is not by
teaching the names of these virtues that one teaches them to children. It is by
making the children taste them without knowing what they are” (131).
Rousseau’s view of “habit” can be confusing. He says, “the only habit that
a child should be allowed to contract is none,” but he advocates “leaving nat-
ural habit to his body” in the same paragraph (63). Toward the end of book
2 Rousseau says of Emile, “he does not know what routine, custom or habit
is” (160). But in a footnote Rousseau adds: “The only habit useful to chil-
dren is to subject themselves without difficulty to the necessities of things,
and the only habit useful to men is to subject themselves without difficulty
to reason. Every other habit is vice.” His view of habit here is similar to the
medieval notion that natural powers require habits for their smooth execu-
tion. Habits that follow from nature are virtues; habits that do violence to na-
ture are vices.
For the child to submit himself “without difficulty to the necessities of
things” may suggest that there is no effort, hardship, or pain involved. But
there are aspects of Emile’s early education which are harsh. Rousseau wants
his boy to become manly not effeminate. Emile needs training, for example,
in listening to gunshots: “I accustom him to rifle shots, to grapeshot explo-
sions, to canons, to the most terrible detonations” (64). Like Plato, Rousseau
has nothing good to say of physicians. He prefers to “let the child know how
to be sick” (55). The body has to be hardened by exposure to the cold and
other inclement weather. If the child breaks a window in his room, he should
learn to cope with the result. “It is better that he have a cold than that he be
crazy” (100).
The role of punishment is a good indicator of Rousseau’s overall theory of
childhood education. In book 2 he says: “Inflict no kind of punishment on
him, for he does not know what it is to be at fault” (93). The prohibition is
clarified by a later statement that “punishment as punishment must never be
52 Chapter Three

inflicted on children, but it should always happen to them as a natural conse-

quence of their bad action” (101). Still, a simplistic picture of just letting na-
ture direct the child is not what happens when the child is out of line. In one
example, a child in Rousseau’s care several times disturbs his sleep. When
general admonitions do not work, Rousseau locks the child in his room and
lets him holler until he is exhausted and falls asleep (123).
The most striking example of how punishment is to be exercised according
to nature is found in a footnote concerning corporal punishment. Rousseau
and John Locke were opponents of physically beating the child, a common
practice until the eighteenth century.8 Both authors, however, still accepted
the need for sometimes hitting the child. “If he seriously dares to strike some-
one, be it his lackey, be it the hangman, arrange that his blows be always re-
turned with interest in such a way as to destroy the desire to revert to the prac-
tice” (97). One of the things that nature teaches is that if you hit human beings
they are likely to hit back. If the blows are “returned with interest,” the child
will learn not to do that again.
The nearly universal practice of quoting only from books 1 and 2 fits the
stereotype of Emile but it is especially misleading because of the reversal of
method in book 3. The last three books that do not fit the stereotype are there-
fore dismissed or not read at all. An early manuscript of Emile described birth
to age twelve as the age of nature; the period after age twelve was called the age
of reason. The full emergence of reason at about age twelve means an entirely
different approach to teaching. “This is, therefore, the time of labors, of in-
struction, of study. And note that it is not I who arbitrarily make this choice. It
is nature itself that points to it” (166). Thus, the teacher following nature after
age twelve means that he or she has to rely on reason and reasoning.
A sharp contrast of nature and reason by Rousseau could be misunderstood.
For Rousseau, reason does not replace nature; instead, reason is an element
of (human) nature but it emerges slowly and in stages (as Piaget showed).
Rousseau first ridicules John Locke for saying that one should reason with
six-year-olds: “I see nothing more stupid than these children who have been
reasoned with so much” (89). Later, he qualifies that criticism by admitting
that six-year-olds “can reason very well in everything they know that relates
to their immediate and palpable interest” (108).
Before age twelve, the child should be shielded as far as possible from the
distractions of society. The task for the teacher is to lose time; learning has to
be leisurely as the child interacts with the physical environment. By age
twelve, the student has a clear sense of self and a control of his emotional life.
Now the task of the teacher is to use time efficiently so that Emile can rap-
idly learn what he has to know about history, politics, science, religion, sex,
and how to practice a useful trade.
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 53

As the student gets older, the teacher continues to manipulate the physical
environment, but now plenty of verbal instruction is needed: “Up to now our
care has only been a child’s game. It takes on true importance only at present.
This period, when ordinary educations end, is properly the one when ours
ought to begin” (212). Anyone who has read that passage would not quote
from books 1 and 2 as a summary of Rousseau’s view of education.
Emile’s sexual education, which is unrealistically delayed until age fifteen,
is found in book 5. In the same book, the educational pattern for Sophie is de-
scribed. Much of what Rousseau says about the education of girls is dis-
missed these days as embarrassing, but it is a key to understanding Emile. I
discuss this issue below.
Throughout the stages of Emile’s development and the joining of Emile
and Sophie, one character remains central: the tutor. It is ironic that Emile is
said to be child-centered. The only one at the center of the book, who knows
where both Emile and Sophie are going, and also knows the proper route to
leave childhood behind, is the teacher. Of course, this teacher is no ordinary
mortal. He spends twenty-four hours a day for over twenty years to see that
Emile and Sophie become the perfect parents. At the least, that seems obses-
sive and unhealthy. What Rousseau imagines for a tutor is Plato’s philosopher-
king. Plato speculates that if only we could produce one such wise man, a
whole society could follow.9 The problem for both Plato and Rousseau is
where to get this first perfect model on which a whole new society can be
constructed.
The nearly omniscient tutor prepares Emile’s encounters with the physical
world. Then, when Emile is ready, the tutor arranges social encounters (99,
174). Only in a few passages does the tutor tip his hand and reveal the nature
of the game. Diane Ravitch, in the above passage, says that the role of the tu-
tor was “to do nothing and let nothing be done.” Actually, the full sentence is
a conditional not an imperative statement: “If you could do nothing . . .” (93).
The quotation is from book 2 where the tutor is trying to create a safe cocoon
of learning. The claim that the teacher does nothing is an ironic joke. As every
expert teacher knows, the trick is to seem to be doing nothing while carefully
arranging all the interactions in and with the environment.
Emile, in the first few years of life, should discover himself away from peo-
ple who would distract him with envy, jealousy, and other social vices. Freed
from those influences, the child would develop a healthy self-love. The one so-
cial interaction allowed to Emile is with the tutor who is apparently free of
vices. The tutor knows Emile’s nature better than Emile does. Thus, Emile can
do as he wishes so long as his wishes are what the tutor wants: “Doubtless he
ought to do only what he wants, but he ought to want only what you want him
to do. . . . Let him always believe he is the master, and let it always be you who
54 Chapter Three

are. There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of

freedom” (120).
How does the tutor guarantee that Emile will follow the program in every
detail? Only once does the tutor candidly admit the basis of his control: “Do
not command your pupil to do anything in the world—absolutely nothing. Do
not let him even imagine that you claim any authority over him. Let him
know only that he is weak and that you are strong, that from your respective
stations, he necessarily lies at your mercy” (96). That basis of control works
well when the learner is age six months or six years. At sixteen years old,
when perhaps the student is as strong and tall as the teacher is, the basis of
control will have to include reasoned argument.
The teaching in books 3, 4, and 5 manifests this appeal to the student’s rea-
soning power. By the end of book 5, the tutor is a consultant to Emile and So-
phie (480). He gives up control of their lives shortly after their marriage. The
tutor continues to teach in a kind of grandfather role, but Emile asserts that he,
the father, will be the teacher of his son. Robert Wokler blurs this point when
he refers to “the gestation of a fresh pupil . . . whose care will be entrusted to
a new tutor similar to his own.”10 It is true there will be a tutor for Emile Jr.
but the father, Emile, will have been prepared to play this role.

HUMAN NATURE

I said above that many people seem to be familiar with only the first few
pages of book 1. That material is the usual source for quotations that are pre-
sumed to summarize Rousseau’s educational philosophy. At the beginning of
book 1, Rousseau does set out some general principles. But given his dialec-
tical method, some of these positions are almost reversed by the end of book
5. For example, in book 1, Rousseau attacks the patriotism that would place
devotion to the fatherland over the life of the individual. One can educate ei-
ther a citizen or a man but not both (39).
Toward the end of book 5, after Emile has been required to travel to other
lands, he concludes airily that he can be a free individual anywhere; the place
one lives is unimportant. In one of his sharpest rebukes, the tutor tells Emile
that his answer shows his immaturity. When Emile is a husband and a father
he will appreciate the importance of where one lives (473). The tutor tells
Emile that he should be grateful to the country that has nourished him and he
should be ready to serve his country if he is asked to do so. (Rousseau was
miffed at his countrymen for not appreciating him so he says that his talented
and dedicated student is not likely to be called upon for service to his coun-
try)(475).
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 55

The misreading of Emile is likely to begin with the book’s first paragraph.
The famous first sentence begins: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands
of the Author of things . . .” (37). The rest of the paragraph is a paradox. “Man”
is accused of corrupting the pure good of creation. The natural things that are
spoiled include man himself. The puzzle is how “man” can be both subject and
object. “Man” would be good—except for “man.” The second paragraph adds
to the paradox. Despite the fact that man turns everything bad, he must con-
tinue to do so because if he stopped things would get even worse (37).
Today’s reader can be left confused by Rousseau’s conflict between man
and nature. Starting with Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, “nature”
came to mean what is outside human beings, or more exactly, what is con-
fronted by individual, rational, controlling “man.” Today’s reader might think
that a conflict between man and nature refers to human versus nonhuman.
Rousseau is aware of this meaning of nature as what is opposite to man,
what man has the vocation to conquer. Rousseau is also heir to the meaning
of “nature” that the middle ages took over from Greek philosophy: Nature is
the inner principle of a living being, including the individual human being.
Most often for Rousseau, “nature” refers to what the human being is born
with, the innate capacities of the individual. In Rousseau’s conflict of man
and nature, “nature” is individual man, while “man” is human beings in the
aggregate, that is, society.
This clarification of man and nature does not dissolve the paradox of how
man (society) corrupts nature (the individual). But Rousseau has located what
he believes to be the central educational problem: how to resolve the conflict
between individual and society. It is not a trick question that has a simple and
clear answer. Rousseau takes five hundred pages to pursue an answer while
holding on to both sides of his puzzle. For achieving a resolution of the prob-
lem, he relies on a psychological dialectic within the individual and a sexual
dialectic between Emile and Sophie.
The success or failure of the journey depends on the ethics and religion of
book 4. Everything in Emile lives in the shadow cast by John Calvin, founder
of Rousseau’s beloved Geneva. Rousseau was intent on eliminating the
Christian doctrine of original sin, formulated by Augustine and applied with
rigorous consistency by Calvin in sixteenth-century Geneva. The first sen-
tence of Emile may seem to dismiss sin, vice, evil, and all the constraints of
conservative religion. But Rousseau was no twentieth-century liberal; he was
acutely aware of the evils men do.
His dialectical approach is already evident in the first paragraph, which be-
gins with the fact that everything is good and which ends with the horrors and
crimes that human beings commit. The way to address the problem is by ed-
ucation, but it has to be an education that is always aware of humanity’s in-
56 Chapter Three

ner conflicts. And despite the best efforts of educators, humans cannot com-
pletely solve the problem because they, the humans, are at the heart of the
problem.
The Christian explanation of the problem was the doctrine called original
sin. In Adam’s sin—or the result of that sin—all people share. Rousseau re-
jects this explanation but he is forced to do his own explaining of the origin
of evil. The doctrine Rousseau supplies is actually very close to Christianity’s
original sin. Thoughtful Christian commentators did not think of original sin
as a black mark on the soul or a personal failing. In the Christian story, hu-
mans were originally born good, but every generation, after the first, has lived
in a tainted world. Humans are born into a messy world because previous
generations have messed up things and no one knows how to prevent bad
consequences for today’s children.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theorists, including Rousseau,
posited the myth of a state of nature that preceded historical experience.11 The
biblical inspiration of these social contract theories is evident: an Eden before
the conflicts of history. Neither the Bible nor any of the political theorists has
a convincing explanation for why the human beings moved out of the state of
nature but all agree that they did.
The silliest summary of Emile is that the boy grows up in a state of nature
and that he innocently avoids all conflict. Rousseau repeatedly tells the reader
that Emile is not in a state of nature, that he is being prepared to live in soci-
ety (202, 205) and he is going to have to deal with society’s corrupting ways.
The obvious reason that Emile is not in a state of nature is clearly stated by
Rousseau: “The man who speaks of ‘the state of nature’ speaks of a state
which no longer exists, which may never have existed, and which probably
never will exist.”12
Why do Rousseau and others talk about this nonexistent state? Because,
says Rousseau, it is “an idea to judge correctly our present condition.”13 In-
fluenced by the Christian belief of a three-stage story in which the last stage
will be a restored paradise, Rousseau has Emile journey toward a new kind of
society that is similar to the beginning stage, the imagined state of nature. His
redemption depends on Sophie who embodies a human closeness to that
imagined natural state.
The psychological mechanism that operates throughout the whole of Emile
is the conflict of two loves, one that is genuine—an immediate relation to
one’s own bodily self—and one that is false—a relation to oneself dependent
on the opinion of others (92, 214). Augustine had described the two loves as
the love of God and the love of man. At his most dualistic, Augustine seems
to hold that the love of oneself is opposed to the love of God and is the source
of the evils in the “city of man.” When Augustine trusts his own psychologi-
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 57

cal insight, he recognizes that there is a proper love of man and woman within
the “city of God.”
Both Augustine and Rousseau describe with keen insight the psychology of
human love. To this day, the insights of both thinkers remain valuable.
Rousseau goes beyond Augustine in providing an explanation of why humans
create an illusion of the self separate from their actual bodily selves. Augus-
tine presupposed this explanation—the awareness of mortality—as part of the
Christian theology of death and redemption. Rousseau describes the psycho-
logical mechanism that follows from a fear of death.
What lies at the root of the human incapacity to accept and to love oneself
is the awareness of death. Human beings put up layers of defense to avoid this
most obvious of facts. Rousseau posits that one of the two instincts we are
born with is self-preservation or the fear of our own mortality.14 Every human
vice is traceable to our inability to accept the fact that one out of one dies
(92). Despite every advance in civilization the death rate is still one hundred
percent.
Crucial to Emile’s education is that the boy should learn to accept death as
a part of life. Like today’s proponents of “natural death,” Emile is supposed
to view death as simply a natural phenomenon (208). But here Rousseau
slides too easily over the conflict. On Rousseau’s own principles, death is nat-
ural but human death is not, that is, human death is historical, moral, and re-
ligious. Human death is what all humans experience, but each human being
experiences a personal search for the meaning of a life that includes dying.
The problem of death for the young Emile cannot really be solved in book 3.
Rousseau has to bring to bear the ethics and religion of book 4 to make the
thought of death bearable.

ETHICS AND RELIGION

Rousseau believed that besides the fear of mortality, the other instinct that hu-
mans are born with is pity (221). On the basis of pity, Rousseau builds his
ethics and moves Emile into a kind of social responsibility. Pity is a well-
defined idea, related to but clearly distinct from sympathy or compassion.
These latter two words have a meaning of “suffering with someone.” Sympa-
thy or compassion is likely to lead to action aimed at reducing the suffering
that we share.
Pity is a response to suffering, but it is a one-way reaction rather than a mu-
tual relation. It is a feeling that a superior can indulge in while viewing a crea-
ture of lesser status. An animal often evokes more pity than a fellow human
being because the animal is not suspected of being personally responsible for
58 Chapter Three

its plight. Human beings do not like to be pitied by other humans who con-
sider themselves superior.
Rousseau goes to great length in book 4 to describe the extent and the lim-
its of pity (223–30). Because humans are born with an aversion to suffering
and with pity for sufferers, pity is not itself a virtue. As an isolated reaction,
pity is just an instinct that does not initiate action to relieve suffering. People
are said to “wallow in pity,” responding to outside stimuli but in a way that
turns inward.
Having led a sheltered life until his teen years, Emile has a surplus of pity
to direct toward others who have not had his privileged upbringing. He is like
Gautama on his first trip beyond the comforts of his household, encountering
the human situation of suffering and death. Like Gautama, Emile feels a call
to serve suffering humanity, a vocation that is in tension with his first love of
a human being, Sophie. On one occasion, when Sophie is upset that Emile is
late, due to his helping someone in distress, he says to Sophie: “Do not hope
to make me forget the rights of humanity. They are more sacred to me than
yours. I will never give them up for you” (441).
What Rousseau is suggesting here is that pity can be transformed so that it
does lead to action. Emile’s innate feeling of pity has to be caught up into a
large project; otherwise, it will corrupt the soul. “To prevent pity from de-
generating into weakness, it must therefore be generalized and extended to
the whole of mankind. . . . For the sake of reason, for the sake of love of our-
selves, we must have pity for our species still more than for our neighbor”
(253). Instead of just pitying one’s neighbor, the feelings have to be the driv-
ing power within a large-scale movement toward justice. A person has to
learn how to be ethical, which in turn requires ethical models and teachers of
ethics.
Rousseau is one of a few thinkers who offer a bridge between two com-
peting approaches in modern ethics. For David Hume, ethics was all about
passion or emotion. Reason as the “slave” of passion was almost irrelevant.
We are ethical only to the extent we can feel for the sufferings of those we
know. In reaction, Immanuel Kant based ethics on abstract principles. Feel-
ings are untrustworthy. What we need are universal maxims for our actions.
We should not act according to feelings but from a requirement of duty.
Contemporary ethics continues to be plagued by this dichotomy. Kant is
popular with writers on ethics. It is unclear that Kant, or his successors such
as John Rawls and Lawrence Kohlberg, have had much influence on busi-
ness, politics, and the general public. In the United States, an ethic of pity
dominates the news media and popular imagination. A lost child or a stray
puppy can engender an outpouring of feeling and be the lead story on the
nightly news. The concentration on an individual’s suffering can obscure
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 59

policies in business and politics that devastate the lives of hundreds of thou-
sands of people.
Rousseau recognized the problem of integrating big and small pictures,
sensitivity on the small scale that is not lost in the grand designs of geopoli-
tics. Rousseau wants his pupil to act ethically, to move from exclusive con-
cern with his own desires and development. What motive does Emile have
that would dislodge him from his comfortable self-satisfaction? While
Hume’s metaphor of reason as a “slave” seems to give too little to rationality,
Kant’s belief that reason can trump feeling seems unrealistic. Emile has to un-
dergo a kind of conversion, what Christianity called a change of heart.
For making such an ethical conversion, Rousseau has to turn to religion,
his own version of Christianity. Why should Emile move out of his self-
centeredness? Rousseau provides this image: “The good man orders himself
in the relation to the whole, and the wicked one orders the whole in relation
to himself. The latter makes himself the center of all things; the former mea-
sures his radius and keeps to the circumference. Then he is ordered in relation
to the common center, which is God” (292). This key passage in book 4 is the
conclusion that follows from the religion that Rousseau calls “natural reli-
gion” which he equates with pure Christianity (294).
This outlook of Emile’s place in the universe needs underpinning. For that
purpose, Rousseau makes a radical shift in style to provide a forty-seven-page
apologetic for natural religion. Rousseau puts a long sermon into the mouth
of a disgraced but wise priest, the Savoyard Vicar (266–313). The convoluted
style of presentation is presumably so that the views are not stated as
Rousseau’s own (260). The ruse did not work; The condemnation of Emile by
church officials centered on the exposition by the Savoyard Vicar.
Rousseau expresses contempt for teaching religion through the lifeless cat-
echism of the time (378). But the Vicar’s sermon is a mostly boring argument
for religion based on seventeenth-century science. Famous scientists, includ-
ing Isaac Newton, believed that the new science provided rich evidence for a
God in the Christian image. “Nature” was the handiwork of God; we are born
with a sense of the creator. “Natural religion,” a phrase coined at the begin-
ning of the seventeenth century, was the source for God’s revelation. The
Bible supplied additional information, especially for the uneducated.
In the course of the seventeenth century, “natural religion” moved from in-
nate sentiments to rational arguments for a first mover of the heavens. By
Emile’s time in the eighteenth century, this kind of natural religion was in trou-
ble. The Declaration of Independence still made appeal to “nature and nature’s
God,” but most of the French philosophers saw redundancy in that formula.
“Nature” became another name for God. The attributes thought to be divine—
eternal, necessary, and immutable—were now a description of nature.15
60 Chapter Three

Rousseau, in his fights with Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, and Holbach, in-
sisted on the need for a nature’s God but the best he could come up with was
Paley’s “great watchmaker” in the sky to which the Vicar several times adverts
(272, 275).
A watchmaker would not inspire religious fervor, but Rousseau did suc-
ceed in employing Christianity in support of an ethic of pity. Rousseau
thought that “the best way to protect that faith, and thus morality, is to rein-
terpret it in subjective terms and root it in our moral sentiments and con-
science.”16 The Christian religion could lend itself to that interpretation inso-
far as it centers on the sufferings of the Christ. The emphasis after the twelfth
century on the crucifixion, paired with the nativity scene, could convey a re-
ligion of pity. Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity as a glorifying of the
weak was mediated through Rousseau’s version of Christianity.
Part of the paradox of Rousseau is that he is also one of the main sources
of the rationalistic theology of modern times. While Rousseau had a senti-
mental attachment to Jesus, his Christian religion was a dry system of rational
arguments. Karl Barth, in his history of modern Protestant theology, had no
doubt about its origin: “It is from Rousseau onwards and originating from
Rousseau that the thing called theological rationalism, in the full sense of the
term, exists.”17
Rousseau’s Emile was immediately condemned by the church. In the words
of the Paris parliament, the book is “subversive of religion, morals and de-
cency; seditious, impious, sacrilegious, besides much more.”18 Rousseau had
to flee for his life and spent his remaining fifteen years as a wanderer. At first
sight, the church attack on Emile seems to be out of proportion. In a letter to
the Archbishop of Paris, Rousseau had asked a simple question, typically self-
centered but nonetheless legitimate: “Is it simple, is it natural that God should
go in search of Moses to speak to Jean-Jacques Rousseau?”19 Instead of re-
thinking the idea of revelation—Did God speak to someone in the past and
then retire in silence?—the church simply condemned Emile.
Ironically, Rousseau has had the last laugh. Although he was condemned,
his language has dominated Christian theology ever since. In particular, his
contrast of “natural religion” and “revealed religion” was completely ab-
sorbed into Christianity. It is assumed by Christian writers to be traditional
language, the obvious description of Christianity. In fact, “revealed religion”
is a strange invention of the seventeenth century that cuts off Christianity
from whatever is “natural” in religion. Before then, there was nothing called
“Christian revelation.” Instead, there was a divine revelation embodied
among other places in the objects and forces of the natural world. The God of
“revealed religion” or “Christian revelation” is that of Herbert, Locke, Butler,
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant. 20
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 61

GENDER DIFFERENCE

Emile was instructed in the “dogmas” of natural religion via elaborate philo-
sophical reasoning. His partner Sophie gets a very different religious educa-
tion, centered on family rituals and passed down by the mother. Rousseau
gives too little detail of Sophie’s education, but he does make a point of de-
scribing her religious upbringing (377). Rousseau is widely condemned for
describing Sophie as having an education in which her reason is not fully de-
veloped. The criticism is undoubtedly valid but on the religious issue Sophie
gets the better of it. Religions, including Christianity, and more obviously Ju-
daism, Islam, and Buddhism, have not survived on dogmas taught in the
classroom but on ritual, family, codes of conduct, and inspiring models of ho-
liness.
Sophie does not appear until book 5 of Emile, but she is integral to the na-
ture and purpose of education. The reader cannot find out from book 1 what
Rousseau conceives education to be; only at the end of book 5 is that clear.
Some schools of education do not read book 5 because it is considered of-
fensive to women. That is like reading a mystery novel but skipping the end
where the murderer is revealed.
Sophie is not a murderer but Rousseau’s portrait of her is thought to be
egregiously condescending or worse. The first two pages of book 5 do seem
to locate all women as inferior. And some of the subsequent catchy
phrases—“she awaits the moment when she will become her own doll”
(367)—seem to seal the case. However, book 5 recapitulates the whole book
in having the form of a dialectical argument. In the course of book 5, weak-
ness is revealed as the real power. The man who appears to be in control of
the woman turns out to be the one who is controlled by the woman. “Every-
where men are what women make of them,” Rousseau wrote in a letter to
Toussaint-Pierre Lenieps.21
Rousseau was always in search of human unity, and in Emile Sophie the
woman holds the key to unity. She is the one who begins by seeming to be a
slave but who knows how to turn the relation to her advantage. Rousseau was
the source of Hegel’s and Marx’s parable of the master-slave relation. The dy-
namic of that relation leads to the slave triumphing by the clever manipula-
tive tactics that slaves require for survival.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Rousseau was not seen to be
misogynistic. On the contrary, he was, said Lord Byron, “the birthplace of
love.”22 Couples came to him to have their love blessed. His romantic novel,
La Nouvelle Heloise, was one of the best-selling books of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Rousseau was a main inspiration for the “woman’s movement” of the
nineteenth century, a reform in which the man would run the public world
62 Chapter Three

while the woman controlled the man in the private world. (There was also a
women’s rights movement in the nineteenth century that opposed this roman-
tic view). The problem with Rousseau’s romanticism was not that he consid-
ered women inferior. Dependent on strong women all his life, he held wom-
anhood in awe, an attitude that did not exclude shabby treatment of Theresa,
his common-law wife.
In book 5, Rousseau propounds a sharp difference between boys and girls.
The twentieth-century women’s movement was intent on emphasizing same-
ness, but recent decades have brought back a more complicated picture of
sameness/difference. Rousseau tries to encompass the issue by saying: “In
what they have in common, they are equal. Where they differ, they are not
comparable” (358). Note that the choice is not between equal and unequal;
the issue is a matter of equality and incomparability. For Rousseau, equal/un-
equal is too crude for describing the sexes. Nonetheless, he does proceed to
say many things that would be outrageously offensive today. The fact that he
presumes to toss out generalizations about women at all is his first offense.
Book 5 provides a sketch of education for girls, an ideal education for a
perfect young woman. Sophie as an ideal of womanhood is introduced before
the girl, Sophie, appears. Anyone can argue with the details, but Rousseau de-
serves credit for acknowledging the existence of women. Until very recently,
and even sometimes today, educational writers don’t ask the question of gen-
der relations. One of Dewey’s first educational essays in 1885 was about dif-
ferences between boys and girls. By 1911, however, he assumes that there is
no significant difference.23 After that, he simply does not discuss the question.
Maybe the later Dewey was right, but, as Jane Martin notes, you first have to
notice the gender difference before deciding it is irrelevant.24
Even if Rousseau was right in emphasizing the difference, his dividing line
is too crude. It opens him to the charge of making Sophie inferior. Although
Sophie is said to be more precocious than Emile (368), she does not have her
rational powers developed. Rousseau put great value on human emotion but
he nonetheless thought that intelligence and freedom of choice were the dis-
tinguishing marks of human nature. Sophie remains childlike, which can be a
compliment only if one’s adult capacities have already been developed.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written in
direct opposition to Emile.25 Wollstonecraft criticizes Rousseau’s portrait of
Sophie for her lack of rational competence. However, the positive qualities
that he attributes to Sophie—patience, gentleness, zeal, affection—are ones
that are indispensable to human families. Jane Martin writes that Mary Woll-
stonecraft’s attack on Emile is in danger of ignoring those qualities.26 Still,
Wollstonecraft’s anger at Sophie’s undeveloped rationality is understandable.
How to create whole persons in livable communities remains a problem to
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 63

this day. To those who emphasize only sameness, Rousseau’s warning still
has some force: “The more women want to resemble men, the less women
will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters” (363).
The dialectic of book 5, within the dialectic of books 1 to 5, has the inten-
tion of bringing about integral persons in a healed society. The project is
stymied both by Rousseau’s confused sexual life that he brings to the study
and philosophical presuppositions built into eighteenth-century language.
Women are introduced as having no purpose in life except to serve man, but
that quickly appears to be the cover story for how women manipulate men.
Manipulation may be an effective strategy for women winning some battles,
but it is not the basis of healthy, mutual relations.
Sophie—the wise woman—rises above the common lot. Her parents say
she may choose her own husband—while they do some manipulating of their
own (401). On their wedding night, Sophie makes it known that she will be
the decider (478). And finally, after the tutor discusses with Emile and Sophie
true love and a happy marriage, the tutor makes Sophie the teacher of Emile.
The tutor says to Emile: “Today I abdicate the authority you confided in me,
and Sophie is your governor from now on” (479). Karl Barth is therefore in-
correct in writing that Rousseau “believed that his Emile, having completed
his education, will actually have become his own educator.”27 Emile remains
in need of a tutor throughout his life and it is Sophie who will play the main
role.

CONCLUSION

Rousseau’s heart was in the right place, but joining two half persons, a pub-
lic self and a private self, do not create a human unity. Unless the power re-
lation can be conceived in another image than dominative power versus ma-
nipulation, there is no hope for human freedom. The starting point for Emile
of one teacher/one student may sound like the perfect educational situation,
but it is hopelessly distorted. Sophie comes to the rescue but she is too little,
too late, and she also suffers from a similar isolation. Emile needs some class-
mates, both boys and girls. He also needs some other adult figures.
Young children do need protection from bad example but the solution pro-
vided for Emile is unrealistic and unhealthy. The fact that Sophie is Emile’s
first real encounter with a girl does not bode well for the marriage he imme-
diately envisions. The tutor demands a three year separation to test their love
(448), but both lovers need some friends.
There is a beautiful passage on friendship in book 4 (220), but it is not ex-
emplified in Emile’s actual education which is totally lacking in friends.
64 Chapter Three

Rousseau was right to criticize Plato for basing community on the dissolution
of the family (362). In the polis envisioned by Plato, everyone would be
called comrade.28 But Rousseau’s family unit of Sophie, Emile, and Emile Jr.
is also too fragile a basis for a new society.
Rousseau seemingly recognized that his story of Emile and Sophie would
not have the happy ending suggested on the last page. Rousseau left an un-
completed manuscript of a sequel, Les Solitaires, in which Sophie becomes
promiscuous and is pregnant with another man’s child. Emile, unwilling to
accept this child, runs off. The two solitaries are still in search of the other
half of their selves.29
Even for Rousseau, then, Emile seems to have been an ambitious failure.
That may suggest it is not worth reading. The book is certainly not to every-
one’s taste, and it is not an educational model to be applied in the classroom
or anywhere else. People who wish to try radical experiments in education of-
ten invoke Emile as an inspiration and guide. The fact that such experiments
usually end in chaos is not the fault of Emile.
Part of the fault does lie with assuming that Emile is the story of a boy who
discovers all by himself everything that he has to know. The assumption is
that lacking all rules, habits, and authority, Emile becomes a free and au-
tonomous individual. If that were the story of Emile, it would not be worth
reading. But as an ambitious book about teaching-learning that includes
struggles over politics, ethics, religion, and sex, Emile is revelatory of today’s
struggles in all of those areas.

NOTES

1. All page references in the text are to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Ed-
ucation, intro. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
2. Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 37.
3. John Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” in Later Works (Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University, 1981), 9:195.
4. Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform (New York: Si-
mon and Schuster, 2000). She has kind words for Isaac Kandel, The Cult of Uncer-
tainty (New York: Macmillan, 1943) and William Bagley, Education and Emergent
Man (New York: T. Nelson, 1934).
5. Ravitch, Left Back, 169.
6. William Boyd, ed., The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1971).
7. Ravitch, Left Back, 170.
8. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett
Publishing, 1996), sec. 85.
9. Plato, Republic, 502b.
 Rousseau: Teaching Emile and Sophie 65

10. Robert Wokler, Rousseau (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 101.
11. Other social-contract theorists include Thomas Hobbes and John Locke
12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality (New York: Washington Square Books, 1967), 169.
13. Rousseau, Discourse on the Oroigin of Inequality, 169.
14. Rousseau, Discourse on the Oroigin of Inequality, 171.
15. Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1990), 300.
16. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God (New York: Knopf, 2007), 125.
17. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (London: SCM
Press, 1972), 233.
18. Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 346, 358.
19. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932), 46.
20. On the language of “revealed religion” and “Christian revelation,” see Gabriel
Moran, Both Sides: The Story of Revelation (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), 75–101.
21. Wokler, Rousseau, 102.
22. Cranston, The Solitary Self, 37.
23. John Dewey, “Education and the Health of Women,” Science 6 (October
1885): 341–42; “Is Co-education Dangerous for Girls?” Ladies Home Journal, 28
(June 1911): 42–43.
24. Jane Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 195.
25. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Mod-
ern Library, 2001).
26. Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, 98.
27. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 223.
28. Plato, Republic, 463–64.
29. Cranston, The Noble Savage, 192.
 Chapter Four

Dewey: Why So Misunderstood?

John Dewey, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is often cited for his view of edu-
cation but, like Rousseau, Dewey does not seem to be much read. Like
Rousseau, Dewey’s writing style is part of the problem—more on that shortly.
However, much of the problem is that Dewey’s influence on U.S. education
in the twentieth century is assumed to be obvious. Didn’t he give us “pro-
gressive education,” a phrase that can still divide writers on education, as well
as the general population?
While Rousseau’s view of education is largely captured in the single work,
Emile, Dewey’s ideas are scattered throughout a prolific writing career of
more than sixty years. Dewey is widely regarded as the preeminent philoso-
pher in the history of the United States. He wrote dozens of books and hun-
dreds of essays that did not have education as the main topic but might imply
a theory of education. Two commentators on Dewey’s work say that the
books, Experience and Nature and Quest for Certainty are his most lasting
legacy.1 Dewey himself on his seventieth birthday referred to Democracy and
Education as the place “in which my philosophy, such as it is, was fully ex-
pounded.”2
It is important to note Dewey’s belief that “philosophy may even be de-
fined as the general theory of education.”3 Like Plato and Rousseau, but un-
like most philosophers today, Dewey did not think of “education” as a pe-
ripheral topic nor did he think of education as a place where philosophical
conclusions are merely applied. For Dewey, education is at the center of
philosophical reflection: “Education is the laboratory in which philosophic
distinctions become concrete and are tested.”4
Of course, what the word education means is itself a philosophical prob-
lem. Some writers on education think that Dewey moved away from any in-
timate connection with education when he became a philosophy professor
67
68 Chapter Four

early in his career. Dewey surely did not think that being in the philosophy
department of Columbia University rather than teaching philosophy of edu-
cation at Teachers College Columbia excluded him from a realistic involve-
ment in education.
For anchoring this essay on Dewey’s view of teaching, I will use a 1900 es-
say, “The Child and the Curriculum,” and a 1938 book, Experience and Edu-
cation. I will supplement these two works with material from other books and
essays. The context of each of the two main texts is indispensable for under-
standing what Dewey was opposing and what he was offering as an alterna-
tive.
One reason for choosing works that are thirty-eight years apart is to see
how the author’s views have changed over time. Unlike some philosophers
who do U-turns in the course of a long career, Dewey was generally consis-
tent. One might even say that it is surprising how little he changed in his the-
ory of education. The world changed dramatically in the first third of the
twentieth century and Dewey’s political and economic thinking evolved con-
siderably in that period; his view of education had a steadier course.
My main interest in this essay is not Dewey’s idea of education but his
meaning of teaching. Here the problem is not an excess of material but a sur-
prisingly thin body of material. Of course, assumptions about teaching run
throughout his writing on education. Similar to other writers, Dewey seems
to think that with a good theory of education, teaching almost takes care of it-
self. It is surprising that a philosopher writing on education does not have any
extended reflection on what it means to teach someone something. Even in
Democracy and Education, which overflows with a multiplicity of angles and
perspectives on education, the words teach, teaching, and teacher appear in-
frequently.
Dewey does often use the word educator in referring to the professional
schoolteacher. If that term were used to spell out a distinction between pro-
fessional schoolteachers and other teachers, that language would have been
helpful. No such contrast is drawn; “Educator” simply occupies the whole
ground of teaching. Dewey casually refers to “parents and teachers,” a phrase
that excludes parents from being teachers.

