This is a wonderfully clear introduction to some of the most powerful ideas

that have shaped education today. Written in an engaging and inviting

style, it encourages readers to analyze and synthesize for themselves the
ideas that form the major paradigms of educational thought. Five Paradigms
for Education is additionally valuable because it brings unexpected insights
into reflection on current educational issues, from, among others, Mende
thinking as well as the more familiar Rousseau, from ancient Israeli
thinking as well as Plato, from Jesus as well as Homer, broadening and
deepening conversations about what we should do in everyday classrooms.
A great text for pre-service teachers, as well as other educators. Neat, clear,
engaging, and helpful.
—Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University
Ted Newell presents an informative and engaging account of five major
forms—paradigms—of education in Western history. He relates these to
important issues in contemporary education. He demonstrates that all
forms of education, however different they may otherwise be, rest upon
underlying, fundamental assumptions about the world and human life.
These assumptions are at bottom essentially philosophical and religious.
The reader is challenged and given important help in being able to bring
to light and evaluate the basic religious-philosophical assumptions—often
hidden—to be found at the heart of every form and practice of education
today.
—Douglas M. Sloan, Professor of History and Education Emeritus, Teachers
College, Columbia University, author of Faith and Knowledge.

The best teachers do what they do well, and know why they do it. The
fundamental aims of education continue to be hotly disputed. According
to Whitehead, “it is the essence of education that it be religious.” Newell’s
underlying message is that education has the potential to transform
students for the better. A superb overview of the key issues, Five Paradigms
for Education is essential reading for pre-service teachers: challenging yet
accessible, provocative yet level headed, and with the potential to irrevoca-
bly transform their understanding of what it means to be a good teacher.
—Andrew Wright, Kings College London, author of Critical Religious
Education: Multiculturalism and the Pursuit of Truth

Beginning with the proposition that educating is spiritual or religious work,

Newell insightfully and analytically compares five mayor paradigms of
education with fruitful results. Here is choice reading for all those engaged
in education of any form—scholar, teacher and student alike.
—Robert Pazmiño, Valeria Stone Professor of Christian Education, Andover
Newton Theological School

Newell helps advance an important conversation about ways people under-

stand education, giving his readers a framework to think about how their
societies’ educational ideals influence the day-to-day work of teachers. His
readers will identify what philosophic wells they themselves drink from in
their educational practice.
—Ken Badley, Director of Doctoral Studies, George Fox University

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0001
The Cultural and Social Foundations of Education

Series Editor: A.G. Rud, Distinguished Professor in the College of Education of Washington
State University, USA.
The Palgrave Pivot series on the Cultural and Social Foundations of Education seeks to
understand educational practices around the world through the interpretive lenses provided
by the disciplines of philosophy, history, sociology, politics, and cultural studies. This series
focuses on the following major themes: democracy and social justice, ethics, sustainability
education, technology, and the imagination. It publishes the best current thinking on those
topics, as well as reconsideration of historical figures and major thinkers in education.

Titles include:

Ted Newell
FIVE PARADIGMS FOR EDUCATION
Foundational Views and Key Issues
Aaron Stoller
KNOWING AND LEARNING AS CREATIVE ACTION
A Reexamination of the Epistemological Foundations of Education
Sue Ellen Henry
CHILDREN’S BODIES IN SCHOOLS
Corporeal Performances of Social Class
Clarence W. Joldersma
A LEVINASIAN ETHICS FOR EDUCATION’S COMMONPLACES
Between Calling and Inspiration

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0001
 Five Paradigms
for Education:
Foundational Views
and Key Issues
Ted Newell
Associate Professor, Education,
Crandall University, Canada

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0001
five paradigms for education
Copyright © Ted Newell, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–39180–3 PDF
ISBN 978-1-349-48524-6 ISBN 978-1-137-39180-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-39180-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2014
www.palgrave.com/pivot
 To Wanda, my wife.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0001
 Contents

List of Images vii

List of Tables viii
Series Editor’s Preface ix
Preface: Benefits to Students xi
Personal Acknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction: Why Learn about

Paradigms of Education? 1
2 Traditional Paradigm of Education 12
3 Plato the Revolutionary 52
4 The Empirical Paradigm 74
5 Rousseau’s Paradigm 100
6 Jesus’s Paradigm 124
7 Summary: What Is “Education”? 145

Index 156

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0001
 List of Images
1 Mende Bundu mask used for goddess
Sowo in Poro initiation rituals
Credit: Brooklyn Museum Collection in
public domain 13
2 Ancient Greek helm typifies the warrior ethic
of aretē
Credit: Bigstock 21
3 Jewish papyrus scroll typifies scholarly concern
for divinely revealed Law
Credit: Bigstock 35
4 The sun at noon typifies the culmination sought
by Plato’s education, an overwhelming vision of
the Good attained by persistent critical
reasoning
Credit: Bigstock 56
5 “Two and two makes four; four and four makes
eight ... Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the
marigolds. You and your arithmetic, probably
you’ll go far/… Seems to me, you’d stop and
see, how beautiful they are.”— “Inchworm Song,”
Frank Loesser, 1952
Credit: Bigstock 76
6 Desert island. The innate goodness and
resourcefulness of solitary individuals such as
Robinson Crusoe inspired Rousseau
Credit: Bigstock 102
7 The circle at the center of the Celtic Cross
claims a cosmic scale for an event accomplished
within time
Credit: Bigstock 127

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0002 vii

 List of Tables
2.1 Mende education facets, reverence, and duty 19
2.2 Athenian education facets, reverence, and duty 27
2.3 Hellenistic Jewish education facets,
reverence, and duty 43
3.1 Platonic education facets, reverence, and duty 68
4.1 Empirical education facets, reverence, and duty 93
5.1 Rousseauan education facets, reverence,
and duty 118
6.1 Jesus’s education facets, reverence, and duty 138

viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0003

 Series Editor’s Preface
The Palgrave Pivot series on the Cultural and Social
Foundations of Education seeks to understand educational
practices around the world through the interpretive lenses
provided by the disciplines of philosophy, history, sociol-
ogy, politics, and cultural studies. This series focuses on
the following major themes: democracy and social justice,
ethics, sustainability education, technology, and the imagi-
nation. It publishes the best current thinking on those
topics, as well as reconsiderations of historical figures and
major thinkers in education.
The cultural and social foundations of education are
enjoying a rebirth. While studies of Plato, Pestalozzi,
and Dewey or analyses of the effects of Supreme Court
decisions or world economic policies have always been
important to understanding education, there is increased
urgency for such work in today’s educational climate.
Education is seen in both the developed and the developing
world as a means to social advancement and improvement
of life. More than ever there are questions about what kind
of education should be provided and for whom. In addi-
tion, information technologies are rapidly transforming
teaching and learning, while a political climate in many
countries emphasizes market solutions to social problems
at the same time that it moves away from democratic
forms of schooling.
Out of this rich context, the Cultural and Social
Foundations of Education series was established to
explore five themes important in schooling in short books
by leading and rising scholars. I chose themes that are of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0004 ix
x Series Editor’s Preface

perennial importance to the foundations of education, such as democ-

racy and social justice, as well as newer emphases, such as technology
and sustainability that scholars are exploring. Democracy and social
justice has been a perennial theme in foundations of education and
continues to have greater urgency. This series will feature works that
examine worldwide issues related to democracy and social justice, from
the effects of wealth and income inequality on schools in developed
countries to the spread of democracy and social justice concerns to other
countries around the world. Closely related to this is the second theme
of ethics: issues of right, wrong, fairness, equity, and equality in schools
and educational practices worldwide. Increased attention is being paid
to our planet’s health; so how we can educate our children to accept and
deal with environmental degradation forms the third theme. What it
means to educate for a sustainable future is a question that foundation
scholars are increasingly addressing. For a fourth theme, the impact of
information technology upon education is enormous and not something
that should be left just to technical experts in that area. There is a need
for scholars in the cultural and social foundations of education to inquire
critically about the claims made by technology and to inform us about
new developments in this area. Finally, especially today, the arts and
imagination are all too often pushed to the margins of schooling, and
so this topic forms the fifth theme. Scholars of foundations have long
championed the importance of this area: in the last century, John Dewey
made a compelling argument for the importance of art and the imagina-
tion and especially for supporting the arts in educational practice in his
work Art as Experience (New York: Putnam, 1934).
The volumes in the series will be both single authored and edited
collections and will serve as accessible resources for those interested
in foundational issues in education at all levels, particularly advanced
undergraduate and graduate students in education and the social
sciences who are being exposed to the latest thinking on issues of peren-
nial importance and relevance to the context and practices of education
worldwide.
Series Editor
A. G. Rud

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0004
 Preface: Benefits to Students
This book explores five major paradigms of education.
Comparing the paradigms will lead pre-service teachers
to see the assumptions that make each one so unique.
You will find your own personal approach to teaching
and learning in the middle of perennial controversies in
education. You will see how basic curriculum decisions
lead to instructional approaches.
The five paradigms will enable you to expand your ideas
of teaching and learning beyond familiar public educa-
tion. They will help you to imagine alternative classroom
practices, motivational strategies, ways of assessment, even
alternative schools. You can develop what Eliot Eisner
called an “educational imagination” by seeing a spectrum
of educational possibilities.1
Students can use this book to begin thinking out their
own practice of teaching. Philosophical language is abstract
and difficult by definition. By contrast, histories are
narrations. They strike chords with students’ experience.
Historical narratives let you conduct a dialogue between
yourself and others. In historical or cross-cultural reading,
one can no longer take the present as the only standard
of what is right—a vice historians call “presentism.” “The
past is a foreign country—they do things differently there.”
Readers can make sense of concepts when they are seen
in an unfamiliar frame of reference. After initiation in
histories of education, students have a basis to size up
theoretical claims or philosophies for themselves.2
After your encounter with the five paradigms, you
will be able to make educational choices knowing more

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0005 xi
xii Preface: Benefits to Students

alternatives. The five paradigms draw lines from your own experiences
into educational history. Each paradigm includes stories of major educa-
tors. They hold up historical snap-shots for us. Examples allow you to
agree or disagree about basic commitments in education. In the process,
you will develop cross-cultural competency. As you realize how much a
teacher is the human face of schooling, your commitment to students
will strengthen. Your vocational commitment will grow stronger as you
identify your own educational “bottom lines.”3

Notes
 In The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School
Programs, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall, 1994), Eliot
Eisner expands educational thinking beyond narrowly defined educational
objectives and subjects with clear economic payoff. He focuses on artistic
expression to expand ideas of knowledge that are worthwhile.
 Émile Durkheim (1857–1917), founding figure of academic sociology, wrote in
his Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development
of Secondary Education in France, trans. P. Collins (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1977), 9–14, that historical study can give students a foundation
for abstract philosophy. H. M. Kliebard, “Why History of Education?,” The
Journal of Educational Research 88, no. 4 (1995): 194, cites Durkheim’s reasoning.
The past as foreign is the first sentence of L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New
York: New York Review Books, 2002), 17; H. I. Marrou, A History of Education
in Antiquity, trans. G. Lamb (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1982), xi, says that educational histories generate in students an internal
dialogue that makes them alert to issues.
 H. I. Marrou, in A History of Education in Antiquity, xii, says that educational
histories generate in students an internal dialogue that makes them alert to
issues.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0005
 Personal Acknowledgments
My gratitude to John Kuentzel, Samuel Scolnicov, Natasha
Gill, Joseph Buijs, Robert Larmer, Jennifer Aikman-Smith,
Kevin Quast, and Althea Spiridon is deep and sincere.
Thanks for taking time out to read and suggest improve-
ments in the chapters in this book. Your encouragement
and corrections meant a great deal through the months of
the project.
To Douglas M. Sloan, Andrew Wright, Harry Fernhout,
N. T. Wright, Craig Evans, and David I. Smith—your
words on paper and in person enabled me to begin to
bracket education and faith together. The book would be
impossible without you.
To Dan Goodwin, Stephen Dempster, and Seth Crowell:
conversation with you or material help made this a ten-
year adventure.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0006 xiii

 1
Introduction: Why Learn about
Paradigms of Education?
Abstract: Sets out advantages of studying education
foundations or philosophy of education. Historical or
narrative presentation avoids unfamiliar abstractions.
Explains the book’s thesis that Whitehead’s aphorism, “The
essence of education is that it be religious,” most fully explains
features of the five educational paradigms. Advocates that
pre-service teachers can comprehensively grasp the work
of teaching when they see educating as “religious” work.
Whitehead said that education should seek to implant
“reverence” in students—respect for what is most important
in their tradition—and “duty,” or readiness for appropriate
action. The five paradigms show distinctive reverences and
duties.

Keywords: aims of education; education foundations;

philosophy of education; religion; Smart, Ninian;
Whitehead, A. N.

Newell, Ted. Five Paradigms for Education: Foundational

Views and Key Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137391803.0007.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0007 
 Five Paradigms for Education

Why learn about paradigms of education?

This book gives readers a map to see education as a whole. Its bird’s eye
view can place aspects of education in right proportion. Seen from the
highest vantage point, the significance of a teacher’s work can appear in
right perspective.
Education is far more than classrooms, student desks, and an orderly
day. Education is not only what people in Western societies associate
with public schooling or university. Most broadly, education is a society’s
process of cultural transmission. A paradigm of education depends on
a distinct meaning of self and society; it works toward a conception of
ideal humanity. Rival educational paradigms come from rival concepts
of what is important about life. Underlying conceptions of reality are
radically different. For their own purposes, the educations in this book
shape their initiates in radically different ways.
The five paradigms of education are:
 Traditional paradigm
 Plato’s academic paradigm
 Locke’s empirical paradigm
 Rousseau’s paradigm
 Jesus’s paradigm

Facets of paradigms

Alternative educational practices come from alternative basic assump-

tions. The meaning of educational excellence, a conception of “teacher,”
and so on are different within each paradigm, because the whole point of
“education” differs. People in Western societies are familiar with a main
way of educating—the Empirical paradigm with its precise routines
(more or less). How most people in Western societies understand a
teacher’s role, expectations for students, school discipline, regular
rituals, and other facets come from the Empirical paradigm. But the
word “teacher” does not mean the same to Jean-Jacques Rousseau as
in the Empiricist paradigm. The character of Rousseau’s ideal graduate
differs radically from Plato’s ideal graduate. Variation also emerges in
a Traditional paradigm compared to Jesus’s paradigm—and between
all paradigms. By comparing, readers see the range of possibilities for

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0007
 Introduction: Why Learn about Paradigms of Education? 

“teacher,” “discipline,” and other facets. Pre-service teachers can learn

to relate the facets of an educational paradigm to a core purpose and
meaning. Each facet shares in the task of passing on to its graduates the
desired personal attributes. “Facets” is term of choice because, like a
diamond, these are aspects of education.
Even if most readers return to teaching in an Empirical educational
paradigm, they come to a wider understanding of teaching. They
appreciate how teachers can be mentors as in, say, the Traditional Greek
Athenian paradigm.
Questions a reader can ask about each paradigm include:
 Aims: In this paradigm, what makes a person “educated”? That
is, what are its aims of education? When are sponsors of learners
satisfied with graduates? Why did the society educate? What
knowledge is important? What is its telos?
 Assessment: How is learning assessed? By ability to repeat a body of
knowledge; certain abilities; values, dispositions, or moral qualities?
 Students’ nature: Who was educated? From which ages onward?
What is the student’s nature? For example, is it innocent, depraved,
receptive, resistant, social, individualistic, conceptual, embodied, or
holistic? What psychologies are relevant?
 Teacher: What is the teacher’s role for students? Is it passive or
active? Is the teacher the knowledge source, facilitator, coach, or
mechanic? How are students shaped toward the preferred outcome?
Which teaching approaches are appropriate or efficient?
 Knowledge: What is valued as knowledge? What is truthful? What
is “content”? How is it gained? What was taught? What is the
human horizon? Is teaching about the material world or a spiritual
world, or both?
 Motivation: How do sponsors motivate? Which ways of discipline
or management are emphasized and which are avoided or
minimized?
 Setting: Which learning environments are important—classrooms,
outdoors, labs, hands-on settings, workshops, library, individual
study, or the drill square? Is teaching institutionalized in a school?
 Characteristic events: Which regular events characterize the
paradigm? Are any rituals shared? For example, how would a
visitor know that a particular educational setting is within this
paradigm?

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0007
 Five Paradigms for Education

Proposition: educating is spiritual or

“religious” work
Alfred North Whitehead urged fresh aims for education. His address on
the right aims for education appears in dozens of volumes on philosophy
of education or educational foundations. It is a classic expression.1
Speaking when World War I made British leaders aware that the educa-
tion system fell short, the eminent mathematician and philosopher says that
teachers and administrators have tolerated disconnected facts and subjects
for too long. Education is unnecessarily boring because its information
is separated from life. Whitehead urged that education move to a holistic
approach. Educational data should connect to form a comprehensive picture.
Showing how subjects have coherent meaning should be so much a prior-
ity that teachers should teach some elements intensively even if they teach
less of a range. Better to sacrifice coverage than lose meaning. Education
must also draw lines between subjects that seem isolated from each other.
Mathematics should connect to language and history, for example. For full
meaningfulness, education must adopt the broadest possible aim.
Whitehead concludes with his recommendation for that basic
connection. He says: “The essence of education is that it be religious.”
Whitehead suggests a basic understanding that will join all parts together
is a comprehensive view of the world and calls it “religious.” Perhaps
he chooses the term “religious” instead of “philosophical,” because the
first term denotes a wide-angle understanding of reality that shapes and
directs one’s personality.
How could anyone assert that education is “always religious”? Public
education in Western societies claims to be not religious at all. It believes
itself to favor no religion, nor suppress any religion. Courts boost
school neutrality and pluralism as they secularize facets of school life
such as holiday displays or names. Occasionally public schools in North
America, Europe, or Australia teach about religion. Few, if any, teach a
particular religion as the way the world really is—as public truth.2
Let’s be clear that Whitehead is not promoting any particular religion.
The terms he chooses show he refers to spirituality. Whitehead believed
that all religions are manifestations of an underlying reality, a single
religion that underlies the different religions. Though widely accepted in
Western societies, his relativistic conception is far from uncontroversial.
Few committed Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or Christians—to say
nothing of other faiths—are relativists. Each believes that their religion

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0007
 Introduction: Why Learn about Paradigms of Education? 

gives an account of the world as it is, and their lives are more or less
consistent with their understanding.
Whitehead’s insight is that education must be religious in the sense of
making meaning. The task of building the fullest comprehension lends it a
clear purpose. For Whitehead, an education makes complete sense when
its parts are oriented to character development. His perceptive and freeing
advocacy is for education to empower people by connecting to meaning.3
Whitehead says that education’s specific “religious” aims are “rever-
ence” and “duty.” He maintains that reverence is “an intense awareness
of how the past is present as the future unrolls. The present holds within
itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole
amplitude of time, which is eternity.” Whitehead is saying—at least—that a
society lives its history. The novelist William Faulkner said the same when
he wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Reverence is conscious
respect for a society’s foundations. Traditions become alive as a new
generation comes to live in them. Traditions die if they are not taken up
and renewed. The need for renewal is true of every new generation even in
the present-day West. Cynicism about a society tears at its future.4
Duty is reverence’s companion virtue. It “arises from our potential control
over the course of events.”5 Duty thus means readiness to respond. Whitehead
is urging that students should be led to respond to shared reality.
Scholars have virtually ignored the main point of Whitehead’s essay on
aims of education. Its deepest note attracts the least attention. This book
sets out to show that the most basic work of educating is developing
people within an understanding of reality. It will show how reverences
and duties vary by paradigm. It asserts that the variety of beliefs about
reality largely—but not entirely—explains the variety of educational
systems which this book calls “paradigms.” If educating is religious work,
then the most important influence on an educator is what Whitehead
calls his or her religion—that is, his or her view of reality.
“Neutral” public education, like all educations, draws on a worldview
and reproduces that worldview. Thus it is “religious” in the Whitehead or
Ninian Smart sense, to be seen in this chapter.

What does “religious” mean?

Humans may or may not be able to be certain about what is ultimately

real. However, groups that sponsor schools share key beliefs about the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0007
 Five Paradigms for Education

important things in life. They must agree enough that the school is able
to function. Complete skepticism would leave a society unable to make
decisions needed for everyday life. Any social group rests on confidence
and trust, whether between two persons or among millions. Thus, shared
beliefs establish possibilities for any social group, including educational
possibilities.
What is this basis of agreement? Ninian Smart, a founding figure of
religious studies as university discipline, realized that nearly any proposed
definition of religion would run into some exception or other. We might
insist on an essence, such as transcendence. But political ideologies of the
twentieth century functioned like religions, even though their concerns
were apparently all this-worldly. Another example is Buddhism, which
is non-theistic. Due to the difficulty of definition, Smart defined religion
by what it does. If a system of thought or being functions as religions do,
then it is a religion.
The functional approach led Smart to propose seven interlocking
dimensions that mark a religion: a narrative or mythic dimension; a prac-
tical or ritual dimension; an experiential, emotive dimension; a doctrinal
or philosophical dimension; an ethical and legal dimension; a social and
institutional dimension; and a material, visible dimension such as art
works or buildings. Together the seven dimensions are a virtual reality
helmet of life. They are facets of a complex story about reality lived out
by members. Thus, Smart’s “worldview” is a comprehensive way to talk
about religions. Comprehensive reality-narratives include religions and
Marxism, fascism, nationalisms, secularism, scientism, post-modernism,
or nihilism.
The other side of Smart’s approach is that one cannot understand reli-
gions as a general phenomenon. One can hardly make a statement about
religion in general. What might be said about Buddhist transcendence
is radically at odds with monotheistic transcendence. Specific religions
in specific times and places interpret reality in a unique way. Any idea
about “religion” will meet exceptions.6
Smart’s approach leads us to see the beliefs that inform a cultural
process like education are embodied in practices. A worldview is in
part what sociologists such as Berger and Luckmann call a “plausibility
structure.” None of the paradigms of education in this book are only
head knowledge. They make total sense to their adherents because they
embody a way of being in the world. Traditionalists, Plato, Rousseau,
empiricists, or Jesus—our five paradigmatic educators—see their

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0007
 Introduction: Why Learn about Paradigms of Education? 

practices as common sense. Their educational proposals are not merely

a kind of mental chess. Education embodies and inducts initiates into a
persuasive way of life.7
Smart presents his seven dimensions like snapshots in an album, but
the comprehensiveness shows the scale of a reality-narrative. He makes
apparent that an extensive effort over time will be needed to initiate a
society’s members into its social reality. Education is hard work. Only a
conviction that initiates come into fuller reality could prompt the long-
term engagement of an educator. Skepticism about education’s worth will
not get the job done. As Whitehead said, educating is religious work.

Presuppositions start us thinking

How far down do basic beliefs go? Try an experiment. Pick any statement
and start asking “why?” See how many answers you give before you can
no longer ask “Why?” Perhaps your last reply will be the same as the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s: “If I have exhausted the justifications
I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to
say: ‘This is simply what I do.’ ” Reasoning is built upward from assump-
tions, as Wittgenstein makes clear. We take some basic beliefs on faith
before we even start to think.8
For example, I may believe that human nature is basically good. If so,
then I will also believe that children want to learn and require light or
no incentives to do so. Someone who believes human nature is basically
inclined toward itself-benefit narrowly conceived will see my approach to
classroom management and discipline as lax, liberal, wrong, or foolish.
The basic disagreement is not on a technique of classroom management.
It is with my presupposition that human nature is basically good.
Some disagreements will go on and on, just because different assump-
tions are below the surface. The realization of the deeper basis of disa-
greement or agreement is helpful to wise choices. Ways of seeing and
being in the world make certain practices plausible. Other people’s ways
of seeing and being make their practices “natural” and “common sense”
to them. The assumptions we make before we begin to reason can be
called presuppositions. They make reasoning possible in the first place.
Prior commitments are unavoidable in education.
Cataloging our basic suppositions is not simple. As soon as any of us
debates a value-loaded issue such as sex education, assessment policies,

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 Five Paradigms for Education

testing procedures, or subjects to be included in required curriculum,

different assumptions come out. Presuppositions are one’s deepest
commitments, which are not reasoned. You cannot determine empiri-
cally any answer to the question whether human nature is good or bad.
An empirical test could not end the debate between Great Books boost-
ers and progressive, child-centered educators. Presuppositions are basic
beliefs of individuals and societies. In other words, even if a secular
person holds them, basic beliefs are religious in nature.9
Kieran Egan made a short list of issues on which educators believe
very differently. Each issue has sweeping implications for educating. The
issues are:
 Is human nature good or bad?
 Is culture without or within? Is culture something external to
human beings that they acquire, like a knowledge of great books,
works of art, or plane geometry? Or is culture an attribute that each
person develops inside themselves which can appear differently in
different persons?
 Is consciousness past, present, or future? Should people be oriented
to the foundations and great achievements of the past, to the “now,”
or to a future on a progressively receding horizon?
 Is the center of value body, or mind, or soul? Should education be
about the will, about cognition and academics, or about spiritual
life?
The four parameters (at least) invent contrasting systems of education
to fit. Some presuppositions nest together, fortunately. For example, the
educator who believes culture to be without (in books and art and music,
etc.) will tend to be the same person whose orientation is to a great
past. The point is that presuppositions shape one’s educational package.
Education is built up from unargued and unarguable assumptions that
make thinking possible.

What is “education”?

A working definition seems to be an essential preliminary before

studying “education.” However, let’s consider the challenge of definition
carefully. John White’s study of aims of education is cautious about defi-
nitions. How one defines an “educated” person also defines education’s

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 Introduction: Why Learn about Paradigms of Education? 

aims. To avoid limiting himself and to catch the widest possible set of
options, White defined education minimally—simply, “upbringing.” His
question of aims was: what should be our aim in bringing up children or
young people? The minimal definition allows for aims that are cognitive
or to do with character and others.10
The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein urged that
definitions in many areas are impossible but suggested that the way a
term such as education is used in practice can point to its meaning.
“[W]hen investigating meaning, the philosopher must ‘look and see’ the
variety of uses to which the word is put.” So different is his perspective
that Wittgenstein repeats: “Don’t think but look! ... and such looking is
done vis-a-vis particular cases, not thoughtful generalizations.” Let’s take
Wittgenstein’s advice. By comparing what education looks like in the five
paradigms, the variables of any education will stand out. After exploring
the five paradigms, we return in the summary with the advantages that
definite illustrations and examples give us and consider a definition.11

Footnote: educational paradigms are

historical snapshots

The explanation of each paradigm is limited to a defined historical

period. Anthropologists sometimes used to write in the “anthropologi-
cal present.” A ritual could be idealized; it might never have appeared as
described. For example, it might be true that Mende education in the
1890s was not very different from Mende education in all eras. However,
what might be accurately said about it before the changes brought by
colonialism, modern education, and the cash economy is never quite true
afterwards. Similarly, what one might say about aristocratic Greek educa-
tion in Homer’s era is different from the period after city-states rose to
prominence. Accordingly, I avoid a general label like “traditional African
education” or even a “Mende education.” Education changes in new
circumstances. Changes in technology, resources, economic development,
political arrangements, gender empowerment, historical turns, basic
human creativity, or the internal logic of a paradigm brought change to a
society’s education process. Significant shifts occurred in understanding
Homer’s story-singing and Jewish education after the Exile.
Whenever African, Greek, and Jewish education as we showed it was
pretty well always the case, we note the generality.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Dozens, if not hundreds, of scholars work on the thinkers discussed in

these pages. The explanations here are richer because they incorporate
more complex understandings from recent publications. The educational
paradigms are current to 2013. Historical precision is anthropology’s
friend.
Three examples of the Traditional paradigm of education follow. In
each example, we look at a relatively stable and homogeneous culture,
not an education for a modern pluralistic culture undergoing rapid
change.

Notes
 Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Education—A Plea for Reform,” in
The Organisation of Thought: Educational and Scientific (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1917), 1–28. The essay was in later Whitehead collections in 1949
and 1982.
 One sample report of many available works on religious neutrality and
schooling is Javier Martínez-Torrón and W. Cole Durham Jr., “Religion and
the Secular State,” in General Reports of the XVIIIth Congress of the International
Academy of Comparative Law/Rapports Généraux Du XVIIIème Congrès de
l’Académie Internationale de Droit Comparé, ed. Karen B. Brown and David V.
Snyder (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2012), 1–28.
 Jack G. Priestley, “The Essence of Education: Whitehead and the Spiritual
Dimension,” Interchange 31, no. 2–3 (June 1, 2000): 117–33. The philosopher
David Hume (1711–1776) was skeptical about facets of daily life that even a
child takes for granted. Michael Polanyi writes that if Hume had practiced
his skepticism, he would not be able to function. Polanyi’s philosophy is a
form of critical realism. M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical
Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 270, 297; the quoted
material is from Whitehead, “The Aims of Education,” 28. The essay was in later
Whitehead collections in 1949 and 1982; Priestley, “The Essence of Education,”
laments that even Whitehead’s adherent have overlooked his insight that
education is essentially for religious development; Nel Noddings picks up on
Whitehead when she writes that teachers should connect knowledge across
disciplines to boost its relevance to students, in Educating for Intelligent Belief or
Unbelief (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993); and “What Does It Mean to
Educate the Whole Child?,” Educational Leadership 63, no. 1 (2005): 8–13.
 Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York:
New American Library, 1949), 26; William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New
York and Toronto: Random House LLC, 2011), 73.

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 Introduction: Why Learn about Paradigms of Education? 

 Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Education—A Plea for Reform,” in

The Organisation of Thought: Educational and Scientific (London: Williams
and Norgate, 1917), p. 28.
 Ninian Smart, The World’s Religions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 1–10.
 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966).
 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe,
1st ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Pub, 1958), sec. 217.
 Kieran Egan, “Some Presuppositions That Determine Curriculum
Decisions,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 10, no. 2 (1978): 123–33.
 John White, The Aims of Education Restated, vol. 22, International Library
of the Philosophy of Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982),
5–18; also “Philosophy and the Aims of Higher Education,” Studies in Higher
Education 22, no. 1 (March 1997): 7.
 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sec. 66; cited in Anat Biletzki and
Anat Matar, “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” ed. E. N. Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, accessed November 21, 2013, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
sum2011/entries/wittgenstein.

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 2
Traditional Paradigm
of Education
Abstract: Three examples of traditions which initiate new
members by cultivation of their lore and habits: Mende
pre-modern education; classical Athenian education in 450
BC; and Hellenistic Jewish education in a diaspora after
586BC. Expositions show a “reverence” and “duty” appropriate
to the basic presuppositional (“religious”) values of the three
examples. Each example pays attention to historical change
and its effect on established processes of education.

Keywords: Agon; Alexander; Aretē; counter-culture;

cultural resistance; Diaspora; folklore; Gerbner, George;
Greece, ancient; Havelock, Eric; hegemony; Hellenism;
hermeneutics, Second Temple period; Homer; Iliad;
Israel, exile; McLuhan, Marshall; Media Education
Foundation; Mende; Odyssey; Parry, Milman; Poro;
proverbs; Ptolemy; Rabbinic education; Sande; Sierra
Leone; synagogue, development of; television; traditional
education; tragedy

Newell, Ted. Five Paradigms for Education: Foundational

Views and Key Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137391803.0008.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0008
 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

Example #1: Mende education

Who the Mende are and what do they believe?

“Mendeland” is an area of rain forest and low-lying savannah in Sierra Leone.
Mende people are descended from Mandinka speakers who migrated from
the Western Sahara five centuries ago. As a result, neighboring groups in
West Africa with different languages have similar educational practices. In
2012, Mende comprise a third of Sierra Leone’s population of six million.
The majority of Mende still live in villages of roughly 20 families. Polygamy
is a desired ideal, so a family may have multiple dwellings. Each year, men
clear trees and undergrowth with “slash and burn” practices while women
plant and tend crops, including the staple food—rice.1
The Mende world is alive with spirits. The high God N’gewo is remote
from everyday concerns. Mende respect a host of spirits who may help
or harm them. Streams, trees, or rocks may be spirit entities. If a Mende
crop fails, for example, perhaps it was not planted in accord with the
spirits of that part of the bush. Or a jealous neighbor may have cursed

image 1 Mende Bundu mask used for goddess Sowo in Poro initiation rituals
Credit: Brooklyn Museum Collection in public domain.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

the crop by witchcraft. Potential help may come from the spirits of
Mende ancestors who mediate with N’gewo—those who are known and
named, as well as the “nameless dead.”2
Spirits rule traditional Mende thinking as thoroughly as monotheism
or scientific rationalism rules Westerners. In the Mende world, the sacred
and the secular intermingle all the time. To those Mende least influenced
by modern ways, the world is still as “enchanted” as the modernized
world is “disenchanted.” “Because God does not want to face a barrage of
individual supplicants of unproven merit, he requires requests to come
through the proper authority channels.” Traditional Mende education
develops the skill, knowledge, and discretion to live safely and success-
fully in a world of spirits.3

Mende folklore educates

At every stage, Mende education is the opposite of abstract. Education
happens first in a family or together in the village. Mende storytelling
is well-developed. Among a child’s earliest exposures to Mende wisdom
are enacted tales. “Old tales” (njepe wovei) include history, dilemma tales,
and myths. Star story “pullers” are the best improvisers, but every Mende
over the age of nine who can handle an audience tells stories. Their
storytelling is now known worldwide—enslaved Africans brought their
stories to North America, for example, in wily Brer Rabbit’s amazing
escapes. Anansi the spider’s adventures, also known worldwide, mirror
Mende myths of Kaso the trickster.
Dilemma tales are a special form of improvised storytelling. The
storyteller ends with a question and asks the audience to choose the
outcome. The implied question is, “What should a character from the
mythological past do?” The Mende call these tales “lies.” These inven-
tions, not intended as literal histories, actively build capacity for wisdom
in the young. Folktales develop wisdom less by encouraging one-to-
one application of plots to life than by modeling themes and showing
protagonists engaging problems in characteristic ways.4
Proverbs are another notable way of developing a Mende mind.
They convey wisdom in relation with authorities, young women,
family members, and time, among other concerns. A Mende speaker
has hundreds of proverbs available. Proverbs include this saying about
chiefs, “A river depends on its tributaries to become full,” meaning that
any leader must have followers. In the Mende language the same saying
is “Nja a vala nja ma lo a ve.” Even without knowing the language, one

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

can imagine its musical properties. Appealing symmetry is also in “Nimi

nimi i lo kalie, ma, ba kula,” or “When something sweet is still on the
bone, will you drop it?”
Repetition of words or sounds characterizes memorable proverbs. Of
course, one who lacks insider knowledge of a culture may fail to see the
significance of a proverb. A proverb’s bite comes from its astute combi-
nation of cultural values. Moreover, the Mende deploy proverbs to suit
the situation. Keen application thus takes insight. Mothers and fathers
demonstrate hard-won discretion in their choice of proverb. Moreover,
when the parent uses a proverb, its authority comes from the ances-
tors. Ability to use proverbs well continues to count in African judicial
proceedings, where a proverb can serve as a precedent and establish
what justice should look like. Proverbs pass on centuries of Mende expe-
rience. Being able to employ them marks a well-instructed Mende man
or woman.5
Acquiring a culture is an everyday process. In a memorable article,
Raymond Williams describes his own working-class upbringing to show
culture acquisition as unremarkable as the pattern of daily activities.
He refutes a definition of culture as an elite attainment. Mende values
come across in the folktale performances and proverbs used in everyday
life, as well as many tacit performances that pass unremarked. Ordinary
life thus enculturates Mende folk tacitly, as if through their skin. Mende
storytelling was a leisure activity that cultured the young. Before radio
and television, and before the growth of the “English” modern economy
in their land, folklore taught a Mende a “way of thinking ... made up of
codes so deeply represented in language that they become ... the primary
way in which people of that culture can understand anything.”6

Initiation: the proving process

The village-based informal process prepares young people for a formal
initiation into full adulthood. To earn mature adult standing, men’s
normal route is to become members of the secret society, the Poro.
Women may enter the parallel Sande society. Poro society office-holders
have charge of traditional spiritual knowledge. The word “poro” means
“law.”
The initiation process gives future members personal experience of
the ways of the ancestors. Admission to the Poro requires an extended
survival period in the bush. At intervals of eighteen months or more,
specially made bush villages are set up as Poro schools for young men.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Traditionally, the bush school ran from six months to several years. The
women’s Sande societies are similarly set up, though shorter in duration
and closer to the village. Poro and Sande mark a young person’s “rite of
passage” into adulthood.
Poro training is a kind of military boot camp attuned to the spirits.
The Mandinka forebears were conquerors with warrior attitudes.
Conflict between villages and across ethnic lines continues, as does the
militarism. The wars in Sierra Leone and neighboring Liberia during the
1990s revealed that Poro still motivated participants. Poro initiation is
not soft training, nor mere information. It is an ordeal. Initiates can die
in the bush school.
To usher initiates into the spirit world, the whole village launches an
elaborate ritual. Helpers force the initiate headfirst into a hole, slashing
his back with razors. The chief devil then “consumes” him. The initiate
“dies.” Dancing, drumming, and call-and-response chanting set the
scene. Garments and masks for the start of Poro training—and later, full
induction to the society—make the spiritual realm visible.
A masked representative of Sowo, the water goddess, attends, and
Poro society officials personify other spirits. Initiates enter a “liminal”
condition, “betwixt-and-between”: neither a child, nor yet a fully
responsible member, consigned to a condition that will end. Patterned
scar tissue remains on the initiate’s body for life as a permanent mark of
endurance.7
Mende understand that personified forest “devils” possess enhanced
power in the intense environment. The chief of the school is the chief
“devil”—the da-zo. His position is hereditary. The da-zo is said to be a
spirit; he is thought to be able to fly through the air. He might land on a
tree to talk with his Sande counterpart. When he appears in public, only
the initiated may see him; others are shooed indoors. The da-zo is generally
naked, surrounded by assistants. When he dies, his death may not be made
known outside of the Poro society. A spirit being, he knows the unseen
world. He is a moral model and source of knowledge, thus chief mentor to
the boys. The council around him sets out the school’s activities.8
Watkins sees the da-zo as a grandmaster, one initiated into the deepest
mysteries and having the highest degrees. Fulton thinks the da-zo is not
head of the Poro but head of the bush school and Poro society spokes-
person. Because initiates are sworn to secrecy, investigators remain
uncertain about Poro society structure even after decades of study. The
oath of secrecy clearly induces fear.9

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

In their time in the bush, all initiates participate in games, sports,

and mock battles. All learn a mundane task such as recognizing spoor
for hunting. Some develop special aptitudes leading to a differentiated
degree in the society. Poro has three main degrees of knowledge: chief
level; middle level including followers of Islam; and slave or common
level—but within these three levels a hundred sub-degrees are possible.
The Poro school teaches trades and more. A worthy initiate could train
to weave, carve, dance, or do leatherwork. The bush school can qualify
some initiates to wield a ritual knife. Not everyone needs to know every-
thing. Links between specific sicknesses and spirits is especially secret.
Thus, the highest level within the Poro society is of medicine men with
knowledge to diagnose illness. Importantly, Halei or spiritual power
belongs only to those who have earned the right to possess it.

