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Democracy's Middle Way: An Essay on "Can 'Education' be Defined?"
| Article
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10544 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
4,267 Words |
| Author
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Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Centennial Professor of Political
Science and professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
Author of several books, she is the editor of The family in
Political thought and coeditor of Women, War and Feminism. She
is the author of over a hundred essays in scholarly journals
and journals of civic opinion. She has been a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a scholar-in-
residence at the Bellagio Conference and Study Center,
Bellagio, Italy and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow at work
on an intellectual biography of the Addams. |
Education is a subject on which we all feel that we have something to say," writes Eliot, and here one is reminded of Flannery O'Connor's pithy riposte to a query from an earnest young student following a lecture she had given on the state of American fiction. The student fretted that education, the dead hand of the past, must surely stifle many a budding genius. Did not O'Connor find this to be the case? Her typically sardonic response was that, on the contrary, education didn't "stifle enough of them." She would surely join hands with Eliot in holding that everyone has something to say but not everything said is worthy of sustained attention. How to sort the wheat from the chaff, especially on a subject on which all feel they have something to say?
This quickly takes us to the heart of whether or not education can be definitely defined, so to speak. Here we find Eliot steering a course between those who, deploring the "wobbliness of words," opt for a strong stipulative definition that brooks no dissent and those who wobble all over the place, careening wildly in their definitions depending upon the passing enthusiasms of a given moment. The latter temptation is particularly great for educators and the definition of education in a democratic society. We all agree that a good society is democratic. But this is just the beginning of inquiry, for democracy is, in Eliot's argument, not simply a set of procedures, a constitution, if you will, but "a common ethos, a common way of responding emotionally, even common standards of conduct in private life."
Not being simple, democracy does not afford us a straightforward definition of what education in, and for, democracy might be. If we move too quickly to the notion of education for relevance ("to play their part in a democracy") we may stress watery adaptation above authentic excellence. If we concentrate exclusively on the few, assuming that the many are less vital in the overall scheme of things, the democratic culture necessary to sustain democracy over the long haul will either wither on the vine or not bear fruit in the first place. We are on the horns of more than one dilemma. But Eliot, almost jauntily, is neither discouraged nor deterred, for ours is a vibrant, living language and culture. "We do not want our language to become a dead language," he notes, and only a language and a tradition behind glass, an immobile tableau, would yield up a final word on what education means. And even that would not tell us what we, from our living vantage point, what to know. For one culture's definition of education or democracy will not and cannot be identical to that of another. We arrive at democracy and our understanding of education in our own way, framed within a
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