book that brings together lifetime threads of Jane Roland Martin's thought.1 A rich ... about education over her long and productive career as a philosopher of ...
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• BOOK REVIEW
Education Reconfigured: Culture, Encounter, and Change Jane Roland Martin Routledge, 2011, Pp. 240. Education Reconfigured is a slim volume with a substantive agenda. It is a book that brings together lifetime threads of Jane Roland Martin’s thought.1 A rich tapestry, the book weaves together in new ways the many ideas she has generated about education over her long and productive career as a philosopher of education, most notably with echoes of Reclaiming the Conversation, The Schoolhome, and Educational Metamorphoses.2 Yet the book goes beyond merely recapitulating these works. Instead, its agenda is to more explicitly situate schooling in the larger cultural and social landscape. Her idea of reconfiguring education is to vastly expand its scope and purview. For that alone the book is worth reading. Martin’s new book is ambitious in scope: namely to change our thinking about education and, in particular, to broaden society’s usual understanding of that term. Like John Dewey and Lawrence Cremin before her, Martin views education as coextensive with social life, rejecting what she calls “the false equation between education and schooling” (ER, 36).3 This reduction, she suggests, puts the focus solely on the student inside the school. From this perspective, education becomes one-dimensional, bringing to view only the individual who is changed in an educational event (ER, 9). A central worry of hers is that this says “very little about cultural transmission” (ER, 38), the second dimension she wants to bring into view in her broader understanding. In Education Reconfigured, Martin devotes chapter 2, titled “The Deep Structure of Educational Thought,” to showing that this failure to address cultural transmission is not accidental; rather, she demonstrates that there is a “deep structure” of thinking about education that locks into place the usual one-dimensional perspective. This deep structure itself is complex, including “two rock-bottom dichotomies”: a “nature/culture divide” (ER, 28) that interprets the learner as a rational mind rather than an embodied being, and a “two-sphere split” (ER, 30) that separates public (civic) from private (domestic) realms. At its least, she argues, the narrowed view of education caused by this deep structure creates huge gaps in what is rightly part of the educational domain, including perspectives such as cultural transmission, aims such as preparation for membership in home and family, and issues such as learned violent behavior. EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 © 2015 Board of Trustees University of Illinois
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Her reconfiguration of education, of course, is not merely negative. Martin translates her critique of the narrowness of education that results from its current deep structure into a more expansive conception. In chapter 3, “Repopulating the Educational Realm,” she broadens our understanding by making visible what she calls heretofore “missing populations” in education. By “populations,” she does not mean only groups of humans, but a broader set of cultural stock that should be acknowledged as educational. The chapter identifies seven missing populations: “the missing women,” including the cultural stock of “private home and family” as well as knowledge, skills, and values we traditionally identified as feminine; “the missing minorities,” where she argues that “race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disabilities” make a difference for conceptualizing education; “the missing persons,” where she makes visible that learners are more than cognizing minds, but whole, embodied beings; “the missing species,” to include as cultural stock what humans learn from animals and animals from humans; “the missing cultural stock,” including everyday social practices, popular culture, one’s ethnic heritage, work expectations, and acceptable interactions with pets; “the missing educational agents,” including social movements, art museums, mass media, cultural groups, home and family, and airline personnel; and “the missing educational processes,” namely the multiple neglected processes that are educative, including informal play, imitating parents, experimenting with drugs, and listening to sermons (ER, 47–66). Her claim is not that these missing populations are exactly absent, but that the current deep structure of educational thought has rendered invisible these important characters in the educational drama. As a result, her reconfiguration is a marked broadening of human, nonhuman, institutional, and organizational agents in education’s realm. This repopulation has greatly enriched her reconfiguration of education. But repopulation is only part of the book’s aim. Martin claims that the current deep structure, with its exclusive focus on schooling, has rendered educational thought one-dimensional — that is, it has produced a fixation on learning and the learner. Martin wants to broaden our understanding of education as something involving a second perspective, that of the broader culture that educates. Without the cultural dimension, she contends, we cannot understand what is going on educationally in the individual