Subjectivity, Curriculum, and Society : Between and Beyond the German Didaktik and Anglo-American Curriculum Studies [1 ed.] 9780203821466, 9780415652124

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SUBJECTIVITY, CURRICULUM, AND SOCIETY Between and Beyond German Didaktik and Anglo-American Curriculum Studies

STUDIES IN CURRICULUM THEORY William F. Pinar, Series Editor

Autio · Subjectivity, Curriculum, and Society: Between and Beyond German Didaktik and Anglo-American Curriculum Studies Brantlinger (Ed.) · Who Benefits From Special Education? Remediating (Fixing) Other People’s Children Pinar/Irwin (Eds.) · Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki Reynolds/Webber (Eds.) · Expanding Curriculum Theory: Dis/Positions and Lines of Flight Pinar · What Is Curriculum Theory? McKnight · Schooling, the Puritan Imperative, and the Molding of an American National Identity: Education’s “Errand Into the Wilderness” Pinar (Ed.) · International Handbook of Curriculum Research Morris · Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing Sites of Memory and Representation Doll · Like Letters in Running Water: A Mythopoetics of Curriculum Joseph/Bravman/Windschitl/Mikel/Green · Cultures of Curriculum Westbury/Hopmann/Riquarts (Eds.) · Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktic Tradition Reid · Curriculum as Institution and Practice: Essays in the Deliberative Tradition Pinar (Ed.) · Queer Theory in Education Huebner · The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays by Dwayne E. Huebner, Edited by Vikki Hillis. Collected and Introduced by William F. Pinar jagodzinski · Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art&Art Education jagodzinski · Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experifigural Writings in Art&Art Education

SUBJECTIVITY, CURRICULUM, AND SOCIETY Between and Beyond German Didaktik and Anglo-American Curriculum Studies

Tero Autio University of Tampere

2006

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

Copyright Ó 2006 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, New Jersey 07430 www.erlbaum.com

Cover design by Tomai Maridou

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Autio, Tero. Subjectivity, curriculum, and society : between and beyond German didaktik and Anglo-American curriculum studies / Tero Autio. p. cm. — (Studies in curriculum theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-5468-1 (alk. paper) 1. Curriculum planning. 2. Educational psychology. 3. Teaching. I. Title. II. Series. LB2806. 15.A95 375¢.001—dc22

2006 2005055497 CIP

Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

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1

1

Introduction Overview of the Book 1

2

“Truth as Utility”: Reconsidering the Rise of Scientific Method as a Pragmatic Precursor for Modernist Curriculum Thinking

14

Historical Prologue to Western Curriculum Studies: Developing the Norms of Modern Scientific Reasoning 14 The Actuality of Cartesianism 16 The Revolution in the Inquiring Mind: Method, Mathematics, and Learning 19 Francis Bacon: Toward a View of Science as an Intellectual Tool; “Truth and Utility Are . . . the Very Same Things” 20 The Formation of the Cartesian Method: Meta-Mathematical Rationality and Human Interests 29

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From Theology and Metaphysics to the Culture of Method: The Cartesian Revolution of Epistemology and Curriculum

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The Advent of the Modern Era in Education: The Cartesian Curriculum as an Embodiment of “Rightly Conducting One’s Reason”; Reading Descartes as Educational Text 34 A Curricular Prerequisite: From Theology to Epistemology 38

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The Intentional and Ideological as a Social Framework of the Intellect: The Cartesian Shift From Rational Essentialism to Instrumentalism 43 The Structure of the Cartesian Curriculum 48 Conclusion 52

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The Puritan–Protestant Disenchantment of Spirituality: The Rationalization of Religion, Inquiring Mind, and Education

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Protestant Contribution to the Rise of Modern Science and Curriculum Through the Rationalization of Religion: Max Weber’s Critical Account 58 The Bifurcation of the Protestant Movement 61 Calvinist–Puritan Notion of Work and the Birth of Modern Identity 63 Calvinist–Puritan Roots of Individualism 66 Calvinistic Implications for the Notions of Science, Philosophy, and Curriculum 70

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Curricular Predicaments of John Locke’s Liberalism: Pleasure and Reason; Psychology and Politics

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Extending the Rules of Knowledge: John Locke and the Conditions of Human Study 78 The Development of Enlightenment Thinking and John Locke 79 “Reason Must Be Our Last Judge and Guide in Everything” (Book IV, CH XIX: 14) 82 Locke, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism 90 Locke and the Notion of Human Action and Self 93

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Curriculum and the Politics of Psychology: “Conformity of Wills and Predictability of Behavior” The Rationalization of Curriculum by the Psychologization of It: From Kant to Tyler and Beyond 99 Kant on Education 100 Herbart’s Two Models for the Science of Education: The Rise of Educational Psychology 104 “Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction” 108 The Rationale and “Occidental Rationalism” 113 Method, Effectiveness, and Moral Concern 114 Psychology of Learning: Logic Without Content? 117 From Rationalization to Commodification 121 Conclusion 123

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Epilogue: Toward a Curriculum Discourse Sui Generis?

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The Spiritual Framework of Instrumental Rationality 126 Psychology, Curriculum Studies, and the Challenge of the ‘Posties’ 135 The Postempiricist Turn 137 Tentative Critical Implications for Current Curriculum Policy 142 The Infusion of Ideology Into the Scholarly Curriculum Discourse 144 From Process to Product: Commodification as an Example of the Infusion of Ideology Into Educational and Curricular Discourse 150 The Protest of the “New” Economy 153 Curriculum Discourse and a Need for a Theoretically Enriched Rehabilitation of Educational Practice 155

References

163

Author Index

169

Subject Index

173

Preface

This study is an act of remembering. It is a theoretical and historical account of those reifying practices that govern our souls, our subjectivities, and our relationships to ourselves, to culture, and society. It is mainly a masculinist his/story about the commodification and de-subjectification of our bodies and souls in the name of schooling and education. In this work, remembering means an effort to see through the traditions and layers of instrumentalism. Between the lines the work is hopeful: I am thinking that perhaps a “new” memory would be a powerful impulse to educational and political action, to a more authentic restructuring of education which is now at stake, toward a restructuring informed by history and theory in cultural, social, and political terms. The topic here is instrumentality and the intellectual traditions informing it. Drawing on theological, sociological, and philosophical sources, I identify those instrumentalist intellectual traditions still operative today, if in different guises. My main motive stems from my concern over the present intensification of a worldwide instrumentalist stranglehold in education, curriculum, and teaching. Today, on a political level, neoliberalism, in specific ways, involves the importation into education of instrumentalist values: efficiency, effectiveness, and control. In neoliberal education policies, new and often sharpened forms of patriarchal authoritarianism colonize education and, specifically, curriculum. In the Anglo-American world, the rebirth of managerialism has had alarming effects on the professional autonomy of teachers and the intellectual standards of public education. Neoliberalist managerialism drew its ideological strength from the 1911 publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, designed initially for the improvement and efficiency of the railway economy. Gradually, its ix

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principles were popularized after World War I and became an educational ideology in U.S. schools. In his Education and the Cult of Efficiency, educational historian Raymond Callahan (1962) documents this excessive preoccupation with pseudoeducational activities of recording and reporting: Efficiency had not only to be done, but it had to be seen to be done. Efficiency was to be continually demonstrated through the incessant production of records and reports. Educational cost accounting became the order of the day. Teachers were required to keep records, accounting for every hour and every day of the week. Administrators were forever occupied in writing reports and policy statements. Needless to say, there was less and less time for teaching, and schools became places of tedium, ritualistic order and bland routine. Ironically, they became less and less efficient in an educational sense. By the late 1920’s these attempts to reform American schools had produced a system that was weighted down by its own inertia and managerial oppression. The cult of efficiency had become a cult of managerialism which eventually proved to be totally unworkable in educational institutions. (Olssen, Codd, & O’Neill, 2004, p. 191)

After the often successful challenge to managerialism in the 1930s by progressivists like Dewey, Kilpatrick, and others, managerialism has resurfaced as a neoliberalism during the last decades of the 20th century: In its contemporary form, managerialism is preoccupied, if not obsessed, with the notion of “quality.” Quality has become a powerful metaphor for new forms of managerial control. Thus, in the pursuit of quality, educational institutions must engage in “objective setting,” “planning,” “reviewing,” “internal monitoring” and “external reporting.” Policy formation and operational activities must be clearly separated. Governance, management and operations are all distinct functions assigned to different roles. The quality of education is reduced to key performance indicators, each of which can be measured and reported. (Olssen, Codd, & O’Neill, 2004, p. 191)

The ensuing effects of the rebirth of managerialism on teachers’ professional autonomy and on the intellectual standards of the profession are mediated through the decrease of public trust in the profession. Trust and the moral agency, the cores elements of education and teaching practice— “scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose” (Fullan, cited in Kelly, 1999, p. 9)—are destroyed by different kinds of monitoring and accountability systems promoted by neoliberal education policies. Paradoxically enough, the contribution of academic educational psychology may enact compliance and gendered “gracious submission” to those alienating constructions of private-and-public selves of teachers (see Pinar, 2004). Traditionally, the “learning” of educational psychology refers to a context- or in-

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stitution-free event, to some relatively autonomous “happening” inside the head of the “learner.” This encapsulated notion of self may prove fatal to education in the context of neoliberal education policy. Neoliberalism performed as “individualization” (which would mark the social scene of postmodernity and create the structural characteristics of highly developed western societies [see Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002]) accomplishes its ideological hegemony. What do I mean by this? Broadly speaking, educational psychology has faithfully attached itself to the agenda of modernity, most notably to progress and universality, claiming to enhance the overall well-being, at least for those within the reach of the agenda. Ideologically, as I attempt to show later, psychology has served as an instrumental micro-level guarantee of the modernist social order by securing the spread of those ideas with the aid of education to every single individual. This is the core of the psychological legitimation of the curriculum, the relationship between the private and the public, the individual and society, between the particular and the general, between the subjective and the objective. This basic idea holds true as well for the Didaktik tradition as it does for the tradition of Curriculum Studies. Both models of curriculum thought would justify their approaches by appeal to the “individual.” But the ideological aim is the overall, collective, predetermined “good” interpreted as the “conformity of wills” and the “predictability of behavior” wherein individuality is rather a means than an end in itself to those political and educational ends. This penchant for ideological unity through the individual draws on different bases of explanation, however. In the Anglo-American psychologized curriculum model (the Tyler Rationale as its icon), ideological unity (“predictability of behavior”) is sought through the scientific generalization of human behavior. In the German Didaktik schools of thought, the aim of the “conformity of wills” (Volksgeist; the mentality of the nation) is derived from the metaphysical essence of the nation-state. Hence, “individualization” takes place in terms of collective interests stated “top-down,” from the normatively pressuring interests of scientific universalism (generalizable laws of science of psychology) and from the requirements to rule-obeyant behavior as a “learner” or a citizen, respectively. In the neoliberal context, the ideological kernel of governing the soul in both curriculum traditions becomes more visible: individualization and standardization go hand in hand. In the American curriculum tradition, the psychological programs of self-monitoring and metacognition aimed at success in school tests is inculcated even in young children to order to control, regulate, and even replace the emergent idiosyncrasies of authentic discovery and learning. Through this psychologized learning and curriculum, encouraged by, and in accordance with, neoliberal policies, schools emphasize rote learning instead of meaningful understanding. This is the educational kernel of the neoliberal culture, the educational instance of the Lyotardian performativity.

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Also the Didaktik tradition, with its pivotal notion of Bildung, is in crisis for at least two reasons. First, the role of the nation state as the moral framework as well as the financial and material guarantee of the Bildung is no longer self-evident. National politics is substantially subordinated to the global economy, the result being the adoption of the corporate logic as the operational philosophy and policy of the nation-state. Education worldwide—under the reifying and colonizing effect of the (educational) market—converges toward standardized performativity, a global culture wherein there is decreasing space for those humanist values promoted by the Didaktik tradition. Second, in the circumstances of multicultural postmodernity and globalization, the humanist tenets of the Didaktik tradition themselves have themselves been critically challenged as the theoretical b(i)ases by theorists of race (Eurocentrism), class, and gender, often informed by postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial theories. Both intellectual traditions of curriculum theory are firmly, and maybe often without recognizing it, in a co-partisan way, embedded with the present neoliberal Evaluative State. Presupposing the Fukuyaman end of history, neoliberalism as a political ideology promotes managerialism and a culture of performativity where everything is already known and only waiting for the total ordering of things according to a predetermined agenda. There is a déjà vu return to an Aristotelian classificatory notion of science: The universe is ready made. The intellectual task is to classify and order it along with the principles of the performativity culture and the neoliberal political status quo. What this state of (educational) affairs implies is the stagnation or demise of the sustainable cultural evolution. This would be an absurd effect, given the challenges and threats that humankind is facing. Without exaggerating the significance of education for the destiny of humankind it is, however, of utmost importance to repudiate that curriculum theory and practice that is encapsulated within the schoolhouse walls and legitimated by “curriculum development” in terms of standardization and performativity. The social, cultural, and political “big picture” is essential in order to understand the present space provided for education. This might be part of the request made by Pinar (2004) in his appeal to comprehend curriculum as a “complicated conversation” and as an alternative to the sterile bureaucratized curriculum studies whose domination of the field at one time seemed already ended but which seems to have revived in neoliberal education policy. This study can also be interpreted as a conscious effort to “complicate” further the curriculum conversation by bringing forward some historical points of view in order to more fully understand the instrumentalist education present. This complicatedness aims at the critical recognition of the double bind where science and study, education included, is made dependent on the model of an objective and neutral science. The degenerative and restric-

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tive effects on education are already visible in the unquestionable dogmas of performativity, of a single yardstick, of standards of accountability. This is all leading to the deterioration of educational quality and to the de-intellectualization of the teaching profession and scholars’ capacity to formulate practical, historical, and theoretical understanding of education. A specifically national, even personal, impetus for this effort comes from the current Finnish situation. Finnish curriculum theory and practice results in a unique way from a mix of the German Didaktik and Anglo-American curriculum tradition. Traditionally, in Finnish schools, the professional freedom of teachers was encouraged and trust in the teachers’ judgment was high. Now, however, there are signs of the disappearance of these national and cultural practices of Finnish education. Quality assurance systems with new managerialist–bureaucratic and political agendas are eroding the long traditions of trust in professional judgment and pedagogic competence based on the intellectual freedom of highly educated teachers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many have contributed to the shaping of ideas and thoughts in this book. Professor William E. Doll Jr., Louisiana State University, was the first person to open my mind to the options of postmodern theorizing in educational and curriculum studies. This important initial impulse redirected my efforts to contextualize our intellectual curriculum traditions, especially those as embodied in Anglo-American Curriculum Studies tradition on one hand, and the Didaktik traditions in middle and northern Europe on the other. From the beginning of my educational studies I have been bothered by the lack of comparative curriculum theory research, wherein these two curriculum “superdiscourses” might be encompassed in some larger framework than their own specific traditions. This book is my first attempt to address that personal and professional uneasiness. And, perhaps, the processes of globalization make it necessary to unpack nationally and regionally cherished beliefs in curriculum theory, policy, and practice. Professor William F. Pinar’s coauthored book Understanding Curriculum, revived my resistance to and uneasiness over curriculum viewed through instrumental and methodical lenses. With his many monumental and insightful contributions, Professor Pinar has reintroduced to the field of curriculum theory, vitality in terms of moral, cultural, and political worth and, consequently, refreshed the intellectual complexity of curriculum research worthy of its name. My friends and nearest colleagues in Finland, Professors Eero Ropo, Eija Syrjäläinen, and Veli-Matti Värri, have, in many instances, helped me to articulate my complex ideas in a more palatable form, often accompanied by laughter and joking. My special thanks go to my editor, Sondra Guideman

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from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, whose expertise and critical but constructive eye were decisive in the successful cooperation between San Francisco and Tampere. I owe much to my nearest ones, who have created the unique and stimulating context both for our mutual exchange of ideas and for my solitary intellectual and creative work. —Tero Autio

1 Introduction

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK Simply put, two basic models of thought have been applied in conceptualizing Western education with its interrelated notions of teaching and learning. The one draws on the Anglo-Saxon tradition of curriculum studies, the other on the Continental European tradition of Didaktik (Gundem & Hopmann, 1998). The division is somewhat gross and it does only partial justice to the Latin European Continent (i.e., France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and some parts of Switzerland) and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). National principles of curriculum study and design may involve their own rather autonomous principles or a blend of elements from both of those models. Indeed, shifts in emphasis may even have occurred from one model to another, as the example of Finland might prove, where the former authoritative curriculum partnership with the German Didaktik has been gradually altered since WWII, to a conception of teaching and learning in terms of curriculum study and design informed mostly by Anglo-American educational psychology—albeit paradoxically, still in the name of Didaktik. Furthermore, most recently, the neat compartmentalization of the two models may be disturbed by worldwide developments in education where its structures and functions have been strongly challenged during the last two decades by what A. V. Kelly (1999) terms “the politicization of the curriculum.” This phenomenon has also become known as the “restructuring education” movement, a kind of globalization of educational institutions in terms of economic metaphors (see, for instance, Carlgren & Klette, 2000; Kelly, 1999; Whitty, 2002; Whitty, Power, & Halpin, 1998). As 1

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a consequence of these events the national character and imagery of education are shifting to become more amenable to transnational or global influences. For this reason, apart from acknowledging the national roots of each of these discourses and their international influence, it might be equally appropriate to find discursive means of going beyond any single and/or set of alternatives in more adequate and novel terms of education. The ruptures and breaks in question concern the field of curriculum studies as well as other fields of human practice. In this context it is well to recognize the ideological interest of the and/or to reproduce the educational hopes of the civilized Western hemisphere, plagued as it is by the dynamics of upheaval in economic, social, cultural and identity structures. Research into international curriculum discourse in terms of two alternatives would decisively obscure some of the complexity of the problems of current educational practice if it were to restrict itself to this binary relation as subordinated versions of those supposed superdiscourses. In this sense, then, the division may rather be accepted for pedagogic reasons, as a historically conditioned point of departure in more nuanced and decompartmentalizing, deconstructive studies of education, teaching, and learning. Curriculum studies, in its traditional sense, and Didaktik are conceived to have been and to remain “embedded in very different practical, cultural and structural contexts. They are very different intellectual systems developed out of very different starting points, and seek to do very different kinds of intellectual and practical work” (Westbury, 1998, p. 48). What are these radical differences Westbury alluded to? Ultimately, for him, they are their focus in the core of teaching practice, in the role position of the teacher in the educational setting. Both traditions, it is true, address parallel questions like: the question of teaching and learning goals; the question of the topics and contents that follow; the question of organizational forms, teaching and learning methods and procedures; the question of teaching and learning media; the question of prerequisites, disturbing factors, and unintentional auxiliary effects; the question of the way in which learning results and forms can be controlled and judged. (p. 47) Nonetheless, the answers to these questions, Westbury thinks, have been very different. In the American case, the answer has been intimately associated with the idea of building systems of public schools in which the work of teachers was explicitly

INTRODUCTION

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directed by an authoritative agency which had as part of its larger program a curriculum containing both statements of aims, prescribed content (and, in the American case, textbooks), and methods of teaching which teachers are expected to “implement”. In the German case, the state’s curriculum-making has not been seen as something which could or should explicitly direct teaching, but rather as an authoritative selection of traditions that must become embedded, for realization in the classroom, in the self-determined work of teachers and in the forms of teacher thinking represented by Didaktik. (p. 48)

Didaktik, in Westburian terms, would be much more sensitive to personal variance among teachers, allowing them more intellectual and professional freedom to think and accomplish their tasks, whereas their American colleagues seem more strictly controlled by the systemic needs of education administration and by the expertise of scholars and scientists. Didaktik would not be centered on the school system but on expectations pertaining to the tasks of a teacher working in a context that is defined by two sources of authority: . . . the values represented by the concept of education as Bildung and the framework of an authoritative state-mandated curriculum (Lehrplan). Didaktik seeks models of teacher thinking—seen in terms of the quality and the character of the rationales which they yield and which teachers, in their turn, can use to thoughtfully justify their teaching in terms of both its contribution to Bildung and the mandates of the Lehrplan. (p. 48)

The values represented by Bildung are predominantly concerned with the search for an educational solution to the general dilemma of the relationship between the individual and the general. The Bildungstheoretical approach claims to reject outright the notion of individuality in the sense of the relative atomism of liberal individualism: “. . . the concept of individuality was not understood by the classical theoreticians as being ‘individualistic,’ as a selfcentered isolation. Instead, it always denotes fundamental individuality, and is characterized by the relationship of the individual to the general” (Klafki, 2000, p. 93). The philosophical backdrop to the Bildungstheoretical values summarized in the notion of fundamental individuality was provided by German classical idealism, highlighted as the “Deutsche Bewegung” (German Movement) in the period 1770–1830. Notably, the metaphysical contribution of Hegel would appear to have been decisive for the intellectual formulations of Bildungstheoretical postures. In Klafki’s account of the Hegelian logic of Bildung, a process of becoming himself, in terms of fundamental individuality, would denote that “the subject ‘comes’ in the ‘other’ (the ‘other’ meaning here the objective, the general), ‘to himself ’, to fundamental reasonableness, to concrete universality” (Klafki, 2000, p. 92). Education in terms of Bildung would thus aim at individuality through “the formative

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process characterized as Bildung for all to gain the capacity for self-determination” complemented by the dialectical counterpart of the general in the spirit of Hegel: “Bildung is possible only in the medium of a general, that is, of historical objectifications of humanity, of humaneness, and its conditions, with an orientation to the possibilities of, and obligation to, humanitarian progress” (p. 92). In current language, the Bildung movement is keenly aware of the linguistic and social nature of identity and individuality, even if it would never admit the poststructural phrase envisaging the production of those characteristics in its faith in the self-determination of an individual. Yet, it may be argued, the subject–object division of reality may be proving to be intellectually and practically fatal to the educational discourse accompanying it. The objectified (and even glorified) status of the other as “historical objectifications of humanity,” as the best accomplishments of humanity, would entail extraordinary educational burdens of history on the “capacity of selfdetermination.” This German equivalent to the late-20th-century conservative American ‘Great Books’ movement would actually remove an individual from self-determination to a regulation of the self in terms of a preconceived symbolic curriculum of objective nature, of reality in all its senses. This argument may be illuminated by the role assigned to the teacher within the complex institutional framework of the Lehrplan. The institutional embodiment of the concrete universal in Didaktik discourse would be the State. The metaphysical qualities related to it as “the inner form of the state” would impinge upon the tasks of teachers working within this framework much more profoundly in its subtle but comprehensive interest of control than any of those expected from their American colleagues. The guarantors of this inner form of the state are never the institutions and curricula themselves, whose spirit can be misinterpreted and sabotaged, but living human beings who feel responsible for both the state and education. In curricula, the state gives responsible-thinking, civically, and educationally oriented people the opportunity of showing the young its worth, and whoever wishes to serve the state and at the same time provide a truly worthwhile education must adapt themselves to this objective structure. (Weniger, 2000, p. 120, emphasis added)

The professional freedom and teacher-centeredness in the Didaktik Westbury thus enthuses over are to be conceived within this structure, which might effectively play down many pedagogic and educational interests which fall outside those laid down by the state. The essence of what is expressed conceptually in the Lehrplan and institutionalized in the organizational structure requires the educator to come alive, and

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thus curricula are directed primarily at the teacher. They outline the human assets that the state must demand of its teachers. (p. 120)

The almost inhuman extent to which the state is coming to regulate the teacher’s self from without appears in the following excerpts from Weniger’s authoritative text: The Lehrplan indicates which of the opposing forces legitimate our present existence and, therefore, cannot be relinquished. It is these that should be alive in the teacher. The teacher represents the changing constellations of opposites in school, as the state does in life as a whole. The antinomies of the contemporary human situation are alive in the teacher, but at rest. An ideal is required that governs how these forces are to be regulated in accordance with the will of the state, an ideal that encompasses the individual forms of dialectical unity still possible with respect to the differences in the teachers’ personality structures, their disciplines, and their basic attitudes. (p. 121)

In no way divergent from these theoretical vistas of a humanistically oriented “Didaktik as a theory of education,” the institutionalization of teacher education and professional licensure follows the same pattern of thought. Every German teacher must, as a part of his or her Second State Examination, present a thesis which demonstrates facility in sustained, theory-based reflection on teaching using one or another of the topics or themes of the Lehrplan as an example. They must demonstrate how they marry, using the language provided by Didaktik, the values represented by the teacher’s role as a public servant working within the framework of the Lehrplan, understandings of the ideal embedded within autonomous (sic!) tradition of Bildung, and the “needs” of the students—and then justify their decision-making in these same terms. (p. 59)

The autonomous tradition of Bildung may appear a powerful ideological attempt to inculcate in the teacher’s mind and behavior not only the procedural maxims of Didaktik but even subordinate their pedagogic intentions and will through Didaktik to the speculative metaphysical values manifested in “the inner form of the State.” Genuine professional freedom and self-responsibility are subtly but even more stringently than in the American case harnessed, through the whole person of the teacher, solely to the interests of the nation-state in the name of humanist science and ethics. This rigid institutional frame, legitimated as the general, as the philosophically necessary counterpart to the particular, to the subjective and personal, reveals Didaktik as specific educational instance of the Foucauldian knowledge/power discourse. From this perspective, the Didaktik tradition would together with “traditional American curriculum theory” (Westbury,

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1998, p. 47) coincide in their common ideological concern to govern the social, the ‘general,’ by the attempt to standardize the behavior, and even the psyche and will, of the individual via the more or less subtle discourses of collective interests. In traditional American curriculum theory, this educational ideology has been translated, as will be evidenced in later chapters, into the scientific language of psychology. The American psychologized curriculum shares its ideological partnership with the Didaktik tradition, albeit in the more subtle, ‘civilized’ guises of the latter, in its holistic, humanistic approach. Against this briefly sketched picture, Westbury’s (1998) assertion that the traditional American curriculum studies and the German tradition of Didaktik “are very different intellectual systems” (p. 48) would seem questionable. It might be argued, with good reason, that both have drawn on universal principles of objectivist kind in morality (Didaktik) and science (psychologized curriculum), and that the ideological task of these traditional and authoritative curriculum discourses seems to have been, despite their contrary claims, to eliminate difference and individuality by positing their ostensibly privileged (philosophical or scientific) sense of common educational culture. Both discourses, in thwarting with full academic authority and by the symbolic power structures they constitute, any attempt at intellectual or moral questioning of their own educational and curriculum goals, have advocated the rise of overemphasized instrumentalism and proceduralism in curriculum work. The arbitrary symbolic power of these discourses, that is, one specific curriculum discourse among all modes imaginable, would legitimate the respective combination of psychological and humanistic instruments of symbolic violence. Symbolic violence as a particularly subtle and thus effective form of power, which “is never reducible to the imposition of force” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, p. 7), would, while camouflaging itself as ‘natural’ or ‘necessary,’ come to comprise the core of pedagogic authority in those curriculum discourses: Insofar as it is an arbitrary power to impose which, by mere fact of being misrecognized as such, is objectively recognized as a legitimate authority, pedagogic authority, a power to exert symbolic violence which manifests itself in the form of a right to impose legitimately, reinforces the arbitrary power which establishes it and which it conceals. (p. 13)

The authoritative closure of such symbolic power as a ‘curriculum circulus vitiosus’ would form a hermetic triadic unity between the traditional American curriculum studies, humanistically oriented German Didaktik, and the nation-state bureaucracy. This ‘iron cage’ seems to realize, in the case of education, the Weberian prophecy of the intrusion of instrumental rationality resting on ‘mechanical foundations’. These are designed and maintained by

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pretension to an education reducible to a pure and simple process of rational communication between becoming or already autonomous individuals beyond any terms of gender, class, race, ethnicity—or of the idiosyncrasies of any concrete individuality. Instrumental rationality is considered an ideal mode of human action which the psychological–curricular, Bildungstheoretical and bureaucratic hierarchies employ through their closure of symbolic power. Hence the teacher is already structurally relegated to a subservient agency. On this structural platform of the two main intellectual curriculum traditions with their statemandated bureaucracy there has been launched their most recent version. The change has been described as a change of discourse, an economization of the language of schooling as well as a growing influence from an increasingly globalized economy and business life. The change of discourse is embedded in a neo-liberal rhetoric together with an increasing control of teachers and an orientation to performance indicators and as a result of that a narrowing and a trivialization of the educational mission. (Carlgren & Klette, 2000, pp. 16–17)

From the viewpoint developed here the question may be not so much of a change of discourse as of a continuation of discourse on educational instrumental rationality advocated by both of the main schools of curriculum theorizing. What has been changed is the status of the nation-state. The essence of the nation-state has experienced a radical shift from a relatively hegemonic political actor to a local economic area in an interdependent global economy (see, for instance, Reich, 1993). The implications for education of the role of the new economy in the governance of nation-states, “state-promoted instrumentality” (Ball, in Carlgren, 2000, pp. 329–330), have been drastic but logical. In terms of instrumental rationality, the step from metaphysical legitimation of the state as the carrier of the supreme humanist values to sanctification of the economy as an “objective structure” of education may not be so great. The consequence has been the intensification, rather than any change, of the same hierarchical symbolic violence present in the teacher’s work from the outset. The “objective” structure of the curriculum has only been strengthened by the removal of bureaucratic power and control aided by traditional intellectual curriculum traditions closer to the professional and private identity of the teacher. This background, as much a personal as a theoretical concern, has prompted to an appraisal, from both a historical and a current viewpoint, of some of the interrelated issues involved in instrumentalist curriculum theory, policy, and practice. The emphasis will be on an intertextual endeavor to detotalize reading and writing on these topics through a fragmentation and mutual experimentation with historical, philosophical, psychological, social

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theory, and economic interests. The ideological aim of this textual maneuver is to defend, in an indirect and tentative way, hybrid forms of curriculum discourse more sui generis, not be reduced to forms of application to any particular interests foreign to educational experience and intentionality. The interest will thus not be so much on the organizational curriculum itself as on curricular ideologies, drawing intertextually on a variety of sources converging topically to textual forms which have informed the production of organizational curriculum frameworks. The study focuses on what might be called a discussion of the symbolic curriculum, centering on the linguistic and social production of ideological images or metaphors which, in turn, have proved useful in the construction of the instrumental links between self, schooling, culture, and society already briefly outlined in this introduction. According to Westbury (1998), the images produced by symbolic curriculum discourse are “fundamentally important because they embody conceptions of what is desirable in social and cultural orders, what is to be valued and sought after by members of a community or nation” (p. 66). Chapter 2 seeks briefly to establish the origins of the norms of modern scientific reasoning, not only for its own sake but, more pointedly, from the standpoint of curriculum studies, for the educational preliminaries of the modern ideal of the personality as a rational actor. The contributions of the pioneers of modern scientific thought and mentality exemplified by Bacon, Galilei, and Descartes are presented here. In chapter 3 the pivotal figure is René Descartes. The received notion of the Cartesian philosophy as a strictly rational enterprise is challenged as at least partly misleading from the viewpoint of curriculum theory. The pragmatist zest, along with methodical and rational concerns coincided in Descartes’ moral motivation of science. The task of science was to improve the prospects of a good life and morality as an inescapable part of it, to be “beneficial to man” in a pragmatic but, most importantly, in a moral sense. The Cartesian belief in moral improvement by dint of increasing valid and methodically assured knowledge, by science, has backed the modern faith in the unity of science and education as embodied in the shape of the modern curriculum. Furthermore, the current educational optimism takes its origin in the Cartesian notion of educational equity. The institutionalization of education in the modern sense was effectively promoted by his incisive criticism of the then prevailing schooling and his claim of the potentialities of every human being for education. The modernization of schooling and the curriculum received decisive impulse from Cartesian epistemology. His insistence on a focus on “efficient causes” divorced from the metaphysics of the infinite and the divine made for a general concentration on pragmatic aspects of life manifested also in the gradual secularization of education. The structure of his epistemology fully admitted the contingent, indeterminate, even chaotic characteristics of reality. Rationalism, for him, was not a credo of the a priori

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rational reality of abstract philosophical or theological speculations, but it was justified precisely by reason of the practical insurmountability of reality by any means other than rational method. This instrumental element in the Cartesian rationalism was a deliberate ideology in his epistemological designs as a kind of Gnostic concern for the condition of the human world (see Epilogue), where moral concerns, theoretical curiosity, scepticism, and the sensed contingency of this world forced him intellectually to instrumental, method-driven decisions. Descartes’ contribution is a sine qua non in dealing with the rise of modern psychology as an autonomous discipline and as a constitutive part of the modern curriculum discourse. The roots of ‘errors in thought’ were to be traced to socialization in childhood in adopting bad habits of thinking from adults who have not reflected sufficiently on their early learning experiences. The possibility of shaping the behavior of dogs by psychological conditioning during partridge hunting led him to think of human educational applications. The role of volition in Cartesian epistemology comes very close to the Freudian unconscious id, and the rational approach of regulation of the self suggested by Freud can equally be conceived as the dynamic principle of the Cartesian symbolic curriculum: ‘Where the id is there shall the ego come.’ Though Descartes had no genuine form of social theory he might have envisaged the liberal state as the ideal organization of society attained through the systematic use of methodical reason by every single individual. The Cartesian curriculum has, in good and bad, been a forerunner of instrumental tradition, and without recognition of its constant and multilayered influence the current emphases in curriculum studies might be more obscure. Chapter 4 continues the theme of individualization by means of instrumental rationality as a solution to the problem of governing the general, the novel social situation in which the Reformation was taking place as one of the constituents of that social change. It manifested itself as a kind of parallel challenge to the novel situation to which Descartes responded in his revolutionary redefinition of the interrelatedness of morality, knowledge, and subjectivity. Apart from its enormous theological significance, the Reformation, notably in its Calvinist sense, denoted literally, and particularly aptly from the standpoint of curriculum studies, reformation of the self. The psychological mechanisms of Predestination went deep in the formation of modern society and culture and contributed decisively to the modern ideal of the self. In dissociating the individual from tradition, community, and the “status naturalis” Calvinism created the framework for the emergence of the achieving society, where the institutionalization of education proved indispensable. For religious reasons, initially, one could never be satisfied with or assured of one’s achievements because the number of those who would be elected for salvation was restricted and known to none except God. The diabolic genius, if the expression may be permitted in this context, of the principle of Predesti-

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nation expanded, of course, into a new criterion of social order and progress by means of a subtle but most effective symbolic coercion whereby individual behavior was ultimately regulated by the inner sense of immense loneliness and insecurity. Paradoxically, the Calvinist Reformation contributed most decisively to secularization by despiritualizing aspiration to salvation. The new rules regarding salvation were now based in a commitment to paid work. The rise of the whole capitalist economic system has been claimed to draw upon the emergence of the “Protestant ethic” (Weber, 1930/1995). The modern notion of progress could hardly dispense with these powerful internalized incentives to work and the concomitant constant struggle for the better on the part of each. This instrumental aspect of the Calvinist influence was methodologically invigorated by its emphasis on natural science: The mathematical method was conceived as superior to futile philosophical speculation. These historical internalizations have been sedimented in the Western ideals of (lifelong) learning and personal identity and in the way they have been produced as intellectual postures in curriculum discourses in historically varying but in principle intact guises. Chapter 5 constitutes an effort to add a special authoritative supplement to the historical layers of rationalistic regulation of the self in current curriculum discourses. For this purpose, John Locke’s contribution is enormous. The point here is not the textual production of the child through the practical advice on child-rearing Locke (1989) presented in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education, but rather the curricular implications of the modernist quest for the remaking of the self in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke, 1690/1990). Education, in terms of how Locke, among other pioneers of modern thought, conceived it, as the remaking of the self, was a radical departure from classical views and extended the educational task stipulated by Descartes to the level of society, since human nature in and of itself was not adequate to fitting someone to the kind of civil society he would like to have seen implemented. Education-rearing emerges as a supplement to human nature. This marked a shift from classical images of citizenship in which an Aristotelian picture of humanity was as creatures born fit for society. (Baker, 2001, p. 196)

Locke’s comprehensive intellectual agenda provided by the accounts of politics, epistemology, and the dynamics of human consciousness was of course not unaffected by the social and political context he lived in. The similarity between his and Cartesian principles, even to the terminology of the demand for ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’ ideas is obvious. The pragmatic penchant for modest questioning without aspiring to transcendental foundations proved useful for the rise of empiricism and, notably, for the science of psychology as a constitutional curriculum discourse: “Our business is not to know all

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things, but those which concern our conduct” (Locke, 1990, p. 46). What might, however, be the difference between the liberal Lockean approach and the neoliberal discursive production of individuality today is the constant intellectual and moral alertness manifest throughout Locke’s writings and in his overall posture. He was well aware about the role of language games in the production of scientific, social, political, and moral arguments claiming for themselves the status of privileged truth. The aim of institutionalized scepticism Locke was advocating was to sustain the power to produce morality within the context of practice. In this sense one may observe a radical departure in the current neoliberal educational policy and curriculum discourses, where the removal of the power to define morality has been predetermined from within the context of practice. This shift is reflecting in a shift of terminology, where morality is replaced by quality, thus producing a very different, and one may claim, misguided image of educational practice. The dialogue with Locke and consulting him in regard of the current educational crisis may be helpful in uncovering restrictions also emanating from other authoritative sources, for example Didaktik, on defining education and its curricular embodiments. Locke’s profound scepticism regarding foundationalism was manifested in the way he even ridiculed any attempt to define morality in any fundamental or transcendental sense. At best, and importantly from the point of view of educational practice naturally imbued with moral complexities, transcendental and foundational moral philosophies can indeed inform practice, but they cannot, and they should not, attempt to impose practice without harming the moral purposes of education itself. This contextual stress of Locke’s on morality, along with his recognition of the significance of emotional and sensual pleasures as a precondition for a good life also made his moral conceptions in principle more tolerable and closer to the complexities of concrete life than the moral philosophies drawing solely on rational calculation. This, however, only in principle. Locke’s respect for, and not only toleration, of individual idiosyncracy in terms of hedonism, which has left its traces in today’s postmodernist ‘relativism,’ was not, however, sufficient to prevent his thought from sliding to the seductions of methodological universalism. Locke had an obsession to subsume the language games of morality and moral inquiry to the principle of pretended mathematical rigor and exactitude. The interest in quasi-mathematical, methodological foundationalism entered the context to displace the original interest in restoring the substantial and ‘unfoundational’ complexity of moral, social, and political life in his endeavor to establish the human equivalent of natural science, the “moral sciences” (translated in German as the Geisteswissenschaften, which subsequently has informed the German Didaktik tradition). This seductive vision of managing complexity and chaos has arguably featured in the modernist curriculum discourse. His overall motto “reason must be our judge in every-

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thing” has proved extremely useful in the philosophical, psychological, and curricular conceptions of a self-sufficient, socially encapsulated individual as “the unified, monolithic, reified, essentialized subject capable of fully conscious, fully rational action, a subject assumed in most liberal and emancipatory discourse” (Lather, 1997, p. 103). This Lockean rationalistic program has been conveyed to the core of modernist curriculum procedures as its psychologized framework, where the moral strain of education has been increasingly displaced by the discourse on psychological management of, say, cognitive, affective and psychomotor domain. Chapter 6 brings together more explicitly the fragmentary threads of the previous chapters to a view of the ‘aims-and-objectives’ model of curriculum discourse. The general objection, while it gathered momentum from the historical fragments, will be orchestrated to question the symbolic framework of both the traditional curriculum (the German Didaktik and the traditional Anglo-American curriculum studies) discourses. For reason of space, however, the Didaktik tradition will not be the main case. Some general claims will be made on the basis of Kant’s theory of education, which might be argued rather to promote the understanding of the curriculum discourse as an authoritative and instrumental text than to enhance the understanding of education, in his own phrase, “as the greatest and most difficult problem to which man can devote himself ” (Kant, 1991, p. 11). One may even argue that precisely the moral and intellectual complexities of education manifested in his theory of education presented a stumbling block for Kant’s moral philosophy to enter into educational theory as a genuine constituent. What remained was the predominance of a performance-oriented volitional and instrumental posture paving the way to the achieving individual in the achieving society, the Leistungsgesellschaft. Kantian educational theory, then, may have even furthered the displacement of the moral strain in the curriculum discourse rather than its re-establishment. This instrumental dilemma was again reflected in the pedagogy of Kant’s successor, Johann Friedrich Herbart. Since Herbart’s time the instrumental prominence of psychology in education and curriculum discourse has been established. Nor has the Herbartian influence been restricted to the Didaktik tradition; there are vital interconnections with the American curriculum tradition. The main focus of chapter 6 is on this Anglo-American account of curriculum theorizing prior to the intellectual breakthrough of the Reconceptualization Movement (on this, see Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995). The discursive production of practice in the context of neoliberal educational policy has taken place in an even sharpened instrumental sense (“the restructuring of education”) informed by the traditional curriculum field. Historically and within the institutional discourse, the predominance of “the aims and objectives movement” (Kelly, 1999, p. 57) has become manifest through successive generations of curriculum scholars: Franklin Bobbitt,

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Werrett Charters, Ralph Tyler, Benjamin Bloom, and D. R. Kratwohl. The flavor which those aims and objective pioneers gave to curriculum discourse was one of behavioral, scientific job-analysis. The introduction of precise scientific methods in educational practice, drawing especially from industry (Bobbitt, Charters), has been expanded to an ambitious, relatively autonomous and highly detailed classification of objectives in the cognitive (Bloom) and affective (Kratwohl) domain (Kelly, 1999, pp. 58–59). At the center of this succession of scholars remains Ralph Tyler. His contribution was to capture the spirit and letter of the instrumental symbolic curriculum in his Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Tyler, 1949), “Bible of the curriculum” (Jackson, 1992) as “the fundamental icon of the American curriculum field” (Westbury, 1998, p. 49). This aims-and-objectives movement, in which Tyler focused its scrutiny on the definition of curricular objectives, has been replaced by the neoliberal interest in the assessment of objectives by an intensified monitoring of individual performativity. In both developments of this movement the discursive production of educational reality in terms of scientific psychology has been obvious. The Epilogue, as well as a kind of summary—as a kind of tentative heuristic source of further study—can be read as a textual fragment for the theoretical dignity and understanding of praxis; a practice, where the complexity of an educational task is à la Heidegger ‘always already’ there. In this sense, many traditional and current curriculum discourses like the state- or theory-mandated regulation of the selves of those engaged in the already theoretically and morally complex practice of teaching and learning have proved misguided—in terms of both theory and practice. They can claim a privileged status only by appealing to their own ideological reasoning. One of the main tasks of current curriculum studies and teacher education might be to learn to read what language and thought games different discourses are using in producing linguistically and via social practice a preferred kind of educational reality. More specifically, in this sense, an extra digression will scrutinize the roots of our prevalent ideology, instrumental rationality, embodied throughout all spheres of human practice. This maneuver will be made in an excursion into the eschatological arguments used in the current modernity/postmodernity debate. These arguments may provide a further understanding of the popularity of instrumentalism in the historical succession, and even, one might argue, in the succession of increasing simulation of instrumentalism.

2 “Truth as Utility”: Reconsidering the Rise of Scientific Method as a Pragmatic Precursor for Modernist Curriculum Thinking

HISTORICAL PROLOGUE TO WESTERN CURRICULUM STUDIES: DEVELOPING THE NORMS OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC REASONING This chapter constitutes an attempt to delineate the rise of the modern (or modernist) notion of science and the way it was geared to learning and education from the very outset. Hence, although the names usually linked to pioneering work in philosophy or science—names such as Bacon, Galileo, or Descartes—the objective here is to show the direct or mediated relevance of their respective contributions to the formative field of education and curriculum. Education has its own rich history, recorded and interpreted by each generation in turn, where an auxiliary or foundational role has been reserved for those great eminences behind the scientific revolution from the 16th century onwards. In fact, however, it may be argued with good reasons that they have a status among other pioneers of modern education. If the project of the Enlightenment were conceived as a huge pedagogic project, then the seeds of the Enlightenment could be argued to have been sown during the era when mathematics and the empirical method won the battle for the souls of philosophers and scholars. To elucidate the explicit educational bearing of the modern scientific outlook reflected by many of those early pioneers, notably Descartes, is one of the main tasks of this and the following chapter. These influences should by no means be conceived as if pedagogic and educational thought and practice had resulted from philosophical or scientific innovations in any straightforward manner. On the contrary, a more plausible model of development might be such as has taken place rather on a reciprocal 14

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basis. For instance, the Cartesian epistemological and scientific revolution grew out of a critique of the school practices of his time; and his invention of Method might arguably be attributed to educational and curricular discourses in earlier centuries, for example Peter Ramus’ “map of knowledge,” John Comenius’ methodizations of traditional teaching (Doll, 1998, p. 303), and the exhaustive method of teaching set out in the Catholic Jesuit scheme of studies, Ratio Studiorum (Bowen, 1981, p. 24). Cartesianism as rationalistic epistemology was born out of the ideas of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), and established, with the contribution of Galileo Galilei, a methodological and intellectual basis for the Nuova Scienzia. These rationalistic and empiricistic intellectual breakthroughs were subsequently epitomized in Newtonian physics, which in turn, with its successful application of mathematics fueled the Enlightenment dreams of human progress with novel vistas of rational intervention in nature and society. While the influence of the Cartesian–Newtonian world-view is well recorded (see, for instance, Doll, 1993, pp. 23–38), the role of Calvinism (which will be the topic of chap. 4) in the formation of modern Western institutions and mentalities is largely overshadowed by its philosophical counterpart. Apart from Max Weber’s famous and much disputed treatise on the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism there have been a fairly small number of works on this topic. For educational and curriculum studies, the recognition of origins and impact of the Protestant, and more specifically, Calvinist thought, might prove a vital issue. In the 1990s, however, there occurred an increase in interest in what might be called the Calvinist partnership in present-day education and curriculum discourse (e.g., Doll, 1998; Goodson, 1997; Hamilton, 1990). Whereas Cartesianism and the new empirical science promoted a firm belief in the progress of science accompanied—rather implausibly from today’s perspective—by a belief in the progress of morality, Calvinism’s intent was to show the other side of the coin: the harshness and dullness of life, the futile search of absolute certainty, and the poor prospect of any genuine moral edification. Yet the door of human destiny was not totally closed. Devotion to paid work could keep the hope of salvation alive, and this aspect of the Calvinist symbolic curriculum—in increasingly secularized form where the measure of human dignity is work—might be argued to have been one of the main threads in the evolving web of Western rationalization and modernization. Despite the different images of growth and success there may to be found a common interest binding these two approaches together. This interest was the conscious effort to develop a method whereby decisions concerning problems of any kind, from existential to social, scientific, political, and economic, could be effectively resolved. The emphasis on method in Cartesianism meant an incessant search for the certitude of knowledge, whereas the Calvinist con-

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cern was to lay methodical grounds for everyday practices, especially (paid) work. As a consummate effect these emphases, with their scientific and political consequences, were to lead to a sweeping rationalization and modernization of society: to the birth of the modern nation-state and the ideal of rational agent. The chapter’s aim here, then, is to try to discern some of the origins of the Cartesian method-focused impact on our cognitive heritage, reflected especially in the realm of education, in the preparation of people for the designated cognitive and, consequently, social order.

