Education and The Economic Menace
In the halcyon days of the British welfare state, even the poor had the opportunity to go to university. Anyone who had been offered a “place” could apply to the local Education Authority for support — not to cover the fees (there were none), but to meet the expenses of living. But when I took the form to my parents for the necessary signature, they hesitated. Having left school at twelve and fourteen, respectively, they wondered why I wanted “more study.” With my background in mathematics, I was already qualified for “a good job,” one beyond anything they could have imagined for themselves. I might become an accountant, even an actuary.
That sort of thinking is still too much with us. It dominates the decisions of powerful people who, unlike my parents, have had ample opportunity to appreciate its shortcomings. The assault on public goods, carried out on both sides of the Atlantic, has bequeathed to nations, in varying degrees, an economic conception of education. Politicians as different as Margaret Thatcher and Barack Obama have played variations on the same theme. We need programs to prepare the young to do their bit in maintaining financial health. Perhaps we are not yet at the stage where embryonic citizens are viewed as raw materials, to be hammered into shape, fitting the available slots in the powerful economic machine that the nation will send to do battle in the Global Demolition Derby, but that vision is on the horizon.
From Plato on, most people who have reflected seriously on education and its aims have not adopted the economic conception. Their attitude towards it is the one adopted by Rick Blaine to the petty crook Signor Ugarte: they would despise it if they thought about it. To be sure, many of them are concerned only with the elite, with people who do not have to worry about earning a living. Yet even Adam Smith, very much occupied with eliminating waste in the classroom or lecture-hall — sweeping away “the cobweb science of ontology,” for example — worries about the intellectual and moral decline of the minimally educated worker, confined by the division of labor to a lifetime of repetitive tasks. W.E.B DuBois eloquently strips the common disdain for market-oriented education of its limitation to class: “The object of education is not to make men carpenters but to make carpenters men.”
Today, in many affluent nations, the Economic Menace slouches towards the schools and colleges and universities. The funds for public education need to be cut. When school budgets are tight, administrators decide to cut back on “the frills.” The arts and the humanities are the prime targets. Classes in music and the visual arts disappear. Instruction in the “less important” languages, including the dead ones, is abandoned. In the remaining humanities classes, teachers are urged to concentrate on the basics. Less time for literature, more emphasis on functional literacy. Such attitudes are also echoed at higher levels of educational policy. Governments decide to slash the already meager budgets for the humanities and the arts. In the United States, scientists often bewail the reduction of funds to support research, but American humanists can only envy American scientists: although the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health may be pinched by policymakers apparently bereft of any sense of the value of basic research, the scorn directed at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts has been far more intense. Those agencies are permanently threatened by the barbarians within the gates. (It was almost miraculous to read that the Biden administration has proposed to increase these agencies’ funding.)
Increasingly, education means training and training means vocational training. Although it is entirely reasonable to identify a capacity for self-maintenance as one of the goals of education, two others ought not to be discarded. Young people should learn how to be citizens and how to be individuals. They should be taught how to be a member of a community, a society, a state, and they should also find their own distinctive place, their own distinctive voice, their own way of contributing to the lives of others, their own projected path to fulfillment. Perhaps tens of thousands of years ago, the small bands of hunter-gatherers of the later Paleolithic reasonably socialized the young by concentrating on the skills required to survive in a precarious world. During recorded history, the vast majority of human beings have been treated as disposable material for rulers bent on maintaining the wealth and power of their domain. Occupations have been routinely assigned by caste or class or gender or race, and their occupants have been efficiently honed to suit the appointed role. Thanks to political and economic developments that are rightly celebrated, some twentieth century societies demonstrated the possibility of doing more than that. They showed, for a time, how all three major aims of education — creating people who are simultaneously workers, citizens, and individuals — were broadly achievable. Why, then, the extraordinary regression, the return to a world in which training substitutes for education? What justifies the penny-pinching and the celebration of economic efficiency above all else?
Let us suspend, for a moment, the assumption that what young people need — that all they need — is preparation for “a good job.”