Reverence and Duty: a true Mende keeps secrets well

Poro is a secret society. Both genders know that the societies exist; to
speak of “secret” is not to refer some government agency that only a few
high officials know about. Poro is an agency in charge of spiritual secrets.
Bellman wrote about the related Kpelle people, “It was always crucial for
members to be certain whether they have the right to talk as well as the
right to know. The two are not necessarily related. Nonmembers very
often know some of the secrets of membership; yet they must maintain a
description of the event comparable to that of nonmembers.” No respon-
sible Mende would reveal secrets, nor let on that he or she knew them.
For example, a Mende person may know that the chief forest devil is a
human being. Yet they will speak as if he is a spirit who really returns to
the heavens at the end of the Poro school.10
Swearing secrecy is an important ritual of the school. Early on, the
devils may give basic knowledge to an initiate, but they reserve higher
knowledge until the initiate performs oaths. Initiates swear oaths on
fetish magic, calling a curse on themselves should they give away secrets.
The seriousness of the oaths was seen when British authorities inves-
tigated the 1898 Hut Tax Rebellion. Poro members routinely silenced
witnesses in open court by presenting them a fetish—a burnt leaf.
Authorities proved unable to break the secrecy.
Because only those qualified will speak, Mende society is able to main-
tain order in the face of threatening spiritual powers. Discretion in speech
and respect for legitimate authority are two prime attributes of any mature
Mende person. Mende education thus fits exactly within its society that

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 Five Paradigms for Education

respects authority and maintains order through control of spiritual knowl-

edge. Respect for the power of spirits prompts the verbal strategies so
frustrating to Western and other investigators of the horrific regional wars
of the 1990s. Among Upper Guinea Coast peoples such as the Mende,
(a) person who communicates directly what she or he desires or thinks, or who
draws unmediated inferences from sensory data and texts, is considered an idiot
or no better than a child. Instead, ambivalence is prized. Great value is attached
to verbal artistry that couches meaning in puns, riddles, and cautionary tales.

The end of the bush school is marked by a ritual of new birth. During
the weeks or months of the bush ordeal, the devil’s “wife” is considered
pregnant. Now he screams like a woman in labor. Poro school graduates
are then found inside the village—in fetal position. The devil’s “wife” has
birthed mature Mende men.11
Mende young people do not doubt the relevance of what they are
learning. The knowledge immediately benefits kin and oneself. This is not
education for “later on.” Conducted through village and family life, and
later through a special agency, Mende education is not about abstract disci-
plines of thought like Western education. Its spiritual connection makes
it truly “holistic” education. Mende education induces deep reverence. It
prompts a sense of duty in line with its worldview. Table 2.1 summarizes
the unique facets which contribute to Mende reverence and duty.

Education changes with the times

Yet it would be a mistake to say that the central threads of spirits,
secrecy, and power explain all facets of Mende education. Ferme shows
that a history of slavery marks the institution of marriage among Mende.
While the division of secret societies into male and female clearly teaches
gender relations, Mende marriage is marked by religious ideals but
seemingly also by historical circumstances that reshape—perhaps even
radicalize—the ideals.
Mende education changed in the twentieth century. Poro reached its
height by the late 1890s. In 1898, British authorities imposed a tax on
each Mende hut. To minimize the tax, men centralized wives and fami-
lies into a single home. The Mende resented the pressure. The failure of
their Hut Tax Rebellion marked Mende subordination to the imperial
civic service and a cash-based economy.
The conditions of the pre-cash economy where no central power
required taxes, no children gained cash employment, and under which

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

table 2.1 Mende education facets, reverence, and duty

Facet Keywords
Aims Wisdom to maintain spiritual balance;
discretion in speech; cultural role fitted to
student
Assessment of success Poro graduation; victory in battles;
maintenance of spiritual status quo
Students and their nature Require military-like discipline for full
development; weakness may be fatal
Teacher A secret-holder and moral example, source
of spiritual knowledge and power
Motivation and discipline Fear of harm or humiliation by spirit world,
desire to avoid imbalances or disrespect
Valued knowledge Knowledge of spiritual realities applied to
all spheres of life
Key learning Poro and Sande bush villages, family and
environments village “entertainment” activities
Characteristic events or Initiation to Poro bush school, “graduation”
rituals
Reverence N’gewo (supreme God), mediating spirits,
halei (spiritual power)
Duty Keep secrets, exercise halei (spiritual
power), respect ancestor-mediators

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 Five Paradigms for Education

villages enjoyed ample time for initiations were over. The cash economy
and its opportunities reshaped Mende education. British education
facilitated the chance for civil service and other opportunities outside
the traditional structure. An initiate’s stay in a Poro bush village can
now be as little as two weeks. The colonial cash economy began a
shift of power from their ancient structures to a centralized national
administration.
As significantly, the war in the 1990s reduced women’s participa-
tion in Sande. Lacking women’s complicity, men’s power through Poro
diminished.12
In the Mende example of the Traditional paradigm, concepts of reality
give a matching view of the “right” way of educating. For Mende, the
paramount need is to control secrets. Remaining on good terms with
dangerous spirits means well-being. Mende reverence brings a sense of
Mende duty.

Traditional education #2: Athenian

education, 450 BC

Homer: the first two thousand years

From the West African bush of the 1890s, step into a time machine—to
Athens, 450 BC. Some seven centuries before Christ, Athenian educa-
tion’s central figure was a bard or rhapsode who took legends, histories,
and mythology to compose an epic story-song, the Iliad. He used a new
technology—writing. He was Greek culture’s single greatest source. His
name was Homer.
A generation later, traveling rhapsodists were performing Homer’s
Iliad and his Odyssey across the Greek world, from Asia Minor to
southern Italy. Rhapsodes accompanied themselves on the kithara—a
harp with small resonant board held in the lap—or sang to the sound
of an instrument like an oboe. Like the Mende, Greeks did not divide
life into secular and religious. Homer’s songs were sung at city festivals
held in honor of a God. Festivals typically ran for days. Homer gave
the concentrated essence of Greek culture including Athenian culture.
Thus, Greece’s culture stemmed not from priests, court officers,
philosophers, or famous public speakers, but one singer-songwriter’s
vision of life.

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

Homer’s epic poems were the songs of Greece from the time of their
writing in the late seventh century BC. Homer’s influence continued
though the society changed from villages to city-states. He held his
place even when political rule moved from aristocracy, to democracy,
to a foreign emperor. Remarkably, Homer’s imagination retained its
hold on Greek education though the dominant understanding of reality
changed from the classical polytheism of his epics to Christian mono-
theism. As late as the 1100s—more than seventeen centuries later—the
Christian archbishop of Thessalonica saw the need to write an exhaus-
tive commentary—on Homer. A text like Homer’s that persists over an
extended time—across political, social, technological, economic, even
massive religious change—is the life-blood of a culture that is persisting
through significant shifts.
Because Greece’s culture and education shaped Roman and European
Christian education, its aristocratic education continued even beyond
ancient times as the pattern of what the best education should look like.
Homer was not only the prime educator of Hellenistic-Roman civilization.
His aristocratic influence continues beyond ancient cultures to the present.

image 2 Ancient Greek helm typifies the warrior ethic of aretē

Credit: Bigstock.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Ancient education
Homer’s epics picture Greek life as centered on villages led by a king. The
picture was current, about 725 BC. As in medieval Europe, Homer’s kouroi
or knights cluster around a king’s court, accepting his care and sharing his
meals. As the city-state became important, and a wider group of young
males were educated, Greek society remained biased toward aristocratic
male culture even in the democracy that was Athens in 450 BC.
Formal education was never meant for everyone. City-states like
Athens had a small number of citizens, and a few non-citizens and
foreigners, both supported by a large number of slaves (helots) who
farmed its lands. “Schole,” the Greek parent word of “school,” means
“leisure.” Education was for citizens, not helots. It was for those who were
not obliged to physical work and had time to be intensively cultivated.13
The Greeks were competitive, and competition was not limited to
athletics. Rhapsodes took a section of one of Homer’s two epics and
competed against one another. The Iliad and Odyssey were performed in
24 parts. Rhapsodists tried to outdo each other, like a televised talent
show. In Athens’s festival called the City Dionysus, dramatists such as
Aeschylus and Sophocles entered tragedies in competition. Performers
on kithara, lyre, or flute competed. In the bucolic poems of Theocritus,
even shepherds could summon a woodcutter to judge their pipe-and-
verse competition. Philosophical dialogue was another form of the agon,
so were the competitions of orators. Even fine painters battled.14
Homer was central because his works encouraged a distinctive Greek
character. In a single word, the desired characteristic was “aretē.” The
term can be translated as “excellence” or “virtue” but neither of these
words, or even the two together, gives an English reader the idea of what
a Greek mentor would have had in mind for his initiate.15

The world is tragic

In Homer’s thought-world, further developed by Athenian dramatists
such as Sophocles, Greek life was tragic. Why tragic? First, erase the
thought of any god as a loving parent. The gods are a race apart from
human beings. The gods pursue their concerns—and humanity is not
central in them. Zeus, who in the order of things was a supreme God
arranging human affairs according to his own unknowable designs, is
himself bound by a superior, overruling necessity—the power of moira
or Fate.

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

A scene in the Iliad provides an example. A warrior is in serious trou-

ble. Zeus, who favors the warrior, wants to extract him supernaturally.
Zeus’s wife dissuades him, because other gods have their favorites who
they might also desire to rescue. If Zeus rescues this warrior, he will
awaken the wrath of other gods. Since every mortal has to face death, let
this warrior face what is inevitable for all humans. Thus, even Greece’s
leading God is subject to necessity or Fate—that is, subject to moira.
The concern of gods is not for a humanity created specially by or
for them. Humans have their own appointed time, place, and work.
Humans may well become pawns of gods who are at odds with each
other, for reasons barely glimpsed even by special seers. Some vengeful
intervention within the divine family, possibly generated by an over-
reaching action by a human being who is favored by one of them, may
lead to the destruction of an army or a fleet. The first pages of the Iliad
picture this scenario: Agamemnon, king of Argos, forcibly takes the
daughter of a priest of Apollo. Apollo then brings plague upon the
Greek army. Not until the girl is returned to her father and sacrifices
made to Apollo could destruction be halted. Human pride or hubris is
a killer.
The quality that Greeks admired in the gods was not their (ambigu-
ous) morality but their immortality. Later Greek thinkers such as Plato
came to question whether Homer pictured the gods aright. Surely
gods could not be so immoral. Yet the gods are to be envied because
they dwell forever in a radiant world. Human life is the opposite: finite
and short. Death is practically the end. It means loss of consciousness.
While Homer imagined an afterlife, it is a poor substitute for this life. In
Homer’s Odyssey, for example, the shades in Hades move aside respect-
fully for Achilles’s ghost. The hero congratulates Achilles, who replies,
“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I’d rather
slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes
to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

Though his name is glorious forever, death fails to improve the situation
of even a hero like Achilles.16
One might think that Greeks would hardly have confidence to live if
they believed in indifferent gods, an overriding power of Fate, and death
as virtual extinction. Why attempt success in what is sure to be a helpless
life? The Greek reply is that life’s struggle, the agon, can open up a kind
of immortality. Through the agon, a true and lasting grandeur can be

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 Five Paradigms for Education

achieved. By dying bravely, one can win fame that will never die. In this
resolute response, the Greek warrior ethic rises to meet the overwhelm-
ing challenge of life and death.17
Aretē is a main concern of Greek life and death. It motivates callings
in life other than that of warrior or civic leader. Domestic or professional
callings have their distinct excellences, their state of high virtue, and
most stations in life have their own particular aretē. The pursuit of aretē
can apply to artisans or to wives. It can apply to a great horse. Aretē is
characteristic excellence, which is honorable and permanent. True, one
might overstep in seeking aretē. The gods are jealous of what is rightfully
theirs. Success can prompt pride (hubris) in a person, which the gods
punish. Success may easily bring on one’s nemesis as its result. Zeus may
even bring delusion into one’s soul and override one’s normal judgment
ability—exactly what the Iliad’s King Agamemnon blames for his poor
judgment when he helped himself to Achilles’s female prize of war.
Nevertheless, truly great persons persist and win an immortal name.
Aretē is the right response to Greek tragic life.18

The aim of Greece’s education

Education’s aim was to develop aretē. The Greeks understood education
as a life-long process of character development. Classical Greece valued
education so highly that it has been called the civilization of paideia.
Developing the highest possible culture within oneself was a life-long
and society-wide process. By paideia, one could meet the challenges of
life and win everlasting fame. The ideal toward which paideia moved was
a kaloskagathos—a beautiful and good man.19
Even more basic than formation of citizens, the stress on paideia is a
religious impulse: to acquit oneself with honor in an unfriendly cosmos.
The Greeks resisted the undertow of the human situation. They wished
to stand against tragic necessity. Schooling was for more than good or
cultured citizens. The primeval impulse to the glorious survival of one’s
name propelled education. In Greece, education was akin to develop-
ment of the soul. Because their striving conception of humanity remains,
Greek thinkers still inspire educators.20
Aretē meant victory in the agon that is life. Greek culture and educa-
tion centered on the pursuit of aretē. That realization helps to solve a
huge puzzle: Why did Greeks mark out so many new areas of activity
and thought? Why were they so distinctive in poetry, philosophy, drama,
politics, medicine, astronomy, geometry, engineering, biology, sculpture,

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

and architecture? Why is almost every present-day field of intellectual

activity an “-ology,” taking the Greek term for structured knowledge?
Why did Greeks show so much individuality and presence of mind?
Why not some other people?
The reason for Greek achievement is that their conception of human
dignity contrasts sharply with neighboring cultures in the Ancient Near
East where centralized religious, political, and intellectual authority
dominated. Fatalism knocked down human ambitions. Greeks were the
original humanists. The Greek way has been a powerful current in the
West to the present. Life-long paideia inspired by aretē transmuted into
a term connected to liberal education to the present—Roman and then
Christian humanitas.21

Mentors
Plato is famous for asking whether a teacher can really teach moral living.
Is goodness an intellectual quality that can be cultivated by writing many
essays? Likely, you answer “no”—intellectuals are not necessarily better
human beings than the rest of the population. Yet since aretē was the
prime aim of Greek education, some way of encouraging it was needed.
The old military knightly education relied on mentorship. In the Iliad,
for example, Achilles could hardly be closer to his old mentors. When
the growth of city life and democratization broadened education to
citizen males, not enough mentors could be found. Schooling in small
classes developed here first.
To educate their sons, fathers engaged separate tutors in three subjects:
grammar, music, and gymnastics. Upper class Athenian boys would start
learning their letters at about age seven. In a dialogue by Plato, Protagoras
says that the most important facet of the grammatistes’s teaching was
sections of the Iliad, for its character-building power. A music teacher
likewise taught boys to sing and play like a singer-songwriter poet. But the
most ancient and most important learning was by the gymnastics teacher,
the paidotribes. He trained boys in boxing, running, and wrestling from
about the age of twelve. Though newer military techniques diminished
the need for personal heroics, Athenian education in 450 BC continued
to prepare leaders to display distinctive excellence in the agon of life.22
In Athens, as in most Greek city-states, city life centered on the
gymnasium. This small campus of buildings later emerged all over the
Greek and Roman Mediterranean. It included a wrestling compound,
the palaistra. Contrary to the English world’s idea of a gymnasium, these

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 Five Paradigms for Education

institutions taught literacy, music, and physical education; the word

“gymnasium” still means a comprehensive secondary school in middle
European countries such as Germany. In Greek city-states, gymnasiums
were a public concern due to what Griffith calls “cult associations.”
Leading families traditionally sponsored religious and other activities for
the public good, and the city fathers regulated some gymnasium activi-
ties. A God or Goddess stood behind the life of any Greek city. Worship
of a God led to gymnasium rituals and its activities of paideia equally.
Since life for Greeks was an agon, pupils would practice to compete
at games held at local and regional festivals held in honor of a
God—religious occasions without exception. No surprise that gram-
mar teachers, kitharists, and instructors in gymnastics “focused their
work on the endless competitions for crowns.” For example, the games
at Olympus—the first games to take on a “panhellenic” character that
included all Greeks no matter how far-flung—honored Zeus Olympios.
In the presence of the athletes, a hundred oxen were sacrificed on the
Great Altar of Zeus on the middle day of the festival. Similarly, the festi-
val on the island of Delos honored Apollo. Thus, the pursuit of aretē is
most fully understood as a religious pursuit.23

Reverence and duty

Athenian education in 450 BC developed its own distinctive reverence
and duty. Athenian education was less formal than Mende education. A
curriculum dominated by festivals, sports, lyrics, and music has as much
in common with informal educational movements as with the many
practical degrees of the Poro. Consider a voluntary association like a
city soccer league where coaching builds up the general level of play. Or,
consider Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement, aiming for well-
rounded citizens. After all, the Scout promise was, “I promise to do my
best to do my duty to God and the King.” Athenian education aimed to
reproduce a cultural ideal in inductees drawn from its persuasion about
the nature of reality. Reverence is respect for the gods, to whom sacrifices
at the right time are appropriate. But the deeper reverence is for human
striving. Duty is the pursuit of aretē in every calling of life. Education
is always a deeply serious and demanding project only sustained with
life-and-death sanctions and rewards. Table 2.2 lists the distinctive facets
of Athenian education which combined toward its reverence and duty.
Athens, 450 BC, shows that education does not necessarily include the
three “R’s” of reading, writing, and arithmetic. While numeracy is a vital

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table 2.2 Athenian education facets, reverence, and duty

Facet Keywords
Aims Aretē—characteristic human excellence
of aristocratic warrior, extended to trade,
station, or profession
Assessment of success Persistence through life to death—aesthetic
quality of personal character
Students and their nature Require discipline shaped by competition,
not highly structured
Teacher Mentor, whose character intimately
transfers to his charge
Motivation and discipline Those with innately great souls seek
maximum honor
Valued knowledge Personal character, technical abilities
Key learning Gymnasium, religious festivals
environments
Characteristic events or Competitive games in honor of a God;
rituals civic drama
Reverence Deep human character; formal reverence
of gods, moira, fear of hubris
Duty To die demonstrating character worthy of
honor

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 Five Paradigms for Education

skill for a Westerner, numbers were not foundational for the Greeks,
except for the mathematics pioneer Pythagoras and his followers. Before
formal development of an Athenian military cadet-like “ephebate”
(around 350–300 BC), a math tutor would be a rarity. Reading and
writing is a skill for Westerners. For the Mende, tradition passes by oral
means, so literacy is not central; nor was literacy central for Greeks. For
Hellenistic Jews, though, as we see later in the chapter, literacy could not
have been more important.
I would like to make two observations. One, Athens in 450 BC shows
that education does not originate from, nor is it limited to, a school.
Likewise, much of the development of an educated Mende person is in
the village, though formal Poro initiation caps education. Mentors bore
most of the responsibility for early Greek aristocratic education. Later on,
gymnasium education starting at puberty was in consort with an older
sponsor. In the city-state period, schools for elementary writing could
have housed a hundred students or more and a teacher likely remote
from any one student, but such schooling might have lasted only a year
or two for many students. As we see in the next section, Jewish education
was at least as much in family, festivals, synagogue, and distinctive Jewish
practices as in the late-developing bet midrash or yeshiva. Education and
schooling are far from the same thing.
The second note about Athenian education is how it changes over
history. Originating as a rurally based education for aristocratic knights,
by 450 BC Greek education transmuted to education of citizen-soldiers
for city-states like Athens, more comprehensively including athletics,
music, and grammar. Likewise, history brought change to Mende formal
education, which shrank in the early 1900s after cash and economic
opportunities outside the village appeared. Jewish culture and education
were revolutionized by the historical events of the Exile and Diaspora.
All of these observations show the ecology that nurtures formal
education can shift. Broadly, any nation’s history reveals periods of
great vitality, sluggish times, and times of economic, social, or religious
retreat. Societies go through declines and renewals. Though educational
institutions are almost always present, formal education is not urgent in
all societies at all times.

Folklore as education
How did rhapsodes sing their lengthy poems without any written text?
For a long time, scholars puzzled how these bards could recite such a

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

long poem. Performances could run for days. A popular translation of

the Iliad runs to nearly five hundred pages in a small font! Yet no one
held a book open for the singer. He worked from memory.
The rhapsodes’s feat of memory is due in large part because the poem
tells a story. Oral societies must deliberately cultivate human memory.
Writing may be limited or non-existent, but any society must transmit
its culture from generation to generation. Techniques such as rhyming,
rhythm, meter, clever aphorisms, or similes make abstractions tangible
and help memory. But the story is most helpful of all.
In the 1920s, Milman Parry studied the performance of Homer’s verse
not as recital of literature but as an improvised oral re-creation. He
examined the songs of epic singers still active in Bosnia and Serbia in the
1930s to confirm the possibility of song-spinning extending over days.
Video and audio excerpts of these twentieth-century epic singers, who
accompany themselves with a bow on a stringed “guzla” held in the lap,
are freely available on the Internet.24
Rhapsodes recreated Homer for a particular audience. They retold
its stories, choosing emphases out of a repertoire of stock images and
epithets. Rhapsodes used a huge fund of formulas and typical scenes and
themes to improvise their story. Visualized, emotionally charged stimuli
in story form releases the potential of human memory. The Iliad’s very
first line, “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles,” has the
singer asking the Muse to take possession and sing through him.25
Greek poetry was sung and learned by heart. “Music” included
Homer’s epics, other poets such as Hesiod, the effort of learning to play
the kithara—but also drama like that of Aeschylus. Poetry was the litera-
ture of the civilization. Members of society identified with the heroes
and lived in their stories. In Plato’s time, everyone could recite some—or
many—portions of Homer and other poets. Sung poetry reproduced the
culture in society’s members. Even the first 50 lines of the Iliad recall
and memorialize acts, attitudes, judgments, and procedures typical
in ancient Greece. Havelock calls Homer a “tribal encyclopedia.” The
Iliad, the Odyssey, and the many poets and tragedians who followed up
Homer’s themes gave a “running report” of how to be Greek, which the
young naturally learned to imitate.26
Homer and the poets were not only artists in the way that poets or
singer-songwriters are modern artists but were the equivalent of mass
media, Internet, and official state religion rolled into one. No other form
of communication came to all Greeks in every location. As the poets

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sang, they retold all kinds of micro-level knowledge. Their encyclopedia

of daily life made them holistic educators, not only religious or social
educators.27
This tribal encyclopedia was composed in the attractive verbal and
metrical patterns essential if the lore was to be memorable and thus
retained. Before writing and reading, memorable language was not
optional but essential. Beauty is part of the community’s “unconscious
conspiracy with itself to keep the tradition alive” because memories have
to be continually recharged. Verbal, rhythmic, and musical devices are
the way to do it. An ongoing musical festival, as it were, maintains the
culture. Learning had to be pleasurable to be effective. It was no accident
the leading lights of the culture were the rhapsodes who could perform
for hours or days and that the competition winners were those with the
most amazing memory.28
Sung poetry wraps religious, spiritual, and political understandings
together. The goddess Muses, matrons of that activity named for them,
music, inspire a rhapsode’s performance. The Muses bring key under-
standings to the mind of the rhapsode; they inspire fresh performances;
they memorialize. But the other parent of music is none other than Zeus,
father of gods, patron of society. Thus music is bracketed by inspiration
and order, shaped by and shaping the Greek sense of right and wrong.
Songs strengthen the civic order, keeping the city intact and thriving.
No wonder that the dramatist Aristophanes calls a schoolmaster a
harpist. The harpist’s work was as basic to social formation as could be.
Much later, the Scottish nationalist Andrew Fletcher (1653–1716) wrote,
“[I]f a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who
should make the laws of a nation.” It was in this fashion that Homer
served as the central point of reference, lawgiver, and custom setter. He
had far more influence than the backwoods rhapsodes that Parry studied
in the 1920s Balkans. No other sources of culture rivaled Homer. Thus
his influence dominated the aristocracy and civic leaders. He was their
arbiter of taste and ethics.29
The poets employed a powerful way of enabling hearers to relive an
experience in memory. In oral culture, where leadership depends on
speaking beautifully and memorably, people speak poetically. Even
their memory is poeticized. The poet is prophet and teacher to his
community.30
What the rhapsodes did then to make the story come alive, teachers
can do now. Research on story and memory transforms dull lessons

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into a narrative experience. Kieran Egan notes human memory is not

like computer memory. Unlike a computer, experience shapes human
memory. Techniques such as simile make details come to mind.
Emotional connections fire human memory. Think of trying to memo-
rize a long, arbitrary list of data—like a single page of a directory or a
page of computer code. Details can dim with the passage of time; later
events can change the way events are remembered. As the title of a best-
selling book implies, stories are what we “live by.”31

Modern media: folklorists par excellence

Stories are encoded with ways of seeing. Look at present-day mass
media. Television, Internet sources, and studio films reach millions.
Their programs are carefully crafted. Mass media educative processes are
“on” all the time.
George Gerbner researched the power of stories to cultivate ways
of seeing. Gerbner, founding dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s
Annenberg School of Communication, saw that stories develop our
sense of self. Storytellers in modern cultures are novelists, musicians,
filmmakers, and mass media content producers. Stories include
folktales, myths, and—less obviously—songs, poems, and images. It
would be an oversight to think of storytelling as only verbal relating
of narratives. Imagery has long been a kind of storytelling: the paint-
ings in the Lescaux caves were used to tell stories to worshippers
between 18,000 and 15,000 BC. Pyramids or cathedrals, and many
other monuments, are virtual stories about the identity of the people
of their time and place. Besides images, any patterned or ritualized
behavior—any cultured activity—lies within a story. Stories are
comprehensive. They tell us how things are, how things work, and,
what to do about them. Woven into the web that is culture, stories
make the world we know.32
Gerbner underscores that over the centuries people mainly told stories
face to face—parent to child, religious leader to congregation, teacher
to class. Mende, Athenian, and Hellenistic Jewish traditions maintained
themselves face to face. Storytelling until recent centuries has been
personal and limited. Then, first the printing press, then a communica-
tions industry boosted by electronics, turned storytelling into a factory
operation. Impersonal corporations tell stories now, not to a small group,
but to millions in one telling.

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Stories shape norms. Television, mass-market films, and folktales all

convey messages in the same way. They work by common themes and
repeated stereotypes. The repetition of expectations and stereotypes
repeatedly cultivates values and beliefs. One hearing or one observa-
tion does not make immediate change. The effect of one advertisement
is momentary. However, repeated stereotypes establish expectations of
the possibility of violence that viewers, hearers, or readers have for other
people. One might call it “brainwashing”—except it is so commonplace.
The underlying beliefs of the storyteller become ingrained in the
hearers. Storytelling passes on a culture. For example, little measurable
violence results from millions who view a violent act. The immediate
effect is negligible. Nevertheless, repeated images tell viewers what kind
of person commits violence and who is likely to be a victim.

Heavy viewers take it straight

One result of television viewing is that frequent viewers think more
police will protect them. Images are able to override fear too, as the auto-
mobile industry has done successfully by heavy advertising. As a person
absorbs the stories, he or she will tend to absorb the underlying message.
A researcher can measure media’s ability to cultivate values and beliefs
by asking whether heavy media users see things differently from light
users. Images continually remind us of what is natural and normal. Mass
media sustains values by continually nourishing them.
Gerbner found that television’s limited cast cultivates gender stere-
otypes. Women’s roles tend to emphasize their bodies and dependence.
Males learn masculinity calls for aggression and control. Recent years
have likely brought a degree of change in gender profiling, but we could
anticipate the change has been far from radical. Television casts more
men than women: three men appear for each woman. Television tends to
write out female roles after age 35—especially if they involve romance.
Television also cultivates economic expectations. Heavy television
viewers absorb media images of the good life and of life in the world:
people in beautiful clothes, cars, and carefree comfort. Police, soldiers,
doctors, lawyers, or scientists comprise the occupational universe—
hardly representative of most folks’ work. Heavy viewers know more
about rare occupations than they know about the work of the majority.
On the other end of the scale, unemployed persons and the poor are
invisible on television and other media. The television world represents
the lower 30 percent of American society as exactly 1.2 percent.

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Cultivation occurs virtually through the skin, by “osmosis.” Unless they

come by other information sources, consumers may never be aware that
some people have another point of view. The television world presents a
stable way of looking at the world. Its stories are compatible with each
other, even intertwined. The stories’ values are broadly shared.
Since media exposure conditions users, culture is the root of political
possibilities. The world conceived by a handful of corporations shifts
power from democratic institutions. As social control moves from poli-
tics or military power toward the cultural arena, so social control moves
to a few company presidents. Gerbner charges that control by media
conglomerates is not significantly different from control by an old-style
totalitarian ministry of culture. More cautiously, one can say that corpo-
rate messages pervade present-day societies.

Cultivation is education
The cultivating patterns of mass media are similar to the patterning in
a traditional culture. Greek educating imparts Greek ways of thinking.
Jewish informal and formal educating creates distinct Jewish ways of
thinking. Modern educating imparts modern ways of thinking. Over the
course of a school year, much more formation occurs informally, in the
media, on the street, and in the family than at school in five or six hours
per day, over thirty-five weeks or so. Gerbner shows cultivation as “on”
all the time, everywhere. Handheld wireless devices make media an even
more constant companion.
Gerbner’s cultivation theory emphasizes that conceptions of reality
give different conceptions of the “right” way of educating. How the soci-
ety imagines its situation in the universe gives force to its educating—in
these three traditional examples and in all paradigms. Education repro-
duces a society’s way of seeing and being in its new generations.
Media’s influence is often described as miseducation. It inculcates
the mores of Mickey Mouse and friends—to paint it no more darkly.
That the media engage in education is undeniable. Gerbner definitively
shows that mass media educates. Education is not limited to intentional
efforts.
Repetition of patterns leading to the characteristic personality
of a particular society marks the Mende and Athenian examples of
traditional education seen until now. Let’s add one more example
of a traditional education that shifted to maintain itself in changing
circumstances.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Traditional education #3: Hellenistic Jewish

education—AD 30

The first globalization movement

Alexander, king of Macedonia, defeated Darius III and the Achaemenid
Persian Empire in 332 BC. Significantly, Alexander settled former soldiers
in conquered lands, including Palestine. As successive Greek kings ruled
Palestine after Alexander’s death in 337 BC, roughly 30 Greek city-states
became new neighbors to Jewish settlements.33
Like the present-day process of globalization, hellenization was two-
way. Globalization changes the traditions of old societies. In return, the
main streets and malls of the West receive such benefits as traditional
foods. Hellenization similarly saw old societies drawn into a worldwide
culture. A common Hellenistic-Roman culture emerged from southern
Italy to North Africa and beyond Asia Minor to the Black Sea.
Jews had already surrendered political independence. In 586 BC,
the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, the political and
spiritual center of Israel’s life. They exiled Israel’s leaders. Jews settled in
the Euphrates valley, Egypt, and around the Mediterranean and Black
Seas. This dispersion was called the Diaspora. Dominated now by subtle,
powerful, persuasive, fully developed ways of life promising prestige
and prosperity, how could new generations maintain a distinct Jewish
identity? How did Jews resist the constant social, economic, and political
suction of the mainstream?
To understand the problem, think of twenty-first-century Koreans
who immigrate to America. Their children move outside the web of
linguistic and personal expectations that sustains Korean ways in the
mother country. Korean children expose themselves to American
media, including electronic social networks, studio films, cable televi-
sion, and a school system historically intended to weave newcomers
into the social fabric.
First-generation Koreans may work many hours each week and main-
tain a traditionally distant posture toward children. Soon their ways
become “old school” to their “with-it” offspring. The children come to
see themselves as “second-generation Koreans”—a well-documented
phenomenon. The second generation and their parents experience pain-
ful separation. Tensions grow over the second generation’s attachment to
the new culture. The third generation will be completely Americanized.

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image 3 Jewish papyrus scroll typifies scholarly concern for divinely revealed Law
Credit: Bigstock.

Mainstream culture is powerful through economics, social benefits,

political power, and cultural or artistic sophistication. Giving one’s chil-
dren to mainstream education gives access to a society’s benefits. So why
did Hellenistic culture not come to dominate the Jews? How have Jewish
subcultures successfully resisted the allure of their host society? The
answer is that, in scattered urban communities, in the occupied home-
land of Palestine, and later in Europe and around the world, Jews found
ways to maintain their way of life. Unique religious and cultural practices,
including schooling, enabled Jews to resist assimilation successfully.34

Ancient Israel’s reason to exist

Traditional Jewish monotheism affirmed the control, authority, and
presence of only one God. Polytheism was the ancient world’s normal
understanding of reality. The Mende and Athenian examples were
typical. Control, authority, and presence were divided among many
gods even if one god was paramount. Gods were patrons of the nation
worshipping them. Their patronage assured military victories. Religious
claims supported the authority of the state.
We noted that traditional Athenian and other Greek festivals showed
the interweaving of religion and civic life. By contrast, Israel claimed her

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 Five Paradigms for Education

god to be the one true god who created all visible and invisible entities,
whose control, authority, and presence determined history including
the spatial and temporal order among nations. No human power could
resist his rule. As Israel’s Scriptures grew from the original five books of
Moses to inspired prophets and historical records of Israel’s experiences,
they worked out the full implications of the confession of “Listen, Israel:
Yahweh our God is the one, the only Yahweh” (Deut. 6:4). The name
Yahweh was itself revealed knowledge: God himself was thought to have
given it to Moses, a founding prophet and leader. But it meant: “I Am
That I Am.” The personal god who called Israel into existence underpins
the existence of the universe. In such a view of the world, education is
supremely about passing on the secret that makes sense of all else.
The confession of one god implied a universe that is loaded with moral
implications. If Yahweh made an orderly world, human life properly lived
must be bound by laws like those giving order to the universe. Israel
celebrated her Law that other nations’ laws only roughly approximated.
Physical and human worlds were both divinely directed.
Of all people, only the family of Abraham possessed this knowledge.
The original revelation making Israel special was to the oldest ancestor.
Yahweh revealed himself to Abraham, head of a household in the ancient
Mesopotamian city of Ur. Yahweh commanded him to leave the city with
a promise that he would gain a land of his own. Others could acquire
knowledge of the true god only by becoming attached to Israel and bind-
ing themselves to a special relationship. Descendants of Abraham thus
believed themselves to bear the only reliable knowledge of the true god.
Other nations would do well to acquire this knowledge but resisted it in
stubborn ignorance, tending instead to oppress the true god’s people.

Ancient Israel’s education for identity

Israel had a tradition of resistance to other cultures from her founding
onward. Almost everything about Israel’s practice of education before
586 BC and exile is disputed or unclear. However, scriptural imperatives
from the earliest period clearly intend to separate Israel from non-observant
societies. Accordingly, parts of the Scriptures understood to be ancient
were to be taught to the young. Deuteronomy, the fifth book ascribed to
Moses, enjoins:
Let the words I enjoin on you today stay in your heart. You shall tell them to your
children, and keep on telling them, when you are sitting at home, when you are

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

out and about, when you are lying down and when you are standing up ... For
us, right living will mean this: to keep and observe all these commandments in
obedience to Yahweh our God, as he has commanded us.35

Israel’s scriptures from first book to last highlight the capacity of spoken
words to be true or false. Not all religions operate by verbal and codified
systems of belief. For Israel, though, that Yahweh spoke words creating
conditions of blessing or curse made language profoundly real. The
true god spoke the cosmos into existence. The technology of the time,
writing, recorded revelations. The oldest strata of the Scripture attest to
“inscripturation.” Jews believed that the precise words were mandated
by heaven. So much was this the case that a minority opinion from the
medieval period onward believed that secret messages could be detected
by attributing numerical values to the God-given letters. When a prophet
speaks in the name of Yahweh, his words are believed to infallibly name
present and future reality. When Isaiah the prophet gives a name a child
by divine command, he is also relaying to Israel a firm fact about the
unhappy future. Without further revelation, events “prophesied” are
certain. Revelation from certain sources may be disqualified precisely
when it does not occur. Hence, “false prophets” were a phenomenon.
Yahweh allowed their words to “fall to the ground.” Knowing scriptural
words by heart conditioned thoughts and prevented misdeeds. Thus, a
critical skill in scripture-oriented Jewish education is interpreting texts
rightly.36
The scriptures went on to mandate unique customs in worship
of the one true invisible God. Images of him could never be made.
Israel’s Scriptures perpetuated a regulation of time. Specific foods were
commanded, some to be avoided; economic practices and precise
worship rituals are spelled out. Though the rules seem arbitrary, they indi-
vidually and collectively elaborate a way of life marking those who believe
themselves to be God’s special people.
As with fifth-century Athenian education, recurring religious festivals
educated the young. Prominent among these was the Passover, which
celebrated Israel’s exodus from Egyptian slavery. The Hebrew Scriptures
anticipated children’s questions about the festival and provided ready
responses: “When in the future your child asks you, ‘What does this mean?’
you shall answer, ‘By strength of hand Yahweh brought us out of Egypt, from
the house of slavery’ ” (Exod. 13:14; Deut. 6:20–5). To the present day, the
youngest Jewish child at a Passover celebration must ask the Four Questions,
which are at the foundation of Jewish identity:

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 Five Paradigms for Education

 For on all other nights we eat either leavened or unleavened bread;

why on this night only unleavened bread?
 On all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs; why on this night only
bitter herbs?
 On all other nights we need not dip our herbs even once; why on
this night must we dip them twice?
 On all other nights we eat either sitting up or reclining; why on this
night do we all recline?
As the father provides answers, the four practices re-enact the ancient
deliverance.
Scriptural festivals also included Sukkot—the harvest-time festival of
booths—as well as the New Year celebration Rosh Hoshana and the Day
of Atonement. The most important festival for education was without
doubt the weekly Sabbath, held after each sixth day at sundown to
sundown on the seventh day. On each Sabbath, faithful Jews re-enacted
the rest God took after six days of creation. The strict prohibition against
all forms of work on the Sabbath and tensions around its observance
marked observant Jewish life. Learning to keep Sabbath was essential
for any Jewish young person. Resting from work taught an unmistakable
identity. After the Exile, all festivals, and new ones such as Hanukkah,
assumed new significance. Festivals became deliberate steps to maintain
Jewish identity.

