Durkheim and Modern Education (Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education, 6)

DURKHEIM AND MODERN EDUCATION Emile Durkheim’s teaching and writing on education has traditionally been a neglected area of research. Much of his work on this subject was published. posthumously and only slowly translated into English after the Second World War. However, philosophers of education increasingly argue that Durkheim’s ideas are applicable to modern education. This volume explores Durkheim’s place in modern educational thought at three different levels: • Durkheim’s ideas on education are analysed and placed in the context of a modern society; • Current educational issues are explored using a Durkheimian framework; • Durkheim’s thought is related to that of modern educational theory to reveal his enduring influence. In discussing Durkheim’s modern relevance, the contributors stress his desire to integrate the practical and theoretical aspects of education. They identify particular pertinence in his focus upon the moral base of education and his insistence upon the importance of the social and society. Durkheim and Modern Education brings together authoritative work from acknowledged leaders in both educational and Durkheimian studies. Written from an international perspective, this will be an important resource for sociologists and educationalists alike. Geoffrey Walford is Reader in Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. His publications include Privatization and Privilege in Education (1990) and, as editor, Doing Educational Research (1991). W.S.F.Pickering helped to found the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies at the University of Oxford in 1991 and is currently its General Secretary. His latest publications with Routledge include Debating Durkheim (edited with H. Martins, 1995) and On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (co-edited with N.J.Allen and W.Watts Miller, 1998).

ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1 EDUCATION AND WORK IN GREAT BRITAIN, GERMANY AND ITALY Edited by A.Jobert, C.Marry, L.Tanguy and H.Rainbird 2 EDUCATION, AUTONOMY AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP Philosophy in a changing world Edited by David Bridges 3 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN LEARNING Christopher Winch 4 EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH Beyond the Postmodern Impasse Edited by David Carr 5 VIRTUE THEORY AND MORAL EDUCATION Edited by David Carr and Jan Steutel 6 DURKHEIM AND MODERN EDUCATION Edited by Geoffrey Walford and W.S.F.Pickering

DURKHEIM AND MODERN EDUCATION Edited by Geoffrey Walford and W.S.F.Pickering

London and New York

First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Editorial material and selection © 1998 Geoffrey Walford and W.S.F.Pickering Individual chapters © 1998 the individual contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Durkheim and modern education/edited by Geoffrey Walford and W.S.F.Pickering. p. cm. “Published in conjunction with the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies”—Added t.p. A selection of revised papers presented at a three day conference sponsored by the British Economic and Social Research Council and the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, University of Oxford, held at Maison Française, Oxford in July 1996. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Durkheim, Emile, 1858–1917—Views on education—Congresses. 2. Educational sociology—Congresses. 3. Moral education—Congresses. 4. Education—Philosophy—Congresses. I. Walford, Geoffrey. II. Pickering, W.S.F. III. British Centre for Durheimian Studies. LB775.D862D87 1998 306.43–dc21 98–20185 CIP ISBN 0-203-02205-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26521-1 (OEB Format) ISBN 0-415-18168-2 (Print Edition)

The Durkheim family on holiday at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux in August 1915. From left to right are shown: Mme Durkheim, M.Durkheim, Claudette Raphaël (then aged five and still alive), Mme Raphaël, Madeleine Raphaël and André Durkheim. Mme Raphaël was Durkheim’s niece, André was Durkheim’s son, and the photograph was taken by Marie Halphen who was Durkheim’s daughter.

CONTENTS Notes on contributors Preface 1

Introduction W.S.F.PICKERING AND GEOFFREY WALFORD

PART ONE 2 3 4 5 6

8 9

10

xiii 1 16

Emile Durkheim and moral education in a pluralistic society MARK S.CLADIS

18

Emile Durkheim, citizenship and modern education ANTON A.WESSELINGH

30

Kohlberg’s critique of Durkheim’s Moral Education STEPHEN P.TURNER

42

The administration of punishment in schools W.S.F.PICKERING

54

Teaching autonomy WILLIE WATTS MILLER

65

PART TWO 7

ix

83

Japanese education: a Durkheimian ideal type? ROGER GOODMAN

85

Educating for social cohesion in a pluralist society MART-JAN DE JONG AND JACQUES F.A.BRASTER

97

Durkheim, democracy and diversity: some thoughts on recent changes in England and Wales GEOFFREY WALFORD

112

Durkheim, Dewey and progressive education: the tensions between individualism and community ALAN R.SADOVNIK AND SUSAN F.SEMEL

128

11

12

Emile Durkheim in the context of the American moral education paradigm ARTHUR K.ELLIS

147

Classroom management as moral education: a Durkheimian perspective DAVID RIGONI

163

PART THREE 13

179

Durkheim, social revitalization, education and religion PHILIP WEXLER AND PAUL STEIN

181

Name index

202

Subject index

208

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Jacques F.A.Braster is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Social Sciences Faculty of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Until 1993 he was researcher at the Rotterdam Institute for Sociological and Public Administration Research. In 1996 he wrote his Ph.D. thesis ‘De identiteit van het openbaar onderwijs’ (The identity of public education). His research interests are sociology of education and educational policy, sociology of religion and culture, and methodology of evaluation research. Mark S.Cladis, author of over twenty articles and A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism: Emile Durkheim and Contemporary Social Theory (Stanford University Press, 1992), is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Vassar College. After receiving his doctorate from Princeton University, where he studied philosophy and social theory as they relate to the field of religious studies, he taught at the University of North Carolina and at Stanford University. His publications and teaching pertain to the history of Western political, social and religious thought, especially the religious nature and origins of liberal, democratic society. His current research project, Politics of the Heart: Rousseau, Religion, and the Relation between the Public and Private Life, is expected to appear in 1999. Mart-Jan de Jong is Associate Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam and member of the management team of the Netherlands School for Social and Economic Policy Research. For his Ph.D. thesis he studied educational careers of immigrant children. He wrote a book on political issues of the welfare state. His latest book is about the lives and work of nine masters of sociological thought (Grootmeesters van de sociologie, 1997). Arthur K.Ellis is Professor of Education and Director of the Center for Curriculum Studies at Seattle Pacific University, Washington. He is the author of twelve published books and numerous articles and papers. Professor Ellis taught for several years in public schools and for seventeen years at the University of Minnesota prior to joining the faculty of Seattle Pacific. He has been consultant to various National Science Foundation projects and to state and local educational organizations. Presently, he teaches and consults at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and at Moscow State University and the University of the Russian Academy of Education in Moscow, where he holds the position of Corresponding Professor. Roger Goodman, formerly Reader in Japanese Studies at the University of Essex, is currently University Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of Japan and Fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Japan’s ‘International Youth’: The Emergence of a New Class of Schoolchildren (Open University Press,

1990) and Kikokushijo (Iwanami Shoten, 1992) and editor of Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan (Routledge, 1992; with Kirsten Refsing), Case Studies on Human Rights in Japan (Curzon, 1996; with Ian Neary) and Welfare Orientalism: Social Policy in East Asia (Routledge, forthcoming; with Gordon White and Huck-ju Kwon) as well as many articles on Japanese education and social welfare. Willie Watts Miller is editor of Durkheimian Studies/Etudes Durkheimiennes. His publications include Durkheim, Morals and Modernity (UCL Press, 1996), a critical translation of Durkheim’s Latin thesis on Montesquieu Montesquieu/Quid Secundatus (Durkheim Press, 1997) and On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Routledge, 1988; edited with N.J. Allen and W.S.F.Pickering). He is a member of the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol. W.S.F.Pickering was for many years a lecturer in sociology in the Department of Social Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. His books include: Durkheim on Religion (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975; introduction and translations with J.R.Redding); Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979; edited with introductions); Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Anglo-Catholicism: A study of religious ambiguity (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989), Debating Durkheim (Routledge, 1995; edited with H.Martins) and On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Routledge, 1988; edited with N.J.Allen and W. Watts Miller). He is currently General Secretary of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies at the University of Oxford. David Rigoni is Associate Professor at the Education Department at the College of St Scholastica, Minnesota. Prior to teaching at the university level, he taught English for fourteen years in both public and private secondary schools. At the College of St Scholastica, he taught in the Computer Science Department for nine years before becoming chair-person of the Education Department. He gained his doctorate in Educational Leadership from the University of St Thomas in St Paul Minnesota, and he now also chairs the Behavioral Arts and Sciences Division (in which the Education Department is situated). His interests include sociological approaches to education, critical thinking and problem solving. Alan R.Sadovnik is Professor of Education and Dean of the School of Education at Adelphi University, New York. He received his BA in sociology from Queens College of the City University of New York, and his MA and Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. He is the author of Equity and Excellence in Higher Education: The Decline of a Liberal Educational Reform (Peter Lang, 1994), editor of Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein (Ablex, 1995), co-editor of Exploring Society (Allyn and Bacon, 1987, with Caroline Hodges Persell, Eleen Baumann and Richard Mitchell, Jr.), the International Handbook of Educational Reform (Greenwood, 1992; with Peter W.Cookson, Jr and Susan F.Semel), Implementing Educational Reform (1996) and The Encyclopedia of Sociology of Education (Garland, 1998; with David Levinson and Peter W.Cookson, Jr), and co-author of Exploring Education (Allyn and Bacon, 1994; with Peter W.Cookson and Susan F.Semel). Susan F.Semel is Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Hofstra University. She received her AB in history from Wheaton College (Norton, MA), and her MAT, Ed.M., and Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of The Dalton School: The Transformation of a Progressive School

(Peter Lang, 1992), co-author of Exploring Education (Allyn and Bacon, 1994; with Alan R. Sadovnik and Peter W.Cookson, Jr), co-editor of the International Handbook of Educational Reform (Greenwood, 1992; with Peter W. Cookson, Jr and Alan R.Sadovnik), and editor of School of Tomorrow, Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education (Peter Lang, 1998). Paul Stein is a doctoral student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development of the University of Rochester, New York. Stephen P.Turner is Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, and the author or editor of a number of works on Durkheim, including Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist (Routledge, 1993), The Search for a Methodology of Social Science: Durkheim, Weber and the Nineteenth Century Problem of Cause, Probability and Action (Reidel, 1986), a special issue of Sociological Perspectives on the centennial of the publication of Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, and ‘Durkheim among the statisticians’, Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences, 1996. His The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (Polity and University of Chicago Press, 1994) is critical of the Durkheimian tradition, and places it in a broader historical perspective. He has taught at Virginia Polytechnical Institute, the University of Notre Dame, and Boston University, and has been a visiting fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Social Sciences and an Honorary Simon Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester. He recently won a Thyssen prize for a paper on charisma published in the Berliner Journal für Soziologie. Geoffrey Walford is Reader in Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College, at the University of Oxford. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Education Policy at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham. His books include: Life in Public Schools (Methuen, 1986), Restructuring Universities: Politics and Power in the Management of Change (Croom Helm, 1987), Privatization and Privilege in Education (Routledge, 1990), City Technology College (Open University Press, 1991; with Henry Miller), Choice and Equity in Education (Cassell, 1994), Researching the Powerful in Education (UCL Press, editor, 1994) and Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal (Falmer, 1997; edited with Richard Pring). In 1997 he edited a Special Issue of the Oxford Review of Education on ‘Choice, diversity and equity in secondary schooling’. Anton A.Wesselingh graduated from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in sociology and worked as a researcher at the Universities of Leiden and Amsterdam. His professional interest has been focused for a long time on the problem of social inequality in education. This has resulted in a doctoral thesis on the role of education in the reproduction of social inequality, in articles on the problem, and several reports of research projects in educational priority areas in the Netherlands. At the moment his main interest lies in sociology of education as a discipline, educational policy and, in particular, citizenship education. His publications include several theoretical books and articles on varying topics in the field. He is now an associate professor in the sociology of education at the Department of Educational Sciences of the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Philip Wexler is the Michael Scandling Professor of Education and Sociology and Dean of the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development of the

University of Rochester, New York. He is the author of Social Analysis of Education (Routledge, 1990), Becoming Somebody (Falmer, 1992), Critical Social Psychology (Peter Lang, 1996), and author and editor of many other books and papers. His most recently published book is Holy Sparks: Social Theory, Education and Religion (St Martin’s Press, 1996).

PREFACE Over the last two years the British Economic and Social Research Council and the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, University of Oxford, have sponsored a series of conferences on the work of Emile Durkheim. As part of this series, a very successful three-day conference on ‘Durkheim and Modern Education’ was held at the Maison Française, Oxford in July 1996. This book presents a selection of revised papers first presented at that conference with the addition of several further specially commissioned chapters. Contributions are included by scholars from the United States, Great Britain, France and the Netherlands, but this is only a partial indication of the international resurgence of interest in the work of Durkheim. An edited volume on the relevance and applicability of Durkheim’s work to modern education is particularly appropriate, for throughout his academic life Durkheim was continually involved with teaching and writing about education. His first appointment at Bordeaux was to give a course on social science and pedagogy to school teachers, and his major university posts at Bordeaux and the Sorbonne both involved him in lecturing about education as well as sociology. His deep involvement with and desire to integrate the practical and theoretical aspects of education continued throughout his life. However, most of Durkheim’s work on education, including his monumental The Evolution of Educational Thought in France, were published after his death and compiled from lectures notes taken by his students. The majority of his work on education was only translated into English comparatively recently, and many authors are now finding that his ideas have considerable relevance to modern society. Although Durkheim was writing about a century ago, the uncertain and rapidly changing situation that France faced at the time has many similarities with the present day. Durkheim’s focus on the moral base of education and his insistence on the importance of the social and society have important implications for education today. The editors wish to express their appreciation for the help they have received in the organization of the conference which gave rise to the papers. In particular, they thank Jean-Claude Vatin, Director of the Maison Française, Oxford, for encouraging us to hold the conference there, and for the assistance of its administrative staff. For the preparation of the book, we should above all thank the contributors themselves, who had to produce chapters in accordance with stringent technical instructions. Without willing authors there would be no book. But we should also like to show our appreciation to those who gave papers which, for various reasons, we have not been able to include but who all made a positive contribution to the conference. We are sure that all contributors benefited from the constructive debate and discussion at the conference. Finally, it is necessary to forewarn readers of a particular technical point in the format of this book. Steven Lukes’ dating-enumeration system for Durkheim’s work has been

followed throughout. In this system each original published work has its own specific identification. Unless otherwise specified, references to Durkheim thus give the date of the French original (followed by an identifying letter), then the date of the English translation used (again followed by an identifying letter). This system allows a precise identification of any quotations.

1 INTRODUCTION1 W.S.F.Pickering and Geoffrey Walford

The unpopularity of Durkheim’s work on education Of all the social areas that Durkheim examined, or the sub-disciplines that he developed, the least referred to has been that of education. This was the case amongst his own disciples who constituted the Année Sociologique group. And the same lack of interest continues amongst scholars today. The subjects of methodology, religion, morals, epistemology, suicide, the division of labour, law, and so on, have given rise to comment, criticism, praise and development. Not so the Cinderella of them all: education. Admittedly, Paul Fauconnet who followed Durkheim as professor in Paris made education his speciality but published nothing original on the subject. In more recent times a few books and some articles have appeared on the subject. But the fact remains that Durkheim’s Rules of the Sociological Method (1895a) and Suicide (1897a) have been far more prominent among teachers and students than say, The Evolution of Educational Thought (1938a)—a book which in many respects approaches the magisterial—or even Moral Education (1925a). Why is it, then, that Durkheim’s approach to education has been so marginalized? As a sociologist of education, should he not be written off? Before an attempt is made to answer such questions, and to suggest why he should be taken more seriously, attention ought to be focused on his deep concern for education. But lest there be any misunderstanding, it should be stated at the outset that this book and its introduction are concerned only with the education of young people up to about 18 years of age. University education lies outside its boundaries.

The educational world of France Durkheim was born at a time when public education was seen to be of the utmost importance to the well-being of the French nation. In spite of the fact of radical

Durkheim and modern education

2

Napoleonic reforms in education, the disastrous war of 1870 was held by some to be due to a failure of an entrenched educational system which, amongst other things, was not focused sharply enough on the sciences. In France the training of teachers in primary and secondary schools was taken much more seriously from the beginning of the nineteenth century and was much more institutionalized than it was, for example, in Britain. One can point to the Ecoles Normales Primaires (teachers’ training colleges) which were initiated by Napoleon and which were for primary school teachers and were found in every département. For those anticipating teaching at the secondary level, in lycées or universities, study at an Ecole Normale Supérieure was required, the most prestigious of which was the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. The best candidates often went from teaching in a lycée to lecturing in a university. Students unable to pass the exams necessary to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure usually went straight into a university. The courses at the Ecole Normale in Paris were of an academic standard, usually held to be higher than that of the university itself. A person who successfully completed the course would at the end have received something equivalent to an honours degree as well as a qualification in pedagogy. In Britain, teachers’ training colleges were never given such priority. The first voluntary college was opened in Battersea, London in 1834: by 1850 there were about thirty such colleges in England under the control of the national church or local civic authorities (Judge et al. 1994:165). Such colleges were outside the compass of the universities and it was commonly reckoned in the mid-nineteenth century—and to some extent is still found—that a man (not a woman!) who read for a degree at Oxford or Cambridge could proceed to teach in a school without any further training. Education courses in universities proceeded slowly and Cambridge created a faculty of education only in 1968 (Searby 1982:3).2 Another reason that made the training of teachers so important in the eyes of the French government in Durkheim’s day was the policy that the ideals of the state should be implemented by teachers themselves. It was these instituteurs and institutrices of the Third Republic who, it was hoped, would supplant the curé as the moral leader, not only in towns, but in the thousands of villages of rural France. The policy was to replace a rigid ecclesiastical morality with a secular one. Through Jules Ferry, who was in the ministry of education during the Third Republic, all primary schooling was made free and compulsory in 1881.

Durkheim, man, sociologist and educator Such, in a few words, was the educational world in which Durkheim found himself as a leading pedagogical figure. He was born in 1858 into a rabbinic family in Epinal in Lorraine, entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1879 and received his aggrégation in 1882. He taught at three lycées for short periods and then went to lecture at the University of Bordeaux in 1887. In 1902 he became a lecturer at the Sorbonne and gave compulsory courses in education at the Ecole Normale. All his life he was deeply immersed in the teaching profession at various levels.

Introduction

3

Unlike the situation in Britain and the United States, formal education in France was controlled by the French civil service based in Paris. It was centralized and much influenced by the government in power. Local authorities had little or no say in its administration. Realizing his potential for their purposes, not least in education, certain people in the government of the day selected Durkheim as someone important for the future. To enhance his career they sent him in 1886 to study in Germany for a year under leading psychologists and philosophers. All his university posts involved the subject of education. When he first went to Bordeaux he was appointed lecturer in social sciences and pedagogy. Later he became professor of social science. When he went to the Sorbonne it was as a lecturer in the science of education and when he was made professor in 1913 the title of the chair at his request was Science de l’Education et de la Sociologie. When he first went to Paris to teach he followed a professor of education, Ferdinand Buisson. Buisson before that had been Director of Primary Education and supported Ferry in the reforms—the Ferry Laws, just mentioned. Thus it is clear that education was always prominent in his appointments and might be said to be his life’s work, irrespective of the many books and articles he wrote on sociological subjects in general. It is estimated that three-quarters of his teaching time was given to pedagogy. However, Durkheim referred to an uncomfortable tension in this respect. On the one hand he admitted the extreme importance of education to society and the fact that he had to spend so much time in lecturing on education. And he was unique among all sociologists until recent times in giving education such a large place in his thought. On the other hand, he saw his creative work—his mission—as that of developing the science of sociology, which he was convinced had so much to offer to the academic world and to society in general. Sociology, as a totally secular science of social phenomena, could also be seen to have an ideological base which coincided with that of the anti-clerical Third Republic. It provided it with a firm, ‘scientific’ foundation. Another type of sociology was known before that of Durkheim. It was that of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who indeed had coined the word. But his sociology had been rejected by the academic world and was scientifically and philosophically unacceptable, not least because it reached its culmination in a secular Catholicism. Durkheim was a far more political creature than Comte. He was a devoted Frenchman and a strong supporter of the Third Republic. Though never a member of any political party, he was a socialist in spirit and many of his friends were socialists. He was critical of its manifestation in various parties claiming to be socialist. Such were the alleged political consequences of his sociology that in the 1930s it was attacked by more conservative politicians when it was planned to incorporate some of his thinking into educational syllabuses. The person responsible for such an inclusion was Félix Pécaut, a strong Durkheimian sympathiser. His policy forced him to resign from the government. But in general Durkheim was successful. Sociology became a recognized academic subject and his disciples were able to teach it through university appointments, as a rule, within the discipline of philosophy. It made its way into Eastern Europe, to the United States and slowly into Britain where Durkheimian sociology gradually became popular through social anthropology. During his lifetime, Durkheim’s publications on education were meagre. They were mainly articles and reviews (see references). However, after his death, lectures and

Durkheim and modern education

4

lecture courses appeared in the form of books—Education and Sociology (1922a), Moral Education (1925a), The Evolution of Educational Thought (1938a). All these, whose titles are given in English, were not translated into that language until after the Second World War. The fact that they were translated relatively late, compared with the English translations of other books by Durkheim, only emphasizes the fact that was raised at the beginning, why of all the social areas dealt with by Durkheim, was education the most neglected? To that question we now turn.

Criticisms expounded and answered The purpose of education Perhaps one reason for the unpopularity of Durkheim’s work on education comes in his concept of the function, or if one prefers, the purpose of education. In an early book not usually referred to in connection with education, Suicide, he writes that education is ‘only the image and reflection of society. It imitates and reproduces the latter in abbreviated forms: it does not create it’ (1897a:427/t.1951a:372). There is no evidence to show that Durkheim ever deviated from this position. Two issues ensue. One, it assumes a form of determinism and rigidity within the processes of education. Two, it reduces the role of the teacher in society to that of a kind of civil servant. By today’s values, does Durkheim’s assertion about the purpose of education damn him? At first sight it might appear so for it means that the teacher can teach only what is stipulated by the curriculum, that is, what the ‘authorities’ prescribe and is thus highly restricted. Boundaries are set: the content is imposed. Only in this way, it seems, can a society be sure that its children become socialized into its norms and ideals and receive practical knowledge held necessary for being adult members. The object of education is ‘to arouse and to develop in the child a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states which are demanded of him by both the political society as a whole and the special milieu for which he is specifically destined’ (1922a:41/t.1956a:71). Of course the extent to which the teacher is restricted will depend on the curriculum set by authorities. Some teachers who find it acceptable will be pleased with the task before them. But others might say it limits their powers and they thus become little more than ‘state administrators’. Their own predilections and ideals have to be repressed. Durkheim never really considered in detail the issue of the syllabus. He probably did not think it was his task. It was a given within which the teacher could be creative. For Durkheim teaching was both a science and an art (Pickering 1979:104–6). The teacher must never be an automaton. Durkheim emphasized the humanity of the relation between the teacher and the pupils and this is nowhere more evident than in his argument for the total prohibition of corporal punishment in schools (see chapter 5). That the teacher cannot change society would appear to downgrade the role of teachers, for they must be subservient to higher authorities. The teacher is therefore very much ‘number two on the list’. Durkheim wrote ‘education can be reformed only if society itself is reformed’ (1897a/t.1951a: 373). One assumes the order is irreversible.

Introduction

5

That the school must always reflect the community in which it is situated may seem to reflect Durkheim’s authoritativeness and his sense of social order. And order is necessary for a society to function. But surely it is true that a primary school or even a secondary school has to follow in the wake of social ideals rather than be an agent for social change? One has to start with the tradition contained in and set by society. It is necessary to build on that so that lasting change can take place. A school’s primary purpose is to transmit that tradition. Never can a school be a hotbed of revolution! Is the individual or society the primary object of education? At the heart of a society stand représentations collectives, which are ideas, ideals, morals, religious values created by society for society. It is these which have to be absorbed by the pupil. This, it might be argued, makes education social-centred rather than individualcentred. Durkheim, with his commitment to social realism (society is a reality sui generis), is open to criticism from educationalists on the grounds that the individual is crippled because what is social must always be prior. The individual is therefore dehumanized. This is a distorted reading of Durkheim. He stands for the autonomy and full development of the individual. The highest point in the process of evolution is the emergence of the individual. An individual must be free to be the person he or she believes they can become. Education encourages each individual to advance to the degree she or he is able. The point is that this cannot be achieved apart from the social. It is out of the social that the individual grows. Young children have a need for order and security before the individual can develop particular characteristics and abilities. Thus in general terms the relation between the social and the individual is a dialectical one, with neither of them being finally triumphant. The individual is partly derived from the social and partly from specifically individual traits. On this point Durkheim and Dewey are very close. Further, Durkheim held that the child’s mind was not a tabula rasa but had given emotional characteristics. Psychology had a legitimate place in studying the individual development of children. In preparing the individual for adult society, education beyond a certain age has to be tailored for society and its requirements at a particular period in history. Again, society dictates, or what are now called market forces dictate what is desirable or possible. Pupils are not to be given just a general education but a vocational one where the occupation students finally embrace is available to them. Earlier school education directly prepares them for vocational education. Such an educational policy has nothing which smells of dilettantism or learning for its own sake. Life is too earnest for that. Durkheim asserted that the school can be viewed as a community which reflects the society in which it is situated. Obvious though such an assertion is, it has its limitations. The school is indeed a social institution but can never be an independent society, even a democratic one, because of its authoritarian structure and its economic dependence on the larger community. In another direction one might say that Durkheim has been maligned, or cast to one side, because he held that all teaching had to be carried out in schools and that parents should have no say in it. It is interesting because he himself gives the impression of being a patriarchal figure who would have had a considerable say in the education of his own

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children.3 He offered no reasons for his position. But nevertheless certain social groups adopted Durkheim’s position long before him, notably Anabaptists, who were pioneers in infant education and who have always stood for the autonomy of the school, where all discipline of children is carried out—never in the home. This is certainly a stronger position than Durkheim’s. The issue of morals Of all Durkheim’s books on education the most popular has been Moral Education (1925a). But although it covered many topics in education, including the class and school as social groups, discipline, punishment, psychology, the teaching of the sciences and so on, the subject which engaged most of his attention was the teaching of morals. The reasons for this are several. One might begin with a personal one. Durkheim himself was a very ‘moral’ person, indeed there was something of a Puritan in him. He had hoped his greatest book would have been on morality but alas he completed only the introduction in manuscript form before he died (see 1920a). Standing within the humanist-rationalist camp, he believed that morality was little short of religion. But although he rejected the traditional religions of Judaism and Christianity he wished to retain much of their ethical teaching. He believed that a new form of secular religion was emerging, which he called the cult of the individual. It was this that was destined to become the ideological base of modern Western industrial society all over the civilized world. No society can exist without some system of morality. Such a system was one which had to curb a person’s natural instincts and give to everyone a sense of responsibility and duty, and a set of common values. It called for obedience, self-discipline and sacrifice. In keeping with such Greek philosophers as Aristotle and Plato, Durkheim stressed the need for moderation and self-discipline. But those whose work it is to teach morality are obliged to show that it is was not just a negative approach to behaviour but that people should be encouraged to love moral behaviour for its own sake. Here he diverges from Kant. For Durkheim, discipline is never an end in itself but is necessary for freedom, for the good of the individual and society. Durkheim saw that one of the difficulties in teaching morals to the young was that of authority. Whereas the Catholic church could appeal to the teaching of a divine church, to a divine founder, and Protestants to the Bible as a written account of God’s revelation, and in all these instances refer to an authority beyond the present world, no such option was available in the imparting to pupils a laïque (non-religious), humanistic system of morality (Durkheim 1925a:3ff./t.1961a:3ff.; 1905b). He was convinced he had solved the problem by asserting that the authority for such behaviour was in society itself (see Durkheim 1991a). While this is a severe weakness in Durkheim’s thought, some of those who teach a non-religious morality in schools find the problem just as serious. Indeed, it might be argued that Durkheim is in a stronger position because he saw the problem much more clearly than perhaps some school teachers do. For Durkheim morality has to have its reasons and these can be abstract. Children cannot absorb a kind of logical Kantianism which stands at the foundation of a philosophical humanistic ethic. Further, it

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has to be admitted that Durkheim’s relativism logically leads to what today is called postmodernism. Not sufficiently empirical Another weakness which some might level against Durkheim is that, sociologist though he was, there was little in his lectures that was based on empirical research—nothing comparable to his much debated and allegedly empirical work on suicide (1897a), and The Elementary Forms (1912a) in which he employed Australian ethnographical material. In his lectures on education he relied on the experience that he felt was common to his listeners (and readers) as well as himself. He did not attempt to plumb empirically the notion of a school or a class, each viewed as a community. He knew the answer from his own educational experience! Two things should be stressed in his defence. First, there were limits to what he could accomplish. Few people, if any in his day, had undertaken in education the kind of research empirically inclined people now demand. For his book on suicide, statistics had been gathered for a considerable time. Durkheim was able to use these and sift them for his own purposes. As an armchair anthropologist, he had available ethnographical material for The Elementary Forms, and was helped in this, as in the statistics for Suicide, by his nephew, Marcel Mauss. The second reason is that Durkheim was sceptical about the value of empirical material unless it was related to some theoretical base. And let it not be forgotten that most of Durkheim’s studies on education have been based on lectures which he was obliged to deliver to would-be teachers. Above all, he saw his overarching task in sociology as propagating a method of analysis which he hoped others would adopt in working in specific social areas. In this he was probably more successful than any other sociologist. Political and cultural issues Some critics find the political and cultural setting of Durkheim’s approach to education too time-imprisoned and French-oriented: so much so, that it is not applicable, they argue, to modern times and to other nations and cultures. The ideals of the French middle-class intellectuals of the nine-teenth-century Third Republic are irrelevant to the contemporary situation involving discipline in classrooms, ethnic diversity, and the uncertainty of a common morality. Behind some of this criticism lurks the fact that he was oblivious or paid little attention to the existence of social and economic classes and to the tensions between them. The last point has to be accepted but the issue here is not so much with Durkheim’s general sociology as with his approach to education. As we have repeatedly had occasion to observe, Durkheim rightly did not envisage the school as an agent for social reform, let alone revolution! Schools, at least in France, it should be said did not create the class system. They may reproduce it, as can be deduced from Durkheim’s premises (see comments by Bourdieu in Cardi and Plantier 1993:205ff.). With schools being based in the local community and with little or no choice of school on the part of parents, and with nearly all schools in Durkheim’s day state controlled, they can and do become means

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whereby class, religious and ethnic differences arising in the local community can be reduced. What is taught is not determined by the class from which pupils come: education transcends class and overcomes it. In countries, however, where a choice of school exists, differences in class are likely to be enhanced. Moreover, the issue of pluralism is not necessarily the bone of contention in Durkheim that some might imagine. At no point is Durkheim opposed to the possibility of a pluralistic society. Indeed, he stands against absolute uniformity. Enrichment is to be had in diversity. Admittedly underneath that diversity there has to be some degree of moral consensus for, as we have noted, if everyone was totally different in moral beliefs, there would be no society. A set of moral values to which everyone adheres which reflects the basic ideology of the society is a sine qua non of that society. In countries in the modern Western world this relates to the values which are at the heart of a democracy, and these are to be systematically taught in school. For Durkheim the only acceptable diversity lies in that of the mental ability of pupils. According to him, the examination system is absolutely fair, and is in no way invalidated by class or ethnic grouping. Meritocracy alone reigns. And that surely is what Western industrial societies support, at least theoretically and doubtless they hope de facto. It is true that Durkheim never imagined that class and ethnic background would seriously impair such an ideal and I think he believed that when once the principle of meritocracy was established, such social factors would in time be ironed out.

General trends Today in pedagogical circles in the United States and Britain, and perhaps in other countries, less attention is given to the history, theory and philosophy of education than was once accorded to such subjects. In a crowded curriculum focus is on more technical matters aimed at making teachers better equipped to help their pupils achieve examination results of a high order—in making them master literacy and numeracy skills, in acquiring a working knowledge of languages and now skills in the operation of computers. Trends, fashions, and ideals come and go in pedagogy as in other professions. Not long ago the dominant ideal in teaching was the free expression of what individual pupils were said to possess. It was not a question of ‘forcing’ facts into the child’s mind but of extracting what was ‘naturally’ in it. Further, the notion of direct competition between pupils was held to be more harmful than good. Today, these ideals have been eroded, not least because the concept of competition seen in judging school against school, country against country, has now demonstrated, in the eyes of British authorities, the failure of giving pupils too much encouragement in freedom of expression. The swing means that it is necessary to implant in children ‘facts’ and techniques and, above all, the 3 Rs. In short, education is now to be more rule-governed and formal. But, also in Britain, there is a tendency for more state intervention and centralization. There should be greater accountability for money spent on education (see, for example, Hargreaves 1994). Much more attention is to be paid to discipline, not least because the levels of crime amongst

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children are higher than in previous decades and because of the need to control unseemly and violent behaviour of children in classrooms. But there is another interesting change. In Karabel and Halsey’s book on ideology in education published in 1977, there is no contribution to the teaching of morality in schools—something so prominent in Durkheim’s thinking on education. To be sure, many chapters imply some kind of underlying morality, but it is the morality of political issues. Today, there is an increased concern for the teaching of basic morality in schools, as discipline continues to break down. The changes that are now occurring point, certainly indirectly, if not directly, to the work of Durkheim. Most assuredly Durkheim upheld the usefulness, if not necessity, of competition within the school milieu, but competition had to be contained within given boundaries and unbounded competition led to social malaise. He argued that the child in its development needed security and that security had to be provided by the teacher on whom the child was dependent. The teacher was to be a role model, and assuredly a moral one at that. But it also brings us back to the quotation of Durkheim stated at the beginning of this introduction—that in the last analysis education is and has to be a reflection of the country’s ideology. The school must never be an instrument of ideological manipulation. The child must never be a pawn in the ideological ambitions of the teacher. In conclusion we would appeal to a serious consideration, or reconsideration, of the contribution Durkheim has made to the various facets of the sociology of the education. The climate is right at the moment to rehabilitate his educational thought. If what he said and wrote does not fit precisely the problems of the present time, at least he spelt out those problems with great force and many of them do not appear to have been solved. What he wrote cannot be ignored.

