Читать книгу Humanistic Critique of Education - Группа авторов - Страница 7

Introduction: A Prelude to Critique

Peter M. Smudde and Bernard L. Brock

Fifty years hence we may well conclude that there was no “crisis of American education” in the closing years of the twentieth century—there was only a growing incongruence between the way twentieth-century schools taught and the way late-twentieth century children learned.

—Peter Drucker

America’s approach to education is terribly outmoded and should be updated to the realities of the 21st century.1 The contributors in this volume would like to breathe some new life into the education system and set a new direction. This book’s central focus, then, concerns Burke’s philosophy of education and how his larger system informs us about education as a specific arena of human symbolic action. Isolating a Burkeian pedagogy is simple enough, if and only if one were to depend on his only formal treatise on education from 1955, “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education,” published here in the first chapter. But Burke scholars would strongly caution against such an approach, citing at least the explanatory power of Burke’s canon to truly illuminate his thinking and apply to humanistic education. This orientation is particularly true when it comes to the symbolic action of education and all that transpires in this specialized realm of human relations.

Kenneth Burke’s philosophy and critical method have been extended into many areas of human relations, but perhaps the least-often addressed area for extension is that of education. A search of published scholarship on the application of Burke to specific and general areas of education (see Chapter 4) reveals only a handful of work, and most of it was published sporadically within the last quarter century and focused on applying only selected Burke “tools” (especially the pentad). Other scholarly work done around the turn of the 21st century was presented at National Communication Association conferences in 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2004, all of which largely targeted ways to teach Burke’s ideas and only began to examine his system as it applies to broad matters of pedagogy.

This book does not develop or advance any singular view on education, except to have Burke as the nexus for thinking about and acting on education. Accordingly, in true Burkeian fashion, this book allows for multiple perspectives. As Burke once said of himself and the critical enterprise: “I think that there has to be a lot of leeway in this business. I see no reason for being authoritarian. . . . The fundamental notion of choice in my scheme is difference” (as cited in Chesebro, 1992, p. 365). The fact that Burke created an open system—one that welcomes others’ views that are similar and different, converging and diverging—allows it to grow beyond what he originally set forth. This book seeks to do just that for education.

Humanistic Critique of Education’s collection of critiques about education addresses the subject on both general and specific levels. On a general level this book concerns the rhetoric of contemporary teaching and learning. Humanistic Critique of Education focuses on education as “symbolic action” that is “equipment for living” and the foundation for discovery. In this way the book sparks dialog about improving education in democratic societies through a humanistic frame. On a specific level, this book takes the lead from Burke’s only focused piece on education to address matters about the design, practice, and outcomes of educational programs in the new millennium. Concepts like cognitive motivational outcomes, student development, literacy, active learning, constructivism, problem-based learning, cooperative educational movement, learning communities, student retention, community responsibility/service, technology, curriculum development, and others are featured. Such specificity grounds Humanistic Critique of Education in the current context of pedagogy and public policy. This book takes the position that Kenneth Burke’s approach to humans as “bodies that learn language” and rhetoric as symbolic action has a great deal to contribute to a rebirth of education. The chapters that follow will describe aspects of that rebirth.

Readers may wonder why a 50 year old educational treatise can help improve today’s and tomorrow’s education situation. Burke is a pivotal figure in twentieth century rhetoric and social criticism, and we can use his ideas to help us learn from the past and, especially, better prepare for the future of education in America. The guiding principle for Humanistic Critique of Education is that education is the foundation for citizenship and community. This principle is humanistic in its origin and serves as the perspective from which the book analyzes the subject of education. Kenneth Burke’s work is the inspiration for the book’s humanistic perspective on education. The central question raised and answered in the book is, “How does Burke’s philosophy of education and, especially, his larger system, inform our understanding of the nature and activity of a humanistic education, and how would that understanding be applied to education?” The book also answers a natural follow-up question: “Why is a Burkeian perspective important as we critique education in this new millennium?”