In one of the greatest essays on liberty ever written, John Stuart Mill explains what he takes to be fundamental. “The only freedom deserving of the name,” he instructs, “is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” Mill’s vision of fulfillment, of the worthwhile life, centers on autonomy. Each of us should choose the pattern of our existence, setting the goals we view as most important, and, if we have a tolerable amount of success in attaining them, we shall have lived well. But is that enough? Some projects for a life are harmless — they do not interfere with the plans made by others — but also trivial. A person who retreats into solitude, spending the days counting and recounting the blades of grass in a particular area, has not discovered a promising new “experiment of living.”
Mill’s tendency to focus on an abstract individual, disconnected from society, interferes with a genuine insight. Autonomy, as he recognizes, is important. The life you live should be your own. Still, it is worth asking just what this means. As a banal matter of fact, human beings do not spring into the world equipped with preferences and ideals that can guide their selection of life plans. The horizon bounding their inclinations is set by the possibilities made available by their social milieux. Although they may seek to expand the boundaries, they will inevitably do so by beginning from the options they come initially to understand. Moreover, that understanding emerges from their socialization. More concretely, the direction of their inclinations is set by the education they receive.
Where, in all this, does the liberal’s cherished autonomy fit? What is the intended contrast with the regimes that have dictated, for the vast majority of human beings, the patterns of their lives? A tempting answer is that the choices made by the developed individual should accord with “who she is.” Genuine education is a “leading out” of a self. It is a process in which the embryonic form is preserved and allowed to grow undistorted. True education, Nietzsche claims, is a kind of freeing: the seeds of the mature individual are permitted to grow, protected from the weeds, rubbish, and pests that would interfere with their development. There is surely something right about this picture. It points to a genuine danger in socialization, to the possibility of distortion, mutilation, regimentation, alienation. Yet it is hard to make sense of the threat. For the idea of a complete character already present in the infant is absurd.
To solve the difficulty, I suggest, we should not insist on a match between the full-grown person and a pre-formed inherited self, but attend instead to the nature of the process out of which the individual emerges. Think of education in its most expansive form as a dialogue between the growing organism and the ambient society. The educational dialogue goes badly when society fails to listen, insisting on leading in a particular direction whatever signals the developing organism might send. By contrast, education goes properly when the representatives of society, the parents, the caregivers, the teachers, as well as the institutions within which they work, are attentive to the features of the individual, responding to the directions in which they point.
Long before a child can be credited with a clear sense of self, sympathetic and sensitive observation of distinctive patterns of behavior allows the identification of activities that seem likely to prove interesting. Opportunities are offered, not on the basis of what society supposes appropriate for children of that age and sex, but rather because they seem attuned to the ways that individual child is developing. Nothing is forced. Educators listen closely to the particular voice, trying to follow its individual music, and to help it express its own song.
Autonomy is thus a matter of degree. It is not a property accruing to individuals who are launched into some space outside of (or above) society. Rather, the extent of someone’s autonomy is the result of developmental processes in which society is profoundly implicated. The choices that we see as autonomous are made possible because our prior socialization has provided opportunities that attentive interlocutors have recognized as attuned to individual features, observed so far in a growing person’s behavior. Those interlocutors have drawn out embryonic traits and instilled capacities for reflective choice. Although they have shaped the self that chooses, they have nonetheless cultivated a degree of autonomy. And in doing so, they have made possible the selection of a life plan that will continue the individual’s dialogue with the ambient society.
For each of us, in our time, plays both parts. As we have received from the fostering of others, so too we grow into beings capable of providing opportunities in our turn. How that is done depends on our particular choices, on the projects that we select and the activities and values that we mark out as central. Once we recognize the social embedding of our lives, however, it is easy to understand why the project of the solitary grass-counter appears pathological. For that imaginary recluse contributes nothing to the lives of others. A fulfilling life must surely meet an extra condition: its plan must involve a positive impact on other lives, the lives of sentient beings. At the close of his brief for humanistic religion, John Dewey makes the point with uncharacteristic eloquence:
We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.
Personal fulfillment has an other-directed, a collective, dimension. For this reason, it becomes easy to harmonize two of the three major aims of education. In fostering tendencies to engage with others and to contribute to their lives, we would also induce the capacities for good citizenship. Dewey’s famous linkage of democracy and education is neither arbitrary nor a penchant for teaching what he called (disdainfully) “the civics.” Democracy, he says, is a way of life, a condition in which citizens seek to understand, and to learn from, the perspectives and the life experiences of their fellows. At small scales, in deliberations within the family or in a local community, examples of the delicate dialogue are familiar, even if they are not as common as they might be. The educational challenge, common to promoting fulfillment and to forming citizens, is to find ways of improving this aspect of life — increasing the frequency with which mutual engagement occurs at small scales, and fashioning institutions for introducing it at larger ones.