THE DISTANT BACKGROUND OF

“THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM”

Before examining the text of “The Child and the Curriculum,” it is necessary
to comment on a few European theorists that Dewey was familiar with and to
take note of what was happening to education and schools in the nineteenth
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 69

century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau hovers over the century-and-a-quarter be-

tween Rousseau’s Emile and Dewey’s early writing on education. Writers in
the nineteenth century generally credit Rousseau with influencing their think-
ing, even when taking a critical distance from him. The development of a
state school system, especially in the United States and France, created a nar-
rower focus for educational writing than at the time of Emile. Johann
Pestalozzi, for one key example, did not have much success at running
schools for poor children but he highlighted the possibilities and difficulties
of the classroom.5
Another writer to whom Dewey gives some credit is Johann Herbart who
concentrated very specifically on the classroom instructor’s procedures and
lesson plan. Instruction, Herbart argued, builds on the foundation of experi-
ence already gained in or out of the school. In practice, that usually meant re-
viewing the previous day’s lesson. Dewey insisted that education in the class-
room should start from “life-experience,” by which he seemed to mean
anything outside the classroom. Despite this difference with Herbart, Dewey
generally praises him. In one of his infrequent uses of “teaching,” Dewey
says “Herbart’s great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the re-
gion of routine and accident.”6
Dewey inherited an educational language that was being shaped by the
ideal of “universal education,” that is, a school-based education for every
child. In the United States, this kind of education was dominated by the need
to “Americanize” millions of immigrants and prepare them for productive
work in their new country. Dewey’s attitude to the school was decidedly
mixed. He opposed an educational institution separate from the rest of life but
he accepted the school’s mission to prepare children for the new world of the
twentieth century.
In an early and popular book, School and Society, Dewey looked back nos-
talgically to a few decades previous when the family, apprenticeship, and re-
ligious communities had formative influence.7 He believed that all of those
forms of education had lost their power in a fast changing world. In his “Ped-
agogic Creed” of 1897, he announced that “education is the fundamental
method of social progress and reform.”8 Correlated with this article of faith
about education (=school) is an even more grandiose belief that ends his
creed: “I believe that the teacher is the true prophet and the usherer in of the
kingdom of God.”9
Was that last phrase meant to be tongue in cheek? If by “teacher,” Dewey
was referring to Moses, Jesus, Socrates, Gautama, and other “prophets,” the
case might be made. There is no sign here that “teacher” means anybody
other than an elementary schoolteacher in the U.S. state school. It was an un-
supportable burden, as Dewey later realized, that a young woman, in addition
70 Chapter Four

to preparing and presenting a lesson for a few dozen school children in P.S.
121, should also have to usher in the kingdom of God. Having dismissed
other educational institutions as irrelevant, Dewey had to identify education
with school. He expected great results from the disciplined work of school-
teachers and a sophisticated school curriculum.
It is something of a mystery why Dewey’s name is so often linked to
Rousseau’s. Both men are often categorized as romantics who thought that
the teacher’s job is to get out of the way. Rousseau did speak negatively of
the colleges of his day, but his alternative was a carefully structured curricu-
lum that started at birth and was directed by a nearly omniscient tutor. Dewey
disparaged what he called “traditional” schools, but he wished to replace
them with better schools and with teachers trained in science.
Dewey’s most extensive treatment of Rousseau is in Schools of Tomor-
row. The entire first chapter of that book is filled with excerpts from Emile,
and Dewey credits Rousseau with being “just about the first person to real-
ize that education is a developmental affair.”10 If one stops at the first chap-
ter, one might think that Dewey is following Rousseau. But by the fourth
chapter, Dewey is dismissive of Emile: “If Rousseau himself had ever tried
to educate any real children he would have found it necessary to crystallize
his ideas into some more or less fixed program.” Rousseau’s book, accord-
ing to Dewey, is “his account of the impractical methods he used to create
that exemplary prig—Emile.”11 Dewey faults Rousseau for neglecting cur-
riculum. Rousseau in fact has a detailed curriculum of education, starting at
birth, but he does not have a school curriculum, which is what Dewey was
looking for.
The starkest contrast between Dewey and Rousseau is their attitude to the
“social.” Rousseau regularly uses the term negatively; the social is the enemy
of individual development. In Dewey’s writing, there is no word used more
frequently or more positively than “social.” He never tires of saying that the
aim of education is the “socializing of intelligence.” He wrote that way in the
1890s and by the 1930s he was even more insistent that “it’s [education’s] end
is social and . . . the criterion to be applied in estimating the value of the prac-
tices that exist in school is also social.”12
It was a continuing struggle to socialize individuals into American democ-
racy but that was precisely the point of education in school. Children had to
be convinced that their interests were best served by cooperating with their
neighbors in a democratic way of life. By 1890, a science of society had been
born. Eventually, “society” would become a big container within which pol-
itics, economics, education, and religion are particular aspects. How could
education be anything other than learning to be social or becoming a produc-
tive member of something called society.
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 71

THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT OF

“CHILD AND CURRICULUM”

The “progressive movement” in the United States coalesced about the year
1900. John Dewey’s name became intertwined with progressivism and pro-
gressive education. The progressive movement was concerned with econom-
ics and politics before it included education. But the phrase “progressive ed-
ucation” held on long after the political/economic movement had flamed out.
World War I gave a fatal blow to the progressivists who naively thought that
the expansion of government for the war effort would later be turned to pro-
gressive, domestic programs. After World War I, “progressive education”
took a sharp turn away from urban reform and toward experimental schools
in the suburbs. A simplistic opposition between traditional and progressive
has survived to the present, at least in schools of education.
The progressive movement in the United States was not homegrown. The
United States was somewhat late in picking up the themes of economic and
political reform from England, France, Germany, New Zealand, and else-
where.13 The main concern of the movement was that many of the poor were
being left behind in the technological and corporate revolutions. Two nearly
opposite solutions appeared in the United States under the rubric of progres-
sive. One route was for the corporate business world to control and discipline
workers so that they would be efficient cogs in the new industrial machine.
The other route, which eventually got control of the term progressive, thought
that government had to intervene and provide protection for workers and for
people displaced by progress.
What had up to then been called “liberal” nearly reversed direction. In the
nineteenth century, liberals believed that government was the enemy from
which individuals needed protection. Suddenly, they realized that industrial
trusts, the power of capital, posed the greatest threat to individual liberty. The
only force able to withstand this threat was the state; government became the
protector of liberty. It had not been inevitable that “liberal” and “progressive”
would become synonyms. To this day liberalism remains in tension with gov-
ernment programs to help the needy. Right-wing Republicans who are always
calling for less government are the original liberals, that is, believers in the
liberalism that preceded its confusing reversal under the tag of progressivism.
John Dewey occupied a central position in this confusion. He was at the
center in trying to reconcile the tension between liberal and progressive. Ed-
ucationally, this tension is between the wisdom which the older generation
wishes to transmit and the novelty-seeking younger generation who are sure
that they can do much better than their elders. It has been said that the 1950s
was the last decade in which children still looked to adult models. While the
72 Chapter Four

1960s did embody a dramatic revelation of the split between generations, the
rebellion was there from the beginnings of the United States, even at the time
of its colonial period. The start of the twentieth century was when the split be-
came evident.
Emile Durkheim stated the classic or traditional view of education: “Edu-
cation is the influence exerted on children by parents and teachers.”14 The
adult world passes on its wisdom to children; thus, the aim of education is the
socialization of the young. Dewey, as I have indicated, accepted this tradi-
tional meaning of education; it was embodied in the educational vocabulary
of the time. And yet, he realized it was not working, particularly in the United
States with its advertising slogan of “progress is our most important product.”
In his early writing, Dewey does not refer to traditional versus progressive but
simply to old versus new. Dewey put his own stamp on what the “new edu-
cation” was, but there were sharp differences among writers of the time as to
what this new direction should be.
An aspect of the progressive movement often downplayed but now ex-
plored by many historians is the religious roots of the progressive move-
ment.15 This theme is relevant for getting at Dewey’s meaning of teaching be-
cause of Dewey’s personal religious search that intersected with
progressivism. Dewey assumed a meaning of teaching that came from Chris-
tianity even though Dewey rebelled against the church. Dewey’s mother, it
has often been noted, was an evangelical Christian whose concern was that
her son “would be right with Jesus.”16 In today’s context, that image can be
misleading. Evangelical Christianity was a driving force of social reform in
the late nineteenth century. True, by the 1920s, evangelical Christianity had
shifted toward fundamentalism (a word coined in 1920), but before that there
was the “social gospel” movement on the side of compassionate programs of
political and economic reform.
William Jennings Bryan epitomizes what happened to the evangelical
movement and the way that its history has been distorted. Bryan is most iden-
tified by his role in the Scopes trial of 1925. As reported by H. L. Mencken
and portrayed in the play and movie, Inherit the Wind, Bryan was an ignorant
and reactionary fundamentalist who opposed evolution. But in a fuller picture
of history, Bryan had been a leader in progressive reforms (social security,
disability benefits, direct voting). His opposition to evolution had little to do
with biological theories. He rightly feared that “social Darwinism” (which
Mencken embraced) represented a vicious attack on the poor. Bryan’s dis-
grace at the Scopes trial—at least as northern newspapers judged it—drove
evangelical Christianity underground for half a century.17
Dewey’s religious journey, which at the beginning was similar to Bryan’s,
quickly veered off into a non-church religiosity. Several of his philosophy
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 73

professors at the University of Vermont were products of Union Theological

Seminary.18 A philosophy not entirely distinct from theology allowed Dewey
to move toward a philosophical absolute in place of the Christian notion of
God. Dewey seems to have remained a practicing Christian up to his time at
the University of Michigan in the late 1880s. By the mid-1890s he was still
using most of the same religious vocabulary, but he was by then outside the
boundaries of the Christian church. His wife, Alice, was no doubt a major fac-
tor in that move.19
“Religion” became for Dewey a negative term but the adjective “religious”
remained a positive description that could be applied almost anywhere. “The
opposition between religious values as I conceive them and religion is not to
be bridged.”20 The fact that he thought the public schools should be religious
is something of an embarrassment to today’s opponents of all things religious
in the public school.21 Whether or not his sharp opposition between “religion”
and “religious” makes logical sense, it allowed Dewey to cling to a sense of
the unity of all things while criticizing the church as an obstacle to progress.
Dewey’s lifelong religion/religious conflict affected his belief about the
purpose of education and the place of the teacher. Dewey absorbed the pro-
gressivist assumption about the passionate preaching of reform. At the same
time he came to distrust the preacher who tells people what to believe. He re-
peatedly says that the teacher’s job is not to tell the pupils what the truth is.22
What was the alternative? He suggests bringing “things” into the classroom,
material different from words.23 The teacher should talk less and let pupils
work out the truth for themselves. He also thought that the school’s walls
should be permeable if not removed entirely. The pupil could then be dealing
with real “life-experience” and the teacher in the classroom could imitate
Emile’s tutor in arranging and guiding life experiences.
Dewey railed against the school as an institution separate from ordinary
life, and having a distinct character of its own.24 He seems not to have con-
sidered the possibility that without walls the classroom’s fragile relation of
teacher and students might be overwhelmed by “ordinary life-experience.”
Bringing things into the classroom (today it would be the computer, the cell
phone, and accompanying technology) can sometimes be helpful, but words
are unavoidably at the center of what the classroom can do. Words in a care-
fully prepared conversation can be powerful, but, like others of his time,
Dewey tended to identify verbal teaching with preaching.
Teaching in the schools of the Middle Ages included lecturing (reading a text,
usually the Bible), followed by the “disputation” (interpreting the text), and then
the preaching of the text (application to life situations). By the nineteenth cen-
tury, the academic lecture had absorbed both interpretation and preaching. In-
stead of reading from sacred scripture, the professor read his lecture from his
74 Chapter Four

notes on modern science. The student’s job was to copy what the lecturer said.
The classroom was always part-theater and the teacher’s acting style was part of
the package. It was not only a reading of science; it was a preaching of science
as the way to truth.
The lecture took over the U.S. university in the late-nineteenth century. It
has never had the strict liturgical formality of the German university but it
still occupies the center of classrooms in the universities of the United States.
In elementary and secondary schools, reading at students is more difficult.
The preaching format is challenged when a classroom teacher is confronted
by a couple dozen squirming youngsters. Nonetheless, teaching understood as
lecturing seeps down into high schools in a modified form.
Dewey is not the only culprit in the lack of imagination concerning teach-
ing but he never directly challenges the assumption of what teaching means
either in the old or the new education. He did praise Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity where “the student is treated not as a bucket for the reception of lec-
tures nor as a mill to grind out the due daily grist of prepared textbook for
recitation.”25 He likens the old education’s teaching “to inscribing records
upon a passive phonographic disc to result in giving back what has been in-
scribed when the proper button is pressed in recitation or examination.”26
He advocated as an alternative that “our schools truly become laboratories
of knowledge-making.”27
What he was opposed to is fairly clear; but whether “knowledge-making”
says much about teaching is not clear. Reforms in the twentieth century that
began by opposing teachers as the tellers of truth have most often ended in
disillusion on discovering that students either are unwilling or unable to dis-
cover the truth (or “make knowledge”) on their own.
Before looking at an essay in which Dewey does wrestle with the issue of
teaching, a few words are needed about his writing style. Dewey, like
Rousseau, had a problem with people misreading him. Rousseau’s problem
was his use of pithy phrases that are assumed to summarize his views. Fur-
thermore, reading five hundred pages of eighteenth-century French prose re-
quires a commitment from today’s reader.
Dewey’s problem is different, a case of tangled syntax. Dewey’s friends
made fun of his writing style but without giving us much insight into the
cause and nature of the problem. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said that Dewey
wrote “as God would have spoken had he been inarticulate but keenly de-
sirous to tell you how it was.”28 William James commented that “Dewey’s
style is damnable; you might even say God-damnable.”29 H. L. Mencken, no
friend of Dewey’s, engaged in some hyperbole when he wrote of Dewey: “I
believe he is the worst writer ever heard of in America, and probably the
worst philosopher known to history.”30
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 75

Dewey’s defense of his writing style was to claim that other writers
“achieve a specious lucidity and simplicity by the mere process of ignoring
considerations which a greater respect for concrete materials of experience
would have forced upon them.”31 Dewey has a point here that his style is
complex because his thinking is complex; but as a total justification for his
style, the argument is not persuasive.
Dewey’s form of arguing is not so different from many other philosophers.
He uses a dialectical form of arguing, as does Rousseau (“on the one hand,
but on the other hand”). Dewey’s dialectical format, however, is much more
compressed than Rousseau’s. Dewey’s movement from one side of an argu-
ment to the other is not spread over hundreds of pages but is within a few
paragraphs or sometimes within a single sentence. And when he moves from
one side to the other, he very often does not tell the reader he is doing so.
In Dewey’s way of thinking, if “a” and “b” are opposed to one another in
an argument, the answer is: “c.” However, the road to “c” is a convoluted
journey; it is not the middle of the road. People who say that the answer is
“both/and” instead of “either/or” simply restate the problem. Instead, in
Dewey’s dialectical movement, when the choice is assumed to be either “a”
or “b,” Dewey negates both “a” and “b”; the answer is on neither side of what
is being argued. Dewey’s next step is that the resulting “not a” and “not b” are
also negated. The negation of the negation of both “a” and “b” has the effect
of restoring “a” and “b” but now in new meanings which are compatible and
which constitute “c.” I will illustrate how this method functions in “The Child
and the Curriculum.”
Jay Martin says that Dewey always tried to go beyond his teachers, with
the result that he is driven to negative solutions.32 I don’t think Dewey saw it
that way. He did try to supersede other writers by negating the opposite views
in an argument. The result was not a negative solution but a double negative
solution, which is Dewey’s way of being positive. Still, it must be admitted
that Dewey’s complexity often seems unnecessary and the writing cries out
for an editor. He sometimes uses a quadruple negative where a double nega-
tive would seem to be just as precise.

“THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM”

I turn to a particular instance of Dewey’s style of argument. The essay “The

Child and the Curriculum” has some helpful comments on the role of the
schoolteacher and the nature of academic teaching. It is also an essay that
helped to fix the public image of Dewey as educational reformer. The mys-
tery that needs explaining is why Dewey to this day is assumed to be the main
76 Chapter Four

source of the “child-centered movement,” even though that is not what the es-
say advocates. There are sentences or fragments of sentences that are quoted
to support the view that in a choice between child and curriculum Dewey took
the side of the child. One might guess, even before reading the essay, and it
should be abundantly clear after reading the essay, that Dewey’s answer to the
question of child or curriculum is: neither. If he does unwittingly tilt in one
direction it is toward curriculum but that is a defect in his terms not his in-
tention. I would add, however, that Dewey is not entirely blameless in the fact
that his essay is misread. I think he makes a bad choice within the essay in
describing the role of the (school) teacher.
First, however, is the question: why the question? Why would Dewey write
an essay on child and curriculum? It is not obvious that education should be
described as a conflict between these two. In the first four paragraphs, Dewey
refers to a dispute in the 1890s, but as is common with Dewey, he does not
name names. The essay quickly jumps to an abstract level where Dewey ap-
pears to be engaged by a solely logical problem instead of his trying to me-
diate a political dispute that was occurring between some of the country’s in-
tellectual leaders.
On one side of this debate in the 1890s were William Torrey Harris and
Charles Elliot. On the other side were G. Stanley Hall and Francis Parker. The
usual typecasting of conservative versus liberal does not do justice to the de-
bate. If the terms that were emerging at the time are used—traditional versus
progressive—traditional as a description for Harris and Elliot cannot be
equated with reactionary or thickheaded opponents of progress. William Tor-
rey Harris was one of the leading U.S. philosophers, as well as U.S. commis-
sioner of education. Charles Elliot was the dynamic president of Harvard Uni-
versity. Their concern was “curriculum,” a fairly new term for what the
school teaches.
Elliot headed a committee that published a report on curriculum in 1893.
The report has often been ridiculed, and it does sound rigid and reactionary
today. The report says that “every subject which is taught at all in a second-
ary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every
pupil so long as he pursues it no matter what the probable destination of the
pupil may be or at what point his education is to cease.”33 The concern that
prompted this statement was that students judged to be less capable were
shunted off to vocational schools and not given the challenge of intellectual
study. The committee was defending the right of access to good school-based
education for all pupils, whatever the expectations for their social class.
On the other side of the debate was the “new psychology” most notably led
by G. Stanley Hall. He had received the first U.S.-based Ph.D. in psychology
from the new kind of university, Johns Hopkins. Psychology was seen as the
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 77

key to unlocking the mysteries of the human mind, a breakthrough of incal-

culable importance for education. Comenius, Rousseau, Locke, and others
had offered their insights into human development, but the new psychology
promised to chart in detail exactly how a child progresses into adulthood. Ed-
ucational psychology was child psychology.
Speaking before the National Educational Association in 1901, Hall said:
“The guardians of the young should strive to keep out of nature’s way and to
prevent harm; they should feel profoundly that childhood, as it comes from
the hand of God, is not corrupt. . . . We must overcome the fetishes of the al-
phabet, of the multiplication table. . . . There are many who ought not to be
educated and who would be better in mind and morals if they knew no
school.”34
Aligned with this new scholarship was the work of Francis Parker, one of
the most famous educators in the country. He was showing in practice that if
the school removed artificial constraints, the child’s natural appetite for learn-
ing could lead the way. He agreed with Hall that “The spontaneous tenden-
cies of the child are the record of inborn divinity. We are here, my fellow
teachers, for one purpose, and that purpose is to understand these tendencies
and continue them in all these directions, following nature.”35
John Dewey recognized what would be evident to many outsiders to this
conflict, namely, that child and curriculum need not be opposing terms. Why
couldn’t psychological insight be at the service of an intellectually challeng-
ing curriculum? Dewey’s response to the debate is that there should not be a
conflict between child and curriculum but, since a conflict is perceived to ex-
ist, it is necessary to “reconstruct” the argument. Thus, there is a real problem
in the statement of the problem. “Solution comes only by getting away from
the meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to see conditions
from another point of view, and hence in a fresh light.”36 That is just what he
tries to do in this essay.
Notice that he says “getting away from the meaning of terms that is already
fixed.” He does not offer new terms but new meaning(s) of the terms already
in dispute. One can immediately see from this principle of Dewey’s why he
was often misunderstood, with both sides claiming his support. He was on
neither side of the argument while at the same time he was using the terms of
both sides—the terms but not the meanings of the terms that the debate as-
sumed.
His principle is a good one for theorizing but not always applicable. Some-
times the term itself may be wrong. In the case of child and curriculum, he is
able to change the meaning of the second. Curriculum, argues Dewey, is not
school subjects but the “mature experience of the race” which is partially em-
bodied in school subjects. In contrast, the word “child” did not offer the same
78 Chapter Four

ambiguity. He needed a different, more flexible word; “learner” or “student”

would have been an improvement.
In the third paragraph of the essay he writes: “The fundamental facts in the
educative process are an immature, undeveloped being, and certain social
aims, meanings, values incarnate in the mature experience of the adult” (92).
The word child does not appear here. An immature, undeveloped being could
be twenty-five or fifty-five years old. But if one were to call into question
“child” as the recipient of education, it would also force a rethinking of
“adult” as the end of education.
Dewey does not pursue another word for “immature, undeveloped being”
and reverts to using “child” throughout the essay. When only a small fraction
of students went beyond elementary school, equating “child” with learner or
student was somewhat understandable but nonetheless unfortunate. Educa-
tional writers today who continue to refer to the recipient of education as the
child, when six out of ten students go to college and tens of millions engage
in adult education programs, is scandalous.
Instead of changing the meaning of child, Dewey’s solution is to speak of
the child’s “experience.” The word experience is one of Dewey’s richest and
most ambiguous terms. Education, as Dewey describes it in this essay, is a
movement from the experience of the child to the experience of the adult. But
what is lacking here is the “interaction” that Dewey thought was at the heart
of education. The movement in his solution is all in one direction. I said
above that if there is a bias in his comparing child and curriculum it is toward
curriculum. The child disappears; curriculum is forever. That is, the move-
ment is from immature experience (embodied in the child) to mature adult ex-
perience (embodied in the curriculum).
A frequently quoted passage in this essay is “The child is the starting point,
the center and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. It alone fur-
nishes the standard . . .” (95). One author who quotes this passage then fol-
lows with the comment: “In theory, this ideal is unassailable. In practice it has
proved largely unattainable.”37 She apparently thinks these words are
Dewey’s view of education although it is one side of the debate that Dewey
is criticizing. The problem is not that the theory has not been put into practice
but that the theory is in fact very “assailable.” In this quotation from “The
Child and the Curriculum,” Dewey is putting forth the “child” side of the ar-
gument in preparation for negating it.
The assertion that “the child is the starting point, the center and the end”
does not make much logical sense.38 For Dewey, the child—or rather, experi-
ence embodied in a child—might be called the chronological starting point.
But the child cannot be the end because, as I have noted, the child disappears
in the end. As for the child being the center of education, that is a different
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 79

image from starting point and end. If there is a center for Dewey it is not the
child but “experience,” which functions as bridge, mediator, or gap closer for
the perceived conflict.
The most fateful sentence in “The Child and the Curriculum” is: “It may
be of use to distinguish and to relate to each other the logical and the psy-
chological aspects of experience—the former standing for subject-matter in
itself, the latter for it in relation to the child” (102). At first glance, the con-
trast of logical and psychological may seem to be an example of the dialectic
that runs throughout the essay: the psychological is on the side of the child,
the logical is on the side of curriculum; the two need to be united. But that is
not what is said here. Dewey has indeed placed logical on the side of cur-
riculum material, but he says that “psychological” is that material in relation
to the child. In other words, psychology is not on one side of child versus cur-
riculum; it is the solution to the problem.
Dewey then offers an extended metaphor for relating logical and psycho-
logical. Logic provides a map of experience whereas psychology provides the
notes for the mapmaker. Psychology might seem to be preparation for the log-
ical. But then, as Dewey continues the metaphor, psychology is also the use
of the map to lead back to life-experience. He concludes that “it [curriculum]
needs to be psychologized; turned over, translated into the immediate and in-
dividual experiencing within which it has its origin and significance.” As he
succinctly puts it, “the logical standpoint is itself psychological” (104). One
might say without irony that this statement is not logical. A logical statement
would seem to be that the psyche-logical is one form of logical, along with
arthropos-, socio-, thanatos- and many other -logicals.
Dewey proceeds immediately to use this contrast of logical and psycho-
logical to compare scientist and teacher. The teacher is concerned “not with
subject matter as such, but with the subject-matter as a related factor in a to-
tal and growing experience,” that is, the teacher’s concern is psychology.
What is the teacher’s task in relation to curriculum? “To see it is to psychol-
ogize it” (105). Dewey believed that this description of the teacher overcomes
a perceived conflict of child and curriculum. Introducing the teacher into the
debate was surely a good move. But he has made the teacher a psychologist
and subordinated all subject matter to psychology. Teacher preparation would
not require mastering physics, math, or history. The teacher’s knowledge of
psychology implicitly includes all those areas; teachers have to concentrate
on the psychology of learning.
My highlighting of what could be construed as a momentary slip in logic
may seem exaggerated. It would be except that this passage is symptomatic
of a shift that happened to educational language in the twentieth century and
Dewey’s contribution to that shift. Psychology almost completely absorbed
80 Chapter Four

the language of education. If education is a topic to be explored, would one

not study how education involves politics, economics, ethics, philosophy, his-
tory, anthropology, and religion? That does not appear to be the case in
schools of education. “Teacher preparation” consists mainly of learning a
method prescribed by the psychologists’ study of learning.
There is no denying that psychology has in fact discovered many helpful
things about learning. Unfortunately, psychologists have had little interest in
teaching, other than in “behaviors” that would bring about learning. Dewey’s
essay did not cause the takeover of education by psychology. Nonetheless,
Dewey was enamored of this new science that promised to finally turn edu-
cation into a science. Dewey does not show familiarity with Freud’s Inter-
pretation of Dreams, published at the same time as his essay. In any case,
Freud would not have been scientific enough for him. Although Dewey con-
stantly put forward the scientific method as the only valid way to knowledge,
his version of psychology was still supported by his philosophy. William
James was Dewey’s inspiration for the meaning of psychology and James was
as much philosopher as psychologist. When Dewey was at the University of
Chicago during the 1890s, psychology was still part of the philosophy de-
partment. In imagining the teacher as psychologist, Dewey was assuming a
philosophical outlook on human experience buttressed now with careful re-
flection on the workings of that experience.39
Dewey was successful in having education become absorbed into psychol-
ogy. But it turned out to be a different psychology than Dewey had envi-
sioned. Psychology in the United States became an experimental science ori-
ented to quantitative study. The scientific method that Dewey advocated was
applied to external data and statistical conclusions were the result.
This kind of psychology in the early twentieth century of the United States
was led by Edward Thorndike who celebrated the fact that education was fi-
nally a science. Writing in 1913, Thorndike confidently predicted that
“through the knowledge of the science of human nature and its work in the
industries, professions and trades, the average graduate of Teachers College
in 1950 ought to be able to give better advice to a high school boy about the
choice of an occupation than Solomon, Socrates and Benjamin Franklin all
together could give.”40
Ellen Lagemann, a historian of education, has written that although Dewey
is revered in many places, it is Edward Thorndike who set the research
agenda and influenced practice in the public school. She writes, “one cannot
understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth
century unless one realizes that Edward Thorndike won and John Dewey
lost.”41 Quantitative studies of learning have triumphed in educational theo-
rizing and in the preparation of schoolteachers.
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 81

Because Dewey makes the teacher to be a psychologist, readers assume

that Dewey—his protests notwithstanding—comes down on the side of the
child. The conclusion of “The Child and the Curriculum” is either skipped or
completely misread. That is unfortunate because Dewey introduces here one
of his best descriptions of teaching. He writes: “The value of the formulated
wealth of knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may enable
the educator to determine the environment of the child, and thus by indirec-
tion to direct. Its primary value, its primary indication, is for the teacher, not
for the child” (110).
Dewey states clearly here what his third gap filler is in addition to experi-
ence and psychology: the teacher. The reason there is no essential gap be-
tween child and curriculum is the role that the teacher plays. Curriculum is
first for the teacher, and the teacher teaches by changing the environment of
the child. By environment here, one should understand all the physical and
social surroundings of a child.
A teacher cannot directly transmit knowledge into the head of the student.
Almost the whole history of philosophy testifies to that principle. But that does
mean the teacher cannot teach. As Emile’s tutor knew, the teacher has to
arrange the physical and social environment in a way that will issue in “learn-
ing experiences.” Like Emile’s tutor, Dewey’s teacher knows where the child’s
education should take him or her: “See to it that day by day the conditions are
such that their own activities move inevitably in this direction” (110).
The next to last paragraph of the essay begins: “Let the child’s nature ful-
fill its own destiny revealed to you in whatever of science, and art and in-
dustry the world now holds as its own” (111). It is Dewey’s typical dialecti-
cal way of saying things, the second clause a near reversal of the first. But
sometimes the first half of the sentence is cited as evidence for Dewey’s po-
sition on the teacher and the child. Richard Hofstadter, for example, quotes
Dewey’s words, “let the child’s nature fulfill its own destiny,” and then se-
verely criticizes Dewey for not giving direction to the child’s development.42
But that is just what is in the second half of the sentence: “revealed to you
in whatever of science, and art and industry the world now holds as its own.”
For Dewey, the teacher provides the direction that the child needs; the
teacher knows from a study of art, science, and industry where the child’s na-
ture leads.
Why would anyone quote the first half of a sentence by Dewey when the
second half of the sentence is often almost the opposite of the first half? The
only conclusion one can draw in this case is that Hofstadter either did not read
the passage carefully or he deliberately misconstrued it by cutting the sentence
midway. Neither conclusion is an admirable explanation for an historian who
was in the midst of criticizing the anti-intellectualism of the country.
82 Chapter Four

Dewey’s claim that the child’s destiny is revealed in science, art, and in-
dustry is a remarkable assumption. There is no mention of psychology here,
although it is presumably included in science. The child’s destiny is revealed
to the teacher by art, science, and industry. The child does not know its own
destiny; only the teacher does. Perhaps that is true but listening to a student
might have been mentioned as a help to understanding not human destiny but
the individual journey of a particular student. That fact becomes more obvi-
ous if one talks of student, pupil, or learner rather than child. Six-year-olds,
though they should be listened to by teachers, may not be able to articulate
much about human destiny. Sixteen- or sixty-year-olds surely have something
to say for themselves about their respective destinies.
In the last paragraph of the essay there are three sentences that summarize
his dialectic. This conclusion of his argument has constantly been misread.
The first sentence is a peculiar fragment that reads in full: “The case is of
Child.” That sentence is often quoted, apparently on the assumption that
Dewey’s last word is child rather than curriculum. But that sentence is the
lead into the second sentence of the paragraph: “It is his present powers
which are to assert themselves; his present capacities which are to be exer-
cised; his present attitudes which are to be realized.” That is Dewey’s state-
ment of the case on the child’s side.
The third sentence of the paragraph and the final sentence of the essay goes
back to curriculum but now as understood by the teacher: “But save as the
teacher knows, knows wisely and thoroughly, the race-experience which is
embodied in that thing we call Curriculum, the teacher knows neither what
the present power, capacity, or attitude is, nor yet how it is to be asserted, ex-
ercised, and realized” (111). Unfortunately, this last sentence is one of his
quadruple negatives that lose all but the most determined reader. If Dewey
wished the reader to grasp his final statement of a solution to child versus cur-
riculum, he should have tried a simpler syntax.
I have often asked students to put into their own words what Dewey says
in the last two sentences of “The Child and the Curriculum.” I did that with
hundreds of intelligent students who were preparing to be schoolteachers.
Most of them would come up with almost the opposite of Dewey’s meaning.
They presumed that Dewey was saying the child is more important than cur-
riculum. When I would diagram the two sentences—one line under the sub-
ject, two lines under the predicate, dependent clause slanted down from inde-
pendent clause, and so forth—it would be clear to them what Dewey’s
meaning was. Dewey’s conclusion places the burden on the teacher as psy-
chologist and as an expert in art, science, and industry.
The difficulty of understanding Dewey’s prose makes one wonder if it is
worth bothering with. Certainly, it makes no sense to have students skim
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 83

through his books. Nevertheless, much of Dewey’s language floats through

discussions of education in the United States even if the speaker has never
read Dewey. Whatever one thinks of Dewey, it is impossible to make sense of
contemporary educational debates without understanding Dewey’s part, for
good or ill, in what the early twentieth century has given us.

