The Philosophy of Richard Rorty Interpreted As a Literary Philosophy of Education

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The Philosophy of Richard Rorty Interpreted as a Literary Philosophy of Education

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Todd Aaron Bitters

Graduate Program in Education: Policy and Leadership

The Ohio State University

2014

Committee:

Philip Smith, Advisor

Bryan Warnick, Co-Advisor

Ann Allen

Copyrighted by

Todd Aaron Bitters

2014

Abstract

The central question of the dissertation is: what significance do Richard Rorty’s ideas have for education and for philosophy of education, broadly defined? Three major themes dominate Rorty’s scholarship, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature to his late work, that have consequences for education. One, we should suspend correspondence theories of truth and, instead, focus on a pragmatic concept of truth that eschews

Cartesian models of epistemology. Two, people can be viewed as having two distinct sides—one, public, and one private. Each side may share common attitudes with the other, but one’s public and private outlooks are not necessarily reconcilable. Three, literary criticism, or literary study, is the ultimate intellectual enterprise. The primary claim of the dissertation, resulting from the interpretation of Rorty’s three ideas, is that a culture rich in literary study—based on a literary philosophy of education—is preferable to a culture in which only an elite few enjoy the benefits of serious engagement with literature. I review works by a series of scholars, published in the field of philosophy of education, that address Rorty’s ideas and their connections to education. I argue that, for the most part, scholars in the field have ignored the intersection of literary criticism and education in Rorty’s work. Finally, I outline several problems in education, as I see them in my role as an academic advisor and college administrator at The Ohio State

University. The final chapter carries out a thought experiment, entitled “The Hypothetical

Rorty,” that considers a Rortyan perspective on such problems.

For Stella Laing Virginia Greer

iii

Acknowledgments

To my mentor Phil Smith, my committee, my colleagues in philosophy of education and in the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State, my friends, my family, and my wife Anna: thank you. Without your support, this project would not be possible.

Vita

June 1995 ...... Thomas Worthington High School

May 1999 ...... B.A. Bowling Green State University

December 2002 ...... M.A. University of Kentucky

June 2011 ...... M.A. The Ohio State University

December 2003 to present ...... Advisor, Coordinator, and Director,

College of Arts and Sciences Advising and

Academic Services

Fields of Study

Major Field: Education: Policy and Leadership

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Vita ...... v

Table of Contents ...... vi

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2: Rorty on Truth ...... 13

Chapter 3: Education, Literature, and the “Ironist” ...... 40

Chapter 4: A Literary Philosophy of Education ...... 69

Chapter 5: Conclusion: The Hypothetical Rorty ...... 93

References ...... 118

Chapter One: Introduction

Richard Rorty, in a 1990 article published in Educational Theory, says he doubts the importance of philosophy for education. Given that the central question of my dissertation is: “what significance do Richard Rorty’s ideas have for education,” it would seem that Rorty preemptively derailed the project years ago. Rorty’s pithy statements, however, do not always tell the whole story. As Rob Reich (1996) points out about Rorty and his claim that philosophy may not have much to say for education, “Rorty is a bundle of seeming contradictions” (p. 342). Indeed, Rorty (1990) tempers his doubt at the end of the Educational Theory article, saying that philosophy is not irrelevant for education but, rather, that “we should not assume that philosophy is automatically relevant to political or educational change” (p. 44). Educational change, says Rorty, is more likely to come from educational policymakers than philosophers. Moreover, Rorty says he does not have the understanding of educational policy to “have more than suspicions” about how educational change happens (p. 41).

Richard Rorty’s work, as others have pointed out, cuts across many academic fields—the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, in particular. Rorty writes, too, about the subject of education, but it was never the focus of his scholarship. To be sure, Rorty wrote more about analytic philosophy—in an attempt to lay bare the problems he saw with the analytic tradition—than about the subject of education itself. Rorty, however, does not reject analytic philosophy so much as he puts it aside. For example, in

1 the last chapter of Consequences of Pragmatism, he gives a brief history of the rise and stabilization of analytic philosophy. Rorty (1982) writes:

In saying that “analytic philosophy” now has only a stylistic and sociological

unity, I am not suggesting that analytic philosophy is a bad thing or is in bad

shape. The analytic style is, I think, a good style…. All I am saying is that

analytic philosophy has become… the same sort of discipline we find in the other

“humanities” departments—departments where pretensions to “rigor” and to

“scientific” status are less evident. (p. 217)

In other words, Rorty claims that analytic philosophy is one approach to intellectual inquiry, among many, that does not hold any higher status than others. Rorty says that analytic philosophy has done its job (or, perhaps, run its course), and that working over and over the problems it seeks to solve—mainly epistemological ones that he says start with Descartes and end with Nietzsche—does not get us anywhere, in philosophical terms. He sees analytic philosophy as having evolved but meeting its end; Rorty (2000) writes in response to Hilary Putnam: “I see the progress of analytic philosophy of language from Russelian empircistic representationalism to Brandom’s neo-Hegelian inferentialism as progress from a rather primitive to a fairly sophisticated form of anti-

Cartesianism” (p. 88).

Rorty, however, knew the field of analytic philosophy as well as anyone; as Neil

Gross (2008) points out, Rorty began doing professional analytic philosophy when he was at Wellesley out of concern for his career; it was the method of philosophy one practiced if one wanted to become a distinguished philosopher. But it would be a mistake

2 to say that Rorty was, in his career, an analytic philosopher. As I’ve said, Rorty used the methods and language of analytic philosophy, especially in Philosophy and the Mirror of

Nature, to advance his ideas and to critique the span of western philosophy; but these are neither his methods, nor is this his language. Beginning with his tenure at Princeton,

Rorty left the analytic project behind and struck out in his own direction, freeing himself from disciplinary Philosophy. Thus, Rorty didn’t feel the need—nor should he have felt the need—to pay close attention to the analytic critique of his ideas on truth or analytic critiques of any of his other work.

Interestingly, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty says that part of the project of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as I’ve defined it—to challenge the concept of truth as correspondence to reality—is impossible. Rorty (1989) claims:

Philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the

correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the “intrinsic nature of reality.” The

trouble with arguments against the use of a familiar and time-honored vocabulary

is that they are expected to be phrased in that very vocabulary. They are expected

to show that central elements in that vocabulary are “inconsistent in their own

terms” or that they “deconstruct themselves.” This can never be shown….

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis.

Usually it is… a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a

nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises new things.

(pp. 8-9)

The long quotation above should not be misconstrued as undermining the importance of

Rorty’s discussion of a pragmatist view of truth versus absolute truth. Rather, in a typically Rortyan way, he is acknowledging that one cannot simply dismiss existing paradigms and that his challenge to correspondence theories of truth should be seen only as one more set of words, one more lexicon among many; in other words, Rorty is avoiding the claim that he holds the right vocabulary, that is, absolute truth.

Thus, Rorty is not obliged to defend himself on others’ grounds, according to his own argument that you can’t successfully defend yourself on someone else’s turf. If Rorty was an analytic philosopher, he would be compelled to respond to his fellow philosophers. But since he took himself out of the “Philosophy department,” in the disciplinary sense, he is not obliged to respond to the analytic critique of his work. To be sure, he did not make a habit of trying to refute analytic philosophers on their terms. In books like What’s the Use of Truth, a brief debate between Rorty and analytic philosopher Pascal Engel (2007), Rorty responds to the analytic critique of his work—but not in a way that rigorously or seriously defends his pragmatic theory of truth. There is evidence to suggest that Rorty, when he did engage an analytic critique of his view of pragmatic truth, was exhausted by the conversation and simply wished to move on. At the end of the final section of What’s the Use of Truth? Rorty (2007) says: “I am tempted to say that we have given many of these traditional distinctions [that Engel raises about positivism] their chance…. I propose that from now on we focus on other distinctions”

(p. 59).

But do we really want to reject that idea that some types of truth must have something to do with correspondence? Rorty would say, “yes, we do.” Rorty (1989) writes:

Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—

because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but

descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or

false. The world on its own—unaided by the describing activities of human

beings—cannot. (p. 5)

Of course, one wants to know things like “how much money is in my checking account,”

“where did I park my car,” or “when does the next train arrive,” but such questions are not the types of truths Rorty is talking about. He’s not being irresponsible, he’s just saying that truths like account balances, parking locations, and train schedules are mundane or philosophically uninteresting. Rorty claims that it is easy to say, with confidence, that routine details “correspond to reality,” but when we look at the larger picture, it is difficult—and not desirable—to find the One Truth about the way things are.

Neither is it desirable, for Rorty (1989) in particular, to try to privilege one set of

“vocabularies as a whole” (p. 5) over another.

Rorty’s claims about pragmatic truth and absolute truth are controversial, and it would be tempting to do a thorough review of the analytic critique of Rorty’s work. I am not, however, writing a dissertation defending Rorty’s view of truth. A review of the analytic critique of Rorty’s ideas about truth, and an attempt to synthesize a response, would be outside the scope of my project and would likely detract from it. Furthermore,

5 to focus solely on the analytic critique of Rorty would ignore his other critics, like Jürgen

Habermas, who was not an analytic philosopher but disagreed with Rorty’s anti- representationalist view of truth on other grounds. Habermas, in Rorty and His Critics, gives a compelling argument for Rorty’s attitude toward analytical philosophy. Habermas

(2000) explains what he calls Rorty’s “ambivalence toward the tradition of analytic philosophy” (p. 31). He claims that Rorty held analytic philosophy in high esteem, but also that Rorty felt disillusioned over what he thought analytic philosophy could not provide—access to universal truth. Habermas writes that Rorty’s

program for a philosophy that is to do away with all philosophy seems to spring

more from the melancholy of a disappointed metaphysician, driven on by

nominalist spurs, than from the self-criticism of an enlightened analytic

philosopher who wishes to complete the linguistic turn in a pragmatist way.

(p. 32)

Habermas says that Rorty marked the end of an era—the era of analytic philosophy— having realized what it cannot provide. Rorty (1967) made his mark, formally, in The

Linguistic Turn.

So why devote a lengthy discussion to the question of how Richard Rorty’s philosophy impacts education? To put it another way, why ask a question about what education might look like, in philosophical terms, if we take Richard Rorty’s ideas seriously?1 I intend to show that Rorty—through his ideas that directly address education as well as through his ideas that do not—expresses optimism, and a trivial amount of

1 For the purposes of the dissertation, I would like to borrow Phil Smith’s description of “philosophy of education”: “the specification and justification of our attitudes and practices towards deliberate socialization, along with our deepest understanding of what we intend to accomplish.” 6 cynicism, for the future of education. Furthermore, I hope to show that Rorty’s work, as a result of his optimism, gets at something greater than the academic field of philosophy of education itself. That is, Rorty’s ideas have the potential to transform education for the better.

My approach to Richard Rorty’s ideas, and the question of how his philosophy might impact education, is to start from the big picture of Rorty’s work and divide it according to broad themes. Thus, the middle three chapters are structured according to what I consider to be three of Rorty’s most impactful ideas for education. The three ideas, briefly stated, are as follows. One: we should suspend talk about truth as correspondence to reality, as metaphysical truth, as non-linguistic truth, or as relating to a theory. That is to say, for Rorty, truth is best viewed as that which can be agreed upon through public discourse that, in turn, increases human solidarity in a democratic society. Two: there is a split between one’s private and public lives such that one can develop one’s own self- concept—that is, an authentic self—through discovery and rediscovery, description and redescription, of oneself and one’s beliefs. At the same time, for Rorty, one can develop one’s public self and behave in a manner that doesn’t have to match the private self but is, nevertheless, equally as important to cultivate as the private self. As Rorty (1989) puts it, one can embrace one’s own beliefs and attitudes but may, publicly, relinquish private ambitions and strive for “peace, wealth, and freedom” (p. 85) for others. These altruistic ends, in turn, are features of a society that allows people the latitude and leisure time to pursue their own self-creation and discovery. Rorty’s public/private split is epitomized by

7 what he calls the “liberal ironist,” an important and controversial figure in Rorty’s scholarship. And three: literary criticism is the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

Chapter two begins with a discussion of Rorty’s first big idea—or set of big ideas—Rorty’s views on pragmatic truth and absolute truth. Rorty’s critique of epistemology seems an appropriate place to start, since there are myriad consequences for education if truth is viewed as that to which we agree on as a public—if, as Rorty (1991) puts it, “the desire for objectivity is not the desire to escape the limitations of one’s community, but simply the desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible, the desire to extend the reference of ‘us’ as far as we can” (p. 23). Traditionally, part of the aim of education, particularly institutionalized education, is to pursue or uncover “truth” and “knowledge.” But if there is nothing important or notable to say about metaphysical truth, as Rorty suggests, we need to think differently about the basic assumptions of our institutions and the pursuits of education generally. Later in chapter two, in order to help contextualize Rorty’s ideas, I contrast Rorty with Allan Bloom (1987), who argues that students should know the great ideas of the great philosophers and that to abandon the great ideas of the west impoverishes the culture and fuels what Bloom sees as disastrous relativism. Bloom’s overarching argument is that high school students matriculate as complacent relativists; that is, they come to college harboring the thought that any culture is as good as any other and without the important desire to learn unconditional truths.

Bloom’s solution is to offer a Hutchinsonian curriculum designed around reading the classics and teaching core values. Bloom is concerned about filling the void left by a declining emphasis in our culture on scripture and the deterioration of family values in

8 society. After examining Rorty’s response to Bloom’s criticisms, I end the chapter with a discussion of Consequences of Pragmatism in which Rorty engages Wittgenstein and the idea of philosophical “purity of heart.”

Chapter three focuses on Rorty’s book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. The chapter begins by outlining the connection between Rorty’s ideas about human nature and essence, education, and the liberal ironist. It continues by describing Rorty’s public/private split, the liberal ironist, and the metaphysician—the alter ego, so to speak, of the liberal ironist. I then introduce Rorty’s views on literary criticism and the importance of literary study for the ironist. Chapter three traces the importance of literary study for education and, finally, raises the question of whether or not the public can become ironic, literary critics.

Chapter four reviews the literature of the field. I address articles published in philosophy of education journals that engage Rorty’s ideas about education and literature.

Scholars in philosophy of education have discussed many of Rorty’s ideas and their significance for their field; my contention is that there is a void in the discussion, particularly regarding the question of what Rorty’s ideas about literary criticism could mean for education. The upshot of the inquiry into Rorty’s views on literary criticism, an inquiry that spans both chapters three and four, is what I’m calling a literary philosophy of education—this is the principal finding of the dissertation. At the end of the chapter, I ask the question of why scholars have, for the most part, ignored literary philosophies of education.

Chapter five consists mostly of a thought experiment. I describe problems in higher education, as I see them in my professional capacity as a college administrator and academic advisor, and consider the hypothetical question: what might a Rortyan—that is to say, one who takes Rorty’s attitudes seriously—have to say about such problems?

Finally, I extend my description of a literary philosophy of education to envision a literary/moral culture as an alternative to a technicist culture.

A potential objection to one of the central questions of the dissertation is that John

Dewey showed us, explicitly, what education looks like if one rejects correspondence theories of truth. In other words, one might ask: why not turn to Dewey, instead of Rorty, on the question of what the significance is for education if we set traditional epistemology aside? There are three ways—ways discussed in greater detail in the following chapters—that Rorty builds on Dewey, in terms of the relationship between epistemology and education. One, Rorty engages in what has been described as

“metaphilosophy,” that is, treating the broad history of philosophical ideas using a generally “philosophical” approach. As a self-described Deweyan, Rorty weaves together

Dewey’s ideas about correspondence theories of truth with other philosophical treatments, and what results is a distinct reinterpretation of Dewey, et al. Two, one of the results of Rorty’s reinterpretation of Dewey’s ideas about epistemology is the concept of the liberal ironist, discussed at length in chapter three. Three, Rorty’s attitudes about literature and literary criticism update Dewey’s ideas about education and our evolving culture. That is, Rorty puts a finer point on Dewey’s Darwinian view of our socially constructed culture; literary criticism is a specific type of experience that is a crucial

10 piece of Rorty’s concept of education. For Dewey, education is about experience. For

Rorty, literary study is one of the most important types of experience that can be harnessed for educational purposes.

If Rorty truly doubted that philosophy has anything to say for education, his doubts did not stop him from exploring, on his own terms, what the significance might be for education if we reject correspondence theories of truth. Rorty (1996) addresses the problem of “how education might be conceived if one starts from Nietzschean rather than

Platonic assumptions, if one sees no transcendent goal of inquiry, if one abandons the notion of ‘objective truth’” (p. 24). Rorty’s approach to the question is to reflect on the charge of what he calls “vulgar relativism” (p. 24) made by adherents of Platonic conceptions of education; he challenges absolutist views of education that claim that the primary obligation of education is to uncover unchanging truth. Rorty, in typical Rortyan, metaphilosophical fashion, draws parallels between Dewey and Hans-Georg Gadamer who, Rorty says, “have been accused of either preaching, or at least tacitly encouraging, such vulgar relativism” (p. 24). Rorty argues that both Dewey and Gadamer offer “a sense of tradition, of community, [and] of human solidarity” (p. 24) as a substitute for

“Reason—the Platonic organ for detecting truth” (p. 24). Rorty calls this “a sufficient defense against vulgar relativism” (p. 24).

In a sense, my project picks up where Rorty’s discussion of Platonist education leaves off. As stated above, I’m interested in what Rorty adds to Dewey’s deliberations on truth as correspondence to reality and education. I’m also interested in exploring how

Rorty builds upon his rejection of correspondence theories of truth, examining the ideas

11 that result from that rejection, and investigating the significance of those “second tier” ideas for education. While I am mostly sympathetic to Rorty’s ideas, the recommendations I make qua philosopher of education diverge, at moments, from a

Rortyan line of thought. But if we believe, with René Vincente Arcilla (1990), that

“teachers are in a position to turn the tide of epistemological despair into educational hope” (p. 35) and, furthermore, that

if we let go of the compulsion to certify our knowledge and join a conversational

community whose members are seeking to edify themselves… we philosopher-

teachers may be able to do our part for that venture and hence pass the tribunal of

our impure society, (p. 35) then Rorty’s ideas can have a tremendous impact on education, the goals we have for education, and the means by which we educate people.

Chapter Two: Rorty on Truth

By the time he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, analytic philosophy was, Rorty (1979) claims, the dominant program in academic philosophy and had “little more to do” (p. 173). Rorty criticizes analytic philosophy in part for the same reason he criticizes the entire tradition of western philosophy since Descartes, that is, for the “attempt to put philosophy in the position which Kant wished it to have—that of judging other areas of culture on the basis of its special knowledge of the ‘foundations’ of these areas” (p. 8). The fact that Rorty used methods of analytic philosophy to point out failings in the analytic tradition probably irritated his contemporaries, but as he points out, the analytic tradition was “the vocabulary and the literature with which [he was] most familiar” (p. 8).

Besides criticizing the project of analytic philosophy, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is about questioning historical theories of “knowledge”—in the sense of

“knowledge that has the quality of being true.” Rorty attempts to show that “truth” is best viewed as a term we use when we agree that a statement is valid, not as “Truth,” in the metaphysical sense of “the way the world really is” apart from our judgment. Rorty

(1982) would later call this a “pragmatist theory of truth” (p. xiii), although he was distrustful of theories in general. It is important to note that Rorty did not seek to argue about the concept of truth so much as he tried to shift focus away from quibbles about how to accurately retrieve or access truth. There are hints of Rorty’s idea of truth, what

I’ll call “pragmatic truth,” in his early articles; as Neil Gross (2008) points out, Rorty was

“arguing that contemporary analytic discourse was colored by pragmatic themes” by

1959 (p. 158). Rorty wrote about pragmatic truth throughout his career, and it is clear that he was not satisfied to talk about truth/Truth in the vernacular of analytic philosophy.

