On the Politics of Educational Theory

Front matter

THEORIZING EDUCATION

On the Politics of Educational Theory

Rhetoric, theoretical ambiguity and the construction of society

Contents

Acknowledgments viii

1 Theory, (in)visibility, and totality: Theories of education as discourses. By way of introduction 1

2 Education, society, and the nation. “I have decided to be what you made me” 19 ROUSSEAU

Chapter 2

Education, society, and the nation. “I have decided to be what you made me”

Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of education is one of the most influential in the history of modern Europe, and it still inspires numerous and diverse interpretations: not only because of its richness, but also because of its almost proverbial ambiguity and its often paradoxical rhetoric.

In this chapter, I am not trying to reconstruct the body of Rousseau’s work in its whole complexity. Rather, it is a selective analysis through which I aim to identify topics and tropes which allow for systematic and complex transitions between education and politics. My intention, as I have mentioned in the previous chapter, is to look at Rousseau’s ontology by reconstructing the conceptual structure of his work together with its rhetorical devices. I focus, first of all, on Emile, or Education (Rousseau 1921), trying to reconstruct the connections between the conceptions of the child, nature, and divinity as the scaffolding for the analysis of the concept of education. In this triangle, the ambiguity of nature plays a pivotal role. I also refer to Rousseau’s political works, including a rarely discussed text on the political system of Poland, where the same triadic structure is supplemented with the concept of nation and where the issue of civic education — apparently different from that exposed in Emile — is discussed. Within this structure, I am analyzing the transitions between the registers of the pedagogical and the political.

Nature, education, and invisibility

An often discussed feature of Rousseau’s rhetoric is his inclination to paradox. As Bronisław Baczko (1966) notes, paradoxes are taken by Rousseau “seriously,” as reflecting real antagonisms and impossibilities — a topos that will be “elevated to the dignity of theory” in the work of Laclau. The opening paragraphs of Emile expose this paradoxical rhetoric very well:

God makes all things good; man' meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. . . . He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself ...Yet things would be worse without . . . education... . Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest... . She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by . . . . Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man’s estate, is the gift of education.

The lamentation of the destruction of nature does not sound like an introduction to praise for education, inevitably involved in the “meddling” with human nature; and yet education — as in the reference to the sapling — is presented as capable of saving the natural from destructive civilization. This single excerpt creates the structure of oppositions and ambiguities which invite the conception of negative pedagogy proposed by Rousseau, as Jean Starobinski says (1971), foretelling the Hegelian structure of the negation of negation.

As many researchers suggest, nature is the most ambiguous concept of Rousseau’s philosophy (cf. Baczko 1966; Baker 2001b). Nature, as the creation of God, is “good” but “imperfect”: it is incomplete, marked by lack and absence, and vulnerable to human destruction. It is weak and has to be supplemented by education. At the same time, in contrast to the idea of saving nature by education, Rousseau is perfectly aware that we are on the way of no return. He uses the concept of “natural man,” but he makes it clear that it is an idealized state of the beginnings of humanity that, if it had ever existed, cannot be transplanted to the contemporary. Once we have decided to divide the Earth into individual properties (The Social Contract), the irreversible process of supplementing nature, including our own, with human creations, has begun. We may question the moral value of such substitutions, but we are their products ourselves.

The idea that it is nature rather than civilization that provides a proper environment for the growing child (Rousseau advocates removing children from town life and educating them in the country) is not, therefore, the one of return. Education has to take a circular path: it has to evade, or detour the evils of civilization, and speak to that which is — potentially, if we manage to reveal it — natural in us. It has to follow from the present state of oblivion, to the implied naturalness, and from there it can aim at the future. With all the concern with the lost paradise of natural men, Rousseau’s pedagogy — by virtue of bypassing the present — has a potential to be revolutionary.”

