Individualism and Educational Theory

Individualism and Educational Theory

Philosophy and Education Editors: C. J. B. MACMILLAN College of Education. Florida State University. Tallahassee and D. C. PHILLIPS School of Education. Stanford University Editorial Board: Richard J. Bernstein, Haverford College David W. Hamlyn, University of London Richard J. Shavelson, U.C.LA. Harvey Siegel, University of Miami Patrick Suppes, Stanford University

Indi vidualism and Educational Theory by JOHN WATT School of Education, Murdoch University, Western Australia KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON

ISBN-13: 978-94-010-7610-4 e-isbn-13: 978-94-009-2460-4 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-2460-4 Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061. U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. IJrill/('d nil ("id/r('(' I)(II"'/" All Rights Reserved 1989 by Kluwer Academic Publishers Softeover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1989 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

FOR WENDY who manages to combine individuality with the social virtues.

No man is an island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were... ; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. John Donne, Devotions. Society is everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members... The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion... Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance.

PREFACE AND OVERVIEW The quotations on the previous page express two sharply different ways of looking at human life. The former comes from the early seventeenth century. John Donne, graduated from the intellectual and sexual explorations of his youth to middle-aged piety and a comfortable job as Dean of St. Paul's, is warning his congregation against seeing themselves as individuals. For him, virtue requires a consciousness of solidarity. To be a human being is to be continuous with the whole of humanity, and a proper grasp of the human condition involves feeling this continuity, suffering with anybody's suffering, rejoicing with anybody's joy, and dying a little with anybody's death. The growth of individualistic attitudes in his time is obviously, to him, a threat to this form of consciousness, and he calls his congregation back to the path of virtue. For Emerson, more than two centuries later, individualism is virtue. To be fully human is to perceive oneself as separate, autonomous, selfreliant. The feeling of solidarity and organic connection with other people, far from being the necessary foundation for the right approach to life, is the greatest possible threat to it. In the transition between these two quotations we see the emergence of individualism as a dominant ideology. My central aim in this book is to discuss and criticise the dominance of individualistic ways of thinking over western educational theory of the last generation. However I shall not begin directly on this, for two reasons. The first is that individualism is not a Simple, well-demarcated body of beliefs and attitudes, but a loosely-related and ill-defined family of them. Before discussing its place in recent educational theory it is necessary to do something towards defining it more exactly: to sketch its general character and the different strands or aspects which can be distinguished in it. The second reason is that I do not believe that educational theory can usefully be discussed as if it were separate from other areas of thought social theory in general, epistemology, and so on. For these reasons the first four chapters are not concerned directly with education, but with attempting to give a brief general account of the character and the varieties of individualistic thought. The first is a sketch of the development of the western individualistic tradition, designed to emphasise the existence of different and conflicting strands within it. The

VIll second is concerned with distinctively individualistic images of the desirably developed human being. The third is an attempt to put the special character of individualistic thought into sharper focus by contrasting it with examples, and particularly with one major example, of anti-individualistic thought. The fourth fills out the rather schematic account of individualism in the first two chapters with slightly fuller discussions of three approaches to it. Only then does the argument tum explicitly to the last generation of western educational theory. Selected areas of it are surveyed in the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters, and the dominant place held in them by individualistic modes of thought as these have been defined in the first part of the book is pointed out. The three areas of educational theory selected for discussion are the analytic school of educational philosophy, a group of theorists representative of the free schooling and deschooling movements, and the developmental theory of Jean Piaget. The eighth chapter is an attempt to assess the defensibility of the individualistic tradition of thought. It is argued that individualism can be defended as a fundamental normative stance, but that its influence as a dominant ideology on social and educational policy has been unfortunate in a number of ways, and that it needs to be tempered in most contemporary western societies by a heavier stress on communal solidarity and social obligation. The final chapter considers some variants of more collectivist ideologies, and points out that these too tend to take undesirable forms in societies where they are clearly dominant. The final suggestion is that all ideologies seem to tend towards corrupted forms when they dominate thinking in a SOciety, and that for this reason ideological pluralism and inconsistency make for the most tolerable ways of life. Individualism is treated here as an ideology, or rather as a number of related ideological positions, which cluster in two main strands. These strands will be called altruistic individualism and egoistic individualism. The former is centred on the conviction that every individual has a unique and ultimately equal value, on which morality ought to be founded. The latter is centred on the perception of people as separate, ultimately selfinterested individuals, whose basic relationship with each other is competitive. The first chapter is primarily an effort to sketch the parallel development of these two aspects of the tradition, and to map the common ground between them and the ways in which they are conceptually distinct, and even in conflict. The distinction between these two aspects of individualism will be basic to the development of the whole argument.