THE ACTUALITY OF CARTESIANISM Any effort to understand the origins of the rationalization of society could hardly dispense with Descartes’ philosophical and epistemological revolutions. His radicalism gave birth to myriad notions alive today in the context of knowledge, scientific method, modern images of self and individuality, technology, and nature. Edwin G. Boring (1957, p. 166) in his magnum opus of the history of psychology, gives a testimony to the foundational role of Descartes in the science of psychology: “. . . Descartes really stands at the beginning of modern psychology and many of its concepts, and even anticipates physiological psychology.” Jakov Ljatker (1984, p. 23), the Russian historian of science, enlarges the view of the actuality of Cartesian ideas in his biography of Descartes: “Philosophy and mathematics, physics and mechanics, psychology and psychophysiology, politics and production—in all these different fields the issue called Descartes and the Twentieth Century proved to be most actual.” Thomas McCarthy, in the Translator’s Introduction in Habermas’ two-volume treatise The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1984, 1987), illuminates the continuing struggle over Cartesian thinking: The Cartesian paradigm of the solitary thinker—solus ipse—as the proper, even unavoidable, framework for radical reflection on knowledge and morality dominated philosophical thought in the early modern period. The methodological solipsism it entailed marked the approach of Kant at the end of the eighteenth century no less than that of his empiricist and rationalist predecessors in the two preceding centuries. This monological approach preordained certain ways of posing the basic problems of thought and action: subject versus object, reason versus desire, mind versus body, self versus other, and so on. In the course of the nineteenth century this Cartesian paradigm and the subjectivistic orientation associated with it were radically challenged. Early in the century Hegel demonstrated the intrinsically historical and social character of the structures of consciousness. Marx went even further, insisting that mind is not the ground nature but nature that of mind; he stressed that human consciousness is

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essentially embodied and practical and argued that forms of consciousness are an encoded representation of forms of social reproduction.

McCarthy adds a number of further counterarguments or countermovements to Cartesianism, among them Darwinism, American Pragmatism, historicism, and Nietzschean and Freudian thought. Darwin theoretically established the continuity of the human species with the rest of nature by understanding intelligence as a major means to human self-preservation. This notion in turn fed “a basically functionalist conception of reason such as we find in American Pragmatism.” Nietzsche and Freud repudiated reason as the heart of consciousness, setting up the preconceptual and the nonconceptual to challenge the conceptual realm. Finally, historicism contributed to the acknowledgment of the unavoidable contextuality of social reality when it “exhibited in detail the historical and cultural variability of categories of thought and principles of action” (McCarthy, in Habermas, 1984, p. x). This very powerful set of anti-Cartesian influences was not, however, strong enough to disempower the basic paradigm. In McCarthy’s words, the history of ideas is full of surprises; and twentieth-century philosophy bore witness to the continued power of the Cartesian model, in a variety of forms— from Edmund Husserl’s openly Cartesian phenomenology to the Cartesianism lying just below the surface of logical empiricism. (p. x)

Not only philosophy but large parts of current social, political, economic, and educational theory and practice may be argued to witness the continued sway of this “monological” tradition at the turn of the 21st century. The Cartesian model is again the question of the day as we try to understand our contemporary social theory and curriculum discourses. The renewed interest in Cartesian paradigm is due to the vigorous postmodern critique of it in political and cultural studies, literary theory and criticism, and gender studies, but most importantly from the viewpoint of this present undertaking, in contemporary curriculum discourse. These shifts have also touched the ‘founding’ role of philosophy itself. All these novel transformations have meant a gradual demise of the philosophy-centered, generalizable, metaphysical, and foundational efforts in favor of contextualized, antifoundational, ‘networked’ and local points of view (see, for instance, Caputo, 1987; Kincheloe, 1995; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995; Toulmin, 1990). In curriculum studies, notably, the renewed interest in the Cartesian paradigm has been evidenced in the recognition of the close historical and conceptual tie of the current field to that paradigm. William Doll (1993) has brought out this interrelatedness between the mainstream curriculum paradigms of the 20th century and the modernist assumptions of Descartes and Newton. Doll is fully aware how

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modern science and industrial revolution did bring fourth not only material benefits but also concepts of progress, freedom, and individual accomplishment not found in the pre-modern thought. Modern thought opened up vistas not accessible by pre-modern thought. (p. 26)

The undeniable success of modern thought did not, however, hide a more shadowy aspect of the modern vision which has proved closed and restrictive. This closedness was fostered by the Cartesian model and Newtonian mechanics. According to Doll (1993), the centerpiece of this vision, cause-effect determinism measured mathematically, depended on a closed, nontransformative, linearly developed universe. Stability was assumed, nature was in all ways consonant and simple, and the disciplines were organized in a reductionist hierarchy from mathematics and physics through sociology and psychology. . . . Despite its miraculous accomplishments in fields like medicine and microbiology, [modern thought] has been quite ineffective in dealing with growth, development, and personal or physical interactions looked at from a systems or network viewpoint. In short, modern thought has not provided a good model for the education of human beings. (p. 26)

Doll is able to show the close affinity between the Cartesian paradigm from the 17th century and the most influential paradigm in the field of curriculum studies in the 20th century, the Tyler Rationale: Overall, Ralph Tyler’s four fundamental foci for curriculum planning—(1) chosen purposes, (2) provided experiences, (3) effective organization, (4) evaluation—(. . .) are but a variation on Descartes’ general method for “rightly conducting reason and seeking truth in the sciences.” (p. 31)

In the same vein, Joe Kincheloe (1995) elucidates the current influence of the Cartesian model in the educational problems of today. While focusing on the failures of many educational reforms, Kincheloe seeks the philosophical context which might have spawned some of our present problems. Despite all their benefits, Western modernism and Cartesian rationality carry profound and unfortunate consequences. Like Doll, Kincheloe perceives the progressive aspects of modernism, its ideals of freedom, justice, and equality as applied to politics and government, but nevertheless does not close his eyes to the excesses of the rational method: The Cartesian compass pointed the way to modernism with its centralization, concentration, accumulation, efficiency, and speed. Bigger became better as the dualistic way of seeing reinforced a patriarchal expansionist socio-political order grounded on a desire for power and conquest. Such a worldview often served to dehumanize, to focus attention on concerns other than the sanctity of

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humanity. A foundation was laid which allowed science and technology to transform the world. Commerce increased, nationalism grew, and European civilization could conquer at a rate previously unimagined. Rationality became a new deity, and around this god the credo of modernity was developed: the world is rational and there is only one meaning of the term. All phenomena can be described within the boundaries of this monolithic rationality whether we are studying atoms or the solar system, dreams or engines, learning or gunpowder, electricity or forms of government. (p. 4)

THE REVOLUTION IN THE INQUIRING MIND: METHOD, MATHEMATICS, AND LEARNING The major figure behind the transitions and the scientific revolution of the 16th century Doll and Kincheloe refer to was undoubtedly René Descartes (1596–1650). His time coincided with the breakthrough of empirical natural science, with other major contributors like Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), and somewhat later Isaac Newton (1643–1727). The preparation for the intellectual breakthrough had nonetheless already been ongoing since the 13th century as a consequence of the revived interest in Aristotelian thought and empirical knowledge. In England, the experimental method was developed by Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) and Roger Bacon (1214–1292). Basic concepts for the Nuova Scienzia (e.g., uniformly accelerating motion) were created by the Parisian philosophers Jean Buridan (d. 1358) and Nicholas Oresme (1323–1382). Duns Scotus (1266–1308) had been designing a non-Aristotelian modal theory which drew distinction between logical necessities and the necessities of nature which prepared the way for novel understandings and methods in the empirical study of nature (Niiniluoto, 1980, pp. 42–43; Randall, 1940, pp. 209–212). The logical groundwork undergirding the gradual refinement of Aristotelian physics and logic directed the way to the mathematical inventions of Descartes and Newton: From the beginning of the fourteenth century, . . . there set in a persistent and searching reconstruction of the Aristotelian tradition, which when directed to the Physics led by gradual stages to the mechanical and mathematical problems of the Galilean age, and when directed to the Logic led to the precise formulation of the method and structure of science acclaimed by all the seventeenthcentury pioneers. (Randall, 1940, pp. 219–220)

Oxford and Paris were the academic sites of the major intellectual breakthroughs. Together with the masters at Paris who made notable discoveries in the treatment of motion and falling bodies, the Oxford school of thought was able to show the central role of experience in this intellectual revolt. With

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the chief pathfinder of this via moderna, William of Ockham, . . . this new modernism stood for a skeptical empiricism that completely demolished in the fourteenth century the great systems so carefully erected a hundred years ago. Gone were all the necessities of reason, all metaphysical entities and distinctions. Nothing could be accounted real in nature that was not an observed fact or relation between facts. Experience was the only test of physical truth. At the same time Ockhamites built on this basis a positive science of physics that laid the foundations for the astronomy and dynamics of the seventeenth century . . . thus by 1375 the genius of Descartes, of Galileo, and of Copernicus had been anticipated; natural science had advanced as far as the scientists of 1575. (Randall, 1940, pp. 19–20)

The main reason for the 200 years’ delay Randall posits thus: Further rapid development was held back by the shift in intellectual interest to the concerns of literary humanism, that is, by the need of assimilating a new set of values. But the essential ideas of mathematical physics were found by the fourteenth-century Ockhamites two hundred years before technological and commercial experience had progressed far enough to support steady growth. (pp. 211–212)

FRANCIS BACON: TOWARD A VIEW OF SCIENCE AS AN INTELLECTUAL TOOL; “TRUTH AND UTILITY ARE . . . THE VERY SAME THINGS” The replacement of the Aristotelian syllogism by a systematic, mathematically inspired method and Aristotle’s notion of essence by the perception of the utility and experimental malleability of things were perhaps the most important conceptual revisions contributing to the breakthrough of natural science. But the revolutionary novelty that Bacon and notably Descartes brought about was—contrary to the received notion of Descartes as a straightforward rationalist and methodizer—to gear scientific method to human interests. The experimental method came to be associated with the intuition of the practical utility of science, which replaced Aristotelian essences as the objects of study. Aristotle had formulated the notion of essence as what something “precisely is” in terms of the categorial definability of things: “. . . there is knowledge of each thing only when we know its essence,” which too has emphasized the classificatory aspects of scientific knowledge and study (Aristotle, Metaphysica, Book Z.4 resp. Z.6). Francis Bacon in his Novum Organon (New Organon, 1620/1984) sought once and for all to formulate new rules and a new agenda for science which would prefer the empiricistically proven usefulness of things to their essentialistic definability. This vision was prompted by the invention of new instruments and devices “which were un-

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known to the ancients.” Here Bacon names the three most important inventions: “printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. . . . these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries” (New Organon, Book One, CXXIX). Hence, for Bacon, “true knowledge is knowledge by causes” (Book Two, II); to establish causalities, however, was but a necessary step in an attempt to refigure in a novel and revolutionary way the notions of natural causal laws and rules for action based on them. Bacon’s empiricism is bound up with practical interests. Theory itself, without human interests striving toward better states of affairs, could accomplish nothing. Nonetheless, theory, now conceived in empiricistic terms, is indispensable for Bacon’s practical program: For I am building in the human understanding a true model of the world, such as it is in fact, not such as a man’s reason would have it to be; a thing which cannot be done without a very diligent dissection and anatomy of the world. But I say that those foolish and apish images of worlds which the fancies of men have created in philosophical systems must be utterly scattered to the winds. . . . Truth, therefore, and utility are here the very same things (emphasis added); and [philosophical] works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts of life. (Book One, CXXIV)

The distinctiveness of his view of science with respect to pure experimentation and rational philosophy Bacon seeks to underline with his metaphor of ants, spiders, and bees (Book One, XCV): Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

For Bacon, method is no longer a plain logical (syllogistic) instrument for organizing knowledge already accepted, but rather a means to expand research by an inductive approach into unknown areas and topics. Philosophy and the “intellectual sciences” stood for him as a backwardness, they “stand like statues, worshipped and celebrated, but not moved or advanced . . . they

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sometimes flourish most in the hands of the first author, and afterwards degenerate” (New Organon, Preface). In place of the static and dead-end generalizations of “ancient” philosophy Bacon’s demand for intellectual change would imply a need for a reconceptualization of the identity of research work. The basic problem of perennial philosophy was, according to Bacon, its peculiar impatience with regard to particulars. Successful and progressive science demands, however, slow and laborious work in order to understand the nature of its objects by proceeding from particulars (things or experiences) to the “axioms” inductively composed by and through those particulars: The understanding must not, . . . be allowed to jump and fly from particulars to axioms remote and of almost the highest generality (such as the first principles, as they are called, of arts and things), and taking stand upon them as truths that cannot be shaken, proceed to prove and frame the middle axioms by reference to them; which has been the practice hitherto, the understanding being not only carried that way by a natural impulse, but also by the use of syllogistic demonstration trained and inured to it. But then, and then only, may we hope well of the sciences when in a just scale of ascent, and by successive steps not interrupted or broken, we rise from particulars to lesser axioms, and then to middle axioms, one above the other, and last of all to the most general. For the lowest axioms differ but slightly from bare experience, while the highest and most general (which we now have) are notional and abstract and without solidity. But the middle are the true and solid and living axioms, on which we depend the affairs and fortunes of men, and above them again, last of all, those which are indeed the most general, such, I mean, as are not abstract, but of which those intermediate axioms are really limitations. . . . The understanding must not therefore be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying. Now this has never yet been done; when it is done, we may entertain better hopes of the sciences. (New Organon, Book One, CIV)

The way ahead, Bacon presumed, was the inductive method which was to become, for him, “the instrument of the mind” or “the true helps of understanding” in unraveling the secrets of nature. Because neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand. And as the instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it, so the instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions. (New Organon, Book One, II)

Instead of syllogistic and deductive logic Bacon advocated inductive reasoning as the “true helps” of the mind in searching for the laws of nature. Induction must be used not only “for providing and discovering first principles,

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but also the lesser axioms, and the middle, and indeed all.” The kernel of modern empirical research in the Popperian sense is already echoed in Bacon’s maxim: “But the induction which is to be available for the discovery and demonstration of sciences and arts, must analyze nature by proper rejections and exclusions; and then, after a sufficient number of negatives, come to a conclusion on the affirmative instances.” Bacon is also anticipating the statistical approach in research when he stresses in his Aphorisms—and often by indirect critique of the Aristotelian science—a sufficient number of “facts” as the only valid basis of scientific reasoning: “But in order to furnish this induction or demonstration well and duly for its work, very many things are to be provided which no mortal has yet thought of; insomuch that greater labor will have to be spent in it than has hitherto been spent on the syllogism.” The task of empirical work Bacon was advocating would not be restricted solely to “discover axioms,” but it might expand into the formation of notions themselves by creating language sui generis for empirical research without simply adopting it from “speculative philosophy.” This kind of comprehensive induction will create the kernel of the new identity of science Bacon will promote: “. . . it is in this induction that our chief hope lies” (New Organon, Book One, CV). Yet the choice of means was not entirely independent of the aim of the sciences: “If . . . the end of the sciences has not . . . been well placed, it is not strange that men have erred as to means” (New Organon, Book One, LXXXI). In Bacon, theory, unlike in Greek philosophy, cannot comprise disinterested speculation. The lack of guiding goals together with the insufficient focus on particulars had been in Bacon’s eyes the cause of the backwardness of the sciences of his time: There is . . . [a] great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress, which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed. Now the true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers. (New Organon, Book One, LXXXI, emphasis added)

For Bacon, knowledge means something within the reach of experience based on human senses, understanding, and action. The primary task of the sciences, as Bacon perpetually stresses, is to dwell upon “experience and facts of nature” (New Organon, Preface). Man “cannot through his own powers attain to a knowledge of the transcendent mind and nature of God, or anything else that is divine.” Man belongs to three “kingdoms”: the kingdom of God, the political kingdom, and the kingdom of nature. The first and second kingdoms have their base in the Divine Grace and Order accessible to human understanding in the Scriptures: Through the Grace man is saved from his sins, but also the principles of human society, sovereignty, justice, and law, are

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given by God to ruling powers (New Organon, Andersson, 1984, editor’s introduction, III). This Baconian division of labor between God and man has proved to be highly consequential for the unfolding of modernity. The intellectual revolution Bacon decisively contributed to rests on this division. Human well-being was not primarily a political matter but was best promoted indirectly: through and by the success of natural science and the ensuing material and technological progress Bacon had envisioned. As his division between kingdoms reveals, society as such is not intellectually interesting, its principles belong, as already established, to the realm of Divine pregivenness. His novel and revolutionary combination of knowledge and power—knowledge is power—would gain its impetus indirectly through his epistemological visions of the study of nature. Nature was for Bacon the main arena of human action and only by acknowledgment of natural causal laws as the basis for proper conduct would the anticipation of power be sustained: Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule. (Book One, III)

Thus Bacon was able to restructure the relation between the notions of natural causality and the rules of human action. This insight, together with his demand for an epistemic compatibility between truth and utility, had a revolutionary and lasting impact on the process of modernization and the identity of science. The ensuing practical and procedural hope of being able to make things better became to give direction to strivings not only in the natural sciences but also in the human, cultural and curriculum studies and other areas of human action as well. Bacon’s proclamation of the program of novel scientific empiricism was anything but modest: The Divine revelations of the mysteries of faith excluded, all other knowledge comes from sense perceptions. The “Baconian spirit” as an expression of the great intellectual change, might on the one hand be summarized in its disdain of the Greek authorities as well as those medieval humanists citing them. “Delicate learning” is Bacon’s name for humanism “which is ostentatious without giving power, leans ‘rather towards copie than weight’, and is a study of words and not matter” (Randall, 1940, p. 222): From all these systems of the Greeks, and their ramifications through particular sciences, there can hardly after the lapse of so many years be adduced a single experiment which tends to relieve and benefit the condition of man, and which can with truth be referred to the speculations and theories of philosophy. (New Organon, Book One, LXXIII)

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Practical and secular propositions articulated as the passionate search for power over nature, and acknowledgment that power is the fruit of empirical knowledge, was the theoretical quintessence of the Baconian approach: [In] this Faust-like spirit of the new science, occurs at last the marriage of the knowledge of the world and the service of man. It was science becoming more humanized, less divine; it was science serving, not them that built cathedrals to carry them to God, but the rising commercial and industrial classes. All the early scientific thinkers shared this gospel of bending Nature to man’s will; but one has made it peculiarly his own by his ringing enthusiasm and iteration, and it is this we mean when we speak of the “Baconian spirit.” (Randall, 1940, p. 224)

This practical view of science was unfamiliar to the people of the Antiquity and Middle Ages, or the Renaissance. As late as 1662 Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), on whose thought Descartes drew in his demands of “clear” and “distinct” ideas as prerequisites of truth, declares in his best-seller, La Logique de Port-Royal (known also as L’Art de penser (the art of thinking)), that science in its entirety is useless and mistakes in science are of no significance because science has little to do with the conduct of life in general (Niiniluoto, 1980, p. 69). The destiny of Arnauld’s intellectual posture was of course to be pushed to the margin and the Baconian spirit inevitably captured general interest. Yet within the wider realms of knowledge Bacon envisioned one decisive element was still needed. Although Bacon laid down the principles of empirical science in the modern sense and although he insisted on a middle road between empiricism and rationalism, he was not able—his general recommendation of inductive method excluded—to accomplish more than create faith in method. Many fields of empirical investigation, notably astronomy and celestial mechanics, had advanced to the point where a plea for sense perception became insufficient. Knowledge based solely on sense perception or experience, however scrutinized, might prove to be false and flawed. The most convincing argument came from Galileo, who set the astronomy of Copernicus in a more general frame. “In the Copernican doctrine the criterion of philosophy is spoiled,” wrote Galileo in his Dialogue, referring to the capacity of senses to perceive correctly the motion of the earth, not to speak of the motion of other celestial bodies. He also stressed, however, how the evidence of the senses was not trustworthy in the case of much simpler matters like the motion of a boat. The criterion of philosophy which Copernicus had discredited and which had been “in agreement with philosophers of every school,” was “that the senses and experience should be our guide in philosophizing” (Galileo, 1967, p. 248). Thus, as it unquestionably turned out, “in Copernicus’s method one must deny one’s sensations” (Galileo, 1967, p. 254); the appeal to a method based

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solely on sensations and sense perceptions was increasingly found to be problematic. Bacon’s solution to the paramount scientific problem of the 16th century was partly correct, but remained nonetheless halfway in its attempt to establish a method that could ensure certain and cumulative knowledge. The senses must be accompanied by reason, Galileo concluded, not unlike many philosophers before him. His decisive contribution in this new social context, however, was the interpretation of reason as a faculty of mathematical reasoning. Galileo was able to show convincingly the usefulness of the mathematical method in the study of nature: Select a single instance, like that of the ball rolling down the incline, analyze it completely to find the simple mathematical principle exemplified in it—the law of acceleration—deduce the consequences mathematically, and test by further experiment. Completed scientific knowledge will thus have passed both the test of accord with facts and of deduction from fundamental mathematical laws of nature. This has, indeed, been the method of physics to the present day, and to Galileo primarily belongs the honor of its formulation. (Randall, 1940, p. 221)

The use of mathematics Galileo decisively contributed had far-reaching consequences for the identity of scientific work. Mathematics seemed to be an instrumental answer to the program Bacon had dreamed of. Mathematics provided rigorous, logically based tools for inductive reasoning and empirical science. Science was now able to liberate itself from the metaphysical and teleological essences of speculative philosophy and to devise its objects of study by causally related particulars, and would thus be able to make the piecemeal but steady progress Bacon had already envisaged. In this sense, for instance, Galileo’s experiments of the motion of (falling) bodies, accompanied by mathematical analysis and inductive generalization to planetary motion, created novel intellectual vistas for practical and rational modeling of ordinary phenomena. Mathematics together with the inductive–empirical approach promised a concrete step forward in a genuine accumulation of useful knowledge which the critics of classical philosophy had laid to. In addition, by mathematical reasoning it was possible to confirm or question the correctness of sense perceptions or even to go beyond sense data in creating hypotheses or hypothetical realities to be then corroborated or falsified by empirical evidence. This division of labor between mathematical theory and empirical practice has arguably contributed to the enormous progress of science in the 20th century, manifested in quantum and relativity theory as well as in the study of organic nature. All this cannot but have influenced modern economic, educational, and political development. The feasibility of applying mathematical methods was to becoming indicative for the degree of progress and the prestige of scientific knowledge.

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From the standpoint of the history of science, Galileo’s ingenious synthesis of mathematics and experimentation, built on his medieval predecessors, nevertheless lacked a distinctively methodological explication. Method was still “in Galileo buried in the midst of the record of his discoveries and his quick-tempered polemical broadsides” . . . “precepts on method are more or less by the way, as well as somewhat unclear” (Randall, 1940, p. 221). At this point Descartes entered the stage, “the great formulator of the new world view,” who “. . . generalized and popularized Galileo’s ideas” (Randall, 1940, p. 224) into a genuine methodology as those “helps” Bacon had sought. Descartes’ search for method as a main instance of reason is succinctly present in the opening of his Discourse on the Method. His interests were not confined solely to the methodological advancement of science but were spiced by a specific political and educational flavor; one might see in them the seeds of rising Western democracy and a good measure of the educational optimism with a concern for educational equality later reflected in the French Revolution and in the education theories and systems from the age of the Enlightenment to this day: Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world. For everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call “good sense” or “reason”—is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things. For it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to apply it well. The greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues; and those who proceed but very slowly can make much greater progress, if they always follow the right path, than those who hurry and stray from it. (Descartes, 1985/1637, Part One, p. 111, emphasis added)

Thus Descartes’ dream of creating a method did not arise merely from the internal demands of logic and science; his project might have received a decisive impulse from this perception of the cognitive capacities invested in people in general. The obvious educability of people, by the design of a proper method to enhance their cognitive and social capacities, together with the possibility to achieve novel scientific inventions and discoveries by the same method, must have been related in his mind to a social panorama parallel to that of Bacon. The unity of science and education received a decisive impulse from this insight. One of Descartes’ revolutionary contributions was his realization of the educational and social implications of mathematics beyond its ordinary use

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to render it a model of valid knowledge in general. In Rule Four of his Rules for the direction of the mind (Descartes, 1985) Descartes makes his startingpoint clear: I would not value these Rules so highly if they were good only for solving those pointless problems with which arithmeticians and geometers are inclined to while away their time, for in that case all I could credit myself with achieving would be to dabble in trifles with greater subtlety than they. (p. 17)

In his view, mathematics has much more to offer than figures and numbers even though “no other disciplines can yield illustrations as evident and certain as” this kind of basic mathematics. The illustrations of ordinary mathematics, however useful or demonstrative they might be, represented for Descartes only the “outer garments” of mathematics rather “than its inner parts.” The true meaning of mathematics is even etymologically related to learning: “the word ‘mathematics’ has the same meaning as ‘discipline’ . . . (lat. disciplina, from discere, ‘to learn’).” Descartes’ appeal to the educational connotation of mathematics was intended to expand a vision of mathematics toward a universal method of discovery and learning: When I considered the matter more closely, I came to see that the exclusive concern of mathematics is with questions of order and measure and that it is irrelevant whether the measure in question involves numbers, shapes, stars, sounds, or any other object whatever (emphasis added). This made me realize that there must be a general science which explains all the points that can be raised concerning the order and measure irrespective of the subject-matter, and that this science should be termed mathesis universalis—a venerable term with a well-established meaning—for it covers everything that entitles these other sciences to be called branches of mathematics. How superior it is to these subordinate sciences both in utility and simplicity is clear from the fact that it covers all they deal with, and more beside; and any difficulties it involves apply to these as well, whereas their particular subject-matter involves difficulties which it lacks. (Descartes, 1985, Rule Four, p. 19)

The extension of “universal mathematics” to revolutionary educational and social uses is paralleled by Descartes’ trust in the natural feasibility of this method: This discipline should contain the primary rudiments of human reason and extend to the discovery of truths in any field whatever. Frankly speaking, I am convinced that it is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other with which human beings are endowed, as it is the source of all the rest. I have spoken of its “outer garment”, not because I wish to conceal this science and shroud it from the gaze of the public; I wish rather to clothe and adorn it so as

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to make it easier to present to the human mind. (Descartes, 1985, Rule Four, p. 17)

THE FORMATION OF THE CARTESIAN METHOD: META-MATHEMATICAL RATIONALITY AND HUMAN INTERESTS Despite Descartes’ fame as one among a number of modern rationalists (along with Baruch Spinoza [1632–1677] and G. W. Leibniz [1647–1716]), his contributions might equally be regarded as a pre-pragmatism. In Descartes, the commitment to rationalism was geared to an attempt to explain the phenomena of the natural and social world alike, which at best would take place in utilitarian terms. So Descartes’ concern as a rationalist—if this textbook categorization does any justice to his efforts—was not at all for metaphysical speculations per se but rather for those Baconian down-to-earth “helps” in the form of practical science and philosophy. The interests which guided Descartes’ search and prompted his writing were related to the enhancement of the variety of often mundane but important conditions for the maintenance of good life: As soon as I had acquired some general notions in physics and had noticed, as I began to test them in various particular problems, where they could lead and how much they differ from the principles used up to now, I believed that I could not keep them secret without sinning gravely against the law which obliges us to do all in our power to secure the general welfare of mankind. For they opened my eyes to the possibility of gaining knowledge which would be very useful in life, and of discovering a practical philosophy which might replace the speculative philosophy taught in the schools. Through this philosophy we could know the power and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans; and we could use this knowledge—as the artisans use theirs—for all purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as it were the lords and masters of nature. This is desirable not only for the invention of innumerable devices which could facilitate our enjoyment of the fruits of the earth and all the goods we find there, but also, and most importantly, for the maintenance of health, which is undoubtedly the chief good and the foundation of all the other goods in this life. (Descartes, 1985, Discourse, Part Six, pp. 142–143)

Rationalism itself was no longer the same after the entry of Descartes. It was increasingly imbued with a pragmatic zest in which the vistas of the utility of mathematics colonized reason and anticipated its best imaginable expression in its “fruits,” notably in mechanics, medicine, and morals. Reason as it would be instantiated in mathematics and as mathematics, in turn, would be instantiated in technology, would be both the guiding image and

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the literal agenda for the novel and artificial organization of nature, and consequently, society. Descartes’ program is all-encompassing, setting out with the proof of his own existence and the self, and then reaching out to a characterization of nature (his philosophy of nature was still after the publication of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687 a viable alternative) and, evidently, his wishes—though he himself is ostensibly modest on the issue—concerned for the organization of society along the same rational principles applied to the study of nature. The very name of his six essays from 1637, Discourse on the method of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences, reflects the dual direction of his thoughts. Society, for him, might have appeared as a kind of self-organizing entity and this selforganization was best enhanced if its single members have been educated in the use of proper reasoning. Throughout these essays there is a marked stress on self-education (“self-instruction”): The development of scientific method meant for him alongside the scientific concerns a matter of personal development in the art of thinking. Part Three of his essays is devoted, according to the “prefatory note by the author,” to “certain of the rules of Morals which he has deduced from this Method” (emphasis added). The deduction is underlining how the hunger for self-improvement in thought was simultaneously a moral act. And vice versa, to neglect the continuous improvement of one’s own cognitive capacities was tantamount to moral weakness: But I saw nothing in the world which remained always in the same state, and for my part I was determined to make my judgments more and more perfect, rather than worse. For these reasons I thought I would be sinning against good sense if I were to take my previous approval of something as obliging me to regard it as good later on, when it had perhaps ceased to be good or I no longer regarded it as such. (Descartes, 1985, Discourse, Part Three, p. 123)

The elimination of errors, flaws, and misconceptions and a constant striving toward progress up to perfection in the sphere of cognition was the main mission of René Descartes. The only area where the perfection process seemed to be reasonable and possible, at least partially and in principle (Descartes himself remains throughout extremely modest), was the realm of thought and intuition. Possibly this conclusion carried him to his ultimate conviction of the necessity to strictly separate between mind and body where the mind during its perfecting process might approach Divine, eternal virtuosity: From this I knew I was as a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this “I”—that is, the soul by which I am what I am—is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than

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the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist. (Descartes, 1985, Part Four, p. 127)

Arguably, however, precisely through these discourses of the virtual self and the consequent necessity of body–mind distinction, Descartes kept an eye on the “clear and distinct,” practical utility of his findings: how these philosophical conclusions might be useful in the accomplishment of his holistic–pragmatic vision. The proof of the famous Cogito thesis, for instance, where his method of doubt, which on the surface may appear as a prime example of philosophical hair-splitting, is supplemented by his rejection of the use of methodical doubt for its own sake but to the advancement of his project of “rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking truth in the sciences.” A decisive context for rightly conducting one’s reason is the political sphere: By affirming the consciousness of the subject as the sole source of the validity of all knowledge Descartes is actually creating space for the emergent notions of democracy and Western liberal individualism. This development of method along with practical interests is distinctively present in his story of the teachings of his ‘wandering years.’ Even, again, the most metaphysical, nonpractical account of his methods, the method of doubt, was not created for the speculative uses of ‘perennial philosophy’ but rather to meet the standards of certainty in terms of useful knowledge: Throughout the (. . .) nine years I did nothing but roam about the world, trying to be a spectator rather than an actor in all comedies that are played out there. Reflecting especially upon the points in every subject which might make it suspect and give occasion for us to make mistakes, I kept uprooting from my mind any errors that might previously have slipped into it. In doing this I was not copying the sceptics, who doubt only for the sake of doubting and pretend to be always undecided. (Descartes, 1985, Discourse, Part Three, p. 125)

In the design of his method in the search for truth Descartes had in mind the model of logic, geometrical analysis, and algebra. He was not, however, quite satisfied with the achievements of those disciplines. For instance, he found in logic syllogisms, to which he was introduced during his scholastic education, quite useless, if not harmless, when used in the search for new knowledge and novel discoveries. Reasoning with the syllogisms only ‘downloaded’ the already known without any genuine increase in the knowledge of a student. However, all three disciplines did have a sound core of reason on which Descartes was able to draw in his methodological endeavor. His aim was to discover a method that would comprise all the advantages of logic, geometry, and algebra and which would be able to discard the defects within them. The demand for economy in thinking for the sake of clarity was the main reason for minimizing the number of necessary items in the body of the

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methodology. As a result, Descartes devised four methodological rules which he anticipated would be of great help in any kind of problem solving. The first rule admonished never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it.

The second rule suggested to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as may be required in order to resolve them better.

The third rule instructed to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by beginning with the simplest and most easily known subjects in order to ascend little by little, step by step, to knowledge of the most complex, and by supposing some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence.

The fourth rule advised throughout to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure of leaving nothing out. (Descartes, 1985, Discourse, Part Two, p. 120)

An interesting point in his methodological designs is their educational bearing. The Discourse was addressed as much to his fellow scholars as to ordinary people. His presentation of ideas as “clear and distinct” was as much a methodological as an educational and curricular device. Throughout his writings Descartes occasionally reminds his readers of the ease with which the thoughts and results of his investigations are to be grasped if only his precept for learning, namely method, was properly employed. He arranged his whole production according to this curricular point of view, beginning from the simplest and most intelligible and then proceeding to more complex and multilayered objects of study. One intriguing feature which might have been neglected in the traditional reception of his writings as the works of a rationalist is the distinctive human interests point of view which would transform the received picture of him as an arch-rationalist toward a proponent of pragmatism in science (cf. Toulmin, 1990). Descartes’ search for certainty would not be explained as having taken place solely in epistemological or metaphysical terms. These

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interests would be seen subordinated to his more comprehensive (social, political, and educational) project in which he sought to combine mathematical reasoning with practical affairs. Thus, the guiding motive of a metamathematical application of reason would be to be able to design the characteristics of the rational actor (citizen) in general, not only that of a scientist or a philosopher.

3 From Theology and Metaphysics to the Culture of Method: The Cartesian Revolution of Epistemology and Curriculum

THE ADVENT OF THE MODERN ERA IN EDUCATION: THE CARTESIAN CURRICULUM AS AN EMBODIMENT OF “RIGHTLY CONDUCTING ONE’S REASON”; READING DESCARTES AS EDUCATIONAL TEXT The idea of the self-sufficient rational actor Descartes was aiming for in his coup d’état over Aristotelian thought could hardly have dispensed with the deliberate educational contribution, and Descartes clearly recognized the need for its creation. Based on the ‘rightly conducting one’s reason’ and on the principle of the growth of knowledge, Descartes was able to refresh the already method-focused tradition of educational field (e.g., Ramus and Comenius) in accordance with the vistas of the rising New Science. In his paradigm dispute against Aristotelian science Descartes clearly saw the crucial importance of education. His constant appeal to the educability of the public, provided proper (his!) curricular terms are met, would form one front of this ideological battle. The Preface to the French edition (the original was in Latin) of his most ‘scientific’ writing, Principles of Philosophy (Principia Philosophiae), contains the Cartesian educational and curriculum theory in a succinct form. Descartes was a strong proponent of ‘a deschooling society’ in his times. He straightforwardly warns of the many detrimental, even pathological effects which schooling may bring about. While thought is equated with soul as human essence, bad habits in thinking inculcated by schooling may result, at worst, to weak morals, lack of wisdom, and, lastly, in a miserable life. He 34

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strongly criticized the schooling of his times for leaning too heavily on the principles of Ancient masters, notably Aristotle, whose teachings he saw canonized, often by misrepresentations, as the unquestionable doctrines or restored as unfortunate objects of unending and futile debates. In Descartes’ view, “the ancients” have failed methodologically; neither have they succeeded “to find anything certain,” being hence unable “to give a reason for other things.” Philosophy meant for Descartes an intellectual and educational activity, the purpose of which was “to seek after the first causes and true principles from which one can deduce the reasons for everything one can know.” The practice of philosophy had, however, become perverted, Descartes maintained, so that the majority of those aspiring to be philosophers in the last few centuries have blindly followed Aristotle. Indeed they have often corrupted the sense of his writings and attributed to him various opinions which he would not recognize to be his, were he now to return to this world. Those who have not followed Aristotle (and this group includes many of the best minds) have nevertheless been saturated with his opinions in their youth (since these are the only opinions taught in the Schools) (emphasis added), and has so dominated their outlook that they have been unable to arrive at knowledge of true principles. Although I respect all these thinkers and would not wish to make myself disliked by criticizing them, I can give a proof of what I say which I do not think any of them will reject, namely that they have all put forward as principles things of which they did not possess perfect knowledge. (Descartes, 1985, Principles, p. 182)

Despite severe criticism of the official schooling of his time Descartes nevertheless maintained a firm belief in the human capability for learning, if correctly guided, at least parallel to overwhelmingly optimistic visions of “mastery learning” in the 1960s and 1970s. In the Preface to the French version of The Principles of Philosophy (Descartes, 1985), he wrote: An examination of the nature of many different minds has led me to observe that there are almost none that are so dull and slow as to be incapable of forming sound opinions or indeed of grasping all the most advanced sciences, provided they receive proper guidance. And this may also be proved by reason. For since the principles in question are clear, and nothing is permitted to be deduced from them except by very evident reasoning, everyone has enough intelligence to understand the things which depend on them. (p. 185)

Descartes’ (1985) pedagogic optimism is even higher with the less educated because “those who have studied bad science the most are the greatest victims”; they may have great difficulties in getting rid of their misguided or narrowly channeled routes of thought and learning. His consoling of disbelievers in their talents is strongly encouraging, yet he made no concessions to the high standard of learning materials he believed he was providing:

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It almost always happens that people of moderate intelligence neglect to study because they do not think they are capable of it, while the others, who are the keenest, press on too quickly, with the result that they often accept principles which are not evident, and draw uncertain inferences from them. This is why I should like to assure those who are overdiffident about their powers that there is nothing in my writings which they are not capable of completely understanding provided they take the trouble to examine them. I would, however, also like to warn the others that even the most excellent minds will need a great deal of time and attention in order to look at all the things which I set myself to include. (p. 185)

The reader of the Principles is also provided with a lengthy description of a concrete learning technique charmingly modern and familiar to every absolvent of any Western school system three and a half centuries afterwards: I would also have added a word of advice about the way to read this book. I should like the reader first of all to go quickly through the whole book like a novel, without straining his attention too much or stopping at the difficulties which may be encountered. The aim should be merely to ascertain in the general way which matters I have dealt with. After this, if he finds that these matters deserve to be examined and he has the curiosity to ascertain their causes, he may read the book a second time in order to observe how my arguments follow. But if he is not always able to see this fully, or if he does not understand all the arguments, he should not give up at once. He should merely mark with a pen the places where he finds the difficulties and continue to read on to the end without a break. If he then takes up the book for the third time, I venture to think he will now find the solutions to most of the difficulties he marked before; and if any still remain, he will discover their solution on a final re-reading. (Descartes, 1985, Principles, Preface, p. 185)

Descartes’ interest in the betterment of education through methodically guided “self-instruction” is implicit in all his works. In the Preface he explicitly reveals the educational intentions of his publications. The teaching of philosophy and science would form a spiral curriculum beginning with the clearest and simplest rules of reasoning and advancing gradually to more complex but recurring content issues where the procedural method initially provided would warrant their certainty. His offering of his Principles as a paradigm of a modern curriculum aimed to remedy the unproductive practices of the schooling of his time, saturated by antiquated and stagnant ideas deduced from Aristotelian syllogisms and rhetorical and dialectic drills of scholastic schooling: . . . nor I have ever observed that any previously unknown truth has been discovered by means of the disputations practised in the schools. (Descartes, 1985, p. 146)

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The curriculum Descartes himself designed aimed to be progressive and cyclic. It begins with a “provisional” code of morals presented in the Third Part of the Discourse on the Method 12 years before the Principles and to which he appeals here. Overtly, the task of this code was to inculcate mental attitudes necessary for self-study or self-instruction. However, in addition, the “provisional” or “imperfect moral code” is a kind of characterization of basic civic virtues which stresses the wider educational nature of his undertaking. Descartes often uses a narrative or cautious autobiographical mode in presenting his ideas. This textual mode is designed educationally in the original sense of paidagogos: He likes to present himself as a model to be followed as he himself will follow the example of the best models available. The educational reference of a moral code comprises the interests of cognitive and social regulation of the self. The first piece of the code which he presented stresses the importance of obeyance and loyalty to one’s country, its customs, and religion without question: . . . to obey the laws and customs of my country, holding constantly to the religion in which by God’s grace I had been instructed from my childhood, and governing myself in all other matters according to the most moderate and least extreme opinions—the opinions commonly accepted in practice by the most sensible of those with whom I should have to live. (Descartes, 1985, Discourse, Part Three, p. 122)

The second maxim, quite paradoxically, encourages to be as firm and decisive in my actions as I could, and to follow even the most doubtful opinions, once I had adopted them, with no less constancy than if they had been quite certain. (Descartes, 1985, Discourse, Part Three, p. 123)

Descartes motivates this at first strange maxim from practical reasons. Because we have in many actual instances no certain way or power to determine what is true and have nevertheless to act, we ought to accomplish an act according to what is most probable. The pragmatically motivated Cartesian rationalism is displayed in his almost too witty explanation of this decision: Since in everyday life we must often act without delay, it is a most certain truth that when it is not in our power to discern the truest opinions, we must follow the most probable. Even when no opinions appear more probable than any others, we must still adopt some; and having done so we must then regard them not as doubtful, from a practical point of view, but as most true and certain, on the grounds that the reason which made us adopt them is itself true and certain. By following this maxim I could free myself from all the regrets and remorse which usually trouble the consciences of those weak and faltering spirits who allow themselves to set out on some supposedly good course of action which later, in their inconstancy, they judge to be bad. (Descartes, 1985, Discourse, p. 123)

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In the third and last maxim Descartes included a kind of life-philosophical credo where his model of self, akin to the later liberal individualism, is figured. Descartes’ characteristic hesitation between progress and stability diverts here to a dreamless acceptance of private, even solipsistic volition: My third maxim was to try always to master myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world. In general I would become accustomed to believing that nothing lies entirely within our power except our thoughts, so that after doing our best in dealing with matters external to us, whatever we fail to achieve is absolutely impossible so far as we are concerned. (p. 123)

The rules of knowledge Descartes presented in his theory of education encompass the spheres of subjectivity, forms of reasoning, and an implicit political order, which have all proved highly influential for both the development of modern subjectivity and the collective mentality subsequently reflected in the mood of the Enlightenment and its institutional achievements in science, economy, and state administration. The twin task of the Discourse on the Method of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences not only provided methodical rules but the moral context of the Discourse aimed explicitly at the discursive production of a self-reflective and selfregulative self. The educational strategy of the Discourse was to blur the distinctions between the personal rationality and the social conformity manifested in his recommendation of obeyant and loyal citizenship. Combining conceptually personal development with the social–political realm Descartes was able to envision enormous progress in the future, based on scientific and objective, namely, rule-governed knowledge. A CURRICULAR PREREQUISITE: FROM THEOLOGY TO EPISTEMOLOGY These developments, however, preceded a shift from theological to epistemological discourse in the first part of the Principles, where Descartes laid down the characteristics of human knowledge: What should we regard and teach as knowledge, and how can we ascertain the validity of knowledge. The focal point in his epistemological discourse was the role of error in human thought and action. His strategy served his dual objective: first, to separate the human from the Divine, and, second, to argue for his Method. In article 29 of Part One (of The Principles) entitled “God is not the cause of our errors” he absolved the Divinity from the errors of the human mind and human action: The first attribute that comes under consideration here is that he is supremely truthful and the giver of all light. So it is a complete contradiction to suppose

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that he might deceive us or be, in the strict and positive sense, the cause of the errors to which we know by experience that we are prone. (Descartes, 1985, p. 203)

Thus the Cartesian conception of the human mind implied that theological arguments are to be displaced by epistemological. This operation would, however, give rise to an inherent sense of psychological uncertainty (parallel to that of the individualism of the Reformation). But, simultaneously, there would appear seducing novel vistas for an unprecedented openness and freedom when the theological infinity would be replaced by the cognitive space of an individual. Resort to tradition would be futile in resolving this ambivalence, since Descartes spoke not in the first place in terms of convenient religious experience but of the functioning of human mind and the need for its moral and cognitive betterment. The strategy for this dilemma would be then, for Descartes, explicitly educational: The human mind is to be consciously reordered and re-created in accordance with the rational rules of knowledge and self-governance. By such an approach Descartes might hope to overcome not only existential ambivalence or ontological insecurity but also the susceptibility of the human mind to malfunctioning assessed by the standards of “rightly conducting one’s reason.” The educational diagnosis of the erroneous in thinking, knowledge acquisition and life conduct in general is present in Part One (The Principles of Human Knowledge) of the Principles. The perceived non- or ir/ rationality in thought and action in all human spheres and Descartes’ firm faith in human educability to rationally rectify these flaws formed the twin pillars of his epistemological designs. The practical motives of his epistemology were present in Descartes’ discursive strategy even when he used theological arguments for epistemic purposes. The main objective would appear to be the replacement of traditional metaphysics by his proposed epistemology. Though God has initially equipped ‘man’ with rational talents, there was no proper reason to implicate God in the issues of human knowledge Descartes had in mind. Preserving God aloof from erroneous human thought served Descartes’ purpose of also keeping distinct the perennial metaphysical questions and proper philosophical questioning, a “new philosophy,” and, most importantly, objective scientific knowledge. Although Descartes identified infinity with Divinity in the sense that both are beyond the grasp of human reason, he simultaneously paved the way for his own notion of knowledge and self. The operative range of reason and human rationality is to be interpreted in terms of the limits of sense perception, of everyday practice, and of formal laws of causality and mathematics. In Descartes, rationalism at last remains in the service of empiricism and practical concerns of life. Cognitive freedom has its rational and practical limits:

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We should never enter into arguments about the infinite. . . . We will never be involved in tiresome arguments about the infinite. For since we are finite, it would be absurd for us to determine anything concerning the infinite; for this would be to attempt to limit and grasp it. (Descartes, 1985, article 26, p. 202)

Consequently, Descartes is able to stipulate further epistemic conditions which would prefer an instrumental ‘what to do with knowledge’ orientation to the teleological and essentialistic undertakings of perennial philosophy he had strongly criticized: It is not the final but the efficient causes of created things that we must inquire into. . . . we shall entirely banish from our philosophy the search for final causes. For we should not be so arrogant as to suppose that we can share in God’s plans. We should, instead, consider him as the efficient cause of all things; and starting from the divine attributes which by God’s will we have some knowledge of, we shall see, with the aid of our God-given natural light, what conclusions should be drawn concerning those effects which are apparent to our senses. . . . and we shall be assured that what we have once clearly and distinctly perceived to belong to the nature of these things has the perfection of being true. (Descartes, 1985, article 28, p. 202, emphasis added)

Descartes skillfully employed theological arguments to discard Aristotelian metaphysical teleology for the promotion of his own methodological program, and he used the same rhetorical strategy in drawing a division between the divine and the human. Clarity and distinctness as the qualities of truthful knowledge were designed to apply to nonmetaphysical, nonreligious and sense-based entities and things of the human realm in their rational explanation. To enhance the clarity and distinctness of the perceiving and thinking mind formed the goal of the Cartesian curriculum. These two qualities, as necessary ingredients of truthful knowledge, were based on Descartes’ (1968) theory of cognition and the self. The self is most intimately related to cognition and thinking, as suggested in the Meditations, “I am . . . precisely speaking, only a thing which thinks, that is to say, a mind, understanding, or reason . . .” (p. 105). The identification of thinking with self inherent in his notorious body–mind theory forms the initial basis of Cartesian epistemology, the theory of self, and of curriculum. The possibilities of eradicating error by replacing “preconceived opinions” and errors in thinking and action by rational deliberation and rational life conduct were related to the Cartesian notions of self, childhood, and education. For Descartes, education would mean a process of purification from preconceived opinions and the gearing of one’s thought and conduct to the artificial, deliberate rules of selfreflection and self-regulation where tradition will be valid only to the point where it may suffice as the conditions for those rules. In this sense, the

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Method of Doubt would be instrumental not only as a measure to refigure epistemology but equally for educational purposes, in order to question one’s own early experiences and upbringing: Since we began life as infants, and make various judgments concerning the things that can be perceived by the senses before we had the full use of our reason, there are many preconceived opinions that keep us from knowledge of the truth. It seems that the only way of freeing ourselves from these opinions is to make the effort, once in the course of our life, to doubt everything which we find to contain even the smallest suspicion of uncertainty. (Descartes, 1985, p. 193)

The Cartesian view of the human being in the world was anything but straightforwardly rational. One lives in a perplexing world of sense perceptions and aspirations of will, captured by the acute demands of one’s own body, influenced by one’s own socialization and educational biography, and amidst the practical bombardments of everyday life. To create order in the chaos of human life was the task Descartes undertook and for this purpose the cultivation of human rationality by method seemed to him most fitting. Descartes featured thought as “everything which we are aware of as happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it. Hence, thinking is to be identified here not merely with understanding, willing and imagining, but also with sensory awareness” (Descartes, 1985, article 9, p. 195, emphases added). Human awareness is not exhausted by rational definitions and logical derivations; but there is room for contingent mental events in his theory of the human mind and cognition. Actually, the Cartesian epistemology would be closer in good and bad to today’s psychological theory of cognition than to strict and rigorous rationalism. Apart from the interests of civic virtues the need for self-regulation and self-controlling which Descartes stressed as a “provisional moral code” in his educational theory arose precisely from the perceived contingent nature of human cognition. Reasoning and understanding were intertwined with such cognitive qualities as willing, imagining, and sensory awareness. Here, the role of volition in contributing to contingency is decisive. The Cartesian ordering of the mind would follow a fairly simple but surprising scheme: “We possess only two modes of thinking: the perception of the intellect and the operation of the will.” Descartes was identifying intellect with some form of mental perception (presumably parallel to geometrical intuition) but for a rationalist he was remarkably sensitive to empirical reality in describing the nature of human intellect: To intellectual perception are subordinated not only “imagination” and “pure understanding” but also “sensory perception.” The other major realm of thinking, “the operation of the will,” consisted in desire, aversion, assertion, denial and doubt as “various modes of willing” (Descartes, 1985, article 32, p. 204).

