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Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction
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Robbie McClintock
Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000
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Section 11 — Infinite Possibilities
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¶ 99
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In human terms, this range of possibilities — which, with
worldwide jet travel and a global telephone system, is numerically
understated -- is for all practical purposes infinite. This,
then, is the change of phase that has occurred with respect
to character formation: whereas in the past the average man
had limited opportunities for day-to-day contact with others,
he now has infinite options. Although the conditions making
this change of phase possible have been developing during the
past hundred years, it is mainly since World War II that they
have taken full effect as virtually everyone gained easy access
to road, rail, and air travel, to telephone, radio, and television.
Mankind is fast approaching the unprecedented situation in which
anyone, on a day's notice or less, can involve himself directly
with anyone else. Thinkers have still to come to terms with
the implications of this change for society, economics, politics,
and education; and the implications augur well for the future
of study.
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¶ 100
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On the surface, the assertion that personal possibilities
have become unlimited seems to ignore obliviously the conditions
producing a pervasive fear of the all-surveillant state. Arbitrary
political barriers still exist, and the ability to accumulate
facts and fictions about every individual has increased portentously.
Not only in America does the invasion of privacy and the official
abuse of civil rights seem rampant. But perhaps the surest way
to cooperate with potential persecutors is to take them too
seriously, to recoil, not in the face of repression, but at
the thought of repression, allowing the action of the state
to have a chilling effect in areas where in fact it has little
force. Officials of state turn to surveillance and repression
out of weakness, not strength; they seek to dominate, not by
virtue of their own great stature, but by casting fearful shadows,
by amplifying their ability to destroy this or that individual
into an appearance of complete and arbitrary command. To be
sure, the centralized, bureaucratic state can gather vast quantities
of information, but it can concentrate and act on a human level
only on infinitesimal parts of the bulk. And furthermore, in
the long run, the most significant consequence for individual
autonomy that will result from the change of historic phase
may pertain less to privacy and surveillance and more to the
nature of social sanctions. It may turn out that big brother
will know all about what each does but be powerless to do much
about it.
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¶ 101
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With no implacable limits on the range of personal relations
open to most, people have a good chance of finding companions
for any imaginable undertaking; and in time, in a rather short
time, this latitude may lead to a thorough transformation in
the nature of authority. In a world in which each individual
can pursue most any personal purpose in most any place that
suits him, all on his own initiative, the habit of relying on
authoritative institutions, which operate through commands enforced
by penalties and inducements, may sharply diminish. With the
change of phase in the opportunity factor, people need less
and less to rely on formal institutions for a chance to fulfill
their personal purposes. And as more and more people become
aware of the unlimited choices that they have in their personal
lives, sanctions and incentives will become ineffectual means
of administering authoritative commands in government, society,
business, and education. As everything becomes possible for
everyone in their personal lives, only the most extreme sanctions
— sanctions that deprive the person of his mobility through
extended incarceration or death — have a significant effect
on his personal possibilities; and these extreme sanctions must
be reserved to check serious crime. But minor sanctions — social
disapproval, loss of a job, fines, or even short-term imprisonment
— cannot significantly narrow the range of infinite options
open to most individuals, nor can minor, perhaps even substantial,
incentives meaningfully broaden what is already infinite. Hence,
increasingly, attempts to coerce daily behavior will fail, and
any and all relationships entered into by consenting adults,
provided these do not lead to the serious harm of others, will
become both socially and legally acceptable.
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¶ 102
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Although authority based on sanction is likely to diminish
in societies that offer individuals infinite possibilities for
involvement with others, authority itself will not disappear,
for allocations of effort will still have to be made, but on
the basis of a quite different principle. All the iconography
of love that has become so popular with the young is indicative
of more than a fad, for all around coercive authority is giving
way to erotic authority, and many functions that in the past
were performed by the use of causal manipulation will occur
in the future by virtue of erotic attraction. [ 82
] Erotic authority has always operated among men, but as never
before it is likely to become the dominant form of authority.
This change is patent in economics where desire has long since
displaced need as the arbiter of demand and where sex is the
smooth salve of sales. And in most other areas as well, one
finds endless signs of the transformation; in politics, art,
science, and education, men are more and more acting according
to their aspiration, pursuing what seems to them to be good
or beautiful or true because they are drawn to it, for nothing
compels them to it. As sanction becomes less effective, allurement
will take over, not to enforce the same goals that coercion
would assert, but to promote its own goals, so that society
will not drift without direction. In a world in which men share
unlimited personal opportunities, the natural form of authority
will be erotic, not only in the crass sense, but in the best
Platonic sense, on the basis of which effort will distribute
itself as it is drawn to various possibilities according to
a many layered teleology.
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¶ 103
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A society governed by Eros will not automatically be a good
society, for, like any other principle, Eros can go astray.
The Manson family, for instance, is among the authentic combinations
possible when people have infinite options; but it is neither
representative nor inevitable. As with any mode of human order,
the quality of life attained depends on the wisdom with which
the controlling principles are understood and applied. Because
of this imperative, man will not make an erotic society better
simply by trying to deny its nature; rather the wise course
is to accept and understand its nature and to act in sympathy
with its principles so that the best in it will fully develop.
