768 Teachers College Record

768 Teachers College Record Power over Power David Nyberg. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981, $14.95. 200 pp. MAXINE GREENE, Teachers College, Columbia University In his “Philosophies of Freedom,” John Dewey laid great stress on the “intrinsic connection between choice as freedom and power of action as freedom.“’ His concern was for the “power of vision and reflection,” the “power-to-do” in relation to the actualization of freedom. David Nyberg may be the first educational thinker to take seriously the notion of power and its relevance, not only for a conceptualization of freedom, but for a philosophy of education as well. He is certainly the first to talk about teaching power and the “skills of freedom.” Disagreeing with Socrates in the Gorgias, Nyberg rejects the idea that a philosophy of power is antithetical to a philosophy of culture or education. If education has in part to do with empowering persons to make life plans for themselves, if it has anything to do with enabling them to act on their projects, it has to “speak to power.” Because power refers to something that comes into being within the context of social relations, because (as Hannah Arendt says) “it corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert,“* and because one of the fundamental meanings of freedom has to do with action along with and with respect to others, the old polarity of power and freedom probably should be reconceived. Professor Nyberg goes at the problem of reconceptualization as an educational philosopher fundamentally concerned with clarity and, yes, with rationality. At once, he responds to certain existential insights when he identifies freedom with action and a sense of project, and when headmits-as one of his categories of constraint-Albert Camus’s vision of the “absurd.” The dominant tone, however, is that of the analytical philosopher-cool, occasionally detached, oriented as much to the overcoming of “bewitchment” as to the achievement of freedom and the attainment of the democratic ideal. Nyberg is also original in his breaking with a number of educational shibboleths and in his handling of well-known educational thinkers like Carl Rogers, B. F. Skinner, Michael Apple, Joel Spring, Jonathan Kozol, and even Bertrand Russell. This may well be a significant moment for the kind of perpective Power over Power provides. The powerlessness so widely experienced today is associated by Nyberg with “not being able” and the sense of personal insignificance where planned action is concerned. It may also, of course, have to do with the mystifications proceeding in our society: with the use of technical and economic categories to explain or account for what is happening; with the ripping apart of networks of mutual understanding and support. Along with this has come- not necessarily a feeling of the loss of freedom-but a feeling of pointlessness, an incapacity to answer thequestion “Freedom for what?” Nyberg does not deal with powerlessness in this sense, but he does pay heed to the not uncommon feeling that nothing in particular would be lost if there were no freedom. And he explicitly rejects the “subjective construct” view of freedom, deals with the concept as “essentially contestable” (in W. B. Gallie’s phrase), and proceeds to lay stress on the complexity of the concept. There are, inevitably, a number of “rival meanings,” not all of them compatible. Objecting as he does to freedom viewed as a lack of encroachment (as in the case of the Free Schools), as a goal or a good in and of itself, or (in reified form) as a kind of idol, he concludes that his concern is for particular freedoms. “Freedom is machinery,” he writes, “that makes various modes of conduct more or less possible.” Focused as his argument is on the rule- governed and often constraining conditions in which people make their choices and pursue their life plans, he cannot but think in terms of what he calls “diminutive” freedoms grounded in autonomy and rationality. Then, because freedom always occurs in relation to certain kinds of limitations, in relation to circumstances, or in relation to others, he goes on to explain the concept of freedom as one “with rational, relational and diagnostic qualities that are joined together in the process of choosing and judging plans for action in a context of constraints” (p. 131). The activity of freedom, then, involves “a sort of practical mastery made possible by increments in knowledge, and the application in practice of this knowledge.” Knowledge, along with a degree of imaginative vision, is required for understanding the nature of existing constraints, for positing alternative possibilities, and for devising significant projects within the actu- alities of social life. Without some understanding of power, however, in a plu- ralist situation, it is extremely difficult to realize such projects. Individuals, Nyberg continues to remind us, live in organizations; their life plans are made within and not apart from their relationships to diverse others; whatever power they have to act in their freedom is delegated-and maintained, Nyberg says, through the consent or good will of those who delegate the power. Not to comprehend this is to be left, in a distinctive way, powerless. There is no question but that theschools have traditionally shiedaway from a consideration of power. This has been partly due to the prevalence of euphemisms in discourse about education. It has been due, as well, to the moralism that so long permeated expressed purposes and goals, a moralism derived from what Nietzsche called the “Judaeo-Christian ethic” with its stress on docility and its discouragement of the “will to power.“3 Also, there has been the notion of laissez faire, used in such a fashion that it led to neglect of the matter of informed consent. The emphasis for years was laid on “self- control” and/or “voluntary compliance”: The individual, in some manner self-contained, was expected to conform to externally defined rules and an extrinsic authority. Diversity and pluralism were seldom mentioned; consent (like power) did not strike the ordinary educator as a matter of consequence. Nyberg offers an exhaustive list of books that use the word power in their titles and avoid serious consideration of the concept. He talks about the euphemisms (like “motivation”) so frequently used; he describes the ways in 770 Teachers College Record which teachers repress their own ambitions and desires for power. The argument is capped by a quotation from R. S. Peters’s Ethics and Education, where an acerbic distinction is made between “authority” and “power.” For Peters, power connotes coercion, manipulation, even hypnotism; whereas authority “involves the appeal to an impersonal normative order . which regulates behavior basically because acceptance of it on the part of those who comply.“4 For Nyberg, authority is power under another, more acceptable name. Reminding us that power is always contingent on consent, he says that authority “is contingent on respect inaddition to consent” (p.89). And, indeed, when one considers Peters’s talk of an “impersonal normative order,” it is difficult to see the distinction. But, because he does not take the question of consent into account or the notion of “acting in concert,” Peters cannot consider the possibility of power’s becoming an alternative, not only to violence, but to coercion and manipulation as well. This is not to say, of course, that force is not one of the forms of power; and Nyberg readily acknowledges this. It is not, however, the only form: it is certainly not the only way of eliciting consent. There is, in addition, what he calls “fiction” or “story,” words and ideas and images, themselves another form of power. He cannot deny the common use of fictions for the sake of propaganda or deception; but he extends the meaning of “story” to include any arrangement of related events that has “some sense of meaning that governs the structure of its relations.” (It is difficult not to recall the comment in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea that life takes on meaning only when you tell a story about it.5) Nyberg says that related events must always have a plot if they are to make sense; he may mean that they have to be given a kind of structure, a logic, if they are to signify. Statements of educational purpose have plots, he tells us; so do curricula; so do the words teachers use to motivate students to work harder. This storytelling is done not to manipulate (at least, not always); it is done to elicit consent, arouse commitment, induce belief. And Nyberg believes that this use of the power of fiction must be confronted if consent and commitment are to be in any way understood. One wonders, with stories in mind, why he did not include the view of story found in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. She writes about what happens when people begin speaking with their own voices, about the actions that take place that are associated with new beginnings. These actions, she says, fall into an already existing web of human relationships; and what emerges can be seen “as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes in contact.” No one, she says, is the author of his own life story, although “everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action or speech, ” because stories are the outcomes of actions; and the actor or agent is not an author or producer.6 Surely, the interacting life stories of the newcomers (or students) in any educational setting become relevant when stories are told to elicit consent.

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