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An intriguing question would be why Descartes located within the core of his epistemology sensory perception along with these various modes of the will. The traditional tripartitioning of human mind into thought, volition, and emotion did not seemingly suffice for him; he sought to break the old categories with his reductive synthesis of human cognition where volition would play a decisive role. The strategic position of the will in his epistemological architecture might be illustrated in the way Descartes interrelated the will, the intellect and the appearance of error and how this interrelatedness was used for the establishment of Method. For Descartes, “the freedom of the will is self-evident” (Descartes, 1985, article 39, p. 205). It was precisely the freedom of volition as a mode of thinking with its infinite scope which enabled Descartes to stipulate human being as a “thinking thing.” There is, however, the other side of the coin: The root of error lies precisely in the freedom of the will. Due to its freedom “the scope of the will is wider than that of the intellect, and this is the cause of error” (emphasis added). The perception of the intellect “is always extremely limited,” extending “only to the few objects presented to it” (Descartes, 1985, article 35): The will, on the other hand, can in a certain sense be called infinite, since we observe without exception that its scope extends anything that can possibly be an object of any other will—even the immeasurable will of God. So it is easy for us to extend our will beyond what we clearly perceive; and when we do this it is no wonder that we may happen to go wrong. (p. 204)

Hence Descartes had again a sound theological basis for dealing now with the problem of the will and attempting to draw it back from the divine to human reality: “Our errors cannot be imputed to God.” Descartes’ ambitious search for truthful and objective knowledge is manifested in the courage with which he included the most vague and complex phenomena of mind and body as possible sources of error in the core of his epistemological study. Truth would thus be filtered out of the mass of a clear and distinct perception in both the sensory and intellectual sense: A perception which can serve as the basis for a certain and indubitable judgment needs to be not merely clear but also distinct. I call a perception “clear” when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind—just as we say that we see something clearly when it is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility. I call perception “distinct” if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains itself only what is clear. (Descartes, 1985, pp. 207–208)

These conditions of certain knowledge may nevertheless be experienced as a source of frustration. They hardly provide any positive criteria for the

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truthfulness of any item of knowledge beyond textual play with intuition and visual metaphors. This dominance of vision in the real or allegorical senses was nonetheless to persist in positivist discourse on observational and theoretical language in the 1920s and 1930s and in the post-positivist critique of the 1980s and onwards, nicely present in Richard Rorty’s (1989) title Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. As it was, this was to be the ‘foundation’ on which Descartes built his system of human knowledge. Against the clear and the distinct all other modes of knowledge could be assessed, be they mathematical proofs or uncertain and preconceived opinions, feelings, and volitions or bodily experiences. However, the importance of the Cartesian stress on the volitional has been reflected elsewhere: in the phenomenological notion of intentionality and, somewhat consequentially, in the poststructuralist efforts to revive ideology from its Marxist and critical theory stranglehold as “false consciousness” (see Epilogue).

THE INTENTIONAL AND IDEOLOGICAL AS A SOCIAL FRAMEWORK OF THE INTELLECT: THE CARTESIAN SHIFT FROM RATIONAL ESSENTIALISM TO INSTRUMENTALISM The centrality of the will in the Cartesian account of the human mind and knowledge might be defended by a kind of double bond of human existence. On the one hand, as we saw, the will is a major source of error but, on the other, it is a manifestation of “the supreme perfection of man” and the successful or failed regulation of the will would constitute an ultimate moral criterion of our thought and action. The direction of one’s thought and action was a touchstone of “rightly conducting one’s reason” similar to the formal rules of logic and mathematics. Hence Descartes began his methodological treatment in the Discourse and Principles with moral preliminaries, furnishing them with a deliberate educational and curricular accent. The juxtaposition of will and intellect in the Cartesian epistemology turned out to be necessary in the making of judgments in general and particularly in defining the realm of objective and true knowledge: In order to make a judgment, the intellect is of course required since, in the case of something which we do not in any way perceive, there is no judgment we can make. But the will is also required so that, once something is perceived in some manner, our assent may then be given. Now a judgment—some kind of judgment at least—can be made without the need for a complete and exhaustive perception of the thing in question; for we can assent to many things which we know only in a very obscure and confused manner. (Descartes, 1985, article 34, p. 204)

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The cooperation of the intellect and the will would thus be a necessary condition for the kind of objective knowledge Descartes desired. Clear and distinct perception is to be complemented by volitional assent to it in order to become validated as objective, truthful knowledge. Contrary to the 20thcentury positivists, Descartes never discarded contingency and never appreciated value judgments as nonknowledge but made conscious efforts to encompass them within a rational and manageable order. The social dimension of knowledge (and self) was embraced indirectly in the Cartesian notion precisely through the contingency of the will. To become conscious of one’s volitions and emotions, and to regulate them by reasoning with the aid of an appropriate method, was the Cartesian proposal for successful coping with often chaotic contexts of life. For Descartes, the human being was certainly not an incarnated logical calculator; the unavoidably contingent and chaotic nature of reality made it necessary to attempt a rational ordering of both reality and the self. An instance here is Charles Taylor’s (1991) view of the disengaged Cartesian self, whereby we would be “pure mind, distinct from body, and our normal way of seeing ourselves is regrettable confusion” (p. 102); this might fit well with the received notion of the Cartesian epistemology. But it might, however, equally be challenged by reconsidering Cartesian reason and rationality rather as an instrumental means to proper knowledge with which to cope with contingency and ambivalence than as an essentialistic depiction of human subject. Descartes’ main interest was not predominantly in the speculations of the human nature as such, and he therefore consciously confined his interests in instrumental, earthly rationality rather than to efforts to dig into the depths of the soul and pure mind. He preferred to find rational means to avoid error for the pragmatic success of reason instead of attempting to define the rational nature of the human being. “The fact that we fall into error is a defect in a way we act, not a defect in our nature” (Descartes, 1985, p. 205, emphasis added). Descartes’ point is succinctly reiterated in Jürgen Habermas’ (1984) pragmatism: When we use the expression ‘rational’ we suppose that there is a close relation between rationality and knowledge. I shall presuppose this concept of knowledge without further clarification, for rationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge. (p. 8)

His manner of dealing with the sources of error in the Principles and the way he faced the problem of the emotions in his last remaining writing, The Passions of Soul, within the interrelated order of body and mind would illuminate the pragmatic starting points of his thesis of rationality. Descartes’ theoretical gaze is twin-focused: Sense perception, bodily occurrences, and

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the “operations of the will” would form the ideological raw material for a balancing and regulating effect of the “perceptions of the intellect.” The educational and bodily-bound character of the Cartesian epistemology is manifested in how he catalogued the “causes of error” in The Principles of Human Knowledge (Descartes, 1985, articles 71–74, pp. 218–221). Descartes motivated the necessity for his epistemological program with the rationale that “The chief cause of error arises from the preconceived opinions of childhood. It is here that the first and main cause of all our errors may be recognized.” The second source of error in Descartes’ account is also dependent on the lasting influence of our childhood experiences on adulthood: “. . . we cannot forget our preconceived opinions.” The third is based on Descartes’ perception that humans are not primarily rational; our normal conduct is adjusted to habituation and preconceived opinion, not to fresh and present, namely, clear and distinct, perception. The same obscurity and confusion on the linguistic level formed the fourth cause: “We attach our concepts to words which do not precisely correspond to real things.” The Cartesian correspondence theory of truth would be a logical conclusion of his demand for clear and distinct perception, which he extended here to the use of language. For Descartes, the problem here was that the correspondence would obtain instead between concepts and words, not between concepts and the respective perceptions, which result in an inadequate or inaccurate understanding of the original object: When we store the concepts in our memory we always simultaneously store the corresponding words. Later on we find the words easier to recall than the things; and because of this it is very seldom that our concept of a thing is so distinct that we can separate it totally from our concept of the words involved. The thoughts of almost all people are more concerned with words than with things, and as a result people very often give their assent to words they do not understand, thinking they once understood one, or that they got them from others who did understand them correctly. (article 74)

The stress on the self-regulation of the self both in the scientific study of things and in life conduct in general by dint of distinct and clear perception formed the quintessence of the Cartesian endeavor, which integrate epistemology, education, and politics. With his comprehensive program Descartes was a powerful proponent of modern science but on no lesser scale also the pioneer of modern education, which would be based more on the principles of new emerging science than on repetitions of the Scholastic philosophical tradition. Descartes’ educational interest in the regulation of the self, which has remained largely unnoticed in the philosophical reception of his work, is also manifest in his last study, The Passions of the Soul, from 1649. There the intellectual and volitional aspects of human characteristics were deepened by his

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treatment of the emotions. The dualism of body and mind received now a more sophisticated and subtle featuring. Descartes seemingly began to seek new interpretations of his previous dualism via a more delicate balance between body and mind, which may arguably have contributed to the development of modern psychology. He determinedly strove to avoid both the urge to reductionism and the treatment of body and mind as distinct but mysteriously interacting entities. The new interrelatedness Descartes sought was focused on the mediating and central nature of “passions” or emotions in a meaningful human life. Descartes closed his last article of his last work with a deep sense of the complexity and significance of emotional life—only paralleled by his unshakable faith in reason (Descartes, 1985): It is on the passions alone that all the good and evil of this life depends . . . the soul can have the pleasures of its own. But the pleasures common to it and the body depend entirely on the passions, so that persons whom the passions can move most deeply are capable of enjoying the sweetest pleasures of this life. It is true that they may also experience the most bitterness when they do not know how to put these passions to good use and when fortune works against them. But the chief use of wisdom lies in its teaching us to be masters of our passions and to control them with such skill that the evils which they cause are quite bearable, and even become a source of joy. (p. 404)

His faith in reason was strong enough to admit the ubiquitous, contingent, and chaotic aspects of volitional and emotional life, and he cannot thus be considered a rationalist in any a priori sense of the word. His epistemological theories of body and mind and their interaction anticipated modern medicine as well as modern psychology and education. Descartes also clearly recognized that reason and rationality were also not always an ultimate and readyestablished authority but rather a desirable goal or even an unattainable but still worthwhile ideal. In all, and viewed from the educational standpoint, the Cartesian epistemology may have more in common with modern science, notably psychology, than academic rational-speculative philosophy itself. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1972) in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (4.1121) captured the Cartesian point: The theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology. Some elements of the Cartesian epistemology are perceivable in some of the 20th century’s main developments of psychology: Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and behaviorist-cognitive psychology. Similarly to Piaget, Descartes seemed to believe in some kind of psychogenesis of knowledge in locating the main source of error in thought in childhood. The way in which we arrive at abstract concepts is a highly sophisticated form of activity and a long process of both bodily maturation and mental learning. The Piagetian sensorimotor level of cognitive development “that the young child does not exhibit any consciousness of self nor of a fixed

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boundary between data given internally and those given externally” (Piaget, 1972, p. 20) is strikingly similar to the Cartesian perception of the holistic nature of childhood experiences: In our early childhood the mind was so closely tied to the body that it had no leisure for any thoughts except those by means of which it had sensory awareness of what was happening to the body. It did not refer these thoughts to anything outside itself, but merely felt pain when something harmful was happening to the body and felt pleasure when something beneficial occurred. (Descartes, 1985, p. 218)

Though Descartes had no notion comparable to that of the Freudian subconscious, his suggestion of the various modes of willing (desire, aversion, denial, and doubt) nonetheless formed a similar, constant, and subconscious obstacle (the Id) on the way to a conscious and rational, ‘clear and distinct’ self (the Ego). Freud’s notion of subconscious which he sought in his psychoanalytic theory comes close to the Cartesian “operations of the will” as a mingling of bodily occurrences and mental intentions, which for the greater part are and will remain beyond rational and conscious control. Freud’s conceptual move is interesting from the Cartesian point of view in that obviously Freud felt that the reference to subconscious was still too rational for a description of that part of the human psyche. Freud’s metaphor of the Ego as the rider on the back of the horse, the Id, which parts will never fuse together parallels Descartes’ intention to conceive the human as the distinct and irreducible but interactive parts of mind and body. The most intimate relation with modern psychological notions would, however, be found in The Passions of the Soul. If this discourse in the Principles on the respective operations of volition and the intellect was at least hesitant regarding the mental control of passions and volition, now his passionate trust in human educability in terms of the rational malleability of the human psyche and body was again surfacing. This emphasis strongly anticipated a coming pattern of scientific psychology, Pavlovian and Skinnerian behaviorism, and even the subsequent rise of modern cognitive psychology: There is no soul so weak that it cannot, if well-directed, acquire an absolute power over its passions . . . when a dog sees a partridge, it is naturally disposed to run towards it; and when it hears a gun fired, the noise naturally impels it to run away. Nevertheless, setters are commonly trained so that the sight of a partridge makes them stop, and the noise they hear afterwards, when someone fires at the bird, makes them run towards it. These things are worth noting in order to encourage each of us to make a point of controlling our passions. For since we are able, with a little effort, to change the movements of the brain in animals devoid of reason, it is evident that we can do so still more effectively in the case of men. Even those who have the weakest souls could acquire absolute mastery over all

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their passions if we employed sufficient ingenuity in training and guiding them. (Descartes, 1985, p. 348, emphasis added)

In all, the Cartesian suggestion of the dynamic function and evolution of the mind is closer to the 20th-century pioneers of psychology and education than to the concerns of philosophical rationalism with its logically refined operations by the end-products of ideal adult cognition. His approach in epistemology is rational rather in an educational and psychological than a logical or mathematical sense of the term. The Cartesian epistemology is more of an educational diagnosis of the human mind and practice geared to the possibility of rational development through a reprogramming of the self. The concomitant ideology of hope and progress within his epistemology, perhaps more than his time-bound mathematical inventions or physical accounts of the universe, or his physiological records of the human body, might explain Descartes’ huge impact and lasting influence on the unfolding of modernity and on the dynamic nature of the modern self. The Cartesian notion of the rational actor capable of cognitive and moral self-regulation has reverberated in the respective theories of Piaget, Freud, Skinner, Kohlberg and in those of later cognitive psychologists and curriculum theorists.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE CARTESIAN CURRICULUM Stanley Rosen (1987) touches the nerve of the Cartesian influence on the development of postmetaphysical thought in his Hermeneutics as Politics: Descartes’s attempt to construct a universal method on the model of mathematics was not a simple rejection but a replacement of metaphysics. In general, the Enlightenment attempts to replace what we may call the metaphysical absolute by the absolute certainty of effective solutions to practical problems. (p. 145)

What Rosen perceives as the achievement of the Enlightenment was, however, already manifest in Descartes himself. “The metaphysical absolute” was removed to the realm of the Divine, beyond human intellectual grasp, and hence beyond genuine human interest in the Cartesian epistemic discourse. In his scheme mathematics was to become a guarantee of the certainty of effective solutions to practical problems. Ambivalent and contingent everyday life and scientific and technological attempts “beneficial to man” created a complex plane where the need for the certainty of decisions and solutions arose. The urgency to find relief from the theological, political, and social predicaments of his times (see Toulmin, 1990), and hence to improve social and intellectual life, led Descartes to discard metaphysics in favor of everyday

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praxis. This actual repudiation of metaphysics is manifestly present in his educational and curriculum theory. In the Preface to the Principles Descartes summarized his view of the comprehensive organization of the curriculum and his designation of currere. The learning process will set out from the ordinary and imperfect knowledge one can acquire by four means. To the first of those belong only notions which are so clear in themselves that they can be acquired without meditation. The second comprises everything we are acquainted with through sensory experience. The third comprises what we learn by conversing with other people. And . . . a fourth category, . . . , what is learned by reading books, not all books, but those which have been written by people who are capable of instructing us well—for in such cases we hold a kind of conversation with the authors. I think that all the wisdom which is generally possessed is acquired in these four ways. I am not including divine revelation in the list, because it does not lead us on by degrees but raises us at a stroke to infallible faith. (Descartes, 1985, p. 181, emphasis added)

The tacit Cartesian celebration of unsystematic and “imperfect” everyday knowledge is evidenced by its dynamic and developing nature compared with the highly respectable but fixed characteristics of “infallible faith.” No less the same distinction would be sustained between metaphysics and everyday experience. To discard tactfully but decidedly both the divine and the metaphysical from his epistemological agenda made it possible to Descartes to view knowledge as evolving and progressing, where the only sure foundation would be the method: how “to acquire and use knowledge” in a rational way. And precisely this solution prompted the conception of knowledge and self in terms of education. Hence, as a first step of currere, a process of “selfinstruction,” Descartes (1985) again recollects his pragmatic conviction about the importance of moral self-regulation as a precondition to good life: First of all, a man who still possess only the ordinary and imperfect knowledge that can be acquired in the four ways explained above should try before anything else to devise himself a code of morals which is sufficient to regulate the actions of his life. For this is something which permits no delay, since we should endeavour above all else to live well. (pp. 185–186)

The first item in the curriculum will embrace the study of logic; not however that logic the school teaches, the logic Descartes regarded as an uninformative and useless practice of traditional philosophy which “is strictly speaking nothing but a dialectic which teaches ways of expounding to others what one already knows or even of holding forth without judgement about things one does not know” and which consequently rather “corrupts good sense than increases it.” Instead Descartes preferred the logic which is useful

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in increasing one’s knowledge or at least in reducing the erroneous in thought and action. The curricular aim of logic should be to gradually accustom the mind to the habit of conducting reason well. The best means to those desired habits of mind would be the diligent exercise of the Rules of Method on “very simple and easy questions, such as those of mathematics.” Descartes recommends a long period of practice dedicated to this preliminary phase of study. After that initial and formal exercise of mind where the student “has acquired some skill in finding the truth on these questions” the next step on the educational agenda is to proceed to content issues: the student “should begin to tackle true philosophy in earnest” (Descartes, 1985, p. 186). Descartes commenced to design his curricular procedure with metaphysics as a preliminary to epistemology and with his doctrines of free will and the immateriality of the soul: “The first part of philosophy is metaphysics, which contains the principles of knowledge, including the explanation of the principal attributes of God, the non-material nature of our souls and all the clear and distinct notions which are in us” (p. 186). The overt reasons for such a curricular choice were intended in first place to be (or seem) theological or religious, but Descartes cannot resist the temptation to introduce his secular epistemological interests already in this initial phase. To begin with, the immaterial or ‘virtual’ reality would refer on the one hand to Descartes’ insistence on the apodictic starting-point, as his Cogito thesis suggests. God’s benevolence and omnipotence, in turn, would guarantee the certainty of the other truths derived from this basic certitude. With those items Descartes stipulated the foundations of his procedural theory of curriculum which would feature education as a process of redefining and reconstituting the self by correct reasoning. The educational emphasis in Descartes’ philosophy comes from the paradox that “this natural method of reasoning does not spring up automatically, but must be actively cultivated” (Blom, 1978, p. 42). Once a certain basis was laid down for the curriculum and studying habits (morals) of successful learning were expounded, the Cartesian curriculum was ready to take the outer world on its agenda. To turn from the inside outwards immediately after this grounding is a deliberate act. Equipped with rationally warranted moral and cognitive “helps” one is well prepared to study the objects in the outside world. Thus, after metaphysics, the second part of “true philosophy” is physics, where, after discovering the true principles of material things, we examine the general composition of the entire universe and then, in particular, the nature of this earth and all the bodies which are most commonly found upon it, such as air, water, fire, magnetic ore and other minerals. (Descartes, 1985/1637, p. 186)

The next curricular shift comprise moving on to the study of organic nature:

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. . . we need to examine individually the nature of plants, of animals and, above all, of man, so that we may be capable later on of discovering the other sciences which are beneficial to man. (p. 186, emphasis added)

Succinctly, then, the Cartesian curriculum is a twofold entity, containing, firstly, a prologue or a preliminary set of attitudes and thinking skills whose function is to develop the moral and cognitive competence of the student for the main task: to apply Method in diverse theoretical and practical problems and inquiries “beneficial to man.” Descartes compares his curricular composition of the sciences with a tree: The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. (p. 186)

Most interesting in this scheme of the sciences is Descartes’ value judgments concerning the different parts of the tree, which at the same time might reveal the ultimate ideological objectives of his overall scholarly endeavor. His intentions could be divide into two main categories, pragmatic and educational. First, the whole value of his comprehensive charting of science would be dependent on the usefulness of the last branches, which nicely captures the tenor of pragmatism and instrumental rationality in his scientific endeavor: “Now just as it is not the roots or the trunk of a tree from which one gathers the fruit, but only the ends of the branches, so the principal benefit of philosophy depends on those parts of it which can only be learnt last of all” (p. 186, emphasis added). Metaphysics formed an auxiliary and preliminary starting point for study in the Cartesian conceptual map, but beyond that it would have no vital role regarding the usefulness of knowledge. In a sense, evolving knowledge will prove increasingly self-sufficient and even make “an imperfect moral code” dependent on knowledge “which we may follow provisionally while we do not yet know a better one” (p. 186). The way Descartes dealt with moral issues has proved highly influential in subsequent developments of instrumental thought down to our day. As his remark on “morals” as the last and so the most beneficial branch of the tree of knowledge would suggest, the improvement of morality is dependent on the progress of scientific knowledge. Thus the ultimate motivation of Cartesian universal method resulted from combining moral good with instrumental one. To link moral issues with scientific knowledge furnished the Cartesian effort with its educational bearing. In the Preface to the Principles of Philosophy Descartes revealed his publication politics, where the educational purpose of his activities was reflected. He organized his studies in accordance with a deliberate curricular scheme beginning with Discourse, which con-

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tained Morals and Logic and continued with the treatises of Optics, Meteorology, and Geometry. In Optics his aim was “to show that one could make sufficient progress in philosophy to enable one to achieve knowledge of the arts which are beneficial for life.” Descartes’ fascination with ‘technology’ was manifested in Optics, where he provided a detailed analysis of the optimum shape and configuration of telescopic lenses. In Meteors his persistent criticism of the curriculum of the time, based on “traditional philosophy” surfaces once more: “I wanted people to recognize the difference that exists between the philosophy I practise and that which is taught in the Schools, where the same subject-matter is normally dealt with.” Geometry dealt with a demonstration of the several successful results Descartes had achieved by his Method, which had hitherto been unknown, and thus sought to promote the belief that many more things may yet be discovered, in order to stimulate people to undertake the search for truth (Descartes, 1985, p. 187). Succinctly then, the Cartesian curriculum created a kind of hermeneutic circle starting and ending pragmatically with “morals.” Descartes’ interests were as much scientific as educational. Perplexed by the calamities and tragedies of his time he might have been more than reluctant to continue “business as usual” with the ideas and practices of speculative philosophy: as an abstract and useless academic game. He must have envisaged indirect but radical and active involvement in the destinies of his nation and humankind at large. Seen in this light his keen interest in both science and education, manifested in the pragmatic extension of reason and a preference for conscious curricular form in his scholarly writings, might be more intelligible.

CONCLUSION Descartes’ impact on education and curriculum theory has been proved in the process of this study to have been more straightforward and structural than merely auxiliary, namely, epistemological or methodological. His faith in reason and thus in the learning capability in principle of every “man” was unshakable. For all that, his faith in the institutional schooling of his times was not parallel to his faith in reason. His major contributions were consciously planned to serve educational and curricular purposes, designed to correct the flaws he found and experienced in the school institution; they are not only studies for scientific purposes per se; they contain a consciously planned curricular framework and the results of his investigations purport to be, at the same time, pedagogic devices for (self-)education. Descartes gathered and summarized in coherent and deliberate curricular form his own main scientific achievements but, above all, he thus recorded a new start for modern scientific research, and, most importantly, laid down guidelines for modern education based on that novel, scientific-rational and secular framework.

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From the educational point of view, the adoption of Cartesian ideas of self/subjectivity and knowledge might have often been received misguidedly or in a biased way, also in their educational receptions (see, for instance, Kincheloe, 1995, in the preceding chapter). The solipsistic interpretation of the self as a self-sufficient cognitive and a priori rational entity, res cogitans, strictly detached from its corporeal and social form, does not do full justice to Descartes’ intentions. Rationality was not a ready-made property in an individual but a (“self-instructional”) task in seeking balance in the interaction between the intellect and one’s own bodily functions, and between the intellect and the social and cognitive friction arising from the chaotic profusion of the volitional incentives in everyday life. Descartes’ interest in striving for a unitary order between the sensual and the mental is manifested in his terminology, where he conceived sensing as a special mode of thinking, or in the quite empiricistic tone of his Sixth Meditation (Descartes, 1968): “I had no idea in my mind which had not passed beforehand through my senses” (p. 154). Descartes’ epistemological policy aimed to remedy the flaws he perceived in the individual patterns of thought as well as at the social level more generally. Thoroughly frustrated with the outcomes of ‘perennial philosophy’ Descartes’ overall aim was to improve social, political, and educational conditions by rational scientific efforts. Social progress was sought indirectly through the educational perfection of the thinking habits of single individuals. By this maneuver Descartes for his own part laid down the cornerstone of Western liberal individualism as an organizational principle of the modern nation-state. In the ‘Discourse on the method of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences’ there is present on close reading the double task of the Method, intended for use in everyday as well as in scientific practice. Perfection on the personal and progress on the social level as the guiding Cartesian visions led to the epistemological strategies he adopted: to the equalization of the infinite and the divine in order to be able to differentiate an epistemology suited to the advancement of his pragmatic interests. This brilliant move served simultaneously the critique of philosophy exercised as the useless and tiresome study of the infinite (as he saw it) and the act of respect for the divine as the realm beyond human grasp. Now it seemed possible to repudiate classical metaphysics as the epitome of the intellectual stagnation of philosophy and to replace it with science focused on “efficient causes.” For Descartes, errors in thought constitute the most urgent area in which to seek efficient causes. Because God was not the cause of our errors Descartes felt himself entitled to search for the sources of imperfection and error in the function and structure of human cognition. He perceived how the development of human consciousness is significantly regulated by everyday ex-

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periences and social settings. Descartes clearly saw the influence of childhood in the formation of adult thought in a pattern much akin to Piagetian terms, ideally as the route from the sensomotoric phase of cognitive development toward the stage of formal operations. Yet Descartes was very conscious of contextual and internal limitations to that ideal path of development, which modern cognitive psychology might have omitted in its own rationalistic projects of defining human consciousness. He anticipated Freud and psychoanalysis in recognizing the elusive role of the unconscious and childhood in his treatment of “the operations of volition” within the complex of cognition. Ultimately, however, despite their otherwise drastic differences, common to these mainstreams of modern psychology and the Cartesian dynamics of the mind is their preoccupation with the effort to subordinate mental life with all its idiosyncratic variance under the governance of rational reflection and control: ‘where the Id is there shall the Ego come.’ For Descartes, to be rational is to become increasingly conscious of one’s emotional and volitional aspirations and to develop rational means to cope with the chaotic world of cognition mainly dominated by “the operations of volition.” Hence the road to success in combatting errors in one’s thought lay not in inculcating the rules of logical reasoning in the first place, but rather in recognizing the psychological and social, even physiological, sources of error. For this very reason Descartes considered the educational and developmental aspect highly relevant in his scholarly writings. Education in the Cartesian sense would mean a lifelong process and a battle against thought errors, false opinions, prejudices, biased sense perception, bodily interventions in cognitive processes, and unquestioned social conventions. Furthermore, the progressive nature of scientific knowledge as opposed to the stagnation of philosophical and metaphysical speculation would expand the horizon of learning over the whole lifespan: “although my knowledge increases more and more, nevertheless I know well enough that it will never reach so high a point of perfection that it will not still be capable of further increase” (Descartes, 1968, p. 126). Instead of directly declaring reason as an ultimate authority in everything, Descartes carefully gathered epistemological, psychological, social and scientific problems whose explication or solving in terms of “efficient causes” would require the introduction of the Method. In addition to the goal of clear and distinct ideas this approach would be useful in the regulation and educational remaking of the self in the situation where Descartes had replaced the theological infinity by the infinite human vistas of cognitive development and learning. Though Descartes’ main focus was overtly directed to the individual conditions of learning, his rules of knowledge had nevertheless implicit but powerful implications on the social and political level. Although he never expounded his vision of society beyond the obedient citizenship, he was well

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aware of the political benefits of the curriculum—in addition to those of the moral and psychological—he was suggesting as opposed to the current rivals: The truths contained in these principles, because they are very clear and very certain, will eliminate all ground for dispute, and so will dispose people’s minds to gentleness and harmony. This is the opposite result to that produced by the debates in the Schools, which—slowly and without their noticing it—make the participants more argumentative and opinionated, and hence are perhaps the major cause of the heresies and disagreements which now plague the world. (Descartes, 1985, p. 188)

The passage is replete with the huge significance Descartes saw in education. The political and theological upheavals of his time, of which the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) was the most disastrous, might ultimately have derived from the flaws of education. Descartes exhibited his skills in masterful rhetoric in expounding his competing vision. He convincingly brought out the educational and political fruitfulness of his chosen way, which he proclaimed in the optimistic closing words of his Preface to the Principles: The majority of the best minds have formed such a bad opinion of the whole of philosophy, because of the faults they have noticed in the philosophy that has been current up till now, that they certainly will not apply themselves to look for a better one. But perhaps the difference which they see between these principles of mine and all those of other philosophers, as well as the long chain of truths that can be deduced from them, will finally make them realize how important it is to continue in the search for these truths, and to what a high level of wisdom, and to what perfection and felicity of life, these truths can bring us. If they realize this, I venture to believe that there will not be one of them who does not try to apply himself to such a beneficial study, or at least favours and willingly assists with all his resources those who devote themselves to it with success. My earnest wish is that our descendants may see the happy outcome of this project. (Descartes, 1985, p. 190)

The philosophy of consciousness and the rationalistic canon related to it (for instance, McCarthy, 1984) seems obviously insufficient in a reappraisal of the overall Cartesian impact on the development of modern notions of instrumental reason, society, science, self, and education. Progress and pragmatic criteria of knowledge might be more fitting than abstract and decontextualized rationalism in characterizing Descartes’ intentions. Especially the way he related the prospects of moral edification to the development of scientific knowledge are indicative of his concerns. His love for progress where the role of mathematics would be indispensable in seeking absolute certainty for effective solutions to practical and technical problems (Rosen, 1987) would be hard to ignore. It is doubtful whether Descartes at all is to be

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conceived in terms of the conceptual framework so often and so eagerly reserved for him: In the early period of modern science it was plausible to believe, and indeed it was believed by both Bacon and Descartes, that natural science would be a continuously progressive, cumulative, and convergent approach to truth, where truth was understood as correspondence between a system of objective knowledge and real world. It was therefore reasonable to adopt a realist interpretation of scientific theory as that which progressively discovers or uncovers the hidden essences of nature. It soon became apparent in the subsequent history of science, however, that there is no such cumulative approach to description of a real world of essences by scientific theory. The conceptual foundations and premises of theories undergo continuous and sometimes revolutionary change, and this occurs not merely before the so-called scientific revolution in method of the seventeenth century, but subsequently, when the method of science remained comparatively stable. (Hesse, 1980, p. 174) .

The real issue is not related to cumulative and progressive aspects of knowledge but to the maintained “convergent approach to truth.” Primarily, for Descartes, truth is arguably related to truth in its instrumental and pragmatic terms, to the findings and discoveries of science equipped with the method, not to truth in its metaphysical or convergent sense. The ideology of his metaphysics is imbued by his intention to establish scientific method where the only ‘hidden essence’ he would be concerned with is a definition of the human being as a “thinking thing” and accordingly to confine the epistemological realm of human interests fitting to the empiricistic notion of science of “efficient causes,” and not to metaphysical essences. The Cartesian notion of rationality and reason would arguably be more akin to the Baconian “helps” as an intellectual tool for solving practical problems than to a purely essentialistic notion of reason for mainly speculative philosophical uses. The instrumental stress on rationality is increasingly reflected in the Cartesian adoption of the value system, “morals,” within which he packaged his method, principles, and epistemological beliefs where the supreme value would be the “beneficial” effects of scientific studies. For this reason not metaphysics but the “last branches” of the tree of scientific knowledge, medicine, mechanics, and morals, would be the most valuable in the Cartesian order of preference. Hesse’s (1980) revisionary depiction of the most recent understanding of the value-laden nature of natural science is striking also in regard to the one of the first innovators of modern science: In the history of natural science, these further criteria have sometimes included what are appropriately called value judgments, but these have tended to be filtered out as theories developed. (. . .) The ‘filtering-out’ mechanism has been powered by universal adoption of one overriding value for natural science,

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namely the criterion of increasingly successful prediction and control of the environment. (. . .) I shall call this the pragmatic criterion. (p. 188)

In the Cartesian system itself, theological and metaphysical arguments were those value judgments which were filtered out in favor of the value of the progressiveness of science, marked most notably by a preference for the application of “efficient causes” in explaining phenomena. Progress, which was Descartes’ main concern, is closely linked to a pragmatic criterion of truth, because: “If we press the question ‘What is it that progresses?’, the only possible long-term answer is the ability to use science to learn the environment, and to make predictions whose results we can rely on not to surprise us” (Hesse, 1980, p. 190). “To use science to learn the environment” was expanded in Descartes to a deliberate educational project of self-instruction, for whose purposes he arranged his scholarly project in the curricular tree form. The pragmatic criterion was not, however, and this most logically, restricted to outer reality but also embraced the predictable self-regulation of the self. The pragmatic criterion as applied to “morals” meant the psychologization of epistemology. This historical shift has proved highly influential for the development of the modern curriculum when the traditional moral wrapping of education experienced a transformation toward psychological regulation of social conduct in terms of the pragmatic criterion. Since then the reformed alliance between morality, science, and curriculum has reappeared in a myriad of curriculum designs in which the discursive field of Cartesian rules and standards of knowledge have remained by and large intact. In point of fact, from the current point of view of curriculum theory, the Cartesian legacy might prove most vital in understanding modern notions of education and the curriculum, most importantly, the Tyler Rationale as the prime example of a psychologized teaching and study scheme. The tacit reinstantiation of the Cartesian curriculum has been echoed in efforts to combine mass-scale schooling with the psychologized curricular rules to produce rational, self-governed individuality. The same critique which could be directed to the Cartesian uses of epistemology and psychology in defining the curriculum as social regulation would apply with regard to the educational psychology of our day.

4 The Puritan–Protestant Disenchantment of Spirituality: The Rationalization of Religion, Inquiring Mind, and Education

PROTESTANT CONTRIBUTION TO THE RISE OF MODERN SCIENCE AND CURRICULUM THROUGH THE RATIONALIZATION OF RELIGION: MAX WEBER’S CRITICAL ACCOUNT The symbolic pillars of modern Western societies might be argued to consist of two main components: knowledge and work. The power struggles around these constitutives have shaped the structures of modern nation states and their institutions. Even more, those same elements, the shifting notions of knowledge and work, have also for their part featured modern worldviews and individual mentalities. In this process, the executive and mediating role of education and schooling in general has proved indispensable and, in particular, the curriculum as the centerpiece of educational activity has played a major role at societal as well as individual levels. The revolution Descartes engendered in his synoptic views of the Galilean Nuova Scienzia, together with his critique of scholastic thinking, meant a drastic change in cognitive attitudes, which did not leave society at large untouched. The decline of religious authority to the advantage of human reason spread to the most diverse spheres of human action. For Descartes himself, the appeal to Divine authority was no longer a main instance as a genuine authoritative source in matters of knowledge. Fides became increasingly disabled to replace Reason. In Descartes’ metaphysics, God is no longer on the main stage but acts behind the scenes as a formal guarantee of scientific truths. In fact, that method-centered approach, by supplanting other modes of knowledge, paved the way toward scientism and 58

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was tantamount to an acid bath for traditional metaphysics itself. The Cartesian world soon realized that there was pressing need for neither Divine legitimation nor metaphysics: The world was free for unending intellectual breakthroughs and technological innovations without fear of Divine intervention, not to speak of retribution. The reluctance to set any limits to the use of human reason and creativity have since Descartes marked the increasingly secularized landscape of modernity. In politics, the new sense of freedom was to lead to the invention of liberalism, where the critique of the past, the use of reason, and the emphases on individual rights coincided. Since then, knowledge has experienced a drastic shift from its private and institutional uses of satisfying human needs and curiosity to a cornerstone of economy and production. It is easy to agree with the claim of Aronowitz and DiFazio (1994):

Not only has abstract knowledge come to the center of the world’s political economy, but there is also a tendency to produce and trade in symbolic significations rather than concrete products. Today, knowledge rather than traditional skill is the main productive force. (p. 15)

The converged affiliation between knowledge and work is best perceived in today’s informational economy, in which those two pillars of modernity, knowledge and work, are increasingly manifestly coming together. Descartes’ dream of the success of his notion of knowledge could hardly ever have been better realized than in the invention of the Internet (or the Information Society at large) with its virtual preference of mind over body. Historically, these outcomes may be accounted for by the Cartesian notion of knowledge endorsed by a methodical approach and its counterpart in the Protestant–Calvinist notion of work, with which it shared an interest in seeking after Method and subjecting body to mind. While Cartesianism sought after order in knowledge, Calvinism contributed to modern social order by advocating the institutionalization of paid work. The twin and complementary legacy of those two Cs has arguably had a vital and lasting influence both on the rationalization of society and on the emergence of the modern structures of consciousness. In this process the role of education and learning can hardly be underestimated. The whole process of modernization and the project of the Enlightenment has primarily constituted a huge learning process where social and scientific novelties were for the greater part unknown and unfamiliar from tradition. The Cartesian epistemological program itself showed no keen interest in history: For Descartes, this was little more than the repository of flaws, of misconceptions, of recycled ideas, and blind faith in obsolete authorities. The Cartesian outlook symbolically embraced the thrust for new starts and novel, artificial conceptions in all fields, and the insistence on ‘methodical’ learning was assumed to

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come to challenge the indoctrined ways of traditional schooling and the traditional ways of life. The parallel impact of the Protestant, notably Calvinist, ethic on the formation of the modern self and society was mediated via novel interpretations of work. The significance of the modernist notion of work—where the contribution of Calvinism is hard to disregard—might be illustrated by the developments recorded at the turn of the 21st century, where the exhaustion of that notion of work seems evident: If the tendencies of the economy and the culture point to the conclusion that work is no longer significant in the formation of self, one of the crucial questions of our time is what, if anything, can replace it. When layers of qualified— to say nothing of the mass—labor is made redundant, obsolete, irrelevant, what, after five centuries during which work remained a, perhaps the, Western cultural ideal, can we mean by the “self”? Have we reached a large historical watershed, a climacteric that will be as devastating as natural climacterics of the past that destroyed whole species? (Aronowitz & DiFazio, 1994, p. 16)

The drastic scenario envisaged by these two scholars might be only matched by that which the Reformation introduced in its revolutionary notion of work almost five centuries ago. The Reformation was definitely not only about a reformation of the relationship between God and mankind or of religious attitudes or sentiments; it contributed to the whole range of human life. Max Weber’s thought-provoking account of the relationship between the Protestant religion and the capitalist economy attempted to connect unorthodoxically the most intimate and spiritual with the most material, where the novel conception of work would bridge the private and the public. The ideal of self and the rationalization of society would thus encounter each other within the same order. The Cartesian attempt to lay the ground for the ratio-driven, calculative practice of human action is despite its influence a necessary but possibly insufficient element in trying to identify the driving force of modernization. The appeal to human reason alone has never succeeded in subduing the majority of people, and hence, perhaps, it does not alone explain the penetration and triumph of Cartesian rationality. In fact, the seeds of rational modernization were sown before the time Descartes came on the scene. It was once again an irony of history that support for Cartesian rationality came in the first place from religion, and especially from the Reformed religion (Descartes himself was a dedicated Catholic): The tenets of the 16th-century Reformation might prove indispensable in understanding the powerful spread of rationalistic ideas. In this sense, a short excursion into Max Weber’s theory of the unfolding of the Protestant Ethic and of societal rationalization will be appropriate.

