Revisiting durkheim's morality, democracy and collective spirit of education in an era of instrumentalism, pluralism and competition

Transcription

1 Pedagogy, Culture & Society ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Revisiting durkheim's morality, democracy and collective spirit of education in an era of instrumentalism, pluralism and competition Lyn Yates To cite this article: Lyn Yates (1999) Revisiting durkheim's morality, democracy and collective spirit of education in an era of instrumentalism, pluralism and competition, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 7:1, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 23 Feb Submit your article to this journal Article views: 650 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 01 January 2018, At: 07:39

2 Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1999 REVISITING DURKHEIM REVIEW ESSAY Revisiting Durkheim s Morality, Democracy and Collective Spirit of Education in an Era of Instrumentalism, Pluralism and Competition LYN YATES La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia Durkheim and Modern Education GEOFFREY WALFORD & W. S. F. PICKERING (Eds), 1998 London: Routledge 232 pp., 50, ISBN Emile Durkheim, regarded along with Weber and Marx as one of the big three founders of sociology, was unique among them for the amount of his working life and his publications devoted to education. Geoffrey Walford and W. S. Pickering, editors of a new collection of essays on Durkheim s contribution to education, estimate that he spent three-quarters of his teaching time lecturing on pedagogy, and he produced books on Moral Education (1925, reprinted 1979) and on The Evolution of Educational Thought (1938, reprinted 1977), as well as taking considerable account of the institutional function of education in his Division of Labour in Society (1893, reprinted 1964). For much of this century, Durkheim s contribution to educational theory received relatively little attention. In the 1970s, however, especially through the sociological theory of Basil Bernstein (1975), and the new volume on Durkheim s life and work by Stephen Luke (1973), there was an upsurge of interest in Durkheim s work. What was particularly taken up was Durkheim s contrast between mechanical and organic solidarity, between two forms of society, and the different forms of association (social cohesion) and training required by each. It was an account that helped to make sense of the changing curriculum forms of the 1970s, the 165

3 LYN YATES new subjects and pathways and forms of pedagogical integration, the processes whereby schooling reproduced society. Since that time, in sociological circles at least, the focus has moved elsewhere. The impact of feminist theory and movements, the enthusiasm for the deconstructive readings of education offered by Foucault and others, the interest in ethnographic studies of particular groups, and in policy studies assessing and examining new developments in national curricula in various contexts, have been more to the fore. This new collection of essays on Durkheim, Durkheim and Modern Education, only occasionally and unevenly explicitly engages with this recent context of analysis and social and educational change. However, its choice of questions and topics, its selection of texts for analysis, does speak to these changes. In particular, the questions the contributors generally now find to be of interest are not, as in the 1970s, the question of the form of contemporary society or a descriptive/analytical account of changes in social solidarity which are reflected in educational reforms. Rather, its interest is in more pedagogical and normative questions for education. How, in any given pluralist and multicultural society, might schools engender a collective solidarity or spirit that can respect these differences, but yet form a sufficiently energised basis for continued democracy? How, in relation to the concerns in many countries that students are not being sufficiently educated in citizenship, can citizenship and the morality required of the citizen actually be developed through schooling? What insights can Durkheim s problematic offer in regard to the impoverished basis of some of the most popular contemporary programmes for approaching discipline and moral education in schools? How might schools and national schooling systems today deal with tensions between society and individualism? What else, other than the transmission of knowledge, vocational skills and rationality, should schools be engaged in? This collection brings together essays by distinguished Durkheim scholars (a notably male contingent, judging by this collection) working in a range of national settings: the United Kingdom, Holland, Japan, the USA. It is divided by the editors into three sections: a section primarily focused on textual exegesis of Durkheim s work; a section which takes up some empirical issues in schooling in national contexts, and relates these to Durkheim s questions and theories; and a final chapter proposing Durkheimian questions, but not answers as the necessary basis for schooling and social revitalisation in the new millennium. Frustratingly, there is neither a commonality in the context of discussion among the contributors to this collection nor, on the other hand, a format which engages strongly with their differences. Some of the contributions are scholarly and other-wordly; others are empirical, hard-headed and engaged; one is obscure and mystical; one seems to have been produced on another topic altogether, and simply given a brief top and tail to relate it to the Durkheim agenda. They do not work from a similar range of literature and assumptions, and do not show awareness of 166

