User:Robbie/My Canon

My Canon

Reflecting on Formative Influence

by Robbie McClintock

A work in progress. Started Spring 2011 as a series of lectures at Teachers College, Columbia University. The draft material currently on the site comprises files originally drafted for the last course at Teachers College, My Canon: Reflections on Formative Influence, which I gave the spring semester, 2011. I plan to complete, rewrite, and expand these materials.

An Invitation

In September 1961, I waited outside Professor Lawrence Cremin's office, wanting permission to join his colloquium on the history of American educational thought. After a brief eternity, Mrs. Zolot, the secretary for Philosophy and the Social Sciences, a woman at once kindly and curt, instructed me to go speak to the Professor.

Cremin, an attentive, gracious man of 35 or so, listened to me explain,

—I was starting to work on a Ph.D. in Columbia's history department, having graduated from Princeton the previous June,
—Could I participate in his colloquium, which was key to my interest in the history of educational thought?

I am resolved to pose my questions in both a strong personal sense and in a full academic sense—they are questions that have for me deep roots in my experience of life and they are questions of serious, substantial import with respect to the role of academe in the world.

Combining the personal and the academic feels a bit unseemly to me. Normally, or so it has seemed to me, a person circumscribes personal talk to a personal sphere, a world of small talk with strangers, practical activities with people we interact with regularly, and guarded discussion of deep questions with a few confidants, whose reactions one anticipates and trusts. As scholars, we treat big, never-answered questions with appropriate reserve, purveying depersonalized knowledge and opinion—up-to-date, of course, and well informed, but representing, not oneself, but the current state of the field. By overstepping these conventions, one risks sounding grandiose, as if one goes about thinking of oneself as a world-historical actor. Nevertheless, each of us does act and think within the historical world and it does influence us, and we, it, within our spheres of action. Our conventional circumspection, however, can leave that influence unexamined, which weakens our understanding of formative influence as it affects both our lives and the world at large.

A rather WASP upbringing compounded the way academic conventions encouraged reserve in my case, for I've been quite buttoned-down, even when letting it all hang out was my generation's style. Yet, whether buttoned-down or inclined to let it all out, each of us has a life of felt personal awareness with attention constantly moving, concerns churning. Ironically, this awareness is not exactly the awareness that I report to myself or others—"I am aware that . . ."—but rather a more encompassing, immediate, and inchoate awareness that may on occasion precipitate out as formed, explicit awareness, which I can report as such. I think the root awareness from which the formal precipitates is both the activator and the receptor of our constant activity of self-formation. This root awareness is pleonastic, indiscriminate, omnivorous, promiscuous, and over-reaching; it wants it all. Attention to something definite, particularly sustaining attention within an ever churning awareness, requires lots of negation, denial, concentration. We develop character, acquire interests, take on a cast of mind, form skills, and continually become who we are by negating all sorts of possibilities that churn about in our root awareness, by negating them in relatively stable ways. Sustained attention results from systematically negating a myriad of matters that beckon in our peripheral awareness.

Asking questions has an element of risk to it. Putting something in question requires negating the negations to open up settled domains of our churning awareness. Asking questions breaks ruling patterns of attentive activity. Questions are natural to the very young for patterned attention has not yet been established. An infant crawling on a lawn will not hesitate to grab a little orange salamander, crawling there as well, to find out how it tastes, or whether it squiggles in the mouth, or if sucked it exudes a satisfying fluid—questions most adults would find it very hard to entertain. As asking questions is natural to the very young, it is necessary, inevitable in the process of retiring from long-held work, for it entails negating all those negations that come with the job—the routines, the habits, the expectations, the facilities, the discipline, the opportunities, and the resources all bundled up into the work, the this-that-I-do, which is at the same time the all-that-I-do-not-do.

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do not carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it—but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962, pp. 34-5).

He welcomed me in the colloquium, suggesting that I sit in as well on his lecture course, a prerequisite. That was my start here, and I have been here ever since, as a student, and from fall 1967, as a member of the faculty. Now, after this semester, I am retiring from the faculty, which naturally has me thinking back a bit, asking questions—

• What have I learned?
• Why did I try to do what I tried to do?
• What continuities and changes of note have I witnessed?
• Whither goes the future, here and in the world at large?

This course, My Canon, is an opportunity to answer, as best I can. Anyone who wants to join in is welcome.

In My Canon, I will reflect on the history of educational thought. I will also examine my personal engagement with that history. And I will further consider the historical context—in education, in academe, and in the world at large—within which my engagement with the history of educational thought took place.

I suspect that the last of these, the historical context, may be the most valuable of the matters at issue. To refresh my memories, I have been reading some large, comprehensive histories—Postwar by Tony Judt for Europe, and Grand Expectations and Restless Giant by James T. Patterson for the United States. These accentuate the succession of events—history as one thing after another—whereas what stands out for me is the subjective interrelation of historical situations and developments, the way my peculiar experience of one thing colors my experience of another. My Canon will recount how my engagement with important works of educational theory interacted with my experience of a lived historical context over a 50-year period. I hope others may find it informative.

What will come of it, I am not sure. I have offered neither this course before, nor one like it, and I've never taken one like it, either. So I don't know exactly what will happen. Preparing it has taken the better part of a lifetime, and my plan of reflection has an agenda, the skeleton of which is at the right on your screen, with links to Wiki pages and from those to other materials, all of which are extensible by each of us participating in the inquiry. I expect to start our meetings with something of a monologue, which should turn interactive as it proceeds. There will be pointers on a growing number of pages linking to stuff to read, to listen to, and to watch, which each can engage and add to as interests move and as constraints allow.

Students registered for academic credit should study a work of substance to add to Your Canon and post your reflections to the course website about why, in your cultural, historical, and professional context, you include it in Your Canon and how it helps you form your sense of self and your circumstances. And of course, auditors may do so as well.

What's Next

Spring 2011, Robbie McClintock will complete his active service on the Teachers College faculty trying to sum up what he has learned during 50 years as a student and a professor here.

Contentions about The Canon do not interest me. Each person, I believe, has a life-long engagement with an emerging canon, uniquely his own – other persons, cultural works, places and institutions, challenging problems – matters that appear imbued with a charismatic, compelling authority towards which a person reaches out with aspiration and hope. And for me as an academic, my canon has consisted largely of major texts, which over the years I have felt I must engage, struggle with, and try to appropriate into my understanding of my work and of the circumstances impinging upon its pursuit.

• My canon is not a reading list; it indicates cumulative concerns over a prolonged career, which began forming in the late 1950s and will continue beyond this day.
• My canon does not list, as a résumé might, the topics of my expertise. Formative influence arises as we strive towards something, often ill-defined and incompletely mastered, not as we become specialists in it, versed in its every niche and nuance.
• My canon is not only the texts comprising it, but more, the context surrounding engagement with them. Reflection and formative influence occurs through persons immersed in complex circumstances – the cultural, political, professional situations of a specific time and place. Hence,
• My canon is one window, out of innumerable possibilities, for viewing historical experience over the past half century, both within the house of intellect and from it out onto the world at large.

In addition to weekly meetings, My canon will have a website which will provide background resources for classes, a discussion board, and diverse contextual materials.

Albert Camus, The Rebel

"Truth, reason, and justice . . . have ceased to be guides in order to become goals." (p. 134)

During college, and throughout my life, I've been drawn to a series of "aspirational texts," books that I found difficult and did not need to read for any extrinsic reason. Somehow I sensed that they had something to do with what I aspired to do, or be, or perhaps better to become -- but even that statement is far too clear-cut, for aspirations, particularly youthful aspirations, are not formed propositions, but rather feelings, even a sense of surprise that you are doing this or that with unexpected interest or intensity.

The Rebel by Albert Camus was not the first aspirational text for me. In high school, during the summer between junior and senior year, we had to choose and write essays on three books. Of them, I can't remember one at all. The second, a current biography of Abraham Lincoln, made little impression on me. The third, The Outsider by Colin Wilson, recently published, impressed me. Its contents are now a blur, but I do remember gushing about it at the dinner table, causing some consternation in my father, himself something of an Insider, who envisioned his son being educated at considerable expense for a similar orientation. My awareness of Camus, and my urge two or three years later to enter into dialog with his work, derived from reading Wilson, partly by choice and partly as a chore.

Wilson wrote about Camus 'The Stranger, which was then by far the most widely read of Camus' writings—short, hard-edged, and enigmatic, Catcher in the Rye for grown-up college kids. The Myth of Sisyphus was also inescapable—also short, also absurdist. Both were first published in 1942 and represent Camus' understanding of the loss of metaphysical conviction in European thought, as it appeared to an observant critic in a world in total war with its outcome starkly uncertain. The Rebel, properly L'Homme révolté, whose form of life is more complex and comprehensive than that of the rebel, was published in 1951 (English trans., 1956). It was a post-war book, a Cold-War book. And I experienced it, circa 1959-60, very much as a post-war, a Cold-War youth, a young person trying to form his understanding of himself and his world immersed in the period following World War II in which the Cold War came to dominate the historical landscape in which one lived.

Lost in Translation

The following is a draft that needs substantive revision:

I first read Camus 'The Rebel in my sophomore or junior year of college, 1958 or 1959, out of interest, not as an assignment for a course. I should say I read in it, for I recall the first encounter being hard going. Two or three years earlier, I had seen James Dean in Rebel without a Cause and thought it significant in a rather distanced way. At 14 or 15, I had flirted with adopting a tough persona, but acting out in "youthful rebellion" was not my way, nor that of my peers. Our memoirs have more of Simone de Beuavoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter to them, except that we were dutiful sons, but like her raised in the comforts and certitudes of a bourgeois world, having to break away into a world of autonomous intellect.

A Princeton undergraduate in the late '50s would not pick The Rebel up expecting a discourse on adolescent rebellion. I would not have expected something presaging the sense of liberation so powerful 10 to 15 years later. I do not recall my specific expectations that led me to start reading it, putting some real effort into it. It was not an easy book for someone 19, for it is written in that French style in which the author assumes his readers have read, and have their own opinions about everything that he has read and has opinions about. In that sense it is a good aspirational text, for it is like a detailed map that points to all the places a truly experienced traveller should have visited.

An inevitable want of background at the age of 19 was not the only problem I encountered in trying to read The Rebel. I remember significant frustration in my effort to understand what the book was really about. Part of this difficulty arose because I was not really sure what to make of so many familiar references to absolute strangers, but I learned to tame that anxiety by bracketing and filing the references away among those never exhausted destinations for future journeys. In reading The Rebel I began to become confident in my skill at picking up the import of a reference, phrase, or text by attending intelligently to its context and figuring out its meaning through a process that technologists call "reverse engineering." The further problem had to do, not with the author's assumptions, but with his language.

The Rebel was the first substantial text I tried to read on my own that had not been written in English. Fortunately, a good deal of Latin, since forgotten, and even more French, still a useful resource, however much native speakers cringe at my pronunciation, were among the prescribed elements of my schooling. Fortunate too, through college I worked during summers in southern Switzerland, so getting my own copy of L'Homme révolté in French seemed both feasible and natural.

L'Homme révolté was my first encounter with an important realization, a counter-intuitive one. Confronted with a difficult text, reading it in the original, even if my facility with the language is low, often helps me come to grips with the text. In part this surprising phenomenon arises because there are problems and choices made in translation that one can clear up by working with the original and a good dictionary of two—even if ones capacity to read easily in the language is low. But the benefit goes beyond puzzling out problems of translation. Reading in a second language slows one down. One encounters many opportunities to consult a dictionary. These soon become a bore and one skips the exact meaning and uses the overall context of the passage to make sense of the word and the sentence where it occurs—more reverse engineering. Reading requires hermeneutic interpretation, especially reading serious thought. I have found George Santayana to be the most difficult philosopher to read with comprehension because his prose is so good—a text will move on, page after page, lulling the mind into comfortable inattention. A great stylist writing philosophy benefits, like Nietzsche, by writing aphoristically, keeping the reader in a state of continually starting thoughts, one after another, in that heightened state of attention we all bring to the beginning of things.

A big problem of translation with The Rebel confronts the reader at the very beginning, with the title, and it echoes throughout the text. It does not result from a poor choice by the translator, but from one of those excruciating choices that arise because no language in masterful use is fully commensurate with another. "L'Homme révolté" is not merely a rebel. In both English and French, there is essentially the same set of terms -- revolt, rebellion, and revolution. One of the joys of digitization lies in the ease with which it allows us to do word counts on text. L'Homme révolté uses révolution 241 times, and the English translation 244. The translator is simply using the English cognate for the French. In the original, rébellion 4 times and le rebelle, literally the rebel, 14 times. In the translation, rebellion occurs 553 times, and rebel 269. In the translation, revolt occurs all of 22 times, 13 of which are in Herbert Read's "Foreword", while Camus used révolte 724 times and l'homme révolté an additional 124. It is not hard to understand why the translator would make the transposition—"the revolted man" does not mean much in English. But do rebellion and rebel express well in English the implications of the French révolte and l'homme révolté?

At 19, I had neither the means nor the inclination for doing such word counts, but I had a sense that something was problematic. I found it hard on first tackling The Rebel to figure out what the book was really about. In substance, Camus' book encompasses a large swath of human experience—the metaphysical, the historical, the artistic. I do not think the book really holds together if the basic concept informing all its parts is rebellion. That is a statement made by someone aged 71, looking back, having reread much of a work he struggled with long before and occasionally then dabbled in. At 19, I was becoming critical about major aspects of the world I was maturing into. I was ready to question, to reject, to say "no" to a lot that I was expected to accept, but rebellion did not really seem the way to do that. It seemed to me that the peculiar "rebellion" that Camus seemed to explore in the English translation was something more that rebellion in the ordinary sense, not in that it was a still more vehement outburst, but that it was more basic, radical in the sense of being at the root of things.

Now, I think I understand something that I was then sensing because it spoke to a sense of the world that someone like myself would then have. The logic of the French verb révolter gets to the heart of the matter. It is first off, a transitive verb—to appal. That sense still has a presence in English when we recoil from something saying, "That's revolting!" In French, révolter then becomes reflexive, se révolter, to appal oneself, to recoil from something. This leads off in two directions that remain related—to rebel or revolt, and to be appalled. L'Homme révolté in the full sense of the French, with which I think Camus wrote, is someone who is appalled and refuses to obey. In this sense, l'homme révolté is at a very radical ground of motivation: he is appalled and refuses to obey. It is a fundamental negation, for Camus it is the human condition, presenting to us the problem of living our lives—to find how, being appalled and refusing to obey, to commit neither suicide nor murder.

Camus began "L'Homme révolté" assuming the problem of suicide was basically solved—the capacity to be appalled and to refuse to obey had an affirmation of ones life intrinsic to it. It was a reason, and a reason was sufficient to refrain from suicide. Bur a reason, being appalled and refusing to obey, was a danger for l'homme révolté, because it became an invitation to murder. The problem of The Rebel is the problem of being appalled and refusing to obey yet finding reason not to impose that negation of others who might stand in the way of your refusal. This seemed to me to be a big problem as a Cold-War kid.

Of course, we did not put it that way; we did not have an explicit awareness of it. Part of the problem in understanding formative influence arises because a person can intuit the outer horizon of a work, challenged by its potentialities, while quite unable to speak about or deal with the explicitly. Growing up between 1940 and 1960 surrounded by the sources of adult news, one was seeped in reasons for wondering about the grounds for killing and revelations that left one appalled—graphic photo journalism of a vast war, with its terrible bombings culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atrocities of concentration camps and mass graves into which ordinary people had been shot and dumped by the truckload, all then followed by a background fear of nuclear war, built by well-publicized tests, a pervasive us-them interpretative framework, a Manichean right versus wrong, and absurd rituals of what to do in the event of attack.

