Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through Information Technology

Chapter Three - The Educator's Mission

Digitizing our culture will occasion significant historical change. It will not do so overnight, but in a matter of decades as we round one of history's majestic promontories. Should we go by adrift, blown this way, then that, in mindless disarray? Or should we sail confidently around the cape, adventuring hope and considering intent?

Only a catastrophe will stop us from rounding this historic point, driven by a powerful means of communication. This assertion does not propound a technological determinism, wrought as if technology were some suprahuman force, determining our lives apart from us. Technology is one human, all-too-human, means that people have always used to make their history. We, like they, will live with the consequences, and we need to take responsibility for how we shape our lives with our historic innovations, the computer among them. In saying that we are rounding an historic bend created by our inventing new communications technologies, we propound no determinism; we simply characterize the effect of human initiatives on the human destiny.

Thus Norbert Wiener, one of the key innovators in the development of automatic control systems, called his reflections on the social implications of cybernetics, The Human Use of Human Beings. One might think this title strange, if one thinks of the computer as something separate and apart from human beings. But it makes good sense, if one recognizes that the computer simply helps to enlarge our human abilities. The computer is extending human capacities to remember, to perceive, to think. It neither displaces these powers nor obviates our needs for them. Through technology, humanity augments itself, and humans are as responsible for their conduct with their powers augmented as they were without. As we extend our intellectual faculties with the computer, what human use of human beings should we fashion with them, particularly as educators?

The Reciprocity of Equity and Excellence
Equity and excellence: these aspirations have drawn Western culture into modernity, and for better and for worse they are pulling the other cultures of the world along. Both equity and excellence are many-sided aspirations and they have long stood in a creative tension with each other. Historically, educational effort has been one of the means for cultivating both equity and excellence in productive, potent ways.

Let us survey the historical significance of equity and excellence, the mission these qualities perform in life. In doing that, we do not intend to define them philosophically. We will neither argue normatively that here is the one correct conception of equity or excellence, nor pick analytically, exposing flaws in this or that version. Instead, we inquire why representatives of our tradition have taken equity and excellence seriously, seeing important matters to be at stake through them. What has been the use and disadvantage of equity and excellence in cultural experience?

Equity generates historical vigor. Where there is no equity, the favored become arrogant while the deprived become despairing. With an approximate equity, all persons and groups engage fully, from within, in the realization of their unique potentialities. Equity is to the polity what good conditioning is to the athlete.

Rarely has anyone argued that equity should produce universal sameness, entailing precise equality with everyone getting the same measure of goods, neither a jot more nor less, than anyone else. Human beings and their circumstances vary too much in real ways for mathematical identity to be the norm of equity. The norm of equity, however, cannot tolerate differences that are too extreme, so extreme that one person cannot recognize commonalty with another. Whether the cleavage be between rich or poor, townsfolk or peasant, minority or majority, domiciled or homeless, or any other distinguishing mark, it cannot be so great as to define separate orders of being that have no mutuality, one with the other. When that happens, equity disappears.

Equity involves respect for differences within a broad ambit of commonalty. This general principle links the main practical expressions of the drive to equity in our tradition -- equality before the law; the guarantee of minority rights; and maintenance of equal opportunity. Without equality before the law, commonalty breaks down and the community shatters between those who bear the burden of onerous laws and those who enjoy exemption. Without the guarantee of minority rights, respect for differences evaporates, suppressed at one or another difficult juncture by a tyrannous majority. Without efforts to preserve equal opportunity, separations in status and differences in condition build until neither haves nor have-nots can preserve a pretense to commonalty with their counterparts. Equity is unity in diversity, e pluribus unum.

What good arises historically when equity pertains? Were humans and their conditions all identical, equity would simply describe a condition, not an achievement, wrought for a purpose. But people all differ, and we can all mutually benefit from our differences when we arrange them well. Civilization, community, and polity all serve to enable people to arrange their differences in constructive ways: equity is the governing principle of these arrangements. Thus the fruits of equity seem somewhat paradoxical -- they arise, not from making everyone more alike, but in enabling people to share maximum benefit from their differences.

Plato began the Western discussion of justice by recognizing that human civilizations were complicated groupings of different people, each with different conditions, interests, and skills. Civilized people had a stake, he observed, in their not being all alike, but in their benefiting from their differences through a division of activity, with each person perfecting special interests and gifts. Justice was a peculiarly civilized problem, a problem of equity, one of harmonizing the fruitful differences among people so that the variety of capacities served the good of all. The virtue of each deserved nurture and respect. Equity allows each to realize unique potentials and to participate actively in the shared effort of civilization.

