BRC Hosts Educational Philosophy Symposium

Introduction

The Boston Research Center (BRC) hosted an international symposium entitled “Four Enduring Philosophies of Education and the Challenges Facing Teachers Today” at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the foremost international organization for advancing educational research. This year’s gathering, which attracted researchers from 48 countries, was held in San Francisco in early April. The AERA symposium offered a preview of the Center’s forthcoming book, Moral Visions of the Philosophy and Practice of Education (working title), which brings together the ideas and legacies of 10 twentieth-century thinkers on education and is being edited by David Hansen of Teachers College, Columbia University. The symposium attracted almost 100 educators interested in the work of four philosophers from the volume: Maria Montessori, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Rabindranath Tagore, and John Dewey. The relevance of each philosopher’s educational thought to teachers today was explored through presentations by scholars of educational philosophy who are also contributors to the BRC’s forthcoming book: Jacqueline Cossentino (Universtiy of Maryland), Andrew Gebert (Waseda University), Kathleen O’Connell (University of Toronto), and David Hansen (Teachers College, Columbia University). Before each presentation, symposium chair Doris Santoro Gomez (Bowdoin College) sketched out a brief biography of each historical figure. After all presentations were completed, Ann Diller of the University of New Hampshire shared her insights as Discussant.

 The theme of the panel mirrored the theme of the book—how the moral vision and critical thinking of courageous educators responding to challenging times created philosophies and practices with enduring impact. As a focal point for the panel, each presenter explored the respective educator’s attitude toward knowledge and emphasized the ways in which the child’s innate knowledge was viewed as foundational to learning.

The Presentations

The first presenter, Jacqueline Cossentino (University of Maryland), said that Maria Montessori designed her educational methods with world peace in mind, seeing the complex factors linked to peace as the backbone for a potentially powerful new science. Montessori’s question was: What does one need to know in order to achieve world peace? She also believed that the key to educating children is to know the child and gear learning activities to the developmental stages that are considered universal for human beings from birth to maturity. To illustrate, Cossentino showed a picture of a three-year-old child at a Montessori school fully engrossed in pouring water from a pitcher. Later at age 6 or 8, the child becomes more interested in completion of a task, and activities are tailored to that interest. By carefully observing the evolving interests of the child, teachers can create age-appropriate environments in which children engage in activities that are spontaneous yet unified, creating  a sense of calm in the child that researchers today associate with the concept of “flow,” or optimal human experience . For Montessori, the purpose of education was to guide children through a gradual awakening to the interdependence of all life and their own “cosmic task” in achieving world peace. 

The next presenter, Andrew Gebert (Waseda University, Tokyo), drew a stark portrait of the authoritarian conditions prevailing in Japanese schools at the time when Tsunesaburo Makiguchi developed his pedagogical theories. Makiguchi’s insistence on empowering the child’s “valid ability to derive knowledge from experience” flew in the face of the military government’s intention to educate a technically literate, docile public who would blindly follow the emperor, said Gebert. To establish the child’s “faith in the possibility of knowing,” Makiguchi suggested that teachers begin by discussing subjects with the children that the children will know more about than the teachers do, such as knowledge they have gleaned from time spent in nature. Then, teachers can progress to observing the school itself: What does it cost to build? Whose taxes and contributions are used? This way he believed children would be prepared to become “proactive adapters” in the terribly oppressive society in which they would be endeavoring to live contributive or so-called “value-creating” lives. He even suggested that teachers encourage students to analyze the authority structure of the school, and make the emperor himself (the unapproachable pinnacle of the authority structure) an object of study.  

Kathleen O’Connell (University of Toronto) connected strands of thought, explaining that Rabindranath Tagore shared with Montessori and Makiguchi an emphasis on experiential and socially conscious learning, critical thought, and the full development of the child. She went on to explore some of the distinctive features that Tagore, one of the world’s most prolific artists, initiated in his educational approach. Tagore aimed to create a school that would be “a poem in a medium other than words.” He identified the “disconnects” he saw in the world around him—including aggressive nationalism, a rural/urban split, and religious, cultural and racial divides—and then developed practical strategies to help children overcome these barriers. Tagore insisted on the fullest development of the creative personality as a key aim of education and established a school in Bengal called Santiniketan to demonstrate his approach. At Santiniketan, children were encouraged to spend quiet time each morning in nature, since Tagore believed the natural world to be a “guiding creative force” for human beings. In addition, taking part in intergenerational music, dance and other artistic productions allowed students to express their creativity and learn to cooperate socially, honing their ability to adapt and improvise and expanding their capacity for spontaneity and joy.