Where was education conducted?

In earlier Israel, family seems to have been the site of most education. A
father would teach his sons to follow his livelihood; a woman would pass
on domestic skills, including fabrication and trading, to daughters. If the
father was a scribe, he would train his sons as scribes; if in the goldsmith
guild, he would pass on the right to sons. In periods of cultural religious
renewal, kings sent out teachers of religion (2 Chron. 17:7–9; 35:3) but in
ordinary times fathers, mothers, and festivals taught the faith.37
The extent of literacy or numeracy in ancient Israel is debated. Possibly
only priests, administrators, or teachers could have used such skills. On
the other hand, the central artifacts of Israel’s religious life and identity
were the written tablets containing ten divine commandments. Other
strands of the Hebrew revelation could have been written down at the
time of release from Egypt (around 1445 bc) and some archeological
evidence suggests that writing was not uncommon in Israelite homes.38

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

Israel’s background in ancient Egyptian society meant at the least that

they carried the memory of a literate culture with them. Neighboring
societies were highly organized and developed formal education for
priests or scribes who went on to serve as government leaders. These
societies had temple or palace schools for priests and administrative offi-
cials. Some passages in the Hebrew Bible, as well as some outside litera-
ture and some archeological evidence, suggest Israel developed schools
for professional life and possibly a more general school of wisdom.39

Exilic reformulations
After the Exile, Jewish education came to a new focus. The Exile was a
cosmic-scale disaster. The one true god promised Abraham’s descendants
a land of their own from which they could benefit the entire world (Gen.
12). Now Yahweh’s chosen people lost the land of promise. Where had
their God been? Was he as powerful as thought? What had brought on
the catastrophe? Could the chosen people recover hope after such a loss?
The pre-exilic prophets with their warnings of impending disaster and
promises of eventual restoration now took on fresh significance. The
Exilic book of Chronicles responded: loss of the land was from unfaith-
fulness to the divine Law. Restoration would come with national repent-
ance. Prophets such as Daniel and Zechariah used apocalyptic imagery
to point out a future when Israel would be restored. The narratives of
Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah show divine action in human initiatives.
The books of Job and Ecclesiastes developed Hebrew insights about
their God in light of life’s inescapable suffering. At the same time, scribes
compiled and edited the ancient Scriptures.
The prophets said that unfaithfulness to the divine Law was the condi-
tion that produced the Exile. Keeping the Law—and laws that protected
the Law—became Israel’s prime task. Yet Jews now had to observe the
ancient Law in conditions over which they had less than full control. The
correct way to observe the Law required authoritative rulings. An oral
case law of rulings and interpretations seems already to have grown up
around the written Scriptures.
The oral law prevented situations that might lead to a breach of God’s
Law. A growing body of rulings and debates from the Exile extending to
the first millennium after Christ specified the resistance way of life. The
writings are threefold: (1) the Talmud, core rulings on Law observance,
familiar to many even today; (2) the Mishnah, a collection of discus-
sions; and (3) the Gemara, debates on interpretation. The regulations

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 Five Paradigms for Education

came with ways for them to be reinforced, even celebrated—a regular

meeting.
No proof exists that synagogues were primarily religious in nature in
the early period after the exile. Synagogues seem to have hosted a variety
of community transactions, like a city gate served as town hall before the
loss of the land. Though excavations of ancient synagogues sometimes
reveal a special place for scrolls, indicating a primarily religious purpose
other synagogue remains show no special place for Scriptures.
After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in ad 70, however,
synagogues took on fresh significance. They came to symbolize Jewish
distinctiveness. Membership in the synagogue, the place of community
worship, became inseparable from membership in the community.
Just how much national identity now depended on literate learning
is clear in the attitudes of the elite to the unlettered. As in Greece, many
lacked the means or the inclination to send their sons to a school. The
ordinary people of the land, the “’am ha’aretz,” were uneducated by defi-
nition, meaning that they did not know the divine law. They were igno-
rant not just about letters and numbers but about their religion. The
Babylonian Talmud records differing rabbinic opinions on what makes
an ’am ha’aretz: “Anyone who does not recite the (key Torah passage, ‘Hear
O Israel’) evening and morning. This is the view of Rabbi Eliezer ... Rabbi
Nathan ben Joseph says: Anyone who has sons and does not bring them
up to the study of the Torah.”40 How far formal elementary education
extended is unclear. Rabbi J. ben Gamla (d. c. 69) mandated elemen-
tary education for boys in Israel and appointment of teachers as part
of the emphasis on literacy. The Mishnah states that the Torah should
be taught to children at age five; at age ten, the Mishnah; and at age
fifteen, the Gemara. While it is unclear how successful the pronounce-
ment was, it is still evidence of the Jewish drive to preserve distinctive
culture reinforced by the destruction of the second Temple in the year
AD 70.41

Jewish assimilation and resistance

The post-Exile Jewish conservation movement owed a surprising amount
to the Greek rulers and their culture. The Greek tradition of philo-
sophical dispute between masters—seen so clearly in Plato’s dialogues—
becomes the pattern of debate among Jewish experts. Thus, debates over
how to maintain Jewish distinctiveness take Hellenistic form. Notice
how cultures are polyphonic—that is, many voices may contribute to the

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

conversation. Some are loud enough they condition the discussion, as

seen when Jewish education takes a Greek form.42
Hellenism continued with the Roman Empire just as Rome’s culture
took important facets from the sophisticated Greeks. For example, Greek
language was the language of cosmopolitan Hellenistic-Roman culture
around the Mediterranean Sea, in business, the schools, and much
administration.
The God of the Jews inspired a written revelation. For the Jews, know-
ing the precise will of God in the midst of godless societies powered
social survival. Jews studied the Law and its ramifications to learn God’s
ways of living. New notes welled up. Additions to Scripture after exile,
such as Ecclesiastes or Job, absorb Hellenism’s relentless theme of tragedy
but reinterpret it for a Jewish context.43
By the time of Rabbi Hillel (d. 10 CE), Jews were broadly divided into
two groups. A sophisticated upper class, like Greeks, sought rational
explanations of the tradition. This group tended to sideline tradition’s
authority. A second group urged that Jews should keep the traditions of
the elders. To this division of opinion, Rabbi Hillel brought a solution.
Hillel’s solution paralleled Hellenistic legal and philosophical practice: he
simply said that the traditions must be rational. Since the scriptural Law
implied the traditions, traditions are not to be sidelined. Defenders of
Hillel said his method was as ancient as the original revelation to Moses.
However, it was a new way that depended on Hellenistic procedures.
Perhaps no one noticed. To maintain a culture, Hillel borrowed the ways
of tradition’s challenger.44
Hillel developed five methods of reading Scripture that would
employ reason. Since Greek culture pervaded the Mediterranean just
as American and Western culture today permeates the world, it is not
surprising that Hillel’s methods turn out to be those Cicero, the famous
Roman lawyer, used at that time. The methods are also similar to those
used by Philo in Alexandria, a major Diaspora center. Philosophical
instruction was similar at Rome, Jerusalem, or Alexandria. Hillel took
the “common sense” of Hellenistic culture to solve a problem for Jews.
Hillel’s method of interpretation became the highest skill of the culture.
By the century before Jesus, a period of study at a Beit Midrash, generally
located near a synagogue, would render a young male literate enough to
contribute to the synagogue as an elder, or even as a rabbi. Greek school-
ing depended on short texts called “creieai.” Students memorized these
“sayings of the wise.” Regurgitating the text did not indicate one really

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 Five Paradigms for Education

knew it. Students disputed over possible meanings. One who knew the
text could use it with different endings or beginnings, differently struc-
tured for each audience. The tradition adapted.
Education changes in response to historical circumstances. For the
Jews, the challenge of resisting assimilation provoked a response that
drew on the cultural tools of the conquering society to develop a culture
of book learning and debate to maintain its distinctiveness.
Consequently, Hellenistic Jewish education produced its distinc-
tive reverence and duty. Table 2.3 shows the facets which combined to
encourage it. Reverence for the otherness of Israel’s true God yielded the
duty of obedience to revealed laws and traditions, conditioned by—but
also resisting the—dominant culture.

Summary: the Traditional paradigm

The three examples of traditional education reflect relatively stable and

homogeneous cultures, not forms of education for a modern pluralistic
culture. Yet changing historical circumstances reworked the three para-
digms. Each culture adapted to meet a historical challenge and to survive.
 Mende education inculcated the duty necessary to maintain
spiritual secrets. It adapted to British imperialism’s cash economy
and vocational opportunities.
 Traditional Greek education imparted a broader conception of aretē
in generations of young men who were not the aristocratic warriors
of Homer’s period.
 In the Diaspora, Jewish education changed from the impartation
of a historical tradition in controlled conditions. Induction into
Jewish life by family life and rituals shifted toward a focus on study
of written texts. The duty sought was maintenance of distinctive
Jewish life in resistance to subversive dominant influences.
Older ideals of the three examples were reconfigured for changed material
and technological conditions. The natural world mediated through tech-
nology and the organization of work changed dominant forms. Cultural
conceptions shifted—for Mende, Greeks, and Jews. The new education
maintained cultural production and reproduction in new generations.
Any living tradition is dynamic and changing. New circumstances
deepen, reshape, and challenge a society’s understanding of its own

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

table 2.3 Hellenistic Jewish education facets, reverence, and duty

Facet Keywords

Aims Interpret texts to obey law revealed by

the true God, avoid sin, be in accord with
Yahweh and true nature of cosmos: live
fullest human life
Students and their nature Tend toward acts, attitude of self-will but
capable of loyalty to a liberating, revealing
God
Teacher Model of spirituality, tradition, and
close attention to revealed texts, displays
wisdom
Motivation and discipline Internal respect for God, external social
compulsion, sanctions, physical discipline
sometimes appropriate
Valued knowledge Personal knowledge of Israel’s God
through personalized appropriation of
revelation
Assessment of success Positive dependence on Israel’s God
in prayer, trusting actions; negative
avoidance of sin
Key learning environments Synagogue and home
Characteristic events or Festivals, especially Sabbath
rituals
Reverence Israel’s God, scriptures, tradition
Duty Love and obey Israel’s God in line with
revelation interpreted by tradition

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 Five Paradigms for Education

history. For example, as generations move on, new histories of famous

figures and events find their audience. Older histories that make a politi-
cian glorious to his near contemporaries may give way to critical read-
ings as standards of evaluation shift.
In conditions of change, the meaning of symbols, rituals, and distinc-
tive practices become shaky—or gain new ground. A preferred future
can animate a society that must deal with its out-of-step practices. The
preferred future may look less realistic as time goes on—or change
may reinvigorate a society’s hope. In summary, changed educational
approaches perpetuate a society’s ideals in new circumstances. The result
is that cultural production and reproduction continues.
As with all educations, reverence and duty seem both natural and
inevitable within a culture. Whitehead’s aphorism encourages British
general education to pursue a reverence and duty that spans religious and
ideological commitments. However, only particular religions exist, as
Ninian Smart observes. The examples of traditional education also yield
distinct reverences and duties. What is reverence and duty to a Mende
is not that of a Hellenistic Jew, even though both are supernaturalists.
The different pictures of ultimate reality made for various approaches in
forming the young. Variations in reverence and duty brought about by
education will expand as we explore more paradigms.

Modern traditionalism
Tradition is still important for many conservative educators. Three
examples illustrate:
 Present-day revivals of traditional education include R. M.
Hutchins’s Great Books initiatives, Mortimer Adler’s Paideia
proposal, or E. D. Hirsch’s advocacy for cultural literacy. These new
versions seek cultural and political renewal by reasserting a body of
literature—a canon—that will give substance to education.
 The wide popularity of classical schooling attests to the allure of a
defined tradition. Classical schooling enrolls tens of thousands of
US students in both home and institutional schools. Their study
of Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and many
other greats attests to the impulse to cultivate long-recognized
quality. The apparent irrelevance of such learning in modern
conditions is less important than their mind- and character-
forming power.

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

 The 1980s reprinting of the 1800s McGuffey Readers offers another

example of renewal by tradition. Its moralistic views were imbibed
by a young nation. Now the same texts are sold to homeschooling
families and evangelical Christian elementary schools.
Traditional education is far from dead. The three examples explored show
societies culturing their future by cultivating their graduates accord-
ing to their ideals. From a broad perspective, any education replicates
the ways of some tradition, culture, or way of living in the generation
to follow. Always some ideals carry forward. The Traditional paradigm
carries forward ideals of a good life. Pictures or models of reality gener-
ate human beings fitted to their world. Each form of education forms
initiates into the image deemed true by its sponsors. It produces its
distinctive reverence and duty.

Notes
 The descriptions rely on Jude Aguwa, “Mende,” in Encyclopedia of World
Cultures: Supplement, ed. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian A. Skoggard
(New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2002); James Stuart Olson, The
Peoples of Africa: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Group, 1996); Mariane Ferme, Bruce MacDonald, and Nicholas
Plowright, Mende (Series: Disappearing World, Granada TV, 1990) profiles the
village of Kpuawala.
 Mariane Conchita Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and
the Everyday in Sierra Leone (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2001), 2–7; M. C. Jedrej, “An Analytical Note on the Land
and Spirits of the Sewa Mende,” Africa 44, no. 01 (2012): 38–45; William
Thomas Harris and Harry Sawyerr, The Springs of Mende Belief and Conduct:
A Discussion of the Influence of the Belief in the Supernatural among the Mende
(Freetown: Sierra Leone University Press, 1968); a classic source but with
categories challenged by Ferme is James George Frazer, The Golden Bough:
A Study in Comparative Religion (New York and London: Macmillan and
Co., 1894), who may see material and spiritual worlds separately, as if the
inanimate is animated by spirit forces. Ferme thinks the two are a more
united reality.
 Carolyn Bledsoe, “The Cultural Transformation of Western Education in
Sierra Leone,” Africa 62, no. 2 (1992): 192; Anthony J. Gittins, Mende Religion:
Facets of Belief and Thought in Sierra Leone, vol. 41, Studia Instituti Anthropos
(Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag—Wort und Werk, 1987), 38–61,

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 Five Paradigms for Education

provides schematic diagrams and explanations of the Mende world as they

understand it; Darrell Reeck, Deep Mende: Religious Interactions in a Changing
African Rural Society, vol. 4 (Leiden: Brill Archive, 1976), examines Mende
commonalities and influences of the English world.
 Harold Scheub, “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature,” African
Studies Review 28, no. 2/3 (June 1, 1985): 1–72, reviews African oral traditions
and literature up to modern novels; Donald Cosentino, Defiant Maids and
Stubborn Farmers: Tradition and Invention in Mende Story Performance, vol. 4,
Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 1–9, catalogues specifically Mende folklore forms;
Felix Boateng, “African Traditional Education: A Method of Disseminating
Cultural Values,” Journal of Black Studies 13, no. 3 (March 1983): 321–36,
advocates for traditional modes in modern African education.
 E. Ojo Arewa and Alan Dundes, “Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking
Folklore,” American Anthropologist 66, no. 6 (December 1, 1964): 70–85,
describes how West African proverbs are deployed, including in courtrooms.
 The power of folklore is seen in Dan Ben-Amos, “Toward a Definition of
Folklore in Context,” The Journal of American Folklore 84, no. 331 (1971): 3–15;
Robert A. Georges, “Toward an Understanding of Storytelling Events,”
The Journal of American Folklore 82, no. 326 (October 1, 1969): 313–28,
doi:10.2307/539777; Herbert Halpert, “Folklore: Breadth versus Depth,” The
Journal of American Folklore 71, no. 280 (April 1, 1958): 97–103; Edwin W
Smith, “The Function of Folk-Tales,” Journal of the Royal African Society 39,
no. 154 (1940): 64–83; and Marian W. Smith, “The Importance of Folklore
Studies to Anthropology,” Folklore 70, no. 1 (1959): 300–12; the quote is from
Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979);
Williams’s story is in “Culture Is Ordinary,” in The Everyday Life Reader, ed.
Ben Highmore (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 91–100.
 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Gabrielle L. Caffee and
Monika B. Vizedomand (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), first
published 1909, is a classic study of rites of passage including the Poro;
followed by Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period
in Rites of Passage,” in Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society,
Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion, 1964, 4–20, who
detailed the significance of the liminal “betwixt and between” condition of
initiates.
 Richard M. Fulton, “The Political Structures and Functions of Poro in
Kpelle Society,” American Anthropologist 74, no. 5 (October 1, 1972): 1223;
Mark Hanna Watkins, “The West African ‘Bush’ School,” American Journal
of Sociology, 48, no. 6 (1943): 434–5, describes the bush school setup and
activities. Fulton details bush school qualifications and the many possible
degrees among the closely related Kpelle.

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

 Fulton, “Political Structures,” 1223, discusses options for the da-zo’s rank
and function; also “The Kpelle Traditional Political System,” Liberian Studies
Journal 1, no. 1 (1968): 1–19; Watkins draws on Westermann on the da-zo in
“The West African ‘Bush’ School,” 431–2.
 Watkins, “The West African ‘Bush’ School,” 434–5, describes the bush school
setup and activities; Fulton, “Political Structures,” 1223, who supplies details
from the related Kpelle, including the many possible degrees; the quote is
from Beryl L. Bellman, The Language of Secrecy: Symbols & Metaphors in Poro
Ritual (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 51.
 The quote is from Ferme, The Underneath of Things, 7; her investigation of the
anthropology of the 1990s wars underlines the persistent spiritual beliefs
that appeared in bizarre war behavior; Braithwaite Wallis, “The Poro of the
Mendi,” African Affairs 4, no. 14 (1905): 183–9, details the fetish curse that
enforces secrecy as well as the three classes of Poro membership; Watkins,
“The West African ‘Bush’ School,” 436.
 Veronika Fuest relates Sande’s loss of influence in “Liberia’s Women Acting
for Peace: Collective Action in a War-Affected Country,” in Movers and
Shakers: Social Movements in Africa, ed. I. van Kessel and S. Ellis (Leiden: Brill,
2009), 134; Watkins already saw a sharp reduction in the duration of bush
schools though with wide swings in related ethnic groups such as the Kpelle
or Sherbro: “The West African ‘Bush’ School,” 433; Bledsoe, “The Cultural
Transformation of Western Education in Sierra Leone,” describes how
centuries-long patterns of thinking reshape Mende perceptions of Western
schooling.
 Lester L. Grabbe, “The Hellenistic City of Jerusalem,” in Jews in the Hellenistic
and Roman Cities, ed. John R. Bartlett (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), 9, sees ancient education as for warriors; Susan Guettel Cole, “Could
Greek Women Read and Write?” Women’s Studies 8, no. 1/2 (January 1981):
129–55, limits ancient Greek literacy to dedications, quick notes, and other
basic necessities. Women were rarely taught letters.
 Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. Oswyn Murray, trans.
Sheila Stern (New York: St Martins Press, 1981), 182, shows competitiveness
at the micro level; The Idylls of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, and the
War-Songs of Tyrtæus, ed. James Davies, Richard Polwhele, and Matthew
James Chapman, trans. J. Banks (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870), 29, he cites
Theocritus.
 Henri Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. G. Lamb (Madison
and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 10, expresses the judgment,
which seems reasonable given the massive and high-quality literature that
characterized the Greece of the fifth century before Christ.
 Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, 11, quoting Odyssey, Book 11,
510–14; Robert Parker, “Greek Religion,” in The Oxford History of the Classical

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 Five Paradigms for Education

World, ed. John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 255, 270–2, describes the gods’ independence
of human concerns and their radiant world; Francis Macdonald Cornford,
Greek Religious Thought from Homer to the Age of Alexander (London: J. M.
Dent & Sons, 1923), xv, notes the poet Pindar’s objections to Homer’s gods;
on p. x, he states, “The overwhelming consciousness of mortality darkens the
whole main current of Greek reflection upon life”; Seth L. Schein, The Mortal
Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (University of California Press, 1984),
1–2, confirms the important thing about divinity is exemption from old age,
decay, and death.
 Schein, The Mortal Hero, 68.
 Joseph A. Buijs, “Teaching: Profession or Vocation?” Catholic Education: A
Journal of Inquiry and Practice 8, no. 3 (2005): 332, https://napoleon.bc.edu/
ojs/index.php/catholic/article/view/590, discusses the aretē of teaching and
other professions, citing Aristotle, who comes a little later than this study;
Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, 10–12, links aretē to the tragic
view of life; Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” trans. Mary
McCarthy, Chicago Review 18, no. 2 (1965): 5–30, sees fear of nemesis, or the
back draft that comes from overreaching hubris, as the main spring of Greek
culture.
 H. I. Marrou explains the civilization of paideia in A History of Education in
Antiquity, 95–101.
 Explanations of paideia and associated concepts are in Werner Jaeger, Paideia:
The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. G. Highet, vol. I. Archaic Greece: The Mind
of Athens (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 4–10; Gemino Abad, “Iliad and
Odyssey: Areté and Timé,” SMU Humanities and Social Sciences Working Paper
Series, no. 5 (October 2003): 3–4; Eric Robertson Dodds, The Greeks and the
Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); Robin Barrow, Greek
and Roman Education (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1976), 31.
 Parker, “Greek Religion,” 254, describes the evolution of Greek religion as
Caucasian invaders absorbed the existing civilization. The older matrilineal
culture was taken up by the patrilineal new one. The new gods appear to
have married and incorporated the old ones. Homer’s gods are human-like
as are their relationships. The neighboring Ancient Near Eastern never
thought of its deities this way; Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture,
xix–xxiii, links modern liberal education to Greek ideals.
 Barrow, Greek and Roman Education, 40, citing Protagoras, 325e.
 Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, 183; Robert Parker, Athenian
Religion: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 254, writes on Greek
education’s competitiveness; Judith Swaddling, The Ancient Olympic Games
(University of Texas Press, 1999), 16, details Greek festivals as religious
occasions.

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

 J. Foley, “Research on Oral Traditional Expression in Samadija and Its

Relevance to the Study of Other Oral Traditions (Paper #8),” in Selected
Papers on a Serbian Village: Social Structures as Reflected by History, Demography,
and Oral Tradition, ed. J. Halpern and B. Halpern, Research Report 17,
Anthropology Research Reports (Amherst, MA: UMass Scholarworks, 1977),
199–236, summarizes the effect of Parry’s work; see Milman Parry and Adam
M. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); also Walter J. Ong, Orality and
Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), 20–7.
 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin,
1991), Knox’s introduction tells the evolution of thinking about composition
up to 1990; Elizabeth Minchin, ed., Orality, Literacy and Performance in the
Ancient World, vol. 9, Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World (Leiden:
Brill, 2011), applies current research on cognition and memory to Homer;
Alberto Manguel, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography (Vancouver,
Canada: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), 56, expounds the ways that the
opening verse’s original Greek has been translated into English and other
languages.
 Richard Lewis Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1935), 29; Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge,
MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1963), 43–5, 87.
 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 20–35, explains mimesis as representation of
reality; p. 49 explains extent of their teaching.
 Havelock explains need for memorable forms in Preface to Plato, 41–4; for
why it had to be pleasurable, see p. 158.
 Scott Stossel, “The Man Who Counts the Killings,” The Atlantic Monthly, 297
(May 1997): 86, is source of the Fletcher quote; Havelock, Preface to Plato, 54,
on Homer author and arbiter of culture, in influence like a one-man ancient
multi-media corporation.
 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 45–6, 62, 74.
 Kieran Egan, Teaching as Story Telling: An Alternative Approach for Teaching and
Curriculum in the Elementary School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989); “Memory, Imagination, and Learning: Connected by the Story,” Phi
Delta Kappan 70, no. 6 (February 1989): 455–9; Dan P. McAdams, The Stories
We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York and London:
Guilford Press, 1993).
 An excellent anthology of his work is G. Gerbner, Against the Mainstream:
The Selected Works of George Gerbner, ed. M. Morgan (New York: Peter Lang,
2002); George Gerbner, Micheal Morgan, and Sut Jhally, The Electronic
Storyteller: Television & the Cultivation of Values (Media Education Foundation,
1997) is a persuasive summary in video format; “Telling All the Stories:

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Children and Television,” Sacred Heart University Review 16, no. 1 (2010):
37–54, also summarizes.
 Eric Meyers, “The Babylonian Exile Revisited: Demographics and the
Emergence of the Canon of Scripture,” in Judaism and Crisis: Crisis as a
Catalyst in Jewish Cultural History, ed. Armin Lange, Diethard Römheld, and
Matthias Weigold, vol. 9, Schriften Des Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 61; Nathan Morris, The Jewish
School: An Introduction to the History of Jewish Education (London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1937), 38.
 Stephen Schwartz, “Hebrew and Imperialism in Jewish Palestine,” in Ancient
Judaism in Its Hellenistic Context, ed. Carol Bakhos, vol. 95, Supplements to
the Journal for the Study of Judaism (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic
Publishers, 2005), 53.
 Hebrew Bible and New Testament quotations are from Henry Wansbrough
et al., trans., The New Jerusalem Bible: Reader’s Edition (New York: Doubleday,
1990).
 Scripture-based mysticism is profiled in Moshe Hallamish, An Introduction
to the Kabbalah, trans. Ruth Bar-Ilan and Ora Wiskind-Elper (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1999), Isaiah, chapter 8, names children who name the future;
Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1987), 87, emphasizes that systematic doctrines were not the core of ancient
mystery religions, for instance.
 On parental skill training, see A. Culpepper, “Education,” ed. Geoffrey W.
Bromiley, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1988), 21–7.
 William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible became a Book: The Textualization of
Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Stephen
G. Dempster, “Review, Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book,”
American Theological Inquiry: A Biannual Journal of Theology, Culture, & History
1, no. 1 (2008): 95–7, take sides in the literacy debate; see also Culpepper,
“Education”; notice the subtitle here, in James L. Crenshaw, Education
in Ancient Israel: Across the Deadening Silence, 1st ed. (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998).
 See Schniedewind, How the Bible became a Book.
 Berakhoth 47b cited in Morris, The Jewish School: An Introduction to the
History of Jewish Education, 21, n. 15.
 Shmuel Himelstein, “Education,” ed. R. J. Werblowsky, Geoffrey Wigoder,
and Gavriel D Rosenfeld, Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (Oxford
University Press, 1997), 229.
 Russian literary critic M. Bakhtin’s views of culture as multi-voiced are
mentioned in Ray McDermott and Herve Varenne, “Culture as Disability,”
Anthropology & Education Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1995): 325.

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 Traditional Paradigm of Education 

 Jewish culture, marked by suffering, never lost that character. In its medieval
European sojourn it developed a language, Yiddish, whose expressions
convey lament in a hundred variations: Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish
Language and Culture in All Its Moods (New York: Macmillan, 2007).
 David Daube, Rabbinic Methods of Interpretation and Hellenistic Rhetoric
(Hebrew Union College, 1949), 257.

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 3
Plato the Revolutionary
Abstract: Plato’s Paradigm. Exposition shows a “reverence”
and appropriate “duty” for the basic presuppositional
(“religious”) values informing Platonic education. Plato
wants students to gain sure knowledge of reality in order
to re-establish a basis for noble (ethical) civic or political
conduct. Use of reason to locate timeless truth from
distractions of popular culture can build up an intellectual
picture of truth, beauty, and goodness—unarguable goods that
can inspire philosopher-rulers.

Keywords: Academy; Athens 450 bc; cave, parable of;

Eleusinian mysteries; forms; logos; Meno; Nietzsche,
Frederich; Plato; Plato’s Education; poetry; poets;
Protagoras; Pythagoras; religion; Socrates; Sophism;
Sophist; The Republic

Newell, Ted. Five Paradigms for Education: Foundational

Views and Key Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137391803.0009.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0009
 Plato the Revolutionary 

Introduction

Plato’s philosophy propelled Greek education in an entirely new direc-

tion. The two-and-a-half millennia since his time have not diminished
his contribution to broadly Western conceptions of education. Plato
provided solutions to issues confronting any educational program, basic
issues which he raised for the first time. The single most important
philosopher in the Western tradition also made education not a side
issue but a central force for the well-being of persons and society.1
Plato’s new education aimed to purify the muddy stream of culture to
inspire a love of virtue. Revised aretē would enable the long-term contin-
uation of city life. For that purification, Plato stood Homer on his head.
Developments in Greek culture made it possible to understand Homer’s
narratives as a hazard to accurate thinking. In the process of purifica-
tion, Plato outlined a completely new way of thinking. He worked out
abstract, philosophical thought.2
Plato teaches educators to recognize the most important facets of
their work. In modern societies, many agencies educate—public schools,
families, mass media sponsors, workforce trainers, religious organiza-
tions, charitable organizations, and more. The diversity of agencies
makes it difficult to see that teachers have a hand in shaping persons
in their unity. Cultural differentiation existed in Plato’s time, but Greeks
were clear about education’s central focus: the character of individuals. If
educators work toward their aim from a comprehensive picture, they get
the wisdom required for leading students in a way that, through growing
many capabilities, encourages their full humanity.

Plato’s story

Plato was born in 428–7 bc and died at the age of 80 or 81 in 348–7 BC.
Raised in an aristocratic family, he could have expected to share in ruling
his city-state, Athens. However, his political experiences in Athens and
in Greek colonies in Sicily frustrated and alarmed the young Plato.
Throughout his life, Plato’s concern remained the well-being of the city
and what we might call maximum human living.3
As a young man, Plato became attached to a gadfly philosopher whose
distinguishing characteristic was questions, questions, and more ques-
tions. Plato must have shared Socrates’s concern about the future of

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Athens. The aristocratic leisure class would attach their young men to
a special mentor for close guidance and maturation, so there was prec-
edent. However, by this time, Plato was already an adult with overseas
experience, including time spent with a utopian quasi-cult inspired by
the famous philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. Perhaps to
Socrates, Plato was more a companion.
Though Socrates claimed to know nothing himself, the former soldier
cast doubts on traditional opinions by his persistent questions. Plato
and contemporaries moved away from earlier philosophers’ scientific
and sometimes wildly speculative thinking. Socrates’s critical mindset
opened up an unconventional way of seeing the world Plato must have
found deeply attractive.4

The Sophistical challenge

The pursuit of aretē in Homer’s hero Achilles continued as the pursuit

of Greeks in various stations of life. Greek civilization placed the high-
est stress on personal virtue. From before Homer’s time down to the
formation of Greek city-states and the dawn of democracy, the prime
virtue of Greek life was the aristocratic warrior virtue of aretē. As we saw
in the Traditional paradigm, to die without honor was to fail in life. As
Greek life became urbanized—literally, city or civil-ized—political leader-
ship moved beyond the old aristocrats to males from leading families.
Citizens came to desire aretē in civic leaders.
Plato shows Socrates deploying withering questioning on a category
of teachers who were relatively new to Athens. These teachers included
names like Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus. Their collective name,
“Sophists,” reflected their claim to pursue wisdom, or sophia. By teaching
rhetoric—the arts of persuasive public speech—Sophists claimed to give
nothing less than civic aretē to elite young men.
No question that the Sophist approach was popular. Plato’s dramatic
dialogue, “Protagoras,” starts with the youth Hippocrates waking
Socrates before dawn so he can begin Sophist lessons. Sophists were free-
lance teachers who were available to any student for a fee. They charged
extravagantly for boosting careers. In effect, Sophists helped young men
to master public relations to become real powers in the city.
The Sophist aretē was a thinned-out understanding of personal charac-
ter, but they were promoting a genuine facet of the tradition. One strand

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

of the ancient conception of aretē was personal success. In Homer’s epics,

the voyager Odysseus ultimately succeeds. Though a tragic figure, the
warrior Achilles succeeds. By contrast, King Agamemnon fails. However,
aretē’s full nature was not surface success like that of a modern-day
celebrity, but a deep personal honorability. In pushing aretē for political
success, Sophists were amplifying a superficial strand in their culture.5

Issues with Sophist teaching

A central problem with Sophist teaching was that students gained no

knowledge of how to challenge conventional opinions. Plato’s Socrates
is definite that conventional opinion cannot stand up to reason. So
where could truth be found? Not in a return to traditional Greek beliefs:
Sophists were not sure that truth could be known. No transcendent truth
claim could be trusted.
Protagoras, the most able Sophist, famously said, “Man is the measure
of all things.”6 Neither he nor Prodicus was sure the gods existed. Their
skepticism meant that Sophists could lead not from any vantage point,
but only based on what majority opinion in the democracy believed.
Plato had his own doubts about the traditional gods, but if the gods
could not be models for right action, something else had to be the source.
Otherwise, city life was in trouble.7
In current times, politicians and governmental departments of
education ask public schools to produce graduates with character, or
broadly recognized virtues, or a positive attitude toward citizenship. In
no way are socially responsible graduates out of date. However, without
agreement on what characteristics are best, education for “character” is
difficult. We could imagine Plato challenging Whitehead. “The essence
of education is that it be religious or spiritual, you say. Yet can one teach
an undefined religious quality? Education for an unknown can get
nowhere.” Defining aims or a desired graduate is the starting point of
education. Present-day education has not escaped Plato’s concern for
definitions.
Plato sharpens the issue further: no truth, no education. Imagine the
need for truth in dialogue form:
Sophist: Of all things, man is the measure.
Plato: So you say that truth is not objective. There is no way to know. To you,
reality depends on everyone’s subjective perception.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Sophist: It is impossible to convey objective truths, but possible to persuade. I

don’t use logic, I use psychology.
Plato: So there is really no education. Your skepticism can’t challenge popular
opinion. Your education only changes attitudes to perceptions. If citizens
thought something was bad before, you change their way of thinking so they
think it good—and so for them it has become good. You are doing therapy, not
education. Without truth, no real education is possible.8

More damaging yet, Sophists imparted techniques of persuasion to persons

of unqualified character. They claimed their techniques of persuasion were
neither good nor bad. However, if Sophists gave rhetorical skills to persons of
questionable character, the persuasion exercised by these students will be an
evil. Sophism was a public relations scam that endangered the future. Plato
was dismayed at the troublemaking possibilities of Sophist knowledge.9

image 4 The sun at noon typifies the culmination sought by Plato’s education, an
overwhelming vision of the Good attained by persistent critical reasoning
Credit: Bigstock.