learner. Martin describes their relationship in Kantian terms: “as percepts need concepts, individual capacities need cultural stock. Otherwise they would be empty vessels” (ER, 13). This emptiness refers to the inability of individuals to “fill” their innate capacities with content without having a reserve of available cultural stock from which they can draw. Conversely, without the learner acquiring cultural stock through individual and innate capacities, cultural stock would have no “carrier” in society — in Martin’s words, “if there were no [individual] capacities, there would be no cultural stock at all” (ER, 13). For example, the Cayuga language in North America is a cultural stock that has only a few dozen speakers. Without new individuals acquiring this cultural stock, it will not survive; but without the language as cultural stock, the individual speakers would not be able to learn it as their mother tongue. An individual’s
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capacity would have no concrete content without being informed by the surrounding cultural material. This is how Martin reconceptualizes education “as a maker of both individuals and cultures” (chapter 4). Martin convincingly argues that many social institutions and groups are actively involved in educating society’s members; schools are merely one, albeit specialized, educational institution. The term “encounter” figures centrally in Martin’s reconfiguration of education, and she devotes the entire first chapter to this idea. Education on her view occurs in the encounter between individual learner and educational agent, where cultural stock is passed along by an educational agent, either as assets or liabilities. The educational encounter between individual capacity and cultural stock is successful when the two are, in her words, yoked together. She concludes from this reconfiguration that our entire culture constitutes the curriculum of education, as she details in chapter 5, “Culture as Curriculum.” The current deep structure of educational thought that informs schooling has, she argues, “decultured” the curriculum, conveying that the knowledge bundled together as school subjects constitutes objective slices of reality and thus is “culture-free” (ER, 102). On her wider view, however, school subjects are actually cultural constructs on par with other cultural stock. This not only relativizes current curricular subjects in school, it also opens up space to consider that every individual is a “curriculum worker and a culture maker” (ER, 112). In addition, this means that education is not merely a one-sided filling of capacities from a cultural reserve, but rather, “in every educational encounter both the individual and the culture change” (ER, 76). The educational encounter is an event in which both sides are affected. Martin ends the book by revisiting the question of school — in particular what it can and cannot do, given her larger perspective. She raises the point that in her reconfiguration, school is no longer an island of education. Although it remains central to education, schooling needs to consider what other educational agents in society are advertently or inadvertently transmitting to the students in their charge. It is in this context that she urges the school to broaden its scope to that of “the schoolhome” (ER, 190), drawing explicitly on her earlier idea. Here she argues that this would help overcome one of the restricting aspects of education’s current deep structure, the public/private dichotomy. Martin argues that this broader perspective suggests schools ought to think of themselves two-dimensionally, as “a maker of individuals and cultures” (ER, 197). Here she is working out the second part of the Kantian idea, namely, that without individual capacities, cultural stock would be blind and directionless. In many cases, including languages and religious practices, they would cease to exist in meaningful and living ways. For Martin this means that schools should not merely reflect society and acquire its cultural stock, but they also must become sites that actively (re)shape the social order. Central to this task is engaging in the (joint) venture of democratic citizen making. At minimum, schools could contribute to forming citizens by being “a welcoming place to their students’ capacities as living legacies”; but further, schools should be encouraged to instill in their students the value that “education is a gift that should be circulated to others” (ER, 200). Martin uses the term “gift” to indicate
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something that is always in circulation, that is not to be used for profit, and that is not someone’s personal and private property. There is much to agree with in Education Reconfigured. The broadness of education’s scope, the reintroduction of its missing populations into educational thought, the breaking down of the dualisms that form its deep structure, the central importance of education for democratic citizenship (chapter 7), and the renewed emphasis on the school as cultural agent are all important and valuable insights. It is in the spirit of appreciation that I wish to engage with a central conception of Martin’s, namely, that cultural stock is transferred in educational encounters. My concerns are threefold: Martin sometimes writes from an “omniscient observer” perspective, whereas I maintain that it is better to