A society that does not maintain equity will include many who accommodate to misfortune through despair and passivity. They will not make the most of their possibilities and will drag as a weight on the resources of the whole. Others will experience their inequitable privilege as a dimension of their being, something not achieved but given in the apparent order of the world. They will fail to nurture acquired strengths, confusing such accomplishments with gifts of nature. Increasingly they will enjoy the forms of power, without its substance, lordly buffoons. Even between those extremes, where people would seem to enjoy a bracing modesty, they will deflect their energies in behaviors of avoidance and emulation, shunning the needy and aping empty privilege. Thus even the middle class can become at once anxious and over- reaching.

Equity improves the chances that a people will achieve a collective vigor in the face of history. Rarely does a single group by itself ensure the greatness of the whole. For the quality of life to flourish, a wide range of people must have a sweep of skills, each exerting effort, doing well what each does best. Equity makes it possible for each to feel that he can become somebody of worth and that he can do it best by respecting his condition, skills, and interests, making the most of what these are. Equity makes diversity beneficial. It leavens the energies of a people. Equity energizes: that is its historic value to the conduct of life.

We have been reflecting on what equity, as a condition, does for people in history. This question differs from the problem of how a people can achieve or maintain a condition of equity in their history. What food does for me is not the same as what I do to get food -- one has to do with nutrition, the other economics. How equity benefits civilization is not the same as how a civilization becomes equitable. Failure to note this distinction often confuses discussions of equity, especially as it relates to excellence.

Historically, where life is equitable, people will display more cultural vigor. People maintain equity through their history, however, by treating it as a difficult balance that they need to maintain and keep, a dynamic tension between commonalty and difference, unity and plurality, identity and multiplicity. Recognizing this tension, people can then use opportunities for change to move first toward one pole and then toward the other, whichever is deficient, continually channeling effort toward the side of the balance that seems then insufficient. Achieving and maintaining equity is thus like riding a bicycle -- the rider subtlety steers and sways against the direction of fall, turning away from a tumble, crossing the balance point, and then turning back the other way as the imbalance reverses. Should she lean exclusively to this side or to the other, the rider will flop to the ground. The rider keeps the bike upright, continually steering it away from the side to which it is falling, bringing it upright, then starting a fall in the other direction, all as a simple expression of her kinesthetic sense -- she acts and does not find it easy to be consciously articulate about riding a bike. So too, people maintain equity, moving back and forth between commonalty and difference, as a simple expression of their sense of justice, sometimes nurturing distinctions and sometimes leveling differences in ways that they sense to be fit even though they may find them hard to plan or explain.

As movement enables the rider to steer the bike against the direction of fall, so historical development allows people to maintain equity by swaying between commonalty and difference. In a static society, people cannot shift their direction between solidarity and variation, and an imbalance toward one or the other cannot be righted. Perceiving this link between social rigidity and the loss of equity, ancient Greek historians argued that a breakdown in equity caused stasis, the paralysis of a society riven by excessive differences. They had cause and effect reversed, and Machiavelli in his Discourses explained most clearly that the problem really worked the other way around: when dynamic development petered out, people became frozen in their oppositions, unable to shift against their fall. Then their differences inexorably widened, equity decayed, and the creative components of society turned to internal strife, one with the other, leaving the culture in a prolonged, irreversible decadence. In contrast, in a continually developing society, dynamic circumstances enable groups to change their direction of movement with respect to difference and commonalty, shifting from leveling to differentiating and then in time back to leveling and on, thus permitting the preservation of equity over time.

Expansion, change, dynamism: these enable people to sustain equity over time. One cannot balance the stationary bicycle. In the same way, a quiescent society, one that lacks historical movement, cannot maintain equity. Thus, looking at what equity does for people in history, we have observed that the condition of equity maintains the vigor of a society. But looking at what people must do in history to get and preserve equity, we find that their capacity to change, to develop, to move dynamically in history enables them to approximate and maintain equity over time by employing their sense of justice to shift between cultivating commonalty and then difference, difference and then commonalty, thus keeping the dynamic balance, riding the bicycle of time.