The missing definition of deep character

Plato’s aretē is excellence of character that is honorable and permanent.
Good leadership and the city’s future depend on it. Yet in the old society
dominated by aristocratic warriors, perhaps excellence of character was
obvious to all. In the new democracy, where ground-breaking sculptors,

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

painters, dramatists, mathematicians, soldiers, historians, and more are

all excellent, exactly which quality makes them all “excellent”? What is
the essence of aretē, its basic idea? Is it inborn, or can it be taught—or
must it be acquired in some other way?
Sophists said in effect, “The summit of human excellence is leading
others well.” Plato said, “You lead well if you lead a city into order and
truth. You lead badly if you lead from error into social confusion.”
Leadership as such is not excellence of character, not virtue, not aretē. To
Plato, Sophists had no way to know anything about the aretē they claimed
to teach for so much money. Sophists could not teach aretē because their
core problem of skepticism left no resources to know what they were
trying to teach.10
Plato’s Socrates, on the other hand, is not skeptical about the existence
of truth. Socrates’s philosophical career started with a revelation from
the God Apollo. The Oracle of Delphi revealed that no one in Athens
was wiser than Socrates. Since Socrates claimed to know nothing, he was
surprised. But as he went around questioning leading lights, he discov-
ered that public opinion is hollow. The Oracle had spoken truly.
Socrates’s wisdom consisted exactly in knowing that he knew noth-
ing. Yet his supposed agnosticism should not be pushed too far. It
did not lead him to agree with Sophist skepticism. Rather, Socrates’s
overriding mission in life was to locate truth through critical reason-
ing. To him, the order of the universe and the human body indicate
transcendent order. Order in the cosmos meant truth is orderly in
human beings.
Socrates did not play around with language or make distinctions as a
game. “Socrates’ life (is best seen as) the life of piety, of realizing what is
dear to God and thereby serving others.” For the inspired mission, he
eventually accepted death rather than back down. So, it is no accident in
one of Plato’s early dialogues that his character Socrates sets out to define
genuine religious sensibility. Reason has reason to hope for answers—
from Pythagoras-like calculations on the physical world, and from an
orderly supernatural world too.11
Plato’s Socrates discovered, however, that aretē cannot be defined
directly. The dialogue “Meno” shows no attempt could yield its basic
common quality, its idea. An indirect approach seemed the only hope.
To see the good, philosophers must work indirectly from known facts
to derive unknowns. The move to a roundabout strategy defines most
dialogues, including the major work, The Republic.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Plato had developed an acute ability for geometry, perhaps from

overseas visits to Pythagorean ideal communities. Over the door of
the Academy, the school founded by Plato, was this notice: “Let none
ignorant of geometry enter my door.” The inscription seems like an arbi-
trary restriction—until one recalls how geometry works. Its theorems
let searchers calculate an unknown angle from two known angles of a
triangle.
Similarly, if one cannot know the aim of education directly, it can be
deduced. After all, the world is an orderly place. It is a world mathemati-
cal measurement showed to be precisely orderly—more so than appear-
ances indicated. In such an orderly world, an investigator can deduce
aretē. The key is that propositions fit together and do not contradict each
other. True ideas will always hold together and make a coherent logos
or system. Truths support each other, like a web. If academic investiga-
tion leads you to realize that a hypothesis is wrong, discard it. The new
goal is to get to a firm starting point—which is not a hypothesis. From
there one can go back down through the reasoning and validate a whole
system, a logos.12
For example, scientists predicted the existence of dark matter from
calculations well before they confirmed its existence. The scientific
picture could only be complete if dark matter existed. Reason built
a ladder to reality. For Plato, all validated hypotheses confirm each
other and contribute to the superstructure leading us to ultimate truth.
Speaking metaphorically, Platonic truth-seekers are building a ladder to
the sun.13
Plato’s dialogue “Meno” shows that human beings actually possess
inward access to truth. In the dialogue, Socrates teaches a slave boy—who
had no formal learning—a basic lesson in geometry. Socrates believes
he is able to teach him because the soul of the boy has seen everything
before, as in déjà vu. Because souls come from a perfect realm outside
time, they can recognize truth as they have seen it before. Therefore,
strictly speaking, humans never really learn anything. We really only
recall what we know already. In any event, Plato seems to say that because
humans have knowledge, its real object must exist. Scolnicov observes,
“We do have knowledge (and true opinion); therefore, this is what their
object must be like.” Plato takes inward certainty to be a reflection of
cosmic order.14
Plato’s educational psychology sees humans as micro editions of the
true, underlying, spiritual cosmos. Because souls already existed in

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

contact with ultimate reality, teaching is the work of recovering what is

latent in students—albeit to differing degrees. Good souls have the nous.
The paideia of not-so-good souls can only go so far. Plato entwines moral
good and intellectual good. Good students are not only intellectually
good but also morally good. Ironically, the slave boy’s aptitude proves
his soul superior to the low soul of Meno. The aristocratic conception of
good students had a long, long run in the Western academic tradition.15
Plato’s logic might seem to be leaping the wrong way. Is he saying that
the cosmos must be orderly because humans know right from wrong?
Plato says this out of the conviction that human reason is not a cosmic
accident but a share of the reason of the gods. Burbules points out that
whether the soul is actually recollecting a former existence or not,
extending knowledge by recognizing one thing in terms of another is “a
much more interesting philosophical question.”16

Poets lead youth astray

As with earlier Athenian education, poetry continued to be central for

Plato. He understood well the importance of a student’s imaginative
world. We live in our imaginative worlds.
Plato was the first to call attention to the old poets’ near-monopoly on
the Greek way of thinking. Learning was a process of memorizing, repeat-
ing, and recalling songs. To Plato, the sensual pleasure that made memory
possible brought in a lot of nonsense. Not least of the problems was that
the gods were immoral criminals at times. For example, Zeus, “the best
and most just of the gods,” was supposed to have bound and castrated his
father, Cronus, for eating his own children. Sometimes children were told
a myth that was far-fetched because “suitable that all you younger people
should hear it.” They might even hear of the gods’ immorality. On top of
the immorality, Homer was inconsistent when his narrative needed it.
Damage done to children would have to be undone later on in their devel-
opment. If children learned the poets, their thinking had to be cleaned
up later on. The poets held back genuine honest character by going for
superficiality and letting people off with either this sacrifice or that.17
For Plato, supernatural stories about the gods do not make morals
right or wrong. Rather, good ethics all human beings know within
themselves tell whether Homer’s account of the gods is correct. “(T)he
fundamental elements of character (were to be) developed in the first

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 Five Paradigms for Education

instance by habitually putting before the minds of the young the true
nature of God and of what is most godlike in man.”18
Plato’s spiritual or religious conception will govern his education
process. Plato even developed alternate myths to support his way. Plato
is urging a revolution in Greek religion not from Homer or Sophocles
but based on reasoning from knowledge within human beings. Plato has
an alternative world-picture to the mainstream Greek one. His motive is,
of course, the well-being of a city under threat from a Sophistical higher
education that weakened aretē.19
Plato went much further than disrespect for singer-songwriters. His
revision challenges any story-based way of learning. The song-spinners
had massive appeal because they engaged both body and senses. Dancing
was no small part of a Greek festival. But to Plato, the rhythms and
sensual appeal blocked higher thinking. The act of performance encour-
ages people to identify with the fair sounds and colored surfaces of song
or stage. Plato is totally against such a passing show.
In short, Plato’s objection to poetry is not a strange hang-up. He
profoundly distrusted poetry. Poetry is imprecise. The poets described
things in many ways, without clear definition. Poetry is intellectual sin
to Plato. Abstract thinking—necessarily always true, because always
logical and timeless—is pure right thinking. In effect, Plato adopts and
strengthens strands within the culture, in order to save the culture.20
Plato’s best illustration of the better way of knowing is the parable of
the Cave.
Imagine human beings as though they were in a long underground cave-like
dwelling. They are in the cave from birth with legs and heads in chains. They
see only in front of them, unable to turn all the way around. Light is from a
fire and the dim light of the cave entrance, both behind them. Between the
fire and the prisoners is a road. Along the road runs a wall. The wall is like the
partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which
they show the puppets. All that prisoners see is the shadows from humans or
animals or artefacts moved along the road. The restraints placed upon them
mean they have never seen anything directly. Some of those moving along
the roadway make sounds while others are silent.21

Plato’s parable describes how appearances deceive. Surfaces conceal

reality. Humans are like Neo in the late-1990s studio film “The Matrix.”
Humanity is consigned to a false world. The world of appearances has
very little to do with the world outside the Matrix. Neo’s mission is to
penetrate surface appearances to bring liberation. In Plato’s parable, the

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

prisoners call reality what is only shadows flickering on a wall, like the
artificial world of a television screen. Only close reasoning will let one
escape the world of appearances. Making distinctions, setting careful
definitions, abstracting the essential element of some entity, not being
deceived by multiplicity—these intellectual steps bring us toward the
light.
Abstract knowledge is logically, necessarily true. To be released from
the cave into the outside world dominated by the sun is the same as being
released from a lifetime of misapprehensions and falsehood. A prisoner
brought out into the light will take time to see. Initially the sun will blind
him. But eventually he will see the shadows and the true nature of human
beings—directly, as they are, not dimly and distorted.
Gerbner’s cultivation theory follows a similar way of abstraction from
narrative to analyze media phenomena. Recall the process: researchers
noted characters in filmed shows. They correlated their actions to find
repeated stereotypes that become accepted as truths about women, men,
the causes of insecurity, and race. Homer’s sung encyclopedia narrated
tribal lore for warfare and civilian life.
In narrative, events cannot be integrated into sure systems of cause
and effect. It takes an act of reflection to draw lines between the common
factors. Abstraction is an act of seeing correlations, grouping them,
and seeking rules that apply in common. By compiling and analyzing
phenomena, Plato was able to pierce the illusions of popular culture to
see relationships as they really were. Doxa is the Greek word for “opinion,”
in contrast to the sure knowledge from logically bound abstractions. It is
the knowledge of the Cave. Oral narratives can only give doxa.
The flow of events is a multiplicity. The stream of experience allows
for no reflection. Doxa is becoming, not timeless being. It is visible,
rather than invisible and thinkable. Narrative and reason’s sure results—
episteme—are different ways of knowing. More than two millennia later,
a German philosopher urged that a broad, ugly ditch separates the
could-have-been-different truths of history from the necessary, inescap-
able truths of timeless reason. Plato believed that the accidental truths of
history are not necessary truths. History and truth are not the same. He
was ahead of his time.22
Plato was a pivotal figure in the massive Greek shift in ways of know-
ing. Two significant shifts in his culture made the Platonic abstract
knowledge revolution possible. The first cultural shift is the growing
place of literacy in the culture. In reading, the eye takes over from the

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 Five Paradigms for Education

ear. The singer-poets stored, played, and replayed the culture. With an
alphabet, literacy takes that storage, playing, and replaying role. Poetic
narration cannot handle abstractions. Change must be personified and
dramatized. By contrast, literacy promotes abstract reasoning. Plato is
applying a new technology to thinking itself. In the twenty-first century,
will we see ways of thinking change again as communications technol-
ogy puts us in constant contact with friends and information? Plato’s
revolution was as profound as the current technology revolution. Some
thinkers see a return to the world of shifting shapes, sounds, and colors
in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century communications revolution.23
The second cultural shift leading to Plato’s completely new way of
thinking relates to the first. Literacy seems to have brought a new sense
of interiority in human beings. In the old culture, Achilles the warrior
is not a person apart from his actions. Possibly memory recall is done
not by bodily enactment, but by an alphabet that brings some separa-
tion of body from interior life. In any event, the consciousness becomes
newly aware it is thinking. Plato’s shift is a subject seeking to know just
how he or she knows. Plato’s whole career is an urgent defense of right
and wrong living that must be rooted in an ultimately real upper-story
spiritual world beyond the delusive world of the senses. Only a soul
freshly aware of itself could have even become aware of Plato’s problem
of knowing.

Reason’s pursuit of certainty

For Plato, education was nothing less than leading individuals from
narrative-spun illusions into truth that is permanent and perennial.
Non-narrative truth is not subject to narrative happenstances. Narrative
is contingent. The story could be different. But timeless truth must
be always, infallibly, true. By focusing on clear definitions of entities
appearing in various narrative disguises, the student comes to see truth
abstractly, in the mind’s eye. Necessarily this truth coheres with all other
truths; it is logically coherent. Not everybody will be able to complete
the learning journey to arrive at the summit. Many will be incapable of
continuing beyond a certain point.24
A quick review of Greek religion shows Plato’s mental world and his
presuppositions. First, Greek religion was not a system like Christianity
or Islam, which are characterized by written bodies of teaching. Greek

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

religion had no such system of doctrines. In particular, there are no true

gods and false gods. There are powers of life that have always been known
as well as powers newly experienced and active. Each God deserves a
measure of respect, just as a person should not neglect any facet of life.
Demeter is the goddess of agriculture. Dionysus is god of revelry. Ares
is god of war. Over their history, Greeks came to see additional powers.
They tended to link basic facets of experience and material life with
particular gods. Religion was never imagined as the way that an indi-
vidual expresses a unique identity. Cities collectively performed rituals
and sacrifices routinely to keep the favor of their protector god. So Plato’s
new conception of an idea or a form, say of a horse, or of beauty, or of
goodness, actually seems to follow the standard Greek way of thinking.25
The gods themselves were subjects to forces above them. In particu-
lar, the conception of fate, or moira, or necessity governs them—as we
noticed earlier. Gods are a separate race from humans, a higher race
for sure, but they are not ultimate powers. Their dispensations must
be aligned with basic cosmic principles. Greek philosophers from the
beginning, and especially Pythagoras, focus on the harmonious makeup
of the world. Perhaps they deduced that cosmic orderliness could never
have come from Homer’s family of gods, perpetually at odds with itself.
Pythagoras’s mathematical confirmation of an orderly world supported
a monotheistic tendency. Skepticism did not lead to Greek philosophy.
There was no enlightenment like the later European scientific and social
revolution. Plato assumed that truth was orderly. Whatever or whoever
was creator, the human and natural worlds fit together.26
Underneath the poets’ untrustworthy and delusive world of narra-
tive lie reliable ideas. The linked, rationalized world of abstraction is
truly reliable truth. Truth does not contradict itself. But, some might
say, coherence is not enough. There are numerous world pictures.
Science is extrapolated to a scientific world picture. Buddhism spins a
world picture. Islam, likewise. Each is an internally coherent system of
meaning. Plato insists not only on coherence but also that his system of
ideas—his logos—arrive at the highest idea. Truth must not only hold
together; it must also correspond to reality. The missing highest idea
will certainly and inescapably hold the whole meaning-system together.
Academic work must build up toward it by coordinating hypothesis with
hypothesis.
Descartes famously arrived at a lowest-common denominator that
served as the basis of his philosophy: “I think, therefore, I am.” Plato

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 Five Paradigms for Education

instead has an end-point that validates the whole. The hypothesis which
is also the point of departure is not available directly. It must be inferred.
As Samuel Scolnicov observes, the starting point is not assured in Plato’s
system. Instead, it is a desideratum—a wish. With the final confirmation
of this sought-after divine kingpin—keystone of the Platonic system—a
student has both the whole picture and all its parts in correct relative
understanding. Everything assumes correct proportions in relation to
everything else. It is as if humans must feel along the wall of a darkened
room looking for the light switch. When the switch is found, the light
will reveal everything in stark clarity. The ideas will come together in a
logos. Plato posits the ultimate is discoverable. On this item of faith, he
proceeds.
In a time of exhaustive exposure to popular culture, students under-
stand and may want to resist the world of narrative surfaces. They may
agree that narrative is delusive. The questions then become: Is Plato’s
alternative for real? How did Plato figure that he had found truth? Can
anyone know reality for sure?
To answer, Plato’s certainty is religious certainty. Seen from outside,
his philosophy or system of truth settles no question once and for all. Yet
it moves toward a comprehensive vision of reality entirely persuasive to
those who have been formed by it and for it.
Plato uncovered issues that other philosophies, religions, and world-
views must now address. If other meaning-systems try to understand
themselves in relation to Plato’s theory, they will address their problem in
his vocabulary, on his terms. Philosophy raises questions that cut across
theologies, religions, and worldviews. It seems to be neutral or superior
to any particular meaning-system. Yet Plato own system stands within a
definite meaning-system.
Plato’s education, like all educations, starts from its own presuppositions.
His assumptions emerge from the range of possible, potential, or plausible
assumptions operating in classical Greek culture. Assumptions are not made
by any logical process of reason; they are assumed. For example, in Western
societies since the Enlightenment, individual liberty takes precedence
over communal well-being. Western societies assume social arrangements
should prioritize the right of individual autonomy. It is difficult for us to see
value in more communal assumptions of differing cultures.
Selected beliefs ground habits, practices, and institutions of any
society. Assumptions ground every system of education. In that they are
articles of belief, assumptions are “religious.” Plato’s philosophy—like

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

all philosophies, like all education systems—builds upon unargued

assumptions.27

Platonic teaching

Plato’s academic treatises are in the dialogue form of a theater script.

A dramatic performance was essentially a religious event in ancient
Greece. A city-state would assemble to share the enactment of a ritual
in the form of a drama. Spectators were also participants; originally, the
famous Greek chorus was none other than the whole congregation of
the city. So, Greeks were familiar with scripts. Drama developed to the
high art of playwrights like Aeschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles, writer of
Oedipus Rex. Plato was no slouch as writer of scripts either. His charac-
terizations cut to the bone. In the dialogues, Socrates puts questions to
his subjects, which they accept at face value. Irony is everywhere. The
watcher of the dialogue understands Socrates is in effect mocking his
partners to their face.
As an educational device, dialogues have a distinct value over any
straightforward essay. Plato could have opted to tell his students what to
think. Instead, the dialectical method develops critical thinking by those
capable of it. The process of reading the dialogue is the process of think-
ing through the claims and perspective of those who reason in it. This
dialogue builds the reasoning ability needed to see truth.
Students, like the character Meno in the dialogue of his name, complain
that the questioning procedure can do nothing except to paralyze the
researcher. Socrates, says Meno, is like a torpedo fish that stuns his prey.
Plato characterized Meno as pitiful. He is a great guy, an adventurer of
his community who wants to get ahead. His interest in genuine aretē is
minimal. Even the slave can be taught—but not Meno.
Notice the irony. Meno’s every utterance has to be read as the utterance
of a half-hearted truth-seeker. Plato intends that hard-working readers
will prize out implicit conclusions for themselves. The dialectical method
develops critical thinking ability in those who are capable of it—even
in those who overhear the discussion. It can seem a dialogue such as
the Meno ends with a menu of possible answers. Everything is up in the
air. Never are the readings straightforward. Modern scholars still fail to
perceive irony in a given dialogue and so they assess a dialogue’s lesson
differently from those who understand a character’s superficiality.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

The torpedo-fish effect is to show students they do not know what they
think they know. The aporia—a dead end—prompts learning. Motivation
to seek some solution comes when a student recognizes a problem. Crisis
experiences can be deeply educational. “Think!” says Plato.28
Those who press through and get the philosophic passion get much
more than academic credit. Philosophy to Plato is the highest part of
the reasoning animal, the human being. Philosophical thinkers gain
a consuming passion for what is most real. They desire a union of the
mind with reality.
The real lover of learning (desires) to be ever struggling up to being, and not to
abide amongst the manifold and limited objects of opinion; ... the edge of his love
will not grow dull nor its force abate, until he has got hold of the nature of being
with that part of his soul to which it belongs.

Not only spiritual desire, but an unmistakable sexual edge is present in

the quote. The idea of the Good is like the pursuit of a holy grail. The
pursuit is mental, but more importantly moral. Education is a gradual
process of a soul attaching itself to the truth. The philosopher puts
aside the distractions of the narrated world—always in process, always
becoming, never arriving—for the timeless world of pure being that he
can perceive by thought.29
When the thinker arrives at the idea of the Good, he or she has
the ultimate lens to see all of reality clearly. Plato’s educational proc-
ess offers comprehensive wisdom. Careful distinctions and reason-
ing, possibly over a lifetime, can bring the mind’s eye to a kind of
conversion. After receiving the vision of the Good, the philosopher
can never be satisfied with the passing world of illusions, greed, and
pain. At Athens, Plato experienced the Eleusinian mystery ritual. In
the ritual, seeing a sacred object brought conversion. The experi-
ence assured one of escape from death and rebirth. Plato’s education
is a rationalized religious quest. Platonic philosophy draws out not
what is the most natural to human beings, but that which is most
God-like.30
To students who know PhDs personally, or who have read any novel
about academic faculty politics, the thought that philosophizing produces
better people seems absurd. Knowledge seems to be a hindrance to char-
acter. But Plato’s belief is contrary. For him, to know the good is to do the
good. The way to better people is better thinking. Philosophy emerges as
Plato’s genuine way to the aretē hawked by the Sophists.

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

The parable of the cave makes clear what philosophical conversion

will mean for a teacher. In brief, teaching will be uphill. If a prisoner
loses his lifelong chains, he looks first around the cave. He now explains
the passing shadows, but in this-world terms. The movement of goods,
persons, and animals along the backlit roadway at the prisoners’ back
explains the shapes.
Then, pulled outside into the full light of the sun, the new seer begins
to see the real world. No longer will the world of appearances and narra-
tive opinion persuade him. When he returns to the cave as a public
service, the other prisoners mock the new knowledge. His revelations
make him less able to cope in their world. His stories of light make no
sense. Cave-dwellers abuse him like Socrates was abused.
The vocation of professor might involve martyrdom! The task of the
enlightened one who returns to the dark is to turn cave-dwellers toward
the beauty of the good. Students can be expected to resist learning with
their whole bodies. Only the dawn of abstract learning will break old
assumptions. Just as the dialogues portray characters who are exposed
as unwilling to think, so dull students will not read closely for serious
learning. Socratic teaching is a moral purification effort.
Since students have to arrive at the truth on their own initiative, a wise
teacher realizes his or her role is one of a midwife to help students to
realize the truth within them. Because human beings are born from a
realm in which their souls have contact with ultimate reality, they already
carry knowledge within them. Students just have to reason toward what
they already know. The midwife-teacher’s main task is to “turn the soul”
of the student-prisoners toward learning and conversion. The role of
a Socrates is the highest that a human being can have—to assist souls
toward the love of truth, beauty, and the ultimately good.31
A teacher who believes that learning has to be hard work that is often
resisted is not likely to imagine herself as a student’s friend. Mentor,
yes. Coach, yes. Drill sergeant, yes. Friend—perhaps, later on. But no
present-day adolescent psychologist would encourage modern teachers
to bully students to achieve intellectual clarity. Public schools serve a
wider range of purposes than Plato’s self-confident high-society males.32
Whether students pick up on higher learning depends on the state
of their soul. Souls come with three dispositions: the appetitive, the
spirited, and the philosophic. Imagine a being looking like a human, but
combining three creatures—a many-headed beast, a lion, and a human,
says Plato. The many-headed appetite-inclined souls want wealth most

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 Five Paradigms for Education

table 3.1 Platonic education facets, reverence, and duty

Facet Keywords

Aims Knowledge of truth, true actions based on

knowledge
Students and their Three parts: philosophic, spirited, appetitive
nature must be restrained, directed like charioteer
restrains, directs spirited horse
Teacher A midwife (maieutes) who assists but who
cannot force or create recovery of truth in the
soul
Motivation and Love of the truth in company of like-minded
discipline student philosophers
Valued knowledge The vision of the Good, attained by geometry-
model reasoning built up to confirm,
establish a hypothetical apex of Truth, Beauty,
Goodness. Intellection toward religious-like
transformation
Assessment of success Philosophic service of others out of
dispassionate concern; great civic leadership,
civic aretē
Key learning The Academy, lecture theater, symposia
environments
Characteristic events Awarding of degrees of knowledge
or rituals
Reverence Ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness
Duty Careful distinctions and reasoning; academic
superiority is a virtue

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

of all; lion-like spirit-inclined souls want honor; philosophic souls want

truth.
In Plato’s simile, the philosophic soul is the most truly human. An aris-
tocratic background may have nothing to do with true nobility. Remember
Meno. Plato saw that these three dispositions explain three broad roles in
society, too. Those with strong appetites produce the material commodi-
ties essential to life. The spirited protect the state against external enemies
and preserve order within it. Philosophers should legislate and govern.
Beyond a certain point, most people will be incapable of continuing in
study. Plato’s appetitive class is the most numerous by far.33
Plato would organize a new city of human beings into his rational Republic.
He goes beyond any Sophist. Sophists do not challenge the status quo. Plato
sees that good souls make a good society. As souls go, so does society. Plato’s
Academy for future civic leaders and his dialogues were contributions to his
project of a stable society supporting worthwhile lives.34

Plato’s Reverence and Duty

Plato wants students to gain sure knowledge of reality in order to

re-establish the basis for noble civic or political conduct. Reason is
able to locate timeless truth from distractions of popular culture; it
can build up an intellectual picture of truth, beauty, and goodness. The
vision of the Good is a vision of the meaning of life. It is an unarguable
Good that can inspire philosopher-rulers. To Plato, to know what is
good means that one will always do what is good. His optimistic belief
seems to be contradicted by any number of historical disasters, but
perhaps he would reply that the doers had not truly seen the good.
To him, beauty, truth, and goodness were intellectual attainments. The
corresponding duty is the obligation to clear thinking or theory to
pave the way for clear doing. Plato’s educating—as with Socrates—is
religious work. Table 3.1 describes the facets of educating work that
together encourage a unique reverence and duty.

Notes
 Robert McClintock, “Introduction,” in The Theory of Education in the Republic
of Plato, by Richard Lewis Nettleship, Classics in Education Series 36 (New

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 Five Paradigms for Education

York: Teachers College Press, 1968), ix, points out that Plato helps educators
understand themselves and their work.
 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard
University Press, 1963), 4–9, sees concern about poetry as key to Plato.
 Considerations around dates of Plato’s birth and death are discussed by
Nicolas D. Smith and Thomas Brickhouse, “Plato,” Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, 2005, http://www.iep.utm.edu/plato; J. M. Day, “Introduction,” in
Plato’s Meno in Focus, ed. J. M. Day (London and New York: Routledge, 1994),
1–34, details Plato’s early political experiences; Samuel Scolnicov, Plato’s
Metaphysics of Education (London: Routledge, 1988), 5, tells how Sophists as a
new movement of civic teachers in fifth-century Greece led the change from
earlier philosophers’ speculative sciences to concentration on city politics;
also see Adam Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche
(Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 3.
 Charles Hummel, “Plato,” Prospects, Journal of International Bureau of
Education, UNESCO, Paris 24, no. 1 (1994): 329–42.
 Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, five talks about traditional aretē as
success; Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, 3; Alexandre Koyré, Discovering
Plato, trans. L. C. Rosenfield (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 19.
 Plato, Theaetetus, 152 (a), in Plato: Complete Works, John M. Cooper, and
D. S. Hutchinson, eds. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), p. 169.
 Hippocrates’s enthusiasm is in Plato, Protagoras and Meno, ed. B. Radice,
trans. W. K. C. Guthrie (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1956), 39–40, lines
330a–e; Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 5, notes that traditional
aretē included a facet of visible success. Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as
Theologians highlights Sophists’ new basis of public morality. Nettleship,
The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic, 7, says that without any pervasive
countervailing force, public opinion was the real educator, not the
Sophists.
 Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 5–7; C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of
Man: How Education Develops Man’s Sense of Morality (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Co., 1978).
 Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 2–29, is a thorough presentation of
Socrates/Plato contra sophism.
 Koyré, Discovering Plato, 8; R. S. Bluck, “Introduction,” in Plato’s Meno, by
Plato, ed. R. S. Bluck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8;
Alexander Nehamas, “Meno’s Paradox and Socrates as a Teacher,” in Plato’s
Meno in Focus, ed. J. M. Day (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 222;
Plato, Protagoras and Meno; W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy:
Volume 3, The Fifth Century Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969), 434–5, 217; this paragraph represents the arguments of the
Meno and Protagoras.

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

 Xenophon, Memorabilia and Oeconomicus, trans. Edgar Cardew Marchant,

Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
1923), sec. 1.4.4–10; cited by Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians,
122, the quote is from p. 133; Socrates’s obedience to God is stated in Plato,
The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, trans. Hugh
Tredennick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969), 28e, see also
21b–24a; Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, cites L. Navia, if we
remove “his overwhelming faith in God, Socrates transforms himself into
a clever elenchical and dabbling dilettante, comparable to some of our
own language philosophers who deal with words, words, and nothing but
words”; Luis E. Navia, The Socratic Presence: A Study of the Sources (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1993), 132, see generally pp. 121–32; Allan Silverman,
“Contemplating Divine Mind,” in Ancient Models of Mind: Studies in Human and
Divine Rationality, ed. Andrea Nightingale and David Sedley (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 79–87. Fate or necessity (moira)
and the order of the cosmos did not imply a personal conception of “God.”
 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic
Books, 1991), sec. 511b; Samuel Scolnicov, “The Two Faces of Platonic
Knowledge,” Journal of the International Plato Society 4, no. 8 (2004): 4–5;
Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 89–90.
 W. W. R. Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics, 6th ed. (London:
Macmillan, 1915), 43, for the inscription; Koyré, Discovering Plato, 11, on
Plato’s ex hypothesi method; Nicholas C. Burbules, “Aporias, Webs, and
Passages: Doubt as an Opportunity to Learn,” Curriculum Inquiry 30,
no. 2 (Summer 2000): 182, for move from Meno to later dialogues. It is
important not to overplay either Pythagoras as mainly a mathematician or
Plato’s direct use of him; see Carl Huffman, “Pythagoras,” in The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2011, http://plato.stanford.
edu/archives/fall2011/entries/pythagoras/; J. B. Kennedy, “Plato’s Forms,
Pythagorean Mathematics, and Stichometry,” Apeiron 43, no. 1 (2010): 1–32;
Andrew Gregory, “Kennedy and Stichometry—Some Methodological
Considerations,” Apeiron 45, no. 2 (January 2012), for rejoinder.
 Samuel Scolnicov, “The Two Faces of Platonic Knowledge.” Journal of the
International Plato Society, 4, no. 8 (2004), p. 9.
 Plato believed that images held in memory mirrored transcendental reality:
Patrick H. Hutton, “The Art of Memory Reconceived: From Rhetoric to
Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1987): 374–5; A. W. Gouldner,
Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), links the sociology of an aristocratic
leisure class to their view-from-above philosophizing.
 Nicholas C. Burbules, “Aporias, Webs, and Passages: Doubt as an
Opportunity to Learn,” Curriculum Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Summer 2000):

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 Five Paradigms for Education

171–87 especially 177; Plato, Protagoras and Meno, sec. 81a to 82b in “Meno”;
Nehamas, “Meno’s Paradox and Socrates as a Teacher,” 223; Scolnicov,
Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 2, 83; Scolnicov, “The Two Faces of Platonic
Knowledge,” 4 see also p. 9 on objects of human knowledge.
 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 78; Plato, The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro,
Apology, Crito, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin Books, 1969), sec. 6ab, cited p. 23; Parker, Robert. Athenian Religion:
A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), on suitable myths; Nettleship, The
Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic, 43–6; Havelock, Preface to Plato, 100,
where Zeus said humans should not blame gods for misfortunes; poets let
people off too easily, Preface to Plato, 118.
 R. L. Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 33.
 Plato’s better alternative, Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic,
34; Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians—the subtitle underlines that
Plato is rationalizing religion.
 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 126–9.
 Adapted from Plato, The Republic of Plato, sec. VII, 514a–c, the Cave image is
described from 514a to 516a.
 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 97, 101, 218; Toshimasa Yasukata, Lessing’s
Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment, 1st ed., vol. 1 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
 Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” in Media and Cultural
Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, rev.
ed. (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 107–16.
 Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education.
 John Gould, “On Making Sense of Greek Religion,” in Greek Religion and
Society, ed. P. E. Easterling and John V. Muir, 1–33. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985) [specific details at p. 2]; Robert Parker, “Greek
Religion,” in The Oxford History of the Classical World, ed. John Boardman,
Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986), 235.
 Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, vii, 1–2.
 Kieran Egan, “Some Presuppositions That Determine Curriculum
Decisions.” Journal of Curriculum Studies, 10, no. 2 (1978): 123–33”;
Scolnicov, “The Two Faces of Platonic Knowledge”; Drozdek, Greek
Philosophers as Theologians; Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education,
90–1; Nehamas, “Meno’s Paradox and Socrates as a Teacher,” 236–7, on
coherence.
 Koyré, Discovering Plato, 7, 17; Hummel, “Plato” quotes Symposium, 175d;
Burbules, “Aporias, Webs, and Passages,” 172–3; Day, “Introduction,” 29;
editor of the collection notes irony-deniers and irony-perceivers who come

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 Plato the Revolutionary 

to different conclusions about the Meno; Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of

Education, 82; A. G. Rud, “Use & Abuse of Socrates in Teaching,” Education
Policy Analysis Archives 5, no. 20 (November 24, 1997): 10.
 Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic, 25.
 The quote is from Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic,
24, but the whole relies on pp. 22–5; Hummel, “Plato,” 331; Drozdek, Greek
Philosophers as Theologians; Shlomy Mualem, Borges and Plato: A Game with
Shifting Mirrors (Madrid and Frankfurt-A.M.: Iberoamericana Editorial
and Vervuert, 2012), 99; Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education, 3, 13, 82;
Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage,” 20.
 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1985), 9–11. Thanks to John Kuentzel for pointing
out Kierkegaard’s use of Socrates.
 Peter Losin, “Education and Plato’s Parable of the Cave,” Journal of Education
178, no. 3 (1996): 49–65.
 Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic, 9–16; Scolnicov, Plato’s
Metaphysics of Education, 3.
 Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic, 3.

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 4
The Empirical Paradigm
Abstract: Exposition shows a central “reverence” and
appropriate “duty” for the basic presuppositional (“religious”)
values which inform empiricistic education. After Newton,
study of phenomena would directly reveal essentials.
Empiricists rejected purposefulness in physics and, later,
human life in the cosmos. With transcendental purposes
abandoned, education took immediate, present-day society
as its aim. Newton, Locke, Herbert Spencer, utilitarianism,
the early-twentieth-century efficiency movement, behaviorist
psychology, and rationalistic curriculum planning are well
explained by the core “reverence” for direct (positivistic)
perception of reality.

Keywords: Bloom, Benjamin; Callahan, Raymond;

Darwin, Charles; education, aims of; efficiency
movement; empiricism; epistemology, empiricist;
evolution, theory of; Locke, John; Newton, Isaac;
scientific revolution; Spencer, Herbert; teleology; telos.

Newell, Ted. Five Paradigms for Education: Foundational

Views and Key Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137391803.0010.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0010
 The Empirical Paradigm 

Education for all

Over the past three centuries, people in Western societies arrived at

the commitment that every single child should be educated. Western
democracies in North America and Europe sponsor education for
all children not only because finances permit but from beliefs and the
way social relationships embody the beliefs. Presuppositions encour-
age politicians and civil servants to maintain funding. Like all forms of
education, Empirical education draws on a reality-narrative that it aims
to reproduce in initiates.
Education for all male and female children, regardless of social back-
ground, is a first in human history. Plato did not believe all persons were
capable of benefiting from education in letters. Notably, though, his ideal
Republic educated women. Classical education in medieval Europe was
the Athenian paradigm modified for the Roman and then for Christian
Latin contexts like church and government. Naturally, it was elitist too,
though poor male scholars in Europe’s major towns were a familiar sight.
If we made a historical timeline on a twelve-inch ruler, education for all
is a half-inch on the far right.1
By showing the beliefs sustaining public education, we support our
claim that education is “religious.” By this, we mean education’s foun-
dations are unproven and—strictly speaking—unprovable. In a Ninian
Smart perspective, education is from a worldview, for (propagation of)
a worldview. The “religious” purpose of education is as true of “secular”
society as it is of a religious group. Empirical education is one more
tradition producing its own kind of reverence and duty in its initiates.

Mass schooling

Take one country’s experience, the United States of America. In the two
decades between 1879 and 1898, school enrolment more than doubled,
from seven million to fifteen million. The immigration needed to develop
the new world brought speakers of languages other than English. Many
more children were around, and those children were now in schools. The
ideals of the young American democracy meant that male and female
children of poor and rich families should receive similar educations.
The moral mission of schools from 1865 was to support a demo-
cratic polity in conditions of reasonable prosperity for all, a significant

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 Five Paradigms for Education

challenge. Immigrants’ traditions were often not those of America’s

founding English Protestants. Many immigrants came to cities where
their living conditions could be scandalous and where a criminal subcul-
ture was a growing reality. Urban schooling was thus a state agency to
transform immigrants into citizens and able workers—after 1900, no
fewer than one million more students per year. Though the law after mid-
century limited child labor and also made school attendance obligatory,
too few classroom seats were available to meet the legal requirement.
Large-scale, publicly funded education systems, at the time only a few
decades old, lived in a sense of crisis.2
Public schools needed industrial-scale thinking in their crisis of
gigantic enrolments for a vital social mission. As early as 1848, John
Philbrick, superintendent of education for Quincy, Massachusetts,
sought uniform quality in the educational product. Philbrick developed
an egg-crate school of four stories, with 12 classrooms of 56 pupils each.
Textbooks were the same and students knew they would be tested by
uniform exams. Schooling expressed industrial values like punctuality,
order, discipline, precision, and regularity. By the turn of the century, the

image 5 “Two and two makes four; four and four makes eight ... Inchworm,
inchworm, measuring the marigolds. You and your arithmetic, probably you’ll go
far/… Seems to me, you’d stop and see, how beautiful they are.”—“Inchworm Song,”
Frank Loesser, 1952
Credit: Bigstock.

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

superintendent of schools in Portland, Oregon, claimed that, as he sat in

his office, he could know the exact page in each book on which students
were working. With far greater student numbers than ever before, mass
education had to find new ways to meet the challenge.3
The industrial revolution provided the resolution to the urgent problem
of mass education: efficiency. Over the 1800s, factory production made
machinery and goods of uniform quality available to much of the popula-
tion. Time-and-motion experts like Frederick W. Taylor and Frank Gilbreth
made factories hum. Perhaps the most stunning success of all was Henry
Ford’s Model T, first sold in 1908. By 1913, Ford’s moving assembly line and
use of precisely made, interchangeable parts reduced production time for
a single vehicle from 12 hours and 30 minutes to 5 hours and 50 minutes.
Now everyone could afford a motor car. The future seemed wide open.
The factory symbolized disciplined human potentiality. Factories were
similar enough to schools. Local boards of education paid hundreds of
teachers who required supervision, all housed in large buildings and
offices requiring equipment and maintenance. Why not take a factory
approach to schooling?4

Pushing for efficiencies

Concern about wasted time and money prompted an early advocate of

educational efficiency. Leonard Ayres’s Laggards in our Schools, published
in 1909, tracked the cost of pupils who repeated grades. He observed that
if only half of pupils reach eighth grade, the system is wasting half its
raw material; efficiency is only 50 percent. System A’s Grade Eight might
have nine thousand students on its rolls. If efficient System B has only
eight thousand, then inefficient System A is bearing unnecessary costs
for one thousand students.5
Maintaining a physical plant is expensive. In the example, plant effi-
ciency computes to 8/9 or 88.8 percent. When Ayres combined attrition
numbers with plant efficiency numbers, he gained a “system efficiency
number.” He listed comparisons for 58 cities. The most efficient city
spent 6.5 percent on repeaters; the least efficient spent 30.3 percent on
repeaters. Repeating instruction to students who did not comprehend
the first time around cost a whopping 27 million dollars—in cities alone.
Ellwood Cubberley noted a 1912 newspaper editorial: “Lately we have
had a striking demonstration of what experimental science can do by
reducing the motions in laying brick and the fatigue in handling pig iron.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

It can hardly be pretended that scientific efficiency is of less consequence

in the schools.”6
Given Ayres’s kind of criticism, elected leaders from business circles
who dominated urban boards of education pressed their superintend-
ents to stop waste and find efficiencies. Business leaders were seen as
models of success in a democratic society. A new genre of success and
self-help books recounted their achievements, authored by Horatio
Alger or Andrew Carnegie, a successful capitalist himself. Mass-
circulation journals such as McClure’s or Ladies Home Journal urged the
school system toward reform on the lines of scientific business prac-
tice. The way to run a school system was the same as to run a railroad
system. Boards of education responded to public pressure and exerted
private pressure on superintendents. They met the system’s financial
and administrative challenges by pressing industry-like efficiencies
onto schooling.7
The efficiency emphasis changed teaching. A clear example is the
introduction of an objective test for student reading ability. Daniel
Starch’s 1915 article entitled “The Measurement of Efficiency in Reading”
urged teachers to test pupils by giving exactly 30 seconds for each of
eight graded passages, explaining that
they are to read silently as rapidly as they can, and at the same time to grasp
as much as they can, and that they will be asked to write down, not necessar-
ily in the same words, as much as they will remember of what they read. They
should be told not to read anything over again but to read on continuously as
rapidly as is consistent with grasping what they read.

