Open Secrets: Literature, Education, and Authority from J-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee (review)

Michael Bell’s Open Secrets: Literature, Education, and Authority from J-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee offers a deft analysis of pedagogical practices as exhibited in literary and critical works that span approximately 240 years. He points out in his Introduction that he does not intend to present a thoroughgoing survey of the pedagogical theme as George Steiner has recently accomplished in The Lessons of the Masters. Instead Bell focuses intently on eight writers, with occasional insightful discussion of intersecting works by writers and critics contemporaneous to the primary writer under discussion, whose works explore the notions of pedagogical circularity and authority as well as understanding and interpretation in educational relationships. While many studies over the years have exposed the attributes of and discussed the progression and influence of the Bildungsroman from the perspectives of the development of the apprentice or student, Open Secrets upends those projects in order to explore the influence and sway of the teacher or authority figure. With this often overlooked aspect of teaching and learning as his focal point, Bell investigates complex and subtle relationships to explore “the limits of the teachable” (1).

Borrowing the term, offenes Geheimnis from Goethe, Bell uses the English translation of “open secret” to set up the motif that serves to connect the various threads of his discussion. Oxymoronic in nature, open secret, notes Bell, “is not a secret which everyone has discovered, but an utterance that few can understand” (4). To concretize this notion, Bell cites the example of a professor concluding a semester by asking students to summarize the larger issues they covered during the term. After a few minutes of spouting out the content some students replied that had they been told at the beginning what they would be expected to master by the end then the semester would have been easier. Bell assured the students that the course objectives and learning outcomes had indeed been stated and discussed the first day of the course. He continues:

What was said on the first day had seemed comprehensible; neither the words nor the conceptions were unfamiliar or puzzling. But while the experience was lacking, the words had no real content and had been quite naturally and healthily discarded. At the same time, the instruction had not been futile; it was just the necessary first stage, a preliminary focus of attention in a much longer process of assimilation.

(1–2)

This becomes the premise or the foundational phenomenon that moors Bell’s analysis as he traces the various processes of educational assimilation through his study. Open Secrets interrogates the esoteric process of imparting knowledge. Bell is careful to probe both the agency of the pedagogical function, the master or teacher imparting information, as well as the life experience on the part of the learner or student, which is of tantamount importance in arriving at understanding and knowledge. Bell organizes his examination in two distinct parts explaining early on the organizing principles for the progression of the study.

In Part I, Bell traces the undoing of the “instruction and understanding” model of learning dominant in the Enlightenment especially as communicated in the theories and fiction of Rousseau. With regards to his own pedagogical scheme in Emile, Rousseau sought “as far as possible to create the effect of unmediated experience.” Bell adds: “The pupil must always seem to exercise his own will and powers even as he is secretly controlled by the tutor in the constantly varying, unpredictable circumstances of every day” (20–21). Bell does a thorough job discussing the traits of Rousseau’s educational process while at the same time pointing out glitches in Rousseau’s hypotheses regarding teaching and learning. Before moving on to his exploration of Goethe’s work, Bell spends some time surveying two fictional tales, Sterne’s Tristam Shandy and Wieland’s History of Agathon. This chapter is especially enlightening as it inspects...