A résumé of the papers The book is divided into three parts broadly representing different types of engagement with Durkheim’s work on education. Part One has Durkheim’s writings at the centre of each chapter. These first chapters examine in a detailed and critical way Durkheim’s thought about various aspects of education. The authors then discuss these ideas in the context of a modern society. These chapters deal with, for example, Durkheim’s ideas about morality, punishment and social cohesion. In contrast, the chapters in Part Two start by focusing on particular educational problems and issues in modern society and look to Durkheim’s work for illumination and understanding. These authors present up-to-date discussion of current areas of concern and use a Durkheimian framework to structure their analysis. Finally, the single chapter in Part Three is concerned with developments in social and educational theory that have been influenced by Durkheim’s work. In this chapter the authors relate Durkheim’s thought to that of significant present-day theorists, and indicate the extent and nature of his enduring influence. Following this introduction, Part One opens with a chapter by Mark S. Cladis that examines the nature of Durkheim’s conception of moral education, along with a

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discussion of the extent to which that conception is appropriate in pluralistic democracies. It shows that Durkheim’s approach to education was essentially that of the historicist who understands education as a collection of practices and institutions that have been organized slowly in the course of time. His idea of public education was one that embraced moral individualism, and can be seen as one of the best examples that we have of democratic education. Cladis argues that Durkheim’s heterogeneous work on moral education embraces: critical thought and shared traditions, autonomy and community, human diversity and social unity. The chapter offers a nuanced description of and challenge to liberal, democratic institutions. It champions various authoritative perspectives of society’s shared understandings, as a means to cultivate in students dispositions for life in complex, pluralistic societies. In chapter 3 Anton A.Wesselingh discusses Durkheim’s views of citizenship and the role of education in promoting citizenship in the context of his own time. The second part of the chapter examines the relevance of these views to modern multicultural society. The chapter focuses on the Dutch education system, and considers such issues as a national curriculum and the concept of nationhood. It is argued that Durkheim’s strength is his opposition to both utilitarian liberals and conservative traditionalists. Durkheim recognized that there can be no simple restoration of ‘traditional values’. He was aware of the need to adapt the form and content of moral socialization to the social changes or the time, and not isolate moral education from the socio-historical context. There are great difficulties in the direct application of Durkheim’s prescriptions to modern education, yet, it is argued, Durkheim’s definite propositions with regard to citizenship education have yet to be replaced by equally definite alternatives. Stephen P.Turner’s chapter provides a comparison between the theories of moral education of Durkheim and Lawrence Kohlberg. He argues that the contrast between the two approaches provides an opportunity for recognizing the form of problems still to be overcome in the theory of moral education. Lawrence Kohlberg’s writings on moral education remain the greatest influence on the subject today in the United States, and his student, Carol Gilligan, is one of the most influential writers on feminist ethics and on the idea that there are gender differences in morals. In his writings Kohlberg described Emile Durkheim’s conception as ‘the most philosophically and scientifically comprehensive, clear and workable approach to moral education extant’, yet he is highly critical of what he sees as the demonstration of Durkheim’s views in Soviet Russia. Turner’s chapter examines Kohlberg’s criticism, and uses this to show persistent difficulties and lacunae in Kohlberg’s conceptions. The fifth chapter by W.S.F.Pickering focuses on Durkheim’s views on the administration of punishment in schools. Durkheim, in his lectures on Moral Education published posthumously in 1925, provides a comprehensive and closely argued case against the use of corporal punishment in schools. It is based on his deep-seated humanism associated with the Third Republic and la morale laïque (secular morality). His argument turns on the conviction that any form of physical punishment dehumanizes the child. But just as important is the fact that the very moral values the teacher tries to instil in the child are negated by such punishment. Rehearsing Durkheim’s argument has many virtues, not least at the present time. It raises the issue of discipline and punishment in general, the object of punishment and how it should be administered. The grading of

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punishment, group punishment and frequency of punishment are also referred to. These points are relevant today when so much violence is found in schools. Britain was the last country in Europe to abolish corporal punishment in state schools, and it is retained in private schools. In Britain and elsewhere there is always lurking the possibility of a return to physical punishment. Hence the value of looking at Durkheim’s arguments, which of course are not without certain weaknesses. Willie Watts Miller’s chapter examines the teaching of autonomy. Durkheim’s sociology of the modern world has been much misunderstood, partly because his ethical theory has been so much ignored. This chapter reexamines his sociology, opens up his ethics, and explains the importance of the teaching of autonomy within Durkheim’s perspective. The chapter defends the scientific approach to ethics and engages with recent debates on modernism and morality, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of Durkheim’s ideas. Part Two of the book is opened by a chapter by Roger Goodman who investigates the nature of Japanese education in the light of Durkheim’s views. First, Goodman presents a detailed account of one very popular conception of the present-day Japanese educational system. He takes ten elements of that system and shows that there are many similarities between this conception of Japanese education and the type of system that Durkheim thought to be ideal. However, this chapter argues that, in practice, the popular conception of the Japanese educational system is a myth. While the ideological underpinnings of the educational system might be seen to have strong parallels with Durkheim’s ideas, the reality is very different. The chapter then describes an alternative conception of the Japanese system, which includes the widespread private sector, and shows that the system is far from the ideal type that Durkheim envisaged. In chapter 8, Mart-Jan de Jong and Jacques F.A.Braster focus on The Netherlands. They argue that growing ethnic and cultural diversity in Dutch society, due to historic developments and recent immigration, have created a strong need for education directed at enhancing social cohesion and the acceptance of ethnic and cultural diversity. These needs were detected by Durkheim a century ago, and the authors investigate the extent to which Dutch teachers are able to meet them. The authors draw upon their own extensive research into educational policies and practices in state schools in The Netherlands. From 1988 till 1994 this study has yielded data on teachers’ pedagogical values and their strategies for making pupils aware of a wide range of social problems and political issues. They show that teachers attach a higher value to tolerance than to self-reliance or conformity. But the study also indicates that the focus on cultural diversity is very limited. The paper ends with a discussion on the desirability of education for equality, social cohesion or cultural diversity. In chapter 9 Geoffrey Walford considers the links between Durkheim’s views on democracy and diversity and some of the recent changes in England and Wales. The last decade has seen many changes in the English educational system that have been designed to broaden choice and diversity within the state-maintained sector. However, until recently, little has been done to encourage the ‘supply side’ of schooling. This chapter reviews the changing nature and structure of the educational system in England, concentrating on 1993 legislation that allows the establishment of faith-based and sponsored grant-maintained schools. Groups of parents or sponsors may now apply to the Secretary of State for Education and Employment to establish their own schools and

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existing private schools can also apply for this new status. The chapter reviews the conditions under which new schools can be established and can operate, and examines the extent and nature of implementation of the legislation. The whole development is discussed in the light of Durkheim’s ideas on the nature and provision of schooling and his beliefs about the role of schools in developing social solidarity. Chapter 10, by Alan R.Sadovnik and Susan F.Semel, applies Durkheim’s sociological analysis of education to understanding the tensions between the concepts of community and individualism in the history of American progressive education. Through an analysis of the limits and possibilities of Durkheim’s work, the similarities between Durkheim and John Dewey are examined. The chapter describes two New York progressive schools, founded in the first half of the twentieth century (The City and County School and the Dalton School) and, through a Durkheimian approach, explores a number of themes including the object of education, the function of the school and the concepts of socialization and autonomy. It discusses the attempts made by the two schools to balance the tensions between community and individualism, and links Durkheim’s work to the current liberal-communitarian debates in philosophy and sociology, showing the centrality of Durkheimian thought to these debates. Arthur K.Ellis focuses on moral education in the next chapter, where he reviews and assesses the state of moral education in American public schools during the fifty-year period from 1945 to 1995. He utilizes both primary and secondary sources, and shows the way that certain ideas, trends and fads have been pervasive components of school programmes, particularly in the light of the changing and differential emphases on such societal, and thus school-related, goals as egalitarianism, individualism and efficiency. Four major areas of emphasis—citizenship, values education, character education and moral education—are defined, characterized, explicated and traced as influences of the school curriculum. Their places as distinctly identifiable school subjects or as infused aspects of the existing subject curriculum are documented, as are their roles as shapers of the so-called hidden curriculum of the school. This analysis is illuminated by Durkheim’s work which traced the institutionalization of school curricula in France from medieval times to his own. Durkheim gave attention to ideological and social movements and to interest-driven group action as major sources of curricular and organizational change in French secondary education. His work informs this chapter in two ways: first, the focus of attention, particularly in connection with the influence of certain groups interested in shaping the agenda; and second, the validation of much of his insight with regard to modern American school culture. The following chapter by David Rigoni returns to the question of punishment in schools, by examining a specific Assertive Discipline programme. He shows that, in the last few years, Assertive Discipline has swept through the USA and is now entering Britain. Being a complete package of ideas and behaviours that promises teachers greater control over their classes, assertive discipline has been widely taught on in-service courses and has entered the initial teacher training curriculum. The essence of the idea is that children need firm, clear rules that are enforced without exception. Once the teacher has set the rules, children who break them know exactly what punishments will follow. Punishment is calculated and performed by the teacher in a clear and impersonal manner. Rigoni describes and examines the nature of assertive discipline training, and compares the moral underpinnings of the system with those put forward by Durkheim. The system

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is criticized and it is shown that there are both similarities and differences between Assertive Discipline and the form of discipline that Durkheim advocated. In the final chapter Philip Wexler and Paul Stein present a theoretical exposition of the complementary nature of education and religion based on Durkheim’s writings. Education, they hold, is transformed religion. The development of social forms moves from religion into education. Both, expressed as ideals, are derived from the dynamic of social becoming. Religion, far from disappearing, magnifies changes and idealizes social reality through the notion of resacralization. All rests on the notion of social energy— which is at the heart of Durkheim’s thought. The collection is thus diverse and, in some places, provocative. It is offered to encourage debate about Durkheim’s work and its relevance to modern education. As such, it should be noted that the interpretations and opinions of the contributors do not necessarily concur with those of the editors.

Notes 1 For a fuller and more historical introduction to Durkheim’s educational thought, see Pickering 1979. 2 See Searby 1982 for an account of the early attempts to introduce teacher training at the edge of the University of Cambridge. Only after the 1960s did the sociology of education in universities receive any attention, mainly through the work of Bernstein, Floud and Halsey. In the 1970s Departments of Education in Britain were embroiled with Marxist ideology, which did not raise their already low reputation in universities (see Davies in Cardi and Plantier 1993:146ff.; also The Times for 9.12.74 describing the formation of an anti-Marxist movement amongst teachers). Marxist school teachers envisaged their work as a means of radical social change, if not revolution. This was totally unlike Durkheim’s concept of education (see Karabel and Halsey 1977). 3 The story in the family is that Durkheim was very much concerned with the education of his son, André, who turned out to be a brilliant university student and who was killed in 1916 on the Eastern Front. His death undoubtedly hastened Durkheim’s own death. But he felt that his daughter, Louise, should not proceed on a course of higher education. (My thanks to Mrs Claudette Kennedy for this point.)

References Cardi, F. and Plantier, J. (eds) (1993) Durkheim, sociologue de l’éducation, Paris: L’Harmattan.

Durkheim, E. (1893b) De la Division du travail social: étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures, Paris: Alcan.

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——(t.1933b) by G.Simpson, The Division of Labor in Society, New York: Macmillan. ——(1895a) Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, Paris: Alcan. ——(1901c) 2nd edition by Durkheim. ——(t.1938b) by S.A.Solovay and J.H.Mueller, The Rules of Sociological Method, edited, with an introduction by G.E.G.Catlin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press and (1950) Chicago: Free Press. ——(1897a) Le Suicide; Etude de sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1951a) by J.A.Spaulding and G.Simpson, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, edited, with an introduction by G.Simpson, Chicago: Free Press and (1952) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1901a(i)) ‘Deux Lois de l’évolution pénale’, L’Année sociologique, IV:65–95. ——(t.1969e) by W.Jeffrey Jr, University of Cincinnati Law Review, 38:32–60. ——(1905b) Contribution to: ‘La Morale sans Dieu: essai de solution collective’, La Revue, LIX:306–8. ——(t.1979a) by H.L.Sutcliffe. In W.S.F.Picketing 1979, see below. ——(1912a) Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le système totémique en Australie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1915d) by J.W.Swain, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan. ——(1920a) ‘Introduction à la morale’, Revue philosophique, LXXXIX:79–97. ——(t.1979a) by H.L.Sutcliffe. In W.S.F.Picketing 1979, see below. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, introduction by Paul Fauconnet, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology, Chicago: Free Press. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, introduction by Paul Fauconnet, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schurer, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, edited, with an introduction, by E.K.Wilson, New York: Free Press. ——(1938a) L’Evolution pédagogique en France, 2 vols, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1977a) by P.Collins, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1991a) ‘L’Enseignement de la morale à l’école primaire’. Reproduced in J. Gauttain ‘Le Formation d’une discipline universitaire: la science de l’éducation 1850– 1914’, Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris V, pp. 636–55. ——(t.1995a) by D.Lussier, W.S.F.Pickering and J.Watts as ‘Durkheim and moral education for children: a recently discovered lecture’, Journal of Moral Education, 24, 1:26–36.

Hargreaves, D. (1994) The Mosaic of Learning: Schools and Teachers for the Next Century, London: Demos.

Judge, H., Lemosse, M. and Sedlak, L.P. and M. (1994) The University and the Teachers: France, the United States, England, Oxford Studies in Comparative Education, 4, Wallingford, Oxfordshire: Triangle Books.

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Karabel, J. and Halsey, A.H. (eds) (1977) Power and Ideology in Education, New York: Oxford University Press.

Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim. His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study, London: Allen Lane. New edition 1992, London: Penguin.

Pickering, W.S.F. (1979) Introduction’ to W.S.F.Pickering (ed.) Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Searby, P. (1982) The Training of Teachers in Cambridge University. The First Sixty Years 1879–1939, Cambridge: The University Department of Education.

Part One

2 EMILE DURKHEIM AND MORAL EDUCATION IN A PLURALISTIC SOCIETY Mark S.Cladis I One of the defining characteristics of contemporary, North Atlantic democratic societies is what John Rawls has referred to as ‘the fact of pluralism’. My chief question in this chapter is: What is the nature of Durkheim’s conception of moral education and is it appropriate for pluralistic democracies? Many would not associate Durkheim with anything having to do with moral pluralism, especially if the subject pertained to education. Training, discipline, authority—are not these the terms at the heart of Durkheim on education, and what have these to do with pluralism? Yet we know that the case of Durkheim on pluralism is not simple. Durkheim was, after all, a champion of the dignity, indeed, the sacredness of ‘the individual’. This meant, among other things, that he was a strong supporter of individual rights. Moreover, ‘the individual’ for Durkheim was never a mere tool of the state or a mere vessel to be filled by the state for the sake of the state. We also know, however, that Durkheim was a champion of the common good. To what extent do Durkheim’s theories permit conflict between the autonomy of individuals and the good of society? This issue is important when discussing moral education in the context of pluralistic societies. For example, to what extent do parents have the right to determine their children’s education? And in what way are children protected from what some would call state socialization? In this chapter, I describe what I take to be the ethos—the character—of Durkheim’s approach to moral education, while highlighting the relation between his educational vision and the question of pluralism. In the end, I will argue that Durkheim’s approach is one of the best examples we have of democratic education for pluralistic societies. II In 1885, in a very early review, Durkheim wrote: It is necessary that we never lose sight of what is the aim of public education. It is not a matter of training workers for the factory or accountants for the warehouse, but citizens for society. The teaching

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should therefore be essentially edifying [moralisateur]; it should detach minds from egoistic views and material interests… (Durkheim 1885b:449) In the same review Durkheim argued that material power is not the only social good to be distributed justly. ‘Political power constitutes a sort of social fund’, and in democracies this ‘collective capital is to be distributed equally’. Such equality, Durkheim claims, ‘can be justified on good and solid reasons’. Yet lest there be a ‘contradiction between the quantity and the quality’ of political participation, political power must be wed to ‘that other collective good’ that is also to be distributed equally—‘intellectual capital’, that is, education. Early on, then, Durkheim was aware of the important role education plays in the life of a democracy. He never lost this perspective, but developed it into a sophisticated, and helpful, model for democratic education. Its heterogeneous character, embracing critical thought and shared traditions, autonomy and community, human diversity and social unity, provides a powerful support and challenge to liberal, democratic institutions. Durkheim took to heart Rousseau’s belief that education ought to transform individuals into citizens ready for moral participation in society. ‘Education’, Durkheim wrote, ‘far from having as its unique or principal object the individual and his interests, is above all the means by which society perpetually recreates the conditions of its very existence’ (1922a/t.1956a:123). Socialization, then, not private self-expression, is the aim of education, and socializing individuals is a moral endeavour: ‘We are moral beings only to the extent that we are social beings’ (1925a/t.1961a: 64). Education, in Durkheim’s view, shapes social beings by instilling shared moral traditions, practices and ideals. Despite all the assorted moral disputes, Durkheim claimed, ‘there exists a certain number of principles which, implicitly or explicitly, are common to all’. These include ‘the respect…for the ideas and sentiments which are at the base of democratic morality’ (1922a/t.1956a:81). Through moral education, young people become autonomous and develop the skills in reflective and critical thought that are so important to flourishing democracies, as they are nurtured in, to use John Rawls’ phrase, ‘an overlapping consensus’ or, to use Durkheim’s phrase, nurtured in society’s shared ‘ideas, sentiments, and practices’. Rousseau’s dilemma (namely, how to reconcile his love for both the autonomous indi-vidual and the devoted citizen) is tackled by Durkheim when he described ‘the individual’ as a cherished social ideal. Advancing this ideal, according to Durkheim, should be a prominent goal of modern education. I now turn to explore some of the various aims and methods specified in Durkheim’s work on moral education. For Durkheim, education is a moral task. It is not self-evident that we should expect Durkheim, a professor of education, to hold this position. Many would not agree with him. Education, some would argue, is amoral. It imparts facts about the way the world is, and not values concerning the way it should be. Statements about how things should be or ought to be are normative and pertain to morality. Unlike education, whose domain is public facts for public consumption, morality is a matter of the individual’s heart. It is private. The most that public education can do is clarify for students what they already believe. A child’s public education must remain neutral on questions of morality so that he or she can, someday, freely choose a morally satisfying

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way of life. Proponents of this position argue that good parents, like good educators, respect this principle of neutrality. Durkheim rejected the very idea of a neutral or amoral general education. Moral ideals, in his account, are public. They contribute to the creation and re-creation of the world about us. They are inescapable. I do not want to suggest that Durkheim considered all education moral education, only that, contrary to many educational theorists, Durkheim considered the moral aspect the most important aspect of education. Teaching is genuinely educational, he claimed, when ‘it has the capacity of exerting a moral influence on the way we are and the way we think…. An education whose sole aim is to increase our mastery of the physical universe is bound to fail in this central task’ (Durkheim 1938a/t.1977a:336–7). Moral education, in Durkheim’s view, takes place in most school subjects. It cannot be confined to a daily course. It is not lessons in Moralität, to use Hegel’s term— memorizing abstract ethical codes and regulations.1 ‘Moral education cannot be so rigidly confined to the classroom hour…it is implicated in every moment. It must be mingled in the whole of school life, as morality itself is involved in the whole web of collective life…. There is no formula that can contain and express it adequately’ (1925a/t.1961a:125). The teaching of science, history, literature and the social sciences all contribute to the construction of the social worlds in which the child will ethically develop and participate. I have said that for Durkheim education is fundamentally a moral task, yet I still need to specify the nature of that task, that is, the nature of Durkheim’s conception of moral education. A good way to begin is to note how Durkheim distinguished his position from Kant’s and from the utilitarian positions of Bentham, James Mill and Spencer. Durkheim offered specific criticism of each, but for my purposes these particular critiques are not as significant as Durkheim’s general criticism of what these theorists had in common: ‘They assume that there is an ideal, perfect education, which applies to all men indiscriminately; and it is this education, universal and unique, that the theorist tries to define.’ History, however, in Durkheim’s view, provides no evidence of such an ideal. Moreover, these theorists failed to understand education as a ‘collection of practices and institutions that have been organized slowly in the course of time’ (1922a/t.1956a:64, 65). Durkheim’s approach to education, unlike Kant’s and the various utilitarians’, was that of the historicist. By historicist I am referring to those who, to use Richard Rorty’s description, ‘have denied that there is such a thing as “human nature” or the “deepest level of the self”. Their strategy has been to insist that socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down’ (Rorty 1989:xiii). Durkheim complained that the modern educational theorist ‘asserts that human nature is universally and eternally the same. It is regarded as self-evident that to the questions of how to think about the world and how to behave in it there is a single right answer which holds true for the whole of the human race’ (1938a/t.1977a:321). Those subscribing to this essentialist view attempt to discover ahistorical human nature and then use education as a means to elicit or instil it, thereby protecting it ‘from all the deceits and artificialities of different civilizations’. In Durkheim’s view, however, all education, like all morality, is sectarian. It is for these people, at this time. Moreover, what we teach here and now cannot be developed from scratch. We suffer from self-deception when we believe that we can create, ex nihilo, the ways and means of education. Educational systems, he wrote:

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are the product of a common life…. They are, moreover, in large part the work of preceding generations…. Historical investigation of the formation and development of systems of education reveals that they depend upon religion, political organization, the degree of development of science, the state of industry, etc. If they are considered apart from all these historic causes, they become incomprehensible. (1922a/t.1956a:66) Educational institutions, then, are contingent. They cannot be derived from God above or nature below. But they are not arbitrary. They belong to a vast though not shapeless narrative, or set of narratives, that a society tells itself about itself. Durkheim wrote of the diverse educational aims of a variety of cultures. Of Roman culture, for example, he claimed that ‘education trained the individual to subordinate himself’ to society. This is not the case for modern democratic societies. Today, Durkheim noted approvingly, education ‘tries to make of the individual an autonomous personality’ (1938a/t.1977a:64). A central aspect of Durkheim’s principled understanding of moral education is that it should engender this social ideal, the autonomous individual or, more generally, as Durkheim occasionally put it, moral individualism. Moral individualism designates a cluster of values and goals, institutions and practices distinctive of liberal democratic traditions.2 Our belief in the moral worth of the individual, Durkheim claimed, increasingly dominates ‘our whole present-day moral system’ (1938a/t.1977a:325). However, he also insisted that it needs to permeate our institutions more deeply. This social ethos needs to be taught to our youth, and to any others who are destined to be active participants in liberal society. Education centred on moral individualism aims to foster a ‘sense of the dignity of man’ and a ‘greater thirst for justice’. An education centred on moral individualism, moreover, is secular and rational, although it is not anti-religious. It does not, for example, attempt to subvert religious belief. Secular education, in Durkheim’s account, is attentive to rational moral beliefs and practices that are embedded in religion, lest ‘we be left only with an impoverished and colorless morality’ (1925a/t.1961a:9). Secular education, however, does combat what Durkheim called ‘intellectual servitude’. Future citizens of democracies need to know about styles of belief and practices other than that of their family or local group. Otherwise a child, a future adult, who had been held captive to a highly particular moral point of view, could find it difficult to respect those holding other worthy views. So when Durkheim wrote of secular education, he was referring to an inclusive education, an education that arises from the greater society, and that enables individuals to appreciate, if not to participate in, a variety of communities and associations. Such a tutored appreciation is an essential component of moral education in pluralistic societies. III I have been enlarging upon the ways in which Durkheim’s idea of a public education embraced moral individualism; later we will see that there are implicit connections between his educational commitment to moral individualism and our contemporary

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interest in moral pluralism. A further investigation of Durkheim’s educational commitment to moral individualism can be based on his lectures on moral education and briefly inspecting two of the three concepts he considered central to this subject— namely, the concepts of discipline and autonomy. Durkheim was saying some novel things with these familiar terms. In the lectures on discipline, Durkheim repeatedly referred to liberty, critical thought, innovation and self-expression. These are not themes many would expect to find in a discussion on discipline. For Durkheim, discipline is an aspect of morality: it is an acquired capacity for living in the various contours of a moral life. The discipline found in moral education in liberal democracies, according to Durkheim, ought to be directed at furthering the values and goals of moral individualism which give moral education its content. Its form follows its content. Given the content of moral individualism, Durkheim insisted that the forms of discipline should not be harsh or coercive. Corporal punishment, for example, is strictly prohibited. A teacher’s authority is not to be derived from physical power or threat of punishment, but from moral legitimacy (1925a/t.1961a:154). Moreover, ‘discipline must [not] involve blind and slavish submission’, and it must not be removed ‘from the realm of discussion, converting it into icons to which man dare not, so to speak, lift his eyes’ (1925a/t.1961a:52–3). One of the results of discipline is something like Nietzsche’s will-to-power, that is, the will to master one’s life. From self-mastery a host of good things follows. ‘Self-mastery’, Durkheim wrote, ‘is the first condition of all true power, of all liberty worthy of the name’ (1925a/t.1961a:45). Self-mastery protects freedom from ‘caprice’ and emotional ‘gusts of wind’. It produces the freedom to act from a defined character, checking the tyranny of being unduly subject to the influences that happen to surround us. Selfmastery enables us to focus our powers and talents to a precise point, thereby creating something splendid, something lovely, and something novel. Moral innovators such as Socrates and Jesus, Durkheim pointed out, dared ‘to shake off the yoke of traditional discipline’ (1925a/t.1961a:53). Such innovation does not entail spurning all received social ‘contours’. It is a matter of knowing when some disciplines become yokes of slavery. Finally, out of self-mastery emerges the self. ‘The individual human being’, Durkheim said, ‘is someone who can leave his imprint upon everything he does, a mark appropriate to himself, constant through time and by means of which he recognizes himself as distinct from all others’ (1925a/t.1961a:46). This is not an invitation to overcome what Harold Bloom has called ‘the anxiety of influence’ (1973:5–16). On the contrary, the strong personality wields a distinctive influence only because it is enriched and stayed by the stable yet flexible intellectual and moral traditions of an age. The attempt to escape the influence of what has been achieved before is more likely to create vacuity, not originality. ‘Man possesses all the less of himself when he possesses only himself (1925a/t.1961a:69). Autonomy, or self-determination, is the other concept Durkheim employed in his lectures on moral education. This concept represents still another aspect of morality. ‘To act morally, it is not enough—above all, it is no longer enough—to respect discipline and to be committed to a group. Beyond this…we must have knowledge, as clear and complete an awareness as possible of the reasons for our conduct…’ (1925a/t.1961a:120). Autonomy does not spring from escaping collective influences or

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from a total immersion in collective influences such that society’s justifications become the individual’s. Neither account is satisfactory. Durkheim dissociated his position from these two extremes—the position of various Enlightenment liberals and Romantics who insisted that individuals should be free from all social constraints in order to experience spontaneity in moral and aesthetic activities, and the position of those who claimed that individuals, by necessity, are ‘perpetually subject to restraints’ and that the ‘personality can be nothing but a product of its environment’. Kant, according to Durkheim, attempted to preserve the good and helpful aspects of both positions. Kant emphasizes, on the one hand, the imperative quality of morality. On the other hand, Kant ‘refuses to acknowledge that the will can be completely moral when it is not autonomous, when it defers passively to a law of which it is not the maker’ (1925a/t.1961a:108, 109). Kant tried to mediate the two positions by claiming that if the will were free from sensibility and conformed to reason alone, it would, as Durkheim put it, ‘move spontaneously toward duty through the impulse of its nature alone’. The coercive and obligatory aspect of the moral law, in other words, would vanish for the purely rational individual. The Kantian will purchases autonomy, however, by violently separating itself from the world, and by attempting to align itself with unworldly reason. This price is too high, for, as Durkheim noted, ‘our reason is not a transcendent faculty; it is implicated in society’ (1925a/t.1961a:109, 113). In Kant’s account, there is no room for moral pluralism; the universal permits no diversity. In Durkheim’s account, in contrast, there is room for moral pluralism both between and within societies. But this is not an invitation to moral nihilism. Durkheim attempted to capture the merits of Kant’s position by socializing the Kantian faculty of moral reasoning. In doing so, he redefined it. Reason no longer was the faculty for producing universal and certain judgments to guide the autonomous will. Instead, it became the ability to recognize the best—the most helpful, or plausible, or beautiful, or profound—descriptions, explanations and judgments that our historical communities have so far produced. Having said this, Durkheim could agree with Kant that as individuals become rational they become autonomous agents. It was understood now, however, that individuals become rational as they learn to identify what a society calls reasonable or unreasonable or problematic, and as they learn how it has arrived at these (often tentative, and even diverse) conclusions. Autonomous agents are those who are aware of the social and historical warrants for moral beliefs and practices, and who are thereby free to embrace and criticize them. Autonomy, then, is an important virtue to inculcate in young citizens of modern, pluralistic democracies, for these societies benefit from an active citizenry that explores present social practices, asks for reasons and pursues just reforms. IV Because the development of critical thought was a prominent feature of Durkheim’s concept of moral education, he placed particular stress on encouraging critical skills. In order to prevent what Durkheim called ‘parrot-like morality’, he insisted that a society’s beliefs and practices should not be ‘internalized in such a way as to be beyond criticism or reflection, the agents par excellence of all change’ (1925a/t.1961a:94, 52). Students

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need to be taught to expect change; they need ‘to understand that the morality of the future will probably not be that of today’ (1909a(2)/t.1979a:131). Continuity persists, to be sure, but social reality, while ‘relatively stable’, is ‘perpetually in the process of becoming’. It is this ‘process of becoming’ that needs to be made ‘perceptible to the child’ (1909a(2)/t.1979a:132). This may sound more like a sociological than a moral argument about education. Durkheim made it clear, however, that his concern was not simply that children be prepared for change per se, but that they be prepared for moral advances. Society is not to ‘content itself with a complacent possession of moral results that have been handed down to it’. To that end, the teacher ‘must be on his guard against transmitting the moral gospel of our elders as a sort of closed book.’ Morality, then, is to be understood as an open canon. Understanding this, Durkheim felt, could enable students to see themselves as something more than performers, reciting yesterday’s lines. It could excite in them ‘a desire to add a few lines of their own, and give them the tools to satisfy this legitimate ambition’ (1925a/t.1961a:13, 14). The study of history, literature and science is especially helpful for developing skills in critical thought, according to Durkheim. Studying history, for example, enables students to have some sense of and appreciation for the rich complexity of social life, and to develop a critical understanding of their own society’s place in history. The study of history promotes critical thinking because it both discloses to students their society’s distinctive shared understanding and exposes them to alien ways of life. Accustoming students to the unfamiliar enables them to appreciate otherness, to identify the stranger as a fellow human, and to acquire novel ways to cope with suffering and to appreciate ‘the richness of life’. It would be nothing less than a moral failure if students learned to judge all humanity by some textbook account of the ideal human. History, then, plays a critical role in moral education: It is by learning to become familiar with other ideas, other customs, other manners, other political constitutions, other domestic organizations, other moralities and logics than those which he is used to that the student will gain a sense of the richness of life within the bounds of human nature. It is, therefore, only by history that we can give an account of the infinite diversity of the aspects which human nature can take on. (1938a/t.1977a:208–9) Awareness of such pluralism is an essential aspect of moral education, then, because it thwarts the desire to designate a local moral vision as universal, and then impose it on all humanity. Literature and science also figured importantly, and for many of the same reasons. General and abstract talk about the practices and hopes of a people will not make a vivid impression on students. Thick descriptions are required, and literature can deliver these. The detail found in literature allows the student ‘to touch [the manners, ideas, and institutions of a people] with his own hands’, to ‘see them alive’ (1938a/t.1977a:332). Science, too, provides a sense for the complexity of human nature, not just a knowledge of the material world. Studying science conveys to students the diverse and multifarious ways our knowledge is formed. The development of scientific institutions, for example, needs to be taught: ‘We must indicate the hypotheses that successively followed and

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displaced one another, the investment in thought and labor that they entailed. We must explain to [the student] that the knowledge we now have is itself provisional’ (1925a/t.1961a:262). Moral education, then, takes place at the junctures of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the past and the present. Schools are charged with conveying to students a society’s shared understanding—its fundamental beliefs, practices and goals. Schools also are to cultivate in students dispositions for critical thinking, for evaluating contemporary practices in light of alternatives found in foreign or past cultures, in new developments taking place within contemporary society, or in longstanding ideals that need to be more fully realized in social practices. These two aims of moral education—teaching the ways of tradition and criticism, in the context of pluralism—go hand in hand, because future citizens who will become active participants in a democratic society will need to consult the past as they look to the future. In spite of my efforts to highlight the role of diversity, change and critical thought in Durkheim’s account of moral education, the idea of transmitting a shared understanding will frighten many, and for good reasons. Some will ask: Is there such a thing as a shared understanding? What is in it? What is missing from it? Is there only one? If not, whose version of ‘it’ are we to transmit? In America, for example, some may ask: Is the shared understanding the same for African Americans and White Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, men and women, hetero- and homosexuals, lower class and middle, middle class and upper? Some, no doubt, will ask: Is not public, moral education a form of state domination and coercion? Given ‘the fact of pluralism’, to use John Rawls’ phrase again, what shared moral understanding is to be imparted to our youth? There are no easy answers to these pertinent questions. That, in fact, would have been one of Durkheim’s responses. These are not problems to be ‘easily determined, once and for all’; they are difficulties to be discussed through continual debate and argument in a democratic society. ‘It is not indeed up to the State to create this community of ideas and sentiments without which there is no society’, Durkheim said (1922a/t.1956a:80–81). That community is made and remade continuously by a host of social activities, from parent—teacher associations to national debates to marches on Washington or Parliament. None the less, the state has an active role to play in education, Durkheim insisted, lest, for example, the majority should attempt systematically ‘to impose its ideas on the children of the minority’ (1922a/t.1956a:81). Durkheim recognized that in a pluralistic society, there is a moral obligation to resist the imposition of an absolute homogeneity. Diversity, on some matters, is to be safeguarded. However, in his typically dialectical fashion, he also argued that education should not be ‘completely abandoned to the arbitrariness of private individuals’. Since education is crucial to the common life of a nation, the state ‘cannot be indifferent to it’. This is not to say that the state ‘must necessarily monopolize instruction’, only that it must not remain aloof. It must insure the equal distribution of this crucial social good, education, and prevent it from falling under the domination of any particular group or class. There is no evidence to suggest that Durkheim viewed the state as a legal or moral enforcer of state-sponsored ideologies. That would contradict everything he said about moral individualism and the life of democratic societies.

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Still, questions having to do with legitimacy and authority remain. Durkheim assumed that a ‘community of ideas’ exists, and this assumption raises questions about the relation between public education and the state, the family, the local community and, of course, the individual. How is a ‘community of ideas’ established or determined given that we live in increasingly pluralistic societies? I have noted that, in Durkheim’s view, the state has no exclusive right to pronounce on and to perpetuate a society’s conception of the good life, that is, those beliefs and practices that a society values. Indeed, Durkheim often described state-monopolized instruction as a threat to democratic morality. On the other hand, Durkheim was equally critical of the idea that educational authority rests exclusively with the family, that is, with the parents. He argued that, with respect to education, there is tension between the rights and duties of the state and those of the family, and he opposed those who, in his words, claim that ‘education is…an essentially private and domestic affair’ (1922a/t.1956a:79). Advocates of this position ‘forbid any positive action [by public education] designed to impress a given orientation on the mind of the youth’. Durkheim maintained, along with Tocqueville, that as modern societies become increasingly pluralistic, older, more traditional forms of transmitting social ideals and practices wane. For this reason, it is all the more essential that in modern, pluralistic societies that a common treasury of democratic principles be taught, lest education fall into the service of ‘private beliefs, and the whole nation [become] divided and break down into an incoherent multitude of little fragments in conflict with one another’ (1922a/t.1956a:79). Unlike a social philosopher such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Durkheim did not deplore pluralism, but he would insist, I hold, that the more pluralistic a democratic nation, the greater the need for a common—even if limited—democratic faith. Public education can contribute to this faith. From this argument come other reasons for the state to take an active role in education. As we have seen, the state is to prevent the majority from imposing ‘its ideas on the children of the minority. The school should not be the thing of one party’ (1922a/t.1956a:81). Pluralism is lawful and needs to be ensured. The state also protects the individual child from some minorities. It blocks antisocial provincialism and prevents families from intellectually and emotionally tyrannizing a child. ‘There is no school which can claim the right to give, with full freedom, an antisocial education’ (1922a/t.1956a:80). Children are citizens. They have the right to an education that will enable them to become full participants in the complex, pluralistic life of a democracy. Democratic societies have a duty to uphold children’s educational rights, and this includes providing an adequate liberal, moral education. The very idea of educating students in a shared understanding is still likely to give many pause for thought. I suppose this is to say that they still find the very idea of public, moral education alarming. Public education can be determined by relations having more to do with power than with justice. I want to suggest, however, that Durkheim emphasized a common liberal moral education precisely because he was mindful of the potential abuses of power that emerge from conflict not governed by deliberation. Distressed by what he perceived to be a disintegrating collective moral consciousness and by the injustices that accompany it, Durkheim focused on the need for educating future citizens in their progressive moral traditions, in what he called moral individualism and democratic morality.

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There is nothing neutral about Durkheim’s approach to moral education. Durkheim was devoted to the Third Republic in which he lived, and he was committed to sustaining its often fragile institutions and values. The value of individual rights, for example, is a substantive belief, one that Durkheim thought schools should teach. Public schools can no more afford to be neutral on this score than can other public institutions such as the courts. To abandon this value is to abandon the very virtue needed for practising prudential tolerance or impartiality. Instilling a common morality, in this case, will not serve to silence diverse voices but will give them a greater hearing. Durkheim, then, was interested in fostering progressive, liberal values, not radical neutrality. This is not to say that he abandoned the communitarian regard for community and the common good. On the contrary, he contended that liberal values and practices can create in us a deep sense of moral unity. Moral individualism is not simply a means to secure private ends. It promotes shared public goods, and hence summons individuals to embrace common projects and identities. He consistently held that practices and ideals that are associated with moral individualism are the ‘moral backbone’ of his cherished Third Republic. Like Rousseau, Durkheim championed the rational, autonomous individual who is skilled in both self-mastery and self-expression. Again like Rousseau, he located the individual’s heart and soul in the virtuous society whose common good is discovered in common deliberation. This deliberation, this active, intelligent participation in society, is not a gift of nature. It needs to be imparted. Consequently, Durkheim devoted himself to promoting public moral education. V Permit me to recollect some of the features of Durkheim’s understanding of moral education that can be extended to address education in the context of pluralism: Durkheim not only approved of moral individualism, but he saw it as a set of beliefs and practices that should be taught to our youth, and to any others who would be active participants in liberal society; Durkheim emphasized discipline not for the sake of mere social conformity, but in order that the individual develop self-mastery and hence a distinctive self; to prevent what Durkheim called ‘parrot-like morality’, he insisted that a society’s beliefs and practices should not be ‘internalized in such a way as to be beyond criticism or reflection, the agents par excellence of all change’; Durkheim held that future citizens of democracies need to know about styles of belief and practices other than that of the family or local group; he emphasized the need to accustom students to the unfamiliar in order that they can appreciate otherness, to identify the stranger as a fellow human; finally, he did not deplore pluralism, but insisted that the more pluralistic a democratic nation, the greater the need for a common—even if limited—democratic faith. I began this chapter by suggesting that some would find it difficult to believe that Emile Durkheim could have any positive contribution to the subject of moral education and pluralism. I would now like to conclude by suggesting that this view ignores how very much the issue of moral pluralism dominated Durkheim’s thought. Durkheim described two kinds of pluralism: what I have called moral pluralism and a plurality of morals. Think of a plurality of morals as referring to the diverse sets of goals and values,

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and the varying levels of homogeneity that characterize groups in the domestic, occupational, civic and international spheres (we can also think of this as a division of moral labour, or what Durkheim referred to as moral particularism). Moral pluralism, on the other hand (and more important for our purposes here) pertains to the relation between the beliefs and practices of the political community and the beliefs and practices of such associations as churches and synagogues, clubs and organizations—or even individual families. I have argued that the common good of the political community, in Durkheim’s view, does not require broad agreement from these associations on every issue. Political unity and a common faith, in other words, do not require social homogeneity. On some issues, however, widespread agreement is desirable. Moral pluralism, then, refers to a plurality of communities and associations that promote distinctive practices and beliefs, and yet also support—or at least do not threaten—the common good, in Durkheim’s case, the good of the Third Republic. I think one of the best—and most misunderstood—examples of Durkheim’s capacity to connect a common faith with aspects of pluralism and conflict is his work on moral education. Its heterogenous character, embracing critical thought and shared traditions, autonomy and community, human diversity and social unity, offers a nuanced description of and challenge to liberal, democratic institutions. It champions various authoritative perspectives of society’s shared understanding as a means to cultivate in students dispositions for life in complex, pluralistic societies. Durkheim’s model of moral education in the context of pluralism is, no doubt, not fully adequate; yet the life children need to prepare for is too complicated, too wonderful, too difficult for us to settle for anything less. Notes 1 For an excellent discussion on Hegel’s use of Moralität and the contrasting concept, Sittlichkeit—moral beliefs and practices embedded in vital traditions and institutions—see Charles Taylor (1979:83–84 and 89–90). 2 The best single work to consult for Durkheim’s work on moral individualism is his ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’ (1898c).