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THE BIFURCATION OF THE PROTESTANT MOVEMENT Norman F. Cantor, an American historian of ideas, starts his book Twentieth Century Culture (1988, p. 4) by locating the birth of modern statism and the centralized bureaucratic state in the era of the Reformation. This is interesting from the standpoint of historical common sense because the actual beginning of the rationalization of society is usually associated with the rise of industrialism a couple of centuries later. What was the impact of the Reformation on the emerging modern structures of consciousness and societal rationalization? Whereas Descartes’ aim was to establish a rationalistic worldview based on meta-mathematical premises and metaphors of human practice, where the appeal to religion and divine reasons may had been as much a veil for his need to work in peace as a true commitment to his Church’s dogmas, the complementary effort of the Reformation naturally grew more directly out of religious ideas and practices. However, the reformative ideas of Martin Luther and Jean Calvin also embraced distinctive elements of a political ideology, which during the 17th century turned into political and military upheavals spearheaded by The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The conception of the interconnectedness of worldly obligations with religious virtues was a real novelty of the Reformation which thoroughly changed the conventional social order. The shift from spiritual to mundane was engendered by Luther’s doctrine of Beruf or calling, which instigated the breakthrough in the notion of individuality. It was a beginning in the sense that Luther’s formulations received much more strictly rationalistic emphases after Luther, especially in the notions of Calvinism. The key point was that “the Reformation took rational Christian asceticism and its methodical habits out of the monasteries and placed them in the service of active life in the world” (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 235). One of the most significant contributions here was a religious justification of worldly activity which laid the ground for novel conceptions of calling (Beruf ), vocation and labor—and for a secular morality. Weber (1995/1930) wrote: It is true that certain suggestions of the positive valuation of routine activity in the world, which is contained in this conception of the calling, had already existed in the Middle Ages, and even in late Hellenistic antiquity. . . . But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume. This it was which inevitably gave every-day worldly activity a religious significance, and which first created the conception of the calling in this sense. . . . The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly

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morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. This was his calling. (p. 80)

The interrelatedness of “wordly affairs,” work or labor on the one hand with the highest moral activity on the other implied vital consequences for the underpinning discourse of modern society, the modern self, and modern schooling and curriculum. The Reformation provided secular rationalism, paradoxically, with its ultimate legitimation and authority. The Reformation itself was not a strictly unified movement but contained internal divisions and geographical dispersal. In Germany, the great pioneer, Martin Luther, established an influential sect of the Reformation bearing his own name, Lutheranism. However, arguably, a stronger impact on the formation of modern subjectivity and self came from the other Protestant variant, Calvinism in Germany and Switzerland, which formed the basis of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American Puritanism: Although the Reformation is unthinkable without Luther’s own personal religious development, and was spiritually long influenced by his personality, without Calvinism his work could not have had permanent concrete success. (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 87)

Lutheranism remained captive to traditionalism with respect to vocation and work. Luther’s conception was predominated by the authority of the Bible, “from which he thought he had derived his idea of the calling” (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 83). Following St. Paul’s eschatological euphoria and indifference to the material world Luther’s attitude toward worldly obligations was gradually established. Nonetheless Luther’s posture was also influenced by other current factors, most markedly perhaps in the conflict with some Protestant fanatics and the peasant disturbances. All this prompted Luther to envision the social order as a direct and objective manifestation of the Divine will: The stronger and stronger emphasis on the providential element, even in particular events of life, led more and more to a traditionalistic interpretation based on the idea of Providence. The individual should remain once and for all in the station and calling in which God had placed him, and should restrain his worldly activity within the limits imposed by his established station in life. While his economic traditionalism was originally the result of Pauline indifference, it later became that of a more and more intense belief in divine providence, which identified absolute obedience to God’s will, with absolute acceptance of things as they were. Starting from this background, it was impossible for Luther to establish a new or in any way fundamental connection between worldly activity and religious principles. (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 85)

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Resort to Luther’s doctrines alone in seeking after roots for religious and social rationalization might thus prove insufficient. Luther’s thoughts remained unchanged or rather became during the 1520s ever more traditionalistic (p. 84). In contrast, Calvinism stipulated a program that proved to be much more revolutionary in its societal consequences than its Lutheran counterpart. Not that these effects were consciously intended on the part of the reformers: They were not the founders of societies for ethical culture nor the proponents of humanitarian projects for social reform or cultural ideas. The salvation of the soul and that alone was the centre of their life and work (italics added). Their ethical ideals and the practical results of their doctrines were all based on that alone, and were the consequences of purely religious motives. . . . the cultural consequences of the Reformation were to a great extent . . . unforeseen and even unwished-for results of the labours of the reformers. They were often far removed from or even in contradiction to all they themselves thought to attain. (Weber, 1995/1930, pp. 89–90)

Paradoxically, these same religious motives turned out to be among the prime forces of modern identity formation and secular rationalization. The tenets of Calvinism not only differed from the views of Luther and his followers; also “Catholicism has to the present day looked upon Calvinism as its real opponent.” “A purely superficial glance shows that there is . . . quite a different relationship between the religious life and earthly activity than in either Catholicism or Lutheranism” (p. 87).

CALVINIST–PURITAN NOTION OF WORK AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN IDENTITY Calvinism contributed to unprecedented social and political transformations as an unintended by-product of its religious programs. The debate on the religious underpinning of overall Western development, political, economic, and cultural as well as individual, has lasted since the disputes over the development of “the spirit of capitalism” initiated by Max Weber and Werner Sombart (Töttö, 1991). What characteristics of Calvinism might make intelligible its claimed effects and otherness in respect to Lutheran Protestant sects and to Catholicism itself? First, Calvinism sharpened the vision of the role of the vocation or the calling in human life and promoted its actual realization. Among Puritan sects strongly influenced by Calvinism—Weber identifies Continental Pietism and its Anglo-American counterpart Methodism, and the Baptist sects—the central axle around which all other rotates is work or labor. Ideally, work serves both spiritual and mundane functions: It is an end itself as a best

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means to worship God, but simultaneously, it also has an instrumental value in the methodization of the lives of religious supporters. This latter function proved vital in promoting the process of societal rationalization and, paradoxically yet logically, the process of secularization. Spiritual virtue and the utilitarian bent converged in the reconceptualization of work—arguably with unpredictable individual, cultural, political, and economic consequences. Most especially those English-speaking Puritan sects which stemmed from Continental Calvinism render—according to Weber—“the most consistent religious basis for the idea of the calling” (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 155). In English Puritanism Weber was primarily interested in those religious writings which focused on counseling and the everyday practices of supporters. In this respect Weber found useful the works of Richard Baxter, “one of the most successful ministers known to history.” Baxter sought “his field of labour most especially in the practical promotion of the moral life through the Church.” His “Christian Directory is the most complete compendium of Puritan ethics, and is continually adjusted to the practical experiences of his own ministerial activity.” As a compendium Baxter’s canon synthesizes elements of other doctrines such as German Pietism, Quakerism, “and some other representatives of ascetic ethics” (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 156). In Baxter, the interrelatedness of religious faith and worldly calling got a clear and straightforward definition. Vita activa, as contrasted to vita contemplative, is the only acceptable way of life in the eyes of God: On earth man must, to be certain of his state of grace, “do the works of him who sent him, as long as it is yet day”. Not leisure and enjoyment, but only activity serves to increase the Glory of God, according to the manifestations of His will. . . . Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. (Weber, 1995/1930, pp. 157–158)

Baxter’s passionate words about the precious worthiness of time preceded—as Weber notes—the famous phrase of Benjamin Franklin: Time is money, if not literally yet true “in a certain spiritual sense”: Time is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. Thus inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one’s daily work. For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling. Besides, Sunday is provided for that, and, . . . it is always those who are not diligent in their callings who have no time for God when the occasion demands it. (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 158)

Two different motives lie behind the introduction of work to the forefront of human existence. First,

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labour is, . . . an approved ascetic technique, as it always has been in the Western Church, in sharp contrast not only to the Orient but to almost all monastic rules the world over. It is in particular the specific defense against all those temptations which Puritanism united under the name of unclean life. (p. 158)

Second, work is elevated as the panacea for the problems and predicaments of human conduct to the overall solution of the meaning of life: The sexual asceticism of Puritanism differ only in degree, . . . from that of monasticism. . . . Along with a moderate vegetable diet and cold baths, the same prescription is given for all sexual temptations as is used against religious doubts and a sense of moral unworthiness: “Work hard in your calling.” But the most important thing was that even beyond that labour came to be considered in itself the end of life, ordained as such by God. St. Paul’s “He who will not work shall not eat” holds unconditionally for everyone. Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace. (pp. 158–159, emphasis added)

Despite the rigor of this doctrine, a more closely specified notion of work was to come. Not any labor whatsoever or labor itself, but rational labor in a calling is what God demands. In the definition of work there is to be found a subtle but decisive difference between the Lutheran and Calvinist notions. While Luther in fact never quite freed himself from Pauline indifference with respect to the world (p. 160), the Calvinist doctrine for its part meant a radical potential for social change through its novel definition of work. The Lutheran indifference toward the world implied an impossibility to find any efficient ethical principles for the reform of the world. The calling for a Lutheran is a fate to which he must submit and which she or he must make the best of. The world is to be accepted as it is and submission to the facticity of the existing world, for instance, with “[T]he differentiation of men into the classes and occupations established through historical development” (p. 160), alone can be made the religious duty. In the Lutheran context the world seemed to remain or to be let be beyond the control of human powers: “The relations of Lutheranism to the world were in general uncertain from the beginning and remained so” (p. 160). In the Calvinist and Puritan view, calling is not a fate but “God’s commandment to the individual to work for the divine glory.” The difference between these two attitudes may be subtle but it has—as Weber notes—“farreaching psychological consequences, [and it] became connected with a further development of the providential interpretation of the economic order which had begun in scholasticism” (p. 160). “To work for the divine glory,” even if commanded to do so, means quite a different motivational basis from “to submit to the world as it is.” Neither the world nor individual life was ready-made but could or rather should be viewed as a human task stipulated by God himself. The time horizon and the prime motive of Puritanism was in

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the future because only the fruits of labor were to reveal to mankind the providential purpose regarding the order of the world. The Puritan stress on the outcomes or the “fruits” of labor constantly challenged the present skills of its practitioners. Thus the human mind and human skills were in constant need of improvement, namely, learning and education, in order to work better and better for the glory of God. This Puritan feature stressing a continual, work-focused worldly struggle for spiritual edification was sharpened by the doctrine of predestination. The genius of this dogma kept under control both two “regiments,” heavenly and earthly, by laying down guidelines for the spiritual as well as for the mundane order. Psychologically, due to the insecurity inherent in this dogma, it kept religious supporters busy in work. At societal level, modern citizenship and the organization of the modern nation state began to take shape around the division of labor and the work-related structuring of society: “. . . modern statism, the centralized bureaucratic state, was rapidly entrenched” (Cantor, 1988, p. 4). The foregoing notwithstanding the macro-level transitions may still not be intelligible without an excursion into Puritan theories of subjectivity and self. These social formations have been anchored in the structures of modern consciousness where, in turn, the partisanship of Puritanism through its stress on work-related self-identity has been vital. The main question here remains to be answered: how “the undoubted superiority of Calvinism in social organization”—as Weber maintains (1995/1930, p. 108)—is related to the Calvinist view of the individual as a solitary, even isolated being? Calvinist–Puritan theories of self are naturally imbued with theological deliberations created in the doctrinal battles with opponents, and they also underwent modifications in different subsects in different countries. Hence a brief glance into the background of Protestant theology is in order here.

CALVINIST–PURITAN ROOTS OF INDIVIDUALISM The doctrine of predestination created a basic psychological motive for a Calvinist–Puritan mentality. In Catholicism, as well as in Lutheranism, institutional or pastoral solutions had been made to alleviate the spiritual predicament caused by the human tendency to an impious status naturalis, for example the doctrine of divine grace and forgiveness, the institution of confession, or the practical use of indulgences. For instance, as Weber remarks, Lutheranism, on account of its doctrine of grace, lacked a psychological sanction of systematic conduct to compel the methodical rationalization of life (Weber, p. 128). . . . The Lutheran faith thus left the spontaneous vitality of impulsive action and naive emotion more nearly unchanged. The motive to con-

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stant self-control and thus to a deliberate regulation of one’s own life, which the gloomy doctrine of Calvinism gave, was lacking. A religious genius like Luther could live in this atmosphere of openness and freedom without difficulty and, so long as his enthusiasm was powerful enough, without danger of falling back into the status naturalis. That simple, sensitive, and peculiarly emotional form of piety, which is the ornament of many of the highest types of Lutherans, like their free and spontaneous morality, finds few parallels in genuine Puritanism, . . . But for the everyday Lutheran, even the able one, nothing was more certain than that he was only temporarily, as long as the single confession or sermon affected him, raised above the status naturalis. (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 126)

Within Puritanism the constant uncertainty as to whether one is among the elect had certain novel and interrelated consequences regarding the notions of individuality which had prevailed before the 17th century. The first is an indispensable and strange individuation of the individual: On the existential level the individual is stripped of communal and traditional bonds. The doctrine of predestination made it impossible to seek after certainty solely in a community or in the Church, because these institutions as such were not able to guarantee the salvation of the religious supporter. No one can have certainty about his own spiritual destiny. This feature in Calvinism is dramatically characterized by Weber (1995/1930, first emphasis added): In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual. In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity. No one could help him. No priest, for the chosen one can understand the word of God only in his heart. No sacraments, for though the sacraments have been ordained by God for the increase of His glory, and must hence be scrupulously observed, they are not a means to the attainment of grace, but only subjective externa subsidia of faith. No church, for though it was held that extra ecclesiam nulla salus in the sense that whoever kept away from the true Church could never belong to God’s chosen band, nevertheless the membership of the external Church included the doomed. They should belong to it and be subjected to its discipline, not in order thus to attain salvation, that is impossible, but because, for the glory of God, they too must be forced to obey His commandments. Finally, even no God. For even Christ had died only for the elect, for whose benefit God had decreed His martyrdom from eternity. This, the complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the sacraments (which was in Lutheranism by no means developed to its final conclusions), was what formed the absolutely decisive difference from Catholicism. (pp. 104–105)

The Calvinist definition of the condition of the individual seemingly shared a solipsistic ambiance with the Cartesian epistemological cogito pro-

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gram. Initially, both schools of thought—Calvinism was more a religion thought than a religion affectively experienced—liked to envision the social reality at large with a laissez faire style where a seemingly contingent aggregate of the actions of isolated and de-personalized individuals is preordained by the divine plan. This plan contributed to the order of the life of single individuals but it was also influential at the social level promoting the birth of modern statism and the centralized bureaucratic state (cf. Cantor, 1988). The (initially religious) reification of man is a consequence of that pre-given hierarchy of reality: “God does not exist for men, but men for the sake of God” (Weber, 1995/1930, pp. 102–103). A further similarity between Calvinism and Cartesianism might be found in their overwhelming emphasis on thought and cognition at the cost of bodily or social interests. For Descartes, what makes human beings distinctively human is the cognitive capacity. In Calvinism, the existential reduction is to take place through the doctrinal methodization of an individual life, where the task of the individual is to recognize the ordinary duties divinely planned for her or him. The disenchantment or de-mystification (Entzauberung) of the world was of chief interest for the implementation of the Calvinist worldview. God has in his unrestricted omnipotency determined the structure and the function of the world, and “decided the fate of every individual and regulated the tiniest details of the cosmos from eternity” (pp. 103–104). In the rationalistic reduction and de-mystification of reality by Calvinism was incorporated the repudiation of all magical means to salvation. Magic in any form was considered an indication of superstition and sin. The renunciation of magic was not initially a Calvinist invention but “had begun with the Hebrew prophets, and . . . with Hellenistic scientific thought.” In Calvinism, however, great historical process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world . . . came . . . to its logical conclusion. The genuine Puritan even rejected all signs of religious ceremony at the grave and buried his nearest and dearest without song or ritual in order that any superstition, no trust in the effects of magical and sacramental forces on salvation, should creep in. (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 105)

The fundamental antagonism to any kind of sensual culture was a natural outcome of that purified attitude and worked for the promotion of cognitivist rationales for human conduct—which have also shaped decisively the modern curriculum discourse. At the same time, the Puritan doctrine outlined the view of an isolated individual forced to struggle alone for the salvation of the soul which rendered the ultimate meaning of and reason for life. Sensitively and insightfully Weber unites these psychosocial and cultural consequences of Puritanism:

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Combined with the harsh doctrines of the absolute transcendentality of God and the corruption of everything pertaining to the flesh, this inner isolation of the individual contains, on the one hand, the reason for the entirely negative attitude of Puritanism to all sensuous and emotional elements in culture and in religion, because they are of no use toward salvation and promote sentimental illusions and idolatrous superstitions. . . . On the other hand it forms one of the roots of that disillusioned and pessimistically inclined individualism which can even to-day be identified in the national characters and the institutions of the peoples with a Puritan past. (p. 105)

The combination of the predetermined but hidden order of the world and the doctrine of predestination meant living in an almost intolerable doubt and solitude. From this pressure there was no easy way out. The doctrinal tendency was to lay the burden of salvation on the shoulders of the single individual. There was no other way to achieve certainty of one’s membership among the elect than to devote every single moment to the glory of God by worldly labor. This was the mental space of the individual in the newly created spiritual system. Spiritual and existential Angst and uncertainty accompanied by constant efforts to attain freedom from them found its reconciliation in the methodization of one’s life. The devotion to paid work as an answer to religious–existential predicaments meant, as mentioned, that the rules of monastic asceticism were moved to the worldly work. Nevertheless the acumen of the Calvinist theory of self and subjectivity rested on its ability to tear the individual away from the close ties with which she or he is bound to this world. This double bond—pushing and pulling simultaneously—opened up the possibility to demolish the old and design a new society by starting with a clean slate with ascetic–rationalistic principles. The self in Calvinist terms is strictly bound and subjected to the sole task of glorifying God, which in turn is best accomplished when one pushes hard in one’s labor. Self means subjectivity in one of its literal senses (to submit) and this interpretation makes a radical option for the rationalistic rearrangement of social relations. The overwhelmingly de-personalized and detached notions of the Calvinist self was enhanced by the replacement of all anthropocentric explanations. The focus on the single individual as self-sufficient, metaphysical entity was discarded by the subservient role of the human being in the grand design. However, again, this instrumental position reserved for humans might have promoted a transition of the motivational basis of human action from purely religious to more and more secular considerations. To serve means to be useful. This pragmatic connection is in accord with the Calvinist doctrine whereby the ultimate criterion for any action is to be found in its outcomes or “fruits.” This principle was applied to the deeds of God as well. To achieve more enlightenment about God and his designs is best promoted by a knowledge of his works.

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CALVINISTIC IMPLICATIONS FOR THE NOTIONS OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND CURRICULUM These attitudes—with their de-personalized notions of self and subjectivity— may have had interesting implications for the directions the rising scientific and research paradigms first took. Weber had some tendency—in our contemporary curricular view but not necessarily out of his own interests—to overlook these developments but nonetheless said something particularly relevant to this topic in the footnotes of The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber presented as if self-evident the claim that “[T]he decided propensity of Protestant asceticism for empiricism, rationalized on a mathematical basis, is well known.” He quotes the Neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, one of the founders of the Baden or South–West school of thought. (This “School” was influential at the turn of the 20th century but was overshadowed by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology). The South–West School was especially interested in studying the methodological differences between human studies (“Kulturwissenschaften” or “Geisteswissenschaften”) and the natural sciences. Windelband himself conceived the difference between the study of history/culture/society and natural sciences to lie in the fact that the former is an idiographic science whereas the natural sciences are nomothetic (cf. Juntunen & Mehtonen, 1977, p. 85) This division has some currency even in today’s methodological debates. But what is of greater relevance and what also Weber was interested in was Windelband’s claim “which rightly denies that modern natural science can be understood as the product of material and technical interests” (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 249). Weber himself added that “highly important relationships exist, of course, but they are much more complex” (p. 249). As a hypothetical but interesting answer to the question why the development of the natural sciences took the direction it took and what were the motives behind it Weber was inclined to look to Protestant asceticism. As already remarked, the stress in Puritan ethics on outcomes applies equally to the study of the Divine ‘grand design’ itself. In the successful accomplishment of this task metaphysics and philosophy seemed to have no proper use; on the contrary, they might be more harmful than of any genuine help while unraveling the secrets of nature: The favourite science of all Puritan, Baptist, or pietist Christianity was thus physics, and next to it all those other natural sciences which used a similar method, especially mathematics. It was hoped from the empirical knowledge of the divine laws of nature to ascend to a grasp of the essence of the world, which on account of the fragmentary nature of the divine revelation, a Calvinistic idea, could never be attained by the method of metaphysical speculation. The empiricism of the seventeenth century was the means for asceticism to seek God in nature. It seemed to lead to God, philosophical speculation away from Him. (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 249: fn. 145, emphasis added)

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Together with these novel utilitarian conceptions of science the stress on the performance of the individual and on the utility of her or his actions was of great consequence on the social level. In the required mentality of the individual there was mirrored the ideal image of a whole society. The implied spirit of detachment and impersonality of the Puritan ethic helped “its transition from the will of God to the purely utilitarian view-point of the later liberal theory” (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 260). Thus Puritan theories of self and Puritan images of society would be nicely bridged and reciprocally reinforced. This is already implicit in the words of the Puritan minister Richard Baxter in his Christian Directory: It is for action that God maintaineth us and our activities; work is the moral as well as the natural end of power. . . . It is action that God is most served and honoured by. . . . The public welfare or the good of the many is to be valued above our own. (quoted in Weber, 1995/1930, p. 260: fn. 9)

In these words there were again present the subtle bond between the Calvinistic notion of self and its reflection on the social level. The solitary and heightened responsibility of the individual was motivated by the most praiseworthy mundane outcome: “the public welfare or the good of the many.” There might also be found some clue to “a mystery how the undoubted superiority of Calvinism in social organization can be connected with [this] tendency to tear the individual away from the close ties with which he is bound to this world.” Weber’s own account scrutinized the transition to what “the Christian brotherly love was forced to take under the pressure of the inner isolation of the individual through the Calvinistic faith.” In a sense God himself is the first utilitarian because “the wonderfully purposeful organization and arrangement of this cosmos is, according both to the revelation of the Bible and to natural intuition, evidently designed by God to serve the utility of the human race.” Because the primary task of a Christian is to work “in majorem gloriam Dei” all his deeds must carry the flavor of utility. Brotherly love comes to be replaced by specialized labor: Brotherly love, since it may only be practised for the glory of God and not in the service of the flesh, is expressed in the first place in the fulfillment of the daily tasks given by the lex naturae; and in the process this fulfillment assumes a peculiarly objective and impersonal character, that of service in the interest of the rational organization of our social environment. (Weber, 1995/1930, pp. 108–109)

This ethical motivation of the transition from the private to the public in the name of utility created the possibility for the rationalization of both individual conduct and social practice. The main concern of Puritan belief here was to encompass the sphere of the individual life-world: the submissive de-

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votion to the task which was preserved for every single person in the lex naturalis, the law which emanated from the authority of God but gradually removed—reinforced by the discoveries of the emerging natural sciences—to the hands of worldly authorities. The unity between the hierarchical organization of society and the developments of the Nuova Scienzia was epitomized in the words of Louis XIV, “l’etat c’est moi,” where the hierarchical, stable order of the universe—as it was then conceived—also legitimated the heliocentric planetary model arrangements of society (cf. Toulmin, 1990). The unity between the private and the public in Calvinism was welded tightly according to this general principle wherein the private and the individual is from the top-down mandated and controlled. The Cartesian methodized quest for certainty and the Calvinist stress on ascetic, methodized, and internalized self-control had a common enemy: the status naturalis, a personal experience at the individual and a bottom-to-top organization of society at the collective level. The basic discrepancy between the status (being what one is) and making oneself what one should be constituted the driving force of emergent modernization. The psycho-ontological motive was recognition of the horror vacui of all human existence. The old foundational thinking was shaken by the pressures Calvinism and Cartesianism generated in their parallel quest for a novel and artificial foundation both for social organization and for personality formation. Zygmunt Bauman (1992) might well be speaking of the psychological and social motives of Calvinism (and Cartesianism) when he treats the mentality of modernity at large: The kind of society that, retrospectively, came to called modern, emerged out of the discovery that human order is vulnerable, contingent and devoid of reliable foundations. That discovery was shocking. The response to the shock was a dream and an effort to make order solid, obligatory and reliably founded. This response problematized contingency as an enemy and order as a task. It devalued and demonized the “raw” human condition (cf. the status naturalis of the Protestantism, author’s comment). It prompted an incessant drive to eliminate the haphazard and annihilate the spontaneous. As a matter of fact, it was the sought-after order that in advance construed everything for which it had no room or time as contingent and hence lacking foundation. The dream of order and the practice of ordering constitute the world—their object—as chaos. And, of course, as a challenge—as a compulsive reason to act. (p. xi)

The practice of ordering was not restricted to governmental arrangements, though these were an essential part of it. It was a major concern equally in the intellectual realm. Bauman’s insightful words reveal the close affinity between the administrative and the intellectual (curricular) interests and the essential Calvinist–Cartesian quality inherent in them:

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Modern rulers and modern philosophers were first and foremost legislators; they found chaos, and set out to tame it and replace it with order. The orders they wished to introduce were by definition artificial, and as such had to rest on designs appealing to the laws that claimed the sole endorsement of reason, and by the same token delegitimized all opposition to themselves. Designing ambitions of modern rulers and modern philosophers were meant for each other and, for better or worse, were doomed to stay together, whether in love or in war. As all marriages between similar rather than complementary spouses, this one was destined to sample delights of passionate mutual desire alongside the torments of all-stops-pulled rivalry. (Bauman, 1995, p. 24, emphasis added)

There may well be no other human practice where the “designing ambitions” would have been more obvious than in the world of education. All modern Western societies have placed a special stress on formal schooling promoted by the state and assisted by scientific authorities. For the curriculum as a core of education a special place has always been reserved in the interests of rulers: the rise of the modern nation state and the birth of the modern educational system presupposed and adjusted to each other. National curricula were to become a vital means for modern society to assert itself and a major vehicle to inculcate the minds of single individuals with those novel and artificial tenets initially legislated by the early modern rulers: philosophers and religious leaders. Doll (1998) pointed out how the individualism of early humanism was increasingly replaced by “a new social, commercial, and intellectual order” alongside “the rise of Protestantism, commercialism, and the forming middle class.” The distinctive features of the emerging, almost all-pervasive order were “simplicity, efficiency, method.” Restating the importance of the doctrines of Calvinism and Cartesianism for this development Doll maintains that probably no one word captures the tenor of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries better than method. . . . Method was the hallmark of the new Copernican science; it formed the heart of Descartes’ . . . discourse of “rightly conducting reason for seeking truth”, and represented the vehicle by which a rising merchant and Protestant class could assert itself. Finally, method—simple, practical, universal—stood in direct opposition to the intricate entanglements of the Roman church and the circuitous logic and elaborations of scholasticism. (p. 9)

As an executive partner in the emerging political and intellectual hegemony education and teaching did not remain unchanged. Teaching underwent a paradigmatic change—“from dialogic glosses on ancient and honored texts, and even from glosses on those glosses, to a direct, ‘short-cut’ route to a desired and prescribed end. Epistemology became practical and teaching became methodized” (Doll, 1998, p. 9, emphasis added).

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These changes could be seen—in some measure at least—to be prompted by the spreading of Calvinist ideas. David Hamilton’s conjecture raised by Doll (1998) of “the connection between Protestantism, Calvinism and curriculum” proves striking. The affinity between Calvinist ideas of order and control and a new and artificial design of education seems evident. Doll wrote: David Hamilton has pointed out (. . .), that the term curriculum—used in an educational (not chariot racing) sense—first appeared in Peter Ramus’ “map of knowledge” (1576) and shortly thereafter in the records of the Universities of Leiden (1582) and Glasgow (1633). Both were Protestant universities “heavily influenced by Calvinist ideas.” (p. 7

However, the educational influence of Calvinism was not restricted to Europe but the dispersion of Calvinist ideas with their educational implications soon reached the east coast of the American continent. Weber (1995/1930) remarked that the success of the Puritan ideas was manifested even in the numbers of higher education: “. . . perhaps no country was ever so full of graduates as New England in the first generation of its existence” (p. 168). Furthermore, Doll pointed out how Ramus’ idea of methodizing knowledge and the learning process “struck the tenor with the times” despite the critics it met among Ramus’ colleagues at the University of Paris. Ramus’ main concern was to replace traditional rhetorical methods in learning by a “short-cut” methodology where “a taxonomic, hierarchical ordering from the general to the particular, in a linear ‘unbroken progression,’ ” formed the hub of learning. The influence of Ramus’ ideas was evidenced and established in the approximately 250 reprints of his Dialectic during the century after its publication in 1569 (Doll, 1998, pp. 9–10). The case of Ramus with his “idea of general codification of knowledge” is an interesting instance of the executive role assigned to pedagogy in a grand plan of early modernization in order to design society and the individual anew in accordance with those artificial principles legislated by religious and philosophical authorities. To codify knowledge meant for Ramus really a visual charting of knowledge via various dichotomous branchings or ramifications (. . .) This skeletal outline or logical map of knowledge on which the ramifications were to be placed was, Ramus believed, universal in scope. It was a general outline, to fit all knowledge. Further, and this is crucial, he thought the outline mapped not only the structure of knowledge but also the structure of acquiring knowledge. (Doll, 1998, p. 11, emphasis added)

This might have been a historical moment when ‘official’ learning decisively took direction to become interpreted, since in terms of instrumental rationality in the modern sense: in Dollian terms as “the structure of acquiring the knowledge” or, in the same vein, in the Habermasian sense: “rationality

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has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (Habermas, 1984, p. 8). Instrumentality as an overall idea of the curriculum took a stance suited to the interests of the intellectual and priestly legislators, who preferred interpretations of reason as something prior to forms of life and systems of language, as something which would be able to constitute the real world. The “Cartesian anxiety,” the fear of the sensual with the abhorrence of pleasure manifested in the “status naturalis” in Puritanism, altogether symbolized the threatening possibility of a horror vacui. To eliminate these horrible vistas religious Predestination had to be transformed in the course of modernization to mundane, more controllable Predetermination. Bauman quotes and interprets Stephen L. Collins, the historian of ideas, putting Collins’ definition of modern consciousness in parenthesis where it deserves rather to be emphasized in our context of studying early phases of curriculum theory. Bauman (1995) wrote: “Consciousness,” says Collins, “appears as the quality of perceiving order in things.” (p. 5)

In educational settings the quality of perceiving a pre-set order in things reflecting hence, ideally, in consciousness, has remained since the 16th century a lasting hallmark and a desired goal of modern teaching and learning. Ramus used the word curriculum to describe a sequentially ordered map of knowledge, a visual form he felt could be used directly, just as he laid it out. Another teacher had only to add various particular ramifications or fillings-in for his own purposes. Calvinist universities such Leiden and Glasgow, were the firsts to adopt this “idea of curriculum as a set course to be followed and finished” (Doll, 1998, p. 11). The modernist conception of curriculum arguably owes much to Calvinist ideas of legislating human life as a task to be accomplished, to submit self and subjectivity to the work-dominated way of life, and to arrange society along the pivotal principles of paid work and centralized national control. The design of pedagogy in the spirit of Calvinism unintendedly enhanced the process of secularization via the rationalization of society through a methodization of personal lives: As Calvin’s followers gained political as well as theological ascendancy in late sixteenth century Switzerland, Scotland, and Holland, the idea of discipline— “the very essence of Calvinism”—began to denote the internal principles and external machinery of civil government and personal conduct. From this perspective there is a homologous relationship between curriculum and discipline: curriculum was to Calvinist educational practice as discipline was to Calvinist social practice. . . . We have, then, an early instance, if these speculations carry weight, of the relationship between knowledge and control. (Goodson, 1997, p. 24)

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The emergent epoch, modernity, adopted as one of its defining features the obsession with order, control, and method even to the point of absurdity: We can think of modernity as of a time when order—of the world, of the human habitat, of the human self, and of the connection between all three—is reflected upon; a matter of thought, of concern, of a practice that is aware of itself, conscious of being a conscious practice and wary of the void it would leave were it to halt or merely relent. (Bauman, 1995, p. 5)

From our contemporary point of view, however, the intrusion of nonorder (‘manufactured crisis’ or ‘unintended consequences’) is the more evident in different realms of life the more vigorous are the efforts to suppress it. Control of reality in a sovereign way has proved to be a grand illusion which has already fostered a critical reappraisal of traditional institutions in politics, economy, and education. However, mainstream schooling has maintained the basic premises first legislated in early modernity and revalidated in different guises in different ages: for instance, as in “controlling purposes of methods courses in today’s teacher preparation programs” (Doll, 1998, pp. 11–12); in the new rise of a top-down National Curriculum in the name of quality assurance or economic competitiveness; in the controlling and manipulative uses of portfolios, etc. The controlling nature of the legislative interests of modernity has vigorously sought to deny the ambivalence of modernization processes realized in undeniable achievements as well as palpable distortions. In educational policy it is increasingly difficult to maintain a traditional legitimation for the present business of education, with its modernist promises of social mobility and vocational promotion, with the simultaneous decline in traditional paid work (cf. Aronowitz & DiFazio, 1994). The initially Calvinist dogma of work and the accompanying legitimation of mass schooling may have to face, among other risks, “the jobless future” or possibly a radical reconstruction of paid work in the context of “informational capitalism” (Castells, 1998). In this sense the educational system in most Western countries seems to be attempting to respond to the novel situation with the recipe more the old disguised, however, in the rhetoric of change. This might be flawed not only from the policy point of view but also, more seriously, from the point of view of learning itself. The implementation of national curricula constructed—in the spirit of Ramus— through an objectives model and representing knowledge as non-problematic, as an individual rather than social achievement, and as something acquired progressively moving through higher and higher levels of abstraction, will suppress rather than enhance the intellectual development of the majority of children in our schools. (Elliott, 1998, p. 31)

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Additionally, the affective disenchantment of learning might prove to be similarly detrimental. Curricular practices have failed to keep pace with social change. Hence Elliot (1998) speaks of disaffection, nonattendance, and disruptive behavior as rational rather than deviant behaviors: Why, (. . .), should students prolong their dependence on adult authority through an organization invented for the ignorant and untravelled masses when they have been the first to learn the use of the information networks which proliferate around us, and bring the world to their fingertips? What needs to be explained is why so many students attend school and conform to its requirements rather than why some don’t? (pp. 47–48)

Elliot’s provocation of the malfunctioning of the current mass-schooling reflects one of the main dogmas of Calvinist ideology: to see individuality increasingly in disenchanted and literally disembodied mechanistic and collective terms. The Calvinist principle which Weber insightfully foresaw more than 70 years ago as an indispensable precondition of the modern production and economy have been deliberately infused to the current schooling: “That powerful tendency toward uniformity of life, which to-day so immensely aids the capitalist interest in the standardization of production, had its ideal foundations in the repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh” (Weber, 1995/1930, p. 169).

5 Curricular Predicaments of John Locke’s Liberalism: Pleasure and Reason; Psychology and Politics

EXTENDING THE RULES OF KNOWLEDGE: JOHN LOCKE AND THE CONDITIONS OF HUMAN STUDY In this chapter we focus on the historical and symbolical extension of the contributions of Cartesianism and Calvinism. The symbolic meaning is highly significant in that in education the choice of content and methods, for instance, invariably reflects some valuespheres; education is essentially a moral and political enterprise where, arguably, even the most concrete or ‘objective’ plans and actions may symbolize something beyond themselves. Additionally, the boundaries between ideological ‘isms’ might prove permeable. For instance, when we speak of an educational agenda of Calvinism we have at the same time to admit that there might be similar elements in ideological rivals: the Catholicist paradigm of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ratio studiorum, exercised by the Jesuits, shared the same disciplined outlook on education as its Calvinist counterpart: “the Jesuits established, for the first time in history of Western education, an instrument of potentially farreaching control” (Bowen, 1981, p. 24). However, the Jesuit system lacked the same cultural strength due to the success of Protestantism among the rising new bourgeois classes. By the same token, Cartesianism—arguably a symbolic curriculum of modernism with its body–mind distinctions, its preference for reason over other modalities of existence, and its thrust to a quasimathematical blueprint of reality as a guiding image for the politics of knowledge—has maintained its ideological status quo through the varied phases of history—and despite the obsolescence of Cartesian theories of knowledge and nature as such. 78

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The interplay between the history of ideas and their institutionalization in the process of education is a complex and multilayered process where the sources of influence inevitably fall outside any simple restrictions. However, for the purposes of the present study the consciously restricted focus on Cartesianism and Calvinism might prove fruitful by reason of the initial prevalence of the conflict between conservation and creativity within them. This conflict might arguably be one of the leading thread, running through the history of education and, in our day, during the last two decades, this conflict has been sharpened and externalized by the overt political struggle over the provision of education (cf. Bowen 1981, p. xviii). However, the roots of this continuing educational debate are already discernible in the disputes before and during the Enlightenment, where the battle for hegemony between science and religion, with its social, political, and moral consequences, was established. The cognitive revolution initiated by Descartes and complemented by English Empiricism was transferred to the political and social level: The demand for individual rights theoretically stipulated in the liberalism of John Locke obtained programmatic status in the Declaration of Independence in America in 1776 and in the proclamations (‘liberty, equality, brotherhood’) of the French Revolution 1789. Thus the Cartesian assumption that rationality is the same among all people and that consensus would automatically emerge as a result of knowledge based on the “method of rightly conducting one’s reason” had attained to powerful institutional manifestation.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENLIGHTENMENT THINKING AND JOHN LOCKE The mode of rationality Descartes proposed in his system of the methodical use of reason created a space for a scientific revolution, but at the same time represented a continuous theoretical challenge to the 17th- and 18th-century thinkers. The uncompromising formal and antiempirical nature of the Cartesian system—despite his conscious pragmatic concerns—was viewed as ultimately too restrictive for the theoretical premises of emerging scientific empiricism. Descartes’ emphasis on deduction based on mathematical intuition had to make room for inductive reasoning and theory formation based on sense perception, experiment, and systematic observation of phenomena. The alleviation of the rigor of formal and deductive reason found its most distinguished expression in Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) theories of physics (celestial mechanics and the theory of gravitation), which he sought to base on the principles of experimentation, induction, and—where direct experiment was impossible (as in calculating the orbits of planets)—of analogy. However, the Cartesian spirit of scientific progress and his dream of a mathematically ordered reality survived when Newton

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offered a mechanical view of nature acceptable even to religious authorities by stressing it to be divine will that the material universe should operate as an autonomous and ordered mechanism—the clock implies the clockmaker—and, although in the twentieth century Newton’s absolutes of space, time, and motion have been superseded by the theory of relativism, his ideas for a long time remained dominant. (Bowen, 1981, p. 172)

More important, perhaps, at least from the curricular point of view, than the dispute between rationalism and empiricism per se was the way the Cartesian–Newtonian framework contributed to the new vistas of a breakthrough of methodical thinking not only in the study of nature but in how such a scientific view was extended to society and education. John Locke’s (1632–1704) thoughts were the main catalysts among Enlightenment thinkers and Locke was able to summarize the quintessence of previous thinking in these areas. In him, the revolutionary impetuses of the Cartesian as well the Protestant initiatives were modified to seek after rational applications in the formation of state, democracy, education, and the self. Locke’s intentions and interests may have been from the outset more political than philosophical in the conventional sense. Nevertheless, he did not neglect the latest achievements of science and philosophy in dealing with social and educational issues. In Locke, political theory must involve the vistas of rationalization, because the main virtue of communal and democratic life Locke had in mind—toleration—is not necessarily a natural tendency in man but something which would need cultivation, reflection, and education, and for the social enhancement of liberal qualities the best intellectual achievements of the time would be useful and essential. To understand and reconstruct Lockean motives and thought it is appropriate to explore some of his epistemological conceptions. First, the development and argumentation of Locke’s political notions (like liberty, individuality, toleration, private property) are arguably dependent on or, at least, adjacent to his epistemic designs. Second, and notably from a curriculum studies point of view, the Lockean epistemology contributed in a striking way to the rise of modern psychology and to the way the modern theory of curriculum has essentially developed around psychological considerations and principles (affected by Locke’s notions of experience and individuality). The psychologization of the curriculum from the theories of Herbart on to the 20th century curriculum paradigms might be substantially indebted to Locke’s thoughts. Locke developed many of his notions of knowledge in his famous publication, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he had been preparing for its final form during his 5-year exile in Holland and which was finally published in March 1690 (Fraser, 1959, pp. xxxiv–xxxviii). The Essay was, however, not complete in the mind of its author: Locke “continued to make

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additions until 1700” (Bowen, 1981, p. 173; cf. Nidditch, 1990, p. xvi). Locke was born into a Puritan family near Bristol and in 1652 he went to Oxford, where he remained for the next 30 years as student, lecturer, and fellow. While at Oxford medicine became his scientific career and he received his medical licence in 1674; his major intellectual interests were however elsewhere: He was especially attracted to and influenced by the thinking of Bacon and Descartes. Locke’s publishing period of his major works was brief but intense. After his arrival from Holland in 1689 he met Isaac Newton, whose Principia mathematica had appeared 2 years earlier, and in the next year, 1690, the publishing boom commenced. Along with An Essay there were issued hisTwo Treatises on Government and the Letters on Toleration, followed in 1693 by Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Bowen, 1981, p. 172). An Essay is not concerned with an abstract epistemology which would try to establish the ultimate constitution or transcendental conditions of human knowledge. As to being a philosophical study, the overall nature of the Essay is modest, practical, even commonsensical. The main task of science and theory, as for Bacon and Descartes, is to create “helps” for the practical conduct of life. The Introduction to the Essays (Locke, 1990) nicely captures that ethos: When we know our own strength, we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of success; and when we have well surveyed the powers of our own minds, and made some estimate what we may expect from them, we shall not be inclined either to sit still, and not set our thoughts on work at all, in despair of knowing anything; nor on the other side, question everything, and disclaim all knowledge, because some things are not to be understood. It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him. Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct. If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions, and actions depending thereupon, we need not to be troubled that some things escape our knowledge. (p. 46, emphasis added)

Locke was—as his words reveal—deeply conscious of the sweeping changes of his time not the least on the ground of his personal experiences of the Restoration, which forced him into exile for years. Locke’s epistemological theories—not unlike those of Descartes before him—were not unaffected by the social context he lived in. Contrary to the conventional history of philosophy and its ivory tower scheme of the motives of philosophizing ‘he wrote books and died,’ Locke’s ponderings on the possibilities of “a rational creature put in the state in which man is in this world”

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acquired a specific autobiographical and contextual flavor. His epistemology discloses an overall concern about the state of “man” and society where moral and ethical issues are not discrete topics but necessarily embedded within the intellectual discourse on social conduct. The Essays is precisely by reason of its prosaic style a rebuttal of anemic accounts of the subtleties of philosophical drills. “REASON MUST BE OUR LAST JUDGE AND GUIDE IN EVERYTHING” (BOOK IV, CH XIX: 14) That motto-like sentence from the Essays might be displayed as the quintessence of Enlightenment thinking at large: to convey the Light of Reason to the darkness governed by traditional authorities and respective practices. The criticism of both worldly and religious authorities shaped the nexus of Lockean argumentation across various contexts and issues. For Locke, too, Cartesian Doubt was to form an indispensable intellectual and moral posture: “Nothing can be so dangerous as principles . . . taken up without questioning or examination; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men’s lives, and give a bias to all their actions” (Locke, 1990, p. 642). The questioning Locke was suggesting is addressed not only to the abolition of prejudices, the elimination of flaws in reasoning, or to other means to alleviate the ‘weaknesses’ of an ordinary mind, but also to the doctrines and principles of religion, science, and philosophy. Nor had he planned to write a critical analysis of the ultimate constitution of knowledge and mind. Locke’s (1990) aims are here again more modest and pragmatic: If by this inquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities. We should not then perhaps be so forward, out of an affectation of a universal knowledge, to raise questions, and perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things to which our understandings are not suited; and of which we cannot frame in our minds any clear or distinct perceptions or whereof (as it has perhaps too often happened) we have not any notions at all. If we can find out how far our understanding can extend its view; how far it has faculties to attain certainty; and in what cases it can only judge and guess, we may learn to content ourselves with what is attainable by us in this state. (pp. 44–45, emphasis added)

While Locke is a strong proponent of human reason, and although the mood of his theorizing is akin (even to the wording!) to that of Descartes, he