What drives this capacity to develop, to change? What pedals the historical bike? Here excellence enters the equations of history. Historic development flows from the ability to break through the molds of the moment. A person who excels at something penetrates beyond given levels of achievement. Historical dynamism arises from this drive to excel. Conservative excellence is an oxymoron, and its proponents confuse real excellence with conventional achievements. In actuality, equity is the much more conservative virtue, for it enables each, in a fit way, to contribute to the common enterprise. In contrast, excellence does not conserve; it forces change. To excel is to shatter molds, exceed norms, to better the existing standards. An ever flowing excellence preserves the dynamism, the historical movement, that permits people to maintain equity. Excellence drives change so that people can accentuate commonalty when differences begin to become extreme and they can nurture differences when commonalty begins to cloy and suffocate the spirit. Excellence, by breaking beyond the given, turns the wheels of change.

Many who write in praise of excellence attribute to it the fruits of equity. Excellence does not necessarily guarantee a high level of competence across all the walks that contribute to the common weal. General levels of competence are the work of equity: with equity, each person feels that she has a fair shake and will, therefore, live her life, integrally, to the hilt, proud and engaged. To attain a high level of general competence, each and all must exert themselves, and equity promotes such universal exertion. Historical change, however, does not come from diffused competence, but from localized, unexpected innovations that alter existing balances between groups and functions, unexpectedly forcing readjustments among all components of society. These innovations take place when someone, in one or another walk, comes to excel all expectations, to surpass existing norms and eclipse familiar patterns.

An historic flow of excellence keeps a civilization in dynamic development, allowing it to maintain equity over time. Thus we can say that the historical function of excellence is to be the historical source of the condition of equity. What, however, is the historical source of excellence? If excellence produces equity, what produces excellence? To a certain extent, excellence is an indelible expression of the human spirit, what Nietzsche called the will to power, an aspiration to find and fulfill one's possibilities. In this sense, excellence happens anywhere, often under the least propitious circumstances. Thus change has eventually, surprisingly, welled up throughout all societies, even the most static and regressive. Yet however inexorable, excellence as a driving dynamism has been more prevalent in some societies than in others and it is for this source of relative prevalence that we search.

With respect to the maintenance of equity, significant excellence can originate from any sector of society. In that sense, excellence is intrinsically egalitarian. What is important in excellence for keeping equity is not that excellence occur regularly at the leading edge, whatever that may be, but that it occur with sufficient dynamism that it forces readjustments among all the parts, allowing them to shift orientation, like the cyclist, between the poles of equity. Such excellence can sometimes occur in a society that arbitrarily channels all advantage to limited groups, but it does so very rarely as the indelible spirit rises up from within one or another dispossessed group. Thus redeeming religions arose from decadent cultures. But societies that provide all their participants with opportunities to develop, to generate a compelling excellence, will more continuously undergo the dynamic readjustment of their parts.

Increasingly in modern societies, people have been using the intrinsic egalitarianism of excellence to maximize the likelihood of its occurrence and to keep social relations in continual movement. Since excellence can occur unexpectedly in any and all walks of life, a society that approximates equity, and provides all walks with nurturing opportunities, will be the most dynamic, the one continually forced to undergo change and innovation. The frequency with which an energizing excellence wells up will be improved by ensuring that each and all have opportunities for self- development. Here is the wager of participatory polities: equity is the historical condition that increases the frequency that excellence will emerge in one or another sector, forcing realignment throughout the culture.

Excellence sustains equity; equity occasions excellence. Excellence drives historical development; equity spreads human competence. The two together foster progress, an improving quality of life for a growing number of persons. The great achievement of modernity -- roughly the half millennium from 1500 to 2000 -- has been to harness equity and excellence together and to use them to transform both the material and cultural conditions of life, extending unprecedented opportunities to a multitude of peoples.

During this period, technologies for the mechanical reproduction of information, particularly printing, greatly facilitated efforts to promote both equity and excellence. Printing expanded access to the defining documents of law and religion. It empowered vernacular cultures to address all the complexities of civilization and it evinced the creation of a community of scientific discourse. Printing altered numerous arenas of activity, giving people the opportunity to achieve unprecedented excellences in them. Printing also enhanced equity by nurturing both commonalty and diversity, helping to provide general access to cultural assets and to preserve the distinctive resources of numerous groups and specialists. Consciously and unconsciously, people made printing a powerful leaven in modern culture by discovering ways to use it as a means promoting both equity and excellence.

No less needs to be done with the computer as a system. We are rounding a bend of history that will express our culture in digital code. We should do so aware of the importance of equity and excellence for the enduring quality of historic life. During the rise of modernity, education has been a domain that helped to link equity and excellence constructively, making use of the pedagogical possibilities of print. The task before us now, as the era of print gives way to that of the computer, is to find ways to renew the pedagogical link between equity and excellence, which has been strained of late. Educators have a mission to nurture our historic capacity for equity and excellence. To do that, they need to use advanced technologies to create an education that will be both integral and liberal, both meaningful relative to each person and worthy of each person's autonomy.