Late in his career, Rorty (1999) writes that truth is “whatever belief results from a free and open encounter of opinions” (p. 119); such a description of truth is far from an analytic one. But Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is the book in which Rorty lays out his critique of the history of epistemology and his “pragmatist theory of truth” in detail; the book significantly shaped the remainder of his work, and he devoted volumes to refining the ideas therein.2

Education, including higher education, is traditionally thought of as a process of acquiring, rehearsing, and applying various kinds of knowledge. The aggressive testing movement in primary and secondary schools, and the relentless assessment procedures in colleges and universities, are indications that the practice of measuring the acquisition and short-term retention of knowledge is well established. Thus, one could make a case that any hypothesis about what it means to have or acquire knowledge—or, as is the case with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a history of the philosophical treatment of ideas about truth and knowledge that attempts to dismantle epistemologies—will probably have something to do with education. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, however, as a treatise that challenges the way we think about truth/Truth, is not just relevant to education; it also has the potential to transform education. By questioning the

2 For purposes of clarity, throughout the rest of the dissertation, I adopt the following convention: “truth” refers to “pragmatic truth,” while “Truth” refers to the concept of “universal” or “absolute Truth.” 14 idea of what it means for a statement, fact, or idea to be true, Rorty puts into doubt the relationship one has with knowledge—that is to say, he puts into question what it means to “possess” knowledge and what it means to say that we “know something to be true.”

Perhaps more importantly, Rorty puts into doubt what it might mean to be educated. To put it another way, Rorty disassociates knowledge, Truth, and education in ways that, I’m arguing, are positive, given our best intentions as philosophers of education.

Generally speaking, Rorty thinks that letting go of the notion of Truth allows for better education than the alternative. As I mentioned briefly in the introduction, however,

Rorty writes more about other areas of philosophy—in Philosophy and the Mirror of

Nature and his other works—than he writes about education. Nevertheless, in conducting a thought experiment about what Rorty’s ideas might mean for education, it is helpful to consider Rorty’s own ideas about education, in the moments when he addresses, explicitly, educational questions. I’ll begin the discussion of Rorty’s ideas about education, then, with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in which he disassociates

Truth and education and begins to formulate, in detail, the concept of pragmatic truth.

Call Me Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Education

I cannot resist beginning my treatment of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by saying that the book is something like Moby Dick; it is lengthy, difficult to read

(especially on the first attempt), and can be read as two separate books. Herman

Melville’s seminal work consists of two distinct threads, one on the practical aspects of whaling, and one that focuses on Ishmael’s first person narrative. Similarly, Rorty’s groundbreaking book consists of a section that focuses on reviewing and doing technical

15 epistemology, and another section—much less technical than the first—that sets epistemology aside. As I suggested above, it would be misleading to say that Rorty is trying to disprove once and for all correspondence theories of Truth, so I will resist a second urge to identify such theories as Rorty’s “white whale.” Instead, Rorty explains in the second part of the book how minimizing epistemological concerns allows for a less- than-traditional view of education. Rorty (1979) draws on the work of Hans–Georg

Gadamer to explore the idea of “edification” (p. 360), a word Rorty uses to gloss

Gadamer’s “Bildung (education, self-formation)” (p. 359). Edification, for Rorty, is the process of “finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (p.

360), particularly about oneself. Rorty says that Gadamer makes an important educational distinction “by substituting the notion of Bildung… for that of ‘knowledge’ as the goal of thinking” (p. 359). Rorty writes:

To say that we become different people, that we “remake” ourselves as we read

more, talk more, and write more, is simply a dramatic way of saying that the

sentences which become true of us by virtue of such activities are often more

important to us than the sentences which become true of us when we drink more,

earn more, and so on. The events which make us able to say new and interesting

things about ourselves are, in this nonmetaphysical sense, more “essential” to

us… than the events which change our shapes or our standards of living…. From

the educational, as opposed to the epistemological or the technological, point of

view, the way things are said is more important than the possession of truths.

(p. 359)

Rorty (1979) adopts Gadamer’s idea that we should not be concerned with finding the

“essence” (p. 361) of human beings, and he rejects, in general, the notion of metaphysical substance underpinning human nature. For Rorty, it is more important that we pay attention to discovering or making “descriptions of ourselves” (p. 360) than finding ways we can talk about intrinsically human traits. He calls this the “existentialist view” (p.

362).

Generally speaking, the natural sciences do not share the existentialist view. The natural sciences, for Rorty, attempt to reveal facts about human nature, human essence, and the way human beings “really are.” But these attempts, Rorty says, hold no more claim to reality than descriptions of humans produced in other academic fields. Rorty

(1979) writes:

The utility of the “existentialist” view is that, by proclaiming that we have no

essence, it permits us to see the descriptions of ourselves we find in one of (or in

the unity of) the Naturwissenschaften [natural sciences] as on par with the various

alternative descriptions offered by poets, novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors,

anthropologists, and mystics. The former are not privileged representations….

They are simply among the repertoire of self-descriptions at our disposal. (p. 362)

In other words, the vocabulary of the natural sciences, and the claims to knowledge that the natural sciences make, have no more to do with the “real world” than the vocabulary of the arts and humanities, the social sciences, or any academic discipline. Rorty (1979) goes on to claim that education, in the “humanist tradition,” does “what training in the results of the natural sciences cannot do,” that is, “giving sense to [Gadamer’s] notion of

Bildung as something having ‘no goals outside itself’” by acquiring “a sense of the relativity of descriptive vocabularies to periods, traditions, and historical accidents” (p. 362). Rorty, it should be noted, does not downplay the importance of scientific depictions of human beings as such. Rorty celebrates, rather, the power of alternative interpretations of human experience and the idea that, in order to be educated, one must have instruction in both the sciences and the humanities.

Rorty extends his comparison of philosophy and natural science in a chapter of

Consequences of Pragmatism entitled “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on

Derrida.” Rorty (1982) says that philosophy, alongside physics and other disciplines, can be viewed as a “kind of writing” (p. 108). Rorty argues that philosophy should not be considered a privileged language that frames other languages or gets us close to “reality,” but should be regarded as one possibility, among many, for creating descriptions of the world. Rorty puts Derrida’s ideas about writing and its relationship to reality thusly:

“Derrida’s point is that no one can make sense of the notion of a last commentary, a last discussion note, a good piece of writing which is more than the occasion for a better piece” (p. 109). Good writing, for Rorty, is an invitation for more writing. Rorty’s interpretation of Gadamer and Derrida—a view that attempts to level the playing field, so to speak, among the various academic disciplines—is important for education because it releases us from the bonds of thinking that there is a “right way” to think of oneself or of human existence. Rorty reminds us, in the face of powerful positivistic, scientific analyses, that the human story is still being written; in other words, among all the attempts to reduce humans to mathematical formulas and biochemical data, there is

18 plenty of room for more novels, more short stories, and more poetry. Rorty, channeling

Thomas Kuhn, says that Gadamer tries to “prevent education from being reduced to instruction in the results of normal inquiry” (p. 363). May the arts and humanities rejoice.

The Educational Split

To return for a brief moment to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty

(1979) makes what he calls a “banal point” (p. 365), in the latter part of the book, about the lifelong process of education. His so-called banal point, however, is a key concept in

Rorty’s thinking about education. Rorty says that education must convey the orthodox attitudes of one’s culture before beginning the process of edification; he then uses the example of two components of education—acculturation and edification—as an analogy for the idea of “systematic and edifying philosophies” (p. 366). For Rorty, edifying philosophies—that is, those that lay outside the main philosophical programs of the day—rely on systematic philosophies, those that make up the main, “normal” philosophical discourse. Rorty (1979) writes, “to adopt the ‘existentialist’ view of objectivity and rationality… makes sense only if we do so in a conscious departure from a well-understood norm” (p. 367). Rorty’s deliberations on “systematic” and “edifying” philosophies are part of the broader aims of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, that is, the project of criticizing analytic philosophy and traditional epistemology. In other words, to suggest that Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a treatise on education would be misleading. But, as I said above, Rorty’s point about acculturation laying the groundwork for later education (Bildung) is much more than a prosaic way of introducing a discussion on systematic and edifying philosophies. Rorty’s idea about two “halves” of

19 education goes well beyond Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and forms a description of education he cultivates later in his career.

Rorty (1999) integrates the concepts of acculturation, education and self-creation in a chapter of Philosophy and Social Hope entitled “Education as Socialization and

Individualization.”3 The chapter is an example of how Rorty’s ideas about truth/Truth influence his ideas about education. Rorty discusses how the political arrangement of education affects the progression of students’ thinking, as it begins in primary and secondary school and transforms through college. He sees two broadly defined levels of education as being split along opposing political lines. He says that, for conservatives, education is a process that allows one access to Truth (in the Platonic tradition of universal Truth) that, in turn, results in freedom. For the left, education inverts the

Platonic process. First, education helps free one from the stultifying traditions of society and, once freed, one gains access to truth. Conservatives, Rorty says, think that

“conventional wisdom” (p. 116) equates to reason, and that schools should indoctrinate students with some of that wisdom. Leftists, on the other hand, think that doing what conservatives want is “betraying the students” (p. 116). What this means for education, in political terms, is a compromise: the concession between the opposing sides, Rorty claims, is that the primary and secondary schools function as socializing institutions that reproduce convention—satisfying the right—while “the left [controls] non-vocational higher education” (p. 116). Higher education, for Rorty, helps students take a long view of what they learned in primary and secondary school about their culture and its shared

3 The chapter originally appeared in 1989 as an article in Dissent. 20 attitudes and, through exposure to liberal, non-vocational education, challenge the status quo.

Rorty sees the history of edifying philosophies following a pattern similar to the pre-college/college educational split: some philosophers absorb the prevalent, paradigmatic philosophy of the day and reshape it. Rorty (1982) says of Heidegger and

Kierkegaard: “both need to invoke the tradition to identify what it is that has been wrongly approached, or has veiled itself. But both need to repudiate the tradition utterly in order to say what they want to say” (p. 53). Rorty also likens the philosophy of Kant to a kind of tradition and the philosophy of Hegel, on the other hand, as a kind of “parasite”

(p. 108) on the canon of Kantian philosophy. Rorty, to be sure, followed the same pattern, rejecting the tradition as he left analytic philosophy behind for his own brand of pragmatism.

Rorty, as I’ve said, claims that seeking universal truth, whether truth is conceptualized from the intellectual right or left, is beside the point. For Rorty (and

Dewey), the socializing process of primary and secondary schooling should teach students about the progress made in America—what Rorty (1999) calls a “tradition of increasing liberty and rising hope” (p. 121)—and prepare them for a college experience that helps them challenge the social structures they learned about in elementary, middle, and high school. For Rorty, students should be educated in ways that will help them gradually change traditional thinking; subsequent generations, then, will be educated differently and, hopefully, for the better. Rorty says that the

socially most important provocations will be offered by teachers who make vivid

and concrete the failure of the country of which we remain loyal citizens to live

up to its own ideals—the failure of America to be what it knows it ought to

become. (p. 123)

Primary and secondary schools will never be about challenging the status quo, says

Rorty, and colleges have to do much of the socialization that should be the role of primary and secondary schools. Since the public school system fails to do what critics like E.D. Hirsch (1987) say they should, the role of the universities, for Rorty, is to finish whatever socialization needs to be done and to help the students adapt themselves to new ideas—not with specific aims in mind, but with the general goal of progress for progress’ sake.

What Rorty gives us is his vision of an ideal, non-vocational university experience—one in which administrators and formal curricula do not restrict what is taught, one in which academic specialization doesn’t get in the way of academic freedom, and one in which education, for the most part, is left up to the faculty. But, as Rorty

(1999) acknowledges, his vision is of a “utopia” (p. 122) rather than a holistic, plausible picture of an educational system. He says that, given current conditions, the best we can hope for is a compromise—occasional bursts of energy between students and teachers that further the project of individual edification. Rorty writes:

The sparks that leap back and forth between teacher and student, connecting them

in a relationship that has little to do with socialization but much to do with self-

creation, are the principle means by which the institutions of a liberal society get

changed. (p. 126)

Rorty says that the ideal non-vocational educational interaction would not be part of a structured program, and that policy makers “would not… have to worry about the integrity of the curriculum” (pp. 122-123). This is not to say that curricula do not matter.

Rather, given the best faculty and well-prepared students, education can be a process of inquiry through conversation among intellectuals with shared interests. By setting aside the search for knowledge as unchangeable Truth, inquiry becomes free.

An Opposing View of Finding Truth through Education

Rorty’s concept of self-creation is fundamental to the idea of “liberal ironist,” to whom a significant portion of the next chapter is devoted. Currently, though, I want to explore an alternate view of Truth and education. Rorty’s position on education and truth/Truth, to be sure, is not uncontroversial. The chapter discussed at length in the previous section, “Education as Socialization and Individualization,” was written, in part, as a response to the intellectual right—to critics like Allan Bloom, in particular. The chapter was originally published as a journal article in 1989 under a different title, about two years after Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom (1987) claims that American education in the 20th century conditioned students into believing in

“openness” (p. 25), a concept Bloom also refers to as “cultural relativism” (p. 30).

Openness, for Bloom, is a general belief or understanding that truth is relative. Bloom says that openness, which holds that no culture has a better claim to Truth than any another culture, is a poor substitute for “inalienable natural rights that used to be the

23 traditional American grounds for free society” (p. 25). Unless one is open to every culture, says Bloom, one is deemed an “absolutist” (p. 25) by others—a trend that Bloom laments. In other words, he thinks that openness has become a “moral virtue” (p. 26), without which a person will be considered hateful. Openness, then, is really a form of closed-mindedness for Bloom because an open person does not think that serious, intellectual, critical engagement with others is important—rather, one with an “open” attitude accepts everything and everyone as morally equal. Bloom bemoans openness in

American culture because, he says, it abandons reason. In past generations, the spirit of openness encouraged one to seek universal principles, but openness has come to mean, for example, that one looks toward other cultures in the guise of cultural tourists rather than exploring those cultures with an intellectually serious approach.

Further, for Bloom (1987), cultural relativism eliminates the purpose of education, which he equates to the quest for the “good life” (p. 34). Bloom claims that the drive students once had to study and experience foreign lands and languages is gone, along with their passion to seek those outside American culture who can help them find

Truth. For Bloom (1987), “students… arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it” (p. 56). Bloom claims that the moral guidance of religion and family has deteriorated; at one time, families were sources of intellectual development, but they no longer provide an environment that encourages intellectual activity. Bloom says that students do not have the substance that allows them to develop deep understanding or beliefs; they do not have grounding in classic literature, for example (like their European

24 counterparts), and this deficiency sets them intellectually adrift without any understanding—or desire to gain understanding—about the human condition.4 In

America, says Bloom, the Bible was once a text people shared that taught common, unifying, universal themes, but the Bible as a source of unification has been removed from the American consciousness over time and has not been replaced. Bloom (1987) says that, without moral foundations, education struggles to “find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion” (p. 63) and help them “autonomously to seek that completion” (p. 63). University students are, for Bloom, self-centered, “egalitarian meritocrats” (p. 90); they come to college intellectually and morally empty, looking for a path to a career rather than a deep understanding of the human condition. For Bloom, college is the one chance students have for deep, intellectual, and moral personal development. Bloom says that American universities, however, are ill-equipped to provide such an education.

The most striking feature of The Closing of the American Mind, at least in terms of its relation to Rorty’s work, is the idea that students, as products of the American educational system, have lost touch with universal principles and are unlikely to find them, in college or elsewhere. Bluntly put, the university system fails for Bloom because it does not teach Truth. If one assumes that inculcating universal principles is important and takes Bloom’s claim seriously that students come to college without proper grounding, the implications for education—and philosophy of education—are tremendous. For Bloom (1987), there are relatively few who have had the “theoretical

4 One should keep in mind that Bloom and Rorty are talking mostly about students in elite liberal arts colleges. 25 experience” (p. 271) of common principles, that is, experiences that are universal, unchanging, and point “necessarily toward first principles” (p. 271). Bloom says that such knowledge was held by a “tiny band of men” (p. 271)—philosophers within a traditional canon of thinkers that would be much narrower than Rorty’s list—who shared common principles that both precede and transcend experience. But Bloom (1987) seems to imply that shared, common principles are somehow inaccessible to the rest of us; he says “the philosophers… have more in common with one another than anyone else, even their own followers” (p. 271). Unfortunately, Bloom’s revelation is enough to make the vast majority of students give up the pursuit of a quality education; that is, it is impossible for everyone to gain membership in his “tiny band of men” that have experienced Truth.

So how does Bloom think schools should help students find Truth? Bloom’s solution boils down to this: read the classics and one will be in touch with the timeless

Truths of humanity. Bloom may be right that, in general, liberal arts curricula have drifted and thinned out, so to speak, since the 1960’s, but I’m not convinced that Bloom has a feasible solution to the problem. Bloom is looking to replace what he calls relativism with vague, universal principles. He may be right in saying that there should be a stronger core to liberal education in the universities, but he has neither adequately defined a solution nor helped others in building an alternative philosophy of education.

Bloom (1987) says “it is difficult to imagine that there is either the wherewithal or the energy within the university to constitute or reconstitute the idea of an educated human being and establish a liberal education again” (p. 380). Thus, he sets the task for

26 philosophy of education to fix everything. For Bloom, education should try to develop a unified picture of the human condition, but Bloom comes down on the side of despair, without the slightest margin for hope.

Rorty rejects Bloom on several accounts. In Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty

(1982) says of relativism that “no one holds this view…. The philosophers who get called

‘relativists’ are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought” (p. 166). He says, further, that pragmatism and relativism get tangled up because of “confusion between the pragmatist’s attitude toward philosophical theories with his attitude toward real theories” (p. 166). If relativism concerns real theories, says Rorty, it could indeed be considered dangerous.

Rorty, too, thought that Bloom did not pose feasible solutions to educational problems. Rorty (1988), reviewing The Closing of the American Mind, says that “it would be nice to know how [Bloom] thinks we could restructure universities so that they would cease ‘impoverishing the students’ souls’ while still hanging on to what we have come to think of as academic freedom” (p. 32). Rorty, in the same review, shows again how setting aside the pursuit of universal truth matters to education:

About the last thing we Deweyans want is for humanities departments to have a

consensus about their function and mission. When Bloom speaks of “the problem

of the humanities, and therefore of the unity of knowledge,” we Deweyans cannot

see why knowledge should be thought of as a unity (rather than, say, as a bag of

tools). The university as flea market… is fine with us. Once the defects of our

high schools have been made up for by a couple of years’ worth of Great Books,

the students should be left free to shop around in as large and noisy a bazaar as

possible. (p. 32)

The idea of “shopping around” is important for Rorty, as he believes universities should be places where students can study whatever they like. He doesn’t disagree with Bloom about the claim that students should read “great books”; the argument with Bloom begins, rather, over the purpose of reading the classics. Bloom thinks that books teach universal

Truths that enrich the soul; Rorty says that books help move along the process of edification, or Bildung, and he wants to stop talking about the soul altogether. But as far as looking for Truth, or meaning, Rorty would say that the search for Truth is disastrous.

He would likely agree with Avital Ronnell, who says in an interview for the documentary film The Examined Life (2008) that she distrusts the search for meaning. Meaning, for

Ronnell, “has often had very fascistoid, non-progressivist edges.” The search for

“meaning,” for Rorty, is coextensive with the search for Truth.

Rorty, Carlin, and Wittgenstein

As Neil Gross (2008) and others have pointed out, Rorty was not an activist; he was not a “boots on the ground” liberal like his parents. While not pretentious, Rorty was an elite intellectual. But no matter how stilted he may seem to some, and no matter that his technical, metaphilosophical, analytic critique of epistemology (his whaling section, as it were) seems far removed from the classroom, his ideas are useful for addressing the problems common to anyone concerned with education. Rorty’s work holds out hope, at least at a theoretical level, for solving problems that are so common that they have risen to the consciousness of pop culture.

Take George Carlin, for example. Carlin is not, perhaps, the first person that comes to mind when one thinks about the questions of philosophy of education. Carlin does, however, have a poignant way of expressing some of the problems shared by educational philosophers, problems that have transcended academia and met the awareness of the broader public. Carlin (2005), in an HBO special called Life is Worth

Losing, says that the reason education isn’t going to get any better in America is that the people that control the country—the wealthy elite driving the big corporations—don’t want citizens that can think for themselves, critically or otherwise. A population in which the people are educated for autonomy, Carlin’s argument goes, is not in the best interest of the wealthy. Carlin says that elites do not want a society full of people that can figure out how they are being manipulated—instead, the heads of the big corporations want

“obedient workers.” They want people that are just smart enough to run machines and fill out paperwork but are not educated in ways that would cause them, or allow them, to challenge the status quo. Carlin says that the wealthy elite are part of a club and, he says with a sardonic look to the camera, “you’re not in it.”