For Starch, the “chief elements in reading are (1) the comprehension of
the material read, (2) speed of reading, and (3) the correctness of pronun-
ciation,” though the third factor was “relatively insignificant.” To this
efficiency expert, comprehension is anything a child remembers from
the passage. Starch measured reading by a test of specific short-term
memory—but did not test interpretation, analysis, and other aspects
of critical thinking. Reading was nearly reduced to bare recognition of
words.
This narrow testing was no isolated phenomenon in efficient educa-
tion. Objective tests—apparently fairer and easier to grade—edged out
essay tests that might capture “logical reasoning, critical evaluation,
or creative synthesis.” Realizing that a test loomed at the end of a term
could not fail to change a teacher’s approach. Teachers were forced to

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

teach so students would do well, whether the test was fair or unfair,
holistic or reductionistic. Starch’s objective testing shows how empiricist
educators reduce apparently discursive or narrative forms of learning,
like literature or history, to atomized facts.8
The efficiency movement is a variation of the Empirical paradigm.
Education rarely takes such a starkly mechanistic form. A restraint on
scientific, bureaucratic procedures is that teaching must translate ideas
into actual classrooms with real boys and girls. For example, a project
assignment moderates scientism. A project integrates areas of knowledge,
an art or music class, or a community activity such as theater or a field
trip. A project is inspired by a different paradigm. Any activity tending
toward interpretation and integration works against the dominance of
scientific procedure.

Empiricism’s advance

How did empirical reason come to a privileged place in the education

of human beings, as it did with the efficiency movement? A brief review
highlights assumptions which proved to be influential.
The European scientific revolution made Empirical education possible.
By 1687, three centuries of scientific exploration came into focus with
the publication of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia. Copernicus’s calculations
in the 1400s showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Newton’s
major work finally confirmed that movements of the planets were not
from spiritual forces. Astrology as a serious science was out. Instead, the
same gravity that causes apples to fall is the force that moves the heav-
ens. Newton finally broke the “enchantment” of the world. The universe
operated per mechanical laws.
Technological developments began to transform the world. To
those willing to remove the blinders of the old sciences, the objective,
experimental new science revealed useful information. Let us dare to
look without old religious prejudices. As Voltaire told a young man in
1741, Newton taught men to “examine, weigh, calculate, and measure,
and never to conjecture.” Newton had not been a system-maker: he
conducted deductive, empirical research. His science seemed not to
depend on religion, ideology, or metaphysics—just what he saw.9
After the European religious wars of the 1600s, a more rational way of
politics seemed imperative. Perhaps empirical science could revolutionize

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 Five Paradigms for Education

not only the heavens but the way humans live together in society. Social
sciences were born in the secular political thinking of Hugo Grotius in
Holland and Thomas Hobbes in England. They received another boost
after the French Revolution in the effort to reconstruct society, in the
work of Auguste Comte and others. European thinkers of all kinds had
great hopes for the empirical scientific method.

Death of the soul

Newton’s intellectual revolution changed not just astronomy and phys-

ics. Humanity’s understanding of itself changed. When science liberated
itself from theology, humanity lost a position of high privilege. Before
the empirical scientific revolution, investigation depended on purposes.
Everything possessed what Aristotle called a telos—a purpose for which
the phenomenon existed and toward which it tended to move. Nature,
including human beings, was part of a hierarchy of truths, a great Chain
of Being. For Plato, the forms that ordered changeable matter were
always true, because forms or ideas were beyond time and thus beyond
change. Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophy sought the meaning of phenom-
ena. Later, Christian theology accounted for the purpose of things. By
contrast, the new science deliberately set purpose aside.10
Humans had their purpose as image-bearers of the Creator who were
destined to reunite with Him. Human living was often torn up, broken,
or dislocated, but people understood the nasty, brutal, shortness of life as
due to humanity’s refusal of true purpose. God made an Earth that was
the center of the universe, and humanity was the previous and future
crown of creation. By contrast, Newton’s mechanical universe raised
questions about the meaning of being human.
An important truth in the old system was the Platonic and then Christian
belief that human beings are born with a soul. Human beings from the
first instance were different from animals, because God breathed life into
them in a special action. The living soul animates the body. A soul helps
explain how, though experiencing many changes, humans are conscious
of being the same through life. Since it is separate from the body, having a
soul guarantees that persons survive bodily death. In short, until empirical
science, European thinkers placed great stock in the soul.11
By contrast, after Newton, no alert thinker could write up ways of
educating human beings to realize an intended purpose coming from

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

an outside system. Divinely given purposes no longer explained the

world’s orderliness. Newly discovered laws of nature were transform-
ing the European mind. Human beings could now be understood
empirically, by the same kind of predictable regularities. They could
be developed in line with this-worldly laws governing them. The more
we know science, the more we know human reality. “God” became
an absent maker who designed—but did not need to maintain—the
cosmos.
With the dawn of empiricism, humans believed they could know real-
ity by taking measurements. Mathematical reason would reveal order.
Reasoning should be inductive. It should be based on facts, not on a
system that imposes meaning upon facts. Locke described himself as
an empirical “under-labourer” who aimed merely to clear the ground of
doctrinal and philosophical overlays. He wished to limit sure knowledge
to what the five senses affirmed to be true.12
The innate dignity of human beings was a casualty of the empirical
revolution. The soul was a problem for John Locke and fellow empiri-
cists. The new science wanted to verify entities by experiment and obser-
vation. Of course, the soul was unobservable. We cannot experimentally
verify it. Besides, Locke lived in a country where Christianity was the
official state religion and worked in institutions that supported official
faith. Locke was a spiritual man and did not desire to minimize religious
belief. To him, belief led to moral people and orderly society. At the same
time, the new science validated by the “incomparable Mr. Newton” was
an irresistible revolution.
Empiricism implied beliefs about how human beings learn things.
For Locke, as for Newton, genuine knowledge comes from the things
themselves. The mind, or the soul, must therefore start as a blank slate.
We write on the blank slate what we learn. Locke denied the long-held
idea that humans are born with innate ideas. Any innate ideas would
be inaccessible to investigation and contrary to the Newtonian empirical
revolution. The soul wound up on the shelf.
The postulation of a blank slate changed thinking about teaching. If
(a) knowledge comes from phenomena and (b) the human mind comes
unfurnished or unbiased, then (c) persons will learn best by studying
things directly. Human learning is from stimuli in the environment. The
best educational procedure is the same empirical method that brought
so much progress to humanity. Words, the darlings of universities and
building blocks of traditional rhetorical education, were now seen to have

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 Five Paradigms for Education

little impact. Empiricism—truth directly from things minus system—is

the basic commitment behind active learning.

Perfect minds

If the mind is shaped by stimuli, then it is not basically good or bad.

Rather, the mind is neutral. All that is required for a good outcome is
education. Instead of being disadvantaged by limited powers of reason-
ing, children actually have a great advantage over adults. They have no
deposit of bad thinking. Their minds are like empty rooms, ready for
furnishings. Minds are open to shaping by human design. Locke wrote
that “nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by
their education.”13
Locke’s assertion of inborn neutrality is revolutionary—it contradicts
Christian belief. Now ignorance, not a genetic tendency toward sin, is
the main human problem. Locke’s aim is as much human perfection as
science would support—but here-and-now, in time, not only in eternity
as Christians expected. Passmore writes,
The teleological concept of perfection, for which to be perfect is to attain
some remote end, has been replaced by an aesthetic concept, for which to be
perfect is to possess a harmoniously developed moral character, a character
which men can, in principle, be so educated as to possess here and now. The
perfect man is a work of art, the harmonious realization of an educator’s ideal;
education, not God, is the source of grace.14

Locke’s belief for the first time makes schooling more important than
religion. His view displaced the older belief and remains influential
to the present. John Dewey’s 1922 article “Education as a Religion”
expresses—in a confident and forthright manner—the same awareness
of scientific schooling’s ultimate purpose as Locke’s conception.15
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was a major carrier of Locke’s utopian
and this-worldly education. Spencer was a public intellectual in the
English-speaking world during the second half of the 1800s. He—not
Charles Darwin—coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Spencer
spent his adult life on a multi-volume project of “synthetic philosophy”
that applied evolutionary principles. His account of topics from social
organization through biology and philosophy appeared in a stream of

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

volumes published over 50 years, from 1850 to two posthumous works in

1904. His books sold a million copies in his lifetime.
For Spencer, evolution explains the progress of human beings. Spencer
believed societies make progress, just like nature does by survival of the
fittest. Government should get out of the way of progress. Rationalization
of society and the end of the old aristocracy is progress. Rich people
should not help poor people; instead, poor people should be encouraged
not to reproduce. Those best placed to benefit from schooling should pay
for it; the state should not pay for strong and weak alike. Policy should
strengthen the fittest part of the population. Progress is an irresistible
and positive scientific force. No one should try to hold it back. The effi-
ciency movement was part of a world in a tough pursuit of progress.16
Spencer’s essay on the aims of education brought evolutionary insight
to education. The title asked, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?”
The answer was, “Not much of what was then taught in schools.” Life is
short. Classical languages or history, along with art or music, could not
be justified. Spencer’s education would focus instead on a sequence of
useful activities. The five are
 Activities directly needed for self-preservation
 Activities indirectly needed for self-preservation
 Activities supporting the next generation
 Knowledge for social and political life
 Miscellaneous and leisure activities “devoted to the gratification of
the tastes and feelings”
The systematic wholes that Whitehead so desired, or systematic knowl-
edge such as Plato’s, only appear in the guise of present-world functions.
Any hope to expose children to as many fascinating aspects of life as
possible would be limited to the fifth set of activities.
Eight decades later, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow’s
famous pyramid imagined a similar sequence: first physiological
needs, then safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization needs. In both
hierarchies, seeing bare self-preservation as fundamental pushes
artistic, humane, and spiritual learning to last place. Self-preservation’s
hierarchy makes the most attractive and “fulfilling” aspects of human
life “impractical”—including traditional religions. To Spencer, science
itself is the supreme “religious” pursuit, because it develops awe for
an orderly reality. As we will see, Rousseau’s basic disagreement is

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 Five Paradigms for Education

whether self-preservation is really the most important thing about being

human.17
To a thinker like Spencer, the early educational paradigms of this
book are only historical stepping-stones. For him, “There cannot fail to
be a relationship between the successive systems of education, and the
successive social states with which they have co-existed.”18 To Spencer,
“[E]ducation evolves in a way similar to that in which individuals and
society evolve.”19 One system leads on to the next. Earlier educational
paradigms are not appropriate expressions of different reality-narratives.
They are partial, incomplete, semi-scientific efforts on the way to the
present. Spencer’s evolutionary view saw history as progress. The ulti-
mate society was the one he lived in. Society could only improve. There
is an important implication for education. The progress narrative means
that the last paradigm is the greatest because it discarded the weaknesses
and built on the strengths of its predecessors.20
By contrast, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential books
urge us to see that
No such thing exists as a rationality that is not the rationality of some tradi-
tion. Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Hume are four major philosophers
who represent rival traditions of inquiry. Each tradition developed within
a particular historical context and sought to resolve particular conflicts.
Allegiance to one tradition can allow for meaningful contact with other tradi-
tions in a way that can lead to understanding, vindication, or revision of that
tradition in its continuing form. Thus, only by being grounded in the history
of our own and opposing traditions will we be able to restore rationality and
intelligibility to our moral attitudes and commitments.21

In a MacIntyre way of thinking, each educational paradigm is for its

particular society. Education works from and reproduces a more-or-less
defined tradition. The Empirical paradigm of education reproduces the
empirically minded human being needed for a progress-oriented society,
just as all educational paradigms reproduce their tradition in students.
In this view, even the tradition-busting Empirical paradigm reproduces
its tradition.
Empiricists like Locke thought they had seen through philosophical
systems. Direct access to truth and freedom from system is what Spencer
means when he writes in “What Knowledge” that nothing is in the
mind that was not first external. Knowledge is only internalized objects.
Consequently, the right way to teach is “of necessity from concrete to
abstract.”22

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

Many post-modern voices refute the belief that raw facts make sense
by themselves. Thomas Kuhn and others saw through the scientific
progress myth. “Progress” depended on presuppositions. “Discoveries”
succeed for human and political reasons. The apparent progress of
science is a tale written by the victors.
What we really know as “true” is true within a system of seeing. A
culture or a philosophy is a system of seeing. Post-structuralists like
Lyotard take the knowledge-system insight to urge an end to “metan-
arratives.” All knowledge claims must be deconstructed because they
oppress human autonomy. All knowledge claims are claims to power
and must be exposed. MacIntyre’s philosophy of science and French
post-modernism each understand that particulars make sense only in
terms of a whole structure. Plato’s particulars (these dogs or chairs)
were shadows of some ideal form (a benchmark ideal dog, perfect true
chair). Some system of seeing makes a particular “fact” visible. However
discredited in current thinking, fact-first education lives on.23
Empirical education has not gone unchallenged. The novelist Charles
Dickens satirized fact-oriented education in the 1854 novel Hard Times.
A schoolmaster by the name of Thomas Gradgrind claims,
Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts
alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can
only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of
any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children,
and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

Gradgrind knows all the children in the class by their number.

“Girl number twenty,” said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square
forefinger,
“I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?”
“Sissy Jupe, sir,” explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and
curtseying.
“Sissy is not a name,” said Mr. Gradgrind. “Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call
yourself Cecilia.”
“It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,” returned the young girl.

Though her father is a horse trainer, Sissy is unable to define a horse. The
schoolmaster calls on his favorite student Bitzer—by name—who rhymes off:
“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four
eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries,

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 Five Paradigms for Education

sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known
by marks in mouth.”

“Now girl number twenty,” says Mr. Gradgrind, “You know what a horse is.”

Dickens’s irony is that Sissy is really no wiser and Bitzer’s empirical

knowledge is worthless—unless animals are really machines. In Poetic
Justice, philosopher Martha Nussbaum urges that Dickens mounts a
“deep attack” on utilitarian economic science. The story about a teacher,
a student, and a classroom takes readers to the heart of narrow utilitar-
ian assumptions about the human good—much like, a century before,
Rousseau used the alternative education of a boy to show what insin-
cere social relations has cost humanity. Gradgrind’s education limits
personal knowledge and privileges impersonal knowledge. Gradgrind
strips off metaphor and “fancy.” His kind of language reduces nearly to
mathematics. The philosophical ancestry of an efficiency approach to
education—reducing complexity to simple, testable propositions—is
clear.24

Qualities or quantities

Qualities inside human beings, like consciousness or the soul, are

hard to study. The psychology of behaviorism felt obliged to eliminate
mind and motivation to gain the prestige of empirical rigor. Locke’s
utilitarian approach lent itself to a study of complex psychological
phenomena as if they arise from simple sensations stemming from
pleasure or pain. For a twentieth-century behaviorist psycholo-
gist such as J. B. Watson, control of the stimuli affecting the human
organism would mean control of the human being. Human freedom
from an invisible will is an unverifiable distraction—like a soul. The
promise of behaviorism, though, is a more effective education than
ever before possible:
I wish I could picture for you what a rich and wonderful individual we should
make of every healthy child, if only we could let it shape itself properly and
then provide for it a universe in which it could exercise that organization—a
universe unshackled by legendary folk-lore of happenings of thousands of
years ago; unhampered by disgraceful political history; free of foolish customs
and conventions which have no significance in themselves, yet which hem
the individual in like taut steel bands.

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

Just a few decades later, B. F. Skinner, inventor of operant conditioning,

nearly repeats Locke: “men [sic] are made good or bad and wise or fool-
ish by the environment in which they grow.”25

Empiricist curriculum studies

We have focused thus far on the narrow knowledge produced by

empirical scientific approaches to education. The empirical science
of Newton inspired Locke, Spencer, and the efficiency movement.
Empiricism’s apparent technical precision attracted administrators and
teachers. Empiricism produced a new vocabulary demonstrating appar-
ent competence. Educators could stake a claim to professional status.
Professionalism meant teachers and administrators gained authority,
respect, and better pay. The field of curriculum studies emerged from
empirical education at the height of the efficiency movement.
Scientific teaching procedures required a list of the aims of schooling.
To an empirical mind, absorption of some body of approved literatures
was too hopelessly general and vague to be an aim. Spencer was among
the first to define curriculum according to practical, this-world-oriented
objectives in his “What Knowledge is of Most Worth.”26
As important, Spencer identified the scope of the school curriculum
with life itself. John Franklin Bobbitt, founder of curriculum studies,
simply built on the insights. “Ability to care for one’s health is too
general to be useful. It must be reduced to specific abilities: ability to
manage the ventilation of one’s sleeping room, ability to protect one’s
self against micro-organisms, ability to care for the teeth, and so on.”
Broader curriculum aims that appeared like “vague Delphic prophe-
cies” were insufficiently precise to be empirically tested. To teach
precise skills, educators needed to predict a pupil’s probable future.
Kliebard and others object to the bureaucratic social engineering
implicit in such curriculum-making. They prefer less restrictive forms
of curriculum that build students’ autonomy—like those of Rousseau
or Freire.27
The fundamental issue with empiricism, however, is not its aims but its
presuppositions. Education both mirrors and models an understanding
of reality. Understandings of reality shift along with a culture’s science.
With empiricism’s rise, humans are thought to understand facts as they
present themselves to awareness. Science can improve humanity. Reality

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 Five Paradigms for Education

has become limited to social reality since transcendent purpose is, at

best, veiled.
Consistent with these understandings, Bobbitt validated aims by
an opinion poll of graduate students—a kind of enlightened public
opinion. Bobbitt’s language obscured the way that some “precise”
curriculum specifications were hardly empirical but rested on values.
For example, Bobbitt aimed for “the ability to keep one’s emotional
serenity, in the face of circumstances however trying,” “an attitude
and desire of obedience to the immutable and eternal laws which
appear to exist in the nature of things,” and a striking “confidence in
the beneficence of these laws” along with “ability to read and interpret
facts expressed by commonly used types of graphs, diagrams, and
statistical tables” and “ability to care properly for the feet.” All aims
stem from values.”28
The empirical focus in educational psychology encouraged the change
from traditional disciplines of knowledge toward utility. Curriculum
makers had justified disciplines such as mathematics, history, or
languages by their supposed value for different mental disciplines.
Geometry developed logic, for instance. Pythagoras, influencer of Plato,
had urged geometry’s value for the mind. Now Edward L. Thorndike
showed that students who completed courses in geometry were no
better at solving logical problems than were students who had not taken
geometry. Similar findings for other subjects left the traditional
curriculum without justification. Furthermore, Thorndike said
students could apply school learning only to identical elements
found outside of the school, a principle he called transfer of learning.
Curriculum designers would need to tailor learning to present-day
society.
When mental discipline was the dominant belief, good education
often deliberately went against student interests. A fascinating impli-
cation is that uninteresting topics called for discipline. The mental
muscle worked harder. School was boring because boring made for
better mental development. After Thorndike, the rationale for unin-
teresting school slowly withered. Teaching present-day behaviors
seemed likely to meet student interest—which was no longer a nega-
tive thing.29
From the founding figure of curriculum studies, it is clear that empiri-
cal education has no resources to escape its non-transcendental charac-
ter. The present world is the limit of its capability.

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

Consider how an empirical teaching approach renders a narrative.

Let’s map a well-known fairy story to the updated Marzano version of
Bloom’s taxonomy:
Remember: Describe where Goldilocks lived.
Understand: Summarize what the Goldilocks story was about.
Apply: Construct a theory as to why Goldilocks went into the house.
Analyze: Differentiate between how Goldilocks reacted and how you would
react in each story event.
Evaluate: Assess whether or not you think this really happened to
Goldilocks.
Create: Compose a song, skit, poem, or rap to convey the Goldilocks story in
a new form.

In line with empiricist procedure, we start with concrete details. Then

we engage in increasing abstraction. The creation of new art, the last
step, appears to advance knowledge. Yet it is hard to imagine that anyone
would be gripped by it. Few youngsters, not even two-year-olds, imagine
the story as non-fiction reportage. The narrative deliberately intends to
place hearers in an imaginative world with genre-flagging words such as
“Once upon a time.” Even though not true, a story like “Goldilocks and
the Three Bears” may show a psychological realism about life that non-
fiction might struggle to depict. As with Bitzer’s horse, has empiricism
evacuated the life out of the story?30
The major model of curriculum planning since its publication in
1949 has been Ralph Tyler’s four-step procedure. Bobbitt’s three steps of
curriculum planning were:
Step 1. Divide life into major activities
Step 2. Analyze each activity into specific activities. This process is to
continue until he [sic], the curriculum discoverer, has found the quite specific
activities that are to be performed.
Step 3. The activities once discovered, one can then see the objectives of
education.31

Tyler’s similar steps seem more open-ended. They were cast as four
major questions:
Step 1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
Step 2. How can learning experiences be selected which are likely to be useful
in attaining these objectives?

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Step 3. How can learning experiences be organized for effective instruction?

Step 4. How can the effectiveness of learning experiences be evaluated?32

The question format makes Tyler’s rationale appear more neutral than
it is. It appears that a curriculum designer could work out almost any
kind of learning using the questions. How can we understand that value
judgments are embedded into the procedure?
The first step, of setting objectives, depends on values. Bobbitt’s
dependence on values became obvious in hindsight: he programmed
for personal hygiene to vocational skills to religious life, and in doing
so assumes the ideal of the present day. Tyler’s rationale, though, seems
to leave open-ended the selection of objective. Notice the pivotal way
objectives are selected. Tyler points this out: the later three steps follow
naturally from the first step. From the infinite set of possible objectives—
expanded from Bobbitt, not whittled down—how will objectives be
chosen?
Studies of learners, studies of contemporary life, and suggestions from
subject-matter specialists will winnow possible objectives. Yet students,
society, and subjects have each been a site of fierce debate. Philosophers,
sociologists, historians, religious figures, and the public continue to
debate the ideal society. Again, how to take the first step? Tyler’s answer,
“student needs,” overlooks the inescapable reality that a “need” depends
on values. For example, if someone “needs” food, she may be in need of
a meal to preserve life. Or, she may be deliberately fasting for health or
spiritual reasons. She may be on a hunger strike to make a point ignored
by society. Any need depends on what one wants. Needs are not cast in
stone.
The bottom line is that the rationale depends on philosophical
screens. A teacher’s philosophy of life and education are resources in
setting objectives. In the last analysis, what determines objectives is one’s
philosophy. The rationale’s appearance of neutral procedure that will fit
any education is just that, an appearance. Verbal sleights of hand give an
illusion of scientific neutrality.33
Since Tyler, empiricist presuppositions have retained their hold on
public and private education. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and associates
published a detailed sequence for curriculum construction. Its mammoth
set of objectives provided detail for Tyler’s first step. The book’s title
shows its dependence on the pattern of empiricist knowing: Taxonomy
of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook
I: Cognitive Domain. Bloom’s hierarchy of learning is, first, knowledge

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

(the basic, empirical data), then comprehension, application, analyzing,

synthesis, and evaluation.
A second volume for the affective domain followed in 1964. A revi-
sion of 2000 expands the sequence. Marzano and colleague proposed
instead a hierarchy of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing,
evaluating, and creating. More could be written about the taxonomies,
especially since they are how students are taught in many, if not most,
pre-service teacher education programs. A taxonomy spells out an
empirical way of knowing. The basic commitment is that human beings
learn by first acquiring facts by unmediated observation. Facts are
built into theories. The taxonomies are Locke’s educational program as
developed by Spencer and the efficiency movement. Terminology like
competencies, skills, or mastery reflect similar perspectives. Newer
expressions such as Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design are
variations of Tyler, Bobbitt, or Bloom. All rely on concrete-to-abstract,
facts-to-theory cognition.34

Center of the paradigm: loss of purposes

Each example of the Empirical education paradigm seen so far—Effi-

ciency, Locke, Spencer—share empirical common ground but express
variations. The efficiency movement applies standard procedures to
large numbers of pupils and is hardly interested in individual variation.
Locke takes a well-rounded gentleman of his time as his educational
ideal. Spencer similarly urges a practical education tailored to a child’s
interests, but he prefers a tradesman. None gives much consideration to
women’s education. A philosopher may be uneasy. The examples have
as many differences as commonalities. Will the center hold? Or is the
paradigm itself an uncertain construction?
The paradigm pivots on empirical science’s loss of meaning. To reli-
gious, spiritual, New Age, and postmodern thinkers, the empiricist’s
separation of empirical scientific reason from purposefulness is clear. By
taking a step back, one sees sameness in examples that seem distinct at
close range. Authors such as J. Krishnamurti highlight empirical educa-
tion’s lack of purpose or telos:
Now, what is the significance of life? What are we living and struggling for? If we
are being educated merely to achieve distinction, to get a better job, to be more
efficient, to have wider domination over others, then our lives will be shallow

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 Five Paradigms for Education

and empty. If we are being educated only to be scientists, to be scholars wedded

to books, or specialists addicted to knowledge, then we shall be contributing to
the destruction and misery of the world. Though there is a higher and wider
significance to life, of what value is our education if we never discover it?35

Reverence and duty

Perhaps because empiricism has the appearance of being neutral about

values, the 1967 discovery of the hidden curriculum of public schooling
appeared to open a fresh perspective. Philip Jackson noticed three signif-
icant imprints on character that students learn from school. Students
learn to defer to the authority of the teacher; to the selection of valid
knowledge presented in books; and to the system of learning presented
by the teacher. The character lessons are not stated in print anywhere.
Yet they may be the deepest lessons learned from school.
The hidden curricula achieve the Empirical paradigm’s reverence and
duty. Learning “ABC” and “2+2=4” requires discipline, not only in the
Empirical paradigm but in any paradigm of education. The structure of
schooling elicits either discipline or resistance from students.
In the opening decades of public schooling, its sponsor and adminis-
trators stated its moral aims openly. The aim was to induct large numbers
of immigrant children into the mainstream society and they said so. A
Traditional paradigm seeks primarily to form a mature member of soci-
ety. Plato saw formation as more important than education’s technical
aspects.
A hidden, structural, or moral curriculum is a universal aspect of
education. It remained hidden to industrial schoolers because it was
“moral” in the sense it developed virtues essential in an industrial,
impersonal society: reliability, submission, self-discipline, respect for
impersonal authority, and so on. Only a disciplined population can
maintain the labor force necessary for assembly line operation. Much if
not most work in highly organized societies requires Jackson’s deference
traits.
In the Empirical model, Jackson’s hidden curriculum develops appro-
priate forms of Whitehead’s “reverence” and “duty.” How the facets pull
initiates in the direction of a uniquely modern “religiosity” – not too
strong a term – is outlined in Table 4.1. The most important industrial
virtues are punctuality and reliability. Recently thinkers have urged the

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

table 4.1 Empirical education facets, reverence, and duty

Facet Keywords

Aims Empirical scientific method applied to modern life

Students and Neutral, not good not evil; teachers write on blank
their nature paper; nature determined as human beings perceive
patterns of empirical data to state theories
Teacher Technologist who engineers maximum learning by
attending to scientific theories and organization
Motivation and Consequences in adult life within present society,
discipline both positive and negative
Valued Empirical knowledge which has utility in present
knowledge society and economy, especially literacy and
mathematics, sciences; ability to manipulate data
for generative theories in business, government,
university research
Assessment of Success in utilitarian society
success
Key learning Egg-crate type school; classroom ordered both in
environments space (desks in rows) and time (day governed by
clock)
Characteristic Graduation
events or rituals
Reverence Self-preservation and comfort, maximal efficiency
Duty Conformity, competition, pursuit of excellence
defined as in engineering

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 Five Paradigms for Education

modification of public education to foster creative thinking for a new

industrial information age. If this change transpires, it will amount to a
reformation like that which changed Christian Europe in transition to
modernity. New ways reflecting information-age reverence and duty will
produce in society’s ideal initiates a revised package of virtues.36
Kliebard came to a startling verdict after articles on Tyler and Bobbitt:
“The persistence in education of a simplistic and vulgar scientism is
a source of embarrassment.” Kliebard is not alone. Many progressive
thinkers decry narrow empirical objectives. Dewey’s education-as-
continuous growth hardly fits with the Empirical paradigm sketched
here. Why then are alternatives to empiricism mostly honored in
the breech? Why are dissenters given honors, but the mainstream of
education continues with the language of competencies, taxonomies,
and thousands of technical-sounding acronyms like CBE, CTB, PDAS,
or INTASC?37
The efficiency movement drew inspiration from the industrial organi-
zation of its era. Assembly lines assembled millions of parts into reliable,
useful machines like the Model T. Films like Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern
Times” (1936) satirized the enthusiasm of executives and an enthralled
public. Educators applied the assembly line as a metaphor for efficient
operation.38
How we speak can reveal our presuppositions. Researchers of teach-
ing observe classrooms and ask the teachers to verbalize what they were
doing. The results have been revealing. By noticing patterns of speech,
researchers perceive underlying mental models that teachers apply to
their work every day without being aware. Surfacing the metaphors can
help teachers grow in their professionalism. The metaphors may reveal a
teacher’s reverence and duty, in Whitehead terms.39
The underlying reverence of Empiricist education would seem to
be harmonious, rational organization of present-day society, as it was
for Locke, Spencer, for the efficiency movement, even for Watson
and Skinner. Self-preservation or—more attractively put—maximum
comfort are Empiricist education’s priority. Technology holds much
promise for a smoother future: science’s potentials attracted many at
the dawn of the scientific era and still continue to dazzle many today.
We wait for Rousseau, our next paradigm, to hear a vigorous protest.
The appropriate duty of Empiricist education is to resist the resisters
of progress, to go optimistically where technology shall open the door.
Education for technical competence is a key component of progress and

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

a duty. However, as it was in the beginning, the meaning of progress

remains uncertain.

Notes
 A late-medieval foundation to support poor scholars is detailed in John H.
Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and
the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008).
 David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Lawrence A. Cremin,
American Education: The National Experience 1783–1896, vol. 2 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1980); Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of
Efficiency (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
 Barbara Berman, “Business Efficiency, American Schooling, and the Public
School Superintendency: A Reconsideration of the Callahan Thesis,” History
of Education Quarterly (1983): 297–321, argues that the challenges of American
urban and frontier education led superintendents toward rationalized efficiency
like that in Germany, so Callahan’s efficiency movement is more of an intensified
reliance on science than a wholly new liaison. Tyack, The One Best System, 74.
 Ford’s advance is in Daniel Gross, Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time
(New York: Wiley, 1997); growing efficiency details are from “The Moving
Assembly Line Debuted at the Highland Park Plant,” accessed June 4, 2014,
http://corporate.ford.com/our-company/heritage/historic-sites-news-
detail/663-highland-park.
 Leonard Porter Ayres, Laggards in Our Schools: A Study of Retardation
and Elimination in City School Systems (New York: Charities Publication
Committee, 1909).
 Cited in Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 41–3; Ellwood Patterson
Cubberley, Public School Administration: A Statement of the Fundamental
Principles Underlying the Organization and Administration of Public Education
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916); cited in Callahan, Education and the
Cult of Efficiency, 96.
 Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 7; Tyack, The One Best System,
126, is the source of the railroad comparison.
 JoBeth Allen, “Taylor-Made Education: The Influence of the Efficiency
Movement on the Testing of Reading Skills” (US Dept. of Education Eric
Document Reproduction Service No. ED 239 and 247, June 1984), ERIC who
cites along with Callahan (1964); Robert L. Ebel, Essentials of Educational
Measurement (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972); and Daniel Starch,

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 Five Paradigms for Education

“The Measurement of Efficiency in Reading,” Journal of Educational Psychology

6, no. 1 (January 1915): 1–24.
 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism,
vol. 1 (New York: WW Norton & Company Incorporated, 1995), 135, is
source of Voltaire quote.
 I am giving a light account of the detailed changes in telology after Plato.
Aristotle seems already to mark a kind of autonomous teleology. Jeffrey
Wattles, “Teleology Past and Present,” Zygon® 41, no. 2 (2006): 445–64.
 Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An
Intellectual History of Personal Identity (New York and Chichester: Columbia
University Press, 2013), 4; William Barrett, Death of the Soul: From Descartes to
the Computer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1987).
 An overview of the loss of telos in the new science is Richard DeWitt,
Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science, 2nd
ed. (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Alexandre Koyré,
From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, The Hideyo Noguchi Lectures
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), distinguishes new
cosmology from new science though they advanced together; C. Taylor,
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), details the early modern shift in humanity’s
conception of itself.
 John Locke, John Locke on Education, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1971), p. 10.
 John Arthur Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (3rd ed) (Indianapolis:
Liberty Foundation, 2000), p. 233.
 Gorman Beauchamp, “Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies: Human Nature
in Utopia,” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 2 (2007): 280–93; John Locke,
John Locke on Education, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Teachers College Press,
1971), Locke’s “nine parts” is in S.1; John Dewey, “Education as a Religion,”
New Republic, September 13, 1922, 63–5; the European pursuit of human
perfection is explained in John Arthur Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, 3rd
ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Foundation, 2000), p. 233, is source of quote; see
p. 246 on educational advantage of childhood innocence.
 Publication history is from William Sweet, “Spencer, Herbert,” eds. James
Feiser and Bradley Dowden, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004, ISSN
2161-0002, http://www.iep.utm.edu/spencer/ retrieved June 27, 2014. Kieran
Egan is a recent champion of Spencer’s forgotten influence. See Egan, Getting
It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer,
John Dewey, and Jean Piaget (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
 Herbert Spencer, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?” in Education:
Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (New York: Hurst and Company, 1862), 12–14;
18; 88–9. Eric Shiraev, A History of Psychology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

2014), 392; Abraham Harold Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,”

Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (1943): 370.
 Spencer, Education, Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (New York: D. Appleton,
1860), p. 88.
 Brian Holmes, “Herbert Spencer,” Prospects-Quarterly Review of Education,
Thinkers on Education 4, 24, no. 3–4 (1994): 533–54, retrieved from http://
www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/spencere.pdf on October 24,
2014. The quote is on p. 541.
 Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (London:
Williams and Norgate, 1861), 61; quoted in Brian Holmes, “Herbert Spencer,”
Prospects-Quarterly Review of Education, Thinkers on Education 4, 24, no. 3–4
(1994): 533–54.
 The publisher’s description for Alasdair Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Whose
Rationality? (1988) seems also an apt enough summary of After Virtue: A Study
in Moral Theory, 1st ed (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 1981); Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (South
Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
 Spencer, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?,” 52.
 J. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, foreword by F.
Jameson, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, vol. 10, Theory and History
of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
 Charles Dickens, Hard Times: For These Times (Original Title) (London:
Bradbury & Evans, 1854); The dialogue inspired educational, political, and
economic reflection; for instance, Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The
Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Paulette
Kidder, “Martha Nussbaum on Dickens’s Hard Times,” Philosophy and
Literature 33, no. 2 (2009): 417–26; Stephen Dilks, “Teaching Uncertainty:
The Danger Is in the Neatness of Identifications,” accessed June 9, 2014,
http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Uncertain.html; Nele Pollatschek, “ ‘Discard
the Word Fancy Altogether!’ Charles Dickens’s Defense of Ambiguity in
Hard Times,” Dickens Quarterly 30, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 278; Robin
Gilmour, “The Gradgrind School: Political Economy in the Classroom,”
Victorian Studies 11, no. 2 (December 1967): 207–24; Wendell Harris, “The
Value of Utilitarian Ethics at the Present Time,” Texas Studies in Literature and
Language 40 (1998).
 Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, 255–9; the Watson quote is in Passmore
from John Broadus Watson, Behaviorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 1998), 248, originally published in 1924.
 Spencer, Herbert. “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?”, in Education:
Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (New York: Hurst and Company, 1862), 5–92.
 John Franklin Bobbitt, How to Make a Curriculum (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1924), 12–26, 32; quoted in Herbert Kliebard, “The Rise of the Scientific

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Curriculum and Its Aftermath,” in The Curriculum Studies Reader, ed. David
J. Flinders and Stephen J. Thorton (New York: Routledge, 2004), 54. Bode
noted Herbert Spencer was the start of the trend to most specific objectives
and also the trend to identify the best curriculum as the one with most
utility, so that schooling is identified with life; see Kliebard, “The Rise of the
Scientific Curriculum and Its Aftermath,” 56. Well-rounded individuals are
the aim of general education in Bobbitt, How to Make a Curriculum, 64, 274.
J. Wesley Null, “How to Make a Curriculum,” in Encyclopedia of Curriculum
Studies, ed. Craig Kridel (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, February 16, 2010),
453–4, describes Bobbitt’s telos of present-day successful adults. Null points
out that critics disagreed with Bobbitt’s methods because they track students
into narrow social roles.
 Ibid.
 Ralph W. Tyler, “The Five Most Significant Curriculum Events in the
Twentieth Century,” Educational Leadership 44, no. 4 (1987): 36–7.
 M. Forehand, “Bloom’s Taxonomy: Original and Revised,” in Emerging
Perspectives on Learning, Teaching, and Technology, ed. M. Orey, accessed June
18, 2014, http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/, retrieved June 18, 2014.
 John Franklin Bobbitt, How to Make a Curriculum (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1924), p. 9.
 Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 3.
 Herbert M. Kliebard, “The Tyler Rationale,” in Curriculum and Evaluation, ed.
Arno A. Bellack and Herbert M. Kliebard (Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing
Corporation, 1977), 56–67; Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and
Instruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 3, 5–6; Elliot W.
Eisner, “Franklin Bobbitt and the ‘Science’ of Curriculum Making,” School
Review 75, no. 1 (Spring 1967): 43.
 Benjamin S. Bloom, ed., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The
Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain (New
York and London: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1956); David R. Krathwohl,
Benjamin S. Bloom, and Bertram B. Masia, Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook II: Affective
Domain (New York and London: Longman Group Ltd, 1964); Lorin W.
Anderson et al., A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision
of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Complete Edition (New York:
Pearson, 2000); Robert J. Marzano and John S. Kendall, The New Taxonomy
of Educational Objectives, 2nd edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2006);
Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design (Virginia
Beach, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development,
2005); Kieran Egan, “Metaphors in Collision: Objectives, Assembly Lines,
and Stories,” Curriculum Inquiry (1988): 65.

