iPad 8:27 PM * 20% O < Back Modules < Reading: Jane Martin's Educated Person the educated person-1.pdf Introduction Education (Completion Benchmark: March 2nd) The Ideal of the Educated Person* By Jane Roland Martin iBook (Completion Benchmark: April 13th) 6 History R. S. Peters calls it an ideal.' So do Nash, Kazemias and Perkinson who, in their introduction to a collection of studies in the history of educational thought, say that one cannot go about the business of education without it? Is it the good life? the responsible citizen? personal autonomy? No, it is the educated man. The educated man! In the early 1960s when I was invited to contribute to a book of essays to be entitled The Educated Man, I thought nothing of this phrase. By the early 1970s I felt uncomfortable whenever I came across it, but I told myself it was the thought not the words that counted. It is now the early 1980s. Peters's use of the phrase "educated man" no longer troubles me for I think it fair to say that he intended it in a gender-neutral way. Despite one serious lapse which indicates that on some occasions he was thinking of his educated man as male, I do not doubt that the ideal he set forth was meant for males and females alike. Today my concern is not Peters's language but his conception of the educated man — or person, as I will henceforth say. I will begin by outlining Peters's ideal for you and will then show that it does serious harm to women. From there I will go on to argue that Peters's ideal is inadequate for men as well as women and, furthermore, that its inadequacy for men is intimately connected to the injustice it does women. In conclusion I will explore some of the requirements an adequate ideal must satisfy. Let me explain at the outset that I have chosen to discuss Peters's ideal of the educated person here because for many years Peters has been perhaps the dominant figure in philosophy of education. Moreover, although Peters's ideal is formulated in philosophically sophisticated terms, it is certainly not idiosyncratic. On the contrary, Peters claims to have captured our concept of the educated person, and he may well have done so. Thus, I think it fair to say that the traits Peters claims one must possess to be a truly educated person and the kind of education he assumes one must have in order to acquire those traits would, with minor variations, be cited by any number of people today if they were to describe their own conception of the ideal. I discuss Peters's ideal, then, because it has significance for the field of philosophy of education as a whole. Jane Roland Martin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Presidential Address at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, April 1981, Houston, Texas. 1. R. S. Peters, "Education and the Educated Man," in R. F. Dearden, P. H. Hirst, and R. S. Peters, eds., A Critique of Current Educational Aims (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 7, 9. 2. Paul Nash, Andreas M. Kazemias, and Henry J. Perkinson, eds., The Educated Man: Studies in the History of Educational Thought (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), p. 25. 3. For a discussion of "man" as a gender neutral term see Janice Moulton, "The Myth of the Neutral 'Man," in Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Frederick A. Elliston, and Jane English, eds., Feminism and Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1977), pp. 124-137. Moulton rejects the view that "man" has a gender-neutral use. 4. Peters, "Education and the Educated Man," p. 11. Peters says in connection with the concept of the educated man: "For there are many who are not likely to go far with theoretical enquiries and who are unlikely to develop much depth or breadth of understanding to underpin and transform their dealings as workers, husbands and fathers" (emphasis added). 1 of 13 Dashboard DOO DOO Calendar = To Do Notifications Inbox iPad 8:27 PM @ * 20% < Back Modules < Reading: Jane Martin's Educated Person the educated person-1.pdf Introduction 98 Education (Completion Benchmark: March 2nd) EDUCATIONAL THEORY R. S. PETERS'S EDUCATED PERSON iBook (Completion Benchmark: April 13th) History A The starting point of Peters's philosophy of education is the concept of the educated person. While granting that we sometimes use the term "education" to refer to any process of rearing, bringing up, instructing, etc., Peters distinguishes this very broad sense of "education" from the narrower one in which he is interested. The concept of the educated person provides the basis for this distinction; whereas "education" in the broad sense refers to any process of rearing, etc., “education" in the narrower, and to him philosophically more important, sense refers to the family of processes which have as their outcome the development of an educated person. Peters set forth his conception of the educated person in some detail in his book, Ethics and Education. Briefly, an educated person is one who does not simply possess knowledge. An educated person has a body of knowledge and some kind of conceptual scheme to raise this knowledge above the level of a collection