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is nevertheless too much of a pragmatic realist not to attempt to impose the strict demands of rationalism and methodism on reality in a straightforward way. From doing so he was saved by his starting point. Locke’s main interests lay in interpersonal and political issues where the complexity of things is ‘naturally’ or commonsensically present; it is thus difficult to find a gap between his social theory and his epistemology—contrary to the conventional writing of the history of philosophy, interested in the disciplining of philosophy. Social, political, and moral issues are closer to us than those of the studied facts of nature and at the same time the former are more complex. Locke’s (1990) notion of rationality sought after an expansion of it from the study of nature to that of the human world. His next words on the study of “morality” could be read as a rational complement to Descartes’ quantitative and geometrical approach and as an attempt to confer comparable intellectual respectability on the study of the human world: social conduct and “moral ideas.” The features of the quantitative approach, which made mathematics and physics accessible to demonstration and evidenced certainty, constituted for him a real intellectual challenge. He searched vigorously for a modus of intellectual inquiry where the distinctive features of moral ideas and social conduct, that is, their linguistic, discursive, and practical nature, might be expressed in a way which preserve their peculiar characteristic: [The ideas of quantity] can be set down and represented by sensible marks, which have a greater and nearer correspondence with them than any words or sounds whatsoever. Diagrams drawn on paper are copies of the ideas in the mind, and not liable to the uncertainty that words carry in their signification. An angle, circle, or square, drawn in lines, lies open to the view, and cannot be mistaken: it remains unchangeable, and may at leisure be considered and examined, and the demonstration be revised, and all the parts of it may be gone over more than once, without any danger of the least of change in the ideas. This cannot be thus done in moral ideas: we have no sensible marks that resemble them, whereby we can set them down; we have nothing but words to express them by; which, though when written they remain the same, yet the ideas they stand for may change in the same man; and it is very seldom that they are not different in different persons. (p. 550)

Locke seemed to recognize clearly the discursive nature of social practice as a communicative action, contrary to the relatively more simple “ideas of quantity” rendered more “capable of certainty and demonstration.” However, the Cartesian pressure toward “clear” and “distinct” ideas continued to haunt his mind; he could not liberate himself from the obsession of exactitude despite his clear recognition of the impossible nature of the task. Locke chose a way which came to characterize the whole range of rising human and social disciplines: psychology, philosophy, sociology, economy, and political studies. Mathematics and the interest in the quantification of the substance of hu-

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man and social study came to direct the social–scientific mainstream through the 20th century. As a practical man Locke was somewhat reluctant to dwell upon and draw any further ontological conclusions from his recognition of the nature of the social world; the Cartesian appeal to straightforward and methodological clarification of the imperfections of human language use proved irresistible. Where Descartes invested in his universal method, Locke was more interested in individual variance in learning. Locke’s intellectual ambition might ultimately consist in his attempt to combine this recognition of individual variability with the Cartesian rigor of method. Thus he could take into account both demands of the dawning epoch of the Enlightenment: the pressure to individualization after the Reformation and the challenges the increasingly mathematized study of nature posed for other intellectual pursuits. Thus, on the one hand, he believed (or thought he believed) in the demonstrability of moral ideas according to mathematical method: I am bold to think, that morality is capable of demonstration, as well as mathematics: since the precise real essence of the things moral words stand for, may be perfectly known. (p. 516)

It has been generally taken for granted, that mathematics alone are capable of demonstrative certainty: but to have such an agreement or disagreement as may intuitively be perceived, being, as I imagine, not the privilege of the ideas of number, extension, and figure alone, it may possibly be the want of due method, and application in us, and not of sufficient evidence in things, that demonstration has been thought to have so little to do in other parts of knowledge, and been scarce so much as aimed at by any but mathematicians. (p. 534, emphasis added)

While promoting the idol of mathematics Locke (1990) also employed the Cartesian-like appeal to theology, where resort to the benevolence of God served as a prime argument for the interest of ordering reality: The idea of Supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, and on whom we depend; and the idea of ourselves, as understanding, rational beings, being such as are clear in us, would, I suppose, if duly considered and pursued, afford such foundations of our duty and rules of action as might place morality amongst the sciences capable of demonstration: wherein I doubt not but from self-evident propositions, by necessary consequences, as incontestable as those in mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out, to any one that will apply himself with the same indifferency and attention to the one as he does to the other of these sciences. (p. 549)

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On the other hand, however, it seems that Locke was ultimately not very confident about the way he was choosing in idolizing mathematics. He had to resort to the objectification of language in order to preserve the idea of the universal clarity and distinctiveness of “moral ideas,” and he was forced to produce a textual form which overtly pretends to be able to evacuate the social, psychological, and political problems at hand. Disillusioned cynicism together with bleak wishful thinking were the manifestations of his doubt of establishing the certain method for moral and social conduct: One part of these disadvantages in moral ideas which has made them be thought not capable of demonstration, may in a good measure be remedied by definitions, setting down that collection of simple ideas, which every term shall stand for; and then using the terms steadily and constantly for that precise collection. And what methods algebra, or something of that kind, may hereafter suggest, to remove the other difficulties, it is not easy to foretell. Confident I am, that, if men would in the same method, and with the same indifferency, search after moral as they do mathematical truths, they would find them to have a stronger connexion one with another, and a more necessary consequence from our clear and distinct ideas, and come nearer perfect demonstration than is commonly imagined. But much of this is not to be expected, whilst the desire of esteem, riches, or power makes men espouse the well-endowed opinions in fashion, and then seek arguments either to make good their beauty, or varnish over and cover their deformity. Nothing being so beautiful to the eye as truth to the mind, nothing so deformed and irreconcilable to the understanding as a lie. For though many a man can with satisfaction enough own a not very handsome wife in his bosom; yet who is bold enough openly to avow that he has espoused a falsehood, and received into his breast so ugly a thing as a lie? Whilst the parties of men cram their tenets down all men’s throats whom they can get into their power, without permitting them to examine their truth or falsehood; and will not let truth have a fair play in the world, nor men the liberty to search after it; what improvements can be expected of this kind? What greater light can be hoped for in the moral sciences? (p. 552, emphasis added)

Despite the doubts and hesitations Locke remained fascinated by his idealized image of mathematics. He could not but take up again his favorite and recurrent theme while dealing with the problem of the reality of knowledge. Locke’s Essay had begun with a promulgation of the impossibility of innate ideas (his white paper—better known as a tabula rasa—thesis) in the title of Book I: Neither Principles Nor Ideas Are Innate. In the fourth Chapter of Book IV Locke defended his initial thesis by presenting our complex ideas (built up mentally from our sensations and reflections) as a kind of “archetypes of the mind’s own making.” The role of this construct in Locke’s theory is to avoid the difficulties accruing from his attempt to demonstrate the simultaneous “reality” and “certainty” of moral knowledge. His final aim might have been to bridge the gap between the certainty of mathematical

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“truths” and the contingency of sensory experience. Locke’s dilemma may have been that he wanted both: The notion of experience is indispensable to his theory of consciousness and consequently to that of politics, but the problem was how to link the contingency of experience with the demand for apodictic evidence in mathematics. Locke’s strategy is a kind of circular demonstration between experience and reason starting from sensory experiences and the “simple ideas” related to them, then show through his construction of “archetypes” the autonomy of rational mental operations (“complex ideas”) from sensory experience, and, last, demonstrating the “connexion” between these ideal mental representations and the experiential reality of things. The ultimate motivation of this circle of reasoning aimed at the rational regulation of otherwise contingent experience: “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.” In this way Locke (1990) sought to show the interconnectedness between certain (mathematical) and real (experiential) knowledge: It will be easily granted, that the knowledge we have of mathematical truths is not only certain, but real knowledge; and not the bare empty vision of vain, insignificant chimeras of the brain: and yet, if we will consider, we shall find that it is only of our ideas. The mathematician considers the truth and properties belonging to a rectangle or a circle only as they are in idea in his own mind. . . . But yet the knowledge he has of any truths or properties belonging to a circle, or any other mathematical figure, are nevertheless true and certain, even of real things existing: . . . Is it true of the idea of a triangle, that its three angles are equal to two right ones? It is true also of a triangle, wherever it really exists. . . . concerning those figures, when they have barely an ideal existence in his mind, will hold true of them also when they have a real existence in matter: his consideration being barely of those figures, which are the same wherever or however they exist. (p. 565)

For the purposes of this present study it might be more relevant than to consider the internal adequacy of the passage regarding the epistemology of mathematics, to see how Locke used this argumentation for the demonstration of the certainty of “moral ideas.” Basing himself on the preceding account of the relationship between the ideal and real existence of things in mathematics Locke without hesitation was ready to extend the conclusion to the realm of “moral ideas”: And hence it follows that moral knowledge is as capable of real certainty as mathematics. For certainty being but the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, and demonstration nothing but the perception of such agreement, by the intervention of other ideas or mediums; our moral ideas, as well as mathematical, being archetypes themselves, and so adequate and complete ideas; all the agreement or disagreement which we shall find in them will produce real knowledge, as well as in mathematical figures. (p. 565)

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The phrases “real knowledge” and “real certainty” might prove informative in locating Locke’s epistemological concerns. He does not wish to be a rational idealist: a constructor of “vain, insignificant chimeras of the brain.” Neither is he satisfied with an empiricist view of human consciousness simply as a “mirror of nature” (Rorty, 1989), a quasi-passive automaton mechanically fed by sensory outputs. His notion of experience consisted of two aspects: sensation and reflection. In sensation the mind is passively attentive, whereas in reflection it is, with its main faculties, will and understanding (Locke, 1990, p. 236), able to create novel associations of mind not found initially in sensations. Understanding is “the power of perception” (p. 236) and “Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind” (p. 115). Consciousness as a perceiving and thinking “thing” remained not so entirely passive in Locke as the conventional reception of his idea of mind as the tabula rasa might suggest. For instance, Bowen (1981, p. 175) stated that “the view that the mind is passive in perception was to remain for a long time a basic tenet of scientific methodology and to exercise a profound influence on educational theory.” The first part of the assertion, “the mind is passive,” might be true as far as only senses are concerned, but this issue of the ‘raw material’ of perception is quite irrelevant from Locke’s pragmatically colored epistemological or educational point of view. What might be more fitting in his conviction would be that sense data capable of becoming perceptible (ideas) cannot be held mentally in a latent or unconscious, passive state (cf. Fraser, in Locke, 1959, p. 50, fn. 2). For to imprint anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. . . . To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say, that the mind is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing. No proposition can be said to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of. (Locke, 1990, pp. 49–50)

Precisely Locke’s outright rejection of the idea of “innate ideas” presupposed the active role of the mind up to the extreme where there was left no room for sub- or unconscious processes not accessible by reflective reason. Locke was never able to articulate a comprehensive theory for the consciousness, but it is likely that he was never in fact particularly interested in this question as such. His primary concern seemed to be to probe the ways in which the mind is active in interpreting the practical and chaotic world, how to use the seemingly indubitable model of mathematical reasoning as a guiding beacon in one’s thought, and how these means could be useful in the achievement of moral and political ends. Perception and intuition are both the main constituents of the Lockean theory of mind. The function of perception is to provide the mind with material with which reflection as an “inner

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perception” would be able to create novel combinations and associations, and the Cartesian-like role of intuition as the highest instance of reason (“the candle of the Lord in us”) would be to produce and endorse the certainty of clear and distinct ideas. Locke’s emphasis on perception cannot be mistakenly read as barely a mechanistic account of the function of the mind. His initial pragmatic posture stresses the active role of interpretation and understanding amidst the continuous bombardment of sensations from without and cognitive impulses from within consciousness. The commonsensical aim of his approach directed him to seek a dynamic balance between outer and inner reality. His conception of the nature of mind may come close to Dewey’s concept of cognition where mind “is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which we find ourselves” (in Doll, 1993, p. 109). To deal “consciously and expressly with the situations” might equally well have been Locke’s main maxim, too. People who were able to act like sensible scientists would also reflect his ideal image of social practice. However, from the viewpoint of his vision of the rational as reasonable, it is somewhat surprising what stringent meta-mathematical conditions he set to the knowledge claims of social practice. “Reflection” serves to refine from sensory experiences the “archetypes” of knowledge which warrant the certainty of knowledge. Mathematical intuition is here some kind of prime model of that process where perceptual raw material, for example the ‘sensation’ of a triangle, molded by reflective higher cognition, would be transformed to an universal archetype, namely, a clear and distinct idea, of the triangle. The obsession with the use of mathematical intuition for legitimation of the certainty of social knowledge is in many ways also problematic within the Lockean framework itself. Locke’s own examples of “complex ideas” like beauty, gratitude, a man, an army, the universe, space, time, or infinity (Locke, 1990, p. 164) may be argued each to represent rather a bunch of often irreconcilable linguistic and cultural conventions than determined and universally shared root images or archetypes. The practical world focused by the Lockean “moral sciences” is already interpreted and there is no single interpretation of that world (except, perhaps, in God’s mind) and even less regarding the ‘truths’ of social knowledge: “I think it past doubt, that there are no practical principles wherein all men agree” (Locke, 1990, p. 84). Why is this so? To look at the genuine complexities of human action Locke displays might shed light on the incongruity between his insightful account of the structure of human motivation and the strict methodological conditions he would suggest for the “moral sciences.” According to Locke, the ultimate goal of action is to become happy and the criterion of happiness is the quantity of pleasure an action may produce. Happiness and misery are the two extremes of human life and within this commonsensical framework the direc-

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tion and the worth of action will be determined: “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of our selves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty” (Locke, 1990, p. 266). Certain aspects in this definition of the purpose of life might warrant closer attention. Locke most insightfully lumped together emotional, intellectual, and political conditions of the good life. The focus shifts from after-life prospects and promises to the secular and down-to-earth effect of disciplined reason. The genius of these words might be best expounded from the background of his autobiography, himself a Calvinist. In place of the dullness of Calvinist doctrines Locke was promising something much better without however denying his faith. There might be an alternative to the devotion to paid work as an impersonal cog in the Divine or societal machine. The introduction of the notion of happiness with the pleasure principle rendered Locke’s theory revolutionary and still viable in the postmodern Erlebnis society. It opened quite new vistas for the organization of individual and collective life. The double promise of “true and solid happiness” which would ensue with the possibility of “the highest perfection of intellectual nature” still echoes as a promise of paradise on earth. One’s destiny would be placed in one’s own hands, but in a much more appealing way than in the harsh doctrines of Calvinism. Locke’s suggestion would not, however, save people from toil and trouble; what was revolutionary was the credible prospects of true happiness already during one’s life time and amidst one’s obligations. It contained not only hopes of individual but of social fulfillment in sowing the seeds of social justice and toleration with the individualistic demand that pleasure cannot be defined universally because of its dependence on the quality of any single experience. The methodization of life had thus assumed a most captivating aspect. The content of life could be imbued by “true and solid pleasure and happiness” if one would follow “in a careful and constant way” the principles inherent in those qualities. The attributes “true” and “solid” assigned to the notion of pleasure imply, however, that the conditions of achieving the goal are not arbitrary. Locke (1990) had no high expectations of the competence of the human mind in dealing with pleasure: “the narrow and weak constitution of our minds” (p. 276) will make it necessary to unveil the weakest points in the functioning of the mind and then to provide it with rational tools for the better attainment of pleasure and happiness. Locke’s views of the human mind and action based on hedonism on the one hand and rational calculation on the other might be read as a preliminary account of the historical roots of current and bifurcated tendencies of modernism and postmodernism: a strife between an individualistic, experiential, and hedonistic culture on the one hand and, simultaneously, intensified, hitech aided efforts toward rationalization in self-monitoring, economy, and

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public administration—not to overlook their mixed forms, as for instance, in the educational neologism, where entertainment (pleasure) + education (rationalization) = edutainment.

LOCKE, HERMENEUTICS, AND POSTMODERNISM The notion of experience as the center of the Lockean enterprise has proved to be at the crossroads of further developments. Locke’s theory of mind has been interpreted as an introduction to mechanistic accounts of the functioning of the mind—for which Locke gave good reasons with his quasi-mathematical comparisons and metaphors. This line of argumentation has predominated among the historians of psychology and among his philosophical critics as well. In psychology, there has been a tendency to view Locke as a pathfinder in the Anglo-American mainstream psychology, behaviorism and cognitive psychology, both of which have been influenced by at least some elements in Lockean methodology and ideas: the interest in quantifying the qualities of mind according to the model of mathematical physics, the primacy of experience, the interpretation of the mind as a mirror of outer reality, or the image of human consciousness as an information processor. In essence, Locke treated the mind as though it behaved in accordance with the laws of the physical universe. The basic particles (or corpuscles or atoms) of the mental world were the simple ideas, conceptually analogous to the material atoms in the Galilean–Newtonian scheme. As Lowry noted, “it is possible to see the whole of Locke’s psychology as a kind of Newtonian cosmos in miniature.” The basic elements of the mind—the simple ideas—are indivisible. They cannot be broken down into anything simpler and, like their counterparts in the material world, they can join in various ways to form more complex structures. It was a significant step in the direction of considering the mind—like the body—as a machine (Schutz, 1975, pp. 26–27, emphasis added). This stance might be representative in the context of the prevailing image of Lockean psychology. Interestingly enough, the ‘bible’ of the history of psychology, Edwin Boring’s A History of Experimental Psychology (1957/ 1929), did not regard Locke so straightforwardly and comprehensively as a proponent of mechanistic psychology, while on the other hand admitting his influence on the development in the more narrow areas: experimental and physiological psychology (Boring, 1957, pp. 168–176). In the same vein, in recent philosophy too, the role of the villain in the matter of mechanizing the mind and the conditions of understanding has been assigned to Locke. One of the most recent and important among those are Richard Rorty with his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1989). As an alternative to the annihilation of philosophy by the reduction of it to

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epistemology with its knowledge claims, where the mind (and the person) could be viewed as a thing among things, Rorty would suggest a paradigm shift in philosophy toward hermeneutically inspired philosophical discourse, “philosophy without mirrors,” aiming at moral and cultural “edification.” Curiously enough, one of the main founders of hermeneutics, Wilhelm Dilthey (1883–1911) would raise a counterargument in support of Locke. He preferred Locke’s emphasis on experience and did not regard it as an instrumental intrusion to the integrity of personhood. Dilthey viewed rather certain important moral implications in the Lockean endeavor. The very appeal to the individual experience would imply the worthiness of every human being and make it possible to look at every person, oneself included, as an end in itself. According to Dilthey, the emphasis on experience is the only way to learn to discern and encounter the authentic dignity of every single individual—this could never happen by the imposition of outer and abstract philosophical, scientific, or religious doctrines. Thus Dilthey saw the significance of the notion of experience for ethical consideration and drew a parallel between the Lockean interest in experience and one of the central sentiments of the Christianity: that of charity (Dilthey, 1971, p. 97). To read side by side the Essay and the texts of the pioneers of hermeneutics would reveal how much in common the Essay and the original ideas of hermeneutics share. From this standpoint, the criticism leveled at Locke by Rorty would appear quite unjustified, because reading Locke with(in?) the emerging context of hermeneutics in the 19th century will unveil precisely those themes whose disappearance from philosophy after Locke Rorty expresses concern. The link to hermeneutics might also make more intelligible Locke’s status in the Enlightenment, which was not only the tribute of instrumental reason (to which he also contributed); the Enlightenment was also about the comprehensive and concrete interpretation of novel moral, social, and political consequences associated with the scientific and theological revolutions. To the hermeneutic endeavor to comprehend the human world in its genuine complexity Locke contributed with the comprehensive psychological, ethical, and political agenda of the Essays. The geographical dispersion of his thought across the Continent helped the recognition and spread of his ideas. The concern for the social world and the relevant “moral sciences” reflected the German-speaking areas in the rise of the Geisteswissenschaften. In France, his thoughts inspired such different thinkers as Voltaire and Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the latter known especially for his work from 1747, L’Homme machine (Man the Machine), which has been claimed to be “the ultimate development of tabula rasa theory” (Bowen 1981, pp. 179–180). Locke’s project in the Essays shared many aspects with the early proponents of hermeneutics. The attempt to reduce it to the theory of knowledge may not do justice to the complex social and educational interests of the

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work. The comprehensive recognition of the intricacy of the world and the intricate ways of trying to cope with it formed the initial essence of the ambitious project. The relation between I and the world (Dilthey, 1883; Heidegger, 1927)—as in hermeneutics—would seemingly create the basic tension Locke’s project for its part sought to illuminate. Dilthey’s starting point was similarly the unreduced “life-nexus” (Lebenszusammenhang) within which “the world” and “I” would create the equiprimordial constituents of the structure of all psychic and social life (Dilthey, 1982, p. 349). From this point of view, coping with the world, his project of human understanding would mean more than a philosophical reduction to a search for a firm foundation for knowledge. Reading Locke through the history of hermeneutics the critique might acquire a more balanced pattern. The failure of the comprehensive reception of Locke’s project of understanding was due primarily to his own intellectual obsession with comparing mathematical and moral knowledge. However, in this sense also the coming foundationalist epistemology of Immanuel Kant proved detrimental. After Kant and his critical triad (The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment) there were few options left to view philosophy otherwise than in terms of epistemology. Kant’s challenge to Dilthey manifested in his comprehensive endeavor to lay the ground for what Locke had called the “moral sciences” and Dilthey himself “Geisteswissenschaften” (human studies). Dilthey saw his task as to complement and criticize the Kantian triad with a fourth “critique” (“the critique of historical reason”) as a theoretical preliminary to the Geisteswissenschaften. Being enthusiastic about the Lockean notion of experience, but also influenced by Kantian transcendentalism Dilthey himself might have been unable to see the further similarities between his project and Locke’s, and thus lumped together Kant with Locke (and Hume). This was expounded in Dilthey’s own voice, which was already preceded by his critique “of Comte and the positivists as well as John Stuart Mill and the empiricists . . . [who] seemed to me to mutilate historical reality to accommodate it to concepts and methods of the natural sciences”: Only in inner experience, in facts of consciousness, did I find a firm anchorage for my thinking, and I am confident that no reader will evade the proof of this point. All science is a science of experience, but all experience has its original constitution and its validity in the conditions of our consciousness, in which experience takes place—in the totality of our nature. We call this standpoint— which logically sees the impossibility of going beyond these conditions, which would be like seeing without an eye or directing the knowing look behind the eye itself—the epistemological standpoint, modern science can recognize no other. Furthermore, it seemed to me that precisely from this standpoint the independence of human sciences finds a foundation (. . .). For on the basis of that standpoint the idea we have of the whole of nature proves to be a mere shadow

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cast by reality which remains hidden from us. By contrast, we lay hold of reality as it is only through facts of consciousness given in our inner experience. Analysis of these facts is the core of the human sciences. And so, (. . .) knowledge of the principles of the mental world remains in the sphere of the mental world, and the human sciences constitute a system which is independent in its own right. It is true that on such matters I found myself to be in agreement on many counts with the epistemological views of Locke, Hume, and Kant, nevertheless I was compelled to conceive of this relationship of the facts of consciousness, in which all of us agree to recognize the whole basis of philosophy, in a different way than they did. If one sets aside some impulses, few in number and never developed scientifically (. . .), earlier epistemology, both empirical and Kantian, explains experience and knowledge on the basis of a framework which is purely ideational. There is no real blood flowing in the veins of the knowing subject fabricated by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but only the diluted juice of reason as merely mental activity. But dealing with the whole man in history and psychology led me to take the whole man—in the multiplicity of his powers: this willing-feelingperceiving being—as the basis for explaining knowledge and its concepts (such as outer world, time, substance, cause), even though, to be sure, knowledge appears to weave these concepts solely out of raw material it gets from perceiving, imagining, and thinking. (Dilthey, 1988/1833, p. 73, emphasis added)

The Diltheyan “critique of historical reason” aimed at recognition of the process-like nature of life and particularly of the subsequent conditions of knowledge and subjectivity. Thus the target of his criticism was the excessive, as he saw it, intellectualism of philosophy and, notably, of Kantian transcendental philosophy. Dilthey’s intention was to replace the Kantian abstract subject of knowledge with his idea of the concrete human subject where abstracted reason would not supplant other modes of mental “powers”: feeling, perceiving, and willing. To overcome the rigidity (Starrheit), ‘lifelessness’ (Unlebendigkeit) and transcendental philosophy’s lack of a sense of history required the recognition of the historicity of all human knowledge (Lessing, 1983).

LOCKE AND THE NOTION OF HUMAN ACTION AND SELF Locke’s remedies, in turn, for overcoming the anemic narrowness of philosophical speculation was the development of the hedonistic theory of human action as a kind of equivalent for the Diltheyan concrete subject. The radicalism of this suggestion may only be weighed against the Calvinist background of its advocate. The seductive power of hedonism must have been insurmountable within the social and temporal context of its introduction. The genius of Locke—in good and bad—was his ability to offer down-to-earth,

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however cogent and subtle, interpretations in the questions which metaphysics had in vain speculated—as it seemed to him. The seductive force of his proposal for the theoretical motivation of human action was decisively increased by the moral appeal of his hedonism. To seek pleasure and happiness meant to pursue good. Locke sought to avoid any metaphysical contemplation regarding the nature of these basic qualities. The simple, commonsensical, and pragmatic outcome of his position was to equate pleasure, happiness, and good, and correspondingly, pain, misery, and evil: Happiness, . . . is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, and misery the utmost pain. . . . what has as aptness to produce pleasure in us is that we call good, and what is apt to produce pain in us we call evil. (Locke, 1959, p. 340; 1990, pp. 258–259).

For the further feasibility of his ethical doctrines Locke added a dimension of a kind of quantitative comparability (Locke, 1959, p. 341; 1990, p. 259): So that if we will rightly estimate what we call good and evil, we shall find it lies much in comparison: for the cause of every less degree of pain, as well as every greater degree of pleasure, has the nature of good, and vice versa.

Locke’s (1990) account of human action based on a hedonistic good prepared the way for his radically subjectivist view of the person of such great consequence for liberal individualism on the political level and for his views of toleration—and also contributed, partially at least, to the later rise of relativism and to the shape of the ‘me-culture’ of today’s postmodernism. Though . . . that which is called good and evil, and all good be the proper object of desire in general; yet all good, even seen and confessed to be so, does not necessarily move every particular man’s desire; but only that part, or so much of it, as is considered and taken to make a necessary part of his happiness. . . . Now, let one man place his satisfaction in sensual pleasures, another in the delight of knowledge: though each of them cannot but confess, there is great pleasure in what the other pursues; yet, neither of them making the other’s delight a part of his happiness, their desires are not moved, but each is satisfied without what the other enjoys; and so his will is not determined to the pursuit of it. (pp. 259–260)

Locke (1990) ridiculed the practices of speculative philosophy in its neglect of individual needs and idiosyncratic variation in its search for universal and ultimate good: I think, that the philosophers of old did in vain inquire, whether summum bonum consisted in riches, or bodily delights, or virtue, or contemplation: and they might have as reasonably disputed, whether the best relish were to be

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found in apples, plums, or nuts, and have divided themselves into sects upon it. For, as pleasant tastes depend not on the things themselves, but on their agreeableness to this or that particular palate, wherein there is great variety: so the greatest happiness consists, in having those things, which produce the greatest pleasure; and in the absence of those, which cause any disturbance, any pain. Now these, to different men, are very different things. (p. 269)

This far all is well. But the questions of ‘why not’ remain: Why do people not always pursue the right course, why do they so often fail to find their true happiness; “How men come often to prefer the worse to the better” (Locke, 1990, p. 271). Feelings and tastes are, however, a very sound point of departure in the organization of human life Locke was planning; yet left alone with her or his pleasures and desires a human being will soon lose the due course of life. Locke’s account of the natural weaknesses in human thought and behavior arguably owed much to the Calvinist heritage, where the “status naturalis” would display the state in urgent need of rectification by the use of reason. The pleasure principle as a single indication of happiness is not enough: There might be cases where people do not even know—at least not beforehand—their “true happiness.” For that reason people are in need of proper education in order to be capable of a rational remaking of the self for attaining their gratification. The conventional education had meant mere socialization on the basis of tradition, without any deliberate effort first to recognize the flaws and imperfections in thought and action and thereafter to instruct people in the real pursuit of their true happiness. Locke’s diagnosis of the main failures of thought and practice in attaining the worthwhile goals in life represented a prelude to his theory of education. The charm and appeal of Locke’s thoughts is in their dealing with feelings, emotions, and human weaknesses in a way everyone must find to have often wrestled. The questions and challenges of overcoming obstacles to fulfillment revolve around the proper means to achieve the goals set by each single individual. In fact, Locke for his part stipulated the order of modernity based on a purposive or means–end rationality, (explicitly formulated on the institutional level early in the 20th century by Max Weber with his notion of Zweckrationalität, “the inherent aim of which is the mastery of the world in the service of human interests” (McCarthy, 1984, p. xvii)). The gist of his solution lies ultimately in his drawing insightfully on the ideas of the Reformation, with the aid of which Locke created a theoretical model of social order based on an ideal of rational actor—like Descartes before him. Thus he could leave the macro-level untouched yet in principle structured and predictable by rational individual choices. This might be a tough blueprint for the liberal society Locke had in mind. The problematic quintessence of the notion of the Lockean goal-directed action, however, is to subsume uneasiness (“the chief, if not the only spur to human industry and action”; Locke, 1990, p. 230), happiness, pleasure, de-

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sire, will, and liberty all into the sphere of undifferentiated rational judgment. This notwithstanding, this step meant a remarkable increase in psychological and social sensitivity compared to the Calvinist demands for rationality while facing the complex palette of human feelings and desires. This is evidenced in Locke’s (1990) attempts to answer the questions of a direct or indirect “why not,” not properly answerable by straightforward appeal to human reason. Locke, the doctor, presented first the disease and then the conjectures as to the causes: Why is the greatest good not always desired? With these three different extracts I will make my argument clearer. . . . the greater visible good does not always raise men’s desires in proportion to the greatness it appears, and is acknowledged, to have: though ever little trouble moves us, and sets on work to get rid of it. The reason thereof is evident from the nature of our happiness and misery itself. All present pain, whatever it be, makes a part of our present misery: but all absent good does not at any time make a necessary part of our present happiness, nor the absence of it make a part of our misery. (p. 342) . . . though all men desire happiness, yet their wills carry them so contrarily; and consequently some of them to what is evil. And to this I say, that the various and contrary choices that men make in the world do not argue that they do not all pursue good, but that the same thing is not good to every man alike. (p. 350) Some of them come from causes not in our power, such as are often the pains of the body from want, disease, or outward injuries . . . which, when present and violent, operate for the most part forcibly on the will, and turn the courses of men’s lives from virtue, piety, and religion, and what before they judged to lead to happiness. . . . Other uneasiness arises from our desires of absent good; which desires always bear proportion to, and depend on, the judgment we make, and the relish we have of any absent good; in both of which we are apt to be variously mislead, and that by our own fault. (p. 354)

But, after all, and despite all his recognition and sympathy in regard to the variability in thoughts, emotions, and desires in the constitution of human action, Locke seemed rather reluctant to meet these phenomena on their own terms. Instead, his actual aim comprised isolating the general structural features of the problems and coping with them by the canons of reasoning. Human action and its complex motivations came not to be treated sui generis. Ultimately, even the appeal to individuality itself seemed more a rhetorical device interpreted in collectivist terms for the purposes of the objectification of consciousness and personal identity. (This choice may be a remote origin of the notion of “the learner” in educational psychology, as will be argued later in this study.) This interest in the sweeping objectification of consciousness by constant self-reflection had certain vital and lasting consequences for the modern

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self. Personal identity, according to Locke (1959), “can by us be placed in nothing but consciousness (which is that alone which makes what we call self )” (p. 462). This notion, combined with Locke’s assumption that a rational spirit is the idea of man, leads to a view of man as an embodiment of rational consciousness: . . . to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls self. (pp. 448–449, emphasis added)

By the objectification of consciousness and self Locke maintained the discourse of the rationalized ideal of personal identity Descartes had already initiated in his project of rational self-regulation. As in Descartes, however, the conception of reason and rationality featured as procedural and instrumental with the fixed goals of control and regulation has become the landmark of modern rationality: “rationality is above all a property of the process of thinking” (Taylor 1989, p. 168); “rationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how we . . . acquire and use knowledge” (Habermas, 1984, p. 8). Paradoxically, that method-centered and instrumental approach to knowledge might have been initially powered by the Lockean preference for individual interests and tastes over universal values. Because it would be increasingly difficult to negotiate or achieve consensus on common goals or ends in terms of moral standards, it may appear easier to seek common ground in terms of method. But the Lockean attempt to solve the dilemma of relativism and the anticipation of moral emptiness by rationalization of the self was not sufficient to make divisiveness disappear. Uneasiness has remained to mark the postmodern will to pleasure and freedom, where the moral intentionality of human action has been disembedded from its original concerns, whatever they might have been. “The proper connections are determined purely instrumentally, by what will bring the best results, pleasure, or happiness” (Taylor, 1989, p. 171). Or possibly even more, in the postmodern condition this shift in emphasis from goals to means might have experienced a further drastic transformation in whose interpretation the Lockean hedonistic theory of self and morality proves useful. To interpret moral parameters of good and evil in terms of pleasure or displeasure, the goal of pursuing the good would have become increasingly reified and registered as the presence of mere disquiet and uneasiness—as one vital aspect of our postmodern scene where sheer performativity

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may have supplanted even instrumental rationality in the form of simulation (cf. Lyotard, 1984). The Lockean project ended, as Taylor views it, in a search for control which was intertwined with a certain conception of knowledge and a criterion of scientific truth. With poignant criticism regarding Locke’s “punctual self” Taylor (1989) concludes: What one finds running through all aspects of this constellation—the new philosophy, methods of administration and military organization, spirit of government, and methods of discipline—is the growing ideal of a human agent who is able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action. What this calls for is the ability to take an instrumental stance to one’s given properties, desires, inclinations, tendencies, habits of thought and feeling, so that they can be worked on, doing away with some and strengthening others, until one meets the desired specifications. (pp. 159–160)

This description precisely captures the essence of the modern symbolic curriculum. Generally, from the viewpoint of curriculum theory, the Lockean contribution and legacy has meant a strengthening of the trend to view education, teaching, and learning mainly in terms of psychology. Locke’s special impact on this process was to introduce the pleasure principle (present later, for instance, in the behaviorist programs of reinforcement/extinction of emotions and behavior) into the psychological framework of rational self-regulation. Despite its many appealing benefits one less favorable outcome of this development is the replacement of moral concerns with psychological techniques, also reflected in the psychologized structure of the curriculum. The rationalization of society in turn has been dependent on the success of the rationalistic regulation of individual selves by the behaviorist and cognitive maneuvers of scientific psychology as the core of the curriculum.

6 Curriculum and the Politics of Psychology: “Conformity of Wills and Predictability of Behavior”

THE RATIONALIZATION OF CURRICULUM BY THE PSYCHOLOGIZATION OF IT: FROM KANT TO TYLER AND BEYOND The foregoing historical excursions were intended to show the rise of the new scientific approach which superseded scholastic philosophy and its conception of reason and rationality. Instead of disinterested philosophical speculation, modern scientific reason powered by novel mathematical innovations and the experimental method was geared ultimately to practical purposes. Not only philosophy but also the status of theology as a viable worldview was challenged. The isolation of the divine from the emergent scientific interests was already implicitly present, as noted before, in the Cartesian epistemology. The dualistic two-world theory of reality had pervaded intellectual history from Plato down to Luther, but it was the Cartesian division between the divine and the human as the epistemological stand that proved decisive for the breakthrough of modernity. That original division was now focused as the duality between mind and body. This picture, where mind inhabited the infinite, transcendental, and free realm of Ideas and body was subordinated to the orders of the phenomenal world was reflected again in Immanuel Kant’s formulation of the dual nature of the human being: as the inhabitant of the determinate, knowable world of Erscheinungen in space and time and as the free moral agent of the invisible, indeterminate, and unknowable world of Dinge an sich (Kant, 1978, p. 53). The basic dilemma already hovering above the Cartesian conceptions resurfaced in Kant’s metaphorical ponderings in the conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason: how to combine the laws 99

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of the ‘starry heavens’ with the demands of moral law. The human is the irreconcilable double manifestation as an animal creation (“als ein tierisches Geschöpf”) composed temporarily of celestial dust and as a personality who is disembedded from the animality and the constraints of sensual reality by the recognition of the infinite and free Intelligenz, whose main instance the moral law is (Kant, 1984, pp. 253–254). The Kantian project, with its three Critiques, may be conceived in its entirety as an effort to understand reason and Intelligenz beyond their merely instrumental uses Kant might already have anticipated in the powerfully rising profile of the natural sciences. But the difficulties involved in the attempt to conceive reason and rationality in more comprehensive terms derived initially from the structure of his reasoning, where the transcendental preconditions of morality (“die absolute Spontaneität der Freiheit”; Kant, 1984, p. 81; p. 159) were analogous to the a priori conditions of knowledge of outer reality; because, in practice, this structural decision was based, conceivably, on a dream of the “sicheren Gang der Wissenschaften” also in the realm of moral study—as in Locke. The moral equivalent of the thought categories—the Categorical Imperative: “Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne” (Kant, 1984, p. 53)—would function rather as a formal test of the moral principles, “als die oberste Bedingung aller Maximen” (p. 53), we already have than as a genuine source of those principles. Thus determination of the transcendental conditions for the moral world remained elusive and uninformative: We cannot, therefore, know morality; we can only by a priori reasoning arrive at the conclusion that it must exist logically as a corrective to the determinate world, as a source of values. At this point [Kant’s] philosophy becomes most controversial, since his moral theory is one in which we are obliged to recognize a moral law and to strive towards its imperatives even though we cannot know it. Indeed, by definition, the moral law cannot be known; if it were, it would be part of the external, determinate order. The problem as Kant posed it is virtually insoluble; either the separate moral realm must be affirmed or else morality must be accepted as part of the determinate world, with the inevitable consequence that it has no absolute value. (Bowen, 1981, p. 211)

KANT ON EDUCATION The philosophical controversy between the determinate and free order of moral reality also shaped in some respect Kant’s theory of education. He was firmly convinced that “the greatest and most difficult problem to which man can devote himself is the problem of education” (Kant, 1991, p. 11). Related more specifically to the moral aspects of education he was pondering:

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One of the greatest problems of education is how to unite submission to the necessary restraint with the child’s capability of exercising his free will—for restraint is necessary. How am I to develop the sense of freedom in spite of the restraint? I am to accustom my pupil to endure the restraint of his freedom, and at the same time I am to guide him to use his freedom aright. Without this all education is merely mechanical, and the child, when his education is over, will never be able to make a proper use of his freedom. He should be made to feel early the inevitable opposition of society, that he may learn how difficult it is to support himself, to endure privation, and to acquire those things which are necessary to make him independent. (pp. 27–28)

These words have proved prophetic; they comprise many keys to an understanding of modern education (and, for that matter, also the context of its postmodern critique): the dilemma between the regulation of behavior and individual freedom; the same dualistic problematique at societal level: the sharply liberalistic focus on the individual struggle against society; and the partly “mechanical” nature of modern education and schooling. The interrelatedness of the dilemma between freedom and “necessary constraint,” together with the good, reason, character, mechanism, perfection, and progress, created the kernel of a conceptual network for Kant’s notion of education and its study. For Kant, the nature of the theory of education deviated from the conventional wisdom regarding theory. The ‘truth value’ of any theory of education would lie in its ability to promote the “perfection of all man’s natural gifts” (Kant, 1991, pp. 8–9). Thus the precepts of the tradition as well as the discovered empirical laws of current practice should be subsumed under the test of morality: How and in what respects might they be useful in one’s duty to improve oneself and cultivate one’s mind and character. If the prospect of a theory of education cannot transcend the limits of current givenness, its nature must unavoidably remain mechanical. For instance, in Kantian terms, the needs of society as such would never straightforwardly dictate the goals of education only to become unreflectively translated into the learning experiences; the goals themselves would come to be weighed against educational criteria. The instrumental and mechanical use of reason which seemed partly necessary and inescapable in the science and practice of education should be complemented and transcended by the particular mode of reason, the faculty of judgment (Kant, 1991, p. 13), which is capable, beyond a sheer focus on means, of deliberate reflection and critique of the goals and purposes of education. In Kant’s theory of education, judgmental reason and experience passed over the lines of his dualistic philosophy by allowing for an interplay between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds (cf. Bowen, 1981, p. 217). Yet the interplay between the rational and the empirical tacitly implied universal standards of the respective kinds: moral “maxims” on the one hand and empiri-

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cistic–causal laws of science on the other. Kant’s (1991) desire for uniformity is present in his critique of the educational system of his times: Under the present educational system man does not fully attain to the object of his being; for in what various ways men live! Uniformity can only result when all men act according to the same principles, which principles would have to become with them a second nature. (p. 9)

Uniformity could be achieved and warranted only when both types of principles, moral and scientific, formed the basis of education. Uniformity was for Kant a dynamic concept. In the first place, he sought to maintain the moral idea of education through the successive generations and across the fluctuations of empirical history. For that reason the idea and art (Kunst) of education had to be interpreted by every new generation and to be stored as the “mechanism of education.” To be progressive, however, education cannot be but a mechanical repetition of the practices of previous generations; it was in constant need of reinterpretation and reflection: “If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment” (Kant, 1991, p. 13). Precisely the application of judgment meant an attempt to enlarge the realm of reason, not restricted solely to its mechanical and traditional use but ensuring a certain moral endurance, an intellectual comprehensiveness, and a practical vitality and innovation in a transgenerational conception of education. As if anticipating the colonialization of reason and educational experience by scientific, administrative, and commercial instrumentalism Kant (1991) warned: Intelligence divorced from judgment produces nothing but foolishness. Understanding is the knowledge of the general. Judgment is the application of the general to the particular. Reason is the power of understanding the connection between the general and the particular. (p. 71)

This stress on the judgmental aspect of reason as a vital part of science, a most important instance of intelligence, justified Kant in proposing that the “mechanism of education must be changed into a science” (p. 14). Yet he wanted to maintain a certain balance between the mechanical and the ideational: Education and instruction must not be merely mechanical; they must founded upon fixed principles; although at the same time education must not merely proceed by way of reasoning, but must be, in a certain sense, mechanical. (p. 22)

These ideas have had a profound influence on the shape of modern science in general and of the study of education and curriculum in particular. They reflected the debate ongoing since Thomas Hobbes and J. B. Vico over the

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identity of scientific study: Does it consist in only one universal scientific method or should the study of human nature, culture and society be profiled according to different principles? The suggested division and subsequent debate between Understanding (Verstehen) and Explanation (Erklären) has dominated some part of the discussion within the philosophy of science since the middle of the 18th century (Riedel, 1978; von Wright, 1971). According to Blass (1978, p. 49) Kant’s theory of education contributed decisively to the emergence and establishment of a duality in the methodology of educational and curriculum studies, hermeneutically inspired geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik and Didaktik and empirically oriented educational disciplines such as the psychology and sociology of education. Curiously enough, this line of methodological division has featured in the Didaktik tradition of the German and North-European countries and Curriculum Studies in NorthAmerica. American curriculum studies traditionally inspired by psychology has moved quite recently toward the Continental tradition with the increasingly influential Reconceptualization Movement, which seems in many respects to revive and critically revise hermeneutical interests both within curriculum studies and in the Didaktik tradition, as indeed the title of the movement’s magnum opus by William Pinar and associates (1995) reveals: Understanding Curriculum. Also as a measure of the level of the content level of education Kant’s “influence was profound, especially in Germany”: Kant’s concern with morality and virtue as the overriding purpose of education dominated most subsequent theory, although it was not equally manifested in practice. Henceforth all serious theorists followed his lead in searching the patterns of human nature, in particular the structure of the mind and the ways in which this orders our perceptions. They were also concerned with the two areas of intellectual and moral education and how these might reasonably be the subject of a science of education. (Bowen, 1981, p. 218)

The rising role of psychology in education is anticipated in Bowen’s words. But concomitant with this development there remains a serious challenge to the comprehensive pattern of educational thought. The Kantian dualism between the invisible realm of morality and the sensible and practical world of education, with their methodological incompatibility, and his hesitation as to the possibility of moral knowledge, comprised the seeds for the displacement of morality from the center of education. Here two considerations are involved. First, Kant introduced into educational thought a new conception which unambiguously articulated the suggestion only latently present in earlier writers like Descartes and Locke: “the perfectibility of man through his own efforts. There is no hint of clerical assistance; Kant showed no interest in religion in education . . . God is relegated to a remote role, . . . and man alone bears the burden of his own perfecting”

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(Bowen, 1981, p. 216). The entirely secularized notion of education was paralleled by enthusiastic vistas regarding the possibility of education: It may be that education will be constantly improved, and that each succeeding generation will advance one step towards the perfecting of mankind; for with education is involved the great secret of the perfection of human nature. It is only now that something may be done in this direction, since for the first time people have begun to judge rightly, and understand clearly, what actually belongs to a good education. It is delightful to realize that through education human nature will be continually improved, and brought to such a condition as is worthy of the nature of man. This opens out to us the prospect of a happier human race in the future. (Kant, 1991, pp. 7–8)

Second, the general idea of progress coincided in the Kantian scheme with the conception of individual morality, which actually rendered it eligible for psychological self-regulation and volitional malleability. “Our ultimate aim” of moral education, Kant (1991) wrote, “is the formation of character. Character consists in the firm purpose to accomplish something, and then also in the actual accomplishment of it” (pp. 98–99). What is most interesting in the Kantian perspective is that there is no hint left of genuinely moral preferences or orientation in character formation. Moral reflection has been replaced by procedural and volitional posture: means substitute end. The formality of moral maxims whose aim was expressly to avoid the arbitrariness of the empirical world in the determination of morality appears as an open door for moral relativism in character formation. Progress and perfection will be liberated from purely moral determination. Thus the good will be increasingly conceived in terms of efficient means.

