The New Significance of Learning: Imagination's Heartwork

Educational practice has purposes of its own before they are taken over by religious, political or other controls with ambition to influence the minds and hearts of the young. This arresting notion forms the framework for an ambitious historical and philosophical discussion of very high quality. Part I proclaims the identity of education as a practice, as a prelude to the account in Part II of educational forms of understanding and action that constitute the practice. Hogan suggests that to make the case, he needs: “to show what is distinctive about educational purposes” […] “and what is lost by an abiding failure to appreciate their integrity” […]; to show how the loss of the sense of educational practice is a “decisive feature” of education across the globe; and how recent educational reforms promote “coercive uniformity” (p. 6). This interesting and complex book is not for the faint-hearted with its considerable range of historical and philosophical scholarship.

Part I “seeks to reclaim the all-but-obscured idea that education is a practice with an integrity of its own” (p. 8). Chapter 1 explores how it became “natural” in Western Civilization for education to be “a subordinate undertaking controlled by the powers-that-be in a particular society,” as contrasted with fifth century Athens where no such controls existed. Chapter 2 describes what Hogan regards as the failure of contemporary philosophers to put “visionary ideals for human betterment […] into the public arena” (p. 8), apart from measures designed to meet performance objectives. He singles out post-modernism as interested only in critique, while failing to “elucidate the distinctiveness of the practice.”

Chapter 2 provides the substantive account of the main theme, the nuances of which are best understood by quoting the argument from the Introduction to the book. “[…] Historical influences are active in every practice, whether these influences are religious, political, cultural or otherwise.” However, where such influences come to dominate the practice – as can happen in practices such as medicine and law, as well as in education – the inherent purposes of the practice become sidelined, or realigned to extrinsic goals or interests (p. 9). Hogan regards Socrates as the paradigm of providing education as a practice in its own right, but his insights, he claims, were eclipsed as Christianity was institutionalized in the Roman Empire and then in Western Civilization. To such political forces, Socrates’ pedagogical practices were unwelcome.

The final chapters of Part I begin the task of establishing education as a practice. In Chapter 4, Hogan rejects MacIntyre's account of teaching as a means, on the grounds that four distinctive kinds of relationships constitute teaching and learning, “the teacher's relationships to students, to the subject or material being taught; to colleagues, parents and others; and finally the teacher's relationship to him/herself within which the nature and significance of the other three relationships are decided” (p. 9). In Chapter 5, he relies on George Steiner for an account of the pedagogical imagination, though he rejects that view of the authority relationship in teaching and learning. Teaching, he asserts, “is the disciplined “heartwork” of human imagination. It stresses the singular importance of originality, self-criticism and renewal in the teacher's own learning for as long as teaching remains his or her way of life” (p. 10). Chapter 6 picks up the notion that the teacher engaging the various relationships explored in Chapter 4 “woos” the other parties to the engagement. Kinds of care are explored, and the “ever-present overtones of Eros” are examined and the demand made for an “unerotic” relationship since the teacher's commitments cannot be specific. It seems appropriate to examine the idea of education as a practice with distinctive purposes before engaging with the arguments in Part II.

The challenge in reading this stimulating book is that presented by the idea of education as a practice independent of political or economic forces, although education has presumably to be a social enterprise of some kind. The culprit in taking over this conception of education for its own purposes, it is argued, is Christendom in its emergence from the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century through to the Reformation and beyond, which formed the precedential base for governments and states through the centuries to follow suit in their takeover of the practice of education. There are at least two distinctive problems with this account: first, its historical accuracy, and second, the viability of the theme, derived from Socrates, that education is, could or should be a practice described as method.

First to the history. While there is some indication that Plato's work was known in the Byzantine Empire, the original texts were simply unknown to what we call Western Civilization before the early fifteenth century and with it knowledge of either the historic or the Platonic Socrates. Scholarship was primarily directed to mathematics and astronomy. It is generally acknowledged that Gemistos Plethon introduced Plato's writing to Cosimi de’ Medici in the early fifteenth century which marks the beginning of interest in Plato in Northern Europe. Persian and Arabic scholars had translated both Aristotle and Plato from the middle of the first century, and Islamic scholars such as Averroes discussed their work. Both were eventually translated into Latin. Yet Plato (and thereby Socrates) had no impact on Christendom in the first millennium after Christ, because the work was unknown. For it was not till the twelfth century that medieval scholasticists were thrilled by the discovery of Aristotle's ruminations on reason and faith: but they had no particular interest in Plato, nor in the teaching methods of Socrates. “Religious authorities” in “Western Civilization” would have known nothing of the rumblings of a character in the work of a then obscure Greek philosopher-politician who ran an academy for wealthy young Athenian men. The claim therefore that education as a practice was taken over by religious forces seems ahistorical: that “education lost its original identity as a practice in its own right and became largely subordinated into the more institutionalized interests in society” (p. 149) has a very uncertain historical base.