consistently theorize from a participant’s perspective; Martin thus often takes a semantically neutral stance toward the normativity of education, whereas I suggest that education is better depicted as a normative undertaking; and Martin’s use of the static, mechanical metaphors of “transmission,” “yoking,” and “coupling” get in the way of appreciating that central to her idea of the educational encounter is also the idea of responsiveness, which has a dynamism of risk and novelty. My first worry is that at times Martin develops her expanded understanding from taking a “god’s eye” point of view. Her use of the term cultural “stock” rather than “capital” is a good example. The word “stock” is unusual in educational theorizing. Wanting a name for what Theodore Brameld called “the stuff of culture,”4 Martin takes the term stock from Michael Oakeshott. She quotes him as saying “The world into which we are initiated is composed, rather, of a stock of emotions, beliefs, images, ideas, manners of thinking, languages, skills, practices, and manners of activity out of which these ‘things’ are generated” (ER, 9; emphasis added).5 Oakeshott is using “stock” as a collective term to refer to a variety of each sort of thing listed. Similarly, “stock” for Martin is a very broad term, covering all of the sorts of things Oakeshott lists, ranging from individually held beliefs and ideas to publicly observable, shared practices and activities. In Martin’s model, social groups and institutions are custodians of cultural stock, which they maintain through their collective practices and organizational structures. These groups and institutions include churches, banks, businesses, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, media networks, and publishing companies. These are the repositories of cultural stock, including items such as confessional doctrines, ceremonies, music repertoires, traffic regulations, sculptures, and bureaucratic policies. A major theme in Martin’s book is that there are many places in society with cultural stock. If we focus on the variety she counts as cultural agents and kinds of stock, there seems to be little downside to using this term. However, Martin transforms the term “cultural stock” into a term of art by defining it as something neutral. She says she chose it over the more familiar term “cultural capital” because the latter indicates a positive worth. Martin’s intent is to withhold judgment about the value of the cultural material precisely in order to be more expansive about what counts as educational encounters. Her laudable goal
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is to acknowledge the many kinds of beliefs, images, skills, and activities that are the stuff of culture, and she wants to steer clear of adjudicating which are beneficial and which are harmful before including them in education. In employing the term for its neutrality, however, Martin takes a problematic vantage point above the fray. She is using a god’s eye perspective to withhold judgment about the worth of what is transmitted by cultural institutions to individuals who have the capacity to receive this “stock.” The perspective of omniscient observer is difficult to maintain consistently. It is true that we can, by definition, hold to a purely formal definition of cultural stock, one that is neutral with respect to benefits and harms. However, we all live inside cultural frames and perspectives. That is to say, from the perspective of the participants, “cultural stock” is never neutral. Rather, right from the start the stock is contested as either a cultural asset or a cultural liability. This point becomes clearer when we consider concrete examples. Martin might point to the cultural stock of the attitudes of the Ku Klux Klan with respect to lynching African Americans and remain neutral regarding whether this stock was beneficial or harmful, yet the KKK will call this stock socially beneficial while many others, including African Americans, will call it socially harmful. More generally, we all operate from within particular cultural perspectives that frame our ideas of human flourishing and the good life. From within its own finite perspective, a group’s cultural stock is always beneficial, and it is for this reason that the group makes it available in the educational encounter. For example, the cultural stock transmitted to the professional pickpocket Apollo Robbins is a good for those that taught him the art of misdirection. Or, to take a current social dispute, some churches such as Westboro Baptist offer the cultural stock that same-sex marriage is immoral and should be illegal, holding it as a cultural asset because they think that restricting marriage to opposite-sex relations benefits the social fabric; simultaneously, other cultural groups such as the Human Rights Campaign develop the cultural stock that same-sex marriage should be legal, holding it as a cultural asset because they believe extending marriage rights is of benefit to the broader society and to individuals in it. There is no god’s eye view in which judgment is withheld, where both positions are viewed as neutral with respect to benefits or harms in order to include them in the realm of education. From a first-person perspective of the social group or institution, cultural stock is included in education precisely because it is considered to be beneficial. Education’s cultural stock is never neutral, but is always oriented to some social good from a particular perspective. Rather than neutrality, all we ever have is the contestability of the harm or benefit of cultural stock in education. This brings me to a second, related concern about Martin’s often neutral conceptualization of education more generally. Her idea is that “the educational realm includes the sum total of cultural stock” (ER, 61). Education is conceptually neutral about the propriety of whether such stock should or should not be “yoked” to the individual. I question the clean neutrality that her term “education” is meant to signal here. From the perspective of a participant in the encounter, it is difficult to maintain that an encounter with things felt to be deleterious to one’s