Carlin goes on in his HBO program to talk about a range of problems that is, proper to a comedy special, much broader than it is deep. But I bring up Carlin’s complaints about education and the powers that be not only as an example of a pop culture perspective on problems with education, but also as an example of the tone of despair about the institution of education that sometimes permeates our society. Carlin’s complaint about education seems to be without hope—he says that things are never going to get any better, and he poses the problem as one that we don’t have the power to

29 change. The club that “you’re not in,” he says, is the same club “they” use to “beat you over the head.”

As philosophers of education, if we believe in the idea that education has the power to change the culture for the better, Rorty’s ideas allow us to address issues like those Carlin complains about and, perhaps, to shift the tenor of the conversation about problems in education from despair to hope. Rorty (1982), in a chapter of Consequences of Pragmatism called “Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein,” offers ideas that can be helpful as we face the broadest questions of educational philosophy, those big questions that are on the tips of our tongues and that hover over our heads on a daily basis—questions like “what recommendations can we make that might, in some way, make a difference?” Rorty’s essay examines Wittgenstein’s massive impact on contemporary philosophy—he says Wittgenstein is to philosophy today as Kant was to philosophy in his time—and Rorty (1982) scrutinizes what it means to say that philosophy was “brought to an end” (p. 19) with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Wittgenstein, according to Rorty, abandoned his early “pretense of purity” (p. 19) in the Tractatus and took up the search for a different kind of purity in his Philosophical Investigations. Early in his life, Wittgenstein thought he had figured out how to manage all the problems of philosophy by formal, “pure” methods of analysis. Rorty suggests that the later

Wittgenstein, however, sought a “purity of heart which replaces the need to explain, justify, and expound” (p. 20). Rorty says that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, put forth in the later Investigations, allows one to surpass the notion of a pure philosophy (pure in the sense that one might view science, for example, as a “pure” discipline that exists above

30 and independent of all other fields), and to let go of the “need to answer unanswerable questions” (p. 36).

Two ideas in Rorty’s essay are of interest here. First is the idea of “pure philosophy.” In what ways might it be helpful to think about philosophy of education as a

“pure” discipline? Second is the idea of “purity of heart.” What might Rorty be talking about, and what are the potential risks and rewards of thinking of education in terms of

“purity of heart?”

As I’ve said, Rorty writes about two types of purity. The first has to do with the idea of a “pure” discipline of philosophy—a concept Wittgenstein eventually came to question. The idea of purity, in this sense, applies to what Rorty calls a “Fach,” or

“subject.” Rorty (1982) says:

Ever since philosophy became a self-conscious and professionalized discipline,

around the time of Kant, philosophers have enjoyed explaining how different their

subject is from such merely “first-intentional” matters as science, art, and religion.

Philosophers are forever claiming to have discovered methods which are

presuppositionless, or perfectly rigorous, or transcendental, or at any rate purer

than those of nonphilosophers…. Philosophers who betray this gnostic ideal… are

often discovered not to have been “real philosophers.” (p. 19)

Rorty, it should be noted, rejects the idea of “real philosophers,” or a canon of philosophers like Bloom wants to prescribe—Rorty says that such an idea would exclude thinkers like Dewey. Rorty examines purity as it relates to three distinct categories of

“philosophy”: philosophy broadly defined, philosophy narrowly defined, and philosophy

31 defined as dealing with eternal questions. In the first sense, Rorty (1982) talks about philosophy as the study of “how things, in the largest sense of the term, hang together, in the largest sense of the term,” in a phrase he borrows from Wilfrid Sellars (p. 29). For

Rorty, Sellars’ definition of philosophy does not encompass a distinct set of problems, and therefore it does not make sense to claim that it is “pure.” Second, Rorty (1982) writes about philosophy as a narrow set of problems that are “being discussed at any given moment by any given philosophy department or philosophical school” (p. 30). In this sense, Rorty says there is a built-in purity, given that the professional philosophers working on a fixed set of problems “will be the only people who know what is relevant, and they will justifiably resent intrusions from non-specialists who know the name of the issue but not its substance” (p. 30).

It is the third sense of philosophy Rorty describes5 that raises some interesting questions about purity. The third sense of philosophy Rorty (1982) describes deals with the everlasting problems of the field—everlasting in this case meaning the “definite and permanent problems” (p. 31) of philosophy. Rorty says that “to say these typically

Cartesian problems are ‘purely philosophical’ has a fairly definite meaning; it is to say that nothing that the sciences (or the arts for that matter) do is going to be of any help in solving them” (p. 31). These are questions, Rorty says, that may eventually become extinct but have been problems nonetheless throughout the history of western philosophy.

Rorty writes that, for those trying to answer the timeless questions: “questions as distinct from ‘fact’ as these must be approached by a method whose purity is adequate to the

5 In “Keeping Philosophy Pure,” Rorty calls this the second sense of philosophy, but he talks about it last in the chapter; I changed the order for the purpose of the structure of my discussion. 32

‘hidden depths’ from which these problems spring” (p. 32). These eternal questions, rooted in Cartesian philosophy, are constructed in such a way that they will remain equally problematic no matter how “many details are added” (p. 32) by scientific study.

So how can thinking about the problems of philosophy of education in light of

Rorty’s investigation of three kinds of philosophy, and their relationship to purity, be helpful? First of all, philosophy of education, as a field that makes recommendations for education, is more specialized than philosophy in a generalized sense; thinking about philosophy of education in terms of “how things hang together” does not afford any distinct advantages because such an approach does not offer tangible solutions. On the second sense of philosophy as a professionalized set of inquiries among academic departments, we risk giving up hope for the discipline if we conceive of educational philosophy in the sense of a focused set of problems, or if we attempt to narrowly define the problems of philosophy of education. This is one of the reasons that I hesitate to define, even broadly, “the problems of education,” other than to say that they are “the things we all worry about on a given day” or, more specifically, the specification and justification of our attitudes and practices towards deliberate socialization, along with our deepest understanding of what we intend to accomplish. The problems of the field are whatever issues are at hand as education changes and the challenges shift. That is, educational philosophy cannot be a “pure,” hermetically sealed, ivory tower discipline that only a small group of people can grasp or understand. Indeed, any professionalized academic discipline runs the risk of overspecialization, but if philosophy of education

33 becomes purely academic—if we are not impacting, at some level, the practice of education or at least making feasible recommendations—then it has failed.

If we extend Rorty’s third sense of philosophy to include philosophy of education, we are forced to think of educational problems as being wrapped up with “pure” and everlasting questions. But it can be risky to think of problems of philosophy of education in similar terms as the “pure” questions Rorty mentions. The difference is in the stakes involved. That is to say, if we don’t solve Cartesian dualisms we’re no worse off, but we do have to work to solve questions like the one that underpins George Carlin’s complaint about corporations owning education—for example, who gets to decide what gets taught?

The problems of educational philosophy may belong to the academic professionals and not with historians, scientists, or social scientists, but there is a sense in which philosophy of education, as I mentioned above, is more of an applied field than “general” philosophy. Thus, narrowing the field down to problems that only those trained specifically in academic philosophy of education would recognize would put the field on the wrong path because it separates the field from the classroom. But while putting questions of education in the same category as the centuries old, seemingly interminable

Cartesian questions seems risky, at the same time, the problems of educational philosophy seem, somehow, definite and permanent—to put it in Rortyan terms, the questions of philosophy of education seem to be constructed in a way that that they will be problematic no matter what. Maybe the questions are unanswerable and timeless, like the age old query “what does it mean to know?” Maybe there is a parallel between

34 questions of philosophy of education and the “pure” and “everlasting” questions of philosophy.

The problems of philosophy of education may not fit neatly with any of the three categories of philosophy Rorty describes. They can be viewed, however, as having a strong kinship with Rorty’s second sense of purity. The second sense of purity—Rorty’s idea of “purity of heart”—is vague, perhaps deliberately. Rorty makes the point that many philosophical problems defy definition and that one can, or should, be comfortable with that. That is to say, some problems may not belong in a category. So what does

Rorty mean by purity of heart? What makes a heart pure? Rorty (1982) says: “this purity is only possible for the twice-born—for those who once abandoned themselves to the satisfaction of this need [i.e. let go of the need to ‘explain, justify, and expound,’ as Rorty once did], but who are now redeemed [as Rorty became]” (p. 20). As Neil Gross documents in Rorty’s biography, Rorty labored within the analytic tradition early in his career and later shifted to pragmatism, which freed him from the toxic constraints of the professionalized discipline of philosophy—I interpret the shift as giving Rorty a sort of purity of heart. Rorty (1999) talks, too, in a chapter of Philosophy and Social Hope called

“Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” about how he went to college looking for Plato’s forms—to “hold reality and justice in a single vision” (p. 7)—and abandoned this quest later in his life in favor of a more comparative, metaphilosophical approach to philosophical ideas. This abandonment and transition to pragmatism may have allowed

Rorty to gain purity of heart.

Rorty does not give a clear explanation of what “purity of heart” means. But the evidence seems to suggest that purity of heart is a sort of freedom from the burdensome need to get at final answers, or the freedom of abandoning foundationalism, or freedom from whatever we want to call the timeless problems that “pure philosophy” deals with.

There appears to be an underlying idea in Rorty’s work that by abandoning the need for a

“pure subject,” or by not worrying about a pure discipline—that is, by abandoning the need for purity—there is somehow a cleansing of spirit.

What happens if we give up on the need to “explain, justify, and expound,” say, the goals we have for education, the outcomes we desire, and the means by which we educate people? What kind of freedom will purity of heart give us? First of all, purity of heart, and the freedom it affords, does not imply that we can stop worrying about problems; it just means that we can stop worrying so much about solutions in terms of whether or not they are the “right” solutions. The entire field of education, and the problems that come with it, seem to shift beneath our feet on a daily basis, especially at each election cycle, and the search for concrete, final answers that are going to solve everything get us nowhere. So it is beneficial, for those making the decisions about what gets taught and by what means, to be “light on their feet,” so to speak. But do we really want pure hearts, or are there educational problems that need definite explanation?

Or should we rethink the problems all together? As Cahoone (2010) explains,

Wittgenstein believed it makes no sense to exclaim “I know this is my hand,” because there is no language game in which such a statement would make sense. Are we asking equivalent types of nonsensical questions in philosophy of education? Do our questions

36 make sense in the language game we’re playing? Does it make sense to have “outcomes” and to think about who should be educated and by whom and who should decide? Are we posing questions, like Cartesian questions, that are set up in such a way (whether intentionally or not) that they are unanswerable? Do we need new and better questions?

Questions like “what gets taught,” could be reframed into something like “since education is happening at all times all around us as both deliberate and unintentional socialization, how do we do the best with what is already happening and make an attempt to shape the environment?” Dewey has a lot to say about such questions; a Deweyan approach might help us pay better attention to the project of blurring the distinctions between school, home, and the public in order to address the problems that matter.

Does it make sense to say that trying to ground educational recommendations in foundational principles—even those of liberal democratic education—is a lost endeavor, in favor of a kind of purity of heart Rorty talks about? Or is abandoning principles and foundations too dangerous a risk? The benefit of looking away from foundational principles is that one’s mind becomes free, so to speak, but there is the added danger of losing the focus necessary to make good educational recommendations. In other words, we should not become careless with the types of questions we are asking qua philosophers of education. On the other hand, questions like “what is it that everyone needs to know” that may shape curriculum sound somewhat like questions of “pure philosophy,” especially those that look for foundational groundings. But can we, or should we, get away with thinking about education in these terms? It seems that, if we are

37 going to have any kind of serious education at all, then we have to have some formal or organized curriculum. But should a strict curriculum matter?

At times, it seems like the questions of philosophy of education have no answers.

What if we abandon our need to answer unanswerable questions in education? Alan Ryan offers an alternative and, perhaps, enlightening perspective on the matter. In his short book Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education, Ryan (1998) writes about “what decent schools and colleges are (or would be) like, what they teach (or would teach), and how they (would) do it” (p. 3). Ryan claims that there is some comfort in the idea that the worries about education that liberals, in general, share are not new problems. Further, for

Ryan, there is sense that these problems might always be with us, or at least for a long time to come. Ryan’s attitude is a good example of what Rorty might be getting at with the idea of “purity of heart.” If we are pure at heart, definitions and permanent solutions elude us—and in the end, we’re okay with it.

Summary

Rorty’s claim that “truth” is best viewed as a term we use to describe valid statements, rather than as a term “Truth” that refers to accurate representations of the world “as it really is,” is an important one for education. For Rorty, setting aside representational theories of truth allows hope for education; by putting ideas about Truth aside, education can take the form of edification. Furthermore, by letting go of the search for Truth in higher education, schools can educate students liberally and in ways that may, gradually, change the culture for the better. Rorty’s position is not uncontroversial, and scholars have vehemently disagreed with Rorty’s position. Finally, philosophy of

38 education as a field has distinct features that separate it from general philosophical inquiry, especially in terms of the purity of the field. Philosophy of education deals with problems that come with high stakes and that are embedded with unanswerable questions—if, as philosophers of education, we are comfortable with the resulting ambiguity, we may be in a better position to make good educational suggestions.

Chapter Three: Education, Literature, and the “Ironist”

In the last chapter, I described how Rorty, in Consequences of Pragmatism, says we should drop the idea of inherent human nature or “essence.” Rorty’s attitude toward the idea of inherent human nature can be understood as part of his overall idea of, or his suspicions about, the notion of Truth, especially at the level of theory. I don’t presume that Rorty wants to say we should all be skeptics or that we should refuse to acknowledge things that make us uniquely human. What Rorty does seem to say, though, is that for human beings, our public and private languages—which are conditional and temporary— are what ultimately defines us and are the closest things we have to a “human nature.”

Later in this chapter, I will consider the question of whether or not Rorty understands human beings outside of their linguistic existence. For now, however, I will focus on how

Rorty, in the book following Consequences of Pragmatism entitled Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, continues to reject the idea of inherent human nature and further develops the ideas of the public/private split and the ironist. I will proceed by reviewing Rorty’s concept of literary criticism and exploring further how his ideas can shape education.

The Absence of Inherent Human Nature, and the “Ironist”

In the introduction to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty (1989) claims that the practice of community building in the west depends upon the idea of inherent human nature. He sees the relationship between the idea of inherent human nature and the idea of a single, unified vision of community and individual interests thusly:

The attempt to fuse the public and the private lies behind both Plato’s attempt to

answer the question “Why is it in one’s interest to be just?” and Christianity’s

claim that perfect self-realization can be attained through service to others. Such

metaphysical or theological attempts to unite a striving for perfection with a sense

of community require us to acknowledge a common human nature. They ask us to

believe that what is most important to each of us is what we have in common with

others—that the springs of private fulfillment and of human solidarity are the

same. (p. xiii)

Other viewpoints, Rorty says, hold that humans are predisposed to act in ways that reject community—he points to Nietzsche’s theory on the will to power as an example—and favor selfish interests. Nietzsche, Rorty says, espouses a version of human nature opposed to Platonic and religious, metaphysical viewpoints that hold dear the idea that unselfish behaviors are at the core of the human spirit. Rorty (1989) rejects both sides, however, for the idea that “socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down—that there is nothing ‘beneath’ socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human” (p. xiii). Rorty not only rejects the idea of human nature as such but, as we will see in further examples, he also rejects the notion of “springs… of human solidarity.”

Two things of particular interest to my project are tied to Rorty’s rejection of the idea of innate human nature. One, Rorty identifies socialization—what we can read from the quotation above as “education”—along with language—the most powerful means of socialization—as two key elements that bind humans together. For Rorty, human minds are not prefabricated, Lockean wax tablets waiting to be socialized, but there is also no

preprogrammed language latent in human beings; there is no human nature as such. By default, he places responsibility on educators and philosophers of education to provide and supplement socialization. That is, if we are to understand philosophy of education as the specification and justification of our attitudes and practices towards deliberate socialization, along with our deepest understanding of what we intend to accomplish against a Rortyan backdrop, then the responsibility on educators and philosophers of education is tremendous. If language is the closest thing we have to human nature, and socialization is the process by which we acquire language (among other traits), then the idea of rejecting human nature raises the important question of how to develop good language habits. It is uncontroversial to say that we learn language through exposure to its frequent use, but how do we develop a deeper language, a language that binds human beings together? Literature and literary criticism is Rorty’s answer, and it underscores the importance of shared language for the process of socialization—thus making development of language the most important component of education.

The second thing related to Rorty’s rejection of innate human nature that is of interest to my project is the idea of the “ironist.” The idea of the ironist, which I mentioned briefly in the introduction, depends in part on the rejection of a need for theories joining the interests of the community and the private interests of the individual.

Again, for Rorty, once you let go of the idea of human nature, it allows the separation of private and public concerns. For the ironist, one’s public and private self—which amounts to, according to Rorty (1989), one’s “final vocabulary” (p. 73)—are separate and do not necessarily match one another. A final vocabulary, for Rorty, is “a set of words which [people] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives…. They

are the words in which we tell… the story of our lives” (p. 73). For Rorty, the private part of one’s final vocabulary does not have to cohere with the public part of one’s final vocabulary. This idea is controversial, and some scholars in the field of philosophy of education have rejected the public/private split. Mark Beatham (1991), for example, argues that Rorty is too wrapped up in “modernist dualist assumptions” (p. 41) for his

“anti-essentialism” to work, especially if any progress is to be made in education. In the next chapter, I deal with further criticisms from Beatham and other scholars.

So who is the ironist? First of all, Rorty considers himself a “liberal” ironist, and he often writes about the ironist with “liberal” attached to it. In Rorty’s vocabulary, a liberal is someone who thinks that causing suffering in others is the ultimate moral wrong. But one does not have to be a liberal to be an ironist, just as one does not have to be an ironist to be a liberal. It is worth noting that Rorty does not believe that there are any metaphysical grounds for his claim about the importance of kindness; for the liberal, benevolence is the only approach to one’s behavior when interacting with another person—nothing else makes sense. When writing about the ironist, Rorty uses “ironist” and “liberal ironist” interchangeably; that is, I don’t think he imagined a “cruel” ironist.

For the purposes of my discussion in this chapter I’m assuming, as part of my own philosophy of education, that some of what we intend to accomplish through education is an increased quality of life and reduced suffering. But as I said—and this is a purely academic point—it is not necessary that the ironist be a liberal. In any case, Rorty (1989) says that an ironist, whether liberal or not, has the following three qualities:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently

uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as

final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument

phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these

doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that

her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not

herself. (p. 73)

The ironist, in a lifelong dialogue with ideas that are shared through language he or she understands to be temporary and conditional, works gradually toward his or her final vocabulary. The final vocabulary is only final for its owner, and it doesn’t necessarily match up with anyone else’s final vocabulary; there is no “common,” True final vocabulary, hidden or universal in the Platonic sense. Part of the ironic quality of the ironist, says Rorty, is that the ironist realizes his or her own final vocabulary may not be final; Rorty (1989) says that ironists are “never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change” (p. 73-74).

The intellectual attitude opposite to that held by the ironist, Rorty (1989) says, is taken by what he calls the “metaphysician” (p. 74). Allan Bloom, for example, would be a metaphysician in Rortyan terms. The metaphysician, too, searches for a definitive set of words or a final vocabulary, but the metaphysician looks for words that map onto reality; he or she does not take final vocabularies to be provisional. Rather, for the metaphysician, final vocabularies are cosmically and teleologically joined. The metaphysician, for Rorty (1989), accepts the paradigmatic ideas of his or her time, “in

particular the platitude which says there is a single permanent reality to be found behind the many temporary appearances” (p. 74). While the ironist looks for diverse, unique, and practical interpretations of her world, the metaphysician looks for the “right” ways of talking about the world. The ironist wonders whether or not “she has been initiated into the wrong tribe” (p. 75), while “the metaphysician responds to that sort of talk by calling it ‘relativistic’ and by insisting that what matters is not what language is being used but what is true” (p. 75). Metaphysicians think of books “as divided according to disciplines, corresponding to different objects of knowledge” (p. 75), while ironists see books as pieces of “traditions, each member of which partially adopts and partially modifies the vocabulary of the writers whom he has read” (p. 76). The metaphysician wants to put intellectual fields into neat, disciplinary categories, while the ironist doesn’t particularly care for such categories. Rorty (1989) writes:

The metaphysician agrees with the Platonic Theory of Recollection… namely,

that we have the truth within us, that we have built-in criteria which enable us to

recognize the right final vocabulary when we hear it. The cash value of this theory

is that our contemporary final vocabularies are close enough to the right one to let

us converge upon it—to formulate premises from which the right conclusions will

be reached… “right” does not merely mean “suitable for those who speak as we

do” but has a stronger sense—the sense of “grasping real essence.” (p. 76)

Again, the ironist does not think that talk of “essences” gets us anywhere, and “grasping real essence” is of no consequence. The metaphysician, on the other hand, thinks that human beings are obligated to find essences. Ironists, Rorty (1989) says, “do not take the point of discursive thought to be knowing” (p. 75). Recall the distinction between

education for Truth and education as Bildung that I rehearsed in the previous chapter.