Education, Liberal and Integral
It is one thing to say that education should promote equity and excellence. It is another to explain what kind of education can best do that. Links between educational activities and their results, both biographical and historical, are not direct. People believe that the extent and quality of education makes a difference in the experience of individuals and groups, but the results unfold slowly over time and many other contingencies affect the outcome.

Most tests of educational outcomes cravenly duck this difficulty. Evaluators assume that all results empirically evident at the conclusion of an educational activity will endure, relatively unchanged, for as long as they may be significant. Thus they measure the quality of education by the grades a person earned in a sequence of courses and they estimate the quality of schools, teachers, and programs by measuring how well children perform under their influence at one or another instant of time. It is a testament to our tolerance for absurdity that the educational research establishment allows such a methodology to stand.

Think of investment theories. With respect to education, researchers and the public obsessively look only at the rate of current return. Which method, they ask, yields the highest immediate gain? Economists long ago realized that this was a poor way to ascertain the value of an investment, for every investment has a useful life, which may be long or short, and a pattern of payoff across that life, which will vary, instance to instance. By measuring only the immediate current return, investment in growth industries would make little sense at their start, for at the start growth industries often lose money and usually require plowing back whatever profit they generate into development and expansion. Often the time to invest in growth industries is when they have negative current returns. In general, if people judged only by current returns, practices of deferred gratification would seem merely masochistic, yet these have been among the historically most productive economic strategies. Like economic investments, the benefits of education accrue over long periods and they accumulate in many forms. Our educational measures provide very weak resources for investigating these cumulative benefits and educators consequently have trouble making good sense of the relative value of the various means they might adopt.

If the computer as a system has fundamental significance in education, it will be as a long-term transformative agent. Experimental measures of how effective one technique is relative to another rarely measure long-term secular effects, showing how a systemic innovation, operating from kindergarten through graduate school, performs, across the full span of people's lives, relative to other system options. In education we have not yet invented the techniques of integration for calculating the full values of the whole education, leaving claims of measured worth partial and deceptive. Hence, little will be gained by culling the literature to show that a selected method, used in this subject through that grade, will accelerate performance by some fractional current return. We should legitimate experiments in a different way.

Let us try a different method; let us attend to intuited preferences, especially to those that recur frequently in different times and places, trying to reason out why those intuitions may have a vital truth to them. Over and over again, people in many times and many settings have had strong, intuited preferences for and against particular types of education. Neither they nor we can rigorously measure out quantitative grounds for these preferences, taking the full span of education from infancy through maturity into account, but we can thoughtfully understand them and perhaps see how they connect to the imperatives of equity and excellence. Such reasoning may help us understand how to use digital technologies as historically constructive agents in education. Here we will concentrate on two such recurrently intuited preferences, a persistent quest for an integral education and for a liberal education, which we will see, as our reflections unfold, link pedagogically to the more general aspirations of equity and excellence.

Commentators often resort to the term "liberal" in discussing education. They rarely agree precisely on what it means. I will return to the topic and give a version of it. But first, let us consider the other recurring preference, that for an integral education. Commentators rarely use the term "integral" in discussing education. Yet they almost always agree about the matters that we can describe with this term. An integral education is one that the student integrates and makes her own. Educators analyze the functions that lead to an integral education when they study the processes of assimilation and stress the importance of intellectual synthesis. Likewise, they have often decried education that fails to be integral, objecting over and over to rote learning, empty mimicry, and taking on airs. If the term is a bit novel, the phenomenon is not -- it simply has not been definitively named in educational discourse.

Education should be integral, it should consist of things that a student integrates into a set of skills, understandings, preferences, and beliefs that comprise a whole, one that integrally characterizes the person. A person who has achieved an integral education would be likely to have what psychologists once called "an integrated personality," and would be, in an even more traditional terminology, "a person of integrity." Integral education need not lead to bland sameness in all; rather, as we will see, it should take into account the differences that characterize each. Cultures are collective human works of such complexity that no person can integrate into his character all that is of value in one of them. Were a culture so simple, or the human character so all encompassing, history would freeze in a repetitive classicism, which is probably why so many primitive cultures persist unchanging. In a single, complex, culture, many, many different integral educations are possible and desirable.