HERBART’S TWO MODELS FOR THE SCIENCE OF EDUCATION: THE RISE OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY These choices have far-reaching implications for the shape of the intellectual patterns of educational and curriculum inquiry. The dualistic dilemma was to live on in the differing identities of educational study. The controversy is manifest in one of the most distinguished pioneering undertakings in the study of education, the suggestions of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776– 1841), Kant’s successor in Königsberg, for the science of education. He developed two alternative models of science for pedagogy. The first drew upon the insight that the goals of education would be discussed and established through ethical discourse, while the ways to realize these goals would be revealed by empirical psychology. The Kantian theory of two worlds with all its

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difficulties reflected in Herbart’s attempt to unite the moral end of education, the idea of inner freedom manifested virtually as a moral character (Herbart, 1986/1804, p. 59), with strict and exact ideals of scientific psychology developed in accordance with the methodology of the natural sciences (Blankertz, 1982, p. 144). Herbart’s second model of educational science was built on “einheimische Begriffe” (Herbart, 1986/1804, p. 74): Educational concepts were educational more sui generis, where education could be conceived more autonomously in terms which arise rather from its own practice and tradition than as applications of adjacent realms, ethics, anthropology, philosophy, or psychology. Already the Kantian notion of morality such as it was manifested in the definition of character, as a purposeful and rational actor, became an item of the phenomenal world. This indirect stress on everyday practice strengthened also on the part of Kant the Cartesian initiative of education based on efficiency and instrumental rationality, where morality is embedded within method and is dependent on the growth of knowledge. The Kantian transcendental freedom remained as an insoluble dilemma on the agenda of ‘perennial’ philosophy without further power of influence on mainstream developments in education and curriculum theory. Nonetheless, the another side of the Kantian and Herbartian coin, the judgmental reason with its emphasis of education as a moral enterprise, remained to contribute in its own controlling way to the notions of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik. The line of argument from the Reformation, Descartes and Locke to Kant and Herbart gathered momentum toward the notions which forced the direction of development toward the psychologization of education and curriculum. The induced ideology of secularization placed the stress on individual responsibility also as a social ideal, which prompted to view the methodical self-regulation of freedom as an efficient means for secularized morality. Individuality as a “personality system” (Habermas, 1984, p. 166) became an important part of the societal process of rationalization, where the role of scientific psychology in education has proved vital. The shift where morality itself came to be conceived in instrumental terms as the regulation of behavior and social conduct received decisive impulse from the movement of Herbartianism in the late 19th century. In educational and curricular terms, regulation of the behavior of learners would be effected by schematic application of the five formal steps (preparation, presentation, association, generalization, and application; Hopmann and Riquarts, 2000, p. 6) without any of the deliberate moral or educational analysis still present in Kant’s and Herbart’s efforts. Nevertheless, in a mediated fashion, Herbart himself may also have played a pivotal role here, and not only a positive one. During the last decade of the 19th century in the United States a small but dedicated group of his proponents, for example Charles de Garmo and Charles and Frank McMurry, ef-

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fectively spread Herbart’s ideas among American educators. Also in the American interpretation, however, Herbart’s holistic ideas were supplanted, not this time by formal steps but with the reference to Herbart’s psychology, where “the superficial features of the psychology of apperception masses and sequential instruction . . . were annexed to the new conceptions of positivistic science” (Bowen, 1981, p. 367). The drive to a scientific grounding for education led to the adoption of Herbart’s educational psychology while discarding other elements of his theory. For this purpose Herbart’s psychology, especially his theory of apperception masses, fitted well. Herbart’s zest for universalizable laws of mind made his theory eligible in the eyes of positivism but also suitable for the purposes of mass education. It was therefore understandable why in the United States “Prussian Herbartianism became relevant to the mass training of teachers in the late nineteenth century” (Bowen, 1981, p. 370). What the philosopher of science Mary Hesse calls the pragmatic criterion of natural science also allowed for the adoption of the Herbartian psychology of apperception. The pragmatic criterion, that is, “the criterion of increasingly successful prediction of and control of the environment” (Hesse, 1980, p. 188), had displayed its power in natural science and emerging technology with industrial, mass-scale applications. Now stripped of its ‘unnecessary’ metaphysics and epistemology, the Herbartian theory of apperception masses seemed to point the way for the science of psychology to deal with human ‘objects’ in the spirit of the pragmatic criterion. The natural–scientific “prediction and control of the environment” turned into an interest in psychological prediction and control of the human mind in the educational environment. Bowen (1981) comments on Charles McMurry: All the time, the teacher, using the Herbartian psychology of apperception, must be guiding the perception and leading to the formation of ‘correct’ results, working by the processes of logical induction to assist the otherwise confused mind of the child to “the formulation of the general truths, the concepts, principles, and laws which constitute the science of any branch of knowledge”; to organize the contents of knowledge in “well-arranged textbooks” and ensure that they are “stored in the mind in well arranged form”. The apperception of mass of each child, McMurry wrote, is different because backgrounds vary; the task is, by means of a curriculum of many-sided interest, by sequentially organized lessons, to develop common apperception masses. The essence of the position was to produce an identity of outlook among the mass of the population; the image of the industrial system demanding uniformity and interchangeability is dominant. The morality and character being sought was a conformity of wills and predictability of behaviour; there was no intention of accepting individuality or personal autonomy. (p. 371, emphasis added)

Thus what seemed to have been changed in the transition from Herbartian psychology to a ‘scientific’ psychology of learning in the Anglo-

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American world would have been that “apperception” was replaced in the spirit of positivism by “behavior” as the center of the curriculum. The basic order of values from Herbartianism onwards has nevertheless arguably remained the same even though in more subtle ‘scientific’ guises. The ideological preference for standardization of thinking and behavior creates the quintessence of this order as the predetermination of the good citizen and competent worker. This consequence is partly due to the thinking of Herbart himself and not merely to Herbartianism. Herbart’s own intention was to develop a universal model of a ‘mechanics of mind’ (“eine Mechanik des Geistes”) and to go down in history as ‘the Newton of psychology’ (“als Newton der Psychologie in die Geschichte einzugehen”) (Benner, in Herbart, 1986, p. 43). Herbart’s belief in the feasibility of establishing such a mechanics, namely mechanical lawlike associations as the internal constituents of human consciousness, might have led the Herbartians to discard the metaphysical and ethical elements of Herbart’s original theory. This reduction of Herbart’s ethics to a normative theory of the “conformity of wills” and “predictability of behavior” might have been of consequence for a discursive attainment of the educational and psychological goal of a selfsufficient and self-controlling individual in terms of the suggested normativity. Individuality and personal autonomy were to be conceived not in their genuine idiosyncrasies but in universal, namely collectivistic, terms. The intertwining of the normativity of Herbartianism and of educational psychology was not confined to the United States. For instance, in Finland the German influence on educational theory and practice was dominant until the Second World War, and the Herbartian–Zillerian formal patterns of teaching had constituted the basis of teacher education programs—and still indeed have some appeal. After the war, however, official educational relations with Germany weakened, English replaced German as the first foreign language in schools, and authoritative sources and partners in education and curriculum were sought in the United States. Yet Didaktik (in Finnish didaktiikka) as the cover name of some core courses in teacher education programs still persisted, only without references to Didaktik in terms of its Bildungs-theoretical sense, but rather in terms of “learning” designated by educational psychology. The proceduralism of Herbartianism seemed to have been updated and reproduced by the context- and institution-free proceduralism of educational psychology. In general, this transition from Herbartianism to the psychology of learning might claim rather an increase in the more subtle control than any real change in thought patterns themselves. In the original dual focus on a “conformity of wills” and “predictability of behavior” the former has been displaced by the more manageable “predictability of behavior.” From the contemporary point of view, the question remains whether, for instance, psychological constructivism will denote a return from behavior-

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ism to the ‘inside of the head’ where the ideology of a “conformity of wills” still lingers. In German-speaking countries criticism of Herbartianism grew in an unmediated fashion as an emergence of reform pedagogy and as a proliferation of varying versions of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik. Yet these often idealized versions were arguably unable to dissolve the contradictions inherent in the thinking of the authoritative pioneers. The response in the United States has taken place over a prolonged period because the Herbartianist order of values was tacitly implied and sustained in the interests of those in charge of the industrialization of society and the enculturation of the immigrating masses. That order of values was also supported in the preunderstandings of the rapidly expanding and academically prestigious educational psychology. “Thus Herbart became one of the fathers of the American spelling of pedagogy as educational psychology” (Hoppman & Riquarts, 2000, p. 7). The reduction of not only pedagogy but also curriculum studies to educational psychology in terms of natural scientific pragmatic criterion and instrumental rationality is succinctly manifest in the “Bible of the field” (Jackson, 1992), Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (cf. Autio, 2003, pp. 303–306).

“BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTION” The requirements of precision, flawlessness, and predictability of knowledge have dominated the ideal of the mastery of outer reality as well as the regulation of the self. This was evident in the Cartesian curricular framework, where the betterment of one’s “morals” was tied up with one’s adoption of methodically warranted knowledge. For its part, again, the Calvinist celebration of the natural sciences as opposed to philosophical speculation, its insistence on individual responsibility in work and everyday practice, with the Lockean dream of the predictability of the social world á la mathematics (“moral sciences”) through the rationalization of feelings, emotions, and desires imposed pressure on single individuals to remake themselves in accordance with the normative implications of this modernist mix of epistemic and moral demands. These instrumental norms were determinedly and ultimately introduced to the field of education by Immanuel Kant with his educational goal of the accomplishing individual as a cornerstone of the Leistungsgesellschaft (achieving society) and by Herbart’s mechanistically received psychology. Epistemic and moral standards did not remain merely as theoretical guidelines for thought but, particularly through their universal demands, created social space for the regulation of behavior in terms of standardization. These

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interests underlined the avoidance of error as the guiding principle of truthful thought and successful action. The displacement of sin by error has shaped modern (educational) thought and action in a lasting way most concretely manifested in the teacher’s red pencil. Theoretically, and most recently, this early modern insight into the significance of doubt and criticism in avoiding error is present in Jürgen Habermas’ social theory, in his theory of communicative action. This is somewhat surprising in that Habermas’ interest was to make a difference between the “monological tradition” of rationality of Descartes and the Cartesian successors and his own notion of communicative rationality, but there remains, at least, one common emphasis in both modes of rationality where the role of error is vital. On the one hand, error is related to the “grounding” of knowledge. Both Habermas and Descartes approach the truthfulness of knowledge by grounding it through criticism. The Cartesian method of doubt is paralleled by the Habermasian qualification of rationality: For what is required of rational expressions is their “susceptibility to criticism and grounding” (Habermas, 1984, p. 12). The truthfulness of assertions (namely their emancipation from error) would prove fundamental to successful action in the world. The established link between grounding and successful action would ultimately issue in the prospects of progress in scientific knowledge. The role of error also proves decisive in the progress of knowledge indirectly but no less importantly: The susceptibility of knowledge or action to criticism would make possible the explanation of failures in a rational way as an often indispensable part of explanatory success (p. 12)—as also the Popperian thesis of the falsification would assert (Popper, 1959). The attempt to relate the truthfulness of propositional assertions to successful action emphasizes the desire for valid knowledge in terms of practical success. This methodical (“to acquire and use knowledge”) and pragmatic stress on rationality, where knowledge is assessed by its amenability to instrumental mastery of social and natural reality, has formed the desired order of social life and the mainstream logic of Western science. These developments of instrumental rationality have been followed in the identities of the curriculum since the Cartesian beginning, where (scientific) knowledge and the self-regulation of a learner (“morals”) were interrelated. Since Descartes, the role of education has been conceived as vital in social efforts to improve human conditions. What those historical discourses underscore in this effort is the desire to bring about social change through and by single individuals. This stress on individuality has continued to virtually regulate mass-scaled schooling. The featuring of psychology as the centerpiece in the modern curriculum has been shaped by the updated Cartesian demand to take account individuality in terms of the norms of “scientizised” reason and of the rationalization of society. These social ideals are reflected in the most influential curricular paradigm of the Western educational tradition,

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the so-called Tyler Rationale, which comprised—consistently and faithful to the Cartesian curriculum paradigm—both the content (knowledge) and the behavioral aspects of learning (morals). Ralph W. Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction from 1949 has been treated as “a Bible of the curriculum” (Jackson, 1992) or “the fundamental icon of the American curriculum field” (Westbury, 1998, p. 49). His four-step synthesis of curriculum planning, known as the Tyler Rationale, became the commonsense of the field: The first is the development of objectives—a crucial first step since all other aspects of curriculum planning depend on the precise articulation of achievable ends. The second step involves the creation of learning experiences that will lead to the attainment of those objectives, with the third step involving the ordering of those activities in an effective way. In the final step the curriculum designer/teacher evaluates how successfully students have accomplished the objectives identified in step 1. (Tyler, 1949, p. 1; Beyer & Liston, 1996, p. 25)

The obvious commonsensicality of these maxims might have been one reason for the success of the Tyler Rationale in educational settings not only in American curriculum work but increasingly, with the advent of industrial society, all over the world—if not literally at least symbolically. The Rationale itself might be claimed to constitute more than one proposal for an “effective” curriculum as Tyler himself saw it. In a very succinct form it is a consummation of American curriculum thought, and even more, it might be argued to feature the culmination of Western rationality at large. Though Tyler (1949) was himself concerned at the narrowness of the social efficiency project, he was not able to prevent the Basic Principles from becoming a manifesto for the ideological drives to effectiveness (“education should help people to carry on their activities more effectively,” p. 20), neutrality, and objectivity in curriculum work. It promoted the search for a utilitarian curriculum which would respond to societal and economic needs and prepare future citizens to meet these needs. The Tyler Rationale has its own institutional roots. Westbury (in Gundem & Hopmann, 1998, pp. 48–54) stresses the continuity of the American school system and curriculum work starting from the first half of the 19th century, when New York City experienced a tenfold population increase between 1800 and 1850. Rapid urbanization hastened the need to create a school system which, first, “drew heavily for the inspiration for its institutional development both on the notion of a school based on universal, general rules about how human affairs might be ordered and on the imagings, and the practices, of the industrial and organizational revolution of the 19th century” (p. 50). The result was a school system which applied collective decisions to a large mass of people; it promulgated detailed procedures and then attempted ensure quality by eliminating deviation from

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these procedures. The system’s governors employed supervision, inspection, punishments, and rewards to encourage uniform performance, and they made explicit the relationships between levels in the authoritative hierarchy for teachers and the curriculum hierarchy for students. (Kaestle, in Westbury, 1998, p. 51)

The second critical feature of the New York pattern was that it was a system developed within an institutional context which offered common direction from a single authoritative center. This center directed and provided the organization within bureaucratically organized, monopolistic provision of “public” education. Almost all the forms of the modern American school system can be seen encapsulated in the early 19th century school system. (Westbury, 1998, p. 51)

These administrative arrangements were completed by novel curricular tasks which were associated not with elite preparatory schools but with the organization of mass terminal secondary education. The necessary curriculum changes called for a new kind of ideological and public legitimation, which the new class of university curricular intellectuals like Tyler undertook: In this new mutation curriculum work became an activity which supported, rationalized, directed and sought to legitimate the changes being undertaken in the schools, and a source of authority vis-à-vis publics for the emerging professional, administrative “leadership” of such social change. It was “movement” which sought sanction for its prescriptions in new versions of “science” (i.e., Tyler’s “psychology”), the systematic (“scientific”) analysis of social “needs”, and images of a “modern” school; and while it identified itself with the curriculum, and with the school programs and teacher practices that would support the new schools, its target of concern was still the “system.” (Westbury, 1998, p. 52)

Westbury’s critical conclusion is that the history of the (American) curriculum field summarized in the Tyler Rationale would reflect and only extend 19th-century procedures of systemic curriculum-making. Thus, from the origins of curriculum work in the urban school bureaucracies of the 19th century, through the period of reform of the 1920s and 1930s which created the modern comprehensive high school, through the curriculum reforms of the Sputnik era to the concerns of today with nation-wide “systemic reform” and the national curriculum, the focus has been on public needs and on the adjustment of the system to the perceived public “needs” of each time. (p. 52)

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One of the astonishing paradoxes of this picture Westbury is painting would be how restricted a role seems to have been reserved for the teacher: Within the perspective of curriculum, teachers are always, . . . the invisible agents of the system, to be remotely controlled by that system for public ends, not independent actors with their own visible role to play in the schools. They are seen as “animated” and directed by the system and not as sources of animation for the system. . . . The curriculum and its transmission, teaching, is ideally “teacher-proof”. Thus both traditional curriculum theory and “practical” curriculum work have seen the abstracted teacher as a (if not the) major brake on the necessary innovation, change, and reform that the schools always require, a “problem” which must be addressed by highly elaborated theories and technologies of curriculum implementation. Teachers are seen as the conservative source of the “failure” of much innovation. It is the task of teacher education to prepare teachers as effective vehicles for delivering the curriculum and its goals to students by equipping them with most effective methods for delivering that content. It was and is not their task to reflect on that content. (pp. 52–53)

Although Westbury focuses on the American curriculum field, his speculations might be equally relevant in many other Western countries. Particularly the advent of neoliberal discourses and political practices since the end of the 1970s made the trends Westbury describes more perceptible elsewhere in the developed West, which Kelly, for the case of the UK (especially England and Wales) has featured in the following principles: (a) a simplistic concept of ‘standards’; (b) instrumentalism; (c) commercialism; and (d) an increased emphasis on management (Kelly, 1999, pp. 187–192). The practical outcome of this kind of educational policy has proved rather similar to that of the United States. Teachers are, or should be, merely operators, passive agents, technicians rather than professionals, whose task it is to carry out the policies made for them elsewhere and by others, to instruct children in those things their political masters wish to have them instructed in. . . . Whether, in reality, teachers can be thus operated by remote control is another question, but it is certainly a premise and an assumption of current policy that they can and should be. (Kelly, 1999, pp. 192–193)

The question remains whether educational and curriculum policies and practices are becoming increasingly uniform in different parts of the world. Might these developments mean, in a word, globalization in educational terms? At the center of these efforts are to be found the very principles Tyler himself hesitantly proposed as merely one, his, alternative to curriculum design; his suggestion may have been transformed in the hands of educational stakeholders throughout the world into the universal model and ideology of curriculum work. In any case, in the United States at least, the ideas of Tyler and his predecessors (Bobbitt, Charters, Snedden, and Finney) have been claimed to be “very much alive and well in contemporary society”:

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The attempts of the new right to reconfigure the school and college curriculum are tied to yet another attempt to make the curriculum reflect the needs not of industrial or corporate capitalism but of what has been called postindustrial society. Such an attempt in many ways reinstantiates the curriculum movement at the turn of the twentieth century. (Beyer & Liston, 1996, p. 27, emphasis added)

THE RATIONALE AND “OCCIDENTAL RATIONALISM” What would the Tyler Rationale as a symbol of Western curriculum thought look like when viewed from within the development of the “Occidental rationalism”? Max Weber (1864–1920), in his classical but fragmentary studies of Western or “Occidental” rationalism, made an effort to explain the peculiarly rationalized nature of “our European-American social and economic life,” which is manifest specifically in the establishment of the capitalist economy and the modern state. Weber’s treatment of the development of rationalization might be pertinent from a curriculum theory point of view in that he had a two-way focus on the processes of rationalization. On the one hand, he was interested in the processes of motivational anchoring of the individual in societal institutions; on the other, he tried to articulate how posttraditional moral or psychological remakings of the self would emerge as institutional embodiments. In other words, for Weber, rational action functioned like an adhesive between single individuals and societal institutions. In similar fashion, the differently stressed mediations between self and society might be argued to have formed the core of educational agendas throughout the history of education. In order to understand the historical and theoretical roots of the Tyler Rationale it might be informative to take a look at it through the lenses provided by Weber’s (1978) exposition of “Types of Social Action” in Economy and Society. Social action, like all action, may be oriented in four ways. It may be: 1. instrumentally rational (zweckrational), that is, determined by expectations as to behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings; these expectations are used as “conditions” or “means” for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends; 2. value-rational (wertrational), that is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success; 3. affectual (especially emotional), that is, determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states; 4. traditional, that is, determined by ingrained habituation. (pp. 24–26)

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Of these four it was instrumental rationality which stood for Weber as the ideal type of Western rationalism, as a yardstick against which the other three orientations could be ordered and against which they could be assessed. Instrumental rationality is closely related to knowledge. However, there would be a specific emphasis on knowledge, as is nicely manifested in Tyler’s opening words in the Basic Principles: “Instead of answering the questions, an explanation is given of procedures by which these questions can be answered” (p. 2). This is precisely what Habermas says, as already noted, about rationality in his “preliminary specification” linked to Weber: When we use the expression “rational” we suppose that there is a close relation between rationality and knowledge. . . . for rationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge. (Habermas, 1984, p. 8)

The methodical and pragmatic stress would be characteristic for instrumental rationality, where knowledge is assessed by its capacity for the instrumental mastery of reality. Habermas (1984) introduces “the concept of cognitive-instrumental rationality that has, through empiricism, deeply marked the self-understanding of the modern era” (p. 10). This mode of rationality, with its modernist scientific outlook, leans on two basic premises also peculiarly present in the Tyler Rationale. The first is the notion of truth conceived in empiricistic terms, and the second the notion of effectiveness: As truth is related to the existence of states of affairs in the world, effectiveness is related to interventions in the world with whose help states of affairs can be brought into existence. (pp. 8–9)

This abstract philosophical expression is concretely present in the Rationale: Empirical “truths” and pragmatic “effectiveness” stripped out of all metaphysical or moral considerations would form a kind of circular reasoning in curriculum planning, where educational goals are constantly revised in the light of scientific findings and “needs” of society, which, in turn, are to be tested against their effective applicability indicated as preferred behavior changes in students.

METHOD, EFFECTIVENESS, AND MORAL CONCERN Though Tyler dedicates almost half of the space available (62 pages) to the treatment of educational purposes and their determination, his approach involves no genuine ethical or “value-rational” search for an ultimate guide in setting ends. His straightforward and pragmatic focus on “contemporary

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life” is akin to Locke’s and other early empiricists’ interest in experience and the subsequent rational organization of the human mind and society. In preferring contemporary life to ethics or metaphysics Tyler is actually affirming everyday life as a source of morality as did Descartes and Locke at the dawn of modernity. This emphasis on mundane practice might prove to be anything but unproblematic: It instantly brings to the forefront the question of social and political power and control; “whose interests can be accepted as morally overriding in the situation that faces us here and now” (Toulmin, 2001, p. 122). This issue is addressed in the next brief excursion into the moral and ideological features of the Rationale. The foregoing notwithstanding, the overt lack of moral concern and the stress on instrumental rationality is not to be interpreted one-sidedly as theoretical naiveté or moral indifference. Tyler continued—perhaps not yet consciously—that long tradition of the proponents of instrumental rationality which sees morality as embedded within scientific method or methodism in life conduct in general. Already for Descartes the skills of “rightly conducting one’s reason,” like the methodical life conduct in the Protestant–Calvinist devotion to paid work, meant a conscious effort toward moral improvement. The whole cultural context which gave birth to instrumental rationality was imbued with moral concern. This primary morality immersed in the methodical thinking of the founders of modern philosophy and science might have constituted a first appeal to instrumentalism, lasting to this day in the search for solutions to social, political, and educational problems with the aid of science. Charles Taylor (1991) has illuminated the moral of instrumentalism which “has by no means been powered by an overdeveloped libido dominandi and thus has served exclusively the ends of greater control or technological mastery” (p. 105). According to Taylor, the domination of nature is not the whole story; there are two other important moral contexts out of which the stress on instrumental reason has arisen. The first of these, according to Taylor, is the Cartesian theoretical initiative of disengaged reason: “we are pure mind, distinct from body, and our normal way of seeing ourselves is a regrettable confusion” (p. 102). Here the Calvinist image of the self as imperfect and being in constant need of betterment coincides with the Cartesian view. The idea of human as disengaged reason in turn “is grounded in a moral ideal, that of a self-responsible, selfcontrolling reasoning” (p. 103). Apart from Taylor’s disputable claim whether the Cartesian morality rested, in the first place, on the disengaged reason, one of the secrets of the great success of instrumental rationality, from a historical point of view, was that it was not restricted solely to the controlling function of reason but was at the same time “an ideal of freedom, of autonomous, self-generating thought” (p. 104). This bond between bodily self-control and cognitive–mental freedom would give rise to a powerful

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modern image of self and personality on which the Enlightenmental notions of progress in general and modern education in particular could be anchored. Taylor (1991) stated: Instrumental reason has grown along with a disengaged model of the human subject which has a great hold on our imagination. It offers an ideal picture of human thinking that has disengaged from its messy embedding in our bodily constitution, our dialogical situation, our emotions, and our traditional life forms in order to pure, self-verifying rationality. This is one of the most prestigious forms of reason in our culture, exemplified by mathematical thinking, or other types of formal calculation. Arguments, considerations, counsels that can claim to be based on this kind of calculation have great persuasive power in our society, even this kind of reasoning is not really suited to the subject matter. (pp. 102–103)

The moral core in this methodical and disciplined freedom is bound up with a need to find an explanation for the problem that has been common to all world religions: “the question of justifying the unequal distribution of life’s goods” (Habermas, 1984, p. 201). In the secularizing context the need to reduce inequality and individual suffering no longer fell from heaven but resulted from “learning processes that set in as the ideas of justice established in tribal societies clashed with the new reality of class societies” (p. 201). In these novel social situations the common good as an ethical ideal presupposed an idea of a free and rational agent whose destiny was no longer bound by the habits of tradition. In this model of thought the methodical disengagement of the human subject, an ideal of self-directed freedom, and instrumental rationality would create the minimal conditions for the common good in the constitution of modern society. As in Descartes, Taylor’s (1991) second suggestion for the fundamentally moral strain of instrumental rationality—the moral ideal of free, yet selfresponsible and self-controlling reasoning—is related to the conception of the new science as a rational institution, one of whose main tasks was alleviation of human suffering. The desire for the common good would mean stress on pragmatic truth criteria by “the affirmation of ordinary life,” because the life of production and reproduction, of work and family, is what is important for us, for . . . it has made us give unprecedented importance to the production of the conditions of life in ever-greater abundance and the relief of suffering on an ever-wider scale. Already in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon criticized the traditional Aristotelian sciences for having contributed nothing to “relieve the condition of mankind”. He proposed in their stead a model of science whose criterion of truth would be instrumental efficacy. You have discovered something when you can intervene to change things. Modern science is in essential continuity in this respect with Bacon. But what is important

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in Bacon is that he reminds us that the thrust behind this new science was not only epistemological but also moral. (p. 104, emphases added)

Viewed in this historical perspective the Tyler Rationale seems anything else but a morally indifferent or isolated piece of work, as it might appear separated from its theoretical forerunners—Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and the Protestant forms of the Reformation which were resounded in the 18th century in Kant’s moral conceptions and personality ideals. Pragmatism as its epistemology and its criterion of truth, psychology as a major means to methodize the pursuit of pragmatic educational goals (“the needs of society”) would form the operational core of the Tyler Rationale. However, and more important perhaps, is the way of moral justification in the Rationale. In fact, education in its proper sense is a moral and political enterprise. Within the Cartesian and Calvinist legacy there is a tendency to subsume the moral and the political under rules of procedure or method, often ideologically clothed in scientific objectivity and political neutrality. The Tyler Rationale faithfully follows this scheme in its tacit moral justification. There is no factual need for an analysis of moral or political aspects of educational goals, because such requirements would be automatically satisfied by “rightly conducting” the reason in everyday life and scientific endeavors, which means that the best available morality is already embedded within the instrumental use of rationality.

PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING: LOGIC WITHOUT CONTEXT? The central status of psychology in the Tyler Rationale is interestingly related to this general scheme of thought. A way should be found to mediate the basic moral concern at the level of personality. Here there is a striking similarity with the Calvinist and Cartesian attempts to design a program for the promotion of cultural and societal ideals of rationalization on the level of personality. This would mean the fostering of a decentered, that is, scientific understanding of the world and, subsequently, a psychological objectification of interpersonal relationships. The overall but tacitly assumed objective in these efforts would be the common good and human welfare. There is thus no real incentive to exercise genuine moral or political deliberation in the choice and justification of educational ends as such. The real problem lies in proper procedure: how to make these ends psychologically accessible, and amenable to instructional arrangements. The rational and calculative aspects of knowledge Tyler would embrace in his conception of psychology might arguably be interpreted as a 20th-century version of Calvinist and Cartesian notions of self. The reduction of the com-

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plexities of economic, social, and political life to psychological orders would reinstantiate those initial requirements for the remaking of the self. Psychology does not thus function merely as a means in the pursuit of selected ends; it also has an active role with philosophy in “screening” out educational objectives from the three main sources of the curriculum: from “contemporary life,” from “learners themselves,” and from “subject matter specialists.” Within the structure of the Rationale, however, the role of philosophy remains the minor one of the two “screens.” Philosophy at its best seems to function as a preparation for the psychologization of curriculum planning. First of all, the Tylerian definition of education essentially restricts the scope of philosophy to behavioral aspects of human action: “Education is a process of changing the behavior patterns of people” including “thinking and feeling as well as overt action.” Thus, in practice, an auxiliary role has been reserved for philosophy as “the first screen” in selecting and eliminating educational objectives. “In essence,” writes Tyler, “the statement of philosophy attempts to define the nature of a good life and a good society” (Tyler, 1949, p. 34). The initial moral strain of instrumentalism emerges clearly enough here, but the way Tyler uses philosophy is a negative one: “selecting and eliminating,” not using it, for instance, as a theoretical and critical tool for an analysis of what the preconditions of a good life in modern society might be. Such a definition of philosophy might raise a further fundamental problem related to that of the good life and the good society: the Lockean-like reduction of values and morality to the behavioral sphere of experience. This stand is later reflected in positivism, according to which ethical questions and values are not scientific and thus no real problems, because they cannot be unequivocally reduced to experiences based on sense perception or sense data. The inherent problems of Tyler’s positivistically and instrumentalistically inspired curriculum theory may find their most serious manifestations in his “screens thinking.” He never makes it quite clear what those values inherent in his philosophical screen are. Yet the main function of the philosophical screen is to guide the choice making among an infinite number of objectives which can be drawn from the three sources. However, Kliebard (1995) stated: Since the philosophical screen (and the psychological screen for that matter) are essentially arbitrary statements of beliefs, they can just as easily screen out what is worthy and commmendable as what is trivial and senseless. Because we have no guidance as to what a good ‘philosophy’ is as opposed to a bad one, we also have no guidance as to what objectives to choose. We are enjoined only to make the objectives consistent with the two screens. Needless to say, if there were no necessity to choose objectives in the first place, there would be no need of a mechanism for sorting them out. . . . It may even be possible to engage in an educational activity for good reasons that have nothing to do with objectives in the Rationale’s sense of the term, and, I dare say, many excellent teachers have done so for centuries. (p. 82)

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Kliebard’s (1995) critique shows how this kind of “very rough and commonsensical” use of philosophy in determining educational objectives functions only as curricular lip service to philosophy: Stating philosophies in this sense is only one of many extant rituals of schooling. These rituals continue to exist not because they are actually instrumental in resolving curriculum issues or in guiding the choice of objectives but as a kind of secular analogue to prayer. What the Rationale asks us to do is to invoke divine philosophy (rather than a deity) in order to bless the objectives of the curriculum that are born out of the process. They are good objectives not by virtue of their demonstrable merit but because they have the philosophy’s benediction. A typical school’s philosophy expressing such bromides as “meeting the needs of children” excludes nothing because it says virtually nothing and therefore will not serve to guide the process of curriculum making even in the unlikely event that it is taken seriously. Don’t get me wrong. Philosophy is important, but its significance lies in the way it can illuminate the problems we face and not as an inventory of sanctimonious platitudes. (p. 85)

The real and ideological core of the Basic Principles lies not in philosophy but in the psychology of learning: how motivational and psychological anchoring of people to the institutions of modern society could be educationally established. Conceivably, contrary to what Kliebard claims, the psychological screen is not arbitrary. It seems to be in the service of societal rationalization. The tacit ideological concern of the psychological screen is to connect personality to system by “the rationalization of the personality system” (Habermas, 1984, p. 166). By the personality system Habermas denotes “the behavioral dispositions or value orientations that are typical of the methodical conduct of life” (p. 166). Historically, the rationalization process within the “personality system” has been manifested in the transposition of the initially Protestant ethic into professional–ascetic orientations, “above all in economic and administrative spheres of life” (p. 166). The process of structuration of modern society as the embodiment of moral–practical structures of consciousness has been heavily dependent on the rationalization of the personality system, where in turn the role of education has been, and continues to be, vital. The methodical conduct of life is now justified and promoted by scientific–psychological arguments, not by religious or philosophical ones in the spirit of Descartes. The thrust of the Rationale is to psychologize educational theory and practice. Complexities of social, economic, and political life are reduced to serving a process of creating the psychological individual. To strip education of its socially situated character is legitimated by the ideological manouvre where the systemic interests are contained within the “personality system.” By the psychologization of education the Rationale may wish to transcend race, gender, class, and religious divisions and create a universal paradigm of

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curriculum design. But precisely this kind of procedural universalism suggested by empirical generalizations might have given rise to the inherent problems of the Rationale. Universalism has been bought at the price of content despite Tyler’s explicit insistence on the inclusion of the content aspect with the behavioral one in a valid choice of educational objectives. One of most instructive single expressions of that universalistic bias based solely on formal procedures is Tyler’s (1949) account of critical thinking as an educational objective. Critical thinking has been acknowledged to be as one of most important goals of education, and the treatment of this topic in the Tylerian framework is illustrative of the problems inherent in the Rationale. Critical thinking, wrote Tyler, “implies some kind of mental operation involving the relating of facts and ideas in contrast to mere apprehension or memorization of them” (p. 60). Referring to the formative experiences of secondary school teachers during the Eight-Year Study Tyler defines “critical thinking” as including three sorts of mental behavior: The first involved inductive thinking; that is, the interpretation of data, the drawing of generalizations from a collection of specific facts or items of data. The second involved deductive thinking; the ability to begin with certain general principles already taught and to apply them to concrete cases which, although new to students, are appropriate illustrations of the operation of the principles. The third aspect of thinking identified by these teachers was the logical aspect by which they meant the ability of the student to make material purporting to be a logical argument and analyze this argument so as to identify the critical definitions, the basic assumptions, the chains of syllogisms involved in it and detect any logical fallacies or any inadequacies in the logical development of it. (p. 60, emphases added)

It is characteristic that the procedural recommendation of the Rationale seems to extend the behavioral aspect of an educational objective to the point where it engulfs the content aspect of critical thinking. There is no material indication—a content aspect of an educational objective—as to what critical thinking might be. This model of critical thought might be partly valid in the context of laboratory experimentation, but it is definitely insufficient in dealing with social and human issues. However, Tyler (1949) takes the case of critical thinking as a model for transforming any vaguely stated term into a valid educational objective: By defining critical thinking in this way the teachers gave meaning to a term which previously has been vague to them, and thus provided a base for understanding what curriculum implications there might be whenever such a term was set up as the behavioral aspect of an educational objective. (p. 60)

Content-free proceduralism might unveil the ideological nature of such a notion of psychology. From the Weberian–Habermasian standpoint scien-

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tific psychology forms an essential part of modern rationalism. In the reductive creation of the psychological individual the Tyler Rationale nevertheless mirrors and shares the spirit of larger institutional contexts like the rationality of the market, the formal legal system, rational administration and methodical professional ethic. The Rationale, along with its psychologized curriculum suggestions, maintains the ideal of the rational actor as an indispensable part of modern Western nation-state institutions. Educational psychology assumes its tacit responsibility to be to connect people to the nation-state not by force but by methodical and rational self-control, where self-interest and personal variety come to be subordinated to the requirements of society. To be a good citizen and a good worker in a (post)modern society means a constant remaking of the self tending toward more and more deliberate, rational, and predictable behavior, where the outer control is increasingly removed and replaced by a psychological, namely, inward and subtler one.

FROM RATIONALIZATION TO COMMODIFICATION Rationalization, differentiation, and commodification are the main constituents of modernization. These three processes are closely related: “Modern social systems have a high or complex level of differentiation and are equally characterized by progressive commodification and rationalization.” The concept of differentiation specifies a dimension of modernization which is more “power neutral” than the other two (Crook, Pakulski, & Waters, 1992): As Marx and Weber respectively make clear, commodification and rationalization are closely connected to the forms and distribution of power in society. The level of their development is an index of the extent to which commodity producers and ‘rule producers’ are able to extent their control over material and cultural objects and over other human beings. (p. 10)

The symbolic tools Tyler well-meaningly offered for the school bureaucracy and “rule producers” in his Rationale have experienced somewhat vulgarized but nonetheless comprehensible transformations in the most recent, commodified developments in curriculum work. The result in many countries has been that the school institution has become something of a hybrid of traditional bureaucratic organization and a business enterprise. This development, however, is no great surprise, because both models of organization are manifestations of the same type of modern thinking and practice: instrumental rationality. Kelly describes this shift as the imposition of the commercial and industrial metaphor on the education system of England and Wales, but

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they are in fact widely known in the world of education (Blenkin et al., in Kelly, 1999): Throughout the official literature on the National Curriculum, we are offered a commercial/industrial imagery which encourages us to see schools as factories. Teachers are invited to view their task as one of “delivering” a “product”, they are subjected to “quality-control mechanisms”; they are encouraged to focus their efforts on “increased productivity”, usually at a more “economic costing” (i.e. on the cheap); inspectors and advisers have in many places acquired new titles as “quality control” specialists. Soon education will be run, like the Rev. Awdry’s railway system, by a “Fat Controller”—if this is not happened already. (p. 42)

One might conclude that “all was quiet in the western front” if we compare this description with Westbury’s account of the development of a teacherproof curriculum from the very beginning of the 19th century. The metaphors which reflect a new, commodified phase in societal rationalization are mirrored again and consistently at the level of personality. The subtle manipulation of language readily leads to self-censorship—“the most difficult of all kinds of censorship”—where teachers as the agents of the system cannot comprehend their vocation in any other terms than those in accord with commercial and business metaphors: competition, productivity, instrumentalism, quality and value for money: The loss of other values and attitudes perhaps more appropriate to education in a democratic society (caring, human development, intrinsic value) has been almost completely absorbed by the teaching profession, and has come to dominate not only the education debate but also educational policies and practices. (Kelly, 1999, p. 43)

In this context educational psychology seems to continue the tradition of proceduralism and systemic concerns with all their alienating effects in constantly new guises (situated cognition, constructivism, etc.). Any thoroughgoing redefinition of the task of educational psychology would come to be supplanted by or situated within the systemic interests of society and schooling: The discipline of educational psychology approaches the new millenium with a distinguished theory, a compelling vision, and a sense of anxiety: given the prevailing turmoil in both education and psychology, what should be the shape of our field in the decades to come? I argue for refinement rather than redefinition. Our foundations as an applied science are sound, in my opinion. The challenge ahead is to bring together the scattershot elements of our accomplishments to date. A cornerstone for coherence can be found in the object of our investigation: the institution of schooling. In an effort to satisfy diverse clientele, Ameri-

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can schools have virtually “disintegrated” during the past 50 years. By focusing our efforts—theoretical, methodological, and empirical—on the integration of schooling, we can both assist education and re-establish a sense of disciplinary integrity. (Calfee, 1992, p. 163)

CONCLUSION Modernization process which started with strong intentions à la Descartes and Bacon to tie the scholarly curiosity with practical interests rearticulated in terms of instrumentalist rationality and method-driven, procedural overtones. Instrumental rationality has for a long time, as seen in this chapter, affected authoritative educational and curriculum theorizing and shaped educational institutions. The powerful influence of instrumentalism in educational theory and practice owes much to those pioneers of modern thought, notably Descartes, who envisioned the scientistic collusion of knowledge and morality embedded within method. “Rightly conducting one’s reason” here and now would be beneficial to the future state of affairs too. Since then the proper procedures and methods have been preferred to genuine theoretical conversation of education and curriculum. This instrumentalist bias is visible both in the Tylerian tradition as well as in German and North-European Didaktik Tradition. Ewald Terhart (2003) bluntly depicts not only the Didaktik situation but more generally the state of the arts in the current field of education: In Germany, it has become quiet around general didactics. The controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s have died down; the theoretical situation has been basically stable for decades. The textbooks still present, with persistence and success, the “theories and models of didactics” systematized by Blankertz (. . .) 30 years ago. . . . However, this is surprising because one might perhaps expect, given the widespread talk about the crisis in instruction, in school, and the teaching profession, that the wheat of didactics would bloom on a theoretical level. Just the opposite is the case! In general didactics, there has been no theoretical discussion worth speaking of for around 2 decades. . . . genuine theoretical discussion has been largely replaced by the development and defence of certain teaching methods on a more practical level. (pp. 25–26, emphasis added)

The detachment of method, powered often with the instrumentalist tones of educational technology, from the complex of education is a specific manifestation of the modernization process, analytically distincted as processes of differentiation, rationalization, and commodification where the latter two are closely intertwined with regard to power. On a societal level, rationalization in the Weberian sense is to be identified as three unifying themes (Crook et al., 1992, pp. 8–9). The first of these is knowledge: To act rationally is to act

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on the basis of knowledge. “In modern society the growth of positivistic scientific knowledge and technological knowledge systems inflates the importance of knowledge as a basis for action almost to the level of sanctification” (Crook et al., 1992). In a Cartesian and Kantian sense, “such forms of knowledge displace religious knowledge systems and in so doing intellectualize and demystify the world. Paradoxically, the greater the level of factual knowledge of the world the further the retreat of the possibility of discovering its meaning. Action based on scientistic knowledge tends to be instrumental, focussing on short-run calculators of self-interest rather than long-term commitment” (Crook et al., 1992). The second unifying theme is impersonality in the economic and political realms and the third theme in rationalization is “extensions of control over natural and social objects” (Crook et al., 1992). Social and educational relationships are reduced to “to aspects of scientific, industrial or administrative processes. Much as in Marx’s formulation of the commodification of labour, human beings may be seen as being disciplined to conform with the instrumental needs of centrally organized industrial and administrative systems” (Crook et al., 1992). Individual attitudes and identity productions develop in conformity with these impersonal rationalization processes, as reifying and alienating Habermasian personality systems. Individual lives are increasingly evaluated in terms of the Kantian obsessive, submissive duty-driven performativity: “a firm purpose to accomplish something” (Kant, 1991, pp. 88–89), whatsoever (?). This conformistic attitude is translated as the “needs”of society which form one prime source for curriculum planning à la Tyler—fitting well with the prevailing neoliberal education policy.

7 Epilogue: Toward a Curriculum Discourse Sui Generis?

Consider of a colony of termites, whose motion, at first apparently Brownian, will much later appear to be directed toward the construction of a termitarium. It is a gargantuan task compared to the size of these individuals, and quite ordered compared to the disorder of their comings-and-goings. —Michel Serres (1991, p. 1)

The symbolic curriculum of the Tyler Rationale as a model of social world rested ultimately on the presumption of infallible scientific method and perfectly exact language. The univocal source of authority in this approach has been left intact in most recent productions of the reified and commodified images of curriculum discourse. The apparent inability of this logic to face the complexity of education and the subsequent challenge to conceive curriculum discourse across sweeping revisions, fragmentations, and ruptures in aesthetics, ethics, politics, science, and in the notions of subjectivity have been convincingly mapped in the magnum opus of the reconceptualized field, Understanding Curriculum, by Pinar and associates (1995). Here, a brief and preliminary account will be given as a kind of second round of the still ongoing modernity–postmodernity debate focused particularly on the critique of curricular instrumentalism raised in the Understanding Curriculum. This account may be useful in featuring, in an albeit sketchy and summary way, the historical roots of instrumental curriculum discourse first imbued with moral concerns (Descartes), subsequently embodied as ‘sheer’ instrumentality as a response to “the needs of society” (as in the reception of the Tyler Rationale). Most recently, in the context of late (Giddens, 1991), second (Beck, 1994) or 125

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postmodernity, performativity as a simulation even of instrumentality has emerged as our grasp of “the needs of society” in terms of totality and homogeneity has been lost. Literally, and not only ironically, the idea of progress in terms of performativity would have been transformed to the notion of delivering outputs at the lowest cost. Specifically, the suggestions of Jean Baudrillard and Niklas Luhmann refer to the transition in science whereby “ ‘performativity’ rather than ‘truth’ has become the criterion of scientific knowledge” (Crook et al., 1992, p. 216). From a social point of view, the birth of modernity denoted in first place the birth of individuality. The novel invention, expressly in order to be an invention, was conceptually and experimentally abstracted from tradition, from knowledge, from reason, from practice, from the other, from the community, the cosmos, the transcendental, and the divine. The task ahead was to create a new order, a symbolic curriculum, to situate individuality anew within a new network where the relationship between the subject and reason would provide the primary challenge. Mainly, this struggle for the focus of individuality has formed an important axis about which the traditional curriculum discourses, as reflections of larger modern intellectual networks, have revolved. The spectrum of views from a cog in the cosmic, political, or learning machine to an autonomous being, capable of fully conscious, fully rational, and transparent self-determination, have made the arena for educational and curricular debates. Despite radical differences in views, however, the common feature, from a symbolic curriculum standpoint, has been the concern to arrange reality ever anew in accord with the respective view adopted. This shared general aim, where any theory is always practice in this sense of arrangement, would provide the peculiarly instrumental flavor of modern reason and education. From the current point of view, it is claimed that the only unity that exists is that provided by instrumental rationality (e.g., Delanty, 2000, p. 111). The possibility, still available in the Cartesian, Baconian, or Lockean endeavors, to relate science directly to the human interests has been disappearing. Paradoxically, this development might be ascribed partly to the very revolutionary intellectual incentives of those and other pioneers of modern thought behind the vast and increasingly intertwined complexity of the current world provided with unity only by instrumental rationality across differentiated realms of human practice.