References Bloom, H. (1973) The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1885b) Review of ‘Fouillée, A., La Propriété sociale et la démocratie’, Revue Philosophique, XIX:446–53. ——(1898c) ‘L’Individualisme et des intellectuels’, Revue bleue, 4e série, X:7–13. ——(t.1973a) by M.Traugott, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals.’ In R.Bellah (ed.), Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society (pp. 43–57), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——(1909a(2)) ‘L’Efficacité des doctrines morales’, Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, IX:219–31.

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——(1979a) by H.L.Sutcliffe, ‘A discussion on the effectiveness of moral doctrines.’ In W.S.F.Pickering (ed.), Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology, Chicago: Free Press. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education, New York: Free Press. ——(1938a) L’Evolution pédagogique en France, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1977a) by Peter Collins, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, C. (1979) Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3 EMILE DURKHEIM, CITIZENSHIP AND MODERN EDUCATION1 Anton A.Wesselingh The sociology of Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) must be understood against the background of a society on the verge of the First World War, characterized by rancour and resentment, and riddled with unrest. La défaite, the defeat by Germany in 1870, had also created the challenge of starting again. Of particular importance in this light is the nostalgic attitude of Durkheim towards the glorious past of France and his objections to the modernization of French society. In considering Durkheim’s ideas, the sociology of knowledge (Mannheim 1936) may be helpful: influences from the social context and the personal circumstances of the author can clearly be found in the thinking of Durkheim, and consideration of this influence can help us to understand his opinions. In the present contribution, Emile Durkheim’s ideas with regard to education and in particular his opinions about the role of the school in education for citizenship within the nation state will be considered. The questions which I will pose and attempt to answer (at least in part) are: Why did Durkheim attach so much importance to education from a national perspective? and what is the relevance of Durkheim’s ideas for modern education in post-industrial society? Durkheim, education and the nation state ‘L’individu, en voulant la société, veut lui-meme’—the individual, in willing society, wills himself (1922a/t.1956a:78). This is Durkheim’s main point with regard to the relation between the individual and society. In my opinion, the obvious interpretation of this statement is not that the individual should lose himself in a society; this is far too simple. The development of an individual does not take place in a vacuum but in a historically moulded society. In the words of Durkheim: The influence that it exerts on him, notably through education, does not at all have as its object and its effect to repress him, to diminish him, to denature him, but, on the contrary, to make him grow and to make of him a truly human being. (1922a/t.1956a:78) Durkheim’s hammering at the necessity of a good general upbringing for all (French) citizens is an expression of his republican conviction that such a citizenship ideal must be pursued in the nation state of France at the end of the nineteenth century. The ideal is a

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clearly centralistic-nationalistic ideal fed by Durkheim’s concern for the morality, spirit and resilience of the French people at the fin de siècle. It is not going too far to describe Durkheim’s ideas about the relation between the individual and society, as frequently expressed in numerous places (1922a, 1925a, 1938a, 1950a), in terms of a nationalistic ideal: the almost total equation of citizenship with the awareness of a national identity. The plea is for a form of citizenship education with a strong collectivist orientation and a heavy emphasis on solidarity in the Durkheimian sense (organic solidarity). This form of solidarity sees the collective conscience or the whole of convictions and feelings shared by the members of society as the binding agent. For Durkheim there are two institutions which play a particularly important role in this process: the educational system and the state. Durkheim’s vision of upbringing and education (he consistently speaks of education embodying both elements in most cases) is well known. Education constitutes an essential prerequisite for the reproduction of society, ‘the means by which society perpetually recreates the conditions of its very existence’ (1922a/t.1956a:123). Education should bring the more collective, cross-individual opinions and practices to the fore. Society can survive only if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity; education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in the child, from the beginning, the essential similarities that collective life demands. (1922a/t.1956a:70) Durkheim nevertheless argues against strict homogeneity in education. He sees education as being confronted with the task of creating the necessary diversity (that is, education is diverse and one—un et divers—at the same time). This can be done by devoting attention to two aspects of the person. In each of us, it may be said, there exist two beings which, while inseparable except by abstraction, remain distinct. One is made up of all the mental states which apply only to our selves and to the events of our personal lives. That is what might be called the indi-vidual being. The other is a system of ideas, sentiments, and practices which express in us, not our personality, but the group or different groups of which we are part; these are religious beliefs, moral beliefs and practices, national or occupational traditions, collective opinions of every kind. Their totality forms the social being. To constitute this being in each of us is the end of education. (1922a/t.1956a:124) It is striking that Durkheim does not consider, at least here, the formation of the individual to be a task for education, he is so heavily fixated on the social being: without the collective, no individual. These ideas with regard to the necessity of a good basic curriculum for fully-fledged citizenship are worked out in an endless number of variations in L’Education morale. Morality is of great importance to Durkheim. It constitutes the connection between his

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general sociological ideas and his concern about the national crisis at that time. With regard to education and upbringing, he systematically spells the connection out and, in doing so, emphasizes adherence to socially anchored moral rules—themselves social facts—by the youth. Durkheim sees a formal element implied in morality, namely the spirit of discipline (l’esprit de discipline). This element consists of behavioural rules which determine our actions and are obligatory in nature (i.e., a social fact). This element also consists of behavioural regularity and authority (not of a supernatural but a social nature). With respect to content, Durkheim sees the attachment to social groups (l’attachement aux groupes sociaux, l’esprit d’association) which comes close to solidarity. Finally, there is a third element, the autonomy or self-determination of the personality: an understanding of oneself, the country and the group to which one belongs. The question which now arises is how education can best convey these notions. The first element, discipline, has two aspects: morality characterized as regularity of behaviour (what holds today as a moral rule holds tomorrow) and appreciation of authority sui generis or the moral obligation to behave according to rules (1925a/t.1961a:33, 34; Lukes 1973:112 and elsewhere). In L’Education morale Durkheim considers these matters in a number of chapters on punishment (la pénalité scolaire). Infringement is seen as shirking solidarity and punishment as confirming the rule which has been violated (1925a/t.1961a:200). In Education et sociologie he sketches the importance of authority in the school and is quite strict in this. In passing, he also manages to criticize Montaigne. Nothing is so false and deceptive as the Epicurean conception of education, the conception of a Montaigne, for example, according to which man can be formed while enjoying himself and without any other spur than the attraction of pleasure. (1922a/t.1956a:87) Durkheim’s position is almost Calvinistic, with education constituting a very serious matter for young children. Attachment to the social group or imparting of group solidarity (l’attachement aux groupes sociaux) is the second element of morality. What counts as morally good behaviour and what are the features of such behaviour? The answer is hardly surprising. ‘Moral goals, then, are those the object of which is society. To act morally is to act in the light of a collective interest’ (1925a/t.1961a:59). The role of education is obviously considered critical. Digressions are made into the, according to Durkheim, excessive French individualism and the lack of a network of intermediate groups (in between the family and the state). Durkheim provides some concrete recommendations. Education has the task of restoring the central values of collectivity, morality, group spirit and solidarity among students at a very young age. This helps national reintegration based on a secular morality which must be collectively oriented. The moral begins there where the group life begins (Klaassen 1981:34). Reverberations of the preceding can also be heard in the third task of the school, namely, the imparting of personal autonomy. This is a peculiar concept for Durkheim and appears to have the task of reducing the implicit determinism contained in both of the

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preceding elements. What is at stake is the person behaving consciously and fully aware of the implications of his behaviour, and the reasons for his behaviour; that is, an awareness of morality (1925a/t.1961a:120). Understanding the moral rules clearly facilitates moral behaviour. Translated into the tasks of the school, Durkheim emphasizes that teaching morality is neither preaching nor indoctrinating: it is explaining. Here we quickly encounter a collective completion of the notion of personal autonomy. The school (and in particular the teaching staff) should not repeat an endless series of creeds and rules, and so imprint them on the child’s mind. The task of the school, rather, is to lead the child ‘to make him understand his country and his times, to make him feel his responsibilities, to initiate him into life and thus to prepare him to take his part in the collective tasks awaiting him’ (1925a/t.1961a:123, 124). Durkheim propagates the formation of small groups in schools in order to fulfil the ideal of an intermediary between the family and the state. Durkheim systematically works out these ideas in L’Education morale and along with his ideas on the dangerous modernization tendency in French society at the time. He is concerned with discovering which convictions can best promote the national reintegration of a modern industrial society such as that established in France (but eclipsed by England and Germany) and how these convictions can best be distributed via education (Lukes 1973:354 ff.). Sociology should contribute significantly to the formulation of relevant social objectives, and the school has the task of realizing these objectives when youth still stands open to them and thus as early as possible in the childhood years. ‘This is virgin territory in which we can sew seeds that, once taken root, will grow by themselves’ (1925a/t.1961a:236). Nearly a century later this all sounds very strict and moralistic but is nevertheless in keeping with the goal of developing a new republican fervour in a country where the citizens have more or less let it slide. When specifying the role of the state in this process, Durkheim goes to great lengths. We might say that in the State we have the prime mover. It is the State that has rescued the child from patriarchical domination and from family tyranny; it is the State that has freed the citizen from feudal groups and later from communal groups; it is the State that has liberated the craftsman and his master from guild tyranny. (1950a/t.1957a:64) It is clear that the state is crucial in Durkheim’s thought because of its vital role in moral education on which depends the continued existence (sa propre existence) of society, ‘No State, no citizen?’ is the question raised by Heater (1990:177). For Durkheim, this is certainly true. But it is also the case that ‘since education is an essentially social function, the State cannot be indifferent to it. On the contrary, everything that pertains to education must in some degree be submitted to its influence’ (1922a/t.1956a:80). Democratic principles should be formulated by the government and taught in the schools. The state is viewed here as the steering force behind moral discipline, entitled to think and act instead of representing society (1950a/t.1957a:48). The state is also continually brought forward as the guardian of individual development and individual interests. In fact individualism seems only possible along the route of the state.

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Durkheim and modern education With his ideas on education, Durkheim pleaded for a national curriculum. At that time this was certainly not avant la lettre, for such an educational programme already existed in strongly centralized France. Nation formation as it has occurred since the French Revolution is always accompanied by educational innovation. Put differently, the development of education in any Western country can be mainly understood as part of the wider process of state formation which leads to the emergence of the modern capitalist nation state (Green 1990). France is one of the most obvious examples: its national system of state schools for trained administrators, skilled teachers and specialized technicians in the grandes écoles can be seen as an answer to the needs of a strong nation state. The nation state also largely depends on education for its internal cohesion, and the national identity of France in those days reflected the clear ideals the French leaders had in mind. Traces of these ideals can still be found in current French education: the education of everyone (la promotion de tous) before the selection of the best can take place. Viewed in such a light, the call which Durkheim makes for education to function under the leadership of the state as the restoration place for a national feeling of unity is understandable. The ideal citizen in this type of society perfectly fits the classical concept of citizenship encountered in the nation state in the first half of the twentieth century. The history of the concept of citizenship shows the provision of rights and duties for all citizens ‘descending’ towards the lower classes in a stratified society, a process of democratization of citizenship which corresponds to the emergence of the nation state. This development is mirrored in the classic typology of T.H.Marshall (1950) and includes his well-known three types of civilian rights: civil, political and social. What is important here is that the emergence of the nation state goes hand in hand with an extension of civic rights to those groups that, for one reason or another, had not established a direct relation with the state machinery and were thus denied equal treatment as citizens. Citizenship is obviously the outcome of a historical process and thus a dynamic concept in the sense that it is continuously changing and has to be reformulated in order to suit new goals. It has no fixed standards to measure the rights and duties of citizens in an absolute way: it is an essentially contested concept (Wesselingh and Klaassen 1995). Citizenship in a national curriculum? The modern citizen of today is not the same as the French citizen in Durkheim’s day, which leaves us with the question of conceptualizing the relationship between education and citizenship under current circumstances. Particularly after the Second World War, the character of the nation state changed and the welfare state made its entrance. This prompted major shifts in the notion of citizenship, in part because the social dimension of citizenship was significantly expanded under the welfare state: a right to health, happiness and good fortune for all citizens. This system is now under extreme pressure and gradually being changed for a post-industrial society under the influence of a conglomeration of factors including: increased mobility, greater urbanization, disappearance of familiar frameworks, strong individualization, rapid automatization, a

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growing market orientation, increased privatization, environmental problems. It is these factors which have also pointed to the relevance and utility of Durkheim’s ideas with regard to citizenship and education. Examples of the shifting demands on schooling, and their consequences for the ideal of citizenship, can be found in Dutch educational policy. Since the end of 1993 and after a long period of fierce debates, the secondary education system in The Netherlands has changed fundamentally. In the lower secondary grades, a core curriculum has been introduced: the so-called basisvorming (basic education). The selection of students and their allocation to one of the existing types of secondary education only take place after this core period of two years. Fourteen subjects are given, each with an accent on application (of acquired knowledge in daily life), skills (planning, cooperation, making choices) and coherence (integration between subjects). The curriculum includes such new compulsory subjects as ‘social and life skills’ and ‘technology’ while social studies and ‘civics’ have disappeared. Perhaps more illustrative are some recent developments in the upper-secondary grades. The Dutch government intends to transform these grades into what is called a ‘study house’ (studiehuis), a new type of secondary education where students work more or less independently and the role of the teacher is gradually shifted from instruction to one of guidance and supervision. In such a setting, the new concept of ‘self-responsible learning’ will play an important role. One of the arguments for restructuring the upper grades is better preparation for the labour market and higher education. Students can choose from four types of streams or combinations of subjects: Science and Technology, Science and Health, Economics and Society, and Culture and Society. Part of each combination will be compulsory and part will be optional. A second aim is better selection and determination after the first years of secondary education. Problems of drop-out are to be handled by these innovations. Schools will be given greater autonomy in order to realize these goals. Of course students will have to be taught the specific study skills necessary for this new way of learning. School buildings will have to be adapted to make this way of learning possible. Counselling and guidance services will have to be provided and, needless to say, teachers will have to be prepared to shift their activities from traditional instruction to guidance of the learning process. At the moment, a socalled ‘process management team for secondary education’ is preparing the introduction of the new system, which is foreseen for August 1998 or 1999. A few experimental schools are already using the new concept. In this context we can see the relevance of Durkheim’s concern for the moral dimension of citizenship education in France and particularly the third element of it: the autonomy or self-determination of the personality, which implies an understanding of one’s self, the country and the group to which one belongs. More than the two other elements (discipline and attachment to the social group), this autonomy is concerned with the individual ideal of an autonomous personality in a particular social context. In our modern society, characterized by increasing individualization, such an ideal may be useful. In my opinion, citizenship refers to social participation, influence, autonomy and the capacity of ruling, while also being ruled at the same time in the original republican sense of the concept. If this idea of citizenship still applies, then any government should be concerned with having these qualities transmitted to its future citizens. There is reason for

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some pessimism, however, because in the new proposals for self-responsible learning in the study house for upper-secondary education in The Netherlands, civic education has been reduced to an absolute minimum. In the core compulsory part of the curriculum, 200 hours are reserved each year for a combination of civics and history. Civics will be presented by up to 360 hours a year but only in the stream ‘Culture and Society’ and will thus be absent from the other three streams. This is despite the recommendations of the influential Dutch National Advisory Council for the government (WRR) in its report on citizenship in 1992. The traditional concept of citizenship, the one that Emile Durkheim was aiming at in his pleas for moral education, has as its prerequisites rationality and solidarity. According to some critics, however, this type of citizenship belongs to the past. Philip Wexler, for instance, argues that, under the pressure of commodification and communication, Western society has changed so much that the prerequisites of rationality and solidarity seem to have disappeared. In his view, citizenship is now in fact an archaic term, a ‘linguistic residue of the modern era’ (1990:164). The problem is that democracy can also only flourish in post-industrial society when the citizens are well informed, competent and willing to participate in public life (and not just the political aspect of public life). More than any other social institution, the school is the place for teaching and practising such competence. For a clear understanding of the role of the school in citizenship education, however, research is needed at the concrete level of the curriculum. In The Netherlands, traditional research on political socialization as part of the official curriculum, shows that citizens are not particularly well informed on political matters (Vis 1995) and that the implementation of political socialization within school curricula has no more than a modest effect (Wittebrood 1995). This means that an orientation towards the world outside the school and the chance to develop democratic competencies in a democratic school climate must somehow be created. The extent to which secondary schools foster school practices of civic commitment and civic competence may be a fruitful area for research. It may also help explain differences in political orientations and practices of students today. Schools are obvious areas for practising these competencies, precisely because young people spend a good deal of their life there (Rupp and Wesselingh 1997). Schools are indeed important public sites for citizenship education. A second fruitful area for research is along the line of the international OECD research project on cross-curricular competencies (CCCs). These competencies include the knowledge and skills needed for individuals to lead a worthy and socially valuable life in society. In a pilot study in nine European countries new indicators are being developed for several domains, including citizenship (OECD 1997). Citizenship as moral education The search for the significance of Durkheim’s work for modern education inevitably leads us to his texts on moral education. He promotes the moral dimension of citizenship education, and moral education is an actual theme in The Netherlands at this moment. The Dutch minister of education has called for greater attention to the ‘pedagogical task’ of education and thereby suggested that schools should become more active in the transmission of values and norms. This pedagogical task also includes citizenship education and the creation of a school climate supportive of the social relationships

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between all of the participants. In the debates that have been organized all over the country and at the initiative of the minister himself, most of the attention seems to have gone on the moral aspect of this pedagogical task, namely the transmission and checking of values and norms in accordance with family upbringing. The question of what kind of behaviour should be permitted, or not permitted, at school and at home, has been frequently raised. The debates have attracted a great deal of interest. In crowded auditoriums, parents, school personnel and students have discussed rules of behaviour with regard to alcohol, drugs, sex, vandalism, the possession of arms, violence, bullying and the like. The idea that schools can be seen as the restoration place for the damage caused by modern society sounds like echoes of Durkheim’s concern for vanishing social solidarity in France at the end of the nineteenth century. The Dutch minister of education, himself an active participant in the debates, has set up a heavily staffed committee which then produced a rather unsatisfactory report, with little or no utility for educational practice or policy. For insiders, this hardly comes as a surprise for they know how sensitive these moral topics are in the context of religion-based schools and the relative autonomy which these schools are guaranteed under the Dutch constitution. The transmission of values and norms as an educational goal is also not easily realized as a subject within the school curriculum. This explains the sceptical attitude of the abovementioned Advisory Council with regard to the role of the school in moral education and possible indoctrination. Nobody seems to hear Durkheim emphasizing that teaching morality is neither preaching nor indoctrination, but explaining! Anyone familiar with matters of education realizes that in education values are always at stake and that they inevitably play a role in the process of transmission. This is also why sociologists commonly speak of a ‘hidden curriculum’. The critical question here is: what part of a moral education should be transformed into part of the official curriculum in schools? People differ on this point. Greater consensus exists on the need to incorporate moral practices and values into a school climate that practices these moral values outside the official curriculum. Some conclusions According to some, the alleged cultural homogeneity needed for a national identity is difficult to find these days. Without it, however, the traditional notion of citizenship within the nation state also has little future. This is because the notion of citizenship, with its accent on political participation, shared national values and respect for law and order, does not have much in common with the cultural developments of today. It is precisely the political arrangement of the nation state that increasingly encounters problems with ethnic and cultural pluralism in post-industrial society. It must also be assumed, of course, that the pessimistic views of post-industrial society are correct and that postmodern culture thus constitutes a clear threat to citizenship today. An example of this pessimism is provided by Ralf Dahrendorf (1991) who argues that a social underclass has emerged in the richest OECD countries. This underclass consists of those who have fallen through the social safety net. Philip Wexler (1987) also speaks of new classes maintaining social divisions in post-modern society. Among them are the new creators of culture whose source of power lies in access to and control over the

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media which distinguishes them from the masses who are the target of such media manipulation. Neither the manipulators nor the manipulated are attracted to social or political action and one simply cannot speak of a collective memory to guide their actions. An attempt to bridge the gap between the two groups by appealing to some shared ideals does not seem very promising at this time either. International factors are indeed gaining increased importance. Educational systems, according to Boli and Ramirez (1986), must be viewed increasingly as a transnational or even a world-cultural phenomenon, crossing the boundaries of the nation state and receiving their structure, appearance and legitimation at the supra-national level. In this context, Heater (1990) seeks to maintain the classical ideal of citizenship at the mondial level and speaks of ‘world citizenship’. In the domains of citizenship and a national curriculum, these developments can complicate the direct translation into the educational system and other qualification processes. The question of which basic skills should be imparted to all students as part of their formal education is always difficult to answer uniformly because of the diversity of political issues associated with the skills. This spills over into the definition of citizenship. The history of the concept of citizenship clearly demonstrates this. The discussion around the introduction of a core curriculum for lower secondary education in The Netherlands—still only a faint reflection of the national curriculum in Britain—also illustrates it. In each case, it is clear that the variant of citizenship promoted by Durkheim is no longer directly applicable to our situation because of its uniquely French character and the strongly nationalistic-republican interpretation provided at that time. I would like to conclude with some remarks on the remaining significance of Durkheim’s work for modern education and citizenship. Traditional mass education, with its emphasis on rationality, individual autonomy, national history, hierarchical forms of organization and so forth, is currently being challenged, largely because it ignores the trends among modern youth which lives with television, fashion, music, dance and little career perspective (Meijers and Wesselingh 1997). It is perfectly clear that anyone who should want to go back to the past and try to restore the traditional values and norms of the first half of the twentieth century cannot call Emile Durkheim as the crown witness. Durkheim opposed both utilitarian liberals and conservative traditionalists at the same time. He was very aware of the necessity of adapting the form and content of moral socialization to the social changes at the time and not isolating moral education from the social-historical context (Klaassen 1996). Nevertheless, many of his ideas on the topic are inevitably out of date. It is difficult to appeal to general values in a multicultural and pluralistic society such as ours. Durkheim’s strong emphasis on the spirit of discipline is also difficult to reconcile with the hedonistic character of the modern consumption society and its anti-authoritarian attitudes. His focus on individuals participating in social groups still makes sense, even in our atomistic society where many of the intermediate institutions have lost their attraction for citizens. A call for group solidarity will hardly be heard in a strongly individualistic society where many of the traditional groups have simply disappeared. New groups appear to be emerging in the sphere of recreation, sports and leisure-time activities, however, and thereby providing new opportunities for more loosely connected membership. The strengthening of personal autonomy via the educational system appears to have a chance of succeeding but, again, not in the collective sense which Durkheim

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gave this element of morality. New ways of learning, and new forms of education built around new learning styles, may help to strengthen the personal autonomy and selfconfidence necessary to be a contemporary citizen. That citizen has to be well-informed, competent, willing to participate, able to make his own decisions and ready to defend his choices. At the moment little more than a modest start has emerged in the research literature and thus the present observations remain quite speculative. In brief, Durkheim’s definite propositions with regard to the direction in which citizenship education should go have yet to be replaced by equally definite alternatives. Note 1 This is a revised version of an earlier contribution in Dutch, entitled ‘Emile Durkheim, burgerschap en onderwijs’ (Emile Durkheim, citizenship and education) in P.Dijkstra, P.Kooij and J.C.C.Rupp, (eds) (1992) Onderwijs in de tijd. Ontwikkelingen in onderwijsdeelname en nationale curricula. (Developments in educational participation and national curricula.) Boekaflevering van het tijdschrift Mens en Maatschappij, Jrg. 67, pp. 46–55. Houten/Zaventem: Bohn, Stafleu, Van Loghum.

References Boli, J. and Ramirez, F. (1986) ‘World Culture and the Institutional Development of Mass Education’, in John G.Richardson (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood Press.

Chastenet, J. (1949) Une époque pathétique. La France de M.Fallières, Paris: Fayard.

Dahrendorf, R. (1991) ‘Herformulering van morele waarden is dringende noodzaak’ (Moral values must be reformulated), Amsterdam: De Volkskrant 23.03.1991. Durkheim, E. (1893b) De la division du travail social: étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures, Paris: Alcan. ——(1895a) Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, Paris: Alcan. ——(1897a) Le Suicide: étude de sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology, Chicago: Free Press ——(1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education, New York: Free Press). ——(1938a) L’Evolution pédagogique en Franee, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1977a) by Peter Collins, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1950a) Leçons de sociologie: physique des moeurs et du droit, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1957a) by Cornelia Brookfield, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, with a new preface by B.S.Turner in 1992, London and New York: Routledge.

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Green, A. (1990) Education and State Formation, London: Macmillan.

Heater, D. (1990) Citizenship. The Civic Ideal in World History, Politics and Education, London: Longman.

Klaassen, C.A.C. (1981) Sociologie van de persoonlijkheidsontwikkeling. Verkenningen in de socialisatietheorie, (Sociology of personality development. Explorations in the theory of socialization), Deventer: Van Loghum Slaterus. ——(1996) Socialisatie en Moraal. Onderwijs en waarden in een laat-moderne tijd, (Socialization and morals. Education and values in late-modern society), Leuven/Amersfoort: Garant.

Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim, his Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction in the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Routledge. Marshall, T.H. (1950) ‘Citizenship and social class’, in T.H.Marshall (1963) Sociology at the Cross-roads, London: Heinemann. Meijers, F. and Wesselingh, A.A. (1997) ‘Living a meaningful life. Career identity and new ways of learning’, paper presented at the ISA RC-04 conference ‘Education, Knowledge and Culture’, 16–18 June in Joensuu, Finland.

OECD (1997) Prepared for Life? Indicators of Educational Systems, Paris: OECD.

Rupp, J.C.C. and Wesselingh, A.A. (1997) Citizenship, Education and Public Life, Nijmegen: Vakgroep onderwijskunde.

Vis, J. (1995) Politieke kennis en politieke vorming (Political knowledge and political education), Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff.

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Wesselingh, A.A. and Klaassen, C.A.C. (1995) ‘Education for citizenship in The Netherlands’, paper presented at the conference ‘Educational Knowledge and School Curricula’ of the ISA/RC-04, Jerusalem 27–29 December 1995. Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (1992) Eigentijds burgerschap (Contemporary citizenship), by H.R.van Gunsteren, Den Haag: SdU. Wexler, P. (1987) Social Analysis and Education. After the New Sociology, London: Routledge. ——(1990) ‘Citizenship in the semiotic society’, in B.F.Turner (ed.) Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, London: Sage. Wittebrood, K. (1995) Politieke socialisatie in Nederland (Political socialization in The Netherlands), Nijmegen: Vakgroep politicologie.

4 KOHLBERG’S CRITIQUE OF DURKHEIM’S MORAL EDUCATION Stephen P.Turner Lawrence Kohlberg’s writings on moral education remain the greatest influence on moral education today in the United States. His student, Carol Gilligan, is one of the most influential writers on feminist ethics and on the idea that there are gender differences in morals. In a remarkable passage, Kohlberg described Emile Durkheim’s conception as ‘the most philosophically and scientifically comprehensive, clear and workable approach to moral education extant’ (1970:200). He went on to say that the workability of the system has been demonstrated in Soviet Russia, and describes what he calls the ‘logical but to us rather horrifying innovations’ suggested by Durkheim’s ideas (1970:201; cf.1987:263–5). Durkheim himself would have found Kohlberg’s criticisms odd and unfair for a number of reasons. Some of these reasons are of more than anti-quarian interest, for they reveal persistent difficulties and lacunae in Kohlberg’s conception and one need not accept Durkheim’s conception as a whole to recognize these difficulties. So the contrast between the two approaches provides an opportunity for recognizing the form of problems still to be overcome in the theory of moral education. Theory The core of Kohlberg’s critique of Durkheim relies on a presupposition which is deeply embedded in modern ethical writing. Kohlberg is, like modern philosophy from Descartes and Kant, a justificationalist, in that he supposes that the true and valid moral position is one which may be justified by a chain of reasons. Moral reflection is a matter of noticing conflicts or contradictions in one’s moral beliefs or judgments and resolving these contradictions at a higher and more comprehensive level, for example by a principle that shows which of the moral claims is superior to the other. A typical example of this kind of reasoning is the problem of racial preference: practically speaking, racial and gender preferences are needed to produce certain desired goals; preferences are not fair, but the higher principle of ‘justice’ requires that the goal be met, and we should not be prevented from acting justly by our attachment to the convention of non-preferential treatment. It was once supposed by philosophers that the strategy of working one’s way up the chain of justification until one comes to the point where the justifications run out would lead to truths which were certain and which warranted morality. Kohlberg has emancipated himself from the idea that there is one truth to be found at the end of the

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process of moral reasoning. But he has not emancipated himself from the idea of justification itself.1 And the central premise of his account of stages of moral development is that moral development is intellectual development, that is to say, development in the level of moral reasoning that one employs: the more abstract, comprehensive and general, the better. Briefly, the Kohlbergian ‘stages’ fall into three groups. The first two are ‘preconventional’: Stage 1, in which the orientation is toward physical punishment and unquestioning deference to superior power, and Stage 2, in which right action is that which satisfies one’s own needs, and occasionally those of others, instrumentally. The next group is ‘conventional’: Stage 3 is the good-boy—good-girl stage, in which good behaviour is that which is approved by others, and intentions count heavily; Stage 4 is oriented toward duty, understood as obeying fixed rules and respecting authority. The ‘post-conventional’ level includes Stage 5, which is a rights or social contract orientation, which emphasizes procedures, legalism, but unlike Stage 4 recognizes different opinions as possibly valid and contemplates changes in rules, and Stage 6, the highest stage, which involves self-chosen ethical principles, which are not concrete rules, but universal principles, such as justice, equality of rights and the dignity of individual persons. People pass through these stages in the course of moral development, though some get stuck at lower stages, and of course routinely employ considerations from several stages. Part of the background to the development of this model is the apparent failure, exemplified in the 1920s’ efforts of Hartshorne and May,2 to measure the virtues as they figure in ordinary language, such as honesty, generosity and self-control, that is to say, to make them correspond to a complex of stable, measurable psychological traits of individuals. In contrast, the Kohlbergian stages do correspond to something stable and measurable, and are sequential. The problem with the Kohlbergian model is in a sense a product of its virtues—taking progress though these stages as ‘moral development’ amounts to changing the subject. We are no longer talking about the virtues, but about something else. The something else, in the end, is the use of particular kinds of moral arguments, and ‘development’ is using more and more general ideas. The peculiarity of the idea that moral development is a matter of using more and more general and comprehensive moral principles may be readily seen in a few simple contrasts. The classical conception of virtue, for example, treated it as something akin to an acquired skill. A long tradition in English ethical thinking was based on the idea that there was a moral faculty which enabled a person to distinguish right and wrong, and was given by nature. It may be noted in connection with Kohlberg, who appeals to the example of contract theory, that it was felt by many writers in this tradition that the possibility of a social contract depended on a pre-existing natural moral faculty, without which, to paraphrase Hobbes, men would not feel any compulsion to keep the social contract into which they had entered. On any of these accounts, moral development consists in something other than facility in the giving of moral justification. Durkheim, similarly, supposes that moral development consists in something other than facility in moral justification, something more akin to mastery. But there is more to it than this. The one development which destroyed intuitionism as an empirical theory of the nature of morality was the fact that different cultures adhered to moral codes radically unlike those the intuitionists claimed to be known to a developed moral faculty. Durkheim recognized that variations between

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moral notions occurred between societies, and recognized, in his famous arguments for the explanatory autonomy of sociology as against psychology, that the causes of this variation had therefore to be sought in facts which varied between societies (1895a/t.1982a:129). He further recognized that the idea of ‘social evolution’ would not suffice to explain the differences. Specifically, he noted the existence of systematic patterns of coincidence or correlation between distinct types of custom which held up apart from evolutionary development, such as the relation between a certain type of family structure and the nuptial custom of carrying the bride over the threshold. The existence of such patterns led Durkheim to postulate the existence of what he called the ‘collective unconscious’, a notion which is similar in some ways to Rousseau’s notion of the general will. Durkheim put a different point on the concept, however, in that he considered that the proof of the concept lay in showing it to be governed by causal laws. Naturally, such laws could not be proved directly, since the realm of collective consciousness, like the general will, could not be directly observed. It could be observed only through the causal effects of these facts on the facts at the level of individual action. Durkheim speaks of social facts as ‘constraining’ individual action. The many differences between Durkheim and Kohlberg result from their difference on this point. For Kohlberg, morality consists in moral opinions, which can be graded according to the sophistication of the reasoning which relates to the justification of an opinion. For Durkheim, morality is a force. It acts on the individual to constrain his or her passions and desires. This constraint cannot be reduced to moral sanctions, however. It must be inter-nalized. But this internalization is not merely private assent to a common opinion, for the moral fact, such as duty, continues to be experienced by the actor as something ‘outside’ the individual.3 Consider obligations to spouses. They are highly private. But they are impersonal, and the mark of this ‘impersonal’ character is the fact that they are, as the expression goes, culturally conditioned. They are, in Durkheim’s terms, forces outside and independent of the private desires of the individual. The phenomenological experience of constraint or externality of standards is a much noted feature of moral conduct. Hilary Putnam, discussing the philosophical issue of the objectivity of morals, remarks that when ‘I found myself with a severe moral problem in my own life…the interesting thing is that I found myself agonizing over whether what I was doing, contemplating doing, or had done, was right—really right’ (1979:117). But the phenomenology of moral conduct is not Durkheim’s true concern. His true concern is with the influence of the moral order on conduct, and this is essentially a causal question. The phenomenological experience of feeling outside moral facts to be determinative of one’s desires is merely epiphenomenal to the causal process by which choices are determined. In cases where the individual does not feel impulses which conflict with the social and moral forces acting on him, he does not feel outside ‘constraint’, but the social or moral forces are none the less determinative. Kohlberg of course does not subscribe to the notion of the collective consciousness. But the point served by the concept for Durkheim is one with which Kohlberg, as a moral educator, should be concerned. For Durkheim the problem of the salience of moral notions to the agent and their actual influence on his conduct is treated as a causal, indeed quantitative, problem of measuring the ‘force’ of these ‘collective consciousness’ facts on agents in various societal groups. To put it sharply, morality consists in acting morally, not in rationalizing action in moral terms.

