orientationNext, education traditionally has been constructed and marketed around the idea that individuals should advance themselves as fast and as much as they possibly can. This approach, by focusing exclusively on the individual, has created a self-centered society that has had significant negative consequences. People looking out only for themselves can exploit others, especially the weaker members of society—the young, the elderly and the handicapped. Instead, education should be based on people balancing rights and responsibilities. This would hopefully teach a greater sense of responsibility to the others and to the community.
Finally, the metaphor operating in education today is the “workplace.” It fosters thinking such as “school is a student’s job,” “that behavior is unacceptable on the job,” “school is measured by how well it trains a person for a specific job,” and schools are evaluated based on “job placement” to name a few ideas.2 This approach might have been appropriate when we had a manufacturing economy. However, manufacturing jobs have been disappearing, and we’re moving from an information economy to a creative economy, requiring a dramatically different approach to education and therefore a new metaphor. Either a creative or a community metaphor would be far superior to the current approach, or they could be combined into a “creative and humanistic community” metaphor that would be far superior for the needs of the 21st century.
Additionally, instead of problem solving, people must understand creative thinking that shapes the future. This pattern of thought could breathe new life into education because it requires a dramatically different structure and curriculum. As McCoog (2008) argues, “To acquire 21st century skills, students must be encouraged to create new ideas, evaluate and analyze the material presented, and apply that knowledge to their previous academic experiences. This is achieved by changing the methods of instruction” (p. 4). These changes are necessary to be consistent with the emerging humanistic context for thought. The inspiration for a “creative community” approach to education is Kenneth Burke’s writing on rhetoric and education.
Fit Within the Literature
Numerous books have been published about individual pedagogical thinkers, ranging from Socrates to Dewey to Bloom. These works have been formative on the discipline of education, and many played a role in Burke’s thinking. What is so important about this new book about a humanistic, Burkeian frame for pedagogy? There are three vital reasons for this book:
• Only one other book, Blakesley’s (2002) The Elements of Dramatism, has ever been published that is dedicated to specifically extending Kenneth Burke’s ideas into the realm of teaching and learning. To this end Humanistic Critique of Education further fills that gap and serves as a solid steppingstone to additional study and refinement of Burke’s work for scholarly and professional application in education.
• Textbooks that address the communication of teaching focus on behaviors and strategies. But these same books do little to address the rhetorical dimensions of teaching and learning, with the notable exception of Mottet, Richmond, and McCroskey (2006). Such texts, including trade books, treat education as a communication phenomenon and present a montage of perspectives.
• No volume has been published that focuses solely on a single rhetorical perspective’s illumination of education theory and praxis. Such a focus—framing education as symbolic action among humans—hits on specific purposes of teaching and learning that span the range from elementary and secondary education, to higher education curricula, to training seminars, to special education. It also includes specific matters, ranging from the impact of technology to changing the public-policy environment for education.
The rhetoric of teaching is sorely missing in the literature, with the exception of Petraglia’s (1998) work that focuses on how constructivist pedagogy is most informed by an understanding of education’s rhetorical challenges. Humanistic Critique of Education, offers a broad range of appeal to target readers that break into three categories, admittedly with some overlap among them but enough uniqueness to secure individual appeal:
• Academics—professors and practitioners who teach, research and serve in rhetoric, English, communication, and education fields
• Students—graduate students plus motivated, advanced undergraduate students in rhetoric, communication, and education
• Professionals—educators attending graduate school looking for a humanistic perspective to education that would be helpful to them as they enhance their credentials with a master’s degree and move up in careers in the field but not to go on for a doctorate; also teachers wanting to build their knowledge about education through independent reading on the subject
The book’s subtitle, “Teaching and Learning as Symbolic Action,” positions the entire critique in the realm of Burke’s philosophy and method. It would appeal to Burke scholars while also emphasizing the centrality of communication that other target audiences can reasonably understand without specific familiarity with Burke’s ideas.
In this volume, the chapters are arranged to progress from Burke’s “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education” (Chapter 1) and address issues about effective education in our nation. Chapters 2 through 5 present analyses about Burke’s ideas that reveal much about the potential of his work in education in terms of pedagogy and curricula. In Chapter 2, Andrew King places Burke’s teachings on power within the frame of his educational ideas and practice. The key is that Burke gives us practical tools for life in the world of the publicly engaged intellectual and teaches how to assess, critique, and resolve power conflicts that undermine the effectiveness of social hierarchies, including those of education itself. Elvera Berry, in Chapter 3, next argues that Burke’s extensive analysis of human beings, as defined by their linguistic capacity and activity, and his observations concerning education in a democracy are incorporated in a trans-disciplinary perspective as “equipment” for learning. Berry, then, proposes a framework within which to examine education and a heuristic by which to generate educational agendas and shape curricula. In Chapter 4, Peter Smudde reveals that a very small collection of research has applied Burke to education, and its application is restricted overwhelmingly to teaching Burke’s ideas and never to contemporary pedagogical perspectives. Smudde demonstrates how Burke gives us a philosophy of education and that, together with his larger system, it is directly applicable to the field of education through constructivist pedagogy and problem-based learning, ultimately building up to an educational design for the development of “citizen critics.” In Chapter 5, Mark Huglen and Rachel McCoppin develop pedagogical strategies specifically from Burke’s four “rungs of learning.” Huglen and McCoppin argue that the educational curriculum ought to place primary emphasis upon the two latter rungs, applying several anecdotal examples to demonstrate the importance and challenges of this kind of positioning.
Chapters 6 and 7 address matters largely focused on humanistic teaching and learning in situ. Chapter 6, by Richard Thames, approaches education from a student’s perspective—that the material cannot bear the burden of repetition. Teachers may constantly update their courses with new information, which tends to work for “hard” sciences and fields whose content frequently produces new information. More humanistically/philosophically oriented courses must be built on a “psychology of form,” which may include some repetition but is far more interesting initially because there is a dramatic arch to such courses.