THE SPIRITUAL FRAMEWORK OF INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY To gain a conception of the predominance of instrumentality one must appeal to the process of rationalization as the secularizing power in modern thought. Though admittedly there is a rupture between modernity and

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premodernity, the secularization thesis, at least alone, may not explain the attraction of instrumentalism. The still ongoing modernity–postmodernity debate in social theory has raised controversy over the traditional reception of modernity in terms of secularization. Such accounts would make the initial appeal to instrumental thought more intelligible before its evidenced success in further developments. Reference was already made in chapter 6 to the notion of instrumental rationality imbued with the pretension of tacit moral concern. Whence that moral concern for “the condition of the world” and the later shrinkage toward instrumentality for its own sake and, then, increasingly toward performativity? Quite surprisingly, the contribution of early theological developments to our worldview and to the formation of modern science has been introduced in the current social theory literature. In part, this could be understood as a postmodern methodological response to the disenchantment of social science theory in its traditional insistence on the historical permanence of the criteria of rationality (see Toulmin, 1990, 2001). However, the return to the theological roots of the modern worldview has served wider intellectual purposes in the search for spirituality, morality, and cultural alternatives in the reappraisal of the postmodern critique of modernity and modern science. In this sense, Delanty (2000, pp. 37–38), for instance, in seeking the roots of contemporary social theory, recalls the question of eschatology in addressing the issue of the alleged divisions between the premodern, modern, and postmodern epochs. Delanty’s introduction to eschatology might be useful in reinterpreting the relationship between modernity and postmodernity through controversial issues such as certainty or firm foundation, progress, indeterminacy, and contingency. Entering into a sustained reading of Hans Blumenberg’s (1991) work The Legitimacy of the Modern Age from 1983 Delanty’s (2000) argument is that the modern world was already secularized in the early Christian era when the eschatological hopes of the early Church were abandoned. His most farreaching argument is that the eschatological belief in salvation as a real historical possibility ceased in the early decades of the first millennium when hope turned to fear and the future became a focus of anxiety rather than redemption. Consequently, when the idea of progress eventually emerged, eschatology had already ceased to be connected to hope: “Eschatology may have been, for a shorter or a longer moment of history, an aggregate of hopes; but when the time had come for the emergence of the idea of progress, it was more nearly an aggregate of terror and dread” (. . .). In this period, eschatology lost its connection with historical fulfillment when it became apparent that the “kingdom to come” would not occur in human history. (Delanty, 2000, pp. 36–37; Blumenberg, 1991, p. 37)

Since eschatology was already, as it would seem in Delanty’s and Blumenberg’s account, secularized prior to the advent of modernity, the nature of

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modernity itself would be in need of reinterpretation. If secularization was not a product of modernity but modernity itself was a response to the already completed secularization of religion, these events had far-reaching consequences for mundane life. Hence modernity should not be appraised as a secularized version of the messianistic original; it had to create its own standards of legitimacy. It is easy to imagine how the radical change in the vistas of eschatology as ‘the body of religious doctrines concerning the human soul in its relation to death, judgment, heaven, and hell’ must have had an equally radical impact on the goals and meanings of human existence reflected in all human institutions. Subsequent to the eschatological disenchantment salvation came to be understood in terms of frustration: “the recognition emerged, as evidenced in St John, that the events decisive for salvation had already occurred” (Delanty, 2000, p. 37). The “basic eschatological attitude of the Christian epoch could no longer be one of hope for the final events but was one of fear of judgment and the destruction of the world” (Blumenberg, 1991, p. 37). “The early Church prayed not for a second coming, but for the postponement of the end. Thus, the understanding of history that this provides is not one of an expectation of historical salvation, but one that revolved around the theological predicament of a God whose promises could not be fulfilled by a fallen humanity” (Delanty, 2000, p. 37). The first and most fundamental Grand Narrative had collapsed well before the advent of modernity. The new understanding suggested by Blumenberg draws on the interpretation that the ancient Church was already secularized, and, crucially, it was secularized not by science and reason but by religion itself: secularization can be understood only as an immanent theological process. By secularization is meant the rationalization of religious belief, the process by which belief becomes more and more drawn into doctrinal system and loses its connection with other dimensions of life. In this sense, then, secularization means not the external rationalization of religion, but its self-transformation. (Delanty, 2000, p. 37, emphases added)

The upshot of Blumenberg’s thesis is “that the premodern period must be seen in a more differentiated light and that the events decisive for modernity had already occurred before the appearance of the modern itself” (Delanty, 2000, p. 38). These claims would open novel vistas for an understanding of the unfolding of modernity and for a re-assessment of its nature conceived mostly today in terms of postmodern critique. Notably, the thesis of the internal secularization of eschatology would be interesting from a curriculum studies point of view; through a projection of the educational implications of this thesis we can perhaps attain a more understandable conception of the historical identities curriculum work and theories of curriculum have taken in their instrumental and procedural uses.

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Related to Delanty’s and Blumenberg’s revisionary accounts of the historical epochs, some insights might be called up experimentally regarding the early background of the symbolic structure of a modern psychologized curriculum whose prime example the Tyler Rationale has been considered to be. In a way, this conceptual or symbolic modern structure would indirectly reflect the contingency of the human condition initially engendered by the eschatological demise yet historically covered by the institutional routinization of the vistas of success and development. The perturbing events related to eschatology necessitated a reorganization of the basic structure of human life. What was lacking was a genuine founding origin. This awareness, accompanied by compensating efforts at self-assertion, may have created some of the conditions for the emergence of modernity. “Central to the self-assertion of modernity is the discovery of method” (Delanty, 2000, p. 39) and the “concept of a self-legislating reason” (pp. 35–36). With method were connected the emergence of a host of other ideas traceable in the current scientific notions and in the debates between modernity and postmodernity. The most important idea was that of progress, which characterized the whole epoch of modernity. Progress, with its social and historical vistas, was related most intimately with method and self-assertion to the human condition. According to Blumenberg (1991): The idea of method, and indeed not by its organizing itself specifically for history in a different way than for nature but rather by making theoretical domination of nature the condition of the historical “marcher avec assurance dans cette vie” (to walk with confidence in this life). The idea of method is not a kind of planning, not a transformation of the divine salvation plan, but rather the establishment of a disposition: the disposition of the subject, in his place, to take part in a process that generates knowledge in a transsubjective manner. (pp. 32–33, emphasis added)

Here are manifest the quintessential linkages between the major characteristics of modern subjectivity, which have also framed modern educational and curricular thought: the idea of a regulation of the self through method, assured knowledge, and claims for methodological universality in order to be collectively and individually able “to walk with confidence in this life.” What makes the modern epoch strikingly educational is precisely its striving for “the establishment of a disposition” by method and knowledge. Thinking in this context of the deep structure of the Tyler Rationale, its long posteschatological roots would appear intelligible: It is not merely a procedure or planning method to effectively organize learning experiences; its educational bearing would be much more comprehensive: It is a symbolic curriculum for the management of the social and natural environment and for the subsequent remaking of the self by artificial, method-driven experiences.

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The modern agenda was, however, ambitious enough to go beyond the limits of mere governance, control, or ‘engineering.’ Eschatological despair has been converted to a self-assertive spirituality, to utopian hope by method and education: In the course of the unfolding of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum as the selfguarantee of man who has got free of religious bonds, eschatology turns into utopia. To plan history becomes just as important as to get grip on nature. (Koselleck, in Blumenberg, 1991, p. 32)

Paradoxically, the planning of history in the spirit of the Cartesian method would be virtually accomplished without any sense of history. What rendered human-made history yet valuable was its pretended predictability. Thus the time conception in the aftermath of eschatological disappointment discovered ways which were compatible with the needs precipitated by the hopes of predictable progress. There are two reasons, at least, which have influenced the peculiarly modern conception of time and, through it, the rise of the notion of progress through science. Initially, from the eschatological point of view, the New Testament’s ‘immediate expectation’ unavoidably put the stress on the present “by which the promised events of the Parousia [the Second Coming] are moved into the actual life of the individual and of his generation” (Blumenberg, 1991, p. 42). If this “genuinely specific character of New Testament eschatology can be grasped, its untranslatability into any concept of history, however defined, is evident. There is no concept of history that can claim identity of ‘substance’ with immediate expectation” (p. 42). What is left is to seek self-assertion in a lack of ultimate goals in time through method, instrumentally, here and now. Subsequently, the interest of control engendered by the time conception of immediate expectation would affect equally nature and history (p. 42), thus exerting pressure toward methodological universalism. The focus on the present in the initial eschatological urge to immediate expectation may be reflected again in the time conception of empiricism—and, most recently, in the high value placed on the ability to create real-time presence everywhere by information technology. An equally important eschatological implication was the rise of modern individuality in the capacity for an acute immediate expectation to tear “the individual free even from the historical interests of his people” and press “upon him his own salvation as his most immediate and pressing concern” (p. 42). “By the time of the Protestant reformation the turn to individual salvation is brought to completion” (Delanty, 2000, p. 37). In sum, what remained to be reflected in later, more mundane scientific notions, as the preconditions of progress or development, was the notion of individuality captured by method-centredness and the prominent, almost exclusive, focus on the present.

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These transformations of eschatology as the autonomous hallmarks of modernity yet affected by Christianity were reinforced by the post-scholastic critique of the authority of Aristotelian science. Bacon and Descartes both indicated the progress of useful knowledge that the abandonment of Aristotle would make possible. “Self-comparison with the authorities of antiquity and reflection on method, thanks to which this comparison could be evaluated positively each time in favor of the present, were the most powerful beginnings of the idea of progress” (Blumenberg, 1991, p. 32). Thus, and notably from the perspective of the modernity–postmodernity debate, it would be illegitimate to conceive of modernity as a watered-down, secularized version of original Christianity: “When modernity finally made its appearance from 1500 to 1800 it did so in a world which was already secularized by nothing less than Christian eschatology itself” (Delanty, 2000, p. 38). Modernity’s affirmative faith in progress would not be understandable merely by appeal to its mantle of secular reason. That mantle with its enduring institutional embodiments, has effectively concealed a number of affirmative internal values and incentives initially ascribed to instrumental rationality. This has been considered so self-evident that any external motivations have become redundant as manifested, for instance, in the presupposition of the ‘automatic’ moral dimension of the Tyler Rationale. Succinctly, then, the larger question of the appeal of modernity to be briefly experimented with will be, how it was possible that “scientific method, as it was projected by Descartes, provided the procedural regulations for a summoning-up of incomparable theoretical energy, in whose service both individuals and generations were enrolled” (Blumenberg, 1991, p. 155). In essence, Blumenberg’s suggestion, as noted, would go somewhat radically against the strain of the secularization thesis conventionally attached to modernity and the modern mentality. Blumenberg’s (1991) very idea is that the modern age is an outcome of the struggle within Christianity: Modernity is the second overcoming of Gnosticism: A presupposition of this thesis is that the first overcoming of Gnosticism, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, was unsuccessful. A further implication is that the medieval period, as a meaningful structure spanning centuries, had its beginning in the conflict with late-antique and early-Christian Gnosticism and that the unity of its systematic intention can be understood as deriving from the task of subduing its Gnostic opponent. (p. 126)

What was especially dangerous and unacceptable in Gnosticism was its rejection of the essential unity of the divine plan: “it disputed the combination of creation and redemption as the work of a single God” (Blumenberg, 1991): The God who had created man and the world and given them a Law that could not be fully complied with, who directed the Old Testament history of the Jews

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in the manner of an ill-tempered tyrant, who demanded sacrifices and ceremonies, was the evil demiurge. The god who brings redemption without in the least owing it to man, whom he did not create, the “foreign god,” is seen as the essence of pure, because unreasoning, love. This divinity has the right to destroy a cosmos that he did not create and to preach disobedience of a Law that he did not lay down. (p. 129, emphasis added)

The origin of what is bad in the world was not a product of human failure; Gnosticism held “that the God of creation was responsible for evil and that the God of salvation had to triumph over this evil demiurge” (Delanty, 2000, p. 38). The rescue from the domination of evil “turns out to be primarily man’s enlightenment regarding his fundamental and impenetrable deception by the cosmos. Gnosis must therefore be literally recognition [Erkenntnis]” (Blumenberg, 1991, pp. 129–130). The event of Gnosis was a moment of existential self-assertion where “human beings are not constrained by the principle of theodicy imposed by the God of creation” (Delanty, 2000, p. 39). Thus by the recognition of the reality of uncertainty and the disappearance of the expected order, space was created for knowledge (gnosis), the autonomy of thought and action and the need for the institutionalization of education. Though condemned as a heresy, Gnosticism offered a plausible alternative to the disappointment arising from the hopeless delay of the Parousia. In the aftermath, one event proved highly meaningful for the rise of modernity. According to Blumenberg (1991): The world, which turned out to be more persistent than expected, attracted once again the old questions regarding its origin and its dependability and demanded a decision between trust and mistrust, an arrangement of life with the world rather than against it. (p. 131, emphasis added)

Thus, in Gnosticism, the “original eschatological pathos directed against the existence of the world was transformed into a new interest in the condition of the world” (p. 131). In this way the re-emergence of Gnosticism “made acute the problem of the quality of the world for man” (p. 142) as the main item on the agenda of modernity. This new interest is reflected in the pioneers of modern thought, notably in Bacon and Descartes, with their search for “efficient causes” which could be used in efforts “beneficial for man.” The introduction to the intellectual landscape of early modernity of the Gnostic intention would render the Cartesian theoretically motivated yet pragmatic interest even more intelligible. The elimination of “error” in thought and thereby the reduction of the bad or undesirable in the condition and quality of the world was the pragmatic context of the Cartesian method: The promotion of morality was best enhanced by the betterment of living conditions by practical endeavors nonetheless theoretically informed and methodically controlled as in “mechanics” and “medicine.” The Gnostic in-

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centive as a concern for the state of the world encouraged for its part theoretical curiosity and its application in novel areas. The Gnostic notion of a disunited divinity might arguably be reflected in Descartes’ epistemology, where the role of God (of salvation), instead of intervening in the events of the world, was only to guarantee the correctness of human reasoning in its attempts to create existential trust by means of method in the aftermath of eschatological uncertainty. In ascribing failure not to the divine but to human characteristics Descartes’ intention was twofold. On the one hand, he sought to show respect to his God and his religion, yet, on the other, his epistemological designs show how he virtually followed the Gnostic scheme in his serious concern for the condition and the quality of the world. The whole architecture of his epistemology aimed at a division between the divine and the human in order to make room for the autonomy of human thought and action for the cognitive, moral, and social improvement. His faith in worldly success in combating failure by scientific method and rational regulation of the self imbued his absolutely optimistic educational theory as the operative core of the implicit Gnostic impulse. The emerging modern utopia now focused on this-sidedness, as a concern for the qualitative condition of the world, was soon reinforced by the positive outcomes the scientific questioning of reality could accomplish. It appeared possible to create and maintain trust by dint of the human intellect. Especially decisive for the possibility of human-made trust was the success in finding laws for the movements of celestial objects, which in principle defy any direct sense perception. The perceived harmony of celestial mechanics and the novel human ability to grasp and calculate planetary motion markedly strengthened the belief in human cognitive capacity to manage the worldly contingency and indeterminacy in the wake of the eschatological demise. In a sense this human-found ‘heaven’ effectively complemented if not compensated for the original religious one and heralded the reappearance of transcendence and cosmic spirituality in novel terms provided by natural science. The initial religious utopia was replaced by faith in human cognition to manage both cosmos and polis. This novel, evidenced ability to manage reality by science and reason functioned as a religion-like counter-reaction to the original loss of certainty and determinacy. This worldly utopian hope of cognitive and social progress provided by method rather than the direct quest for certainty as such may well have created the quintessence of the modern mentality. Enthusiastic fervor accompanied by the obvious ability to solve successfully by method problems of any kind also offered more rewarding and dynamic vistas for trust than a mere search for certainty through a founding origin. Trust remained a sideeffect, yet important, of the enthusiastic and efficient use of method. In this sense, perhaps, Blumenberg’s provocative interpretation related to the ex-

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haustion of the original eschatological hope would challenge many poststructuralist and postmodernist readings of history. Delanty (2000) notably raises two points in this respect: First, the argument proposed by Derrida that all of western thought is an expression of a search for a founding origin can be viewed in a more differentiated light. Blumenberg has demonstrated that modernity was precisely a rejection of a founding origin and entails much of what postmodernism reserves for itself, namely theoretical curiosity, skepticism, a concern with uncertainty and selfassertion. Second, the reduction of modernity to a continuity thesis that does not distinguish between modernity and premodernity is no longer tenable in the light of Blumenberg’s work, which demonstrates that modernity was based on a rupture with what preceded it and, crucially, premodernity was itself a process which must now be seen in terms of secularization. (p. 41, emphasis added)

The suggested rupture of modernity with previous epochs would have its legitimation in the Gnostic initiative, according to which the basic human task would concern the condition of the world. This conception of the order of the divine cosmos, where there was a clear division of labor between the God of salvation and humanity, ultimately renders the peculiarly instrumental notion of modern action and, most importantly, of modern morality, more intelligible. In other words, while the qualitative condition of the world was made dependent on human achievement, the achievement itself was to be a measure of morality. On the individual level this stance was reflected as the above-cited main goal in Kantian moral education, character formation: “a firm purpose to accomplish something and in the actual accomplishment of it.” The instrumental tone of the Kantian volitional voice in one of the most decisive of contexts, morality, reflects a general theoretical departure from the deliberate discussion of human ends and goals while making room for the increasingly colonizing effect of means. This single event would nonetheless reflect what is often the case in the dynamics of change, when later events become detached from the original context to live a life of their own by merit of a renewal of tradition: Theoretical curiosity, skepticism, and a concern with uncertainty and self-assertion became isolated from the pragmatic origin and human interests which Bacon and Descartes had still maintained. Method and procedure became increasingly canonized and abstracted from content and context. (The rehabilitation of the link between theory and human interests resurfaced expressly as late as 1971 in Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests.) The subsequent quest for universal and objective knowledge in both the natural and the social sciences built on this canonization of methodical self-assertion. The excessive stress on method notably in the social sciences was the result of the pursuit of a new order parallel to that of a newly found cosmic one, which, again, might be argued to follow from the “major contribution to western civilization” Gnosticism has made:

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The seemingly ‘natural social order’ is taken to be an abomination, the creation of evil powers or of evil deity, against whom the Gnostic community wages battle to the finish, which means, that the Gnostic community seeks to replace, to overturn the social order with another, ‘new’ social order. (Tiryakian, in Delanty, 2000, p. 105)

The urge to remake the social order helped overcome the intellectual complexities caused by content and context. The modernist pursuit of a new order was justified by an implicitly Gnostic appeal to a superior knowledge of the hidden truths of reality beyond appearances, human context, and interests which scientific experts could expose through valid use of method. The historical background to this posture might be found in Delanty’s (2000) remark: Despite their differences, Gnosticism and Christianity are similar: both struggle to free human beings from the natural order and appeal to a strong individual activism (cf. Kant, author’s remark). For Gnosticism this is to be achieved through some form of institutionalized intellectualism, while for Christianity the liberation of the self comes from the teachings of the divine saviour. (p. 45)

PSYCHOLOGY, CURRICULUM STUDIES, AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE ‘POSTIES’ The Cartesian method expanded from piecemeal application and problem solving here and there to a systemic interest to subsume under the invented order every detail of human life. The necessarily accompanying reductionism was furthered by success in the study of nature. Institutionalized intellectualism, as the imagined precondition of both the liberation of the self and a new social order, was embodied especially in the science of the human psyche, psychology. This in turn has, consequently, created the framework discourse of modernist education and curriculum in the spirit of universal psychological standards where, for instance, the initial “appeal to strong individual activism” has turned to behavior and more recently to cognition. In its pursuit of a new self and a new social order psychology has followed the agenda of what Sigmund Koch has termed the Age of Theory. Steinar Kvale (1997) has summarized Koch’s Epilogue to Psychology: A study of a Science from 1959 under four common themes: The Age of Theory was characterized by a passion for external legitimation, most often from some fashionable theory of proper science. The history of psychology became a history of what to emulate in the natural sciences, even regarding the language of physics as the ideal of psychology. Scientific respectability had more glamour than insight—“psychology was unique in the extent to

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which its institutionalization preceded its content and its methods preceded its problems” (emphasis added). In the Age of Theory, there was a quest for universality, formulating theoretical laws which were potentially adequate to all behaviour, laws of unrestricted generality. The theories of psychology were often based on a rather restricted observation basis, such as the behaviour of white Norwegian rats and white American college students in laboratory settings; still there was a fundamentalist belief in global applicability of the psychological theories. The Age of Theory involved a formal rationality, a scientism of hypothetical-deductive theories and an intervening variable design, correlating linear variables, with prediction and control as the criteria for science. There was a quest for developing a rule for the theoretical process, a hope of discovering a canonical experimental-quantitative method adequate to all problems of psychology. The Age of Theory emphasized commensurability; there was a search for decision procedures for comparing the many heterogeneous theories, a search for rules to decide theoretical controversies. There was the belief in a quantified behaviour theory of comprehensive scope; the ideal was a mathematics of behaviour as precise as the mathematics of machines. (pp. 40–41)

The Age of Theory was a particular (scientific–psychological) upshot of a development from content and context to uniform social order and universal method where the Blumenbergian interest in the condition and quality of the world, an ideal arrangement with life concerning the choice between trust and mistrust, was reinterpreted by a methodological interest of control and prediction of individual behavior. The first serious attack on this view of science came with Thomas Kuhn’s discourse on paradigm shifts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/1970). The Kuhnian argument drew on the idea that it is internal tensions which cause paradigm shift through the inability of the dominant paradigm to explain empirical anomalies. Kuhn’s argument, however, never questioned the status of method and the descriptive adequacy of language as the preconditions of the dream of the transparent representation of the world (see Lather, 1997, pp. 91–92). From the viewpoint of psychology and curriculum studies, Kuhn’s discourse on paradigm shifts somewhat misses the point in that he assumes that social sciences, psychology included, have never reached but the preparadigmatic phase. Kuhn’s contribution nevertheless shook the scientific establishment, and together with the followed postempiricist accounts of natural science this critique had influential consequences for the self-understanding of science in general. Since then modernist self-assertion through method and transparent language as the conditions for objective knowledge has been seriously challenged. In view of the predominating methodological identification of psychology with natural sciences the next discourse will briefly focus, first, on the postempiricist turn in the natural sciences, and, second, on the way that turn, among other important transitions, might have changed the self-understanding of psychology and curriculum studies as scholarly disciplines.

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THE POSTEMPIRICIST TURN The empiricist presuppositions of transparent language, ‘pure’ experience and ‘brute’ data as constituents of objective knowledge was already questioned by hermeneutics. Notably with Martin Heidegger’s extension of hermeneutics from the philosophical and theological methodology of interpreting texts to encompass the characteristics of human existence, the approach took a radical and far-reaching turn. According to Heidegger, our relationship with everything is hermeneutic. The basic feature of human existence is understanding, Verstehen. Understanding forms the basis of all our relationships both with surrounding world and with our selves. Heidegger termed the cultivation of understanding interpretation, Auslegung. To relate these insights to the phenomenology of consciousness would mean that our existence is always intentional: to perceive, to experience, to understand something will denote to do it as something (Heidegger, 1986, p. 148). This conception, removed from philosophy to the traditional language of science, would imply that perceived reality is always theory-laden, always interpreted in the act of apprehension: every practice (scholarly included) is ‘already’ infused by different kinds of worldviews, scientific and common sense theories, and language games. This necessarily constant business of interpreting as a basic modus of human existence has subsequently been informed not only by the Verstehen tradition but also by the postempiricist philosophy of natural science. In the latter the emphasis has moved toward what might be depicted as a hermeneutic turn or critique in the overall understanding of the natural sciences themselves. This turn, due its occurrence in the domestic field of natural science, would be useful for an appraisal of the relation between theory and practice in social and curriculum studies, which have traditionally adopted their models from the natural sciences. According to Hesse (1980), in a traditional empiricist view of natural science it is assumed that the sole basis of scientific knowledge is the given in experience, that descriptions of this given are available in a theory-independent and stable language, whether of sense data or of common sense observation, that theories make no ontological claims about the real world except in so far as they are reducible to observables, and that causality is reducible to mere external correlations of observables. (p. 172)

The theory-ladenness of the descriptive language of “observables” has become increasingly apparent through the works of Wittgenstein, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and others, and the interpretative element makes the concepts of meaning and value equally intrinsic to natural science. At this point the Verstehen tradition and postempiricist accounts of natural science

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would intersect. Jürgen Habermas, while reclaiming human interests as a constituent aspect of science, draws on the tradition initiated by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, both of whom set as a prime concern of science and study ‘enlightened’ and informed practice. Habermas’ starting-point, which he explicitly described in Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), consists of three major interests with their respective validity claims and around which the human practice called science has been organized: 1. “technical interest,” which aims at mastery of nature and constitutes knowledge as successful prediction and dictates the methodology of the empirical sciences; 2. “practical interest,” where knowledge is constituted in free communication between persons as interpretation of meanings and which dictates the methodology of hermeneutic sciences such as history and cultural studies insofar as they aim at understanding; 3. “emancipatory interest,” which Habermas claims to be essential in liberating from constraints of all kinds, of natural necessity as well as of social domination. Habermas motivates his project by the critique of scientism, which is parallel to that of postempirical philosophers of science in the Anglo-American context. For Habermas, scientism means two things: First, the view that empirical knowledge is co-extensive with knowledge, and is adequate for knowledge of persons and societies as well as things. Second, scientism implies the view that empirical knowledge is sufficient for its own explanation. His arguments against the first thesis follow lines made familiar by Winch and others, namely that knowledge of persons and societies involves interpretations of meaning implicit in human language and social institutions. Moreover, Habermas adds the thesis that the interest of hermeneutic science lies in such interpretive understanding with the aim of interpersonal communication, and not (or not exclusively) in the empirical interest of prediction and successful test. (Hesse, 1980, p. 211)

With his critique of the supposed ultimate rational grounds of natural science Habermas’ aim is to show, by a hermeneutic analysis of the theoretical aspects of natural science, its dependency on practical interests and value judgments—that no autonomous superstructure for science detached from “life” can be envisaged, as early hermeneuticians asserted. Hesse (1980) suggested that “it is not alternative internal rationalities that are required in the aftermath of empiricism, but rather a wider perspective on scientific theory in its social and ideological content” (p. xx). The accompanying novel picture of natural science inspired by postempiricist and hermeneutic influences might be symbolically instrumental in

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turning to a consideration of the traditional discourses within curriculum studies (Hesse, 1980). 1. Theories are logically constrained by facts, but are underdetermined by them: that is, while, to be acceptable, theories should be more or less plausibly coherent with facts, they can be neither conclusively refuted nor uniquely derived from statements of fact alone, and hence no theory in a given domain is uniquely acceptable. 2. Theories are subject to revolutionary change, and this involves even the language presupposed in “statements of fact”, which are irreducibly theory-laden: i.e., they presuppose concepts whose meaning is at least partly given by the context of theory. 3. There are further determining criteria for theories which attain the status of rational postulates or conventions or heuristic devices at different historical periods—these include general metaphysical and material assumptions, for example, about substance and causality, atoms or mechanisms, and formal judgments of simplicity, probability, analogy, etc. 4. In the history of natural science, these further criteria have sometimes included what are appropriately called value judgments, but these have tended to be filtered out as theories developed. 5. The “filtering-out” mechanism has been powered by universal adoption of one overriding value for natural science, namely the criterion of increasingly successful prediction and control of the environment. . . . I shall call this the pragmatic criterion. (pp. 187–188) According to Hesse (1980), “value judgments related to natural science may be broadly of two kinds. They may be evaluations of the uses to which scientific results are put, such as the value of cancer research, or the disvalue of the nuclear bomb.” But value judgments “may enter more intimately into theory-construction itself as assertions that it is desirable that the universe be of such and such a kind and that it is or is not broadly as it is desired to be” (pp. 187–188). What is, after all, of crucial importance here is the issue of scientific truth. It has been traditionally believed that natural science consists in a progressive, cumulative, and convergent approach to truth. Truth was understood as a correspondence between a system of objective knowledge and the real world. Yet this realist interpretation of scientific theory as something which would progressively reveal the hidden essences of nature has become untenable: It soon became apparent in the subsequent history of science (. . .) that there is no such cumulative approach to description of a real world of essences by scientific theory. The conceptual foundations and premises of theories undergo con-

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tinuous and sometimes revolutionary change. And this occurred not merely before the so-called scientific revolution in method of the seventeenth century, but subsequently, when the method of science remained comparatively stable. The succession of theories of the atom, and hence of the fundamental nature of matter, for example, exhibits no convergence, but oscillates between continuity and discontinuity, field conceptions and particle conceptions, and even speculatively among different topologies of space. (Hesse, 1980, p. 174)

Precisely this instability of theory in natural science and the consequent impossibility of maintaining a view of science as constituted essentially by accumulating knowledge of the fundamental but hidden nature of things has resulted in a pragmatic interpretation of scientific truth. This view would prefer accumulating knowledge of phenomena and observables which issues in technical application, the cumulative character of which cannot be in doubt. Thus the claim of science to yield objective knowledge comes to be identified with the cumulative possibilities of instrumental control rather than with theoretical discovery, and this in fact is the conclusion drawn by Habermas and most other hermeneutic philosophers when they come to compare the forms of objectivity of the natural and human sciences. (pp. 174–175, emphases added)

Hesse’s points are of special interest in seeking the identity of the social sciences in general and curriculum studies in particular. It may be argued that the main task of theory in those studies too has since Comte been seen to lie in the accomplishment of the interest ‘to see in order to predict and control.’ The difficulty nevertheless persists here that there is no unequivocal pragmatic criterion or notion of truth in the sense of prediction and technical control comparable to that of natural science: There is no a priori guarantee, . . . that the pragmatic criterion will be as successful in the social sciences, in other words there is no guarantee that these sciences will, can, or even should attain comprehensive and progressive theories like those of physics or biology. This fact, together with the admittedly evaluative character of adoption of the pragmatic criterion in the first place, suggests that the social sciences may properly adopt goals other than that of successful prediction and control of their domain. (p. xxi)

The long-standing debate between social and natural science has not yet resulted in a deeper gulf between them but rather in the acknowledgment that we know today that the separating of Verstehen from Erklären was a misleading way to characterize both social and natural science. Summarizing complicated matters briefly, advances in the philosophy of the natural sciences have made it plain that understanding or interpretation are just as elemental to these sciences as they are to the humanities. On the other hand, while generalizations in the

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social sciences are logically discrepant from those of natural science, there is no reason to doubt that they involve causal attributions. (Giddens, 1987, p. 18)

In the same vein, Mary Hesse (1980), in the critical discussion with the Habermasian interests, develops a continuum of the sciences and concludes her scrutiny by distinguishing two kinds of objectivity within both natural and human science: 1. Technical interest in external instrumental control, whose objectivity is ensured by the method of self-corrective learning. This interest applies to the more predictive aspects of the human sciences as well as to natural science proper. 2. Communicative interest, which includes the interpretive understanding of the human sciences, and also the social function of theoretical science, not as pure ontology, but as a mediation of man’s views of himself in relation to nature. (p. xxi) One thing seems evident regarding the nature of theory briefly discussed here. Since, as Hesse points out (1980, p. 183), adoption of the pragmatic criterion itself implies a value judgment, it is possible to adopt other value goals for social science and so decide against a straightforward pragmatic criterion in the Hessean sense of prediction and control as the overriding goal for social science. The most prominent achievements of sociology and social theory might be interpreted as manifestations of an ability to decide differently: Weber’s “desire to rescue human ideals from dominance by substructures, whether economic or bureaucratic; Durkheim’s sense of the need for social cohesion and stability in face of man’s inordinate and irrational desires; the note of protest inseparably bound into Marx’s ‘scientific’ concept of exploitation of man’s labour power.” All these instances of social phenomena, like many others such as the French Revolution, the Great Depression of 1929, or the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than requiring explanation in the spirit of the natural sciences, can be made more intelligible “as redescription (interpretation, understanding) in terms which make them cohere with the chosen order of values” (p. 199). In social research, then, the intentional, that is, value-laden and evaluative, aspect of it would also justify the theoretical motivation of research by personal interests and intentions. Alvin Gouldner’s description of the sociologist’s task in the aftermath of empiricism captures this point as it simultaneously reflects the recollection of the post-eschatological mental scenery: Commonly, the social theorist is trying to reduce the tension between a social event or process that he takes to be real and some value which this has violated. Much of theory-work is initiated by a dissonance between an imputed reality and certain values, or by the indeterminate value of an imputed reality. Theory-

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making, then, is often an effort to cope with threat; it is an effort to cope with a threat to something in which the theorist himself is deeply and personally implicated and which he holds dear. (Gouldner, in Hesse, 1980, p. 199)

This voice of personal concern and implication is clearly echoed in the “intellectual breakthrough” in North American curriculum studies, in the Reconceptualization Movement. In the Introduction to his edited Contemporary Curriculum Discourses, Pinar (1999) situates the whole layer of the recent changes in the philosophy of science in the parallel radical changes in curriculum studies: The thoughtful practice of everyday educational life requires us to understand practice theoretically. So understood, curriculum becomes intensely historical, political, racial, gendered, phenomenological, postmodern, autobiographical, aesthetic, theological, and international. When we say that curriculum is a site on which the generations struggle to define themselves and the world, we are engaged in a theoretically enriched practice. When we say that curriculum is an extraordinarily complicated conversation, we are underscoring human agency and the volitional character of human action. When curriculum specialists understood their work only in institutional terms, they had in fact retreated from politically engaged and phenomenologically lived senses of practice. When curriculum was understood only institutionally, the classroom became a mausoleum, not a civic forum. We rejected a bureaucratization of the everyday, what was in fact pseudopractice. We embraced praxis. Over the past twenty years the American “curriculum” field has attempted “to take back” curriculum from the bureaucrats, to make the curriculum field itself a conversation, and in so doing, revitalize practice theoretically. (pp. xvii–xviii)

Conversation, understanding, interpretation, and dialogue as defining features of research activities have been and might still be regarded as uninformative, odd and indefensible in some scholarly circles. However, as Hesse (1980) put it The model of dialogue as a form of objectivity is unfamiliar and somewhat shocking to those accustomed to empiricist presuppositions, but it is one of the few alternatives to the model of natural science in dealing with the human sciences. (p. 180)

TENTATIVE CRITICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR CURRENT CURRICULUM POLICY The mainstream educational and curriculum scholars, notably those with a penchant for psychology but also for sociology, have been keenly attached to the understanding of science in terms of empiricism and virtually character-

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ized by some implicit reference to Newtonian physics. The routinized quest for objective knowledge in these branches of educational and curriculum research has not been able to recognize the development of human knowledge in the 20th century. This atrophy of theoretical curiosity, accompanied by methodological dogmatism, might have left a substantial portion of the field back in the history of science: Kant and his contemporaries strongly believed that the mathematics and physics of that time, and even the moral code, were true beyond all doubt. Kant thus assumed that the schemata employed in mathematical, physical and moral thinking were unique and could not be otherwise. . . . we have [now] nonEuclidean geometry, Einstein’s relativistic view of the space-time continuum, Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ and the knowing that Newtonian physics only applies to slow-moving objects. (Wellington, in Kelly, 1999, pp. 30–31)

The postempiricist turn in natural science was one particular upshot of the processes seen to be related to a wide range of scholarly efforts from the later Wittgenstein’s turn to notions of language games and forms of life to the poststructuralist and postmodernist accounts of the nature of scientific theories. The implications for curriculum studies and science education of those sweeping changes in the self-understanding of natural science from physics to biology has been convincingly embodied in William Doll’s Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum (1993). Most recently, Stephen Toulmin’s (2001) words on the state of the arts of theory-making succinctly capture the prevailing spirit: “Theories are practices that have specific parts to play in particular disciplines” (p. 136). Not differently, from the standpoint of postmodern and poststructuralist curriculum studies, Pinar et al. (1995) stated: Discourse, as poststructuralists employ the term, communicates the social relatedness of the human world, and more specifically, our social relatedness as inscribed in and expressed through language. . . . We encounter the notion that the human world is a world of language. This idea regards the distinction between “theory” and “practice” as an apparent distinction only. Both are discursive realities. In this view, theory is practical. Practice is theoretical. (p. 49)

All these views recognize knowledge as socially and linguistically constituted and they stand strictly opposed to theories of knowledge which view human knowledge as “timeless, objective, in no sense related to the particular circumstances of individual eras, societies, cultures or human beings. True knowledge, on this view, is independent of all such ephemeral considerations” (Kelly, 1999, p. 27). But most importantly, this latter type of knowledge is anything but neutral, as it often pretends to be, in respect of ideological commitments, as was evidenced in the case of the Tyler Rationale: “These theories seek to embrace not only knowledge of a ‘scientific’ kind, that concerned with the

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‘factual’ or empirical aspects of existence, but also, and more significantly, human values—aesthetic, moral and even social/political.” While these views less understandably still attract some theorists of education and curriculum, their more powerful appeal has been in recent neo-liberal attempts at overtly politicizing the provision of education. “Such a view of knowledge . . . has its attractions for the politicians, since it seems to offer a kind of universality and certainty which makes their lives easier—not least because it seeks to put an end to individual questioning and challenge” (Kelly, 1999, p. 27). Paradoxically, the politicization of education during the last two centuries has argued for certain central themes raised by postmodern and poststructuralist research. This politicizing trend has unintendedly concretized the transition of the knowledge debate from being a philosophical concern focused on concepts of truth and questions of the validity of universal knowledge to an awareness of a more plausible characterization of human knowledge as a social construct (Kelly, 1999, p. 35). This conception of a transition of knowledge from the abstracted innocence of philosophy and science to the power struggles of meaning and politics is insightfully present in its fundamental historical succession in Jean-François Lyotard (1984): The question of the legitimacy of science has been indissociably linked to that of the legitimation of the legislator since the time of Plato. From this point of view, the right to decide what is true is not independent of the right to decide what is just, even if the statements consigned to these two authorities differ in nature. The point is that there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics: they both stem from the same perspective, the same “choice” if you will—the choice called the Occident. . . . Knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided ? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government. (pp. 8–9, emphasis added)

For the field of curriculum studies the recognition of this knowledge/ power overlap have urged to revise some cherished conceptions of power and influence in education. Hence a brief ‘ideological’ treatment of empiricist knowledge, but especially of the tradition of critical theory, is needed before an account of poststructural and postmodernist discourses and their curricular implications may be undertaken. THE INFUSION OF IDEOLOGY INTO THE SCHOLARLY CURRICULUM DISCOURSE The infusion of ideology through language as a constituent of empirical knowledge may be generalized to concern even the most abstracted formal systems. Kurt Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness of any arithmetic system

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in demonstrating “the existence in the arithmetic system of a proposition that is neither demonstrable nor refutable within that system” evidenced that all formal systems have internal limitations and they are never linguistically ‘pure.’ This means that in order to be comprehensively describable any system of logic has to resort to metalanguage and that “the metalanguage it [logic] uses to describe an artificial (axiomatic) language is ‘natural’ or ‘everyday’ language; that language is universal, since all the other languages can be translated into it” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 43). There would thus seem to be an increasing burden of proof for the claims which argue for the way things ‘really’ are independent of the representational logic and apparatus of investigation. The objectivist view of knowledge inherent in those claims have traditionally had a prominent status in the study of education and curriculum. In general, within this discourse “knowledge becomes reified and the knower is seen as a passive recipient of this kind of knowledge rather than as an active participant in its creation.” A particular and important instance of this representational logic “is the reification of school subjects which the work of Ivor Goodson has highlighted. For that work has convincingly demonstrated that school subjects, far from being the rational entities which some philosophical theories . . . suggested most of them to be, are in fact the creations of interest groups whose prime concern has been with maintaining and extending their own status” (Kelly, 1999, p. 32). But what is the state of affairs in scholarly circles which are more selfassertively and autonomously identifying themselves as advocates of the social and human sciences sui generis? This issue is briefly dealt with by way of two categorizations made by the Habermasian interest theory: the practical interest of hermeneutic investigation and the emancipatory interest of critical social science (Habermas, 1971). Reflecting the Gnostic concern for the qualitative condition of this world, critical social science directly raises “questions about the political nature of social research, about what it means to do empirical inquiry in an unjust world” (Lather, 1997, p. 93). This effort would overlap the practical (aiming at understanding) and emancipative (aiming at emancipation) interests in the original Habermasian scheme. The open and systemic antagonism of critical science toward value-free knowledge, which it sees to obscure the human interests inherent in all knowledge, results in the view that “critical theorists hold that there is no end of ideology, no part of culture where ideology does not permeate” (Lather, 1997, pp. 93–94). In terms of the critical science initiated by the Frankfurt school, ideology has necessarily become absorbed into reality by the effect of science itself. With science reason becomes an instrumental reason, concerned with the manipulation of means and no longer with the question of whether the ends are reasonable. . . . The pervasive influence of scientific instrumental reason has

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brought about a progressive inability to determine the desirability of any goal in itself. Self-interest has become dominant. Reason is no longer autonomous but has become an instrument which is measured only by its role in the domination of nature and, consequently, of men. (Larrain, 1986, p. 202)

Despite its claimed interest in changing reality in terms of egalitarian practice, however, the main body of the work done in critical science may still adhere to some kind of preconceived and objectivist views of reality while being insufficiently informed of the conscious understanding and unconscious dynamics of language embedded in social practices and cultural forms. There still remains in the critical schools of thought, as an unrecognized reminiscence of modernist thought, the sense of how things ‘really’ are, and, notably concerning the moral and political part of ‘objective reality,’ how they ought to be. Critical theory, in this sense, may appear at its worst a scholarly equivalent of a political party intelligentsia representing totalitarian politics with an excuse of good intentions and thus justifying an arrogant governmentality interests by correct knowledge of its own creation. Critical theory might arguably have been trapped in its own, social-scientific, variant of representational logic. The lesson to be learned from the critique of critical theory would be that even the best canons of understanding would appear as uncritical instances in facing reality in its genuine cultural, social, and political complexity. For this reason postmodernism and poststructuralism argue that “no discourse is innocent of the Nietzschean will to power. . . . Whether the goal of one’s work is prediction, understanding, or emancipation, all are, . . . , ways of disciplining the body, normalizing behavior, administering the life of populations. All forms of knowledge and discourse that we have invented about ourselves— all define, categorize and classify us” (Lather, 1997, p. 95). After the theoretical unsettlement of poststructuralism, the Gnostic reappearance of postfoundational context would serve to undermine both critical theory and objectivist science. Critical theory, with its assets of ideology critique, draws ultimately on the modernist principles of Marxism, where ideology came to be conceived as more or less explicit discourse of ‘false consciousness.’ This discourse assumes a cognitively superior standpoint of an academic intelligentsia in order to be able to renounce all the deviations from the grand narrative of emancipation: “European philosophical thought [is] still dominated by the Marxist notion of Ideologiekritik, and by the romantic notion of the philosopher as the person who penetrates behind appearances of present social institution to their reality” (Rorty, 1997, pp. 45–46). The quest of science for objective knowledge, in turn, as a foundational discourse seeks to posit “grounds for certainty, outside of context, some neutral, disinterested point of reference” (Lather, 1997, p. 99). Both appear as ideologies of objectivity in their respective foundational compul-

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sions for the Archimedean standpoint, while denying that they themselves “have always been shaped in the crucible of the power/knowledge nexus” (Lather, 1997, p. 101). Ideology remains an indispensable but contested term. The loss of foundational standards, so goes the counter-critique, would send us directly to irrationalism or undercut the grounds of the struggle for social justice. But, as stated by Lather (1997), relativism might appear as an issue only within the context of foundationalist epistemologies which search for a privileged standpoint as the quarantee of certainty. . . . If the focus is on the procedures which take us as objects and involve us in systems of categories and procedures of self-construction, relativism becomes a nonissue. If the focus is on how power relations shape knowledge production and legitimation, relativism is a concept from another discourse. (p. 99)

Relativity, the dependence of things on factors that vary according to context, appears as the instance of false consciousness against which some foundational absolute has to be set up in prevent anarchy and chaos from descending upon us (Lather, 1997, p. 101). The ghosts of relativism hover above even the sophisticated versions of social theory influenced by critical theory. Perhaps the best example of this is Jürgen Habermas’ (1984, 1987) theory of communicative action with its quest for undistorted communication and its excessive stress on consensus, which is unable “to accept that the conflict between fundamental values can never be resolved” (Mouffe, 1997, p. 6). These and other “such claims are cultural dominants which masquerade as natural, rational, necessary, but which are a fact less of nature than of human production. They are, in spite of their denial, embedded in what Foucault (. . .) terms ‘regimes of truth,’ the power/knowledge nexus which provides the constraints and possibilities of discourse” (Lather, 1997, p. 101). From a poststructuralist perspective, the deconstruction of false consciousness must entail the notion of ideology “as a constitutive component of reality. . . . There is no meaning-making outside ideology. There is no false consciousness, for such a concept assumes a true consciousness accessible via ‘correct’ theory and practice. . . . As we attempt to make sense in a world of contradictory information, radical contingency, and indeterminacies, ideology becomes a strategy of containment for beings who, . . . cannot ‘Stop Making Sense’ ” (Lather, 1999, p. 253). The hermeneutics of science claims that even in its most theoretical moments science and study remains a practice shaped by the struggles for legitimacy of discourse between and within different knowledge/power constellations. Since the intellectual development from the pretended innocence of pure science to hermeneutics and deconstruction, however, it has emerged that there is more at stake than a mere shift from a pure ‘logic of science’ to

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the methodological recognition of ideological and linguistic ‘contamination’ of any intellectual endeavor. Beyond methodology, the present practice reveals itself through the institutionalization of reason, where technology has conferred upon instrumental uses of reason such a range of power (cf. Lyotard, 1984, p. 9) that the self-sufficient philosophical or existential logic of hermeneutics and phenomenology in their essentialistic critique of instrumentality, might themselves appear an instance of self-deception at collective and individual levels. John Caputo (1987) draws on his interpretation of the shift in Heidegger’s thought from “the sober hermeneutic analyses, suffused with the technical vocabulary of phenomenology . . . to the voice of protest. The hermeneutic determination of the essence of science was displaced by a deconstructive critique of the Wesen of technology”: Science belongs together with technology as inseparable forms of the will-topower as knowledge, of the will-to-know, the will to dominate and manipulate, of what Foucault calls “power-knowledge.” The metaphysics of the will-topower stamps our age, marks our epoch, dominating all the phenomena of our time—political and social, scientific and artistic. We are in danger of being swept up in an enormous totalitarian and totalizing movement which aims to bring every individual, every institution, every human practice under its sway. He [Heidegger] is not concerned with science and technology themselves but with the preoccupation with control, manipulation, and power which they induce. He thinks that they have common essence, that science cannot be purified of technology, that science is driven by a desire for control and mastery, that science is the will-to-power as knowledge. They spring from a common metaphysics which articulates the guiding conceptions of modern technological civilization, the ontology of technology. (pp. 232–233, emphasis added)

The destiny of the ideological panorama of our civilization Caputo outlines is critically dependent on the self-understanding of the institution of education. And this is because one of the most potent mechanism for effecting such kinds of knowledge as the will-to-know and the unavoidable will-to-power will be made available in the educational system, with the curriculum as its very core. The weakening of theoretical curiosity in many subfields of education, not to speak of the deliberate or unconscious blindness with regard to ideological commitments, has been the trademark of much current practice (theoretical and political) in education. The self-assertive but haphazard and reifying identification with the linguistic production of ‘quality control and assurance’ and the permanent preference of, or even obsession with, procedural or methodical solutions, ‘methodical fetishism,’ as the panacea for educational problems, all of these might defy any efforts to meet the education and curriculum problematic on its own terms. In doing so these approaches for their part effectively maintain and reproduce the logic and technology of

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behavior and, most importantly, the larger ideological framework of the willto-power where all problems—political, social, personal—are conceived as technological problems for which an appropriate technology of behavior is required. The world has become the raw material for the various technologies of power—political technologies which manipulate and control public opinion and policy; social technologies which set standards of conduct; educational technologies which ensure the normalization and regulation of schools and children. It is not only nature which must submit to our control but education, sexuality, the political process, the arts—in short, the whole sphere of human practices. Nuclear power, and bio-power; power/knowledge; the will-to-know and knowing as willing. This is what is coming to pass . . . in science and technology, in the sense that this is the frame of mind of a culture dominated by the success and prestige of science and technology. And the university bends slowly under the power of the [causa efficiens] principle of reason. (Caputo, 1987, p. 233)

These provocations imply the importance of education deriving from the cultural and social complexities framing the curriculum and education, and the way those complexities might be effectively nullified by the reproduction of the routines of educational policy. These routines often obscure the way education has been and is constantly reproduced initially by the dual pressures of educational study of the objectivist kind and bureaucratic administration, both of which draw on the self-sufficient ideologies of instrumentalism. In terms of postmodern and poststructural curriculum discourse, this prevailing practice prefers to see the curriculum discourse as an institutional text while neglecting the other vital discourses of the curriculum complex (cf. Pinar et al., 1995). Furthermore, during the last two decades the prevailing discourse has seemed to combine scientific (most notably, the psychological as the carrier of the social) and economically refreshed bureaucratic interests to understand education in terms of a commodity. The legitimation of this discourse is related to the changed status of the nation state consequent upon a reinterpretation of the individual and the collective. The state-mandated, centrally controlled educational policy has been deregulated into local or even personal (teacher) accountability. It has even been maintained that despite the seemingly contrary policy manifestations in different countries the actual “restructuring of education” has taken place in conformity with the same standards: It is not the same policies in different national settings but the same underlying principles and operational mechanisms leading to the fact that the ground of education, which used to be both social and economic, is now mainly economic. Education is turning more into a matter of economic competition than a matter of building societies—it is becoming increasingly commodified. (Carlgren, 2000, p. 329)

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FROM PROCESS TO PRODUCT: COMMODIFICATION AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE INFUSION OF IDEOLOGY INTO EDUCATIONAL AND CURRICULAR DISCOURSE Thus the commodification of the curriculum may be conceived as the latest ideological turn whereby the new global power/knowledge nexus is legitimated by the educational discourse in economic terms. The extent to which this new reality of education is discursively produced by language appears from the adopted terminology: “delivery,” “product control,” “clients,” “managers,” “mechanisms,” “quality control” (McMurtry, in Kelly, 1999, p. 42). The linguistic production of this new ideology draws upon the economic tenet that schools will improve once they behave more like private, profitdriven corporations and respond more sensitively than the old bureaucratic system to the demands of educational consumers. This ideology has been embodied in concerted moves to create devolved systems of schooling entailing significant degrees of institutional autonomy and a variety of forms of school-based management and administration. In many cases, these changes have been linked to an increased emphasis on parental choice and on competition between diversified and specialized forms of provision, thereby creating “quasi-markets” in educational services. (Whitty, 2002, p. 11)

Competition has been thought to enhance the efficiency and responsiveness of schools and thus increase their effectiveness: Many hope that market forces will overcome a levelling-down tendency which they ascribe to bureaucratic systems of mass education, while others see them as a way of giving disadvantaged children the sorts of opportunities hitherto available only to those who can afford to buy them through private schooling or their position in the housing market. (Whitty, 2002, p. 11)

The global spread of these kinds of policies is due to the change in political climate since the 1980s. Educational policies that view education in terms of marketplace products “received particular encouragement from New Right governments in Britain and the USA in the 1980s, and were subsequently fostered by the IMF and the World Bank in Latin America and Eastern Europe.” The ideological shift toward a uniform shape of reality is to be observed in the party political rearrangements beyond right and left: “Even the political rhetoric of many parties of the centre left now places an increasing emphasis on diversity and choice in education, as is certainly the case with New Labour in Britain” (Whitty, 2002, p. 11).

