Fragment from notes for a lecture at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Spring 1979
I distinguish taught mother tongue and the process by which it is learned from vernacular language and the development of competence in its use. The former results from both formal and informal educational activities, while the concepts of pedagogics developed since the sixteenth century are only metaphorically applicable to the latter, the vernacular domain. By describing in general terms the limited appropriateness of pedagogical concepts to learning in primitive cultures, learning in pre-industrial societies and, particularly, learning of certain competences in modern, commodity-intensive economies, I use insights gained through contemporary economic history and anthropology and apply them to the field of education. The inapplicability of pedagogical concepts to the learning of vernacular language can then be extended to other areas of learning, and the implicit limits to all education can then be understood. I hope to encourage research on as distinct from research in education, that is, research that examines the myths, the practices, the structures and the assumptions that are now common to all societies where education has been ‘disembedded’ as a distinct realm of activity, as a formal context or sphere.
The medieval mind firmly accepted the existence of heavenly spheres; the contemporary mind as certainly adheres to the existence of social spheres. My argument focuses especially on the educational spheres, but it can be generalized to the other modern spheres. On each of these spheres, two types of research can be done: that which does not go beyond the model of Copernicus, and that which tends to resemble the work of Kepler. The former is concerned with exploring the possible restructuring of the educational (or other) sphere by redefining its centerpiece, recalculating its amplitude, integrating more epicycles into its curriculum, or reassigning to it a new place or order within the hierarchy of social spheres. The latter research searches for the origins of the paradigm itself and, therefore, implicitly recognizes that, like heavenly spheres, modern social spheres might one day disappear.
Astronomers deal with a before and an after. They know that at some date human beings were able to reckon with a Copernican and then with a relativistic sky. They remember the change when planets were first perceived as physical objects that spin around the sun. They work within a paradigm that has an acknowledged beginning and, therefore, can plausibly end. Educators still lack such a historical perspective on their own work. The sphere of their competence appears to them as beginningless. They now need to recall that Ptolemy no less than Copernicus, Aristotle no less than Thomas Aquinas, were all convinced that planets were embedded in crystal spheres — transparent, hollow, perfect globes moving in uniform fashion. According to Aquinas, science was free to investigate, first, if heavenly spheres were driven by a soul, second, precisely how many spheres there were, and third, to what degree these spheres and their epicycles were eccentric. However, their existence, their substantive, three-dimensional nature, and their uniform circular motion could not be questioned without upsetting sound philosophical truth — and the latter was needed for the explanation of Christian dogma. Today, these men’s common, firm and critical conviction about the existence of such heavenly spheres is almost beyond belief. Yet, Keynesians and Marxists, Curriculum Planners and Free Schoolers, Chinese and Americans, are all convinced that homo is educandus, that his well-being — nay, existence — depends on services from an educational sphere.
It is precisely this well-knit assumption of an educational sphere that becomes the subject of the research on education I would recommend, but only as part of a wider research on the process by which economics, politics, wage-labor, and domestic serfdom came into being. And this is the moment for such research, because the orthodox members of the cloister have lost the innocence of their convictions, while the heterodox have not yet found their new paradigm outside. The character of the approaching paradigm change is not yet clear, for the educational community is at a stage similar to that of astronomy at the Renaissance.
One of the principal figures in the development of astronomy at that time was Copernicus (1473–1543). He is one of the most popular examples cited when people write on paradigm changes in world views. In the literature, one finds an enormous appreciation of the importance of his De revolutionibus coelorum. All testify to his undoubted worth as a mathematical astronomer. But de Solla Price challenged this view. He actually believed it to be a dangerous myth. Since similar myths now envelope some anti-school prophets, I shall comment on Copernicus and his influence.