To my mind, then, Camus spoke to all that, and I think he still does—profoundly. The experiences of growing up between 1940 and 1960, even beyond, underlie, with the endless variations characteristic of concrete human experience, the anti-foundationalism in post-modern thought. But that post-modern sensibility, however important, is still very much under-developed, jejune, intellectually under-nourished. As a result, it drifts in our times without much consequence, leaving the more brute engines of history, the nihilism of unquestioned conviction, to work their course unchecked. There has been running through My Canon a quest, a hope, and a recurrent frustration and disappointment. Justice remains elusive, hard to understand, let alone achieve, even more, complicity in injustice in so many forms, continues, a troubling backdrop that we learn to gloss over for the sake of survival, enjoying or suffering the fortune of the moment.

I think it has been unfortunate that Camus 'L'Homme révolté is so hard to translate because clarity about these problems seem both important and difficult to attain. I think Camus achieved a valuable clarity, which got somewhat lost in translation. Post-modern anti-foundationalism, especially in its English-speaking variants, is too a-historical—everything before us was foundational in its assumptions; therefore we need not study it. The consequence is excessive superficiality and a need to reinvent well-won ideas. Camus, particularly the Camus of L'Homme révolté, was a subtle post-modernist before the label, one who cast the foundational problem in an important way, a way that can enable the recovery of important resources in the intellectual tradition.

Consider a couple sentences that occur early in the section on "Creation and Revolution," which concludes the part on Art. "Rebellion in itself is not an element of civilization. But it is a preliminary to all civilization." (p. 273) These two sentences are examples of assertions in many places in The Rebel that on first encounter gave me trouble, for it is hard to say exactly what Camus had in mind. It is easy, taking it in in ordinary English, to say hogwash—all sorts of rebellion are elements of civilization. The translation is entirely straightforward aside from substituting rebellion for la révolte. Are the implications of the sentences different in the two languages?

Insofar as a reader attaches an agenda to rebellion or revolt, the sentences do not really ring true, and whether one attaches an agenda to rebellion or revolt has significance for how one situates Camus and the kind of thinking he exemplifies with respect to foundational issues in thought. I think in English, the rebel usually has a cause—that was why The Rebel without a Cause was a powerful movie title, and rebels without causes came to refer to angry youths acting out their discontent at having to take on (meaning both contend with and adopt) confining adult limitations. That implicit agenda attaches as well to the word in French, which is why the book was called L'Homme révolté, not Le Rebelle.

It is true that a concept can take on an altered meaning if a text carefully nurtures it, and to some degree, I think, the The Rebel may lead its readers to dissociate the act of rebellion from a justifying cause. But I do not think the translation fully succeeded in doing that. Take as an instance, the sentence concluding the important section, "Rebellion and Murder" or "Révolte et Meutre," towards the end of the book. The English version reads, "But the revolutionary spirit in Europe can also, for the first and last time, reflect upon its principles, ask itself what the deviation is which leads it into terror and into war, and rediscover with the reasons for its rebellion, its faith in itself." (293) For our purposes, the French is equivalent except for the last clause—". . .et retrouver, avec les raisons de sa révolte, sa fidélité." (p. 362) The reasons of its revolt, not for its rebellion. It is not a question of deciding for what it is that one is rebelling, but why one is appalled and refuses to obey.

It is not hard to see how revolt as a feeling . . . .

Henry Adams & The Education of Henry Adams

Ignorance and Education

My first semester at Columbia, I participated in a colloquium given by Henry Steele Commager on American intellectual history. Commager was a small, lively man who drew our reactions out well. I was reasonably diligent in preparing for class and remember speaking up quite a bit but feeling ill at ease, confronted by a disconcerting situation, my Jamesian, "age of innocence" moment.

Since the 2nd grade, I had gone to boy's schools and a man's college. During summers, I had met girls, but single-sex boarding schools made it hard to have either friends who were girls or a serious girlfriend. The summer before graduate school I had become engaged to be married to a student at Smith College. Sharing a narrow field of experience, she and I had grown close working at the same summer program in Switzerland for several years. We were still on the far side of the sexual revolution—the pill hit the market in 1960 and it took a few years for its cultural effects to take root. Oblivious to what we did not know, we shared our intellectual interests and a nervous erotic attraction. To me, this relationship was a special case. The life of the mind appeared to be a man's life, not from any conviction of male superiority—rather, to the degree that I had experienced it, the life of the mind seemed to occur in all male institutions.

In the fall of 1961, this appearance began to change for me, but not all that suddenly. Whether male or female, many beginning graduate students hold back in classroom discussions, accustomed to large undergraduate courses and uncertain about the sort of talk appropriate between a prestigious professor and a few graduate students. I went a bit against this pattern thanks to Princeton's precept system, small discussion groups in every course led by senior faculty members. So did one young woman in Commager's colloquium. By her appearance, short black hair, no make up, often lithe in a black leotard, I guessed she had gone to one of the good progressive colleges, like Sarah Lawrence. She always seemed to sit directly across the seminar table from me, and she too spoke up a lot, which was fortunate as it gave me a reason to look at her without seeming to stare too much.

A revelation, yes, but I found her thoroughly disconcerting. For the first time, I encountered a female peer in an academic setting. Engaged, confident about what she had to say, she voiced informed opinions in class about ideas, politics, and history that were clearly to the left of mine, which were moving a good deal more to the left than those passed to me by my origins. I wanted desperately to strike up a friendship, to get to know this revelation better. But I was thoroughly at a loss about what to do or how to do it. In that situation, on feeling a strong attraction to a woman, I could not form the distinction between initiating a meaningful friendship and starting a romantic entanglement. I did not want to disrupt my engagement and I did not understand my intent. There I sat, ignorant, marveling at the revelation across the table, never to speak to her outside of class nor to cross her path again.

From this experience, I became a settled opponent of single-sex education, especially for men. And with this experience in mind, perhaps it was natural that I should have written my paper for Commager's colloquium on Henry Adams. His great theme was the relation between ignorance and education. And the theme of ignorance and education marks him, I think, as the most important writer about education in the American tradition.

Adams 'Education was thoroughly Socratic, an examined life, even in the part of his life, a central one, that he left out of the reckoning—the 20 years of his marriage. We might speculate that this gap indicated the most overwhelming ignorance he felt had conditioned his education. By all accounts, the marriage of Henry and Clover united two highly talented, active members of the American elite. Clover had great creative abilities that Adams recognized and treasured. An excellent writer and an innovator in the art of photography, she became seriously depressed on her father's death. In the face of this depression, what could Adams have done? Was he too bound by what was comme il faut ? Did he know how to recognize and support her bringing her talents to bear in the world at large? Adams must have had an overwhelming ignorance about the world of emotions beneath the formalities of haut bourgeois life. He was ill-suited to launch into depth psychology, an American Freud, and willed to say nothing about Clover, her death, and his feelings—hence the famous 20-year gap in The Education of Henry Adams. But even without insight into all that pain, his reflections on the relation between ignorance and education remain profoundly important.

More than any other thinker that I know, Adams came to grips with the human importance of education. Most writers about education view it as something that humans do to and for others, educators acting with a sense of agency and an educational agenda of some sort. This view is deeply engrained in our ways of thinking. We might take as a characteristic example. Lawrence Cremin's definition informing his 3-volume study, American Education, in which many critics hold him to have used a dauntingly broad definition. It is worthwhile to reflect on it for a moment before considering what Adams did in The Education.

Lawrence A. Cremin. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) p. xiii.

. . . I shall view education as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit or evoke knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities, a process that is more limited than what the anthropologist would term enculturation or the sociologist socialization, though obviously inclusive of some of the same elements. Education, defined thus, clearly produces outcomes in the lives of individuals, many of them discernible, though other phenomena, varying from politics to commerce to technology to earthquakes, may prove more influential at particular times and in particular instances. There are some who would consider all such phenomena educative, for they invariably shape men and affect their destinies; I myself find such a view so inclusive as to define nothing for the educational historian to study except "history in general," a concept with which I have always had a good deal of difficulty and which should not in any case be mistaken for the history of education.

Unlike Cremin, Adams did not define education in order to demarcate a domain of professional inquiry. For Adams education was the name for a necessary human function, in the same way that people speak of respiration, nutrition, locomotion, circulation, and so on. People begin to understand these functions and how they work by inquiring why they are necessary in the course of human life. Why do human beings require nutrition and how do they get it? Why do human beings require education and how do they get it? They require nutrition because at birth the umbilical symbiosis with the mother is cut and the physiology of self-maintenance, growth, and activity require sustenance ingested through suckling, drinking or eating. Starting from that recognition observers can build up an understanding of all sorts of ensuing functions from the mechanics of chewing and swallowing, the chemistry of digestion and absorption, to the mechanics of excretion. In the case of education, according to Adams, at birth, the human being is not only radically hungry, it is also radically ignorant, and as much as it needs nutrients, it needs those good things that Cremin enumerated—knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities—for the sake of survival and well-being. To live is to be ignorant and to struggle to overcome that condition sufficiently to survive, possibly to thrive.

Lawrence A. Cremin. American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) p. xiii. Here Henry didn't make the cut.

Established usage makes one want to say simply that initiative, control, and responsibility rest with the recipients of education, but such an expression would contradict what it is trying to say, for they are not the receivers, but rather the agents. Providers are merely the resources the the people educating use in coping with their ignorance.

Two further points relative to Cremin's definition help illuminate what is distinctive and important in Adams' ideas about education. The first of these concerns the source or locus of initiative, control, and responsibility. Modern culture has a strong tendency to locate these with the providers of education, not the recipients. Cremin and many other writers on education (although not, I think several in My Canon such as Ortega, Plato, Rousseau, Hegel) concentrated on education as a positive agency, ". . . the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit or evoke . . ." all the sustaining cultural stuff. Later, at the prodding of the likes of me, he expanded the effort a bit "to transmit, evoke, or acquire." But the really relevant agent is not the one moving the positive goods, the "knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities, as well as any learning that results from that effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended," as he put it in the final version. Rather, what drives education is the ignorance, the need that human being suffer on finding themselves in a complicated and difficult world. Initiative, control, and responsibility lie with those experiencing education, those coping with their own ignorance, engaged in recognizing it, assessing its implications, and actively working to diminish it.

Much of our thinking about education, and our practice of it, purveys all sorts of stuff with too much confidence that it will enable its recipients to overcome their substantial ignorance. Educators are too often like little children playing mud pies—"Yummy!" "Good!" "Wouldn't you like some more!"—only the children have enough sense not to eat them. Whether the proffered "knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities, as well as any learning that results," diminishes the ignorance from which a person will suffer in subsequent situations depends on the prospective life experience of that person. The measure of educating effort, coping with ignorance, turns out to have been what it purports to be depends on the character and import of the ignorance it seeks to assuage. Neither good nutrition nor good education results from stuffing a person with anything and everything that she can swallow—literally or figuratively. People educating could use much more insight into the cultural physiology of their ignorance. Adams addressed it.

Henry Adams was acutely aware that a great deal of what gets proffered in the pursuit of education does not diminish ignorance and often expands or accentuates it. He used himself as a litmus test. If anyone in his generation could have overcome their ignorance it was likely to have been him. He was very smart, wealthy, incredibly well-connected, hard-working, a serious person, impeccably schooled, a world traveler, a confidant of genial artists, powerful politicians, and savvy scientists. He spent his life in the systematic pursuit of education and did not brook much self-deception in the effort. He had the discipline to cut through his own complacencies and those of his time. If he had trouble overcoming his ignorance, few others, if anyone, were likely to do much better. And by normal assessments, Adams was supremely well-educated. He tried to show that the normal assessments were profoundly deceptive, themselves a source of dangerous ignorance—the belief that the wisdom of 1800 could suffice to manage the complexities of 1900. In reality, he and everyone else were failing in their pursuit of education.

Henry Adams and the Making of America by Garry Wills (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005) renews appreciation of Adams' accomplishments as an historian of enduring importance.

Does it matter, one might ask, that Adams failed, in his odd view, in his pursuit of education? Indeed it does, Adams answered. Here we should attend to the second point relative to Cremin's reasoning about education. Adams was one of the great founders of the historical profession in the United States, but his sense of history went far beyond a professional commitment to writing it. He was acutely aware that he and everyone else lives in it.

Human beings are historical beings. Our historicity is the source of our ignorance. We are born into and dependent upon a complicated historical construction, at first utterly ignorant of what it is and how it works, having to develop a working diminution of that ignorance in order to survive and thrive, to form and fulfill our intentions. In Adams' view, historical catastrophes for persons, communities, nations, and whole civilizations have been real, sorely suffered experiences. For Adams, these catastrophes are what happens when the good stuff turns out to have been inadequate, deceptive, poorly mastered, when people turn out to have been ignorant about their ignorance. In historical catastrophes, history gives those engaged in "the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort" the boot and takes over with a stern rod—learn by suffering the consequences or die.

Adams best statement of this sense of how education in history hurts, but by no means the only one, came at the end of his chapter on "Teason"—

The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 7, (http://www.feedbooks.com), p. 89.

Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one wihout exception, Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country could recover its balance and movement.

By chronology and upbringing, Adams belonged to what the Austrian writer, Stephan Zweig, called The World of Yesterday, a relatively stable, pre-20th-century world in which people across many stations in life enjoyed a relatively high confidence that they could, through their deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort, overcome enough of their ignorance to come to grips, more or less, with the vicissitudes of their experience. But through serious reflection, Adams perceived the world of tomorrow. He sensed the passing of yesterday earlier than Zweig, marking its collapse with the Civil War, not World War I. And Adams was also far more analytical about the nature of the educational problem confronting people born into a historical world that had somehow gotten launched into a prolonged phase transition, shifting from a world of yesterday, to one of tomorrow. The world of tomorrow obeyed the law of acceleration. The problem of ignorance under the law of stability differed deeply from the challenge of ignorance under the law of acceleration. That was the change of phase.

Education, feedbook, p. 396.

The attempt of the American of 1800 to educate the American of 1900 had not often been surpassed for folly; and since 1800 the forces and their complications had increased a thousand times or more. The attempt of the American of 1900 to educate the American of 2000, must be even blinder than that of the Congressman of 1800, except so far as he had learned his ignorance.

Adams used chaos 60 times in the Education and complexity 22. As a benchmark, John Dewey did not use chaos in Democracy and Education and complexity twice. Readers will find Henry Adams, Novels • Mont Saint Michel • the Education (New York: The Library of Americ, 1983) to be a highly usable edition. All Adams work is widely available online.

Adams saw that the ignorance that people were vulnerable to in history, personally and collectively, was itself profoundly relative to history. The latter parts of The Education—supplemented by The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, especially the long essay on "The Rule of Phase in History," anchored with Mont Saint Michel and Chartres as an historical baseline—are remarkably prescient anticipations of ideas about dynamic self-organization, chaos theory, and the problems of accelerating complexity in historical experience. He was alert to how uncontrolled changes in industry, technology, and science were driving changes in the demographic and material conditions of life that put great strains on the conduct of life by all persons, especially those in the leading elites, those who would exercise levers of rapidly mounting power about which they were increasingly ignorant. Catching up to a condition of relative equipoise would not be easy. The dynamo, the huge engines of an emerging electric age, fascinated and frightened him. He could plot curves of acceleration and the curves he plotted moved towards ever-increasing complexity at a mind-boggling rate. And given his views about ignorance and education, the boggled mind was not a comforting state.