of disjointed facts which in turn implies some understanding of principles for organizing facts and of the "reason why" of things. Furthermore, the educated person's knowledge is not inert: it char- acterizes the person's way of looking at things and involves "the kind of commitment that comes from getting on the inside of a form of thought and awareness"; that is to say, the educated person cares about the standards of evidence implicit in science or the canons of proof inherent in mathematics. Finally, the educated person has cognitive perspective. In an essay entitled "Education and the Educated Man" published several years later, Peters added to this portrait that the educated person's pursuits can be practical as well as theoretical so long as the person delights in them for their own sake, and that both sorts of pursuits involve standards to which the person must be sensitive.? He also made it clear that knowledge enters into his conception of the educated person in three ways, namely, depth, breadth and knowledge of good. In their book, Education and Personal Relationships, Downie, Loudfoot and Telfer presented a conception of the educated person which is a variant on Peters's. I cite it here not because they too use the phrase "educated man,” but to show that alternate philosophical conceptions of the educated person differ from Peters's only in detail. Downie, Loudfoot and Telfer's educated person has knowledge which is wide ranging in scope, extending from history and geography to the natural and social sciences and to current affairs. This knowledge is important, relevant and grounded. The educated person understands what he or she knows, knows how to do such things as history and science, and has the inclination to apply this knowledge, to be critical and to have curiosity in the sense of a thirst for knowledge. Their major departure from Peters's conception — and it is not, in the last analysis, very major -- is to be found in their concern with knowledge by acquaintance: the educated person must not merely have knowledge about works of art - and, if I understand them correctly, about moral and religious theories - but must know these as individual things. Consider now the knowledge, the conceptual scheme which raises this knowledge above the level of disjointed facts and the cognitive perspective Peters's educated person must have. It is quite clear that Peters does not intend that these be acquired through the study of cooking and driving. Mathematics, science, history, literature, philosophy — these are the subjects which constitute the curriculum for his educated person. In short, his educated person is one who has had — and profited from liberal education of the sort outlined by Paul Hirst in his famous essay, "Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge.” Hirst describes what is sought in a liberal education as follows: a 5. Ibid., p. 7. 6. R. S. Peters, Ethics and Education (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966). Page references Dashboard DOO DOO Calendar : To Do Notifications Inbox iPad 8:27 PM @ * 20% < Back Modules < Reading: Jane Martin's Educated Person the educated person-1.pdf Introduction IDEAL OF THE EDUCATED PERSON 99 Education (Completion Benchmark: March 2nd) iBook (Completion Benchmark: April 13th) first, sufficient immersion in the concepts, logic and criteria of the discipline for a person to come to know the distinctive way in which it 'works' by pursuing these in particular cases; and then sufficient generalisation of these over the whole range of the discipline so that his experience begins to be widely structured in this distinctive manner. It is this coming to look at things in a certain way that is being aimed at, not the ability to work out in minute particulars all the details that can be in fact discerned. It is the ability to recognise empirical assertions or aesthetic judgments for what they are, and to know the kind of consideration on which their validity will depend, that matters. History If Peters's educated person is not in fact |Hirst's liberally educated person, he or she is certainly its identical twin. Liberal education, in Hirst's view, consists in an initiation into what he calls the forms of knowledge. There are, on his count, seven of them. Although he goes to some lengths in his later writings on the topic to deny that these forms are themselves intellectual disciplines, it is safe to conclude that his liberally educated person, and hence Peters's educated person, will acquire the conceptual schemes and cognitive perspectives they are supposed to have through a study of mathematics, physical science, history, the human sciences, literature, fine arts, philosophy. These disciplines will not necessarily be studied separately: an interdisciplinary curriculum is compatible with the Peters-Hirst ideal. But it is nonetheless their subject matter, their conceptual apparatus, their standards of proof and adequate evidence, their way of looking at things that must be acquired if the ideal is to be realized. II. INITIATION INTO MALE COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVES What is this certain way