Natural education in Rousseau is not, thus, about letting the child experience nature “as it is”: naturalness is staged and controlled. Emile is accompanied and supervised by his tutor who should administer the “right” experiences to the child. However, the appeals to control the experience of the child are accompanied by constant reminders that teachers must be discreet and silent. Rousseau advocates negative pedagogy in the early period of a child’s development, which means the prevention of evil rather than the construction of the good (the good is already there — the child is “good by nature”). Secondly, the inaction of the teacher is more valuable than action:

Zealous teachers, be simple, discrete, and reticent. Be in no hurry to act unless to prevent the actions of others. .. . [R]eject, if it may be, a good lesson for fear of giving a bad one. Beware of playing the tempter in this world, which nature intended as an earthly paradise for men, and do not attempt to give the innocent child the knowledge of good and evil. (Rousseau 1921, p. 60)

Rousseau’ rhetoric operates within the Biblical myth here. It was the failure of Adam and Eve to resist the temptation to gain “knowledge of good and evil” that led God to expel them from Eden. The paragraph reads as if Rousseau wants to interrupt the repetition of the history of the Fall of Man in every human life, to keep the child in a semblance of Eden and, thus, to break the cycle of the reproduction of evil. The innocent purity of the child, shielded from premature experience and slowed down in learning the unnecessary, helps to safeguard the unrestricted influence of the teacher in further steps of education; it prevents not only the impact of the corrupt world, but the resistance of the child as well. ““Without prejudice and without habits, there would be nothing in him to counteract the effects of your labours. In your hands he would soon become the wisest of men; by doing nothing to begin with, you would end with a prodigy of education” (1921, pp. 57-58). The tutor, discouraged from frequent direct interventions, operates mainly by controlling the learning environment, of which he himself is a part.

Remember you must be a man yourself before you try to train a man; you yourself must set the pattern he shall copy. While the child is still unconscious there is time to prepare his surroundings, so that nothing shall strike his eye but what is fit for his sight. Gain the respect of every one, begin to win their hearts, so that they may try to please you. You will not be master of the child if you cannot control every one about him; and this authority will never suffice unless it rests upon respect for your goodness.

It is the arrangement of physical and social space that inspires the child to explore reality and prevents him from premature or improper experience. A very important thing is that the work of the teacher as the author of such an arrangement, including the arrangements of the personal features he had acquired while preparing himself for the role, are hidden from the sight of the child. The figure of the teacher is thus split along the line of visibility: being physically and visibly present as a part of the educating environment of the child, he stays invisible as the author of this environment and of himself as the educating persona.

With this observation we have thus exposed the intriguing figure of the invisibility of the educating agent as one of the premises on which the modern idea of education was built. The instance of invisibility, as that of significant absence, is more than a technical invention here. In the following section, I propose to interpret it in two perspectives. First is a mythical one composed of two interconnected and somewhat colliding figures of divinity. Second is the Nietzschean idea of the invisibility of active force, which is most widely known through the Foucauldian concept of the asymmetry of seeing and the notion of dispersed disciplinary control.