The second problem for this historical account is this: what counts as an educational practice, and does Socratic pedagogy define it? Here the distinction between content and method in an educational practice is surely relevant, or does (Socratic) method always trump content in defining educational practice? During Socrates lifetime (469-399 BC), the Parthenon was constructed (447-432 BC). The architects and builders of such a structure must have understood a great deal of mathematics, let along the arts and crafts the building displays and the knowledge of the capabilities of material used. Consider also this. In 193 AD, the Emperor Severus, an African by birth, richly endowed his native region with the city of Leptis Magna, along the coast from the Libyan city of Tripoli. The city, built some 600 years after the Parthenon, is one small example of the culture that developed the aqueduct, designed the vaulted arch, created the dome, designed central heating, decorated with mosaic, and pioneered paved roads. But who were these people, the men of immense imagination (note) and skills who constructed these magnificent theaters, temples and villas – architects, engineers, masons, builders (and no doubt slaves to do the donkey work)? It is surely stipulative at least to rule out that such people had had no educational experience or that their learning was not properly an educational practice. We will want to describe them as educated, not in terms of a philosophical method, or a reflexive study of themselves, but in terms of the content of the mathematics, etc. they knew and handed on.

Hogan's basic argument, then, that education is a distinctive practice has to face: the historical problems in the account of its origins and its treatment; and that educational practice cannot simply be defined in terms of method.

Turning to Part II of the book, the emphasis is changed to exploring what Hogan describes as the “forms of understanding that are most appropriate to the practice itself and its defensible conduct” (p. 10). Practitioners need to understand how it occurs, but also what is the “predisposed character of human understanding.” All experiences of human understanding involve interpretation. Teachers should detect predisposing influences that inhibit or facilitate fruitful learning. In Chapter 8 we are introduced to the contrast between MacIntyre's and Gadamer's conception of how we relate to text. The former Hogan describes as combative (p. 120) and the latter conversational. Combative describes the view that we enter the controversies within traditions, through testing and re-testing, say, as opposed to the exploratory, conversational mode where we are open to new opportunities, ideas and inspirations. Yet the combative must, in Hogan's view start from a partisan position, as opposed to Socratic explorations of conversation.

It is in Chapter 9 (pp. 131-134), however, that the argument for a distinctive educational practice, free of political or partisan encumbrances is best articulated. A teacher of Hamlet might come to a class from held conceptions of interpretation (Feminist, Marxist, Freudian). “All environments of learning that involve a teacher and a group of students are also environments of moral enquiry, to a greater or lesser degree” (p. 132). So students’ attitudes and beliefs are directly influenced by how the teacher handles the material. Free of these partisan loyalties to traditions, it is claimed, “there is such a thing as an educational standpoint in its own right” (p. 132). “[…] The relationship of such teachers, both to students and to inheritances of learning, were marked by a renewed questioning engagement.” The family of attitudes and practice, their underlying convictions, flourish in different historical and social circumstances, making the articulation of the educational standpoint universally defensible. Alertness to a predisposition to a particular tradition, pedagogically, will mean adopting a conversational stance to such traditions as a necessity, and engaging in the fruits of that conversation with learners. Ultimately there is an educational conception of a tradition that has to be protected from custodial or partisan ones (maybe, but math is math!). Chapter 10 focusses on the implications of this position for the education of teachers and Chapter 11 on globalization, though here the contributions of Rabindranath Tagore are oddly not included as exemplary for this tradition.

Hogan's account of the forces determining the character of public education is both judicious and pointed. Notwithstanding that the book is replete with this and other fascinating ideas, relationships and perspectives on teaching and learning, the central argument seems to be difficult to sustain, i.e. that education is a practice which in principle can and should be free of social, political, custodial or religious influences. Three comments are apropos. First, the book does not pick up with any clarity that Socrates’ view of himself was as a “gadfly” stinging the large noble horse of democracy into life. He was trying to encourage wealthy and influential people, often youngsters, in Athens to bring argument into their political affairs, and not merely rely on the existing political conventions – a matter that Aristophanes brings out so clearly in The Clouds. Second, the book is oddly neglectful of the values that seem implicit in the idea of education as a practice as being democratic values, i.e. social and political commitments to reason, logic, the value of the individual perspective. For maybe education as a practice in the way described so richly by Hogan is simply what a democracy requires, where individuals flourish in a political and social order: but that would, I suspect, be regarded as a custodial interest. Third, if it is the case that any educational practice demands content as well as method, then conversation may be more appropriate in some contexts than others. Teaching Hamlet needs a different pedagogy than teaching engineering, though neither demands solely one form of pedagogy or another. Finally, the unexamined life is not worth living, but human beings are already, as they begin that examination, rooted in their social and cultural mores. Conversation cannot begin with what Nagel calls “the view from nowhere.”