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 The Empirical Paradigm 

 Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life (New York:

HarperCollins, 2010), 11.
 Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press,
1990), original publication 1967; P. W. Jackson, R. E. Boostrom, and D. T.
Hansen, The Moral Life of Schools (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998);
Richard Lewis Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1935), 57.
 Kliebard, “The Rise of the Scientific Curriculum and Its Aftermath,” 60.
 Egan, “Metaphors in Collision,” 63–86.
 For examples from a big literature, see H. Munby and T. Russell, “Metaphor
in the Study of Teachers’ Professional Knowledge,” Theory into Practice 29,
no. 2 (1990): 116–21; William Taylor, ed., Metaphors of Education (London:
Heinemann Educational Books for the Institute of Education, University of
London, 1984); M. Johnson and G. Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Kenneth Rea Badley and Harro W.
Van Brummelen, Metaphors We Teach By: How Metaphors Shape What We Do
in Classrooms (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012); D. J. Clandinin, “Narrative
and Story in Teacher Education,” in Teachers and Teaching: From Classroom
to Reflection, ed. Tom Russell and Hugh Munby (London: Routledge, 1992),
121–34.

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 5
Rousseau’s Paradigm
Abstract: Exposition shows a central “reverence” and
appropriate “duty” for the basic presuppositional (“religious”)
values informing Rousseau’s educational and political
platforms. Rousseau disagrees with empiricist view that
self-preservation or bourgeois comfort is enough to integrate
human beings in a harmonious society. Because Rousseau
thinks human beings to be essentially good, he proposes a
progressive movement to realize a perfect society. Émile,
Rousseau’s educational novel, is a progressive utopian
presentation which inspires or repels educators depending
on their presuppositions. Rousseau’s “reverence” for human
perfectibility explains his “duties.”

Keywords: anthropology, philosophical; Émile; Freire,

Paulo; French Revolution; Gramsci, Antonio; Idealism,
German; Illich, Ivan; Neill, A. S.; Romanticism; Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques; teaching, nature of

Newell, Ted. Five Paradigms for Education: Foundational

Views and Key Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137391803.0011.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0011

 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

A utopian appeal to educational imagination

With the stirring words “Everything is good as it leaves the hand of

the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man,”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) launches his Émile, Or, On Education.
Published in 1762, the Émile is a myth-making appeal to imagination that
inspired some educators from the day it was published and infuriated
others. The Émile is a utopian thought experiment. Rousseau did not
imagine that the Émile could be widely implemented. Earlier utopists
like Sir Thomas More did not think his Utopia (1516) possible—“Utopia”
means literally “no place”—neither did Plato wish Athens to be the
Sparta depicted in his Republic. Plato, More, and Rousseau use utopias
to reveal truths about the human condition. They intended to provide a
baseline for a better world. Émile’s education is one-on-one with a tutor
for 20 years: Rousseau is not recommending a curriculum for a large
population. Rousseau reportedly said to one who had taken the Émile as
a blueprint for his son, “Too bad for you!”
The Émile maintains human beings are born without an orientation
toward selfishness or sin. Their inherent goodness means they could live
well together in a society free of coercion. Rousseau wrote to a friend,
I cannot believe that you take this book to be a real treatise on education. It
is a philosophical enough work on that principle advanced by the author in
other writings, that man is naturally good. In order to bring this principle into
accord with that other no less certain truth that men are wicked, it was neces-
sary to show, in the history of the human heart, the origin of all its defects.1

Émile is a hypothetical child who becomes an authentic human being—

completely sincere and whole. Allan Bloom says it is the philosopher
G. F. W. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of the Mind posing as Dr. Spock.” Dr.
Benjamin Spock, of course, authored the leave-them-alone baby manual
that dominated 1960s American thinking about parenting. Through
the literary device of a process of education, Rousseau shows how one
person’s natural perfection can be kept clear of present society’s corrupt-
ing influences.
Perhaps the Émile’s presentation as a fable rather than academic trea-
tise ensured its reception by a wide public. Rousseau’s earlier fiction, The
New Heloise (1759), experienced fantastic success and many printings. He
knew story presentations make models that people are able to live out.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

image 6 Desert island. The innate goodness and resourcefulness of solitary

individuals such as Robinson Crusoe inspired Rousseau
Credit: Bigstock.

Émile is affective like Plato’s Republic with its Cave and myth of Ur, More’s
Utopia, and the Bible. In particular, Rousseau meant the Émile to appeal
to the imagination as an alternative history to the Bible’s Fall from origi-
nal innocence.

Rousseau’s basic assumptions

Rousseau was a controversial intellectual in France in the decades leading

to the Revolution (1789–97). He was part of a loose movement of enlight-
ened writers and promoters such as Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, and
Condorcet. These “lumières” or “enlighteners” advocated social patterns and
institutions based on the same empirical methods that had transformed
science and technology. Denis Diderot’s groundbreaking Encylopédie,
published between 1751 and 1772, shows their confidence. The encyclopedia
aimed to provide a summary of all knowledge gained in the new era.2
Among the lumières, Rousseau was a contrarian, the enfant terrible of
the Enlightenment. A watchmaker’s son from Geneva, then a city-state
in Switzerland, his childhood education was spotty. However, he became
an avid learner, especially through a youthful relationship with a rich,
pious, and sexually free widow who he called “Maman.” In his twenties

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

and thirties, he learned the demeaning and dehumanizing nature of

dependent relationships as a servant to aristocratic families—a footman
and tutor to unruly children. Rousseau’s checkered background was
the basis of his claim that he was an Everyman with unique insights to
share, a man of the people who was able to mix with the elite. Rousseau
was in his late thirties before his career took off. His winning essay for a
notable competition claimed cultural achievements in sciences and arts
were really backward moves—a counter-cultural debut in his science-
worshipping society.3
Rousseau assumes the source of human evil is unfortunate develop-
ments in natural history. Social life corrupted humanity’s basic goodness.
Christianity, still dominant in France as in Europe generally, taught the
opposite. The human problem is a genetic human tendency toward moral
evil. The first humans defected from the one true God. A choice against
authority in favor of autonomy continues to direct human experience.
Institutional Christianity, as well as maintaining its own ecclesial and educa-
tional institutions, influenced government to the highest levels. It sponsored
a comprehensive pessimism and conservatism about the present world.
Rousseau believed the historical accidents corrupted individuals;
genetic evil does not. Society’s false priorities make us insincere actors
out of touch with ourselves. As a result we oppress each other. False
norms alienate human beings from each other and from their deepest
selves. The result is the inauthentic, insincere, hypocritical, superficial
class which Rousseau stigmatizes—for the first time in history—as
“bourgeois.”4
However, if individuals can be educated to be good and rational, as
Rousseau believed, then such carefully-nurtured natural people could
become a new society. Since superficial society spawns oppression, the
first priority of a counter-cultural education is to prevent natural-born
goodness from spoiling. Rousseau needs to show how one child could
potentially hold onto his natural goodness. One person, the young Émile,
will re-run human history. This time, the outcome will be as it should be.
The mature Émile will prove to be uncorrupted by social pressures and
fully in touch with his true nature. This individual will honestly contrib-
ute to existing society and not dominate others. He will be truly free.5
For Rousseau, freedom is a religious necessity for a genuine human
existence. Any education proposal, not only Rousseau’s, must place indi-
vidual freedom in relation to the need to maintain a society. Likewise,
political thinkers must strike a balance between individual freedom and

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 Five Paradigms for Education

social imperatives. Society only functions by principles shared among

its members. An example is traffic rules. To allow complete freedom to
individual drivers would mean anarchy—literally, a lawless, disordered
condition.
On the other end of the spectrum is ancient Spartan society, neighbor
and rival of Athens. Spartan education achieved a high degree of disci-
pline. Mothers gave up their children to the state, to raise disciplined
leaders and warriors. How much coercion is appropriate in a society that
thinks of itself as free? Different thinkers place the accent in different
places.
Rousseau is neither a Spartan social disciplinarian nor an anarchist,
and nor is he a hermit. He recognized that human beings associate with
others. For him, the challenge is to enable truly free individuals to live
a happy life in a worthy society. No individual should be dominated
by another. Neither should anyone dominate others. Choices that are
not free are inhuman and immoral. Humane living is impossible if
the individual is dominated or is a dominator. Compelling others also
makes them act irresponsibly. What makes true humanity is being able
to choose. As the French Revolution would insist less than three decades
later, liberty and equality are inseparable partners.6

The process of autonomous human development

Émile’s five sections lead readers through a thought process. Rousseau

outlines stages to retrace the natural history of humanity, this time the
right way. Economic and social history brought wrong turns. For the
resulting false human being, Rousseau imagines a natural developmental
psychology. The aim is to hold onto a natural Émile and then bridge him
to society. In Rousseau’s words:
The source of our passions, the origin and the principle of all the others, the
only one born with man and which never leaves him so long as he lives is
self-love-a primitive, innate passion, which is anterior to every other, and of
which all others are in a sense only modifications. In this sense, if you wish,
all passions are natural. But most of these modifications have alien causes
without which they would never have come to pass; and these same modifica-
tions, far from being advantageous for us, are harmful. They alter the primary
goal and are at odds with their own principle. It is then that man finds himself
outside of nature and sets himself in contradiction with himself ... The love

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

of oneself is always good and always in conformity with order ... This is how
the gentle and affectionate passions are born of self-love, and how the hate-
ful and irascible passions are born of amour-propre. Thus what makes man
essentially good is to have few needs and to compare himself little to others;
what makes him essentially wicked is to have many needs and to depend very
much on opinion.7

Each stage of development is a collection of tactics appropriate to the

child’s changing psychology. As Rousseau states, “Each sort of instruc-
tion has its proper time, which must be known, and its dangers, which
must be avoided.” The way of dealing with Émile will change in the brief
phase before puberty. It will alter again as Émile arrives at adulthood and
desires a spouse.8
The five books resolve into a two-phase program. In the first 12 years
of life, Books I–III, Émile will be kept apart from society in general and
his family of origin. Rousseau’s aim in the first phase is to keep legitimate
self-regard (“amour soi”) from misdirection. The first phase is all about
passion management. It avoids exposing the child to competing wills.
Educational stimuli will be only concrete things, not other people, to
avoid provoking the child.
Rousseau differs. For example, a child always accepts “No cookie” if no
cookies are in the jar. However, if another individual says “No cookie,”
then rage and a desire to dominate are stirred. Presenting only uncon-
testable necessities keeps Émile from frustration. Another’s arbitrary will
would spoil the child’s innocence. “[T]he words obey and command will
be proscribed from his lexicon, and even more so duty and obligation.
But strength, necessity, impotence, and constraint should play a great
role in it.”9
Children cannot be expected to understand rules; explanations and
justifications are always misinterpreted. Natural consequences are much
better than rules used to punish morally wrong behavior. Rousseau calls
this phase a “negative education” designed to retain natural goodness.
Émile’s upbringing will leave him indifferent to all the ways by which
human beings make themselves better than the next person. Émile
must not want to dominate another human being. Better to take it slow.
Rousseau’s spoliation-avoiding phase will not end until age 12.
Rousseau’s position departs from traditional understandings. Plato
already saw that thumos or pride is both the power for excellence and
source of evil passions. However, he never saw that social interaction
wrecks children. In families, a child is inevitably exposed to other

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 Five Paradigms for Education

persons who resist the child’s will. In the traditional understanding,

children learn self-control and respect for others through the caring
direction of a parent or a teacher.
For example, his tutor has Émile plant beans on top of what turns out
to be someone else’s melon garden. Brought up short when the owner
turns up, Émile sees the justice of respecting others. Rousseau offers here
a direct counter-story to the Christian story of indwelling sin:
A luscious fruit in the garden which was forbidden would only set the self-
ish will of the owner against Émile’s nature ... demands on men contrary to
their natural inclinations and are therefore both unfounded and ineffective. If
these standards are removed and men’s inclinations are accepted rather than
blamed, it turns out that with the cooperation of these inclinations sound
regimes can be attained.

Competition, private gain, and saying “this is mine” just make trouble.
The parable of the beans shows how Émile’s basic inclinations can be
kept good. External authority to counter sin is unnecessary.10
Rousseau wants no learning by use of force. Obligatory training or
any extrinsic compulsion would, again, twist reasonable self-regard.
The passions would be misdirected into that terrible desire to domi-
nate. Motivation departs radically from the Traditional and Platonic
respect for a mentor or teacher out of necessity. The tutor is neither
mentor nor teacher. Rousseau assumes humans are motivated by
pleasure and the avoidance of pain. “You must be happy, dear Émile.
That is the goal of every being which senses. That is the first desire
which nature has impressed on us, and the only one which never
leaves.”11
Though freedom is perhaps the core of Rousseau’s desired happiness,
the only way he can work up an education that is uncontaminated by
society is by committing Émile to the care of one tutor. Only an unusual
one-on-one supervision can avoid misdirected self-love. The tutor is
only a facilitator. Émile’s useful learning seems to be on his own initiative
but the tutor manipulates situations extensively so Émile learns what the
tutor desires. He rarely tells Émile what to do explicitly, because telling
would lead, again, to a contest of wills.
As observers note, Rousseau replaces mentoring with manipulation.
Émile’s tutor takes much the same role as does the master legislator in
Rousseau’s Social Contract, published in the same year, 1762. There the
legislator teaches the population its own common mind, to which all
learn to submit.

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

Rousseau sees education and politics as parallel sciences of society, like

two rails of a railway track. Rousseau writes of education in his Émile but
his eye is also on revolutionary political arrangements. Thinkers must take
a post-Christian scientific conception of human nature into political life
as much as into education. Education is political for Rousseau. The twin
educational and political concerns of Émile make sense of the demeaning
way that Rousseau educates Émile’s future mate—as we see later.12

Émile the empiricist

As the pre-social phase ends, Émile, now age 12, will learn to read one
book—Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe had no lack of motivation
to learn—he needed to survive alone on an island. To Rousseau, Émile’s
situation is like the protagonists of films like Gravity (2013) or 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1970). All protagonists are isolated individuals who must
use resources at hand to survive. Just like Crusoe was alone on an island,
humanity is alone on its island, the Earth. In older word-based humanist
educations, reasons to learn logic or a language only appear at the end of
a long, difficult process. Childhood motivation must be an authority or
a mentor whose character inspires confidence. Not so with education for
survival. Physical needs demands fulfillment and create conditions for
immediate learning. Émile finds immediate motivation to navigate out
of the woods.
Émile learns like a scientist. In the pre-social phase, he learns only
what his senses tell him. As for empirical science, raw direct nature is
a reliable source. Émile was “led ... by a most devious route, to replicate
in his own need-based inquiries the basic course of modern natural
science.” Like Locke and the lumieres, Rousseau resists any overarching
system of thought that might color Émile’s empirical learning. Like a
good empiricist, Rousseau is concerned to avoid any Platonic cave dug
by some philosophical system.13
Émile’s tutor exhorts himself, “Remember always that the spirit of my
education consists not in teaching the child many things, but in never
letting anything but accurate and clear ideas enter his brain. Were he to
know nothing, it would be of little importance to me provided he made
no mistakes,” so “[c]ontinue to be clear, simple and cold.” Rousseau’s
program is, “[L]ove nature, despise opinion, and know man.” He turns
Plato upside down. The five senses will yield truth directly. Rousseau says,

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 Five Paradigms for Education

“In the first operations of the mind let the senses always be its guides. No
book other than the world, no instruction other than the facts.”14
Throughout Émile’s childhood, education will be experiential—that is,
empirical. A famous example of experiential learning comes when Émile
breaks a window. Émile will not throw any rocks at windows after he
experiences the resulting cold. A child’s own activity is by far the best
teacher. Similarly, by navigating his way out of a forest, Émile learns
the value of mathematics. Émile will not need to be compelled to learn
because he will learn as he needs to, like Crusoe. Émile’s first-phase learn-
ing is all useful learning. Rousseau says the valuation of beautiful objects,
for example, jewelry or art, is in inverse relationship to their usefulness.
Émile ought to value useful things over rare but useless things.
Rousseau, like Locke, has little faith in words. “Young people pay little
attention to them and hardly retain them. Things, things! I shall never
repeat enough that we attribute too much power to words. With our
babbling education we produce only babblers.” In part, Rousseau reacts
against endless medieval distinctions over apparent trivialities. Medieval
logic-chopping has come down in folk memory as debates over how
many angels may dance on a pinhead. However, Rousseau goes further
in his preference for empirical objects. Children are not able to think like
adults, so reasoning—using words—is wasted on them. Wordless things
directly educate learners about themselves, just like empiricist scientists
taught themselves about the nature of things. Facts about things can then
build general ideas about their nature.15
Locke urged reasoning with the pupil, but Rousseau thinks this a major
mistake by Locke. Reasoning with children is a waste just like rules are,
because children do not think as adults do. Rousseau lists examples of
a child’s predictable misconceptions. He is pessimistic about childhood
reasoning. He over-reads LaFontaine’s fable of the crow and the fox and
sees that it will be hopelessly misunderstood.
Sound learning is not linguistic to Rousseau. A basis in language would
imply learning is social. Rousseau’s biological developmentalism implies
that learning is not fundamentally a social activity. Nor is absorption of
stories or a body of knowledge necessary, contrary to Traditional and
Platonic paradigms. The biological metaphor understands learning is
as natural as the growth of a plant. New capacities will arise with new
stages of development. The teacher’s challenge is to identify the learner’s
stage and adapt learning to it. The individual’s apparent capacity governs
the process.

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

Here is the source of the emphasis on adapting learning for inclusion.

For Rousseau, any practical learning is as good for his developing minds,
better than words in books. Learning is not primarily a social activity,
either. Interaction with peers is not necessary.16
By contrast, Traditional and Platonic education carried an understand-
ing that life is meaningful. With non-teleological empiricism—as we saw
with Locke’s version—meaning is an upper-story concern emerging after
physical imperatives are satisfied. The long, difficult, obscure, linguistic
education produces art and poetry, expressions of human longing
for transcendence. With Rousseau, the loss of teleology reduces art to
optional fripperies.
Rousseau is not a materialist like his contemporary Helvetius. He does
not imagine children are blank white sheets of paper. For Rousseau,
natural history—recapitulated aright—is the science of humanity, not
physics. His empiricism seeks the laws of human nature. Children have
their own character, individuality, and potentials. They bring their
agency to their education. They are not passive receptacles of a teacher’s
inputs.
Rousseau takes childhood seriously for the first time in history.
Childhood is its own good condition, not one to be left behind as soon
as possible in favor of adult hypocrisies and responsibilities. One never
knows when life will end—so children should be happy now, not in some
uncertain future. In Locke, the thinker who most influenced Rousseau,
childhood is still only preparation for adulthood. Childhood is a tran-
sitional stage. “Rousseau makes happiness and fulfillment in childhood
the model and prototype of happiness and fulfillment in adulthood.”17

Émile and society

The second half of Rousseau’s program will integrate Émile into society.
About the same length as the first phase, the second phase starts just
before puberty’s onset and ends with Émile’s marriage. The hazard to
social integration is this: “Reflect that the passions are approaching,
and that as soon as they knock on the door, your pupil will no longer
pay attention to anything but them.”18 Teenage Émile learns enough
geographic, historical, and literary lore to get along. He learns indiffer-
ence to the follies of society, for instance, rich food and idle table conver-
sation. He learns a useful trade. Rousseau says Émile must work like a

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 Five Paradigms for Education

peasant and think like a philosopher so as not to be lazy as a savage.

Notice how Rousseau wants a new society, not a noble savage or return
to pre-history. The tutor’s careful preparation of the pre-social phase
pays off:
Opinion, whose action (Émile) sees, has not acquired its empire over him. The
passions, whose effect he feels, have not yet agitated his heart. He is a man; he
is interested in his brothers; he is equitable; he judges his peers. Surely, if he
judges them well, he will not want to be in the place of any of them; for since
the goal of all the torments they give themselves is founded on prejudices he
does not have, it appears to him to be pie in the sky.
He deals with others out of compassion, moved by their struggles—not
competition.19

No aspect of Émile is less appreciated than Rousseau’s education of

Émile’s mate. To consummate the social integration phase, the tutor
selects a wife for his perfect man. He appears to treat Sophie as not much
more than wife in the kitchen or a doll. Her education seems to call
forth little imagination by Rousseau—it is close to that of a traditional
woman. For a writer so willing to dispense with tradition, Rousseau’s
treatment seems less than imaginative. The approach is more surprising
in that Plato already adopted the same education for women as for men.
Rousseau aims to improve on the Republic.
Feminist philosophers continue to point out Rousseau’s inconsistency.
The only way to respect Rousseau is to remember that Book V must
bring this modern Stoic, Émile, into relation with civil society. Rousseau
has raised an asocial male. He could adopt a Spartan approach to child
rearing and place children in the care of the state, not unlike Plato.
However, Rousseau had another utopian model in mind. In the isolated
Swiss Alps, he had seen harmonious families. Rousseau understood from
his “Maman” experience that women really rule men.
The impulses of nature after puberty, the inescapable search for a
mate, is sure to lead asocial Émile into happy domesticity. Asocial
man can be integrated with naturally social woman. Families can build
society. Societies rely on the sociality of women to subsume men into
one harmonious structure. The glue of society is the love of a woman.
Rousseau’s vision is biologically and socially complementarian. Though
male and female halves of human nature somehow came apart in history,
love will reunite them perfectly. It seems as if Rousseau betrayed his
egalitarianism in Book V, but his reason is his need to bring the new man
into society. The dominance of Émile is only apparent. Rousseau’s hope

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

that male-female union points to a holistic way of knowing. It inspired

later philosophers, including Kant and Hegel, as well as the Romantic
movement.20

Educational progress in history

By the end of Émile, Rousseau’s thought experiment has yielded a citizen

not motivated by desire for comfort or fear of death—those bourgeois
shortcomings. Émile is the point-man for a new society, first of a new
breed—the way humanity should always have been. What the Christian
church had aimed to do for society through the saintliness of individual
members, a process of education can achieve.21 Émile is to be authentic
both in his solitariness and in his civic life. At least he will know who he
is. If Rousseau’s Social Contract is ever to come to expression, it will be
through people like Émile who point forward to a society of individuals.
His conformity with his natural endowments leads him into a revolu-
tionary consciousness. That shared collective mind can grow into a new
society.
This new man will not be a slave to society unlike Locke’s comfort-
seeking city dweller. He is authentic and autonomous, truly free. His
good character supports and does not dominate a society of free equals.
Émile’s education is a parable. Expanded to the scale of a society, it
advocates a progressive movement that can take over history, if we want
it. Nature and human history can be brought together by a progressive
movement.22
Rousseau’s expression of education responds to the loss of a teleologi-
cal world. Almost one hundred years before Darwin’s theory of biologi-
cal evolution, Rousseau saw that language and morals were historically
constructed. If language and morals have developed in time, humanity
is an open-ended project. What distinguishes humanity for Rousseau is
not reason—also a historical and changeable development—but passions
or feelings, in the original French, “sentiment.”
Rousseau shows that the breech between self and its underlying
goodness can be mended and humanity made whole—if not by Émile’s
highly unusual education, then by some working out of the social
contract under a wise legislator-tutor. Bloom says that Émile was made
to fascinate people. Not so much a serious proposal as an imaginative
summons, it was meant to shift the thinking of those who read it. Émile,

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 Five Paradigms for Education

the proposal—like the grown Émile—is internally consistent, an educa-

tional expression of thorough evolutionism where nearly nothing is fixed
except the imperative of freedom.
Conservatives saw its subversive potential immediately. Hence, the
controversy it sustained. Strauss calls Rousseau the initiator of a second
wave of modernity, a wave of “historicism” in which the meaning of
history is open-ended progress. As John Dewey was to put it a century
later, the aim of education is growth.

Rousseau’s legacy

Interest in Rousseau as a philosopher has risen and fallen since 1762.

Rousseau attracted progressive thinkers with an educational bent,
including Kant, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori, and Dewey. Students
who read the Émile often feel as if they know this paradigm already.
Aspects, especially the pioneering developmental theory, still guide
teaching and discipline. Pre-service teacher education is still influenced
by its understanding of children.
Immediate reaction to Rousseau’s two publications was voluminous.
For example, the Italian Catholic philosopher H. Gerdil’s “Anti-Émile”
feared the shaping power of Rousseau’s rhetoric. Gerdil questioned
whether Émile’s self-focus would really allow him to transcend himself
in sociability toward others or worship to God.
Three decades later, Rousseau proved to be a major inspiration to
French revolutionaries, especially to the Jacobins who dominated
in the Reign of Terror. Their leader, Maximilien Robespierre, saw
himself as implementing Rousseau’s program. The Jacobin association
made Rousseau notorious to conservatives and notable to radicals.
Reaction continued through the 1800s. In mid-1800s Holland, an
Anti-Revolutionary Party arose to provide a political alternative to the
continuing influence of his pernicious ideas. In North America, schol-
ars saw him as inconsistent and interest lapsed. Then, in the late 1950s,
the influential conservative Leo Strauss wrote a significant chapter that
began a tidal wave of Rousseau articles and books continuing to the
present.
The Introduction to this book noted that presuppositions about
human nature are pivotal to different education theories. Kieran Egan
writes about the assumption of human goodness,

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

Holding th[e] ... presupposition leads to feeling no sense of risk or danger

in removing constraints and providing greater freedom. Indeed, quite the
reverse—change and innovation are favored, almost regardless of their nature,
not just because they may involve the removal of constraints, but because they
provide moments when the freedom for “good” human nature to express itself
is at a maximum ... The person who presupposes that human nature is bad
is led to see traditional forms, institutions, and constraints as carefully built
defences against the exercise of a naturally destructive, ignorance-preferring
human nature. Consequently, periods of change and innovation are seen as
times of high risk.23

Conservatives may doubt the presupposition of basic goodness, as liber-

als doubt the presupposition of basic inclination to sin and self. The
argument is about unarguable premises. However, a major shock or life-
change, a kind of conversion, can alter the presupposition because the
presupposition lies within a web, a set of stories depicting reality.
The sheer vociferousness between the parties speaks louder than
words about the depth of disagreement. Rousseau prompted partisans
and resisters. Nevertheless, Rousseau continues to attract followers who
attach themselves to a strand of his thinking.
Educators who echo Rousseau’s notes about freedom, self-determi-
nation, and happiness include A. S. Neill and Ivan Illich. A. S. Neill’s
Summerhill School has operated in Suffolk, England, since 1927. Neill
operated not a service of multiple tutors but a school with teachers.
However, no student is obliged to study in any teacher’s class at any time.
Only when a student wants to go need he or she attend. Motivation is
intrinsic.
The school offers classes including practical as well as academic subjects.
Discipline is by a weekly democratic meeting that votes on rules and sets
sanctions on those whose behavior violated agreed norms. Teachers at the
school have the same single vote as students. Neill shows his Rousseau
affinity in the quote, “I would rather see a school produce a happy street
cleaner than a neurotic scholar.” A recent scholar summarizes Neill thus:
“The organization of the schools around the primacy of the boss, the
maximization of knowledge acquisition, and the insertion of the body into
habitual routines failed to alleviate the psychical and emotional damage
produced by institutional life.” The concerns match Rousseau’s concern
with bourgeois alienation, the sin that limits human freedom.24
Illich, though, never started any school, which perhaps places him
even closer to Rousseau. He promoted a wholesale “deschooling” of

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 Five Paradigms for Education

society, seeking an end to the autonomy-stifling mentality brought on by

such “disabling” institutions.25
Rousseau’s developmentalism is a more influential legacy for education
than a private school or proposals for deinstitutionalization. Early think-
ers like Plato were developmentalists already in that they understood a
child’s reasoning powers are not those of adults. However, knowledge
drove their developmentalism. They believed minds absorb the deposits
of great curriculum. When accumulated, sound knowledge made for
mature thinking. Content drove maturity. The human faculty of know-
ing is innate due to divine way humanity came into being. The mind is
innately suited to understand its world. Development is the expansion of
a knowledge organ, that is, an “epistemological” growth.
How is Rousseau’s developmentalism different? In one sentence: He
understands the mind’s growth as a biological phenomenon. Its growth is
inevitable. Maturity will happen, regardless of any specific kind of content.
To Rousseau, the child’s mind will develop predictably, in definite stages.
Each stage arrives at predictable intervals. Good educational inputs do not
make growth. The learning does not make the stage, as had been believed
before. More deeply, the developmental stages mirror the historical devel-
opment of humanity. Like Émile, an individual isolated from a society of
false consciousness will develop according to the scheme.
The failure of research on biological developmentalism to demon-
strate value for classroom teaching has not laid it to rest. For instance,
developmentalism sequences Bloom’s taxonomy. The taxonomy remains
influential. Because Rousseau’s assumptions match mainstream post/
modernity, biological developmentalism is taken-for-granted common
sense to most educators, with or without confirming evidence.26

Counter-institutionalization

A few pages in company with two more educators, Antonio Gramsci and
Paulo Freire, will show the continuing power of Rousseau’s approach to
human nature and knowledge. Both of these are usually thought of as
adult educators. They enable us to put a finger on the precise duty and
reverence sought by Rousseau.27
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian Communist activist and
politician who was jailed by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini
in 1926. He was vividly aware of the way a political class gains assent to
its rule. Western European societies are ruled not by brute force but by

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

a diffuse power he termed hegemony. In everyday usage, “hegemony”

is synonymous with simple dominance, as when a more powerful state
exerts hegemony over a less powerful one.
Gramsci is referring to a subtle cultural process. The most compre-
hensive definition is “an order in which a certain way of life and thought
is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout soci-
ety in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its
spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles, and
all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connota-
tions.” Notice the closeness of Gramsci’s problem to Rousseau’s. For both,
the problem is existing society and its illusions supporting an unjust and
insincere class.28
It would be wrong to say that Gramsci read Rousseau and updated
him; the lines of thought had to pass through Kant, Hegel, and Marx
first. Yet the fundamental affinity of Gramsci with Rousseau is apparent:
Rousseau may not have coined the word “bourgeois,” but he gave it the
meaning of an insincere, unjust way of life.
Gramsci saw, in light of hegemony, that an alternative way of expe-
riencing life had to be worked out. Fortunately, while workers’ under-
standing of the world in their own terms is suppressed and co-opted,
the reverse side is that their worldview is never entirely at ease with the
Establishment line.29 Gramsci sees that workers have a consciousness half
Establishment and half their own.30 However, if the oppressed were to
glimpse a different account of reality, imagine a different future, and see
an alternative to hegemony, they would cease acting against themselves,
cease being tools of capitalists, and unite labor with consciousness to
forge a new humanity. So the oppressed must be led to make better sense
of their experience. They must be told an alternate story that empowers
them as workers and dignifies them as sharers in the creation of culture.
Then a European revolution would be unstoppable. To put it plainly,
there is hegemony and counter-hegemony.
Gramsci wanted a liberated working class prepared to participate fully
for a new society. When Rousseau writes that Émile “must work like peas-
ant and think like philosopher so as not to be lazy as a savage,” he expresses
the ideal of the authentic, non-alienated, working contributor to culture
progressive thinkers of left-wing commitments have longed for.
In Gramsci’s approach, the comprehensive alienation system called
hegemony can be contested by a certain kind of teacher. To Gramsci,
human beings are all intellectuals in that they behave out of what they

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 Five Paradigms for Education

believe. To stand in the gap between the present day and the future, we
need organic intellectuals. The organic intellectual does not bring to
workers “some alien truth from ‘above.’ ”31 Granting dignity to ordinary
people, Gramsci imagines a mediating role in which a teacher could
“give[s] shape and cohesion to [a] practical understanding, thus unifying
theory and practice.”32
Organic intellectuals were to “use the language of culture to express
the real experiences and feelings which the masses could not express for
themselves. In order to understand those experiences, they must feel the
same passions as the masses.”33 Organic intellectuals identify with the
people. They personalize the revolution. They cast the vision. They are
wedge persons. They teach. They lead. But this visionary work is to effect
cultural transformation among regular people for the goal of sustained
revolution in a highly developed society.
Gramsci imagined a way to replace a dominant worldview with an
alternative. Critical adult education is education from and to a Marxist
worldview.34 Gramsci’s organic intellectuals—and Gramsci himself—
serve as broad illustrations, teachers who struggle to see their truth gain
traction in the society of their time.
Paulo Freire (1921–97) also stands squarely within the Rousseauan
paradigm that presupposes human goodness. Freire grew up in the poor
northeast of Brazil at a time when the country was dominated by planta-
tion owners, landlords, the Catholic Church, and a military or otherwise
repressive government. Freire first trained as a lawyer but moved into
continuing education.
Freire’s major breakthrough came in 1962. He developed a Brazil-wide
literacy program in which peasants learned to read in 45 days. Freire
generated unusual motivation to learn by having peasants connect their
present situation to their preferred futures. Learning to read was the link
between the two. However, the conservative government, perceiving a
growing threat to its rule, exiled the educator.
For Freire, the process of becoming free is itself the curriculum,
with dialogue and naming the world central tasks. An educator who
imposes or requires answers by standing outside the life of the student
is “banking.” Having answers ready perpetuates the slave mentality of
the dominant system. The alternative is “consciousness raising.” Freirean
education is for liberation, defined politically and culturally. Stated,
hidden, and null curricula clearly appear, for the first time, as aspects of
a single process. The curriculum is the process.

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

Freire’s critical education is not from a privileged direct knowledge of

reality. Freire wants to maximize present human potential as seen in his
ideology. The education was toward an ideal which he held out explicitly.
Attributes appropriate to his understandings are to be inculcated in the
learners. “Transformation,” a term often used with these educators, is
not neutral, untainted, pure. It is in the model of human freedom put
forward first by Rousseau.

Reverence and duty: summary

One can see how radically Rousseauan education differs from Locke’s
empirical form by considering two research projects. Project Follow
Through in the United States traced the results of nine teaching models
on 75,000 children from 170 communities over 28 years from 1968
to 1995. Seven models it tracked were learner-centered, cognitive, or
conceptual education. Examples include the Tucson Early Education
model, the Banks Street model, and the Florida Parent Education
model.
These learner-centered models contrasted with teacher-centered, skill,
behavioral, and outcome-based models, including Direct Instruction
and Behavioral Analysis models. The two teacher-centered models
outperformed the constructivist models on all dependent variables.
On self-esteem and higher-order cognitive skills—specially prized by
Rousseauan education—the teacher-centered models outperformed
as well. The literacy scholar Jeanne Chall conducted a second research
project. She reviewed 25 years of educational results for teacher-centered
versus student-centered approaches and found similar results to Project
Follow Through.35
Insight into reverence and duty comes from after the following
consideration: To the Rousseauan, test results, no matter how damning,
have no validity. Only the individual would know for himself or herself
if the educational experience was of value. An objective test could not
locate the deeper comprehension that Rousseauan education seeks. The
Empiricist paradigm and the Rousseau paradigm aim for either replica-
ble (empirical) knowledge or for authentically appropriated knowledge
(never standard from student to student).
Objective tests validate surface knowledge only. The real outcome of
education for Rousseau—its reverence—is human freedom, the autonomy

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 Five Paradigms for Education

table 5.1 Rousseauan education facets, reverence, and duty

Facet Keywords

Aims Authentically good, natural person in free

society of equals
Students and their Good love of self can be corrupted by rival
nature wills
Teacher Facilitator/arranger
Motivation and Pursuit of self-realization, natural curiosity,
discipline physical and sexual needs, sociability
Valued knowledge One’s virtuous true self
Assessment of success Personal virtue of natural human being
Key learning Virtual islands for child-centered learning
environments
Characteristic events or Teachable moments with tutor
rituals
Reverence Nature seen in natural goodness of self and
physical nature; science; non-interfering
creator Deity
Duty Pursue full realization of innate good nature
on scientific authority

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

that Rousseau desired at all costs. Happiness cannot be without autonomy.

That this outcome seems anti-intellectualist, even undermining an educa-
tion for external reality, is simply not relevant to a Rousseauan. Each child
should be satisfied with her unique, personal insights. Table 5.1 summa-
rizes aspects of education which nurture perfectly autonomous reverence
and duty. The duty to which one responds is the cause of oneself, one’s
genuinely good passions, and one’s authenticity.

Notes
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. and intro. by Allan
Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 213–14; 14. The famous sentence that
opens the chapter is from Emile, 37. Bloom compares Rousseau to Hegel in
his introduction, ix. Like Bloom, Judith Shklar sees the utopian education
proposal as Rousseau’s way of presenting a diagnosis of society. Judith N.
Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge:
CUP Archive, 1985), sees Rousseau as a great “utopianist.” Natasha Gill,
Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: From Nature to Second
Nature (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010), 189; 197, fn26, is the source of
the “philosophical enough” quote which she cites from Asher Horowitz,
Rousseau, Nature, and History (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto
Press, 1987), 214–15. Kenneth Wain, On Rousseau: An Introduction to His
Radical Thinking on Education and Politics, vol. 3 (New York: Springer, 2011),
catalogues and explains Rousseau’s writings on education.
 Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010); the philosophe’s encyclopedia project is a symbol of the
scientific Enlightenment’s vaunting ambition to codify all knowledge in
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia,
Genealogy, and Tradition (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press,
1990).
 Patrick Riley, “Introduction,” in Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed.
Patrick Riley (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
7; Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, 1712–1754 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Robert
Wokler, Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
 Allan Bloom’s introduction in Rousseau, Émile, or On Education, trans.
Allan Bloom; Nicholas Dent, “Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,” in Shorter Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, November
29, 2005).