Ironists think that it is impossible to get an outside perspective on our own language, that is, to judge it from an outsider’s point of view. Ironists, furthermore, do not think that final vocabularies are bound by common, underlying Truth. The metaphysician relies on focused, technical arguments, the ironist on broad vocabularies. Finally, metaphysicians believe that humans have given, incorporeal qualities that bind them to other humans; ironists think that what binds humans together is language.

So what does Rorty’s juxtaposition between the ironist and the metaphysician have to do with education? The opposing attitudes Rorty describes can be viewed as two contrasting views of education, one conventional and the other non-traditional, evoking

Rorty’s discussion of the political divide between pre-college and higher education. If we expand Rorty’s sketch of the ironist and the metaphysician into two views of education, it might look like this: the non-traditionalist (or ironist) is one who, because he or she thinks of his or her own language as contingent, is constantly seeking new and better language to describe the world. The non-traditionalist is the “lifelong learner.” The conventionalist (or metaphysician), on the other hand, if he or she stumbled upon the

“right” language, would cease to learn and would cease to pursue education. He or she would come to intellectual rest. Further, the non-traditionalist believes in liberal education, liberal in the sense of being flexible, boundless, and of free discovery, while the conventionalist believes in education according to quantifiable metrics and benchmarks, things that are readily measured and assessed, and outcomes that are stated in terms of finite goals. The non-traditionalist believes in education that may not be able

to be measured, and he or she is okay with the uncertainty that remains; he or she wants to develop a “good brain,”6 while the conventionalist wants to develop technicians.

I’m drawing a caricature of Rorty’s idea of the metaphysician here, perhaps unfairly, in order to make the point that the idea of the ironist looks to me like a preferred version of the educated person. Education that does not have a fixed end is liberal education at its best. The ironist, for Rorty, is constantly recreating him or herself, and although Rorty doesn’t use the same terms I’m using to describe the process, I take recreation to be reeducation. To be open to reeducation, or to seek reeducation, is a virtue because it allows one to adjust to unforeseen circumstances, new facts, and new ideas and, subsequently, to act in better ways than before—and then to repeat the process whenever appropriate.

Rorty often builds on Nietzsche’s ideas, especially in his interpretation of the concept of self-formation. He sees Nietzsche as a good example of a thinker who broke free from convention and helped establish a new kind of philosophical thought. For Rorty

(drawing on Nietzsche), to create oneself equates to self-description. Rorty (1989) writes:

[Nietzsche] hoped that once we realized Plato’s “true world” was just a fable, we

would seek consolation, at the moment of death, not in having transcended the

animal condition but in being that peculiar sort of dying animal who, by

describing himself in his own terms, had created himself. (p. 27)

6 I owe this phrase to a late professor of history at The Ohio State University, Dr. Sam Chu, who told me over dinner at his home one evening that the humanities are about developing “good brains” rather than specific skills. He said that it was futile to compare the disciplines of, say, history with engineering in terms of the worth of the degrees because of the way we measure worth in our culture. 47

Ironists, for Rorty, create themselves continuously through self-description and development of a final vocabulary. The final vocabulary is both conditional and limited.

Rorty (1989) says

Nabokov built his best book, Pale Fire, around the phrase “Man’s life as

commentary to abstruse unfinished poem.” That phrase serves both as a summary

of Freud’s claim that every human life is the working out of a sophisticated

idiosyncratic fantasy, and as a reminder that no such working out gets completed

before death interrupts. It cannot get completed because there is nothing to

complete, there is only a web of relations to be rewoven, a web which time

lengthens every day. (pp. 42-43)

The metaphor of one’s existence being a set of annotations about a complex piece of poetry reinforces the Rortyan idea that one can constantly reeducate oneself as one discovers new interpretations of the “poem” she is “reading”—that is, the literature, films, ideas, and stories to which she has chosen to pay the most attention. Furthermore, the metaphor of one’s final vocabulary as a poem in itself, or as a work of literature, is an important one for Rorty; as we will see in the next section, literary works inform much of the ironist’s final vocabulary, and the ironist must take literature seriously. For Rorty, the final vocabulary is like a grand poem that is created out of other poems one has embraced. Rorty, by emphasizing that the self is created, not discovered, reinforces the idea that truth is not something that is revealed; he underscores the claim that there is no

Truth about oneself, in the metaphysical sense.

But how does one become an ironist? And how does one learn to create oneself?

The general approach of the ironist—the part of the ironist’s attitude that understands

one’s beliefs to be subject to change—must be modeled to some extent by others and can, therefore, only come through socialization. In order for someone to become an ironist, ironic socialization must be built into one’s education. Similarly, creation of oneself has to be learned. Consequently, if we take the formation of ironists as a social good, Rorty’s idea of ironic self-creation has enormous significance for educators; it becomes the responsibility of teachers to help students develop their own private truths, and it becomes the role of administrators to make sure their curricula are rich in literary study.

This may mean, in some cases, massive curricular overhaul, especially at the K through

12 level. But it may also mean re-inventing the way the culture values literature.

Education, the Role of Literature, and the Ironist

Generally speaking, one does not learn not to be cruel simply by reading books.

Most of us have an aversion to hurting others that begins early in life, instilled by our parents, or teachers, or other adults. But reading books can help, and as I mentioned in the introduction, Rorty says that literature, and literary criticism—that is, serious literary study and discussion—can replace metaphysical bases of morality, for ironists in particular. In defining the ironist, recall that Rorty says the ironist can be influenced by people or books, but it is hard to imagine that the only source of material for an ironist’s vocabulary could come from verbal interactions alone. Thus, I interpret Rorty to mean that the ironist and literary study are, in most cases, conjoined. For ironists, the substance or “meaning” of a text is an important teacher; Rorty says that it is not important to the ironist whether or not the narrator of a literary work is a mouthpiece for the author.

Ironists, for Rorty, are more interested in deciding if they should incorporate ideas from the novels they read into their own lives rather than the True meaning of the texts.

Education, described in Rortyan terms, is teaching someone how to create, and recreate, oneself. Rorty (1989) writes: “we redescribe ourselves… in those terms and incorporate the results with alternative redescriptions which use the vocabularies of alternative figures. We ironists hope, by this continual redescription, to make the best selves for ourselves that we can” (pp. 79-80). The activity of reading novels, poems, and other narrative and non-narrative texts, and comparing them to other texts, is what Rorty means by “literary criticism.” In the following section, I suggest that education can maximize the socializing potential of literature and literary criticism for more than just ironists and intellectuals. A culture educated in literary study can sustain a high quality of living, quality in terms of opportunities for personal and community prosperity, liberal in the sense of freedom from suffering, and liberal in the sense of citizens being free to pursue individual interests (or happiness). But can we, or should we, expand ironism?

To back up a bit, Rorty is neither a radical nor an activist. It would be false, too, to say he is a reformer. He is, for sure, a liberal, in the sense of one who abhors cruelty, and in the sense of one who believes in a society of individuals who are free to pursue their own desires in a diverse, dynamic, and inclusive culture. Rorty is also one who, in his personal life, sought his own path—his own attempt to recreate himself considerably—even at the risk of becoming a pariah in his own discipline. He left

Princeton as a fully tenured professor in order to break free from disciplinary philosophy—what he would have called “normal” philosophy in Kuhnian (1996) terms— and develop his own style of pragmatist, ironist, anti-representationalist criticism. In leaving the philosophy department at Princeton, he turned heretic to analytic philosophy

in order to escape what was, for Rorty, a soul-crushing existence doing work he didn’t believe in, even though he was brilliant at the task of doing analytic philosophy.

As part of his liberal volitions, Rorty thinks about social progress in terms of increased leisure time for citizens, decreased suffering, and increased access to education.

He also thinks about social progress in terms of the way we speak and write; he thinks that the culture of the west continues to improve, gradually, as new and better ways of speaking and writing replace the old. Rorty, qua ironist and pragmatist, believes that ways of thinking and talking are subject to change, no matter how fervently we want to stand by our beliefs in the present moment. Rorty (1989) also says that realizing that our present beliefs are temporary and that they need not be rooted in metaphysics is the

“chief virtue of the members of a liberal society” (p. 46).

Rorty, it should be noted, has been criticized for taking for granted the flaws of social institutions. That is, his faith in the west ignores that our institutions, like public education, don’t always serve the public in the ways they intend to serve; that is to say the schools, like many social institutions, are imperfect and, at times, perpetuate suffering rather than alleviate it. Rorty, it could be argued, doesn’t go far enough in wanting to eradicate the evils of social institutions. Realization of Rorty’s vision of a free and open society that stresses unfettered communication, access to education, and minimizing suffering, some would argue, alone will not combat the Machiavellian tendencies of social institutions. Personally, I don’t know where one would begin unraveling, for example, the problem of public universities contracting with companies that utilize unfair or cruel labor practices. Two things, however, come to mind about Rorty’s commitment to reducing suffering and changing social institutions. One, he does take a somewhat soft

stance on social change; he says that our liberal, western society is not perfect but is the best we have, and he has what seems like a naïve confidence that things will, however gradually, get better. This will not be satisfactory to some. Two, Rorty was clear that, at times, he wished he had done more to alleviate suffering of others—not from an institutional view but on a one-to-one, personal basis (VPRO, Of Beauty and

Consolation: Part 23 – Richard Rorty, 2000). We can take Rorty’s claim that he wanted people to be free of suffering at face value, but he probably doesn’t deserve criticism for failing to create a blueprint for societal change. He wasn’t that type of intellectual.

If he wasn’t an activist, Rorty is nonetheless consistent in offering general solutions to the ills of social establishments and for reducing suffering. Rorty (1989) calls it a “traditional liberal claim that the only way to avoid perpetuating cruelty within social institutions is by maximizing the quality of education, freedom of the press, educational opportunity, opportunities to exert political influence, and the like” (pp. 66-67). Rorty supports this “traditional” claim. And while he does not say much more than what I’ve already cited in chapter two about what he thinks a quality education might look like,

Rorty makes clear that one of the keys to a liberal culture, and the educational structure that supports it, is literary criticism. Rorty (1989) writes:

Literature and politics… are the areas to which we should look for the charter of a

liberal society. We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a

whole can be ‘poeticized’ rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be

‘rationalized’ or ‘scientized.’” (p. 52)

Why “poeticized?” Rorty (1989) invokes Harold Bloom’s notion of the “strong poet” or the “strong maker” (p. 28), the “person who uses words as they have never before been

used” (p. 28) as the leader of the new culture, the creator of a new language for a society that moves along, steadily, toward less cruelty and more freedom. The strong poet, for

Rorty, is like the revolutionary scientist, in Kuhnian (1996) terms of normal and revolutionary science. The normal poet is a hack, the strong poet is Shakespeare. For

Rorty (1989), “an ideally liberal polity would be one whose cultural hero is Bloom’s

‘strong poet’ rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth-seeking, ‘logical,’

‘objective’ scientist” (p. 53). Rorty envisions a culture that is shaped by literature, not by philosophy. Rorty, it should be noted, does not put much stock in defining who is a philosopher and who is a “literary author.” Rorty (1989) writes: “ironists take the writings of all the people with poetic gifts, all the original minds who had a talent for redescription—Pythagoras, Plato, Milton, Newton, Goethe, Kant, Kierkegaard,

Baudelaire, Darwin, Freud—as grist to be put through the same dialectical mill. The metaphysicians, by contrast, want to start by getting straight about which of these people were poets, which philosophers, and which scientists” (p. 76). Thus, a Rortyan is more interested in interpreting ideas than to what discipline the author belongs. Science, philosophy, and literature are all potentially valuable types of writing to be interpreted, and subsumed or discarded as part of one’s final vocabulary. Rorty, then, thinks that interpretation of literature should be our guide. Furthermore, he thinks that literary criticism is the supreme intellectual endeavor. Rorty (1989) claims that “a sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species” (p. 20). Literary criticism, for Rorty, is poetry in its own right.

I want to pause here and ask whether or not it is possible that a culture could have, as its champion, the revolutionary writer. If so, how? And should educators take seriously the idea that we should educate citizens to revere the revolutionary author over the alternatives? What is the justification for teaching citizens to be ironists? Is it right to do so? And why is it important that we link education to recreation of the self?

Before addressing the questions above, it will be helpful to look further into

Rorty’s attitude toward literature. Rorty, of course, was not the first philosopher to take literature seriously. David Hume, whose family expected him to be a lawyer, might be found reading Cicero when he was supposed to be studying legal cases (Robinson,

Aigret, Levin, & Dooley, 2004). Conversely, literary critics took Rorty, who was trained as an academic philosopher, seriously, especially as he distanced himself from disciplinary, academic philosophy and began to write about novels. Rorty (1989) says that philosophy itself, as a field, can be viewed as a type of literature; he felt that Hegel, in particular, “helped turn it into a literary genre” (p. 79). One might say that, in general, the fields of philosophy and literature go hand in hand. One can find Plato’s Republic being taught in undergraduate courses in both literature and philosophy. The same can be said for Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. I don’t want to get caught up, however, in debates over defining literature, nor in drawing distinctions between literature and philosophy, because it doesn’t matter for the point I’m trying to make. Pragmatists, like

Rorty, tend to blur lines between categories, and the literature/philosophy split is no exception. I want to focus, rather, on ways that literature and literary criticism combine with educational purposes. It will suffice to say that “literature” and “literary works,” for my purposes, follow Rorty’s inclusive sense of “literature,” to include texts, some

narrative and some not, from which we can learn and develop final vocabularies. Good literature, then, is that which is edifying, in Rorty’s sense of the term.

The Problem of Elitism

The following long quotation sums up nicely what a Rortyan philosophy of literature and education might look like. Rorty (1989) writes:

To see one’s language, one’s conscience, one’s morality, and one’s highest hopes

as contingent products, as literalizations of what once were accidentally produced

metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in such an

ideally liberal state. That is why the ideal citizen of such an ideal state would be

someone who thinks of the founders and the preservers of her society as such

poets, rather than as people who had discovered or who clearly envisioned the

truth about the world or about humanity. She herself may or may not be a poet,

may or may not find her own metaphors for her own idiosyncratic fantasies, may

or may not make those fantasies conscious. But she will be commonsensically

Freudian enough to see the founders and the transformers of society, the

acknowledged legislators of her language and thus of her morality, as people who

did happen to find words to fit their fantasies, metaphors which happened to

answer to the vaguely felt needs of the rest of the society. She will be

commonsensically [Harold] Bloomian enough to take for granted that it is the

revolutionary artist and the revolutionary scientist, not the academic artist or the

normal scientist, who most clearly exemplifies the virtues which she hopes her

society will itself embody. (p. 61)

Rorty envisions a culture in which we look to others’ texts—the best of what has been written and the best that has been written about those texts in turn—as the literature that guides us toward better citizenship. This is where literature and education meet in the realm of Rorty’s ideas, and I argue in the next chapter that the literature of the field of philosophy of education does not fully address this intersection. The problem with

Rorty’s idea that we reconstruct ourselves through engagement with literature is that the

“we” for Rorty—that is to say, his culture of ironists—is too narrowly defined. As I mentioned in the introduction, Rorty (1989) says that the non-intellectuals in his “ideal liberal society” (p. 87) would not be ironists and would not read literary criticism. Rorty

(1989) writes:

In the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists, although the

nonintellectuals would not. The latter would, however, be commonsensically

nominalist and historicist. So they would see themselves as contingent through

and through, without feeling any particular doubts about the contingencies they

happened to be. They would not be bookish, nor would they look to literary critics

as moral advisers. (p. 87)

The people who are actively interpreting literature and incorporating their interpretations into their own final vocabularies are, for Rorty, professional academics and intellectuals and, thus, he categorically excludes an enormous section of the public. As Rob Reich

(1996) puts it, “Rorty creates a system that affords only a select elite the opportunity of self-edification toward becoming a liberal ironist” (p. 342). Rorty’s “ideal citizen” is one who spends much of his or her time in the ivory tower. It is not surprising that Rorty focuses on an elite group; he was, after all, an Ivy League academic philosopher, so it

makes sense that he would be making recommendations based on the people and the culture with which he was most familiar. But he limits, unnecessarily, his vision of the ideal citizen.

Furthermore, there is not a significant difference between a “non-metaphysical nominalist and historicist” and an ironist; Rorty is splitting hairs. The public, by earning a quality education that emphasizes literary study, can become ironists and, to answer a question I posed above, the culture could indeed take as its champion the revolutionary author. That is to say, one does not have to be an intellectual in order to be an ironist and to take literature seriously. One has to have a serious, literary education, grounded firmly in books and various types of texts. Furthermore, quality literary education does not have to take place solely in the classroom. There are many windows to good literary instruction like video lectures and books.

The expansion of ironism is a societal good if we expose students to good ideas and help them sort out, and recognize for themselves, the good from the bad. Sharing ideas and working them over against a broad landscape of peoples and cultures can help cure us of what William James (1929) calls “blindness in human beings” (p. 1); that is, literary study can help remedy the inability, due to limited perspective and experience, to see what others value. It is a moral good, then, to expand ironism to the public and teach people more about other people than they would know without literary study; it helps people become empathetic. Educators who believe in the general well being of the public should take these recommendations about the importance of literary study seriously.

Moreover, it is important to link education to recreation of the self because unchecked, misguided, non-deliberate and otherwise rogue personal self-creation is dangerous. Self-

creation and recreation should be done with deep consideration of shared ideas and standards, sought through literary study.

To put the question another way: if we grant that, one, we should set aside notions of Truth and, two, that in our post-metaphysical western culture, literature should replace metaphysical sources of authority, what should be done if the large section of the public that is not made up of professional academics is gradually adopting the Rortyan idea that we should set the search for Truth aside? Does one have to be an ironist to take literature seriously and benefit from what it has to offer? Does one have to be an ironist, in Rorty’s words, (1989) “to read literary critics and take them as moral advisers?” (p.

80). In my interpretation of Rorty, the answer is yes. In order to benefit from the study of literature in a meaningful way—that is, to build lessons learned from literature and literary study into one’s final vocabulary—one has to be an ironist, both in terms of having a pragmatic willingness to adjust one’s deepest beliefs and a willingness to set the search for Truth aside. Furthermore, if one is going to continually adjust one’s outlook, attitudes, and behaviors, one must accept contingency. Rorty (1989) says, explicitly, that one of the goals of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is to “suggest the possibility of a liberal utopia: one in which ironism, in the relevant sense, is universal” (p. xv). In order to fulfill Rorty’s vision of a utopia, then, the public would need to become full of ironists and literary critics, beyond what Rorty imagines. Rorty (1989) wants people to be able to recognize, and sympathize with, anguish in others; he wants us to realize that our birth into a particular group or way of life is accidental, and that “solidarity… is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people” (p. xvi). He says that the best way to understand fellow

humans is through the study of literature, including “ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel” (p. xvi). He thinks that literature has more or less supplanted metaphysical sources of moral socialization; he says that literature “has replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress” (p. xvi). Rorty’s idea that literature is replacing other sources of morality is, for him, a positive component within his broad concept of setting notions of Truth aside; that is, it is part of the ongoing progress of the west that we not look for the True meaning of, or the grounding beneath, philanthropy and, instead, look for pragmatic ways we can help one another according to a general awareness of the suffering of others. Rorty proposes a utopia, but he sells it short by suggesting that it would not be a culture of liberal ironists and literary critics.

Rorty (1989) asks what would happen if our culture relied on sources of morality, like certain works of literature, that are both secular and “nominalist and historicist” (p.