People do not easily achieve an integral education. The world of education has many stock nincompoops -- pedants, bores, pettifoggers, humbugs, fakers, dreamers, incompetents, sticklers, marionettes, drones, bombasts, drudges, and charlatans. All exhibit a failure to integrate acquirements fully. In a more positive vein, the great studies of education in our tradition have put the problem of integral education central. Plato's Republic, turns on the question of how the person can integrate appetite, emotions, and reason in a harmonious unity in which each part, keeping to its proper business, contributes constructively in coping with the claims of experience. Rousseau's Emile, turns on the issue of how the wise educator can hearken to the unfolding readiness of the maturing child so that her development is neither forced nor stunted, keeping instead to a regimen of challenges that strengthen her as she rises to each. Dewey's Democracy and Education turns on the problem of situating the child's growth in his reflective experience, nurturing and sustaining it, from the world of play outwards into that of science, work, social bonding, and politics. Throughout these, and many other works of our educational tradition, the pedagogical problem centers on the importance of integrating the particulars of education into an integral whole for the person and the group.

How does a person integrate cultural acquirements into his character? Consider some hypotheses responsive to this question, a question that is far too complicated ever to receive a conclusive answer. The generalizations that follow here have their roots, not primarily in psychology, but in history and other cultural studies, along with simple introspective reflection. We should entertain them, not as claims to achieved knowledge, but as design heuristics that may enable us to create more effective modes of practice. Too often, educational researchers adopt methods that exemplify the old saw, "penny wise, pound foolish." Let us reach, as widely as we can, for knowledge tested in the crucible of controlled observation. But when, owing to the complexity of the activities at issue, we cannot subject the full spectrum of relevant variables to sound experimental study, let us not truncate our thinking about them to deal only with those few variables that we can grasp through controlled observation. Where the phenomena are many-sided, as in understanding how a person integrates cultural acquirements, we should turn to philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, to all the human studies, to advance our reflections.

In integrating learning, it does not suffice to learn to recognize something or even to repeat it on cue, or to know a lot about it. A person who thoroughly assimilates a language may know far less about it than someone who has been taught it extensively without integrating it into his living or his work. An integral education challenges a student with things that are new to him, but it also allows him to select, to incorporate, to synthesize the new into what he knows, thinks, and believes. Sometimes, something new will not simply integrate with what came before, but will force him to reintegrate many of his ideas, and he will call that a transformative educational experience. Traditionally, formative education, which accentuated the ardor of thoroughly assimilating one's learning into one's life and work, often called for long apprenticeships capped with production of a difficult, unexpected masterwork.

An integral education will usually be a student-centered, active education. Teachers cannot integrate material for their students. This problem is quite evident for anyone who tries teaching skills that depend on a person's kinesthetic senses -- just about any sport that turns on one's sense of balance and coordination. Take, for instance, water-skiing. You can explain to someone what to do over and over. He won't get it until he gets in the water and feels the pull of the boat, the resistance of the water on his skis, and then, quickly or laboriously as the case may be, he gets the knack of letting complex forces intersect through his legs, arms, and torso. At that point he has integrated instruction and experience, using his kinesthetic senses to get up on the skis, and a whole new discourse can start between teacher and student, a discourse based on a shared understanding of the essential experience. The same holds for cycling, dance, gymnastics, diving, the use of tools: "let me show you" can at best inspire the student to trials in which he gets the feel for it himself and then a new exchange can begin between two people, who both know how to do it, in which they exchange the fruits of their complementary experiences.

As learning to manage one's body in complex ways requires that the student use her kinesthetic senses to integrate precept and example into her set of abilities, so too does integrating intellectual and emotional acquirements. Here the essential resource is the sense of judgment. Do not understand by "the sense of judgment" a quasi legal process of applying rules to instances, handing down a judgment about how a rule applies to a case. Rather the sense of judgment is a philosophic term for the process by which a person forms likes and dislikes, commitments, and rejections, in the full flux of experience. The sense of judgment generates selections. It is a biological, characterological, esthetic sensibility, and a teacher must appeal to a student's sense of judgment -- her sense of the interlocked importance and significance of things in the world she experiences that she uses to make choices, to allocate attention, to discern differences, to perceive possibilities, to respect limits, to sense dangers, to define aspirations, to obey precepts, to form intentions, to act for herself in her world. An educational system that does not effectively engage and make use of the sense of judgment that its students possess will be futile and dysfunctional.