The principle of Eros is to forego domination, to resist the
compulsion to correct petty faults in others, and to concentrate
on helping those who attract one's attention to achieve fruition.
Many in positions of "authority" have still to start acting
in sympathy with this principle, yet it is hard to imagine a
reversion to a situation in which they can effectively rely
on domination, command, and sanction.
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¶ 104
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Certainly a retreat to strict standards, social and sexual,
to be enforced by parents and the pillars of society, is most
improbable. As soon as the child masters the basic means of
movement that life now offers, he is largely impervious to parental
sanction, and whatever parental authority remains inheres in
love, not power. And that bugaboo of reactionaries, "permissive
society," is coextensive with the societies that, through a
combination of dense population and high mobility, have opened
boundless alternatives to their members; consequently the permissiveness
results from no mere abdication of authority or slackening of
standards: with the mass production of the SEAT 850, it is fast
appearing in very fascist, very Catholic Spain. In reality,
permissiveness is no mere consequence; permissiveness is the
inherent character, the ordering principle, of the social flux
that has resulted from the great change of phase in history.
To repress permissiveness one would have to do away with the
extensive personal mobility that has given rise to the cornucopia
of choice confronting each and every person. Such a reaction
will not come except through an atomic war, and public leaders
had best face the new realities rather than bemoan bygone simplicities.
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¶ 105
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Here then, in the change of historic phase, is a complicated,
tangible, palpitating force within the flux that is incongruent
with systems of compulsory education, for these function by
means of sanctions that are weakening visibly as children become
aware of their limitless options. Hence, the world of instruction
may steadily decline in effectiveness. This would not be the
doom of education. Like leaders in other public spheres,- educators
have the option of working in sympathy with Eros. As we have
seen, for Plato, Eros was one of the principles that made study
the most human, most natural form of education, even in times
when each man's choices were still severely limited. Hence now
— when the most effective authority will be erotic, a set of
varied attractions through which men will determine their preferences
among their measureless prospects — the character of historic
movement will conduce to a spread of comprehensive, voluntary
study, directed by the student's selective attention and motivated
by his personal initiative. For these reasons, the future of
our past looks promising; the prospects for study seem good.
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¶ 106
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But such an analysis is simply an analysis, one man's interpretation
of the way things appear to him. Many words, even when spiced
with a few facts and figures, can never encapsulate reality;
at best they echo it at considerable remove. Truth is neither
in the words nor in the theories that they spin out; truth is
in the experiences that each of us has, and the value of words
and theories is not that they communicate truth, but that if
all is aright they may help us grasp and comprehend the truths
of our experience. Hence, in speaking about historic forces
and the promising prospects for study, one is establishing no
inevitabilities, not even probabilities; rather one is working
out certain heuristic propositions, which will hopefully help
others understand the truths of their experience, for in the
light of that truth, their practice will be wiser, surer, and
to greater effect. Such is the praxis of the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of the spirit.
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¶ 107
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In this temper, one last hypothesis: in making the case for
study, one does not denigrate the teacher's profession. To be
sure, one has to speak out against exaggerating the power of
instruction. But this criticism does not reject teaching; in
place of a rejection, it is a quest for the mean, a celebration
of the Greek sense for nothing too much, an attempt to balance
an inflated version of the teacher's mission with a touch of
reality. Yes — let us continue our effort to teach all as best
we can, but let us do so with more humility, sobriety, and realism.
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¶ 108
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Instruction does not make the man. A teacher gains coercive
power to control and mold his students only so long as they
abdicate their autonomy and dignity. Such an abdication is not
a good foundation for an educational system, especially since
it is less common and continuous than many would seem to believe.
The teacher's authority, be it as a model of excellence or of
folly, is a quality his students project erotically upon him.
It is an attraction or repulsion that results because students
are forever suspending their interest in learning their lessons;
instead they abstract, they reflect; they step back mentally
and with curiously cocked heads they observe their didactic
deliverer, musing with soaring hope, wonder, joy, resignation,
boredom, cynicism, amusement, sad tears, despair, or cold resentment
— Ecce homo!
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¶ 109
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A teacher may or may not cause learning, but he will always
be an object of study. Hence the pedant so surely plays the
fool. But hence too, the man teaching can often occasion achievements
that far surpass his personal powers. Great teachers can be
found conforming to every type — they are tall and short, shaggy
and trim, timid and tough, loquacious and terse, casual and
stern, clear and obscure. Great teachers are persons who repay
study, and they repay study because they know with Montaigne,
"My trade and my art is to live." [ 83 ].
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Endnotes
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| Note 82 |
My conception of Eros as a form of authority is more deeply
influenced by Plato, especially the Symposium; Dante
throughout The Divine Comedy; Goethe, especially in
Wilhelm Meister; Nietzsche, throughout his work
and especially in Schopenhauer as Educator, and Ortega, especially
in On Love; than it is by Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.
New York: Vintage Books, 1961, although I have studied the latter
with profit. I am working on an historical inquiry into erotic
theories of education which I hope to publish in the near future
in a book, Eros and Education. [Back] |
| Note 83 |
Montaigne, "Of Training," Selected Essays, op.cit.,
n. 2, p. 126. [Back] |
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