And at this point we can even reintroduce the third aim, the goal of preparing young people to sustain themselves. What jobs will remain when the labor market becomes fully global, and when production becomes ever more automated? The most plausible answer: those requiring human contact. We are likely to continue to need human firefighters and doctors, nurses, and gardeners — and especially people to care for the elderly and to teach the children. In a future world in which the stigma of “service employment” has been thoroughly scoured away, and in which these occupations receive the level of compensation that they deserve — wages and salaries that allow those who serve to lead full and fulfilling lives — the skills needed in the labor market will be those needed for attentive interactions with others. Instead of lamenting the closing of the pit or of the factory, we might view automation as an opportunity. Those who have learned from the delicate dialogue may become fluent participants in it, finding satisfaction in the work they do with and for one another.
Today education should provide, more than anything else, the propensity to engage with one another. How might that be accomplished?
It will certainly not be accomplished by restricting it to emphasize the skills required by the current vision of the labor market. Instead we should start by fostering the three major capacities required by the aims of education. Children must learn to understand themselves, to enter into the perspectives of others, and to recognize the range of opportunities from which they can select to find their own distinctive place. This requires a broad education — what used to be called a “liberal education.”
If young people are to find their own distinctive pattern for a fulfilling life, education must enhance their self-understanding. To do so, they should gain some understanding of the diversity of human lives. A view of the different circumstances in which people live and the (often narrow) range of opportunities available to them promotes an awareness of where and how an individual might contribute to the lives of others. That form of awareness is promoted, from all sorts of angles, by a bundle of disciplines that Anglo-Saxons struggle to categorize. German does better, the Geisteswissenschaften comprise all those areas of research and teaching that bear on the human condition, from psychology at one end of the spectrum to the purest of the humanities at the other. Some degree of immersion in these disciplines, especially when they are taught in relation to one another, is essential for people to fashion their ideals of themselves, guiding them to find worthwhile ends to pursue, instructing them in how their own lives can bear positively on the lives of others.
All too often the delicate dialogue between the growing individual and the ambient society goes awry. Social pressures can diminish autonomy by closing off attractive paths. Barriers can be constructed and obstacles introduced in two different ways. Societies can impose outright bans: women cannot have access to higher education — or even to any education at all; members of a particular caste (or ethnic group) may only pursue a limited number of occupations. Or, as is far more common in the contemporary world, they can couple de jure possibility to a de facto constraint: “Of course any African-American child can become a lawyer” — but, without jobs for the sole parent, without a place in which to live, and with access only to schools awash in drugs and crime, staffed by a rotating corps of disillusioned teachers, any real prospects for a legal career are suppressed from the start. Complacent political leaders preen themselves on the existence of “opportunities for all,” overlooking the myriad ways in which the obstacles to taking advantage of the alleged “opportunities” crush the hopes and aspirations of the young.
Education may fail the ideal of autonomy by closing off potential lines of development and by failing to provide the support that it needs to grow in attractive directions. The latter failure is most evident in the material conditions of existence. Homeless people, or people mired in poverty or trapped in neighborhoods overrun by violence, need food, clean water, clean air, medical care, and safe shelter. Beyond these necessities, their children also require schools that they can attend without fear — schools that will offer them genuine chances of finding out where their talents lie and what kinds of life might prove fulfilling. In delivering those chances, the humanities and social sciences have an important role to play.
Formal education is central to the cultivation of positive freedom, of freedom to rather than freedom from. Children should learn who they are and what kinds of people they might realistically become. Without resources to identify their distinctive talents and interests, or to understand what kinds of lives are available to them, their autonomy is diminished. The dialogue between the growing individual and society is unhealthy, not because the voices of authority issue decrees forbidding a large range of options, but because those voices are virtually silent when it comes to positive suggestions. They supply no conceptual nourishment on which the developing imagination can fasten.