Invisibility and divinity

The notion of natural environment as suitable for the early development of the child is construed by Rousseau in accordance with the Biblical vision of Eden. Emile is innocent, he lives close to nature, and he should be prevented from learning the knowledge of good and evil (as in Genesis 3:5). It is worth noting that such religious connotation is by no means specific to Rousseau’s pedagogy: it was fundamental for the emergence of the lay discourse of education in modern Europe. Its structure was built on the topics of religious debates of the time, especially within Protestant denominations (Osterwalder 2012;Tréhler 2014; Trohler, Popkewitz, and Labaree 2011). As Fritz Osterwalder notes, Rousseau’s ideas of education presented in Emile (unlike those expressed in his accounts on republican education, as in The Social Contract) were strongly influenced by the Piety movement in the Protestant church and the Jansenist movement in the Catholic one, both referring to the Augustinian tradition. Osterwalder points to the role that the Jansenist school of the Cistercian abbey in Port-Royal played in Rousseau’s thought. The role of the tutor in guiding the pupil’s transformation in isolation from the corrupt world, the stress on solitude and the low pace of learning, the treatment of child’s innocence as holy, or such theoretical concepts as amour propre and amour de soi find their predecessors in the practice and the writings associated with these movements. As Osterwalder notes, Rousseau’s account on the education of Emile “follows the theological — pedagogical concept of the piety movement almost to the letter” (p. 443). Moreover, Rousseau follows the style of religious writing as well: his “rhetoric layout . . . follows the theological tradition. The text does not just talk about education; instead, the writer addresses the reader directly and educates him thus to become an educator himself” (p. 444). Quoting Baczko, Osterwalder notes that Rouessau’s treatises assume the function of a new gospel: teachers and legislators (in The Social Contract) are charged with “superhuman tasks”; they are projected as “divine figures” (p. 444).

The lines of continuity of religious discourse in Rousseau are strikingly strong. However, there is a splitting line as well, and it is a scandalous one.

Rousseau challenges the Christian dogma of the original sin and claims that the child is born as innocent, rather than being made so by the act of christening. The line of the continuation of Christian theological language is broken in the very beginning of the educational trajectory: at the moment of birth of the child. It is there that the goodness of the child is constituted, and it is from that point that it needs to be protected against the bad world. In consequence, salvation needs no church — the only gospel, as we read in Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, is the “book of nature.’ Following the religious mission, education displaces and replaces it in the work of transforming the soul on the way to salvation.

The similarity of Rousseau’s vision of natural education to the figure of Eden is not accidental, then, and the invisibility of the teacher can be read through this metaphor. Apart from the idea of an invisible God who speaks through His creations, and occasionally through prophets and revelations, one can find another instance of invisibility in Genesis. After having violated the prohibition of eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve hide from the gaze of God among the trees of the garden. It seems that Rousseau plays with both these tropes, creating a mythico-theoretical structure composed of pedagogical and theological narratives on the creation of the human. Following the first of these metaphors, one may say that the teacher, as the author of things, as the one who created the environment of learning for his pupil, hides himself before human eyes behind his creation.The nature of the child, revealed through careful and self-restricted education, will speak for the teacher. This interpretation can be illustrated by numerous excerpts of Rousseau’s text, for instance by his account on the role of the tutor in arranging the marriage between Emile and Sophy.

Instead of providing a wife for Emile in childhood, I have waited till I knew what would suit him. It is not for me to decide, but for nature; my task is to discover the choice she has made. ... Do not suppose, however, that I have delayed to find a wife for Emile till I sent him in search of her. This search is only a pretext for acquainting him with women, so that he may perceive the value of a suitable wife. Sophy was discovered long since; Emile may even have seen her already, but he will not recognise her till the time is come.

Similar to a previously quoted excerpt, where Rousseau advocates that the teacher change the surroundings of Emile before he is conscious, the above paragraph speaks of a certain temporal encroaching, of determining the future of the child by controlling his past, of creating his world before the time of his arrival. The precautions taken before the child enters the scene of experience allow the teacher to almost rest in inaction when the time of experience comes; they create the conditions allowing for his pedagogy to be negative and, by leaving the present to apparently natural experiences, make it invisible to the child. In the child’s presence, the teacher has only to control the purity of the scene; to prevent it from being intruded upon by things from other temporal settings (premature experiences) or strangers acting in line with uncontrolled scripts. The time for such alien encounters, travel time — in the paragraph about marriage represented by “acquainting with women” — comes later, in a similarly prescribed way. Such temporal encroachment on the part of the teacher, turning the course of lived experience into a prescribed curriculum, becomes visible to Emile only a posteriori, in a retrospective gesture of synthesis, when the pupil is capable of seeing his teacher through the memories of his experience. It leaves Emile with only one option on his way to personhood: “What decision have I come to? I have decided to be what you made me” (Rousseau 1921, p. 390). Indeed, the temporal dimension of Rousseau’s pedagogy foretells the Hegelian dialectic of identity.

