Modes of Learning: Whitehead's Metaphysics and the Stages of Education

Introduction

Introduction There is nothing more important than a good education—the kind of education needed in order to become a good person and a good citizen, a responsible adult member of political, cultural, and natural communities . In this book I will explore, by means of the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, these interrelated notions and their metaphysical conditions. Although the specifics have changed over the centuries, a key claim about a good education has been that it has two stages. First, students should be taught the basic skills necessary for learning about anything, no matter what it is. Then, second, they should be taught a specialized field of inquiry. In the medieval European universities, students first learned the trivium—the general subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and then the quadrivium—the basic sciences of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. This two-stage sequence is echoed today, although only faintly, in the distinction between elementary and secondary education, or at the university level between general education courses and those that constitute a major field of concentration. Process philosophers of education, following Whitehead’s suggestions in two short chapters from The Aims of Education, re-express this traditional sequence as a cyclic rhythm of three learning stages rather than as a two-stage linear development. These chapters, a 1922 essay on “The Rhythm of Education” and an essay the next year on “The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline,” run to a total of only twenty-six pages. Yet they develop what is probably the most frequently mentioned of all Whitehead’s ideas: that education has a rhythmic structure to which teachers should be sensitive. In his first essay, Whitehead cites the “truism” that “different subjects and modes of study should be undertaken by pupils at fitting times when 1 2 Modes of Learning they have reached the proper stages of mental development” (“Rhythm” 15), then parses the “fitting times” as having to do with “rhythmic” stages of a pupil’s “mental growth.” He organizes these stages into a “threefold cycle,” which he likens, tongue in cheek, to Hegel’s dialectic of thesisantithesis -synthesis, labeling them as the stages of Romance, Precision, and Generalization (17). Education, Whitehead argues, “should consist in a continual repetition of such cycles” (19). He then applies these three cyclical stages to infant and adolescent learning, and makes some comments about university education. He concludes with a warning that the stages are not linear but concurrent: each stage marks merely “a distinction of emphasis, of pervasive quality”—an “alternation of dominance”—in a process where all three are “present throughout” (28). In his second essay, Whitehead elaborates these same points with a few minor differences. He characterizes the three stages as marked respectively by “freedom, discipline, and freedom” (“Rhythmic Claims” 31). Then he emphasizes that the cycle of stages recurs in differing ways in different educational situations, as “minor eddies” in ever wider contexts, “running its course in each day, in each week, and in each term” (38), as well as composing the way by which a formal educational curriculum should be organized and, indeed, by which a person’s whole life should be structured. “Education,” Whitehead concludes, “is the guidance of the individual towards a comprehension of the art of life” (39). Romance, precision, and generalization. These Whiteheadian notions have taken on a significance all out of proportion to the few oracular pages in which they are presented. Indeed, most people know of Whitehead only through secondhand versions of these notions, along with a treasure trove of phrases he used in explicating them, phrases that are cryptic enough to make wonderful epigrams for books or papers on educational practices, or as titles for conferences on current issues in education. I suspect this interest is a function of their vagueness, their utility as a way to suggest a wide variety of ideas about the dynamics of learning, enough to generate an interesting exchange of differing views. This suggestiveness is especially attractive for those who reject the excessively modular ways in which contemporary education is imagined and implemented, and who are looking desperately for a few countervailing quotes with which to indicate their distress. These opportunistic uses and misuses of Whitehead’s ideas about education raise a serious question. Are his ideas merely so much rhetorical 3 Introduction bling, a convenient way to add a bit of glitter to one’s substantive discussion of important...