THE CONTEXT OF EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION

One of Dewey’s books that is assigned to students and is taken to be a com-

pact summary of his educational theory is Experience and Education, pub-
lished in 1938.43 The book is a cry of frustration on Dewey’s part, an impa-
tient and all too brief summary of what he really meant. This hundred-page
book makes little sense unless one knows the context of the 1930s and the his-
tory of “progressive education.”
By the 1930s, Dewey felt pressed from all directions in his role of grand
theorizer of education. The book Experience and Education arose from an in-
vitation by Kappa Delta Pi to address their annual meeting and critique his
own philosophy of education. An author criticizing his or her own philosophy
may seem like admirable candor but it is not generally a good idea. Why sup-
ply help to one’s opponents with a negative statement of one’s own work. Ex-
perience and Education is mostly a negative book. Dewey’s harshest criti-
cism is for those who profess to be following his philosophy.
The strange thing about the book is that Dewey writes as if he were still a
disinterested spectator viewing a philosophical debate. In 1900, Dewey was
a relative newcomer offering to mediate a debate between his elders. By
1935, Dewey was in his seventies and was one of the most famous people in
the country. He gives no indication in the book that the progressive education
he is criticizing is something directly attributed to him in the popular imagi-
nation. The audience that heard him deliver the lecture could be assumed to
know that he was not an outsider to the argument, but generations of readers
since then have a quite different context.
The “progressive movement” had suffered a fatal blow with its support of
World War I.44 (F.D.R. would retrieve some of its political and economic
causes in the 1930s). Progressive education, on the other hand, only gelled af-
ter World War I. William Kilpatrick at Teachers College gave practical shape
to the progressive method. He articulated his method before thousands of
prospective and practicing schoolteachers. Kilpatrick assailed the old educa-
tion: “Our old-type school, with its formal subject-matter, remote from life,
made us think of the learning process as laborious and repellent.” Fortunately,
the new-type school shows that “life’s inherent learning comes in fact without
84 Chapter Four

effort, comes in fact automatically and stays with us.”45 In the progressive
school, according to Kilpatrick, the pupils control the method, “Pupils must
propose what they actually do. . . . All learning should be done only if it is nec-
essary for what pupils have actually proposed.”46
The ideology of “the child-centered school” was the basis of the Progres-
sive Education Association founded in 1919. The organization lasted until
1955 (though it temporarily abandoned its name in 1944 for “American Edu-
cation Fellowship”).47 In his 1930 presidential address, Burton Fowler stated
the principle of the group: “We do endorse by common consent the obvious
hypothesis that the child rather than what he studies should be the center of
all educational effort.”48 So much for Dewey’s solution to the false opposition
of child and curriculum.
Two years before this address by Fowler, Dewey had been honorary presi-
dent of the Progressive Educational Association and he had offered criticism
of the child-centered ideology. But criticizing an organization’s founding
principle is a hopeless undertaking.49 Dewey’s frustration at people who
claimed to be implementing his philosophy can be seen in his blunt statement
of 1926 on the child-centered school: “Such a method is really stupid. For it
attempts the impossible, which is always stupid, and it misconceives the con-
ditions of independent thinking.”50
Dewey continued to offer criticism of the lack of subject matter in schools
that invoked his philosophy.51 Even to the very end of his life in 1950, Dewey
was complaining to a friend: “Why do writers and teachers insist on saddling
me with the ‘child-centered’ school. Anyone who has read me knows it is the
socially-centered school that I have sought.”52 True, anyone who read Dewey
would know he was not a proponent of the child-centered school, but Dewey
assumed too much in thinking that his “socially-centered” school was an
easy-to-grasp alternative.
There was a movement in the 1930s that claimed to be socially centered,
but Dewey had problems with that reform, too. The “social reconstruc-
tionists” reacted against the child-centered school and proposed to make
the school a force for social reform. The Depression of the 1930s made
clear that society was not going to be radically reconstructed by letting
children run free in school. George Counts, in an electrifying speech that
was published in 1932 as a small book, Dare the Schools Build a New So-
cial Order, called on schoolteachers to take power away from the “practi-
cal men”—politicians, financiers, and industrialists—so as to change the
country. “The profession should rather seek power and then strive to use
that power fully and wisely in the interests of the great masses of the peo-
ple.”53 Counts was not calling for an end to “progressive education.” On
the contrary, he was claiming to take back the movement that had moved
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 85

out to the complacent suburbs and had fallen under the direction of psy-
chologists instead of political activists.54
Counts preached, “if the schools are to be really effective, they must be-
come centers for the building, and not merely for the contemplation of our
civilization.”55 It was a thrilling but ultimately delusional idea that the young
women who were the schoolteachers, together with the children in their
charge, could seize power from the politicians and industrialists. Dewey had
some sympathy for the aim of the social reconstructionists. Thirty-five years
before Counts’speech, Dewey had called upon teachers to usher in the king-
dom of God. But if Dewey had called teachers “prophets,” he had perhaps not
considered that prophetic speech can clash with the role of schoolteacher.
While Dewey may have shared Counts’ desire for social reform, he re-
belled at the means that Counts proposed. Counts called for progressive edu-
cation to “become less frightened than it is today at bogies of imposition and
indoctrination.”56 Although Dewey had expressed some admiration for the
“cultural promise” of the Soviet Union’s schools,57 he could not accept a bald
endorsement of “indoctrination” in U.S. schools. It might be argued that
school children were already being indoctrinated by the political establish-
ment on the right. The temptation on the political left was to fight fire with
fire, imposing true doctrine in place of falsehood, but indoctrination ran up
against the fundamental principle of liberalism. Dewey always remained
skeptical of Marxism and other ideological doctrines.
By the 1930s, Dewey’s interest had moved to the political arena and eco-
nomic theories. He still thought of education as found in school, a place
where adults shepherded children into society. In 1933 he wrote: “The pur-
pose of education has always been to everyone, in essence, the same—to give
the young the things they need in order to develop in an orderly, sequential
way into members of society.”58 That is a remarkable claim about what the
“essence” of education is and must be. Education is equated with school;
school is equated with children. What else then can education be other than
keeping society in order?
Dewey had not changed his educational language since the 1890s but his
hope that education (school) can be the agent of social change had been
dashed. By the late 1930s, Dewey wrote that the schools cannot “in any lit-
eral sense be the builders of a new social order,” though he still hoped that
they could “share in the building of the social order of the future.”59At other
times, Dewey was more pessimistic of the school’s part in creating a new so-
cial order. He wrote: “It is unrealistic in my opinion, to suppose that the
schools can be a main agency in producing the intellectual and moral
changes, the changes in attitudes and dispositions of thought and purpose,
which are necessary for the creation of a new social order.”60 If Dewey had
86 Chapter Four

said that the school couldn’t be the main agency, the statement would be a re-
alistic assessment of the school’s limits. But in saying that the school cannot
be a main agency, the statement reflects a despair of education. Having
placed education in the school and having assumed schools are for socializ-
ing children, Dewey’s idea of education had no chance up against the social
problems of the 1930s or any other decade.

EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION

Experience and Education brims with impatience and frustration. In the pref-
ace and in the conclusion, Dewey proposes getting rid of “progressivism” and
“progressive” as descriptions of education. Strangely, he does not take his
own advice, and he structures everything in between the beginning and the
end of the book as a conflict between traditional and progressive.
In the introduction he adverts to another movement of the time, one that
shadows the discussion in the book. He refers to “the attempt to revive the
principles of ancient Greece and of the middle ages” (6). The reference is
specifically to Robert Hutchins, the brilliant young president of the Univer-
sity of Chicago, and his associate, the prolific philosopher, Mortimer Adler.
They had initiated the Great Books Program, which, like the program of so-
cial reconstruction, was a reaction against child-centered programs.
While George Counts wished to turn the school into a revolutionary van-
guard, Hutchins and Adler saw the school as a contemplative place to im-
merse young people in the wisdom of great minds from the past. Dewey
would have agreed that a solid intellectual curriculum made logical sense,
given his own criticism of schools, but he was upset by Adler’s rigid adher-
ence to his version of great books. Dewey’s exchanges with Hutchins and
Adler were remarkably vituperative.61 Did he really think that their Greek,
Latin, and medieval texts threatened the U.S. public schools?
In any case, Dewey’s portrait of the “traditional” school did not give any
ground to a value in the traditional. In the nineteenth century, traditional ed-
ucation meant Greek and Latin for an elite, along with basic literacy and job
training for the masses. By the 1930s, nineteenth-century traditional educa-
tion had largely disappeared, replaced by a variety of educational theories and
practices in a massive school system. The schools under Roman Catholic aus-
pices may have gloried in being traditional. The public schools were trying to
be up to date, despite being burdened with economic problems, including in-
adequate pay for the young women who staffed the schools.
From the first page of Experience and Education, Dewey is a harsh critic
of schools that claimed to be progressive. Despite his stated wish to get rid of
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 87

the term, he seems instead to be intent on correcting what progressive means.

As usual, he announces on the first page that “instead of taking one side or
the other,” he will “indicate a plan of operations proceeding from a level
deeper and more inclusive than is represented by the practices and ideas of
the contending parties” (5).
Unlike “The Child and the Curriculum,” where Dewey as outsider could
logically proceed to undercut the debate, in Experience and Education he is
clearly and deeply involved on one side. His argument is a messy complaint
about the inadequacies of progressive schools, but at the same time there is
no dialectical interplay between “traditional” schools and “progressive”
schools. Dewey could not reconstruct a meaning of “progressive” unless he
also rethought the meaning of “traditional,” something he was unable or un-
willing to do.
If one wished to explore “traditional,” the first step would be to recognize
that traditional education—encompassing the last few thousand years—was
not mainly about schools at all. To reexamine tradition, Dewey would have
had to reconsider his dismissal of the family and the religious community as
educational forces. He would have had to rethink education in relation to a
new world of work and lifelong development. Dewey often dropped hints of
an education beyond a schoolteacher’s efforts with children.62 But he could
not get free of the educational language that dominated the late nineteenth
century—nor have we yet found a consistent way out of it. Mortimer Adler’s
Great Books Program proved to be only a small blip in the attempted reform
of education, an attractive alternative for a select few college students. How-
ever, some of the “traditional” ideas in those books might have some rele-
vance to our continuing problem of what education is.
Dewey’s concern in Experience and Education, as indicated by the title, is
the relation between experience and education. That was certainly a worth-
while concern for any writer on education, and especially for Dewey. In the
present, just as in the 1930s, there are people who enthusiastically announce
a grand new discovery: experience-based education. Dewey takes dead aim at
this cliché by pointing out that all education is based on experience. What else
could it be based on?63
While Dewey has little good to say for “traditional” education, he does re-
mind his would-be progressive disciples that “it would be a great mistake to
suppose, even tacitly, that the traditional classroom was not a place in which
pupils had experiences” (26). Even though he uses one of his double nega-
tives here, he does acknowledge that traditional schools dealt in experience.
Unfortunately, everything else he has to say about traditional schools is sim-
ply negative. Lacking any dialectical partner for the progressive side, Dewey
could not succeed in sorting out the good and the bad in progressive schools.
88 Chapter Four

Dewey had been writing about “experience” for almost fifty years. Much
of Democracy and Education in 1915 was about experience. One of his finest
books in the 1920s was entitled Experience and Nature. And in 1934, he pub-
lished Art as Experience, which has a systematic explanation of experience in
relation to art. Experience and Education was Dewey’s last, exasperated at-
tempt to explain what experience means in the context of education. How-
ever, I doubt that there are many readers who on finishing the last page of Ex-
perience and Education say: Now I finally understand what Dewey meant by
experience.
Dewey writes as if the reader is already familiar with his meaning of ex-
perience and needs only a few reminders or some course corrections. Many
of his audience for the original address might be presumed to have known
about his previous writing on experience. Most readers of the book since
then, hoping to get Dewey’s idea of experience, find themselves in a tangle
of criticisms directed at progressive schools. Experience is a topic addressed
only obliquely in this book. A reader might expect a first chapter laying out
exactly what he means by experience. Instead, Dewey proceeds to talk about
the quality of experience, aspects of the quality, interpreting experience, and
the interplay of conditions of experience forming a “situation.”
He might have begun with at least the kind of straightforward statement
found in Democracy and Education: “Experience itself primarily consists of
the active relations subsisting between a human being and his natural and so-
cial surroundings.”64 That is not a complete picture (“primarily consists”) be-
cause he did not have adequate words for what is his last word before silence.
In Experience and Education, he should have emphasized to his readers that
“experience” includes all the relations you can imagine, and also those you
cannot imagine.
Dewey argues that the human mind thinks about “objects” but that actual ex-
istence (experience) is relational. There are no objects but there are objective
and subjective poles within experience. Education, therefore, is always about
“interactions”65 within experience: teacher–learner, man–woman, adult–child,
thinking–feeling, active–passive, human–nonhuman, school–family, tradition–
progress, and so on without end. Dewey does have scattered comments on many
of these relations within experience but, lacking a firm overall meaning of ex-
perience in which to situate the relations, the reader may miss the educational
significance of these interactions.
Among the endless relations within experience, there is one that cries out
for discussion if education is to be clarified. I refer to the relation of teaching-
learning. Dewey frequently has indirect references to this relation but never
systematically explores it. He could have been helpful in undercutting many
of the fruitless assumptions about teaching.
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 89

In most writing on education, teaching is assumed to involve a human in-

dividual (the teacher) and another human individual who is young but not too
young (the child). The assumed context is almost always a classroom. The
question posed or more likely hovering in the background is: What does the
teacher say and how does he or she say it so that the learner will take in that
information? That question has no answer; there simply is no way for the
teacher to transmit his or her knowledge into the head of the learner. While
Socrates is celebrated for showing this to be the case, schoolteachers are still
expected to transmit their knowledge to their students.
Dewey offers the possibility of a different question that does have an an-
swer or has many answers. Teaching-learning is what goes on all the time
within experience. Learning is what happens when humans, and other ani-
mals that are receptive to development, receive direction from those living or
nonliving forces that show them a way of life. Thus a teacher can be a human,
either a living person or someone who is still present in memory. A teacher
can also be a group of human beings; a community that is no longer alive
makes up tradition. Finally, a teacher can be other than a human being; if hu-
mans are receptive to the teaching, animals and, by extension, objects, such
as air, light, oceans, and deserts, are capable of teaching.
One could go on indefinitely naming those who can play teacher. The more
important point not to be lost sight of is that teaching-learning is a single re-
lation seen from opposite ends. Dewey compared teaching and learning to
buying and selling. “No one can sell unless someone else buys. There is the
same extant equation between teaching and learning that there is between
selling and buying.”66 He could have used any number of relations as analo-
gies for teaching-learning. What is taken to be a truism in current educational
writing—that learning is separate from teaching—is an impossibility within
Dewey’s philosophy.
If one starts with Dewey’s meaning of experience, the question for the
classroom instructor is, How do I join the other teachers? The teaching has
been going on in a person’s life since birth The most important individual hu-
man teacher is usually the mother (the father may be a close second). A per-
son who is assigned the term “teacher” in the context of school can only try
to gently reshape whatever teaching-learning has already occurred and is con-
tinuing to occur in the student’s life.
Dewey was insistent that the school should be in continuity with out-of-
school experience. That would mean that the parents and the professional ed-
ucator should provide a continuity of teaching-learning, within which the
family’s teaching and the school’s teaching have distinguishable areas of con-
cern. For Dewey to make that point effectively, he would have had to give at-
tention to the parent as teacher but he never does that. Like other writers on
90 Chapter Four

education, he casually refers to “parents and teachers.” Nearly all educational

literature, after a rhetorical gesture toward parents, explicitly denies that par-
ents are teachers.
The loss here is not just for parents but also for the people carrying the im-
possible burden of being called “the teacher.” The important but limited pos-
sibilities of classroom teaching are hidden beneath unrealistic pressures for
success on test scores and overwhelming problems of classroom manage-
ment. The work is extremely difficult and the public does not show much re-
spect for the job. Politicians and parents deep down believe that “anyone can
teach.” They are right; every human being is a teacher. But unless one has
dealt with the expectations and limits of the classroom on a daily basis for
many years, he or she is unlikely to grasp how difficult the job is.
Dewey’s progressive schools were looking for a way to ease the burden.
Why not talk less, do less, have fewer rules, and let children follow their in-
terests? Dewey describes progressive schools that had no subject matter, no
rules of conduct, and no adult authority. Dewey warned that such schools are
headed for chaos, which is one of the worst enemies of freedom. The school
is a game that has to have rules. No rules, no game, Dewey says (52). He po-
sitions the classroom teacher as a member of the community but also the
game’s umpire. That is not a bad image for thinking about classroom man-
agement. However, the umpire in this case first has to design the environment
so that student interactions with each other and their engagement with learn-
ing materials provide a firm basis for authority.
Controlling environmental interactions in a classroom requires someone
who can provoke intellectual questioning. People who try to survive in the
role of schoolteacher with clever tricks have a limited career span. As Dewey
said in the conclusion of “The Child and the Curriculum,” what is required is
that the classroom teacher be excited about the art, science, and industry that
the past has given us. The schoolteacher also has to learn about the teaching-
learning already present in the prospective learners’ lives. Success at the
game requires intelligence, hard work, patience, humor, and luck.

NOTES

1 Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York:
Norton, 1995), 181; Robert Westbrook John Dewey and American Democracy
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 320.
2. John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” Later Works (Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University, 1981), 5: 150.
3.John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1966), 388.
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 91

4. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 384.

5. John Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow (New York: Dutton, 1915).
6. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 70–71.
7. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), 9–10.
8. John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” in Dewey on Education, ed. Martin
Dworkin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1959), 30.
9. Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” 32.
10. Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, 2.
11. Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, 45.
12. John Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” in Later Works, 9:202.
13. For the best treatment of this history, see Daniel Rogers, Atlantic Crossings
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998).
14. Max Weber, Education and Sociology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956), 91.
15. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: Rise and Fall of the Progressive Move-
ment in America 1890–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003).
16. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 3.
17. Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Con-
tinuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
18. Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003), 37.
19. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 36.
20. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1934), 28.
21. John Dewey, “Religion and Our Schools,” in Characters and Events, ed.
Joseph Ratner (New York: Holt and Company, 1929), II, 514.
22. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 38.
23. Dewey, School and Society, 22; Democracy and Education, 161.
24. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 8, 38; Dewey, School and Society, 75.
25. George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1973), 29.
26. Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” Later Works, 9:197.
27. John Dewey, “Science as Subject Matter and Method,” in John Dewey on Ed-
ucation: Selected Writings, ed. Reginald Archambault (New York: Modern Library,
1964), 192.
28. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, xiii.
29. Quoted in the introduction to Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, xxv.
30. Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 501.
31. Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” Later Works, 5:151.
32. Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 53.
33. Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 11.
34. Lawrence Cremin, Transformation of the School (New York: Knopf, 1961), 134.
35. Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 134.
92 Chapter Four

36. John Dewey, “Child and Curriculum,” in Dewey on Education, ed. Martin
Dworkin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1959), 91. Page numbers in the text re-
fer to this edition of Dewey’s essay.
37. Silvia Farnham-Diggory, Schooling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1990), 22.
38. John Dewey, “How Much Freedom in New Schools?” Later Works, 5:319: “I
do not mean, of course, that education does not center in the pupil. It obviously takes
its start with him and terminates with him. But the child is not something isolated.”
Dewey is here inconsistent in speaking of education terminating in the child; a major
theme of his is that education does not terminate.
39. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958, 44–45.
40. Harvey Kantor and David Tyack, eds., Work, Youth and Schooling (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982), 39.
41. Ellen Lagemann, “The Plural Worlds of Educational Research,” History of Ed-
ucation Quarterly 29 (1989): 185.
42. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in America (New York: Vintage
Books, 1963), 375.
43. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier Books, 1963).
Page numbers in the text are from this 1963 edition.
44. Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” in Untimely Papers (New York:
Huebsch, 1919).
45. Samuel Tennenbaum, William Heard Kilpatrick: Trailblazer in Education
(New York: Harper, 1951), 243.
46. William Heard Kilpatrick, introduction to An Experiment with a Project Cur-
riculum by Ellsworth Collings (New York: Macmillan, 1923), xvii.
47. Patricia Graham, Progressive Education from Arcady to Academe: A History of
the Progressive Education Association 1919–1967 (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1967), 20.
48. Cremin, Transformation of the School, 258.
49. Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 502.
50. Cremin, Transformation of the School, 234.
51. John Dewey, “How Much Freedom in New Schools?” Later Works, 5:319–25.
52. Letter to Bob Rothman, in Martin, The Education of John Dewey, 498.
53. George Counts, Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? (New York: Arno
Press, 1932), 29.
54. Cremin, Transformation of the School, 259.
55. Counts, Dare the Schools, 37.
56. Counts, Dare the Schools, 9–10.
57. Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 66.
58. John Dewey, “Why Have Progressive Schools?” Later Works, 11:147.
59. John Dewey, “Can Education Share in Social Reconstruction?” Later Works,
9:207.
60. John Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” Later Works, 11:414.
 Dewey: Why So Misunderstood? 93

61. John Dewey and Robert Hutchins exchanged a series of strident essays start-
ing with Dewey’s review of Hutchins’ book, Learning in America in Later Works,
11:391–96 and Hutchins’ response in Later Works, 11:592–97.
62. For example, Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” Later Works,
9:195: “An educated person has the power to go on and get more education, to grow
and expand his development.”
63. One must note, however, that Hutchins contrasted the “work of the intellect”
as opposed to “mere experience.” See Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of Amer-
ican Liberalism, 281.
64. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 274.
65. Dewey uses as his key word, interaction; late in life he thought he should have
used “transaction” though the advantage of the latter is not obvious; see John Dewey,
The Knowing and the Known, with Arthur Bentley (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1949).
66. John Dewey, How We Think (New York: Lexington, Ky.:D.C. Heath, 1933),
34–35.
 Chapter Five

Can Morality Be Taught?

This chapter is a condensed history of the movement known as moral educa-

tion and its attitude toward teaching. I date the beginning of the movement
from 1900 with the publication of Emile Durkheim’s book, Moral Educa-
tion.1 The concern with moral education throughout the past century provides
a special insight to society’s ambivalence about teaching. If teaching is
thought to be a questionable practice—a necessary imposition on children of
a certain age—then the problem of teaching would be especially acute in the
area of morality. Can anyone teach morality? Should anyone try to teach
morality? If teaching itself is not a moral act, how can morality be taught?
Two diametrically opposed approaches wind through the history of moral
education. On one side are people who have felt increasingly beleaguered.
Their regular cry has been “tell them what to do and make sure they do it.”
On the other side are people who prefer to talk about learning and develop-
ment. They think that education should facilitate the personal journey but
teachers should not be in the business of telling people what to think or how
to behave. Unfortunately, the idea of teaching is seldom explored on either
side. The term teaching is readily used by proponents of “just tell them what
to think and what to do.” In this case, the assumed notion of teaching is rather
primitive. Their opponents, instead of examining a full range of teaching
practices and teaching languages, prefer to talk about other things.
The year 1900 is, of course, somewhat arbitrary. The concern with the
moral had been voiced throughout much of the preceding century. However,
Durkheim’s book signals the creation of a moral domain separated from the
rest of education. It is not at all clear that Durkheim intended that develop-
ment with his book, but his title, Moral Education, conveyed to people that
there is a subject matter called moral education that can be distinguished from

95
96 Chapter Five

education in general. Is such a separate entity called moral education legiti-

mate and desirable? Is it possible that there is no answer for moral education
because it does not, or at least should not, exist?
In questioning whether moral education should exist, I am not suggesting
that education should be either amoral or immoral. Rather, throughout most
of history, “moral education” would have sounded like a redundancy. It was
assumed that education is neither an amoral or immoral venture; the adjective
moral was unnecessary for describing education. But that is just what some
people in the nineteenth century thought was changing. As the school took
over control of “education,” and the school was intent on preparing its pupils
for a scientific and industrialized world, there was fear that moral concerns
would be obscured if not entirely eliminated.
From the beginning of the public school system in the United States, the
moral concern could not be avoided. In the United States, the special role of
the school was to “socialize” the flood of immigrants. One of the reasons for
replacing men with women teachers in the newly founded common schools
was that women are better examples and teachers of morality.2 The teachers
were to provide mothering and gentle understanding while the male adminis-
trators of the system saw the job as providing strict controls. The Boston
School Committee saw the schools as populated by children “with the inher-
ited stupidity of centuries of ancient ancestors.” The teacher’s job with such
students was “forming them from animals into intellectual beings; and as far
as a school can do it, from intellectual beings into spiritual beings.”3
Urbanization and industrialization created a continuing sense of moral cri-
sis. When John Dewey in the 1890s declared that the family and the church
were no longer influential as moral guides, he was enunciating what had be-
come a common fear.4 There was no moral compass for society unless the
school could offer it. Well before Dewey’s time, it was being said that the
school has responsibility for “the whole man,” which in practice meant a
greater concern for the moral than the intellectual.5 Dewey, as I pointed out
in the previous chapter, did not agree with that assessment but there was
enough ambiguity in his language that he could be quoted in support of the
moral at the expense of the intellectual emphasis in the school.
The United States concern for turning millions of immigrants into up-
standing citizens was different from concerns in France, Germany, or Eng-
land. The United States may have been all too willing to import theories of
moral education into the schools rather than examine whether the school was
already doing more than its share of educating in morality.
Another aspect of the question in which the United States contrasted with
Europe was that of religion in the private lives of its citizens and the expres-
sion of religion in public places, including public schools. In chapter 6, I ad-
 Can Morality Be Taught? 97

dress the struggle over religion and the schools that continues to the present.
Here I note that European theorists of moral education were aggressively an-
tireligious in the articulation of their theories.
It is probably not a coincidence that “religious education” as a term desig-
nating a distinct area was coined at almost exactly the same time as “moral
education.” The weakening of religion—more precisely, the Christian reli-
gion—was a large part of the reason for the conceptualizing of moral educa-
tion. In France, the questioning of (Christian) religion as the basis of moral-
ity went back to the eighteenth century. Voltaire feared that there would be a
collapse of morality without religion as a control upon people; Diderot was
confident that there was no necessary connection.6 Writing in 1900, Emile
Durkheim looked back only twenty years to when “we decided to give our
children in our state-supported schools a purely secular moral education. It is
essential to understand that this means an education that is not derived from
revealed religion, but that rests exclusively on ideas, sentiments, and prac-
tices accountable to reason only—in short, a purely rationalistic education.”7
All adjectives in front of “education” have the danger of cutting off a sector
of education rather than emphasizing or reintegrating that concern within ed-
ucation itself. Thus, adult education, political education, drug education, sex
education, or environmental education find their respective passionate advo-
cates but the call for each of these educations may succeed in isolating the con-
cerns from the meaning of education in relation to power, people, and money.
Moral education, environmental education, sex education, and other edu-
cations, might have been better served by not separating them from education
as a whole. Then moral or environmental or sexual education would be rec-
ognized as a redundancy but one that could be temporarily useful as a re-
minder that any education worthy of the name cannot neglect its moral di-
mension, environmental context, or sexual implications.

EMILE DURKHEIM

Emile Durkheim and Jean Piaget are the grandfathers of twentieth-century

moral education. The two of them shared an antipathy to mixing religion into
moral education, but on most issues they were at opposite ends of the spec-
trum. Durkheim wrote as a sociologist, looking at moral education as an is-
sue of achieving social conformity. Piaget, as a psychologist, was interested
in moral judgment as it emerges in the development of the child. Not surpris-
ingly, they disagreed about the role of the teacher and the nature of teaching.
Durkheim gives an exalted place to the teacher—that is, the schoolteacher—
but his view of teaching needs scrutiny.
98 Chapter Five

Durkheim begins his Moral Education on a note of modesty: “In this book,
our aim is not to formulate education for man in general; but for men of our
time in this country” (3). Many of the people who advocated moral education
in the twentieth century laid claim to universality for their theories.
Durkheim’s emphases reflected concerns in France at the threshold of the
twentieth century. To be fair, one has to take account of his limited aim when
offering a criticism of his theory.
While some of his emphases would no doubt change with time, I think his
succinct definition of education was assumed to be perennial. “Education is
the influence exerted on children by parents and teachers.”8 Some people
might take this definition to be self-evident, but three of his elements should
be noted. First, education is given an unusually wide meaning with the vague
but comprehensive word “influence.” Second, the recipient of education is
“children,” an assumption common at that time but one that became increas-
ingly inaccurate in the course of the twentieth century. Third, referring to
“parents and teachers” is standard rhetoric to this day, but logically it is an as-
sertion that parents are not teachers. Usually when someone is challenged on
this point, he or she will deny intending that (“You know what I mean”).
However, in Durkheim’s case the phrase carries significance. He really does
want to give teaching to the schoolteachers when the issue is moral education.
The split of family and school is at the heart of Durkheim’s moral educa-
tion theory. He distinguished two stages of childhood, the first within the
family, the second, in the elementary school. “We shall focus on it [the sec-
ond] in discussing moral education. This is indeed the critical moment in the
formation of moral character” (17). He has little to say about the first stage
within the family and most of what he does say is dismissive of the family’s
contribution. He acknowledges that his view contradicts much of standard
rhetoric. “Contrary to the all too popular notion that moral education falls
chiefly within the jurisdiction of the family, I judge that the task of the school
in the moral development of the child can and should be of greatest impor-
tance (18).
His attitude to the family as educational might seem similar to Dewey and
others of that time who were bemoaning a recent decline in the family, as
when Durkheim says that “the center of gravity of moral life, formerly in the
family, tends increasingly to shift away from it. The family is now becoming
an agency secondary to the state” (75). But his view of the family’s loss of in-
fluence runs counter to the view of many others who talked of the family’s
decline. Durkheim’s problem is that “family relationships have lost their ear-
lier impersonality and have a personal and quite volitional character which
does not fit regulation very well” (147). Note that he thinks that by becoming
more “personal” the family has lost its moral influence.
 Can Morality Be Taught? 99

For Durkheim, regulation and carrying out one’s duties are what moral ed-
ucation is for. All that the modern family can give birth to is “altruistic incli-
nation,” which is based on emotion and sentiment. Much of the writing on
morality today, especially among writers who are influenced by evolutionary
psychology, equates morality and altruism. For Durkheim, the two are very
different. In feminist writing at the end of the twentieth century, a common
complaint was the neglect of compassion and care in theories of moral edu-
cation. Durkheim is aware of these “sentiments.” He just does not think they
are relevant to moral education.
The school is for Durkheim not an extension of the family but its opposite
in moral education. The school is “the locus, par excellence, of moral devel-
opment for children of this age” (19). “We have thought the school the
means of training the child in a collective life different from home life”
(235). The reason why the school stands at the center of moral education fol-
lows from Durkheim’s definition of morality. “We can say that morality con-
sists of a system of rules of action that predetermine conduct. They state how
one must act in given situations; and to behave properly is to obey consci-
entiously” (24).
If the school is the place for moral education, then the schoolteacher is the
primary agent for conveying those rules of conduct. “A rule can scarcely have
any authority other than that which the teacher invests in it—that is to say, the
idea of which he suggests to the children” (154). The schoolteacher is not
only affirmed by Durkheim, he is placed on the high altar. “Just as the priest
is the interpreter of God, he [the teacher] is the interpreter of the great moral
ideas of his time and country” (155).
I imagine that many schoolteachers would be amused by the sacred aura
that Durkheim attributes to the school and its teachers. The school can exer-
cise authority, he says, because of “the feeling that the children have for it;
the way in which they view it as a sacred and inviolable thing quite beyond
their control” (165). Perhaps children approach their first day in elementary
school with reverential awe, but it is difficult to match this attitude with the
ordinary running of schools and the daily toil of its teachers.
It can seem at times that for Durkheim the teaching in school is simply a
priestly overseeing of the ritualistic imposition of rules. But Durkheim
thinks that these rules can be explained and that they make good sense. His
notion of (school) teaching is therefore on the side of rationality and set
against religion: “To teach is neither to preach nor indoctrinate but to ex-
plain” (120). The teacher has to rationally convince the students that the in-
dividual is meant for society; the rules that seem to put limits on a person’s
desires actually lead to fulfillment for the individual. “The school has, above
all, the function of linking the child to this society” (79). Education is not
100 Chapter Five

aimed at individual development; “it is the means by which society perpetu-

ally recreates the conditions of its very existence.”9
There is a remarkable assumption here by Durkheim; it is similar to
Dewey’s that there is a neat correspondence between individual and society.
At times he refers to “societies” as simply groups of individuals (57), but he
also thinks of societies “as empirical and natural as the minerals and organ-
isms” (266). They provide the object for moral action. “To act morally is to
act in terms of the collective interests” (59). While there may be many soci-
eties, Durkheim usually refers to three that are part of social and moral evo-
lution: family, nation, and humanity. These three “may be super-imposed
without excluding one another. Just as each has had its part to play in histor-
ical development, they mutually complement each other in the present” (74).
The problem with the reality of these three societies is that on one side of
the nation is the family, which is inadequate and is subordinate to the next
level; on the other side of the nation, “humanity” seems only to be the name
of an idea or an ideal. There is no “empirical and natural group” called hu-
manity to which the nation bows. That leaves only the nation as the object of
moral devotion. Durkheim should not be burdened with the horrors of
twentieth-century nationalism. Nevertheless, his apotheosis of society and the
identification of society with the nation did not provide protection against the
clash of two or more nations, each claiming a sacred aura.
I have introduced religious terms because Durkheim constantly returns to
the need to replace the sacred with a “quasi-religious” character to morality.
He asks what is it that “merits the respect that the faithful of all religions re-
serve for their Gods?” His answer seems clear and forthright: “One of our
fundamental axioms—perhaps even the fundamental axiom—is that the hu-
man being is the sacred thing par excellence” (107).
One final testing of Durkheim’s view of what moral education is and what
acts as a teacher is his attitude to art and play. It is a point that is in sharp op-
position to Jean Piaget’s starting point for the study of moral development.
Durkheim’s attitude to art is particularly blunt: “If art has a part to play in
moral education, it is an entirely negative role. Art does not contribute to the
formation of moral character” (274). What separates art and morality is the
difference between play and work. Art is merely a game whereas morality is
life in earnest (273).
Durkheim was probably reacting against the German romanticism of the
nineteenth century. A writer such as Friedrich Froebel regarded play as a kind
of mystical experience that taught the mysteries of life. The kindergarten was
Froebel’s invention, a place for the child to play. Maria Montessori, writing
just after Durkheim, agreed with him that play is not a proper educational
tool. The child must learn to work; the human being is homo laborans.10 For
 Can Morality Be Taught? 101

Montessori, life is about labor; for Durkheim, life is following the rules of so-
ciety. “Not therefore by learning to play that special game, art, will we learn
to do our duty” (173).

