Humanistic Critique of Education. Группа авторов
what great tragic assertions have been made of this distrust, as with the grotesqueries of Macbeth, or the stateliness of murder in Julius Caesar. Do we discern how the motives of sheer ownership figure in relations between husband and wife? Then note how these are made almost exultant in Othello.
Does a writer seem to suggest that he despises all people, either in particular or in general? Then note how, by the very scrupulousness of his work, he shows that he most earnestly respects an audience. And no matter how questionable the scramble, there is a gallantry, an essential cult of the compliment, implicit in the earnestness with which a good artist will bring the best he has to market, even though he suspects that, by not making it worse, he may sell it for less.
Is there an overriding fear of death? Then see how the poet exploits this attitude to the ends of pomp, in the hope of infusing his work with a funereal, corpse-like dignity.
Is there a need of victimage, to relieve ourselves by thoughts of a vicarious sacrifice? Must we look for a goat? Then see how such impulses are made grand by the devices of tragedy.
Does the weight of a social order oppress us grievously, driving us within ourselves, imposing upon us the involuntary vows of psychogenic illness, making us prone to fantasies of sexual perversion that represent, in terms of erotic appetite, the jealousies and malice and self-punishments typical of the “hierarchal psychosis”? All this may, by the “alchemy of the word,” be transformed into an aesthetic “remembrance of things past,” that loves to contemplate the pageantry of corruption. And the tangled social motives may come to take the form that Stanley Hyman has called the “Albertine strategy” (having in mind Proust’s resources whereby a heterosexual love is imagined not directly, but roundabout, by the aesthetic perverting of an experience that, in the real moral realm, had been homosexual).
Have we questioned the entire modern cult of gadgetry by which the wheels of industry are largely kept going, over and above production for war goods? Then note how this same gadgetry becomes the pleasant movement and glitter of a spectacular Hollywood revue, in which woman plays a leading role, as the gadget of gadgets. Well-groomed, specious flesh clothing the skeleton.
There is no tangle so hopeless that it cannot, with the symbol-using species, become the basis for a new ingenious assertion that transcends it, by the very nature of linguistic assertion. No way of life can be so wretched, corrupt, or even boring that some expert symbol user or other can’t make it the subject matter of a good book. Wherever you might moralistically exclaim, “How awful!” there is the opportunity for the aesthetic to answer spiritedly, “But how delightfully awful!”
In sum, there is the transcendence in expression as such (the point emphasized in the Crocean aesthetic). Atop that, there is the transcendence implicit in the processes whereby the work “purifies itself” in the course of its unfolding. And beyond that, there is transcendence by the various ways whereby we feel ourselves similarly purified while undergoing the imaginary discipline of the story’s action and passion (undergoing such either as spontaneous spectators or as students, or both). And so, each time we inspect a great work of human thought (that is, a great symbolic exercising), we can be delighted by the manifestations of its genius, a skill whereby even the accents of lamentation can be transformed into the pleasurable.
Here is a glorious realm of solutions. Here is easy going, atop hard going. But such expression is at the same time fearsome by reason of its very felicity, in so far as the availability of such cunning resources may tempt us to perpetuate an underlying moral ill by cultivating the happy exercise that makes it beautiful. A familiar example appears in the popular art patronized by commercial advertisers which helps make insatiable in real life the very appetites which it symbolically gratifies in the world of make-believe. In any case, by dodging between aesthetic positives and moralistic negatives, one seeks to improvise the “good life.” Such an attempt is always complicated, as Aristotle’s Ethics reminds us, by the fact that, before one can live well, one must contrive to live.
However, when we attempt charting the good life, we must be linguistically shrewd about our own statement, too. There is always the invitation to express such matters in terms more or less flatly opposed (polar terms, they have often been called), with some variant of the thought that what we want is a middle road between the two extremes. A variant is the discovery that, where two opposed principles are being considered, each of which has the “defects of its qualities,” what we want is something that avoids the typical vices of either and combines the typical virtues of both. Or, dialectical resources being what they are, we can readily propose that any troublesome either-or be transformed into a both-and. Thus, when thinking of “authority, control, and discipline” on the one hand, and of “freedom and initiative” on the other, most people are likely to opt for a moderate mixing of the two. “There should be both respect for the individual and subordination of the individual to the group; there should be both patriotism and internationalism, in happy balance; education, as the projecting of traditions into new situations, must combine conservative and progressive tendencies; student interest must not be stifled by overly authoritative guidance, yet the student should not be deprived of such guidance where he requires it,” etc. Such linguistic resources suggest why even excessively one-sided educators might tend to think of themselves as serving under the sign of the golden mean.
And there can be further very good reasons for such a view. As regards the relation between authority and freedom, for instance, the investigating of symbolic action is still in a highly problematical stage, while many teachable principles and rules of thumb have already been formulated; and this situation of itself almost compels one to ask of the student a kind of discipline not distinguishable from pronounced personal initiative.
And there is always the aura of promise in education, a promise implied when it is not made explicit. This promissory motive came to the aid of the various fly-by-night outfits that quickly cooked up likely looking courses to profit by the situation of the returning soldiers, with funds at their disposal under the G.I. educational bill of rights. Courses in vocational training draw especially on such hopefulness, on the willingness of the student-customer to be assured that, if he takes the course, he will somehow have a much better chance to hit the “jack pot” and thereby to experience the deliciously immoral thrill that occurs when a slight gesture, made accidentally at the right time, disproportionately calls forth an abrupt unloosening, an indecent downpour, of revenue.
Thus, the promise will be there to some extent, even when it’s false. And it should never be wholly false, so far as a linguistic approach to education is concerned. For the analysis of symbolic action should not only sharpen kinds of perception that are competitively useful to the manipulating of symbols, it should also contribute to our lore of human foibles in general, and so make for much sheer shrewdness as regards the ways of the scramble. This should be particularly the case if the study of linguistic tactics is extended to a “post-Machiavellian” kind of inquiry in a realm where purely rhetorical devices overlap upon a realm of nonverbal materiality, as with the pronouncements of promoters, politicians, diplomats, editors, and the like, whose use of purely symbolic resources is backed by a tie-in with organizational or bureaucratic forces.
But, ideally at least, viewed in “the absolute,” an educational program of this sort would come closer to such promises as were once called the consolatio philosophiae. Admonition would make of education a watching and waiting, appreciation would seek out the positive attitudes that corrected such negatives. Its great stress upon linguistic skepticism would imply that it is not designed to make up the student’s mind for him. For it could not arrogate to itself the right (or assume that it had the ability) to anticipate the particularity that characterizes an individual’s decisions. In fact, it cannot even deny its knowledge of paradoxical cases where training can be a sheer handicap to a man, as when the sudden introduction of new technological methods required that the former experts be discharged, since their very fitness for the old ways made them less fit for the new ways. It can, however, make such considerations an important part of its teaching, in accordance with the particular kinds of quizzicality in which it would become at home.
Education, as so conceived, would be willing to give full recognition to every important favorable and unfavorable factor in a given situation. If it failed to meet such tests, the failure would be caused by lack of knowledge