Rationality and the Political Face of Education

Philip Smith

The Ohio State University

June 2007

From the time of the Greeks western culture has embodied a deep commitment to reason. Aristotle (384 B.C.-322 B.C.) believed that it puts us above the rest of nature’s creatures, not merely in a practical way, but in the way it has enriched our experience and culture. Georg Hegel (1770-1831) did him one better by proclaiming that we participate as mindful actors in reality as it unfolds before us. Philosophers of education have typically viewed reason as the heart of the educational process, whatever their attitude towards classical or romantic metaphysics. We use reason to promote reason; otherwise education is betrayed. There are many who distrust reason, even those who despise it, who believe that it dulls the emotions, fosters hubris, or masks duplicity. But for most of us complaints like these serve only to convince us of reason’s power. And we become more interested in it, not less. But how should reason be understood? What does it consist in?

In the metaphysical tradition reason was conceived as an objective and universal perspective on the truth. It was seen as a way to transcend, even escape from, the contingencies of life. These might include one’s own feelings, desires and prejudices, in addition to the conventions and idiosyncrasies of a particular culture that distort or bias our understanding. For someone like Aristotle, to lack reason was to be a slave to circumstances, to be oppressed and, therefore, to be un-free. Knowledge alone (i.e., true belief or skill) could not save us from this fate, unless it was grounded in reason. We might say that my reason is not really my reason, in the sense that it is not created or defined by me as a finite mind. Reason is not, in this sense, subjective. It is a mode of understanding that I may choose to utilize or not. But once I make the choice to employ it and put myself in that mode I am carried along more or less objectively towards an objective outcome. It would be analogous to traveling on a modern day super-highway. Whether I get on or off is pretty much up to me. But once committed to the route, I am taken in a predetermined way towards a predetermined destination.

This conception of reason was not espoused out of the blue. It made perfect sense, given the assumptions of classical metaphysics. Reason was seen as a function of truth, both as a property of truth and as a means for knowing or assessing it. Truth was also assumed to be objective and universal, “objective” in the sense that it has its own integrity apart from what anyone might think, feel, or want; and “universal” in the sense of not being contingent on anything except itself. By these standards practical truth is not real truth. Real truth is not concerned with convenience. Objectivity and universality are connected as a matter of logic. If reason was to comport with reality, it had to reflect these characteristics.

It is hard to say exactly when, but sometime during the late middle ages this view started to fall apart. People began to travel more, explore more, trade more, go to war more. Generally speaking, they began to live more in the world of sensible experience. They did this by choice, because they could. It is not that they officially rejected the world of eternal verities. Only that they paid less attention to it. Ironically, it was partly because of advancements made within the classical tradition that helped pave the way for this new attitude. Aristotle’s metaphysics, for instance, enriched his naturalism. But it was increasingly this naturalism, and the way Aristotle studiously observed natural happenings, that caught the attention of adventuresome minds, not his metaphysics. Practically minded people were looking for a new philosophy that would help them deal more effectively with the reality of here-and-now. Roughly speaking that philosophy was empiricism and the reality of here-and-now were the truths of science.

The significance of this change and its impact on reason could hardly be exaggerated. It flipped experience from being a liability to being a critical asset for learning. Like Rudolph’s red nose, it transformed our shame into our glory. Experience may not help us grasp eternal truth, but it can tell us a lot about the world that exists in space and time. It can show us how that world works and how it might be utilized to help us cope with the fog of life. This was precisely what people were looking for. And just like that, reason became a function of experience, rather than a function of truth. The problem is that experience is a function of us, that is to say, our attitudes and circumstances filtered through our organic bodies. So, reason is a tool, created by us, individually and as a culture, to advance our purposes. Its character is political, in the broad sense of the term, and hardly a way of getting above ourselves. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) understood this perfectly well, after reading David Hume (1711-1776), and was inspired to develop what might well be the most amazing philosophical theory ever devised in a largely unsuccessful attempt to demonstrate that we are not prisoners of experience even though our knowledge is based on it.

Kant was part of the romantic tradition in philosophy that argued against determinism in an age of modern science. This tradition was the last grand attempt to see reason as a function of truth rather than experience, and it lasted well into the 19th century. Hegel was its culminating force. The romantic tradition had much in common with the classical tradition, but differed sharply in its attitude towards change and how reason works to bring change about. In the classical tradition reason directs change in a search for balance and harmony. In the romantic tradition “sturm und drang” (storm and stress/fuss and bother) are the engines of ideal development. Whereas Kant put reason in its own domain apart from nature, Hegel mixed the two together, giving evolution a purpose and reason odd forms of expression.

According to Hegel, science by itself is a narrow, one-sided affair. It utilizes human experience without telling us much about what this is. It generates mechanistic explanations, the aim of which is to account for events without reference to anything seriously meaningful or significance. By themselves scientific facts or laws have no reason. If force equals mass time acceleration (F=MA), why 1/2MA or MA+6? It just doesn’t, and that’s that. If physics were to change and force, indeed, equaled 1/2MA or MA+6, there would be no reason for that, either. When Hegel said that science alone is inadequate for human understanding, he meant that it tells us nothing about what things mean, why they should happen as they do, or be the way they are. He believed that good science needs good philosophy if scientific facts and laws were to be rendered comprehensible beyond their brute presence.