In the fall of 1961, Adams struck me as setting an extremely important and difficult standard for someone embarking on a career in education. It seemed to me that the level of historical risk, and the evidence of a dangerous ignorance, was not anywhere at the point of intensity that Adams had witnessed in Washington 100 years earlier. But it seemed dangerously high, and the million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, was perhaps modest should 20th-century events spin out of control. Adams set the standard it is imperative to meet: to understand real ignorance, to know what one does not know with sufficient acumen to remedy the deficiency, at least to the degree that a catastrophic pedagogy of events does not take over in the course of history, personal or collective. This imperative was being poorly met; historical suffering was doing too much teaching; and the threat of a disastrous intensification of historical education was far too high. Here are a few events listed for 1961 in Wikipedia—

• February 1—The United States launches its first test of the Minuteman I intercontinental ballistic missile.
• March 15—South Africa withdraws from the Commonwealth of Nations.
• April 11—The trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann begins in Jerusalem.
• April 17 | The Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba begins; it fails by April 19.
• April 22—Algiers putsch: Four French generals who oppose de Gaulle's policies in Algeria fail in a coup attempt.
• May 4—U.S. Freedom Riders begin interstate bus rides to test the new U.S. Supreme Court integration decision.
• May 14—American civil rights movement: A Freedom Riders bus is fire-bombed near Anniston, Alabama and the civil rights protestors are beaten by an angry mob.
• August 13—Construction of the Berlin Wall begins, restricting movement between East Berlin and West Berlin and forming a clear boundary between West Germany and East Germany, Western Europe and Eastern Europe.
• September 28—A military coup in Damascus, Syria effectively ends the United Arab Republic, the union between Egypt and Syria.
• October 17—Paris massacre of 1961: French police in Paris attack about 30,000 protesting a curfew applied solely to Algerians. The official death toll is 3, but human rights groups claim 240 dead.
• October 27—A standoff between Soviet and American tanks in Berlin, Germany heightens Cold War tensions.
• October 30—Nuclear testing: The Soviet Union detonates a 58-megaton yield hydrogen bomb known as Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya. It remains the largest ever man-made explosion.
• December 2—Cold War: In a nationally broadcast speech, Cuban leader Fidel Castro announces he is a Marxist-Leninist, and that Cuba will adopt socialism.
• December 11—The Vietnam War officially begins, as the first American helicopters arrive in Saigon along with 400 U.S. personnel.
• December 15—An Israeli war crimes tribunal sentences Adolf Eichmann to die for his part in The Holocaust.

Thankfully, 50 years later, we do not seem as close to the brink of Armageddon as we did then, despite the financial meltdown, egregious unemployment, and ever-greater fragility in countries long ruled by dead, repressive regimes in tension with a populace that seethes with discontent. But I am not sure how much comfort to take in that judgment. Can we cope with our ignorance? Are we wise to saddle our schools with educational expectations, missions, and responsibilities that they cannot possibly meet? Can we continue to imbue the brightest and most advantaged of our youth with an ethos of driving greed questing useless billions while the commonweal starves for resources and ordinary people slip into insecurity? Can we, over time, preserve sufficient public clarity when many powerful communicators serve their interests by propagating confusions, falsehoods, and resentments? To me, Henry Adams is still the most relevant and important of American educational thinkers.

A question of limits

My sense of urgency, and my sense of the historical importance of education, drawn from Henry Adams, and from Camus and Ortega as well, is evident in the excerpt from the draft of my MA thesis written in the winter and spring of 1962. Students starting on a Ph.D. in history had to submit a Masters essay at the end of our first year, which the Department would use to separate the few from the many. We were assigned to small seminars, intended to acquaint us with the nuts of bolts of writing history. I was part of a small batch of us, about ten, all recent graduates from college. We had a good deal of freedom to choose topics according to our interest, and I thought mine merited a lot of hard work. I would sit for hours in a cafeteria in Lerner Hall, then a good deal scruffier than now, reading and annotating a stash of documents with great care.

I had decided to write on changes in the language that prominent educators used in speaking about collective organizations, especially the nation, the public, the society. I thought there had been a growing proclivity to reify, to hypostatize these over the prior 200 years. People had come to think of them as self-subsistent entities with their own interests, morality, and goals, acting independently of living human beings. Such thinking struck me as rank mystification, resulting in very dangerous superstitions. These reifications risked legitimating absurd prospects, a nuclear Armageddon sacrificing millions of human lives for the survival of the nation, even merely for the advancement of the nation—nothing but an imagined construct of thought.

Now I look back and say that I had taken the "linguistic turn" well before those in the historical profession dreamed that a linguistic turn might be taken, a dangerous move for a beginning graduate student. I had spent six months in a detailed analysis of the language used in documents, dating from 1633 to 1948, collected in American Higher Education: A Documentary History, edited by Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith (2 vols., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), which had just been published. I wrote up a close reading of the documents that I thought were the most revealing, showing changes in the use of abstract nouns and associated pronouns. The week before Spring vacation, we submitted our drafts to our seminar leader, a senior American historian. He would comment and return them in class after the break so that we could revise and submit our manuscripts to the department faculty for evaluation at the end of the semester.

According to plan, the day for feedback came, and one by one the professor returned the manuscripts, meting praise and criticism out in due measure for each—one, two, and on through nine of us, whereupon he declared the class ended. "But professor, you forgot me," I blurted out with a tremor. "Oh, yes . . . McClintock"—said with a tone and look that did not reassure—"I did not forget." He then reached down in his briefcase and pulled my manuscript out, holding it at a corner between thumb and forefinger, stretched away from him as if it were something soiled and smelly. I was sitting to his right and he swung his arm across the table and dropped my draft in front me, saying, "This is not history. When you decide you want to write history, perhaps you may come back and try again."

Here are the first two sections of the offending document. They are of interest here for they show a bit how in 1962 the work of Camus, Henry Adams, and José Ortega y Gasset was entering into the development of my concerns. . . .

---

The Development of Concepts of Association in American Educational Thought

Robert McClintock

Excerpt from a draft MA essay in history, submitted Spring 1962.

Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country could recover its balance and movement.

The Education of Henry Adams
The Modern Library, New York. 1918, 1931. p. 109.

One: Murder and Education

The problem of life is death. And the problem of human life is murder. The difficulty of murder is not simple; has it been faced? Great energy is expended finding guilty murderers who are murdered by "society" in punishment. With greater energy mental expediencies are devised in the name of which vast numbers of people are killed. People kill people in war. It is not soldier killing soldier. No it is people killing people: men, women, and children.

D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Modern Library Edition, Random House, New York, 1950, p. 36.

But what has murder to do with education? To ask this is to ask why people kill people. As D.H. Lawrence pointed out every act of murder involves a murderer and a murderee. Both are implicated in the crime, the former positively, by committing the act, the latter negatively, by letting the act be committed.

I assume that people aspire to act rationally; that, if their acts are irrational, some devious twist of mind has convinced them of the rationality of the conventionally irrational. Given this assumption, it follows that people kill because they think it is right, and they must think it is right because of something they have learned. The murderer, somewhere in his personal history, has learned to kill. The murderee, in his, learned to be killed. Education, thus, becomes involved with murder in two ways: positively, we learn the symbols for which we kill in our educative experience; negatively, we fail to learn to put aright the dislocations that lead to death.

As long as the image of the "murderer" remains that of the unbalanced individual, the problem shall not be gripped. Murder, the intentional killing of a human being by another human being, is intimately involved with what is called society. In our world, today, multitudes starve in the midst of plenty while the engines of war expand. Now, men are murdering. And man murdering is common enough through the ages to discourage our glorification of any state of innocence. Education in the past has faltered in the struggle to avoid either positive or negative involvement in murder. The problem is not one of lost innocence and degraded standards. The problem is to face our condition. This confrontation shuns sentimentalizing the good society now past or the good society to be built. This confrontation admits that I am implicated in murder and asks why I murder and what I will do about the self-knowledge.

Through the ages the reason most murders are committed changes. This observation applies more to the positive reasons for murder than the negative ones. Man's limitations have always led to murder involving hungry, terrified, unbalanced, uncertain people. But the killings in the name of men's certainties have been the most repugnant. Here will and ineptitude, cruelty and pathos, horror and terror, seem to intensify: murder becomes a positive act, sometimes on a scale beyond comprehension. For most of the preceding 2000 years these positive reasons for murder have been variations on a single theme: religion. But in the last few centuries, these positive reasons have shifted to variations on the theme of politics.

An impression of the shift may be gained by a contrast of the Muslim wars of expansion, the Crusades, and the violence of the Counter Reformation, with the French and Russian revolutions, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II. Religion was central to the former group and peripheral to the latter. Politics was peripheral to the former and central to the latter.

Why do people kill for religion or politics? Because they think it is right and they think it is right because of something they have learned. That is, that religion or the political grouping is more important than the person. To die for God or to die for Country, Class (propertied or proletarian), or Culture becomes ones highest destiny. Here, education becomes positively involved in murder.

What has murder to do with education? Now, to ask this question is to ask how education is involved with concepts of political destiny which have so consistently led to people killing people in recent times. This is not a question of showing that in 1890 the Imperial Rescript on Education greatly intensified Japan's plunge into aggressive nationalism; nor of discovering and decrying tendencies to idealize American history in textbooks. Such occurrences undoubtedly have an effect, and they could be multiplied and expanded. But the problem of political destiny goes much deeper. It becomes necessary to confront the basic structure of our thought. Ortega y Gasset has described this purpose well:

José Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme, Harper Torchbook, New York, 1931, 1961. p. 11.

The explanation of a scientific system involves a further postulate: besides being true it must be understood. I am not for the moment referring to the difficulties imposed upon the mind by a scheme of abstract thought, especially if unprecedented, but to the comprehension of its fundamental tendency, of its ideological significance. I might almost say, of its physiognomy.

I shall search for the fundamental tendencies in the thought of certain educators. It is time to shift focus, away from the very general, towards the specific subjects I have chosen to examine. To begin with I shall take up a recent editorial in the New York Times. After this editorial I shall turn back 135 years to the Yale Report, once influential in higher education in the United States. Following this introduction to a contrast I shall study a series of educational thinkers: Francis Wayland, Horace Mann, Charles W. Elliott, John Dewey, Irving Babbitt, and Randolph Bourne, inquiring into the comparative physiognomy of their thought.

Professor's comment: "This is inappropriate as an introduction to a historical essay."

Two: A Contrast of Social Concepts

I asserted that the reason people kill changes; and that most modern murders were committed for reasons of political rather than religious destiny. Politics involves the common activities of people. Our term for it derives from the Greek word for city, polis. I think you will agree that political murder in modern times rarely involves a concrete dislike between the murderer and murderee. In political murder justification is derived from ideas held in common about common relationships in everyday life. Political murder involves city against city: it involves the clash of groupings, of communities. Because most murders are now political, the key areas in my confrontation will be ideas of the public, of society, of the nation, of the culture, of the community. I shall try to discover the fundamental tendency in the usages of these by the selected subjects.

In April 25, 1962 issue of the New York Times the editorial "In the Pursuit of Peace" appeared. The first third of this editorial summarized the events that led to president Kennedy's decision to resume atmospheric nuclear tests. In this part "we" was used once, with the meaning of "we, editors of the New York Times." In this part there was little that strikes one as extraordinary at a casual reading.

The remaining two thirds were introduced as follows:

Now it is more urgent than ever to explain once again to all humanity that the United States stands for a peaceful world ruled not by force, but by law, and that it has made innumerable efforts, sacrifices, and concessions to attain that goal.

The editorial staff of the New York Times (cir. 500,000+) were expounding "once again to all humanity" what "the United States stands for." In the remaining 12 sentences the editorial staff used "we," "us," and "our" 23 times. Their usage was precisely "we the people of the United States." Such a usage of "we" occurred in the Constitution only once and it was justified by requiring ratification by nine states and by expressly stating: "Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present. . . . In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names, George Washington, President and deputy from Virginia. . . ."

The authors of "In the Pursuit of Peace" repeatedly spoke for we the people of the United States and refrained from subscribing their names to the document. While more thorough documentation may be necessary, I advance the generalization that glibness in reference to the body politic, the society, the nation has become more common feature of discussion and writing. The use of we the people, at least, appears to have changed. To start eliciting the significance of this, and other changes, I shall return temporarily to the modern act of murder.

Note from 2011: The OAS was a right-wing terrorist group in France wanting to prevent the French granting of independence to Algeria, up until 1962 a French colony. A close friend at Princeton wrote his senior thesis on the OAS and we had had several conversations about how it had operated.

Modern murders are committed for reasons of political destiny. I must take this further and observed the peculiar physiognomy of modern political murder. It is not enough to note, as is often done, that this is the century of total war. War has become social war: it is war of the society, by the society, and for the society—whatever that may be. Note the technique of air bombardment both sides used in World War II. It might justifiably be considered an attempt at applied sociological destruction, the wrenching loose of the fabric of society. Note that this was precisely the technique of the victors wherever they roamed. The enemy society was torn apart and replaced by one fashioned in the image of the victor. Note the technique of the Organisation Armée Secrète: random terror coupled with systematic sabotage of social services, the post, garbage collection, governmental records, communications, etc. The social role of guerrilla warfare can also be seen reflected in "Operation Sunrise" in South Vietnam where all Vietnamese in troubled areas are being resettled at gunpoint in specially designed villages in which security suspects are settled in the center of the villages while those of sure loyalty are located at the perimeter.

The role of the individual in 20th century political murder follows from the central place of society in this debacle. A warring society emphasizes the function a person performs, his docile submission to the higher expediencies of the social whole, and his reluctance to doubt socially symbolic characteristics on the basis of mere personal experience. In respective order, illustrative examples are: the terroristic technique fragmenting key urban occupation categories; 10 years of a peacetime draft with no significant dissent compared to the draft riots during the Civil War; and the techniques of brainwashing prisoners of war and [the use of] propaganda and counter-propaganda campaigns designed to weaken or preserve the conviction of soldiers and civilians. Keeping these characteristics of political murder in mind, let us return to "The Pursuit of Peace".

In issuing the orders to the Defense Department and Atomic Energy Commission, the President had to weigh the inexorable requirements of both national and free world defense against the many protests voiced not only by the Communists but also by neutralist statesmen, "peace marchers," and even United Nations Secretary General Thant. With deep reluctance and regret, which we share, he decided that our own and free world preservation demands the tests; and nobody who is not privy to the secret military and scientific considerations that went into the decision can gainsay it.

Everyone involved was described by his function. The requirements of national and free world defense were inexorable. The decision about free world strategy, based on secret information, was beyond debate of ordinary people. This physiognomy of thought corresponds remarkably with the nature of modern political murder. The person is reduced to his function in society. The social whole is the level of imperative concern. The symbolic characterization of this whole is maintained in spite of the realities of the actual situation.

An edited version of this is reprinted in Hofstadter and Smith, eds., American Higher Education: A Documentary History, Chicago, 1961, pp. 276-91. Page references to it will be given in parentheses in the text.

Such functionalism, fatalism, and phantasmagoria is not unique to this editorial in the New York Times. Rather it is a feature of our everyday speech. The editorial staff of the New York Times are well-educated individuals (excuse my functional identification, but they do not give their names) writing for a clientele of above-average intelligence. The implication is that we have learned to think easily and with confidence in these terms. But the public has not always had such a dominating usage in our intellectual heritage. What is now a pillar of imprecise usage, once, at least, was used much differently. I refer to the Yale Report of 1828.

The Yale Report expressed the philosophy of the traditional American college with its prescribed curriculum dominated by the classics. This exposition was influential over American higher education until after the Civil War. According to it, the purpose of Yale was to lay the foundation of a superior education. The prescribed curriculum was an intellectual expedient for attaining this goal. It best ministered to the psychology of mental faculties. It effectively disciplined the mind and gave the most valuable mental furnishings for those who would guide their lives with good sense and taste. While the intellectual resources available and those needed in living changed, the reporters felt that the prescribed curriculum had also changed. New sciences has been added to it. Expert judgment found the classics still of fundamental value. Prescription of studies, a careful planning of the intellectual experience as a whole, was the special feature of a college education. In respect to this point the concept of the public held by the reporters, President Day and Professor Kingsley, was explained.

It is said that the public now demand that the doors should be thrown open to all; that education ought to be so modified, and varied, as to adapt it to the exigencies of the country, and the prospects of different individuals; that the instruction given to those who are destined to be merchants, or manufacturers, or agriculturalists, should have a special reference to their respective professional pursuits.

The public are undoubtedly right. . . . And we rejoice at the prospect of ample provision for this purpose, in . . . the establishment of commercial high schools, gymnasia, lycea, agricultural seminaries, etc. But do the public insist, that every college shall become a high school, gymnasium, lyceum, and academy? . . . The college has its appropriate object, and they have theirs. . . . While an academy teaches a little of everything, the college, by directing its efforts to one uniform course, aims at doing its work with greater precision and economy of time. (pp. 285-86)

The word "public" was used as a plural noun. This emphatically placed the discussion of public interests on a plane different from that common today. Our indefinite, but monolithic "public interest" was not present. President Day admitted discussion of public interests only as special interests to which he could counterpose his special interest on an equal footing. Thus maintaining equal standing between Yale and the public, he stated that the college should define its aims regardless of the public strictures. He possessed special competence. But the public were interested in a little of every thing, owing to the multiplicity of interests among the public. Yale was interested in a special thing, a uniform course of instruction, to which it would devote its full efforts. Its distinctive program would appeal to a distinctive interest: those who wanted a superior education.