in which the educated person comes to look at things? What is the distinctive manner in which that person's experience is structured? A body of literature documenting the many respects in which the disciplines of knowledge ignore or misrepresent the experience and lives of women has developed over the last decade. I cannot do justice here to its range of concerns or its sophisticated argu- mentation. Through the use of examples, however, I will try to give you some sense of the extent to which the intellectual disciplines incorporate a male cognitive perspective, and hence a sense of the extent to which Hirst's liberally educated person and its twin Peters's educated person -- look at things through male eyes. Let me begin with history. "History is past politics" was the slogan inscribed on the seminar room wall at Johns Hopkins in the days of the first doctoral program.10 In the late 1960s the historian, Richard Hofstaedter, summarized his field by saying: "Memory is the thread of personal identity, history of public identity." History has defined itself as the record of the public and political aspects of the past; in other words, as the record of the productive processes man's sphere - of society. Small wonder that women are scarcely mentioned in historical narratives! Small wonder that they have been neither the objects nor the subjects of historical inquiry until very recently! The reproductive processes of society which have traditionally been carried on by women are excluded by definition from the purview of the discipline. If women's lives and experiences have been excluded from the subject matter of history, the works women have produced have for the most part been excluded from literature and the fine arts. It has never been denied that there have been women writers and artists, but their works have not often been deemed important or significant enough to be studied by historians and critics. Thus, for example, Catherine R. Stimpson has documented the treatment accorded Gertrude Stein by two journals which exert a 9. In Paul Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. Dashboard DOO DOO Calendar = To Do Notifications Inbox iPad 8:27 PM @ * 20% < Back Modules < Reading: Jane Martin's Educated Person the educated person-1.pdf Introduction Education (Completion Benchmark: March 2nd) iBook (Completion Benchmark: April 13th) 6 History 100 EDUCATIONAL THEORY powerful influence in helping to decide what literature is and what books matter." Elaine Showalter, pursuing a somewhat different tack, has documented the double standard which was used in the nineteenth century to judge women writers: all the most desirable aesthetic qualities - for example, power, breadth, knowledge of life, humor – were assigned to men; the qualities assigned to women, such as refinement, tact, precise observation, were not considered sufficient for the creation of an excellent novel,"2 The disciplines are guilty of different kinds of sex bias. Even as literature and the fine arts exclude women's works from their subject matter, they include works which construct women according to the male image of her. One might expect this tendency to construct the female to be limited to the arts, but it is not. Naomi Weisstein has shown that psychology constructs the female personality to fit the preconceptions of its male practitioners, clinicians either accepting theory without evidence or finding in their data what they want to find.13 And Ruth Hubbard has shown that this tendency extends even to biology where the stereotypical picture of the passive female is projected by the male practitioners of that field onto the animal kingdom.' There are, indeed, two quite different ways in which a discipline can distort the lives, experiences and personalities of women. Even as psychology constructs the female personality out of our cultural stereotype, it holds up standards of development for women to meet which are derived from studies using male subjects.15 Not surprisingly, long after the source of the standards is forgotten, women are proclaimed to be underdeveloped and inferior to males in relation to these standards. Thus, for example, Carol Gilligan has pointed out that females are classified as being at Stage 3 of Kohlberg's six stage sequence of moral development because important differences in moral development between males and females are ignored.18 In the last decade scholars have turned to the study of women. Thus, historical narratives and analyses of some aspects of the reproductive processes of society – of birth control, childbirth, midwifery, for example have been published." The exist- ence of such scholarship is no guarantee, however, of its integration into the mainstream of the discipline of history itself, yet this latter is required if initiation into history as a form of knowledge is not to constitute initiation into a male cognitive perspective. The title of a 1974 anthology on the history of women, Clio's Consciousness Raised, is unduly optimistic.18 Certainly, the consciousness of some historians has been raised, but there is little reason to believe that the discipline of history has redefined itself so that studies of the reproductive processes of society are not simply tolerated as peripherally relevant, but are considered to be as central to it as political, economic and military narratives are. Just as historians have begun to study women's past, scholars in literature and the fine arts have begun to bring works by women to our 11. Catherine R. Stimpson, "The Power to Name,” in Sherman and Beck, eds., Prism, pp. 55-77. 