JEAN PIAGET

Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, is probably the most important figure in the
twentieth-century history of moral education. A paradox arises from the fact
that Piaget never professed to be writing about “moral education.” He wrote,
“I have no opinion on pedagogy. . . . It’s the pedagogue’s job to see how he
can use what we offer.”11 His self-description was genetic psychologist, a
combination of biology and psychology. His constant focus was the parallel
development of the child’s physical and psychological powers. As one aspect
of that work, he wrote a book entitled The Moral Judgment of the Child.12
Moral judgment is distinguishable from moral development, and, even more
clearly, from moral education.
Why then did Piaget become a dominant figure in moral education? The
cause was partly Piaget’s own doing and partly that of his enthusiastic disci-
ples. On his side, he insisted that his study was restricted to following
changes in the child’s logic. But there was no way for him to avoid philo-
sophical and educational implications of that work. While he claimed to have
a “method of inquiry that was independent of all philosophy,”13 it is not dif-
ficult to identify Immanuel Kant’s philosophy underlying his assumptions.
And while having little or nothing to say to “the pedagogue,” he does make
comments on education.
Once Piaget’s work had left his hands, pedagogues, psychologists, lin-
guists, ethicists, and others drew out their own conclusions. The lines sepa-
rating moral judgment, moral development, and moral education became
blurred. One of Piaget’s own principles was that all knowledge is practical.
People who were looking for practical answers in regard to children’s moral
behavior found answers in Piaget even though he did not intend to supply
such answers. We will see that Lawrence Kohlberg, Piaget’s main successor
in the United States, was prominent among those who slid across the bound-
aries from moral reasoning to moral development to moral education.
The Moral Judgment of the Child is an attempt to trace the developing
child’s notions of morality. It is dependent on Piaget’s main body of research
concerning the biological/psychological capacity to make abstract judgments.
In Moral Judgment there is a simple two-stage development of “two morali-
ties”: heteronymous and autonomous (335). At first, the child thinks of rules
as eternal and imposed on humans; therefore the activity of obeying the rules
102 Chapter Five

has a sacred character. Later, the rules are understood to be humanly invented
and to serve the purpose of justice. Rules are now accepted because the child
wills and freely consents to them.
Running through Piaget’s text is a fierce opposition to Durkheim’s Moral
Education. I have said that they agreed on some things, such as an antipathy
toward religion. At first glance, they seem to agree on morality as governed
by rules. Piaget begins his book with the assertion that “all morality consists
in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the
respect which the individual acquires for these rules” (13). That sounds sim-
ilar to Durkheim’s system of rules that a child must learn in order to become
a good member of society. However, Piaget takes the rules in a nearly oppo-
site direction. Rules deserve respect, but ultimately the rules have to be cre-
ated by oneself (in cooperation with others). The rules that Durkheim en-
dorses lead to conformity. Piaget does not say it directly, but he implies that
Durkheim is stuck at the level of the ten-year-old’s attitude to rules.
In one of the places that Piaget makes a general comment about education,
he says that “education for most people means trying to lead the child to re-
semble the typical adult of his society. . . . But for me, education means mak-
ing creators, even if there aren’t many of them, even if the creations of one
are limited by comparison with those of another. But you have to make in-
ventors, innovators, not conformists.”14
Piaget’s animus toward Durkheim comes out in relation to schools and
schoolteachers. Piaget writes that “the school, according to Durkheim, is a
monarchy founded on divine right. We have seen that children are capable of
democracy” (366). For Durkheim, “all authority comes from Society with a
big S; the schoolmaster is the priest who acts as an intermediary between so-
ciety and the child” (361). The metaphor of “priest” is not unfairly introduced
here by Piaget. Durkheim had sacralized Society and its authority embodied
in the school. The schoolteacher was to be respected as a priest who guards
Society’s secrets. Piaget ridicules this idea: “A priest is the last thing a school-
master should be” (361). Piaget’s own choice of metaphor may sound naïve
to many schoolteachers: “[The teacher] should be an elder collaborator, and
if he has it in him, a simple comrade to the children” (364). Despite his pre-
viously cited claim that he has no opinion on pedagogy, he offers a firm opin-
ion here.
In the previous chapter, Dewey described the schoolteacher as one of the
group—a comrade or collaborator. Such a role might sometimes be desirable
but would require special conditions including the size of the group, the age
of the students, and the educational environment. The teacher as a collabora-
tor in a doctoral seminar makes eminent sense. But one need not disagree
 Can Morality Be Taught? 103

with any of Piaget’s finding’s to think that it is a bad idea for a tenth-grade
teacher in an urban high school to try to be a comrade to the students.
The basis of his attack on Durkheim is Piaget’s study of children’s groups.
Moral Judgment opens with a hundred pages of children playing at marbles.
(So much for Durkheim’s morality as serious work rather than play). For the
moral development of the child, Piaget found spontaneously formed chil-
dren’s societies more important than family, school, or nation. It is in children
acting with children that “true discipline comes into being—discipline that
the children themselves have willed and consented to” (364). Durkheim had
said that the individual as such has no authority. Piaget counters with the
claim that the child develops respect for a fair-minded companion in a match
of marbles” (362). Out of that mutual respect is born a legitimate form of au-
thority.
Piaget thus saw his method as preparing children to live in a democratic so-
ciety. “The essence of democracy resides in an attitude towards law as a prod-
uct of the collective will, and not as something emanating from a transcen-
dent will or from the authority established by divine right” (363). The
antireligious formulation of this statement could limit the imagination as to
alternative forms of government. Piaget’s democracy requires children to ac-
cept rules only if they have been “willed and consented to” by themselves.
Piaget’s politics here seem heavily dependent on Rousseau and Kant. In
this philosophy, each man wills his own good as a universal law that every-
one can agree to. The role of a pedagogue in Kant’s philosophy is to bring the
child to the point where he or she can “dare to be wise,” throwing off the ped-
agogue’s control.15 The schoolteacher’s job, beyond arranging groups to fa-
cilitate learning through cooperation, would be to get out of the way so that
the child can be free. “One could develop a marvelous method of participat-
ing education by giving the child the apparatus with which to do experiments
and thus discover a lot of things by himself.” Piaget adds: “Guided, of
course.”16
Piaget’s undercutting of the schoolteacher’s role might suggest a more
prominent role for parents. However, that does not follow. He is skeptical, as
well, of the role that parents play. “The majority of parents are poor psychol-
ogists and give their children the most questionable moral training” (191).
Like many other psychologists of the twentieth century, Piaget seemed to
think he could do a better job of parenting than any parents. Piaget believed
that he had penetrated the secret life of children. In agreement with Freud, he
thought that childhood is a closed world to adults, unless they retained an un-
usual attitude of childlikeness. “That’s the ideal I personally strive for, to re-
main a child to the end.”17
104 Chapter Five

At the end of Moral Judgment, Piaget suggests that there might be a de-
velopment of morality beyond where children take it. He thinks that children
go through a stage of thinking that justice is a simple equality: What is done
to me I should do in return. But some children come to realize the inadequacy
of this logic. One precocious ten-year-old, when asked why he does not re-
taliate for being hit, replies, “there is no end to vengeance” (323). Perhaps
other categories, such as care and compassion, apology and forgiveness, are
part of the moral life. Piaget acknowledges other possibilities but stays with
the children. He is sure that, while morality may develop further, no new
mental “operations” will emerge beyond the power of formal abstraction. The
feminist criticism that began with Carol Gilligan’s work had its roots in this
acknowledgment by Piaget of another language of moral education.18
Piaget’s insistence on staying within the age limits of his study is his
strength but also a danger when others take this part for the whole. Of course,
the tendency to equate education with what happens between the ages of six
and sixteen did not originate with Piaget. There is a problem, nevertheless, if
Piaget’s focus on logical-mathematical judgments between the ages of seven
and twelve is taken to be the whole of “moral education.”
Piaget offers some brilliant insights into the child’s capacity to make ab-
stract judgments and to understand logical principles. Carried into the arena
of moral judgment, he may be right that the best teachers are other children.
But a disparagement of adult influence and adult teaching is not helpful. The
moral life of the child is largely formed before the age of seven. Parental
teaching is never perfect, but it is the major part of early moral development.
Dismissing the parents as poor psychologists does not improve the situation.
Taking seriously the rhetoric that parents are the first and most important
teachers might spark some social, political, and economic help for them and
for their teaching.
One of Piaget’s important assumptions is that language follows upon logic
not vice versa. “Linguistic progress is not responsible for logical or opera-
tional progress. It is rather the other way around. The logical or operational
level is likely to be responsible for a more sophistical language level.”19 It is
a principle that cannot be proved and one that is the basis for widespread crit-
icism of Piaget’s work. His primacy of logic has reverberations in what he
omits and how his studies are carried out. Of the criticism of his work on this
point,20 I note only that Piaget’s assumption downplays the parent’s role as
moral teacher. Other researchers argue that what happens to a child before it
has developed any logical powers is crucial. How the child learns language
from the parents is a major part of moral education.
Within the question and answer method itself, Piaget’s assumption of
logic’s primacy has been criticized.21 Questions addressed to a child are, of
 Can Morality Be Taught? 105

course, stated in language and the language has connotations and affective
meanings for different children. Some researchers have tried replicating Pi-
aget’s experiments with language that is more child-friendly, and they
achieved different results. For example, asking a child whether a policeman
could see a child in a pictured situation rather than asking whether A is visi-
ble to B makes more sense to the child.22 When the child is given a picture of
six horses and two cows and is asked if there are more horses or animals, the
child’s problem may not be its lack of logic. It may be wondering why this
adult is asking such a senseless question. A teacher who knows the student
well and has plenty of experience with the child’s language would be in the
best position to ask questions about logic.
The need for teachers does not end at age twelve, sixteen, or twenty-one.
Rousseau said that the main work of the teacher begins at about age twelve.
As I noted in chapter 3, Emile’s education hinged on the ethics he would
learn at about age fifteen. Piaget may be right that moral instruction to eight-
year-olds is ineffective or obstructive. But that tells us very little about the
role of the teacher and the place of teaching in a person’s moral education.
Good examples are powerful teachers throughout life. And when ready for
it, instruction in ethics and moral philosophy can help a person to decide
how to live.

LAWRENCE KOHLBERG

For some decades of the twentieth century in the United States, the name of
Lawrence Kohlberg was practically interchangeable with “moral education.”
So much was this true that those who opposed Kohlberg were hesitant to call
what they were doing moral education. That hesitancy persists to today even
though the “cognitive-developmental theory” of Kohlberg has long since
given up its dominance in this area.
Kohlberg only claimed to be “putting patches” on Piaget’s theory.23 How-
ever, he engaged in a much more ambitious project than Piaget and he made
more grandiose claims. In one respect, Kohlberg was just extending Piaget’s
theory through the teen years but that was something that Piaget thought was
not possible. Piaget had relied on there being two stages in the child’s ability
to make abstract judgments. After that there would be no new cognitive “op-
erations.”
Kohlberg’s aim was to construct a system that applied to human develop-
ment as a whole. That would include an individual’s lifelong development. It
also meant a claim to “cultural universality.” Kohlberg was a cognitive psy-
chologist, but he did not shy away from commenting on moral development,
106 Chapter Five

moral behavior, and moral education. That meant blithely disregarding the
boundary between moral reasoning (that is, reasoning about moral issues) and
other aspects of human life. When questioned about the scope of his claims,
he pointed to research that he hoped would eventually support his claims.
“Although we cannot yet be sure that the stimulation of the development of
moral judgment will result in moral conduct, research indicating considerable
correspondence between level of judgment and conduct in children provides
some optimism on this score.”24 This presumed connection seemed to disre-
gard several millennia of human experience of people who could see the good
but did the opposite.
For the “stimulation of the development of moral judgment,” Kohlberg saw
the school, as central. He was closer to Durkheim than to Piaget on the mis-
sion of the school, but he sided with Piaget in thinking that the role of the
schoolteacher should be reduced. He did not think that it was necessary to in-
troduce moral education into the school because it is already there. He claimed
that “the school cannot be ‘value neutral’ but must be engaged in moral edu-
cation. . . . All schools are necessarily involved in moral education.”25 The
school’s mission is the “transmission of the values of justice on which the so-
ciety is founded,”26 but the school is not currently fulfilling that mission.
Kohlberg said there were two ways that schools were already engaged in
inadequate moral education; he offered a third way that would be effective.
The first approach depended on the “moralizing” of teachers. Every school-
teacher exemplifies a moral stance in life. The teacher also carries into his or
her instruction references to morality. While students might be positively in-
fluenced by such moralizing, the approach was haphazard and unfocused.
Moral education ought not to be dependent on the views of one or another
teacher.27
A more systematic approach constituted a second form of moral education
but Kohlberg had no use for it. He called it the “bag of virtues” approach. The
usual way to refer to this approach was “character education.” There had been
great enthusiasm for character education in the early twentieth century. By
1960, it had almost disappeared. As I describe later, character education has
also been enthusiastically endorsed at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury. Proponents of the new character education either think that the twenti-
eth-century’s disillusionment with it can be overcome or else many people are
unaware of the earlier history.
Kohlberg did not have much difficulty in shooting holes through character
education. It consists, he said, in a list of virtues: honesty, truthfulness, re-
sponsibility, loyalty, and so on. Almost everyone agrees on the desirability of
these traits. But as soon as one comes to concrete cases, there is no agreement
as to what these high-sounding words mean in practice. More important, try-
 Can Morality Be Taught? 107

ing to instill individual virtues has little discernible effect on the development
of character. Kohlberg regularly cited the major study at the end of the 1920s,
Studies in the Nature of Character, which sought to establish the basis of
character education but came up empty.28 There was never the same enthusi-
asm for character education after that, but the school was still thought to be
the place for instilling virtues.
From the time of his doctoral dissertation in 1958, Kohlberg presented a
new approach to moral education. He believed that his approach would be ef-
fective and measurably so. Theories that allow for a neat classification of
everyone are almost irresistible to administrators. Furthermore, Kohlberg’s
theory promised to overcome a liberal/conservative split in dealing with
morality, a split that was widening in the 1960s.
Kohlberg’s content appealed to conservatives; at least there was content.
One might think it was a minimum of content but the crucial point was that
the system steered people to a well-defined endpoint. In contrast, what at-
tracted liberals was Kohlberg’s open-ended method. The point of discussing
moral dilemmas was not to find the right answer; it was to develop one’s rea-
soning powers. The teacher’s moral views became irrelevant. Everyone could
endorse Kohlberg’s theory. Of course, a system that is approved by strongly
disagreeing groups can also draw the most disappointment as the different as-
pects of the theory become evident.
Kohlberg’s writing was a stream of essays that reiterated the basic theory.
I will note a few essays that carried surprises, but even these essays did little
to shake up the Kohlbergian system as it was elaborated in the early 1960s
and was repeated in essays until his untimely death in 1987.
The theory posited three levels of moral development, each divided into
two stages. The first two levels roughly corresponded to Piaget’s two moral-
ities without the strict correlation to age level that concerned Piaget. Kohlberg
was concerned with how people actually thought about justice rather than
whether they were just capable of thinking that way. He claimed that once a
person reached a particular level of thinking, he or she would not regress to a
lower state. As was constantly said, the stages were hierarchical and differ-
entiated. “Stages form an order of increasingly differentiated and integrated
structures to fulfill a common function. Accordingly, higher stages displace
(or rather, reintegrate) the structures found at lower stages.”29
He assumed that this movement up a ladder is what is common across cul-
tures. “A culturally universal definition of morality can be arrived at if moral-
ity is thought of as the form of moral judgments instead of the content of spe-
cific moral beliefs.”30 The universality thus turns out to be the increasing
isolation of a principle of justice or equality: “Treat every man’s claim im-
partially regardless of the man.”31
108 Chapter Five

The value of life has to be disentangled from all its relations, not only those
of status and property values (stage one) but from “the actual affection of oth-
ers for him (stage three).32 The theory here comes close to ancient Stoicism
in which Epictetus cautioned: “If you kiss your wife or your child, say that
you are kissing a human being, for when it dies you will not be upset.”33 The
Kohlbergian system would seem to be culturally universal in breadth but not
so in depth. As it widens in concern it becomes thinner in content.
Kohlberg acknowledged that “preliterate villages” and “tribal communi-
ties” fell off his scope of universality.34 I would guess that those people were
more interested in caring for a family member than taking a stand on human
rights. Perhaps Kohlberg was right in claiming that individuals and societies
develop together “moving toward greater justice in terms of equity or recog-
nition of universal human rights.”35 But it is at least debatable whether ac-
knowledgment of human rights and morally good behavior go together, either
for nations or for individuals in those nations.
I have said that Kohlberg’s essays were highly repetitive. The essays on the
theory rolled out the predictable, standard phrases. Occasionally, however,
there was a surprising admission as, for example, in the essay just cited in
which he acknowledged that his universal system was tied closely to a West-
ern idea of democratic progress. Sometimes what is more amazing than the
admission itself is that Kohlberg and followers went on as if nothing surpris-
ing had been admitted. I offer a few key examples.
Kohlberg always insisted that his stages went straight up. If you get to a
higher rung on the ladder, you do not go back down. With that assumption,
Kohlberg had to confront an anomaly. When some students that he had iden-
tified as stage four changed, they did not go to stage five but seemed to
regress to stage two. Some of the hedonism of stage two reemerged, but struc-
turally they were still at or beyond stage four.
What the data called into question was the very image and idea of progress
on which the theory was based. Perhaps the cognitive and affective did not
fall into place together. Is it possible that moral development can have a cycli-
cal character? Could the medieval principle be correct that the further along
toward moral perfection you go, the more danger you meet, making the cor-
ruption of the best the worst?36 Rather than entertain any drastic change in im-
agery, Kohlberg invented a stage four and a half. The apparent reversal of
stage four is to a stage four and a half rather than to stage five. The logic was
not clear, but it was needed to shore up the system.37
A second surprise in Kohlberg’s string of essays was a short piece in The
Humanist entitled “Moral Development Reappraised.”38 After two decades of
denouncing religious indoctrination, Kohlberg decided that a little indoctri-
nation might not be a bad thing for some people. He seemed surprised to dis-
 Can Morality Be Taught? 109

cover that some young people with developed moral reasoning powers would
still lie and steal. In a world of lying and stealing, he wrote, not many people
are going to arrive at universal morality.
The role of the schoolteacher is here reversed from facilitator of group dis-
cussions to one who enforces the truth. Kohlberg had discovered what most
religions are keenly aware of, namely, the frailty and imperfection of all hu-
man morality. A closer study of religion, however, might have revealed that
indoctrination is not the primary instrument for moral influence. Religious
communities use a variety of rituals that link individuals to the community.
The sermon as a way of instilling doctrines or teachings is only a secondary
instrument.
The reaction of some of Kohlberg’s disciples to this essay was shock and
disbelief. One of his best known followers, James Rest, described his reaction
this way: “You are the first mate on a ship, taking your tour of duty at the
wheel; you have been alerted that your course is about to take you into stormy
seas, and then you hear that the captain of the ship has just jumped ship and
is headed in another boat in the opposite direction.”39 James Rest rather
quickly reconsidered the whole scene and decided that Kohlberg’s cognitive
developmental theory was still his main concern. Rest developed an opera-
tional way to evaluate Kohlberg’s stages, an instrument used in many doctoral
dissertations.
The 1978 essay did not come completely out of nowhere. In the late 1970s,
Kohlberg had begun to talk about the environment that has to embody justice.
He began speaking about the need for a school to be a “just community.”40
This step required a change of approach to teaching: “Our cluster approach is
not merely Socratic and developmental; it is indoctrinative.”41
Kohlberg saw himself moving from the Socrates of The Meno to the
Socrates of the Republic.42 Creating ways to make the school and classroom
be teachers of justice increasingly occupied Kohlberg. He had discovered the
limits of psychology, but his talk of “just community” did not easily flow
from his psychological theory. He continued to put forth his theory of stages
and that continued to be the interest of most of his followers.
A final surprise from Kohlberg was the sudden appearance of a stage
seven. The answer to the question “why be moral” was answered at each
stage by the rung above. The logical problem was how to answer that ques-
tion at stage six. In a few essays in the 1980s, Kohlberg proposed that above
the morality of individual rights was an all embracing cosmic unity. Stage
seven was “the sense of being a part of the whole of life and the adoption of
a cosmic as opposed to a universal humanistic Stage six perspective.”43
The troublesome word in that description is “opposed.” Instead of extend-
ing the straight line of development a rung higher, this new stage reverses and
110 Chapter Five

undercuts the movement in the other six stages. Not only are the rights of the
individual not given further protection, the individual disappears. There is
once again a touch of Stoicism here; the individual has to accept its place in
the great cosmic unity. Not surprisingly, the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aure-
lius is one of the thinkers that Kohlberg invokes in support of his seventh
stage.
Kohlberg is not the first rationalistic thinker to end in mysticism. In his sys-
tem, the individual had already been submerged within a principle of justice.
It is an understandable step for the process to end up in complete unity, as in
Stoicism or Buddhism. It is surprising, however, that the one writer Kohlberg
cites at length is Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest who tried to join evo-
lutionary science and mystical theology. Kohlberg’s reading of one of
Chardin’s many works, The Divine Milieu, is skewed by his own interest.
Chardin pointed out in the introduction that the whole of the book is based on
theology. His talk of cosmic unity revolved around the Christ figure and the
individual’s relation to Christ. Kohlberg might have been wiser to stay with
Marcus Aurelius or with Benedict Spinoza whom he also refers to but only in
passing.
Like his other surprises, Kohlberg’s dabbling in religious mysticism did not
have much impact on people who were enthusiastic about “moral develop-
ment” as Kohlberg had first conceived it. Kohlberg continued to practically
own the term moral education until his death.
The most formidable challenge Kohlberg faced in his later years was the
feminist criticism that started with Carol Gilligan’s book, In a Different Voice.
The book obviously struck a chord among many women. Kohlberg’s theory
of development, which tended to find women at lower stages than men, was
seen as male-biased. Other writers joined Gilligan in claiming that women
spoke with a moral voice different from that of men. Gilligan retained some
of Kohlberg’s language, at least at the beginning, but she contrasted her con-
cern with responsibility to Kohlberg’s emphasis on rights.44
Gilligan’s original study was based on interviews with women who were
considering abortion. She derived from her interview data a three-stage the-
ory of development, a movement not up a ladder but a circling toward an in-
tegral self. At the first level, women have a tenuous concept of self; the ques-
tion is how to get rid of a problem. At a second level, goodness is defined by
self-sacrifice. At a third level, the principle is care for everyone—including
oneself.45
Gilligan could not replace Kohlberg’s stages. The greater significance of
her work was to open the door to women writing on morality and ethics with
a new set of categories. Care, compassion, and a different sense of responsi-
bility began to be taken more seriously in ethical discussions.46 We are prob-
 Can Morality Be Taught? 111

ably still at an early stage of a revolution in the very meaning of ethics which
will eventually reflect women’s experience as much as men’s. The new con-
cerns helped in the transition to a post-Kohlberg idea of moral education.

FROM VALUES TO CHARACTER EDUCATION

Kohlberg’s interest in “just community” schools formed a link to the next

wave of moral education that began emerging in the 1980s. This part of the
story is more difficult to recount because it is less dependent on a single the-
orist. Partly for that reason it is a more diffuse movement that goes under the
name of character education. Thomas Lickona, perhaps the best known ad-
vocate, proclaimed in the 1990s that “the deliberate effort to teach right and
wrong—through good example, the curriculum, and the total school ethos—
is called ‘character education’, arguably the fastest-growing education reform
movement in America today.”47 Lickona’s writing, starting in the early 1980s,
was a point of origin for the movement. William Bennett’s surprising best-
seller, The Book of Virtues, was a sign that a cultural shift had occurred.48
The character education movement is usually interpreted as a conservative
reaction that fitted snugly with the political change embodied in the presi-
dency of Ronald Reagan. There is some truth in that association, but the his-
tory is more complicated. Proponents of character education do not see their
work as a simple reaction or a swing of the pendulum. Instead, while they do
see the movement as restoring past wisdom, they also see it as a comprehen-
sive, if somewhat eclectic, approach to moral education. “Character develop-
ment is ready to select from many disciplines and use many metaphors—the
growth metaphor, the Skinnerian metaphor, the fill-the-jug metaphor.”49
The attempt to include disparate approaches from the past can be seen in
the movement’s embrace of both “virtue” and “value,” two terms with very
different histories. Recent history involved a curious and radical shift in the
meaning of “value,” so that it has become a synonym for “virtue” rather than
an alternative.
Virtue is an ancient term traceable back to Plato and Aristotle, with trans-
lation by Cicero. In the middle ages, Christian thinkers bought into the whole
Greek package of virtues. As a result, many people today have a religious
connotation for the term virtue. All talk of virtue raises suspicions that reli-
gious advocates are trying to reimpose a Christian moral code on the whole
population. The 1960s was in one way the rebelling against a remnant of the
moral code that still held sway. The most obvious and dramatic revolt con-
cerned sexual morality, but there was a general questioning of all forms of au-
thority. Rather than one virtue being under attack, the very concept of virtue
112 Chapter Five

was often ridiculed. Kohlberg’s reference to the “bag of virtues” was a dis-
missal of an idea whose time, he believed, had come and gone.
As I noted earlier, Kohlberg often referred to the Hartshorne and May study
that could not find any connection between the attempt to instill virtues and
the development of character. Specific habits learned in relation to specific
situations did not carry over.50 Toward the very end of his life, Kohlberg was
willing to reopen the question of habit as conceived by Aristotle, but he still
opposed the idea of a bag or long list of virtues.51
The alternative to virtue in the 1960s was value, a peculiar word with a
much shorter history than virtue. Some German philosophers in the nine-
teenth century had used the word in contrast to “fact.” Many other philoso-
phers adopted this contrast between fact and value. The world of modern sci-
ence may have control of the facts, but it cannot touch values which depend
on the will rather than the mind. The obvious danger in making moral values
impervious to scientific criticism is to isolate morality so that it has no give
and take with an individual’s ordinary concerns and with the politics, eco-
nomics, and science of the public world.
Value has a history that precedes its philosophical adoption. The word was
largely under the control of economists who to this day presume ownership
of the term. For example, in the New York Review, economist Robert Solow
commented, “everyday life is about prices, not values.” A letter writer ob-
jected, recounting how he had paid a higher price for a Honda than a Ford be-
cause he judged the Honda to be a better value in that class of car. Solow
replied that the letter writer “did not make his judgment by comparing the
number of hours of standard labor embodied directly or indirectly in the
Honda and the Ford, nor would he have changed his mind if the Ford had
turned out to represent more labor.” Solow concluded: “As we know, to our
political sorrow, a word like ‘value’ can have many meanings and nonmean-
ings.”52
Solow bemoans the fact that the rest of us do not know the economist’s
meaning of value which indeed does go back many centuries. The letter
writer may have been employing a less precise meaning of value, but it is a
clearer meaning in contemporary speech. Solow’s meaning stems from the at-
tempt of economists to tie the subjective act of valuing to objective criteria.
“The number of hours of standard labor” embodied in a product does not
make as much sense as it once did. What is the replacement? Is there some-
thing in the world of objects called “values?” The act indicated by the verb
valuing, or evaluating, is clear enough but what is to be made of the noun?
The struggle of economists to provide a quantitative anchor for value is rel-
evant to the philosophical and educational use of the term. There was a dra-
matic eruption of talk about values in the 1960s. Everyone was called upon
 Can Morality Be Taught? 113

to create his or her own set of values. Gertrude Himmelfarb, gazing back
wistfully at the nineteenth century, complained: “So long as morality was
couched in the language of virtue, it had a firm resolute character. . . . One
cannot say of virtues, as one can of values, that anyone’s virtues are as good
as anyone else’s, or that anyone has a right to his own virtues.”53
Lawrence Kohlberg used the word “value” fairly frequently but without
any special attention to its meaning. It simply functioned in his vocabulary as
an alternative to virtue. He did resist being grouped, as he sometimes was,
with a movement called “values clarification” because he insisted that his
cognitive developmental theory referred to a natural development, not simply
subjective attitudes.
A “values clarification” movement was all the rage for a few years in the
1960s.54 The second word in the phrase, clarification, was as important as the
first. Everyone has his or her own values; they cannot be taught. But each stu-
dent can and should clarify what values they have. Becoming conscious of the
values one is acting on is a main task of education.
Any educational movement based on that premise was bound to be thin and
brief. With just one trip around the lecture circuit, advocates of values clari-
fication exhausted what was to be said. A book entitled Values and Teaching
provides a summary of the short-lived movement. The book has a chapter on
“teaching for value clarity,” but there is not much there on teaching. In con-
trast, values are everywhere in the book. Values are whatever students choose.
The authors go so far as to say that “it is entirely possible that children will
choose not to develop values. It is the teacher’s responsibility to support this
choice also.”55 Apparently, choosing not to have values is a value, too.
The authors do reach a limit to their openness with the question “what if a
student values intolerance or thievery?” They reply “we have to respect his
right to decide upon that value . . . but we must often deny him the right to
carry the value to action.”56 Their admission that some behavior cannot be
permitted because it interferes with the freedom or rights of others seems to
undermine the whole point of clarifying the values embodied in one’s actions.
If the student says, “I like to steal candy from the store,” the teacher has to
say that’s a good value for you but just stop doing it.
When the authors reach this limit to the clarification of values they do not
reconsider their assumptions about teaching. They do not conclude that, while
students clarifying what they value in life can be a helpful pedagogical tech-
nique, it has to be set within a discussion of judging right from wrong or
teaching people how to distinguish right from wrong.
In the 1960s, “value” resided on the left side of the political spectrum. The
fact that it could mean anything you choose was seen as liberating. It repre-
sented freedom from the encumbrances of religion, tradition, and any moral
114 Chapter Five

code. Of course, with that much openness any group could take hold of the
term and make it theirs. A few clever tacticians on the political right saw that
opening. Why not take this favorite word of the left, which has no content,
and fill it with our meaning? The left will be left speechless up against their
own word.
And so the word values made its journey across the political world in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. The change was signaled by often adding the ad-
jective “family.” That word was highly ambiguous in the setting, but it was
simply a stand-in for a clearly defined political agenda (abortion, homosexu-
ality, prayer in school, respect for the flag, and so on). The move was suc-
cessful beyond what anyone could have imagined. Today, any organization
with the word values in the title is likely to be on the conservative right; while
on the left, political leaders keep fidgeting over their values problem, still not
sure what the term means.
The character education movement in embracing both virtue and value
uses a rhetoric that is difficult to penetrate. It tries not to repudiate anything
except sin, but the result is a laundry list of values/virtues. No one is likely to
object to what the Character Counts organization calls the “six pillars”: trust-
worthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. Likewise,
the eleven principles of the Character Education Partnership do not evoke
controversy.57 But what is one to make of the interrelation of these
virtues/values/principles? What is the basis of judgment when there are diffi-
cult choices? Most human choices are not between the good and the bad, but
between the greater of two goods or the lesser of two evils.
The character education movement lives on the computer more than in
books. One of the striking features of the many websites is the selling of
booklets along with CDs, films, banners, and anything else a school might
need for a successful program. The word “free” is liberally used, but the price
tag eventually shows up. Perhaps slick advertising and big money are un-
avoidable today, but there does seem to be a tension for organizations so in-
sistent on their guardianship of morality. Surely a subject for moral education
is the place of big corporations and their control of personal life. At some
point, character education’s cozy relation to the corporate world becomes a
conflict of interests.
The connection of value to money has never disappeared and may have re-
asserted itself in recent years. In the 2004 presidential campaign, Al Gore said
in an interview: “If the only tool you use for measuring value is a price tag or
monetization, then those values that are not easily monetized begin to look
like they have no value.”58 Gore was right but he should not have been sur-
prised that our values are “monetized” since that is the origin of the term
value.
 Can Morality Be Taught? 115

It would be unfair to characterize the whole movement and its sincere ad-
vocates of being subservient to economics. Still, the lists of the six, ten, or
twelve rules, pillars, or principles often seem innocent of the bruising economic
struggles that are the context of education. True, the terrible crime statistics
and divorce rate are regularly cited to show the need for character education.
But the response is in a rhetoric that seems to turn inward on individual
virtue.
As an example, take the term responsibility, one of the favorites that shows
up on everyone’s list. Is there anyone arguing for irresponsibility? It would
appear that there is no need to raise critical questions about this idea that
everyone agrees upon. But is it possible that responsibility is mainly a
nineteenth-century virtue that politicians and business leaders love to talk
about as a way to avoid doing anything to improve the lives of people. Is it
possible that many people are already trying to take too much responsibility
urged on by religious and secular preachers that say we should be responsi-
ble for ourselves, for others, for the whole world?
When a politician says, “I take full responsibility for my action,” it is usu-
ally a sure sign that no actions will result. The Character Counts booklet says,
“being responsible means being in charge of our choices and thus, our lives.”
Really? Is anyone in charge of all his or her choices? Does that mean that
choice puts one in charge of his or her life? Thomas Lickona’s Educating for
Character is subtitled How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibil-
ity. There is barely a paragraph in which the meaning of responsibility is set
out but that is about par for the literature.59
The point is not to be cynical about responsibility and all the other prized
virtues/values. On the contrary, asking provocative questions is the way to
honor such ideals rather than assuming that “implementation” is the problem.
Especially when everyone seems to agree on the “value” of a proposed idea,
suspicions should be aroused.
Thomas Lickona admirably wrote a book about character education in the
family before writing a book on the school.60 Anyone who is serious about the
formation of character would look mainly at the family and the social and
economic pressures on parents in today’s world. If like Piaget and Kohlberg,
one’s interest is moral reasoning and judgment, then the family plays a sec-
ondary role. The character education movement wisely tries to include the
parents as cooperators.
The language, unfortunately, is still against real partnership. The move-
ment has restored an active role to teachers, but that means schoolteachers.
The eleven principles of Character Education Partnership include: “A
school’s character education mission must state explicitly what is true: Par-
ents are the first and most important educators.” That is the standard rhetoric
116 Chapter Five

of our society, but it does not carry over into talking about parental teaching
and school teaching as a partnership.61 The movement remains school-
centered and the result is that the schoolteacher is given an impossible task.
The school is still assumed, as it was for Durkheim, the “locus par excel-
lence” of moral education. But whereas for Durkheim teachers were simply
to explain morality with their aura of authority, today’s teachers are asked to
be parent, friend, guide, collaborator, teammate, and counselor. Any of these
roles may come into play, especially with very young children. But what is
put forward as the soft, all encompassing mission of the school does not spec-
ify what teachers should and should not do in the classroom.

ACADEMIC SUBJECT?

Is “character education” a course that can be taught in the classroom? The lit-
erature sometimes seems to say so, though more often than not there is no dis-
tinction made between what the school is doing and what is appropriate as
subject matter for academic study. In his 1997 State of the Union Address,
President Bill Clinton said: “Character education must be taught in our
schools. We must teach our children to be good citizens.”62 Did he mean the
schools should teach character or character education? Certainly it is desir-
able that schools turn out “good citizens,” but can that be done by “teaching
character education”?
In the 1890s when the country was especially concerned about the schools
turning out good (hard working, tax paying) citizens, a subject called
“civics” was invented and put into most school curricula. A course on civics
was usually a set of sermons that probably turned away many people from
engagement in civic affairs. Good citizenship is more likely helped by
worthwhile courses in history, literature, politics, and other topics that are
not so easily subject to sermonizing. The classroom instructors need some
substance to work on, material that invites critical questions and different
points of view.
Thomas Lickona writes, “in its underlying philosophy character education
reasserts the idea of objective morality. . . . That adultery, infanticide, torture,
date rape, and cheating are morally wrong is objectively true—even if many
people don’t realize it.”63 Perhaps, as he says, we need “objective” morality,
but it cannot be taught while pretending that the twentieth century did not
happen. Does “objective” in his statement refer to “objects,” such as rules that
are separate from human beings or does “objective” mean the external pole
of a subjective-objective relation? If one assumes the latter meaning, then all
moral rules require (subjective) interpretation. Adultery, infanticide, and so
 Can Morality Be Taught? 117

forth are in most people’s vocabulary wrong by definition but that does not
get us far educationally.
Here is where a clear distinction between different kinds of teaching is cru-
cial. The school and its faculty may be trying to provide morally good exam-
ples and a morally uplifting atmosphere. That is the way a school might be
able to teach morality. But classroom instruction in morality has a different
form and purpose. Classroom teachers have to engage in the politically
volatile practice of raising questions about the supposed social consensus on
values, virtues, and vices. Until recently, for example, “everybody knew” that
homosexuality is wrong.
The classroom is a place to explore the history of moral rules about abortion,
drugs, torture, or pornography. The nineteenth century gave us a separate part
of life called “morality” and with that many of our names for what is “objec-
tively” bad. Of course, letting young people find out that “morality” involves
class, racial, and gender biases can be dangerous. But a moral education that
wishes to get good behavior without acknowledging the ambiguities in a soci-
ety’s judgments of “objective” morality is not facing today’s problems.
The most commonly used term for an academic study of morality is
“ethics.” There is an ambiguity in the meaning of ethics that goes back as far
as Aristotle; originally, the word simply meant practices or customs. Varia-
tions on that meaning have never disappeared. However, in the United States
since the beginning of the twentieth century, ethics has been the name for an
academic subject in colleges and professional schools. A full course in ethics
might not be warranted in high school, but some academic inquiry into ethics
can begin these days in the fourth grade.
In teaching ethics the point is not to tell students what is right and wrong
but to help them to understand morality. A course in ethics might raise ques-
tions about what business or political leaders are doing; it might even raise
questions about what the school is doing. The character education movement
may represent progress in giving more respect to teaching and teachers. But
it still lacks some of the most elementary distinctions about the different
forms of teaching.