Not only did the Yale Report express a precise concept of the public. A concept of social action was at least implied. The authors asked whether merchants, manufacturers, and agriculturalists could derive no benefit from a Yale education. These were the men who were going to accumulate large estates by riding "the tide of prosperity." Given their increasing wealth "ought" they not be men of superior education, additions of "higher distinction" to their society? (pp. 287-88) This was asked rhetorically, implying the faith that the merchant, confronted by the question of what he ought to do, would answer that he should receive a superior Yale education and cease agitating for technical training.

There was, here, neither a feeling of helplessness, nor of social engineering. There was no effort to manipulate trends. There was no concept of an inexorable character of future society implicit in present society. The tide of prosperity would enrich many: let this be anticipated and acted upon by potential educators and students.

In Democracy and Education John Dewey observed:

John Dewey, Democracy and Education, Macmillan Paperbacks, New York 1960, 1944, 1961. pp. 282-3.

Science, adopting the methods of observation and experimentation, was to give up the attempt to "anticipate" nature—to impose preconceived notions upon her—and was to become her humble interpreter. In obeying nature intellectually, man would learn to command her practically.

This attitude towards opinion should be compared to that exemplified by the National Opinion Research Center which last year felt that 30 minutes of each of 30,000 college senior's time would suffice as a basis for a "major" study of the relation between college experiences and student's plans for later life.

The position in the Yale Report was pre-scientific in these terms. President Day tried to anticipate the workings of society by imposing preconceived notions upon it. For him society was not a thing with a nature: it was an association of particular men. The good additions to society were those of "large and liberal views," of "solid and elegant attainments, which will raise them to a higher distinction. . . ." (p. 288) The stature of society depended on the quality of its individual members. The individual, after college training, "when he comes to be engaged in the study of his profession, . . . may find his way through the maze, and firmly establish his own opinions, by taking days or weeks for the examination of each separate point."(p. 280) The implication was that the individual could control his own future, and by doing this he would control the future of society. It was not an easy course: it required self-discipline and this, therefore, was the central feature in the Yale education. This, supposedly, was the source of Yale's superiority.

In the Yale Report the public was composed of groups with special interests which each actively tried to further. The individual could make himself superior through discipline, followed by a careful forming of his opinion. The social future depended on the generation of high aspirations, lucid opinions, and a disciplined living by the present students. This educational philosophy has frequently been characterized as aristocratic. But Ortega y Gasset has advanced a different juxtaposition than the aristocratic and democratic man.

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, W. W. Norton and Co.of, New York, 1932, 1937, p. 63.

Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline—the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes upon us—by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige.

Without agreeing with President Day's educational philosophy, we can note that he and his philosophy show characteristics of the noble life: "life lived as a discipline." Certainly the Yale idea was the discipline Day would follow; and its stated purpose was to discipline the student's mind. This service to clear thinking had its transcendental aspects as well. The man of superior education would not only continually transcend himself; but, by doing this, he would contribute to the social transcendence.

For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man—not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia. (p. 65)

Recall President Day's idea about education for merchants, manufacturers, and agriculturalists: since the tide of prosperity would enrich them, they should acquire a superior, rather than a technical, education so as to enhance opulence with elegance, dignity, and the potential of service. The appeal to the manufacturer was to overcome the inertia of being a manufacture and to pass beyond this by developing other qualities.

Earlier I quoted John Dewey to the effect that the scientist gave up the attempt to impose preconceived notions upon nature. The scientist "in obeying nature intellectually, . . . would learn to command her practically." I then observed that the Yale Report, with respect to society, was pre-scientific. It was pre-scientific in just those things in which it was noble. President Day refused to be society's "humble interpreter." He anticipated society, formed a discipline, and strove to fulfill it. On the one hand this was characteristic of the noble man. On the other, it was characteristic of the pre-scientific man.

This contrast relates to the editorial "In the Pursuit of Peace." The editorial extolled a heavy inertness in spite of the magnitude of events. The editorial opened with: "As the miracle . . . has failed to materialize. . . ." This set the tone of inexorable events carried out by vast abstractions of functions and forces. The very purpose of the piece was to preserve the inertness of the readers, to still dissent from an important decision.

The editorial expounded not only inertia. It exuded science in the sense of humbly interpreting events for their practical control. This "Pursuit of Peace" did nothing but observe, symbolize, order, and conclude. The product served only to enhance one current of thought while impeding another in the social audience; and, thus, it practically controlled the life of you and I to serve those national and free world interests, shrouded in miracles, secrets, and inexorable forces.

The contrast of public might be said to be the noble, pre-scientific public of 1828 compared to the inert, scientific mass of 1962. But deduce no golden age in the Yale Report. Its nobility and pre-scientific qualities qualities were by then anachronisms. Its roots were sunk in times when religious destiny was still supreme. Its surrounding ethos of religion was being challenged by that of politics. Napoleon had already risen and fallen. The Civil War was soon to descend upon the United States. The noble, pre-scientific public of the Yale Report were soon capable of developing symbols that justified murder. And events proved a vast lack of sufficient learning to put aright the dislocations that led to the Civil War. All this would be of interest, but I shall maintain the focus of my thought: the change in the fundamental tendency of American educational thought.

José Ortega y Gasset What is Philosophy? and other works

Ortega as educator

Here is the opening to the "Preface" to my book on José Ortega y Gasset, published in 1971, looking back at my first encounter with his ideas through his recently published book on What Is Philosophy?

OVER TEN YEARS AGO, while browsing in the Princeton University Bookstore, my eye was caught by What Is Philosophy? Good question!, I thought. I had entered my undergraduate studies with an instinctive reverence for philosophy as the first among disciplines; but the philosophy courses I then took were all disappointing: invariably they concerned philosophies, not philosophy. The author of the book that chance had brought me to, José Ortega y Gasset, was unknown to me, but on quick perusaI he seemed worth reading. Read him I did, and I have been doing so since.

What Is Philosophy?—with its concern for the ego living in the world, for the person thinking, choosing, doing—is a work well calculated to move a young man in his last year of college as he begins to face seriously the question of what he would do with his life. Ortega offered no substantive answers to this perplexity, for answers depend on the unique actualities of each separate self and its particular circumstances, but he greatly reinforced my developing sense of the importance, the continual importance, of deciding on one's future. We live, not for a final answer, but by endlessly asking the question, what am I going to make of the coming instant? By constantly asking this question, one shapes a continual present according to the vision of the future and the comprehension of the past that are commands at each successive instant. Such thoughts, which had already been germinating in me, were brought to life by Ortega's prose; hence from the very start, he convinced me that he was part of the past that I should seek to comprehend should I want to shape my present according to a vision of a future.

In quick order, thereafter, I read Man and People ,The Modern Theme , and The Revolt of the Masses . Here I encountered Ortega's public relevance, a relevance that has grown as the prospect of public affairs has become monotonously more bleak. At the time of my first encounter, the Kennedy-Nixon campaign was moving towards its denouement, and the contrast between the noble man and the mass man that Ortega so sharply drew seemed to resonate perfectly with the contrast between Kennedy's apparent style of aspiration and Nixon's self-satisfaction. Thus, despite his own pessimism about the politics of any nation, Ortega at first seemed to explain the why and the wherefore of the political hope dawning within me. After all, I had learned from others to think that America was special, exempt from the foibles of the European nations.

Events soon shattered these first hopes and relentless retrospect has made me doubt their reality. Being American for me has ceased to be sufficient, no more significant in itself than my being from New York and you perhaps from Milan or somewhere else. During the last decade, events and Ortega have made me into a European: I pledge my allegiance to that chancy, uncertain, but constructive process of transcending the nation, transcending the state, and transcending coercion in the conduct of public affairs in the post-industrial West. And much of what I have to say about Ortega is intended—in keeping with his own example—as a small but serious contribution to the creative effort of devising a future for the West.

Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator by Robert McClintock (New York, Teachers College Press, 1971) pp. xiii-xiv.

Now—so quickly!—another forty years have passed, and the sense of discovery that I had on first encountering Ortega is still fresh for me. My book was about Ortega as educator, an educator of the public—Spaniards self-reforming, Europeans self-organizing. Here instead, I will reflect on Ortega as my educator. To be sure, I never signed up to take a course with him. He was not, my teacher, but much more properly, my educator . I use educator in a sense defined beautifully by Nietzsche, in a powerful passage early in his extraordinary essay,Schopenhauer as Educator . Nietzsche spoke to aspiring youth in a moving anticipation of the Overman in each, later a key idea in his thought. And he did so with astonishing reverberations of Rousseau's appreciation and care for the natural person embodied in each. I translate loosely—

You can find a reasonable translation of Schopenhauer as Educator by Friedrich Nietzsche, in Nietzsche,Unfashionable Observations (Richard T. Gray, trans., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995),pp. 174-5, or an even better one by R. J. Hollingdale in Untimely Meditations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 129-30.

Here is the full passage in German, reproduced from the Schopenhauer als Erzieher<a class="anno" href="http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Nietzsche,+Friedrich/Unzeitgem%C3%A4%C3%9Fe+Betrachtungen/3.+Schopenhauer+als+Erzieher" title="Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: 3. Schoopenhauer als Erzieher on the Zeno.org site"> [ GoTo ] </a> on the Zeno.org site, a fine full-text site for German literature and thought supported by unobtrusive advertising. "Die junge Seele sehe auf das Leben zurück mit der Frage: was hast du bis jetzt wahrhaft geliebt, was hat deine Seele hinangezogen, was hat sie beherrscht und zugleich beglückt? Stelle dir die Reihe dieser verehrten Gegenstände vor dir auf, und vielleicht ergeben sie dir, durch ihr Wesen und ihre Folge, ein Gesetz, das Grundgesetz deines eigentlichen Selbst. Vergleiche diese Gegenstände, sieh, wie einer den andern ergänzt, erweitert, überbietet, verklärt, wie sie eine Stufenleiter bilden, auf welcher du bis jetzt zu dir selbst hingeklettert bist; denn dein wahres Wesen liegt nicht tief verborgen in dir, sondern unermeßlich hoch über dir, oder wenigstens über dem, was du gewöhnlich als dein Ich nimmst. Deine wahren Erzieher und Bildner verraten dir, was der wahre Ursinn und Grundstoff deines Wesens ist, etwas durchaus Unerziehbares und Unbildbares, aber jedenfalls schwer Zugängliches, Gebundenes, Gelähmtes: deine Erzieher vermögen nichts zu sein als deine Befreier. Und das ist das Geheimnis aller Bildung: sie verleiht nicht künstliche Gliedmaßen, wächserne Nasen, bebrillte Augen – vielmehr ist das, was diese Gaben zu geben vermöchte, nur das Afterbild der Erziehung. Sondern Befreiung ist sie, Wegräumung alles Unkrauts, Schuttwerks, Gewürms, das die zarten Keime der Pflanzen antasten will, Ausströmung von Licht und Wärme, liebevolles Niederrauschen nächtlichen Regens, sie ist Nachahmung und Anbetung der Natur, wo diese mütterlich und barmherzig gesinnt ist, sie ist Vollendung der Natur, wenn sie ihren grausamen und unbarmherzigen Anfällen vorbeugt und sie zum Guten wendet, wenn sie über die Äußerungen ihrer stiefmütterlichen Gesinnung und ihres traurigen Unverstandes einen Schleier deckt.

Gewiß, es gibt wohl andre Mittel, sich zu finden, aus der Betäubung, in welcher man gewöhnlich wie in einer trüben Wolke webt, zu sich zu kommen, aber ich weiß kein besseres, als sich auf seine Erzieher und Bildner zu besinnen. Und so will ich denn heute des einen Lehrers und Zuchtmeisters, dessen ich mich zu rühmen habe, eingedenk sein, Arthur Schopenhauers – um später anderer zu gedenken."

Look back, he said, and ask, "What have you truly loved? What has drawn your spirit out? What has, together, ruled and fulfilled it?" These revered purposes, put in a series, set forth "a law, the very constitution of your intrinsic self." Each "fulfills, widens, surpasses, clarifies the others." They form a ladder, a hierarchy, which takes you upward. "Your real being lies not hidden in you, but immeasurably high above you." And your true educator reveals the original sense and substance of all this, your constitution. In itself, this constitution is intrinsically prior to education and cultivation; it rests in you—inaccessible, tied-up, and lamed. Hence, "your educator can be nothing but your liberator. And that is the secret of all Bildung ." What seems to bestow characteristics and capacities is only a simulacrum of education. Education is what disentangles, what cleans away weeds, debris, and worms so the tender sprout will wax; it is what streams light and warmth, a night-time rain; "it is an emulation and adoration of nature."

Of course, what Nietzsche described does not happen all at once. The liberation of which he spoke is not a sudden breaking of chains—the opportunity for it develops slowly, it becomes evident unexpectedly, and then it carries through its sustained work over an extended time. An educator works, rung by rung, over time, at first seeming to be just another momentary fixing—here-this—in the flux of a person's attention—a fixing, perhaps, on one among the many books on a table full of new non-fiction releases.What Is Philosophy? Interesting title. . . . Ortega had been dead six years when I picked the book up, and when I picked it up, I had no inkling who Ortega was. The title simply posed a question that had been in the back of my mind, for I had entered Princeton with the fancy that I would study physics, for which I thought I had a knack, combining it with philosophy, whatever that was. But I quickly tabled the philosophy part of that intent, checking out the courses in it that I might take. The philosophy being taught was not what I had in mind, and other courses sufficiently caught my attention. But the question Ortega asked remained in the back of my mind. Seeing the title, I picked up the book, sampled it for a few minutes, as was my want, and then bought it. And here is the important part, for I have always been good at acquiring unread books: my initial interest was strong enough that I returned to my dorm, sat down, and actually read the book.

In retrospect, this first encounter through What Is Philosophy?, was for me the start of a liberation, in the sense that Nietzsche illuminated. Ortega did not communicate some big idea to me. My markings in the text were restrained: in the first chapter, his recurring remarks about history caught my interest, and then I simply read through until the last three chapters, which really engaged me, primarily noting what Ortega had to say about the self and its relation to the world, to its circumstances. In these, I was not signaling some sort of discovery, but rather commenting on something in the text as if it was deeply familiar to me. Ortega started to work as a liberator. He helped me see myself. He helped clear away confusions, expectations passively received. By helping me disentangle myself, Ortega became my educator, my liberator.

Liberating What? Or the Problem of Knowing Thyself

My start at Princeton had been an academic disaster. I went there with a strong record from a good school, early acceptance, and an ambition to major in both physics and philosophy. My career as physicist suffered one of those accidents in initial advisement that I did not really understand until it was too late for physics, almost too late to stay in college.

I had nearly been a math-science whiz at Deerfield Academy, a top boarding school not far from Amherst. A mathematician on the Amherst faculty had the idea that high school students might effectively study set theory and combinatorics. He arranged with the Deerfield math department to test the idea, recruiting a few of us to take his course, instead of the intensive version of calculus, which normally we would have taken our senior year. The school judged that its normal calculus course would be redundant with the more intensive one we would naturally get freshman year in college, and as math students we were strong enough to do well in that without taking a high-school warm-up in it. And I thought the special course was a great opportunity, excited by what we would do and oblivious to what we would not. A year later, at Princeton, my adviser was impressed by my having done set theory and combinatorics with a college professor, and I found myself the lone freshman in a course for junior and senior math majors, taught by someone whose pedagogy consisted of filling a large blackboard twice weekly with arcane notations that would of course speak with self-evident clarity to us all.