How, then, can the humanities supply what is lacking? By making vivid and illustrating the diverse possibilities for a human life. Literature, drama, film, and the visual arts can all stimulate the young imagination, revealing ways in which human beings might live, how they might prosper and how their lives might prove miserable and empty. History ranges across time to add detailed portraits of parts of the actual past. Geography and ethnography are comparably expansive across space. These humanist studies, at all levels, nourish a sense of possibilities, of horizons greater than the inherited ones.
In the earliest years of schooling, children are rightly expected to acquire basic skills. They must learn how to read and write, to add, subtract, and so forth. These capacities will be called on as they explore the rich possibilities of human existence. Even at the start, however, they can be captivated by stories, by colorful tales of the past, by accounts of life in strange — and even exotic — places. Long before they are able to probe the details of forms of life, to appreciate nuances of success and failure, of virtue and moral error, they can thrill to simple pictures, entranced by great heroes and heroines, appalled by villains — and recognize that the patterns of their familiar life are not the only possibilities.
Once reading skills have advanced sufficiently far, a more systematic evaluation of alternative modes of existence becomes possible. Geography and history classes can contain segments in which children learn the details of life in different contemporary places, at different times in the past of their own society, and in circumstances remote both in time and space. Some parts of their study should include arranging conditions enabling them to feel such alien forms of existence. By this, I do not intend the pallid exercises in which children bring to the classroom a motley of dishes allegedly representing those consumed by their forebears — and then sit down to a more-or-less palatable common meal. Rather, they should learn how to make the implements required to grow the crops, they should plant and tend them, and prepare the food — and, if all goes well, share in a convivial final feast. Along the way, they should be asked to solve, individually and collectively, the problems that would have arisen for the community whose way of life they are exploring. Work of this type also allows for practice in applying mathematical skills and coping with the kinds of situations that experimental scientists face daily.
All this paves the way for deeper engagement with a small number of (diverse) forms of life during the last few years in secondary school. A possible strategy for organizing this is to require each student to choose a particular place and period, to spend a significant part of the school year (perhaps all of it?) researching how people lived there and then, culminating in a detailed historical and ethnographic report and a presentation to fellow students. At each step of the way, students would have opportunities to consult with knowledgeable mentors; it is important that many adults bring their varied perspectives to the classroom. They would be expected to read widely, and to treat some aspects of the alien culture in great detail.
The three phases envisaged in such a program are intended to help students discover two things. Early training prepares them to enter deeply into lives very different from their own. As they choose to focus on groups of people, located at particular places and times, they discover respect and tolerance and interest across differences as well as what aspects of cultural life fascinate them most, and they are asked to understand the demands and constraints experienced by people very different from themselves. One goal is to bring them to recognize their own proclivities, thus helping them to chart a satisfying direction for their own lives and careers. Another is to widen their consciousness of human needs, their ability to see and feel from other perspectives.
As they grow, they should discover how to read a particular style of history, not the kind that is focused on the large affairs of states, on rulers and conquests and sweeping social reforms. Rather, they should be asked to attend to the details of everyday life. Reading not only historical analyses but also primary documents, they may be expected to enter into the lives of others. Along the way, depending on their focal society, they may need to absorb, and apply some parts of, economics and sociology. To the extent that their education succeeds, the skills they acquire are likely to prove valuable throughout their lives, as their pursuit of their favored projects leads them to actions with consequences for distant strangers. They will be prepared not to view those whom they affect remotely as faceless masses, and (with luck) they will be inspired to inquire and to reflect before implementing their plans.
Such an interdisciplinary program whose contributory domains are primarily geography and history, as well as those parts of anthropology flowing naturally from their explorations, might also draw on other areas of social science — economics, sociology, political science, and psychology. As they proceed with the individual studies of their later school years, this program should also be in dialogue with central areas of the humanities. None of the special inquiries would be complete without entering the culture of those whom they have chosen to study. The understanding of others’ perspectives requires engaging with the myths and stories, the poems and songs, the paintings and sculptures, through which a society’s personality is most deeply expressed.
To attain that understanding, students must first be taught how to read, how to listen, and how to see. While the primary materials with which they engage are works of art, their ability to engage profitably with them will depend also on historians and critics, specialists in understanding and analyzing literature or painting or music. The later studies of the secondary school (as I have envisaged them) can only succeed if there are people trained in the humanities who can enable their pupils to find in works of art what those works have to offer. Historians of art and music, like literary critics, are mediators, “liaison officers,” revealing precious insights in works that would be misunderstood, or dismissed as incomprehensible, without their guidance. The art historian invites students to attend to the relation between two areas of a canvas. The architectural historian points to the curve of a cornice and its echo in the shape of windows. The musicologist plays a short figure on the piano, before accompanying a recording of an orchestral work with exaggerated gestures, inviting hearers to recognize the recurrence of that figure. The literary critic points out the overtones and ambiguities of particular words in a poem.