87) instead of metaphysical.7 In conducting his thought experiment about sources of morality, Rorty responds to critics who say that relying on such sources would run counter to—or dismantle—a liberal culture (liberal in the sense of reducing anguish and allowing freedom to pursue diverse interests). Rorty (1989) says that our tendency is to

“assume that nominalism and historicism are the exclusive property of intellectuals, of high culture, and that the masses cannot be so blasé about their own final vocabularies.

But… once upon a time atheism, too, was the exclusive property of intellectuals” (p. 87).8

It would seem, then, that Rorty does think ironism is something that can, eventually,

7 Nominalism and historicism can be herein understood as a state of non-universalism and the recognition of historical contingency, respectively. 8 Here is another example of where Rorty updates Dewey. Through rejecting universals, Truth, et cetera, one allows for the education of nominalists and historicists. 59

become a more publicly accepted way of thinking than before. But, as I said above, he sells his utopia short.

Rorty (1989) goes on to doubt that “there could or ought to be a culture whose public rhetoric is ironist,” and he questions whether or not there should be “a culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continuously dubious about their own process of socialization” (p. 87). But young people should be doubtful about the culture, particularly about the way they are educated, if Rorty’s vision of reducing cruelty and reforming social institutions is to be achieved. A culture in which one would not need to be doubtful about its own institutions would indeed be a utopia, and until we’ve reached it, one has to be vigilant about the activities of social institutions, including the schools.9 Further, Rorty says that one has to have something to rebel against in order to be an ironist, and a culture in which the public had doubts about public language—that is, a culture in which everyone questioned the vernacular of day-to-day life—would not allow for one to engage in private irony because everyone would be an ironist. For Rorty’s public/private split to function, one has to have something to split; the private person has to have something public against which to define himself or herself.

But there will always be “normal” paradigmatic discourse against which to define one’s own language. There will always be cruelty, and there will always be social institutions to reform. Making one’s irony public, or at least making part of one’s ironic thinking public by speaking out against the status quo, can change things for the better; it will not ruin the chance for ironists to have something to be ironic about. Rorty thinks that irony is a

9 There is a difficult balance to manage when one tries to teach youth to be critical; a teacher needs to maintain some authority while educating students to question authority at the same time. See J.S. Mill on the matter in On Liberty. 60

private matter, but private irony does no good for anyone. Rorty, by trying to limit public irony, is being too modest. He also does not want to recommend that private fantasies be made public, should they be labeled as taboo. But he makes too sharp a distinction between the public and private side of the ironist.

None of this is to say that only English professors should be literary critics or that only intellectuals can be ironists. An ironist can be anyone who gets a liberal arts education (liberal meaning “flexible” rather than “of reducing suffering”).10 So my goal here is to add to what Rorty says and push his hopes a little further, because I think he stops short of recommending what is possible. A culture of ironists could become, in a way, literary critics—or at least incorporate some literary criticism into their own final vocabularies. It would take a lot for this to happen. Models of literary criticism, and works of literary criticism, would have to be made more readily available and accessible to the public. But why shouldn’t they be? There is a need, and a desire, for research faculty to publish for the public.11 In addition, students must be taught to have their own understanding of, and personal relationship with, literature, starting early in K through 12 education and continuing through college. Granted, finishing a liberal arts program in a college does not make one an intellectual. There is only so much curricular real estate available in a liberal arts program for the various fields of study, and required courses in literature are typically few. Even an undergraduate English major cannot be called a

10 See Rene Arcilla (1995) For the Love of Perfection (p. 3) for an enlightening description of liberal education. 11 See Colón-Ramos, D. (2013). Found in translation: a professor searches for a public voice. Chronicle of Higher Education, 59 (33), A56 for an interesting discussion of public academic research. 61

“literary critic” upon completion of a four-year degree.12 Moreover, the recently graduated Master’s student in literature is just finding out what it means to be a literary scholar, as he or she begins to identify a focused area of research interest and work toward the PhD. So I’m not talking about creating a society of people who publish for literary journals, even if literature requirements are expanded or if more students declare

English as a major. But literary study can, as Rorty believes, transform one’s final vocabulary. We need to encourage students to read as much as they can get their hands on and teach them how to take good lessons from the books they read.

Anyone with an open mind and access to education can be a kind of literary critic, albeit on a small scale in comparison to professional critics. Again, Rorty should be questioned for limiting literary criticism to the intellectuals in his perfect society. By saying that the “nonintellectuals” will not read literary criticism and not seek out the work of literary critics, Rorty sounds a little like Allan Bloom (1987), who (as we’ve seen) claims that there are a select few philosophers who share “theoretical experience”

(p. 271) synonymous with Truth. The strong poet, as Rorty describes him or her, could also be misconstrued as a type of elite, passing down his or her wisdom while all others should be thankful just to be in the presence of greatness (or great writing, more accurately). This is why I hesitate to limit my recommendations such that only the college bound would become literary critics in the “lite” sense, even though it would be naïve to expect everyone to fall in love with novels. But Rorty’s version of the literary critic is not the same as Bloom’s philosopher with the experience of shared Truth; that is,

12 Students I’ve worked with often think that they have earned a “degree in English” when, to be more accurate, they have earned a liberal arts degree and have just gotten their “feet wet” in sampling what faculty spend all of their professional energies studying and researching. 62

Rorty doesn’t think that talk of truth outside of language is worth our attention. Both philosophers, Rorty and Allan Bloom, see elites impacting the culture. Both think that the public should look to the elites. The difference is that Bloom thinks that Truth is limited to a certain type of inquiry, while Rorty claims that people might want look to the elite novelists, literary critics, and intellectuals for guidance for saying interesting, useful things so that they might be able to better describe themselves and have compassion for others—but not for Truth. My addition to Rorty’s suggestions is that, through expanded education and modified curriculum that extends exposure to reading and criticism, more people can become ironists and contribute to the public good.

Novels and Novelists for Teaching

For Rorty, literary works have particular qualities that make them good models for speaking and writing about the world and that make them good teaching tools. In a chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity about Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,

Rorty (1989) says that “novels are a safer medium than theory for expressing one’s recognition of the relativity and contingency of authority figures” (p. 107). They are

“safer,” says Rorty, because while theory has the potential of being universal and aspiring to Truth, novels are temporary. Rorty (1989) writes:

Since the characters in novels age and die—since they obviously share the

finitude of the books in which they occur—we are not tempted to think that by

adopting an attitude toward them we have adopted an attitude toward every

possible sort of person. (p. 107)

Rorty strikes something important here. Not everyone should adopt, say, the attitudes of

Holden Caulfield, but Catcher in the Rye is a book that, at a certain point in one’s

adolescent life, may help one capture how one feels about, say, social institutions (like the school he or she is a part of, for example). Holden Caulfield’s attitude is, of course, not the only attitude or the best attitude to adopt. Nor, as Rorty says, should we build our final vocabulary based on one experience, or on one book. We should, however, keep on reading.

Furthermore, according to Rorty’s description of Nietzsche, qua theorist, and his comparison of Nietzsche to Proust, qua novelist, novelists produce better material for adopting as part of one’s final vocabulary than philosophers produce. For Rorty, philosophers tend to write about universals. Rorty says that Nietzsche, insofar as he wanted to end philosophy, wanted to be the one whom no other philosopher could touch—he was, according to Rorty (1989), “as interested as Heidegger himself was in getting beyond all perspectives” (p. 106). As a teacher trying to help students explore and develop their own final vocabularies through engagement with literature, I would hesitate to assign Nietzsche, given some of his most radical thinking. This may seem obvious, but

I’m saying, along with Rorty, that Proust (at least in the example of Swann’s Way) would be better as an educational tool or as a source of one’s final vocabulary, given its local, personal focus, than would Nietzsche, given his grand schematics. We should teach

Nietzsche, but as a piece of a greater historical puzzle, not as a wellspring of final vocabularies.

In other words, an educator must be cautious with novels; while novels are about temporary matters, as Rorty says, they can also have a seductive, potentially everlasting and impactful quality that theory doesn’t have and that grand schemes don’t have.

Theory, labeled as theory, can be viewed as “just theory” or as an impersonal treatise. On

the other hand, when it seems like the narrator of a good novel is speaking directly to us, we may want to follow in his or her ways. To go back to the example of Marcel Proust,

Proust writes fiction, and it is well fit for teaching how to live. Proust’s work is more like a thought experiment than a manifesto. It could spark great ideas, or bad ideas, but it is not doctrine. It is not teaching a way of life for the world; it speaks to us personally.

More to the point, a responsible teacher would not teach Nietzschean theory as a source of final vocabularies. An approach to studying someone like Nietzsche in, say, a high school classroom, would be akin to studying Alexander the Great—not as a model for living but for historical curiosity. Studying Dickens, for example, is something entirely different than studying Nietzsche. We wouldn’t want our students studying Nietzsche’s theories by asking “what do you think of these ideas… isn’t Nietzsche’s theory on the will to power inspiring?” But we might want to say “what do you think of Pip’s attitude toward the family he left back home in the countryside in Great Expectations. Look how he feels toward his family now that he’s moved to the city and reflected on his roots. Do you see anything in yourself that resembles his struggles?”

Rorty believes that there are books that help define us—sort of like a list of songs that one believes adequately defines his or her life—and books that teach us about meanness toward other people. Rorty (1989) says that, in turn, there are two kinds of books that teach us about unkindness toward others: those that show us how “social practices and institutions” affect people and books that “help us see the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others” (p. 141). Chapter seven of Contingency, Irony, and

Solidarity focuses on the second type of book, and it is of particular significance to the

intersection of literature and education. What does it teach us? Rorty (1989) says that by reading such books,

we may come to notice what we ourselves have been doing… such books show

how our attempts at autonomy, our private obsessions with the achievement of a

certain sort of perfection, may make us oblivious to the pain and humiliation we

are causing. They are the books which dramatize the conflict between duties to

the self and duties to others. (p. 141)

One does not have to have read Lolita to know what Rorty is talking about; we easily recognize our own failings in books. Rorty (1989) goes on: “literary interest will always be parasitic on moral interest. In particular, you cannot create a memorable character without thereby making a suggestion about how your reader should act” (p. 167).

The important point here, in addition to the claim that anyone can be an amateur literary critic, is that literature can teach us more than the basic liberal ethic of “thou shalt not hurt others” and teach us about others’ suffering so that we may become more sensitive. Literature has the power to teach us how we might live, if it is taught well. It has the ability to teach as metaphor. It has the power to change the culture, not just to help define or shape the individual’s private idea of what he or she thinks of him or herself. It has the power to do much more than that, and narratives in many forms, and stories in many forms, can be the tie that binds, especially if we accept Rorty’s argument about the absence of universal Truth and innate human nature. If Philip Smith and

Frederick Goodman (2013) are right in their Rortyan claim that “human beings are the source of their culture, not nature” (p. 8), then we need a good source of cultural influence. Literature, and literary study, can be an important way to avoid creating, as

Smith and Goodman put it, “a culture that lacks integrity, one that offers no more than a simple-minded vocabulary for expressing personal preferences, or one that’s merely a framework for making self-serving social contracts” (p. 8).

Does Rorty Understand Non-linguistic Reality or Meaning?

One could make the claim that, by setting aside the idea of Truth and innate human nature, Rorty has reduced reality, or meaning, to language. As we’ve seen, Rorty says that “truth” is a word we use when we wish to say that we agree on a way of speaking about some thing or things. According to his way of looking at the world, there doesn’t seem to be any room for non-linguistic reality (for example, non-verbal cues that foster understanding between people or the simple affection shared between a person and his or her faithful Labrador). A perfunctory reading of Rorty would suggest that he doesn’t understand non-linguistic reality or meaning, but this is not the case. Rorty

(1989) writes: “pain is nonlinguistic: It is what we human beings have that ties us to the nonlanguage-using beasts. So victims of cruelty, people who are suffering, do not have much in the way of a language” (p. 94). Rorty goes on to say that “novels and ethnographies which sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language must do the job which demonstrations of a common human nature were supposed to do”

(p. 94). Rorty understands non-linguistic reality; he just chooses to focus on language rather than non-language.

Conclusion

To restate the basis of my study and close a loop I started in chapter one: Rorty says that the circumstances that make up one’s environment, determined by a multitude of factors including the timing of one’s birth, are the only sources of what I’m calling

“education.” The drive to understand the exigencies of our time and our environments should include serious exploration of literary ideas, forged in the works of Salinger,

Dickens, Melville, or any great novelists of our time and of the past. We should also look to other sources of literature, broadly defined as that which is, in Rorty’s sense of the word, edifying. There is nothing deep, metaphysical, ephemeral, or universal behind any of it, says Rorty, and, as we’ve seen, his stance impacts education greatly if we take seriously the idea that literature is a powerful teaching and learning tool. Literature can supplement—or take the place of—other sources of authority. Through an increasingly literary culture, people outside the ivory tower can engage in literary criticism, qua ironists, in search of their own authenticity and guidance for moral behavior.

Chapter Four: A Literary Philosophy of Education

One way to put the argument I made in the last chapter is the following: a culture in which people read and discuss literary works is better off than a culture that does not. I also suggested that education, including education acquired by formal schooling, can prepare the public for doing literary criticism, at some level. My claims about literature and education have thus far been put forth against the backdrop of the philosophy of

Richard Rorty. My interpretation of Rorty’s views on literary criticism comprises what

I’m calling a literary philosophy of education; in other words, doing literary criticism is a way of specifying and justifying our attitudes and practices towards deliberate socialization, along with our deepest understanding of what we intend to accomplish. The present chapter shifts most of its attention away from Rorty’s views and resettles on the scholarship of the field of philosophy of education. The main purpose of this chapter is to review material published in philosophy of education journals that represent the literature of the field on Rorty. As part of my concluding remarks in the chapter, I will also consider the question: why have scholars in the field of philosophy of education largely ignored Rorty’s talk of literary criticism? Another way to ask this is: why have scholars overlooked literary philosophies of education?

Articles in philosophy of education journals that address Rorty’s work do not include much, if any, discussion about literary criticism. This is not too surprising, given the siloed culture of academic disciplines. If one scoured literary journals that deal with the many sub-genres of literary criticism, I’d wager that they, conversely, do not talk

much about education. But while the literature of the field has not yet fully investigated literary philosophies of education informed by Rorty’s work, it does include ideas that help expand the literary educational concept that I’m attempting to describe.

Mark Beatham, for one, does not talk about literary criticism in his review of

Rorty’s work but, rather, focuses on the importance of narrative in education. Beatham is sympathetic to Rorty’s anti-foundationalism, but he wonders if Rorty’s ideas are not postmodern enough and, furthermore, claims that Rorty is caught up in dualisms; Rorty’s dualist thinking, Beatham (1991) argues, discounts his educational recommendations. For

Beatham, Rorty is limited by classic dualisms, including “mind/body, subject/object, individual/society, and so forth” (p. 41). Beatham does not take Rorty’s ideas lightly; he says that Rorty’s “uncritical assumptions” present a “potentially dangerous monotony”

(p. 45) to the culture—at least to the intellectual culture. But by claiming that Rorty is caught up in dualisms, Beatham is mistaking Rorty’s descriptions of the way he sees things working out in practice for recommendations—recommendations that Rorty simply isn’t making. For Rorty, agonizing over dualisms is for professional philosophers

(philosophers in the strict, disciplinary sense), and not for pragmatists; when talking about philosophy in the sense of “how things hang together,” Rorty is not interested in metaphysics. His public/private split, for example, is a description of the way he sees things playing out in the world, not a fixed ontological claim. As I’ve said, Rorty is not trying to map language onto reality; he is concerned, rather, with crafting powerful descriptions that help us better understand and manage our world. Rorty wants to put aside dualist notions of, for example, the mind/body problem and scrutinize, instead, the orthodox lineage of epistemology. To say that Rorty is caught up in dualisms, to the

extent that his educational recommendations suffer or that it otherwise encumbers his educational descriptions, is a mistake because such a claim misrepresents the spirit of

Rorty’s analysis of the culture of education.

Beatham’s general misreading of Rorty, then, taints his reading of the significance of Rorty’s ideas for education. Beatham (1991) endorses what he calls an “inversion” (p.

48) of Rorty’s description of the political, educational divide I rehearsed in chapter two.

Beatham writes: “while Rorty seeks to split educational practice in two, I would keep it whole. Rorty would have primary and secondary schools teaching consensus, while I would… focus on differences and distinctions” (p. 48). Beatham claims that Rorty wants pre-college students to learn only the “stories of our ancestors” (p. 48); Beatham says, contrariwise, that he wants students to create their own communal narratives. Again,

Beatham is mistakenly charging Rorty with dualism, and he misses the point Rorty is making. Rorty, in talking about the split between higher education and K through 12 schooling, is describing a political arrangement between right and left, not proposing a plan for how education should be divided between upper and lower halves; he is not

“seeking” to do anything like Beatham suggests. Rorty (1999) calls it a “right” for a culture to want its K through 12 schools to “inculcate most of what is generally believed”

(p. 116), but he does not recommend anything. The closest Rorty comes to a recommendation in this case is his claim that learning the prevalent wisdom of the culture must precede the process of learning to challenge that selfsame wisdom; this, however, amounts to nothing more than a tautology or, at most, a statement of the necessary conditions for non-vocational, liberal education. Rorty says, too, that non-vocational colleges and universities should not be in the business of teaching remedial skills. But

stating that students should have the basics mastered before they come to college does not make Rorty a dualist. What Rorty is saying—alongside Dewey—is that, by the time students come to college, they should know enough about the successes and failures of the American democratic experiment to be able to think about and create new successes and avoid new failures, to build on what they’ve learned, and to challenge the assumptions they’ve developed. Again, this is far from an educational recommendation made by someone trapped in dualisms. It is understandable that Beatham would think

Rorty is prescribing a system of education, but he seems to miss the nuance in Rorty’s deliberations. Beatham wants students to start challenging the status quo earlier in their educations; Rorty (1999) makes it clear in “Education as Socialization and Individuation” that he is aware of the possibility of students’ early differentiation from the shared assumptions of the culture—an awareness that Beatham overlooks—but he understands that, for the most part, students will not have the opportunity for such differentiation until they start college.

Beatham, further, says that the act of creating new ways of describing the world should be at the core of a thoughtful philosophy of education; in effect, he puts forth what sounds like his own version of a Rortyan philosophy of education without acknowledging the similarities to Rorty’s ideas. Beatham (1991) says that, in his own educational scheme, “narrative would be an integral part of postessentialist educational practice because it would focus on the ways in which vocabularies are the mapmakers of our lives” (p. 47). Beatham argues that community narratives are important—more important than individual narratives. Thus, while claiming that shared stories are important as descriptions of the world we live in—a statement Rorty would accept—Beatham rejects

the significance of literary criticism on the grounds that works of literary merit celebrate too greatly the individual author. Beatham thinks that Rorty is too concerned with the formation of the self and not concerned enough with nurturing the society that incorporates the individual. What Beatham misses here is that Rorty is just as interested in community narratives as private narratives. Rorty understands the importance of redescription for both private and public commitments; his cognizance is particularly evident in a chapter of Philosophy and Social Hope called “Back to Class Politics,” in which Rorty (1999) stresses the importance of the story of labor unions. Rorty can be understood to say that public narratives are formed as people find common ground with others, based on multiple, personal vocabularies.

Duck-Joo Kwak, in a manner similar to Beatham, mistakes Rorty’s description of the split between higher education and K through 12 education for recommendations;

Kwak (2004) says that, as a consequence of Rorty’s ideas about the public/private split,

Rorty “ends up advocating an educationally problematic picture of the educated” (p.

347). The problem, according to Kwak, is that students will be morally impoverished if the culture adopts a Rortyan view of education. Kwak writes:

If it is admitted that one of the most desired virtues of good citizenship in

multicultural democratic society today is a capability to respect, or at least

tolerate, differences across diverse religious, cultural, racial and gender groups

(Gutmann, 1994), Rorty can be said to expect that the American youngsters will

learn this civic virtue by conforming to institutional convention and social

practice, rather than by acquiring learned moral consciousness… if they turned

out to be liberals at all as high-school graduates in Rorty’s sense, they would

respect or tolerate differences across various cultural or religious groups, not by

virtue of understanding another group’s perspective as reflecting a moral point of

view that can potentially and legitimately challenge their own moral outlook, but

out of their commitment to social convention, or of pragmatic convenience, or, at

worst, out of mere moral indifference. (p. 356)

In terms of a making statement about what Rorty is suggesting about the current function of secondary education, Kwak is incorrect. Rorty does not say that high school alone will forge moral attitudes in students. Rorty, rather, sees pre-college education as an opportunity for students to learn about the cultural status quo, so to speak, so that they may critically reflect upon it as they continue their education. Kwak is trapped in his failure to see the difference between recommendations and descriptions; Kwak thinks that Rorty is satisfied with the function of the high schools and that Rorty is championing the current arrangement. As I’ve said, however, Rorty’s descriptions of the differentiating and socializing functions of higher and lower education amount to just that— descriptions.