As I have mentioned before, another mythical interpretation of the invisibility of the teacher may follow the metaphor of Adam and Eve hiding from the sight of God. Can one say that Emile’s teacher keeps himself invisible in a similar way? Such a possibility invites two questions. First, whose gaze does he hide from? Second, what might the tutor feel guilty or ashamed of, or what kind of guilt is implied in the work of the teacher? Is it not only the teacher, but also the child who is placed in the position of God in Emile? Bernadette Baker finds such a godly trait in the writing about children as early as in John Locke, pointing to the transcendent character of the child in his works (Baker 2001a, p. 175). Apart from its mythical (Biblical) context, this interpretation may relate to the fact that in Rousseau’s time, the idea of nature as connected to divinity was popular. In Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau presents a theological argument based on the Newtonian definition of movement, whence he infers the notion of universal Will that is responsible for spontaneous movements and harmony in nature. This idea, as well as the observation that our morals ground in natural sentiments (“love for the good”), forms the basis for Rousseau’s natural religion that needs no reference to theological speculation, explication, or condemnation; neither to miracles nor to revelations. “There is one book which is open to every one — the book of nature. In this good and great volume I learn to serve and adore its Author. There is no excuse for not reading this book; for it speaks to all in a language they can understand” (Rousseau 1921, p. 242).

If we follow the idea that the child remains close to that which is natural in man, Emile himself may be seen as part of this divine book of nature, and through him can the teacher “learn to serve and adore its Author.’ Accordingly, indecent human deeds (like those of “meddling” with the creation, manipulating it so that its nature is distorted, as in the opening paragraph of Emile), may be a reason for shame and can make one avoid the transparent eyes of the child through which the Author of nature is seen. Can one say that education, in its manipulative manner proposed by Rousseau, is a reason for shame? Can it make the teacher feel guilty? The education of Emile is based on deception. If nature speaks through the child, the child is thus God’s gospel. It is not unthinkable, then, that the teacher’s work better be hidden from the controlling, natural, and innocent gaze of the child, just as before the Exodus the first humans had to evade the eye of God. In other words, if God speaks through nature, and the child is the instance of nature in man, one who educates should fear the gaze of the child.

The hiding of the intent and the actions of Emile’s teacher can thus be interpreted as following the duality of the child who is both natural (and thus, through metonymic connections, divine) and incomplete (and thus subject to supplementation). The godly teacher makes a human of the child, and blasphemously profanes the godly nature of the child. The human teacher fears the godly nature of the child, keeps silent about his own godly deeds, and presents himself as inactive. Education based on the myth of nature profanes nature as “the book of God” and reveals it at the same time.

Rousseau seeks theological justification for his claims, and to legitimize his projects of managing societies and human souls, he gives his naturalism a religious form. Thus positioned, education tends to erase its work; it “prefers” to remain silent and invisible. Its secure work depends on the art of manipulating the environment which allows the teacher to make her work invisible.

[Let the child] always think he is master while you are really master. There is no subjection so complete as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will itself is taken captive. ... No doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. He should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell.

The child’s nature is thus saved from the devastating influence of the spoiled society, and safe from direct intervention that teachers might irreverently commit. In the humble service of a nonexistent society, the teacher works against the existent one, gently taking the child a hostage of the utopian future.

The complex structure of links between nature, goodness, and divinity, with their supplement of education resorting to deception, presented rhetorically as control over temporality (slowing down the time of growth, encroachment into the past to control the future) and over the spatiality of the child (moving to the country, arranging every detail of the space of experience) work toward the naturalization of education. In fact, from the position of the child, education is erased; it is replaced by a simulation of free will and natural experience. The cultural construction of the conditions and the stimuli of that experience are made invisible. In short, the culture of nature (the cultural construction employing nature for social and political goals) is substituted for the nature of culture: for its formative, cultivating, ultimately pedagogical work (Szkudlarek 2005).