This F, I was more or less able to explain. The other one, in freshman physics, was more insidious. Neither I nor anyone else at Princeton was much aware that the year before at Deerfield I had been exempted from acquiring certain skills, while playing with sets and graphs, that were useful in solving problems about concepts I thought I understood sufficiently well. My fiasco in advanced math did nothing to help remediate my deficiency, the fact that I had never taken calculus. My being in the advanced course, no matter how thoroughly I flunked it, masked what I lacked: if I had not gone through the standard progression, or so it seemed, I would never have been in such an advanced course, my failure in it notwithstanding. But as the year wore on my deficient knowledge of the calculus became increasingly acute and my performance in physics, and then other subjects in tow, accelerated downward. That shook my confidence: instead of seeking help, I tuned out. At the end of the year, I ranked one above the flunk-out line, and my father vividly described my future pumping gas should I slip one further down.

Even during my freshman nadir, I would read a lot, serious stuff largely of my own choosing, responding to a free-floating intellectual interest. Among friends, I caused a certain stir of wonder by reading The Brothers Karamazov closely in one 72-hour sitting, sending them out for quantities of coffee, coke, and sandwiches. It was an extremely intense, personal experience, quite independent and disruptive of normal academic work. I would not come away from such an experience with much to say about the work—I'm not really sure what such total engagement in reading a powerful work does for or to me, but from time to time I pick up a complex novel and become completely involved in it to the exclusion of all other claims on my attention until I have finished it. The binge over, I slowly withdraw, having perhaps expanded my sphere of experience, but having little to say about what has been sucked into that inward world about which one does not consciously think or speak. A cautious man, I instinctively ration such experience and nurture my interests, not to the exclusion of literary works, but far more readily with works of serious reflection, theory, and criticism.

Sophomore year, I worked, not grimly, for it was well within my capacity, but firmly, to ensure academic survival. I chose courses a little more wisely, working with diligence on most, although not doing all that well in those, while getting strong grades in two or three even though I was not particularly disciplined in keeping up with the assignments in these. I regained enough confidence to begin toying with the thought that there was an inverse correlation between how closely I followed a course syllabus and how good a grade I received at the end of the course. This tactic applied within that safe range where the bell curve was high, encompassing most of us with academic respectability, the proverbial gentleman's C, rising on occasion to the status of a B (this all being BGI, before grade inflation).

As a sophomore and junior, it did not occur to me to aspire to the upper ranks of academic performance and I used my rule of inverse correlation to pursue a self-organized pursuit of independent reading. My course selection was quite eclectic—humanities, 20th-century theater, 19th-century French literature, introductory economics followed by international economics, international relations, symbolic logic, political theory, Chinese intellectual history, 20th-century Europe, several courses in American history, "From Humanism to Existentialism." These classes stimulated me with all sorts of ideas, as did my reading in the context of them, and day-to-day, I felt engaged.

Through most of my four years as an undergraduate, however, I had little sense of direction. The initial ambition to be the genial philosopher-physicist had succumbed quickly. In its place, I had no sense of prospective vocation and did not feel a terribly strong need for one. I liked reading and thinking about things that caught my interest, but my rule of inverse correlation meant that the connection between the formal curriculum and my thoughts and interests would be an ad hoc improvisation. I derived little sense of validation from what successes I seemed to have, for these seemed less to be signs of incipient efficacy than further evidence that I could game the system sufficiently to stay safely within the main parts of the bell curve. I had discovered how to avoid the lower extreme, but I had acquired no sense of significant capacity that might be of value in the world, no sense of meaningful agency, and had no sense that I might enter the upper extreme.

From the "Indenture," as translated by Thomas Carlyle, at the end of Book 8 in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

Neither a career in medicine nor in law ever attracted me—I am not sure why. I had a couple friends who wanted to be writers—one became an insurance salesman in St. Louis and the other a successful novelist. It was the style, particularly strong among those of us from prep schools, to take the idea of a liberal education seriously, doing it for its own sake. We exemplified a quality Goethe put memorably in a document I later learned to love—"The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him: he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise." But seriousness had yet to surprise many of us, certainly me. With respect to the future, I was most aware of learning, bit by bit, what I did not want to do. The corporate world had no allure. In popular culture, a variety of films like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit depicted the corporate life as a sterile sell-out. Lots of serious sociology buttressed this impression.The Organization Man by William H. Whyte had substantial influence on campus as a compendium of reasons to avoid becoming a company man. A thickish, Doubleday Anchor Book, it was ubiquitous, depicting the corporate cocoon and its upscale, suburban subdivisions. An influence on me, and others, but less widely so,The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, tame now by the standards of extraordinary rendition and the outsourcing of imperial unpleasantries to corporate mercenaries, nevertheless made the idea of foreign service repulsive.

At the end of the 1950s, on the heels of what had been billed "the silent generation", we came onto a campus on which tremors of an "unsilent generation" faintly reverberated. We were not yet far enough to the left to be reading C. Wright Mills, although the sections on education in The Power Elite fit us like a glove, and Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd was more about the high-school years and a bit too lower-middle class to directly mobilize our experience. Through our childhood and youth, we had been initiated into an ethos loudly proclaiming itself to be the bastion of the free world, founded on universal principles of human dignity, the rule of law, and a productive respect for human intelligence and initiative. Yet it was evident to anyone modestly informed about civil rights, income distribution, and obsessions with subversion that adult actualities fell far short of their pretenses. Many of us, I think, felt subliminally if not consciously, that we did not really want to spend our lives doing the things we probably could do well, and it was hard to envision a future we could both affirm and excel at. For me, at any rate, a sense of direction seemed hard to generate.

Carlyle's Complete Works: The Sterling Edition (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, n.d.),p. 14, [Book I, Chapter 3].

Late our sophomore year, in its time-honored fashion, we had to choose a major. I was not at all sure what to choose. Years later I would take great pleasure in reading Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh by Thomas Carlyle, in which Teufelsdröckh held the enviable status as Professor of Things in General. Although a professorship was not within my horizon as I contemplated becoming an upperclassman, a major in things in general seemed highly attractive. Since that was not among the possibilities, however, I sought admission to Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which took a limited number of undergraduates each year into a rather interdisciplinary program. By my record alone, I am sure I would not have been accepted into it, but the application process included an interview, which I must have brought off well. Formal academic weaknesses aside, I had read and traveled widely and could present myself as a young man who was informed and thoughtful. Many things were possibilities, but at that time, neither I nor others would have judged an academic career to have been a likely prospect for me.

A problem of youth is to find and recognize appropriate feedback about themselves and their prospects. This involves a difficult problem of judgment that each must exercise. I think an important book from the time,The Lonely Crowd by David Reisman, is helpful with its contrast of inner direction and outer direction in understanding the problem, but insufficient insofar as those characteristics are perceived as outward characterizations. A real sense of direction depends on a subtle conjunction between the inner and the other becoming operative and evident for the person. This was difficult to attain, with my rule of inverse correlation. I would attend to classes regularly and use course reading lists as a spring board, not a prescription. I would participate actively in precept discussions, which I would use, not as an opportunity to display what I had learned from the reading, but as a challenge to think actively about the topic at hand. This worked well enough as a personal rule of thumb, but a young person has a strong sense of absurdity because they know their knacks and skills as idiosyncrasies and need some experiences that show how they fit into larger schemes of things.

Early in my senior year in a course on 20th-century American history, I experienced an initial confirmation that my style of study might have an arena of application beyond my personal need for academic survival. I was in a precept group led by an excellent historian, David Donald, then about 40, already well-known, with his first prominent success,Lincoln Reconsidered , having been published in 1956. Early in the semester, Donald led the group through discussion of a reading—Richard Hofstadter's first chapter on "The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities" in The Age of Reform.

See Eric F. Goldman,Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1952, 2001), David Herbert Donald,Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York: Vintage Books, 1956, 2001); and Richard Hofstadter,The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955).

Growing impatient with our tendency to repeat what Hofstadter said without our adding any intelligent commentary, Donald suddenly asked what a conservative historian would say about the agrarian myth and the rise of commerce. One of us replied that the only reading assigned was by Hofstadter, a liberal interpreter. How could he, Donald, expect us to respond? At that Donald, normally a quiet man with thick glasses and a timid look, launched into a vehement discourse, asserting passionately that historians must always use their intelligence and imagination. Given any view on the spectrum of thought, we should be able to infer the full range of possible positions as if we had read them all, ready to speak about them with conviction. With that, perhaps discomfited by his own impatience, or perhaps sensing that he had seized the teachable moment well, he scornfully dismissed us early. Several friends thought Donald had unreasonable expectations—I quietly basked in a glow of recognition, and with it a gathering flow of confidence, for I realized that what I had been practicing with my inverse correlation exemplified precisely what Donald had commended.

Hearing another, someone with some authority in the world, articulate a thought that you know you have thought for yourself, on your own, is an important step in self-recognition. It discloses that intrinsic self of which Nietzsche spoke, that constitution of your being "immeasurably high above you", towards which you can constantly aspire, living thereby a life of meaning. I was approaching self-recognition.

Besides reading a lot, I kept a journal, now almost completely lost. At first, I kept it haphazardly. In my junior year, it became more systematic. I liked to read in my dorm room, where I could sit for hours as others came and went, or in a corner of a cafeteria on campus near Firestone Library, now a map indicates with the fancy name, the Chancellor Green Café—gentrification strikes in the oddest places. Then I regularly had a small table off in a corner where I would read or write in my journal or work on a paper. Mid-morning friends would come up from the depths of Firestone and gather at a larger table for talk and coffee and I would join them until we all went back to our respective nooks (places not tablets). I had read a small set of books and interacted with them in my journal, developing my own ideas in dialogue with the authors—Frederick Lewis Allen, Albert Camus, James Conant, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, John Kenneth Galbraith, Oscar Handlin, Robert Heilbroner, Gilbert Highet, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, John Stuart Mill, Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Schiller, Albert Schweitzer, Alfred North Whitehead, and more. In many ways, the list lacked intellectual or academic pretension, for it did not include any really substantial or difficult works. But it did show a certain unselfconscious seriousness of purpose, and I was using it less as a source of ideas than as a stimulus to my own reflections.

By late in my junior year, these had begun to build up in my journal and they started to take on a certain form. They centered on two themes, one having to do with the direction that my aspiration might take and the other what I recognized the temporal situation of a person to be as he was thinking and acting in the world. My ideas were deeply private in the way that a young person, and a not so young person for that matter, holds big thoughts in a tentative, embarrassed grip, astonished that he should have them at all, afraid to expose them to view, sure they would be dismissed as puerile.

My first theme, the question of aspiration, took shape at a high level of generality, leaving it rather useless with respect to the question of a vocation. It was influenced, I'm sure, by the sense that the high-minded pretenses of free-world leadership were not evident in real-world practice. I liked critiques of public purpose and aspiration, much of it like The Waist-High Culture by Thomas Griffith, appropriately forgotten. Other examples, particularly,The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, had lasting importance for me and fed an ongoing quest. I felt myself drawn to find a worthy sense of aspiration, personal and collective. This quest went beyond a search for an end-in-view; rather it motivated me to begin characterizing what living a life purposefully consisted in and entailed. Through these reflections, I came up with a sort of motto, the type of statement that one hesitates to utter in public, for it easily sounds priggish. But I did not mean it for general consumption, and we can note in retrospect some interesting characteristics in it—In this world of abundance, we should seek perfection, for it is perfection we most sorely lack. Had this motto, quite hidden in the privacy of my journal, been seen by someone knowledgeable, he might have recognized in it a sign that perhaps I had some talent for serious thinking.

Looking back on it now what strikes me is not its stilted language, but rather the deeply Platonic character of the motto—the object of aspiration is not some positive quality that will cause greatness in we who attain it, but its negative quality, the sore lack, our deepest deficiency, and what indicates that deficiency is some intimated fulfillment, which I might just as well called, not perfection, but Plato's Idea of the Good. This motto was not something I lifted from some chance passage I had read, but something I worked out interacting with critiques like that by Galbraith or Karl Jasper's Future of Mankind . A couple years later, when pushed to really study Plato, his dialogues were to me wholly fresh, for I had not studied them before. The Platonism of this motto was my Platonism, not Plato;s. The closest I might then have come to a study of Plato was in a course on major political thinkers with William Ebenstein, an émigré from the Hitler era, but in that course we concentrated on modern political thinkers. I certainly was not going to show my motto to Ebenstein, nor to anyone else. And there was the rub. However much it served to orient me then, it did not trigger any sense of self-recognition about what I could or should do as a set of worldly commitments. I simply saw it as something I had worked out in my journal with no sense of context into which I might see it fit.

In addition to critiques of public purpose, I liked to read reflections on time and on history, for instance Post-Historic Man: An Inquiry by Roderick Seidenberg,The Origin and Goal of History and Man in the Modern Age by Karl Jaspers, and the rather difficult Time and Western Man by Wyndham Lewis. I even have a copy of Time's Arrow and Evolution by Harold F. Blum, which I read in, with little comprehension beyond its gist. In interaction with such works, over a period of time, I worked up a speculative essay in my journal about the lived experience of time, what I called the continual or eternal present, and about the way living persons acted in that continual present. It was very existential. I speculated that the only form in which time existed was present time and that present time has a directional flux that allows us as living beings, inhabiting present time, to postulate constructs of future and past. These constructs postulated imaginary present states: a future conjured up a present that did not yet exist and a past signified a present that had ceased to exist, orienting both according to the directional flux of present time. These constructs made feasible, within the ever-fleeting duration of a living present, a domain of lived intentionality, the locus of life and the lives of each of us. Recognizing the temporality of life in this way accentuated and more reasonably oriented the intentionality of experiential life, I thought.

My hold on this existential experience of temporality was tenuous, as it still is, and its consequences, if consequences is the proper term, or its implications, are far from fully worked out, or clear. All the same, I did, and still do, struggle towards those consequences in a way and I find that they allow me to see limitations in other ways of experiencing time, of seeing past, present, and future as denoting states that each partake in a similar, underlying reality. I think we need to make place in our lives and our culture for things like this question of temporality that are hard to grasp—from those difficult, obscure questions come religion, art, literature, science, even hope and expectation.

My tenuous recognition of a continual present has led to two forms of reinforcement significant for me. The first arises within my own sphere of awareness and activity: I still have my transcription of the pages I wrote 50 years ago and after drafting Educational Emergence this past fall, I happened to go back to those earlier speculations out of curiosity in preparation for this course, and there is a striking continuity of thought, albeit glimmers of a surer style and expression, along with, perhaps, a fuller and more confident comprehension now. For the story at hand, a more forward looking reinforcement had immense importance to me. My first inchoate effort to develop a concept of the continual present, and the existential state of inhabiting it, enabled me to experience Ortega, not merely as a book in my hands, but far more importantly, as that Nietzschean educator, my liberator, someone who cleared away doubts and helped me to find and grow into myself.

One of the great sources of positive reinforcement in the life of the mind is the recognition that another, saying what he has to say in his own way, which may be very different from your own way, is nevertheless addressing the same problem, with ideas and convictions that are the very ones that you yourself have achieved. Most of the time in active study, we work with negative feedback, entering a marginal dissent here and a call for clarification there. Sometimes, however, we need to recognize ourselves in the other, to see someone else trying to say what one is trying to say in a way that is not one's own but with the same sense and import. That happened to me with the last three chapters of What Is Philosophy? It was tremendously important for me, crucially empowering. Ideas that I was struggling to form were ideas that Ortega was struggling to form and I could see both sides of the equation coming together, meeting as peers, working together. This was important for me; I could see it for myself; I did not need a grade or any third party to validate it for me. It clarified my sense of purpose—I wanted to exercise my powers of thinking about the human capacity for self-formation through the flux of lived experience. And it gave me confidence—no longer someone who had almost flunked out, I could recognize myself as someone who had been thinking well enough to function as the peer of a thinker of substantial stature.

With this purpose and confidence, a lot snapped into place.

