Abstract
This paper seeks to address the question of schooling for democracy by, first, identifying at least one form of social character, dependent, after Marcuse, on the historical emergence of a “new sensibility.” It then explores one pedagogical thread related to the emergence of this form of subjectivity over the course of the last two centuries in the west, and traces its influence in the educational counter-tradition associated with philosophical anarchism, which is based on principles of dialogue and social reconstruction as opposed to monologue and reproduction. The idea of a dialogical school has been made possible by a historical shift in adult views of child as interlocutor rather than “othered” object of adult formation—a shift that can be observed in an historical process of “closer approaches” between adult and child and a recognition of childhood and adulthood as forms of subjectivity that lie on a synchronous rather than a diachronic lifespan continuum. Finally the author identifies an archetype of “school” understood as a specific type of intentional community—an experimental zone in which participants are allowed and encouraged, through explicitly dialogical practice, to develop the personal and relational habits that make authentic democracy possible—a communal form that gives practical meaning to Dewey’s notion of school as “embryonic society”: a utopian space where natality is recognized as a fundamental cultural force, and where the evolutionary possibilities inherent in neoteny are taken as normative.
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Notes
Democratic polity is threatened by the steady entrenchment of the Orwellian state, naked corporate-state economic imperialism at home and abroad, extreme income inequalities, political domestication of the mainstream citizen–consumer, legalized corruption in government and business, conditions of permanent global war, the rise of criminal states, the normalization of terror by both state and anti-state actors, catastrophic environmental degradation on a global scale, and perhaps most gravely, by the simulacrum of democracy represented, for example, by US politics.
As argued by Murray Bookchin in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (2004), “the technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world… free from material want, from… the struggle with necessity…. A century ago, scarcity had to be endured: today, it has to be enforced—hence the importance of the state in the present era… for perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation and unfreedom” (2–3, 5).
Neumann argues that a “new ethic” will emerge from a recognition and acknowledgement of our own “shadow,” which in the Jungian scheme, is the “lion at the gate” of the re-unification of conscious and unconscious elements of the personality, or “individuation.”
As May (1994, 106), explains it, “In overcoding, disparate practices are brought together under a single category or principle, and are given their comprehensibility as variations of that category or principle. What was different becomes merely another mode of the same.”
Zizek offers three “contemporary figures of the post-Cartesian subject”—the “proletarian, the exploited worker whose product is taken away from him, reducing him to a subjectivity without substance”; “a totally “mediatized” subject, fully immersed in virtual reality–while “spontaneously” he thinks that he is in direct contact with reality, his relationship to reality is in fact sustained by complex digital machinery” as in The Matrix; and the “post-traumatic autistic subject: in it, we are dealing with the zero-level of subjectivity, with the formal conversion of the pure externality of the meaningless real (its brutal destructive intrusion) into the pure internality of the “autistic” subject detached from external reality, disengaged, reduced to a persisting core deprived of all substance.” (2011, 311, 314).
There is a grim historical logic in the fact that Johan Pestalozzi’s first school in Stanz Switzerland—typically identified as a founding instance of dialogical education–was created to care for the orphans who survived the Napoleonic army’s massacre of 1200 men, women and children there in 1798–given that Napoleon’s police state was the first to create a national educational system marked by centralization, standardization, and constant surveillance (Bowen 1981, 222, 252 ff; Gutek 1995, 225, 188–191).
Arguments for cooperation and altruism as fundamental evolutionary impulses have been carried forward over the last century by sociobiologists, ethologists, and evolutionary psychologists. For a recent example, see Michael Tomasello et al. (2009).
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), still required reading in a multitude of US high schools, is the commanding parable of childhood in the Hobbesian universe.
For a particularly well-argued, thorough and eloquent exploration of this “new way of seeing” the natural world, see Abram (1996).
These principles are currently best exemplified in the schools listed on the International Network of Democratic Schools, such as Summerhill or Sudbury Valley School.
For those who consider this a “utopian” ideal, keep in mind that in fiscal year 2015, US military spending was projected to account for 54 % of all federal discretionary spending, a total of $598.5 billion.
Nor should we forget those nonprofit organizations dedicated to school reform that keep progressive educational ideals alive, such as the Coalition of Essential Schools, the Progressive Education Network, and the Alternative Educational Resources Organization.
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“All history is really the history of perception, and what we make history with is the matter of a becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 347).
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Kennedy, D. Anarchism, Schooling, and Democratic Sensibility. Stud Philos Educ 36, 551–568 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9534-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9534-3