If someone was on trial for murder and we wanted to know why the victim died, it would not be enough to be told that people are mortal, or that the victim’s heart stopped. We need to know the reason as the cause. Hegel found reason in a universal ideal that he believed was instantiated by humanized natural occurrences. Without a material expression the universal ideal could not be actualized, which it turns out is what allows us to experience reason and truth as we participate in the development and realization of this ideal.

Hegel was the last major philosopher to link reason and truth in an ontologically serious way. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) pretty much finished off projects like this once and for all.

Or better yet, it was the cultural forces that brought Darwin to prominence. Reason and experience have been locked together ever since in a world-view that is ever more technologically sophisticated, politically liberating, and morally self-determined. We like this arrangement very much because it gives us power, security, and freedom to do in the world what we want. The trick is to be considerate and wise with these assets, not vulgar or corrupt; or at least to know the difference. This was precisely the challenge taken up by American pragmatism and its progressive educational program.

Pragmatism’s leading voice at the beginning of the 20th century was undoubtedly that of John Dewey. He displayed extreme optimism that linking reason with experience would benefit civic life, as well as the individual, so long as proper adjustments were made to education. Dewey may have been a Hegelian early in his career, and he always maintained a romantic, up beat attitude towards change, but he never ran away from science or the experimental method. Hegel’s fear of experience-based reason made no sense to him. Dewey saw human beings, quite literally, as social animals that naturally and necessarily work together to flourish. He believed that integrating the experimental method with reason and experience would give meaning and significance to the findings of science without reverting to metaphysical speculation. It also allowed Dewey to see the democratic ideal not merely as a community of scientists, but rather as a community of citizens, with educating institutions responsible for citizen-in-the-making.

Given America at that time it was no wonder that Dewey’s ideas made such a splash. It was a free society with plenty of hope, along with all of the ills one could read about in OLIVER TWIST. No one in America thought misery should be tolerated, and no one wanted another Civil War. Dewey made it look like American life could be a win-win for everybody, no matter how success was defined. Just as important, he made it easier for Americans to believe that their great experiment in democracy could work, because finally they had a blueprint for the right kind of education.

Now flash ahead to the late 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium. The leading voice of pragmatism has been Richard Rorty (1931-2007), who traced his lineage to John Dewey through Dewey’s friend and collaborator, Sidney Hook (1902-1989). Rorty did not exactly give up on science the way Hegel did, but he admired it more for the solidarity it inspires, rather than the truth in provides. Traditional metaphysics had no credibility whatsoever for Rorty. He looked to literature to find meaning and value that science alone could not furnish.

Rorty made a significant impact on American intellectual life. He was one of the few philosophers since Dewey to have a large audience outside of his discipline. But he never came close to Dewey’s influence on social practice. To a large extent this was due to the tendency of culture since World War II to personalize intellectual judgments, far more than it did in Dewey’s time, along the lines of moral and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, Rorty did not challenge these cultural tendencies. Nor did he offer any authority for his recommendations, other than strong metaphors that he hoped would persuade others to agree with his him. He took refuge in poetry and searched for an aesthetic community of like-minded souls. What else could he have done? Dewey’s theory of intelligence and his ideas about how education could nurture it are not attracting many adherents these days, for good reasons or bad.

What are educators to do? There seems to be little left except to embrace forms of vocational learning, or high-level professional training, that have nothing to do with a calling and everything to do with getting a job, acquiring status, or gaining influence. A newspaper article appearing just prior to the 2006 mid-term elections in the United States focused on a prominent campaign strategist who was especially good at putting together what was referred to as “some of the nastiest TV advertisements you’ll ever see.”1 This person actually received complaints from some of the candidates he worked for, because they didn’t like getting criticized for the negativity of their campaigns. His response was to say, “They think it’s a popularity contest.” When asked if a negative strategy could backfire, he said, “Absolutely, stuff can backfire”. So, why take the risk? “Because”, he said, “it’s a tough election…out there, and life is about risk and rewards.”

Now, that’s education! Dewey would have seen this attitude as unintelligent and correctable. Rory would have found it repulsive. But really, regardless of subject matter, can we, with our philosophies of education, find a higher purpose that would make sense to people and inspire a democratic public? The odds don’t look promising. In the Duke University Lacrosse case, a State Bar Association Ethics Panel recently complained about “a rogue prosecutor…so full of himself…(that), while not having an evil motive, showed judgment clouded by self-interest.” Whether or not there was “evil wrongdoing” remains to be see. As far as the three accused players and their families are concerned, it must feel like a distinction without a difference. As far as the rest of us are concerned, given that we are not about to abandon experienced-based reason, we have to wonder how common this sort of abuse might be, why it occurs as often as it does, and whether we have done much as educators to guard against it.