In the beginning, none of us knows how to do these things for ourselves. We need instruction from people who have acquired the pertinent skills and who know how to convey them to others. Among the school staff there should be teachers who have so deep an understanding of particular genres as to make works of the pertinent types come alive for their students. Humanists, specifically historians and critics of literature, art, music, film, and drama, are needed at two levels. Researchers advance the interpretation of the nineteenth century novel, or of science fiction, or of conceptual art, or of Renaissance sculpture, or of film noir, or of the Romantic song cycle, or of Greek tragedy, or of television docudramas; their achievements are registered in their own teaching (typically at universities) and in their critical writings; and as they frame the work of interpreting their focal genres, they enable their students and their readers to see how to go on. Armed with the skills acquired by steeping themselves in the research level, these students and readers form a cadre at a second level, one that makes direct contact with pupils in secondary schools (and, perhaps, at earlier educational stages). Humanists at this second level are, and should be, less specialized. They ought to range more broadly, over the visual arts of a number of periods, for example, or through the grand sweep of poetry in their native language. The task for them is to instill in those they teach precursor capacities to those which their own education has given them. From the first stages of adolescence (if not before), their pupils should have the chance to learn to read and see and hear, not in the elementary ways of the very young but with attention to nuance and subtlety. The childhood passion inspired by Jo March may endure, but it is set within an understanding of the strengths and foibles of Elizabeth Bennett and Hester Prynne — perhaps even of Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer, and Mrs. Dalloway.
Schools do not just need some second-level humanists. A significant number of people with diverse tastes and interests should move through the secondary school classroom. Not all of them need to be trained teachers. The principal teachers of literature, music, and art should not only offer their own wide repertory of genres, but also supplement and coordinate the visits of others who can introduce an even broader array of works of art. Using their own interpretive skills, they should seek ways of helping their students come alive to the features that excite the visitors who bring their distinctive enthusiasms. Advising pupils who are stirred to similar enthusiasms, they oversee their further development as interpreters, guiding them to suitable mentors and translating what those mentors convey into formulations apt for inculcating enhanced skills. Humanist teachers thus become liaison officers in two different senses: they mediate directly between some works of art and their students, and indirectly between those students and other potential liaison officers, whose fluency is inadequate to convey the messages they hope to offer.
Data on the performance of American students in mathematics and science are far better known than the gloomy statistics about the reading of American adults. According to a study conducted in January and February of 2019, twenty-seven percent of American adults had not read any book (or even a part of any book) within the prior year. In the “league table” of adult readers, the United States ranked equal twenty-second (tied with Germany). Other figures show a decline in the amount of time spent per day in leisure reading, from the first decade of the twenty-first century to the second. How much of whatever reading occurs might contribute to self-understanding is anybody’s guess.
Overall, then, it seems fair to conclude that American schools do not generate a swarm of avid readers, eager to garner the benefits that I have attributed to the engagement with literature; higher education appears to do somewhat better. Laments about the quenching of scientific curiosity are extremely common: why do so few Americans pursue post-graduate studies in the sciences? Yet surely educators ought to worry equally about the quashing of interest in literature. Why do so many abandon reading once their formal education is completed? There are obvious potential explanations. Many of those who graduate from secondary schools may always have found reading difficult. They may have struggled through the materials assigned to them, and felt relief when they no longer have to exercise basic skills they know to be incomplete and inadequate. Perhaps the “golden age of television” has inspired a turn to watching series (documentaries or dramas) offering occasions for reflection and promoting greater self-understanding; but no available data supports so hopeful a conclusion. For the past decade, the most popular television turns out to be sports events, a decline from previous decades that showed clear preferences for comedy and drama series, some of them surely rewarding to watch and providing food for thought. I have a hunch that the people who were gripped throughout all the seasons of The Wire and Homeland are also people who continue to read books.