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Despite their pretension to postbureaucratic practice the underlying policy and curriculum principles of this educational market ideology are arguably no more than a continuation of the pseudo-practice of the bureaucratic phase or even a sharpened version of it. To set up principles like parental choice, competition, or single schools as autonomous self-improving agencies as the conditions for the enhancement of education may carry on, but the unintended consequences of the loss of the ‘bigger picture’ repeat the same, or even worsened, practice. This state of affairs would draw not only on the policy exercised but, most importantly, also on some forms of educational research where [t]he “bigger picture” is not entirely ignored but alluded to in what [can be termed] “contextual rhetoric” at the beginning of a book or paper and then forgotten. The subsequent account may then still seem to exaggerate the degree to which and the circumstances in which individual schools and teachers can be empowered to buck the trends. It may thus raise unrealistic expectations which, when dashed, will only generate cynicism and low morale. (Whitty, 2002, pp. 13–14)

This kind of scholarly activity, which Gerald Grace has termed ‘policy science,’ is marked by the exclusion of any consideration of wider contextual relations “by its sharply focused concern with the specifics of a particular set of policy initiatives . . . and is seductive in its concreteness, its apparently valuefree and objective stance and its direct relation to action” (Grace, in Whitty, 2002, p. 14, emphasis added). This educational policy has been complemented, as its instrument, by the same old instrumental notion of the curriculum disguised once again by the same “apparently value-free and objective stance.” The upshot of this global process of “restructuring in education,” then, is in no sense a shift from bureaucracy but actually an intensification of the bureaucratic spirit as a kind of neobureaucracy where the focus of control is no longer on collective structures and functions. Instead it is imposed more specifically via surveillance of the performance of an individual or of the deregulated unit of accountability, both loaded with arbitrary and foreign quality demands, as forms of “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) against the will and understanding of the key persons involved in practice, teachers and students. Despite the rhetoric of change the reproduction of the dominant educational ideology has been brought once more with the support of the following mechanism: The more directly a pedagogic agency reproduces, in the arbitrary content that it inculcates, the cultural arbitrary of the group or class which delegates to it its pedagogic authority, the less need it has to affirm and justify its own legitimacy. (p. 29)

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The quasi-markets of education are highly dependent not only on market ideological and political preferences but notably on the obsolete notions of science and theory contrary to the rhetoric of novelty and change. This comprehensive ideology draws on a notion of the curriculum which might reflect quite absurd forms of it in which the ideological alliance between objectivist science and a more intense control of the self in the name of individualization is taking place. Referring to the restructurings in England and Wales which led to the 1988 Education Act, Kelly (1999) wrote of the premises underlying the neobureaucratic attempts toward more stringent mechanisms of educational planning and governance: A . . . assumption . . . is that educational planning is a scientific exercise, that education is an applied science and can thus be both studied and planned scientifically. Attempts to study society in this way and to produce scientifically based plans and prescriptions for social change were abandoned long ago, and for very good reasons. . . . The attempt to resurrect this as a model for educational research and planning is yet another example of the primitive nature of the underlying thinking of current policies. (p. 193)

The most serious problem inherent in the principles governing the current policies of the educational quasi-markets is the limitations they are placing on debate about education, and on independent research which might help us better to understand the educational process, in its own right and not merely as a means for instruction in economically useful skills. (p. 194)

The basic weakness of the commodification of education as a mode of extreme instrumentalism has been the de-intellectualization of the educational practice in all its dimensions. This situation seems odd regarding the work of educational profession “which, above all others, should be concerned with the maintenance of intellectual standards” (Kelly, 1999, p. 196). There are, however, indications from politically authoritative sources that the quasi-market movement in education might have more ambitious political aims than a concern for intellectual standards. The ultimate interests of the ideological alliance between neoliberal and neoconservative agenda reflect the incapacity to conceive individuality in other terms than subordination to the personality ideal of the market. In this ideal it is easily seen how these mostly worthwhile and originally moral, religious, and democratic ideals have been crudely ascribed to the achievements of one particular economic penchant. The ideological lesson suggests that there is no need for any other sources for human practice: Capitalism encourages important virtues, like discipline, industriousness, prudence, reliability, fidelity, conscientiousness, and a tendency to save in order to

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invest in the future. It is not material goods but all the great virtues exhibited by individuals working together that constitute what we call the market place. (Thatcher, in Spring, 1998, p. 128, emphasis added)

THE PROTEST OF THE “NEW” ECONOMY The most frequent argument of the prevalent educational ideology since Bobbitt and Tyler has been appeal to the ‘needs’ of society. The recycled social engineering has proved to be the recipe of the restructuring movement for the ever-increasing needs of adaptation and intellectual and moral alertness to real challenges at individual and collective level, in other words: more simplicity while facing increasing complexity. But solely from the standpoint of the interests of the economy and labor market, the prevailing ideology of education might seem seriously flawed, at its best a good solution to the wrong problem. Robert Reich’s (1993) description of the global shift in the operational core of business organization from the traditional “high volume” industry to “high value” enterprises places the recent educational and curricular arrangements, which ostensibly have adopted that organizational shift, in a strange light: The high-value enterprise has no need to control vast resources, discipline armies of production workers, or impose predictable routines. Thus it needs not to be organized like the old pyramids that characterized standardized production, with strong chief executives presiding over ever-widening layers of managers, atop an even larger group of hourly workers, all following standard operating procedures. In fact, the high-value enterprise cannot be organized this way. The three groups that give the new enterprise most of its value—problemsolvers, problem-identifiers, and strategic brokers—need to be in direct contact with one another to continuously discover new opportunities. Messages must flow quickly and clearly if the right solutions are to be applied to the right problems in a timely way. This is no place for bureaucracy. (p. 87)

In the new economy—replete with unidentified problems, unknown solutions, and untried means of putting them together—mastery of old domains of knowledge isn’t nearly enough to guarantee a good income. Nor, importantly, is it even necessary. Symbolic analysts often can draw upon established bodies of knowledge with the flick of a computer key. Facts, codes, formulae, and rules are easily accessible. What is more valuable is the capacity to effectively and creatively use the knowledge. Possessing a professional credential is no guarantee of such capacity. Indeed, a professional education which has emphasized the rote acquisition of such knowledge over original thought may retard such capacity in later life. (p. 182)

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In the socially and linguistically constructed reality the key qualifications of the new economy demand that children learn “how to conceptualize problems and solutions. The formal education of an incipient symbolic analyst thus entails refining four basic skills: abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration” (Reich, 1993, p. 229). The capacity for abstraction, for instance, means the ability to reinterpret and then rearrange the constant chaos of data swirling around us. Every innovative scientist, lawyer, engineer, designer, management consultant, screenwriter, or advertiser is continuously searching for new ways to represent reality which will be more compelling or revealing than the old. Their tools may vary, but the abstract processes of shaping raw data into workable, often original patterns are much the same. (p. 229)

Yet, “for most children in the United States and around the world, formal education entails just the opposite kind of learning.” The basic schooling is still, and in the restructured context of education even more markedly, tied to the stringent ‘personalized’ bureaucratic ideals sharply clashing with the learning needs of the budding archetype of the new economy, the symbol analyst, not to speak of its effect on the majority of the population. The critical message of the representative of the new economy itself clearly recalls the backwardness of some of the educational stakeholders and their supporters in educational research, with all their claims for the educational quality and efficiency of the restructured policy: Rather than construct meanings for themselves, meanings are imposed upon [children]. What is to be learned is prepackaged into lesson plans, lectures, and textbooks. Reality has already been simplified; the obedient student has only to commit it to memory. An efficient educational process, it is assumed, imparts knowledge much as an efficient factory installs parts on an assembly line. Regardless of what is conveyed, the underlying lesson is that it is someone else’s responsibility to interpret and give meaning to the swirl of data, events, and sensations that surround us. This lesson can only retard students’ ability to thrive in a world brimming with possibilities for discovery. (Reich, 1993, pp. 229–230)

This brief glimpse into the Reichian critique of current educational practice might, however, reveal how the new economy has actually received the cherished educational rationale of efficiency and of the presumed importance of the outer control and assessment of the individual performance of both teachers and students. The economic reception alone, promoting as it does important but particular interests, would be symptomatic in regard of the educational competence of those in charge, politically, administratively, or scholarly, of recent changes in educational and curricular policy. The bigger picture is, of course, much more complicated than that provided by the econ-

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omy and the real detrimental effects of the prevalent educational ideology with its curricular identifications concern at large society. As research literature has revealed, however (see, for instance, Doll, 1993; Kelly, 1999; Pinar et al., 1995; Whitty, 2002, among many others not mentioned here), there is scarcely a sign of thoughtful encounter in the realm of current educational policy with the real social, cultural, economic, or scientific changes. The lack of any comprehensive attempt to understand the complexity of the current educational situation has been substituted by simplistic, assessment-led reforms focused on the individual performativity of single individuals or consciously isolated administrative units wrapped in the name of accountability in the arbitraries of competition and choice. The shift of emphasis in evaluation from goals and objectives to the standardized control of outcomes and performance is an indication of the poorly conceived or flawed understanding governing the dynamics of the constant social and linguistic production of change.

CURRICULUM DISCOURSE AND A NEED FOR A THEORETICALLY ENRICHENED REHABILITATION OF EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE These few fragmentary glimpses into the alliance of pseudo-economic and objectivist science discourse in the ideological globalization of education may give some indication of the current, in many ways unsatisfactory, condition of education despite its pretension to the trendy fashionableness of change, which, in fact, turns out to be the same old, too old, wine in a new wineskin. The persistence of the curriculum as an old wine, a neo-bureaucratized “institutional text,” draws on different but resonating sources. Its constant ideological reproduction is dependent on a mixture of mutually compartmentalized but paradoxically allied language games: by deliberate political intentions, scientific psychology, the traditional humanistic discourse of the self-sufficiency (self-autarchy) of the self and the neoliberal idea of the free market individual. Thus the constant struggle to define subjectivity, agency, or self as the curricular regulation of the self has drawn on successive historical patterns from the Herbartianist conformity of wills to behaviorist predictability of behavior to neoliberal individual performativity. The final aim of all of these discourses is to govern the social by control of the individual, or more generally, to solve the dilemma, in Didaktik terminology, between the general and the individual. This theme of struggle over individualization goes back to the dawn of modernity and to the birth of the modern notion of individuality. The vital element in the Cartesian quest for certainty was the rational regulation of the self by a Method ideally internalized as ‘second nature.’ This emphasis on the universal within the individual,

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faithful to the Cartesian stress on method, has been most influentially followed in the science of psychology, not in terms of content but in terms of methodology. The accompanying neglect of content for the ideology of method has had a number of important consequences. The initial moral concern still clearly traceable in the instrumental-pragmatic ideology and methodical thoughts of modern pioneers has gradually vanished as a consequence of the direction the process of rationalization of human practice has since taken. In the development of academic psychology, the method-driven events have assumed two complementary manifestations. As modernity encompasses both the rationality of the Enlightenment and romanticism as its countermovement, also behaviorism has its own counterreaction in the form of the humanistic psychology of the 1960s. Both forms of psychology are arguably caught up as polarizations in modern thought. Kvale’s argument for the quarrel between behaviorism and humanism within the family would draw on the question of legitimation. In both cases, the quest for respectability has been taking place by means of an appeal to external sources of authority. In behaviorism, by appeal to scientific method, while in humanism “philosophies such as phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics have often come to serve as external sources of legitimation, rather than as radical new ways of conceiving of the human subject and its relation to the world” (Kvale, 1997, p. 42). Sigmund Koch’s critical claim from 1964 (in Kvale, 1997) is even more radical in respect of the suggestion of “behaviourism and humanism as two sides of the modern coin”: There are indications that existentialism is tending to be viewed, in some global sense, as an external source of authority for whatever ideas the viewer already owns that he feels to be unconventional. There is a marked parallelism here with the tendency of the neobehaviorists to seek support for the attitudes which they had already embraced by a similarly global appeal to a prestigeful philosophical movement; in that instance, logical positivism. (p. 42)

One consequence of the struggle of the will-to-power via the will-toknowledge between behaviorism and humanism has been that psychology has come to mirror the modern dichotomy between the “universal and the individual, opposing nomothetic and ideographic methods. Modernity is characterized not only by the quest for objectivity and universality, but also by the other extreme of relativism and individualism” (Kvale, 1997, pp. 42–43). In sum, “not only the subject of the psychological laboratory, but also the humanistic self, is ahistorical and asocial. The ideal self has freed itself from tradition and authority and dissociated itself from the society it inhabits” (p. 43). From the standpoint of curriculum studies, the most critical aspect of those developments will be the demise of what might be called the quintes-

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sence of education: the moral sphere embedded within the practice of education and teaching: “Scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose” (Fullan, in Kelly, 1999, p. 9). For behaviorism as well as for the later developments of academic psychology, the issue of ethics is not considered relevant on the agenda of the psychological conceptualization of reality. For humanism, the topic might seem overtly more diffuse. The legitimation of humanistic discourse is traditionally closely related to ethical considerations. Yet humanistic psychology, for example, of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Erich Fromm, “has given support to a cult of the individualized subject and its self-actualization” (Kvale, 1997, p. 43). From the ethical point of view, the humanistic approach may rather urge to less or more civilized versions of selfishness than become concerned about issues outside the self which remain isolated from one’s narcissistic feelings and direct experiences. “Thus, to Fromm and Maslow, man’s individuality became an end in itself that could not be subordinated to purposes of greater dignity. In a humanistic ethics, virtue became responsibility towards one’s own existence, and vice irresponsibility towards oneself. The self-actualizing person must be self-contained, true to his or her own nature, ruled by the laws of his or her own character” (Kvale, 1997, p. 43). As a result, the symbolic curricula of the modern psychologies have effectively rendered moral space hollow and the self empty, a tabula rasa to be filled from within. In education, this effect is maintained and reproduced by the institutionalization of the use of those kinds of psychology as the core in curriculum design across all divisions of subject matter and in the curricula of teacher education. This induced demise of moral discourse in education has been furthered by “the neoliberal idea of the free-market individual” (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p. xxi). This educational goal of restructured education is to be equalized with the encapsulated notions of subjectivity of scientific and humanistic psychology: Neoliberal economics rests upon an image of the autarkic human self. It assumes that individuals alone can master the whole of their lives, that they can derive and renew their capacity for action from within themselves. Talk of the “self-entrepreneur” makes this clear. Yet this ideology blatantly conflicts with everyday experience in (and sociological studies of) the worlds of work, family and local community, which show that the individual is not a monad but is selfinsufficient, and increasingly tied to others, including at the level of worldwide networks and institutions. The ideological notion of the self-sufficient individual ultimately implies the disappearance of any mutual sense of obligation. (p. xxi)

This ideological image of subjectivity and agency extending from psychology through economy to education might with reason be concretely seen as a

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‘false consciousness,’ which does not actually exist anywhere in the real practice of psychologists, business people, or educational professionals. The conception of practice whereby quality as an instance of neobureaucratic control has come to substitute the imagined or real lack of moral commitment is increasingly giving rise to a distorted image of educational practice. The core of the practice comprises conscious, subconscious, or unconscious pragmatic moves toward some ‘varieties of good’ in cognitive, moral, political, bodily, individual, instrumental, and other terms which cannot be entirely imposed from without without harming the situational ethics of educational practice. The rationalist framework, moral, cognitive, or economic, which has dominated curriculum discourses does not touch the nerve of the practice. If the moral purpose, or maybe rather, the unavoidably moral character of practice were to be taken seriously it might be accomplished through acts of sentiment and sympathy (‘pedagogic tact’), which are not in their entirety subordinated to the impersonal calculative steps of curriculum rationales informed by psychological rationality or universalistic moral discourse—or by idealized business management. Simon Critchley (1993) refers to the Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of ethics which would challenge the ethics of the psychological selfactualization or of the neoliberal self-sufficiency as well as the ‘deeper’ philosophical versions of humanist or hermeneutic ethics: Ethics for Levinas, is defined as the calling into question of my freedom and spontaneity, that is to say, my subjectivity, by the other person. Ethics is here conceived, . . . in terms of an ethical relation between persons. What distinguishes an ethical relation from other relations (to oneself or to objects) is, . . . that it is a relation with that which cannot be comprehended or subsumed under the categories of the understanding. (Critchley, 1993, p. 33, emphasis added)

This kind of novel modes of understanding ethics in the spirit of deconstruction conceive the traditional authority of universalistic accounts as particular means to the will-to-power in terms of morality. “Kant spoke of ‘pure reason’ and the ‘autonomy’ of reason. But that is the dangerous abstraction, for reason is always already embedded in systems of power” (Caputo, 1987, p. 229). The ethics of dissemination proceeds by way of a great distrust of everyone who wants to save us or give us foundations. It distrusts all schemes and programs, all metaphysical and eschatological visions. It proceeds on the assumption that every such program harbors within it an exclusionary gesture, a repressive act, a movement of normalization and leveling. It suspects that after a certain point every good idea becomes inflexible and repressive, that schemes cling tenaciously to life and presence long after they have spent their capital and done their work. (Caputo, 1987, pp. 262–263)

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This basic experience of doubt and skepticism, deriving originally from the posteschatological lack of foundations, as the critique of current curriculum practice would also imply possibilities to argue for the dignity and theoretical richness of professional educational practice. The paradox in the “deconstruction of ethics” (Critchley, 1993) or “the ethics of dissemination” (Caputo, 1987) seems to be that many of their valuable and sophisticated insights are already tacitly embedded in the actual practice of education as a constitutive part of the competence of many teachers and other educators. Even the ordinary observations of teaching do not suggest its easy acquiescence in the rules of behavioristic, cognitivist, or other rationales but “a more fundamental stratum” of the intentionality of actual practice can be traced to “sentience or sensibility” (Critchley, 1993, p. 33). The principles of poststructural ethics are readily enough recognizable in the actual tacit assumptions of the practice of education embodied as a pedagogic tact: It is the very unknowability of the other, the irrefutability of skepticism, that initiates a relation to the other based on acknowledgement and respect. The other person stands in a relation to me that exceeds my cognitive powers, placing me in question and calling me to justify myself. Levinas’ philosophical ambition is to subordinate claims to knowledge to claims of justice, or, in Kantian terms, to establish the primacy of practical reason (although, for Levinas, the ethical is the pre-rational foundation of the rational rather than the exemplification of reason). (Critchley, 1993, p. 32)

Despite the seemingly irresistible seduction of the foundation, Critchley’s interpretations would nonetheless intertextually rehabilitate the vistas believed ethically and theoretically to be lost in educational practice, misguided as it is by the terminological and ideological production of foreign reality. These observations would imply a significant reversion in educational attitudes from the indoctrination of thinking through abstracted scientific, philosophical, or economic rationales to caring and affective sensitivities— with accompanying complex cognitive competences demanded by practice. That “the ethical relation takes place at the level of sensibility, not at the level of consciousness” would legitimate, most significantly, the educational or pedagogic relationship as a practice “where the conscious subject of representation and intentionality is reduced to the sentient subject of sensibility” (p. 33). This stance may do more justice to the often sub- or unconscious dynamics and concerns of educational practice where “the deep structure of subjective experience is always already engaged in a relation of responsibility or, better, responsivity to the other” (p. 33) than the managed imposition on education of abstract ethical discourse. The constant theoretical and practical cultivation of and the struggle for this pedagogic tact might be one of the main assets amidst the tides and turns of competing paradigms and ideologies. Despite its overtly idealist outlook this educational posture claims to

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constitute something more than a dream; its promise might be to provide an alternative, also at the institutional level, to the caricature of human and educational relationships imagined by the proponents of scientific or commercialized education. The pedagogic tact or the ethics of dissemination is not opposed to institutional organization or the notion of community. It requires rather the hardiness (virtus) of repetition to keep . . . institutions free, to keep them mobile, in motion, flexible, in flux, reformable, repeating forward. It does not deny that institutional organization is usually the way to get things done, that we tend by a natural momentum to organize our practices along systematic lines. The role of ethics of dissemination is only to keep such organizations honest, to stay on alert to their equally natural tendency, once established, to resist alteration, to suppress and normalize, to persist in place. (Caputo, 1987, p. 263)

Apart from the significance of this educational morality, there are also other reasons entailing an urge of understanding individuality more in its own otherness, in idiosyncratic rather than collectivist terms as advocated this far by objectivist psychology and education, humanism, and economic interests. What is now at stake would be not only a theory of individuality for the sake of theory or as adoption of a stance for specific ideological reasons. The individualist ideology of postmodernity, second modernity, late modernity, etc. derives its importance from the novel social intensivity of the individual. A number of properties, functions and activities previously attributable to the nation-state, the welfare state, the hierarchical firm, the family, and the centralized trade union have been otherwise located. Some of them have been extensively displaced onto global instances, while others have been intensively displaced, onto the individual, to conscious or unconscious subjectivity: in any sense more private instances. (Lash, in Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p. xi)

This intensified individualization is tied to globalization, both of them marking the constitutive features of postmodernity, or in Ulrich Beck’s terms, “the second modernity.” Globalization has by the outsourcing of the functions of the institutions of “the first modernity” effected a radical shift in the relationships between individuals and institutions. A reading of the next account through the lenses provided by the current educational policy might prove a déjà vu experience to the end of the first sentence and then a new lesson to learn: In the first modernity the individual was constituted in consonance with a set of roles in a variety of institutions. Now these institutions are in crisis, and functions which were once taking place at the interface of institution and individual in the role are now taking place much more intensively and closer to the individ-

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ual. What has happened is that there has been a de-normalization of roles. The individual has become, . . . “nomadic”. There has been a move toward complexity, indeed toward “chaos” [cf. for curriculum parallels, Doll, 1993, author’s add.]. But it is somehow a regularizable chaos. The “roles” of the first modernity depended very much on what Kant called determinate judgment; on prescription, on determinate rules. Now the individual must be much more the rule finder himself. Determinate judgment is replaced by “reflective judgment”. Reflective judgment is not reflection because there is now no universal to subsume the particular. In reflective judgment the individual must find the rule. Reflective judgment is always a question of uncertainty, of risk, but it also leaves the door open much more to innovation. (Lash, in Beck & BeckGernsheim, 2002, p. xi)

Reflective judgment, responsivity to the other, or the need for a theoretical rehabilitation of pedagogic tact are respectively sociological, ethical, and curricular responses posed by the current urge to reconceptualize the notion of practice in terms of novel threats and possibilities of individuality. Ultimately, the urge to rethink individuality, subjectivity, agency, or self is a manifestation of the current situation where individualization has become “a structural characteristics of highly differentiated societies” (Beck & BeckGernsheim, 2002, p. xxi, emphasis added). The social intensification of the individual might be reflected in the paradoxical shift in postmodern psychological theory where in contrast to the individualist and intra-psychic terminology of modern psychology, there is a de-individualization and externalization of the person in a postmodern discourse. . . . In the current understanding of human beings there is a move from inwardness of an individual psyche to being-in-the-world with other human beings. (Kvale, 1997, p. 15)

Thus the death of the subject means the death of the notion of the subject as the unified, monolithic, reified, essentialized subject capable of fully conscious, fully rational action, a subject assumed in most liberal and emancipatory discourse. Such a subject is replaced by a provisional, contingent, strategic, constructed subject which, while intelligible, is not essentialized. (Lather, 1997, p. 103)

The importance of the death of the subject for curriculum studies would be, as Lars Løvlie (in Lather, 1997, p. 120) pointed out, that it “seems to eliminate a basic presupposition of psychology and education” (emphasis added). Theoretical sensitivity in this situation would denote readiness for an intellectual rearrangement of the compartmentalization of traditional disciplines by means of intertextuality. The old boundaries of legitimation have been challenged by the recognition of the new intersecting boundaries consequent

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upon the needs of different intellectual responses. Each has nonetheless its own ideological intentions, which cannot be substituted by some others’ interests, and in this sense the rearrangement would mean a new kind of topical autonomy among the intersecting interests. The novel situation featured by the interconnectedness between globalization and individualization has been recorded in the field of curriculum studies in its attempts to conceive educational concepts more sui generis. Education, and curriculum as its core, are coming to be conceived more autonomously in terms deriving rather from their own current intertextual practice geared to the revised and reflected tradition than as mere applications of the realms of discrete ideological interests: economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology, or sociology. This posture, while critically recollecting the Herbartian “einheimische Begriffe” (educational concepts in their own right), is interestingly becoming actual in most recent curriculum discourses influenced by hermeneutic, postmodern, and poststructural theory in the United Kingdom and United States. Curriculum studies, . . . has emerged from an attempt to study education and to explore educational problems in their own right and not as philosophical problems or as psychological or sociological phenomena. The concern has been to end the practice of viewing the study of education as a sub-branch of any or all of these other disciplines. (Kelly, 1999, p. 17) The field [of curriculum studies] will move toward conceptual and methodological autonomy. . . . To understand curriculum further we must capture its internal dynamics and moments, i.e. its movements (flashes, raptures, intensities) of educational experience, so that curriculum does not appear to reside apart from the ideas which elucidate it. Such work does not imply a rejection of ideas conceived in other disciplines; it means that such work will not proceed in a linear causal manner from source to application. (Pinar et al., 1995, p. 853, emphasis added)

The efforts to rescue education and educative experience from the stranglehold and seductions of vulgar instrumentalism is parallel to the act of dusting: There is a constant need for cleaning, dust never disappears completely. Postmodern theory of education has showed the essence of educational theorizing as a constant intellectual, political, and moral struggle for a worthwhile education when there is in sight no convergence to educational truths except in terms of attempts to cultural, political, and economic domination.

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Author Index

A Aristotle, 20, 35, 131, 163 Aronowitz, S., 59, 60, 76, 163

Copernicus, N., 20, 25 Critchley, S., 158, 159, 164, 167

D B Bacon, F., 8, 4, 19–27, 29, 56, 81, 116, 117, 123, 126, 131, 163 Bacon, R., 19 Baudrillard, J., 126 Bauman, Z., 72, 73, 75, 76, 163 Baxter, R., 64, 71 Beck, U., 126, 157, 160, 161, 163 Bloom, B., 13, 123, 164 Blumenberg, H., 127–134, 136, 163 Bobbitt, F., 12, 13, 112, 153 Boring, E. J., 16, 90, 163 Buridan, J., 19

C Calvin, J., 75 Cantor, N. F., 61, 66, 68, 164 Caputo, J., 17, 148, 149, 158–160, 164 Charters, W., 13, 112 Comenius, J., 15, 34 Comte, A., 92, 140

Derrida, J., 134 Descartes, R., 8–10, 14–20, 25, 27–32, 34–61, 68, 73, 79, 81, 84, 95, 97, 103, 105, 109, 115–117, 119, 123, 125, 130–134, 163, 164, 166 DiFazio, W., 59, 60, 76, 163 Dilthey, W., 91–93, 138, 164, 166 Delanty, G., 126–132, 134, 135, 164 Dewey, J., 88 Doll, W., 15, 17–19, 73–76, 88, 143, 155, 161, 164 Durkheim, E., 141

E–F Elliot, J., 76, 77, 165 Feyerabend, P., 137 Foucault, M., 147, 148, 165 Franklin, B., 12, 64 Freud, S., 9, 17, 47, 48, 54

169

170

AUTHOR INDEX

G Galileo, G., 14, 15, 19, 20, 25–27 de Garmo, C., 105 Gouldner, A., 141, 142 Grosseteste, R., 19

M Marx, K., 16, 43, 121, 124, 141, 146 McCarthy, T., 16, 17, 55, 95, 165, 166 McMurry, C., 106 McMurry, F., 105 Mill, J. S., 92

H Habermas, J., 16, 17, 44, 74, 75, 97, 105, 109, 114, 116, 119, 120, 124, 134, 138, 140, 141, 145, 147, 165, 166 Hamilton, D., 15, 74, 165 Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 4, 16 Heidegger, M., 13, 92, 137, 148, 165 Herbart, J. F., 12, 80, 104–108, 155, 162, 165 Hesse, M., 56, 57, 106, 137–142, 165

N Newton, I., 17, 19, 30, 79–81, 107 Nietzsche, F., 17, 146

O Ockham, W., 20 Offray de la Mettrie, J., 91 Oresme, N., 19

K Kant, I., 12, 16, 70, 92, 93, 99, 100–105, 108, 117, 124, 134, 135, 143, 158, 159, 161, 165 Kelly, A. V., 1, 12, 13, 112, 121, 122, 143–145, 150, 152, 155, 157, 162, 165 Kincheloe, J., 17–19, 53, 165 Klafki, W., 3, 165 Kliebard, H. M., 118, 119, 166 Koch, S., 135, 156 Kohlberg, L., 48 Kratwohl, D. R., 13 Kuhn, T., 136, 137 Kvale, S., 135, 156, 157, 161, 166

L Leibniz, G. W., 29 Levinas, E., 158, 159 Ljatker, J., 16, 166 Locke, J., 10–12, 78–98, 100, 103, 105, 108, 115, 117, 118, 126, 165, 166 Løvlie, L., 161 Luhman, N., 126 Luther, M., 61–63, 65–67, 99 Lyotard, J. -F., 98, 144, 145, 148, 166

P–Q Piaget, J., 46–48, 54, 166 Pinar, W., 12, 17, 103, 125, 142, 143, 149, 155, 162, 163, 166 Quine, W. V. O., 137

R Ramus, P., 15, 34, 74–76 Rorty, R., 43, 87, 90, 91, 146, 166, 167 Rosen, S., 48, 55, 167

S Schleiermacher, F., 138 Scotus, D., 19 Sombart, W., 63, 167 Spinoza, B., 29

T Taylor, C., 44, 97, 98, 115, 116, 167 Toulmin, S., 17, 32, 48, 72, 115, 127, 143, 167

AUTHOR INDEX

Tyler, R., 13, 18, 57, 99, 108, 110–115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123–125, 129, 131, 143, 153, 166, 167

V–W Voltaire, 91

171 Weber, M., 64–68, 70, 71, 74, 77, 95, 113, 114, 120, 121, 123, 141, 167 Weniger, E., 4, 5, 167 Westbury, I., 2, 4–6, 8, 13, 110–112, 122, 165, 167 Windelband, W., 70 Wittgenstein, L., 46, 137, 143, 167

Subject Index

A Adulthood, 45 Age of Theory, 135, 136 American Pragmatism, 17 Anglo-Saxon tradition of curriculum studies, 1 Antiquity, 25, 61, 131 Archetype, 85, 86, 88, 154 Aristotelian, 10, 19, 20, 23, 34, 36, 40, 116, 131 Asceticism, 61, 62, 65, 69, 70 Auslegung, 137

B Behavior, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 46, 47, 77, 90, 95, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 108, 110, 113, 114, 118–121, 135, 136, 146, 149, 155–157 Behaviorism, 47, 90, 156, 157 Bildung, 3–5, 7, 107, 163, 165 Bildungstheoretical, 3, 7 Body–mind theory, 40

C Calvinism, 9, 15, 59–64, 66–68, 71–75, 78, 79, 89

Capitalism, 15, 63, 70, 76, 113, 152, 166, 167 Cartesian, 8–10, 15–18, 29, 34, 37, 39–41, 43–57, 59, 60, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 78–80, 82–84, 88, 99, 105, 108–110, 115, 117, 124, 126, 130, 132, 135, 155, 156 Catholic, 15, 60, 63, 66, 67, 78 Childhood, 9, 37, 40, 45–47, 54 Christianity, 70, 91, 131, 135 Cognitive, 12, 13, 16, 27, 30, 37, 39, 41, 46–48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 58, 68, 79, 88, 90, 98, 114, 115, 133, 146, 158, 159 Commodification, 121, 123, 124, 150, 152 Concrete universal, 3, 4 Consciousness, 10, 16, 17, 31, 43, 46, 53–55, 59, 61, 66, 75, 86–88, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 107, 119, 137, 146, 147, 158, 159 Constructivism, 107, 122, 167 Continental, 1, 63, 64, 103 Culture, 6, 8, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 61, 63, 68–70, 89, 94, 103, 116, 143, 145, 149, 164 Curriculum, 1–15, 17, 18, 24, 34, 36, 37, 40, 48–52, 55, 57, 58, 62, 68, 70, 73–76, 78, 80, 98, 99, 101–115,

173

174

SUBJECT INDEX

117–126, 128, 129, 135–137, 139, 140, 142–145, 148–152, 155–159, 161–167 Curriculum studies, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 12–15, 17, 18, 24, 80, 103, 108, 128, 135–137, 139, 140, 142–144, 156, 161–163, 165–167 Curriculum theory, 5–8, 34, 49, 52, 57, 75, 98, 105, 112, 113, 118, 165, 166

D Darwinism, 17 Death of the subject, 161 Didaktik, 1–6, 11, 12, 103, 107, 123, 155, 165–167

E Economic, 1, 2, 7, 8, 10, 15, 17, 26, 62–65, 76, 110, 113, 118, 119, 122, 124, 141, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 157–160, 162 Economy, 7, 31, 38, 59, 60, 76, 77, 83, 89, 113, 153, 154, 157, 164, 167 Education, 1–18, 26–28, 30–41, 43, 45, 46, 48–55, 57–59, 66, 73–76, 78–81, 87, 90, 91, 95, 96, 98, 100–126, 128–130, 132–135, 142–145, 148–155, 157–167 Educational practice, 2, 11, 13, 75, 152, 154, 155, 158, 159 Educational psychology, 1, 57, 96, 104, 106–108, 121, 122, 164 Educational theory, 12, 17, 41, 87, 107, 119, 123, 133 Empiricism, 10, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 39, 70, 79, 80, 114, 130, 138, 141, 142 Enlightenment, 14, 15, 27, 38, 48, 59, 69, 79, 80, 82, 84, 91, 116, 132, 156 Epistemology, 8–10, 15, 34, 38–46, 48, 50, 53, 57, 73, 80–83, 86, 91–93, 99, 106, 117, 133, 166 Erlebnis, 1 Ethics, 5, 64, 70, 105, 107, 115, 125, 144, 157–160, 162, 164, 167

F French Revolution, 27, 79, 141 Fundamental individuality, 3

G Genetic epistemology, 46, 166 German classical idealism, 3 Gnostic, 9, 131–135, 145, 146 Gnosticism, 131, 132, 134, 135 God, 9, 19, 23–25, 37–40, 42, 50, 53, 58, 60–62, 64–72, 84, 88, 103, 128, 131–133, 144 Grand Narrative, 128, 146 Great Depression, 141

H Hermeneutical, 91, 103 Hermeneutics, 48, 90–92, 137, 147, 148, 156, 164, 167 Historicism, 17 Humanism, 20, 24, 73, 156, 157, 160 Human action, 7, 24, 38, 58, 60, 69, 88, 93, 94, 96, 97, 118, 142 Human nature, 10, 44, 102–104

I Identity, 2, 4, 7, 10, 22–24, 26, 63, 66, 96, 97, 103, 106, 124, 130, 140, 165, 167 Ideology, 6, 9, 13, 43, 48, 56, 61, 77, 105, 108, 112, 144–147, 150–153, 155–157, 160, 166 Individualism, 3, 31, 38, 39, 53, 66, 69, 73, 94, 156, 163 Individuality, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 16, 57, 61, 67, 77, 80, 96, 105–107, 109, 126, 130, 152, 155, 157, 160, 161 Informational capitalism, 76 Institutionalized intellectualism, 135 Instrumentalism, 6, 13, 43, 102, 112, 115, 118, 122, 123, 125, 127, 149, 152, 162 Intentionality, 8, 43, 47, 97, 159

175

SUBJECT INDEX

J Jesuit, 15, 78

L Lehrplan, 3–5 Liberal individualism, 3, 31, 38, 53, 94 Logical, 3, 44, 45, 48, 54, 68, 74 Logical empiricism, 17 Lutheranism, 62, 63, 65–67

M Mathematics, 14–16, 18, 19, 26–29, 39, 43, 48, 50, 55, 70, 83–86, 108, 136, 143 Methodism, 63, 83, 115 Methodizing knowledge, 74 Middle Ages, 25, 61, 131 Modernity, 13, 19, 24, 48, 59, 72, 76, 95, 99, 115, 125–129, 131, 132, 134, 155, 156, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 167 Modernization, 8, 15, 16, 24, 59, 60, 72, 74–76, 121, 123, 163, 164 Morality, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 51, 57, 61, 62, 67, 82–84, 97, 100, 101, 103–106, 115, 117, 118, 123, 127, 132, 134, 158, 160

N Nation-state, 5–7, 16, 53, 121, 160 Neo-Kantian, 70 Neoliberal, 11–13, 112, 124, 152, 155, 157, 158 New Testament, 130 Novum Organon, 20 Nuova Scienzia, 15, 19, 58, 72

O Occidental rationalism, 113 Old Testament, 131

P Pedagogic, 2, 4–6, 14, 35, 52, 151, 158, 159–161 Pedagogic tact, 158–161 Personal identity, 10, 96, 97 Personality, 5, 8, 62, 71, 72, 100, 105, 116, 117, 119, 122, 124, 152 Pietism, 63, 64 Politicization of the curriculum, 1 Popperian, 23, 109 Postmodern, 143, 164 Protestant, 10, 15, 58–63, 66, 70, 72–74, 78, 80, 115, 117, 119, 130, 167 Psychoanalysis, 46, 54 Puritanism, 62, 64–69, 75 Pädagogik, 103, 105, 108, 163–165

Q Quakerism, 64

R Rationality, 6, 7, 9, 13, 18, 19, 29, 38, 39, 41, 44, 46, 51, 53, 56, 60, 74, 79, 83, 95–100, 105, 108–110, 114–117, 121, 123, 126, 127, 131, 136, 156, 158, 163 Rationalization, 15, 16, 58–61, 63, 64, 66, 71, 75, 80, 89, 90, 97–99, 105, 108, 109, 113, 117, 119, 121–124, 126, 128, 156 Reduction, 18, 46, 68, 90, 92, 107, 108, 117, 118, 132, 134, 135 Reflection, 5, 16, 40, 54, 71, 80, 85, 87, 88, 96, 97, 101, 102, 104, 126, 131, 161 Reformation, 9, 10, 39, 60–63, 67, 84, 95, 105, 117, 130 Relative atomism, 3 Religion, 37, 58, 60, 61, 68, 69, 79, 82, 96, 103, 116, 128, 133 Renaissance, 25 Restructuring education, 1 Rhetorical, 36, 40, 74, 96

176

SUBJECT INDEX

S Scepticism, 9, 11 Scientific reasoning, 8, 14, 23 Second modernity, 160 Sensory experience, 49, 86, 88 Situated cognition, 122 Social science, 127, 134, 136, 140, 141, 145 Speculative philosophy, 23, 26, 29, 46, 52, 94 Subconscious, 47, 158 Subjectivity, 1, 9, 14, 34, 38, 53, 58, 62, 66, 69, 70, 75, 78, 93, 99, 125, 129, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163 Syllogism, 20, 23, 31, 36, 120 Symbolic curriculum, 4, 8, 9, 13, 15, 78, 98, 125, 126, 129

T Theological, 9, 38–40, 42, 48, 50, 54, 55, 57, 66, 75, 91, 127, 128, 137, 142 Theology, 34, 35, 37–39, 41, 66, 84, 99

Theory of communicative action, 16, 109, 147, 165 Theory of knowledge, 46, 91 Transcendental, 10, 11, 69, 81, 92, 93, 99, 100, 105, 126

U Universality, 3, 129, 136, 144, 156 University, 74, 111, 149

V Verstehen, 103, 137, 140 Vita activa, 64 Vita contemplativa, 64

W Western curriculum, 14, 113 Western education, 1, 78, 109, 164

Z Zweckrationalitä t , 95