NOTES

1. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education (New York: Free Press, 1961).

2. Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1968), 72.
3. Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools (New York: Praeger, 1971), 40.
4. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990).
118 Chapter Five

5. Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1968), 125.
6. Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1990), 116.
7. Durkheim, Moral Education, 3. Numbers in parentheses within the text in this
section are from this work
8. Emile Durkheim, Education and Sociology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956), 91.
9. Durkheim, Education and Society, 79.
10. Maria Montessori, Education for a New World (New York: ABC–Clio, 1989).
11. Jean-Claude Bringuier, Conversations with Jean Piaget (University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 131.
12. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: Collier Books,
1962). Numbers in parentheses in this section are from this edition.
13. Jean Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (New York: Meridian Books,
1965), 24.
14. Bringuier, Conversations, 132.
15. Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (London: Collier Books, 1990).
16. Bringuier, Conversations, 131.
17. Bringuier, Conversations, 115.
18. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1982).
19. Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder The Psychology of the Child (New York: Ba-
sic Books, 1969), 14.
20. Susan Sugarman, Piaget’s Construction of the Child’s Reality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987); Linda Siege and Charles Brainerd, eds., Alterna-
tives to Piaget (New York: Academic Press, 1978).
21. See Margaret Boden, Jean Piaget (New York: Viking, 1980), 159–60.
22. Margaret Donaldson, Children’s Minds (New York: Norton, 1978), 68.
23. A speech before the American Psychological Association in 1978; see Psy-
chology Today, 12 (Feb. 1979): 57.
24. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education and the Pub-
lic Schools: A Developmental View,” in Religion and Public Education, ed. Theodore
Sizer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 179.
25. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 166–67.
26. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 165.
27. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 167.
28. Hugh Hatshorne and Mark May, Studies in the Nature of Character, 3 vols.
(New York: Macmillan, 1928–1930).
29. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Continuities and Discontinuities in Childhood and Adult
Development Revised—Again” in The Psychology of Moral Development (San Fran-
cisco, Calif.: Harper and Row, 1984), 14.
30. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 178.
31. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Education for Justice: A Modern Statement of the Pla-
tonic View,” in Moral Education: Five Lectures, ed. Theodore Sizer and Nancy Sizer
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 70.
 Can Morality Be Taught? 119

32. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 178.

33. Epictetus, The Enchiridion (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983),
no. 3.
34. Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Education,” 170.
35. Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Future of Liberalism as the Dominant Ideology of
the West,” in Moral Development and Politics, ed. Richard Wilson and Gordon Scho-
chet (New York: Praeger, 1979), 62.
36. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II. 73. 10.
37. Kohlberg, “Continuities and Discontinuities,” 192.
38. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Education Reappraised,” The Humanist, 38 (Nov.
1978): 13–15.
39. James Rest “Basic Issues in Evaluating Moral Education Programs,” in Eval-
uating Moral Development, ed. Lisa Kuhmerker and others (Schenectady, N.Y.: Char-
acter Research, 1980), 5.
40. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Just Community Approach to Corrections (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Educational Research Foundation, 1973); see also “High School De-
mocracy and Educating for a Just Society,” in Moral Education, ed. Ralph Mosher
(New York: Praeger, 1980), 20–57.
41. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Educating for a Just Society: An Updated and Revised
Argument,” in Moral Development, Moral Education and Kohlberg, ed. Brenda Mun-
sey (Birmingham, Ala.: Religious Education Press, 1980), 457.
42. Clark Power, Ann Higgins, Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Habit of the Common
Life: Building Character through Democratic Community Schools,” in Moral Devel-
opment and Character Education: A Dialogue, ed. Larry Nucci (Berkeley, Calif.: Mc-
Cutchan, 1989), 137.
43. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Development, Religious Thinking and the Ques-
tion of a Seventh Stage,” in The Philosophy of Moral Development (New York:
Harper and Row, 1981), 311–72.
44. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 73.
45. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 75–82.
46. Examples of how women are changing the face of ethics are: Annette Baier,
Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Eve Brown-
ing Cole and Susan Coultrap, Explorations in Feminist Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992); Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory
and International Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999); Martha Nussbaum,
Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press, 2007).
47. Thomas Lickona “The Case for Character Education, Tikkun, 12 (1997): 22.
48. William Bennett, The Book of Virtues (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1993).
49. Kevin Ryan, “In Defense of Character Education,” in Moral Development and
Character Education, 14.
50. Hawthorne and May, Studies in the Nature of Character, III, 373.
51. Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg, “The Habit of the Common Life.”
52. Robert Solow, “Letters,” New York Review of Books, 11 November 2006: 26.
120 Chapter Five

53. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues

to Modern Values (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
54. Sidney Simon, Leland Howe, and Howard Kirschenbaum, Values Clarification
(New York: Hart, 1972).
55. Louis Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sidney Simon, Values and Teaching (Colum-
bus, Ohio: Merrill, 1966), 47.
56. Raths, Harmin, and Simon, Values and Teaching, 227.
57. Michael Josephson, Making Ethical Decisions (Los Angeles: Josephson Insti-
tute of Ethics, 2002); Thomas Lickona, Eric Schaps, Catherine Lewis, Eleven Princi-
ples of Character Education (Washington, D.C.: Character Education Partnership,
2007).
58. Interview with David Remnick in The New Yorker, 13 July 2004, 67.
59. Thomas Lickona, Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Re-
spect and Responsibility (New York: Bantam Press, 1992), 41.
60. Thomas Lickona, Raising Good Children: From Birth through the Teenage
Years (New York: Bantam, 1994).
61 William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York: Si-
mon and Schuster, 1992), 255–56.
62. New York Times, 5 February 1997, A21.
63. Thomas Lickona, “The Case for Character Education,” 23.
 Chapter Six

Can Religion Be Taught?

Two facts about the United States are widely acknowledged: First, on any
scale of national religiosity (belief in God, prayer, attendance at religious ser-
vices), the United States ranks near the top; second, there is a scandalous ig-
norance of religion, both an individual’s own religion and the religion of oth-
ers.1 This combination is dangerous in relation to public policy. For example,
a president could plunge the country into war under the cover of religious
rhetoric. Carey McWilliams has written: “In an era when religion and morals
are less a matter of habits and givens, religious education is a critical part of
civic education; secularity calls for schooling in the sacred.”2

THE PROBLEM

A major part of the problem is that a comprehensive religious education does

not exist. Furthermore, there is no discussion of religious education in the
public arena. When religious education is referred to, it is assumed to be the
task of church, synagogue, mosque, and temple, but those institutions do not
use “religious education” for the formation of their members. Each of the re-
ligions has its own intramural language of education. This focus of religious
groups on the beliefs and practices of their own members is understandable.
But where then are the other key elements of education in religious matters
that today’s enlightened citizen needs? The logical answer would seem obvi-
ous: Schools that are called public.
The immediate reaction to this suggestion is likely to be that religious ed-
ucation in state schools is unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court has never
addressed the topic of religious education. While some elements of religious

121
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education do not belong in state schools, the same is true of education in most
of the important areas of life. The public school cannot and should not try to
be the sole educator in politics, sex, morals, economics, and much else. Co-
operation between the school and other educational agencies, starting with
the family, is indispensable. The classroom is only a part of education, but it
is a crucial part for today’s citizenry.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, many leading educators and
politicians recognized the need for something new: religious education. It
would encompass the several major religions of the United States. Equally
important, it was to include public education along with education by reli-
gious institutions. The impressive gathering of four hundred national leaders
in 1903 included forty-five university presidents, prominent politicians, many
public school administrators, and religious officials. The ambitious project of
the Religious Education Association was “to inspire the educational forces of
our country with the religious ideal; to inspire the religious forces of our
country with the educational ideal.”3
For a variety of reasons this religious education has remained an unrealized
ideal. At its earliest stage of development, the Religious Education Associa-
tion absorbed the assumptions of liberal Protestantism, something that tended
to drive away Roman Catholics, Jews, and conservative Protestants. Later, it
was the economic depression in the 1930s that undermined hopes for the
“professionalization” of religious education in both church and public
schools. And then the reaction against liberal theology that hit the United
States after World War II all but ended the movement.
For the past sixty years, as the need for a religiously intelligent citizenry
has become increasingly evident, there simply has been no discussion of re-
ligious education within which the public school would have its appropriate
role of academic instruction in religion.

A COMPREHENSIVE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Religious education is probably the best single place to test the adequacy of
a comprehensive meaning of “teach.” And conversely, religious education
can only truly exist if the full range of teaching languages is recognized. The
twentieth-century project to establish religious education ran into numerous
obstacles. I concentrate on the meaning of teach/teaching as one manifesta-
tion of the problem of the relation of religion and education, and, more gen-
erally, the relation of religion and the contemporary world.
From the beginning of the Enlightenment the expectation was that religion
would soon disappear. Rationality would dissolve religious myth. That as-
 Can Religion Be Taught? 123

sumption held true even up to the 1960s when many scholars were convinced
that the secularization of the world was almost complete.4 That opinion is no
longer common in the twenty-first century. Even the recent books on atheism
are an acknowledgment of religion’s continuing influence. The denunciation
of religion or attacks on its logical consistency has little effect on its practice.
The alternative, which has not yet been tried, is education from within par-
ticular religious groups, combined with an education from outside the group.
The outsider’s perspective would include both the challenge of other religious
groups than one’s own and the world of secular education. Such a compre-
hensive religious education is indispensable for future world peace.
Our contemporary idea of teaching suffers from a dichotomy that accom-
panied the revolt against religion in the Enlightenment. The word teaching
(doctrine) was closely associated with religion, especially Christianity. The
emerging secular world tried to shake itself free of “magisterial” authority,
traditional beliefs, and every kind of teaching other than rational explanation.
Clearing away ignorance and superstition was a healthy step forward, but a
world built exclusively on rational propositions was not an adequate alterna-
tive. In H. G. Gadamer’s clever formula, “the fundamental prejudice of the
Enlightenment was the prejudice against prejudice.”5
On the religious side, the intramural language of religious groups was not
subjected to critical challenge from the outside. In the short run, a religious
group can thrive by turning its back on the tools of secular education. But un-
less the group wishes to secede from the modern world, its own vitality needs
the challenge of rational criticism.
On the secular side, the forms of teaching-learning have suffered from the
overly rationalistic reaction in modern education. Even the assumption that
teaching happens primarily if not exclusively in schools reflects an anti-
religious bias. Religious life has subsisted across the generations with only
minor help from the classroom. It has relied on the influence of family in
early childhood, followed by a caring attitude and good example within the
religious community. The verbal teaching has typically been through story
and song, set within a ritual that binds together centuries of practice. Within
the ritual or liturgy, preaching exhorts the members to live up to what they
have promised. A coherent universe sustains the members in their joys and
sorrows. Rational explanations within the religious group do not claim to be
more than a clarifying of lived mysteries.
A modern secular world was skeptical of every one of those forms of teach-
ing. These forms did not disappear, but they were not given much attention in
modern education. Religious teaching is most often dismissed as “indoctrina-
tion.” If rational explanation is the only recognized form of teaching, then these
strange religious groups must be using an inverted rationality. Indoctrination is
124 Chapter Six

a despair of other kinds of teaching; it does affect religious groups but it is also
found in secular ideologies. Secular educators who dismiss religious teaching
as indoctrination are in danger of missing the main forms of teaching that have
sustained the human race.
I indicated above that the encounter of religious groups and secular educa-
tion is mediated by the religious groups encountering each other. In the past,
there were occasional meetings of two religious groups; violent conflict was
the most common result. Today for the first time in history, a regular and
worldwide interaction of religions is occurring. The only choice now is be-
tween violence and a degree of mutual understanding. If, for example, Mus-
lims and Christians are to live peacefully in the same country, city, or neigh-
borhood, the capacity to take the view of the outsider is a necessity for
members of both communities.
“Religious education” is a term that connotes more than one religion; it is
not the first language of any religious group. That is a present weakness but
it also a possible future strength. Each group has its own educational lan-
guage. Even within Christianity, a world of Roman Catholic catechetics sel-
dom meets the Protestant world of Christian education. A Jewish way of
forming its members mainly through family practices, holy day rituals, and
dietary laws is almost unrecognizable to most Christians. Even more puzzling
would be Muslim, Buddhist, or Sikh languages of teaching-learning.
A religious group, for its own well-being, needs the perspective from the
outside. Meeting other religious groups can be a context for that to happen.
So also the schooling that a group offers to its own members provides another
perspective. Unless all the books are in-house apologetics, the students get to
test their religious stance in relation to a larger world. The composition of the
student body and faculty, however, tends to limit the view, not because the
teacher intends to exclude other views but because of the absence of people
having other views. Nevertheless, there are schools under Jewish or Christian
auspices where serious academic instruction occurs, where Jewish or Christ-
ian religions are studied with the aid of scholarly history and social analysis.
Despite the best efforts of these teachers, “religious education” is still in-
adequate when the only perspective is from within one religious group. We
need in addition educational settings where religion and religions are seri-
ously attended to and not just explained away. The teacher need not be a prac-
ticing member of any religious group, but he or she needs an open attitude to
religion and sensitivity for its many forms of teaching. Emile Durkheim
wrote: “What I ask of the free thinker is that he should confront religion in
the same mental state as the believer. . . . He who does not bring to the study
of religion a sort of religious sentiment cannot speak about it. He is like a
blind man trying to talk about color.”6 We need in the public arena teachers
 Can Religion Be Taught? 125

who know the language and logic of a particular religion in relation to the
larger world of religion and the world of secular education. That means the
teaching of religion in the state school.

LEGAL ISSUES

Before I look specifically at the school and religion, I must briefly mention a
topic that has obstructed discussion of religion in its relations to religious in-
stitutions, the public arena, federal and state governments, and the individual
citizen. These many issues are constantly subsumed under a doctrine called
the “separation of church and state.” I would argue that this language of
church and state has always been an inappropriate metaphor for the United
States. For discussing the teaching of religion in the public school, the doc-
trine is irrelevant. We do need some careful distinctions concerning what is
appropriate in the public school. I am not at all siding with religious groups
who want to put (their) religious practices into the schools. Religious prac-
tices are rightly banned from state-sponsored schools, although the doctrine
of church-state is no help in explaining why. The issue of teaching religion in
the public school is an educational and curriculum question.
Despite its inappropriateness, separation of church and state has become
deeply embedded in the national consciousness since the 1940s. Even people
who should know better refer to this doctrine as if it were in the U.S. Consti-
tution and as if it has always been the framework within which the country
has operated.
The European language of church and state was inadequate—and was
avoided—in the eighteenth century when the United States was founded. It is
patently inadequate in the twenty-first century. However, I have no illusions
about the phrase disappearing. Even when its inadequacies are acknowl-
edged, there is usually reluctance to simply stop using the phrase. Martha
Nussbaum in her careful study of religion and public life argues, “separation
of church and state should be seen as posterior to ideas of equality and lib-
erty.”7 She retains the church-state metaphor, even while pointing out its in-
adequacy in numerous court cases.
The United States in its founding document attempted something new: It tried
to remove the federal government from involvement in people’s practice of their
religion. For establishing a legal framework, the authors used two clauses in the
first amendment referring to religion. Both clauses are negative: no “establish-
ment of religion” and no prohibition of “the free exercise” of religion.
The wording is far too cryptic. Perhaps the authors simply wished to pro-
vide flexibility so that future generations would have room to maneuver. The
126 Chapter Six

language, however, is not so much flexible as confusing and inconsistent. The

regular references today to the “establishment clause” and the “free exercise”
clause only further obscure the confusion built into the amendment’s lan-
guage.
The intention of the authors, it seems, was to create a tension between
what is asserted in the two clauses. A logical tension would have required a
clear meaning of religion in each clause. As I will presently trace, “religion”
has two almost opposite meanings and it is not clear in the first clause
which meaning of religion is intended. The second clause in the amendment
does not even use the word religion; it simply refers to “the exercise
thereof.”
James Madison had originally proposed for the first clause that “there
should be no national church.”8 That would have been clear, though then the
second clause’s reference to “free exercise thereof” would be unintelligible.
Instead, the word “church” was avoided. Did they in the final wording sim-
ply mean “church and other similar religious bodies?” Perhaps they had that
in mind but, if so, saying “religion” instead of a religion was a peculiar
choice. If, as some people argue today, they meant that government should
not prefer religion over non-religion, the retention of “establishment” (as in
“established church”) was peculiar. In any case, “establishment of religion”
was and is a peculiar phrase. When “free exercise thereof” is paired with it,
the result is not clear at all.
Madison seemed to think that the first clause referred to religious institu-
tions. He acknowledged “that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to
trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil au-
thority, with such distinctions, as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessen-
tial points.”9 For negotiating the relation of civil authorities and religious in-
stitutions, Madison’s “tracing of a line” would have been a more helpful
metaphor than the one that Thomas Jefferson provided.
Jefferson, in an 1801 letter, translated the first amendment by reintroduc-
ing the word church. And Jefferson added another layer to the metaphor of
“church and state,” saying that the purpose of the founders was to erect “a
wall of separation between church and state.” The Baptists of Danbury Con-
necticut had asked Jefferson’s opinion about the state of Connecticut paying
the salaries of Protestant ministers. Jefferson’s letter to the Baptists was “a
statement delimiting the legitimate jurisdiction of the federal and state gov-
ernments on matters pertaining to religion.”10 Jefferson was mainly con-
cerned with the state of Connecticut; in Jefferson’s view, the federal govern-
ment had no jurisdiction in the matter. Interestingly, the Baptists never
published the letter. Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state”
did not seem destined to have a future.
 Can Religion Be Taught? 127

A “wall of separation between church and state” only got its legs in the
1870s. The language emerged in relation to the Catholic school system. The
underlying meaning of the doctrine, Nussbaum notes, was “don’t let the Pope
take over our government and schools.”11 The doctrine seemed ready-made to
keep the Catholic Church from receiving aid for its schools. At the same time,
it did not touch Bible reading in the public schools because that was the work
of “people” rather than a church. This contrast was made explicit in the
Blaine Amendment, which was defeated at the national level but adopted by
several states. It prohibited any kind of aid to religious schools while encour-
aging Bible reading in public schools.12
If the reference for “church” was not clear in the late nineteenth century, it
certainly was in the 1940s when a national system of Catholic schools lob-
bied for various kinds of aid, including bus transportation for the students. At
that point, the language of church and state entered into Supreme Court deci-
sions. Opponents of the Catholic Church, such as Paul Blanshard and “Protes-
tants and Others United for the Separation of Church and State,” celebrated
the limiting of the Catholic Church’s power.13
Many of the people who were delighted by the separation of church and
state were stunned in the 1960s when the Supreme Court interpreted the doc-
trine as prohibiting prayer and Bible reading in the public school. Their sur-
prise was understandable. History and logic were on their side. There was no
church involved. Of course, a metaphor can have indefinite extension, but the
Court has continued to extend a metaphor that was inappropriate from the be-
ginning.
There is usually recognition that “wall” is a metaphor. Arguments that then
ensue are all about the wall: “Can it be lowered or raised?” “Is the wall being
breached?” “Should the wall be permeable?” and other metaphorical questions.
In an influential Supreme Court decision, Justice Warren Burger said that the
relation of church and state “far from being a ‘wall’ is a blurred, indistinct, and
variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relation-
ship.”14 What gets lost in such discussions is that the governing metaphor is not
“wall of separation” but “wall of separation between church and state.” A wall
that separates makes no sense unless church and state make sense.
What are supposedly separated are two entities: state and church. The term
state in the United States has a built-in ambiguity. It would be clearer to refer
to civil authorities or governments of various kinds. But the ambiguity of
“state” is completely overshadowed by the misleading use of “church.” Ob-
viously, “church” only includes Christian bodies; there are hundreds of reli-
gious institutions in the United States that are not included. Jews, for exam-
ple, are content with talking about church and state; it does not affect them
except by a metaphorical stretch.
128 Chapter Six

Even among Christians, the reference for “church” is not always clear.
Protestants most often use the term for a local congregation, which is not the
locus for church-state talk. Jefferson did not write his letter to the Baptist
church (there is no such state or national institution) but to a Baptist associa-
tion. When right-wing religious groups have engaged in political lobbying,
they have been accused of violating the separation of church and state. Their
logical response has been: we are not a church.
During the past forty years the Court has continued to try to extend the
metaphor of church-state beyond all logic. The concerns of Jews, Muslim, or
Buddhists cannot be addressed as “church-state” issues. Supreme Court Jus-
tice William Rehnquist made this point in no uncertain terms: “The ‘wall of
separation between church and state’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a
metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly
and explicitly abandoned.”15 It is noteworthy that Rehnquist properly refers
to the whole metaphor, not the wall of separation but the wall of separation
between church and state. It is also noteworthy that this firm assertion by a
Chief Justice is seldom quoted compared to some seemingly casual state-
ments by judges that are quoted as dogmas.

THE LEGAL ISSUE: RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

The idea of religious education was still alive in the 1940s, as evidenced by
a report from the American Council on Education. The Committee on Reli-
gion and Education, made up of a distinguished group of educators, was
chaired by F. Ernest Johnson. He was the primary author of the report, “The
Relation of Religion to Public Education.” Published in 1947, the report for-
mulated the issue quite well: “One must either accept the patent inference that
religious education is relatively unimportant and a marginal interest or as-
sume that religion is a matter so remote from life that it admits of no integra-
tion with the general educational program.”16
At that time, the metaphor of “wall of separation between church and state”
was finding legal definition but the report insisted, “this doctrine may not be
invoked to prevent public education from determining on its merits how the
religious phases of the culture shall be recognized in the school program.”17
Unfortunately, that is just what happened as legal jargon edged out genuine
educational discussion.
A Supreme Court decision in 1948 forbade religious instruction that was
given by various religious groups in public school buildings. In the decision
and in two of the opinions, the term “religious education” is used to refer to
this practice. Justice Robert Jackson admitted that the Supreme Court was in
 Can Religion Be Taught? 129

no position to solve the overall relation of religion and public education. He

worried that the Court would become entangled in endless local disputes.
While siding with the majority in this case, Jackson said: “One can hardly re-
spect a system of education that would leave the student wholly ignorant of
the currents of religious thought that move the world society for a part in
which he is being prepared.”18
Jackson’s rhetoric here seems to echo the report from the American Coun-
cil on Education.19 An even clearer connection to that report is found in the
key decision of Abington School District v. Schemmp in 1963.20 That deci-
sion, along with Engel v. Vitale in the previous year, set the direction for fu-
ture discussions of religion and public education. Abington forbade reading
the Bible and saying the Our Father in the public school. Engel outlawed a
state-mandated prayer that the New York State Regents had recommended for
public schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee
and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our coun-
try.”21 These two decisions angered many Protestant groups who had never
dreamed that the metaphor of church-state separation could apply to the Our
Father and the reading of scripture and even to an innocuous prayer com-
posed by committee. A cartoon by Herblock showed a man angrily throwing
down a newspaper and shouting: “What do they expect us to do, pray at
home?” Yes, that was pretty much the general idea.
In some regions of the United States, the Court’s decisions were simply
disregarded. In other places, there began an endless series of court cases con-
cerning what does and does not count as a religious practice. Is a moment of
silence constitutional? When there is no clear intent of the state to sneak
prayer in, silence is allowed. In an Alabama case, however, a moment of si-
lence was found unconstitutional.22 Debate and controversy in this area are
inevitable in this most litigious of countries. However, the courts, including
the Supreme Court, do not have a clear idea of “religion” or any idea of reli-
gious education.
Efforts have been made in the Congress to go around Engel and Abington
with a Constitutional Prayer Amendment. In November 1971, it narrowly
missed the needed two-thirds majority. Interestingly, the opposition that time
was led by Father Robert Drinan.23 When the same issue resurfaced in 1984,
the opposition was lead by another clergyman, Senator John Danforth, who
said: “Prayer should not be cheapened. It must not be trivialized. . . . To many
religious people God is not dependent on the Supreme Court or the Congress.
Objects may be kept out of the classroom, chewing gum for example. God is
not chewing gum. He is the Creator of Heaven and Earth.”24
A practice that has concerned the courts during the last decade has been the
“posting of the ten commandments” in public places, especially in public
130 Chapter Six

schools.25 The school shooting at Columbine gave impetus to this movement.

Liberals pushed for stricter gun control laws; conservative Christian groups
seemed to think that a list of the Ten Commandments on school property
would dissuade shooters.
Both the local supporters of the postings and the American Civil Liberties
Union, their regular opponent in court, assume remarkable educational effect
from what is posted on a school wall. The Supreme Court has attempted to
make distinctions regarding when and how the Ten Commandments may be
posted. In 2005, the Supreme Court allowed a posting of the Ten Command-
ments in Austin, Texas, where the display was one of seventeen monuments
and twenty-one historical markers that surround the state capitol. On the same
day, the Court struck down the display of the Ten Commandments in Ken-
tucky courthouses because it promoted religion. The New York Times edito-
rial hailed the twin decisions under the title: “The Court Affirms Separation
of Church and State.”26
This legal hair-splitting might make sense within a clear framework of re-
ligion and religious education, but that is what is lacking. Congress has stayed
up all night debating prayer in school. What it has never discussed and lacks
the language to raise the question, is the issue of the school doing with reli-
gion what schools are for, namely, to teach it.

THE MEANINGS OF RELIGION

For a meaning of religious education that would include teaching religion in

state schools, one has to recognize the ambiguity of the term “religion.” The
problem cannot be cured by a definition. Nietzsche said that any word that
has a history cannot be defined. That is, no definition can cover the historical
shifts in the meaning of such terms. The result of those shifts is often sharply
divergent meanings within a single term.
“Religion” is a term coined by Cicero who boasted concerning the Romans
that “in religion and the worship of the gods we are pre-eminent.”27 The
Christian church took over the term, reshaping Cicero’s meaning. Augustine
describes religion as existing from the beginning of the world and finding ful-
fillment in the “true religion” of the Christian church.28 This meaning of reli-
gion, genuine devotion, held the field until the sixteenth century. Thomas
Aquinas treats religion under the virtue of justice. Martin Luther and John
Calvin still used religio for practices or devotions directed toward God.29
A different meaning of “religion” emerged when “the Christian religion”
(true devotion) was rocked by division, and opposing groups claimed to be
the possessors of true religion. The first hint of tolerance after the Reforma-
 Can Religion Be Taught? 131

tion is found when there is a reference to the “Catholic and Protestant reli-
gions.” Rather quickly, these two religions were folded into the “Christian re-
ligion” but “religion” used this way was now available to refer to Judaism, Is-
lam, and, more doubtfully, to other groups. “Religion” has a Western (or even
Christian) bias, but it is the best available word to try to encompass the be-
liefs, rituals, and codes of the institutions studied by historians, anthropolo-
gists, and sociologists.
This second meaning of “religion” has obvious roots in the first, but there
are stark oppositions as well. In the ancient meaning, religion was singular;
genuine devotion was opposed to false. The modern meaning necessarily im-
plies diversity even when used in the singular. A reference to “the Christian
religion” today, unlike its use in the fifteenth century, carries comparison of
one religion to others in its class.
This sketch of the history of “religion” might be merely a curiosity except
that the two meanings continue to appear in the present. As regularly happens
with other important old words, the second meaning did not replace the first
but instead created a word of rich ambiguity.30 The two meanings mix to-
gether uneasily in the First Amendment. As I pointed out earlier, the first
clause seems to be referring to religions in the modern meaning of the term;
if so, “establishment of a religion” would have been clearer. The second
clause seems to refer to beliefs and practices of a religious nature but “free
exercise thereof” was hardly a clear way of putting the matter.
In discussions of religion and public education today, the two meanings are
regularly conflated leading to endless confusion. The ancient meaning of “re-
ligion” lives on in referring to devotions and practices in a generalized way,
even though no one practices religion; people follow the gospel, observe
Passover, pray facing Mecca, and so forth. “Religion” can also refer to the
historical systems that include but are not limited to acts of religious devo-
tion. Religion(s) in this sense cries out for intellectual inquiry so as to relate
religion(s) to other important aspects of the world.
The subject matter for academic curricula is any human phenomenon that
has a tradition of rational inquiry and a universe of discourse. “Religion” in
the second sense has better academic credentials than many other subjects.
“Sociology,” for example, was coined in the 1840s; psychology, as an es-
tranged relative of philosophy, is mainly a twentieth-century product. It is
true that “religion” cannot shake off its ambiguity. Religion as meaning prac-
tices of a particular religion should be barred from the public school. Reli-
gion, referring to the many religions that now more than ever are in contact
with each other, deserves intellectual inquiry.
Ambiguity in the meaning of religion as an academic subject is similar to
many other subjects, especially those that do not end in -ology. “Theology,”
132 Chapter Six

at least as used in the United States, does not substitute for an “objective”
study of religion. “Religiology” has seemed too clumsy. “Religion” is a word
comparable in ambiguity to art, history, mathematics, or ethics. “History,” can
be the name for actual events in the past. That does not prevent the word his-
tory from being used for the academic study of those events. Of course, “re-
ligion” raises suspicions that “history” does not.
The discussion of religion in state schools continues to be a confusing
mess. The periodic headline “Does God belong in the classroom?” is a silly
if not blasphemous question. As Danforth said in the above quotation, a dis-
cussion based on that question trivializes both meanings of religion. In a
Supreme Court decision of 2004, allowing “under God” to remain in the
pledge of allegiance, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor defended the phrase on
the basis that it is “ceremonial Deism” which “cannot be seen as a serious in-
vocation of God.”31 Justice O’Connor was cautioning the Court not to try re-
moving all religious language. But approval of “ceremonial deism” is not
what the classroom needs. What the classroom is suited for is a serious intel-
lectual encounter with religion(s). The Supreme Court has allowed “under
God” to be part of a classroom ritual of saluting the flag. But in what course
can the question be raised of whether the pledge of allegiance is itself a piece
of religious idolatry.
As I indicated above, religious education has to include formation in the
practice of a particular religion (or a personal choice to abstain from such
practice) and some minimum competence in understanding the phenomenon
of religion, comparing the religion closest to home with other religions. The
first element of religious education does not belong in the state school; the
second element is needed there. Without a language of religious education,
including recognition of religion as a subject for intellectual inquiry, discus-
sions of religion in state schools become bogged down either in fighting over
devotional practices or by including religion in ways that avoid teaching an
understanding of it.
In recent years there has been considerable enthusiasm for “religious liter-
acy.” There is little opposition to the idea but little success in achieving liter-
acy. Even Richard Dawkins in his assault on religion bemoans the fact that
students cannot recognize biblical references in Shakespeare.32 Stephen
Prothero in Religious Literacy has ninety pages of religious references that
citizens should be able to recognize.33 Such factual knowledge might be de-
sirable, but it is not likely to come from piling up facts about religion.
Surveying all the religions of the world can be a way to avoid actually in-
quiring into the complexity of the logic and history of a particular religion or
understanding the relation between different religions. Prothero, like other
writers on the topic, repeatedly says that the Supreme Court has pronounced
 Can Religion Be Taught? 133

the teaching of religion in state schools to be unconstitutional. That assump-

tion has been the unchallenged legal dogma that prevents an educational dis-
cussion of teaching religion in state schools.