Importantly, he reopened the question of the earth’s mobility. And he showed that no mathematical damage was incurred by assuming that it rotated around its axis. In a sense, he did go back to the Pythagorean position that the sun is at the center of the planetary orbs. Mathematically, he was the first to create a planetary system. All his predecessors had dealt with each planet separately; he integrated them. But he did not differ in method or in basic assumptions from Ptolemy. His demonstrations are derived from the so-called Almagest, and he accepted the existence of heavenly spheres. In terms of received knowledge, he admitted even more. He prided himself for having philosophically restored a strictly uniform circular motion to the heavenly bodies. However, this necessitated the positing of more circles than Ptolemy in order to avoid the use of eccentrics.
It can be argued that Copernicus did replace the potential crystal spheres that Dante — or, before him, Mohammed of the Ladder-Book — could visit by making planets move along prosaic spherical sections. But these neither he nor the young Kepler would think of renouncing. These men could not bring themselves to believe that there is not a natural difference between the movement of the heavens, which is perfect, and that of the sublunar, that is, sinful sphere. Perhaps for this reason the Inquisition did not bother them at all. But in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. Bruno, like the young Kepler, was influenced by Copernicus. But unlike him, he was not an observer of nature, nor did he know any mathematics. Probably wrongly, he imputed to Copernicus the power to prove that the universe is immense, peopled by innumerable stars, and uniform throughout in its nature. With this opinion, he was suggesting that one could think about the universe without spheres — and that led him to the stake.
But Bruno’s relationship to astronomy is somewhat akin to that of the outsider in the educational debate today. Therefore, he is of no direct interest in speaking about research on education. Before Kepler, and with the one exception of Bruno, the sky of common sense was also that of philosophical cosmology and mathematical astronomy. The common subject, however, was not the stars themselves, but rather the spheres that carried the planets and the empyrean. The common interest lay in the perfectly circular movements of transparent concentric material realities of a special kind. Each such sphere carried a planet, was generated by it, and was named after the star. The star in turn indicated the influence that the sphere exercised in the world. Copernicus was a heavenly reformer, a rearranger of these spheres. He cannot serve as an example for educators.
In his day, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was the foremost observer of the heavens. Coming from a powerful Danish family, he was born when Copernicus died and, two years before his own death in 1601, accepted the young Kepler as an apprentice. During his lifetime, Brahe substantially corrected the accepted value of nearly every astronomical quantity. He was the first to allow for the refraction of the atmosphere, to introduce methods of correcting instrumental error, to suggest correctly the nature of a nova, to map the location of more than 7,000 fixed stars. As a practical astonomer, he surpassed all before him and, like them, he still looked at the sky with the naked eye alone.
Kepler approached him to learn because he felt that only Brahe could teach him the observational skills necessary to prove Copernicus correct. But from the beginning of the apprenticeship, Brahe strongly dissuaded Kepler from undertaking such a foolish project. Again, Brahe was the first to point out that the mathematical changes introduced by Copernicus were on the whole such that they increased enormously both the complexity of the calculation and the heavenly mechanism without increasing the accuracy of prediction for the location of stars. Dissatisfied with both Ptolemy and Copernicus, Brahe designed a third system, constructed on a middle ground between Ptolemaic and Copernican assumptions. He retained the immobility of the earth, but the other planets were made to revolve around the sun. The latter, with these planets, annually circuited the earth. In addition, all planets performed a diurnal rotation with the sphere of fixed stars. His correct claim, that this system was more elegant and simpler mathematically than that of Copernicus, indicates the monstrous complexity of the Copernicus system. Experimentally, none of the three systems could be verified. Due to their constant improvement, the Ptolemaic predictions possessed an edge. Pascal was correct in believing that only because of a cosmological prejudice could one possibly choose among the three. Instruments to observe the parallax of fixed stars became available only three centuries later.
