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12 / Education Is Not I-Thou
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12 / Education Is Not I-Thou I Five years ago, perhaps four, our problem was whether we could still be religious. William Hamilton assured us that the only religious experience moderns could have was of the absence of God, and Harvey Cox defined secular man as one utterly shut off from the sense of the numinous. Religious educators somehow managed to survive, in part because the enthusiasm of ecumenism gave us new life, in part because the death of God agitation died in the passage from theological fad to social reality. But that was one sensation back. Today it is obvious one can be religious . The only problem is how. The utter accessibility of God’s Spirit— at least to the young—makes institutions dispensable and education for religiosity a contradiction in terms. (I do not think that is the whole truth of this moment. Those who have fled Western religion for Hinduism or Buddhism have often discovered there that discipline is a primary means to insight, a long and arduous training the normal way to enlightenment. Not every religious seeker today demands instant ecstasy. It will be interesting one day to see whether this encounter with Eastern forms of strict religious training has its effect on our relatively lax Western ways of instruction. But right now, I am convinced, the primary challenge to religious education is the demand for immediate rewards.) The justifications for this mood are another inflated currency of our current intellectual recession: a pseudo-Freudian hope that less repression means more health; a Spockian commitment to demand-feeding and natural development; a Dewey-derived emphasis on child-centered curricula; a Summerhillian faith that out of the greatest freedom comes the greatest good nature; a Sartrean certainty that the self is its 149 1971 freedom and the one thing we must never surrender; all nourished by a society affluent enough to free education from its traditional role as the necessary instrument for making a living. Yet with all these reinforcements of contemporary infantilism, none is called upon more frequently or sanctimoniously than Martin Buber’s teaching of the holiness of the I-Thou encounter. That most people who cite Buber have not read him, and even more misunderstand him, has little to do with his social effect. That Buber is “in” makes it all the more important to review his ideas. If there is any question of his continuing relevance , it will help to keep in mind that the essays I shall cite were written in 1926 and 1939 (as translated in Between Man and Man, Macmillan, New York, 1948). Because Buber clarified the difference between being treated as a person and as an object—or, at the least, supplied us with the language by which we could now bring to self-consciousness what we had previously but dimly sensed—it is obvious that for him all “education worthy of the name is essentially education of character.” However, our technologically oriented and exploitatively structured society makes the I-it relationship dominant, so it is critical that the educator exert a countervailing influence. He must not forget to teach the most important thing, that people are persons. Society generally wants the educator only to provide appropriately trained manpower. Particularly in economies of scarcity, education was content to be an exercise in compulsion. As long as men desperately needed what school or master offered, that was bearable . We honor today as the great revolutionaries of education men like Rousseau, Froebel and Pestalozzi who insisted that was not yet the education of men. So too, Buber says, “Compulsion in education means disunion , it means humiliation and rebelliousness” (p. 91). It can go further. “The situation of the old type of education is, however, easily misused by the individual’s will to power, for this will is inflated by the authority of history. . . . The will to power becomes compulsive and passes into fury, when the authority [of the tradition or culture—EBB] begins to decay” (p. 93). Thus, nearly fifty years ago, Buber saw the necessity of gaining freedom for the student. “Freedom—I love its flashing face: it flashes forth from the darkness and dies away, but it has made the heart invulnerable. I am devoted to it, I am always ready to join in the fight for it . . . I give my left hand to the rebel and my right to the heretic: forward!” But for Buber, contrary to Sartre, freedom is not an end in itself. He continues, “But...