Invisibility and emptiness in social control

The task of repairing the damage of civilization and building the republic can be completed only if the creation of new human beings takes indirect route, by creating proper institutional conditions. This is where the mythical figure of the invisible Author of education, who creates the world for the child to grow according to nature, meets the instances of surveillance and power/knowledge analyzed in Michel Foucault’s (1995) work. We have thus arrived at the second perspective for interpreting Emile, not mythical, but socio-ontological. Education — in its mechanical, disciplinary, and panoptic aspects related to the environmental design of its business — is one of crucial practices responsible for the construction of modernity.

There is a Nietzschean idea, further developed by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, that power is invisible. According to Nietzsche, we are reactive to force, and it is our reactions that inform us of its existence (Deleuze 2002). The writing of Rousseau, in this respect, operates on two levels. On the one hand, it postulates and thus reveals the operation of power by advocating that teachers purposefully construct a milieu in which the child will learn. On the other, he advocates that such arrangements are made invisible to the child. At the same time, Rousseau’s rhetoric legitimizes this indirect and invisible form of control. Naming his pedagogy negative, and presenting it as preventive rather than formative, overshadows the undoubtedly positive aspect of Rousseau’s education, which dwells in the management of the surroundings prepared for the child.

The hiding of such environmental control of experience, expressed 1n postulational language as valuable (natural, benign, effective, permissive) is the main instrument of making power invisible in Rousseau. It is made rhetorically possible owing to the way Rousseau uses the concept of nature. Bronislaw Baczko (1964, p. 46) says that “any attempt at defining nature in Rousseau’s text is futile,’ and Bernadette Baker identifies its “at least six, sometimes overlapping meanings”:

Nature appears as an original state (e.g., First and Second Discourse), as untamed animal appetites without religious or moral reasonings (e.g., Second Discourse), as matter and force (e.g., Emile), as uniform laws of motion (Emile), as that which is not made by humans (e.g. First Discourse), and as those potentials or dispositions that are revealed a posteriori by institutions Man founds (e.g., The Social Contract).

Although the modern notion of the child is inscribed in all these meanings, it is the last one that applies directly to the problem discussed here showing the ambiguity of the origins and their supplementation, or, more precisely, pointing to the nature of the child becoming visible providing that we educate him according to his nature. As Peter Trifonas (2000, p. 250) says, in Rousseau “nature works twice.” Derrida (1997) relates this circular work of nature to the notion of supplement in Rousseau. In Rousseau’s reflections on writing, civil society, education, or masturbation, the secondary (like writing or masturbation) supplements the natural (like speech or love). Derrida reads Rousseau’s notion of supplement as substitution, an excess, scandal, something ambivalent, but at the same time as the condition of seeing that which is supplemented. In Rousseau, we know what is natural when our action, based on that which we imply as such, produces results which we accept as natural. “Immediacy is derived,” says Derrida (1997, p. 157). We cannot have access to nature in the human. It has to be implied, and only as such may it work as the foundation for the work of education

