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2. Autonomous Selves, Liberally Educated
- Southern Illinois University Press
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AUTONOMOUS SELVES, LIBERALLY EDUCATED 2 AUTONOMOUS SELVES, LIBERALLY EDUCATED Like Dewey, Fishman’s ideology is liberal. In other words, at the core of Fishman’s teaching is a respect for the integrity of each student and a commitment to defend that student’s right to think for him or herself. In the classroom this means he wants to grant each student as much liberty as is commensurate with granting similar liberties to every one of that student ’s classmates. He aims to be tolerant about pupils’ deeply held beliefs and to profess a neutrality which encourages the critical and constructive skills which he and Dewey hold dear. As a consequence, Fishman tries to intercede in student debate only when he believes someone’s liberties and opportunities to make up his or her own mind are being transgressed. —Stephen M. Fishman and Lucille Parkinson McCarthy, “Teaching for Student Change” As described in the previous chapter, the most common criticisms of the liberal public sphere focus on: the public/private split; the assumption of universality; the notion of the autonomous individual; limiting public discourse to rational argument. The discussion centered on political theory, but those same criticisms trouble teachers of argument. Should we restrict topics to public issues? What place should personal writing have in a writing course? What sorts of generalizations can we make about writers and readers? What models of writing processes falsely posit an autonomous individual? What sorts of standards do we apply to arguments without imposing our own more or less arbitrary value judgments on people from different cultural backgrounds? How can we be both critical and inclusive? And, of particular importance to liberal political theory, is the notion of autonomous individuals a help or a hindrance in nurturing critical discourse? AUTONOMOUS SELVES, LIBERALLY EDUCATED At least since Kant, the notion of the autonomous individual has been central to liberal theory. Held says, Contemporary liberal thinkers have in general tied the goals of liberty and equality to individualist political, economic, and ethical doctrines. In their view, the modern democratic state should provide the necessary conditions to enable citizens to pursue their own interests; it should uphold the rule of law in order to protect and nurture individuals’ liberty, so that each person can advance his or her own objectives while no one can impose a vision of the “good life” upon others. (299) Initially, the term “autonomous” applied to city-states who were able to set their own nomos, their own laws. As will be discussed later, it now means everything from a sense that individuals can and should be completely independent of one another and their larger communities— particularly in the formation of their value-systems—to a sense that, whatever the origin of those value-systems, individuals have to take responsibility for them. The concept of autonomous individual is under attack in political theory and composition theory, but, as I will suggest, it isn’t always clear which version is meant. Particularly since the critical reactions against cognitivist and expressivist theories, it has become a commonplace in rhetoric and composition that it is inaccurate and politically problematic to talk about writers as autonomous individuals striving for originality and authenticity. David Bartholomae’s critique of Peter Elbow’s idea of “writing without teachers” (which really is, as Bartholomae says, a good example of the autonomous writer) is that “there is no writing that is writing without teachers” (“Writing withTeachers” 481). For Elbow, writers are empowered by freeing themselves from thinking about how their writing is situated ; they benefit by seeing writing as something “which, even if someone reads it, doesn’t send any ripples back to you” (Writing Without Teachers 1), by seeing it as operating within a vacuum (7). For Bartholomae and many similar critics of expressivism, Elbow’s decontextualized space of writing is “part of a much larger project to preserve and reproduce the figure of the author, an independent, self-creative, self-expressive subjectivity” (“Writing with Teachers” 482). This project is not liberatory, as Elbow contends, but disempowering because it hides “the traces of power, tradition and authority present at the scene of writing” (“Writing with Teachers” 481). Elbow has objected that this criticism is AUTONOMOUS SELVES, LIBERALLY EDUCATED not entirely fair; he, too, wants students “to see the act of writing as an act of finding and acknowledging one’s place in an ongoing intellectual conversation with a much larger and longer history than what goes on in this classroom during these ten...