First, a senior thesis. At Princeton all seniors, no matter how mired in the middle, had to write a thesis. Emboldened, I threw myself into mine, which I had previously decided to do on a somewhat ho-hum, idiosyncratic topic—secondary education for American kids living in Europe, a topic I knew something about owing to my summer job at an American school in Switzerland. I did my homework and mobilized a lot of basic information about the high schools on military bases, posh boarding schools for elite children, and international day-schools in the major urban centers of diplomacy and business. I went far beyond that, drawing on all my reading and putting together a theory of education based on cultural experiences that were foreign, difficult, and challenging. Then I dissected the failure of all the different American schools in Europe to offer anything approximating such an education, even though extraordinary opportunities for it surrounded them. Then I turned my idea of secondary education for Americans in Europe into a means for criticizing the convention-bound mediocrity of American schooling as a whole. My advisers thought I conveyed a lot with real force in limited space and awarded my thesis a 1, a straight A, my first at Princeton, and the thesis counted a full third of our final GPA. Perhaps my prospective horizon was wider than I thought.

Next up GREs. My uncertainty about my future went away because I perceived my purpose. I would try to go to graduate school and pursue an academic career as an intellectual historian. In the course of working on my senior thesis, I had studied and seriously criticized the destructive effects of the Educational Testing Service on secondary education, for the whole college entrance process reifyed a lamed curriculum through an imperious standardization that served nothing but bureaucratic convenience. In the process, I studied and seriously criticized the pretensions associated with the college board tests and the GREs. In 1960, ETS was still claiming that students could not prepare for their tests, and they were even convincing most this claim was sound. It seemed bogus to me, and I believed there was an art to acing the test. It consisted partly of a state of mind and partly of a willingness to rely on a ready wit, more than on sure knowledge, but to do so in a controlled way, not using so much ready wit that you got tied up in subtleties, loosing too much time or responding with an obscure possibility. I went in, relaxed and confidant, and came out with a 790 on the quantitative and 760 on the qualitative, the former giving me special pleasure as a counterweight to my freshman failures. And for getting into graduate school, these scores rendered my freshman travails irrelevant.

On to comprehensives. There were four days of tests late in our senior year, four hours each day, all essay questions broadly covering each student's major. I do not remember much about specific questions or my responses to them, except that I had resolved to read each question, to mobilize in response what I had to say and those elements of my knowledge that would support my saying it, and to present my thoughts in a legibly written answer. When results were announced, I had again received a 1, another straight A, my second at Princeton, with comprehensives counting another full third of our final GPA. Two As and a course average that had tended upward to a B-/B gave me enough standing to receive my degree with high honors, and given my freshman rank of one above the flunk-out line, I had a lock on the Gale F. Johnson Prize for the student in our class who had improved the most.

Graduation was hot, and a bore—but father looked serene with the thought that his son was not going to grow old pumping gas, and mother sighed with the hope that perhaps he would wise up and join the diplomatic core. I quietly toasted Ortega, my educator—"You've got to smile, man.Shit happens!"

Friedrich Nietzsche

Plato: The Republic and other Dialogs

My first year working on an MA in history had ended poorly. A successful Masters essay was key to going on to the Ph.D. My draft received the comment, "utterly inappropriate as history," with the suggestion to try again, perhaps, after I had decided I was really interested in historical writing.

If I had merely slapped a draft together, trying to blow the requirement off, this result would not have upset me. But I had worked hard on the draft and believed I was saying something worthwhile. Other aspects of my first year at Columbia had also troubled me. Meeting milestones seemed much more imporant than discussing ideas. With no particular grounds for doing so, I had expected a more autonomous and engaged intellectual community than I encountered—New York City both invigorates and distracts the University in a way I had not anticipated. Aggravated but unrepentant at the rejection of my draft, I quickly resolved to pursue an alternative path to the higher learning. To set it in motion, I would enlist the support of Professor Cremin, who seemed in his colloquium receptive to my work.

In preparing my Masters draft, I had closely read Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger on academic freedom. Metzger's chapter on the "German Influence," especially its long section on Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit, had enthused me with the conviction that German universities must certainly be true centers of higher learning. In 1973, I would spend a year at one, a very enjoyable year, but one that disabused me definitively of the beliefs imbibed through my reading of Metzger. But in April 1962, I was bewitched and hence my hurried scheme of recovery: I should pick myself up and pursue a German doctorate. It was late, however, to make arrangements—get things moving, I thought. I rushed to explain to Cremin the debacle with my essay. I did not really accept that my draft was as bad as Professor X had made it out to be. I had tried to write, both as an academic and a critical intellectual, but that combination seemed to prove unacceptable. Instead of giving in, I would find a way to get my doctorate in Germany, where I thought academic arrangements would be more hospitable to a young person seeking to become both a competent scholar and an effective critic. Would he, Cremin, be willing to write a recommendation supporting my transfer abroad? "Come back next week after I've read the draft," he replied, "and we'll discuss it."

A week later, after the ritual wait in the anteroom, Mrs. Zolot again instructed me to go speak to the professor. On entering, Professor Cremin greeted me (it would be five years and a dissertation defense before he became Larry). He had read my manuscript. He could understand that Professor X in history, a Joe Friday historian—"just the facts, m'am"—would not like it at all. And Professor X had probably fought in World War II and would certainly have a different view about the rationale for armed conflict than I expressed. But my draft was promising as an effort in the history of educational thought. I should consider whether my scheme of going to study at a German university might rest on unfounded assumptions. With a smile, he asked whether it had occurred to me that the Berlin of 1962 was a bit different from the one enthusing me, that of Hegel and Schleiermacher.

Rather than transfer to Germany, he suggested a less drastic transfer into the History and Education program at Teachers College. I would be working on a Columbia PhD, as I had been in history; the whole university would be open to me; and I would have much more latitude to pursue my interests wherever they led. It would be a more prudent course. I would have to swallow a little pride and complete my MA by submitting a proper essay to the history department, but he was sure I could easily work that in during the next year or two. If I got my application in quickly, he would see that it was acted on, even though it would be a couple months past the deadline. My course work in history would transfer and I could start in the fall with my plans in tact. The hop across 120th street to the Teachers College program would fit my interests in the history of education much better, he assured me. He closed the conversation recommending that next year I be sure to take the courses offered by Martin Dworkin.

To Plato—Through a Modern Socrates

Dworkin entered, a moment after the bell, barrel-chested and solid, short-thick arms, as if once a weight-lifter, a wide face with slightly flattened features, a broad-high forehead, black hair, once thick, combed to the back with a tinge of gray, heavy eyebrows over mildly protruding eyes shielded by thick bifocals. Except for the glasses and the business suit, slightly disheveled, he could be Socrates reborn. He hefted a stuffed briefcase onto the desk, put some papers and books down in front of him, and settled himself into his chair. Fifteen or so students faced him, awaiting with curiosity.

So Aesthetics and education began—"An examination of the relation of art and education with attention to theories of the creative act, aesthetic experience, and criteria and methods of criticism." Dworkin introduced the reading list, encapsulating, one by one, the intellectual importance of the six books on it—The Republic by Plato, Politics VII & VIII by Aristotle, The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun, Education through Art by Herbert Read, Art by Clive Bell, and Art as Experience by John Dewey. We were entering into an argument, raging since the beginning of Western history, about the place of art in public life and the standards by which people should regulate their attention to it. He invited us into this discussion in which the readings, everything that had been thought and said pertaining to them, and whatever associations occurred to his assertive intellect, defined the scope of relevance and the standards of expectation for the course. Free to speak, we said little, and Dworkin carried the conversation through fifteen weeks, a mind raging over issues and ideas. Students either liked it and listened, or hated it and tuned out.

To me, then, and still now, with a few reservations added on, Dworkin was the life of the mind incarnate, engaging questions that were unanswered, existentially compelling, and unbounded. Over thirty years later, on his death in 1996, I tried to express what he had meant to myself and others, sparing no difficulties in recognizing his extraordinary worth.<a class="anno" href="E-96a-L-MSD-3.html" title="In Memory of Martin S. Dworkin"> [ GoTo ] </a> In 1962-63, Dworkin was something different, the grail in the presence of which academic Percivals, youths like myself, were to prove their worth. It was difficult, for it was so easy to turn away. One could not learn from Dworkin. That was his power. His discourse, highly assertive, leaped from one thing to another, and was not instructive; there was no intelligible teaching. It amounted instead to a powerful challenge, with diverse suggestions, a bewildering scatter-shot, about how one might address the challenge. Dworkin pushed you forward, toddling yet determined, Thus, he introduced me to Plato, not with a prepossessing interpretation of the texts, but by imparting a felt need to interpret them myself, a personal step in creating my own version of a living mind.

I did the work required for Dworkin's courses—after Aesthetics and Education a second, Education, Ideology, and Mass Communication followed in the spring. It was an interesting exploration of possible educational consequences arising through ideological thinking and mass communication. In it, Ortega's Revolt of the Masses had the position of lead reading, occupied by Plato in the course on Aesthetics and Education. It was the first time I had encountered Ortega within the formal curriculum (and perhaps the last), but in that role Ortega's book did not impress me greatly. Although I was already wondering how I might write on Ortega for a dissertation, it seemed to me that what might be said in classes constrained what should be said, about Ortega and most everything else. To me, Dworkin's importance as a teacher was far greater outside of class than in it.

Part of the problem arose because Dworkin's assertiveness, combined with the way he set his courses up, aggravated the tendency in many students to argue with their readings. Dworkin plunged us into Plato's critique of poetry and art. Good sophisticates, one of us would proclaim that Plato was wrong, and not only wrong, but bad—people shouldn't say such things about art! Others would nod agreement, and the other side of the judgment would fall to Dworkin, who would not so much defend Plato as put the accusation in a larger context. Consider this; think about that; recall how so-and-so dealt with such-and-such. Dworkin's strong net of intellectual associations entangled me and I listened to him enthralled in trying to internalize the web of ideas he cast out. I felt quietly allied to Dworkin, not my peers in class. Somehow on my crooked path through college, I had come to the realization that dead writers did not care a hoot whether I agreed or disagreed with them. I could still get mad in the margins, but less when a writer had the temerity to say something with which I disagreed than when he seemed to say something that was manifestly dumb, willful, or manipulative. Vehemently demonstrating whether one agreed or disagreed while reading seemed to me to be a waste of time.

Martin S. Dworkin, "Disagreement: The Situation of Reason," The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Aug., 1952), pp. 117-119.

Dworkin would on occasion refer to an essay he had written some years earlier, "Disagreement: The Situation of Reason." In it, he addressed the age old struggle between faith and reason, showing how men of faith recoil against the prodigal range of disagreements generated by a reason that has forsworn the boundaries of belief. Theology rejected the primacy of reason because reason generated a chaotic array of positions and counter positions. In reply, Dworkin celebrated the multiplicity of positions, the Heraclitean humanism, the inexhaustible human soul, so expansive that it can never be encompassed. For Dworkin, the expansiveness, the inexhaustibility of the soul, arose through the humane effort to present disagreements to "the ever-present gallery of those who must choose," a profoundly Platonic image with which he closed his essay. On what basis should the members of this gallery make their choices, that seemed to be an important question.

In his essay and in presenting Plato to his class, Dworkin called attention to the contrast with respect to disagreement between Books I & II of The Republic. In Book 1, Plato presented disagreement, especially between Socrates and Thrasymachus, as a test of wills. Socrates thwarted Thrasymachus, who dropped out of the dialog, in his heart still disagreeing but unable to impose his will on the plane of rational assent. Development of his position passed to Adeimantus and Glaucon, who advanced it, not in order to prevail in a contest of will, but to engender fuller understanding of it and the alternatives to it. I think this difference between resolving disagreement by the assertion of will or by reasoned discourse is essential in reading Plato and in thinking about education.

To this day, students too often confuse assertion with reflection, reacting in a Thrasymachean way. For Dworkin, disagreement was the situation of reason, its locus, not its substance. In terms of the Platonic psychology, disagreement expresses the emotive spirit, it arises from the Thymos as an immediate reaction, intuiting friend and foe. It is what the Guardians, at the lower rungs of their training, became adept at, rising spiritedly in defense of what the city held dear and ready to strike out against words that threatened it. Our system of higher education continues to nurture youthful members of the elite, modern-day Guardians, in this emotive simulacrum of reason. Students rise up, chest heaving, to cry out against Plato's apparent plan of education, not noticing that their reactions exemplify and exercise the very pedagogy that they decry. We construct courses to span too much coverage, trying to do too much in too little time, and within those confines, likes and dislikes, backed, not by thought, but by the willful assertion of some ready reasons, passes for thinking for oneself.

In education, the important question is not, Do I agree? The important one is, Do I understand? The phrase goes, tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, "to understand all is to forgive all," and many fear that doing so will lead to a wussy nihilism, Whatever. But the choosing by those in "the ever-present gallery of those who must choose" does not consist in merely opting for or against one side in a disagreement or the other. Rather each must choose how he will deal with the matter himself. To understand all, comprehending all sides of a disagreement allows us to see beyond it, to choose none of the given alternatives, but to work out our own reasons for choosing a position that becomes all one's own. Understanding others is the foundation for my reasoning out my own convictions. To understand all is to think anew. Tout comprendre, c'est penser neuf.

These reflections are pertinent, for in the course of "higher" education, students are quick to disagree, especially on reading Plato, on reading his Republic with its critique of art and his scheme of education. In Dworkin's course, I became a bit impatient, not with text, but with wrangling about who disagrees about this or that part of the text. Do I understand the text? It is important to try, even within in the confines of a course, but it is hard to accomplish because understanding requires careful, thorough reading, with comparison of this part with that part across a large text, dense with images and ideas. Hence, I did the work but do not recall it at all. I read the assigned reading, but I really read it outside the confines of the course in which it was assigned, spending the better part of the year immersed in work by and about Plato.

I remember listening intently to Dworkin as he would spout out suggestions and observations—"Of course you must have read so and so and will recall his point that. . . ." One or two of us would follow him out the building, soaking up his references, and then as we became more familiar, we would follow on a slow trek to the subway, and then occasionally onto the subway itself down to Penn Station, and then finally up the creaky five flights to his walk-up on 31st street, as we suspected, packed with books. Dworkin was a storehouse, not of knowledge, but of further inquiry.

Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, II: In Search of the Divine Centre (Gilbert Highet, trans., New York: Oxford University Press, 1943) and A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (6th ed., London: Methuen & Co., 1949). I am inclined to try to understand Plato as an educational theorist, more than a political theorist, and find the dramatic, interpersonal setting of his dialogs more significant than speculations about their political setting, such as the fact that exchanges in The Republic took place in the Piraeus, the commercial, democratic locus in Athenian life, noted by Leo Strauss in The City and Man (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), a commentary that was not yet published at the time of my first study of Plato. And W. K. C. Guthrie's volume dealing with Plato's early and middle dislogues would not appear until 1975.

Hence, during the whole year, I studied Plato with care, and the pre-Socratics as a propaedeutic. I think in reaction to Dworkin, I was disposed to come at my reading of Plato with certain questions in mind, which I found helpful in seeking to understand the dialogs, particularly The Republic. I attended to how Plato set a dialog, populating it with a group of characters, locating it at a time and place, and indicating how the report of that came to him as author, and through him to the reader. The commentaries in the second volume of Werner Jaeger's Paideia: the Ideal of Greek Culture and in A. E. Taylor's Plato: The Man and His Work were particularly helpful in anchoring my reading. In trying to understand The Republic, I asked first, as a way of deciding what I understood the dialog to be about, Whose problem was the problem Plato wrote about?

Socrates, of course, was executed under the restored democracy for corrupting the youth and he was reputed to have taken a position of principled resistance to orders under the 30 Tyrants. Glaucon and Adeimantus, and Plato as well, were closely connected to the Tyranny through their uncle, Critias, leader of the 30. they were known to have been brave in the military, but were rather conspicuous by their absence in the Tyranny given their dispositions to enter political life and their significant point of entry for then doing so. Cephalus was a wealthy arms manufacturer, a Metic who, along with his sons, as a non-citizen nevertheless gave prominent service to Athens, especially its democratic currents. Of his sons, little is known of Euthydemus; Polemarchus was put to death by the 30 Tyrants; and Lysias barefly escaped that fate and went on to be a prominent speech writer. Niceratus, the son of a prominent but unsuccessful Athenian general, was also put to death by the 30 Tyrants, an condemnation that Xenophon found particularly venal. Thrasymachus was a sophist from Chalcedon and Cleitophon, who weakly assisted Thrasymachus in the exchange with Socrates, was an Athenian citizen, probably noted leaning from a middle-of-the-road position as expedience suggested. Charmantides, an Athenian citizen about whom little is known, was present, but inactive in the dialog.

