Greg on How We Habermas

Dear Shane,

I ended my last post with my favorite quotation from Jürgen Habermas, about how emancipation is only possible within “an already accustomed communicative way of life.”  So now would be a good time, I hope, for me to spell out for the world what you already know, namely how we have adapted Habermas’s thought to the educational enterprise.  Once upon a time we made the disclaimer in writing that we didn’t consider ourselves to be experts in Habermas, a statement that the critics were all over like white on rice.  So, okay, we’re a heckuva lot more expert about H than most people are.  What we were really trying to get at is that Habermas has been wildly prolific for five decades and has produced a body of work comprehensive as only that of a German scholar can be.  Moreover, Habermas has proven himself more willing than any other famous intellectual that I know of to respond to criticism and to change his way of thinking if it has been shown to be in error.  The bottom line is that we draw upon the work that is generally considered Habermas’s most comprehensive, the Theory of Communicative Action, and we employ those insights and conclusions that we regard as most applicable to education:

1. That human social interaction is, at its most basic and its most extensive, verbal interaction.
2. That interaction aims primarily at carrying out actions.
3. That certain conditions apply if interactions are to be both ethically right and practically effective.

Thus:

1. Education consists fundamentally of verbal interactions among teachers and students.
2. Education is oriented almost exclusively toward the action of the student’s learning.
3. The teacher is responsible for establishing a situation in which participants cooperatively carry out that action.

Beyond his analysis of interpersonal activity, Habermas also recognizes in society another tendency for the mobilization of action, which he terms system.  Abstract, impersonal institutional structures and almost animistic “market forces” pervade government, economy, and culture.  Among the biggest problems facing education

Greg completely clarifies freedom in the real world

Dear Shane,

Your innocent reference to Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, which I promise to let go of soon, has gotten lodged in my brain, and I must disclose why.  I used to work for a high school principal who liked to describe teaching as a Sisyphean task.  He was one of those little Robespierres who wanted his subordinates to think of him as first among equals.  And he thought that existentialism was hip and edgy a good half-century after Camus.  He didn’t seem to notice (or perhaps to care) how unseemly it is for the boss to inform the workers that their job is absurd and that moreover they should embrace the absurdity of it.  What really pisses me off about Camus’s interpretation is that his recourse to individual or internal revolt serves the interests of tyrannical power, like little Robespierre, not those of the individual who is suffering through the absurd situation.  Indeed, factory owners should require workers to chant, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”  Beyond that, to any teacher or administrator who regards the educational enterprise as pointless drudgery, I would offer the following explanation: shut up, you selfish bastard.

I’ve worked in a factory, and let me tell you, if you progress to the point at which the work becomes drudgery, you’re doing pretty well.  Up to that point, it’s Chaplin’s Modern Times: scrambling to keep up with the machinery and enduring the wrath of one’s coworkers, to say nothing of the wrath of the supervisor.  But the existentialists are right that as individuals we are existentially, radically free.  As Sartre points out somewhere, even facing a firing squad you can always say no.  On the other hand, recognizing that a situation sucks isn’t exactly a soul-fulfilling anagnorisis.  (Anagnorisis, I state for