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self or society can still be called educational without irony. Neutrality is plausible from a disinterested god’s eye view, namely, construing education through the formal criterion of the interaction between cultural stock and individual capacity. Martin is of course right to suggest that we need some sort of term for the idea that education involves both cultural liabilities and assets. But the participants in education do not have a god’s eye view, and all we have are participants. An educative agent offers some cultural stock as a good, and the individual learner receives it as a good. Others might contest that acquiring such stock is educational, and argue further that doing so is really miseducation. That is, for the participants, the educational encounter is always a normative event, aimed toward (or away from) a particular good. Maintaining the neutrality of education robs it of its inherent normativity. Or, put slightly differently, my argument is that education is best conceptualized consistently from the perspective of participation. From the first-person perspective of the participant, always already situated in finite (historical, socially situated) perspectives, education is inherently normative. From that vantage point, education always intends to better self and society, although others may well rightly contest it as education. It is not that Martin is totally unaware of this. In chapter 6 she develops the adjective forms “educative” and “miseducative” to address the normative dimension. Here, she shifts perspective away from the neutrality of cultural stock to the idea that cultural stock is comprised of both assets and liabilities. This allows her to develop a “virtue/vice” dimension of the encounter: “being educative must be considered a virtue of cultures and their institutions, and being miseducative a vice” (ER, 115). However, she notes that “the trait or property of being educative is … distinct from that of being educated” (ER, 116, emphasis in original). She does so because she wants to maintain the possibility that an educated culture, such as that of Nazi Germany, can be miseducative. But what Martin fails to see, in my estimation, is that such a culture was deeply miseducated, or more abstractly, that the encounters in the culture were forms of miseducation. The discussion in chapter 6 does not allay all my concerns regarding the impossibility of taking a god’s eye view on education. I offer that education itself is better described from within the warp and woof of social participation, and thus is best characterized as intrinsically normative. I have a third concern about Martin’s portrayal of the educational encounter. For Martin, encounters involve an educational agent transmitting some cultural stock to an individual, if he or she has the capacity to receive such stock. In some cases, Martin depicts this encounter — the linking of cultural stock to individual capacity — in terms that are quite static and mechanical. Consider the following examples: education is the “coupling and uncoupling of individual capacities and cultural stock” (ER, 14); “whenever [individual] capacities and stocks meet and become attached to one another, education occurs” (ER, 17); and many social groups and organizations “transmit or pass it [the cultural stock] along to any number of individuals” (ER, 10). Phrases such as “transmission of stock,” “coupling,” and “yoking stock and capacity” depict the encounter as static: a set of capacities receiving incoming stock. Moreover, this language suggests a causal
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mechanism, where a capacity can be construed as a reception device to which cultural stock is sent by an educative agent. It is as if the educative agent is the UPS agent that delivers cultural stock to the house of the receptive individual. The encounter is then easily characterized as a successful transfer of cultural stock associated with an educative agent. The static and mechanical depictions of transmission seem at odds with Martin’s Kantian formulation. That frame suggests that the encounter is a subjective synthesis of an incoming manifold unified by something within the receptive individual. From the perspective of the individual, the encounter could be construed as the synthesis of a manifold of cultural stock by the person’s capacities. The active construction of the synthesis seems to get lost in the “transmission” metaphor. This is only exacerbated by depicting the transfers as couplings and yokings. These metaphors make the encounter seem, perhaps oddly, too strong. It