Timeliness for Critique

An accumulation of problems is throwing American education into crisis, derailing it from its goal to prepare students to become positive, contributing members of society. The traditional signs of crisis are overcrowded classrooms, school buildings in dire need of repair, and under-prepared teachers. Silent dropouts and HIV rates continue to increase. Charter schools have seen mixed results, especially for those where students did not score better than those from traditional public or private schools or scored worse (cf. Planty, Hussar, Snyder et al, 2008; Snyder, Dillow, & Hoffman, 2008). Some students are receiving excellent educational experiences, but this simply is not happening for many children throughout the country, many of whom score below their grade in reading, writing, or mathematics (cf. Bracey, 2007; Ginsberg & Lyche, 2008; Loveless, 2007; Mead & Rotherham, 2008; McCoog, 2008: Murnane & Steele, 2007; Ogden, 2007). No Child Left Behind has been either a praised or vilified public policy (cf. Bracey, 2007; Lips, 2008; Nelson, McGhee, Meno & Slater, 2007; Ogden, 2007). Its antecedent report, A Nation At Risk, in 1983 has also been cited as a watershed to the increasing federal influence—for better and for worse—on the nation’s educational policy and curricula, including the benefits of standardized testing (cf. Casey, Bicard, Bicard, & Nichols, 2008; Ginsberg & Lyche, 2008; Hewitt, 2008; Lips, 2008).

These are just a few of the problems that have brought about the crisis and suggest the timeliness of this critique. However, we cannot solve the crisis by simply adding more money and doing more of what the schools have traditionally done. The following concepts, the detail of which are laid out in Figure 1, frame the tone for that new direction and are central to this book. First, the Western world is experiencing a paradigm shift in thought from a scientific to a humanistic orientation. This does not mean that the technology created by science will be dismantled. It only means that it will be placed in a new context. Instead of people being at the mercy of science and technology, humans will control them for the betterment of society. Education must reflect this shift in values.

Table 1. Comparison between status quo and humanistic views of education.

Education in the Status Quo	Education as Symbolic Action
past orientation	future orientation
content/knowledge focus	behavior/action focus
curricular	participative (increase intellectual involvement)
intellectual	functional
scientific	poetic humanism
life phase (milestone)	life-long learning
individual	sociological
students	learners (holistic)
technology as end	technology as agency
authoritarian	egalitarian
hierarchy	pluralism
metaphor	community
grades	outcomes (learning quality; performance measurement)

Next, 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. In Chapter 7, James Klumpp and Erica Lamm reveal metaphors’ potency in education because they direct people’s attention to the ends that they name, such as student as container, as consumer, as apprentice, as unmolded clay, as computer have marked perspectives on education. Klumpp and Lamm then trace such metaphors’ implications on the attitudes about and practices of education among students, teachers, and the public at large.

Chapters 8, 9 and 10 round out this volume’s humanistic critique by examining education in the bigger, social-democratic picture. In Chapter 8, Robert Wess explains that Burke’s studies of symbolic action and rhetoric offer a new conceptualization of what it means to be human, based on the idea that we are “symbol-using animals” or “bodies that learn language”—all of which stresses language and biology brought together to show humankind as intimately ecological beings. Wess argues, then, that ecological literacy—what it means to be human both biologically, as part of the ecosystem of the earth (ecological science), and linguistically, as distinctive in the way we inhabit the earth (verbal or symbolic action)—may prove to be the paradigm best suited to flesh out Burke’s vision about humanity fully, particularly as it bears on education. In Chapter 9, Bryan Crable summarizes the foundational assumptions and concepts of Burke’s dramatistic perspective of education, and offers suggestions about how this perspective might be used to provide an overall framework for reconceptualizing the aims and goals of American education. For Crable, a truly dramatistic curriculum would start with language in early childhood to form the basis of all educational efforts, rather than traditional emphases on math, writing, and science. Primary and secondary education, thereafter, features a complete developmental program for linguistic appreciation. Finally, in Chapter 10, David Williams observes abundant current concern with the condition of U.S. civic engagement and democratic culture. Accordingly, Williams frames Burke’s “linguistic approach” to education to contextualize that approach in the problems of and prospects for democratic culture and to discuss the implications of the Burkeian approach to education and democracy for the renewal of American democratic culture.

