Humanistic Critique of Education. Группа авторов
right and dignity of doing all in its power to study the lore of such rights and dignities.
Such, then, is what we take to be the nature of education as “preparation for adult life.” The obligations of order hang over us, even if we would revolt against order. Out of such predicaments, ingenious fellows rise up and sing; thus promptly have all our liabilities been by symbol-using converted into assets. Similarly aesthetic, from this point of view, is any way of analytically enjoying the ways of rising up and singing. These ways may be “diagnostic,” as all education in one sense is. And so we are led back to the realm of the admonitory.
And finally, and above all, in keeping with our “socioanagogic” search for the ways in which the magic of the social order infuses men’s judgments of the beautiful (quite as it infuses their ethics and their perception of even “natural” things) we watch everywhere for the manifestations of the “hierarchal” motive, what Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, calls “degree.” It is only “by degree,” he declaims, that communities, schools, brotherhoods, businesses, inheritance, the prerogatives of age and office, even the regularities of nature, “stand in authentic place.” Accordingly, “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And, hark! what discord follows; each thing meets / In mere oppugnancy.” And later, with a strange imagistic paralleling of Othello, he sums up: “Chaos, when degree is suffocate, / Follows the choking.” We cite from this long passage, not exactly to reaffirm the Shakespearean answer, but to recall how vast, in the perspective of Shakespearean drama, was the scope of the question.
School and Religion
The study of religion fits perfectly with the approach to education in terms of symbolic action. What more thorough examples of symbolic action can be found than in a religious service? What is more dramatistic than the religious terminology of action, passion, and personality? What terminology is more comprehensive than the dialectic of a theologian? What is linguistically more paradoxical than the ways wherein the mystic, seeking to express the transcendently ineffable, clothes theological ideas in the positive imagery of sheer animal sensation? Where, more perfectly than in versions of the heavenly hierarchy, can we find the paradigms of hierarchal terminology? And, as regards the principle of negativity, where does it figure more ultimately than in the dialectical subtleties of negative theology?
The great depth and scope of religious terminologies; the range of personalities and problems that have found accommodation within the religious framework; the kind of “inner freedom” that goes with the cult of ultimate praise made possible by the religious rationale; the religious placement of beauty and the practical; the ways in which religious scruples can sharpen even purely secular kinds of sympathy and awareness—to think of such matters is to realize that the long tradition of religion provides us with a field of study as vital and as sweeping as the over-all history of human culture itself.
Thus we could state unequivocally that the language of religion is the most central subject matter for the study of human relations in terms of symbolic action. Or perhaps we should make the claim even more specifically, in saying that the central concern would be not just religion, but theology, that is, the strict realm of dogma, and of a church’s symbolic practices (its rites and rituals) as placed in terms of its dogmas.
But though ideally the dramatistic approach heads in the study of religious forms, the social obstacles are obvious. First, in a nation of many faiths, there would be embarrassment in the mere singling out of any one doctrine for special study, in a secular school. Second, dramatism would also require a systematic concern with the misuses to which a religious terminology can be put, as when its spirituality becomes a sheer rhetorical shield for the least spiritual of special interests. And though, if nothing else were involved, a truly religious person might be expected to welcome any teachings, from whatever source, that help admonish against the misuse of religion, there are many kinds of susceptibility here that make such considerations unadvisable.
Consider, for instance, the frenzy with which Molière was attacked for his comedy, Tartuffe, his enemies proclaiming that religion itself had been slandered in his portrait of a religious hypocrite. And even though a dramatistic analysis of such matters would be much milder, since it would but “study” temptations that Molière sought to make dramatically salient, it could not go far without raising resentments that would militate against its own purposes, by intensifying the very passions it would assuage.
Fortunately, the main concern in a dramatistic treatment of religious language (and of the rites rationalized by such a language) resides elsewhere. There are broad principles of theological placement that can be studied, for instance, when one is studying modes of placement in general. Thus, when considering the formal relationship that prevails between “scene” and “act” in a systematic terminology dealing with such matters, one can include various theological pronouncements in a list that also includes various secular treatments of the same problem. And by such means, theological considerations can be introduced relevantly, without much risk of the embarrassments that might result if a class of secular students were to “index” any one religious terminology as thoroughly as they might index a novel or drama.
A dramatistic stress could not simply omit such subjects, however. For the position is based on the awareness that religious terminologies have charted with especial urgency and thoroughness the problems of “sin” and “redemption” as these take form against a background of hierarchal order. Here, then, are the grandest terminologies for the locating of the attitudes that, by our interpretation, arc grounded in the feeling for negativity, the “idea of no,” a symbolistic genius that makes itself felt in a variety of manifestations. Examples of such manifestations are sacrifice, mortification, penance, vicarious atonement, conversion, rebirth, original sin, submission, humility, purgation, in brief, “conscience”; thence secondarily in rejections, revolts, impatiences; and so with intermediate realms like indifference, betrayal, psychogenic illness, attempts to resolve social antitheses; and finally in the purely technical realm, as with the ability to know that the words for things are not the things, that ironic statements are to be interpreted in reverse of their surface meaning, and that the range of language can be extended metaphorically without error only if we know how to “discount” a metaphorical term.
There is a crucial paradox in the dramatistic approach to religion, however. For whereas it leads to an almost minute interest in the letter of the faith, requiring a particular stress upon the terms that specify doctrine, dogma, its approach to such elements is not doctrinal, but formal. That is, it does not ask: “Is such a doctrine literally true or false?” Rather, it asks, “what are the relationships prevailing among the key terms of this doctrine?” And: “Can we adapt the terminology to other terminologies, at least somewhat?” For instance, one might ask whether theological statements about “original sin” could fit with a purely secular notion that there is a kind of categorical guilt implicit in the nature of all sociopolitical order, with the malaise of its “degrees,” a malaise sharpened by the feeling for negativity, as embodied in the “rights and wrongs” or “yeses and noes,” of man’s linguistically heightened conscientiousness.
Such a secularly formal (or, if you will, “aesthetic”) approach to the literal particularities of dogma must be insufficient, as judged by the tests of advocates who would proclaim one doctrine and no other as the whole and only truth. But though educators, being concerned with preparations rather than fulfilments, might for their pains be classed among those “trimmers” who after death were denied even entrance into hell, since they could not wholly die through never having wholly lived, yet as regards the needs of education for the “global” conditions that technology is imposing upon us, precisely such a deflection seems particularly needed at this time. For it would seem to go as far as humanly possible toward the forming of such attitudes as are required if men of many different faiths are to participate in a common parliament of all nations and are to confront one another in an attitude better than mere armed neutrality, or in a diplomatic silence whereby all sorts of very important things are left unsaid. For though any specific measure can be debated in such a spirit, a world organization can flourish “positively” only in so far as all its members can work toward a frame of reference common to all.
It is the thesis of this essay that, since all divergent doctrines must necessarily confront one another