suggests that the encounter is a strong, causal mechanism in which subjective agency plays little role. Many of the details Martin includes in describing the encounter indicate that this is not what she is after. For instance, at times she describes the encounter as the possibility that “large-scale changes can have small beginnings” (ER, 16). To support this claim, she gives the example of young E. O. Wilson’s early encounter with a jellyfish that set him on a journey to become a famous scientist. She also recognizes that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between capacity and stock, arguing that individuals undergo surprising changes, usually incrementally but at times with quantum jumps. Moreover, she argues that when stocks are yoked to new individuals, it gives the stock a “new lease on life” (ER, 23), sometimes in surprising and novel ways. In this renewal, she allows, stock will be “reinterpreted, reconstructed, or even rejected” (ER, 24). In these examples, Martin depicts the encounter as an event leading to unexpected novelty, and thus links it to the standing possibility of transformation of both the individual and society. Thus, her mechanical and static metaphors, in my view, get in the way of something central to her construal of educational encounters. She allows that individuals can develop in unexpected ways and that cultural stock can change in the transfer. The heart of such an encounter is not best conveyed by mechanical metaphors of transmission and coupling. When Martin gets beyond the static language of transfer and yoking, she shows that in encounters both sides are active, albeit perhaps in different ways. There she takes the encounter as an event that has the potential to generate something new. Perhaps depicting the individual student in the educational encounter as an active respondent would have been helpful. This would highlight more clearly that, from the perspective of the educative agent, the student is not merely a recipient that successfully receives some cultural stock. The cultural stock is not just some content that can be received in order to fill an existing capacity. Rather, in this construal, the educational encounter with cultural stock evokes a subjective response from the student. In the encounter, the cultural stock disturbs the dynamic equilibrium of the student’s knowledge and attitudes, thus forcing
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unpredictable responses and generating something new, unexpected. As a result, educational encounters are inherently risky. It is risky for the educative agent, for it is impossible to predict how the individual will respond. There is always the possibility that there will be slippage in the exchange. Moreover, it is risky for the individual, as something novel might emerge that was not anticipated. The individual learner, it should be noted, is not merely passive from the point of view of the educative agent but is a responsive subject, a point of spontaneity and generativity, exhibiting what Hannah Arendt might call natality. From that angle, Martin’s language of transmission, coupling, and yoking is, paradoxically, too strong. The strong mechanical language of causality with reference to the educative agent implies that the changes in the learner are determined by the educative agent, configured by it, predictable. But the details Martin provides in describing her idea of encounter suggest something less strong—the event involves surprise, novelty, and unpredictability. The conception of student-as-respondent would better serve to depict that what emerges in the encounter cannot be foreseen. On this view, the cultural stock in the encounter is not simply transferred to or coupled with an individual. As something embodied in social practices, it is regenerated in educational encounters as unpredictable responses. I am suggesting that educational encounters are better conceptualized as “offer/response” events, unpredictably generating new and often unforeseen cultural practices. My criticisms are not meant to signal fatal flaws in Martin’s reconfiguration of education, but rather to point out particular limitations of some of the metaphors she uses to describe it. I conclude by restating my admiration for her work. There is much to learn in an encounter with Martin’s book as a cultural asset. Through this encounter, educators will position themselves for unpredictable responses, generating new and unexpected ideas and practices. — Clarence W. Joldersma Calvin College
1. Jane Roland Martin’s Education Reconfigured will be cited in the text as ER. 2. Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Jane Roland Martin, The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Jane Roland Martin, Educational Metamorphoses: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
3. See, for example, John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916; repr. New York: Macmillan, 1961); Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Vintage, 1961); and Lawrence Cremin, The Genius of American Education (New York: Vintage, 1965).
4. Theodore Brameld, Cultural Foundations of Education (New York: Harper, 1957), 148–149. 5. Michael Oakeshott, “The Study of ‘Politics’ in a University,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Education: A Study of Curriculum, ed. Jane Roland Martin (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1970), 41.