The complexity of nature in Rousseau is an outcome of the rhetorical strategy of his writing as much as it is its condition. Vagueness, or emptiness, is a condition, a function, and a product of importance. Its role can be explained in light of Laclau’s theory (2005; 2014). The conflicting tasks Rousseau undertakes (like educating “within and against civil society,’ Baker 2001b, p. 221) can be addressed only where there is the notion that provides space for such efforts, and that notion must be vague, not only because it cannot be defined by what it tries to give ground for, but also for the very sake of the feasibility of the political project. According to Laclau (see Chapter 6), social structures can be constructed only in relation to empty signifiers, and only such figures are capable of articulating the incommensurable demands of which Rousseau speaks when he resorts to his paradoxes. In other words, if nature works as the instance that links past and future, education and politics, collectivity and individuality, it cannot be defined in a logical manner; nor can it work as a concept. Not only does the opaqueness of nature help to construe the argument that cannot be reduced to that for or against civil society, but it gives space for such tension being articulated at all. The installation of nature as the central concept of Rousseau’s philosophy, and — in the context of such centrality — the somewhat “disappointing” vagueness of this concept, is not accidental, even though it invites a circular, proto-Hegelian logic. Kevin Inston (2010) notes that the construction of the human as natural, which is performed by subtracting, or stripping the human of all that can be identified as socially constructed, leads to the subsequent denouncement of modern society as alien to such naturalness, and eventually to the claim that society has no natural foundations. This statement has revolutionary consequences. Inston argues that Rousseau’s work foretells the radical theory of democracy proposed by Laclau and Mouffe.

The negativity of nature — its subtraction of any social content — emphasizes its radical difference from society. That negativity does not signify nothingness, but rather the negation of determinacy: society, without any final and total ground, can never be fully determined, remaining always available to reconfiguration. Rousseau criticizes previous philosophers for not looking beyond the given in order to reactivate the political moment of social construction. While their theories of nature naturalized society, Rousseau’s theory “de-naturalizes” it. Nature, despite its fictional quality, is necessary for understanding the present moment as a mere possibility rather than as an inexorable outcome.

The question which should be asked in this context is the following: what is the relation between education being construed as natural and the constructibility of society? What is the political meaning of education made invisible, naturalized, rendered negative? The first answer suggested thus far is that this relation is based on the instance of invisibility of social control. Rousseau’s naturalism, the culture of Nature he creates, hides the nature of culture: it hides social control inscribed into cultural arrangements, texts, and meanings. This interpretation is indebted to Foucault’s analyses of visibility as constitutive to modern power relations (Foucault 1995). At the same time, Foucault helps to see education as political (Hoskin 1990; Marshall 1996). Power cares, transmits knowledge, prevents deviation, examines, classifies, and allocates individuals in social space. All these verbs describe modern education as well. Rousseau’s pedagogy postulates some of these techniques, but names them so that they present themselves as natural and negative, which actually means that they de-present themselves, that they make themselves invisible. Such a naturalization of education erases or makes invisible the work toward the political reconstruction of society.

How can we read, in this context, the political writings of Rousseau? There, too, the interplay between the natural and that which is made by man is in constant motion. Natural order is far better than an artificial one; natural and savage men have virtues that are extinct in civil societies. But we have to live in modern states. Therefore, we need to construe them “according to our nature” so that they do not enslave us, so that our natural goodness and liberty are maintained. As we read in The Social Contract:

The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.

This implies the mutual recognition of differences and the common recognition of general will: of the goodness of togetherness. The ambiguity of nature in this political construction helps to establish the horizon of universal freedom in which forms of togetherness are possible, and against which forms of government can be judged. The solutions proposed by Rousseau are, of course, complex and not easily reconcilable, especially when The Social Contract is read together with the more specific advice on the reform of the political system of Poland (Rousseau 1972).

The nation: Nature and estrangement

Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projetée (The Government of Poland in the best known English translation; thereafter, referred to as Considerations}? was completed by Rousseau in 1772, when Poland was undergoing delayed political reforms aimed at strengthening the power of the state. The ineffective Polish democracy (where the demos was restricted to land owners) with kings appointed in free elections and their role reduced to executive power, made the country unable to stand the military pressure of its more powerful, authoritarian neighbors. The reforms initiated by King Stanislaw August Poniatowski, supported by intellectuals inspired by French rationalism, met firm resistance from the nobility, which was threatened with the prospect of losing their almost unrestricted political power. Rousseau was invited to write his advice for alternative reforms by Count Michat Wielohorski, a representative of a powerful confederation opposing royal reforms.