4 REVISITING DURKHEIM similar existing questions and critiques. However, nor do the editors organise the material or their own introduction in a way which acknowledges or analyses some considerable differences of assumptions and answers evident n the different chapters. To take one obvious and key issue, to what does the Modern Education of the book s title refer? Does it mean contemporary? If so, does modern, via Durkheim s analysis, broadly take in all of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, and contrast only with traditional? Or is it to be distinguished from post-modern? Is modern education now problematic? Is it possibly a description for Durkheim s own era, but now necessary to be re-examined in the very different social conditions of the new millennium, and the very different analytical assumptions of post-modern social theories? How does globalisation (or even European union) and the growth of post-industrial society affect Durkheim s work, which itself was so founded in the parameters of the nation state and occupational organisations as a key organising foundation? In this collection, there is a surprisingly small amount of attention to any of these issues. For example, Cladis, Wessleigh, Pickering appear to simple take modern education as the latest specific case within Durkheim s basic analysis of modern societies, and do not take up more recent contemporary theorising about social change. Only two chapters, by Walford, and by Wexler and Stein, do engage with the debates about post-modernity and its implications. The editors say of Miller s contribution that he engages with recent debates on modernism and morality, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of Durkheim s ideas (p. 12), but other than Miller s own book, a review of this and a recent chapter on Durkheim, Miller refers to only a single book on the subject more recent than Durkheim s own work (Larmore, 1996). Miller s chapter discusses autonomy without mentioning any feminist or poststructuralist contributions to his theme. This is hardly what I would call engaging with recent debates. By contrast, the final chapter by Wexler & Stein (which I initially found almost unreadable) makes large demands on the reader by assuming a very close knowledge of recent moves, and debates in educational and social theory (as well as an unlimited vocabulary), while other chapters are untouched by these. Pickering s chapter, for example, argues the virtue of Durkheim s approach to moral education as instilling self-discipline without a single reference to the critiques of Foucault (1977), Hunter (1994), Henriques et al (1984), which have focused on this very element as the one which is most characteristic of modern education and most in need of unmasking. The aspects of Durkheim s work this collection particularly takes up are his discussions of how the morality and moral education of schooling must take the form of a set of processes, rather than curriculum instruction. Moral values and good ways of acting, the basis of a cohesive democracy, are to be engendered in students by the hidden curriculum of their schooling, including the role-model of the teacher, the modes of 167

5 LYN YATES discipline, the rituals of school life. The authority of those values is to come from the core foundational values of the society itself, to be outside and above the teacher; but the processes of school life should neither suppress the diversity of faiths among the students, nor suppress the humanity and individualism of the students. Students are to be schooled in ways where they are not suppressed as reflective individuals, but where they come themselves to appreciate (in embodied practice and not just as rational lip-service) the necessary virtues and respect required for communal life. The specific virtues and values are not set and unchanging, and are both a product of the particular society, and remade by its students and citizens. However, without the collective spirit, the embedded self-discipline and moral ways of acting, the complex societies of modern times are endangered and de-energised. A number of the contributors are concerned to demonstrate that Durkheim s vision of moral education is different from the communal indoctrination they associate with communist education systems, while also offering a more satisfactory form of moral training and citizen values than many programmes and prescriptions used in Western countries. Mark S. Cladis argues that Durkheim s vision was one where autonomy does not spring from escaping collective influences or from a total immersion in collective influences (p. 24). Compared with Kant, Cladis argues, Durkheim understood the need for some moral pluralism, both within and between societies, and that schools might legitimately promote plurality and distinctive practices and beliefs so long as these do not threaten the common good. W. Watts Miller offers a similar interpretation: that Durkheim s education for autonomy involves students recognising a multitude of social and moral disagreements (p. 90), but within the bounds of also recognising themselves as attached to and part of a society that provides objective limits, and that rationally requires certain dispositions of all its members. This, one might say, is all very well as an ideal, but what does it mean in any given context? Does not this beg the hard questions about just what today, in any given society, are its foundational core values or attachments? Is speaking about society in this way a code, which obscures that some interests, rather than others will be advanced? Is Durkheim s vision of a socially authorised moral underpinning meaningful and possible today? On these matters, contributors to this collection speak with different voices. Anton Wesselingh, for example, writing from the Netherlands on Citizenship and Modern Education, is dubious that Durkheim s vision of a collective base can offer guidance today. It is difficult to appeal to general values in a multicultural and pluralistic society such as ours (p. 43). However, he thinks Durkheim s problematic, the nexus between collective core social values acquired through schooling and citizenship, is important, and has yet to be replaced by an equally promising alternative. By contrast, Cladis s fellow countrymen, Mart-Jan de Jong and Jacques Braster, argue that the way the Dutch education system deals with matters 168

