Mencius, Mencius, selections from the Mencius, date unknown.
Mencius (371 - 289BCE), [Meng Tzu] was born about 100 years after Confucius and lived during the so-called "Warring States" period. The feudal fiefs that had been under the control of the Chou king had become more or less independent states that often warred with each other. Where Confucius argued that a proper education cultivates benevolence, Mencius argued that we are all born with an inate germ of benevolence and that the point of education is to cultivate it. This he argued against others who thought people were inherently selfish and whose selfishness could only be curbed through strict adherence to a set of socially mandated rules or rituals.
Aristotle (384BC - 322BC), son of physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia, student of Plato, said to have tutored Alexander the Great (son of King Amyntas' third son Philip), founder of a school (the Lyceum) in Athens.
Abu Hamad Mohamad ibn Mohammed al-Ghazali (450-505AH/1058-1111CE) was one of the great Muslem theologians and philosophers of the Middle Ages. In these texts he address issues of knowledge, studying and teaching, and their purposes.
Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) was one of the best known and widely read English philosophers of the Victorian period and is best known for his works on biology, sociology, and psychology, his embrace of laissez-faire and his anti-statist political views - in all of which positivism and Lamarckian evolution play a central role. In this essay we see Spencer arguing that the learning of each person, he felt, spontaneously recapitulates the history of human learning in general and education should be structured to feed and nourish such natural tendencies. While accepting the basic ideas of Pestalozzi (the basis for a school run by his father) he also critiques their application and argues that proper pedagogy can only be based on scientific research on the natural processes of human development.
Nietzsche's concern with the relationship between history and contemporary life was clear in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy" where he analyzed the origins and decline of ancient Greek tragedy and sought to use that analysis to investigate what he saw as the decline and possible rebirth of German culture. The origin of Greek tragedy, he argued, lay in the Dionysian realm of music (tempered with an Appollonian concern with form) and the possibilities of a renewal of German culture, he thought, lay in the music of Richard Wagner. For Nietzsche Wagner music, especially his operas combined both the historical roots of German culture - Teutonic myths - and revolutionary new musical forms - e.g.,of dissonance. The most obvious example of the kind of music Nietzsche is praising are the four operas in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungenlied, the first of which is Das Rheingold - that begins with the story of how the dwarf Alberich stole the gold of the Rhine from the Rhine maidens and used it to take control of the workers of the Nibelung underworld. I've chosen three moments from that opera to illustrate this music and I hope they make clear how Wagner is not only telling an old story, but using it to critique the ascending role of money and imposed work in German "modernization." You will find a parallel critique in Nietzsche's attack on the increasing subordination of German education to the churning out of workers - for business and for the state - in the readings provided here.
His efforts to gloss over his own role in propagating national socialism at his university can be found in two writings: "The Rectorate 1933/1934: Facts and Thoughts", (1945), and "Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger", (1966) which was published posthumously. Their dishonest and self-serving character has been thoroughly dissected and critiqued by Hugo Ott in his biography of Heidegger based on a mass of previously unavailable documentation: Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, New York: Basic Books, 1993.
Jevons (1835-1882), English economist, educated at University College London, but also self-taught in economics, one of the three "fathers" (along with Walras and Menger) of mathematical economics and of the "marginalist revolution" that abandoned the labor theory of value and produced modern microeconomics. His work on capital accumulation and his observations of class conflict in England led him to advocate expanded education among workers, partly to raise their productivity and partly to convince them - and their Trades Unions - to accept their lot, especially to not try to raise their wages more rapidly than increases in their efficiency would allow. For more of my own commentary on Jevons see my Lecture Notes on the marginalist revolution.
Veblen (1857-1929), Norwegian-American farmer-turned-economist was one of the most erudite and sharp-witted social critics of the 20th Century. Educated at Carleton College and then at Yale, Veblen was particularly adroit at skewering the pretensions of the wealthy and illuminating much that was being ignored by the emerging economics profession. Moreover, he was particularly adept at doing so in the vernacular, in a language millions could understand and appreciate in books such as his famous Theory of the Leisure Class. His book-length essay on Higher Learning was written after teaching at the University of Chicago - a school built with Rockefeller money, whose president of that time typified for Veblen the educational entrepreneur and a school that has become widely known for its Economic Department's embrace of free-market gospel. The pdf version of the essay provided here has been edited down to almost half the length of the original. If you enjoy the edited version you'll want to read the whole thing and see what you have missed.
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was no economist, but rather an investigative journalist - a "muckraker" for those who didn't like the results of his investigations. In The Goose-step, however, he illustrated in great detail much of what Thorstein Veblen analyzed - with far fewer illustrations- in his Higher Learning. In The Goslings Sinclair extended his investigations from colleges and universities to American elementary and secondary schools. In both cases he piled case study on case study to demonstrate both how business controlled education and the nasty consequences for both teachers and students - and thus, for the American people as a whole.
A. Studying for Culture & Personal Englightenment
B. Constraints: real and prospective
This paper was a contribution to a Roundtable on Attacks on Academic Freedom, Free Speech, and Free Press sponsored by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS) during the African Studies Association meetings in New Orleans on Nov. 12, 2004. Caffentzis is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maine at Portland, Maine.