IX I have referred to individualism as an ideology, or a related set of them. There is a vast amount of literature which employs this term, and it is not always used in the same sense, so it is important for me to specify the sense in which I use it. By an ideology I mean a set of assumptions, ideals, preoccupations, habitual associations of ideas, and so on, which shape an approach to life. I use the word 'approach' to include selective attention and perception, patterns of thinking, and patterns of behaviour. As any approach must be shaped by some set of assumptions, ideals and so on, it follows that there is no possibility of escaping ideology. An ideology is primarily a collective phenomenon. It characterises an age or a society rather than an individual. Particular people's expressions of various aspects of individualism will be discussed, but they are discussed primarily as illustrations of general modes of thought, perception and behaviour, rather than as unique to those people. An ideology is inevitably related to the structure of the society which it characterises. Every society involves structures of power, gradations of prestige and levels of material advantage. Ideologies have obvious bearing on what sorts of structures will be seen as normal, natural, or legitimate. It is reasonable to expect that a society's dominant ideology will be adapted to its structures in such a way as to give them this appearance of normality and legitimacy. If this were not so there would be a complete dislocation between the thinking in a society and the realities of life in it. However I am not supposing a mechanistic connection between the material culture of a society and a resulting homogeneous ideology. In particular I want to acknowledge the possibility, and indeed the importance, of subordinate, oppositional ideologies, and of individual deviation from received ways of thinking. The main point of using the word 'ideology' is as a reminder of the consequences of the way of thinking for the legitimation, or the criticism, of the prevailing structure of power and distribution of resources, and as a reminder also of the location in the social structure of the groups of people whose interests are served by thinking in this way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ursula Thurgate and Lynne Schickert have both put a great deal of time and intelligence into converting disorganised manuscript into print. I want to acknowledge their contribution to this book. Denis Phillips, Jim Macmillan and Nick Burbules have read drafts and made many suggestions for its improvement. I have not, of course, followed as many of them as I should have done, but they have provoked me to work out a little more clearly what it was that I wanted to say. Most of all, however, my thanks are due to Wendy Watt, not only for her general support, but for the philosophy which I have learned from her.

CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments x PART I What is Individualism? Chapter 1 : The Individualistic Tradition In trod u ction The Christian Scriptures Institutional Christianity The Reformation The Eighteenth Century The Nineteenth Century The Twentieth Century Concluding Comments Endnotes 1 1 4 6 10 14 20 25 28 32 Chapter II : Individualistic Ideals of Human Development Autonomy in Action Autonomy in Belief Concluding Comments Endnotes 35 35 38 42 44 45 Chapter III : Alternatives to Individualism Gentile on the Individual and Society Other Anti-individualistic Viewpoints Autonomy in Belief or Basic Rationality? Endnotes 46 46 48 56 66 69 Chapter IV : Three Approaches to Individualism: Sumner, Rogers, Dewey William Graham Sumner 71 71 72

Xll The Individual as the Centre of Value Individual Creativity Social Darwinism The Inversion of Individualistic Values Carl Rogers The Autonomous Individual What Sort of Individualist? Common Ground Shared by Rogers and Sumner John Dewey Dewey's Attack on Dualisms Dewey's Criticism of Traditional Individualism An Acceptable Individualism Reconciliation or Rejection Endnotes 72 74 80 86 87 87 88 95 99 100 100 101 106 110 115 PART II Individualism in Recent Western Educational Theory 118 Chapter V : Analytic Philosophy of Education Peters on the Concept of Education Peters on Autonomy Scheffler on the Concept of Teaching The Concept of Indoctrination Conclusion Endnotes 121 121 122 126 129 132 135 136 Chapter VI : The Popular Radicals Carl Rogers Ivan lllich John Holt The Difference between Conservative and Radical Individualists A Possible Exception Endnotes 137 137 138 142 148 152 155 164

XUl Chapter VII : Piaget and the Study of Child Development 166 166 Piaget's Developmental Theory 168 Piaget's Individualism 172 Criticism of Piaget 177 Concluding Comments 182 Endnotes 184 Chapter VIII : Limits to Individualism 186 186 Ontological Individualism in a General Perspective 186 Limits to Autonomy 188 Limits to Social Determinism 192 Epistemologies as Social Programmes 197 Ontological Individualism in an Educational Context 200 Normative Individualism in a General Perspective 204 The Drift towards Egoism 208 Normative Individualism in an Educational Perspective 222 Endnotes 233 Chapter IX : The Alternatives and their Limits 235 The Collectivist Alternative 235 A Feminist Alternative 240 In Praise of Ideological Inconsistency 245 Endnotes 249 Index 250