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Technique Durkheim’s suggestions on educational technique follow from his sociology: so Kohlberg’s remarks on his techniques of moral education must be evaluated in light of the prior difference in basic conception and intent between Durkheim and Kohlberg. Kohlberg associates Durkheim with the group-identification methods of Soviet primary education described by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1962, 1970:201–2 ff). For Kohlberg, this amounts to emotionalistic manipulation, something clearly contrary to the process of passing through his stages of justificatory reasoning. The association is misleading. Durkheim is not especially concerned with the group or with the use of social pressures, but with the development of certain ideas. These ideas are not mere extensions or symbolic affirmations of group loyalties, as for example ethnocentric prejudices might be, but notions of one’s responsibilities. Such notions are impersonal, and their impersonality and superiority to all individuals, taken collectively or singly, is one of the crucial things which moral education must convey. Accordingly, Durkheim rejects an emotionalistic approach. ‘If one limits himself to repeating and elaborating in emotional language such abstract words as duty and good, there can only result a parrot-like morality’ (1925a/t.1961a:94). Since the moral ideas are ideas, they must be rationally acceptable. Kohlberg acknowledges that Durkheim speaks of rational morality. But his justificationalistic approach to morality prevents him from regarding as ‘rational’ that which Durkheim does. So he treats the methods Durkheim suggests as though they were nothing other than the kind of emphasis on collective cooperation and loyalty characteristic of Soviet education. This is a remarkable failure of perspective. Both Durkheim and Kohlberg are strongly influenced by Kantian notions in their writings about morality. But Durkheim had a better appreciation of the difficulty in Kant’s view than Kohlberg did. For Kant, moral reason was opposed to the passions and desires, a view Durkheim also accepted. The difficulty this created was that moral reason appeared to be without force, and there was no answer to the question ‘why obey the dictates of universal reason?’4 Durkheim, in contrast to the intuitionist school in British moral philosophy, sought to solve the question of the force of morality by showing that it did not derive, even circuitously, from individual nature or capacities, but from the collective unit of which the individual was a part. On the one hand, this solved the obvious difficulty arising from any attempt to derive morality from universal human nature—the difficulty that such attempts must be made to square with the social diversity of morality. On the other hand, it enabled Durkheim to deal with the question of the force of morality by showing it derived from supra-individual facts. Durkheim’s concern is not with the group, but with the inner life of the individual. The moral individual is the one in whom the collective forces, the impersonal moral order, are sufficiently salient or powerful enough that there is a balance between them, and between the moral forces and the drives of the individual. The sort of altruist and loyalist sought by the Soviet education since the beginning of the attempt to create ‘the new Socialist man’ in the twenties has little in common with Durkheim’s moral person, precisely because for such a person there is no balance. Durkheim of course wrote before the Soviet style of moral education emerged. But we can easily see what he would have thought about the subject, for he discusses in detail the type of individual who is absorbed

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by the collective life to the point of lacking individuality. He associates this type of person with primitive tribes and the military (1897a/t.1951a:217–28, 234). The difference between Durkheim and Kohlberg is greatest with respect to the problem of authority. The school, as both acknowledge, involves praise, power, order and individual competitive achievement. For Kohlberg, the problem is not to get rid of these things, ‘but to establish a more basic context of justice which gives them meaning’. He goes on to say that in ‘our society authority derives from justice, and in our society learning to live with authority should derive from and aid learning to understand and feel justice’ (Kohlberg 1970:213). So Kohlberg thinks that Durkheim has the order wrong— he starts with establishing authority without establishing the more basic context which gives it meaning. The force of this charge rests on the idea that Durkheim is concerned simply with establishing authority, understood as an habituation to follow the rules. But this is clearly a misinterpretation. Durkheim is indeed concerned with establishing in the child’s mind a sense of the impersonal order, and is concerned that this sense become habitual in its force. But he is also concerned that teachers show their own devotion to the impersonal order, thus establishing for the child that the order is impersonal, and that teacher and student alike are subordinate to it. Kohlberg objects to this order of priority, but it is obscure precisely what he could mean by his proffered alternative, that justice be the ‘more basic context’ for the school and that it should reflect the idea that ‘authority derives from justice’. If all Kohlberg means by this is that those in authority should act justly, he has said nothing Durkheim has not said. But if he has a serious dispute with Durkheim as distinct from a difference of emphasis arising from his omission of the problem of the force of moral principles, he must mean more than this. Apparently what he has in mind is another justificationist idea, that the ‘child genuinely learns to accept authority when he learns to understand and accept the principles behind the rules’ (1970:206). But this idea does not match the idea that ‘authority derives from justice’. It suggests rather that ‘good reasons’ are ultimately necessary to make uses of authority intelligible to the child. ‘Justice’ is, however, not the reason for ‘authority’ nor is it often the reason for particular acts of the person in authority, especially in classroom authority. Nor is it clear that, without some initial exercise of authority, it is possible to establish the conditions under which the child can ‘learn to understand and accept the principles behind the rules’. Kohlberg is unwilling to concede Durkheim’s use of the term ‘rational morality’, and accuses Durkheim of believing that ‘morality is fundamentally emotional and irrational’ (Kohlberg 1970:205), and this is another misapprehension. For Durkheim, ‘rational morality’ means ‘secular morality’ or ‘morality acceptable to the rational person’, and not ‘morality justified by principles’. Kohlberg cannot envision a rational morality that is not a matter of justified principles, and this has implications for moral education. Part of Kohlberg’s case against Durkheim is that, as Kohlberg puts it, ‘it is assumed that the means and ends of intellectual education are one thing and those of moral education another’ (1970:205). Durkheim discusses the issue directly and at length in the course of a discussion on the relation between science education and moral education in which Durkheim argues that science is wrongly understood by justificationists, or, as he calls them, ‘Cartesians’ (1925a/t.1961a:252ff.). ‘Oversimplified rationalism’ actually gets in the way of scientific education, for it tempts people to substitute clear but overly simple conceptions for an

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understanding of the complexities of the world. He describes this temptation as something of a French national trait, and remarks that one of the failings of French literature is that its characters, unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Goethe’s Faust, lack complexity and are commonly not much more than the embodiment of some general but simple and abstract notion. He acknowledges that this is a suitable cognitive style for mathematical training, but not very good for science generally, where many clear and distinct a priori justifications or explanations are quite wrong. Something more than a passion for logic is needed there, and this something more must include a sense of and appreciation for the complexity of things. So Durkheim’s advice about science education turns out to be remarkably like Dewey’s. The child must be brought to see how science is studied; how the labor, time and trouble that study entails contrasts with…deductive improvisations…. These are the only conditions under which the child will acquire a feeling for the lack of articulation between the simplistic workings of our minds and the complexity of things. (1925a/t.1961a:262) The lesson here obviously applies to ethics. The child who comes to appreciate the inadequacy of a priorism in science will learn that ‘deductive improvisations’ are likely to be more satisfactory in ethics, which is an extraordinarily complex business as well, and not a place for ‘simple but clear’ formulae, and probably not for formulae at all. Gilligan’s feminist critique of Kohlberg As it has been drawn here, the contrast between Kohlberg and Durkheim is a very broad one, and many of Kohlberg’s critics have noted that his account of emotion in relation to morality is inadequate. One area of criticism of Kohlberg’s work is of special interest, for it allows the contrast to Durkheim to be made much more precise. In 1982 Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, a work which questioned whether Kohlberg’s account was adequate as a depiction of women’s moral reasoning, and argued that it was not. Women, Gilligan said, used relationships with others in a different way in their moral reasoning, and although this kind of reasoning appeared to be ‘lower’ according to Kohlberg’s stage models, it was really different in kind. Gilligan produced a number of striking examples of actual moral reflec-tion about abortion based on interviews with women, many of which are reproduced in her book. Commenting on a later essay by Ronald Dworkin, she recalls that she was struck, as Dworkin was, by ‘the difference between these women’s voices and the terms of the public abortion debate’ (‘the screaming rhetoric about rights and murder’ [as Dworkin put it]), and also came to the conclusion that reasoning about higher moral principles in the fashion of the public debate, that is to say in the fashion that Kohlberg valorizes in his stage theory, is simply not the way that these women reasoned, and perhaps is not the way anyone should reason about such a decision. Indeed, it may be that we decide that reasoning in this ‘principled’ way about these decisions is itself a sign of ethical

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inferiority or simply difference rather than a matter of either ethical or rational superiority. If we consider some of Gilligan’s examples in the light of these questions, we can understand Durkheim’s position more fully. One of Gilligan’s cases, a woman given the name ‘Claire’, worked after college as a counsellor in an abortion clinic. When women having abortions wished to see what was evacuated from the uterus, the practice of the clinic was to tell them, ‘You can’t see anything now, it just looks like jelly at this point.’ Claire decided that she had to see what was actually going on, and decided to look at a foetus from a late abortion. After doing so, she came to the realization that: I just couldn’t kid myself any more and say there was nothing in the uterus, just a tiny speck. This is not true, and I knew it wasn’t true, but I sort of had to see it. And yet at the same time I knew that’s what was going on. I also believed that it was right; it should have happened. But I couldn’t say ‘Well, this is right and this is wrong.’ I was just constantly torn. She went on to say that: Finally, I just had to reconcile myself—I really do believe this, but it is not an easy thing that you can say without emotion and maybe regret— that yes, life is sacred, but the quality of life is also important, and it has to be the determining thing in this particular case…. I had to be able to say, ‘Yes, this is killing, there is no way around it, but I am willing to accept that, but I am willing to go ahead with it, and it’s hard.’ I don’t think I can explain it. I don’t think I can really verbalize the justification. (1993:580) Gilligan’s analysis of this case has some interesting similarities to Durkheim’s position, but also some important differences. Claire, Gilligan argues, casts the dilemma not as a contest of rights but as a problem of relationships, centering on a question of responsibility which in the end must be faced. If attachment cannot be sustained, abortion may be the better solution, but in either case morality lies in recognizing connection, taking responsibility for the abortion decision or taking responsibility for the care of the child. (1993:59) Claire adds that although there are times when ‘killing like that is necessary, it shouldn’t become too easy’ (1993:59). As Gilligan puts it, morality keeps the web of relationships intact, and ‘an absolute judgment yields to the complexity of relationships. The fact that life is sustained by connection leads her to affirm the “sacred tie” of life rather than the “sacredness of life at all costs”, and to articulate an ethic of responsibility while remaining cognizant of the issue of rights’ (1993:59).

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One can see why this is a problem within Kohlberg’s scheme: the Kohlbergian moral reasoner at the highest level would resolve these issues, and resolve them on the basis of highly general considerations. Presumably he—and Gilligan’s point is precisely that this is not a woman’s way of resolving these issues—would be able to act on the basis of this reasoning with no regret and no further emotional turmoil. Like Gilligan, Durkheim saw the problem of moral motivation being closely connected to the actual existence of social attachments. But for him, it was not merely that we take our relationships to others into account in our moral decision-making, though this is important, but that our relations to others provide the motivating force or moral pressure that determines the psychological experiences that we have that eventuate in decisions. This requires some explanation, for to understand Durkheim’s view on these matters one must understand his model of the psychology of moral life and decision. Durkheim’s person is a decision-maker and moral deliberator, but the experience of moral deliberation, indeed the experience of the internal psychological incidents that lead to decision, is not the same as the causal structure of deliberation. For Durkheim, what happens when we are in a state of moral torment, as Claire is, cannot be reduced to the kinds of feelings she is conscious of. She is conscious of being pulled in different directions, of conflicting and often alternating impulses or underlying concerns which she attempts to resolve, and ultimately does resolve by deciding on a course of action, but one which she cannot articulate as a principled decision. Gilligan and Durkheim would analyze the case quite differently. Gilligan argues that to understand Claire’s self-reporting it is necessary to supply some sort of implicit principle that explains her response. Gilligan’s proposal is that ‘in…women’s descriptions’ of moral choices, ‘identity is defined in the context of a relationship and judged by a standard of responsibility and care. Similarly, morality is seen by…women as arising from the experience of connection and conceived as a problem of inclusion rather than one of balancing claims.’ In short, it is assumed that ‘morality stems from attachment’ (1993:160). Gilligan’s analysis thus is still concerned with implicit moral principles. Her point is to establish that the women she discusses, such as those making decisions about abortion, operate with principles, and that these principles are worthy of respect equal to the principles found in Kohlberg’s Stage 6, such as a universalized respect for the individual person. Durkheim had a special interest in the rise of the cult of the individual and the emergence of the notion of universalized respect for persons. But he approached the problem in a quite different way. He asked a historical question about the rituals which affirm our connections and responsibilities to other people—rituals being, like maxims, manifestations of the collective consciousness, but also, and very importantly, means by which individual consciences connect and are reinfused with the moral forces that actually motivate action and moral feeling but are not accessible to introspection or the kind of self-reporting that both Kohlberg and Gilligan rely on. What rituals bear on the issue of abortion and the feelings that decisions to abort produce in women? Almost every woman has participated in one role or another in the following rituals: baby showers, announcements to the family and friends of pregnancy, getting and giving congratulations, showing or seeing sonograms of their own (or their friends’ or relatives’) in utero foetuses, involvement in preparations for the birth of a baby, such as preparing a nursery, buying or making clothes, borrowing and offering

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baby clothes and furniture that other children have outgrown, and so forth. The list of activities involved is long, and these rituals form strong links: they connect women with one another, especially with their own mothers and female kin. These are very powerful rituals, which evoke strong feelings and produce significant changes in the moral status of the mother and often of others, such as the mother’s mother and other kin. What do these rituals ‘say’? They say, pretty unequivocally, that the unborn child is already real, important, and socially consequential. People feel things, very strongly, for the welfare of the unborn child, even if the connection to the child is slight: restaurant patrons may speak to a pregnant woman they don’t know to persuade her not to smoke or drink, actions that would be well beyond the bounds of social propriety if the welfare of the unborn child were not taken with the utmost seriousness. There is a simple message in all of this: philosophical theories about when life begins may say one thing. The rituals say something else, and say so quite strongly, though it is not perfectly clear what they say. Roughly speaking, however, they say this: a foetus, whose natural likelihood of progressing to term is high, is a child. The reality of the foetus as a child is not only acknowledged in these rituals but celebrated. Durkheim’s point would be that the rituals point to and are in part the vehicle of the transmission of the moral category of ‘child’. To adopt a philosophical theory of rights that ignores this ignores a powerful causal reality. The emotional experiences of women who have abortions reflect the realities contained in the rituals, and not the theories. Many women report memorializing the lost child, thinking about what they would be like at the age they would be had they lived and looking at other children of that age with anguish, and much more. And it would be very strange if many women did not have these feelings, for the rituals which they and the child would have been subject to had the woman decided differently, are extraordinarily powerful. Deeply connecting rituals that mark differences in the status of the unborn child that qualifies it for a vast range of strong feelings, include of course the feelings of responsibility and attachment. These, Gilligan emphasizes, are distinctive to the moral sensibility of women. One need not accept Durkheim’s theory of the collective consciousness to see that the Durkheimian point is closer to the truth of the experience than Gilligan’s account. The emotional reality embodied in these rituals and transmitted by them is powerful and specific; the notion of care or attachment is vague and weak. Even a general principle of care and attachment requires an account of the nature of attachment, and this is something that a Durkheimian analysis can do that Gilligan’s analysis cannot. There are practical lessons for moral education here. Durkheim’s writings on the classroom, as we have seen, focused on the problem of creating these attachments, often through ritual. For Durkheim, the moral person is one in whom the collective forces produced by the various collectivities of which they are members, such as the family, society, and so forth, are casually effective, and in proportion to the collective current or force in question. Persons who are overly concerned with the standards of the profession to which they belong, and insensitive to the moral force of familial society, for example, are less than morally adequate. To fail to appreciate the reality of conflicts is a sign of non-attachment. To be able to overcome conflicts with theoretical justifications of one’s choices without experiencing the conflicts deeply is thus not celebrated by Durkheim, as it is by Kohlberg.

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Durkheim would say to Kohlberg that reducing morality to the sorts of things that can be formulated verbally as one’s chosen principles impoverishes morality. But he would also say that making attachment and care into the guiding principles of conduct, as Gilligan suggests women do, impoverishes our morality as well. For Gilligan, the woman making an abortion decision who recognizes her responsibilities and acts accordingly, respecting and feeling the loss that goes with the decision to have an abortion, is acting within an ethic of care and responsibility. For Durkheim, the problem is more fundamental: how do we recognize our responsibilities, and how do we form our attachments? Durkheim’s answer is that we do so through rituals and collective experiences. These form the complexity of moral things which the moral person experiences and acts on, and thus are the foundation of moral education; at the highest level, moral education should convey an appreciation of the lack of articulation between our simplistic verbal or mental formulae and this complexity. Acknowledgment I gratefully acknowledge the stimulation I received from discussions with Winston Bridges, who collaborated on an earlier version of this paper. Notes 1 There is a small but interesting literature on Kohlberg and Durkheim and on Durkheim and the problem of justice (which Kohlberg takes as central, cf. Kohlberg et al., 1983:60–4). The most important texts are by Wallwork 1972, 1985, the first of which criticizes Durkheim from a Kohlbergian point of view, the second revises Kohlberg to include Durkheimian insights. Wallwork attempts to derive from Durkheim something like an ethical doctrine that can be contrasted with the ethical views of a Kohlberg or a Rawls. This is an interesting and sometimes illuminating exercise, but in an important sense it is beside the point: what Durkheim has to say about ethics supplants rather than adds to ethics of the sort practised by Kohlberg or Rawls (cf. Rawls 1971; Turner 1993; Douglas 1993). 2 See Kohlberg 1987, cf. 266–70. 3 Kohlberg has a theory of the emergence of norms which appeals to the notion of group pressure (cf. Kohlberg et al., 1983, 53–60). The differences between this approach and Durkheim’s will become apparent in the final section of this chapter. 4 This is a problem with a long history, but one part of it was formative for Durkheim, who as a young scholar visited Germany and became acquainted with the works of the German theorists of morality of the era, including the legal philosopher Ihering, who made the problem of moral motivation the centrepiece of his critique of Kant.

References Bronfenbrenner, U. (1962) ‘Soviet methods of character education, some implications for research’, The American Psychologist, 17:550–65. ——(1970) Two Worlds of Childhood, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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Douglas, M. (1993) ‘Emotion and culture in theories of justice’, Economy and Society, 22, 4:501–15. Durkheim, E. (t.1982a) W.D.Halls, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, New York: Free Press. ——(1895a) Les Règles de la methode sociologique, Paris: Alcan. ——(1897a) Le Suicide: étude de sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1951a) by J.Spaulding and G.Simpson, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, edited, with an introduction by E.K.Wilson, New York: Free Press.

Gilligan, C. (1993) In a Different Voice, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press (first edition 1982).

Kohlberg, L. (1970) ‘The moral atmosphere of the school’, in David Purpel and Kevin Ryan (eds) Moral education... It Comes with the Territory (1976), Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. ——(1981) The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, New York and San Francisco: Harper and Row. ——(1984) The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages, New York and San Francisco: Harper and Row. ——(1987) Child Psychology and Childhood Education: A Cognitive and Developmental View, New York: Longman. Kohlberg, L., Levine, C. and Hewer, A. (1983) Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics, New York and Basel: S.Karger.

Putnam, H. (1979) ‘The place of facts in a world of values’, in D.Huff and O. Prewett (eds) The Nature of the Physical Universe, New York: Wiley.

Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Turner, Stephen (1993) ‘Reconnecting the sociologist to the moralist’, pp. 1–24, in Stephen Turner (ed.) Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist, London: Routledge.

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Wallwork, E. (1972) Durkheim: Morality and Milieu, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——(1985) ‘Sentiment and structure: A Durkheimian critique of Kohlberg’s moral theory’, Journal of Moral Education, 14, 2:87–101. Wilcox, R.T. (1988) ‘Indoctrination is not a four-letter word’, The Clearing House, 61, 6:249–52.

5 THE ADMINISTRATION OF PUNISHMENT IN SCHOOLS W.S.F.Pickering Introduction In Durkheim’s eyes reasons for punishment have to be gleaned from the basic values— from the representations collectives—of the society in which the punishment is carried out. Reasons for punishment are therefore unlikely to be universal and should never be seen in the abstract. Initially all reasons or ‘theories’ are relativist. When Durkheim dealt with punishment in schools, as he did surprisingly extensively in lectures he began to deliver in 1898 in Bordeaux and which were published in 1925 as L’Education morale (1925a), he considered such punishment, not in abstraction, but strictly within the milieu of the school in late-nineteenth-century France. Inevitably he could not avoid questions of a wider kind. In this short exposition of Durkheim’s position on corporal punishment, I adopt a procedure which is the reverse of that Durkheim himself took. I start with practice and then relate it to theory. This procedure is not as irrational as might appear. Parents are sometimes known to administer punishment and later reflect on what they have done and why they have done it. Admittedly it is a method of procedure which Durkheim, as we shall see, strongly criticized. Undesirable practice Physical punishment Durkheim stood totally opposed to the use of corporal punishment in schools (1925a:224/t.1961a:197). He was adamant that it should be completely prohibited and he was delighted that it had been eliminated in all French public schools. Why was this? Physical punishment, Durkheim held, injured a child’s health, and he implied both a child’s moral and physical health (224/197).1 Very simply he took the position that such punishment is dehumanizing. He stated categor-ically: ‘In beating, in brutality of all kinds, there is something we find repugnant, something which shocks (révolter) our conscience, in a word, something immoral’ (208/183). Again, ‘all violence exercised on a person seems to us in principle like sacrilege’ (208/183). And Durkheim goes beyond the issue of a child and applies it to an adult as well. To paraphrase Durkheim we may say that when we corporally punish an adult we view the person no longer as a human being

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but as an animal or object. In this way we put an offender outside the human family (208/183). But not only does physical violence in schools shock us, it is also counter-productive. And for this reason: the chief object of moral education is to instil in the child a humanistic morality—to give the child ‘a feeling of the dignity of man’ (208/183). Physical punishment is the very denial of such dignity. The morality it engenders is one of brutality, which is no morality. However, there is an exception which Durkheim maintains does not undermine his humanistic approach. Corporal punishment is justifiable while the child is still ‘a small animal’ (un petit animal) (209/183). Here the issue is one of training (dressage, as in the breaking in of a horse). This should occur only in the home and never in the school, for in the home physical punishment is softened by tenderness, or should be. The pain is ameliorated by the intimacy of parental affection. Contrast this with a school where punishment has to be administered impersonally. Ergo, corporal punishment should be totally absent in all teaching institutions. Here Durkheim sees a significant difference between the process of training young children and educating them. For an animal, and hence for a very young child, the main—sometimes the only—effective method is where pain is inflicted. For a creature, be it an animal or child, learning by the senses is the only way to achieve the goal. For the older child, pain, if any is inflicted, is only a symbol which impinges on the inner state of the child. From this position—and I focus solely on the rejection of physical punishment in the process of education—two questions arise. One, why should Durkheim be such a strong advocate of the rejection of physical punishment in schools, which seems so contrary to the practice say, of the English at the time? And two, how did he account for variations over time in the use of physical punishment in schools? Durkheim’s humanism It has just been shown that Durkheim offered various reasons for his rejection of physical punishment in schools and such reasons stem from his basic ideological outlook, that of a convinced and devoted humanist. His attitude to corporal punishment was not unique or original: he merely supported and reflected a popular movement in France which in many respects was epitomized in the policy of the Third Republic, and which was based on a secular, humanist morality, which is generally referred to as la morale laïque. Given the fact that, as Durkheim argues, corporal punishment degrades the person, it cannot be viewed in any other way than as being a denial of a morality based on the sacredness of the person. In the eyes of the humanist of the times, no punishment can be worse than physical punishment, whether it is administered in the school or in adult society. Beatings, floggings, mutilations, branding, sending criminals to the galleys, and torture were so terrible that no man or woman, let alone a child, irrespective of the crime or offence, should ever have to endure them. For adults, imprisonment, irrespective of the length of time served, was the acceptable, humane way of dealing with offenders. Humanism is quintessentially a movement for the alleviation of human suffering, and the most obvious form, which can be relatively easily relieved, is physical suffering. As we

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have hinted, the individual in Durkheim’s view is held to be sacred: one does not mutilate the sacred, for that is an act of profanation. Another reason might be seen in the policy of the Third Republic in radically reforming the school system of which one aspect was the continued abolition of corporal punishment. From this, it can be argued that, as we have asserted, all that Durkheim did, as a teacher of education in the university, was a mere echo of the prevailing ideology. Of course, he was not obliged to take this line and he was not uncritical of the state of French society or of its educational system, for he deeply desired change, for example in the inheritance laws and in the creation of a healthy, just society, but it is true he never favoured anything approaching a revolution. One sees, however, that when he writes about the complete undesirability of corporal punishment, he does so, not because politically he felt obliged to, but from the depth of his heart. A third reason might be tentatively raised. This centres on Durkheim’s Jewish background. Did his attitude towards corporal punishment spring from such origins? This is a complex question but the answer seems to be a firm no. In Jewish homes children’s good deeds were rewarded positively and children were firmly talked to when they misbehaved. Sometimes children were sent to their rooms and had to eat alone, that is, punishment was by isolation.2 Yet it is unlikely that in the matter of corporal punishment, there was any serious difference between Jewish and gentile households in France, except perhaps in Catholic right-wing circles. Early Jewish thought certainly recommended corporal punishment. One reads in Proverbs ‘the rod and reproof give wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame’ (ch. 29, v.15).3 Perhaps on this proverb, the common English adage, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ was built.4 Seeking an explanation of the use of corporal punishment in the past Durkheim sets out to enquire why Western societies until fairly recently have either seen the need to punish children physically, or held it to be desirable. Contrary to what one might think, Durkheim argued that in preliterate societies, even in those which are generally held to be cruel, children are gently disciplined. One outstanding example is that of the aboriginal Indians in North and South America where children are very affectionately treated. Durkheim held that in an examination of 104 primitive societies, as he and others then called them, only 13 had an education which could be called severe (210/184). It was his contention that severity of punishment in schools in the Western world came with the establishment of monasteries when the rod and fasting were widely applied to children. He noted that the severities were less at the beginning of the Middle Ages than at the end. But Durkheim does not find this argument in itself to be completely satisfying. The question arises, why should the development of European civilization into the Middle Ages and beyond have been accompanied by school ‘malpractices’ which are nothing short of dehumanizing? One must look at society in a wider sweep. He produced arguments which are not dissimilar to those of the Division of Labour (1893b) and ‘The two laws of penal evolution’ (1901a(i)) in which he tries to account for historical changes in attitudes to punishment. In L’Education morale he states that in preliterate societies life is simple, based on a few uncomplicated ideas, where

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occupations and work are not clearly differentiated (215/189). Education for the child is therefore correspondingly simple: indeed, education in our general sense of the word is virtually absent. The child readily learns through experience, though elders may see fit to intervene in the process. As cultures become more complex, coupled with an increased division of labour, so does education itself and one result is severer punishment meted out to children. Durkheim admits this is a rather naïve position to adopt and one might add, is by itself contrary to his argument in the Division of Labour, and ‘Two laws of penal evolution’ where he asserts that as society becomes more complex so attitudes towards punishment tend to become less severe and more humane. Thus, the moral conscience becomes progressively refined, manners become milder and violence increasingly repugnant. Durkheim’s explanation is unconvincing in another way. It does not explain why there should be a cruel system of school punishment in the Middle Ages when civilization was at a fairly high level and when the philosophy of the day had reached such a high level of sophistication. Perhaps the cruelty is more due to basic Christian doctrines about man and the evils of the flesh than Durkheim was prepared to admit. However, Philippe Ariès in L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien regime has noted that although the birch was a much-used instrument of punishment in medieval schools, it was the poorer students who suffered most, since the birch was sometimes used as a substitute for fines (1960/t.1962:259). Durkheim uses a further argument that medieval schools were organized in such a way that public opinion had no chance of penetrating them. They were closed societies like the guilds. The danger always is that such societies all too readily degenerate into despotism. It was public opinion against severe corporal punishment that eventually caused it to be phased out in France in the late eighteenth century. But Durkheim does not raise this issue when offering a detailed account of why corporal punishment declined in schools in France over the past two hundred years or so. Nor does he attempt to note the remarkable difference in the practice between France and Britain from the late eighteenth century onwards. Of course we should not criticize Durkheim for not doing something he did not intend to do. In his book on suicide he was happy to make comparisons (1897a). According to Ariès, corporal punishment in schools in France was eliminated in around 1763 with the expulsion of the Jesuits who had been supporters of punishment (1960/t.1962:262ff.). The struggle to abolish physical punishment was successful despite opposition in some church circles. In England, however, notwithstanding a growing humanism, violence and brutality persisted in eighteenthcentury schools. Although Arnold of Rugby later attempted to bring about moderation in floggings in public and other schools, the educational maxim prevailed: a good beating was ‘an opportunity for the boy being flogged to exercise self-control, the first duty of the English gentleman’ (quoted in Aries 1960/t.1962:264). One might add that unlike France again, flogging for adults in England, Prussia, and Russia extended well into the nineteenth century. Desirable practice What form of punishment?

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Having rejected corporal punishment for school children, what form of punishment did Durkheim hold to be legitimate? Deprivation was the answer. The child should be forbidden to participate in games and be made to feel contrite in the face of an offence (225/197). Punishment should be useful (servir) and of service to the child. This is not far from the notion of rehabilitation, which Durkheim felt was the correct principle for punishing adults. As such it is motivated by humanitarian sentiments. Along these lines, however, Durkheim rejected certain school punishments, such as dull copying, e.g. writing out lines and forcing children to do tedious chores. To exert educational influence, punishment must be seen to produce attitudes of respect in the offender. School impositions are hardly likely to produce this. Punishment by way of supplementary tasks seems satisfactory but it should have the same characteristics as general tasks. The offender has to do more of the ordinary and, therefore, embark on positive work within the school. Durkheim was also against group punishment in which all offenders are punished together (226/198). This creates hostility amongst members of the group and therefore increases mutual damage. He was also against group punishment in prisons. In the type of punishment that Durkheim advocated such as forbidding offenders to take part in games or giving them extra positive tasks coupled with reproach and reprimand, one thing is necessary—a graduated scale of punishment. Such a scale begins as low as possible and care has to be shown to the offender that he is moving from one scale to another. Continual punishment Punishment loses its effectiveness, says Durkheim, every time it is applied. Therefore, too constricted a scale of punishments is dangerous since it is soon exhausted for persistent offenders. The threat-value deteriorates quickly. In this lies the weakness of draconian laws. Such measures move immediately to harshness and become ineffective. The effectiveness of punishment declines with the frequency of application. There emerges a point of no return where increased punishment produces no useful effect at all (228/200). Punishment, then, should not be administered in massive doses. All punishment must be preceded by a warning, reproach or disapproval—by a glance, a gesture or silence (227/199). The issue of time The teacher or parent must never strike a child, and most certainly never strike a child in anger. This is clearly compatible with traditional rational thinking. An impulsive response to an offence deprives the action of all moral significance. Thus, a little time should elapse between the act of offence and punishment. For adults the judiciary system with its slowness and complications guarantees that an adequate time intervenes between offence and punishment. The teacher should always be sensitive and reflective about the punishment he metes out to the offending child. Durkheim held that there were and must be differences in the administration of punishment in a school and in society at large—in the adult world. One difference rests with the particular nature of a school class and the schoolroom which is not a copy of

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society, although the class should be viewed as a collectivity (231/203). The offences in the schoolroom are usually clear to see and are immediate. The child is caught in an act of misbehaviour. There is no doubt about the facts of the case and there are no complicated trial procedures (231/203). This affects the time span between the wrongful act and the infliction of punishment which Durkheim saw was of crucial importance in dealing with children. A long delay in punishment is counterproductive. It is desirable that the effect of the misdeed is nullified as soon as possible. The family should never hand over to the school its own authority, since it is not an extension of the family. But neither is it an extension of society (see below). The school is very much an institution in its own right and therefore has to be treated sociologically as such. One consequence is that the parents under normal circumstances cannot perform the function of a school. Hence every child should attend school. Durkheim showed great sensitivity in the administration of punishment which we hope was reflected in his role as father of Marie and André. Good judgment based on sound reasoning should permeate the actions of judges and magistrates on the one hand, and school teachers on the other. Durkheim’s sensitivity and perhaps anguish are shown when he wrote: ‘It is always something of a problem to know whether one should punish, and above all how to do it’ (229/201). But something is quite clear: to achieve a given aim, only a minimum of punishment should be meted out. If anger in punishment is to be deplored, so also should coldness and dispassion. Punishment should always be accompanied by revulsion, as in the common English saying supposedly mouthed by teacher or parent ‘This will hurt me more than it hurts you’ (229/201). The issue is passion associated with suffering (230ff./202ff.). Excessive coldness or impassivity must be avoided. Punishment must demonstrate the revulsion the person administering punishment feels. Should all emotion be drained from it, the moral content is eliminated and it becomes a sheer physical act. In this way it is not educative. A child cannot accept useless punishment or punishment that does not have a raison d’être. In his notes on Rousseau and education, Durkheim emphasized: ‘Children should never receive punishment as such; it should always come as the natural consequence of their fault’ (1919a/t.1979a:177). So punishment is to be seen as a ‘natural’ consequence of an immoral act. But in what way natural? A simple cause and effect? But surely only according to social determinants? Role of rewards in education Rewards in school should be used as ‘means of stimulating qualities of intelligence rather than those of the heart and character’ (232/204). Durkheim sees that intellectual failure or success is qualitatively different from moral failure or ‘success’. While it would be desirable to have a system of rewards for good moral behaviour, this is virtually impossible in practice to bring about. ‘Reward is an instrument of intellectual culture rather than moral culture’ (233/204). This would seem to disadvantage moral education at the expense of intellectual education because moral deeds are difficult to define and cannot be positively rewarded. Such is the argument of Durkheim. Theories of punishment

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Theories rejected: prevention Some punishment is necessary but for what purpose? Durkheim appears to have been dissatisfied with all the theories of punishment which could in any way be held to be applicable to schools. In such a context, he rejected outright several traditional theories of punishment, not least that of prevention. He admitted that the fear of punishment could be effective among some people (184/161). But it is neither the sole nor even chief reason for punishment. Such reasons are of secondary importance. In itself prevention fails to elicit moral change in the offender. Intimidation does not necessarily make for moral change. Italian studies had claimed that the prophylactic influence of punishment had been exaggerated. Danger, which is allied to fear and carries with it the possibility of suffering, does not deter people working in hazardous industries, for example, in the mines. Nor does it deter deep-sea fishermen, and we might add, soldiers (185/162). Indeed, argued Durkheim, these people love such occupations. Those who have a sense of calling are not prevented by the hazards that it entails. But how far can it be said that those who work in mines, those who are soldiers and, could we add, robbers, have a vocation to such work? Most people in these occupations, it can be argued, have no alternative, since there is no real possibility of other work. The limitation of the prevention theory also applies to the classroom. Physical punishments in themselves probably do not prevent immoral actions, for they do not create a sense of morality. In fact they may elicit bad feelings in a child. In this respect Durkheim was opposed to the notion that punishment in general should be seen as a ‘natural’ process, that is, that a misdemeanour has natural consequences in the form of punishment (192ff./168ff.). Rousseau is accredited with such a notion, and indeed held that punishment should not be inflicted, but it was applicable to a child, only to the age of 12. For him, moral life begins at this age. Up to that time, the child, like an animal, lives a purely physical life. One sees perhaps the influence of Rousseau on Durkheim for, as has been noted, Durkheim advocated physical punishment only for very young children. As soon as moral education begins, the teacher must intervene and therefore point the child to moral precepts. It is generally agreed that the punishment should fit the crime in adult and in school life. But in the way punishment is administered, there is a ready acceptance of equivalent sanctions of unequal offences. If, however, punishment is to forestall a forbidden act, it should not relate to the nature of that act but to the intensity or strength of the inclination to commit the act. This means, therefore, that a prevention theory is at variance with the notion that the punishment should fit the crime (186/163). The theory of expurgation or expiation rejected? The theory of atonement or expiation as the reason for punishment has had a long history. The argument is that compensation has to be made for what has been done. The atonement annuls the evil that the offender has committed. The offender has to undergo punishment in order to eliminate the evil he or she has committed. To some, Durkheim held, the notion is absurd and irrational (188/164). In what way can the evil of punishment inflicted on an offender compensate for the evil he or she has done to another person? Durkheim’s humanism again becomes apparent in his assertion

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that all suffering is evil. Expiation is based on the notion of retaliation (188/164). To most humanistic thinkers such assumptions and assertions are totally unacceptable. Durkheim, however, is cautious. He holds that there is something of this theory that should be retained, namely, that punishment erases or makes amends. It is not a question that the offender has to undergo moral purgation, or that he or she is receiving just deserts. The actual suffering is far less significant that we imagine. What is necessary is that the punishment must demonstrate that an offence produces a moral wrong which must be negated or expurgated (189/165). At this point we come face to face with certain aspects of Durkheim’s notion of morality. Moral authority rests on opinion, that is people’s attitudes towards morality. In schools, Durkheim argues, children should have a feeling for the sacred and its inviolable nature, which stands totally outside their control (189/165). An act of delinquency is a violation of the rule. It means that the moral rule loses its sacredness. Thus, a violation undermines a child’s faith in the intangible—might one say the transcendental quality of a rule. A child submits to the rule because the child sees the rule is endowed with a prestige, which is shattered when people disregard it. This demoralization continues if no action is taken against the offender. In short, it weakens the sacred authority of the rule. It is necessary, then, to demonstrate the strength of reversal, proportional to the attack made against the rule. ‘Punishment is nothing but this meaningful demonstration’ (190/166). The reaction against the offence and the affirmation of the sacred quality of the rule is mediated through the teacher. The child respects the rule because she or he has faith in the teacher. If the teacher allows violation of the rule, the child respects neither the teacher nor the rule. The teacher must punish and demonstrate unequivocally that he or she is committed to the rule despite the offence. The rule is the rule and must be obeyed (191/167). One can conclude therefore that punishment is not for expiation undergone by the offender who does not have to nullify any guilt but rather is carried out to reassure and strengthen consciences. A violation of the rule can and must disturb people’s faith, ‘even though they themselves cannot give an account of it’ (191/167). Discipline, then, plays an important part in the function of strengthening the morality of the school. Punishment prevents discipline from losing its authority. What is important is not that the child should suffer but that his behaviour should be vigorously censored. Punishment is disapproval shown against a given conduct. Durkheim hopes in this way that the offender will be educated morally because that is really what education is all about. The principle Punishment for offences by children is to be seen in the light of the process of education (230/202). The purpose of education is to prepare the child for adult life and to embrace the civilization in which the child is born, but that means that education must produce lasting, inner effects on the moral development of the child. Durkheim’s concept and function of punishment as part of that education is based on his psychology of the child and on his own humanistic ideology, which he saw as that which existed in France (149ff./129ff.). He combined fact with the desirable: in his day such a combination seemed easy to achieve.