The goal of making Americans great readers again — and great observers and great listeners — is educationally urgent. Achieving it demands a serious campaign to help all children become fluent readers by the time of their adolescence. But it also requires more: literacy should be understood as a matter of degree. All of us, including the most adept readers, are imperfectly literate: there will always be some kinds of writing in our native language that we find difficult, even impenetrable. Formal education, through the secondary school, ought to provide each pupil with a profile in reading ability sufficient to make accessible — indeed, pleasurably accessible — a range of written texts capable of yielding the principal fruits of literacy. In particular, it should prepare them to read, with curiosity, interest, and joy, works able to prompt reflection and enhanced self-understanding. To achieve that goal (or some reasonable approximation to it), I suggest strengthening the connections between the two levels of humanists. Teachers of literature in secondary schools should have a passion for the genres they introduce to their pupils, combined with strong interpretive skills. They should be given the opportunities to refine those skills, and to extend them to other styles through periodic leaves that enable them to work with scholars engaged in humanistic research. Their schools should contain enough colleagues to form a community, regularly interacting with one another. The community would constantly be renewed by its contacts with research, in which the individual members can continue to develop and grow. Such a program has already been pioneered by some progressive schools.
Parallel points apply to the visual arts and to music. Indeed, the status quo in these areas is almost certainly more dismal. Since education in the non-literary arts is so frequently curtailed, lopped off in times of budgetary shortage, visual and auditory literacy only attain more primitive levels. In these areas, the liaison officers are fewer, the time assigned to their mediatory work is minimal, and the range of material they are expected to introduce far too extensive. Like their colleagues in literature, they need to enhance their own capacities for sensitive seeing and listening, to recognize their fundamental task as one in which similar skills are germinated and developed in their students, and to find vital ways of conveying what is required. Teachers of art and music should have the chance to learn from scholars, critics, and historians of art and music, who engage in research and sometimes change the framework within which works of art are understood.
Very few young people are fortunate enough (as I once was) to listen to a critic make an impassioned defense of the importance of literature. In my last undergraduate year in Cambridge, the university extended its support for the annual collegiate drama festival by recruiting eminent members of the faculty to give lunchtime talks on the plays to be performed. My own college dramatic society was rehearsing The Imaginary Invalid, and we invited the distinguished critic George Steiner to speak to us. His presentation was brilliant — and forthright. One claim he made has remained with me ever since: “Molière and Stendhal have taught us more about what it is to be human than all the psychologists there have ever been, combined.”
Steiner’s dictum is an exaggeration — even if, in times when the humanities are suspect and the social sciences are viewed as poor relatives of their natural cousins, it is a necessary pushback against the evangelists of scientism. Psychology, pursued from a diversity of perspectives, has enlightened us about many aspects of human mental life and of human behavior, sometimes through understanding the lives of other animals, often by controlled observations of human behavior. Laboratory studies have enlarged the understanding of perception, memory, emotional responses, decision-making, perspective-sharing, and other significant mental processes. These achievements do not displace the contributions of playwrights and novelists, nor are they superseded by them. Learning can, and should, come from all directions. Understanding human life, of the individual and of the group, is best advanced through the interaction of disciplines. Marking off particular areas of inquiry as barren — “nothing there for me!” — is a foolish dogmatism, whether it serves as the proud credo of the scientistically devout or as the reprimand of a great literary critic.
All young people deserve, however, to be instructed by teachers who are imbued with Steiner’s dictum, who recognize the importance of literature, music, and art for the growth of self-understanding, whose passion for a range of works is accompanied by mature interpretive skills, and who have techniques for instilling precursor capacities in their students. This, to be sure, is a lot to ask for. Yet it represents an important goal towards which education ought to strive.
Literature, art, and music provide access to possibilities for developing individuals, enabling them to try on unrealized alternatives for size. As my passing remark about identification with Jo March indicates, this is relatively straightforward in the case of literature. The impulse to emulate a fictional character, to be as free and strong as Jo or as brave and resourceful as Jim Hawkins, is only the simplest form of literary impact. More complex novels and plays and poems inspire diagnostic reflections on one’s own conduct. They lead some readers of Bleak House to shudder as Dickens’ characters mouth unfeeling words echoing those readers’ own utterances. The more ambiguous figures delineated in “novels for adults” can provoke extended self-reflection: in the contrast between Dorothea Brooke’s impulsive warmth and generosity of spirit and the caution of her more conventional sister, an attentive reader may find material for exploring either the narrowness of his own altruistic sentiments or his own lack of prudence. Reading Ulysses, or the later parts of the Harry Potter series, can reorient our understanding of virtues and vices, change our conception of the heroic, and provoke new ways of working through the successes and failures of our lives.