The last presenter, the book’s editor David Hansen (Teachers College, Columbia University), asserted that moral knowledge is a good way to “break into John Dewey’s vast body of thinking.” Though many readers have misunderstood this, Hansen continued, Dewey valued highly the teaching of academic subjects and had an “endless fascination” with all of these subjects. He even created academic disciplines in the elementary level of his “lab school.” However, Dewey believed that teachers should bring academic subjects to life as “dynamic ways of knowing” so that the study of these subjects would cultivate a very important sense of moral purpose in the child. Knowledge, Dewey argued, is best understood as a “verb rather than a noun,” enabling children to draw connections between events and consequences and ultimately empowering them to figure out an intelligent course of conduct in society and their home lives. He criticized American educational systems for conflating knowledge with information and divorcing knowledge from its social consequences, thereby “burdening students and teachers with piles of material quickly forgotten.”

The Discussant’s Summation

In summing up the four presentations, discussant Ann Diller (University of New Hampshire) remarked that each of the philosophers, while situated in their own unique time and place, faced many of the same social, political, and economic challenges as contemporary educators, including war and precursors of today’s devastating threats to environmental well-being. They faced oppressive challenges to education as well. In introducing parallels among them, she quoted from Tagore who said “the messengers of truth have forever joined hands across seas and across historical barriers.” She pointed to their shared emphasis on creativity and on trusting and believing in children while connecting their knowledge to the wider world. Then, she explored “an incredible similarity” among them—their focus on enabling children to find meaning in each present experience. Recalling Cossentino’s picture of a child pouring water, Diller observed, “The child was completely engaged in the most meaningful thing for the child at that moment.” She argued that all four of these philosophers agreed on one important point: that only by learning to extract the full meaning from each of their present experiences would students be prepared to do this in their future lives. 

She contrasted this consensus with educational practice being promoted by the U.S. government in public schools today where “everything we do at this present moment has something to do with what’s going to happen later, like getting a high grade on the test.” She pointed out how similar this situation is, in particular, to the dilemma Makiguchi faced in Japanese public schools in his own time. Makiguchi’s response is “brilliant,” she said, “because he makes the emperor the object of study, he makes the whole operation of authority an object of study.” Today, in U.S. public schools all thinking stops when it comes to the high-stakes test, as with the emperor in Makiguchi’s time. Don’t make the test an enemy, she advised, but don’t bow down to it either.  Following Makiguchi’s example, we ought to “make the test an object of study.” She closed her comments by returning to knowledge, the theme of the panel, and observing wistfully that the other three educators—Dewey, Tagore, and Montessori—all warned of its fragility, with Dewey seeing knowledge as a “fragile and dynamic gift,” Montessori being moved to “protect its fragile beauty,” and Tagore concerned that “dark bands in our consciousness” can cause us to be mean and unscrupulous, disrupting “the fragility of truth.” 

Audience Q/A

During the open discussion that followed, questions and insights focused on the optimistic stances of the four philosophers, the relevance of ideas from an earlier era, and the interplay between the individual thinker and larger social movements. For example, what would Dewey think of high stakes testing? He would urge us to “unpack” terms like standards and measurement, finding fuller meaning in them, Hansen suggested. A question was posed for all of the panelists: How can we bring out the best that’s in humanity, as these philosophers urged, rather than focus only on controlling the negative aspects of human nature and reproducing knowledge from past generations? Suggestions from the philosophers were numerous. Montessori’s approach stands as a reminder that all educational actions are embedded in a worldview, Cossentino asserted. Makiguchi sees the purpose of education as the same as the purpose of life, said Gebert, as he explained how Makiguchi struggled to express the aims of education and couldn’t come up with any greater single term for this than “happiness.” Like Makiguchi, Tagore sees the aim of education as “joy and the liberation of consciousness,” O’Connell agreed. Rather than traditionalism, Dewey recommends a critical tradition that is very respectful of the past but doesn’t “bow to the emperor,” Hansen remarked.

Why focus on the lives and work of individuals rather than on larger social movements as agents of change? It’s an enactment of the principle that every movement begins with the individual, according to book editor Hansen. O’Connell elaborated by describing Tagore’s use of a single village as illustrative of the value of role models. In the end, education occurs within relationships that encourage and inspire, fueled by the curiosity of the child. Is our historical moment very different from the challenges of the past? Do contemporary conflicts make a battleground of young minds, as World War II did in Japan or in Italy? Perhaps the value of studying educational philosophies and practices within their historical context is to deeply understand the intensity of the creative educator’s struggle against difficult realities and find a “core stance” for today, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Gebert. As this symposium demonstrated, the real work of education is always ethical, and always engaged in the world.

--Virginia Benson, Executive Director, Boston Research Center for the 21^st Century