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But at the basis of this stood the premise that the child needed to be taught moderation and self-control and to be shown categorically that there are limitations to his or her needs. ‘It [education] suffices to lead the child to acquire regular habits with respect to everything which bears on its life’ (157/138). Durkheim distinguished respect for rule and authority, which is held to be good, from the fear of punishment, which is bad (199/174). The clearest way of showing disapproval and upholding the sacred rule is to make the offender suffer. There is only one way of showing that one disapproves of someone and that is to treat him or her less well than people one esteems (191/167). But let it be clearly understood that pain is incidental to the punishment, not its essential element. It is a sign (signe) by which the sentiment translates itself externally— a sentiment which needs to be informed and reformed in the face of the fault. It is the sentiment expressed, not the sign by which it is expressed, that neutralizes the morally disruptive effect of the violation. Thus, for Durkheim, school punishment and discipline are a means of restoring moral credibility, of upholding the moral system and communicating moral truth. In the words of David Garland punishment is seen by Durkheim to be a ‘social necessity’ (1990:58). This social necessity is obviously related directly to his concept of society. And so the purpose of punishment in schools and one might add, adult life, is to restore the damage done to the sacred moral system and negate the profanation created by an immoral act. The system has to continue intact, with its authority fully restored and so guarantees the persistence of society. Whether punishment really achieves that is open to debate. And, further, there are some who would not equate a moral system, let alone a legal one, with the sacred, indeed the concept of the sacred is not part of a secular society (see Pickering 1990). And now? We have briefly stated Durkheim’s position about punishment in schools. What is its relevance today? Despite some of the obvious weaknesses of his argument, not least about the sacredness of the person, and his assumption about the evil of corporal punishment on the individual, the battle seems to have been won. Corporal punishment in state schools in Europe and elsewhere is prohibited, even in a slow-moving country like Britain. But there are two merits in examining Durkheim’s arguments. First, they are a closely reasoned and admirable statement, despite some flaws, for the non-application of corporal punishment in schools and indeed in society at large. Second, although victory seems assured, those calling for the restoration of physical punishment are always lurking in the wings, for example in the United States and in parts of Europe.5 And one should be aware of the fact that in Britain corporal punishment is still permitted in private schools, even though it is said it is seldom administered. Any threat on the part of those advocating such punishment needs to be firmly met and Durkheim’s gambit is perhaps the most powerful we have. Notes

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1 References in brackets which contain no key date, relate to L’Education morale (1925a). The first number refers to the French text, the second refers to the corresponding page number of the English translation of 1961a. See references. 2 A male descendant of the Durkheim family told me that he did not think there was any difference in the use of corporal punishment between Jewish and gentile families in France. Sometimes the cane was given in home on the hand, never on the buttocks. When he was about 11 years of age punishment was in the form of being sent to one’s room and not having meals with one’s parents. Such isolation as punishment is rejected by the Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect, where the strap and the cane are used and the child is then embraced by the administrator. 3 I have been told that there exists a late medieval picture of a Jewish boy being beaten. 4 The United Kingdom has shown itself to be one of the last countries in the Western world to abolish physical punishment in schools. Writing in the early 1970s, Newell noted that in Europe at that time, the only countries which gave the right to use corporal punishment were the United Kingdom, Eire, some Cantons in Switzerland, and in certain Länder in Germany (Newell 1972:9–10). Countries colonized by Britain also tended to allow physical punishment in schools. In Britain itself, the practice was used less and less in the years that followed the Second World War. Often it was the teachers who opposed its abolition (ibid.: 175) and recommendations for abolition were frequently disregarded by the government of the day. The Society of Teachers Opposed to Physical Punishment was active in the 1960s and early 1970s and helped to bring about the abolition of corporal punishment. It was not until August 1986 that an act of Parliament finally brought to an end to such punishment in state schools. After this chapter was written, in March 1998 a government-backed amendment to Labour’s 1997 School Standards and Framework Bill initiated action to abolish corporal punishment in independent schools as well as state schools. It seems very likely that this will become law in the near future. 5 Some British parents still demand the right to beat their children, admittedly in the home. As recently as November 1997 a case was heard on the subject before the European Commission on Human Rights which forced the British government to consider its position. The government decided not to ban corporal punishment altogether but to continue to allow parents the right of reasonable chastisement of their children (see Guardian 8.11.1997).

Bibliography Ariès, P. (1960) L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime, Paris: Editions du Seuil. ——(t.1962) by R.Baldwick, Centuries of Childhood, London: Jonathan Cape.

Durkheim, E. (1893b) De la Division du travail social: étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1933b) by G.Simpson, The Division of Labor in Society, New York: Macmillan. ——(1901a(i)) ‘Deux Lois de l’évolution pénale’, L’Année sociologique, IV:65–95. ——(t.1969e) by W.Jeffrey Jr, University of Cincinnati Law Review, 38:32–60. ——(1919a) ‘La Pédagogic de Rousseau’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 26, pp. 153–80.

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——(t.1979a) ‘Rousseau on educational theory’. In W.S.F.Pickering, Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, translated by H.L.Sutcliffe. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, introduction by Paul Fauconnet, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schurer, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, edited, with an introduction, by E.K.Wilson, New York: Free Press. ——(1897a) Le Suicide: étude de sociologie, Paris: Alcan.

Garland, D. (1990) Punishment and Society: A Study in Social Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim. His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study, London: Allen Lane. New edition 1992, London: Penguin.

Newell, P. (ed.) (1972) A Last Resort? Corporal Punishment in Schools, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Pickering, W.S.F. (1990) ‘The eternality of the sacred: Durkheim’s error?’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 69:91–106.

6 TEACHING AUTONOMY W.Watts Miller What is autonomy, and how might an education for it take place? Durkheim sets out his fundamental ethical theory in the first half of Moral Education (1925a), a lecture-course probably first given in 1898–9 (cf. Besnard 1993). He identifies two core elements of morality, ‘the spirit of discipline’ and ‘attachment to groups’, related to traditional talk of duty and the good. He then goes on to an account of autonomy. He works with a notion of autonomy in The Division of Labour (1893b). But his only sustained discussion of the ideal is in Moral Education, which is also where he grapples with its original articulation by Kant. It is easy to stress differences between their views. It is important, for a number of reasons, to look for common ground that they share. This means going over four main questions: 1 How does autonomy involve the individual, the person and society? 2 Who is the moral judge? 3 What gives the moral law authority? 4 Is a socio-historical understanding of autonomy compatible with (a) free will, (b) universalism? Going on to ask about an education for autonomy runs into a problem. The second half of Durkheim’s course concerns moral education in the primary school. It has sections on developing the spirit of discipline, and then on developing attachment to groups, but finishes with some lectures on the curriculum. There are none on developing autonomy. Durkheim did lecture on this according to Fauconnet, the editor of Moral Education. But the manuscript was not in good enough order for publication (1925a: iii/t.1961a:vi). If it ever existed, it now seems lost. It is still possible, in asking about an education for autonomy, to try to discuss it on generally Durkheimian lines. Autonomy, for Durkheim, includes an understanding of morality’s core elements, but it also grows out of them. It is essential to go into his account of these, and what he calls the ‘reflective will’. Duty and the good form two sets—indeed, trios—of virtues. In each case a lesser virtue is a necessary route to the development of greater virtues, the reflective will and autonomy. We should also go to his hopes in the curriculum of a ‘new humanism’—spanning the sciences, history and the arts—and his belief that ‘only a broad human culture can give modern societies the citizens they need’ (1922a: 116/t.1956a:121).1 Teaching history seems of obvious importance for an understanding of our own, specifically modern moral ideals. But he has more to say on teaching science. So it is of interest to ask how this contributes to an education for autonomy, citizenship and an ability to cope with modern society’s ‘growing multitude of individual disagreements [dissidences]’ (1893b/t.1933b:172).

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The individual, the person and society Durkheim clearly works with a notion of autonomy in The Division of Labour. He might mention the term in only two passages, but these occur at important points in the argument. One, in the preface, states the book’s central problematic and thesis. The other, in the conclusion, helps to wrap things up. The preface asks how it comes about that ‘the individual, while becoming more autonomous, depends more closely on society’ and sees the answer in the division of labour (1893b/t.1933b:37). The conclusion goes over how, as a result, we can each develop and flourish as a ‘person’—that is, as an ‘autonomous source of action’, in which ‘the very materials of consciousness have an individual character’ (1893b/t.1933b:403–4). So despite talk of the person, this view of autonomy centres on the individual. It celebrates difference and diversity, in finding cohesion through the interdependence of a division of labour. The problematic of the individual and the person was much discussed at the time, and runs through Durkheim’s own writings—as in his account of the person in The Elementary Forms, which ends with a long footnote on the individual, referring us back to The Division of Labour (1912a: 386–90/t.1995a:272–5). Moreover, there is a notion of the person, rather than just of the individual, in The Division of Labour itself—as in the conclusion, where the modern collective ideal is an ideal of ‘man’ (1893b/t.1933b: 396– 7, 406), and even in the famous passage where ‘the individual becomes the object of a kind of religion’, but in ‘a cult of the dignity of the person’ (1893b/t.1933b:172). Thus, although the book’s main problematic concerns the individual and society, it still brings in the problematic of the individual and the person. It does so via two underlying arguments. In one, our differences leave us with little in common except our humanity, so that the fundamental modern identity is our dual identity as individual and person. In the other, an ethic which respects each of us as an individual must also be an ethic that confers on all of us the same moral status and dignity of a person. The Division of Labour none the less emphasizes the individual more than the person. A redress of the balance (or tension) between these takes place in Suicide, where man first becomes a ‘god for men’ (1897a:379/t.1951a:334), and where, as soon as ‘the human person is and must be considered something sacred, over which neither the individual nor the group has free disposal, any attack upon it must be forbidden’ (1897a:379/t.1951a:337). Man is redeified a year later in ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’ (1898c/t.1975a:62). The person is resacralized around the same time in the lectures on moral education. Durkheim starts his account of autonomy with ‘the fundamental axiom’ of morality nowadays, that ‘the human person is the sacred thing par excellence’ (1925a:123/t.1961a:107). For he sees our demands for autonomy as part and parcel of the ethic of the person. He gives various standard expressions of them—any ‘restriction on our conscience seems immoral’; a ‘particular way of thinking should never be forced on us, even in the name of a moral authority’; our ‘reason should accept as true only that which it has spontaneously recognized as such’ (1925a:123/t.1961a:107–8). It is mistaken to reject the aspiration as incoherent and a ‘delusion of the public conscience’ (1925a:123/t.1961a:108). It is something that we must try to understand, that we can, if necessary, rework, but that we should, at bottom, accept. He himself goes on to rework

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autonomy as ‘free, enlightened acceptance’ of the nature of the moral world (1925a:123/t.1961a:120). This requires a grasp of morality’s core, universal elements. It also requires an understanding of the nature of our own moral world, its sacred centre of things, how this is the person, and so how it includes autonomy itself as a key aspiration of modern society and its human ideal. Yet does Durkheim’s reworking of autonomy amount to a fundamental rejection—in a way that might go against his approach—of the ideal’s original, authoritative articulation by Kant? Indeed, is there any connection between them at all? In general, Durkheimian autonomy is free, enlightened acceptance of moral realities and is a socio-historical development. In general, Kantian autonomy is man-made self-imposed universal law. But a good place to start is with its similar anchorage in an ethic of the person. The Groundwork sets out a number of versions of the moral law. They include ‘the principle of humanity’—‘always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end’ (Kant 1785/t.1948:91). It is this that leads on to the final version, in which ‘man…is subject only to laws which are made by himself and yet are universal’, and which is baptized ‘the principle of the Autonomy of the will’ (Kant 1785/t.1948:94–5). Kant then writes: The concept of every rational being as one who must regard himself as making universal law by all the maxims of his will, and must seek to judge himself and his actions from this point of view, leads to a closely connected and very fruitful concept—namely, that of a kingdom of ends. (Kant 1785/t.1948:95) This is ‘a systematic union of different rational beings’—in effect, persons—‘under common laws’ (ibid.), and it is the person as ‘a law-making member in a kingdom of ends’ that is the source of man’s ‘dignity’ and due not just respect but ‘reverence’ (Kant 1785/t.1948:96–7). So we find the moral law successively and interlinkingly expressed as the human ideal, autonomy and a kingdom of ends—a ‘republic of persons’, as in its inspired translation for our times by Boutroux (1926:373). What are we to make of this crucial section of The Groundwork? It does not fit in with views of Kantian autonomy as individualistic. Certainly, these would have surprised Boutroux. In seeing a need to bring the individual back into Kantian ethics, he took it as obvious that it centred, instead, on the same shared rational nature and dignity of la personne humaine (which is also Durkheim’s reading, in his discussion of the Kantian person in The Elementary Forms). Nor will it do just to interpret Kant’s autonomy of the person as the autonomy of the individual in the sense of an atom, radically separate from others, even if the same as them. The autonomy of the person in a republic of persons is in a union—Verbindung. The term itself implies more than an association, in the sense of an aggregate of individuals. So does talk, in the same passage, of a union as ‘a whole of all ends in systematic conjunction’ (Kant 1785/t.1948:95). And a union is clearly some sort of organic whole in the third Critique. In discussing a union of persons, this says that while

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each member of such a whole contributes to making it possible and should be an end rather than just a means, ‘the idea of that whole should in turn determine the member’s position and function’ (Kant 1790/t.1987:254, n. 38). A union of persons is also compared with ‘an organized being’, in which, as eventually defined, ‘everything is an end and reciprocally also a means’ (Kant 1790/t.1987:255), and in which, as earlier explained, there is an overall formative force as well as a reciprocal production of parts, each of which exists for the sake of the others but also the whole (253). Kantian autonomy of the person in a union of persons thus has an irreducibly collective dimension, and might be seen in terms of a network of ends. Each person is an end, rather than a mere instrument of the whole, yet the union itself is also an end, rather than a mere instrument of associated individuals. This fits in with Durkheim’s insistence on society as an end ‘in and for itself, and not just to the extent that it serves the individual’ (1925a:76/t.1961a: 67), together with his rejection of a mystique of the state, as something which ‘soars above us’ (1925a:75–6; t.1961a:66), raised up into ‘an end superior to individual ends and unrelated to them’ (1950a/t.1957a:54). It is important to stress autonomy within a collectivity of persons. It is in this context that we can ask how Kant himself makes room for individuals. It is essentially as sources of diverse maxims. It is for the ‘legislative will’ to test these, to see if they pass or fail the moral law. The job of the ‘executive will’—besides being the source of maxims—is to go on to adopt only those which pass the law, to struggle to set aside those which fail, but also to respect the legislative will’s authority in the first place. It is then possible, within the limits set by Kant’s concern with a union of persons ‘under common laws’, to stress how he makes room for us as particular individuals (and, indeed, groups). We can adopt different maxims in fact, if they each pass the law and so are adoptable in principle by anyone. Or rather, they are adoptable by anyone as a person. It is a confusion, of both liberals and their critics, if they do not spell this out. For it is not an insistence on adoptability by anybody as a particular individual (or group), and as if maxims rooted in different concrete personalities should be interchangeable between them. But it remains an insistence that, in developing as individuals in our various ways and in a variety of situations, we all develop as persons. The basic law, allowing for pluralism and difference, is the same for everyone. As such it is objective, even a kind of reality, in that it is ‘to be found in every rational being’ and in ‘the relation of rational beings to one another’ (Kant 1785/t.1948:96). Autonomy might mean that we make the law, but not that we just make it up. On the contrary, a task of our reason is to discover the law as something inherent in our nature and interrelationships. Kantian, like Durkheimian, autonomy involves an enlightened acceptance of things. We make the law in the sense of adopting as the law what we try to articulate as this real, underlying rationale of the moral world. The moral judge Yet, as in The Division of Labour, the ethic of the person generates a ‘multitude’ of disagreements. As in Moral Education, the autonomy of a certain, complete

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understanding of things is an unrealizable ideal (1925a: 132/t.1961a:116). So who, in practice, is the moral judge? This includes asking who should decide whether or not a particular maxim is moral and, in Kantian terms, passes the test of the law. More fundamentally, it is to ask who should decide what the law is in the first place, and on this as against that interpretation of it. A common view is that autonomy means that the moral judge is the individual. It cannot be the individual, for either Kant or Durkheim. Yet how can it be the person, or, for that matter, a society of persons? Kant, like Durkheim, sets up autonomy as an ideal that cannot be fully realized, at least by limited mortal humans. He contrasts us with ‘holy’ beings, who are perfectly rational and whose autonomy is complete. The contrast he emphasizes is between our executive will and theirs. For us, it is a struggle to act in light of the law. For them, it is not. But another contrast, either already involved or fitting in with his view of the human condition, is between our legislative will and theirs. We remain particular, error prone, flesh-and-blood creatures who must do what we can with our reason, and without benefit of theirs, to legislate in light of a notion of the law. So in practice the moral judge is the all-too-human person. Put another way, it is the individual as a person. Or rather, it is the individual as a person and member of a society of persons. The moral judge does not have any simple identity, to find a way through the complexities of the modern moral landscape. The issue concerns the aspect of autonomy as man-made law. But the situation is the same with its aspect as self-imposed law. Authority Autonomy means that we are subjects of a moral law made by ourselves, and so imposed on us by ourselves. It would be heteronomy if it were made and imposed by God instead. Both Kant and Durkheim therefore look for something which, even or especially with an autonomous morality, can transcend us and so which can give the law authority and an obligatory force. But in the Kantian case, is it just reason? This is a common interpretation, encountered in Durkheim himself and, for example, in an interesting essay on morals and modernity by Charles Larmore (1996:46–51). In the Durkheimian case, is it just society? This is the interpretation, for example, of Piaget (1977:342, 349), who seizes on the passage: ‘Only society stands above individuals, and so it is society from which flows all authority’ (1925a:103/t.1961a:91). But the context is the moral world in general. It is not, as later in the lectures, the modern world and its ethic of the person. It is then nearer the mark to argue that the source of authority lies in ‘our form of our life, in so far as it embodies this universal morality’—a view developed by Larmore (1996:57–8), in part, via appeal to Durkheim. This still lacks a sense of Durkheim’s anchorage of authority not just in society but in religion and the sacred. It is vital, moreover, not to confuse the source of the sacred with the centre of the sacred. Society, for Durkheim, might be the source of the sacred. But it is man whom it has now placed at the centre of the sacred. ‘Society has consecrated him…. It has made man the god whose servant it has become’ (1924a: 77/t.1953b:58–9). He could also have said

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that society has consecrated reason, and in effect he does say this, in tying up the ethic of the person—the sacred thing par excellence—with autonomy, and in insisting that ‘it is, above all, a rational ethic’ (1925a:139/t.1961a:122). The point, then, is that it is not just the source of the sacred that inspires reverence and respect. It is the sacred itself. Even though this, in the modern world, is not simply reason, it is not simply society. It is their combination, centred on the ideal of the person. All these elements of modern sacrality—the person, society and reason—transcend us as individuals in the way that Durkheim sees as essential for the authority of an autonomous morality. And they can also be found in Kant. It is the person as a law-making member of a society of persons that is due reverence. It is not just reason. Thus it is important to notice his talk of our reason, as well as of rational beings and, indeed, of holy beings. It is not, even in their case, to invoke the ghost of reason as such. It embeds reason in reasoners. So it is again a way of attaching reverence to persons, which in practice means the all-too-human person. Does reverence not attach, above all, to the embodiment of reason in the law? But the law is the ideal of the person, that insists on respect and regard for everyone as an end, as a legislator and judge, and as a member of a society of persons. What if we dig down to the ethic’s source? We might see it, in line with an earlier argument, as a real, underlying rationale of the moral world. So is it something which transcends not only the individual but the person? But discovery of the rationale is of something inherent in the good will at the core of our moral life—which is where The Groundwork starts—and, going on from this, in our nature and interrelationships as rational beings. It is discovery of the kernel, in everyone, of development as a person. Freedom of the will We have now gone about as far as we can go without asking if Durkheim’s sociohistorical approach to autonomy is not wholly incompatible with two key elements of the Kantian position, relating to free will and universalism. The lectures on moral education defend some sort of idea of freedom of the will as part of autonomy. At the same time they assume the view, set out elsewhere, that causality involves necessary, logical, intelligible relationships which follow from the nature of things (e.g., 1897f/t.1997a:76–80). So Durkheim wants a combination of free will plus necessity. Kant wants this too. But Durkheim rejects The Groundwork’s solution: it converts our reason into a mysterious faculty, ‘set apart from the world, and over which the world has no influence’ (1925a:129/t.1961a:113). However, he does not discuss other Kantian possibilities. He also does not bring out that the Kantian problematic involves freedom vis-à-vis two sets of necessary connections, rather than just one. How are we free in relation to the necessity at work in the empirical, ‘sensible’ world? How are we free in relation to the necessity at work in the moral law’s rationale? A way forward is to reconsider these two sets of determinations, and explore how freedom might be located at the interstices between them. We can struggle against the desires, interests and inclinations of our ‘sensible’ nature, in order to act under the law—which is one side of Kantian free will. But the ability to do so also concerns its other side, and, again, the issue of the law’s authority. Our duty is

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both freely willed and a ‘practical necessitation’ (Kant 1785/t.1948:96). It involves an ‘inner but intellectual compulsion’ (Kant 1788/t.1993:32), and is action an imperative ‘makes necessary’ (Kant 1797/t.1991:48). There is no imperative when such action ‘already inheres by an inner necessity in the acting subject (as in a holy being)’ (Kant 1797/t.1991:49). So just as holy beings, by their nature, act in line with the logic of the law, its hold over us through imperatives is because of our nature too, and inherent in us as limited rational beings. Free will, as a Kantian, autonomous freedom of the will, is not simply about ‘choice’, or something we might find in the world of the contingent rather than of necessitating, necessary connections. We have freedom in that, under an inner (but faltering) intellectual compulsion, we can but also do act in light of the law’s rationale. Similarly, for Durkheim, ‘to will freely is not to will the absurd; on the contrary, it is to will the rational, that is, to will to act in conformity with the nature of things’ (1925a:132/t.1961a:115). It is similar, since for him the nature of things involves a logic of things, and its free, enlightened acceptance is of a reality and the rationale built into and implied by it. In imagining the autonomy of a complete understanding of our moral world, he writes: We can then make sure how far it is based on the nature of things—that is, of society—and, in other words, how far it is as it ought to be. To the extent that we recognize it as this, we can accept it freely. To wish it to be other than is implied by the natural make-up of the reality it expresses would be nonsense under the pretext of free will. We can also see how far it does not have such a basis—for it can always contain abnormal elements. But we then possess…the means of restoring it to the normal state. (1925a:133/t.1961a:117) The argument goes back to Durkheim’s thesis on Montesquieu. He endorses Montesquieu’s concern with the nature of particular types of society rather than just of society in general, his view of the nature of a social world as its underlying dynamic and rationale, and—as in the passage above—identification of the normal with this. What about the deviations from it that—again as in the passage above—are abnormal and indeed pathological? A criticism, of great theoretical importance, is that Montesquieu explains a social world’s pathologies only in terms of causes which are ‘accidental and, as one might say, external’ (1892a/t.1997a:55). So Durkheim, here, has a notion of the contingent. But it is of causes which are accidental in the sense that they are external, coming from outside a system. He insists that, to explain the pathological, we should look for causes lying within the nature of a society itself (1892a/1997a:55–6). His ‘internalist programme’, as we might therefore call it, sets out to understand our ideals and our ills as part of the same social dynamic. Then how can the internalist programme offer a route to freedom of the will? Perhaps there is a route to this via his various allowances for the contingent, as suggested by Susan Stedman-Jones (1996:487–8). Indeed, he explores it himself in a note in Suicide—individualistic explanations rule out free will, while he leaves open who of us in particular are carried off by suicidogenic currents (1897a:368, n. 1/t.1951a:325, n. 20).

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The argument is unconvincing, given his belief in society’s influence over the individual, but also because it seems to appeal to moral luck. For someone as Kantian as Durkheim, the place to find freedom of the will is surely not in arbitrariness, accident, external ‘alien’ causes or whatever else constitutes the domain of the contingent. It belongs, the lectures on moral education insist, in the domain of the rational. For someone as Montesquieuan as Durkheim, this is at the same time a rationale inherent in the nature of a particular social world rather than just of social life in general. Yet he has to open up its set of necessary connections somehow, to get freedom of the will. Otherwise, as Stedman-Jones says, he runs into the problems The Groundwork’s solution attempts to overcome. And Durkheim rejects this solution. But the internalist programme does open things out, in rooting our ideals and pathologies in the same dynamic. It involves two interlinked yet opposing sets of necessary connections, each in its way a logic, each in its way a causality. What might we find at the interstices between them? Not a determinism which just takes us back to a single, monolithic system. Not a freedom of haphazard choices and events which just take us back to contingency. But a freedom of the will, to struggle to overcome heteronomous forces within us and our society, and to realize its own human ideal. This fits in with Durkheim’s stress on a socio-historical freedom, but also with the famous image of freedom as a ‘kernel’ (Kant 1784b/t.1983:45–6) and with the view of it, in the third Critique, as a ‘supersensible ability’ (Kant 1790/t.1987:323). Freedom as such an ability is not something fully formed, transcendentally, forever. It is a power in everyone to become a member of a commonwealth of persons, and which can develop, like the ideal itself, only in and through the world. Our reason ‘requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one stage of insight to another’, and indeed most of the time we stumble blindly along, in a history in which we ‘unconsciously proceed toward an unknown natural end, as if following a guiding thread’ (Kant 1784a/t.1983:29–30; cf. 1790/t.1987:320). It is only eventually—in an ‘age of enlightenment’ (Kant 1784b/t.1983:44)—that man’s end or telos becomes modern man’s consciously held ideal. So both Kant and Durkheim offer a socio-historical understanding of this as the ethic of our time. Its universalism is above all a practical commitment —global and forwards—to a world-wide extension of respect and regard for everyone as a person. It does not depend on a universalism that is retrospective, denouncing the violation of human rights in, say, ancient Babylonia, or that tries to justify the human ideal as a timeless, a priori truth. It is a mistake to see Kantian ethics only as an attempt of this kind. There is no doubt an attempt, as in The Groundwork, just to reason a way to the law from its basis in the good will and in our nature and interrelationships as rational beings. But there is also the concern, elsewhere, with a socio-historical development of our reason and with socio-historical experience (including its development of the free kernel in everyone) as the basis of the human ideal. It is important to renew such an approach. It offers a way out of the present impasse between corrosion of the ethic of the person by an extreme relativism and its defence by an overreaching universalism. Durkheim’s defence of the ethic is certainly not just relativist. It centres on a kind of universal, since it appeals to the same thing, a particular social and moral world’s dynamic, in appealing to that of our own. It also looks for an anchorage in the same essential elements of moral life itself. We need a grasp of these, to develop the modern

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human ideal in light of them—but also to shape and develop them in line with it. Autonomy involves both processes. From lesser to greater virtues How, then, might an education for autonomy take place? It is impossible to reconstruct Durkheim’s lectures on this. His manuscript of them has been lost, and no student notes have been discovered. But we can attempt a discussion on generally Durkheimian lines, and the attempt can be made mainly because of the kind of approach he takes to ethics itself. Durkheim’s ethical theory is innovative and of major significance and importance. Perhaps there would be more recognition of this if, instead of coming under a course on moral education, the lectures setting out his theory were retitled and published as Autonomy and the Virtues. For the theory is innovative in its reworking of Kantian autonomy but also, as an integral part of the same project, in the way it draws on and develops the Aristotelian tradition nowadays revived as ‘virtue ethics’. Durkheim focuses on character, motivation and the will, rather than just on outward action. He does not attempt ‘to draw up an exhaustive list of all the virtues’. He undertakes, instead, to identify ‘the fundamental dispositions, the mental states, at the root of moral life’ (1925a:23/t.1961a:20–1). If, then, a picture of a Durkheimian education for autonomy can be built up from his ethical theory, it is precisely because, in its approach to duty and the good, it is an ethics of virtue. It involves, on analysis, two sets and indeed trios of virtues. In each case a lesser virtue is the path to other, greater virtues. We might discuss the first set as dutifulness, self-discipline and justice, the second set as loyalty, sociability and humanity. Things are clear in his account of the spirit of discipline, which in our terminology goes from dutifulness (1925a: 26–39/t.1961a:23–35) to it as a basis of self-discipline (1925a: 39– 54/t.1961a:35–51), then of justice (1925a:59–62/t.1961a:51–4). They are less clear in his account of attachment to groups, and although loyalty and humanity feature in the main discussion (1925a:63–99/t.1961a: 55–88), sociability appears—as the ‘spirit of association’—only in the second part of the course (1925a:269–73/t.1961a:235–9). Dutifulness is about the inculcation, internalization and almost unthinking acceptance of pre-established rules. Loyalty, in the same way, attaches us to our group. Durkheim’s enthusiastic defence of them might scandalize liberals. Are such things virtues at all? Do they not block a more reflective, ethical outlook? Durkheim’s insight is that they are on the contrary a necessary route to this. He plays down how they are not a guaranteed route and can often be an obstacle. He still confronts us with the challenge that we need to develop autonomy through dutifulness and loyalty, but at the risk of an imprisonment in them. It is important, then, just to see and understand the problem. Apart from this, all that can be done here is to look for keys to it, rather than any detailed solutions. Let us begin, like Durkheim, with dutifulness. It involves a set of moral rules with three main characteristics. They are specific, defining conduct in a comprehensive range of situations. They are almost automatic. They are pre-established. Thus an opening argument is that moral life cannot run on vague principles which we have to think about all the time to decide how to interpret. It requires a respect, engrained in our character

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and almost a habit, for specific rules (1925a:28–30/t.1961a:24–6). A further argument is that we must start from pre-established rules if we are to learn the respect necessary for commitment to any moral rule, if we are to be able to feel this for what we come to consider just rules, but also if we are to grasp and care about the idea which is at the heart of any conception of justice, the idea of the rule itself (1925a:61–2/t.1961a:53–4). Yet where is the kernel in dutifulness, if we are ever to break free from it as mere habit, of development of the ‘reflective will’? Durkheim’s opening argument recognizes what is nowadays discussed as the ‘opentexture’ of rules. They inevitably leave room for judgment in interpreting and applying them (1925a:26; t.1961a:23–4). But at this stage he makes the point as a concession, to stress that rules fix the essentials of conduct. He returns to it in the later argument, only not as a concession, but to stress that moral rules require ‘intelligence’ in their application. Since the nature of society continuously evolves, they should never have such a grip that they are ‘above criticism and reflection, the agents par excellence of all change’ (1925a:60/t.1961a:52). So is dutifulness, in his own account, something that in fact forms any part of the reflective will’s kernel? Is it not intelligence itself, plus change and, indeed, vague principles and aspirations? It turns out that moral life depends on a stirring of these after all, as well as on the very idea of the rule, in a process necessary to evolve new rules and ‘shake off the yoke of traditional discipline’ (1925a:61/t.1961a:53). It is true that Durkheim does not explore the route from dutifulness to the reflective will via the judgment built into the operation of any, including a traditional, social code. Instead, he explores another. This is in his discussion, immediately after dutifulness and before getting on to justice, of self-discipline. Dutifulness is ‘the indispensable condition of the emergence of the personal, reflective will’, which is in turn at the core of selfdiscipline (1925a:56/t.1961a:49). Thus it is here that he begins to emphasize the importance of the reflective will, and in a context in which he wants to emphasize that self-discipline, far from only serving society, is of fundamental importance to us in our own lives—for our happiness, welfare, flourishing and any ‘freedom worthy of the name’ (1925a:51, 55–6/t.1961a: 45, 48–9). But it would be superficial to equate his route to all these things just with something he says again and again—that we learn, through dutifulness, to ‘control’ the crowd of our desires. This becomes shorthand for a long, complex discussion of dutifulness as a way of beginning to learn not only to control desires but to organize, evaluate and decide on concerns—through setting limits to these, and interrelating them in a search for some sort of balance or coherence (1925a:44– 53/t.1961a:39–46). So in bringing in the personal reflective will, it also involves what we might call a personal ‘moral economy’ of our horizons, energies and commitments. Piaget’s famous account of moral development centres on the development of judgment in the interpretation of the rules of social practices and institutions. Durkheim’s, in contrast, centres on the development of the reflective will in a government of our own lives. The two routes to morality are not, of course, exclusive. But perhaps the Durkheimian route is more fundamental. It is about a virtue which is as individual as it is social, and an essential basis of our personal lives as well as of collective life, and virtues, such as justice, bound up with this. Or consider self-discipline in the context of the modern universalizing ethic of the person. Its cultivation is a basic duty to oneself as a person. At the same time it involves working out a balance between concerns for oneself and concerns for others and for a society of persons. At the same

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time, too, it is necessary for acting on these concerns in an effective, real commitment to them. But this is to assume the ethic of the person is already in place. Exploring its development takes us to the set of virtues involved in attachment to groups. Durkheim refers interchangeably in his writings to ‘attachment’, ‘cohesion’ and ‘solidarity’, which he sees as ‘the very source of morality’ (1893b: 10/t.1933b:415). The discussion of attachment in Moral Education takes this more or less for granted. It is instead preoccupied with establishing the primacy of attachment to society, rather than to one another as individuals. The argument, at bottom, is that it is society that is the source of a transcendent authority and of ideals of the good. An argument, to get there, is that society is also primary as a moral end—morality is made ‘by society’, if it is made ‘for society’ (1925a:97/t.1961a:85–6). But the modern social ideal attaches us to ‘man’—as he himself has just remarked (1925a:94/t.1961a: 82)! His discussion obscures one of his own most important insights, that our society has placed the person at the sacred centre of things. It also overshadows the issue which is of interest here, the route from lesser to greater virtues. How might we reconstruct his line of thought on this? As with dutifulness, it is necessary to start from loyalty to particular, preexisting groups to develop the fellow-feeling at the source of moral life, the sociability important for membership of any group, and the moral emotions which reason cannot create by itself but can work on, to ‘clarify and guide’ (1925a:107/t.1961a:94). Indeed, the reflective will in part emerges through a need to sort out different, potentially conflicting attachments (1925a:83–4, 91/t.1961a:73–4, 80). Durkheim is especially worried by a tension built into the modern world between commitment to the nation and to humanity (1925a:85–90/t.1961a:75–9). But let us begin with the worry, in the second half of the course, over a ‘crisis’ in modern France (1925a:266/t.1961a:233). It lacks a network of intermediate groups that draw the individual into wider social and political life. It also lacks, in part as a consequence, the sociability of a readiness to form and participate in such groups in the first place. Durkheim then sees the school as a way of breaking out of the ‘circle’, by helping, as a type of intermediate group itself, to foster ‘the spirit of association’ (1925a: 269/t.1961a:235). This lays an essential basis for autonomy and the ethic of the person. As he argues in The Division of Labours new preface, a network of intermediate groups is a vital part of citizenship, and sees off the ‘sociological monstrosity’ of a mass of unorganized individuals under an authoritarian state (1893b/t.1933b:28). He envisages, in fact, a fusion of work with citizenship through a redevelopment of the guild. This again involves a moral economy of virtue. It is to tackle the problem, in the modern world, of a systematic anomie, and a moral diseconomy which scatters our energies across too many separate spheres and the demands of too many different causes and concerns. As he says in Moral Education, ‘individual energies must be grouped, concentrated, organized to produce any effect’ (1925a:95/t.1961a:84). Thus his worry over the nation versus humanity also generates a search for their fusion, in a moral economy concentrating our efforts and in a way limiting our horizons. Commitment to the human ideal should be to our own country’s realization of it and to the nation, in this sense, as a human patrie. An obvious criticism is that, in an increasingly global era, concerns with everyone’s status and rights as a person do not just stop at local boundaries. But it is then all the more important to recognize that the problem of moral diseconomy and exhaustion is a real one, and to look for alternative solutions. These cannot include the veritable

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sociological monstrosity, as Durkheim would see it, of a mass of individuals under a single monolithic global state. No doubt, as he accepts, particular national identities might and indeed must change (1925a:89/t.1961a:78). Yet even with some kind of global and, in this sense, human patrie, a need for ‘intermediate’ national identities remains. The hostility of some liberals to feelings of attachment to a nation in effect surrenders nationalism to its reactionary forms. This, as Durkheim understood, is a mistake. Loyalty to a nation is a necessary if risk-strewn route to societies of persons. Indeed the whole of his sociology is, in a way, a sociology of risk. Sometimes, as in Moral Education, his emphasis on how our society puts down deep, strong roots within us might obscure that these are the roots of our identity as individuals and persons. Or, again as in Moral Education, his emphasis on love of our country might obscure that it is about fostering the human ideal. Or, again, all his emphasis on fostering the ideal as a ‘cult’—with autonomy as its first ‘dogma’, freedom of thought and discussion as its first. ‘rite’ (1898c/t.1975a:67)—might obscure his commitment to rational ethics. So how, through the school, and as part and parcel of autonomy, might there develop an understanding rather than a dogmatic, ritual inculcation of the ethic of la personne humaine? Autonomy and the curriculum It is obvious that Durkheim works with virtue ethics, not just from the fundamental theory of the first half of his lecture-course, but from how, in the second half, he is so concerned with laying down qualities of character through experience, example and the milieu of the school as a social practice. He never suggests classes on ethics. His lectures on the curriculum are again about a more indirect moral education. He covers the natural sciences, the arts, then history. He excludes the social sciences from the curriculum (saying they are not established enough), and sees a suitable alternative in history. Its discussion is the obvious place to look for something on teaching an understanding of the modern ethic of the person. Its few pages eventually relate to this. He seems to urge that all that needs to be understood is our own nation’s way of contributing to ‘the common good of humanity’ (1925a:323/t.1961a:281). It is clearly not the line taken by the corresponding discussion of history in his lectures, of 1904–5, on secondary education. After stressing the modern world’s ‘cult of the human person’ (1938a, II:195/t.1977a:325), he insists on the pupil’s study of other ways of life, their underlying rationale and why they change, then sees this as providing, amongst other things, a necessary context for understanding our own society and its human ideal (1938a, II: 195–206/t.1977a:325–33). The difference between the two courses cannot just be because they are geared to different levels of school. One reason is that it is linked with a reevaluation of literature and the arts. The earlier lectures exclude art from the vie sérieuse, to assign it an inferior, incidental role in moral education (1925a: 314/t.1961a:274). The later lectures are more positive, emphasizing how literature helps us to understand other ways of life as well as our own, and ‘to arouse and exercise this sense of humanity’ (1938a, II:205/t.1977:332). There is also an evolution of Durkheim’s thought on education in general, and his inaugural lecture at the Sorbonne insists that only a ‘broad, human culture’ can give