Educators do not find it easy, however, to work with and through their students' sense of judgment. The system often functions as if students neither can nor should form likes and aversions according to their inner light, whatever that may be. "Eppur si muove. But still it moves," Galileo muttered, and so they do. Hence, the ineluctable working of each student's judgment, affirming this and rejecting that, makes it necessary that the design of formal education pay careful attention to the diversity of cultural and social conditions. Anyone can have transformative experiences, for better and for worse, and with only a few constructive (however painful) transformative encounters, the anonymous child of poverty and cultural marginality can rise to great achievements. But such metamorphoses will not occur without recognizing the child's sense of judgment as it stands, from the beginning. Hence, the refined preferences of bourgeois civility cannot be the presumed sense of judgment in an education for someone for whom street-smarts are a condition of survival. Instead, the starting points for integral education need to be numerous, diverse, and many-sided.

What are the forms of integration in education? To develop a sense of their range, reflect briefly on three ideal-type constructs that we can generate intellectually to help organize the wealth of experiential particulars -- combinatorial integration, self-reflective integration, and transformative integration. The first, integrating things by combining them together, seems to start early as the child draws connections wonderingly between different elements of experience. Combinatorial integration is relatively uncritical. It motivates all those childish questions -- what? how? why? where? when? The integration happens by a kind of passive proximity -- things need to stand just beyond the perimeter of the person's understanding so that he can encounter them and spontaneously make a connection between what he knows and these new matters. If he simply stays within his web of existing connections, no new combinations form, and if something is too distant from his current stock of integrated information and ideas, he will just let it pass without forming a lasting anchor in his realm of attention. Although it is most common in childhood, combinatorial integration continues through life and it is the normal way people incorporate new impressions and form new skills. Daily attention to the news probably has the function of exercising and keeping current a person's combinatorial integration of experience.

Self-reflective integration involves bringing to consciousness the unifying interests and capacities that constitute an assertion of unique personhood. Often, this form of integration seems to start in adolescence and to carry through early adulthood with the formation of a conscious vocation. For self-reflective integration to occur, a person needs a sense of multiple options. She exercises a projective imagination, seeing different possibilities unfolding in the foreseeable future. She discovers that her interests are many- sided and cannot all be reconciled together by simple combinatorial judgments. Choice becomes necessary, and with it arises the need for criteria and principles, a conscious sense of self, goals, purposes, tastes, and values. She must form these for herself and in modern Western cultures, at any rate, often she rails at the bland assumption of her elders that of course she will simply take on all the norms and expectations that they model for her. Yet forced into self-reliance in this self-reflective integration, she feels that the stakes are high -- while rebelling against presumptive models, she looks about for inspiration and encouragement, and step-by-step she forms her controlling sense of self.

Transformative integration shatters a person's established sense of self and recombines the parts in a new combination and purposeful orientation. Such a reintegration can occur at any time of life, usually through powerful experiences not under the person's control -- a trauma, disease, or upheaval in circumstances. Some significant challenge upsets a person's existing order of ideas, skills, and convictions, and he must reintegrate them in order to cope with the new circumstances. Sometimes in the course of formal education, one encounters a new perspective on things or new ideas or data that undercut the existing integration of a subject, forcing one to rethink it all. Increasingly, as the normal life span lengthens and people seek to maintain a sense of vital engagement with their circumstances, they subject themselves to transformative challenges, consciously through career changes and unconsciously through mid-life crises.

An integral education will help the person use her judgment to mobilize the fullest range of knowledge and skills in defining and pursuing the vital itinerary of her life. Insofar as her education is not integral, it will consist of acquirements of no vital import for her, of skills that will decay unused, of things learned but soon forgotten, of masks and routines performed with hidden resentment to please the powers-that-be. Through an integral education, a student takes responsibility for being whom she is, for both those things she recognizes as fruits of her conscious will and for those things she knows to have been accidents, whether negative or positive, that befell her arbitrarily, yet befell her, and not someone else, some other onto whom she can pass responsibility.

Integral education involves not a sovereign, all-powerful self, but the ever-varied particularities of personhood. As we shall see, each person's achieving an integral education is a key to promoting equity in our culture, But for now, simply let Michel de Montaigne sum up the ideal of integration in education -- "Bees pillage the flowers here and there, but they then make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme and marjoram; so the fragments borrowed from others [the student] will transform and blend together to make a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment. His education, labor, and study aim only at forming that."

As Montaigne perceived, through an integral education a student forms her judgment. In this sense, an integral education is closely allied to that other recurrent educational preference, namely for a liberal education. Let us reflect on the preference for a liberal education and then return to see how integral education and liberal education together help nurture equity and excellence in historical experience.