When Brahe died, Kepler edited his monumental catalog of the stars. Then he began to see the point on which all three of his great predecessors — Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe — were wrong: none of them could conceive of heavenly movements detached from heavenly spheres. Kepler did not attempt to replace the spheres with something else; he simply eliminated them.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) had a poetic and critical mind. Already as a student, in 1593 (a hundred years after the first return of Columbus), he had written out a series of speculations derived from Maestline’s attempts to estimate the elevations on the lunar surface by measuring, in Tübingen, the shadows on the moon; a technique the ancient Greeks had already tried to use. During the summer of 1609, he wrote out a plan for landing on the moon, earth’s closest neighbor in the sky. Kepler mentioned this project, never before conceived in scientific literature, in a letter to Galileo Galilei (April 19, 1610). He confided to his Italian friend:
Last summer, the manuscript begun in 1593 has been expanded into a complete geography of the moon … who would have believed that a huge ocean could be crossed more peacefully and safely than the narrow expanse of the Adriatic, the Baltic Sea or the English Channel…? Provide ship or sail adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will not fear even that void … so for those who will come shortly to attempt this journey, let us establish the astronomy: Galileo, you, that of Jupiter, and I that of the moon.
As Bruno had done by reasoning on general principles, so Kepler, concerned with ordering his observations, replaced a mechanism of spheres by heavenly bodies following their orbits. Voyaging from earth to other planets of the sun thus became a reasonable subject for intellectual speculation in 1609. Mundus became a new Cosmos interpreted by a new set of myths. Kepler confided his transgression of the ‘spheric taboo’ to a private diary written in the form of a dream. Through an indiscretion, some pages of this manuscript became known and led to the arrest of Kepler’s mother and her confrontation with the instruments of torture, an experience from which she soon died. The Somnium was published two years after Kepler’s death.
I am under the impression that the educational debate, no matter how radical, is still only concerned with a rearrangement of social spheres on the model of pre-Kepler stargazers. Correct observations on shared imagery and shared competence are still used, like those of Brahe, to fit a redundant paradigm. Discussion ranges, and research moves about the convenience or the necessity to redefine, to relate, to develop, or to appropriately add new epicycles within this one sphere. And when such educational policy alternatives pretend to be fundamental, the relationship of the educational to the other spheres takes prominence as an issue. Should production or politics be at the center of the social system? Or should the two be related in a more complex way, perhaps on the model of Tycho Brahe? Should we prefer an all-encompassing system of spheres on the Copernican model? Or is it better to muddle through without an overall system, but relying on the proven approximations that Al Shatir’s eccentrics and epicycles permitted one to calculate, even though such a theory deals with only one Ptolemaic planet at a time? Shall the school system remain at the center? Or shall school be but one adjunct to the education that goes on, for example, in a Chinese commune? How shall we rank the different tools of education? Or how shall we relate the spheres of education, health, welfare, research, finance, economics, politics? I think that research on the model of Copernicus is not what we need in education.
Following Kepler’s example, we now need to recognize that the educational sphere is a construct analogous to the sphere of Mercury, and that the need of humans to be educated can be compared with the need of humans to live at the static center of the universe. This educational construct is mapped by an ideology that brought into being our convictions about homo educandus. The construct is socially articulated by a specific set of institutions, for which Alma Mater Ecclesia is the prototype. It is implanted into the world view of each individual by a double experience: first, by the latent curriculum of all educational programs, through which vernacular learning is inevitably debased and, second, through life in the opaque, passive, and paralyzing lifestyle that professional control over the definition and satisfaction of needs inevitably fosters. Finally, the construct of the educational sphere is zealously guarded by the various bodies of educators who identify educational needs in terms of problems for which they alone possess the social mission to find institutional solutions in and out of schools.
This construct of an educational sphere is thoroughly consistent with other similar constructs, especially the spheres of economics and politics. The process through which each of these spheres has been disembedded to the point of achieving a radical monopoly that paralyzes its corresponding vernacular homolog can be studied separately for each one. But research on the educational sphere can claim a certain priority. Studying the process through which this sphere, in its ideological construction and in the degradation and replacement of vernacular languages by taught mother tongue after the invention of the loudspeaker, permits unique insights into the analogous elements that went into the constitution of other social spheres. Education as a subject matter and as a discipline has been defined by the construct and constrained by its basic assumptions up to now. This cannot be otherwise for research in education. But research on the relations of the educational domain to the global ideology of a society, together with the history of these relations, constitutes the kind of study which ought to be called research on education.