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modern societies the citizens they need (1922a: 116/t.1956a:121). The later lectures develop this, in their campaign for a new humanism that fosters a transferable power of critical thought and enquiry, and spans the ‘three cultures’ of science, language and literature, and history (1938a, II:225–6/t.1977:348). The natural sciences have a central curricular place in both courses. But what is their contribution to a moral education, and is it as important as Durkheim thinks? Above all, what is their contribution to an education for autonomy? Science A fairytale about Durkheim is that in his picture of science he is dogmatic, naïve and a positivist, as awful, in his way, as Comte. A corollary of the fairytale is that his championship of a scientific education is of an authoritarian one. Let us consider what he in fact says about science in the school, especially in the primary school, the focus of the earlier lectures. He criticizes a ‘simpliste’ rationalism, mainly because it involves a view of the world that is thoroughly reductionist and sees a reality consisting only of basic elements or atoms (1925a:286, 289–91/t.1961a:250, 252–4). It encourages a similar view of society, as an affair only of individuals (1925a: 287, 294–8/t.1961a:251, 256–60). He defends approaches in the physical and biological sciences that recognize the reality of new emergent properties, as well as of interrelationships, systems and dynamic processes (1925a: 291–4, 302–3/t.1961a:254–6, 263–4). They are important, not least, for our view of the social world. They combat the influence of reductionism with other models and conceptions, that develop ‘a feeling for the complexity of things’ (1925a:299/t.1961a:261). So, we might add, they contribute to an education for autonomy as an ideal, not merely of the individual, but of the person in a society of persons. Durkheim also criticizes the attempt of an atomistic, analytical raison raisonnante to track a logic of the real via a logic of clear, simple, basic ideas. ‘The belief is that the mind can derive science from itself, once it has constructed the initial concepts which implicitly contain this. There is then no need for complex laborious methods to seize hold of the secrets of nature’ (1925a:300/t.1961a:263). He makes similar criticisms elsewhere, in his article on Taine (1897f/t.1997a:75–6, 78). Indeed, they help to confirm the date of the lectures as of the same period (Watts Miller 1997). The article conducts a campaign on two fronts, against an extreme rationalism and an extreme empiricism. The rationalists look for a logic of things, without undertaking the empirical detective-work needed to discover it. The empiricists collate facts, without looking for a logic which might make these intelligible. If their idea of science ‘extends to everything, it enlightens nothing’, and ‘under the guise of positivism, they spread mystery everywhere’ (1897f/t.1997a:78). Both the article and the lectures go on to defend an empirical-rationalist science, with a sense of the complexity and obscurity of things but with a faith in the power of the human mind to come to understand them. At the same time they criticize ‘neo-mystics’ who try to fix limits to this process, above all in the case of the moral world (1897f/t.1997a:79–81; 1925a: 303–5/t.1961a:264–6). It is in this context that we can now turn to a key passage in the lectures. It is directed, as part of the campaign against the influence of a simpliste rationalism, against the

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certainties of this way of thinking. But in effect it becomes a general emphasis on the need, in teaching science, to get away from dogmatism. It is essential to go beyond a mere ‘summary of results’, to get across an idea of the history of science and its claims to knowledge—their development through ‘experiments, gropings and failures of all sorts’, ‘the hypotheses that successively replaced one another’, and ‘the effort that each cost’. But this also involves getting across, in the case of present-day science, that its ‘findings are themselves only provisional’, and there might always be a new discovery which ‘calls them into question, or at least requires their partial modification’ (1925a:300–1/t.1961a:262). It is easy enough to add to these points an understanding of how the development of science, with all the effort etc. it entails, also depends on a division of labour. But this is not just a matter of specialization in the study of different subjects. It also involves adoption, across or within them, of conflicting views and perspectives. The importance of such disagreements in science is implicit in Durkheim’s emphasis on gropings, successive hypotheses and the obscurity of things, in his own engagé account and negotiation of different general approaches, and in his insistence, against a mere collation of facts, on a difficult, tortuous, empirical but also theory-driven search for an understanding of the world. It is quite explicit, for example, in the lectures on pragmatism. Reality is so complex that ‘for every object of knowledge there are differing but equally justified ways of examining it’, yet individual minds are so finite that ‘none can work from all points of view at once’, and each ‘must be able to admit that another has seen an aspect of reality they had let escape them, but which is as real and as true as those to which they had gone from preference’ (1955a:186–7/t.1983a:91–2). Durkheim’s sociology contrasts the ‘organic’ cohesion of individual inter-linking differences with the ‘mechanical’ cohesion in which our beliefs are the same. We might therefore call the development of science through a division of labour—dissidences and all—the development of an ‘organic enlightenment’. The idea, though never named, runs through and dominates his sociology of science. It is about a collective knowledge, to which each might contribute and on which each might draw, but beyond the grasp of everyone. A problem concerns the need, even so, for a general scientific education and background. Another problem concerns what we might call ‘mechanical enlightenment’—that is, an ideal of a knowledge which is certain, complete and possessed by all. For this is the ideal Durkheim holds up to us—even in stressing its unrealizability—in his lectures on autonomy. So, in wondering about his lost lectures on teaching autonomy, a way to conclude is with some thoughts on these two problems. The development of autonomy and a republic of persons generates difficulties which are built into its development along the only route that seems possible, the organic enlightenment of a division of labour. The difficulties turn on the relationship between lay citizens and experts, rather than just on the relationship between those with an expertise in particular bits of knowledge, which is the focus of the discussion of scientific anomie in The Division of Labour. Indeed, everyone is a lay citizen, even the expert, outside of his or her specialism. The situation is a source of two interconnected modern pathologies. One is the authoritarianism which, in demanding the lay citizen’s acceptance of this or that claim as if it is beyond question, exploits and abuses the authority of science. The other is a lumpen-relativism which, at least in part as a defence, throws out

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any claim to a ‘privileged’ knowledgeability. How might a general scientific education help a society of persons to contain these pathologies? Such an education can be a basis of informed, critical debate. Yet this, in itself, cannot be the key. For again, even if, in a division of labour, we all become active, relatively expert citizens in a particular area, we remain relatively inexpert, lay citizens outside it. But we can return to the importance of a general understanding of science’s development, its failures, disputes, successive hypotheses and more-or-less well-attested yet always open and provisional claims to knowledge. The point is not that such an understanding resolves what view to take on an issue. It instead constitutes the general epistemological culture of a society of persons, in which it is hard for either authoritarianism or lumpenrelativism to take hold. What is the role, however, of mechanical enlightenment? In invoking this to explain autonomy, Durkheim does not treat it as a mere heuristic device. It is an ideal of truth. It is unrealizable, but guides and makes sense of our effort to understand the world. Perhaps science needs some such ideal, in the sense of a knowledge which is certain and complete. Yet this seems only to reinforce the picture of a knowledge, as in organic enlightenment, possessed by no one, rather than, as in mechanical enlightenment, possessed by all. There is a way, even so, of bringing mechanical enlightenment back in. It again concerns the epistemological culture of science and a society of persons. The process of questioning, argument and debate which is integral to science, as well as to a. society of persons, involves views which are not just so many different individual opinions. They go beyond these to claim an objective status, although unable to claim an adamantine certitude. There are then all the problems of trying to judge, according to various perhaps incommensurable scales of acceptability, how far a particular view registers on these. But there is a general, underlying problem. To argue, having taken on board criticism, for a view which goes beyond the opinion of an individual to claim a degree of objective acceptability is to argue as if it should be accepted as such by all informed reasonable persons, even in allowing that it need not be. This is a situation which calls for delicacy, rather than just for norms of tolerance. It involves a practical understanding acquired in learning to do science, and which can be difficult, as with instructions on how to wire a plug, to grasp through formulae or, indeed, to formulate in the first place. But the basic logic of the situation might be put in terms of organic and mechanical enlightenment. A particular view requires allowance for others, since all are limited by their individuality in relation to a collectively developed knowledge. Yet, as claims that do go beyond the opinion of an individual, they require advocacy in the court of persons—or, rather, the individual trying to judge as a person—to argue for everyone’s acceptance. If failing, perhaps, to grasp the organic side of enlightenment, the consensus of a Habermasian ideal speech situation expresses a need to recognize the mechanical side. Durkheim himself seems to touch on the issue of learning to combine both aspects, in a passage which leads up to his discussion of science. The milieu of the class lays a basis for learning to say ‘we’ and to get away from too much talk of ‘I’. ‘At least,’ he continues, ‘to the extent that the individuality of particular minds is emphasized, only a very complex solidarity is possible, which implies an organization skilled enough to connect the different parts of the whole with one another while leaving each of them with their autonomy’ (1925a:275/t.1925a:240).

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But however the situation is theorized, its practical understanding is another key part of a liberal epistemological culture. The natural sciences form a core case of the conduct of objective discourse, and yet there is still an important place in it for personal difference. Experience of this through an education in science helps to break free from the lumpen-relativist dogma that disagreement necessarily scuppers objectivity and from its authoritarian twin, that objectivity necessarily rules out disagreement. It therefore helps to break free from assumptions which work against a liberal epistemological culture to undermine the liberal republic itself. An education for autonomy involves recognition of a ‘multitude’ of social and moral disagreements in terms of a discourse which is objective, locating the person in a society of persons at the centre of any acceptable conception of the good. Note 1 References to published English translations of Durkheim are given for convenience. Quotations depart from these when they are inadequate, as is often the case with Moral Education.

References Besnard, P. (1993) ‘De la datation des cours pédagogiques de Durkheim à la recherche du theme dominant de son œuvre.’ In F.Cardi and J.Plantier (eds), Durkheim, sociologue de l’éducation, Paris: L’Harmattan. Boutroux, E. (1926) La philosophic de Kant: cours professé à la Sorbonne en 1896– 1897, Paris: Vrin.

Durkheim, E. (1892a) Quid Secundatus Politicae Scientiae Instituendae Contulerit. ——(t.1997a) Critical edition, with translation, in Montesquieu/Quid Secundatus Politicae Scientiae Instituendae Contulerit, Oxford: Durkheim Press. ——(1893b) De la division du travail social, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1933b) by G.Simpson, The Division of Labor in Society, New York: Macmillan. ——(1897a) Le suicide: étude de sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1951a) by J.A.Spaulding and G.Simpson, Suicide, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. ——(1897f) Contribution to ‘Quelques opinions sur l’œuvre de H.Taine.’ ——(t.1997a) Reprinted, with translation, in Montesquieu/Quid Secundatus Politicae Scientiae Instituendae Contulerit, Oxford: Durkheim Press. ——(1898c) ‘L’individualisme et les intellectuels.’ Reprinted in La science sociale et l’action, (1970a) Paris: PUF. ——(t.1975a) ‘Individualism and the intellectuals.’ In W.S.F.Pickering (ed.) Durkheim on Religion, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1912a) Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1995a) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: Free Press. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. ——(1924a) Sociologie et philosophie, Paris: Alcan.

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——(t.1953b) by J.A.Spaulding and G.Simpson, Sociology and Philosophy, Glencoe, Ill., Free Press. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education, New York: Free Press. ——(1938a) L’Evolution pédagogique en France [2 volumes], Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1977a) by Peter Collins, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1950a) Leçons de sociologie: physique des mœurs et du droit, Paris: PUF. ——(t.1957a) by Cornelia Brookfield, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1955a) Pragmatisme et sociologie, Paris: Vrin. ——(t.1983a) by J.C.Whitehouse, Pragmatism and Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, I. (1784a)(t.1983) ‘Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent.’ In Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Indianapolis: Hackett. ——(1784b)(t.1983) ‘What is enlightenment?’ In Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Indianapolis: Hackett. ——(1785)(t.1948) The Moral Law, London: Hutchinson (known as The Groundwork). ——(1788)(t.1993) Critique of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan. ——(1790)(t.1987) Critique of Judgment, Indianapolis: Hackett. ——(1797)(t.1991) The Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Larmore, C. (1996) The Morals of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Piaget, J. (1977) The Moral Judgement of the Child, London: Penguin. (Original published 1932.)

Stedman-Jones, S. (1996) Review. ‘W.Watts Miller, Durkheim, Morals and Modernity.’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 32, 4:484–90.

Watts Miller, W. (1996) Durkheim, Morals and Modernity, London: UCL Press. ——(1997) ‘Durkheim’s course on moral education: the issue of its date, and the lost lectures on autonomy.’ Durkheimian Studies/Etudes Durkheimiennes, ns.3: 21–4.

Part Two

7 JAPANESE EDUCATION A Durkheimian ideal type? Roger Goodman Introduction As has often been pointed out (see Karabel and Halsey 1977:87), Emile Durkheim was the only one of the great thinkers of classical sociology who offered an analysis of education—both in its formal and informal sense—as an integral part of his general theory of society. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that such little use has been made of Durkheim’s work in the sociology of education, since so much of what he described a century ago would appear to be clearly pertinent to our understanding and analysis of contemporary systems. Durkheim’s writing on education is as much a blue-print for how educational systems should develop as an analysis of how historically they have developed. On a first reading, few contemporary systems would appear to fit his ideal model as well as the Japanese system which is the focus for this particular discussion. If, for example, we extract from Durkheim’s work ten pre-requisites for a modern educational system, then it is interesting to see how Japan’s model appears to measure up to them. The ten that follow are offered in no particular order. 1 FORMAL EDUCATION SHOULD NOT BE SEPARATED FROM GENERAL SOCIALIZATION (SEE DURKHEIM 1922a/t.1956a:71) In Japan formal educational institutions such as schools are seen as the prime locus for the socialization of the whole child. Few in Japan would argue other than that this has been achieved very effectively and many would assert that it is the formal educational system that has allowed Japan to develop its enviable combination of social cohesion and economic competitiveness. Even Japan’s most ardent critics no longer subscribe to the view that its so-called economic miracle was built solely on unfair trade practices, and few still maintain that it can be found mainly in its management and labour practices. Instead, since the early 1980s, there has been a constant stream of visitors examining the Japanese educational system which has been held up as the key to its social and economic success, at least until very recently (for an overview of this debate see Goodman 1997). 2 THE SCHOOL IS THE CORRECT PLACE FOR SUCH SOCIALIZATION (SEE DURKHEIM 1925a/t.1961a:230–1) Durkheim’s view here is well known: the church relies too heavily on revelation, and the family is too self-indulgent to be allowed to play the major role in the socialization of

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children. Instead, the school must perform this task. Such certainly is the case in Japan. Since the American occupation following the Second World War, there has been strict separation of church and state in Japan, nowhere more so than in the classroom. Schoolchildren receive no religious education at all, and only an hour or so of so-called ‘moral education’ (dōtoku kyōiku) which, being outside the normally tightly prescribed curriculum and usually in the hands of left-wing teachers, tends towards general discussions about ‘good’ behaviour. Often it is used as time to catch up with other classes. Children in the school system, therefore, learn very little about Buddhism, Shintoism or Confucianism, except possibly for a few dates during history classes. Even in schools set up as private Christian foundations, Christian education is minimal, in part because the national curriculum leaves very little room for such extra subjects (Holmes 1989:212). The role of the family in the socialization of children is clearly secondary, even if complementary, to that of the schools. An interesting example of how out of line Japan now is with other OECD countries can be seen in a recent OECD project that was based on the assumption that parents influence practices in schools and not the other way around as in Japan.1 In Japan, the ‘authority’ of the teacher extends to the child’s home. All parents of children at state elementary and junior high schools (97 per cent of the total cohort) receive home visits from their teachers who also advise parents via notes on how they should look after their children at home. When children are in trouble with, say, the police, it is likely that their form teachers as well as their parents will be requested to visit the police station to discuss any issues that arise from the bad behaviour. Teachers are treated with enormous respect by parents and there is little culture of parental influence within the school environment. 3 IF NEITHER THE CHURCH NOR THE STATE SHOULD BE THE ARCHITECTS OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM, THEN RESPONSIBILITY MUST LIE WITH THE STATE (SEE GIDDENS 1986:73) Ever since the start of the Meiji period (1868); the architects of the Japanese educational system have been industry and the state. The modernization of the educational system was seen as the key to preventing colonization though rapid modernization by earning the respect of prospective Western colonizers. The state and business have remained the architects of the educational system until today. When a blue-ribbon committee on educational reform was convened in the 1980s its main representatives were bureaucrats, educationalists and industrial leaders (see Schoppa 1991). Teachers and parents, at least qua teachers and parents, were given only token representation. The state’s goals, however, have always been broad public goals and not those serving only narrow interests which is something else on which Durkheim would have insisted. 4 EDUCATION SHOULD BE BASED ON A MERITOCRATIC IDEAL (SEE DURKHEIM 1893b/t.1984a:313) Durkheim believed passionately in a meritocratic, though not necessarily an egalitarian, educational system. He was not a socialist who believed that rewards should be shared

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out equally, but a meritocrat who believed that they should go to those who deserved them. Like any meritocrat, Durkheim believed in the power of nurture over nature and held a tabula rasa view of the human mind. As Ronald Dore (1976) pointed out over twenty years ago in The Diploma Disease, few countries have as strong a meritocratic educational ideology as Japan. Great efforts are expended to ensure the maintenance of the belief in equal opportunities in the system. Efforts at making the Japanese educational system seem egalitarian can be seen in a wide variety of contexts. All examinations, right up and including university, are reduced to a multiple-choice formula which reduces subjectivity in marking. School buildings are built on a uniform design to prevent those who go to new institutions having an advantage over those in older ones. Children are taught as a class as opposed to as individuals; indeed individual education is minimized to reduce charges of favouritism. Even such minor detail as what children are given to eat is uniformly dictated: two noodle-based, two rice-based and two bread-based school lunches a week, and no individual choice. The ideology of egalitarianism is underpinned by a strong social ideology of classlessness and ethnic homogeneity that is reinforced by the state both via the annual publication of a national survey suggesting that over 90 per cent of Japanese see themselves as members of some amorphous middle class (see Ishida 1993) and the denial of the existence of any minority groups (Weiner 1997). As a result, the state can maintain the ideology that everyone has an equal chance in the educational system—if they are prepared to put in the effort. The underlying pedagogical ideology is that hard work rather than ability leads to educational success. School reports draw on a vocabulary of spirit (seishin), effort (dōryoku) and perseverance (gaman) rather than on one of ability and potential (for more detail on this, see Goodman 1989). The apparent social rewards for effort are very clear in the Japanese system. Educational success is measured by both how far one can go in the educational system and which particular university one can enter. The further one goes and the better the institution one enters, then the larger the company in which one will be able to find employment, with greater job security, a better income package and higher social status. 5 KNOWLEDGE SHOULD BE TRANSMITTED UNIFORMLY TO ALL CHILDREN As we have seen above, the Japanese educational system since the Meiji period has been highly centralized. This is not only something of which Durkheim would have approved, but indeed a model he would have recognized since it was largely copied from the French system of the 1870s. Between 1871 and 1873 in one of the most amazing stories in recent modern history, virtually the entire Japanese government under the leadership of Prince Iwakura Tomomi travelled throughout North America and Western Europe picking up blueprints for the modernization of the country (see, Jansen 1965, 1980; Soviak 1971). For its educational system, it picked up from North America concepts of vocational training, from Germany a system of higher education built around a few elite public universities, and from France the idea of a centralized authority and a strong emphasis on state-run normal schools (Hurst 1984:3). Today, the uniformity of the educational system is not, however, uncontroversial. The ministry of education sets a core curriculum and

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screens textbooks for use in school. While in theory schools have some latitude for choosing between different books, in reality choice is very limited. The screening of history textbooks and their account of the Japanese involvement in the Second World War has been particularly controversial; the Japanese government has always defended its position, however, with the argument for the need to teach only verifiable facts that can be uniformly taught and uniformly tested (see Ienaga 1970; Pyle 1983). In short, all students learn the same facts at virtually the same time and at the same pace in practically the same fashion in identical buildings with identical timetables. 6 KNOWLEDGE MUST BE SCIENTIFICALLY PASSED ON (SEE LUKES 1973:390) Durkheim believed strongly that collective ideas needed to be passed on to the child in a scientific manner; the mind was to be trained in a scientific manner through the acquisition of knowledge. This again accords with the model of teaching that is dominant in Japan: all subjects have been reduced to a form which can be learnt as facts that must be taught in the correct sequence and which can be tested by multiple-choice questions (for more on the philosophy behind this, see Cummings 1980). While it is easy to see why North American and Western European educationalists might understand this approach in the case of the hard sciences, they are less likely to perceive its significance in the arts and humanities. But the same principles apply here. Indeed, in Japan one can find multiple-choice art examinations. The principles here are important: there is no such thing in Japan as an inartistic individual, only someone who has not learnt how to draw. Art has been reduced to basic principles of shape, perspective and form which, if taught properly and in the right sequence, can be learnt by anyone prepared to put in the effort. The results, as with music where similarly there is no concept of the unmusical individual, can by Western standards be staggering.2 7 SCHOOLS MUST TEACH CHILDREN BOUNDARIES (SEE DURKHEIM 1923a/t.1961a) Durkheim was much concerned to see educational institutions develop moral values, which are the foundation of social order. In particular, he asked what function the classroom should play in the process of developing social order and social cohesion. As is well known, he responded to these questions by observing that the role of the classroom is to construct boundaries for children and to teach them what would happen if they transgressed those boundaries. For children who can understand what constitutes good and bad behaviour knowledge of these boundaries is essentially a liberation (Wilson 1973:xv). In Japan, as many ethnographers have described, early socialization in the formal educational sphere is very largely learning symbolic and ritual boundaries and correct forms of behaviour which depend on context (see Hendry 1986; Lewis 1995; Peak 1992; Tobin 1992). In Japan, behavioural codes are very explicit, rules are precise, life courses are clearly laid out and much of the socialization process, up to and including socialization in the work place, is about mastering the correct ritual codes.

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8 THE INDIVIDUAL MUST LEARN TO SUBSUME THEIR IDENTITY WITHIN THAT OF THE COLLECTIVE Durkheim believed strongly that excessive individualism in the educational sphere could lead to what he termed ‘personal defeat’ and ‘social chaos’. Moral education was the means of preventing this. As is well known, the idea that Japan is a group society, where individual identity is expressed through and emanates from the collective, is widely expressed in a large number of ways. Linguistically, the word for Western-style individualism (kojinshugi) is the same as the word for selfishness (Moeran 1984); the word for different (chigau) is the same as the word for wrong. Group education in Japan is practised implicitly in all schools and explicitly in many. Individuals are taught to think of themselves not as individuals but in the group context (see Peak 1992). The best-known version of this style of teaching is the han seido, where a class of, say, forty-eight is divided into six groups of eight, with a boy and girl leader of each (co-education is the norm in Japan) who liaise on behalf of the team leader with the teacher. Leaders are rotated, which means that individuals follow requests of the leaders knowing that they will require similar support when they become leaders themselves. If a member of the group does well, then it is the whole group which receives praise; if a member does something bad, then it is also the whole group which is brought together to discuss how the individual can be helped to be better in future. Groups in the classroom are encouraged to be competitive with one another, so that the stronger members of the group are supposed (and indeed often do) help the weaker members with their work so as to bring the average level of the group up. Even in what might appear to be such inherently individualistic competitive activities, such as school sports days, elementary schools in Japan reduce the competition to between two groups (marked by which side of their reversible caps—red or white—are on display) with just one prize. As a result, even the slowest boy in the school has his part to play, since his one point for completing his event may make the crucial difference between the two teams (Hendry 1986:142–3). The use of groups is clearly more complicated than the simple picture outlined above. Children are simultaneously members of many groups—the han, the class, the grade, the school as a whole—and the group context that it invoked, say in disciplining children, depends on the individuals involved. Should members of different classes in one grade be involved in bad behaviour, then it will be all the members of all those classes in that grade who will be called together to discuss the behaviour of the miscreants. Moreover, group membership is flexible. At the beginning of each school year, children are purposefully moved around within and between classes (there is no streaming in Japanese classes) so that, as they themselves remark, they need to say ‘good-bye’ to their friends of the previous year at the end of the school year in March since, when the next school year starts in April, they will have new ‘friends’. Thus groups provide more than just a working context but also a social one; children are expected to socialize with members of their groups, though they will probably be able to distinguish these relations (known as tsukiai) from those of friendship and kinship (though the categories of course may well overlap) (see Atsumi 1982).3

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9 PUNISHMENT IS TO REINFORCE THE MORAL CODE RATHER THAN TO UPHOLD AUTHORITY (SEE GIDDENS 1986:74–6) The ideologies of groupism as described above fit neatly with Durkheim’s idea that to act morally is to act in the interests of the group. This implies, of course, a certain degree of what sociologists have sometimes called particularistic or contextual ethics. It is an ethos which contrasts with Judaeo-Christian ideologies of universalistic ethics where internalized ideas of right and wrong must always be placed before contingent concerns. Both sets of values are of course ideologies—it is as nonsensical to suggest that guilt does not exist in Japan as it is to suggest that shame does not exist in Judaeo-Christian societies. But Durkheim’s views on this subject are interesting to the extent to which they overlap with Japanese ideas of punishment. The severest form of punishment in Japan is often maintained to be that of ostracism (murahachibu) since an individual outside a group finds it very hard to function in Japanese society. In theory physical punishment is prohibited in Japanese schools and the threat of ostracism and shaming are meant to be the main forms of obtaining compliance. For bad behaviour there should be an apology, and if this is done correctly the individual can quickly be rehabilitated into the group since there is a strong belief in the essential goodness (seizensetsu) of the individual. This is in contrast to ideologies of original sin that exist in Judaeo-Christian traditions.4 10 TEACHERS SHOULD BE MORAL EXEMPLARS WHO EDUCATE THROUGH THEIR DEMEANOUR AS WELL AS THROUGH THEIR INSTRUCTION (GIDDENS 1986:74) The Japanese verb manabu (to learn) has its roots in the word maneru (to imitate) and it has been suggested that this summarizes the major difference in Japanese pedagogy from Western traditions where the verb ‘to educate’ comes from the Latin educare, ‘to draw out’ (Seward 1983:30). Similarly the Japanese noun, sensei (teacher), literally means ‘one who comes before’ with connotations that the teacher provides a model for behaviour rather than being simply an ‘educator’ of it. Teaching in Japan has always been a high status profession, and the word sensei, though perhaps overused, still carries much of the connotation of ‘doctor’ in Western societies. As we have already seen, teaching is a 24hour job, and teachers are expected and indeed required by the local community to demonstrate the same standards of behaviour outside the school environment as inside it. Japanese education: the ideal and the real It would appear from the above account that the Japanese educational system fits closely Durkheim’s general prescription. Unfortunately, however, the account we have given above is far from problematic. It is, however, widespread and to a certain extent such an account of the system, as with Durkheim’s views of society, tell us as much about the ideological beliefs and concerns of those who support such a view, as they do about the educational system itself. Interestingly, for our discussion of Durkheim’s influence on the sociology of education, the weaknesses of the above account are also, in many ways, the weaknesses in Durkheim’s analysis not only of education but of other social systems as well.

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The problem with the account offered above of the Japanese education is that it ignores the fact that individuals in Japan live in a democracy and, as in all democracies, class interests emerge which can, and frequently are, defended via the educational system. As Bourdieu among many others has demonstrated, education is a very effective means for the construction and the dissemination of class capital. In many societies, such as the UK, this defence of class cultural capital is substantiated most clearly by sending children to private institutions which are financially out of the reach of poorer families. In Japan, however, since the state has been so instrumental in designing the modern educational system and in utilizing it to create an effective work force, it has generally been the case that state education has had higher status than private education, though there have always been exceptions, especially at the tertiary level (such as Keio and Waseda Universities) which have mirrored the British experience. In Japan (and also indeed South Korea and Taiwan) family investment in education has been not so much through private mainstream education as through payment for supplementary education. In Japan this comes in a variety of forms. Perhaps best known are the juku (commonly known as cram schools) which are attended by virtually all boys living in urban environments for two or three times a week from the age of 12 onwards. As they get older, attendance rates (and costs) go up. This supplementary education may itself be supplemented by home tutors (katei kyōshi). These are normally university students who are tutoring in order to pay their way through university. The most expensive form of supplementary education, however, is also the most intensive, and that is the system of full-time cram schools, known as yobikō. These are attended by those who either failed to get into any university at the first attempt or the university of their first choice, and who wish to spend another year, after the end of senior high school, in full-time education preparing to retake their exams. Students who go to yobikō are known as rōnin which refers to the masterless samurai of the feudal period who, like the rōnin students of today, have no master institution which is responsible for them and to which they need to show undivided loyalty. Since the ministry of education officially refuses to recognize the existence of supplementary education in Japan, it is difficult to get accurate figures on the background of students who attend these institutions. It is clear however, with the often large sums of money involved in attendance, that there must be disparities of access and certainly one survey of those attending high-quality yobikō suggests that over four times the national average of fathers had both managerial jobs and university education (30 per cent and 35 per cent against national averages of 7 per cent and 8 per cent respectively). The same survey showed that 85 per cent of those attending were male, reinforcing earlier surveys that parents invest considerably more in their sons than their daughters when it comes to educational costs (Tsukada 1988). The results of this expenditure on supplementary education are largely responsible for the disparities of wealth of those entering university. Already by the early 1970s, the average family income of those who won places at Tokyo University (the country’s most elite institution) was almost double that of the national average. Those from the top 20 per cent in terms of family income were three times as likely to go to university than those from the bottom 20 per cent (James and Benjamin 1988: chapter 7). There is, of course, nothing startling in these figures when compared to Western European and North American statistics.5 The problem is that the ideology of the Japanese system is rooted in

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its egalitarian ideals and yet inequalities have been growing at a very fast rate since the 1960s (Rohlen 1977). One of the major ironies of the supplementary educational system and the fact that state education generally has higher status than private education is that the higher the family income generally the lower the expenditure on formal education (Takeuchi 1991). The result, of course, is that in examining education in contemporary Japan, one has to think of it in terms essentially of two parallel systems: a formal system based on ideologies of harmony, equality and homogeneity (in essence a Durkheimian ideal type of education) and an informal one based on realities of self-investment, conflict and the maintenance of class interests (in essence a Weberian or even a Marxist perception of education). The decision to emphasize one model over the other is, as we go on to explore, more a political one than an academic one. Critical perspectives on Japanese education The vast majority of commentaries on the Japanese educational system coming from inside, but particularly outside, Japan concentrate on the first picture of the system that has been outlined above. They portray a system built on social values of homogeneity, classlessness, harmony, meritocracy, transparency and rewards for effort. In this sense, such accounts can be best described as functionalist, static and Durkheimian. As we have seen, we need to question the empirical validity of such accounts. We also need, however, to examine the political implications of taking such a position in describing any educational system, since there is a sense in which those who have written about Japanese education in such terms may have been helping to construct and legitimate such a system, as much as actually describing and analyzing it. Durkheimian accounts, as much as Marxist ones, are not constructed in a vacuum but express important (generally conservative) interests. In order to understand the implications of the work-place on Japanese education, we need to situate them in a broader sociology of work in Japanese society. At the time when the modern Japanese educational system was being developed in the Meiji period, great efforts were being expended on the construction of a Japanese national identity. Indeed, a centralized and government-controlled educational system was seen as perhaps the most effective means of constructing and disseminating such an identity. It was at this stage that many of the features of what came to be seen as Japanese identity began to be constructed, notably the emphasis on homogeneity and harmony. Further it was often in historical and environmentally deterministic terms (see Gluck 1985: chapter 5). Such ideologies of national identity continue to retain a powerful presence in contemporary Japan and can be seen most clearly in the genre of literature widely known as Nihonjinron (literally Theories of Japaneseness). These accounts, as critics in the 1980s began to make clear, were essentially ahistorical, static, functionalist and, one could say Durkheimian, and contained assumptions about the nature of the relationship between society and the individual. Such models are presaged on a view of society as essentially based on consensus and where conflict is seen as the abnormal (see Mouer and Sugimoto 1986; Dale 1986). Some have suggested that they thereby reflected ideologies that served the interests of elites whose main desire was to deflect attention away from apparent lines

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of conflict within societies—in terms of gender, class, regionalism, ethnicity etc. Here was the guise of the Japanese having always been a ‘naturally’ harmonious, consensusseeking, homogeneous, unitary race. Accounts of the educational system that also ignore the realities of class interests further serve to bolster those who want to hide such interests from public scrutiny. All accounts of the Japanese educational system, therefore, as with those of any other system, need to be placed in a political as well as a sociological context. Similarly, as Parkin (1992:71–2) notes, one must lay similar charges against Durkheim’s approach to education in his work. As Steven Lukes (1973:132) has pointed out, Durkheim never questioned exactly how it was that the states which needed to be socialized into the child by the political society as a whole were in fact determined by and serve the interests of particular groups within society. It may be that Durkheim’s lack of discussion of class in education reflected the fact that class was virtually irrelevant in the context in which he was writing, where almost all children simply attended the local school. It was Durkheim’s intellectual successors, however, most notably Bourdieu with his ideas of habitus and cultural capital and Basil Bernstein with his work on language codes who most effectively introduced concepts of class into a Durkheimian framework. So far, however, such approaches have had little effect in Japan, where the dominant paradigm of the educational system as essentially egalitarian and consensual remains very much in place. Notes 1 Interestingly, the OECD researchers were unable to take on board the Japanese assumptions because of fears voiced by US and New Zealand representatives that examine the extent to which schools should inform practices in homes might be seen as patronizing to minority communities within those societies. No such debate exists in Japan, mainly because of the denial that there actually exist any minority groups. 2 I once looked over 120 still-life pictures done by a grade of 12-year-olds and was able to recognize, without difficulty, the picture each was trying to draw since every child had followed the basic principles of outline, shape, perspective etc. Of course, similar ideas are becoming increasingly popular in the West where art, music and singing classes for adults who were told at school that they had no natural talent in these areas are becoming increasingly popular. 3 It is worth pointing out in passing that exactly the same concepts of different categories of friendship and the need to transfer personal loyalties on being moved between groups also pertain in the Japanese workplace. 4 In Japan, very few (around 2 per cent) of those found guilty of crimes are sent to prison, as opposed to over 40 per cent in the US. 5 A recent, large-scale comparative project of class mobility in eleven capitalist and former communist countries, including the US and the UK, suggests that the odds ratio in Japan of moving from the working to the middle class is actually one of the lowest (Marshall, Swift and Roberts 1997:52–3).

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References Atsumi, R. (1982) ‘Patterns of personal relationships: a key to understanding Japanese thought and behaviour’, in Sugimoto, Yoshio and Mouer, Ross (eds.), Japanese Society: Reappraisals and New Directions, Social Analysis (Special Edition), Nos. 5/6, 63–78.

Cummings, W. (1980) Education and Equality in Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dale, P. (1986) The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, London: Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series. Dore, R.P. (1976) The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification and Development, London: George Allen and Unwin. Durkheim, E. (1893b) De la division du travail social: étude sur l’organisation des societés supérieures, Paris: Alcan. ——(1984a) by W.D.Halls, The Division of Labour in Society, with an introduction by L.Coser, London: Macmillan. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology, Chicago: Free Press. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education, New York: Free Press.

Giddens, A. (1986) Durkheim, London: Fontana Press. Gluck, C. (1985) Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goodman, R. (1989) ‘Japanese education: a model to emulate?’, in The Pacific Review, 2/1, 24–37. ——(1997) ‘A model for all seasons? East Asian education and the problem of drawing lessons from other societies’, in Yishay Yafeh et al. (eds), Japan and East Asia: Lessons for the Development of the Middle East in the Era of Peace, The Truman Institute, Jerusalem.

Hendry, J. (1986) Becoming Japanese: The World of the Pre-School Child, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holmes, B. (1989) ‘Japan: private education’ in Walford, Geoffrey (ed.), Private Schools in Ten Countries: Policy and Practice , London and New York: Routledge. Hurst, G.C. (1984) Japanese Education: Trouble in Paradise? Asia, University Field Staff International Reports, No. 40.

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Ienaga, S. (1970) ‘The historical significance of the Japanese textbook lawsuit’, The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 2:2–12. Ishida, H. (1993) Social Mobility in Contemporary Japan: Educational Credentials, Class and the Labour Market in a Cross-National Perspective, Basingstoke: St Antony’s/Macmillan.

James, E. and Benjamin, G. (1988) Public Policy and Private Education, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jansen, M.B. (ed.) (1965) Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernisation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——(ed.) (1980) Japan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Karabel, J. and Halsey, A.H. (1977) ‘Educational research: a review and an interpretation’ in Karabel, Jerome and Halsey, A.H. (eds), Power and Ideology in Education, New York: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, C.C. (1995) Educating Hearts and Minds: Reflections on Japanese Preschool and Elementary Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marshall, G., Swift, A. and Roberts, S. (1997) Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Moeran, B. (1984) ‘Individual, group and Seishin: Japan’s internal cultural debate’, Man, 19/2:252–66. Mouer, R. and Sugimoto, Y. (1986) Images of Japanese Society: A Study in the Structure of Social Reality, London: KPI.

Parkin, F. (1992) Durkheim, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peak, L. (1992) Learning to go to School in Japan: The Transition from Home to Preschool Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Pyle, K. (1983) ‘Japan besieged: the textbooks controversy’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 9:297–300.

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Rohlen, T.P. (1977) ‘Is Japanese education becoming less egalitarian? Notes on high school stratification and reform’, Journal of Japanese Studies 3:37–70.

Schoppa, L. (1991) Education Reform in Japan: A Case of Immobilist Politics, London: Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series. Seward, J. (1983) Japanese in Action (rev. edn), New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill. Soviak, E. (1971) ‘On the nature of Western progress: The Journal of the Iwakura Embassy’, in David H.Shiveley (ed.), Tradition and Modernisation in Japanese Culture, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Takeuchi, Y. (1991) ‘Myth and reality in the Japanese selection system’, Comparative Education, 21/1:101–12. Tobin, J. (1992) ‘Japanese preschools and the pedagogy of selfhood’ in Rosenberger, N.R. (ed.) Japanese Sense of Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsukada, M. (1988) ‘Institutionalised supplementary education in Japan: the Yobiko and Ronin student adaptations’, Comparative Education, 24/3:285–303.

Weiner, M.A. (1997) Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, London: Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge. Wilson, E.K. (1973) ‘Editor’s introduction’ to Durkheim, Emile, Moral Education: A Study of the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education , translated by Everett K.Wilson and Herman Schnurer, New York: The Free Press.