Furthermore, in the above passage, Kwak sounds a lot like Allan Bloom, who worries that students coming to college are likely to be morally adrift relativists who embrace the mantra “live and let live” but do not have any interest, or intellectual ability, to engage other cultures critically. Superficially, Kwak is right if one assumes that students are supposed to learn to be good liberals only from social habits that are interpreted, watered down, and transmitted by committee-ruled public school curricula; students may thus be morally disadvantaged. But this is not what Rorty is suggesting, and

Kwak would have a stronger argument than he does if he didn’t neglect the following two

items. One, like Beatham, Kwak mistakenly assumes that Rorty is trying to prescribe a system of education with two distinct approaches: one in which students are taught to absorb and regurgitate what they are told, and one in which they are taught to begin thinking for themselves. But, as I’ve said, Rorty is not trying to prescribe—only describe—a system of education. None of what Rorty says in his discussions about education as socialization and individuation limits primary and secondary education to learning the status quo, as Kwak, Beatham, and others in the field have suggested. Two, by misinterpreting what Rorty says in describing the two halves of education, Kwak does not allow any room for a literary, educational culture wherein students across all levels of schooling engage not only moral but also pragmatic questions about how to conduct themselves; such a culture could be extended and expanded through primary, secondary, and college-level education. A literary education can challenge students at all levels to engage cultural conventions, reflect on them, and begin to form their own opinions about the world in which they find themselves. Through literary education, students can reformulate their ideas about the conventions upon which their culture operates and discover, as Kwak recommends, ways that unfamiliar groups’ attitudes might influence their own. Novels, memoirs, and biographies, for example, all contain divergent moral outlooks that can help shape one’s attitudes—a point Kwak fails to acknowledge.

While missing the importance of literary study in Rorty’s descriptions, Kwak worries that there can be no source of morality in Rorty’s anti-foundationalist world.

Kwak is counting on an instinct in humans—one might call it human nature—to search for unchanging, fundamental knowledge that leads to moral conduct. As we’ve seen, literature for Rorty is one of the things that help us understand each other, develop

empathies for ways of thinking other than our own, and become more sensitive and objectionable to cruelty than we would be otherwise; he doesn’t believe in human nature as a fixed, predetermined state of being, and he doesn’t require a morality outside of thick descriptions of human experience. Kwak (2004), however, does not address Rorty’s literary source of morality, and wonders:

What makes the ironist worry about whether his/her language is the ‘wrong’

language in the first place?; What is the source of the ironist’s doubt? What

motivates the ironist continually to doubt his/her present description? Rorty would

respond by saying that what motivates his ironist to be so anxious and doubtful

about himself/herself is the realization that every final vocabulary is historically

and culturally contingent. And Rorty might continue to reply that this anxiety

could be overcome or dealt with only by our celebrating the contingency of our

final vocabulary by the endless reinvention of a new vocabulary. (p. 354)

While Kwak produces reasonable speculation about what Rorty might say, he doesn’t appreciate that literary study is a significant source, not only of doubt, but of moral instruction and the development of final vocabularies. When reading a captivating novel one is, at times, compelled to see things from other perspectives—sometimes from a surprising perspective. We more readily challenge and revise our attitudes when we recognize that there are alternate ways of thinking about things and/or what is happening around us. We see humans at their best and worst in literature. We see our own potential for good and evil. While Kwak (2004) wants metaphysical reconciliation among competing worldviews, fueled by “awakened metaphysical desire, the desire to make sense of the world one lives in” (p. 358), Rorty wants people to recognize shared values

across various final vocabularies that are, in part, built upon engagement with literary works. Furthermore Rorty, unlike Kwak and Beatham, celebrates metaphors that add to rich community narratives while respecting individualism.

Patricia Rohrer echoes the criticisms of both Beatham and Kwak. She, too, misinterprets Rorty’s description of the split between college and K through 12 education as prescriptive rather than descriptive. Rohrer (2000) calls Rorty’s description of the educational split an “educational scheme” (p. 58) which, as I’ve said, is misleading.

Rohrer worries, along with Kwak and Bloom, that students come to college without any moral grounding. Like Beatham and Kwak, she makes no mention of the moral function of literary works in college and college preparatory schooling. Rohrer (2000) asks: “In terms of Rorty’s account of the virtues of the liberal ironist… how can pre-college education sow the seeds of passionate commitment—first to the democratic virtues, later to those beliefs worth dying for held by the liberal ironist?” (p. 57). To answer the first part of the question, Rorty would say (qua ironist) that “the democratic virtues” are what western cultures invent; while Rohrer seems to think the “virtues” equate to Truth, Rorty sees them as contingent ways of describing political arrangements. To the second part of

Rohrer’s question, Rorty thinks that one important way students come to a “passionate commitment” to ideas, both public and private, is through engagement with literature.

Rohrer worries, along with others, that without an explicit, moral connection between the private self (i.e. the self that is focused on self creation) and the public self (i.e. the part of the self concerned with others in the community), democracy will suffer. Rorty believes that such a connection is unnecessary, and that literary study can help both private creation and public awareness.

Rorty anticipates objections of the kind leveled by Beatham, Kwak, and Rohrer.

In the same chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity in which he delineates the qualities of the liberal ironist and the place of the ironist within the public/private split, he outlines the differences between the ironist and the metaphysician. Without going into detail about everything I said about that chapter, it is sufficient now to say that Rorty

(1989) thinks that the “social glue holding together the ideal liberal society” (p. 84) equates to the idea that each individual wants private space to create herself, and that the

“point of social organization” (p. 84) is that each person has the space to build a final vocabulary and has the freedom to operate within that space. To Rorty (1989), Kwak and

Rohrer would fall within the “metaphysician” camp; that is, they seem to “think that liberal political freedoms require some consensus about what is universally human” (p.

84). Consequently, Rorty says, metaphysicians will think that the “[social] glue is just not thick enough—that the (predominantly) metaphysical rhetoric of public life in the democracies is essential to the continuation of free institutions” (p. 85). Rorty anticipates, too, that metaphysicians would object to his descriptions of the role of the liberal ironist within the public/private split on grounds that “it is psychologically impossible to be a liberal ironist… and have no metaphysical beliefs about what all human beings have in common” (p. 85). In other words, metaphysicians may argue that one must realize what all humans have in common that sets them aside from the beasts of the field and forest in order to work against human suffering. Rorty’s response is that a liberal ironist falls short of metaphysical standards because “she cannot claim that adopting her redescription of yourself or your situation makes you better able to conquer the forces which are marshaled against you” (p. 91)—a claim that a metaphysician would make. Irony, Rorty

believes, does not exclude a person from being a liberal, as some would claim; the choice of whether or not to be an ironist is a private matter. Furthermore, Rorty believes that it is not necessary for the ironist to believe that redescription has the power to transform social institutions; that is, redescription can also be a private matter.

Insofar as Kwak and Rohrer are metaphysicians, we can say that they’re looking for more than a literary philosophy of education. They’re looking for something deeper, a

“stronger glue,” to use Rorty’s metaphor. Literary criticism, and the potential it has for guiding our conduct, is not enough for them to ignore the need for a binding, common human nature that results in public solidarity. As I said above, Beatham seems to accept

Rorty’s anti-foundationalism. Beatham is not interested in metaphysical grounding; he’s interested in celebrating the community over the individual in a postmodern culture.

Beatham sees potential in Rorty, insofar as he is a champion of the post-modern mind, but he is disappointed that Rorty does not step up for the cause, so to speak. Beatham wants Rorty to be more radical, but Rorty simply is not radical in that sense. Thus,

Beatham (1991) feels that Rorty “hamstrings the postmodern future” (p. 41). It is unfortunate that Beatham’s criticisms do not allow space for Rorty’s ideas about the significance of literature to education. Beatham, as I’ve said, is interested in acts of community, and Rorty likely would be an advocate for this kind of thinking, given his interest in social welfare. I’m not sure Rorty would find much objectionable in Beatham, but I see no evidence that Rorty is “only interested in having children learn the stories our ancestors told and believed” (1991, p. 48), as Beatham claims. Rorty is interested, rather, in building new narratives for our time and spinning them off of the well-worn stories of the past.

Alven Nieman, in his criticism on Rorty, falls somewhere in between Beatham and Kwak in terms of their stances on Rorty’s liberal ironism. Nieman is committed to

Rorty’s ironism but is not prepared to give up being a metaphysician, in Rorty’s sense of

“metaphysician.” Nieman is sympathetic to the idea that one of the goals of liberal education should be development of the ironist. He is curious about the impact of Rorty’s ideas for education, particularly regarding what happens when education no longer takes the transmittal of Truth as its goal. Nieman sketches out what he believes an education that prepares one for ironism looks like. In doing so he adds his own interesting dimension to Rorty’s educational split: Nieman describes the role of the high school, placed as it is between primary school and college, in the formation of the ironist.

Nieman (1991) says the following of secondary schools:

Since its predecessor [primary school] markets certainty and its successor

[college] markets irony, perhaps the most reasonable thing to say about it is that it

should be a hybrid, dispensing certainties as it makes possible, prepares the way

for, the ironic education to come. What kind of education could accomplish this

task? After persons have been “made,” after basic skills (reading, writing,

arithmetic, for example) have been achieved, what should happen? I would

suggest that an appropriate form of such education would, ideally, deepen

students’ sense of who they are by exhibiting to them the traditions of thought and

action that have laid the ground, so to speak, for the creation of the historical and

social context in which they live. To study the history of one’s civilization and

culture, given the pragmatic view of self as socially constructed, is first of all to

come to a better understanding of who one is. (p. 376)

One can see a number of reasons why Nieman’s suggestions make sense; high school should be a “hybrid,” and one of the best ways to walk the line between hard facts and values is literary criticism. Teaching literary criticism to high school students, as part of the literary philosophy of education I’m suggesting, would be one way to start the process of helping students learn to question the culture and build irony. I am not necessarily arguing for a great books curriculum, nor do I believe in defining “a canon” as such. Any one of a number of novels, short stories, even poems and non-fiction could be used, by a skilled teacher, to model ironic thinking. That is to say, an experienced teacher is well positioned to demonstrate how one might develop an ironic, private vocabulary based on interpretations of literary works. To be sure, teaching irony could be dangerous; no one wants a band of aimless, adolescent ironist heretics—rebels without an intellectual cause—disrupting the classroom. High school students, however, do not get enough exposure to good literature in the classroom, and if nothing else, an educational culture that helps students learn to think critically about authority is better than an education that does not. Moreover, since students may become dangerously heretical or anti-social on their own, it would be better if teachers helped students become well- informed literary heretics rather than cultural clones with no direction or guidance.

While Nieman does not talk about the use of literary criticism in the high school classroom, he does value literature in education. Following his sketch of the role of the high school, Nieman (1991) goes on to construct an argument that attempts to reconcile metaphysics and Rortyan irony, what he calls an “ironic metaphysics” (p. 380), in which metaphysical institutions are subject to irony. I don’t need to venture too far into

Niemen’s ironic metaphysics here; it would be tangential to my project. What needs to be

said is that while Nieman doesn’t want to abandon metaphysics altogether, he thinks, as does Rorty, that literature is an important component of liberal education. Nieman (1996) sides with Rorty, claiming against Rorty’s detractors that works of narrative literature hold the same value for the public as works of critical theory by thinkers like Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. Nieman writes: “It is tempting to argue… that Rorty's philosophy must be insensitive to the role power, especially economic power, plays in our politics….

But what exactly can the ‘critical theorist’… tell us about such power that a novelist or journalist can’t?” (p. 127). Nieman is one of the few scholars published in the field of philosophy of education who speaks directly to the importance of literature in Rorty’s educational writings. Nieman, however, is defending Rorty by parroting his claim that literary criticism, broadly defined, is important to cross-cultural understanding; in other words, he does not put forth anything like a literary philosophy of education—that is, he doesn’t add much to what Rorty has to say about the role of literature in our culture.

Rob Reich (1996), while he doesn’t add anything specific to the conversation on

Rorty’s views of literary criticism, contributes an article to the body of philosophy of education literature on Rorty that deals with questions central to my project and that underscores some of my interpretations. That is, Reich wonders what education, generally speaking, would look like if we take a Rortyan view of epistemology. Reich understands that Rortyan anti-foundationalism places a heavy burden on educators to help students in their process of self-creation, especially if one believes with Rorty that there is no human nature as such. Reich also criticizes Rorty for too narrowly characterizing the ironist. As I stated in chapter three, in Rorty’s vision of a perfect society, the public (i.e. the non-intellectuals) would not engage literary criticism—a move

that amounts to a mistake, especially if one believes in the goal of developing more

Rortyan liberals and ironists. Reich thinks that the limitations Rorty creates about who can and cannot be an ironist amounts to elitism. Recall, though, that Rorty doesn’t think it would be desirable to have a culture full of ironists. And although Reich thinks Rorty is too restrictive in describing who can become an ironist, he agrees with Rorty that it is best not to develop a culture full of ironists. Further, Reich surpasses Rorty in imagining the potential dangers of a fully ironic culture. Reich fears the possibility of a culture in which a person with great political power might try to impose his or her private desires on the public against its will.

What Reich doesn’t do, like his contemporaries in the field, is engage the literary component of Rorty’s philosophy. Instead, Reich criticizes Rorty for the same things other scholars criticize him for; he says that Rorty, in his pre-college/college educational split, limits socialization to the “lower” half and ironism to the “upper” half. Like

Beatham, he also thinks that Rorty is mired in dualisms—e.g. the public/private and educational splits—and he says that Dewey would reject Rorty’s educational recommendations, in part based on dualisms, and in part based on what Reich perceives as an elitism that is incongruous with Rorty’s educational writings. But as I’ve said several times, Rorty is not in the business of making educational recommendations, and it is incorrect to label him a dualist. More pointedly, it is too easy to call Rorty a dualist and dismiss him. Rorty thinks there are two separate halves of education, but he does not claim that they are necessarily distinct or that they are of two separate types (as a dualist might say). Rorty claims that, as the educational system in the United States has been divided between the political left and right, it has taken on the particular roles of

individuation and socialization, respectively. Rorty would not say that there is a vivid, clean break between higher and lower education. He is not arguing for a dualistic educational system, and he is not saying that there are two categories of education that don’t have anything in common. By separating an entity into two halves, like education or one’s liberal and ironic selves, Rorty seeks to work out ideas—he’s conducting a thought experiment, not preaching from a personal educational manifesto.

Unlike Beatham and Reich, Kenneth Wain (2008) doesn’t charge Rorty with dualism, but concurs, rather, with Rorty’s description of the educational split. Wain, in an article in which he contrasts the viewpoints of Alisdair McIntyre and Rorty on the split between pre-college and college education, questions whether or not the liberal university, as opposed to the vocational college, is sustainable in its present form, and he wonders whether or not the university can do the job of individuation as Rorty suggests.

Drawing on Lyotard, Wain suggests that the university professor is becoming tangential to the changing mission of the university itself; he says that powerful, commercial forces are redefining the role of the research institution. For Wain (2008):

The idea of the universal intellectual… is out of fashion in our post-ideological

world, someone nobody listens to any more, while professors, as Lyotard (1999)

pointed out… are also a threatened breed. The figure of the professor is

challenged by multi-skilled teams of experts skilled in packaging learning and

delivering it efficiently to suit the taste of their clients and transmitting them via

the new communications technologies. (p. 110)

For Wain, universities are starting to favor faculty with technical expertise, who help drive the economy through research, over liberal arts professors, who help teach the

formation of the self—the Rortyan/Gadamerian Bildung. If, in fact, professors are being marginalized, Wain (2008) suggests that Rorty

needs to show how… the ironist is an indispensable protagonist in the narrative of

progress and self-fulfillment that drives the postmodern Western world to justify

the future of liberal, non-vocational universities. Otherwise self-creation will need

to be sought elsewhere than at the university, and otherwise than through the

teaching of professors. (p. 110)

Furthermore, Wain identifies cultural pressures that affect lower, pre-college education.

Wain (2008) asks “whether the learning society we live in, structured by the course materials of the experts in the virtual universities, or unstructured and uncoordinated on

Internet and the media, has not… compromised the very possibility of education in our times?” (p. 111). Wain (2008) goes on:

Rorty suggests that the best general educators are the journalists, historians,

novelists, artists, film makers, and so on with their narratives. While the more

literary philosophers, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger could contribute

differently as exemplars to be imitated and (as Nietzsche suggests) superseded in

the very process of self-creation. Self-creation may be the only way open to us to

recasting education in the postmodern world. (p. 111)

So how might self-creation, for Wain, help fix the problems with “the learning society we live in?” Wain thinks that, perhaps, a strong program of self-creation may help a student survive in the wilderness, as it were. Wain draws a thin, albeit important, link between what he sees as the challenges within education and the potential solutions—the products of the “best general educators,” that is, literature and literary study. For Wain (2008),

self-creation through engagement with literature can counteract the “infiltration of our schooling systems and universities by the culture of performativity plus a mass media culture” (p. 112). One would like to see Wain flesh out the connection he recognizes between literary criticism and self-creation, but he only scores the surface. A more thorough, explicit description of how literature can affect self-creation is in order for

Wain, and it would help further define the literary philosophy of education I’m suggesting.

Richard Smith, while he does not mention literary criticism or the role of literary criticism in self-creation as Wain does, makes an important distinction about philosophy that gets at the impact of Rorty’s ideas for education and underscores Rorty’s metaphilosophy. Smith (2009) says that one type of philosophy seeks to create new texts within the discipline of philosophy—what we might refer to as “academic” philosophy— and another type that looks at philosophy “as a matter for dialogue or conversation” (p.

438). The two types of philosophy Smith (2009) describes sound similar to Rorty’s systematic and edifying philosophies, “the former being the province of philosophers who aim to solve problems so that they can move progressively on to solve more problems… the latter seeing philosophy… primarily as the enterprise of continuing conversations of an educative kind” (p. 438). There is an important connection to be drawn here between Smith’s “conversations of an educative kind” that, Smith says, have no definite structure or approach, and Rorty’s insistence on the importance of literary criticism. For what is Rortyan literary criticism but a conversation with texts that begins without an established method? What one learns from dialogue with others one can, similarly, learn through serious literary criticism. The elimination of the search for

foundational knowledge—truth as Truth—leaves space for all types of conversations; these conversations, Smith and Rorty might say, form the core of education at its best.

The last work I will review here is a book by René Vincente Arcilla entitled For the Love of Perfection: Richard Rorty and Liberal Education (1995). Arcilla’s book is of interest to my project for three reasons. First of all, Arcilla’s interest in Rorty stems from motives similar to mine; Arcilla explores, in a unique way, what the consequences of

Rorty’s ideas are for philosophy of education. Moreover, the broad structure of Arcilla’s book is, coincidentally, similar to the structure of my dissertation. Arcilla starts with a review of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and, as is the case with many scholars in the field of philosophy of education writing about Rorty, he focuses heavily on

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity—as we’ve seen, Contingency is a book in which

Rorty talks at length about the liberal ironist and the public/private split. Arcilla does a concise yet convincing job of rehearsing how Rorty moves from criticizing the “Plato to

Nietzsche” tradition of epistemology to the liberal ironist. It is a compact and helpful companion to both Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and

Solidarity.

Arcilla’s (1995) findings, however, differ from mine; he promotes a philosophy of education that focuses on what he calls “morally perfectionist, conversational edification”

(p. 150). In exploring morally perfectionist conversational edification, Arcilla seeks a compromise between Rorty and scholars like Allan Bloom. Bloom promotes a distinctly metaphysical philosophy of education in which the broadest goal of education is tied to epistemological concerns; Bloom would require that students learn foundational principles that help them understand, as Arcilla (1995) puts it, “what is fundamental to

living a purposeful life” (p. 12). Arcilla sides with Dewey and Rorty, who argue that the search for universal, metaphysical principles as absolute foundations of our understanding is potentially authoritarian and dangerous. Arcilla, however, while sympathetic to Rorty, thinks that Rorty is too quick to abandon metaphysics in his philosophy of education. Arcilla (1995) proposes an approach to education that, Arcilla claims, departs from Rorty’s “conversational edification” in two ways:

First… [it] stresses the edifying power not of irony, but of aporetic questioning.

