The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, and Education

5. Reimagining School

5 Reimagining School . . . our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change. If our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an equally complete transformation. —John Dewey1 The Purposes of Schooling The eminent philosopher of education John Dewey wrote these words in 1899. If we consider the last 100 years, that “radical change” in social life of which he spoke will be seen to have been magnified exponentially . But the school has not transformed accordingly. Most of those who work for change in public education usually satisfy themselves with the hope that the continual assimilation—through gradual cooption of ideas and practices with which the school has been confronted at least since the turn of the twentieth century will lead to a critical mass of slight differences, which will eventually appear as transformation. Whereas we in our lifetime see nothing, Rip Van Winkle might. For others, there is no necessary expectation that slight quantitative increments will turn into qualitative change, and hence no way to imagine the school except as “after the Revolution” whose arrival will surprise everyone, and which will certainly not originate in the schools. This situation presents those of us who allow ourselves to imagine a form of schooling, universally practiced and available, which realizes the potential of adult-child dialogue, with a danger that Dewey has 151 rightly characterized as a situation in which “the ideal is itself the product of discontent with conditions,” which, instead of “serving to organize and direct effort, . . . operates as a compensatory dream.”2 This is especially dangerous in confronting an institution that represents an extreme case of the hardening of habits—in Dewey’s broadened sense of the word—into predetermined “ruts,” which is the major problem around which his analysis of the possibilities for social change revolves. His succinct characterization of schooling as “largely utilized as a convenient tool of the existing nationalistic and economic regimes”3 applies as well today as it did at any moment in the history of public schooling. Dewey characterizes habits as “working adaptations of personal capacities with environing forces,” “affections . . . predispositions . . . demands for a certain kind of activity,” which in fact “constitute the self.”4 Those habits that are not flexible, and open to reconstruction through the influence of what he calls “impulse” or the “practically equivalent” word “instinct,” are not capable of changing social conditions , and are in fact the chief causes, as he sees it, of the structural inequalities that support both personal and social conditions of either chaos or stagnation like economic exploitation and war. In a modern, state-mediated polity and economy, the public school is the chief point of application of adult habit on childish impulse. It is the point of transition between childhood—the age, in his terms, of “original modifiability ” and “plasticity”—and the sort of habituated adult required for the purposes of the state and economy. As such, it is the location in the life cycle where the modal relation between habit and impulse, or reason and desire, is determined through the ritual standardization of the adult-child relation and its operationalization as the moment of transfer or transition from childhood to adulthood. It is this transitional moment in the life cycle, first referred to by Freud as “latency,” where the relation between impulse and habit is normalized on an adult model: where the child is “instructed” through the most fundamental of hidden curricula, in the role and limits, prohibitions and allowances of impulse in the reconstruction of habit. Either we learn to use impulse, which according to Dewey is “the pivot upon which the re-organization of activities turn,” to “give new directions to old habits and change their quality”—that is, we teach children (and ourselves in the process) to be oriented toward continually reconstructing habits—or we reproduce the gap between old habits and present circumstances that make for what he calls, ironically enough, the “infantilisms,” the “mass of irrationalities that prevail among men of otherwise rational tastes,” which manifest “just where critical thought 152 The Well of Being is most needed—in morals, religion and politics.” This reproduction of “normal” social pathology is accomplished through what he calls “training,” that is, “an impatient, premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of adult habits of thought and affection ”5—in short, the adult colonization of childhood. The school has not changed because...