8 EDUCATING FOR SOCIAL COHESION IN A PLURALIST SOCIETY Mart-Jan de Jong and Jacques F.A.Braster Introduction: cultural pluralism in The Netherlands Pillarization, depillarization and repillarization? Indeed, I regard as the prime postulate of all pedagogical speculation that education is an eminently social thing in its origins as in its functions. (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:114) This quotation from Durkheim seems a logical point to start an article about education in The Netherlands, coupled with a description of some important aspects of that society. Most social scientists are familiar with the idea that The Netherlands is a pillarized society, in which the main ideological pillars form separate segments of society. Not so long ago Protestants, Roman Catholics, and the non-religious people all had their own organizations. There were Protestant, Roman Catholic, and non-religious hospitals, sports clubs, voluntary associations, political parties, labour unions, and, not least, newspapers and broadcasting corporations. There were, and still are, Roman Catholic, Protestant and state educational institutions at every level of the system, from primary schools to universities. Also there were, and still are, a few Jewish schools. In the nineties Islamic and Hindu schools have emerged. This was possible because of the outcome of the ‘school battle’ between the Protestant and Roman Catholic pillars against the nonreligious or ‘neutral’ pillars. From 1917 onwards there has been constitutional freedom of education. Every religious group can establish its own schools and still receive state subsidies on an equal par with neutral state schools, provided that there are enough pupils and professional staff. All denominational schools are fully financed by the state in the same manner as ‘neutral’ state schools. Until the sixties it was possible for people to live largely segregated lives. Those of different dominations and ideologies would meet each other only in the work-place. The metaphor of a pillarized society was very apt, because the pillars were standing apart, but the tops of the pillars were connected, like an ancient Greek building. The elites of the separate pillars, the party leaders, church leaders, leaders of labour unions or unions of employers, met each other in parliament, in government, in several national advisory boards and so on. There, they discussed politics and made decisions. In this way Dutch society worked politically: separated in pillars, but united at the top. In the religious pillars all social classes were united (Lijphart 1975). This was not the case for the non-

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religious pillars. Most members of the socialist pillar belonged to the lower class. Nonreligious employers and businessmen did not mix with socialist workers. In the seventies the political landscape changed drastically. It started in 1966 with the emergence of the progressive liberal democrats (known as D’66), and was followed by the fusion of three major Christian parties (one Catholic, and two Protestant) into one Christian Democratic Union. This was an attempt to halt the drop in the vote for Christian parties. Another manifestation was the fusion of the Catholic labour union with the federation of social-democratic labour unions. The sharp decline in church attendance was a clear manifestation of a growing secularization. Indisputably, central parts of the pillarized system were crumbling, but some important parts still led a vital life. This is especially true for the educational system. Moreover, we can observe a kind of repillarization outside the broadening, secularized mainstream of society. The orthodox mini-pillar of the Protestants now have their own TV channel. They still have their own newspapers, whereas other Protestant and Catholic newspapers have disappeared. And they still have a handful of members of parliament distributed over three very small orthodox Christian parties. Moreover, Zijderveld sees manifestations of an emerging Islamic pillar (Zijderveld 1995). The rise of this new mini-pillar has everything to do with immigration in the second half of the twentieth century. Immigration, integration, segregation and marginalization A new impulse for the revitalization of cultural diversity came from the influx of different groups of immigrants. In the beginning of the fifties, about 200,000 people arrived from the former Dutch Indies, now Indonesia. In the sixties, the Dutch economy recovered from the damage inflicted during the Second World War. Industrialists started to recruit unskilled migrant workers in Southern Europe, Turkey and Morocco. Many migrant workers were eager to come to The Netherlands. After a few years, they decided to bring their families. A new influx of post-colonial immigrants arrived when Surinam became independent in 1975. Many people from Surinam migrated to The Netherlands, and within a couple of years, almost half the population of Surinam had left the country. In the eighties unemployment soared to a high rate, not only in The Netherlands, but in most Western-European countries. In the framework of a European Community policy, immigration of non-EC members was severely restricted in an effort to scare off new economic immigrants. From then on, a large part of the legal immigrants have been political refugees. As a consequence of this immigration the proportion of foreign residents has been rising gradually from 1 per cent of 1960 to 5 per cent in 1995 (SOPEMI 1995). The biggest groups within the category of non-EU immigrants are Turkish and Moroccan (202,600 and 164,600 respectively in 1994, including a growing number of naturalized Turkish and Moroccan). However, immigrants from Surinam and their descendants are not included in the category of foreign people, because they have Dutch nationality. The estimated number of Surinamese is 263,000, and that of Dutch-Antilleans is 91,000 (Martens and Veenman 1996).1 If we also add these groups to the category of foreigners, then there are over one million ‘foreigners’ in The Netherlands. This would amount to 7 per cent. However, a fast growing share of the younger ‘foreigners’ are born in The Netherlands and are being socialized into Dutch culture.

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The above-mentioned figures in percentages do not tell the whole story. Migrants are unevenly distributed over the country. In the four biggest cities almost a quarter of the population has a foreign background. In some districts they outnumber the indigenous population. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht the proportion of migrant children in the schools is more than 30 per cent. Segregation does not stop here. In the four biggest cities almost one in three schools has 75 to 100 per cent foreign pupils (see table 8.1).

Table 8.1 Dispersion of foreign pupils in primary education Population 1985/86 Amsterdam 722,245 Rotterdam 599,414 The Hague 442,105 Utrecht 253,357 The Netherlands 15,423,000

1994/95 41.3 38.0 28.4 28.6 8.4

52.2 48.7 38.7 36.2 12.1

Source: Tesser et al. 1995; CBS 1997. Cultural diversity, integration and marginalization Despite the staggeringly high percentage of foreign pupils in many urban schools the migrant population of The Netherlands as a whole really is a small minority. More important, at least from a sociological point, is its heterogeneity. The culture of the Turkish and Moroccans differs very much from that of the Dutch and also from that of immigrants from Southern Europe, Surinam or the Dutch Antilles, and also from the culture of most of the political refugees. Together, these foreign groups form a complex mosaic of cultures, religions, languages, subcultures and lifestyles. If we also bear in mind that immigrants from the same country can be very different regarding religion or ethnicity, we get a better picture of the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity. Think for instance of the people from Morocco, who originated from large cities and speak Moroccan Arabic, or Moroccans from tiny villages in rural areas, each with a different Berber language. Or think of the people from Turkey, who could be Alevite or Sunnite Muslims, Kurds, Tatars, or even Armenian Christian Turkish. Further, culturally there is a big difference if their parents came from a small village in Anatolia or from a big city such as Ankara, Izmir or Istanbul. And, to finish the description of our ethnic mosaic, the people from Surinam could be Creoles who are descended from African slaves. They could also belong to a group of people originating from India or Java, who came to Surinam as indentured labourers after the abolition of slavery. Also, these ethnic differences go along with differences in religion and home language. The cultural heterogeneity of these people, and the fact that together they still form a small minority, give a clear vision that demographically The Netherlands is not just a multicultural society, but a society with a multicultural and multiethnic minority. The large majority of the Dutch now are very much culturally homogenized, despite some repillarization within small orthodox groups. The large majority has been depillarized. Culturally and

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politically they have become a big mainstream group—socially, a very broad middle class (Berting 1995). Since 1994 we have the first coalition government with social democrats and liberal parties. It is thus the first coalition government without Christian parties. We have to keep this picture in mind when we start discussing educational goals for state education. Another point that has to be mentioned is the differing speeds and different amounts of success in the process of integration. Because of this heterogeneity of cultural origins, adaptation and integration processes are going on at different speeds. Post-colonial immigrants from Indonesia came in the early fifties and have integrated smoothly. Migrant workers from Southern Europe who arrived in the sixties also integrated remarkably well (Lindo 1996). But the integration process of migrant workers and their wives from Turkey and Morocco is occurring much more slowly. The main reasons are that they did not want to integrate at all. They wanted to return to their home country after a few years of hard labour and saving up business capital. Moreover, they were not encouraged to integrate because the Dutch government hoped that they would remigrate as soon as the economy cooled off and unemployment rose. But the large majority of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants did not return because the economic situation in their home countries did not improve sufficiently to make a return economically worthwhile. The longer they stayed, the more their children became integrated into The Netherlands. Most parents wanted their children to finish their education here. So, there were always good reasons to postpone their remigration plan for a few more years. But somewhere down the line they passed a point of no return without realizing it. Nowadays, a large proportion of the first and second generation Turkish and Moroccans are marginalized or in danger of becoming marginalized, because of low levels of education, long-term unemployment and welfare dependency. This process of marginalization is aggravated by discrimination in the labour market (Veenman 1994). The picture sketched so far might easily lead to the conclusion that Dutch society is in danger of becoming too heterogenic or becoming socially stratified along ethnic lines. This could lead to ethnic tensions and conflicts, and to an upsurge of ethnocentrism and right-wing extremism, in which a small but not negligible number of people are looking for scapegoats. They are eager to blame immigrants and ethnic minorities for the ills of society, especially rising unemployment and the high levels of crime.2 There is no denying that a small minority of indigenous people are reacting negatively. Fortunately they have not been very successful politically, and only one or two of their following have been elected to parliament. Processes of integration and cultural transformation start as soon as immigrants arrive. It is the most basic assumption of the social sciences that human beings are influenced by their social and cultural environment. This is all the more true for migrants who have lost their daily contact with their original social environment in the home country. This is even more true when there is a severe imbalance between the majority population and the various minority groups. Naturally, the children of migrants will adapt much more easily to their new environment than their parents. The latter were socialized in their home country when they were young. For them, it will take considerable effort to get accustomed to the ways and customs of the Dutch. Most of them will never feel completely at home here. Nevertheless, most of them are adapting to such a degree that they would not feel at

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home in their home country either. The first generation of adult immigrants live between two cultures and will go on doing so for a long time. The children are much more flexible, especially if they arrived before the age of six or were born in The Netherlands. Many studies show that the integration of immigrants takes two or three generations, depending on the circumstances (Brassé and van Schelven 1980; Gordon 1964, 1978; Lucassen and Penninx 1994).3 In the meantime, ethnic and cultural diversity has increased considerably. This is even more so because different members of migrant groups are in different phases of cultural adaptation. Because of the speed of this process of transfor-mation some are even reacting against modernization and Westernization in general, and show definite signs of regression into old traditions and religious dogmatism. However, we have to be careful not to create stereotypes of immigrant groups on the basis of the behaviour of small minorities within minorities. The large majority of older immigrants have sufficiently adapted to Dutch culture and lifestyle. The Moroccan and Turkish women, however, who came here as spouses and were raised in a very traditional fashion, are hardly allowed to leave their homes. And whenever they leave their house to do some shopping or otherwise they will be chaperoned by members of the family. In strong contrast to this, the large majority of their children are becoming ‘Dutchified’ quickly and almost completely. Moreover, owing to our history of democratization, liberalization and pillarization, resulting from our fight for the freedom of religion and resulting in the freedom of education, the culture of toleration along with the Dutch constitution, have made it possible for groups of other religions to fit into the system. Mosques have been built and Islamic schools have been established. The latter also get state subsidies. At least at a cultural level many problems have been solved, with or without the help of government policies. Still, many problems remain, the chief of which is social inequality and the danger of some subgroups becoming marginalized, because of their low level of education, and high level of drop-out and juvenile delinquency. Durkheim on the goals and functions of education Social cohesion and equality of opportunities if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity: education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in the child, from the beginning, the essential similarities that collective life demands. (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:70)4 Education is directed at preparing children for the future. This, of course, was also Durkheim’s view.5 If our analysis about the cultural integration of immigrants is right we are heading for a rather homogeneous society. However, we can never be sure that all immigrants will integrate successfully. Moreover, as long as there are great differences in wealth between rich and poor countries, alongside very significant differences in political freedom, immigration to the rich, democratic countries will go on. An influx of new immigrants from a great variety of countries and cultures will persist. Therefore, society

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at large, and education in particular, should always be prepared to receive these newcomers, and help them settle in their new country. Durkheim was the first pedagogue who emphasized that educational institutions, ideals and practices are rooted in society. So, if a society is changing, then education also has to change.6 In our view, this means that teachers should have adequate knowledge of the cultural backgrounds of the immigrant children they teach. They are then better equipped to understand these children and their reactions to the Dutch school, its curriculum and its social climate. Also, they should have been trained to detect and help solve the specific learning problems of children who are being educated in a second language. Only then can education to immigrant children be effective. In that way the number of transcultural and cognitive problems will be minimized and teaching can be as smooth as possible. Evidently, during the reception period, education has to take account of the cultural backgrounds of immigrant children. But the main goal is preparing children for the future. According to Durkheim, each society should be sufficiently integrated. Therefore, the main social function of education is enhancing social cohesion. It has to play an important role in creating a conscience collective. As the major agency of socialization it must inculcate the dominant norms and values in all children as a necessary prerequisite for individual citizenship and collective consciousness (Wesselingh 1992). If it were not always there to guarantee that pedagogical influence be exercised in a social way, the latter would necessarily be put to service of private beliefs, and the whole nation would be divided and would break down into an incoherent multitude of little fragments in conflict with one another. One could not contradict more completely the fundamental end of all education…education must assure, among the citizens, a sufficient community of ideas and of sentiments, without which any society is impossible. (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:79) Durkheim was concerned with the loss of social cohesion and solidarity in modern society. In his view, industrialization, urbanization, secularization and hedonism were leading to a state of anomie, that would be very harmful for members of society. The twentieth century has seen a continuation of all these processes. The agrarian workforce has shrunk to a small group, urbanization has continued, as well as secularization and hedonism. And, as predicted by Durkheim’s theories, the rate of suicides continues to increase as well (Durkheim 1897a). So, it is no wonder that many contemporary sociologists still show concern about the lack of social cohesion and solidarity. Recently, some nations have broken into small fragments, indeed often resulting in conflict with one other. The most salient example is former Yugoslavia. Other examples are the former Soviet Union, and former Czechoslovakia. Asia and Africa have their own examples. In Western Europe, racist groups and extreme right-wing political parties have used the immigrants as scapegoats for social problems, especially the rise in unemployment and crime. In many countries these have led to violent attacks against immigrants, their homes, shops or places of worship. In Germany and The Netherlands a few of the Turkish and Kurdish immigrants have imported their own political vendetta.

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As societies become more modern, more individualized and more culturally diverse, the greater the importance of a conscience collective at a more abstract level. This insight was already formulated a century ago by Durkheim: when civilization develops over a vast field of action, when it applies to more people and things, general ideas necessarily appear and become predominant. The idea of man, for example, in law, in morality and in religion replaces that of the Roman… It is the growth in volume of societies and their greater condensation that explain this great transformation. (Durkheim, quoted in Lukes 1973:157) To cope with diversity education should aim at values of greater abstraction and generality. Education has to inculcate the core values of the society, otherwise it would lose its function and legitimation. This common consciousness has to encompass core values such as equal rights and equality of opportunities. Equity is of even greater importance in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies, because ethnic inequality could easily flare up into social conflict. Durkheim was very much in favour of a just, and meritocratic society. Such a free and just society supposes, not only that individuals are not relegated by force to determinate functions, but also that no obstacle, of whatever nature, prevents them from occupying the place in the social framework that is compatible with their faculties. In short, labour is only divided spontaneously when society is constituted in such a way that social inequalities exactly express natural inequalities. (Durkheim, quoted in Lukes 1973:176) Lukes asserts that Durkheim was ‘insufficiently Durkheimian’ in this quotation and the context from which it was taken, because he mentions natural inequalities, individual aptitudes and individual faculties, and neglects the massive forces of socialization that produce inequality (Lukes 1973:177). Lukes is wrong here. The quotation above once more proves that Durkheim was fully aware of the strong forces of socialization in reinforcing social inequalities. But, in his view, an ideal educational system would produce sufficient social cohesion as well as a great diversity of skills according to the existing diversity of abilities among human beings. The assumption of a variation in ‘natural talents’ does not contradict the awareness that these ‘natural talents’ often are obscured by their socialized forms. It was Durkheim’s view that modernization should bring us closer to the meritocratic ideal. His plea for equality of opportunities can be directly transposed to equal opportunities for everybody, irrespective of social or ethnic background: It is evident that the education of our children should not depend upon the chance of their being born here rather than there, of certain parents and not of others.

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(Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:117) Multi-cultural education In The Netherlands various educational practices are put under the heading of multicultural education. First, there are special educational reception programmes for newly arrived immigrant children or for immigrant children born here, but with a limited proficiency in Dutch. It is quite sensible to start the education of immigrant children by relating subject matter to the things with which they are familiar, and to build on that new concepts and viewpoints. In case these children have no proficiency in Dutch, or only very limited proficiency, the teaching of Dutch needs extra attention. Second, we can point to practices of mother-tongue teaching and teaching about heritage cultures, with the aim of preventing children from losing contact with their friends and relatives in the country of origin. Some social scientists and policy makers even think that it can boost their self-esteem. And it will help them reintegrate in their home country should they return (Beleidsplan 1981:8–9). Third, multicultural education (or intercultural education as it is called in The Netherlands) is the teaching of all children, minority and majority children alike, about different cultures and religions. Intercultural education is aimed at tolerance and mutual understanding. It is hoped that knowledge of different cultures and religions, about different norms and values, will enhance tolerance and inhibit prejudice, racism and discrimination. It stands to reason that values such as tolerance and mutual respect for groups with different cultures are of the utmost importance for societies with a large variety of ethnic and cultural minorities. We focus on this third form of multicultural education. One of the political responses to increased cultural pluralism is reflected in article 29 of the Dutch Primary Education Act of 1985: Public education contributes to the development of pupils with attention on religious and societal values as they exist in Dutch society and the acknowledgement of the meaning of the diversity of these values. This goal can be seen as a clear break with the former image of public schools as educational institutions that should take a passive and neutral position with respect to the teaching of religious matters. Instead of being silent about religions, the new goal posits an objective and active approach in which attention has to be paid to differences and similarities between several religious beliefs. In line with this idea, the Primary Education Act even introduced a new subject area under the heading ‘spiritual movements’. A subject, by the way, that should also be taught in private denominational schools.7 The time given to intercultural education can be seen in Durkheim’s frequent use of terms such as ‘a sufficient degree of homogeneity’ or ‘a sufficient community of ideas and of sentiments’. These expressions make perfectly clear that he did not desire total homogeneity and similarity, accompanied with a high degree of mechanical solidarity. He knew very well that this was a thing of the past, something that belonged to prehistoric peoples. Modernity demands diversity. His only problem was that this diversity could go too far so as to endanger the coherence of a society (Durkheim 1893b).

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At the same time members of every group have the right to hold on to their own faith, their own language and their own traditions. However, individuals or subgroups in these groups have the right to change their faith, shift to another language and opt for new customs, traditions and lifestyles. Nevertheless, there are limits to these rights. For Durkheim these limits are reached when cultural diversity endangers the survival of society or goes against human rights of the individual. He clearly was in favour of modern individual rights (Lukes 1973:166–7). What is being taught? Durkheim has also written on the power of education, that is to say, the power of teachers. This power is based on the hierarchical relationship between the teacher and the pupils. First, the pupils, especially pupils at primary schools, are relatively passive. Their minds as yet contain only a small number of conceptions able to fight against those which are suggested by the teacher. For the same reason the pupil is very susceptible to the force of example, and also very much inclined to imitation. Moreover, the superiority of the teacher’s experience and cultural knowledge will give him or her an effective force needed for teaching (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:86). Durkheim asserts that we might well be frightened by the scope of the power parents and teachers can have over their children or pupils. If they were more aware that the content of the child’s mind and the form of its character depend on thousands of little unconscious influences that take place at every moment, how much more would parents and teachers watch their language and their behaviour? It is quite clear that children acquire norms and values, moral views, arguments and ways of reasoning, not only by way of direct teaching, but also by unconscious influences, by observing the things told offhand, in a partly unconscious, and unplanned way. They observe the behaviour of the teachers, in particular the consistency in their behaviour. Do their deeds match their words, especially at crucial times when their behaviour could be interpreted as intolerant, disrespectful, denigrating, unfair or unjust? With this in mind, the question of who is teaching our children becomes even more important than the content of the official aims of education. To find an answer to the question how teachers in state schools deal with the new ‘active pluralistic’ approach instead of the former ‘passive neutralistic’ one, an empirical study was set up by the second author (Braster 1996). The study was carried out in a national sample of 85 state schools for primary education. The final data set is based on the questionnaires we received back from 237 teachers. One out of three teachers in state schools considers themselves to be a religious person, while more than a half of the respondents believe in the existence of a spirit or supernatural power. Only 17 per cent of state school teachers are church members, but they attend churches only a few times a year. One out of ten teachers is a member of a political party, while about a half of them are members of a teachers’ union. Politically, state school teachers take a position slightly left of centre. The cultural participation of teachers is higher than that of the majority of the Dutch population, but their interest in publications that deal with the diversity of cultural values is rather low. Specific literature about how to put the pluralistic identity of state schools

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into practice is hardly known. Few teachers are actively involved with organizations that deal with social problems, such as poverty or income inequality, but the support for organizations that care about ecological issues or the preservation of nature is massive. When the majority of state school teachers are confronted with religious or political issues in their classrooms, they are not inclined to take a neutral viewpoint. However, one out of three would not give his or her opinion on such matters. To measure pedagogical orientations we used a series of items developed by Kohn on conformity and self-reliance (Kohn 1969). We also added some items about tolerance. The teachers were asked which pedagogical goals they thought were important. We constructed three scales. After linear transformation all scale scores range from 0 to 10. In this way the outcomes are easy to compare. The main outcomes are presented in table 8.2. Teachers of state primary schools attached the highest value to tolerance. In their minds the four specified goals for tolerance—respect for other people, consideration of other people, tolerance in general, and tolerance for different opinions—were all considered to be of the utmost importance. The mean score of 8.4 indicates that teachers strongly supported a value that was thought to be of very great importance to people working in state schools.

Table 8.2 Statistical outcomes of the scales for pedagogical values mean s.d. tolerance 8.4 1.6 self-reliance 7.4 1.5 conformism 5.5 1.5

N 234 234 231

Self-reliance is slightly less important than tolerance. Nevertheless, many teachers thought that creative thinking, solving problems, being independent and being inquisitive are very important too. Teachers considered that self-reliance and respect for other cultures are much more important than conformity, operationalized as being obedient, having good manners and working hard. But even these items were considered to be of value to some extent. We also wanted to know how much attention was given to several topics (see table 8.3). Teachers could tell us whether they would treat the subjects mentioned by us on a five-point scale ranging from 1 (never), 2 (once or a few times each year), 3 (monthly), 4 (weekly) or 5 (daily). The highest score was obtained for ‘nature and environment’. The mean score was 3.50 which indicated that the average teacher was teaching this subject more than once

Table 8.3 Frequency of treating various subjects in state schools (in %) Items never yearly monthly weekly daily Nature and environment 1 11 33 49 7 Discrimination/racism 8 32 45 14 2 Third World issues 9 37 45 91 War and peace 11 46 36 71

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Christianity Multicultural Netherlands Human rights Other religions Sexuality Women’s liberation European Union Poverty/inequality Political opinions

15 52 16 38 21 50 23 48 24 53 26 42 31 44 33 44 34 39

20 35 23 22 21 24 21 20 23

107

13 0 10 1 51 61 21 63 60 21 40

a month, but not every week. Political issues received the lowest score. The mean was 1.96. This indicates that topics that teachers considered to be of a highly political nature were addressed very rarely, about once or twice a year, but definitely not on a monthly basis. The attention teachers paid to cultural diversity was rather low. The attention given to the natural environment was much higher than for other issues. But this issue is ‘depoliticized’ because the destruction of the natural environment is declared as one of the major contemporary problems by all political parties, whether they are conservative, liberal, social democrat or Christian democrat. The frequent attention paid to matters of nature and environment is very striking. Seven per cent of teachers discussed issues about nature and pollution almost every school day. One in three taught an ecological topic every month, and more than 50 per cent of the teachers treated this topic on a weekly or even daily basis. The large amount of attention to matters of nature and ecological environment can partly be explained by the fact that young children nowadays have a warm interest in the well-being of animals. Another point in favour is the ample availability of attractive visual teaching material. Thirdly, there is a high coverage of these topics in radio and TV programmes, as well as in the newspapers. For all other subjects—with the exception of women’s liberation/gender roles—there was a significant difference between the first, middle and later years in primary education.8 Obviously, many teachers feared that young children were not yet up to a fruitful discussion of heavily loaded subjects such as discrimination, racism and differences in culture and religion. Moreover, teachers know that some of the Dutch children might have parents with racist views, whereas some of the foreign pupils or their parents might have suffered from racism and discrimination. A wrong approach to these subjects could easily become counterproductive, reinforcing ethnic stereotypes and enlarging hostile tensions between pupils from different ethnic groups. Teaching on subjects connected with our natural environment is far less risky and can be easily adapted to the cognitive level of pupils. Besides the popularity of the natural environment, there was a second group of subjects for which teachers showed some interest. These are racism and discrimination. Fifteen per cent of the teachers discussed these issues in the class room on a weekly basis, or even more often. This was particularly true for teachers in primary schools that have a large number of immigrant children. But, generally speaking, not much time was

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devoted to issues related to ethnic, religious and cultural diversity of society. On average, these topics were treated once a month. Subject matters that received very limited attention were sexuality and human rights. One out of two teachers treated these subjects only once a year. The same was true for Christian and non-Christian religions. Teachers seldom paid attention to political philosophies. One out of three teachers said that he or she did not cover political issues. The same was true for issues such as poverty and the unification of Europe. Gender issues also received very little attention during school lessons. This was equally true for all grades. Conclusion In this paper we have sketched the religious, ethnic and cultural diversity of The Netherlands. In 1917 the school battle between religious and non-religious parties was solved. Freedom of education became a constitutional right. From then on denominational schools received state subsidies. State schools were meant for all children and had to be ‘passively neutral’ regarding religion and politics. However, much has subsequently changed. Secularization has weakened the saliency of religious differences, but the influx of many immigrant children in the last three decades brought new forms of ethnic, religious and cultural diversity to The Netherlands. Also the political ideology changed and became strongly supportive of cultural diversity. According to the new law of primary education, state schools now have to be ‘actively pluralistic’, that is, they have to enhance respect for cultural diversity in the broadest sense. In our study we tried to find out whether state school teachers actually are teaching in this spirit. The study showed that they put much more emphasis on tolerance than on conformity. We also found that the bulk of the ‘extra-curricular’ attention goes to issues of pollution, natural environment and endangered species. Less attention is given to topics such as racism, discrimination, non-Western religions and cultural pluralism. Political issues such as poverty and inequality get very little attention in primary schools. The same is true for sexuality and gender roles. In view of the new law, it seems that more time should be spent on issues of cultural diversity, integration and equal rights. But we must be very careful in stating such policy recommendations. Science does not give unequivocal prescriptions on the kind of teaching that will bring about a culturally diverse, but homogeneous society, without discrimination and ethnic conflicts. In Durkheim’s view education has to be endowed with the very important task of building up society. It has to hand on core values of the overarching society, the collective morale, solidarity and a group spirit (attachement aux groupes soriaux) to new generations (Durkheim 1925a). Education has to present a secular morality aimed at national cohesion and solidarity. This should not be done by inculcating credos by rote, but by persuasion and argument. Teachers have to convince pupils that cohesive and healthy societies are absolutely essential. In a modern, pluralistic society tolerance should be one of the basic values because one can never be sure that all parents will enhance a tolerant dispo-sition in their children. But, just as individual freedom and autonomy have their limits, and must be put under the

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control of moral authority, so tolerance, cultural relativism or cultural indifference have their limits, if they become a hazard for social cohesion. When core values from a minority group collide fiercely with core values of the dominant group, it is absolutely necessary to find a solution regarding the priority of these core values. Respect for religious rituals or commandments has to be given second place as soon as they come into conflict with the principles of individual freedom and dignity, or other liberal democratic freedoms. In a recent series of discussions on integration initiated by the Dutch government, it was stated that society has to stick to core values, such as freedom of religion, democratic rights, human rights, tolerance and respect for cultural diversity, and equality. However, the discussion was not extended to the point in which priorities were attached to these values. When should strictly individual rights prevail over collective cultural rights? If some groups do not like the idea of secondary or higher education for girls or young women, can the state force the parents to send their daughters to secondary or tertiary education? The Dutch government thinks it can because it attaches higher value to equal rights, individual rights and the emancipation of women than to cultural traditions that restrict the freedom of individuals. In this respect there is already a certain judicial tradition in The Netherlands. Notwithstanding the freedom of denominational schools to select their own teachers, the government has decided that this should not lead to discrimination against homosexual teachers on religious grounds. So, equality has a higher priority than some interpretations of the freedom of religion and the freedom of education. We think that Durkheim would agree with these decisions, and we conclude that his statements and views are still very modern and highly relevant. In his work we can find many occasions in which Durkheim assumed an identity between the ‘normal’, the ideal and the about-to-happen (Lukes 1973:177). Durkheim’s assumptions were often wrong. Like him we may take too much for granted. Maybe, we falsely assume that the integration of immigrant children is already taking place and only needs to be supported further by education, that cultural integration or homogenization is ‘normal’ and, last but not least, that it is also the best political ideal, because it will mitigate the chances of discrimination, social exclusion and marginalization of minorities. But above all we believe that education aimed at integration and social cohesion will significantly enhance social opportunities of the children of immigrants and their descendants. Notes 1 These are people born in Surinam or with at least one parent born in Surinam. There are also more than 91,000 Dutch-Antilleans in The Netherlands. 2 This problem is also manifested by the votes for the Centrum Partij, which is a group of rightwing extremists who want to expel all foreigners from The Netherlands. At the moment they have three members of parliament (about 2 per cent of the votes). 3 Cases of groups who succeed in maintaining old customs and traditions, norms and values, for more than three generations or even for more than two ages after migration are very exceptional and seem to go along with non-integration or segregation (e.g. the Amish in North America and orthodox Jews everywhere in the diaspora). 4 The next sentence after this quotation might give another impression: ‘But on the other hand, without a certain diversity all co-operation would be impossible; education assures the

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persistence of that necessary diversity by being itself diversified and specialized.’ But the diversity meant here is the variation in skills that is necessary for a society with a high level of division of labour. It is not about cultural diversity of groups, but subcultural diversity between professions. ‘They (pedagogical theories) are orientated neither to the present nor to the past, but to the future’ (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:99). ‘The profound transformations which contemporary societies have undergone or which are…undergoing, necessitate corresponding transformations in the national education’ (Durkheim, 1922a/t.1956a:134). Of course, this does restrict the freedom of education in some ways. This was tested by way of analysis of variance.

References Beleidsplan culturele minderheden in het onderwijs (1981) ‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsdrukkerij. Berting, J. (1995) Het kwetsbare maatschappelijke midden, Amsterdam/Meppel: Boom. Brassé, J. and van Schelven, W. (1980) Assimilatie van vooroorlogse migranten, ‘sGravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij. Braster, J.F.A. (1996) De identiteit van het openbaar onderwijs. Groningen: WoltersNoordhoff.

CBS (1997) Statistisch Jaarboek 1996, Den Haag: Sdu.

Durkheim, E. (1893b) De la division du travail social: étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures, Paris: Alcan. ——(1897a) Le suicide: étude de sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology, Chicago: Free Press. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education, New York: Free Press.

Gordon, M. (1964) Assimilation in American Life, New York: Oxford University Press. Gordon, M. (1978) Human Nature, Class and Ethnicity, New York: Oxford University Press.

Kohn, M. (1969) Class and Conformity, Homewood: Dorsey Press.

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Lijphart, A. (1968) The Policy of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in The Netherlands, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ——(1975) Verzuiling, pacification en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek, Amsterdam: J.H.de Bussy. Lindo, F. (1996) Culturen maken verschil, Amsterdam: Spinhuis. Lucassen, J. and Penninx, R. (1994) Nieuwkomers, Nakomelingen, Nederlanders: Immigranten in Nederland, 1550–1993, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim, his Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study, London: Allen Lane.

Martens, E.P. and Veenman, J. (1996) ‘De positie van etnische minderheden in de Nederlandse samenleving: een statistisch overzich’t.’ In: Jaarboek Minderheden 1996. Houten: Bohn Stafleu Van Loghum.

SOPEMI (1995) Migration, Immigrants and Policy in The Netherlands: Recent Trends and Developments, Amsterdam: Centre for Migration Research (CEMIO), University of Amsterdam.

Tesser, P.T.M. et al. (1995) Rapportage minderheden 1995. Concentratie en segregatie, Rijswijk: Sociaal Cultured Planbureau.

Veenman, J. (1994) Participatie in perspectief, Houten: Bohn Stafleu Van Loghum.

Wesselingh, A.A. (1992) ‘Emile Durkheim, burgerschap en onderwijs’. In: P. Dykstra et al. (eds), Onderwijs in de tijd. Ontwikkelingen in onderwijsdeelname en nationale curricula, Houten: Bohn Stafleu Van Loghum.

Zijderveld, A.C. (1995) ‘Pillarization and Pluralism’. In: C.G.G.Bryant and E. Mokrzycki (eds), Democracy, Civil Society and Pluralism, Warszawa: Ifis Publishers.

9 DURKHEIM, DEMOCRACY AND DIVERSITY Some thoughts on recent changes in England and Wales Geoffrey Walford Introduction Throughout most of the late 1980s and 1990s educational policy in England and Wales was based on the idea that diversity between schools was to be encouraged. In his foreword to the 1992 White Paper on Choice and Diversity (DFE 1992:iii), the then Prime Minister, John Major, made his support for the idea clear. One of his four ‘bullet point’ foundations for the White Paper was: It enhances parental choice by simplifying the creation of grantmaintained schools and by opening the way to greater variety in education through the formation of new schools and by encouraging specialisation. The 1993 Education Act that followed the White Paper included legislation that, for the first time, enabled groups of sponsors to apply directly to central government for support for a diversity of schools—schools that might promote particular religious or philosophical beliefs. The way was supposedly now more open for state-funded Muslim, evangelical Christian, or Sikh schools as well as for those that might support transcendental meditation or yoga. The 1993 Education Act thus marked a very significant change in the nature and range of schools that the state was prepared to support. Perhaps surprisingly, the writings of Durkheim can provide considerable insights into the potential consequences of such a development. Following this introduction, this chapter has three sections. The first section is a simple introduction to Durkheim’s views on the state and democracy in relation to education. The second describes the process by which recent educational changes in England and Wales occurred and the implications of such a potential for diversity of schools. The third begins an exploration of the insights that might be gained from study of Durkheim’s ideas of nearly a century ago. Durkheim, education and the state

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Durkheim argued that society can survive only if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity and that ‘education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in the child, from the beginning, the essential similarities that collective life demands’ (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:70). On the other hand, he continues, ‘without a certain diversity all co-operation would be impossible; education assures the persistence of the necessary diversity by being itself diversified and specialized’. This diversity was easily visible to Durkheim: Even today, do we not see education vary with social class, or even with locality? That of the city is not that of the country, that of the middle class is not that of the worker. Would one say that this organization is not morally justifiable, that one can see in it only a survival destined to disappear? This proposition is easy to defend. It is evident that the education of our children should not depend upon the chance of their having been born here or there, of some parents rather than others. But even though the moral conscience of our time would have received, on this point, the satisfaction that it expects, education would not, for all that, become more uniform. Even though the career of each child would, in large part, no longer be predetermined by blind heredity, occupational specialization would not fail to result in a great pedagogical diversity. Each occupation, indeed, constitutes a milieu sui generis which requires particular aptitudes and specialized knowledge, in which certain ideas, certain practices, certain modes of viewing things, prevail; and as the child must be prepared for the function that he will be called upon to fulfill, education beyond a certain age, can no longer remain the same for all those to whom it applies. (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:68) Within his discussion of education, Durkheim thus appears to include two aspects. In modern terminology, these might be expressed in terms of, first, some sort of ‘common culture’ and, second, vocational training for particular occupations. Education is seen as consisting in these twin purposes and the balance that Durkheim sees between them leads to his well-known definition: Education is the influence exercised by adult generations on those that are not yet ready for social life. Its object is to arouse and to develop in the child a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states which are demanded of him by both the political society as a whole and the special milieu for which he is specifically destined. (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:71) It is easy to recognize that Durkheim’s sexist language is the product of his time (or the translator’s time), as is his focus here on children’s rather than lifelong learning. But his apparent acceptance of the idea of diversity and children being ‘destined’ for particular occupations needs more explication.