This questioning is metaphysical insofar as it evokes the perfect reason for why

things are the way they are…. This stress on aporetic questioning is linked to a

second difference…. Rorty views the aim of conversational edification to be the

formation of liberal ironists… I argued that such an edification could succeed

only at the price of also forming antagonistic cultures. The kind of conversational

edification I am developing here, on the contrary, moderates cultural antagonism

by qualifying any culture’s claim to confident and authoritative knowledge or

value. (p. 150)

Arcilla worries that a culture of liberal ironists would too easily break apart into factions; for Arcilla, a society living by Rorty’s standards would have no compelling reasons to compromise and work toward resolving differences because, to use Rorty’s metaphor once more, the “glue” is not thick enough.

The second thing about Arcilla’s book that is of relevance to my project— something that underscores a major thread of the current chapter—is Arcilla’s affirmation that scholars have taken Rorty’s technique of playing two sides of an issue against one another too literally. Regarding Rorty’s public/private split, Arcilla (1995) writes:

“[Rorty’s] critics have misunderstood him if they think that he conceives of the separation in black-and-white terms, for the purposes of making a point of theoretical principle” (p. 124). The same can be said for the college/pre-college split. Arcilla would also reject Beatham’s claims that Rorty is stuck in dualisms. He realizes that Rorty’s broad generalizations are useful tools to get intellectual work accomplished, not hard and fast rules to be analyzed by formal methods.

Third, Arcilla models the use of literature to teach. I am taking the liberty here of treating Arcilla’s book as a teaching tool—a type of literature in itself—which has the purpose of helping educate the reader about Arcilla’s approach to Rorty’s work. Also, unlike most of the other analyses of Rorty in the field of philosophy of education reviewed herein, Arcilla does address literary criticism directly. In a short article published before For the Love of Perfection, Arcilla (1990) affirms the power of literary study for education:

Indeed there are ready models of how to respond for better or for worse to the

ongoing ways we relate our lives to literature; a Rortyan philosophy of education

would accordingly focus the conversational edification of students and teachers

on narrative texts. Unlike a lot of literary criticism, however, we would study such

texts in the end not to map them definitively but to inspire ourselves to take

charge of our own irrepressibly adventurous narratives which… could be equally

edifying to their authors. (p. 39)

Arcilla (1995) creates a fictional character named Alceste—named so “because his character so resembles that of the title figure in Moliére’s The Misanthrope” (p. 134)—in order to make a point about “conversational edification.” Arcilla quotes from The

Misanthrope to illustrate the connection between Moliére’s Alceste and his own version of Alceste; Arcilla writes at length about Moliére’s Alceste, his attitudes toward schooling, and how philosophy might “save” Alceste from his own melancholy and cynical outlook. Arcilla skillfully draws on the rich characters of Moliére’s play and educates the reader using a thought experiment based on a work of literature. Arcilla’s

Alceste is brooding, difficult, and jaded; Arcilla’s point is that a student like Alceste challenges the teacher to learn from the student and, as Arcilla (1995) puts it, “recalls [the teacher] to the endless, characteristically adult adventure of liberal learning” (p. 149). So while Arcilla does not explicitly mention Rorty’s views on literary criticism, he pays a high compliment to literary methods of teaching by using The Misanthrope to educate the reader.

Furthermore, Arcilla is impressed by Stanley Cavell, who writes a letter addressed to Moliére’s Alceste in The Misanthrope; Arcilla (1995) pushes the metaphor further than

Cavell and uses Cavell’s letter as an illustration of an “educationally constructive response to Alceste” (p. 136). So Arcilla, like Rorty, clearly takes literature and literary criticism seriously as a powerful method of teaching. Arcilla uses a well-known narrative by an eminent playwright to highlight the emotional and professional challenges a teacher might face and, according to my interpretation, demonstrates what a literary philosophy of education might look like.

Arcilla’s use of Moliére leads me back to a question I raised at the beginning of this chapter: why have scholars in the field, for the most part, ignored Rorty’s ideas about literary criticism? Those who haven’t completely ignored it, like Patricia Rohrer, seem to think that Rorty’s ideas about literary criticism contribute to what others have called his

“relativism.” Rohrer (2000) writes: “Rorty acknowledges Kierkegaard as a significant ironic predecessor. In this vein, they both take a literary approach to the pursuit of meaning, one that entails individual engagement with a text, resulting in as many

‘meanings’ as there are individuals” (p. 61). This, however, is not the approach Rorty was talking about, and the charge of relativism against pragmatists has been well documented and defended; I won’t go into it here.

So why have scholars in the field largely ignored Rorty’s discussion of literary criticism and education? First of all, philosophers of education are not literary critics in the disciplinary sense; simply put, literary criticism is not a field that they get paid to write in or about. Secondly, scholars in the field may have left alone Rorty’s ideas about literary criticism because his ideas could be viewed as uncontroversial—although I haven’t found any evidence of this. However, a literary philosophy of education, in

Rortyan terms, is controversial because of its anti-foundationalism; for Rorty, one needs works of literature as philosophical guides in a world without absolutes. Held up against the absence of Truth, literature fills the void. It is surprising that scholars in philosophy of education have not challenged Rorty’s ideas on literary criticism, since some have so vehemently rejected his anti-foundationalism. A claim that there is no benefit to seeking

Truth, as we’ve seen, is highly provocative, and it has earned Rorty a great deal of criticism, both favorable and unfavorable.

Finally, if we view the scholars discussed in this chapter as liberal metaphysicians, in a Rortyan sense, we may get a better picture of why they have chosen to overlook Rorty’s ideas about literature and literary criticism. Recall that, for Rorty, a liberal is someone for whom cruelty is the utmost wrongdoing, and that the

metaphysician is someone who is looking for the “right” final vocabulary that maps onto reality. A metaphysician is not interested in the power of redescription through conversation, and the idea of literary criticism taking place of deep, Platonic Truths is likely to make a metaphysician uncomfortable. A rejection of Rorty’s anti- foundationalism entails a rejection of Rorty’s ideas about literature replacing metaphysical foundations; as we’ve seen in this chapter, scholars in the field of philosophy of education are not content to take the leap, with Rorty, from metaphysical grounding of belief as Truth to interpretation of literary texts as truth.

Summary

Rorty’s ideas about literature and education can be interpreted as part of a literary philosophy of education. A culture that values the interpretation, and reinterpretation, of literature is preferable to a culture that does not. There is much to be written about literary philosophies of education and their potential benefits—much more than can be written in a dissertation. Unfortunately, many philosophers of education have mistaken

Rorty for a dualist with dangerous ideas for education while, at the same time, missing the rich potential of literary criticism for education. Some scholars in the field, like Wain and Arcilla, have recognized the potential of literary models of education. The crossroads of literature and philosophy of education should be further explored. Additional models of using literature to teach, like Arcilla’s example of Moliére, are needed in order to advance the use of literature and literary study in the classroom.

Chapter Five: Conclusion—The Hypothetical Rorty

Karl Hostetler of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Curriculum and

Instruction13 delivers a provoking anecdote, quoted below, of unsuccessful collaboration between his university and a local school system. Hostetler (1992) says that the

University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL)

[had] been negotiating with a nearby school district about establishing a

partnership to work on such things as pre-service and inservice teacher education,

joint field research projects, and curriculum development. [Hostetler] attended a

meeting at which a representative of this school district explained the district’s

point of view on these and related matters. By the end of the meeting, two things

seemed pretty clear to [Hostetler]. First… the district’s view was that this would

not be aimed at wrestling with questions of educational purposes. [UNL’s] role

would be as advisor on means to achieving the ends the district had set. Second, it

was clear that these ends were stated essentially in the vocabulary of “teacher

effectiveness,” with its emphasis on tangible “student outcomes.” This is a

technicist vocabulary that is inadequate for the task of conceiving educational

purposes and policies, a task that requires a moral vocabulary first and foremost.

(p. 286)

Hostetler also gives his interpretation of Rorty’s attitude toward collaborations like the

13 According to the UNL website (http://cehs15.unl.edu/fsinfo/cehs_pull.php?UserName=khostetler&What=profexperience&Department=Te aching,%20Learning%20and%20Teacher%20Education&), Hostetler is still at the Center (as of 5/24/2014). 93

one he describes above; he thinks that Rorty can be read as both contributing to, and creating cynicism about, the “possibility and desirability of collaboration” (p. 286) between colleges and local schools. Hostetler’s reading of Rorty, however, is peripheral to the purposes of the current chapter. His brief narrative about curriculum management, rather, serves as a point of departure for the following discussion, what I’m calling “the

Hypothetical Rorty.” In the following, closing chapter, I will consider some present-day problems in higher education as I see them from the vantage point of a college administrator and advisor of undergraduate students at a large, public research institution.14 I will also consider what a Rortyan might say about such problems, especially in terms of a literary philosophy of education. I will close with some final thoughts and a call for further research.

The Problem of Assessment

The vocabulary used to construct and evaluate curricula that Hostetler criticizes— terms like “teacher effectiveness” and “student outcomes”—is the language of

“assessment.” What Hostetler is getting at is that there are elements of assessment that do not have much to do with education, or philosophy of education, as defined in this dissertation. Furthermore, assessment is incongruous with the literary philosophy of education I’m suggesting. The term “assessment” is awkward because it is often mistaken by college faculty and administrators to mean grading of student work. While

“assessment” may normatively refer to evaluation of student performance in a course, the term “assessment” also refers to an administrative process of curriculum and course

14 Since December 2003, I have served as an academic advisor at The Ohio State University and, in the latter part of my tenure, as an advising administrator. For obvious reasons, I use Ohio State in some of my examples, with the understanding that similar issues exist in other U.S. institutions. 94

management; this is the referent for “assessment” I will use in the present chapter. The language and culture of assessment have become entrenched in both pre-college and higher education. Generally speaking, assessment is intended to make institutions of higher learning accountable for what goes on in the classroom and for what students know once they have completed a course, a program of study, or a degree. Furthermore, structured, carefully documented assessment practices are one, among many, means of maintaining national accreditation for colleges, universities, and degree programs.

Accreditation is part of an administrative process, coordinated by the United States

Department of Education, that is put in place to manage standards for institutions of higher education. If an institution or department does not conform to a set of standards defined by the accrediting body, it can be, in some cases, punished by losing accreditation. The stakes involved, especially at the institutional level, are high; for example, a university can lose access to federal financial aid if not accredited by a national body.15

Assessment procedures focus on collecting data about “student achievement,” however it is defined in various professionalized academic disciplines. In some academic fields, learning goals and student outcomes are fairly straightforward; in music performance, for example, a competent student of the double bass should be able to perform solos and symphonies with few errors—the performance should be in tune, played at the proper tempo, played with the right tone, et cetera. The expectations for the student can be made clear, and performances are relatively easy to judge for the

15 For more on national accreditation, see http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/. For an example of an accrediting body, see http://www.nwccu.org.

experienced faculty member. Thus, a music department could report, fairly easily, on how many of its double bass students meet assessment standards. Similarly, assessment is relatively simple in fields of quantitative inquiry in which students are expected to work on problem sets and achieve standard, logical outcomes.

Many assessment learning goals and outcomes, however, are vague—especially in the humanities and social sciences—and university faculty are made to retrofit courses to sets of arbitrary assessment standards. General education courses—those that make up the liberal arts portion of undergraduate degree programs at places like The Ohio State

University, for example—are assessed according to how well they meet faculty committee-established learning outcomes and goals. Below, I’ve cited the assessment standards, according to the College of Arts and Sciences Curriculum and Assessment

Operations Manual 2013 – 2014 (2013), for literature courses at Ohio State as an illustration of assessment language (my underlining added for visual clarity).

Expected Learning Outcomes:

1. Students analyze, interpret, and critique significant literary works.

2. Through reading, discussing, and writing about literature, students appraise and

evaluate the personal and social values of their own and other cultures.

Goals:

Students evaluate significant works of art in order to develop capacities for

aesthetic and historical response and judgment; interpretation and evaluation;

critical listening, reading, seeing, thinking, and writing; and experiencing the arts

and reflecting on that experience. (p. 36)

The problem here is not the idea of goals; that is, the problem is not that the accrediting bodies, the university, or the individual departments that offer literature courses have developed goals for learning. Philosophy of education worthy of the name considers what it is we intend to accomplish through education—aspirations like helping students find ways of interpreting and navigating their culture—so I don’t mean to say that goals in general are unimportant. There are at least two major problems, however, with assessment as conducted at Ohio State and other universities. First, faculty members generally do not develop the content of their courses a priori to align with assessment goals. Many times, courses that already exist are submitted to a curriculum committee in order to be blessed with General Education status, and faculty—and departmental staff— are made to articulate, in detail, how a course meets each goal and learning outcome for the relevant General Education category. Thus, one can see how assessment amounts to an artificial process of retrofitting courses to meet subjective goals.

Second, the assessment vocabulary itself is flawed. To “analyze, interpret, and critique,” to “appraise and evaluate”—these are tasks, not learning outcomes worthy of being held as standards of judgment. The so-called learning outcomes are descriptions of what happens in a literature course, and they amount to circular predictions, as if to say:

“the course expectation is that the student will learn everything prescribed in the course.”

The goals, then, are extensions of the learning outcomes, describing additional tasks students are expected to perform in a literature course. But what counts as a “significant” literary work? And what evidence could a student give that he or she had, earnestly, evaluated his or her own values against those of another culture? One can imagine the difficulty, and futility, of proving that a literature course teaches students to learn the

things listed in the assessment outcomes and goals cited above. One can also imagine a course that, on paper, meets the goals and learning outcomes for a General Education course—according to whomever happens to be on the curriculum committee at the time the course is reviewed—but fails, in practice, to help educate the student to engage literature in any meaningful way (whatever subjective value “engage” might have for assessors or accreditors). To be sure, there are outstanding literature courses not blessed with General Education status that do not address any of the stated goals and objectives of assessment; such courses nonetheless give students rich, literary educational experiences that help them find empathies with other human beings and better understand the human condition, in the Rortyan sense of building final vocabularies. Furthermore, courses are sometimes geared to meet General Education standards merely for enrollment purposes, rather than educational purposes; academic departments know that some students are more likely to take courses that “count” for something, like a General

Education category, than to take courses that are merely electives.

The assessment language governing literature courses at Ohio State is just one example, among many possible examples, of assessment standards being upheld for the sake of the process of assessment. If an academic department can prove that its courses and programs meet assessment standards, it will keep administrators satisfied, no matter to what degree the standards fail to provide educationally useful guidelines. And the flimsier the assessment language is, the easier it is to fit a course to the language and justify to the curricular authorities that the course meets stated goals and outcomes; thus, there is an incentive to keep assessment language the way it is—vague and ambiguous.

Measuring learning outcomes and goals is also problematic in philosophical, educational terms. Even if assessment outcomes and goals were to be well defined and one could somehow prove that courses and students are meeting each stated purpose, the measurement of assessment outcomes and goals does not tell administrators or teachers anything useful. That is, what is important in education, especially for a Rortyan, literary philosophy of education, is not measurable in a material way; what one can measure does not exhaust what is important in education. Assessment outcomes are measured—to the extent they can be measured—in ways that test short-term retention of facts and performance of specific tasks rather than testing the non-material impacts on students’ ideas and attitudes. To put the complaint another way, courses are not assessed according to how students are being socialized for long-term considerations.

Continuing with the example of literature, courses that carry the stamp of an official literature course—and courses that carry any of the other General Education category labels—are assessed at Ohio State using the following methods as described in the College of Arts and Sciences Curriculum and Assessment Operations Manual 2013 –

2014 (2013):

a) Description of the specific methods the faculty will use to demonstrate that the

aggregate of his/her students are achieving the goals and expected learning

outcomes of this [General Education] category. Thus, if the faculty plans to use

direct measures such as embedded questions on exams, pre- and post-tests, or a

particular essay assignment, provide some examples. If the faculty plans on using

indirect measures such as opinion surveys or student self-evaluations, give

concrete examples as well. (Ideally, a plan should include both direct and indirect

measures.)

b) Explanation of the level of student achievement expected: What will the faculty

define as “success” in terms of student achievement of learning outcomes? For

example, for an embedded question, he/she might define “success” as a certain

percentage of students answering the question correctly. For an essay, he/she

might define success as a particular average overall score based on a scoring

rubric.

c) Description of follow-up/feedback process: Once the faculty collects the data

on student achievement, how will he/she use this information to make course

improvements? How will the information be archived? (p. 34)

The manual also mentions indirect methods of assessment—like consultation with former students and employers—that might give someone conducting the assessment an idea about whether or not a student retained what he or she learned. For the most part, however, courses are assessed according to work students produced during a course, tests students took during or following a course, and surveys of students about how well they felt the course met its stated objectives and goals. The data amounts to a snapshot of how students performed in and around the term they took the course and, moreover, a qualitative study on students’ personal views about how well the course met the goals and learning outcomes stated in the syllabus. Again, collecting data focused on “teacher effectiveness” and “student outcomes,” defined in such vulgar terms, is inadequate for educational purposes, Rortyan or otherwise. Assessment does not give educators or administrators an adequate idea of the value of education for students; it is merely a

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measure of conformity to assessment standards. Assessment practices add little, if any, value to college courses, especially in terms of a literary philosophy of education that stresses the importance of building and understanding narratives. By imposing vulgar and ambiguous assessment practices, the message from the administration to the faculty is:

“we really don’t care what you are doing in your courses, just as long as your course meets assessment standards.”

A Rortyan Reply to Assessment

Faced with current practices of assessment at places like Ohio State, a Rortyan would reject the epistemological foundationalism embedded in assessment practices. To return to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty (1979) says that the idea that there is an ideal language that describes the world as it “really is” is dangerous for education:

But the philosophical fiction that such a vocabulary is on the tips of our tongues

is, from an educational point of view, disastrous. It forces us to pretend that we

can split ourselves up into knowers of true sentences on the one hand and

choosers of lives or actions or works of art on the other. These artificial

diremptions make it impossible to get the notion of edification into focus. Or,

more exactly, they tempt us to think of edification as having nothing to do with

the rational faculties which are employed in normal discourse. (p. 364)

A Rortyan approach would blur the lines between fact and value that Rorty describes above. For a Rortyan, there are consequences of holding on to the enlightenment tradition of viewing truth as correspondence to reality, and these consequences have an impact on education; they can also affect the recommendations of philosophers of education.

Assessment practices create an “ideal language” as Rorty describes above, couched in

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terms of goals and outcomes, that university courses and programs are supposed to help uncover. As we’ve seen, Rorty wants to set aside ambitions to discover “facts”—ideal languages and Platonic forms—and cultivate values instead. A Rortyan, then, if he or she takes seriously the idea that the search for Truth is less important than “edification,” sees the worth of assessment as dubious.

A Rortyan educator would try to move beyond the rote exchange of facts and conventions, past the constraints of assessment practices. Made free of assessment standards, opportunities open up for instructors to teach beyond what it is that every student taking a course in their discipline “should know.” Faculty, moreover, should be trusted to teach the stuff of their fields. Rorty (1999) puts it more strongly:

The question “What should [students] learn in college?” had better go unasked….

Teachers setting their own agendas—putting their individual, lovingly prepared

specialties on display… without regard to any larger end, much less an

institutional plan—is what non-vocational higher education is all about. (p. 125)

Rorty, it should be noted, is writing about an ideal, non-vocational university experience in which students come to college having more or less learned all the “pre-college” information they should have learned in a good high school. Strict curricular outlines may be appropriate for high school courses, a Rortyan might say, but how can we responsibly reevaluate and rethink ideas for our time if university professors are hamstrung by assessment standards? A Rortyan approach would be to move education from discovery to invention while encouraging us to face the idea that possessing knowledge is unimportant if it isn’t malleable or useful. Furthermore, a Rortyan would agree with

Hostetler that a moral vocabulary is in order when we talk about goals for education; a

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good course, for Rorty, would be one that encourages students to think freely, to find areas of common interest and understanding with others, and to develop final vocabularies.

