of terrifying importance being prepared for, even when a writer has no such intentions in mind. For, if certain elements equal “good” and certain elements equal “bad” (or, what is often more important, if certain elements equal “socially superior” and certain elements equal “socially inferior”), then in contemplating the “dynamics” of such “equations” (their implied hortatory value), do we not contemplate the very essence of human foibles?
And, at least within the ideality of our educational pursuits, are we not thereby admonished to watch and wait—and not just preceptorially, but technically?
“Dramatism,” the approach to the human situation “linguistically,” in terms of symbolic action, fulfils its purposes only in so far as it makes methodical the attitude of patience. The “dramatic” may thunder. It should. The “dramatistic,” in a commingling of techniques and hypochondriasis, will “appreciate” man’s ways of thundering.
Educational Aims and Values
Education, as so conceived, would be primarily admonitory. It would seek to become a sophisticated and methodized set of parables, or fables. Noting how man’s distinctive trait, his way with symbols, is the source of both his typical accomplishments and his typical disabilities, education as so conceived would be first and foremost “of a divided mind,” and would seek to make itself at home in such divisiveness.
Far too often, education is wholly under the sign of the promissory. The serious student enters school hoping to increase his powers, to equip himself in the competition for “success,” to make the “contacts” that get him a better-paying job. Vocational courses almost inevitably confirm such an attitude, since their main purpose is to perfect technical ability, to teach special skills.
The “humanistic” aspect of the curriculum is usually approached in the same spirit, even by those who think of themselves as opponents of the vocational emphasis. The courses are expected in some way or other to help students “get ahead” as individuals. Humanistic education thus becomes the attempt to teach and to acquire the kind of “insignia” that are thought to be proof of cultural election.
This pragmatic emphasis may not always be individualistically motivated. With the project of The Republic for the training of the guardians, for instance, the emphasis was rather in the direction of Plato’s yearning that education might serve for the triumph of all Greek states, united in a common cause against the “barbarians.” And nationalistic emphases in general would belong here; for although there is conceivable an ideal world of nationalisms that would be related to one another as peacefully as the varied portraits in an art gallery, we need no very difficult fables to admonish us about the ever-ready dialectical resource whereby national “differences” may become national “conflicts.”
Only a truly “universal” attitude toward educational purposes can modify this intrinsically competitive emphasis. Such an attitude would be grounded in the thought that all mankind has a major stake in the attempt to discipline any tendencies making for the kind of war now always threatening. In this spirit, we would aim at the discovery of methods that would be a technical equivalent of such uneasiness as, in religious terms, has been called the “fear of God.” And we would seek for a technical equivalent of “mortification,” thereby hoping to make active and mundane a kind of scruples now too often confined to the separate realm of the cloister.
But such “technicalizing” would produce notable changes of emphasis, since we are here discussing purely secular modes of education. In this realm, the pious “fear of God” would be replaced by a partially impious “fear of symbol-using” (that is, an ironic fear of the very resourcefulness that is man’s greatest boast). And “mortification” in the religious sense would have, as its secular “dramatistic” analogue, a methodic distrust of competitive ambitions which goad us either as individuals or as groups. Or, more accurately: We would try, at least within the limited orbit of theory, or contemplation, to perfect techniques for doubting much that is now accepted as lying beyond the shadow of a doubt.
A mere inculcating of “tolerance,” “good will,” “respect for the rights of others,” and such, cannot be enough. Such attitudes are all too airily “positive.” And the educational training here advocated would be in its very essence negative, as negative as the Ten Commandments.
Yet its negativity would be of a paradoxical sort; we might label it “Faustological,” since it would center in the study of ambition as a disease. At the same time it would concede that we had all better be very, very ambitious and sufficiently exacting in our ambitiousness to cancel off the many prompter ambitions that, given the new weapons, threaten to destroy us.
The pragmatic, the admonitory, and the appreciative thus merge. For we would study the means by which men have been able to increase their assertiveness; thereby we should be “appreciating” human genius, yet doing so with fearsomeness (albeit a fearsomeness which our technical approach enables us to temper in the kindly spirit of comedy, while we tentatively seek to develop ways of looking upon us all as fools rather than as knaves). But in such tripleness of emphasis, the admonitory (the “negative”) is to be treated as “foremost among the equals.”
The aim, then, is to droop, at least ad interim (within the special conditions of the educational enterprise, considered as but one stage of a person life)—but to droop so methodically, with such an emphasis upon method, that each day can bristle with assertions, as we attempt to perfect our lore of the human scramble (what Goethe calls the Zeitenstrudel, and Diderot the grand branle).
Education, as so conceived, would brood, as with the Flaubert who wrote L’Education Sentimentale. But in its attempts to perfect a technique of brooding, it would learn to cherish the documents as never before. No expunging of records here. All must be kept, and faithfully examined; and not just that it may be approved or disapproved, but also that it be considered as a challenge to our prowess in placing it within the unending human dialogue as a whole.
If we temporarily risk being stopped by such a discipline, let us realize that the discipline is ideally designed precisely to that end. Education must not be thought of merely as a means of preparing students for market, though that’s what much of it now is. Education must be thought of as a technique of preparatory withdrawal, the institutionalizing of an attitude that one should be able to recover at crucial moments, all along the subsequent way.
Admittedly, this view of education as a kind of smiling hypochondriasis presents some difficulties. The promissory, by its very nature, likes to look forward. And there is apparently danger lest youth would either too greatly resist such doctrines as a mere “counsel of despair,” or would accept them only too thoroughly, if a whole educational program were undertaken in such a spirit. Perhaps, the world being what it is, this enterprise could be but one course in a curriculum, rather than the guiding principle behind educational policy in general. But if so, at least it would be conceived of as a kind of “central” or “over-all’ course, a “synoptic” project for “unifying the curriculum” by asking the students themselves to think of their various courses in terms of a single distinctive human trait (the linguistic) that imposes its genius upon all particular studies.
Also, there can be much very active enjoyment in approaching the precious documents from this point of view. When the mortifying “fear of man as symbol-user” has been “comically” technicalized, such an attitude does not by any means close our horizons but opens many new vistas, making all aspects of symbolic activity somehow “contemporary” with us.
“Drooping,” as so qualified, can be quite muscular.
Educational Process
Methodology
Primarily, we are ever to be on the lookout for