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 Five Paradigms for Education

 Nicholas Dent, Rousseau (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005), 220, citing
Immanuel Kant; utopists agree with Ortega y Gasset: “Man has no nature.
What he has is history,” cited in Gorman Beauchamp, “Imperfect Men in
Perfect Societies: Human Nature in Utopia,” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 2
(2007): 280–93; Shklar, Men and Citizens, 1–18.
 Freedom as Rousseau’s religious touchstone—and how ironic his freedom
proved to be—is in Isaiah Berlin, “Rousseau,” in Freedom and Its Betrayal:
Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002), 28–53, especially 33; John Locke, John Locke on
Education, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971); Patrick
Riley, “Introduction,” in Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–7.
 Rousseau, Émile, 212–13, found within Book IV.
 Rousseau, Émile, 328.
 Rousseau, Emile, trans. Bloom, p.89—emphases in original.
 Rousseau, Émile, 14.
 “Rousseau embraces the already common principles that human beings are
guided by the pain-pleasure impulse, direct experience is more effective in
learning than words, and habits can have a profound effect on children’s
nature.” Gill, Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment, 185;
Rousseau, Émile, 442, says that to be happy is the aim of life.
 Gill says the tutor controls the environment of the youthful Emile to such an
extent that the child does not even appear to be a living entity in Educational
Philosophy in the French Enlightenment, 196; Dent, Rousseau, 92, on the tutor’s
manipulative boundary setting; his similarity to legislator of the Social
Contract’s General Will is in Paul H. Meyer, “The Individual and Society in
Rousseau’s Emile,” Modern Language Quarterly 19, no. 2 (June 1958): 112–13;
Shklar, Men and Citizens, 19–20, points out that Rousseau is not at all for
democracy, which he associates with loss of virtue. The correspondence
of Emile’s tutor and Social Contract’s legislator shows education will be
continuous and ongoing. Like Dewey, society is education is society—a way of
humans associating together in freedom; John Dewey, Democracy and Education:
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916).
 Susan Meld Shell, “Emile: Nature and the Education of Sophie,” in
Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 272–301. Quote is from p. 292.
 Shell, pp. 171, 169, 241; resistance to systems is in Rousseau, Émile, 241, where
Rousseau writes, “The philosophic spirit has turned the reflections of several
writers of our age in this direction. But I doubt that the truth gains by their
work. The rage for systems having taken possession of them all, each seeks
to see things not as they are but as they agree with his system.” The tutor’s
memo to himself is at 171.

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

 Rousseau, Émile, 168. Rousseau opines, “The child who reads does not
think, he only reads; he is not informing himself, he learns words”; Gill,
Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment 185; Herman Dooyeweerd,
A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, trans. H. De Jongste (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 194, sees the reaction against words after late
scholasticism. “The rising Humanism turned away from such formalistic
hairsplitting and wished to show its sovereign power over the cosmos.
The watchword ‘to the things themselves’ was given; not only in critical
philology, but also in the research of endless nature, in which, since ... the
heliocentric view of the world, the earth had lost its central position. The
autonomous human personality wished to test its unlimited power of
expansion in the endless spaces of the universe.”
 On Piaget, Kant, and Rousseau, see, for instance, David William Jardine,
Piaget and Education Primer (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); or G. Felicitas
Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Pedagogy: Toward Education for Freedom
(Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2012).
 Locke’s philosophy of education was misconceived, according to Rousseau,
because he regarded children as if they were immature adults in journeyman
apprenticeships for their maturity, cultivating skills and learning trades
which would prepare them for their careers as gentlemen, not least the
keeping of accounts: Wokler, Rousseau, 121; see John Locke, John Locke on
Education, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971). The
source is Locke’s “Some Thoughts,” §§ 201–11; the quote at the end of the
paragraph is from Gill, Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment,
186; to Rousseau, adult pretentions contrast to childhood innocence, like
uncivilized peoples.
 Rousseau, Émile, p. 172.
 Rousseau, Émile, 192, 199, 244.
 Rousseau, Émile, 358–9, 363–4, 367, 371, 394. Bloom justifies the sexist
education strategy for Sophie by referring to Rousseau’s social and political
concerns. See 23–4; Wokler, Rousseau, 129–30, who cites Rousseau in a letter
to Toussaint-Pierre Lenieps, November 8, 1758 (L730), “Everywhere men
are what women make of them”; The pioneering feminist critique is Mary
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin, 2004), originally published 1792; Susan Meld Shell, in “Emile:
Nature and the Education of Sophie,” in Cambridge Companion to Rousseau,
ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 272–301, is the most complete accounting for Sophie’s apparent
subjection. Shell places Sophie in Rousseau’s reconstruction of natural
history. She explains that Rousseau thought contemporary female education
is more fitted to his complementarian vision than was male education. See
Cranston, Jean-Jacques, for more on Rousseau and Madame de Warens,

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 Five Paradigms for Education

the relationship that shaped his ideas about the sexes. A reconciliation of
feminist and political interpretations is Jane Roland Martin, “Rousseau’s
Sophie,” in Reclaiming a Conversation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 38–69.
 Education replacing what was a church’s role is in John Arthur Passmore, The
Perfectibility of Man, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Foundation, 2000).
 Paul H. Meyer, “The Individual and Society in Rousseau’s Emile,” Modern
Language Quarterly 19, no. 2 (June 1958): 101, 111.
 Egan, “Some Presuppositions That Determine Curriculum Decisions,” 123–4.
 A. S. Neill. Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (New York:
Hart, 1960), p. 5. Jason Wallin, “Get Out from Behind the Lecturn: Counter-
Cartographies of the Transversal Institution,” in Cartographies of Becoming in
Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective, ed. Diana Masny (Rotterdam: Sense
Publishers, 2013), 39.
 The Summerhill quote is from A. S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to
Child Rearing (New York: Hart, 1960), 5; the psychical damage quote is from
Wallin, “Get Out from Behind the Lecturn: Counter-Cartographies of the
Transversal Institution,” 39; Illich is summarized by Wain, On Rousseau: An
Introduction to His Radical Thinking on Education and Politics; see also Ivan
Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion Boyars, 1971); Illich’s late-life
reconsiderations are in Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, “Ivan
Illich’s Late Critique of Deschooling Society: ‘I Was Largely Barking up the
Wrong Tree,’ ” Educational Theory 62, no. 5 (2012): 573–92, doi:10.1111/j.1741-
5446.2012.00464.x.
 Kieran Egan, “Students’ Development in Theory and Practice: The Doubtful
Role of Research,” Harvard Educational Review 75, no. 1 (2005): 25–41;
children’s misconceptions are in Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 122–3.
 Stephen D. Brookfield, The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning
and Teaching, 1st ed. (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 3.
 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci,
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds.) (New York: International
Pub, 1971); G. A. Williams, “The Concept of ‘Egemonia’ ” in the Thought
of Antonio Gramsci: Some Notes on Interpretation,” Journal of the History
of Ideas, 21, no. 4 (1960): 586–99, cited in John M. Cammett, Antonio
Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1967), 204. Kolakowski comments that Gramsci uses the term in
varying senses but mainly as “control of the intellectual life of society by
purely cultural means.” Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its
Origin, Growth, and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), vol. 3, The
Breakdown, 241–2.
 To quote popular culture expert Tony Bennett, “A bourgeois hegemony
is secured not via the obliteration of working class culture, but by its

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 Rousseau’s Paradigm 

articulation to bourgeois culture ... so that ... its political affiliations are
altered.” Bennett, “Popular Culture and the Turn to Gramsci,” in Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. J. Storey (Cambridge: Pearson,
2006), 225.
 T. J. J. Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and
Possibilities.” The American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985): 569.
 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 119.
 Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 240–1; Eagleton, 119.
 Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 240.
 Stephen D. Brookfield, The Power of Critical Theory, 20–1, 33.
 William J. Matthews, “Constructivism in the Classroom: Epistemology,
History, and Empirical Evidence,” Teacher Education Quarterly (2003), 51–64.

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 6
Jesus’s Paradigm
Abstract: Exposition shows a central “reverence” and
appropriate “duty” for the basic presuppositional (“religious”)
values informing Jesus’s education. Jesus resisted and
reconfigured the dominant reality-narrative of his time and
place, developing a unique, insightful, and deeply personal
approach to teaching. His “reverence” for one true God against
innate human resistance to uncomfortable truths explains the
“duty” of his disciples, to act from love even through suffering.

Keywords: Brother Lawrence; counter-culture;

discipleship; Gospels; hegemony; historical Jesus
research; intertestamental period; John, Gospel of;
Judaism, second temple; Luke, Gospel of; Mark, Gospel
of; Master-disciple; Matthew, Gospel of; Mentor; New
Testament; Parables; Resistance; Symbolism; Tanakh;
Third Quest; Wach, Joachim; Wittgenstein, Ludwig;
Wright, N. T.

Newell, Ted. Five Paradigms for Education: Foundational

Views and Key Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137391803.0012.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0012

 Jesus’s Paradigm 

Each paradigm of education nurtures religious reverence and duty from

its reality, for which it initiates members. Jesus—the fifth paradigmatic
educator—brings out his particular reverence and duty in his learners.
We bring this study of education as religious to its end with an explicitly
religious educator.

Jesus was a teacher—really?

People in a very different society more than 2,000 years later do not see
Jesus much like a contemporary teacher. He fits late modern conceptions
more as “religious teacher” or “guru.” We think we know what we mean
with the word “teacher.” One who instructs others is a teacher. He or she
may have a classroom, a smart board, a lectern, white board markers, or
other accessories, but these are peripheral. She may adopt a facilitating
role or stand in a more direct position of authority with students. Jesus
does not teach as modern people expect teachers to teach. He preaches,
tells roundabout stories, is not afraid to hold himself up as example,
and is confrontational by times. Studies of Jesus as a teacher by Dillon,
Horne, and Zuck highlight how our expectations of a “teacher” can place
a boundary around an investigation.
Horne firmly puts Jesus into modern perspective. He sees Jesus as a
model teacher, even the ultimate teacher. His often reprinted classic
Jesus: The Master Teacher (1920) “discusses every conceivable personal
and pedagogical trait, judging Jesus to be highly accomplished on every
item.” Horne’s modern definition predetermines a positive evaluation.1
Zuck’s understanding of “teacher” also yields a positive evaluation of
Jesus as a modern teacher. His detailed book explores twenty or more
facets of Jesus’s teaching, with chapters on use of picturesque expres-
sions, on questioning, and how Jesus used stories in teaching. Zuck
then relates the specific skills to teaching tasks in modern schooling. An
overall rationale for the tactics is missing. Like Horne, Zuck finds Jesus
is exemplary in every category. Zuck and Horne are not alone: dozens
of articles, books, and theses on Jesus as teacher from the mid-1800s to
2000 are similarly positive.2
The third example, Dillon, applies modern teacher attributes to
Jesus but arrives at a negative assessment. Dillon’s method is to locate
112 “isolable units” of teaching in the Gospels. He then compares each
teaching event with recorded audience reaction. The Gospels themselves

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 Five Paradigms for Education

show Jesus’s teaching meets with “relatively little positive reaction on the
part of his auditors.” In most cases, he gets no reaction at all.
Dillon’s assessment of the parables as active learning is also contrar-
ian. He finds that the records indicate little learning. Of more than
fifty recorded parables, only five include a reaction of any kind. Dillon
concludes Jesus was not an effective teacher. Davies even thinks that
Jesus’s teaching is disputed in the present day because it was unclear.
He thinks that Jesus’s teaching was casual, rather than systematic; only
reactions to situations, rather than a coherent program. Both these
scholars think Jesus was not a good teacher, at least as they understand
“teacher.”3
That Jesus was known as a teacher in his time seems beyond dispute.
Historical sources about Jesus—four short biographies known as Gospels
included in the New Testament—refer to him a teacher. The biographies
depict Jesus being called didaskalos, epistates, and rabbi, which English
translations render together as “teacher.” Rabbi—literally “my great
one”—was an honorific title in post-exilic Israel for a teacher.4 Didaskalos
is most the frequent term, but this term and the term epistates are Greek
renderings for the underlying Aramaic word rabbi. The fourth Gospel
explicitly explains this detail.5 Although Jesus is shown healing afflic-
tions and exorcising demons, he is addressed as a teacher 66 times in the
Gospels, and on 57 occasions, didaskein (a verb, to teach) describes his
activity.6
In certain ways, Jesus was a rabbi as rabbis were then. His early ministry
included synagogue responsibilities. Jesus was adept at rabbinical tech-
niques, including memorable similes, epigrams, paradoxes, hyperboles,
humor, questioning, and disputation. The Gospels show second-temple
rabbis treating Jesus as a peer. He gathered students around himself, as
other rabbis did.7
In significant ways, though, Jesus was not a typical rabbi. Jesus did not
teach from a home base but was in essence a field preacher. Jesus’s teach-
ing was not centrally concerned with textual details. Unlike most rabbis
who parsed the tradition for answers to current questions, Jesus spoke
with personal authority. Students could not offer themselves to him.8
Jesus the teacher sometimes obfuscates. In Matthew 13:10, for instance,
the disciples ask Jesus why he does not make his meaning clear. His answer
reveals he intended to be unclear. Scholars may recognize the contradiction
of a non-teaching teacher and attempt to account for it. Robert L. Stein, for
instance, provides practical reasons for the parabolic form of teaching. He

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

notes Jesus’s need to obscure his meanings for his own safety or his desire to
obscure due to divine judgment on the hearers. At least, as Cascante notes,
“[H]is teaching does not conform to any strict pattern, either of content or
method.” Jesus challenges a modern definition of teacher and the activities
that teaching includes. How do we make sense of Jesus as a teacher?9
Jesus as teacher is as elusive and Jesus the person is elusive. He remains
a figure of controversy after two millennia. Persons see in him what they
wish to see: Dillon notes that writings on Jesus as teacher tend to assimi-
late him to the worldview of the writer. He says that the many accounts
of Jesus as a teacher parallel biographies of Jesus reflecting a particular
author’s culture or personal circumstance.
Works on Jesus as a teacher go back a century to the 1800s vogue for
lives of Jesus, when scholars thought that they could mine Jesus’s teaching
methods for contemporary application. Studies of Jesus as educator tend to
push then-dominant conceptions of good education. It has become clear
over the decades that writers on Jesus tend to evaluate him in their own
context and from their biases. The result is a series of variously colored
pictures, just as Jaroslav Pelikan recorded for Jesus through the Centuries.10
Focusing the research question on modern attributes found in Jesus’s
teaching introduces circularity. In effect, an investigator can only find

image 7 The circle at the center of the Celtic Cross claims a cosmic scale for an
event accomplished within time
Credit: Bigstock.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

what she is looking for. Studies fail by assuming a definition of teacher.

As the philosopher Wittgenstein urged, until we question the ground on
which we are standing, investigations cannot progress.11
I suggest we use current historical research on Jesus to gain a sense
of his aims for his life and ministry. Understanding his intentions will
enable us to understand his provocative and personal approach to
teaching.

Research on the historical Jesus

Three waves of research on the historical Jesus aimed to understand his

identity. Scholars have interpreted Jesus as a wandering cynic sage in the
Greek philosophical tradition, as a liberal moralist, as a Jewish apocalyp-
tist, as a miracle worker, and more. The most recent research program,
often called the “Third Quest for the Historical Jesus,” began in the 1980s
and continues to the present.
Scholars such as Ben Meyer ask what Jesus believed himself to be
doing when he acted and spoke as he did. Close attention to the context
of beliefs and practices of first-century Jewish life is a basic feature of the
Third Quest. The American New Testament scholar Craig Evans writes:
“Perhaps the most important gain (of the Third Quest) is in a renewed appre-
ciation of (the Jewish heritage). New source material and more nuanced,
contextual methodology have sharpened Jesus’s profile as a Galilean Jew,
standing in the tradition of Israel’s redemption and restoration.”12 British
New Testament scholar N. T. Wright also emphasizes the importance
of second-century Judaism for understanding Jesus. He expressed a
dissenting view of Israel’s covenant with its God. The basic element of
Wright’s history-writing approach is capital “S” Story, an understanding
of reality in a narrative. For Israel, the Story was the authoritative history
of redemption by YHWH as recorded in her Scriptures.
The Story is told again implicitly—repeatedly—in symbols including
Temple, Land, Torah, and Racial Identity. Israel lived its Story through
social reality in Symbol form. Symbol is a second element of Wright’s
history-writing model. Closely related to symbolic re-living is Praxis, a
third element of the model. The Praxis of Israel’s Story is specific worship
practices and festivals, particularly Sabbaths and the annual Passover
celebration. These behaviors live the Story in present time. The way of
life—the “Torah”—set forth in Deuteronomy and the prophets is the

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

required Praxis. Learning the Scriptures is itself Praxis. Symbolism and

the ritualized behavior of Praxis closely link.13
In his cultural context, Jesus’s actions are symbolically loaded.
Understanding how the beliefs of his time are lived symbolically makes
sense of the reactions he prompts. In Matthew 12:9–14, for instance, Jesus
heals on the Sabbath. Jesus’s action of restoring a withered hand seems to
be a violation of Torah. In a surface reading, Jesus’s generous act appears
to result in mere legal wrangling. But a breach of legality is not the griev-
ance. If it were, remedies are available to a penitent. However, Jesus is
not repentant, so remedy is not possible.
Only the consideration of his right to act in the way that he acted is
open. No present-day politician or media celebrity is more aware than
Jesus was of messages that actions send. The healing is a loaded chal-
lenge, an incontrovertible one. An alternative, generous view of Israel’s
God, and an apparently liberal, non-legal, response to him, is implicit in
Jesus’s action.
Jesus’s view of Yahweh depends on his authority as a rabbi, a prophet,
or, heaven forbid, the expected Savior King. Jesus’s act of healing
criticizes the standard view of Israel’s God. Verse 14 tells us the result: the
rules-oriented observers consult with one another as to how they might
destroy him. A symbolic understanding of Matthew 12:9–14 sees not
some sparring by two legal minds but a life-and-death challenge.
From a symbolic perspective, Jesus’s mission is to teach an interpreta-
tion of the Scriptures by precept and example toward a fuller picture of
Yahweh, one focused on himself. Jesus is not writing a new story. He is
re-interpreting Israel’s Story. “If you knew the Scriptures or the power of
God, you would not have condemned the guiltless,” he says in Matthew
22:29. According to Jesus, the dominant worldview was corrupt. We read
his accusation repeatedly. The fundamental problem is a narrow under-
standing of Yahweh. To Jesus, Israel thought too little of God’s mercy.
Evans confirms the value of attention to first century Jewish life and
beliefs. For example, why did the high priest tear his robes at Jesus’s trial?
Jesus stated that the high priest would see the Son of Man sitting at the
right hand of the mighty one and coming on the clouds of heaven. “Right
hand” is from Israel’s recognized Scriptures, at Psalm 110:1. “Coming on
the clouds of heaven” refers to Daniel 7. “Sitting on the right hand” and
“coming on the clouds” appear to contradict each other. One is static
and the other is in motion. But the two images are logically one, if
Jesus will be seated as in Daniel 7:9, on Yahweh’s chariot throne. Jesus is

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 Five Paradigms for Education

claiming that he is the Savior King of Israel, a son of God combined with
the human being of Daniel 7. He is asserting he will judge his accusers.
Yet, as noted in the Hellenistic Jewish Traditional example, Israel’s basic
affirmation was the “shema” of Deuteronomy 6: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our Yahweh is One.” No wonder the high priest is shocked to the core.
Here is apparent blasphemy. The judicial sequence that brought Jesus’s
death becomes understandable.14
Jesus’s parables, actions, and very person appear as symbolic, subver-
sive, and provocative when we understand first century Judaism as a
comprehensive social reality. His actions contravene official understand-
ings of Sabbath and Temple. Because Jesus is re-interpreting the authori-
tative Story of his own society, this collision of worldviews is not like,
perhaps, Islam colliding with Hinduism in present-day India.
Jesus is a Jew, a “rabbi” in second-temple Israel—but he is a contro-
versial one. He proposes a clarification of Israel’s Story centering on
himself, and he and disciples act out his interpretations. He challenges
Symbol and Praxis. Jesus is not merely disrespecting rules and bucking
an established order. He is not one individual at odds with his society. He
is not a 1960s-style romantic rebel. Jesus is an authoritative teacher who
challenges a society’s leadership with its own texts. Jesus is not a canon
lawyer navigating some intricate legal system, as a modern reader might
think. Jesus is the more like Martin Luther King who challenged America
based on the Declaration of Independence. Jesus heads a temple resist-
ance movement like the church reformation movement within medieval
Christianity culminating in Martin Luther, or—a Buddhist parallel—the
mayahana movement which arose some five centuries after Gautama.
These movements claim to recover the founder’s intentions. Jesus is
a teacher who transforms understandings. He both deconstructs the
present order and constructs a new one. Jesus accused leaders who
claimed to represent Israel’s God of profaning the temple. In Jesus’s view,
leaders failed to support the otherness and sacred character of Yahweh.15
Jesus is well aware of the symbolic power of actions. He says, for
example, “[W]hen I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people
to myself.” He foresees his death as a coming re-enactment of Israel’s
Exodus history. Then, a snake raised on a pole was a divine provision for
some to be healed. Jesus is a walking, talking parable of the Kingdom.16
Jesus aimed to teach Israel her covenant by his life, death, and resur-
rection. He approaches his society with tools to take down and build.
Understanding his actions and person as gestures pointing to a revised,

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

deeper Story dramatizes the reading of the Gospels. Considering his aims
enables us to place discrete activities such as teaching, disciple-calling,
and miracle-working into a framework.

Jesus’s program 1: God cares everywhere

Two keys enable us to understand Jesus’s radical education: his loyalty to

God and his identification of truth avoidance.
Jesus’s unflinching loyalty to the God of Israel was perhaps his most
striking attribute. He intensified awareness of the control, authority, and
presence of God. The intensifications assure care of persons who are in
special relationship with Israel’s God, but heightens their responsibility.
For example, in Matthew 10, Jesus says,
Can you not buy two sparrows for a penny? And yet not one falls to the
ground without your Father knowing. Why, every hair on your head has been
counted. So there is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than many
sparrows. So if anyone declares himself for me in the presence of human
beings, I will declare myself for him in the presence of my Father in heaven.

God’s universal control, authority, and presence imply high account-

ability on the part of those allied with him. Already in the passage, Jesus
claims a unique mediator role with Israel’s God.
Jesus extends divine control, presence, and authority deeply into the
moral realm. Matthew 5–7 provides an example. Jesus claims not to
undermine Israel’s revealed Law (5:17). But in light of a God who sees
every human motivation, Jesus proceeds to drive the Law beyond surface
actions to one’s deepest motivations.
Rousseau objected to Locke’s shallow moral education of children.
Locke would nurture children who do the right thing for the sake of
appearances. Jesus is the originator of Rousseau’s and Kant’s concern
for authentic moral actions. Jesus demands absolute purity. But law is
oppressive when extended to motivation. It makes humans aware that
evil is not only outward actions but is within.
In light of the demand for inward purity, Jesus relativizes traditional
rituals like cup-washing and, in principle, scriptural food regulations.
External rituals are simply inadequate to deal with the orientation to self
he calls sin. Loyalty to God, even loyalty to neighbor, must surpass loyalty
to self. The purity of Israel’s creator God calls for purity in Israel and in
creation. In Jesus’s hands, the intensification of divine rules generates a

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 Five Paradigms for Education

massive tension within persons who admit their twisted motivations,

insincere speech, and unworthy actions.
That people continue to find the message of transcendent reality
attractive can be explained by a perception of decadence, then and
now. Loss of confidence in knowledge about external reality creates a
vacuum. Reality as just “my reality” cannot meet a need for surpassing
meaningfulness. People experience freedom but are no longer sure that
their most significant and deeply felt actions matter. Modern anomie
makes selves seem weightless. Even apparently serious political leaders
present themselves as postmodern skeptics about social ideals, lest they
seem too much like discredited idealists. All is flux.
In the crisis of meaning, however, faith that reality is knowable,
with categories underwritten by a transcendent God, can emerge as a
lifeline. Family relationships and work regain purposefulness. Where the
alternative is meaninglessness, transcendent creation and moral order
commend themselves. The Indian thinker Chaturvedi Badrinath said to
Christian missionary Lessie Newbigin
As I read the Bible I find in it a quite unique interpretation of universal history
and therefore, a unique understanding of the human person as a responsible
actor in history. You Christian missionaries have talked of the Bible as it were
simply another book of religion. We have plenty of these already in India and
we do not need another to add to our supply.17

Contrast the confidence in ultimate reality with the short horizon of the
Empiricist and Rousseauan paradigms.
In Jesus’s teaching and practice, moreover, marginalized persons gain
dignity. The poor and powerless, created in the divine image, are put on
divine assignment. Jesus’s 12 special followers are nobodies—fishermen,
a disloyal Jew who collects for the imperial Gentile power, possibly a
guerrilla or two. The band of the selected few witness Jesus’s concern for
sufferers of all kinds—hungry, diseased, poor, bereaved, especially those
stigmatized by religious regulations. Jesus claimed the right to forgive
sins and restore outcasts. His God does not side either with the power-
ful or religious conformists. Here is motivation for social remediation,
social justice, and education.18
The implications of God’s universal control, authority, and presence
might account for Jesus’s practice of summoning disciples. Unlike rabbis
of his day, Jesus did not accept volunteer students. He selected and called
his disciples. He discouraged some who stepped forward on their own by
explaining the total dedication and suffering required of followers. Those

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

selected who came to grasp the significance of Jesus found themselves in

a movement of ultimate significance. Though in no way educationally,
vocationally, or socially distinguished, the affirmation of Jesus made
them visionaries. Their lives demonstrated unusual persistence and
capacity for suffering in the cause. Jesus’s invitation to education is an
invitation to a life of significant contribution.

Jesus’s program 2: you have accountable knowledge

Jesus’s teaching was engaging. He used parables, thought-provoking

sayings, aphorisms, and extended expositions. He raised questions with
disciples, temple representatives, and members of a rigorist renewal
movement called the Pharisees. Controversies made frequent teachable
moments.
Jesus’s tactics engage learners personally. We noted Matthew 12 and the
audience’s conundrum. Mark 2 presents a similar interpretive difficulty.
Responding to the negative reaction when he heals a paralyzed man and
forgives him as only Yahweh could, he asks, “Which of these is easier:
to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Get up, pick up
your stretcher and walk?’ ” For observers, either the healer has standing
with Yahweh whose power achieved the miracle or he represents an evil
power that aims to deceive. Parables such as the Good Samaritan (Luke
10:25–37) or the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) place the tradition in deep
tension with the written revelation. As Jesus challenged narrow inter-
pretations of Israel’s tradition, he treated his followers, challengers, and
crowds as intellectually and morally competent. He obliged thinking. He
does not encourage passivity.19
On the other hand, Burbules notices that Jesus “certainly believed that
some hearers were not open to his moral instruction, and he did not
waste much time with them.” Human beings capable of knowing also
tend to resist uncomfortable truth. Jesus’s key distinctive as a teacher may
be his way of accounting for truth suppression. The recognition makes
sense of his everyday use of tactics implicating learners. Human beings
suppress truth from the created world. Since the twentieth century, one
only needs to say words like “Holocaust,” “psychoanalysis,” or “fault line”
to be reminded of willful blindness or self-deception.
Jesus is aware of the human tendency to avoid uncomfortable truths.
For example, religious leaders ask Jesus to provide a sign from heaven.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

His reply: “In the evening you say, ‘It will be fine; there’s a red sky,’ and
in the morning, ‘Stormy weather today; the sky is red and overcast.’ You
know how to read the face of the sky, but you cannot read the signs of the
times” (Matt. 16:2 NJB). The long catalog of Jesus’s miracles for the deaf,
the mute, handicapped, even blind, and those with chronic illnesses,
were simply insufficient for these leaders without one more miracle.
As Sammons points out, Jesus’s tactics must have made inquirers
deeply uncomfortable. The lawyer who asked about the reasonable
extent of “love your neighbor as yourself ” could only agree with Jesus
that anyone in need is a neighbor, even though Jesus undermined the
“otherness” of Israel’s racial and religious neighbors. Perhaps deep
learning resulted. Jesus brought the inquirer to a Socratic dead-end—an
aporia—from which only a kind of conversion could rescue him.20

Jesus’s impact on disciples

All four Gospels open with the summons issued to a set of men to
follow him. Jesus sets a precise objective: to become “fishers of people.”
Matthew closes with Jesus’s commissioning of the same disciples:
“[M]ake disciples of all nations; baptize them ... and teach them to
observe all the commands I gave you.” Calling and commissioning are
literary bookends of the Jesus story. The positions indicate that Jesus’s
priority was to teach followers who would carry his mission forward.
The success of Jesus’s mission seems to have depended on his teaching
of disciples.
The character of a teacher shapes those who would learn from her or
him—one way or another. The rabbis modeled a way of engaging with
reality, by close reference to a text. Plato’s teacher models reasoning
engaged for transformation through a vision of ultimate reality. Lockean
teachers work from and to depersonalized reality. Rousseau’s tutor
forswears personal influence so that Émile’s natural goodness will cause
him to learn what matters.
Jesus also works from and to a faith. He teaches his life to disciples.
Matthew’s Gospel, written some three decades after Jesus’s death, is a
manual for discipleship in the form of a biographical narrative. As the
first generation aged, a new generation would go on without teachers
who had personal experience of Jesus. Trustworthy oral transmission of
the Jesus tradition was no longer assured.

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

When the Gospel is seen as a second-generation manual for Christian

mission, the person of Peter appears as a literary device by which the
next generation can grasp the tentative, exploratory nature of faith. Peter
is a literary foil to the master, Jesus. His appreciation for the enigmatic
Jesus grows, from his initial contact, through a wealth of shared experi-
ences, to final failure and restoration. Through Peter’s hesitations, new
disciples understand faith can be real yet less than certain. The ordering
of the mini-stories in chapters 6–8 of Mark’s Gospel underlines how the
disciples were slow to learn about Jesus. The Gospel histories show that
education for trust in Israel’s God is not mainly about imparting a fixed
body of knowledge. It is education for a life of confusions and joys, for a
mystery one must keep on engaging.21
Learning to engage Jesus’s fishing work was learning the person of
Jesus—strange as it sounds. Joachim Wach’s 1942 study of master-disciple
teaching may help us see Jesus’s kind of teaching. Wach marks off master-
disciple relationships from formal or technical teaching. Contemporary
classroom teachers with 30 or more students necessarily tend toward a
formal relationship based on the material. Wach’s “masters,” in contrast,
teach about themselves. They include Jesus, Gautama, and Muhammad.
Master-disciple learning is by emulation. Character formation is
everything.22
Jesus modeled the active translation of Yahweh’s intentions from
written revelation into life situations. Jesus claimed that Israel’s
Scriptures authorized his work and teaching. Unlike rabbis of the time,
transmission of an understanding of the Law is not Jesus’s aim. He
intended disciples to learn from his life. Jesus as master taught himself
to disciples to an even greater degree than other great masters. He held
himself out as an example; moreover, as the object of trust. He called
himself “Lord” and “Master,” without apology. Other teachers could not
necessarily do what Jesus did just by using his techniques. After all, no
one else is Jesus.
Master-disciple learning helps us see that learning Jesus’s life could
only come as a narrative, not in abstract legal propositions. The drama
of the Gospels invites one’s reflection and engagement. Their power of
implication is like Plato’s early or middle dialogues such as “Meno.” A
learner must recapitulate the process of learning Jesus for herself. The
Gospel narratives create an imaginative world. As they internalize the
historic exemplars of Peter, James, John, Mary of Magdala, and others,
new disciples can frame their own lives in the Jesus story.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Even when Jesus was no longer present to lead, his apostles never had
authority like the master. The disciples remained examples of tentative
faith, serving as examples to regular folks. Da Vinci’s famous painting
of the Last Supper illustrates the power of their example. Originally, it
adorned a wall of a refectory where a community of monks took meals.
The daring new technology of realist perspective encourages viewers to
imagine Jesus and the 12 at the head of their dining room. Da Vinci’s
technique makes viewers part of the original diverse band. The scriptural
account, like one replicated in paint, enfolds them in Jesus’s imaginative
world.

Jesus as enigma and answer

If “learning Jesus” was the disciples’ pursuit, the full identity of Jesus was
their major discovery. The narrative structure of Matthew’s Gospel leads
readers into the mystery, like a detective story. Jesus does not clearly
claim to be Israel’s expected Savior King until the end of his mission.
He is enigmatic. His favored term for himself is “Son of Man,” a term
taken from Daniel’s prophetic scripture (7:13) but lacking clear defini-
tion. Hearers query, “Who is this Son of Man?” At Matthew 16, Jesus
asks the disciples, “Who do people say the Son of man is?” They relay
to Jesus the general confusion: “Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah,
and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” All of these are figures who
were somehow predicted to reappear. Peter pinpoints his own unclear
understanding by stating Jesus’s identity as the expected Savior King,
and then immediately shows he maintains the traditional concept of a
ruler who would make Israel a world power by force. The enigma resists
premature definition. Jesus rebukes Peter.
Only with the Easter event do the disciples grasp the significance
of the person they have been following. After the crushing defeat of
hope in the crucifixion, an astonishing resurrection follows. In the
decades following, the disciples work out the implications. They come
to profess that in submitting to death and experiencing miraculous
vindication, Jesus fulfilled Israel’s millennia-long project. In their
view, he transformed it from national aspiration to global hope. Three
years of puzzled learning—sometimes stupefaction—came into focus
after the epochal moment. Transformation or conversion yielded clear
hindsight.

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

The image to capture their new sight could be compared to a gestalt

drawing or a Seeing Eye puzzle. In these examples, persistent efforts to
see coherence yield to 3-D appreciation. Learning Jesus was a movement
from bafflement into a new world. The insight propelled a movement that
grew beyond its homeland. It attracted a significant enough minority to
be the coming hegemony of Rome even before Constantine’s avowals. It
encompasses a third of the world’s population.23

Reverence and duty

The kind of reverence and duty inculcated by Jesus remain deeply contro-
versial. Table 6.1 summarizes facets of his educating work. Appraisal
depends on one’s stance toward Jesus and the view of reality he lived
and taught. It also depends on the institutional expressions of his faith
in a multiplicity of church bodies of different geographical, social, and
historical settings. No short statement could do justice to the ambivalent
character of Christian faith in societies and individuals.
Churches inspired by Jesus provided social capital for a renewal of
Rome up to and after Constantine; they were implicated in warfare and
large-scale forced conversions. Controversy continues in the present. The
benefits and the horrors lie side by side. Artists and philosophers wrestle
with the ambivalent Christian inheritance. The reverence and duty that
Jesus inculcated in the first generation carried the potentials of good and
ill that later history displayed so vividly.24
However, the Christian way of construing reality resists easy rebuttal.
Civilizational failures like a world war can be understood as examples of
perennial human weakness. Life for most people is not a walk in a park.
It often brings wrenching reversals of many kinds—relational, health,
losses in war, and massive injustice.
One of the most important attributes of Jesus as educator—if not
the most important—is the way of understanding events of one’s own
history. He taught how to live through suffering. Jesus spoke of his
coming crucifixion well in advance of the event. He persisted in his
teaching mission despite severe opposition and continued to relieve
suffering. Surpassing trust in Israel’s God, whom he called his “Father”
enabled him to continue.
Yahweh’s control of history is such that the meaning of one’s life is
not up to oneself; assessment rests with the Creator. Trust as a way of

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 Five Paradigms for Education

table 6.1 Jesus’s education facets, reverence, and duty

Facet Keywords
Aims Fishers of human beings/engagement in
Jesus’s mission
Students and their Responsible actors who tend to suppress truth
nature falling outside comfortable preconceptions
Teacher Provocative mediator like Socratic midwife,
model of resolute action and wisdom, not
able to program student response which is
finally unaccountable/mysterious; life-coach
for Jesus’s reality-narrative
Motivation and Loving loyalty to the one true God;
discipline acceptance of justice of mediator/mentor
guidance always short of coercion
Valued knowledge Knowledge of the true God’s character and
ways reflected in scripture’s interpretation of
history
Assessment of success Readiness to suffer for Jesus’s mission
Key learning Life—faithful response to events; believing
environments community
Characteristic events Scriptural festivals reconfigured by Jesus as
or rituals Savior King; love expressed in social action
and proclamation of Jesus’s kingdom
Reverence Mysterious three-fold God of comprehensive
control, authority, presence mediates divine
action in human history affirmed by Easter
events
Duty Trusting initiatives and responses to life-
events in line with Jesus’s interpretation of
Israel’s scriptures

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

construing historical events enabled the disciples after Easter to show

similar determination. They accepted violent deaths out of conviction
like Jesus, that the true God deserves true worship.
The effect on onlookers was like the commitment to non-violence of
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Cesar Chavez. If the cause can inspire
a “no” to violence against others, yet endure intense suffering, it may be
worthwhile. Enabling people and societies to see meaning in life despite
suffering is a main contribution of religions. For the disciples and
those taught by them, a cross symbolizes the Christian life because it
symbolizes Christ’s prevailing trust in God on behalf of his people. The
reverence sought by Jesus the educator is trust in his Father. The duty
is active engagement with suffering for the sake of other, to propel the
Jesus movement forward.
Is Jesus’s education a specifically religious education? It appears so at
first glance. Skills and technical knowledge of a trade or a vocation—
demands of regular daily life—seem completely separated from moral or
religious instruction. But skills and technical knowledge find meaning in
some overarching Story.
Whitehead sought the integration of atomized, meaning-sundered
knowledge into a meaningful whole. If all of life is under the care of a God
whose control, authority, and presence is universal, then even a mundane
activity like making a meal may be done well for his sake. Brother
Lawrence, a disabled associate of a Paris monastery in the late 1600s, was
consigned to kitchen duty. In this context, he was famously able to relate
the love of God to the task of washing dishes. Whitehead’s integration
should make aircraft mechanics or bond trading fully meaningful. Love of
God can fill mathematics, grammar, carpentry, or sports with meaning.25

Notes
 J. T. Dillon, “The Effectiveness of Jesus as a Teacher.” Lumen Vitae, 36, no. 2
(1981): 135–62; the quote is on p. 156.
 J. T. Dillon, Jesus as a Teacher: A Multidisciplinary Case Study (Bethesda, MD:
International Scholars Publications, 1995), provides a bibliography of Jesus
as teacher.
 J. T. Dillon, “The Effectiveness of Jesus as a Teacher,” Lumen Vitae 36, no.
2 (1981): 134–40; Dillon, Jesus as a Teacher, 146–51, 157–60; Dillon leaves
unexplored the Ancient Near Eastern culture of respect for masters and the
theoretical or theological intention of the Gospel writers.