12. Elaine Showalter, "Women Writers and the Double Standard," in Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran, eds., Women in Sexist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 323-343. 13. Naomi Weisstein, "Psychology Constructs the Female" in Gornick and Moran, eds., Women in Sexist Society, pp. 133-146. 14. Ruth Hubbard, "Have Only Men Evolved?" in Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried, eds., Women Look at Biology Looking at Women (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1979). pp. 7-35. Dashboard DOO DOO Calendar = To Do Notifications Inbox iPad 8:27 PM * 20% < Back Modules < Reading: Jane Martin's Educated Person the educated person-1.pdf Introduction Education (Completion Benchmark: March 2nd) IDEAL OF THE EDUCATED PERSON 101 iBook (Completion Benchmark: April 13th) 6 History attention and to reinterpret the ones we have always known." But there is still the gap between feminist scholarship and the established definitions of literary and artistic significance to be bridged, and until it is, the initiation into these disciplines provided by a liberal education will be an initiation into male perspectives. In sum, the intellectual disciplines into which a person must be initiated to become an educated person exclude women and their works, construct the female to the male image of her and deny the truly feminine qualities she does possess. The question remains of whether the male cognitive perspective of the disciplines is integral to Peters's ideal of the educated person. The answer to this question is to be found in Hirst's essay, "The Forms of Knowledge Revisited."20 There he presents the view that at any given time a liberal education consists in an initiation into existing forms of knowledge. Hirst acknowledges that new forms can develop and that old ones can disappear. Still, the analysis he gives of the seven distinct forms which he takes to comprise a liberal education today is based, he says, on our present conceptual scheme. Thus, Peters's educated person is not one who studies a set of ideal, unbiased forms of knowledge; on the contrary, that person is one who is initiated into whatever forms of knowledge exist in the society at that time. In our time the existing forms embody a male point of view. The initiation into them envisioned by Hirst and Peters is, therefore, one in male cognitive perspectives. Peters's educated person is expected to have grasped the basic structure of science, history and the like rather than the superficial details of content. Is it possible that the feminist critique of the disciplines therefore leaves his ideal untouched? It would be a grave misreading of the literature to suppose that this critique presents simply a surface challenge to the disciplines. Although the examples I have cited here may have suggested to you that the challenge is directed at content alone, it is in fact many pronged. Its targets include the questions asked by the various fields of inquiry and the answers given them; the aims of those fields and the ways they define their subject matter; the methods they use, their canons of objectivity, and their ruling metaphors. It is difficult to be clear on precisely which aspects of knowledge and inquiry are at issue when Hirst speaks of initiation into a form of knowledge. A male bias has been found on so many levels of the disciplines, however, that I think we can feel quite confident that it is a property also of the education embodied in Peters's ideal. III. GENDERIZED TRAITS The masculinity of Peters's educated person is not solely a function of a curriculum in the intellectual disciplines, however. Consider the traits or characteristics Peters attributes to the educated person. Feelings and emotions only enter into the makeup of the educated person to the extent that being committed to the standards of a theoretical pursuit such as science, or a practical one such as architecture, counts as such. Concern for people and for interpersonal relationships has no role to play: the educated person's sensitivity is to the standards immanent in activities, not to other human beings; an imaginative awareness of emotional atmosphere and interpersonal relationships need be no part of this person's makeup, nor is the educated person thought to be empathetic or supportive or nurturant. Intuition is also neglected. 19. See, for example, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon, 1975); Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1977); Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin Women Artists: 1550.1050 INAW Vork. Álfred A Dashboard DOO DOO Calendar = To Do Notifications Inbox
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