In one sense, asking whose problem was the problem Plato wrote about amounts to asking who he conceived his audience to be, the readership he wanted for The Republic. But in another sense, perhaps a more important one, it is a way of asking what, at its core, was The Republic itself about. Plato indicated the internal audience to the dialog clearly, but the characters were a bit peculiar if he meant them to be emblematic of a significant position in Athenian or Greek political thought. Plato set The Republic probably a little before 420 BC, early in the Peloponnesian War, and probably wrote it circa 380 BC, looking back on the Athenian collapse and political turmoil of the 30 Tyrants and the democratic restoration. The characters seem to span a broad range of the ideological spectrum, as well as statuses via-à-vis consistuted power, including wealthy Metics, foreign sophists, and Athenian citizens who leaned towards both the democratic and oligarchic persuasions. Several were executed, seemingly less for overt acts and more for their convictions. It would not seem far-fetched to see them, Thrasymachus excepted, as a group that in Plato's time might have been recognized as men of principle who acted, sometimes at considerable cost, upon their convictions, some leaning to the democratic persuasion others to the oligarchic.

In the earlier critique of poetry and music, Plato warned about its potential to subvert the city of words by miseducating the Guardians, but in Book X the tension between philosophy and poetry is a contest for the soul of the person with at most incidental reference to the city of words.

At any rate, I engaged The Republic with the assumption that it addressed the person concerned to act on principle in the vicissitudes of life. I cannot say that I came to this sense of the problematic of the work through the interpretation of its dramatic audience, but it seems to me consistent with that interpretation. It also seemed to me to be prima facie the problematic that Plato developed in Books I and II, which concerns what principle for acting justly should control a person's conduct of life. There is no mention of a just city or state until the middle of Book II when Socrates introduces it as an expedient facilitating the search for peronal justice (368d-369b). In Books VIII, IX, and X, the relation between personal character and political character remains deeply intertwined, but as the work moves towards its close, the concern for the sort of life a person will lead returns more and more exclusively to the center of attention. The great concluding myth has no hint of a foundation myth for a just city, but tells instead how each person becomes responsible for choosing to live his or her life, and to suffer or enjoy the consequences.

Virtue owns no master: as a man honours or dishonours her, so shall he have more of her or less. The blame is his who chooses; Heaven is blameless. (617e, Cornford, trans.)

These significant clues notwithstanding, Plato's central five books have appeared to many smart interpreters to call for the implementation of an authoritarian, neo-Spartan educational and political environment that few would take to be a desirable collectivity within which to live. Consequently, Plato's theory of truth, his Allegory of the Cave, his idea of the philosopher-king, beautifully presented and deeply meaningful to many, have seemed embedded in a highly objectionable context.

A great deal of Plato's creative influence in the history of political thought has taken hold as subsequent thinkers tried to spell out a theory of the state that would be more palatable in practice. Generating alternative theories of the just state, the just society, just institutions has been, I think, the dominant historical response to The Republic, a response that has been highly creative over that past fifty years with the work of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. I want to make a case, however, for taking Plato's theory of justice as a starting point, not as a critique of all those subsequent alternatives, or as a denigration of their value. Unless readers deal directly with the off-putting parts of a work like The Republic, ideas of value may be left incompletely developed.

Some how, early on—I do not remember any ah-ha-moment—I internalized an interpretative principle, which has value in extracting formative influence from the work of others. It is a useful heuristic in asking whether one understands a work. It is also a corollary of the idea that other writers really do not care whether one agrees or disagrees with what they have said—they would much prefer that they prove to have been understood.

To understand someone, who may seem different, difficult, strange, even confused or dangerous, a reader needs to impute to a writer, until something seems unquestionably to prove otherwise, both good will and coherence. A writer can at most make it possible for others to understand what he has to say; he cannot guarantee that others will agree or disagree. But the writer's ability even to make himself understood is limited, especially when his readers stand many generations removed from him, and when they read him through the redaction of time and in languages that did not exist when he wrote. Hence, much of the burden of making a text intelligible falls on the reader, not the writer. Should the reader impute malevolence to the writer, or find the text impossibly corrupt or incoherent, the game is up—the writer, dead and finished, can do nothing and the verdict of unintelligibility will be final, at least until some other reader tries in a more generous, patient frame of mind. This is the "sweetness and light" that Matthew Arnold commended, a generosity of mind on the reader's part, an important principle of interpretation.

Perhaps the parts of The Republic that seem to offend a right thinking sensibility are not so much objectionable, but difficult to understand. Assumptions get in the way. We assume that Plato wrote The Republic about political life. We assume that someone writing about politics intends a description of justice in a city to be a plan for prospective implementation. And then, looking at its apparent particulars, we recoil. But Plato included ample suggestion, I think, that Socrates and his auditors founded the city in speech expressly for the purpose of illustrating ideas about the problems persons faced in trying to act on principle in the course of their lives, in particular in trying to be just in their conduct of life. Repeatedly, Plato suggested that implementation of his scheme was not his goal.

And so our dream has come true—I mean the inkling we had that, by some happy chance, we had lighted upon a rudimentary form of justice from the very moment when we set about founding our commonwealth. Our principle that the born shoemaker or carpenter had better stick to his trade turns out to have been an adumbration of justice; and that is why it has helped us. But in reality justice, though evidently analogous to this principle, is not a matter of external behaviour, but of the inward self and of attending to all that is, in the fullest sense, a man's proper concern. The just man does not allow the several elements in his soul to usurp one another's functions; he is indeed one who sets his house in order, by self-mastery and discipline coming to be at peace with himself, and bringing into tune those three parts [appetite, emotion, reason], like the terms in the proportion of a musical scale, the highest and lowest notes and the mean between them, with all the intermediate intervals. Only when he has linked these parts together in well-tempered harmony and has made himself one man instead of many, will he be ready to go about whatever he may have to do, whether it be making money and satisfying bodily wants, or business transactions, or the affairs of state. In all these fields when he speaks of just and honourable conduct, he will mean the behaviour that helps to produce and to preserve this habit of mind; and by wisdom he will mean the knowledge which presides over such conduct. Any action which tends to break down this habit will be for him unjust; and the notions governing it he will call ignorance and folly.(443d-e, Cornford, trans. Cf. 592b, 471a-473b.)

Whose problem was the problem Plato wrote about? He did not write about the problem of the person who sought to receive justice in a well-ordered state, or the problem of the person who wanted to constitute a city in which people received justice. Plato wrote about the problem a person had in seeking to conduct her life justly in whatever state she found herself.

Teaching Plato in Troubled Times

Sometime early March, 1965, I was working at my desk in our apartment on 118th street. I answered the phone, a bit surprised that someone should be calling in the middle of the day. A robust voice asked whether I was Robbie McClintock, and on my saying yes, the voice continued to explain that it belonged to John Walton, chair of the department of education at the Johns Hopkins University. It was a small department in a good university, the voice went on, saying that he had heard that I might be interested in a job, which at Hopkins would be as an assistant professor, tenurable. Would I come down for some interviewing? I stammered back that yes, I had been teaching at a local college to make a little money, but that it had not occurred to me that I was ready for a real job. I was just this spring finishing my course work, and I had plans for my dissertation but had not really even started it. I would be going to Madrid to do research this summer and it would be at least a year and a half, probably two, before I could finish the degree. That's OK the voice said. Isn't next week your spring holiday—come down Tuesday morning and stay through Wednesday. We'd like to hear what you you're doing with your dissertation You'll have a chance to talk with a few of us on the faculty and in the administration. Book the train and call me—here's my number. You can stay at the faculty house. Good to talk with you. . . .

---

Dante—The Divine Comedy

Flâneurs of the fields

In mid-June, 1958, I boarded a chartered TWA Constellation, along with a plane-full of kids, most of them four or five years younger than my 18, bound for Zurich, Switzerland. This was the start of a wonderful summer job that I would have through 1961—a counselor, eventually program director, at the summer program of the American School in Switzerland. The school had started a year or two before, located in Locarno, overlooking the upper part of Lago Maggiore. Given the recent popularity of the film, Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, the program was naturally called Swiss Holiday, and the name fit.

My interview for the job, such as it was since 90% of getting the job consisted of an inside track, centered on two questions —— Was I comfortable driving a stick shift? And, Did I know anything about summertime sports? —— My answer to the first was that I loved to drive and the only cars worth driving had stick shifts. To the second, I confessed that I couldn't play tennis and hated golf, but I swam well and loved to water ski. Those answers seemed to suffice. I got the job, and 12 or so hours after getting on the June flight, we landed in Zurich, having stopped to refuel in Iceland. A couple school officials met us and whisked our herd of 50-plus kids, each trundling a duffel, through customs to a nearby parking lot.

Seven little light blue Volkswagen buses, racks on top, were lined up there. I was to find my nine charges, who would sit in three rows of three in the back; get their gear packed and tied down on top; and then follow the lead bus, driven by a school official, a Swiss who knew the way. A quick briefing informed me that we would be going over the Gotthard Pass, a legendary route across the Alps connecting the Ticino, the main Italian-speaking Canton with the northern, German-speaking part of Switzerland. The drive to Locarno would take four to five hours on a narrow road, (vastly improved in the 1980s), and we would all stop to stretch and regroup at the top of the pass at a rest area with a nice little lake. —— If you get separated, don't worry. Just follow signs to the Gotthard—beyond Zug, it's uphill, steeply so, with lots of hairpin turns, and there will be even more of those going down. Downshift a lot and keep the engine RPMs up. —— And off we went, and after a while little voices from the back began asking whether I'd ever driven on roads like this before. I answered —— Sure. Do you think they would put me behind the wheel on a road like this without experience! —— trusting that experience was rapidly accruing and I was a quick learner, which it fortunately turned out that I was.

"Swiss Holiday" was structured in four two-week segments, with some added time at the beginning and the end. The two-week segments were divided between six days at the school with recreational activities and a gesture at more earnest classes, followed by eight days on the road in our trusty minibus, camping out, exploring our way around Switzerland, northern Italy down to Rome, southern France, and Austria. I go into all this because these experiences, both the six-day respites at the school, and our exploratory forays into Europe, had some lasting influence on later work and interests.

For one, the seeds of my theory of education, privileging study over instruction, were planted during the recreational periods at the school. Soon after we arrived in Locarno I understood the reason for the second of my interview questions and the good fortune in my answer. Since I had volunteered competence at water skiing, I discovered that I was designated a program water ski instructor when I wasn't out on a trip. And water skiing was the really popular "Swiss Holiday" sport. The next morning I went down to inspect. The boat was a little under-powered, but I figured that that mattered only with over-weight novices. The setting was spectacular—the upper end of a long finger lake, an area about 2 miles by 2 miles, framed by the southern edge of the Alps, which channeled the winds away from the water, leaving the lake surface almost always glassy. We were astonished to see the lake edged with palm trees. Could this be Switzerland? Now, with wealthy masses teaming, all sorts of boats crowd Lago Maggiore; but then ours was one of just a handful there. We would slalom to exhaustion in the sunset, a single undulating plume tracing its way back and forth across the lake.

Of course, I had never taught water skiing before, and of my own learning, I vaguely remembered that years before I had just sort of taken to it, getting up on my first try, barely managing to control skis that were a bit too large for my nine-year-old scale. But no matter. I was now working with another guy my age and we would trade off, one driving the boat and the other treading water, trying to coach each kid as the boat pulled them up. The natural athletes got the knack quickly. A few—over-weight, sedentary, endowed with a weak grip—we tried to interest in other activities. Others we patiently coached —— try to keep the skis in front of you, slanting upwards with the rope between them; —— just now, as you rose up out of the water, you were pulled forward in a belly-flop, so keep the skis in front and try to push more of the force on your arms down through your pelvis to your feet; —— you're getting it, but this time you pulled up too quickly and then sagged backward, so let the boat raise you up and try to keep your arms bent a little, crouching some so you can respond to the play of forces. Sound advice, but by itself, not enough. We would have to encourage these kids to keep trying, and with patience, theirs and ours, generally, sooner or later, something would click —— You did it! —— and the kid would have the hang of it thereafter. It was clear to us that the kids were not really applying our advice, but rather working it out for themselves, sometimes using something we said as a helpful hint in trying to control their own bodies through a turbulent transition.

My partner and I puzzled whether there was some way to get better at our appointed function. We experimented, trying to teach kids to ski by sitting on the edge of a dock, skis on the water, pushing them off as the rope tightened—it helped in some ways, especially with heavier kids because our under-powered boat labored too much pulling them up out of the water. Off the dock was great for advanced skiers: we would just stand at the edge, one foot in a slalom ski, and jump just as the slack rope tightened and whoosh, we were off. But it caused problems with kids prone to belly-flopping or sagging backward—the transition was too fast and they would fall too quickly, before their kinaesthetic sense could get the feel of what they were doing. Basically, we concluded, water skiing was unteachable, but most people could learn it by using their experience and insights from observation and the suggestions of others to inform their sense of how to synthesize and control a complex play of forces. Throughout my career in education, this experience working with people learning to water ski has been my primary paradigm for thinking about how a person learns and acquires a working understanding of any matter in which she will exercise active control.<a class="anno" href="E-71c-E-TPS-1.html" title="Towards a Place for Study in a World of Instruction"> [ GoTo ] </a>

A second important set of insights came on the road. In the days between travel, we would do a little preparation, but our trips were anything but packaged tours. We had a very rudimentary itinerary—for instance, over the Simplon to Visp and camp up the valley towards Mont Blanc; then more or less follow the Arve river to Geneva and spend two nights in that area; then up to Lausanne for a night; on to Bern; back to Interlaken; up to Basle; across to Zurich; back by way of Luzern and then the Gotthard again. Two 18-20 year-olds would be in charge of nine 13-14 year-olds. We had a modest budget for food, gas, entrance fees, and the like, with instructions to plan as we went, to see as much as we could, and to return safely eight days after we left. Our minibus had a top speed of 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph), occasionally one could crank it up to 90 kph, so big highways would do it little good, and not many of those were in existence in Europe then outside of Germany. We traveled secondary roads, navigated with detailed maps, and had to keep a bunch of rambunctious kids engaged and interested. Except in large cities, we stayed away from organized campsites—life was simpler in a farmer's field and most were surprisingly accommodating.

Neither of us in charge had previously visited places on our routes, or near them; and whether the language was Italian, French, or German, our command of it was marginal at best. The kids were adventurous, after an initial break-in period in which they learned that they could survive, and even have fun, without plumbing, a proper kitchen, mattresses, or any shelter, unless it looked like rain, in which case our army-surplus tents often seemed to do more harm than good. Tangible sites to visit were much preferred to museums—often natural sites, like an unexpected lake to swim in, or a mountain field to run around on, or a breath-taking view high on a pass; and some human sites, a rampart to clamber along, the aqueduct at Nîmes, an unusual old bridge, with luck and a good story hook, a church or palace. Even when a bit bored, kids can ask challenging questions. —— What's this? Why do they do that? How old is this building? Why did they build it? —— And every bit of information can become itself a question —— What makes it Gothic? How do they know it is Roman? Why did they destroy those images? —— Collective questions turned back on the kids could produce interesting discussions —— Hey guys, what do you think "Blutwurst" is? Should we get some for dinner?

Maps, good detailed ones with hints about places coded into them, were essential. Among our meager supplies, perishables were kept in an icebox that every two or three days needed a new chunk of ice. We had been told that about the only place to get blocks of ice would be in the local brewery and most towns of modest size had one. It was not productive, however, let alone prudent, to pull up in the town center next to the local gendarme standing there, to lean out the window, a scruffy 19 year-old driving a minibus packed with squirming youngsters, to ask —— Hey, where's the brewery? —— Even if the question got an answer, it would be ill-understood, directing us to someplace far from the town center. With a bunch of kids in tow, it is best never to be lost—hence the rule: don't ask until the destination is almost in sight. We quickly learned that breweries were usually near freight yards and these could be located by looking for train tracks on a map and paying attention to the topography of a town. So before long, as the typical answer to our query, preferably addressed to a local laborer, we usually got something like—"Turn left over there and go 200 meters or so. You'll see it."