6 REVISITING DURKHEIM of religious and cultural (immigrant) diversity can be seen as a concrete illustration of how Durkheim s propositions can work in practice today. This system, they argue, does support diversity of religious establishment and support for some multicultural curriculum practices, while limiting these where they might threaten social cohesion. Political values of equity, for example, over-ride the rights of schools to discriminate against women or on grounds of sexuality. De Jong & Braster s chapter includes empirical evidence of teachers values and provides an interesting discussion of what form of social morality is being promoted in this system (the teachers most promoted value is tolerance; but they are less likely to promote appreciation of different cultural practices, or women s equality issues). Walford, writing on England and Wales, offers a different view again of the collective values issue. He notes the claims in the literature that post-modernity fundamentally fractures social solidarity, but also notes dissenting possibilities that this era may be both more diverse and more homogeneous. Moreover, he accurately points out, the nineteenth century nation states were far from being models of homogeneity. Walford then does not rule out the possibility of a collective social solidarity in a contemporary pluralist, post-modern society, but he does rule out the conservative British National Curriculum as a model of this. Its values, he says, are not socially inclusive and do not reflect present-day British society. In this sense, Walford makes a clear distinction between state/political values and foundational values of the society. Durkheim s vision of schooling s moral role requires its reflection of the latter, rather than the more limited former. However, Walford also uses Durkheim s discussion to give insights into the micro-aspects and politics of the state, to show how the processes of approval of new schools, in fact, do restrict these to make sure that they do not threaten social cohesion, at least as interpreted by the bureaucrats involved. Walford s contribution, like that of de Jong and Braster, provides examples of how Durkheim s questions can be used to develop useful new empirical research into the workings of education systems today. Other writers in the collection are concerned about inequalities, conflict and power (not just pluralism) and see the use of a Durkheimian perspective as one that can legitimate and conceal whose interests are being served. Roger Goodman makes this case in an interesting analysis of the Japanese education system, which seen through one lens exemplifies Durkheim s proposals on the appropriate means of education engendering social morality, but seen through another lens allows class advantage to flourish. The fact that this system is almost always analysed through a Durkheimian, rather than a Weberian or Marxist perspective, Goodman argues, is helping to construct and legitimate such a system, as much as actually describing and analyzing it (p. 104). In the USA, Sadovnik & Sempel note that progressive schools that have attempted to build community along Deweyan and Durkheimian lines have historically been 169