TEACH AND TEACH ABOUT

The supposed proscription of teaching religion is derived from the Supreme

Court’s ruling in Abington v. Schemmp. Two key passages from that ruling,
one by Justice Arthur Goldberg and one by Justice Tom Clark, are cited in al-
most every discussion of religion and public education. The two passages re-
sult in a confusing combination of a call to put religion into the curriculum
and at the same time the insistence that religion cannot be taught. It is no
wonder that only a small group of people feel at home in the convoluted lan-
guage that is used.
Stephen Prothero’s book, Religious Literacy, embodies the logical conflict.
He says that “many states and school districts now have standards and poli-
cies that at least in theory carve out a place for religion in public school cur-
ricula.”34 At the same time, he insists that the teacher cannot legally teach this
curricular subject. There is confusion, he says, “about the crucial distinction
between theology and religious studies—between what the Supreme Court
Justice Arthur Goldberg called the “teaching of religion” (which is unconsti-
tutional) and the “teaching about religion (which is not).”35 Prothero here
equates teaching religion and teaching theology, which would be news to pro-
fessors of religion in universities. What one must do with religion, according
to Prothero, is “teach about” it, but not teach it. Not surprisingly, most school
administrators and schoolteachers find this contrast an unworkable puzzle
which they prefer to avoid.
The strange dichotomy of teaching religion versus teaching about religion
is lifted from a comment in Justice Goldberg’s concurring opinion in Abington
v. Schemmp. What Goldberg said was: “It seems clear to me that the court
would recognize the propriety of teaching about religion as distinguished from
the teaching of religion in the public school.” That statement is not exactly a
firm and definitive ruling by the Supreme Court. This one justice says that he
thinks the “court would recognize the propriety” of one but not the other of his
contrasts. In Martha Nussbaum’s comprehensive study of first amendment
cases on religion, she does not mention this comment of Goldberg’s. It would
not seem to have much importance except that it was seized upon and has be-
come unchallengeable doctrine in literature on the public school and religion.
Goldberg expressed a tentative opinion that the court would find propriety
in teaching about religion. He need not have been so tentative on that point.
134 Chapter Six

A teacher can teach about anything that happens to show up in the course of
teaching his or her subject in the curriculum. One can teach about mass mur-
der in sociology, sadomasochism in psychology, or cannibalism in anthropol-
ogy. Religion shows up in all those places and many others, and then, obvi-
ously, one has to teach about it.
The problem is not an approval of teaching about religion. It is that Gold-
berg contrasted that to the teaching of religion. The affirming of the first was
connected to the negating of the second. Ever since then, it has usually been
assumed that this distinction is a neat and clear dichotomy. Instead of chal-
lenging or at least questioning this legal formula, educators set out to put re-
ligion into the curriculum while avoiding teaching it. Pennsylvania and
Florida worked at early projects that soon met with obstacles.36 States con-
tinue to work within impossible restrictions and with nervous insistence on
words such as secular, neutral, objective, and equal.
In California, “Guidelines for Teaching about Religion” say that a teacher
can instruct about religion but can emphasize no particular religion. Appar-
ently, every time a teacher mentions one religion he or she must refer to every
other religion. But a teacher cannot seriously examine religion without ex-
amining a particular religion. A course on sixteenth-century European history
would presumably have to emphasize what happened to the Christian reli-
gion. In one California case, the teacher, Stephen Williams, used disputed ma-
terial that highlighted the role of Christians in the nation’s founding.37 The
lawyer from the Alliance Defense Fund reasonably noted that “You’re not go-
ing to find a lot of Muslim Founding Fathers.”38
From what was published about this California case, I think that the teacher
was in fact proselytizing. He made some good points about the illogic of the
state’s guidelines but that does not prove that his own position was academi-
cally sound. As a recently converted Evangelical Christian, Stephen Williams
used “supplementary material” that was skewed toward making the case for
Christianity. Some people inclined to be evangelical preachers are attracted to
programs for “teaching about religion.” They figure that they can get their
message across while going about and around religion.39 If states exclude on
principle teachers professionally prepared to teach religion in an academi-
cally sound manner, the field is left open to people who see the classroom as
a pulpit.
Where did Goldberg’s strange but catchy contrast come from? Most likely
it was directly or indirectly from F. Ernest Johnson. In the 1947 report, “The
Relation of Religion to Public Education,” Johnson made reference to teach-
ing about religion. Time Magazine, summarized that document as saying:
“The committee proposed to teach about religion, but not to teach religion it-
self in the schools.”40 Actually, that contrast is not explicit in the document
 Can Religion Be Taught? 135

but was deduced by Time. Their insertion of the word “itself” is to make clear
that religion should not be the subject of inquiry. In 1951, a report from the
Educational Policies Commission, Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public
Schools, says: “The public school can teach objectively about religion with-
out advocating or teaching any religious creed.”41 What “teaching objec-
tively” means can be debated at length but one cannot quarrel with the prohi-
bition of “advocating a religious creed” in the public schools.
Johnson used the distinction of “teach” and “teach about” in other essays
and books. In responding to the question of whether “studying about religion
is not studying religion,” he says that is true but “studying about is the be-
ginning of study.”42 That is, Johnson made a distinction within a single
process: the way into understanding something is to become acquainted with
some external facts about it. Unintentionally, Johnson’s description of steps
in the process of understanding may have helped to create a dichotomy of
teaching religion versus teaching about religion.
In addition to confusion about the meaning of religion, the misunderstanding
of “teach religion,” is based on a stereotype of teaching. In this country, learn-
ing and studying are effusively praised but teaching is suspect. Not many peo-
ple go so far as Ivan Illich’s formula that to teach is to corrupt.43 But there are
authors who, while having no experience in academic teaching, assume that
schoolteachers are big people telling little people what to think. The Hollywood
image of a schoolteacher is a man standing on a desk and giving an impas-
sioned sermon on the meaning of life to students who sit in rapt attention. The
actual work of classroom teaching is more prosaic, trying to provoke people to
think carefully about something they have read for that day’s meeting.
The insistence on “teach about” instead of “teach” is to keep schoolteach-
ers from telling students what to believe. Teach when applied to religion is as-
sumed to mean indoctrinating children into the particular beliefs of the
teacher. That assumption makes one wonder what people assume is being
done when teachers teach history, economics, or literature? Does teaching
economics mean indoctrinating students into one school of thought? Do
teachers tell students what to think about literature rather than help them to
understand particular poems? Statements that are routinely made about teach-
ing religion are a slander on the profession of school teaching.

STUDY BUT NOT TEACH

The uneasiness with “teach” leads authors to talk about “studying religion”
instead of “teaching religion.” Students are allowed to study religion; teach-
ers are not allowed to teach religion. This way of speaking shows up in
136 Chapter Six

Supreme Court decisions and in the literature of the last forty years. The use
of “study” to avoid “teach” is found in the widely quoted passage in Abing-
ton by Justice Tom Clark: “Nothing we have said here indicates that such
study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a sec-
ular program of education may not be effected consistently with the first
amendment.”44
In saying that religion should be presented objectively, Justice Clark
sounds like he is talking about teaching. But he studiously avoids the term
teaching and refers to the study of religion. Actually, it is easy enough to
imagine students studying religion or anything else they fancy. The question
is whether teachers can teach religion. On that point, Justice Clark slides
around the issue, leaving to Justice Goldberg the opinion that the teachers
cannot teach religion. The opinion of the Court, therefore, is that in state
schools studying religion is constitutional but teaching religion is not. Reli-
gion should be in the curriculum, presented objectively, but it cannot be
taught.
In 1987, a document with great promise was published by the Association
for Supervision and Curriculum Development. The document’s title is “Reli-
gion in the Curriculum” and its contents include excellent historical and reli-
gious material. But despite advocating that religion be put in the curriculum
the report cannot draw the obvious conclusion that religion should be taught.
It is tied to the Supreme Court phrase that undermines the whole discussion.
In the sixth chapter, a section headed “including religion in the curriculum”
begins: “The proper role of religion in the school is the study of religion for
its educational value. The task is to teach about religions and their impact in
history, literature, art, music, and morality.”45 Religion should be studied for
its educational value but it cannot be taught. It is difficult to see how one can
understand the impact of religion on all those areas without understanding re-
ligion itself.
The American Council of Education report was one source but not the sole
source of the Clark-Goldberg contrast and its use since then. However, what
is noteworthy about the Council report on this point was that the authors were
clearly aware of why people say “study” rather than “teach.” They address di-
rectly the nature of academic teaching, something actually rare in educational
literature. Their advocacy of religion in the curriculum clearly entails that the
teacher would teach it. But in the end they back away from defending what
they know to be the correct position.
A paragraph in the Conclusion of the document embodies their inconsis-
tency. The first sentence reads: “Fundamental to the proposals we have set
forth is an interpreting of ‘teaching’ which distinguishes it from indoctrina-
tion in the ordinary sense of that word.”46 Their distinction between “teach”
 Can Religion Be Taught? 137

and “indoctrinate” is certainly acceptable, although apparently to some peo-

ple it is not obvious.
But if the Committee’s use of “teaching” is fundamental to what they are
proposing, they should have vigorously defended it. Indeed, in defense of
every schoolteacher in the public and private schools of this country, their dis-
tinction should have been insisted upon. However, the last sentence of the
same paragraph says: “We have frequently used the phrase ‘the study of reli-
gion’ instead of ‘teaching religion’ because the latter so commonly implies in-
doctrination.”47 That is precisely why they should have insisted on what they
have said in the first sentence.
Using “study of religion” for “teaching of religion” is not the substitution of
a synonym; it is giving in to the stereotype that they know is the obstacle to their
proposals being heard. The committee failed to stand by their convictions and
became part of the confusion that swirls about the issue of teaching religion.

TOWARD WORLDWIDE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Any attempt to revivify the twentieth-century project of religious education

may seem to be a hopeless undertaking. However, just as the term religious
education was falling out of a public use in the United States, it was being
given a legal meaning in the United Kingdom. Religious education in Eng-
land and Wales was to include religious instruction in every state and county
school.48 For reasons quite different from those in the United States, religious
education in the U.K. has not lived up to the hopes of those who coined the
term in 1944 (probably borrowed from the United States).49 Nevertheless, it
has retained its meaning to include state schools and there is a substantial
body of literature on religious education in the state school.
Today there is some fairly serious discussion of religious education within
the European Union and especially within the Council of Europe. One of Eng-
land’s leading religious educators writes: “Issues about the study of religion in
public education are being discussed internationally as never before. The dis-
cussions include specialists in religion, but also many outside the professional
field of religious education—politicians, civil servants, NGOs and other
groups within civil society as well as educators concerned with fields such as
citizenship and intercultural education.”50 In other words, the Council of Eu-
rope is engaged in a project similar to what the United States started in 1903.
One weakness of the British usage of “religious education” had been that
not only was it allowed in the state school but also that was the only place it
applied. In British usage, especially after the 1960s, religious education be-
came the name of an academic subject. The result was that the work of
138 Chapter Six

church, synagogue, mosque, and temple was excluded from the meaning of
religious education. That usage was almost a mirror image of language in the
United States.
By locating religious education in the state school the British were follow-
ing modern educational language. That is, if the question is understanding
math, then mathematical education in the school is the answer. If you want to
understand religion, you put religious education in the school. The analogy
does not hold all the way. Religion is more like politics, morality, or sex than
math, physics, or chemistry. The school has a crucial job of providing under-
standing of religion, morality, politics, or sex but it cannot provide the whole
of education in those areas. The family begins the education to which the
school can contribute. For receiving a fuller education, a person’s engage-
ment in politics or religion is necessary.
The British way of speaking is now challenged by assumptions in the us-
age of other European nations and Asian countries.51 In some countries the
state has a very limited role and in other places the state has a lot to say about
religion in the state schools. Many countries continue to force the religion of
the majority on minorities in their schools.52 No country offers an ideal solu-
tion that the United States can follow but that is a reason for dialogue.
The United Nations has expressed concern with religious education. Un-
fortunately, the U.N. has only dealt with religious education under the rubric
of parental rights.53 Eventually, the U.N. may have to see itself as a religious
educator. That is, the U.N. constantly finds itself trying to mediate conflicts
in which the misunderstandings of religion play a key role. In such interna-
tional clashes, the alternative to violent conflict is an educational approach
that produces some understanding of cultural and religious differences.
Worldwide religious education is still in its formative stage.54 The United
States, given its religious diversity and its commitment to schools, should be
a leading participant in these discussions but it is absent. Ironically, the im-
petus for European discussion of religious education was the attack on the
United States in September 2001. The question now is whether the United
States will join the rest of the world in developing adequate programs of re-
ligious education. For the country to confront its political, ecological, and
economic problems, the academic examination of religion is a needed part of
education.

NOTES

1. Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy (Harper San Francisco, 2007), 21–38;

George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90s
(New York: Macmillan, 1989).
 Can Religion Be Taught? 139

2. Carey McWilliams, “American Democracy and the Politics of Faith,” in Reli-

gion Returns to the Public Square, ed. Hugh Heclo and William McClay (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 154.
3. William Rainey Harper, “The Scope and Purpose of the New Organization,”
Proceedings of the First Convention (Chicago: Religious Education Association,
1903): 230–40.
4. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1966) was the most fa-
mous but only one example of this writing.
5. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1982), 239.
6. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press,
1995), xvii.
7. Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition
of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 20.
8. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 110.
9. Daniel Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between
Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 88.
10. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and
State, 60.
11. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 178.
12. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 2004), 23.
13. Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1950).
14. Lemon v. Kurtzman 403 U.S. 602 (1970).
15. Wallace v Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 92, 106–7 (1985).
16. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Ed-
ucation (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1947), 10.
17. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Ed-
ucation, 25.
18. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948).
19. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Ed-
ucation, 19.
20. Abington School District v. Schemmp 374 U.S. 203 (1963).
21. Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 438 (1962).
22. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. (1985).
23. James Wood, “Religion and Education in American Church-State Relations,”
in Religion, the State and Education, ed. James Wood (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University
Press, 1984), 33.
24. Joan DelFattore, The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America’s Public
Schools (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 197.
25. Gabriel Moran, “Politicizing the Ten Commandments,” Living Light, 36 (Sum-
mer 2000): 6–14.
26. New York Times, 28 June 2005, A1; Roger Trigg, Religion in Public Life (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 226.
27. Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book II, 7–9.
140 Chapter Six

28. Augustine, Of True Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a, 2ae, 81. 4; 2a, 2a, 49–55.
30. John Bossy, Christianity in the West (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), 170; Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 185.
31. Newdow v.U.S. Congress 292 F, 3D 597(9th Cir. 2000); Newdow, 124 S.Ct. at
2321–27 (2004).
32 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006),
340–44.
33. Prothero, Religious Literacy, 141.
34. Prothero, Religious Literacy, 131.
35. Prothero, Religious Literacy, 53.
36. John Whitney and Susan Howe, The Religious Literature of the West (Philadel-
phia: Augsburg, 1971).
37. Stephen J. Williams v. Patricia Vidmaar et al., USDC North District, San Jose
Div No. CO 44946.
38. Peter Boyer, “Jesus in the Classroom,” New Yorker, 21 March 2005, 71.
39. William Becker, “A History Lesson for the Cupertino Union School District,”
American Thinker, 15 December 2007.
40. Time Magazine, 21 August 1947.
41. Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: Educa-
tional Policies Commission, 1951); for Johnson’s comments on this document, see
“Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools,” Religious Education, 46, no. 4
(1951): 199.
42. F. Ernest Johnson, The Social Gospel Reexamined (New York: Harper and
Row, 1940), 188.
43. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
44. Justice Tom Clark, Abington School District v. Schemmp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).
45. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Religion in the
Curriculum (Alexandria, Va.: ASCD, 1987), 27.
46. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Ed-
ucation, 51.
47. Committee on Religion and Education, The Relation of Religion to Public Ed-
ucation, 51.
48. A. G. Wedderspoon, Religious Education 1944–1984 (London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1964).
49. Jack Priestly, “A New Era—Beginning from Jerusalem? Some Reflection from
1928 on Matters Pertaining to 1988,” British Journal of Religious Education 13
(Summer 1991): 143–51.
50. Robert Jackson, “European Institutions and the Contribution of Studies of Re-
ligious Diversity to Education for Democratic Citizenship,” International Seminar on
Religious Education and Values (Amsterdam: ISREV, 2006).
51. Robert Jackson, Religious Education in Europe (Munster, Germany: Waxman,
2007).
 Can Religion Be Taught? 141

52. Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Commission of Human Rights on Free-
dom of Religion or Belief (New York: United Nations, 1994).
53. Covenant on Political and Civil Rights and Covenant on Economic Social, and
Cultural Rights.
54. Gabriel Moran, “Religious Education and International Understanding,” in Re-
ligion, Education and Society, ed. Dennis Bates (London: Routledge, 2006), 38–48.
 Chapter Seven

Wittgenstein:
I’ll Teach You Differences

Ludwig Wittgenstein is a controversial thinker of the first half of the twenti-

eth century. From my point of view, this chapter is the most important one for
getting at why there is a problem at all with teaching. From the side of the
reader, however, this might be a frustrating chapter because Wittgenstein’s
style determines how this chapter can be written. That is, no book or set of es-
says can be summarized to convey his system of thought. Like a number of
other writers in the past century, he is sometimes ridiculed or dismissed.
This chapter, in accord with Wittgenstein’s work, proceeds with “remarks,”
“signals,” examples, and paradoxes. I am interested in the meaning of “to
teach” but Wittgenstein never attempts to state that. It is important to note
from the beginning that he does not claim to solve the problem but to show
why we have a problem. That John Dewey did not develop a philosophy of
teaching is surprising, perhaps even scandalous. That Wittgenstein has no
philosophy of teaching is not surprising at all.
Although Wittgenstein does not have any extended treatment of teaching, it
is possible to see much of what he wrote as an example of teaching. He tries
in every which way to teach the reader about the paradoxes of language by us-
ing paradoxes. The way he says things is as crucial as what he says in con-
veying a meaning of teaching. I am interested only in his view of teaching, but
it is not possible to get at it without some appreciation of his overall project.
One thing that seems clear is that there is an early Wittgenstein and a later
Wittgenstein. A contrast of early and late is true of many thinkers and it al-
ways raises the question of how the younger and the older thinker are related.
It can happen that the older man contradicts his youthful self; at least he sees
a repudiation while commentators on the work may see continuity. At other
times the writer may see continuity while outsiders see wholesale rejection.

143
144 Chapter Seven

TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

Wittgenstein himself commented on the relation between his first book, Trac-
tatus Logico-Philosophicus and his last book, published after his death,
Philosophical Investigations.1 He says that the two books should be read to-
gether; the second book gets much of its meaning from being a commentary
on the first (Investigations preface). At times, he makes fun of the author of
the Tractatus, his younger self (Investigations 119). Ultimately, as we shall
see, he does not repudiate or contradict the early work but places it in a larger
context that changes its meaning.
The style of the two books is radically different; they are alike only in that
each has a puzzling format. The Tractatus is a series of numbered proposi-
tions by which Wittgenstein laid claim to completely representing the world
that can be known. Like bright young mathematicians of the seventeenth cen-
tury, such as Descartes and Leibniz, he ambitiously thought his system in-
cluded all philosophical knowledge in its proper order. Only at the end of the
book is there an abrupt admission that there might be a whole realm that his
logical statements cannot encompass.
His admission almost seems an afterthought, but it was actually his aim
from the beginning. To a prospective publisher he wrote that his work had
two parts, the part he had written and the part he had not written; the second
part was more important.2 That was not a very good argument to convince a
publisher but it was prophetic. The later book includes much of what he could
not find a way to express in the first book.
The Tractatus ends in what he calls “the mystical” (Tractatus. 6.522). That
is not an uncommon journey for many mathematicians when they reach the
limit of their rational formulas. Beyond rational knowledge is silence. How-
ever, as Wittgenstein once said of his critics, “the difference is that I have
something to be silent about.”3 Beyond the representation of the world in log-
ical sentences is the realm of aesthetics, ethics, and religion.
The image at the end of the book is of a man going up a ladder and then
pulling up the ladder after him. Everything that can be said can be said
clearly; beyond that is what cannot be said but is nevertheless more impor-
tant. The famous last line was translated: “Of that whereof one cannot speak,
one must be silent” (Tractatus 7). This unspeakable realm shows or manifests
itself in silence. Reality is thus divided into what can be said and what must
be shown. Wittgenstein could not have been satisfied with this conclusion.
Simply to be left speechless about what one considers the most important ar-
eas of life has to be frustrating.
A group of philosophers in England and Germany disregarded the mys-
tical ending of the Tractatus and were quite content with an empirically
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 145

based logic. The group was called Logical Positivists. They thought that
what cannot be said clearly is simply nonsense.4 Wittgenstein, from the
late 1920s until his death in 1950, struggled with how to speak about the
unspeakable. The Investigations, published in 1953, is his report of that
journey.
A biographical note here might be appropriate before examining the con-
tents of the Investigations.5 Although Wittgenstein had grown up with wealth
and privilege, he experienced a quasi-religious conversion during World War
I when he nearly died. After the war, he gave away all his money and for the
rest of his life he lived a simple life with few possessions. He became a gar-
dener in a monastery and considered becoming a monk. Silence became a
central theme of his work. He then trained to become a schoolteacher and
spent six years teaching in elementary schools for peasant children in south-
ern Austria. He does not seem to have had much success in the job and had
to resign. He then returned to Cambridge where he had shown great promise
as a student before the war.
During subsequent decades he was a professor at Cambridge University
but he never could quite fit the role of professor. He was especially uncom-
fortable at being a “lecturer” in the classroom. No doubt he confused or infu-
riated some students by his long stretches of silence in which he was trying
to think out a problem.6 He was more at ease meeting with a small group of
students in his room. It is hardly surprising that the university lecture was not
his appropriate format. Universities then and now simply assume that the job
of professors in the classroom is to read aloud from their written text or notes.

WHAT’S IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS?

Wittgenstein said that he tried to write a book in the standard form but real-
ized that the only thing that fits his conclusions is a series of “remarks” (pref-
ace). He wishes the reader to become the writer of the book, that is, to force
upon the reader a journey similar to his own. His purpose is to initiate a new
“sensibility” in the reader brought about by “conversion.”7 Wittgenstein con-
sidered using as a motto for the book the phrase in the title of this chapter,
“I’ll teach you differences.”8
Philosophical Investigations is a book that is loaded with questions, many
of them not answered by the author, at least directly. Wittgenstein said that
mathematicians did not like his work because he asked the simple questions
that a child asks. “I trot out all the problems that education represses without
solving.”9 The whole book can be read as reflections on how a child comes to
learn a language and how grownups lose their first exuberant encounter with
146 Chapter Seven

language. The adult comes to take language “for granted” as a set of names
for labeling the things that make up the world.
Wittgenstein tries to provoke the reader into recognizing that language is
more mysterious than pictures for things. The way we usually think of lan-
guage “casts a spell”; we are “bewitched” by language (109). On occasion
people meet with what Wittgenstein calls “conceptual puzzles,” words that
have conflicting meanings.10 At that point, people may go to a dictionary to
get the “correct” meaning. They then settle back with confidence that their
word is the right representation of the thing.
I earlier quoted Nietzsche that any word that has a history cannot be de-
fined. That is, definition is a setting of limits; a board of experts hands down
a ruling on how the word is properly used. But every old word is ambiguous
in meaning; the older and simpler the word, the more ambiguous. Wittgen-
stein agrees with Martin Buber that this ambiguity is not a defect of language;
it is the basis for the richness of language.11 Dictionaries are for the most part
a cover-up of the process that leads to definition (415).
The Oxford English Dictionary, the most ambitious project on language
ever attempted, makes a great effort to unveil the cover-up by showing how
a word has been used throughout its history. When the OED was begun in the
nineteenth century, it was a Herculean task to track the uses of a word through
centuries of usage. Now the computer makes it a much easier job but even the
best computer cannot give us a record of every time a simple, old word has
been used. If it could, then we would have the meaning of the word. We
would find a pattern of different contexts in which the word has appeared.
The OED does provide rough approximations of the contexts. But we lack
and always will lack what Wittgenstein calls a “perspicuous” view, that is, a
comprehensive view of how language functions in use (122).
Wittgenstein could be said to have written a commentary on what the OED
does. One of his best-known principles is “let the use teach you the meaning”
(212). It is important to understand this principle as embracing the history of
language, not just current use. The etymology of a word throws some light on
why the word was thought to be needed. Someone at some time conceived the
word as a helpful contribution to the language. Although the etymology does
not settle disputes about the meaning of a word, it can never be dismissed as
irrelevant.
Words wander in meaning as they are used in various contexts. That is
hardly surprising. What is truly puzzling and causes endless disputes is when
a word has nearly opposite meanings.12 Wittgenstein says that if our opponent
in an argument is saying something that seems completely absurd, perhaps he
or she is legitimately drawing upon a meaning of the word that is the oppo-
site of the meaning we are assuming.13
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 147

Words abstracted from a context of use do not have a meaning, but we

imagine that some words can simply be used as labels for naming things. We
have a strong tendency to change verbs to nouns so that an activity then ap-
pears to be a thing that can be labeled. Wittgenstein uses as a metaphor that
words, when they are not acting in statements, are like an engine idling; they
are simply static. (132). Or to use another of his metaphors, words are like
tools in a tool box. One has to see the tool acting within what he calls a “form
of life” (11). We think of words as the outer expression of our inner thoughts,
the means by which we communicate our ideas. But words are also our chief
obstacle to understanding the world and conversing with others. It is in
speech that we agree or disagree (241).
If he is right that we are “bewitched” by language, living in illusion, then
no words are up to the task of ending the spell. Every word that we use threat-
ens to entangle us further in confusion. There is no way to directly address the
problem by starting with agreed upon premises and arguing on the basis of
evidence to a firm conclusion. Modern philosophy began with a search for an
unambiguous premise, a truth that no one could deny. But if such a premise
is put into language it is going to be ambiguous in meaning and not do what
is asked of it.
The search for unambiguous truth leads to higher and higher levels of ab-
straction that eliminate human meaning as they eliminate ambiguity. Dean
Rusk, a Secretary of State in the 1950s, described his experience of policy
disputes in government circles. He said that arguments moved to higher and
higher levels of generality until everyone could agree; they could agree be-
cause the agreement no longer meant anything. Of course, outside the dispute
altogether, some official was actually deciding policy, perhaps with no recog-
nition of the ambiguity involved. Or if a new policy was not pressing, the for-
mer policy stayed in place which itself was a decision not subjected to criti-
cism.
Wittgenstein warns that the only way we can get at the problem is by ex-
amples, by showing how language works in practice. That is not the inclina-
tion of the human mind or the direction that philosophy has taken in its imi-
tation of (mathematical) science. Wittgenstein refers to a “contempt for the
particular,” by which he means our wish to create general categories that are
completely under our control.14
Wittgenstein refused to move away from the particulars. What G. K.
Chesterton wrote of Francis of Assisi could apply to Wittgenstein: He refused
to see the wood from the trees.15 We—the human race—lack a comprehen-
sive view of language. We have to work with the simple words of ordinary
life and pursue clarifications one case at a time. In Hanna Pitkin’s apt
metaphor, we are fisherman at sea who cannot put into port to fix our nets.16
148 Chapter Seven

When we talk about language we have only language to work with. Abstract-
ing words from a living context to give us unambiguous constructs only fur-
ther obscures the puzzles of meaning.
Wittgenstein’s “remarks” on language received two main responses, one
negative and the other laudatory. He did not make himself a friend to modern
philosophers by constantly attacking modern philosophy or philosophy itself.
He sometimes says that he is trying to put an end to philosophy (336). On his
own principles he could have tried to recover the root meaning of philoso-
phy—love of wisdom—and use that meaning against the present captivity of
the term in the university. In any case, many philosophers and nonphiloso-
phers think that his work is somewhere between inanity and fraud. They think
that what he said is too obvious for saying or else is just rambling comments
that go nowhere.
In the other direction, Wittgenstein generated some loyal disciples, espe-
cially among a number of his Cambridge students. A small library of books
has been devoted to an exposition of his philosophy (or anti-philosophy).17
The danger here is “Wittgensteinism,” which would be a system of abstract
ideas. The name often given to this school is “ordinary language philosophy.”
His point was that we are stuck with words as we use them in everyday life
for dealing with puzzles and disputes; no set of abstractions can save us. We
do not need a philosophical system of “ordinary-langugageism.”
These opposite responses to Wittgenstein—his work is trivialities that any
fool knows versus a difficult system that only expert philosophers can master—
have a similar effect. They both lead to an avoidance of the difficult but simple
puzzles that profoundly affect life and death. “The aspects of things that are
most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. . . .
One is unable to notice something because it is always before our eyes” (129).
Since the seventeenth century, philosophy had been involved in a search
for the “foundation” of knowledge. In the twentieth century the idea of a
stone structure on which a building is erected was a metaphor that had prob-
lems. One approach to criticizing the metaphor would have been to separate
“foundation” from the picture of a house sitting on concrete. Another ap-
proach would have been to argue that modern philosophy applied the
metaphor of foundation where it did not belong. That is, philosophers were
not in search of a foundation; they were actually in search of a roof from
which to hang other knowledge. A third way of criticizing the use of the
metaphor of foundation is that philosophers did not consider that something
other than one piece of knowledge can be the foundation for the rest of
knowledge. There may be a foundation for knowledge that is not knowledge.
Instead of criticizing the metaphor, many twentieth-century thinkers
declared themselves to be against “foundationalism”; they invented anti-
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 149

foundationalism. This language lifts the question into a stratosphere where

only a few people, comfortable in a world of -isms carry on a debate between
foundationalists and anti-foundationalists. The idea of something being foun-
dational or fundamental in human thinking is probably unavoidable but the
word is ill-served on both sides of the debate. The simple questions of what
do we know, how can we be certain, and what is fundamental to knowing are
not likely to get clarified in a battle of -isms
Wittgenstein transformed the question of foundation. In an early formula-
tion, he wrote in opposition to the “atomic facts” of the Logical Positivists:
“What has to be accepted, the given—it might be said—are facts of living.”18
By the time of the Investigations, he had come to refer to “forms of life” as
the given. The phrase has caused some confusion but he simply meant the
various ways we use language in our daily lives. “Commanding, questioning,
recounting, chatting are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eat-
ing, drinking, playing” (25). He does not begin from “the epistemological
solitude of the individual consciousness” but from human speech in a multi-
plicity of situations. “Nothing is more fundamental to the whole human en-
terprise than the community we create in our natural reactions to one another
as they have been cultivated and elaborated in a very contingent, historical
tradition.”19

CONCEPTUAL PUZZLES

The “conceptual puzzles” that Wittgenstein refers to are terms that have
nearly opposite meanings. The meanings are not contradictory; some under-
lying link prevents the two meanings from simply being equivocal. The dou-
ble meaning emerged in the course of history, and the second meaning, almost
the reverse of the first, does not entirely replace the first. Both meanings re-
main, creating ambiguity and endless disputes involving the correct mean-
ing—“the definition”—of the word. If people consciously carried on that ar-
gument it would be confusing enough. In most disputes, however, the two
meanings float through the argument without debaters recognizing that the
ambiguity of the word is a problem at all.
Wittgenstein, in describing teaching, says that the teacher provides exam-
ples and at some point the learner can “go on in the same way as those who
are teaching us” (31–32). I wish to cite some examples, not those that
Wittgenstein used but ones that go on in the same way. In pointing out the am-
biguities of the following words I am trying to show a form of teaching. I will
use three examples of “conceptual puzzles” before turning to the examples of
education and teaching.
150 Chapter Seven

Culture
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the biological metaphor “culture”
was used to indicate a person with superior taste. Culture was almost syn-
onymous with education. A person was either cultured or not. Culture was
what the superior class defended against attempts to coarsen society. In the
late nineteenth century, anthropology nearly reversed the meaning. From now
on, there were many cultures and an enlightened person was forbidden to
judge any one of them superior to others. Instead of a judgment of excellence,
one was now to be “non-judgmental.” The two meanings are almost opposites,
but one can trace the movement between the two meanings in a work such as
Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas in 1870 which advocates a “program of
culture” open to everyone. The anthropologist in the 1880s was drawing on a
tendency already at work in a democracy where “culture” was to be made
available to all.
In the late twentieth century, “multiculturalism” was a favorite word of peo-
ple who thought it was obvious that the country contains many cultures. Their
opponents, whether or not they were conscious of drawing upon an older mean-
ing of culture, defended educational standards against the multiculturalists.
Russell Baker wrote that he thought the schools should try to get one culture
before claiming to cover many. I was once on a panel for an audience of U.N.
diplomats. The question of the day was whether the United States should be ex-
porting its culture around the world. After the predictable complaints about Mc-
Donalds, Coca Cola, and Hollywood movies by many of the diplomats, the
French diplomat said: “I don’t think this country has any culture.” Everyone
looked at him, everyone understood exactly what he meant, and then they went
back to discussing the bad influence of Hollywood.

Religion
I noted in chapter 6 that the term “religion,” similar to culture, nearly reversed
its meaning. Up to the sixteenth century there was true religion or false reli-
gion. There could not be many religions. Even as late as John Calvin’s Insti-
tutes of the Christian Religion, which could be alternately translated as “Prac-
tices of Christian Devotion,” this meaning of “religion.” was in place.
A different meaning of religion had begun to emerge in the fifteenth century,
but what brought about a fundamental change was the split of Christianity at
the Reformation. Late in the sixteenth century, as Protestants and Catholics
fought to a standstill in some places, one finds reference to the “Catholic and
Protestant religions.” The invention of this new meaning for religion was a big
step on the way to tolerance. It was quite novel to suggest that there might be
more than one set of practices deserving of the name religion.
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 151

Now the word was available for referring to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hin-
dus, and so forth. People who actually engage in practices of devotion do not
think of themselves as “having a religion.” They may object to the word being
applied to them while at the same time they may join anthropologists or soci-
ologists in describing other people as having a religion. For most Jews, Jews
don’t have a religion; Jews think that Christians have a religion, but being Jew-
ish is a way of life. The final ironic twist is when Christians distance them-
selves from religion by contrasting, “Christian faith” and “world religions.”

Revolution
The term “revolution” is a common metaphor with an unusually clear history.
The term used by Copernicus in On the Revolution of the Heavens provided the
image of a circling back to beginnings. The term entered political language in
1689 with the Glorious Revolution that secured the rights of Englishmen. The
revolution restored rights that went back as far as the thirteenth century but had
been disrupted. When the British American colonists declared independence in
1776, their document, with an eye to 1689, appealed to parliament for redress
from abuses by the king. Subsequently, when they wrote a constitution they laid
claim to a “new order,” but they looked for models in the ancient world.
The French Revolution, in some ways a sequel to the one in North Amer-
ica, nearly reversed the meaning of revolution. A violent disruption was at its
heart; a new calendar with the year one was to be adopted, signifying a break
from monarchy and priesthood. In British America, the main revolution was,
as John Adams said, in the hearts and minds of the people; the violent war
was a sequel to the more important revolution.
The French Revolution began in violence and the revolution picked up
more violence as it proceeded. The more common meaning of “revolution”
since then has taken the French Revolution as its model. A series of bloody
revolutions cut across the nineteenth century, culminating in the Marxist-
Leninist revolution establishing the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, John
Kennedy and later Bobby Kennedy talked of a new kind of peaceful revolu-
tion needed in Latin America. Their intention was admirable but they may not
have realized how difficult it would be to bring the older meaning of revolu-
tion back to center stage.

EDUCATION

The term education is also a kind of conceptual puzzle. The way that school
is related to education seems to be a simple omission or a use of a part for the
152 Chapter Seven

whole. People regularly say “education,” when they mean school. If chal-
lenged, they will say obviously education goes beyond school. What is usu-
ally unrecognized is that school and education are not different in extension
but two different kinds of things. “School” is a word that evolved into mean-
ing a place, an institution, or a system. Education is an ancient word for a
process that especially applies to children but can be used of all human be-
ings and in the past was used of animals and trees.
The almost complete collapse of education into school could not have oc-
curred before the middle of the nineteenth century. The advent of an ideal of
“universal education” (that is, school for every child) in France, the United
States, and throughout much of the world, was not greeted with joy by the la-
boring classes. Their resistance was worn down, though never entirely elim-
inated, by the fact that society rewards those who “finish school” and are
properly credentialed (eight years at the beginning of the twentieth century,
sixteen years today).
Some of what schools are for is undoubtedly valuable for a flourishing hu-
man existence. Some parents did need persuading about their children’s edu-
cation. But the new class of educators not only won the game; they all but
eliminated their linguistic opponents. School was the victor over the ways peo-
ple had been educated for millennia, but it may have been a pyrrhic victory.
When the classroom is part of an educational pattern, it can be a place of
hope and revolutionary power; that is the reason why it is both glorified and
feared. But as the sole “deliverer” of education, the classroom is hopelessly
overmatched. The school’s teacher is burdened by both rhetorical praise and
carping criticism. Taxpayers routinely complain: why don’t these teachers do
their job and turn out smart, knowledgeable, and well-behaved citizens?
Whenever it begins to surface that school cannot be the whole of education,
the issue is quickly pushed out of sight with a distinction between “formal ed-
ucation” and “informal education.” The school is the formal education; in-
formal education is anything else anyone cares to name. Since education is
not thinkable without form (of time, place, material, recipients), the distinc-
tion between formal education (school) and what has no form (amorphous-
ness) reinforces the assumption that whatever education is it belongs in
school. Despite the fact that the whole idea has badly broken down over the
last half century, the language has not changed from what the early twentieth
century gave us.
Given assumptions in the way “education” is used, the teacher is the obvi-
ous actor in the middle (or the bottom) of the picture. What do teachers do?
They teach. While the schoolteacher is profusely praised at ritualized mo-
ments, he, or more likely she, does not have much status and is not paid in the
same league as lawyers, bond salesmen, or CEOs. Not many university pro-
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 153

fessors list their occupation as schoolteacher; it would mean a reduction in

status if they did.