You'll see it! That was the key. Fifty years later we have perhaps created an overly captioned world. Go into a big museum these days and count the ways people are being told what to see—headphones, information sheets, iPads and smartphones, human guides giving a standard patter. Are we loosing the capacity to learn through experience? For us in our little bus, there wasn't time to study guidebooks, negotiate about potential destinations, and then find our ways to chosen spots. It was far better to catch something on a map that might be interesting and then discover it on our way —— Gee, look at that. Let's go explore it! —— I developed a rule of thumb for using a good map—scan it for symbols suggesting a ruin, a castle, an interesting panorama and then see which of the possibilities had the tiniest road leading to it. Once in southern France this reasoning led us down a small road which seemed to lead into a large area that the map suggested had nothing in it, no roads, no towns, no streams or lakes, no distinguishing features—it must be some kind of wild park, agreat place to explore! We went up a long hill and at the top there stretched out before us the largest nuclear reactor installation you could imagine, huge cooling towers, surrounded by phalanxes of fencing and heavily armed towers every 100 meters or so. An unusual, instantaneous unanimity erupted —— Let's go back and try something else!.

In northern Italy, my rule of thumb proved more successful. We were having trouble finding a suitable farmer's field on which to sleep. We had stopped for some quick supper by the side of the road and drove on, trusting we'd find some place that would be comfortable for us in our scattered fashion. It seemed like vineyards were everywhere with no place to spread out. It got dark and the kids began to kvetch, louder and louder. I pulled to the side of the road and studied the map with a flashlight and saw a marking for a ruin not too far away with a little road with lots of hairpins turns going to it. Off we went through the vineyards on a dirt road just wide enough for the minibus, weaving around for five kilometers or so, the last one or two of them up a really steep hill. Suddenly, the road ended at a wall, a high wall, a very old wall, one with battlements along its top with a rising full moon shining through. Our headlights shone on a door on the other side of a small, dried-up moat, a plank bridge leading to it. The door was slightly ajar. We looked in and there was a grassy space, perhaps 10 meters by 15, a perfect place to camp. We piled out, quickly settled down, tired kids tried telling ghost stories while watching the moon on the ramparts, but soon everyone was asleep.

Next morning a surprised but good natured caretaker awoke us.

<p —— How did we get here?

—— Well, up the little road as you can see.

Then in our turn: —— But where are we?

—— Ah! You do not know! Esta Soave! El Castello di Soave! You have found a most beautiful place. Come! I will show you.

So before breakfast we were ushered all over the Castle of Soave, a small, then rather dilapidated, yet extraordinary castle on top of a high hill overlooking the town of Soave. The castle had stood since the 1300s, ramparts and vineyards sloping down to the outer fortifications at the foot of the hill. It had an outer courtyard where we had slept, a small inner courtyard all encircled by an intact walls and battlements, and our animated guide eagerly showed us all the secrets of the place. One could still easily see the power structure of the whole area, intact over centuries, with its economy there ripening before our eyes. Legend had it that none other than Dante Alighieri had named the place Soave, smooth, on tasting its wine. Twenty-five years later in an American restaurant a friend ordered a good Italian white. I glanced at the label and there unmistakeably was pictured the castle atop the hill, vineyards and ramparts sloping down towards the town below—memories of that night in the Castello di Soave rushing back to mind.

<img src="../Images/global/Castello_di_Soave.jpg" width="500" height="*" alt="Castle of Soave">

From such adventures, my theory of communication and education took root. Experience of the material world should best precede knowledge about it. —— Here is a church portal. I wonder what it all means. When was it built? Who did it? Why would they bother? Did it get destroyed all at once? When? —— As we wound our ways, our little worlds of material knowledge developed a sequence—days and places. We had some sources of information. Guide books were not yet a big publishing genre and generally, as I recall, for whatever country we would have a Baedeker, which still then leaned heavily towards the pedantic, especially relative to the sensibilities of Americans just entering their teens. We would pick up some brochures as we went along, although they were not then plentiful. We used such sources to back fill—checking, correcting, and improving responses we had come up with ad hoc by looking intelligently at things we saw. Opportunities built up to develop comparisons within the sphere of things we had seen —— How does this church differ from the one we stopped at the first day out? —— Our information was often shaky, but our experience was both growing and real. It was good education.

Things, I learned—material objects and actions—communicate a lot about themselves, and through themselves about life and the world, to anyone who will take the trouble to read them. These experiences tearing around Europe with my minibus full of kids provided me the foundation upon which I developed my interest in the history of communication, and much in the history of educational and cultural thought. So much in our literature records, albeit on a grander scale, exactly what we had been doing—recording a person's movement at a time and in a place, noting what he saw and did, so the reader can ponder the significance—Homer's Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Cervantes' Don Quijote, up to Twain's Huck Finn going down the Mississippi and Joyce's Ulysses with Bloom's day in Dublin, and beyond. Life is a meaningful movement in the space and time of the material world—an "I" linked to a "my circumstances". Formal education is too sedentary—instead of schools, let's invent pedabuggies.

As that interest took more formal, academic shape, I became a proponent of medium theory --x>

On the Place of Great Books
in a Graduate School of Education,
or Towards Historical Pedagogy

A young academic faces two problems in deciding what to teach, which may be the inward and the outward looking faces of one problem. Problem one, the inward looking, has to do with deciding how to manage the effects of what and how you teach on your long-term intellectual development. There is much truth to the insight of Marx that the realities of how a person works have a powerful influence on what that person can and does become. If what we work on and how we work on it suits our potentials, interests, and convictions, we can flourish far better than if what we work on and how we do it requires continual action at cross purposes with our fullest possibilities.

Problem two, the outward looking, has to do with the public agenda served by the instructional purposes to which one dedicates ones efforts. This public agenda can flourish or fail through no fault of ones own. As Ortega said, "I am I, and my circumstances." Those circumstances we do not control. At most, within limits, we can redefine the "I", thereby changing which circumstances pertain to it. In multiple ways and to varying degrees, circumstances may favor or obstruct the public agenda of which my work is a part.

Each problem really constitutes a complicated spectrum for us and we might think of these spectra as two axes at right angles, one the inward value of work and the other the outward value of work, making a matrix of potential professional fulfillment. At any time, a person's sphere of activity will describe an area on that matrix, and over time the matrix will stretch out along a third dimension and the personal sphere of activity will project out a tube-like career that moves through the space of professional fulfillment in significant ways, perhaps gaining both public and personal value, or loosing both, or gaining one while loosing the other, winding down that crooked path of life.In the late 1950s, the Ford Foundation supported an effort to deepen understanding of the role of education in the forming of American society. It was . . .

Machiavelli

Rousseau—Emile and other works

Publish (and/or) Perish

Like many doctoral students, I left tangential matters until late in the process, realizing in 1964-65 that I had to take two courses "out of department" according to the regulation then in force. In the fall, I met the letter of the rule, if not its spirit, by taking a course in the Social Studies program on the History of Europe since 1871: selected topics. The topics—socialism, imperialism, Darwinism, racism, World War I, totalitarianism, World War II, the new Europe, social and intellectual change—were useful background for my dissertation and the lectures and readings excellent.

Furthermore, I thought I had the perfect topic for a term-paper. The prior spring, in working on Ortega y Gasset for the Barzun-Trilling Seminar, I had become interested in the ideas of Jakob von Uexküll<a class="anno" href="http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_von_Uexküll" title="English Wikipedia article on Jakob von Uexküll"> [ WEN ] </a>, a German biologist whose work had been influential among humanistic thinkers in the early 20th century. Uexküll did detailed studies of the input-output capacities of different organisms as each conducted its vital activities within its life-world. I had also been dabbling in books on cybernetic theory and realized that in developing his ideas Uexküll had anticipated much cybernetic theory by half a century. Wanting to make sure that Uexküll was not some sort of flake or rabid Nazi, I asked Barzun if he knew anything about his work and Barzun said he thought Uexküll was worth investigating a bit further and suggested that I talk with Erwin Chargaff, a distinguished biochemist based at the Columbia medical school. I spoke with Chargaff, an emigre from the Hitler era, who thought Uexküll to be important. He encouraged me to develop my work on Uexküll further.<a class="anno" href="http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Chargaff" title="English Wikipedia article on Erwin Chargaff"> [ WEN ] </a> A paper for the European history course seem to be a perfect occasion for doing so.

For perhaps the only time in my career, I submitted my paper on Uexküll and cybernetics a couple weeks early and to my amazement the next week, the professor returned the paper saying it seemed very interesting but he could not accept it as he did not know how to evaluate it. I was so surprised that I did not really object, agreeing instead, with a much relaxed deadline, to do a paper on Nietzsche, about whom we both knew something. I did not complain because I was planning to take a course on the psychology of language in the spring and figured I could use the Uexküll paper there, and I was not adverse to writing something on Nietzsche, who I had often read with interest. Of course, to my considerable consternation, that spring the psychology professor also received and returned my Uexküll paper, basically saying the same thing—he did not know how to evaluate it. I ask that he switch me to a 2-point option so that I would not need to do another paper and went home in a stew, clutching my scorned essay.

At that time, graduate studenst felt less pressure to publish early than they do now. I did not really think myself ready to submit work for publication, and had only done a short book review, which a professor had asked me to write—an offer I couldn't refuse. It would now be described as very snarky. The semester ended and I was off to Madrid to search for materials by Ortega in the Hemeroteca Municipal that had not been published in his Obras completas, of which there were many. In the fall, I returned to my new job at Johns Hopkins, and after getting acclimated a bit, someone raised the topic of publications. I though of my orphaned Uexküll essay.

At the time, I subscribed to The American Scholar, a prestigious quarterly published by Phi Beta Kappa, Encounter, an Anglo-American intellectual monthly, soon to become controversial as the recipient of covert CIA funding, and the New York Review of Books, which had a couple years earlier started its long run as the scorekeeper of intellect. Of the three journals whose editorial addresses were handy, The American Scholar seemed the most vaguely plausible and I sent the Uexküll essay off with a terse little letter—"I wonder if this essay would be of interest to The American Scholar? Thank you for your attention to it...."

Soon I received a postcard acknowledging receipt of the submission and then three weeks later a letter from the editor—"You and the American Scholar are involved in an unusual coincidence ... our Spring issue is to be devoted exclusively to the technical revolution and its impact on the general situation.... Your thoughtful essay certainly belongs in that issue and I am most happy to accept it for publication. A check should follow shortly."

My luck was extraordinary. My very first article of substance has been the most prestigiously situated of my publications to date, a special issue on The Electronic Revolution, with numerous luminaries contributing—among them, Gerald W. Johnson, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Lynn White, Jr., Jacob Bronowski, Herbert Simon, Richard Hoggart, Loren Eiseley, and me. This essay, which I couldn't peddle as a course term-paper, launched me over the next seven or eight years on an active spate of publication, all of which easily wrapped up my initial concerns about professional advancement through tenure. I have always wanted to write, however, not to secure promotion, but to communicate ideas I think are worth engaging. For this purpose, what started out to seem easy became increasingly difficult.

Outwardly, after a pause to gain some steam, I seemed to churn out work of some note....

Notes: In due course, I will narrate my experience publishing and not publishing my academic work. Initially I had a good deal of success along a trajectory by the early 1970s that could lead to some influence as a public intellectual. Writing and publishing, however, is a subtle business. A lot happened personally during the 1970s, which undoubtedly destabilized my work some, but what precipitated an extended hiatus from writing I am not entirely sure. From the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, I published only one article, and then when things picked up again in 1986, I was writing about the cultural and educational uses of digital technologies. And even then, with technology, I was publishing less in an effort at self-expression, and more with quite instrumental goals in mind, establishing myself in an emerging field and marshaling resources for activities within it.

Even in the late 1960s, with all sorts of momentum carrying me along, I was beginning to entertain tiny doubts that publication was effective for the purposes I cared about. Among the many things that deeply impressed me in working on Ortega was his essay on "The Mission of the Library," published in 1935. In addition to censorship, Ortega suggested that the profusion of books was becoming a significant danger to their intellectual effectiveness, an argument that I believed, and now believe even more strongly, was very cogent. Since Ortega wrote, the incentives for unnecessary publication have become egregiously strong, confronting readers with a vast surfeit of redundant trivia. With so much published, attention dissipates and the influence of ideas goes slack. Far too much gets published and virtually nothing gets read with effective critical attention. Even those who blunder into super-star reputations have no real readership or corpus of work—they get sucked into publishing too much. Their readers, many of whom are simply searching for some little point about which to publish a critique, read too rapidly with distorted purpose in a quest of promotion and tenure.

In addition to wondering whether there was value in publication, I began to question whether people in academia really wanted to have effects beyond their immediate institutional context. What to avoid seemed to me to have become more important that what to achieve and a big thing to avoid seemed to be any appearance of a significantly critical reception. I suspect this aversion to criticism affects both academics and academic institutions, particularly when the academic or academic institutions has a reputation to protect. Keeping the reputation bvecomes more important than using it. This defensiveness seems to me to have turned places like Teachers College very inward with respect to exerting leadership in the public discussion of education.

... Early in the 70s, I read The Silver-Plated Age by Tom B. Jones, reviewed recently on Amazon as follows—"As the title indicates, second-century Rome was not a sterling place. It was burdened with poseurs, pompous educators, bureaucrats, and others who 'stultified the intellect.' That world is described in this delightful little book (which a lifelong classicist recently described as his "all-time model work of scholarship"). The author is a serious scholar who is blessed with a sense of humor, an understanding of the universality of human foibles, and an ability to write simply and flowingly...." It, and ever so much else, left me wondering.... ["What's it all about? You know what I mean." Alfie] -- What's it all about?

Despite becoming disillusioned about publishing things, I continued to write quite a bit, although much of it was often in an almost finished state.... "The Dynamics of Decline: Why Education Can No Longer Be Liberal" was a symptomatic exception to the no publishing syndrome.<a class="anno" href="E-79a-E-DoD-1.html" title="The Dynamics of Decline: Why Education Can No Longer Be Liberal"> [ GoTo ] </a>

What does Rousseau and my essays on him have to do with these problems in maintaining my will to publish? A difficult question to answer. The key to an answer is that in working on Rousseau I became aware that however problematic intelligent scholarly criticism had become in general, it was especially problematic in the field of education. In the early 1970s, I became acutely aware how superior the scholarship about Rousseau written by academics in political theory was compared to contributions by scholars concerned with education, even though education was a more important theme than politics for Rousseau and it was the field to which his contributions were most important. That situation galled me and I wanted to do something about it, and still do, but an effort to change the situation struck me, on thinking seriously about how to go about it, to be intellectually quixotic. I published one good essay on Rousseau,<a class="anno" href="E-74c-E-RDA-4.html" title="Rousseau and the Dilemma of Authority"> [ GoTo ] </a> and drafted most of a larger work, which has had two incarnations,<a class="anno" href="E-80a-E-RAE-3.html" title="Rousseau and American Educational Scholarship"> [ GoTo1 ] &</a><a class="anno" href="E-08a-E-ODE-134.html" title="On (Not) Defining Education: Reflections on Historical Life and What Educates Therein"> [ GoTo2 ] </a> and will eventually become a major book on Neuhumanismus.<a class="anno" href="B-20-New-Human.html" title="Neuhumanismus: What can and should a person make of herself?"> [ GoTo ] </a>

A way out? Technology and somewhat changed expectations.... See Mark Salzman, "An Atheist in Free Fall" (New York Public Library, February 18, 2011.<a class="anno" href="http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/mark-salzman-atheist-free-fall" title=""> [ GoTo ] </a>

Goethe

Kant

Hegel

Marx

Weber

Horkheimer & Adorno

C. Wright Mills

Jane Jacobs

Conclusion