One can find numerous different descriptions of liberal education. In part, this multiplicity of visions has arisen because commentators treat the term "liberal," not as an adjective, but as part of the noun phrase, "a liberal education." They busily describe the distinctive features of a liberal education and they of course differ about what these are. Let us ask instead, why did people start qualifying education with the adjective "liberal?" They started using this adjective because it meant "appropriate for a free person." They did not mean by this that a certain kind of education would take slavish youths and magically make them free. The autonomy of the person was not the result of the education; the autonomy was the condition occasioning it. Some people were free, as distinct from dependent, and free persons would find a certain type of education particularly appropriate for themselves, which came to be called a liberal education -- an education worthy of the autonomous, self-directing, responsible person.

No studies mysteriously made people free; no subject had a liberating potency. The autonomy of the student, his moral freedom and responsibility, was not the consequence but the condition of a liberal education. Only on recognizing the student's inalienable autonomy did the choice of subjects traditionally represented by the liberal arts make sense. An unfree person lived and worked, bound by a determining status that laid down what skills and knowledge the person would need in order to function effectively within his allotted station. For the unfree, efficient education would impart those predetermined acquirements and nothing else. For the free person, the self-determining person, the problem of education was more complicated. What skills and knowledge the free person would need in the course of his autonomous conduct in the community could not be fully predetermined. Hence, an education worthy of a free person was one that would enable him to learn whatever skills and knowledge he needed as he conducted himself in open-ended self- governance. In order to do that without incurring a crucial dependence, exactly when autonomy was at stake, he needed to be able to learn his ever-changing skills and knowledge without dependence on paternalistic teachers and other authorities. Consequently the liberal arts were those disciplines the mastery of which would enable the free person to grasp any further concept or capacity as the need arose without dependence on teachers.

Note the phrasing, "without dependence on teachers." This stricture does not suggest that the free person will be without teachers. Quite the contrary, the free person will be autonomous with respect to them, taking responsibility for attending to this one and ignoring that one, able to judge the worth of their teaching for herself. What does a youth, aware of her autonomy, want as preparation? She sees life as a continual development throughout which she will always be responsible to herself and others for certain particulars. Owing to these responsibilities, she seeks competence; but having a keen sense of her ever-changing possibilities, she cannot say honestly exactly what competencies she will desire as she unfolds her life, and she is loath to let her pursuit of competence hamper her prospective development. Consequently, she seeks an open preparation that will enable her, in the all-important school of life, to move forward independently into whatever matter she feels drawn. Hence, neither an introduction to the great books nor the beginning of a specialty, the liberal studies were simply a rigorous discipline in the intellectual tools with which one could gain access to any particular matter. Such access might involve intense engagement with teachers -- be they persons, books, or situations. Having had an education worthy of a free person, she would proceed through those engagements without becoming dependent upon them.

In ancient times this discipline in the tools of study came through grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. But these subjects were not the crux, making the education in them liberal. They empowered people to conduct themselves later in life in ways befitting their freedom. Hence, ancient commentators like Seneca derided people who took pride in being occupied with the liberal studies; he held that one should work instead to be done with them, for no good came of them themselves; rather, they served simply as a preparation for the truly serious matter of self-formation. Can someone, after a suitable preparatory discipline and engagement, acquire new knowledge, skills, and understandings on their own without dependence on teachers and formal instruction? If one can answer in the affirmative, that person has a liberal education, an education worthy of an autonomous person, one who can proceed to acquire needed knowledge without reliance on others.

With the liberal assumption of the student's autonomy, the teacher accepted an important but highly circumscribed function: the self-effacing work of making himself unnecessary. Most pre- modern pedagogy is incomprehensible without realizing that its aim was not to make the teacher more effective, but to make him progressively less important. Traditionally, teachers had the self abnegating responsibility to make their assistance unnecessary by helping students build up their capacities to learn on their own. This is a goal common to most professions. The doctor who healed in such a way that he promoted the permanent dependency of his patient on his prescriptions would be called a pusher, not a physician. The healing arts aim to bring the patient to full strength and vigor, where she is no longer dependent on medical care. So too, the teacher should build up a student's capacity to learn on her own, independent of the teacher's care.