TO TEACH

How then do we find a wider, deeper, richer meaning of “teach?” Wittgen-

stein provides several “signals” for responding to the question: What does it
mean to teach? In asking for meaning, Wittgenstein says, one should ask:
How does the child come to use the word (208)? Another key question for
Wittgenstein is whether the activity is exclusively human or does its “gram-
mar” allow for its use beyond humans? One of his examples is that we know
a machine cannot have a tooth ache; that is not part of the grammar of pain.20
Does the grammar of teach allow us to say that communities of people teach?
Do people unintentionally teach? Do cats, birds and elephants teach? Do
trees, oceans, or deserts teach?
The answers to those questions are debatable. One can assemble examples
that, after a while, are persuasive—or not. The English word “teach” has been
spoken and written millions of times. If one could Google all those millions
of times over the centuries, only a small minority of cases would refer to what
a person called the teacher does in a classroom. The word “teach” shows up
to describe the first moments of life and continues in use to the very end of
life. Throughout life teaching cuts across every “form of life”; that is, its use
is both lifelong and life wide.
Wittgenstein’s question of when and how the child first encounters the
word does not admit of a general answer. What is certain is that a child, even
before speaking, encounters someone showing them how to do something, to
which the child responds. Wittgenstein says that teaching begins as training
(5). Giving an explanation to the learner comes later. Numerous books on ed-
ucation blithely assert that to teach is to give reasons or to explain. These dis-
cussions of teaching simply dismiss what happens in early childhood as train-
ing, not teaching.21
One’s grammar can simply oppose teaching and training or one can include
training as a form of teaching. The preferable choice is suggested by the prac-
tical results. Excluding training from teaching creates a shriveled up meaning
for teaching and it leaves reasons and explanations without a human leg to
stand on. A schoolteacher who does not include training as a subordinate but
indispensable part of teaching-learning is going to find classroom teaching in-
effective, unwieldy, and discouraging.
The young child encounters teaching as a training in human basics (5, 208).
Most of the time the teaching is not verbal and it is not intentional. The child is
154 Chapter Seven

taught how to do things by being shown how to do them. At an early age, the
teaching is similar to the teaching of nonhuman animals when young. Children
feel sympathy with (the other) animals that are similarly being trained. Children
can recognize fear or pain in their next of kin, an awareness that adults may lose.
It takes several years for the child to acquire the verb “teach,” but it is ac-
quired well before “school age.” Once the child is aware of learning things,
its vocabulary soon includes “teach me to do that”—whether the request is to
tie a shoelace, blow bubbles, or learn to ride a bicycle.
In the 1940s and 1950s researchers were interested in the link between
teaching and learning. “To simplify the research task, teaching was recon-
ceptualized as a variety of acts performed by individuals called teachers as
they work in classrooms with the intention of promoting learning.”22 The as-
sumption in such research was that classroom instruction is the primary form
of teaching and that teaching and learning are separate activities. The search
was for surefire behaviors that would effectively connect teaching and learn-
ing. It was confidently said that “since it may be assumed that whatever ef-
fect a teacher has on pupils must result from behaviors, it is only necessary to
identify the crucial behaviors, record them, and score them properly to mea-
sure effectiveness in process.”23
This research never produced much fruit.24 Many researchers concluded
that teaching and learning have no necessary connection. But it could be that
isolating a (school) teacher’s behaviors to understand teaching is the wrong
place to start. Wittgenstein begins with teaching-learning as a single relation.
Learning is always a result of teaching but a pupil in the classroom learns
from many teachers. The academic instructor, mainly using words, has no
guaranteed way to succeed. There is always a gap. The gap is not between
teaching and learning but between what an individual human teacher intends
to teach and what pupils actually learn.
The skillful teacher in the classroom accepts this frustrating fact and does
not try to fill the gap with more explanations or threats of punishment. The
effective teacher uses language that points, suggests, provokes, and leaves the
learner to respond. When people do not learn what someone is intending to
teach, the fault may lie with the person trying to teach, with the one who is to
be a learner, or with conditions that are not entirely under the control of ei-
ther. The question to ask is not why they cannot learn but what are they in fact
learning and how can one influence that teacher. A child in a ghetto school
has many teachers. The lessons taught by the country, the neighborhood, and
the school may drown out the lesson that the hard-working instructor at the
front of the room is trying to teach.
An examination of who or what teaches raises the issue of whether the
grammar of teach-learn extends beyond the human world. I have suggested
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 155

that a focus on teaching as the giving of reasons unduly restricts teaching to

“children of school age” and undermines even that one form of teaching.
Teaching that is humanly most helpful begins with training which can be ex-
amined in the interaction of mother and offspring in many species. The pat-
tern that humans follow quickly veers from the rest of the animal world but,
when humans take the time to look, they can still learn much from the
teaching-learning among other animals.
The teacher of an animal can be another animal or the teacher can be a hu-
man. Some of the best writing on “animal training” does not hesitate to use
the verb teach.25 If you wish an animal to conform to human wishes, you have
to respect its ability to learn and show it to do so in ways that do not violently
intrude on what it has already learned. Its basic learning has come from its
tribe and its parent. Other animals have a more restricted pattern of learning
than do humans, but like humans they learn because they have been taught.
The grammar of teach-learn extends beyond the human world and even be-
yond the nonhuman animal world. One can say that the ocean taught the fish-
ermen, the mountain taught the climber, or that the earth is our teacher. The
question is where the metaphorical extension of teach-learn no longer makes
sense. On the learner’s side, there has to be a being who can respond; teach-
ing a rock or an automobile does not make sense. On the teacher’s side, teach-
ing is to show how to do or not do something. Within that meaning, intention
is not an indispensable element. Calling the universe and everything in it our
(potential) teachers seems to some people to make the word do too much,
evacuating any useful meaning. But so long as one holds to the core meaning
of to teach as to show someone how to do something, the metaphorical ex-
tension does not become empty of meaning.
One theme implicit in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy but which requires
emphasis is that he moved from using visual metaphors for knowledge to a
variety of oral/aural/tactile metaphors. At least he tried to make that move al-
though his language (whether German or English) resists giving up the pri-
macy of the visual. Equating knowing with seeing goes back as far as Plato
and was reinforced in modern times by the metaphor of “enlightenment.” In
the Tractatus, Wittgenstein came to the limits of knowledge as a picture of an
object. His attempted alternative was a realm that shows itself. Although this
realm is unspeakable, it is still visual in character. In the Tractatus, his real al-
ternative to a picture is silence, which is an oral/aural metaphor but it does not
change the character of knowing insofar as the silence is above all language.
In the Investigations, Wittgenstein has language play a variety of games
which do not need pictures attached. Silence now finds its place not above the
world of language but at its center. Most teaching in life is nonverbal. Speech
for a child emerges out of silence. The earliest form of speech in teaching is
156 Chapter Seven

directions for moving the body. The shift is from showing to showing how. It
is easy to miss how crucial the difference is between these two verb forms. It
is the difference between, on the one hand, trying to teach swimming by hold-
ing up a picture of a swimmer and explaining the dynamics of swimming and,
on the other hand, teaching someone to swim by getting into the water, put-
ting a hand under the learner’s body, and saying “kick,” “breathe,” “turn.” In
a classroom, it is the difference between trying to show people the truth by
telling them, as opposed to a conversation in which a student is shown how
best to use language in the search for truth.
Wittgenstein often slips back into talking about a view or a vision of things.
He also uses a distinction between “image” and “picture” in order to free
thinking from a pictorial bias (301). But at least in English, “image” is still a
strongly visual metaphor. An important point he does make with this distinc-
tion is that we get free from identifying knowing and a picture when the im-
ages are multiple. It is doubtful that the human mind can think without im-
ages of some kind. Wittgenstein had a fondness for Western movies and
incorporated them into his image of knowing. The “moving pictures” provide
not a picture or several photos but an experience of movement. In trying to
transcend knowledge imagined as a snapshot, he sought alternatives in math-
ematical formulas, architectural plans, and portraits.26 He also considered mu-
sic to be a key to human understanding. Understanding a sentence is much
like understanding a piece of music.
A person who wishes to signify understanding may say “I see.” But the
sign that the person has understood is that he or she can use the right word in
context (531). Hanna Pitkin gives an example of a three-year-old who is told
by her mother to put her blanket back on the bed. The child responds: “But
mother, I simply can’t function in the morning without my blanket.”27 The
adult may laugh that the child has imitated a statement of her mother’s. But
the child did not just repeat her mother’s words. She used the sentence in the
appropriate human situation, and she is responding to the mother’s (uninten-
tional) teaching by example.
What clinches the fact that the child understands is that she has precisely
substituted “blanket” for “coffee.” She understood the statement within her
own context. If she were asked the meaning of the word “function,” she prob-
ably would not even know that it is a word. She was shown how to use lan-
guage, and she responded with her own proper use of language. In this kind of
teaching, “seeing the truth” and giving reasons do not play a prominent part.
The learning of language is the most obvious example of how teaching-
learning occurs for humans. The child is surrounded with teachers and re-
sponds to the teaching. A child learns French or Spanish or Russian depend-
ing on which language is spoken in the environment. The child can also learn
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 157

a second language from its immediate surroundings before self-reflection

fully emerges. After that time, the person may try to remember rules, memo-
rize words, and compose sentences, all of which get in the way of speaking a
language.
A classroom is a good place for reflecting on language that has already
been learned; it is not designed for acquiring a language. Rather than teach a
person to speak, a classroom teacher can teach a person to speak better. The
usual way to learn a language is in a wide variety of situations in which the
person has little choice but to respond in speech (“Where is the bathroom”).
The teachers are everyone and everything in the vicinity.
Steven Pinker has written, “let us put aside the myth that mothers teach
their children to speak.”28 What he is opposing is a special language of “moth-
erese,” but he badly overstates his case. Mothers most surely teach their chil-
dren to speak. They are only one of many teachers, but they are one of the
most important. The reason, I suspect, that writers on education are dismis-
sive of parental teaching is not that the teaching is ineffective but, on the con-
trary, because it is so powerfully formative of a person’s life. Later in life,
when other people teach by giving reasons and explaining, the teaching is
likely to go nowhere if it conflicts with the teaching-learning of early child-
hood.
The leaders of the French Enlightenment proclaimed that the purpose of ed-
ucation is to free the child from the prejudices of the father (they could have
added mother). But the most that the schooling part of education can do is ex-
amine those prejudices and help a person to decide which ones should be af-
firmed and which ones might possibly be shed. “Prejudice” now has a com-
pletely negative meaning; but we all begin with pre-judgments, what the human
race offers us as a gift before we can do much rational judging on our own.

WITTGENSTEIN, SOCRATES, FREUD

At first glance, Wittgenstein is simply a follower of Socrates, another master

of clever insights into the puzzles of language. But Wittgenstein, like Niet-
zsche and Kierkegaard, has an ambivalent relation to Socrates. Yes, Socrates
is a playful ironist punching through the illusions of knowledge to make real
knowing possible. But to take Socrates as the model of all teaching can itself
be an illusion.
The reason why Socrates is dangerous is that the individual needs a sur-
rounding community, reason needs the context of the nonrational in life, hu-
mor needs something serious about which to make jokes. Socrates in com-
plete isolation, wielding his confident arguments, has too many rationalistic
158 Chapter Seven

and dangerous men as his successors. As G. K. Chesterton said, rationalism

is that peculiar form of insanity in which one has lost everything but one’s
mind.29
Wittgenstein’s crucial difference from Socrates is that his meaning of
“teach” is rooted in the body, the emotions, the human community, and the
life around humanity. For Socrates, to teach is to show; for Wittgenstein, to
teach is to show how. The early Wittgenstein was intent on stating true propo-
sitions that accurately describe the world. The later Wittgenstein was inter-
ested in how a child acquires language and how the many “families” of lan-
guage operate in everyday speech. The early Wittgenstein imagined silence as
an unspeakable realm above the ordinary. The later Wittgenstein understood
silence as the center of ordinary life. One cannot understand language with-
out the silence from which words emerge. Language itself is a syncopation of
sounds and silence.
Socrates is a master of verbal explanations, but that kind of teaching pre-
supposes a great variety of other kinds of teaching, both verbal and nonver-
bal. Teaching begins as training in a community. “We master routines that do
not depend on understanding; our understanding depends on this. At the bot-
tom is not thinking but doing.”30 The “foundational” question is not finding
one piece of knowledge that is the basis for all the rest; it is the question of
who and what do we trust.
Wittgenstein’s answer to the question of trust is that a child does not begin
as a doubter, doubt presupposes belief. A child begins by trusting the teacher
and the most basic teaching occurs as the child encounters the physical envi-
ronment; other humans provide a kind of padded cell for the encounter.
Wittgenstein’s description of the ultimate basis of knowing and teaching is
simple and homey: “It is just like directly taking hold of something as I take
hold of my towel without having doubts.”31
Wittgenstein often refers to what he is doing as therapy: “The philoso-
pher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness” (255). That
description of philosophy strikes many people as peculiar. Wittgenstein was
influenced by his Viennese contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Wittgenstein even
calls himself a disciple of Freud whom he praised for looking at the connec-
tion among things rather than looking for causes. However, he criticized
Freud for attempting to find a single pattern of meaning in dream interpreta-
tion: “Freud wanted to find the essence of dreaming.”32
Both men had an interest in therapy and Wittgenstein was actually more
comfortable with the term. Freud says that his main interest is a theory to
change the world. Freud says that he does therapy for two reasons: to test his
theory and to make a living. Freud was concerned that his theory would be
taken over by therapists in the United States.33 He feared that they would turn
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 159

psychoanalysis into a therapy to adjust rich people to the existing world. His
fears were well-grounded.
Freud was a source of brilliant figures of speech, using insights from
mythology, hunches, guesses, and stories. He did not discover the uncon-
scious but he named it. His language stayed close to ordinary speech, al-
though his English translators created a thicket of Greek-derived words.34
Freud’s weakness, which has badly hurt his reputation, was that he wanted to
be accepted as a real scientist, with science understood in its nineteenth-
century mold. Psychoanalysis has not held up well as a scientific theory of the
workings of the mind; as therapy it does better. However, without the provo-
cation of continued theorizing, the therapy cannot extend beyond “adjust-
ment” to the surrounding political and economic culture.
Wittgenstein is vulnerable to the same domestication. His therapy can be
reduced to an amusing little word game. But his journey from the Tractatus
to the Investigations was a move away from a theory encased in the trappings
of mathematical-empirical science to recognition of a kind of theorizing that
requires a commitment. This theorizing has to move away from the role of a
play’s spectator to being the play’s writer/director/actor. The play is always
fragmentary because the author cannot see the ending.
The relation between theory and therapy is part of a larger relation between
theory and practice.” Theory versus practice has been a favorite contrast in
modern times. “Theory” is a visual term; it means to look. Given that the
Greek image for truth is a coming to the light, theory plays a central position.
The best or most certain knowledge is theoretical, looking upon the truth. In
Aristotle there is also “practical knowledge,” but it suffered from an inferior
status. It almost disappeared from modern philosophy until the twentieth cen-
tury.
Popular speech as well as contemporary institutions and professions em-
body a vertical split between theory and practice. The theorists are on top; the
job of “practitioners” is to “implement” the theory. “Think tanks” produce re-
ports that are peppered with high-flying abstractions. If anyone complains
about the impenetrable prose of the visionaries, the standard response is that
“someone can clean up the language later.” Ideas are what count; words are
just disposable outer covers. It is the practitioners who will be left with hav-
ing to put the ideas “into practice.”
Wittgenstein was part of a twentieth-century attempt to redo the relation
between theory and practice. “Practice” has almost opposite meanings. It can
mean getting ready to do something; it is not the real performance, just prepa-
ration for it. Practice also means the very stuff of living, what we are engaged
in from birth. In this latter meaning, practice precedes theory; theorizing is it-
self one of life’s practices; it is the practice of trying to bend thought back on
160 Chapter Seven

itself. The chief material it has to work with is language. A slight shift in lan-
guage can reverberate throughout practice. This kind of theorizing is based
not on assembling facts and using a chain of reasoning. It is mainly an alter-
ing of metaphors. Theorizing of this kind can have profound effects, but it is
always frustratingly incomplete. It does not end in a theory but in further the-
orizing.
In a reform of language there is a mutually enforcing relation between the
words and the behavior of the participants. Wittgenstein’s “let the use teach you
the meaning” applies to how behavior at any time in history is expressed in lan-
guage and how expression of language changes behavior in the future. Wittgen-
stein was interested in behavior in a special sense “for it includes in its mean-
ing the external circumstances—of the behavior in a narrower sense.”35 The
beginning and the end of his theory are the practices of human life.
Wittgenstein’s statement that philosophy” leaves everything as it is” may
apply to current behavior, but in a longer run of history, philosophy is capa-
ble of changing everything by disrupting the closed circuit of behavior and
language (124). Marx complained that “up to now philosophers have only
tried to understand the world; the point is to change it.” Both halves of his
statement are true, but the second part follows from the first rather than con-
tradicts it.
Wittgenstein’s philosophy, he says, allows him to stop philosophizing
when he wishes to do so and contemplate the simple joys of life (133). A good
teacher knows that one can only make one’s best effort to show how to act,
including how to speak. Then one has to let go, realizing that at least for now
the student may just not get it (143). Neither agonizing over one’s failures nor
pressing harder on the student is likely to bring success. Dialogue is endless;
tomorrow is another day. As Wittgenstein said, “in philosophy the winner of
the race is the one who can run most slowly.36

NOTES

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1971); Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
Numbers in parentheses refer to paragraph numbers in each book.
2. Letter to Ludwig von Ficker in G. H. von Wright, Prototractatus (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University, 1971), 16.
3. Letter of Paul Englemann in Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s
Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 220.
4. A. J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
5. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: His Life and Work (New York: Penguin Books,
1991) is the most complete biography.
 Wittgenstein: I’ll Teach You Differences 161

6. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein (London: Oxford University Press,

1962), 16, 26.
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper, 1969), 612.
8. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: His Life and Work, 537. The line is from King
Lear, act 4, scene 1.
9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1974), 382.
10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row,
1964), 18.
11. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man (New York: Harper, 1966), 115.
12. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 20.
13. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 29.
14. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 18.
15. G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books,
1954), 87.
16. Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 297.
17. A few of the better known studies are Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: Noth-
ing is Hidden (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Rush Rhees and D. Z. Phillips,
Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); John
Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978); James Edwards, Ethics without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life
(Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1982); Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and
the Philosophical Investigations (New York: Routledge, 1997).
18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. G. E. M.
Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), I, 630.
19. Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (London: SPCK, 1997). 76.
20. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 16.
21. R. S. Peters, Concept of Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1967), 19.
22. Elliot Eisner, Educational Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 157.
23. D. H. Medley and H. E. Mitzel, “Measuring Classroom Behavior by System-
atic Observation,” in Handbook of Research on Teaching, ed. N. L. Gage (Chicago:
Rand McNally, 1963), 258.
24. For a critical summary of the research, see Alan Tom, Teaching as a Moral
Craft (New York: Longman, 1984), 53–73.
25. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Random
House, 1986); Monty Roberts, The Man Who Listens to Horses (New York: Ballan-
tine, 1999).
26. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1973), 182.
27. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 57.
28. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: Morrow, 1994), 39.
29. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1959), 16.
30. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 204.
162 Chapter Seven

31. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 204.

32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology
and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967), 49–50.
33. Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (New York: Norton, 1950).
34. Freud, The Question, 16; Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York:
Knopf, 1982).
35. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 314.
36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Values (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 34.
 Conclusion

The reader who has got this far may be inclined to conclude that the only les-
son to be drawn from history is confusion about the meaning of teaching. Cer-
tainly, there is no easy consensus that emerges from the previous pages but
there are lessons to be learned. Perhaps the most important lesson is that his-
tory is not a straight line of progress and that the relation between teaching
and learning remains problematic.
The purpose of engaging a variety of writers from other times and other
places is not to find confirmation of what the reader already thinks. It is rather
to make the reader aware that there may be other ways of seeing the issue that
are worth considering. Sometimes undergraduates who are assigned to read
classic texts only want to read what agrees with their opinions. That attitude
could always be found among students, but it seems more prevalent today. A
history, literature, or philosophy instructor finds it difficult to convince stu-
dents that encountering writers you do not agree with has great educational
potential.
This book has raised questions about the meaning of “teach.” A difficulty
in this inquiry is that in contemporary language “teach” seems to be a clear
idea. Teaching is what teachers do. The teachers are people who have a cer-
tain kind of training in working with young people in places called schools.
Their job is thought to be one of transmitting the knowledge that they possess
to the students in their charge. While the teacher needs skill and various meth-
ods to succeed, the process does not seem mysterious. Of course, everyone
recognizes that the teacher sometimes fails to transmit the knowledge.
One thing that all of the authors discussed in this book agree upon is that
no one can transmit knowledge to another. Numerous other writers agree. If
they are right, then society at large expects the people called teachers to do

163
164 Conclusion

the impossible. The teachers themselves may come to suspect that what is ex-
pected of them cannot be done. Some classroom instructors may decide that
their survival depends on dismissing the paradoxes of Plato and the puzzles
of Wittgenstein.
In much of educational literature there seems to be an unspoken agreement
not to bring up the question of the possibility of teaching. Raising doubts that
anyone can teach anything to anybody is not helpful for the morale of people
who are called to teach. Asking what it means to teach is taken to be a dis-
traction from practical questions, such as how to teach tenth-grade geometry.
What would help the people who are called teachers is that people who do
not think of themselves as teachers would recognize that the question of
teaching applies to them. The discussion of classroom teaching in relation to
other forms of teaching has to include the teaching by parents, politicians,
artists, business leaders, physicians, athletes, and others.

TEACHING AS SHOWING HOW

Teaching is a fundamental activity of all human beings and at least some other
animals. Etymologically and historically, “teaching” is showing someone
how to live, including how to die. (Rousseau recognized what all religious
traditions have known: teach people how to die or they will never learn how
to live).1 A human community does that through a wide range of its repre-
sentatives. For society to ask a few people who work with youngsters in
schools to be the teachers is an impossible burden to lay on any group.
For beginning an inquiry on teaching, Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most
helpful of the authors I have considered. Wittgenstein has nothing to say
about school teaching but much to say about how human beings learn because
they are taught. For Wittgenstein, there is no point in trying to define the word
“teach,” but it is helpful to explore how the word emerges in a person’s life.
The human animal is born with few if any instincts but with a capacity and
readiness to learn. As Rousseau said, everything not given by birth has to be
given by education. The infant responds to being taught. From the first mo-
ments of life, teaching-learning is a relation of giving and receptiveness. It
becomes a fully dialogical relation as soon as the infant can express the rudi-
ments of human speech.
The fundamental form of speech in teaching is choreography, that is, direct
and precise instruction on how to move the body. Good teachers know when
to say “push” or “move your hand an inch further.” A good teacher can break
down an activity into “executable commands.” That is, the teacher must know
exactly what to say and when to say it.2
 Conclusion 165

Teaching-learning between human beings can be broken down into four

steps: (1) student acts, (2) teacher contemplates the act, (3) teacher proposes
modifying the act, and (4) student tries out the proposed change. The se-
quence can be repeated indefinitely forming a circular movement. The stu-
dent’s response helps to teach the teacher what is the next step in teaching. In-
terestingly, the term “instruct,” which is used for direct, bodily commands,
reappears in classroom teaching when bodily commands are all but sus-
pended and the mind is the focus. A classroom instructor has to consider what
can be learned about instruction from a parent teaching a child to eat at the
table or put on his shoes. “Executable commands” are not just for infants.
Every teacher of ballet, baseball, or baton twirling knows that teaching in-
volves training the inherent learning ability of the student through precisely
guided instruction and then repetition of the action. Modern educational lit-
erature not only neglects drill, training, and memorization but tends to attack
them as the enemy. The word memory is usually preceded by the adjective
rote. A basketball student’s reluctance to spend hours practicing foul shots
may be understandable. But educational literature’s disparagement of train-
ing, repetition, and memory is an overreaction to misuse of these practices.
George Steiner has often pointed to the absence of learning “by heart” as one
of the greatest weaknesses of modern education.3
Books on teaching simply announce that training is not a part of teaching.
It is assumed that teaching is explaining or giving reasons. As soon as chil-
dren can understand explanations, they should indeed be given reasons, but
reasoning is never more than a part of teaching. Instead of a conveyance of
reasons or ideas, teaching-learning is always a bodily encounter in which the
teacher shows someone how to do something. In a classroom, the doing
something usually refers to speaking and writing, public behavior that a
teacher can contemplate and then suggest how the action can be improved.
Fundamental human activities, including standing, walking, talking, eat-
ing, and bathing are learned early in life because other human beings have
taught the learner by example. Sometimes the giving of example is intended,
more often it is not. The child, who has become comfortable at creeping, first
stands up because the physical and social environment says, “if you wish to
live in this humanly arranged world, you have to learn to perform this action.”
When a child is learning to walk, the teacher is likely to be an appreciative
observer who says a few words and provides a safe and encouraging envi-
ronment.
Humans have innate talents that can be developed by teaching. The teacher
may have less of a particular talent than the student does. Most good athletic
coaches were not the best athletes. They were often second-stringers who had
the opportunity to study the game and the players while sitting on the bench.
166 Conclusion

The best athletes know that they can always learn to be better at what they do;
they are willing to be taught. I often wonder what reaction Tiger Woods’s
coach gets when asked: “What do you do for a living?” Answer: “I teach golf
to Tiger Woods.” Even if you are unarguably the best in the world at what you
do, you can be taught to improve your performance. Almost certainly, Tiger
Woods’ most important teacher of golf was his father; the teacher was obvi-
ously not as talented as the student. As is true of most cynical slogans, the
saying “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” has an element of truth.
One of the worst assumptions in modern education is that teaching is only for
children. I noted in the introduction that the literature of adult education has ac-
tually reinforced this bias. The mark of an adolescent is to think that he or she
no longer needs to be taught. Thus, much of the writing on education suggests
an adolescent culture in which individuals no longer need good example, intel-
lectually stimulating conversation, and occasional corrective criticism. The ideal
of adulthood is a projection of this adolescent attitude: Since I am a healthy, ra-
tional, self-sufficient individual, I am beyond the need for being taught.

LANGUAGES OF TEACHING4

Teaching-learning begins at least as early as birth and continues at least until

death (I have occasionally been challenged by religious believers when I have
limited the span from birth to death). I have often marveled at the work of
physical therapists as they teach people who are physically disabled or who
are very old. The therapist is precise in commands based on knowledge of the
human body. The learner has to cooperate and be willing to repeat an action
hundreds of times. The physical therapist exemplifies a form of teaching that
was pointed out by many ancient writers. It is not an accident that the physi-
cian came to be called “doctor” or teacher. Therapy is one of the first forms
of teaching (“mommy will kiss it and make it better”) and, if we are fortunate,
it will be one of the last.
Therapy in human life involves a “family” of therapeutic languages, forms
of speech that are directed at healing.5 Throughout our lives, teachers praise,
forgive, console, comfort, and otherwise try to heal the hurts that can obstruct
learning. In contrast to these therapeutic languages, a second family of lan-
guages can be called rhetorical. In this family of languages, teachers say with
more or less directness how the world is and what human nature is. Story
telling, preaching, and lecturing are rhetorical languages that are appropriate
for teaching when the conditions are right.
The stories that last for generations are about human destiny but leave
room for the individual to decide where he or she fits in the big picture. When
 Conclusion 167

an adult composes stories for children, the adult often makes the “moral” of
the story too obvious. W. H. Auden writes that “there are books which are
only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences,
but there are no good books which are only for children.”6 Most adults have
had the excruciating experience of sitting through a movie aimed at children,
as opposed to a movie that the adult and child can appreciate at different lev-
els. We are taught by stories throughout our lives. What is learned as a child
in school should be a help to appreciating the stories that can nourish the
imagination and intellect. The trouble with standard textbooks is that they
have no texts, no artistic, idiosyncratic, surprising crafting of language that
would lead a reader to cherish the book.
Preaching and lecturing are closely related rhetorical languages. Both are
effective only if the teacher has carefully prepared what is to be said and the
learner has chosen to share in this instance of teaching-learning. One often
hears the criticism that a speaker is “preaching to the choir” but that is exactly
who should be preached to, that is, an audience that shares the beliefs of the
preacher and wishes to know the implications of those beliefs. Outside that
context, preaching is boring or insulting. Our main preachers are politicians
whose text of belief may be the U.S. Constitution, the Republican platform,
or House Bill 250-17. Most politicians today are not very good at preaching
because they seem ashamed to preach. They even leave the composition of
the speech to someone else. Can anyone imagine a team of speech writers as-
sembling Lincoln’s Second Inaugural?
Sermons can shade into lectures, but a lecturer is allowed a wider circle
of belief that is shared with an audience. Lecturers, like preachers, ought to
take plenty of time to prepare. Most of us are not up for delivering a worth-
while lecture (or listening to a lecture) more than a few times a year. The
speakers who “have lecture, will travel” are only in the entertainment busi-
ness. The audience for a real lecture has to share with the speaker an ap-
preciation for words well crafted and expertly delivered. A lecturer relies on
facts and tries to persuade the listeners by his or her arguments. With to-
day’s media, sermons and lectures are more important than ever; the Inter-
net has not killed spoken and written words. But as Plato found with writ-
ing and Martin Luther with the printing press, the instrument for spreading
the word can increase the quantity of the teaching at the expense of the
quality. We have more than enough talk but not enough high quality preach-
ing and lecturing.
Rhetorical languages and therapeutic languages are languages of teaching
from infancy onward. Every parent both soothes and sermonizes, adjusting
the language for age, past performance, and dozens of environmental condi-
tions. Later in life, friends, coworkers and public figures largely replace the
168 Conclusion

parents, although one can find ninety-year-olds preaching to their seventy-

year-old children.
While therapeutic language is still obviously related to the choreographing
of the body, rhetorical language can seem to be a teaching by words alone.
Humans share with other animals a teaching in which adults show the young
how to survive. Nonhuman animals have their own language to demonstrate
activities of finding food or spreading one’s wings to fly. Humans seem to be
the only earthlings who can abstract language from the body and choreograph
speech itself. This power of abstract thought and abstract speech is the great
achievement of the humans and their greatest danger. Abstract language is a
force for good or ill.
The classroom within the school is invented for one, very unusual kind of
teaching-learning. The classroom is a padded cell in which to play with the
power of language. Rhetorical or therapeutic languages are not appropriate
for the main language of academic teaching. Of course, since both the would-
be teacher and the potential learner are human, some of those languages are
part of the classroom mix. Academic teaching cannot work if physical or psy-
chic hurts are blocking the way. And classroom order and course management
require some firm rhetorical directives. Conditions for classroom instruction
are seldom ideal. A little therapy may be needed to create an open atmos-
phere. A sermon or lecture may be needed for basic orientation, but if so it
should be less than a minute in length. I would wager that most third-graders
can recognize that the main classroom teaching should be neither therapy nor
preaching.
What then is the nature of academic language? In one respect, it pushes be-
yond rhetorical language to be not only abstract language but abstract lan-
guage that bends back on itself. In contrast to rhetorical language, which is
aimed at changing bodily behavior, academic speech is limited to changing
speech. The classroom is mainly for talk about talk. But the speech in the
classroom returns to the bodily roots of speech, which is why it is called in-
struction. The meaning of a word, as Wittgenstein many times said, is found
in examining how it is used, that is, the bodily, communal, practical perform-
ance of language.
Academic teaching is not pulling ideas out of students’ heads; it is rather a
conversation in which the words help to give birth to ideas. A main charac-
teristic of academic language should be ironic humor. The teacher is not
earnestly leading the student to the desired answer. Where the conversation
goes is not completely under the control of the teacher; the results are unpre-
dictable.
The student, as I indicated above, takes the first step in teaching-learning.
In a classroom that usually means speaking or writing. The teacher’s main
 Conclusion 169

question is “What do you mean?” What the teacher has to contemplate is how
the student’s speaking and writing can be improved by connecting the words
to the history and geography of the language. The history is the etymology
and how the word has been used. The geography refers to current conditions
of its usage. Academic teaching is the providing of a use of speech that helps
the student to join a human conversation and articulate his or her well-
grounded views of a subject.
A scholar, writes Northrop Frye, “lays down his hand and remains dummy,
so to speak, while the reader plays it.” Especially in the university, teaching
gets confused with doing scholarly research. All academic teaching presup-
poses study and research by the teacher, but acting as a scholar and as a
teacher is not the same. University professors are inclined to tell students
what they know instead of engaging in a structured conversation in which the
teacher’s greater knowledge will help the student to go on in his or her own
way.7
To teach is to show someone how to do something. In a classroom, the
showing how is mainly linguistic. Try out this way of speaking that the
teacher exemplifies and advocates; see if it produces greater understanding.
The classroom teacher should be a passionate advocate—but only of linguis-
tic clarity and depth. The connection between the words and the student’s
ideas remains under the student’s control.
A conversation in depth about history, poetry, or physics may produce be-
liefs in a student different from the teacher’s. If there is factual error, the
teacher has to point that out or lead the student to recognize it. In the vast ma-
jority of cases, however, differences between people are differences of inter-
pretation. Since no language captures the whole truth, differing opinions may
both be right or at least neither is completely wrong. The successful academic
instructor neither expects nor desires that every student will emerge with
ideas and beliefs that are identical with the teacher’s.
This whole process of talking about talk may seem suited only for gradu-
ate students in linguistics or communication theory. Actually, seven-year-olds
are often better at this game than university students who have spent many
hours being lectured at. The child can still be excited by words and enthusi-
astic about what words can do. The child cannot grasp theories that require
Piaget’s “formal operations” but, as Rousseau said, the child is quite capable
of reasoning about “immediate and palpable interests.” Rousseau, however,
had a strange block when it came to the child’s ability to understand one or
several languages.8 A young child who is treated with respect can engage in
academic conversations that unlock the power of language.
I suggested in chapter 1 that Socrates can lead us astray. His dazzling dis-
course has made him a dominant figure in the history of education. Socrates
170 Conclusion

is the master of asking probing questions and of getting people to recognize

that their supposed knowledge is just mere opinions. A Socratic method is of-
ten understood to be a tactic of drawing out answers from the student instead
of putting answers in. Teaching of this kind, however, is concerned with ideas
that presuppose a world of bodily and communal teaching.
I argued that to get a full picture of teaching-learning we have to listen to
Socrates and his much maligned opponents, the Sophists. To Socrates’ claim
that he could not find a teacher of virtue, Protagoras, the Sophist, replies:
“You are spoiled Socrates, because all are teachers of virtue, insofar as each
is able, and none is apparent to you.”9 Socrates may be right that the Sophists
were corrupt because they took money for selling knowledge. Nonetheless,
Protagoras recognized that the teaching of virtue or excellence is the work of
a community in which everyone teaches “insofar as each is able.”
In chapter 2, the difference between Socrates and Protagoras is reflected in
the disagreement between Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For Augustine as
a Platonist, God is the teacher who puts ideas into the soul; no human should
be called teacher. In contrast, Thomas has every creature participating in di-
vine creativity; everyone and everything is capable of teaching. In contem-
porary educational writing, Augustine’s view is easy to recognize; but if one
takes account of all forms of teaching-learning in the world, Thomas has the
better case. These two thinkers represent the ultimate choice for the possibil-
ity of teaching: When teaching is limited to an individual trying to transfer
knowledge, teaching is not possible; when teaching-learning is basic to hu-
man and nonhuman life, everything is a potential teacher.
Rousseau and Wittgenstein agree that teaching begins in infancy with the
training that every young animal requires. The physical environment shares
in the teaching of a child. Tradition and the present community introduce the
child to the range of human practices. Language and reason only slowly
emerge from within human nature’s bodily experience. Reason and rational
discourse become central in specifically human teaching. Teaching-learning
continues throughout a human’s lifetime but always on the ground of bodily
performance.
The only author examined here who practically equates teaching and school
teaching is John Dewey. He does not state that equation but, given what has
happened in the last 150 years, Dewey’s failure to clearly affirm other kinds of
teaching, results in his laying the burden of teaching on schoolteachers. That
explains Dewey’s impatience with the school as cut off from “real-life experi-
ence,” and his subsequent criticism of his would-be disciples who thought that
children should just have “experiences” rather than be taught.
Dewey constantly complained about the classroom being a special place and
speaking a language that is not found elsewhere.10 Since then, partly under
 Conclusion 171

