Commandments and Concerns: Jewish Religious Education in Secular Society

12. Cultivating the Authentic Jewish Individual: Theory of Implicit Teaching

12 Cultivating the Authentic Jewish Individual: Theory of Implicit Teaching PSYCHOLOGICAL SCHOOLS AND EDUCATIONAL MODELS Implicit religious orientations cast a spotlight on the relationship of the individual to his or her •'ultimate concerns" and posit that the vision of ultimacy of which a person is capable is a function of personal development. In order to guide the young person toward faith, therefore. the educator must be able to grasp such concepts as "readiness." "development," and others that denote the individuation that (according to the implicit religionist) characterize the mature, "integrated" religious personality. The young person must become himself or herself and the educator must help to facilitate the "encounter " viewed by implicit religion as the crux of "becoming." Psychology, therefore, can be expected to be of crucial importance for the theory of religious education, especially with regard to its implicit dimensions. Yet, seemingly, psychologists should be less interested in or hopeful about education than sociologists. For one thing, the psychologist looks upon the educating agent as an "outsider" vis-a-vis the developing child and may consider the teacher more apt to sabotage than to foster the child's natural growth. Also, the psychologist, more than the sociologist, is likely to see the child as somehow "programmed by laws of his inner nature" and less amenable to change through education. Nevertheless, the fact is that modern educational theory leans so heavily on psychology that scholars such as Schwab and Hofstadter have called attention to the danger of "the corruption of education by psychology.,.1 Because psychology is so widely regarded as the primary scientific basis Cultivating the Authentic Jewish Individual: Theory ofImplicit Teaching 229 of educational theory, and because it is considered authoritative in so many areas ofeducational practice, it is worthwhile to differentiate, howeverbriefly and superficially. among several prominent schools of psychology and their (diverse) approaches to educational philosophy. For different psychological schools do have different philosophical assumptions, and certain philosophical orientations with regard to teaching and learning are more congenial to some psychological approaches than to others. Behavioral psychology. for example, which is predicated on the malleability of people through environmental stimuli that condition them. is highly compatible with what, in Scheffler's educational typology, is termed the Impression Model.2 This approach, with its view of the child as a tabula rasa waiting to be "written upon" and shaped by the teacher, seems even more "optimistic" about the degree of socialization that is possible than does that ofthe sociologists we reviewed in the previous chapter. The concern with socialization is also focal in classic psychoanalytic theory , with its heavy emphasis on identification ("introjection") in educational activity. but here the starting point is radically different from the SkinnerianBehavioral one. Freudian thinkers are preoccupied not with the child's conditioning -toward-contentment but with his or her need to live with-and incivilization despite the discontent it engenders in the human organism. The Freudian conception, with its stress on developing an ego that can cope with reality without superfluous deprivations of the id, is more reminiscent of Scheffler's "Rule Model...3 The humanistic approach, with its motifs of "meaning-making" and its emphasis on personality and self-actualization, seems closest to the "Insight Model," which insists that human beings are "drawn out" in interaction with their environment. This approach has been traced back to the philosophy of Leibnitz. The Leibnitz tradition . . . maintains that a person is not a collection of acts . . . the person is the source of acts. And activity itself is not conceived as agitation resulting from pushes by internal or external stimulation. It is purposive . To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state ofthe person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities.4 Experience is related to what happens in the objective world but is not determined by it. Consequently, the humanistic approach views psychology as ideally a descriptive science and not an explanatory one; it should describe what really happens in human experience. Humanistic psychologists therefore tend to favor a phenomenological approach. which can "take the wisdom and 230 A Theory ofReligiQus Jewish Education insights of the poets and give them precise expression and a rigorous, systematic grounding. ", The foregoing will suffice to indicate that the theories of humanistic psychology , especially those of its "existential" proponents, seem most relevant to the concerns of implicit religious educatorsO (while...