7 LYN YATES private schools, and that casts doubt on what democratic sense and collective values are actually being formed by them. Leaving aside the issue of whether core social values can (or should) be retrieved today, a second key theme in this collection concerns the processes of schooling and, in particular, how moral dispositions and citizenship can be developed through schooling. Concern about the shortcomings of schooling in these regards is certainly something that has been voiced in many countries in recent years often in the wake of a period of energetic curriculum reform devoted entirely to making schooling more up-to-date, more vocationally pertinent, more competitive. In this collection, writers consider Durkheim s theory of discipline and moral and citizenship education, and compare it with some well-known contemporary alternatives. Broadly, the claims made for Durkheim s approach are that it has a better appreciation of social and psychological dimensions of moral life than many alternatives; that it is a humane vision which treats students and teachers as persons of dignity; and that it promotes individual moral growth, as well as democratic social formation. In comparison with Kant and Kohlberg, Durkheim s view of moral values is neither abstracted, singular and timeless, nor simply a matter of rational understanding. For Durkheim, moral relationships must be promoted in the early years, through developing an embodied sense of community and attachment (a psychological basis for moral action), and developed further by a sense that teachers and punishments operate to restore breaches of transgression, which threaten the sacred basis of social life. Corporal punishment is totally inappropriate. Positively, the moral sense is developed through the model of the teacher and the sense of his/her adherence to higher social values, and through rituals which develop the attachments to community. If punishment is required it should be moderate, reluctant, and work by restricting the child from the community and restoring order. Arthur Ellis, reviewing the history of moral and citizenship education in the USA, finds much to commend in Durkheim s perspective. He sees it as a vision which builds moral practices, habits, not just ability to speak about these and one which was present in the founding schools of the early American settlers, stemming from a cohesive set of moral values. By contrast, the more recent approaches to teach values clarification, or teach citizenship in the curriculum, are impoverished understandings of how moral citizens are developed. However, Ellis is pessimistic about the ability to bring together Durkheim s vision and the realities of American schooling: Even the most casual observer should realize that American schools, and the institutions that prepare teachers, with their emphasis on technical interests so evident in the form of crowd control, behavioural objectives, disconnected skills, scripted lessons, dumbed-down textbooks and standardized tests, are far more interested in how than 170

8 REVISITING DURKHEIM in why, whether the subject is reading, mathematics or the enhancing of self-esteem. (p. 174) The rituals which build communal attachments today are only found in extra-curricular (sport, music) associations involving only a small part of the student body. Even worse, any attempt by teacher or school to be the authoritative exemplar of Durkheim s vision is likely to be met by litigation by rights-conscious and obligations-impaired middle- and upper-class parents (p. 180). David Rigoni dissects Lee Canter s Assertive Discipline model, which is immensely popular in many countries today. He shows that, in contrast to Durkheim s vision, it promotes no community or social attachment, no sense of broader values and no reflexive moral development. It simply develops short-term order and that only so long as intensive policing persists a model with worrying social implications. Stephen Turner discusses Durkheim s model in comparison with those of Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. He sees Durkheim, along with Gilligan, as recognising the shortcomings of any system which is not concerned with feelings and with dispositions to act morally as distinct from justify one s position well. However, he argues that Durkheim has a better account than Gilligan of the origins for such moral feelings, psychology, dispositions in social rituals in which attachments are learnt. Equally, however, it might be said that Turner, as well as Durkheim fail to address the problem of why social rituals are not distributed equally and promote a different type of moral development for men than for women. This, in turn, raises the issue that has been so prominent in sociology of education since the 1970s and is an issue for a theory such as Durkheim s, which makes so central the issue of school processes and relationships. The issue is that of difference: including the different meanings students of different kinds derive from their school experiences and the ways teachers (Durkheim s moral exemplars) in practice are likely to relate differently to different students. Only two of the essays in the collection (by de Jong & Braster and by Wexler & Stein) directly acknowledge this issue. De Jong & Braster, in their discussion of the Netherlands, suggest that this schooling system is basically working on Durkheimian lines, with some provision for the specific needs of immigrants and religious diversity, and some teaching of multiculturalism, but with limits to the diversity (for example in the interests of equity) such that there is gradual homogenisation over time (generations). However, their conclusion acknowledges. Durkheim s assumptions were often wrong. Like him we may take too much for granted. Maybe, we falsely assume that the integration of immigrant children is already taking place and only needs to be supported further by education, that cultural integration or homogenization is normal, and, last but not least, that it is also the 171