Dewey’s influence, the walls came tumbling down. The result is more difficulty
for the classroom teacher. What should be a privileged space and time where a
special kind of teaching occurs is often overwhelmed by the outside world. The
school should not be isolated from the rest of life but classroom teaching should
be a clearly distinct form of teaching that complements other forms of teaching.
In addition to the five chapters on historical figures, I have included two
chapters on specific problems: moral education and religious education.
These two chapters might seem out of place. They do interrupt my story line,
but I have included them precisely because they do not fit within the modern
school curriculum. That fact is what makes them revelatory of the problem
with “teach” as a whole.
A serious grappling with moral education and religious education would
force recognition of the need for different languages and different forms of
teaching. That means on the one hand the clear recognition of teaching that is
other than classroom teaching and on the other hand the affirming of a dis-
tinct form of teaching for the classroom. Classroom teaching in the areas of
moral education and religious education would be an utterly crucial but very
narrow part of the whole task of teaching. At present, there is not even an
agreement on what those two forms of classroom teaching should be called.
Teaching outside the classroom gets little attention while the classroom’s role
is comprehensive but vague.
Moral education’s problem with “teach” is based on a suspicion that teach-
ing is itself not quite moral. The activity of teaching, which would otherwise
be a violation of personal autonomy, is allowed to be practiced on children
who are not yet ready to think for themselves. Durkheim’s schoolteacher as
high priest of society’s rules does not have many takers today. Starting with
Piaget, moral education was given over to psychology; the answer for moral
education was looked for in the development of reasoning about moral rules.
Teachers should keep out of the way. After a few decades in which Kohlberg
had supposedly discovered that moral reasoning was sufficient to produce a
morally educated person, the reaction of “character education” has tried to
turn back the clock. Its concern with the “whole person” has possibilities, but
the literature is fuzzy about teaching.
Character education, like other kinds of moral education needs a clear dis-
tinction between the many forms of moral teaching, one of which is class-
room instruction. Lacking distinctions the whole of moral education can end
up in the classroom but without the schoolteacher’s part being circumscribed.
When we are unsure of something fitting in the classroom curriculum, we
nervously attach the word education to it (sex education, drug education, en-
vironmental education, physical education, moral education), which only fur-
ther weakens the subject.
172 Conclusion

For example, we ask schoolteachers to teach “sex education” which makes

no logical sense and causes unending disputes. We should ask: What part of
a person’s sexual education should academic teaching deal with and what is
that subject called? More than a hundred years of arguing over “sex educa-
tion” has not clarified what the question is.11 Moral education, which overlaps
but does not subsume sexual education, likewise remains cloudy as to what
part of a person’s moral education should be taught in the classroom and what
the subject is called. The term ethics is available as the possible name for an
academic subject, but moral education literature does not often refer to the
teaching of ethics.
Religious education is even more confusing and contentious than moral ed-
ucation. The need for some distinctions about teaching is the more urgent.
The solution in the United States has been to declare the whole area out of
bounds for a public education. In some countries “religious education” is the
name of a school subject, which is no more logical than “moral education” as
the name for what can be taught in a classroom. Religious education, like
moral education, begins at birth and at least some elements continue for
everyone until death. Whether or not one practices religion (devotion) one’s
education is incomplete without knowledge and understanding of religions
(the historical and social phenomena).
No one should be subjected to the teaching of religious practices unless he
or she has some choice in the matter. Parents substitute for that choice when
the child is very young. While parents necessarily teach by example and in-
struction, the direction should still allow a personal choice later in life by the
young person. There should be a place for a thoughtful and knowledgeable
examination of religion as a phenomenon and religions as historic realities.
The classroom is the logical place for an intelligent conversation on the mat-
ter. Academic teaching-learning should be shielded from political passions
and charged emotions.
A student picking up numerous facts about all the religions of the world is
not the same as, for example, asking why there has been such conflict be-
tween Christian and Jewish religions, or how a form of Christian religion in-
tertwines with a religious meaning of “America.” A serious examination of
religion as it impinges on student’s lives may not be politically feasible in
most places. But the denial that religion can be taught reveals an assumption
that classroom instruction is simply preaching. Teachers of every school sub-
ject have a stake in the legitimacy of teaching ethics and teaching religion.
The frequent reference to something as “merely academic” is an insult to
classroom teachers. I noted earlier that Wittgenstein’s assertion that talk about
talk “leaves everything as it is” applies to the immediate situation. Classroom
teaching is a suspension of everyday concerns for the purpose of narrowing
 Conclusion 173

the mind on to a few words. But academic teaching that can change how
questions are asked has unpredictable results that frighten people whose
power depends on not asking questions outside preestablished lines. These
people’s dismissal of the “merely academic” is a way of saying that academic
teaching is not “real life.” They prefer to have reality defined by generals,
CEOs, or political leaders. Academic teaching is the potentially revolutionary
practice of questioning the assumptions of what is called real.

TEACHING-LEARNING

The most important question about teaching is whether it is continuous with

learning or whether teaching and learning are two separate activities. The sig-
nificance of this question may not be immediately apparent. What is the dif-
ference between saying “I taught them but they did not learn” and “I tried to
teach them but they did not learn (that)?” In the first case, teach and learn
function independently. Teaching does not guarantee learning; and it seems
obvious that people can learn without being taught. In the second case, teach-
ing and learning are necessarily connected. I tried to teach, but since I did not
succeed at teaching, they did not learn; at least they did not learn what I was
trying to teach.
Some authors think there is no problem in speaking both ways.12 More of-
ten, it is assumed that people who think there is a continuity of teaching and
learning are confused. They have mistaken a “task” word for an “achieve-
ment” word. Teaching is sometimes used for learning (the achievement) and
therefore people talk about the performance of the task as if it were the
achievement.13 John Passmore writes: “It is a very important fact that there
can be learning where no one teaches.”14 But this is not a question of fact. It
is a question of what Wittgenstein calls grammar, which in this case underlies
a whole worldview.
The assumption that teach and learn are separate and only contingently re-
lated identifies teaching with what a human individual called the teacher
does. In this view of the world, it is obvious that the teacher sometimes fails
to convey, instill or transmit what the teacher intends to convey, instill, or
transmit. It is also obvious that people learn when there is no teacher in the
vicinity. The main setting assumed for this conjunction of teacher and learner
is a classroom.
The alternative worldview is one in which teaching-learning is fundamen-
tal and constant for living beings. From the first moment of life, animals sur-
vive because they learn and they learn by being taught. Humans have a wider
range of learning possibilities than other animals. Human speech becomes
174 Conclusion

central to teaching, but to be effective it has to involve a human body in a

physical, historical, and social environment.
Passmore is right in one respect: Learning may occur where no one teaches
because the learning occurs where a community or physical environment
does the teaching. Most teaching, in fact, is done that way. A legitimate ques-
tion that can be addressed to anyone who claims to be a teacher is: What com-
munity do you represent? An individual human teacher comes with a cloud of
witnesses, both living and dead.
In a Peanuts cartoon, Lucy says she has taught Snoopy to whistle. Charlie
Brown says he has never heard Snoopy whistle. Lucy replies: I said I taught
him to whistle, not that he learned. The joke is obvious. In teaching someone
to whistle, walk, swim, use a fork, tie a shoelace, ride a bicycle, and hundreds
of similar activities the teacher and learner are engaged in a common activity.
They succeed together or they fail together. No one comes into the living
room and announces: I taught Jimmy to ride the bicycle, but he did not learn.
How then explain that the students in a classroom do not always learn what
the teacher teaches? The students in a classroom are constantly learning, but
the teacher at that moment may not be the person at the front of the room.
More precisely, what is learned may not be what the person at the front of the
room intends to teach. Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas point out that there
is always a gap between the intention of the individual teacher and the learn-
ing. When the learning is a physical skill, the gap is filled by physical actions.
When spoken words are the medium of teaching, the teacher can shorten the
gap between intention and learning but some gap remains. The experienced
teacher knows that more and more talking will not entirely fill the gap.
Clear and pointed speech is a main way to fill the gap; so are the physical
movements of a teacher, the comfort of a chair, the fresh air in the room, the
time of day, and other factors that a person may hardly be aware of. Each of
those teachers closes or widens the gap between the individual’s intention to
teach and the learning of the student.
An institution’s reward system may be a more powerful teacher than the
words of an instructor within the institution. A person’s behavior may be
teaching something that the person does not intend to teach. When the poten-
tial learner does not learn what someone is intending to teach, the task of a
would-be teacher is to find out who the teacher is and what is being taught. A
schoolteacher has to engage the teaching-learning already in play.
The schoolteacher may see this approach as subverting his or her work. But
school teaching would be enhanced by opening up a dialogue with other
teachers, starting with parental teachers and moving on to all the other teach-
ers, both human and nonhuman. Recognition of these other teachers would
relieve schoolteachers of all the other forms of teaching-learning that a school
 Conclusion 175

is not equipped to handle. They could concentrate on engaging students in a

conversation that can change the way both teacher and student experience the
world.

NOTES

1. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education (New York: Basic Books,
1979), 42, 82, 131.
2. Richard Burton, John Brown, and Gerhard Fischer, “Skiing as a Model of In-
struction,” in Everyday Cognition, ed. Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave “ (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 139–50.
3. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1971), 107; Lessons of the Masters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2005).
4. For a detailed exposition of the languages of teaching, see Gabriel Moran,
Showing How: The Act of Teaching (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1997),
83–145.
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan,
1953), 66, 31.
6. Gareth Matthews, Philosophy of Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 103.
7. Northrop Frye, The Great Code (New York: Harvest Books, 2002), xv.
8. Rousseau, Emile, 73–74, 108–9.
9. Plato, Protagoras, 327e.
10. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), 14; Democracy and Education, (New York: Free Press, 1966), 8, 38.
11. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2000); Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 186–211.
12. Elliot Eisner, Educational Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 158.
13. The language comes from Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York:
Barnes and Noble, 1949), 149–52.
14. John Passmore, The Philosophy of Teaching (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity, 1980), 24.
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 Index
Abington School District v. Schemmp,
139, 140, 177
adult education, attitude to teaching, ix,
166
allegory of the cave, 17
Amendment, First, 125–28
American Council on Education, 128,
129, 139, 178
animals, as teachers, 89; education and,
155, 173
Apollo, 21
Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas
Arendt, Hannah, 22n18
Aristotle, and Augustine, 29; and
Protagoras, 10; and Thomas Aquinas,
39; ethics in, 11; practical knowledge
in, 22; virtue in, 111
Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development, 177
Auden, W. H., 167
Augustine, 23–36; as theologian, 23;
ascent as metaphor in, 32–33;
Christian Teaching of, 34–36; City
of God of, 24; concept of will in,
26–27; Confessions of, 26; denial of
teaching in, 37–39; friendshp as
theme in, 28–29; healing as
metaphor in, 31; interpretation in,
29–30; metaphors for teaching in,
187
30–33; relation to modern
philosophy, 24; Rousseau and,
55–57; styles of preaching in,
34–35; The Teacher of, 36–38;
Thomas Aquinas and, 39–43; two
loves in, 24
authority, Dewey and, 90; Durkheim
and, 99; Piaget and, 102–3; religion
and, 123; religious and civil, 126
Bacon, Francis, 55
Baier, Annette, 119n46
Barth, Karl, and Emile, 63; theological
rationalism of Rousseau, 60
Belenky, Mary, 22
Blanshard, Paul, 127
Boden, Margaret, 118n21
Bossy, John, 140n30
Boston School Committee, xv, 96
Bourne, Randolph, 92n44
Boyer, Peter, 140n38
Bringuier, Jean-Claude, 118n11
Brooks, Harriet, xiv
Brown, Peter, 31
Bryan, William Jennings, 72
Burrell, David, 43
capacity, for knowledge, 8; in Dewey,
82; of mind in Plato, 18; Piaget and,
188
101, 104; two kinds of, 42;
Wittgenstein and, 164
Caputo, John, 44n50
Cavarero, Adriana, 22
Character Counts, 114, 115
character education, 106, 107, 111–17
Character Education Partnership, 114
Chardin, Pierre Teilhad de, 110
Chesterton, G. K., 147, 158,
child, and curriculum, 75–83; as
recipient of education, 78; Augustine
and, 24; Durkheim and, 97–98;
encounter with language, 152–53;
excluded from education, 166;
learning of, 165; physical
punishment of, 52; Protagoras and,
7–19; Rousseau on, 48, 50–54
choreography, teaching as, 164
Christian Teaching, 25, 34
Christianity, conversion, 18; doctrine of
orginal sin, 55–56; education, 124;
influence on progressivism, 72;
morality and, 97, 111; pity and, 60;
religion and, 130–31
church: ambiguity of, 127; and religion
130; and state, 125–28; Catholic,
127; condemnation of Rousseau, 60;
Dewey’s rebellion against, 73. See
also Christianity
City of God, 24, 25
civics, 116
Civilization and its Discontents, 48
Clark, Justice Tom, 133, 136
Clark, Mary, 44n50
Clement of Alexandria, 39
Comenius, Johannes, 9, 77
community, Aristotle and, 10; as
teacher, 8, 164, 170; Christian, 38;
Jewish, 32; professionals and, 5;
religious, 109, 123; Rousseau and,
64; service, 17; tradition and, 89
compassion, 57, 99, 104, 110
Confessions of Augustine, 24, 26, 27,
31
Index
conversion, ethical, 59; in Plato, 18; in
Rousseau, 59; in Wittgenstein, 145;
of the mind, 18
Copernicus, 151
Council of Europe, 137
Counts, George, 84, 85, 86
Cox, Harvey, 139n4
Cranston, Maurice, 64, 65
Cremin, Lawrence, 91, 92
culture, as adolescent, 166; conceptual
puzzle of, 150; religion and, 124,
138
Curren, Randall, xviin3
curriculum, child and, 75–83; in Emile,
70; in Republic, 16–17; progressive
schools and, 90; religion and,
134–36; report on, 76
Danford, John, 161
Danforth, John, 129, 132
death, education and, 164; Emile and,
57
DelFattore, Joan, 139n24,
democracy, and culture, 150; Dewey
and, 70; in Greece, 2; Piaget and,
103
Descartes, Rene, 24, 33, 144
development, educational, 50, 70
development, moral, in Kohlberg,
107–8; in Piaget, 101–2
Dewey, John, 67–90, and George
Counts, 84–85; and William Jennings
Bryan, 72; career of, 68; Child and
Curriculum, 75–83; Democracy and
Education, 68; description of
teaching, 74, 81, 89; dialectical
method of, 75, 77; experience, 78,
87–89; Experience and Education,
86–90; Hutchins and, 86; James and,
80; mother of, 72; Pedagogic Creed,
69; philosophy of education, 67;
progressive movement and, 71;
progressive schools, 86–87;
psychology and, 79–80; religion and
 Index
religious, 73; School and Society, 69;
social aim of education, 70; teacher
in, 68, 81; traditional education, 87;
traditional school, 86; Thordike and,
80; women and, xviii; writing style
of, 74
dialectic, in Dewey, 75, 77; in
Rousseau, 55, 61
dialogue, about religious education,
138; Augustine’s use of, 28; between
schoolteachers and other teachers,
174; in Augustine’s Teacher, 36–37;
in Meno, 14; in Republic, 15–19;
within a dialogue, 14
Diderot, 60, 97
Dionysius, 39
Donaldson, Margaret, 118n22,
Dreisbach, Daniel, 139
Drinan, Robert, 129
Durkheim, Emile, 97–101; art and,
100–101; family and school in,
98–99; Froebel and, 100, Moral
Education, 97–100; nation and, 100;
Piaget’s criticism of, 102–3;
schoolteachers and, 99; teaching as
rational explanation, 99
economics, 70, 71, 80, 112, 115, 122,
135
Eden, Kathy, 44, 56
Edwards, James, 161n17
Eisner, Elliot, 161n22, 175n12
Elliot, Charles, 76
Emile, 50–64; age of reason in, 52;
conflict of man and nature in, 55;
criticism by Diane Ravitch, 49–50;
criticism by Mary Wollstonecraft of,
62–63; death in, 57; Dewey’s reading
of, 48–49; dialectic in, 55, 61;
epigrams in, 47; ethics in, 57–59;
habit in, 51; human nature and,
54–57; nature and, 55; patriotism in,
54; pity in, 57–58; punishment in,
51–52; Savoyard Vicar, 59; serving
189
humanity in, 58; Sophie and, 53, 55,
61–63; state of nature in, 56; tutor’s
control, 53–54; two loves in, 56–57
Epictetus, 43, 108, 119
ethics, Aristotle’s, 11; in Emile, 57–58;
modern dichotomy of, 58–59;
teaching of, 117
experience, as relational, 88; child’s, 78;
community, 10; in Emile, 49, 53–57
Experience and Education, 86–90
family, in character education, 115; of
languages, 166; Plato and, 16–17;
Rouseau and, 61, 64
Farnham-Diggory, Silvia, 92
forms, of education, 69; of life, 149; of
speech, 35, 164, 166; of teaching
123–24, 171; Platonic, 8, 13, 20
foundationalism, 148
Fowler, Barton, 84
Freud, Sigmund, 48, 80, 103, 158, 159
friendship, in Augustine, 27–29, 31; in
Emile, 63–64
Frye, Northrop, 169
Gadamer, H. G., 123, 139
Gautama, 58, 69
gender, 62, 117
gift, 11, 12, 26, 157
Gilligan, Carol, 104, 110
Goff, Jacques, 22
Goldberg, Justice Arthur, 133, 134, 136
Gore, Al, 114
Gorgias, 4, 10, 11, 13, 20, 42
gospel, 37, 72, 131
Graham, Patricia, 92n47
grammar, 153, 154, 155, 173
Great Books Program, 86, 87
Gregory of Nyssa, 39
Guthrie, W. R., 22
habit, Aristotle and, 20, 22n33;
Kohlberg and, 112, 119n42;
Rousseau and 49, 51
190
Hall, G. Stanley, 76, 77
Hamburger, Philip, 139n12
Harper, William Rainey, 139n3
Harris, William Torrey, 76
healing, as a language of teaching, 166;
Augustine and, 31, 36; Protagoras
and, 10; Thomas Aquinas and, 42
Hearne, Vicki, 161n25
Herbart, Johann, 69
Higgins, Ann, 119
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 113
Hippocrates, 10
Hofstadter, Richard, 81, 92
Hutchins, Robert, 86, 92, 93
Illich, Ivan, 135, 140
indoctrination, George Counts’
advocacy of, 85; Kohlberg
acceptance of, 108–9; religious use
of, 123–24; school teaching and, 136
irony, Augustine’s use of, 30; in
classroom teaching, 168; nature of,
3–4; of Dewey’s criticism of
Rousseau, 49; Rousseau and, 53;
Socratic, 3
Jackson, Justice Robert, 128, 129
Jackson, Robert, 140n50
Jaeger, Werner, 3
James, William, 74
Jefferson, Thomas, 126, 128
Jenkins, John, 45n52
Jesus, as a teacher, 37–38; Dewey’s
mother and, 72; feeding as metaphor,
30; original sin and, 26; Rousseau
and, 60
Jews, 122, 127, 128, 151
Johns Hopkins University, 74, 139
Johnson, F. Ernest, 128, 134, 135, 140
Josephson, Michael, 120
justice, community and, 109;
development toward, 108; in
Kohlberg, 110; in Piaget, 102; in
Republic, 17, 20; in Rousseau, 58;
Index
school’s mission of, 106;
Thrasymachus and, 15
Kant, Immanuel, 58, 59, 60, 101, 103
Katz, Michael, xviiin19, 117n3
Kenny, Anthony, 45n50
Kerferd, G. B., 22
Kerr, Fergus, 161
Kilpatrick, William, 120n61
Kilpatrick, William Heard, 83–84
King, James, 4, 22n10
Kliebard, Herbert, 91, 92
knowledge, as innate, 13, 14; Augustine
and, 24, 26; capacity for, 18, 26, 41,
42; forgotten, 14; foundations of,
148, 158; ignorance and, 3; inner, 36;
love and, 27; making, 74; practical,
20; religious, 132; Sophists and, 10;
teacher’s, 79, 81; Thomas Aquinas
and, 43; Tractatus and, 144;
transmission of, 74, 81, 89, 163
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 105–11; habit and,
112; indoctrination in, 109; just
community and, 109; Piaget and,
101, 105–6; seventh stage, 109–10;
stage four and a half, 108;
universality of stages, 107–8; virtue,
106–7.
Lagemann, Ellen, 80
language, academic, 168–69; behavior
and, 160; families of, 166; in
Augustine, 38; in Republic, 19;
knowledge of, 14; logic and, 104–5;
metaphors for, 155–56; of education,
69; of religious education, 121, 123,
132; of teaching, 154, 166–69;
paradoxes of, 149–53; rhetorical,
167–68; therapeutic, 166
Larson, Edward, 91
Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sarah, xviiin20
lecture, as rhetorical language, 167;
Dewey’s, 83; in Middle Ages, 73; in
nineteenth century, 74; in the
 Index
university, 74, 145; Wittgenstein and,
145
Lickona, Thomas, 111, 115–16;
character education and, 111,
115–17; family in, 115; objective
morality and, 116; responsibility and,
115
Lilla, Mark, 65
Locke, John, 52, 60, 77
Luther, Martin, 130, 167
Madison, James, 126
Martin, Jane, 62
Martin, Jay, 75
mathematics, Augustine and, 26; in
Meno, 14; in Republic, 17; religion
and, 132; Wittgenstein and, 144–45
Matthews, Gareth, 175
Meeks, Wayne, 44
memory, in Augustine, 26; in Jewish
tradition, 32; in Plato, 13–14; in
teaching, 165; teacher present in, 89
Mencken, H. L., 72, 74
Meno, 13, 14, 26, 42, 109
metaphor, cultivating plant as, 9;
feeding as, 30; foundation as, 148;
healing as, 10; in Augustine, 30–31;
in Dewey, 79; in Piaget, 102; in
Rousseau, 9; in Thomas Aquinas, 42;
mothering as, xiv; of church and
state, 125; Protagoras’ use of, 9;
Socratic, 21; wall of separation as,
127; Wittgenstein and, 147, 155–56.
midwife, 20, 21
money, character education movement
and, 115; for teaching, 12, 13;
professionals and, 5; Socrates and, 3,
11; Sophists and, 3, 10, 11, 170;
value and, 114.
Monk, Ray, 160n5, 161n8
Montessori, Maria, 100, 101
morality, character education and, 111,
116–17; Durkheim and, 97–99;
Kohlberg’s stages of , 107;
191
nineteenth century and, 116;
objective, 116; Piaget’s stages of,
101-02; teaching of, 95, 109; U.S.
schools and, 96.
Moran, Gabriel, 139n25, 141n54,
65n20, 175n4
Moran, Jeffrey, 175n11
mother, as teacher, xiv, xv, 157; Dewey
and, 89–90; in Emile, 61; in Piaget,
103; in religious education, 123; of
Dewey, 72; Protagoras and, 7
mothering, as metaphor xiv, 96
music, in Plato, 16; in Wittgenstein, 156
mysticism, Kohlberg and, 110;
Wittgenstein and, 144
myth, human nature and, 27; of cave,
17; of classes in society, 16; of
mother as teacher, 157; of social
contract, 56
National Educational Association, 77
natural development, 48
natural religion, 60
nature, age of 52; conflict with man, 55;
following, 44, 77; habit and, 51;
human, 54–57; state of, 56
Nehamas, Alexander, 2, 4, 6
Neoplatonism, 23, 32, 33
New York Times, 120, 130, 139
Newton, Isaac, 59
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 2, 6, 60, 130,
146, 157
Nussbaum, Martha, 119, 125, 127, 133
O’Connor, Justice Sandra Day, 132
Oakshott, Michael, 20
Orestes, 21
original sin, in Augustine, 24, 26; in
Calvin, 55; in Rousseau, 55, 56
parents, as teachers, 7, 89–90, 115–16,
157; character education and,
115–16; Dewey and, 89; Durkheim
on, 72, 98; Emile and Sophie as,
192 Index
63–64; Piaget’s criticism of, 103;
school and, 115, 152; teachers and,
68
Parker, Francis, 76, 77
Passmore, John, 173, 174, 175
patriotism, 54
Pelikan, Jaroslav, 44
Pells, Richard, 92
Pericles, 8
Pestalozzi, Johannes, 69
Peters, R. S., 22, 161
Philosophical Investigations, 24, 43,
144, 145
physicians, 10, 16, 51, 164
Piaget, Jean, 101–5; critics of, 104–5;
Durkeim and, 103; Kant and, 103;
Kohlberg and, 101, 105–6; logic and
language, 104; Moral Judgment of
the Child, 101–5; rules in, 102;
stages of moral development, 101–2
Pinker, Steven, 157
Pitkin, Hanna, 147, 156
pity, 57, 58, 60
Plato, 1–22; Apology of, 2–5; critics of,
1–2; curriculum of, 16–17;
description of teaching in, 18; family
and, 16–17; irony in, 2–4; justice
and, 15; mathematics and, 17; middle
works of, 13–19; Meno of, 14–15;
midwifery in, 20–21; myth of the
cave in, 17–19; philosopher-king in,
17; polis of, 15; Protagoras of, 5–11;
Republic of, 15–19; Rousseau and,
47; teaching as medicine in, 9–10;
trial of Socrates in, 1–2; virtue and,
6–7; women and, xiii, 16–17
Plotinus, 23, 32
politics, 13, 15, 24, 47, 48, 51, 52, 58,
59, 64, 70, 71, 80, 103, 112, 116,
122, 138
practice, Aristotle and, 20; of the
classroom, 69, 77, 117; of a useful
trade, 52; religious, 123, 125, 129,
132; theory and, 159–60
prayer, 38, 114, 121, 127, 129, 130
Priestly, Jack, 140
professional, in religious education,
137; prepared as, 134; schoolteacher
as, xv–xviii, 68; skill in teaching, 18;
sophists as, 5, 12
progressive education, 48, 67, 71, 83,
84, 85
Progressive Educational Association, 84
progressive movement, 71, 72, 83
Protagoras, 2, 4, 5–11, 15, 19, 22, 27,
31, 170
Prothero, Stephen, 132, 133, 138, 140
psychology, 2, 57, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81,
82, 99, 101, 109, 131, 134, 171
purpose of education, in Dewey, 85;
Enlightenment’s, 157; in Plato, 15; in
Rousseau, 50, 61, 64
rabbi, 37
Raths, Louis, 120
rationalism, 6, 20, 60, 158
Ravitch, Diane, 49, 50, 53
religion, academic study of, 131, 172;
Christian adoption of, 32; conceptual
puzzle of, 150–51; Dewey and,
72–73; Enlightenment view of, 123;
establishment of, 125–26; Kohlberg
and, 110; morality and, 97, 99;
natural, 59; religious and, 73;
revealed, 60; Sophie’s, 61; teach
about, 135; two meanings of, 130–33
religious education, and the public
school, xii, 122, 128–33, 138; and
the Supreme Court, 121; and
teaching, 123, 128; British, 137–38;
comprehenisve, 121–24; elements of,
132; Emile’s, 59–60; Sophie’s, 61;
worldwide, 137–38
Religious Education Association, 122
Republic, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22,
27, 32, 42, 47, 64, 65, 109, 117
Rest, James, 109, 119
revolution, conceptual puzzle of, 151;
Dewey’s assumption of, 48; in ethics,
111; political, 48
 Index
Rhees, Rush, 161
rhetoric, Augustine and, 34; character
education’s, 115; inadequacy of, 13;
styles of, 35–36
rhetorical lanaguages, 167
Roberts, Monty, 161n25
Robinson, Fiona, 119n46
Rogers, Carl, viii
Rogers, Daniel, 91
Rothman, Sheila, xviiin14
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 47–64;
Augustine and, 56–57; church
condemnation of, 60; criticism by
Diane Ravitch, 49–50;
developmental theory of, 48; Dewey
and, 48–49; dialectic and, 55, 61;
Freud and, 48; Les Solitaires of, 64;
natural religion in, 59–60; on death,
57; oppostion to original sin, 56;
opposition to swaddling, 50;
psychology of love in, 56–57;
relation to John Locke, 52; Social
Contract of, 47, 56; theological
rationaslism of, 60; Wollstonecraft
and, 62–63; woman’s rights
movement and, 61–62; women and,
xiii, 61–64
Rummel, Erika, 43
Ryan, Alan, 90n1
Ryan, Kevin, 119n49
Ryle, Gilbert, 22n33, 175n13
schools of education, 47, 61, 71
Scolnicov, Solomon, 5, 22
Scott, Gary Alan, 22, 184
separation of church and state, 125, 128
sexual education, 53, 97, 172
silence, 19, 60, 88, 129, 144, 145, 155,
158
Simon, Sydney, 120n54
social contract, 56
Social Contract, 47, 65
social Darwinism, 72
society, conflict with, 48, 55; Dewey
and, 70; distractions of, 52;
193
individual and, 99–100; origin of, 56;
Plato and, 15–16; reform of, 85;
Rousseau and, 48; teachers and, 164
Socrates, 1–15; as teacher, 3–5; irony
in, 3–4; lessons from, 2; midwife in
20–21; money and, 3, 10–12;
sophists and, 3; teaching as gift in,
12–13; trial of, 2–3; Wittgenstein
and, 157–58
Socratic method, 2
Soliloquies, 29, 44
Sophists, Aristotle and, 20; Augustine
and, 31; criticism of, 3, 5–11; in
Republic, 15; Nietzsche and, 6;
Socrates and, xi, 3, 170
Steiner, George, 165, 175
Stoicism, and Kohlberg, 108, 110
Stoics, 27
story, Christian, 56; Genesis, 26,29; in
Emile, 64; in teaching, 166–67;
religious, 123
style, 28, 35, 59, 67, 74, 75, 143, 144
subject matter, 79, 84, 90, 95, 116, 131
Supreme Court, 121, 127, 128, 129,
130, 132, 133, 136
swaddling, 50
Symposium, 13, 19, 20
Taylor, Charles, 24
The Teacher, 24, 25, 34, 36, 37, 41
Teachers College, 68, 80, 83
ten commandments, 129
Theaetetus, 8, 20
theology, 23–25; Augustine as 23;
teaching of, 133; Thomas Aquinas
and, 39–40
Thomas Aquinas, 39–43; dialectical
method of, 40; disagreement with
Augustine, 39–41, 170; healing as a
metaphor of teaching in, 42–43;
philosophical themes of, 39–40; two
potentialities in, 42; Wittgenstein
and, 43, 174
Thorndike, Edward. 80
Thrasymachus, 15
194 Index
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 143–45
traditional education, 86, 87
training, animal, 155; as teaching, 153;
child and, 165; habit and, 51;
physical, 16–17; school and, 99
Truth, 39–43
Tyack, David, xviiin17, 92n40
United Nations, 138, 141
values, character education and, 111,
114; clarification, 113; economists
and, 112; fact and, 112; family, 114;
in the 1980s, 114; Kohlberg and,
106, 113
virtue, and value, 111–12; Aristotle and,
20; as habit, 20, 51; character
education and, 114–15; Christian
church and, 7; in Kohlberg, 106, 113;
in Rousseau, 51; Socrates’ teaching
of, 6, 8
Vlastos, Gregory, 3, 4, 6
Voltaire, 60, 97
Weber, Max, 91
Westbrook, Robert, 90, 91
Whitehead, Alfred North, 1
Williams, Stephen, 134
Wills, Garry, 25, 27, 37
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 143–60;
Augustine and, 24; Cambridge
University, 145; conceptual puzzles,
149–51; early and late, 143–45;
foundationalism, 148; Freud and
158–59; grammar of teaching,
153–57; Logical Positivists and,
144–45; metaphors in, 154–55;
mysticism and, 144; Philosophical
Investigations, 145–57; practice and
theorry in, 159–60 ; reactions to,
148; Rousseau and, 170; silence in,
144–45; Socrates and, 157–58;
therapy in, 158–59; training and
teaching in, 153–54
Wokler, Robert, 54, 65
Wollstonecraft, 62, 65
woman’s movement, 61, 62
 About the Author

Gabriel Moran is the author of twenty previous books on education, com-

munity, and religion. Titles include: Showing How: The Act of Teaching; A
Grammar of Responsibility; Uniqueness: Problem or Paradox in Jewish and
Christian Traditions.
He has been a professor at New York University for the past twenty-nine
years where he has taught courses in the philosophy and history of education,
international education, and religious education. He has lectured throughout
the United States and in many other countries, including England, Ireland, the
Netherlands, South Korea, and Australia. He and his late wife, Maria Harris,
coauthored several book and often taught together.
Professor Moran splits his time between New York City and Montauk,
Long Island.

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