A literary philosophy of education that resonates with Hostetler’s reaction to curriculum management may serve as a possible corrective to the problem of assessment.

We need a moral vocabulary to replace the language of assessment, and a literary philosophy of education allows for a moral approach to education instead of a technical one. A literary philosophy of education utilizes texts that help students reconstruct a historicist narrative of the human condition; it allows students to describe and redescribe their world through reading, writing, and collaborating with other students. A technical philosophy of education, built on assessment, asks: “were the changes in such-and-such major data driven based on assessment goals and expected learning outcomes?” On the other hand, a moral, literary philosophy of education asks: “did we make good intellectual, educational choices in our teaching methods and curricula?” Furthermore, literary criticism and literary study help form long-term ideas and habits that are not detectable by assessment procedures; such ideas and habits cannot be evaluated by assessment methods, especially those that are built on short-term measurements.

Assessment is not what educators worthy of the name want, and it is not what a Rortyan would want. In a word, assessment limits academic freedom.

The Problem of Government Intrusion, Part I: “TAGs”

In 2012, The Ohio State University converted from a quarter calendar to a semester calendar. The State of Ohio required each two and four-year college or university that was on a quarter system to make the switch, in part to facilitate

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transferability of course work among Ohio public institutions. While the calendar change was unpopular with faculty, staff, and students, State government imposition at the curriculum level—also done, in part, in the name of transferability of courses—is far more troubling for the university than the calendar switch was. One way the government inserts itself into higher education curricula is through a set of regulations known as

“TAGs.” The State of Ohio Board of Regents, a nine-member group appointed by the

Governor16 and charged with managing the collective public colleges and universities in

Ohio,17 publishes criteria for a variety of courses that, if taken anywhere in the Ohio

“system” of public colleges and universities, transfer to any other Ohio institution as equivalents. The “Transfer Assurance Guides,” or “TAGs,” operate according to the following parameters (italics in original):

Students are guaranteed the transfer of applicable credits among Ohio’s public

colleges and universities and equitable treatment in the application of credits to

admissions and degree requirements…. Students can complete specified General

Education courses anywhere in the public system as well as many courses in the

degree/major that have been pre-identified for transfer.

(Transfer Assurance Guides (TAGs), 2014)

In Ohio, policymakers have established 13 categories of courses covering the liberal arts and other academic areas (business, health, education, et cetera). For example, the guidelines for American Literature I are described as follows:

16 According to https://www.ohiohighered.org/board, “members of the Board of Regents are appointed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the Senate.” 17 According to http://regents.ohio.gov/transfer/policy/introduction.php, “The Ohio Board of Regents is required by law to coordinate the Ohio institutions of higher education in the development, implementation and improvement of a statewide student credit-hour transfer policy to facilitate student transfer among institutions of higher education.” 104

Outcomes marked with an asterisk are essential and must be taught.

Students will be able to demonstrate an understanding of and/or be able to apply:

1. The historical and cultural context which produces American literature*

2. Techniques used to analyze a text*

3. Accurate critical reading, writing, and discussion of American authors and

movements*

4. Coverage of a substantial portion of the earlier period of American literature up

to the mid-to late-nineteenth century*

(English Transfer Assurance Guide (TAG), 2008)

The Ohio Board of Regents claims that the TAGs “[do] not alter the mission or degree authority of any institution,” and that “the goal of a TAG is to recognize comparable, compatible and equivalent courses at or above the 70% standard of equivalency”

(Guiding Principles for the Transfer Assurance Guides).

There are at least three problems here. The first problem recalls the problem with assessment vocabulary, that is, the language of the learning outcomes in the TAGs is inadequate for educational intentions, especially in terms of a literary philosophy of education. The first two outcomes cited above, along with the fourth, set the bar remarkably low for a college course. The most problematic guideline, however, is the third outcome, which is no less than hostile to intellectual inquiry. To repeat, the outcome states that students should show abilities for “accurate critical reading, writing, and discussion” of a literary work. The idea of “accuracy” in reading, writing, and discussion, however, is incongruous with a literary education that helps students learn to interpret and redescribe their world on their own terms. Are we to accept that there is a prevailing

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way to interpret literature, like some metaphysical, literary truth to be discovered behind each text? If “accuracy” simply means the ability to summarize a plot, then the third outcome may be acceptable for a high school course in which students are learning the basics of literary structure, but not for a college course. Learning outcomes like the ones cited above, written without any apparent relationship to, or consideration of, serious intellectual investigation into academic subject matter, impede academic freedom.

The second problem with the TAGs is that they restrict institutional autonomy.

The TAGs are part of a set of policies meant to create a statewide “system” of colleges and universities in Ohio.18 But measures like the TAGs, put in place to facilitate transfer and streamline students’ paths to degrees, modify institutional standards. Consider the following example. A student takes “American Literature I” at a given community college in Ohio and earns a grade of “C.”19 The student decides, after the first two semesters, to transfer to Ohio State and major in Philosophy. The student submits a transcript to Ohio State, where the credits are evaluated by the Transfer Credit Center.

According to policy set by the State, the course must transfer as “American Literature I” to Ohio State or to any public college or university in the system. No matter whether or not the course the student took looks anything like American Literature I at Ohio State, no matter who taught the course, and no matter the rigor of the educational experience the student had, Ohio State must give equivalent credit. In other words, the course fulfills the same requirement it would if the student took the course at Ohio State. The student would fulfill the general education literature requirement and, if he or she wished to change his

18 For more information about Ohio’s system, see https://www.ohiohighered.org/campuses. 19 Within the past 10 years, Ohio has lowered the standard for transferable grades. Until recently, “C” grades were the lowest transferrable mark. Now, “D” grades from public institutions transfer as well. 106

or her major to English, would likely use the course to fulfill a requirement on the major instead.

For various reasons, many courses at community colleges, while treated by State policy as equivalents at four-year schools, are not, in fact, equal. There are internal standards, set by faculty at the various institutions, for what courses should be, how they should be taught, and by whom. Faculty take the responsibility to create interesting, inspiring, and challenging courses seriously, and what one English department at one university or college values is not necessarily the same as what another English department at another institution values. This is not to say that community colleges do not have good internal standards, but two-year colleges have different and fewer resources and than four-year colleges. Two-year colleges are geared toward awarding associate’s degrees and professional certificates; they operate with mostly adjunct faculty rather than tenured, full-time faculty, and they have different institutional missions than their four-year companions. At any rate, each institution, whether a two or four-year school, is unique, and the autonomy of the school should be maintained.

The third problem with the TAGs is related to online course work. Some colleges in Ohio offer courses that, by policy, are guaranteed equivalent transfer but, according to the spirit of what the courses are supposed to accomplish, should not be offered online.

For example, Columbus State Community College offers a public speaking course online.

Without delving into the merits of in-person versus online course work, suffice it so say that it makes no sense to offer a public speaking course at a distance. In order to practice and refine one’s public speaking ability, one should speak in front of a live audience. The

Ohio Board of Regents, however, does not agree, and one can therefore earn credit for

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public speaking online and transfer the course to any public institution in Ohio. A

Rortyan, literary education would not support an online public speaking course because such a course does not support self-creation through exposure to other people’s narratives. The ironist finds his or her own vocabulary by playing his or her set of attitudes against others,’ and this is best done in person; when students interact through both the written word and through live interaction with one another, it allows for a depth of communication that an online course simply cannot offer.

While the TAGs are put in place to allow students to move freely among public institutions without affecting their degree progress, the TAGs nonetheless constitute dubious policy. To be fair, the learning outcomes for individual courses in the TAGs are not all bad. In some cases, the TAGs require courses to include components that, simply put, make sense. If adopted, such components may even improve the quality of courses in a range of institutions; however, improvement to a bargain level standard does not mean that a course should be treated as an equivalent at every State institution. Transfer policies should be left up to the individual colleges and universities that are awarding the degree, period. The government has no business getting involved at such a level, especially given the inadequacy of the State policies. The government in Ohio has, in effect, done what it claims not to do: “alter the mission or degree authority of any institution.” The Ohio Board of Regents would better support the educational missions of its public universities by allowing the faculty at each institution to determine how courses transfer and how they should fulfill degree requirements. Again, by creating generic learning outcomes, the State is getting in the way of educators doing their jobs instead of fulfilling the role it should: fostering high educational standards.

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The Problem of Government Intrusion, Part II: Truncating the Baccalaureate Experience

Another way state government inserts itself at the level of college curricula is by requiring colleges and universities to compress four-year baccalaureate programs into less than four years. In a way, attempts to shorten a student’s time to degree are more disruptive than the TAGs because the legislature is interfering with whole degree programs instead of individual courses. To be sure, a four or five-year college experience is not necessarily better than a three-year college experience; there are students who cannot afford four years of college, and one can see how a three-year option would be the only way such students could afford a degree. The problem is not the idea of a shortened degree. Rather, the problem with three-year degrees resides in the means of abbreviating the more traditional four-year college model. In Ohio, the State has attempted to truncate the baccalaureate experience in several problematic ways. First, policymakers have mandated that students receive college credit for scores of “3,” or higher, on a scale of one to five, on Advanced Placement (AP) exams taken in high school. Until 2009, Ohio high school students only earned college credit if they attained scores of “4” or “5” on AP exams. Students can earn AP credit in a variety of subjects, like art, history, English, math, social science, computer science, natural science, and foreign language,

(https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse), and credit earned through AP exams is typically used to fulfill general education requirements once students matriculate.

Indeed, some courses that students can “test out of” are more fundamental to success in college than others, and lack of such course work detracts from a Rortyan, literary philosophy of education. For example, a student with a score of 3 on the AP

Language or AP Literature exam will earn credit for freshmen composition. Competent

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writing, in any discipline, is indispensible to the ability to express one’s interpretation of texts and ideas, and yet Ohio has made it easier than ever for students to bypass introductory English composition. The AP policy leaves the task to academic advisors of convincing students—and their parents—that they should take freshman composition. As one can imagine, convincing students at freshman orientation who have already earned credit for introductory composition is a difficult task, especially given the cost of tuition.

This is not to say that earning AP credit for art history, for example, and opting out of taking an “equivalent” course in college is less of a problem than testing out of freshman composition. But if fewer students are taking freshman composition and, consequently, receiving less instruction and practice in writing than they would otherwise, then a literary educational culture is more difficult to cultivate.

When the AP 3 policy was implemented, there was much speculation among college faculty and staff about its impact. In an effort to diminish the problem of over- speculation, the Ohio Board of Regents published a report in August of 2013 investigating the effect of the new AP 3 policy. In short, the report found that the policy did not make things worse by the Board of Regents’ achievement measures. Much like assessment goals and the TAGs, the achievement measures in the report do not have much to do with education, especially as a Rortyan would understand it. The measures were:

a. Grade Point Average (GPA) in the first-year of attendance.

b. Hours attempted in the first year of attendance.

c. Proportion of hours completed in the first year of attendance.

d. Completion rates in sequential courses when students receive AP credit for pre

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or co-requisites; these courses are attempted within two years of initial

enrollment. (Mustafa & Compton, 2013)

The findings of the report were that student achievement did not decrease, from a quantitative standpoint, as a result of the new policy. The underlying assumption beneath the AP 3 policy, then, can be thusly stated: as long as things are not getting worse, according to the Board of Regents’ willowy definitions of student success, shortened time to degree is a good in itself. A Rortyan would disagree, claiming that by allowing students to earn college credit in high school, State policymakers have reduced opportunities for students to learn from live professors how they can responsibly and effectively change the cultural wisdom of their day through reinterpretation of what they have learned and will learn.

The second way the Ohio government has tried to shorten the baccalaureate experience is by requiring its public institutions to develop and publish “3 Year Plans” for a majority of their degree programs (60% by June 2014).20 At Ohio State, the 3-Year

Plans are published online and demonstrate how students, if they wish, would graduate

“early.” In order to graduate in three years, students must bring at least a year’s worth of credit to college, and this is accomplished either by earning credit through AP exams, or through “dual enrollment”—yet another way the Ohio Board of Regents has attempted to drastically shorten time to degree. Dual enrollment allows students to take courses in their high schools and earn both secondary credit and college credit simultaneously. The

“college” courses can be taught either by college/university instructors or by certified

20 For more information, see http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/3333.43. 111

high school teachers.21 Just like AP credit and courses covered under the TAGs, dual enrollment credit is treated as equivalent college credit, no matter what college or university a student attends. Thus, 3-Year Plans are yet another way that the State interferes with institutional autonomy.

Finally, in a measure that sets low-achieving students up for failure, Ohio recently passed legislation requiring that, no matter what score a student earns on a local university mathematics placement exam, if the student presents a score of at least 22 on the ACT math test (or equivalent), he or she is not required to take remedial math.22 That is, if a student at Ohio State places into pre-college math at Ohio State, but earns a 22 on the Mathematics portion of her ACT, he or she is permitted to begin college-level mathematics. The math placement exam at Ohio State is a carefully designed test that takes into consideration multiple, personal factors, like high school preparation, that the

ACT does not. By law, however, Ohio State can no longer require a student to start math at the remedial level, regardless of his or her performance on the customized placement test.23

There are, however, reasons to be hopeful in the face of attempts to shorten the baccalaureate experience. According to testimony provided by former Ohio State Provost

Joseph Alluto (2011), students who come to college with previously earned credit tend to

21 See https://www.ohiohighered.org/sites/ohiohighered.org/files/uploads/board/NewCCPlusReport.pdf for a report on the “College Credit Plus” initiative, which includes the recommendations of the Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents for dual enrollment. 22 Furthermore, the State of Ohio no longer provides subsidy for remedial math courses at four-year public institutions. 23 There are similar policies in place for remedial English composition. See https://www.ohiohighered.org/sites/ohiohighered.org/files/uploads/data/reports/hs-to- college/2012_UNIFORM_STATEWIDE_REMEDIATION_FREE_STANDARDS%28010913%29.pdf for more information.

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take advantage of the situation, not by graduating in three years, but by taking supplementary course work. Many students come to college with hopes of getting the most out of their opportunities, and oftentimes they are in no hurry to graduate. It is the task of undergraduate academic advisors to work with such students to realize all the benefits college has to offer; for the willing student, an advisor can help him or her strengthen his or her undergraduate program by making good use of the time and money that is freed up by credit earned in high school. Rather than graduate early, students can participate in multiple internships, do undergraduate research, study abroad, complete a second major or degree, or complete a series of electives designed to enhance the degree.

Such opportunities can allow students to enhance their literary education; that is, through additional exposure to university faculty and programs, students have a chance to practice interpreting and writing about their culture.

A Rortyan Response to Government Intrusion

The government imposition into public education at the level of colleges and universities, and the resulting constraints on faculty and institutional autonomy, recalls

John Dewey’s 1903 article “Democracy in Education.” Dewey writes:

If there is a single public-school system in the United States where there is official

and constitutional provision made for submitting questions of methods of

discipline and teaching, and the questions of the curriculum, text-books, etc., to

the discussion and decision of those actually engaged in the work of teaching, that

fact has escaped my notice. Indeed, the opposite situation is so common that it

seems, as a rule, to be absolutely taken for granted as the normal and final

condition of affairs. The number of persons to whom any other course has

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occurred as desirable, or even possible—to say nothing of necessary—is

apparently very limited. But until the public school system is organized in such a

way that every teacher has some regular and representative way in which he or

she can register judgment upon matters of educational importance, with the

assurance that this judgment will somehow affect the school system, the assertion

that the present system is not, from the internal standpoint, democratic seems to

be justified. Either we come here upon some fixed and inherent limitation of the

democratic principle, or else we find in this fact an obvious discrepancy between

the conduct of the school and the conduct of social life—a discrepancy so great as

to demand immediate and persistent effort at reform. (pp. 194-195)

Given the Rortyan attitude that modern democracy of the sort Dewey championed was, if not perfect, still the best social arrangement that humans have come up with, it would be consistent with Rorty’s ideas to notice the parallels between what Dewey complained about in 1903 and what I’m complaining about in 2014. That is to say, faculty should have the most prominent voice in what curricula look like at the local level, from degree requirements to individual courses.

In general, a Rortyan approach to education would echo another major Deweyan theme, that is, growth is the most important goal.24 For a Rortyan, non-vocational higher education should work to free inquiry, generate conversation, and support the development of final vocabularies, with the understanding that we should not ask too specifically what students should “know” when they’re done with college and they begin

24 For further discussion, see Ralston, S. J. (2011). A more practical pedagogical ideal: searching for a criterion of Deweyan growth. Educational Theory, 61 (3), 351-364. 114

looking for careers or graduate/professional schools. Too much concern about what students should know and not enough concern for interpretation, for a Rortyan, is dangerous; claims to absolute knowledge support authoritarianism and suffering. For a

Rortyan, education should be, to a certain degree, whimsical, free from constraints, bohemian, a process of muddling through, and not hamstrung by legislation. It should be messy, creative, fumbling, and occasionally a failing enterprise that we learn from so that we can correct our mistakes. A Rortyan education would not be tied to technical learning outcomes and goals but, rather, free inquiry in a rich environment of teachers and students who engage one another in discussing and creating powerful literature.

Keeping in mind what a Rortyan education might look like, the long quotation from Hostetler (1992) at the beginning of the chapter demonstrates further the significance of a literary philosophy of education. Recall Hostetler’s claim that the language of assessment is “a technicist vocabulary that is inadequate for the task of conceiving educational purposes and policies, a task that requires a moral vocabulary first and foremost” (p. 286). The moral vocabulary Hostetler talks about can be thought of as part of a literary philosophy of education—a literary vocabulary. A literary vocabulary in curriculum development would include questions like “what is good for students to learn in order for them to be autonomous citizens?” “How can we structure courses and prepare instructors so that students have an opportunity to develop empathy for others?” “How can we extend in students a sense of fellowship within whatever cultures they become a part of once formal schooling has commenced?” Ideally, a literary/moral vocabulary would extend from schools into society, where such a vocabulary would then penetrate the culture. For an example of when moral/literary behavior is critical and

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technicist/rationalist behavior can be devastating, consider the example of a physician’s office. A “good bedside manner” would mean in this instance that the doctor has a conversation with the patient (rather than a one-way input of symptoms from patient to doctor) and that the doctor learns the patient’s story; this would be a “literary” doctor who puts together a thicker description of the patient than a technicist doctor would, who only understands categories of symptoms and could care less about the patient's story.

We’ve all had doctors like these who will not take the time to stop and take into account a patient’s unique history. A literary education, then, would help train physicians to share a moment with the patient and treat the visit as a sacred opportunity to get to know him or her.

Closing Thoughts

Each day, on my commute to work, I pass a billboard that advertises the services of the adjacent hospital. The message on the sign changes periodically, but the one that stands out to me the most was displayed a year or so ago, a pithy slogan to the effect of: we, at the adjacent hospital, perform spinal surgery, but if—and only if—you actually need spinal surgery. The first time I saw the message I was stunned by the questions it raised. Who is doing spinal surgery on people who don’t need an operation? Why are surgeons permitted to do so? Are people who don’t need surgery asking surgeons to perform operations on their spines? As a philosopher of education, and as an educator, I also wondered how education can help laypersons figure out—with the help, of course, of physicians, chiropractors, and perhaps other people who have had the experience of someone performing surgery on their spines—when not to get surgery, if the question should ever come up. Education and literary education, at their best, should help people

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avoid both the minor problems, and major troubles, of life. Not everyone will face a menacing doctor, driven by profit, recommending spine surgery, but the point is that liberal education should be liberal enough—that is, oriented toward an infinite prospect of ideas—that liberally educated people can handle anything. Liberal education, though, is not only for the college-bound; whether you are going to fix trucks or study neurotransmitters, sell insurance, teach English, or dig ditches, anyone might run into an irresponsible doctor or surgeon.

A literary/moral culture, bolstered by literary education, might serve as a corrective to the problem of the avaricious surgeon, or any professional who has the leverage to take advantage of his or her clients. A literary culture built on literary education would immerse its people in stories and poetry. A literary culture would teach people to empathize and sympathize, to learn the stories of one another so that people would identify things within themselves that they share with others—what Rorty calls intersubjective agreement. Such a culture would reduce cruelty and greed. For these reasons, philosophers, educators, and philosophers of education would be well to continue the project I’m suggesting and further construct a literary philosophy of education.

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