Traditionally, this effort to educate to independence was a controlling goal of educational practice. Formal pedagogy was to help the student arrive as quickly as possible at a point at which he no longer needed instruction in order to continue developing apace. For instance, the medieval scholastic, John of Salisbury, observed, when asked why some arts were called liberal, that "those to whom the system of the Trivium have unveiled the significance of all words, or the rules of the Quadrivium have unveiled the secrets of nature, do not need the help of a teacher in order to understand the meaning of books and to find the solutions of questions." This same desire to end one's dependence on one's teachers was implicit in the way the Renaissance educator, Batista Guarino, recommended his course of studies: "a master who should carry his scholars through the curriculum which I have now laid down may have confidence that he has given them a training which will enable them, not only to carry forward their own reading without assistance, but also to act efficiently as teachers in their turn."

Consider again the question of equity and excellence. We can hypothesize that a liberal education, the capacity to acquire further mastery independently, helps a person to achieve excellence. To excel is to transcend the limits of attained achievement, to pass precisely into those regions where teachers cannot lead. Excellence is a free assertion, a gratuitous quality, something achieved but not mechanistically caused. An education worthy of free persons enables a person to excel, not because it makes her excellent, but because it helps her make herself excel. Educators cannot guarantee that someone in their tutelage will come to excel in a particular walk of life. Such eventualities are beyond the educator's reach and depend on the student's ability to sustain her drive later into the realm of unprecedented achievement. What the educator can do is help the student develop abilities to learn self- sufficiently whatever she later feels she needs. Having become able to learn what she will, without dependence on help from others, the person pursuing excellence can better navigate the realm where she is setting new standards. As an education that enables a person to learn ever more without dependence on teachers and authorities, a liberal education supports people in their drive to excel.

In a similar way, we can hypothesize that an integral education supports the quest for equity. Equity in education entails in large part, that each person, despite differing from others, should attain an integral education. The problem with equity is to respect differences while maintaining commonalty. This problem of equity is most acute, not with respect to "other people," but with respect to "each person." How can one, regardless of one's race, religion, creed, condition, and country of origin, come to respect one's own identifying differences while affirming one's solidarity with all others, recognizing each in his turn as equally unique yet essential to the whole? Through an integral education, a person integrates his acquirements, taking possession of them as his defining qualities within the whole community. If all can achieve an integral education, the grounds of equity will be secure.

Unfortunately, the balance between difference and commonalty is hard to keep in education, particularly when we attend to the education that each person experiences. Education too often suppresses differences and promotes a superficial sameness, something different from genuine commonalty and something that impedes the attainment of an integral education. Diversity is not a sign that education has faltered, however; diversity is the cultural genius of the human species. If people were all exactly alike, educators could offer the same education to all, expecting each to integrate it equally well. But people are different. If they get identical educations, some will find it much more difficult to integrate what is in them. What "each person" learns at that point, when she encounters the common pedagogical program from the specific ground of her unique cultural heritage, can strain equity severely. Then the common program savagely insinuates its biases: "they are advantaged and you are impaired; don't ever forget it." Recognition of such adversity may goad a few to redouble their efforts, but it prompts many to withdraw.

Educators have long understood this problem and have long thought it important to individualize instruction so that different students all have relatively equal opportunities to achieve an integral education. To do so is not easy. Consider for instance the problem of teaching reading in an inner city barrio. Many children will have difficulty integrating this skill into their daily lives. Those around them will not spend much time reading, and reading materials will not be casually at hand. If they are, they may be in a language different from that of the school. Thus it will be more difficult for such a child to integrate reading skills into his sense of what is important. And the difficulty then gets doubled -- the content of formal instruction often then turns out to have less objective value for the child of the barrio than it might for someone else, or it may powerfully appear to be of less objective worth. Under such circumstances, a student will find it both harder to integrate the skill into his set of acquirements and then harder to integrate that set of acquirements into a sustained set of accomplishments. This is not to say that reading is unimportant for the children of the barrio; rather it is to observe that equitable access to integral education is not easily attained.

If the education of each is integral, consisting of challenges that push each to realize his full potentials, delivered in such a way that he has been able to integrate all the resulting acquirements into a stable, unified, self-directing sense of purpose, then equity will have been pedagogically furthered. If that education is also liberal, culminating in a set of capacities that enable each to learn thereafter whatever skills and ideas he may need, without reliance of the fortuitous availability of suitable teachers, then the conditions for excellence will have been educationally maximized. Can the computer as a system extend the opportunity of each person to acquire an education that is both integral and liberal? If we can answer this question in the affirmative, we can be confident that the digitization of our culture will enhance the educator's mission.

Table of Contents

Chapter 4