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 Five Paradigms for Education

 Note the title of Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography, 1st ed.
(New York: Doubleday, 2000).
 William Barclay, The Mind of Jesus (London: SCM, 1960), 196–7; John 1:37.
 Dillon, Jesus as a Teacher, 4. Dillon summarizes no fewer than seven dozen
articles, books, and theses on Jesus as teacher; R. Alan Culpepper, “ ‘Full
of Grace and Truth’: A Theology of Teaching,” in Gladly Learn, Gladly
Teach: Living Out One’s Calling in the Twenty-First Century Academy, ed. J. M.
Dunaway (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005), 36, is source for the
word counts.
 Craig A. Evans, “The Misplaced Jesus: Interpreting Jesus in a Judaic
Context,” in The Missing Jesus: Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament, ed.
B. Chilton, C. A. Evans, and J. Neusner (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002),
24–7; Craig A. Evans, “The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith: Toward
Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” in Who Was Jesus? A Jewish-Christian Dialogue,
ed. Paul Copan and C. A. Evans (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2001), 59–72, 174–8; Charles F. Melchert, Wise Teaching: Biblical Wisdom
and Educational Ministry (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998),
220–2, discusses first-century conceptions of rabbis.
 Graham Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 186, notes Jesus did not follow rabbis and allow disciples to offer
themselves. He discouraged them at some points, for example, Matthew 8:20
paralleled at Luke 9:58.
 Sylvia Wilkey Collinson, Making Disciples: The Significance of Jesus’ Educational
Methods for Today’s Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 20; Matthew
7:24 notes general astonishment at Jesus’s authoritativeness; S. L. Davies,
Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity (New York
and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1995), 13–14; cited
in Melchert, Wise Teaching: Biblical Wisdom and Educational Ministry, 216;
R. H. Stein, The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings, 2nd ed. (Westminster
John Knox Press, 1994), 38; Fernando Cascante, “Jesus the Teacher,” As I See
It Today (Newsletter of Union Theological Seminary VA), 2001.
 J. M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1959);
cited in Dillon, “The Effectiveness of Jesus as a Teacher,” 157; Jaroslav Pelikan,
Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1985).
 H. Horne, Jesus, the Master Teacher (New York: Association Press, 1920); cited
in Dillon, “The Effectiveness of Jesus as a Teacher,” 136; R. B. Zuck, Teaching
as Jesus Taught (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995); Melchert, Wise
Teaching: Biblical Wisdom and Educational Ministry, 214–15; Burbules, “Aporias,
Webs, and Passages,” on Wittgenstein; Perry W. H. Shaw, “Jesus: Oriental
Teacher Par Excellence,” Christian Education Journal 1NS, Spring (1997): 91
writes, “[F]rom this brief study ... many of the claims of those who would

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

seek to contemporizc or universalize the teaching methodology of Jesus

cannot be substantiated.”
 Melchert, Wise Teaching: Biblical Wisdom and Educational Ministry, 207, offers a
list of published interpretations of Jesus, from E. P. Sanders’s Jewish prophet
to Stevan Davies’s spirit-possessed healer. Craig A. Evans, “What Are They
Saying about the Historical Jesus?” (Canada: University of Calgary, November
1, 2004), http://ucalgary.ca is an overview of the Third Quest. A small sample
of the massive literature is E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Minneapolis, MN:
Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1985); John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking
the Historical Jesus, Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press/New York: Doubleday, 1991–2009); Vernon K. Robbins,
Jesus the Teacher: A Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation of Mark, 2d ed. (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1992); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The
Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006); James
H. Charlesworth, The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide (Nashville, TN:
Abingdon, 2008); M. J. Borg, Jesus, a New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life
of Discipleship (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); J. D. Crossan,
The Historical Jesus: the Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York:
HarperOne, 1993); also Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco, CA:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); B. F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM
Press, 1979). The quote is by Craig A. Evans, from “Assessing Progress in the
Third Quest of the Historical Jesus,” Journal for the Study of the New Historical
Jesus 4, no. 1 (January 1, 2006), 35; Evans, “The Misplaced Jesus,” 11–13; Evans,
“The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith,” 62–3.
 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1, Christian
Origins and the Question of God (London and Minneapolis: SPCK and
Fortress Press, 1992), 31–2, 76–7, 124–6; Wright, Jesus and the Victory of
God, vol. 2, Christian Origins and the Question of God (London and
Minneapolis: SPCK and Fortress Press, 1996). Christian Smith, Moral,
Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
 Craig A. Evans, “What Did Jesus Do?,” in Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship
Reinvents the Historical Jesus, ed. M. J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995), 110-11; Evans, “The Jesus of History and the
Christ of Faith,” 66. It is worth noting that while Wright’s reading of the
trial shows great sensitivity to the worldview’s symbols, he thinks it was
more important to the Sanhedrin that Jesus was a false prophet leading the
people astray, and their big concern the warning of Deuteronomy 13; Jesus
and the Victory of God (London, and Minneapolis: SPCK, and Fortress, 1996),
449–60.
 The Jesus movement as temple resistance is important in Wright, Jesus
and the Victory of God; Richard F. Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social

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 Five Paradigms for Education

History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (Abingdon, UK and New

York: Routledge, 2006); Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought (London
and Oakville, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2009); Paul Williams, Mahayana
Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations (Abingdon, UK and New York:
Routledge, 2008), shed light on internal considerations which opened up
into the later Mahayana expression.
 John 12:32, NRSV. Numbers 21:8–9; Craig A. Evans, “Did Jesus Predict His Death
and Resurrection?,” in JSNTSup 186; RILP 5, eds. Stanley E. Porter, Michael A.
Hayes, and David Tombs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999).
 See Thomas De Zengotita, “The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture
as Anesthetic,” Harpers Magazine, April 2002; Mediated: How the Media Shapes
Our World and the Way We Live in It (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing
USA, 2006); “On the Politics of Pastiche and Depthless Intensities: The Case
of Barack Obama,” Hedgehog Review 13, no. 1 (2011), on the disorientation
or anomie when subjective self is barraged with messages that make it the
center of reality; in a similar vein, Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic:
Uses of Faith after Freud (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
Sarah Ruden, Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined
in His Own Time (New York: Image Books, 2010); Mary Eberstadt, How the
West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization (West Conshohocken,
PA: Templeton Press, 2013), on family as depending on a cosmology; David
Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable
Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Charles Norris
Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action
from Augustus to Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957) about
the Christian social and intellectual revolution that eventually inherited the
Roman Empire; the founding contribution to Western society by monks
whose initial impetus was, ironically enough, to withdraw from sensuality
in third-century Alexandria is in J. Décarreaux, Monks and Civilization: From
the Barbarian Invasions to the Reign of Charlemagne (London: Allen & Unwin,
1964); The quote is found in Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 87.
 Jürgen Habermas, a prominent thinker in the Marxist progressive tradition,
states the importance of transcendent reality to ground social justice efforts.
See Jürgen Habermas and others, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,”
in An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age
(Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 15–35; Simone Chambers,
“How Religion Speaks to the Agnostic: Habermas on the Persistent Value of
Religion,” Constellations 14, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 210–23.
 Keith Ferdinando, “Jesus, the Theological Educator,” Themelios 38, no. 3
(2013): 367; Stein, The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings calls parables a
disarming way of explication.

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 Jesus’s Paradigm 

 N. C. Burbules, “Jesus as a Teacher,” in Spirituality and Ethics in Education:

Philosophical, Theological, and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Hanan A. Alexander
(Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2004), 11–12; also T.
McLaughlin, “Nicholas Burbules on Jesus as a Teacher,” in Spirituality and
Ethics in Education, ed. Alexander (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic
Press, 2004), 21–33, who thinks Burbules just makes a progressive Jesus lifted
out of context; Jack Sammons, “Parables and Pedagogy,” in Gladly Learn,
Gladly Teach: Living Out One’s Calling in the Twenty-First Century Academy,
ed. J. M. Dunaway (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005), 46–66, is
brilliant on the way parables implicate hearers; Burbules, “Aporias, Webs,
and Passages,” 184, explains that Socrates saw that how aporia is reached
influences whether one can pass through it.
 Michael J. Wilkins, Discipleship in the Ancient World and Matthew’s Gospel
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), 240, says the best way to read
Matthew is to take position of implied reader who knew one or some of the
Twelve; The Gospels’ structure shows education in faith, in Walter Wink,
“The Education of the Apostles: Mark’s View of Human Transformation,”
Religious Education 83, no. 2 (1988): 277–90.
 “Learning Jesus” is a formulation from Luke Timothy Johnson, Living Jesus:
Learning the Heart of the Gospel (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
 John 12:3–4; Larry W. Hurtado and Paul L. Owen, eds., “Summing Up and
Concluding Observations,” in “Who Is This Son of Man?”: The Latest Scholarship
on a Puzzling Expression of the Historical Jesus, vol. 390, LNTS (London: T&T
Clark, 2011), 159–77; statistics for global Christianity are in, for example,
Todd Johnson, Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion,
and Mission (South Hamilton, MA: Center for Global Christianity, Gordon-
Conwell Theological Seminary, June 2013), http://www.gordonconwell.
com/netcommunity/CSGCResources/ChristianityinitsGlobalContext.
pdf; the account of transformative epistemological breakthrough is from
Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2009); also his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
(Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 1958); Esther L. Meek, Longing
to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids, MI:
Brazos Press, 2003) is source of the Seeing Eye analogy.
 The paragraph can be expanded by reading Richard Dawkins, The God
Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008); rebuttal by Hart,
Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies;
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2007); E. Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 20
vols. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997); George
Grant, The George Grant Reader, 1st ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1998);
an artistic work exploring ambiguities of faith and culture is Fyodor

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 Five Paradigms for Education

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa

Volokhonsky, 1st ed, Everyman’s Library (New York: Knopf, 1992); the
ambivalence of religion appears, for example, in Philip Jenkins’s exposition
of national motivations for the World War I. Participants from different
standpoints imagined a religious war for Christian civilization in Philip
Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade
(San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014); a related perspective is Stefan Elbe,
“European Nihilism and Annihilation in the Twentieth Century,” Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 3 (2000): 43–72, who points out
Nietzsche’s 1880s prediction of coming conflict from loss of religious
confidence.
 Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God (Radford, VA: Wilder
Publications, 2008).

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 7
Summary: What Is
“Education”?
Abstract: Reviews recent definitions of education from
anthropologists such as Ortner and Varenne, who draw on
Geertz, Garfinkel, Rancière, Dewey, and others to show that
culture is maintained and developed by—surprisingly—
ignorance and an everyday need to solve problems. Education
is development of cultural wisdom evidenced in ability to
meet complex challenges (do “duty”). Each paradigm develops
its society’s wisdom, whether maintenance of secrets (Mende),
avoiding social corruption of pristine nature (Rousseau),
or application of transcendent revelation to human history
(Jesus).

Keywords: Dewey, John; Garfinkel, Harold; Ortner,

Sherry; Rancière, Jacques; Varenne, Hervé

Newell, Ted. Five Paradigms for Education: Foundational

Views and Key Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137391803.0013.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0013 

 Five Paradigms for Education

Images and aims

This book has shown that every education aims to nurture human
beings in the image desired by its sponsors. The traditional Mende,
Athenian, or Hellenistic Jewish forms of education sought to reproduce
new generations with their living reality-narrative. But every school in
every society across time seeks the same: to reproduce a viable form
of its tradition. Academic education which we saw as Plato’s paradigm
seeks to mold students as, well, critical academicians. It seeks to
reproduce its tradition. The Empiricist paradigm dismisses traditions;
nevertheless, from its reality-narrative it seeks to reproduce a new
generation which shares its view of reliable knowledge. The Rousseauan
paradigm from its resources molds students to place their autonomy
and authenticity first, thus reproducing its tradition. A tradition like
Christianity seeks to shape persons willing to endure in love for the
truth of the cause.
We declined to give definition of education in the Introduction, saying
with Wittgenstein that the phenomenon itself might reveal to us what
is most important about education. Can we make any generalizations
about the five paradigms? Can we approach at least a working definition
of education?
Philosophers, anthropologists, and historians wrote dozens of articles
in recent decades to clarify a definition of education, to understand the
aims of education, or to grasp its essential nature. Some expect that close
attention to underlying concepts can clarify what education is. Others
hope that human happiness—or another aim—is broad enough include
the wide variety of educations across cultures. The different writings
have not developed a consensus.1
In what follows, anthropology, sociological, and cultural studies
perspectives dominate. Perhaps the social sciences emphasis arises from
the historical and narrative nature of the paradigms.

Systems of exclusion

Education must be selective. No formal program in a school can cover

all the material, so all schools have a null curriculum. Teachers will not
teach positively about aspects of life deemed dangerous or immoral—
and students often cannot mention them.

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 Summary: What Is “Education”? 

Anthropologist Ernest Becker offers a clear presentation of the way

unspoken desires structure a society. Becker believes that humans
repress the looming reality of death. Repression means that the drive
reasserts itself in other forms. Human beings deal with the looming but
unrecognizable reality of death through “immortality schemes.” Many,
even most, worldviews promise some continuing life after physical death.
But the important thing about a culture is that it expresses surpassing
truths that are so important they are worth dying for. An immortality
scheme thus gives surpassing value to human life. It also means that
another society’s immortality scheme threatens one’s own. Muslim truth
negates Christian truth. Sunni Islam’s truth negates Shi’a Islam’s truth.
Free market capitalist truth negates Communist truth. No society could
function if every single individual worked out his or her options on
blanks of paper. A grid excludes things from its frame. It is selective. It
organizes perception. For Becker, that which is repressed forms the grid.
The basic motive of the society never appears. Communist schools do
not teach positively about capitalism; they define capitalism as an aber-
ration, against the true way, immoral. Pluralists do not seriously teach
that there may be only a single way of truth. No religion relativizes itself
by teaching that a variety of paths exist to an unspeakable truth. It is
rare to find a critique of individualism in a society that prizes autonomy,
except possibly in subcultures that resist majority ways.2
Submerged desires help to structure education. Marx, Nietzsche,
and Freud, the masters of suspicion, taught that submerged desires that
cannot be named and which must be disciplined are in every society.
Cultures are systems of discipline. They are distinguished as much by
what they forbid as by what they encourage. Building on their insights,
Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan, and Deborah Britzman show that
present in every educational situation are factors which cannot be said
out loud.3
Schools, in turn, hold out preferred futures for students which are
socially acceptable. Any society’s preferred paths are built into the very
way they habitually speak. By our sayings and from scenarios on televi-
sion, children learn the preferred paths as they grow up. These paths are
hard to leave behind. For example, Bede Griffiths was a British Catholic
missionary who urged that Christianity be synthesized with Advaita
Hinduism. Even one as adventurous and determined as Griffiths writes
with recognizably Western emphases. Any worldview includes and
excludes phenomena in order to maintain coherence. Without a grid,

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 Five Paradigms for Education

humans individually and collectively cannot function. Educating is

culturing a coherent, shared, way of life.4

Constraint and permission

Victor Turner is an anthropologist who sees learning as a culturing

process. Education habituates thinking. Turner focuses his attention on
those revealing points in time where the normal rules do not apply. Rites
of passage, for instance, “paradoxically expose the basic building blocks
of culture.” An example of a rite of passage is the Mende Poro society.
Initiates learn to be adult as they gain embodied experience in the bush
school as they move toward adulthood. Each paradigm has its rites of
passage, too. They are often listed in the Facets table that summarizes the
exposition. Through rites of passage, societies habituate the thinking of
each new generation.5
Turner’s “education as culturing process” could be a basis for fellow
anthropologist Hervé Varenne. He sees that education happens in all the
ways that human beings learn to cope with a situation in which they do
not know what to do. Any established culture is a web of shared under-
standings or symbols. Yet new circumstances strain shared understand-
ings. To deal with a new problem, established habits or cultures may
be either a bridge to new ways or a wall that inhibits actions. Learning
occurs as soon as established ways no longer meet a need.6
For example, Varenne notices from Harold Garfinkel that in a simple
act like maintaining the order of a lineup at a grocery store, certain
people in a society “get instructed.” If one standing in line fails to move
forward with the line, people farther back in the line will teach them to
move up. “[P]eople, everywhere, unceasingly, and always in concert with
others, work at changing themselves and their consociates through often
difficult deliberations.” A community of worship, or a community of
trade, or an industrial manufacturer must always practice, deconstruct,
and reconstruct itself on slightly altered plans as its surrounding ecology
changes. The process never ceases. When old ways fail, new ways must
meet the need of the hour. Collective deliberation is a way of solving
problems.7
Any dominant group constructs what Foucault calls a “pedagogy.”
Gramsci is perhaps less dynamic to call the same dominance of thought
and action “hegemony.” A pedagogy in Foucault’s wide perspective is

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 Summary: What Is “Education”? 

individuals instructing and institutions instructing. Even the body poli-

tic instructs: complex political acts direct people. New legislation is thus
the education of a society. Education itself is a political act. Education is
hardly different than culture, seen this way.
Varenne takes an economics-like perspective, where small marginal
adjustments bring slow but persistent change to a system. From this
vantage point, education is not just in schools. Education happens
everywhere, all the time.8
Varenne’s approach to culture preserves the dignity of individual
agents. Some agents go with the flow of their society. They may also resist,
even sponsor some counter-cultural resistance movement. Individuals
reason, choose, act. Cultivation’s results vary due to the seeds’ inherent
fecundity, soil conditions, water supply, sun, insects, fungi, and other
conditions. Individual agents may and do resist aspects of the culture
of their family or society, though because essential “tools” of thought
depend on language even a religious conversion yields only a partial
transformation of habits.
As much as education is individual, it is a social process. Gadamer
emphasized that the self is educated through communicating. “[B]eing
with one another is the means by which nature has ... raised us above the
world of animals, precisely through language as communicative capabil-
ity.” Education is a social process that habituates individuals in ways of
thinking and acting. Society educates individuals. Individuals educate
society. Both statements are true at the same time.9
As individuals act within or break its rules, they reproduce the culture
and also develop and extend it—as they learn, they also educate their
society. The sum of individual changes moves their society in some new
direction. A society’s reality-narrative is not fixed for all time. Events
force new interpretations for the here and now. Education is both recrea-
tive and creative.10
Sherry Ortner, another anthropologist, adds a vital dimension to
Varenne’s illuminating micro-analysis. For Ortner, cultural practices
link human agents to capital-s Stories. A culture’s unavoidable metanar-
rative—what Smart called the mythic dimension—shapes and reshapes
its preferred future. In the process, the vision of the society is dynamic,
always being reformed. Greek thinkers such as Aristotle more narrowly
thought of the vision as a telos, a goal, or an aim. Aims direct Varenne’s
adaptations. Beliefs embedded in stories constrain people and guide
practices. When the old rules no longer work for shared aims, societies

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 Five Paradigms for Education

change their practices. The change is by reference to beliefs from a

master story. Human choices generate a back-and-forth movement, a
“dialectic.” Ortner’s practice theory shows how a master narrative orients
the problem-solving that builds culture.11
In fact, the inanimate world educates. Don’t rocks teach geologists?
You might prefer to say that a geologist learns from rocks, but geologists
themselves speak of the benefits of attending closely to what the rocks
are telling them. A female biologist who listened to corn and learned its
genetics won a Nobel Prize.12
The pressure of the real world educates human beings. No one has the
luxury of living in a world that is constructed only by their mind. As
philosopher David Carr points out, reality puts pressure on us. After all,
pigs cannot fly. To accept that almost anything can teach a human being,
whether learning is intended or not, opens education’s meaning wide.13
Educating is going on everywhere, all the time. Humans collectively
“educe” the world’s inherent capacities, including their own.

Culturing and educating

“Educing,” seen as drawing out potentials, is nearly identical with

cultivating or enculturating. “Culture” in English or French tends to
mean the finished product, something that one can possess. This mean-
ing points to the highly cultured person, usually meaning to possess a
developed sense for arts or humanities. We even mock the possessor
as one who has “cul-chah.” The range of the German terms, in contrast
to English and French, indicates culture as an ongoing movement. The
German word bildung is often translated as “education” in English,
but the translation is not really adequate. Bildung was first a medieval
Christian term indicating a process toward the soul’s perfection. Then,
following Romantic thinkers such as Herder, it came to refer to a more
generic process of inward human cultivation. Bildung’s range of mean-
ing is close to that of the Greek paideia—as we saw, a maximization of
character that is ongoing. The given world can be developed or culti-
vated—whether the abstraction “culture” means specific ways of doing
philosophy, a society’s technology, its art, or its manners. Culture can
be seen as habits of thought and action which yield predictable patterns
of knowing and doing, thought and technology in individuals, families,
and societies.14

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 Summary: What Is “Education”? 

Both “educating” and “culture” rely on metaphors of “growth.”

“Culture” is a metaphor for the result of an active process. Cultivating
seeds yields plants. Bacteria in milk cultures yogurt. Education is an
activity of a society that cultures persons. It encourages habits that char-
acterize members of a society. Education cultivates.15
Education can be defined most broadly as development of cultural
wisdom evidenced in ability to meet complex challenges (do “duty”).
Each paradigm develops its society’s wisdom, whether maintenance
of secrets (Mende), avoiding social corruption of pristine nature
(Rousseau), or application of transcendent revelation to human history
(Jesus).

Intentional versus always-on education

A wide idea of education has a benefit for teachers. The wide definition
enables us to place formal education in context with other kinds of
learning. This wide-angle view enables us to see around and over the
dominating position of public school education in any modern person’s
experience. Teachers aim to make a difference by cultivating individuals.
Education is much broader than classroom activities, ordered desks, a
metered day. A teacher’s work in a drama club or on the basketball court
may contribute richly to a child’s education, fully imagined.
A widely used definition of education is from Lawrence Cremin. To
write a history of public education in America, Cremin needed to be clear
about what education included. If only schooling conducted in class-
rooms counted, then he would write on formal schooling. If education
can be seen in every human activity, from which humans always learn
something, “education would cover everything in the culture.” Cremin
took a middle path: he defined education as “the deliberate, systematic,
and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes,
values, skills, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort,
direct or indirect, intended or unintended.” The most important word in
the definition is “deliberate.” The definition meant that he saw education
going on “beyond the schools and colleges to a host of individuals and
institutions that educate—parents, peers, siblings, and friends, as well as
families, churches, synagogues, libraries, museums, settlement houses,
and factories.” Cremin’s definition includes the Scouting movement:
Robert Baden-Powell who founded the Boy Scouts in 1908 intended

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 Five Paradigms for Education

to educate young people. A local soccer association intends to develop

skills and confidence in young people through a range of initiatives
such as coaching clinics, and recruiting players: the soccer association
is doing education. Cremin’s definition underlines how educative efforts
work together. It includes “schools” and a wide variety of other educating
agencies. Cremin’s limit of “education” to an intentional activity proves to
separate it from the most general ways that a culture maintains itself in
time—cultivating, enculturing, or socialization. Teachers intend to make
a difference. Teachers should see their work as intentionally developing
their society’s best attributes in those given to their charge. Education
has power for good for the future.16

Notes
 David Carr, “Philosophy and the Meaning of ‘Education,’ ” Theory and
Research in Education 1, no. 2 (2003): 195–212; and Nel Noddings, “What
Does It Mean to Educate the Whole Child?” Educational Leadership 63, no.
1 (2005): 8–13, are examples of philosophers of education who continue to
clarify meanings by conceptual analysis. See the consideration of aims in
Ted Newell, “Education for What Matters: Aims for Christian Schooling,”
in Foundations of Education: A Christian Vision, ed. Matthew B. Etherington
(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2014), 143–56.
 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).
 Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and
Interminable,” Yale French Studies, no. 63 (1982): 21–44; Shoshana Felman,
Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Shoshana Felman, “In an Era of
Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” Yale French Studies, no. 79 (1991): 39–81;
Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,”
in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed.
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, vol. xx (New York and London: Routledge,
1992), 1–56; Deborah P. Britzman, After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein,
and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 17.
 Judson B. Trapnell, Bede Griffiths: A Life in Dialogue (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2001); Bede Griffiths and Thomas Matus, Bede Griffiths: Essential
Writings (New York: Orbis Books, 2004), introduce Griffiths’s life and
thought.
 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of
Passage,” in Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, Symposium on
New Approaches to the Study of Religion, 4–20, 1964. Quote is on p. 20.

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 Summary: What Is “Education”? 

 Varenne’s “ignorance is the engine of culturing” perspective is explained in

McDermott, Ray, and Herve Varenne. “Culture as Disability.” Anthropology
& Education Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1995): 324–48. Hervé Varenne, “Difficult
Collective Deliberations: Anthropological Notes Toward a Theory of
Education,” Teachers College Record 109, no. 7 (2007): 1559–88; Hervé Varenne,
“Culture, Education, Anthropology,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39,
no. 4 (2008): 356–68; Hervé Varenne, “Conclusion: The Powers of Ignorance:
On Finding Out What to Do Next,” Critical Studies in Education 50, no.
3 (2009): 337–43; Hervé Varenne and Jill Koyama, “Education, Cultural
Production, and Figuring Out What to Do Next,” A Companion to the
Anthropology of Education (2011): 50–64.
 Varenne, “Difficult Collective Deliberations,” 1562.
 The phrase, “Getting instructed” comes from Varenne, “Difficult Collective
Deliberations,” 1572; Varenne, “Culture, Education, Anthropology,” 363.
Dewey’s problem-solving pragmatism fits with Varenne’s emphasis derived
from French thinkers such as Bourdieu, LaTour, Certeau, and Ranciere.
Michel Foucault highlighted “pedagogies” as means of social control—
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A.
Sheridan. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1977; and a cupful of the
cataract of writing on Foucault includes Jeffrey P. Cain, “Thinking Along
with Foucault,” Pedagogy 1, no. 3 (2001): 564–73; see Roger Deacon, “Truth,
Power and Pedagogy: Michel Foucault on the Rise of the Disciplines,”
Educational Philosophy and Theory 34, no. 4 (2002): 435–58; Roger Deacon,
“Michel Foucault on Education: A Preliminary Theoretical Overview,” South
African Journal of Education 26, no. 2 (2006): 177–87.
 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Education Is Self-Education,” Journal of Philosophy of
Education 35, no. 4 (2001): 536.
 William F. Pinar et al., Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study
of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses, vol. 17, Counterpoints:
Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education (New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 1995), 518–21; Pinar and Grumet’s interest in currere, curriculum
as autobiographical construction process complements education as a
dialogical practice of agency; despite the contrary-sounding title, Biesta
confirms educating as practice. He emphasizes that education is achieved
not by a passive initiation but by subjects’ performances. Gert Biesta,
“Education, Not Initiation,” ed. Frank Margonis, Philosophy of Education
Archive (1996): 90–8; Pinar and Grumet’s interest in currere, curriculum as
autobiographical construction process, also complements education as a
dialogical practice of agency; Gert Biesta, “Educaţie, Ni Iniţiere (Education,
Not Initiation),” Paideia 50, no. 2 (2006): 3–9.
 Ortner wrote a string of articles which developed from Clifford Geertz’s
well-known 1973 Interpretation, with whom she studied. See especially

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 Five Paradigms for Education

“Introduction: Theory into Practice,” in Anthropology and Social Theory:

Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006), 1–18; also “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973):
1338–46; “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 26, no. 1 (1984): 126–66; Making Gender: The Politics and
Erotics of Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997); Anthropology and Social
Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006).
 Gabriel Moran, in Speaking of Teaching: Lessons from History (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2010), 155, writes about the philosopher Wittgenstein.
Humans learn from animals, who surely do not intend to teach, and also
from mountains. Barbara McClintock’s ability to learn genetics from corn is
profiled in Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of
Barbara McClintock (New York: Macmillan, 1984).
 Carr, “Philosophy and the Meaning of ‘Education’ ” emphasizes the
resistance of the physical world to ways that defy its laws (see 204–5).
 James A Good, “John Dewey’s ‘Permanent Hegelian Deposit’ and the
Exigencies of War,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no. 2 (2006):
293–313, shows that Dewey’s philosophy continues a reliance on Hegel’s
idea of bildung; Jim Garrison, “Professing Bildung,” Professing Education,
Newsletter of Society of Professors of Education, June 2006; Jim Garrison,
“Identifying Traces of Hegelian Bildung in Dewey” (presented at the
annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American
Philosophy, Columbia, SC, 2007), http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/
mleldrid/SAAP/USC/pbt2.html; Norm Friesen, “Bildung and Educational
Language: Talking of the Self in Anglo-American Education,” in Making
a Difference in Theory: The Theory Question in Education and the Education
Question in Theory, ed. Gert Biesta, Julie Allan, and Richard Edwards
(Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2013), 100–120 see bildung as
depending on practices; see also Walter H. Bruford, The German Tradition
of Self-Cultivation: Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge
University Press, 1975); Gert Biesta, “Bildung and Modernity: The Future
of Bildung in a World of Difference,” Studies in Philosophy & Education
21, no. 4/5 (July 2002): 343–51; Paola Giacomoni, “Paideia as Bildung in
Germany in the Age of Enlightenment,” in The Paideia Project: Proceedings,
ed. D. M. Steiner (presented at the 20th World Congress of Philosophy,
Boston, 1998); Rebekka Horlacher, “Bildung—a Construction of a History
of Philosophy of Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 23, no.
5–6 (2004): 409–26; Franz-michael Konrad, “Wilhelm Von Humboldt’s
Contribution to a Theory of Bildung,” in Theories of Bildung and Growth
(Spring, 2012), 107–24; Sven Erik Nordenbo, “Bildung and the Thinking of
Bildung,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 36, no. 3 (2002): 341–8211; Klaus

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 Summary: What Is “Education”? 

Prange, “Bildung: A Paradigm Regained?” European Educational Research

Journal 3, no. 2 (2004): 501–9.
 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1976), s.v. culture, tells of the development of the
term, unknown in English before approximately 1750; I learned much from
Williams, including Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983); The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus,
1961); “Culture Is Ordinary.”
 Mark K. Smith, “Robert Baden-Powell as an Educational Innovator,” The
Encyclopedia of Informal Education, accessed July 12, 2014, http://infed.org/
mobi/robert-baden-powell-as-an-educational-innovator; Lawrence A.
Cremin, “Notes toward a Theory of Education,” Notes on Education 1, no.
5 (1973); Cremin, “Further Notes Toward a Theory of Education,” Notes
on Education 4 (1974): 1; “the ‘beyond the schools’” quote is from Cremin,
“Family-Community Linkages in American Education: Some Comments
on the Recent Historiography,” in Families and Communities As Educators, ed.
Hope Leichter (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978), 567; historian of
education Sol Cohen believes that Cremin’s excessively wide definition of
history cost his project analytical clarity. He struggled to complete the last
volumes. Sol Cohen, “Lawrence A. Cremin: Hostage to History,” Historical
Studies in Education/Revue D’histoire de L’éducation 10, no. 1 (1998): 180–204.

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 Index
Active learning
basic philosophical
commitment, 82
Alexander of Macedonia, 34
Ancient Greek education
civic religious basis, 25
competitiveness, 22
confirms Whitehead
aphorism, 26
contrast to fatalism, 25
inspired by tragedy, 22
mentor role, 25
role of aretē, 24
social-cultural context, 22
tribal encyclopedia, 30
aretē. See Ancient Greek
education
Aristophanes, 30
behaviorism, 86
Bloom’s taxonomy, 89
Bobbitt, J. F., 87
bourgeois, 103
cultivation
repeated stereotypes, 32
culture
acquisition of, 15
Dillon, J. T., 125
duty, per Whitehead, 5
education and culture
social identity formation, 36

education, aims of, 4, 5, 146
education, definition of
bildung, 150
character of individuals, 53
cultivating/culturing,
educing, 150
cultivation theory, 28, 31
cultural resistance, 34
dialectic of individual agents
with cultural master
narratives, 149
education cultures/
cultivates, 148
formal v. informal, 151
historical change intrinsic,
28
induction into reality, 36
miseducation, 33
more than schooling, 28
nurturing human beings in
some image, 146
overview, 8
political pedagogy is
ordinary, 148
schooling offers preferred
life-paths, 147
selectivity and null
curricula, 146
Egan, Kieran, 31
Eisner, Eliot, ix
embodiment, 7
Émile, The, 101
extended thought
experiment, 101
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empirical paradigm
advanced by population pressure
and democracy, 75
aims of education, 83
discrete facts without meaning, 91
early efficiency studies built public
pressure, 77
education a preoccupation, 82
effects on teaching, 78
evolution and historicism, 83
hidden values, 90
human innate moral neutrality
implicit, 82
learning theory, 81
Locke, John, 81
Newton, 80
philosophical pre-commitments, 79
psychological and teaching
implications, 86
scientific view of humanity, 80
Spencer, Herbert, 82
uniformity yielded efficiencies, 76
unique reverence and duty, 92
Evans, Craig, 128, 129
facets, 3
Fletcher, Andrew, 30
Freire, Paulo, 116
Gerbner, George, 31, 32
Gradgrind, Thomas
Dickens character, 85
Gramsci, Antonio, 114
hegemony
cultural dominance, 115
Hellenistic Jewish education
affirms Whitehead aphorism, 42
catalytic effect of Exile, 39
dependence on revelation for
cultural survival, 41
extent of literacy controversial, 38
literacy focus after Exile, 40
oriented to inspired texts, 37
recurring religious festivals as
education, 37
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Index 
reliance on Hellenistic school
approaches, 41
synagogue, role of, 40
historicism
Rousseau a pioneer, 103
holistic education, 4
Homer
influence on Greek culture, 21
rhapsode, 20
Horne, Herman, 125
human nature, 7
human nature corrupt but corrigible by
nurture. See Rousseau’s paradigm
Illich, Ivan. See Rousseau’s paradigm
Jesus’s paradigm
challenges self-deception, 133
confidence in reality basis of
identity, 132
contrasting personal modelling, 134
education in a way to understand
suffering, 137
integrates beliefs and work, 139
lives of Jesus/historical Jesus studies,
127, 128
rabbinic background, 126
story/metanarrative a lived reality, 128
symbolic conflict, 129
transformation ultimate result, 136
variant understanding of God, 129,
131
Kuhn, Thomas, 85
lumières, 102
Mende
economic and social change, effect
of, 18
folklore, 13, 14
location and population, 13
secrecy, 16
spiritual beliefs, 13
spiritual power, 17
Mende expression
practicality of learning, 18
 Index
metaphor analysis, 94
Meyer, Ben, 128
Newbigin, Lesslie, 132
Nussbaum, Martha, 86
Parry, Milman, 29
Pelikan, Jaroslav, 127
philosophes. See Rousseau’s paradigm
philosophy of science
and education, 87
philosophy with children, 108
dialogues appropriate educational
procedure, 65
Plato’s paradigm
biographical motivation, 53
driven by pursuit of definitions, 55,
57
expects resistance to knowledge, 67
frustration, positive value of, 66
governed by religious conceptions, 60
human interiority development
influenced, 62
importance of development of
literacy, 61
learners recall inherent knowledge, 58
motivated by eros, 66
opinion (doxa) versus knowledge
(episteme), 61
orderly ultimate reality of forms, 62
prompted by Sophist skepticism, 54
sought comprehensive knowledge, 58
sought truth and coherence, 64
sought truth as transcendent
reality, 55
unique reverence and duty, 69
plausibility structure
Berger, Peter, 6
Poro society
initiation, 15
leadership, 16
presuppositions, 7, 8
innate goodness or depravity, 113
religion
definition of, 5, 6
Reverence and duty, aim of education,
18, 26, 42, 69, 92, 117, 137
Reverence, per Whitehead, 5
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 101
biography, 102
social contract, 106
Rousseau’s paradigm
affirms original goodness, 101
aim of education, 115
aim of transformation in Freirean
version, 117
avoidance of frustrated will vitally
important, 105
centrality of scientific method, 107
complementarian view of sexes, 109
denies human depravity, 101
devalues literate learning, 108
education key for politics and social
development, 107
educators he influenced, 113
empiricism modified. See empirical
paradigm
feminist objections on Emile’s mate,
110
freedom a religious necessity, 103
Freirean social freedom, 117
human agency. See Tabula rasa
human progress in history, 111
individualism, 105
individualistic, 109
learning from reliable sensory data,
108
moral wrong interpreted
developmentally, 106
Robinson Crusoe exemplary human
being, 107
social vision, 110
stage theories, developmentalism,
114
tutor, 106
unforced free will, 106
unique reverence and duty, 117
utopian, not proposal for
implementation, 110
self-preservation, right to, 84
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 Index 

Skinner, B. F., 87 Hellenistic Jewish expression, 34

Smart, Ninian, 6 Israel’s allegiance to scripture, 37
dimensions of religion, 6 Mende expression, 13
stage theory Mende secrecy motif, 17
human development. See Rousseau’s modern expressions, 44
paradigm traditional paradigm, Hellenistic
Stein, Robert, 126 Jewish example
monotheism, 35
Tabla rasa (blank slate), 81 Tyler, Ralph, 89
teachers as change agents, 116 rationale, 89
telos, 91, 111
tradition, definition of, 84 Varenne, H., 148
traditional paradigm
Ancient Greek (Athenian) Watson, J. B., 86
expression, 20 White, John, 8
Ancient Greek educational elitism, Whitehead, A. N., 4
22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7, 9, 128
Ancient Greek singing Wright, N. T., 128
enculturation, 29
aretē key Greek virtue, 22 Zuck, Roy, 125

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