So far I have turned the gaze inward, considering how the conversations with ourselves, provoked by our well-instructed readings, seeings, and hearings, might redirect a purely personal and private search for fulfillment. But we must not ignore the changes wrought in the ways we look outward. Can refined capacities for reading and viewing and listening also broaden and deepen our sensitivities to the lives of others? Do they also sometimes lead us to recognize possibilities to make our own distinctive contributions to a larger human world?
They can and they do. Education in the humanities not only makes us more self-aware, it also promotes our fulfillment through attuning us more closely to people whose welfare and whose aspirations we might affect. Even that formulation, however, is still held by the inward gaze. Surely we should not clamor for humanistic education on the grounds that, through its opening our eyes to possibilities for aiding others, we may become fulfilled! Those whom we help, aiding in their fulfillment, should not be thought of as means to our own fulfillment. Whatever private good our enhanced understanding of human existence may bring, this is a secondary matter. Rather, we should commend the well-schooled sensibilities for their power to make us better citizens and more highly developed moral agents. So we must turn from the first broad aim of education, the individualistic one, to a second cluster of reasons, which have to do with the preparation for citizenship and good conduct.
Democracy depends on the ability of citizens to deliberate together, with a commitment to finding an outcome with which all potentially affected parties can live. Tocqueville was correct to see the New England town meeting as the core of America’s experiment with democratic government — and Dewey built on the insight when he declared democracy to be “more than a form of government,” seeing it as “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” But how do we cultivate mutual engagement, the capacity to listen carefully to others, to enter into their lives, committing ourselves to finding arrangements that all can accept?
The answer is, from prolonged encounters with people representing a wide range of perspectives. Through living and working with those who are different, citizens come to understand alternative points of view. Perspectives once alien, dismissed as the products of ignorance and selfishness, appear in a softer light. They become comprehensible reactions to a difficult situation. Although disagreement, even strong disagreement, may survive the encounter, the once-despised perspectives acquire human faces. Joint deliberations may then begin in a different place and in a different spirit. Reaching behind the opposed attitudes, people who disagree may attend to the underlying predicaments, identifying factors responsible for the conflict and seeking responses to those factors that might combine to resolve it.
This style of direct broadening can begin with joint planning in diverse groups, starting early in education, and gradually increasing the range of outlooks and the complexities of the situations. There is nothing “relativistic” about this, just as there is nothing “relativistic” about tolerance and compromise and patience. The expansion of one’s understanding is not a betrayal of one’s principles, unless of course they cannot withstand the challenge. Humanistic education is an ally in reinforcing capacities to listen and expanding habits of sympathetic understanding. Learning to interpret works of fiction (as well as to respond to visual art and to music) can induce skills for recognizing the standpoints and predicaments of others. Thus the way is prepared for deeper mutual engagement when citizens need to deliberate together.
Of course, we cannot expect casual recommendations to read to work magic. There is no evidence as yet to support the thesis that people who read fiction become more empathetic than their non-reading peers; and there is a great deal of historical experience that weakens the correlation between culture and decency. Still, there are also historical cases that suggest the power of particular kinds of fiction to generate greater understanding of, and sympathy for, people whose perspectives previously seemed alien, incomprehensible, or abhorrent. On that basis, a carefully chosen set of readings, skillfully interpreted in the classroom, can provide students with the experience of entering the lives of others. Children who are initially inclined to condemn particular kinds of people or specific forms of behavior can be offered stories whose protagonists are relatively similar, and whose conditions of existence are explored in sympathetic detail. Their teacher can pose imaginative questions about how they might have behaved in the circumstances of the story or whether they would have sided with other characters who refused to listen or provide aid. The aim of class discussion will not be to impose a final verdict, but rather to lead each child to a fuller sense of the range of human motivation. Whatever the concluding judgment may be, children should come to see themselves as making it with a deeper engagement with the situation and with the thoughts and emotions of those whom they had been inclined to dismiss as beyond the pale. Exercises of this kind can be developed in many different ways. Testing will reveal how best to do for schoolchildren what Dickens and Stowe did for their nineteenth-century publics.