Humanistic Critique of Education: Teaching and Learning as Symbolic Action fills an important scholarly niche by bringing together excellent scholarship while extending Kenneth Burke’s ideas into a rarely touched area of inquiry, thus providing an opportunity to foster new research and application of his system in new and fruitful ways. Research findings based on ideas applied in situ from Humanistic Critique of Education would be the next important step to contributing knowledge through the scholarship on teaching and learning.

Notes

1. Bernie Brock and I wrote this introduction several months before his death, and I carried on our work for publication. This chapter is likely the last (or at least one of his last) projects, which he embraced with his usual enthusiasm and critical perspective. Through this brief chapter we wanted to apply some of his selected critical observations about America’s education system and bolster them with evidence from other sources—to help me frame this volume’s role in bridging scholarship about Kenneth Burke and education.

2. A related metaphor to these is “student as customer,” which many institutions use to define both their relationships with students and their institutional missions. The problem with this metaphor is that it, essentially, equates education with the mere purchasing of a product or service (cf. McMillan & Cheney, 1996; chapter 7 in this volume). Although education, strictly speaking, may be viewed as a service, it certainly is not like buying a product, such as a toaster. And if education is viewed as a service, it is unlike having a carpet cleaned, for example, where people who want it done may be those who cannot do it well, do not want to do it at all themselves, or find it easiest to pay someone to do it for them. Education, if viewed as a service, is unique from all others, at least because of the particular symbolic action inherent in educational settings among instructors, students, alumni, and administration.

References

Blakesley, D. (2002). The elements of dramatism. New York: Longman.

Bracey, G. W. (2007, October). The 17th Bracey Report on the condition of public education: The first time “everything changed.” Phi Delta Kappan, 119–136.

Casey, L. B., Bicard, D. F., Bicard, S. C., & Nichols, S. M. C. (2008, April). A much delayed response to A Nation at Risk: Recent innovations in general and special education. Phi Delta Kappan, 593–596.

Chesebro, J. W. (1992). Extensions of the Burkean system. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78, 356–368.

Ginsberg, R., & Lyche, L. F. (2008). The culture of fear and the politics of education. Educational Policy, 22(1), 10–27.

Hewitt, T. W. (2008, April). Speculations on A Nation at Risk: Illusions and realities. Phi Delta Kappan, 575–579.

Lips, D. (2008, April 18). A nation still at risk: The case for federalism and schools. Backgrounder, 2125, 1–10. Retrieved October 21, 2008, from http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/bg2125.cfm

Loveless, T. (2007). The 2007 Brown Center Report on American education: How well are American students learning? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Retrieved October 21, 2008, from http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2007/1211_education_loveless/1211_education_loveless.pdf

McCoog, I. J. (2008). 21st century teaching and learning. ERIC Digest. Retrieved October 21, 2008, from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/3f/65/1e.pdf

McMillan, J. J., & Cheney, G. (1996). The student as consumer: The implications and limitations of a metaphor. Communication Education, 45(1), 1-15.

Mead, S., & Rotherham, A. J. (2008). Changing the game: The federal role in supporting 21st century educational innovation. Washington DC: Brookings Institution. Retrieved October 21, 2008, from http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2008/1016_education_mead_rotherham/1016_education_mead_rotherham.pdf

Mottet, T. P., Richmond, V. P., McCroskey, J. C. (2006). Handbook of instructional communication: Rhetorical and relational perspectives. Columbus, Ohio: Allyn & Bacon.

Nelson, S. W., McGhee, M. W., Meno, L. R., & Slater, C. L. (2007, May). Fulfilling the promise of educational accountability. Phi Delta Kappan, 702–709.

Ogden, W. R. (2007). Mountain climbing, bridge building, and the future of American education. Education, 127(3), 361–368.

Petraglia, J. (1998). Reality by design: The rhetoric and technology of authenticity in education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Planty, M., Hussar, W., Snyder, T., Provasnik, S., Kena, G., Dinkes, R., KewalRamani, A., Kemp, J. (2008). The condition of education 2008. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, U. S. Department of Education. Retrieved, October 21, 2008, from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008031.pdf

Snyder, T. D., Dillow, S. A., & Hoffman, C. M. (2008). Digest of education statistics 2007. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, U. S. Department of Education. Retrieved, October 21, 2008, from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/