9 LYN YATES best political ideal, because it will mitigate the changes of discrimination, social exclusion and marginalization. (p. 122) Such an issue has been at the heart of debates in many countries and in relation to many groups, and especially via post-colonial theorising and feminist theorising, has been one major contributor to the post-modern strands of theory which disown the possibility of general answers; which prefer to expose the interests hidden in any claims to truth. On the one hand, then, Durkheim posits that without a citizenry and schooling founded on some collective (though not fixed) attachments and values the society will degenerate; on the other hand, many contemporary movements and theorists say that any such collective values need to be under constant challenge and exposure for the voices and interests that are silenced by them. It is this dilemma that the final essay in the collection, by Philip Wexler & Paul Stein, directly addresses. For Wexler & Stein, the big issue is how, taking account of those movements of recent years, social revitalisation can take place. What they are drawn to in Durkheim s work, as are many others in this collection, is that he is interested in the forms of association and attachment by which societies and communities are built; not just in theories which can analyse and critique the form of existing social organisations. [Signs of this concern and a similar debate are also found in debates in feminist theory, e.g. Benhabib et al (1995).] They are drawn also to Durkheim s sense that these foundations must have some spiritual element, must be something beyond intellectual beliefs or organisational arrangements: Durkheim s vision, however, is of extra-logical rapture, of participation in the grand ideals that are the soul of collectivity. (p. 208) To elaborate this, they turn not to Durkheim s writing on education, but his anthropological study of primitive societies, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and stress the religious elements and embodied consciousness that are necessary foundations of social energy. Although drawing on Durkheim in this way, Wexler & Stein argue that Durkheim s model is not, in one important dimension, appropriate today, in that it does presume a monological collective consciousness which is no longer possible (p. 215). For these writers, the issue of difference is an inescapable foundational issue for contemporary theory and practice. What they propose is to take up Durkheim s concern about schooling as a place to develop social attachments, but to recognise that a different form to this process is needed today, not the inculcation of core social values via the teacher, but a more dialogic working with difference: that the social space is between, existing differences as embodied practices of social energy and as the sensual, dialogic forms of education. (p. 215) I follow the logic of their argument, but I have no idea what this conclusion means as a direction for pedagogical practice! Here is a bit more: 172

10 REVISITING DURKHEIM a mediated education places the embodied relationship of educator and student, not ideals, in the pivotal position and turns the work of education to the social suffering of existence and the possibilities of revitalized living. [...] Cultural resacralization offers a truly post-modern critical social theory of education a vitalization of social being-in presence, un unspeakable, sensual animation of theory/practice as transformational material practices between learners in the light of an infinitude that is not separated from this world. (p. 220) What is interesting about this collection on Durkheim revisited is the questions it raises about our forms of national schooling today: the lack of moral vision that often frames these, the detached and technical approach to both content and discipline, the constant calls for schools to do a better job of educating future citizens, along with the obvious poverty of most of the approaches that are proposed and taken to this. What was interesting and rare about Durkheim (as a sociologist), is that he was concerned with both (detached) analysis and (engaged) pedagogy; with critique and vision; with micro practical and psychological considerations about what would lead students to want to do or not do certain things, as well as with the most macro-reflections on the relationship, and interaction of schooling and social formation. Correspondence Lyn Yates, Graduate School of Education, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia (lyn.yates@latrobe.edu.au). References Benhabib, S., Butler, J., Cornell, D. & Fraser, N. (1995) Feminist Contentions: a philosophical exchange. New York: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (1975) Class, Codes and Control. Vol. 3: towards a theory of educational transmissions. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1964) Division of Labour in Society. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1977) The Evolution of Educational Thought. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1979) Moral Education. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. London: Penguin. Henriques, J., Holloway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. & Walkerdine, V. (1984) Changing the Subject: psychology, social regulation and subjectivity. London: Methuen. Hunter, I. (1994) Re-thinking the School: subjectivity, bureaucracy, criticism. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Larmore, C. (1996) The Morals of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luke, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim, his Life and Work: a historical and critical study. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 173