Nor, quite evidently, are the humanistic disciplines on which I have so far concentrated the only areas relevant to preparing good citizens. History is an obvious source. So, too, are geography and anthropology. All these subjects can expand the sense of human possibilities, presenting the challenges people have faced at different times and in different places and recording their diverse efforts to meet them. Students can find ample material to perplex and to repel them — thus provoking questions about how people could have been led to accept such puzzling and apparently repugnant ways of life.
Although historical education has a place for dates, for the glorious deeds of national heroes, and for the pageantry imaginatively constructed to celebrate a society’s past, these are not, in my view, central to its pedagogical importance. Particularly important for the development of citizenship and moral agency is study of the principal episodes of moral and social change — for good and for ill. Attention should be given to the construction of oppressive hierarchies, in the ancient world and in more recent times. Similarly, students should know how cruel practices were challenged and overthrown. Understanding the forms of slavery in Greece and Rome, in the Renaissance, and in the New World, is a clear and obvious example, profoundly relevant for future American citizens. Since the resonances of the institution of chattel slavery continue to sound in the society to whose future they will contribute, American children need to understand why slaves were originally brought to the American colonies, why the practice of keeping slaves persisted and how it was defended, how it came to be opposed, the character of the debate over abolitionism, how social conditions for former slaves and their descendants evolved, and how the legacy of slavery affects differential life prospects in the United States today. (Obviously there may be differences among historians about such matters. Nothing should be presented as gospel.) Charting that social history is more valuable for the formation of democratic character than depicting the campaigns and the battles of the American Civil War.
Success in enlarging national history to cover all parts of the human world (however the local and global are balanced) must be based on geographical understanding. If, as suggested, history is far more than dates, geography is not simply maps. Naturally, just as a student’s chronology should be approximately accurate, so too her sense of the spatial relations among nations and societies ought to be roughly right. That sense is the basis for knowledge of the climatic and environmental conditions of people’s ways of life. In turn, appreciating the specific opportunities and challenges posed by living in a particular place underlies consideration of the ways in which local conventions and institutions have developed. Geography, as it figures in the education of citizens, must borrow first from the earth and environmental sciences, from demography, and ultimately extend its reach into economics and anthropology.
All very well, you may say. How nice it would be if our society could afford to provide for all so enriching an education. But the world is a harsh and competitive place, and we must be “globally competitive,” and so young people must do their bit for the Post-Industrial Labor Army. It is hard to find fulfillment, or to be a good citizen, if you cannot support yourself.
True enough. (And there is dignity in labor, as we used to say.) The economic menace looms over us, warning of dire consequences if we fail to heed its gloomy warnings. Why, though, should we concede its points about the Global Demolition Derby? Who decreed that our present economic arrangements, and habits of consumption, are the optimal ones, or the best we can do? Isn’t it worth asking if the drive to produce, produce, and produce can be resisted? If human lives can be richer and happier when enough is recognized as enough?
Mill posed those questions, and he answered them. During a period when almost all of his fellow economists quaked at the thought of declining production, dreading the “Stationary State,” he saw such a state as allowing the development of happy and fulfilling forms of life. Repelled by the cutthroat competition already visible in the early stages of industrial capitalism, at the “struggling to get on,” at the neglect of important values in the pursuit of profit, he supposed that, once a nation had advanced far enough economically, the relentless treading on one another can cease. In recommending the “stationary state,” he warned against the danger of too much movement, of the cruel endless churning of the profit-making machinery. The stationary state, he claimed, “would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition.”
To be sure, we are not stationary people, or a stationary society: we have been wildly accelerated by our economy and our technology. But that is hardly the last word. A society that provides economic security, and honors the educational requirements for it, need not be a society that tolerates grotesque levels of economic inequality. Moreover, the uncontrolled excesses of our contemporary acceleration can be resisted and rejected. Indeed, it is the technology itself that can make resistance plausible. In a world in which it has developed beyond Mill’s imagination, in which routine jobs can be automated, human labor can be directed toward fulfilling occupations, in which people work with and for one another. Prominent among them is the care and nurturing of the young. Education, broadly conceived, can become what Emerson thought it should be: the main enterprise of the world.