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Central to any discussion of Durkheim’s views on diversity and education must be his understanding of the nature of the state and of democracy. Neither of these areas of Durkheim’s thought are as well elaborated as we might wish, but it is well known that Durkheim viewed the state as a collection of special groups qualified to think and act on behalf of society (Lukes 1975:269). The state refers to an administrative staff or officialdom which is formally entrusted with the function of government (Giddens 1986:2). Durkheim’s definition of democracy is equally controversial, for he rejects the traditional theory of democracy where the mass of the population have a direct (but limited) role in the exercise of government and defines democracy in terms of the relationship between the differentiated political society, or the state, and the other institutional structures of society. For Durkheim, a democracy has two primary characteristics: the existence of a close, and two-way, communication between government and the governed; and the increasing extension of the contacts and ties of the state with other sectors of the society (Giddens 1986:7). What is crucial in relation to education is that Durkheim sees within a democracy a central role for what he calls ‘occupational associations’. These occupational associations were, in Durkheim’s vision, to be far more than unions. They were to be national public institutions, that included within them, or surpassed, the smaller and independent unions of workers and employers. They were to cover broad industrial categories and to be the means of ensuring close and sufficient contact between ‘interdependent organs’. He argues: An occupational activity can be effectively regulated only by a group close enough to it to know how it operates, what its needs are, and how it is likely to change. The only one that meets all these conditions is the one which might be formed by all the agents of the same industry united and organized into a single body. This is what we call the ‘corporation’ or ‘occupational group’. (Durkheim 1893b/t.1986:76) The occupational associations are seen as the intermediaries between the state and the individual and a principle medium through which a wide range of activities of the state are channelled to the rest of society. On one hand, they are able to check the emergence of an autocratic state separate from the people while, on the other hand, they ensure that the state is not absorbed by society. Durkheim believed that regional differences in culture and interests were becoming weaker and would be eventually eradicated with advanced industrialization. In contrast, work and professional life were increasing in importance as an indicator of diversity and were destined to become the basis of political structure. Thus Durkheim rejected regionally based electoral systems and he would have replaced them with an electoral system based on occupational associations. One hundred years on, one can see the difficulties of these ideas—their many limitations and impracticalities. Obviously Durkheim did not foresee the globalization of economies, the growth of multi-national companies and the rapid rate of technological and social change that has occurred in the later half of the twentieth century. Again, the very concept of ‘professional life’ is now seen to have severe limitations and to be an idealized perception. However, within Durkheim’s framework for a democratic state with

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a central place for occupational associations, his views on education are not as reactionary as they might first appear. If each occupation is seen as constituting ‘a milieu sui generis which requires particular aptitudes and specialized knowledge, in which certain ideas, certain practices, certain modes of viewing things, prevail’ (Durkheim 1893b/t.1986b:77) then that aspect of education that is, beyond a certain age, differentiated is not simply vocational in a utilitarian sense, but is part of political education. The diversity in educational provision envisaged by Durkheim is designed to enable individuals to play their part in his version of a democratic society. The diversity that Durkheim accepts might thus be seen to have two aspects—first, vocationally orientated training which might, in modern times, start at say 14; and, second, a political education which might recognize the particular social class, ethnic and gender positions of young people. There is much potential merit in this sort of diversity. Let us now examine Durkheim’s views on the respective duties of families and the state with respect to education. Durkheim firmly rejects the idea that children primarily ‘belong to’ their parents, and that education can be seen as essentially a private and personal affair. Under this view the state would have a minimum role, limited to serving as an auxiliary to, or substitute for, families. In contrast, Durkheim believes that education has above all a collective function and that society must be ‘the reference point by which education must direct its action’. He argues that each society must assure, among its citizens, a sufficient community of ideas and sentiments, without which any society is impossible. He assigns this role to education and argues that education cannot be ‘completely abandoned to the arbitrari-ness of private individuals’ (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:80). It is the responsibility of the state to: remind the teacher constantly of the ideas, the sentiments that must be impressed upon the child to adjust him to the milieu in which he must live. If it were not always there to guarantee that pedagogical influence be exercised in a social way, the latter would necessarily be put to the service of private beliefs, and the whole nation would be divided and would break down into incoherent multitudes of little fragments in conflict with one another. (Durkheim 1911c/t.1956a:79) Durkheim’s belief in the efficacy of education needs to be firmly questioned—even in his time the school was only one of many influences on young people, but in the present day the message from the school is surrounded by a multitude of cacophonous voices. However, the real problem is what is supposed to be included in the ‘ideas and sentiments’ that are commonly held within society. Durkheim admits that ‘this moral unity is not at all points what it should be’ and that French society of the time was ‘divided by divergent and even sometimes contradictory conceptions’ (1911c/t.1956a:81), but he argues that at the basis of our civilization there are a number of principles which, implicitly or explicitly, are common to all. These are: respect for reason, for science, for ideas and sentiments which are at the base of democratic morality.

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It is the role of the state to outline these essential principles, to have them taught in its schools, to see to it that nowhere are children left ignorant of them, that everywhere they should be spoken of with the respect which is due to them. (Durkheim 1911c/t.1956a:81) According to Durkheim, while the state must remain in control of what goes on in schools, it need not be a monopoly supplier. He states that: one may believe that progress in school is easier and more immediate where a certain margin is left to individual initiative; for the individual is more ready to innovate than the state. Yet the fact that the state, in the public interest, must allow to be opened schools other than those for which it has direct responsibility does not mean that it must wash its hands of what goes on in them. On the contrary, the education given in them must remain subject to its control. It is not even permissible that the function of the educator to be undertaken by someone who does not possess special qualifica-tions, about whose validity alone the state can be the judge. Undoubtedly, the bounds within which its intervention should be confined cannot be determined once and for all, but the principle of intervention is indisputable. There is no school that can claim the right freely to impart an anti-social education. (Durkheim 1911c/t.1956a:80) New diversity in England and Wales Early steps towards greater diversity of schools can be seen in the 1988 Education Reform Act for England and Wales which is said to have introduced quasi-market mechanisms into schooling. By giving families greater choice about the maintained sector schools that they wish to use, and by funding schools largely according to the number of students on roll, many schools (in particular, secondary schools) have been forced to become competitive to survive. One claim that was made at the time was that such competition would lead to a greater diversity of schools as they developed their own ‘marketing niches’, and strove to differentiate themselves from their neighbours. But this has not been the result of the Act. Rather than developing a true diversity of schools, schools have tended to compete on the same dimensions, leading to a hierarchy of schools where some are seen to be ‘better’ than others (Walford 1996). This was an almost inevitable result, given that England and Wales have a fetishistic attachment to hierarchy and to prioritizing ‘academic’ learning, and the government did little to change the supply side of the new quasi-market that it introduced. While the concept of grantmaintained schools was new, the reality was that existing local education authority schools were simply transmuted into another species. Early research has shown that grant-maintained schools generally offered little that was distinctive beyond peripheral matters such as smarter uniforms (Halpin et al. 1997; Power et al. 1994). It has been widely argued that the policy was more concerned with reducing the power and influence

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of local education authorities than with establishing a genuine diversity of schools from which parents could choose. The only area where the 1988 Education Reform Act might be seen to have attempted to enhance genuine diversity of schools was in its clauses on City Technology Colleges. In this case, the act was merely making legislative adjustments to a programme that was already under way—albeit in a very truncated form. The City Technology College programme had been launched in 1986 and the first CTC in Solihull was announced in February 1987. As the CTCs are officially private schools they required no new legislation; the government could simply use its existing powers to give funding to private schools as it wished. The ease with which funding could be made had both positive and negative features, for it meant that another govern-ment could equally quickly cease to fund the CTCs if it wished. Even after the 1987 re-election of a Conservative government, fears of a future Labour government led to clauses in the 1988 Act that began to protect the investment of sponsors. As with grant-maintained schools, the early evidence suggests that they offer little that is radically different from other schools (even in technology) and have yet to move away from traditional modes of teaching and learning (Walford and Miller 1991; Whitty et al. 1993). It was not until the 1993 Education Act that significant changes were made to increase the supply side of the quasi-market. As a result of that Act, since April 1994, it has been possible for groups of parents or independent sponsors to apply to the Secretary of State for Education and Employment in England or the Secretary of State for Wales to establish their own grant-maintained schools. Additionally, the trustees of existing private schools can apply for their schools to become grant-maintained. These new sponsored grant-maintained schools differ from existing grant-maintained schools in that sponsors have to pay for at least 15 per cent of costs relating to the provision of a site for the school and/or school buildings. In return for this financial contribution, through the schools trust deed and instrument of government, the sponsors are able to ensure that the school retains its original purpose. In particular, restrictions on making a ‘significant change in the religious character’ of these grant-maintained schools are explicitly built into the Act. Additionally, the composition of the governing body allows the sponsors to ensure that the religious objectives of the school are maintained and that the religious beliefs and practices of teaching staff are taken into consideration in appointments. Where an existing private school becomes grant-maintained, teachers are not automatically bound to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Act 1991. The schools do, of course, have to teach the National Curriculum, but special arrangements for the teaching of religious education can be detailed in the trust deed, and different arrangements can be made with regard to the character of collective religious worship. The admissions process allows preference to be given to children from families with particular beliefs in the same way as existing Roman Catholic or Church of England voluntary schools. This important change in the way in which schools can be established is, in part, the result of a lengthy campaign by a diversity of pressure groups representing religious and other interests. In recent years calls for greater diversity of schools funded by the state have come to be associated with the New Right, and many have seen the 1993 Education Act and its preceding White Paper Choice and Diversity (DFE 1992) as epitomising New Right ideology. However, as I have made clear elsewhere (Walford 1991), there have

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been many different groups with a variety of political positions that have campaigned for a greater diversity of schools to be state funded. The Christian Schools Campaign, in particular, was at the forefront of the political campaigning for the right to obtain state funding for faith-based schools and can be seen to have had a significant effect on the way in which the legislation has been framed (Walford 1995a, b). This particular pressure group was linked to the new Christian schools which share an ideology of biblically based, evangelical Christianity which seeks to relate the message of the Bible to all aspects of present-day life whether personal, spiritual or educational. These schools are usually poorly funded, having been set up by parents or a church group to deal with a growing dissatisfaction with what is seen as the increased secularization of the great majority of schools. About sixty-five of these schools came together through mutual recognition into a loose grouping. As the number of new Christian schools increased, a decision was made in 1988 to establish the Christian Schools Trust to promote and assist in the founding of further schools. The Trust now provides assistance in the development of curriculum materials, helps coordinate the dissemination of such materials, provides some in-service training for teachers and organizes conferences. By early 1989 the Christian Schools Campaign (CSC) was established to represent the schools in the political arena, specifically aiming to achieve public recognition for these schools and access to public funding. The nature of the schools involved with the Christian Schools Trust and Christian Schools Campaign has been described in some detail elsewhere (Walford 1994c; Poyntz and Walford 1994); here it is sufficient to note that the schools do not serve the ‘traditional’ private school market and are not natural allies of the New Right. Many of the schools have progressive fee structures that are linked to ability of parents to pay, and wish to be open to a wide social intake. Some Muslim education groups have presented another, and rather different, pressure for a greater diversity of schools to be funded by the state. As the number of Muslim children in Britain has gradually increased, so did the calls from some Muslim groups for separate Muslim schools. This call focused especially on separate secondary schools for girls. As might be expected, Muslims hold a variety of views on the desirability of establishing separate schools but there are currently more than fifty private Muslim schools in operation in Britain. The growing emphasis on choice during the 1980s led some Muslim campaigning groups to be increasingly vocal in their demands for state funding for such private Muslim schools, and several schools applied for voluntary aided status. In their desire to obtain state funding, the interests of these various groups also coincided with those of the New Right who wished for further diversity in educational provision (e.g. Cox and Marks 1979), selection of pupils for particular schools (e.g. Flew 1991; Marks 1991) and the increased privatization of schooling (e.g. Sexton 1987, 1992). It also gave the government the chance to expand the grant-maintained sector at a time when applications from county and voluntary schools were low. John Patten, Secretary of State for Education from 1992 to 1994 and an active Roman Catholic, was highly supportive of Christian schools, for their demands for state support chimed with his own desires for ‘choice and diversity’ (DFE 1992) and his emphasis on ‘spiritual and moral values’. Whilst there was a firm emphasis in the White Paper on the need for a high priority to be given to the removal of surplus places, it was argued that this would

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actually give opportunities for new GM schools to be created in response to parental demand. Once the 1993 Act had become law, it was expected that those who had been influential in the process of pushing for change would be active in proposing the establishment of new grant-maintained schools. But, in practice, the whole process has proved to be far more complicated and time-consuming than any of the promoters of the legislation envisaged. The result is that there have been far fewer proposals than expected, and all have met with considerable difficulties. Various schools or sponsor groups have made some initial contact with the FAS (Funding Agency for Schools) since April 1994. Some of these contacts made newspaper headlines—for example, the claim in March 1995 that Manchester Grammar School might become grant-maintained—but most received little comment beyond that in local newspapers. By the end of 1994 around 400 copies of the general information had been sent out, and about 80 schools or groups had made some contact and were considered ‘active’. But the level of activity varied greatly, with very few progressing beyond preliminary enquiries. By July 1994 only three schools had provided the FAS with outline proposals—Oak Hill School in Bristol (an evangelical Christian school), Guru Nanak school in Hillingdon, and a group from Exmoor who wished to fund a small school for academically able children. The proposal from the Sikh school ran into early difficulties and was withdrawn in 1994. In July 1994 the FAS wrote to Oak Hill School saying that it was ‘likely to object’ to their proposals. In August 1994 the FAS wrote to the Exmoor group with a similar message. The Exmoor group heeded the warning and withdrew, while Oak Hill School proceeded and formally published its proposals in October 1994. These were closely followed by a proposal for a new Leeds Jewish High School, published in October 1994, and two proposals from existing private Roman Catholic grammar schools in the Wirral, Merseyside in November 1994. The Leeds Jewish High School proposal was eventually withdrawn as the sponsors were unable to obtain a site. The decision on the two Catholic schools took much longer than expected but a positive response was made in July 1995. Oak Hill’s proposals were finally rejected in December 1995. By the end of 1995 about forty schools or sponsor groups were said to be actively interested, and might eventually bring forward proposals, but there were few firm contestants. Those showing strong interest included another Jewish group which was proposing a Jewish Primary School in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire; two further RC schools in Liverpool with links to the two already given grant-maintained status; and a transcendental meditation school in Skelmersdale. With a general election due at any time and a change of government expected, there was, as 1996 progressed, an increase in interest from existing private schools and other groups wishing to obtain state funding. It was thought (incorrectly) that an incoming Labour government would probably halt the scheme, and that an application for transfer of status would have to be completed quickly. By the time of the general election in May 1997 a total of twenty schools had published proposals. At this time, there had been eight successful English applications, only two applications had been rejected by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, but one had been withdrawn and there were still nine applications outstanding. Some of

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these had been with the Secretary of State for over a year. At the same time, a further fifteen or so promoters were in serious discussion with the FAS. In Wales, the number of applications and approvals was even smaller. By May 1997 only one existing private school had become grant-maintained, and this was a small Roman Catholic school in Denbigh, Clwyd which at that point had only 150 pupils. Very unusually, the school has some boarders who continue to pay fees for their boarding, but no longer have to pay for their tuition. The school plans to expand to about 250 pupils. Two other applications were still under consideration by the Secretary of State for Wales. Strangely, these two were separate applications to establish a new school in Usk, near Cardiff. A single group of proposers broke into two groups due to disagreements between them and submitted competing bids for a comprehensive secondary school in a town where children currently have to travel considerable distances to the nearest secondary school. Both applications were eventually rejected. Only one other existing Welsh private school was said to be ‘nibbling’ at the idea of grant-maintained status. In both England and Wales, the overall policy has thus not been as successful as the original supporters of the 1993 legislation had hoped. Very few schools or sponsors have managed to meet the demands made on them during the application process. Many fell by the wayside before their applications were passed to the Secretary of State for consideration, and only eight schools in England and one in Wales had successfully become grant-maintained under these new regulations by May 1997. All of the sponsored grant-maintained schools so far have involved the transfer of an existing private school into the state-maintained sector. There have been no cases of a new school being started from scratch. The practice has thus not yet fulfilled the potential within the legislation. Agencies of the state have acted in such a way that diversity has been only weakly encouraged. All the new grant-maintained schools so far have been of a type close to existing statemaintained schools, and none has begun to challenge the constraints laid down by the state. The way in which the legislation has been operated has important implications in terms of the nature of the state and a democratic society, as does the legislation itself. Durkheim and new grant-maintained schools We have seen that, for Durkheim, schooling had an essential social function, and the state was thus forced to be concerned about education. Schooling was primarily concerned with the broad national objectives of social integration and the formation of active citizens. These ideas cannot be accepted without question. They are essentially part of a modernist project, and many critics would now argue that in a post-modern, globalized world such aims for education are inappropriate and the objectives unattainable. Donald (1992), for example, has argued that post-modernity has led to a process of cultural diversification and fragmentation and that the idea that education can transmit a common culture is now obsolete. Usher and Edwards (1994) have similarly argued that global post-modernity has led to a pluralization of cultures that fundamentally undermine the modernist goal of national identity. They argue that the progressive replacement of standardized educational systems by such developments as virtual networks will mean that schools will cease to act as dispensers of rational, disciplined knowledge and fail to

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act as agents of socialization. National objectives in education, they argue, will be limited to ‘fulfilling the requirements of the economy under conditions of global competition’ (Usher and Edwards 1994:175). Such arguments have to be taken seriously for the role of schooling in social integration has undoubtedly decreased from its post-war high point, and other agencies (in particular, the media and advertising) have promoted a cultural form that has elements of both internationalism and plurality. However, the transition from modernity to postmodernity is far from complete, and the current conditions in modern Western societies may be more conducive to education acting as an integrating social force than they were in the last century when this function was explicit. As Andy Green has argued, The postmodern world is, generally, both more diverse and more homogeneous than modernity. Globalization, as cultural theorists contend, has not only provided new means for local and particular cultures to express and identify themselves; it has also made them more present and more visible to other cultures, thus enhancing the opportunities for common discourse. (Green 1997:185) Change has occurred, but there are distinct continuities. Schooling is likely to be a familiar experience for many years to come, and there is little evidence that schools will be replaced by learning networks or any similar development in the near future. Neither is the extent of diversity with which schooling has to cope anything new. When national educational systems were developing in Europe, the peoples they served were deeply divided by class, religion, gender, language and ethnicity. As Durkheim himself has shown (Durkheim 1938a/t.1977a), the explicit and dominant function of national educational systems was to act as an integrating social force and to forge the fledgling nation state into a coherent and solid entity. It is instructive to remember that at the moment of unification in Italy, when national education was first introduced, less than 3 per cent of the population spoke Italian (Hobsbawm 1994:60; Green 1997). In comparison, the extent of diversity in English schools at present looks minimal. The ability of education to act as a force for social integration is still strong despite trends in globalization and post-modernity. Indeed, some elements of post-modernity might be seen to have been anticipated by Durkheim. For example, the privatization of provision of education is a feature of postmodern society (Hinkson 1991), yet Durkheim saw no reason for the state to become a monopoly supplier of education. While the state might provide some schooling, it is likely that he would have seen no particular problem in the principle of having sponsors establishing their own schools. However, he is clear that the state must ensure that it still controls what is taught in those schools. Just because the state allows others to establish schools does not mean that it must ‘wash its hands of what goes on in them’. Durkheim admits that it is difficult to determine where the line should be drawn between what the state allows and what it prohibits, but it is essential that a line be drawn somewhere. In particular, it is important that no school should be allowed to impart anti-social education.

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Over the past few years the state, in the form of officials at the FAS and the Department of Education and Employment, has gradually developed a series of criteria that are applied to sponsors wishing to start a new school. The most important of these are the ability to find substantial financial support for their plans and to be able to show that there is sufficient demand for the school without reducing the number of children in nearby schools too greatly. So far the only schools to have achieved sponsored grantmaintained status have been of a similar type to existing grant-maintained schools— Roman Catholic grammar schools or Jewish primary schools. While some Muslim, Sikh and evangelical Christian schools have made contact with the FAS and have put proposals forward, only four of these have got to the official consultation stage and all others have withdrawn, at least temporarily. National Curriculum Clearly, funding is a major issue. But it is not the only one. These new grant-maintained schools have to follow the National Curriculum in the same way as other schools. This includes a study of English literature and history, as well as science and technology and art and music. These, and other, subject areas are all compulsory, and schools are required to offer equal opportunities for all boys and girls. Further, if undersubscribed, the schools have to accept applicants who might not be of the same faith as that of the sponsors. Some of these criteria are too strict for some of the potential applicants, for they believe that to follow this curriculum would be to follow what is essentially a secular curriculum. In a questionnaire and interview survey of schools associated with the Christian Schools Campaign (Poyntz and Walford 1994), one headteacher wrote that: My stand point [is] one who would not tolerate government interference on the issue of education. I believe most Christian schools are set up to be independent and thus able to follow what they believe is the best route to follow. Any compromise on this idealism (i.e. teaching evolution as fact, deviant sex education, acceptance of other faiths as alternatives etc.) would soon weaken their stand and nullify their reason for existence. Any move by government to enforce the national curriculum would have to be resisted, preferably in a united manner, and (though I have no love of law courts and their expense) through the law courts. Any acceptance of government funds is an immediate weakening of the independent status of schools, and is not acceptable in any circumstances. Information from other schools showed similar potential clashes. In an interview with another head, it was explained: We believe in a Christ-centred curriculum. That there should not be a split—a divide—between the home and family and the school—that their education should be an extension of what they learn at home. We obviously have Christ and the Bible at the centre, and we want them to have the same at school. So that they don’t learn one thing at home and a sort of anti-thing at school. I believe there is good Biblical backing for

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that, as the Jewish education was based on the home and Jewish Scripture, and Christian education should be the same… I think the divide between Christian education and state education has become far, far greater over recent years—humanism is taught and not only in the curriculum, but in terms of what children learn in the playground, it is far from what we would want. Other informants wrote or spoke about their desire not to teach particular aspects of the National Curriculum such as evolution and sex education. While some were prepared to teach about other religious beliefs, many would only do so in the context of teaching that the other religious faiths were wrong or misguided. Some did not believe that equal opportunities should be offered to both girls and boys for they were seen to have particular destinies in the home or in full-time work. In the context of Durkheim’s beliefs on the subject, it is interesting that several of these schools were not prepared to become sponsored grant-maintained schools if this meant that they would not be allowed to use corporal punishment. Some of the teachers in these schools were also unqualified as teachers, which Durkheim would have prohibited, but they would have had to become certified teachers if grant-maintained status had been granted. The official criteria set for a school to become grant-maintained automatically cut out many schools such as those above. No doubt Durkheim would have been happy that this was the case, for there are doubts about the degree to which they would teach ‘respect for reason, for science, and for ideas and sentiments which are at the base of democratic morality’. It is worth noting, however, that Durkheim’s criteria apply to all schools within the particular society, and not just those funded by the state. These evangelical Christian schools still exist as private schools—they would, probably not still exist if Durkheim’s instructions were followed. These schools were extreme examples. Many more would be prepared to become state-maintained and follow the National Curriculum. But is this common curriculum similar to Durkheim’s view of the ‘ideas and sentiments’ that are commonly held within society? Can Durkheim’s desire be seen to be embodied within the National Curriculum? Sadly not. But he would probably have been in favour of some aspects of the original 1988 intentions. It is well known that the British National Curriculum has been heavily revised several times since 1988. As it developed some of the elements that might have provided an education in the common ‘ideas and sentiments’ have been squeezed out. In particular, the five ‘cross-curricular’ themes (environmental education, health education, citizenship, economic and industrial understanding, and careers education and guidance), that were originally intended to overlay the collection of separate subjects, never had a chance of being anything other than marginal. The heavy demands made on teachers by the statutory requirements of the ten subjects, meant that there was little chance of encouraging the non-examinable cross-curricular themes, even where teachers were supportive. Of the five, the theme that has had the least impact is the one closest to Durkheim’s desires: citizenship education (Beck 1996; Saunders et al. 1995). The reasons for this neglect are numerous, but lack of clear guidance and the contested nature of the concept of citizenship have been major impediments.

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But a greater emphasis on citizenship education would not, in itself, provide the type of National Curriculum that Britain now requires. In various debates over the detailed content and nature of the curriculum (in particular, over English and history) a monocultural interpretation has largely superseded the multicultural curriculum that was developing in the 1970s and early 1980s. A narrow conception of British culture is now prescribed into which minority ethnic, religious and cultural groups are expected to assimilate. Clearly this version of common ‘ideas and sentiments’ is unlikely to foster social solidarity and national cohesion within a modern multicultural society such as Britain. The curriculum required is one that is inclusive and which recognizes and values the diversity of the present while rejecting post-modernist fragmentation. Last thoughts It has been shown that the number of schools to have made the transition to grantmaintained status is so far very small. The explicit criteria are one set of factors that have restricted the demand from existing private schools. At this stage it can only be speculation, but it is likely that covert criteria have also developed through the routinization of procedures within the FAS and DFEE. Whilst Durkheim’s definition of the state is not one that would now be readily accepted, it does have the advantage of focusing attention on the micro-aspects of the state. If the state refers to an administrative staff or officialdom which is formally entrusted with the function of government, then an examination of the everyday procedures that FAS and DFEE officials engage in will give direct information on the functioning of the state. How do these officials interact with potential sponsors from existing Muslim schools or from schools supporting transcendental meditation? Do their everyday processes covertly inform and ultimately exclude groups that may not promote the ‘ideas and sentiments’ that are ‘commonly held’ within society? Is their definition of what is ‘commonly held’ within English and Welsh society inclusive or exclusive? The research has still to be done. What is clear, however, is that, as Green (1997) has argued, the major dilemmas for governments and educationalists in the coming decade will focus on how to reconstruct cultures of citizenship and nationhood. This must be done in ways that are appropriate to modern conditions and yet conducive to a deepening of democracy and to a strengthening of social solidarity. One final implication from Durkheim. His idea for occupational associations is no longer a practical possibility—if it ever was, but his reasoning for the need for such intermediate bodies is still relevant. They were designed to check the emergence of an autocratic state separate from the people while ensuring that the state is not absorbed by society. They were to be an intermediate level of democratic control and a pathway for communication between the people and the state. While in his time Durkheim saw regional organizations as decreasing in their importance, actually, they have been long lasting. Whilst occupational associations were Durkheim’s first preference, there can be little doubt that he would have strongly supported the maintenance of local authorities and local education authorities rather than have an autonomous, autocratic state!

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Very last thoughts In January 1988, the new Labour government announced state support for two Muslim primary schools that wished to become grant-maintained. This marks a substantial change, but it is interesting to note that the short press notice that was issued emphasized five crucial criteria that proposers have to meet before funding can be obtained. These were: (1) provide a good standard of education, (2) deliver the National Curriculum, (3) appoint suitably qualified staff, (4) offer equal opportunities to boys and girls, and (5) provide suitable buildings for the school. The list shows a balance between the need for diversity and the requirements of the state that Durkheim probably would have strongly supported. These schools will be Muslim schools, but ones far more tightly controlled and directed towards the needs of the state than the existing range of private Muslim schools to which an increasing number of Muslim parents send their children. References Beck, J. (1996) ‘Citizenship education: problems and possibilities’, Curriculum Studies 4, 3:349–66.

Cox, C. and Marks, J. (1979) Education and Freedom. The Roots of Diversity, London: National Council for Educational Standards.

Department for Education (1992) Choice and Diversity. A New Framework for Schools, London: DFE. Donald, J. (1992) Sentimental Education, London: Verso. Durkheim, E. (1893b) De la division du travail social: étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1986) ‘Division of labour’. In A.Giddens, Durkheim on Politics and the State, Cambridge: Polity. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology, Chicago: Free Press. ——(t.1986) ‘The role of the state in education.’ In A.Giddens, Durkheim on Politics and the State, Cambridge: Polity. ——(1938a) L’Evolution pédagogique en France, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1977a) by Peter Collins, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Flew, A. (1991) ‘Educational services: independent competition or maintained monopoly?’ In Green, D.G. (ed.) Empowering the Parents: How to Break the Schools Monopoly, London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

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Giddens, A. (1986) (ed.) Durkheim on Politics and the State, Cambridge: Polity. Green, A. (1994) ‘Postmodernity and state education’, Journal of Education Policy, 9, 1:67–83. ——(1997) Education, Globalization and the Nation State, London: Macmillan.

Halpin, D., Power, S. and Fitz, J. (1997) ‘Opting into the past? Grant-maintained schools and the reinvention of tradition.’ In Ron Glatter, Phillip A.Woods and Carl Bagley (eds) Choice and Diversity in Schooling, London: Routledge. Hinkson, J. (1991) Postmodernity: State and Education, Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1994) The Age of Extremes, London: Michael Joseph.

Lukes, S. (1975) Emile Durkheim. His Life and Work, Harmondsworth: Peregrine.

Marks, J. (1991) Standards in Schools. Assessment, Accountability and the Purposes of Education, London: Social Market Foundation.

Power, S., Halpin, D. and Fitz, J. (1994) ‘Underpinning choice and diversity? The grantmaintained schools policy in context.’ In Tomlinson, S. (ed.) Educational Reform and its Consequences, London: IPPR/Rivers Oram. Poyntz, C. and Walford, G. (1994) ‘The new Christian schools: A survey’, Educational Studies, 19, 3:127–43.

Saunders, L., Hewitt, D. and MacDonald, A. (1995) Education for Life, Slough: NFER. Sexton, S. (1987) Our Schools—A Radical Policy, Warlingham, Surrey: Institute for Economic Affairs Education Unit. ——(1992) Our Schools—Future Policy, Warlingham, Surrey: IPSET Education Unit.

Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1994) Postmodernism and Education, London: Routledge.

Walford, G. (1991) ‘The reluctant private sector: Of small schools, politics and people’. In Walford, G. (ed.) Private Schooling: Tradition, Change and Diversity, London: Paul Chapman.

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——(1995a) ‘The Christian Schools Campaign—a successful educational pressure group?’ , British Educational Research Journal, 21, 4:451–64. ——(1995b) ‘The Northbourne Amendments: Is the House of Lords a garbage can?’, Journal of Education Policy, 10, 4:413–25. ——(1995c) Educational Politics. Pressure Groups and Faith-Based Schools, Aldershot: Avebury. ——(1996) ‘Diversity and choice in school education: an alternative view’, Oxford Review of Education, 22, 2:143–54. Walford, G. and Miller, H. (1991) City Technology College, Buckingham: Open University Press. Whitty, G., Edwards, T. and Gewirtz, S. (1993) Specialisation and Choice in Urban Education. The City Technology College Experiment, London: Routledge.

10 DURKHEIM, DEWEY AND PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION The tensions between individualism and community1 Alan R.Sadovnik and Susan F.Semel There are significant similarities between Durkheim’s sociology of education and the sociological underpinnings of John Dewey’s philosophy of education. Central to Dewey’s analysis of American education and his call for progressive education was an analysis of the tensions between individualism and community. As Bowles and Gintis (1976) note, Dewey’s work attempted to reconcile the tensions between the integrative (community), developmental (individualism), and egalitarian (community) functions of education. Although Bowles and Gintis argue that these functions are inherently contradictory in capitalist society, Dewey believed that schools could help balance the often competing demands of the community and the individual. Much of Dewey’s early writings on education (1897, 1899, 1902, 1916, 1938) called for the need for schools to contribute simultaneously to individual development and to the development of an ‘embryonic democratic community’ (Dworkin 1959:41). In fact, this tension was historically played out in the two sometimes distinctive branches of progressive education in the 1920s and 1930s: child-centred progressivism, which often resolved the tension in favour of individualism, and social reconstructionism, which often resolved the tension in favour of community. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the lessons to be learned from two progressive schools founded during the first half of the twentieth century, the City and Country School and the Dalton School in New York and to show how they attempted to balance the tensions between individualism and the community. Through this historical analysis, we suggest that contemporary educational reformers have a great deal to learn from studying the history of progressive schools. Communitarianism: contemporary concerns and historical roots Social criticism from the 1950s to the present has focused on the tensions between the individual and community. In the late 1950s, in response to the putative conformity of that decade, a number of social critics (for example, Mills 1959) argued that American society had become overly organizational, bureaucratic and stifling. As Ehrenreich (1983) noted, the challenges to authority that percolated in the 1960s, had their roots in a number of cultural and intellectual movements of the 1950s, including the beat movement. Following the social upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s, where the tensions between individualism and community were often resolved in favour of the individual,

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social critics such as Lasch (1979) pointed to the need for an increased sense of community. Lasch suggested that American culture had become a ‘culture of narcissism’ and that such unbridled individualism threatened the core of our civilization. In the 1980s, Bellah et al. (1985) provided a critique of American individualism, but at the same time suggested that there was a foundation of communitarianism in American life. These authors (1991) argued that a ‘good society’ was based on democratic institutions that allowed both for individualism and for the connections between individuals within a cohesive community. In the 1980s and 1990s analyses of individualism and community took on considerable political overtones. Although both the left and right have called for increased community, it is from very different political vantage points. Whereas conservatives have argued for a return to a community of traditional values and decried the pernicious effects of individualism on the family, and on the decline of values, liberals and radicals have called for an increased democratic community that balances the tensions between individuals and society.2 For example, Etzioni’s (1993) more conservative branch of communitarianism argues for a return to more traditional forms of community and like Durkheim, almost a century before him, speaks of the need for schools to be agencies of moral socialization and the transmission of community values. Like Durkheim, Etzioni overemphasizes the cohesiveness of modern societies and underestimates the conflicts between groups over precisely what constitutes a cohesive community and community values. Bellah (Bellah et al. 1991), drawing heavily on Dewey, Lippmann and Niebuhr, suggest that it is precisely the conflicts between groups over competing definitions of community that must be resolved by democratic institutions. Although Bellah et al. do not suggest that such conflicts are easily resolved they do believe that democratic institutions are capable of creating a society that connects individuals to community in a meaningful manner. Reflecting the same liberal optimism about the stabilizing force of schooling that both Durkheim and Dewey echoed almost a century before, Bellah et al. look to schools as central institutions in the democratic, communitarian society. Thus, both Etzioni and Bellah et al., from somewhat different political vantage points, look to schooling as central to community. Durkheim and Dewey: the tensions between individualism and community Durkheim’s sociology was at its centre concerned with the effects of the decline of traditional rituals and community during the transition from traditional to modern societies. Durkheim’s analysis of the differences between mechanical and organic solidarity in the Division of Labor (1893b/t.1933b), and his concept of anomie in Suicide (1897a/t.1951a), examined the need for societies to create rituals and institutions to provide for social cohesion and meaning. Like Ferdinand Tönnies’ (1957) analysis of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Durkheim provided a sociological analysis of the effects of modernity on community. For Durkheim, the processes of industrialization, urbanization and modernization resulted in the breakdown of traditional rituals and methods of social control resulting in the weakening of social solidarity and cohesion. In Suicide (1897a/t.1951a), he

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demonstrated empirically how the breakdown in traditional community resulted in the decline of collective conscience and the rise of individualism. Such a breakdown led to what Durkheim called anomie, the condition of normlessness in individuals and society. As the bonds that connected individuals to each other and to society became unhinged modern societies faced disintegration from within. Durkheim, however, was not a reactionary; he did not believe that the solution to social disintegration was a return to the past, with its strict forms of social control and regulation. Rather, he believed that modern societies had to develop new forms of social control and cohesion that would allow for the newly developed individualism of modernity to exist within a cohesive modern society. Such a society, characterized by what Durkheim called organic solidarity, would allow for a balance between individualism and community. Durkheim was the first sociologist to apply sociological theory to education. His major works on education include, Moral Education (1925a/t.1961a), The Evolution of Educational Thought (1938a/1977a), and Education and Sociology (1922a/t.1956a). While he recognized that education had taken different forms at different times and places, he believed that education, in virtually all societies, was of crucial importance in creating the moral unity necessary for social cohesion and harmony. For Durkheim, moral values were the foundation of society. Durkheim’s sociology has been associated with a general functionalist theory in sociology. Simply stated, functionalist sociologists begin with a picture of society that stresses the interdependence of the social system: they examine how well its parts are integrated with each other. They thus view society as a kind of machine, where one part articulates with another to produce the dynamic energy required to make society work. Most important, functionalism stresses the processes that maintain social order by stressing consensus and agreement. Although functionalists understand that change is inevitable, they underscore the evolutionary nature of change. Further, although they acknowledge that conflict between groups exists, functionalists argue that there must be a common bond to unite groups or society will disintegrate. Thus, functionalists examine the social processes necessary to the establishment and maintenance of social order. For Durkheim, the role of education is to provide a mechanism to help connect different groups to a common collective conscience—one that ensured the maintenance of social order. A criticism of the functionalist theory of education, as conflict theorists point out, is that it often views social order as reflecting the overall interests of society, rather than the interests of dominant groups in society (Hurn 1993). Therefore, Durkheim’s analysis of the rituals that hold groups together fails to analyze sufficiently how the rituals that hold some groups together often form the basis for conflicts between groups. Thus, in modern. societies marked by the existence of many stratified groups, the rituals that hold some groups together are used to dominate and alienate less powerful groups. From a conflict perspective, the role of education is to maintain the dominant order, rather than to provide a democratic social order. The work of Basil Bernstein (1977, 1990, 1996) has integrated a conflict approach with Durkheimian theory. While remaining consistent with a Durkheimian foundation, he has systematically integrated Marxism and Weberian categories in order to understand the role of education in reproducing social inequality. These contemporary concerns with the role of schools in solving problems related to the tensions between individuals and community have historical roots in Dewey’s early

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writings on education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. John Dewey, although born and raised in Vermont had, by 1894, become thoroughly enmeshed in the problems of urbanization as a resident of Chicago and later as Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Distressed with the abrupt dislocation of families from rural to urban environments; concerned with the loss of traditional ways of understanding the maintenance of civilization and anxious about the effects unleashed by individualism and rampant materialism upon a democratic society, Dewey sought answers in pedagogic practice (see Westbrook 1991 for an indepth biography). Dewey argued in ‘My pedagogic creed’ (1897), ‘The school and society’ (1899) and ‘The child and the curriculum’ (1902) for a restructuring of schools along the lines of ‘embryonic communities’ and for the creation of a curriculum which would allow for the child’s interests and developmental level while introducing the child to ‘the point of departure from which the child can trace and follow the progress of mankind in history, getting an insight also into the materials used and the mechanical principles involved’ (Dworkin 1959:43). The school, according to Dewey, was a ‘miniature community, an embryonic society’ (ibid.: 41) and discipline was a tool which would develop ‘a spirit of social cooperation and community life’ (ibid.: 40). Dewey’s progressive methodology rested upon the notion that children were active, organic beings, growing and changing and requiring a course of study, which would reflect their particular stage of development. He advocated both freedom and responsibility for students since those are vital components of democratic living. He believed that the school should reflect the community, in order to enable students when they graduate to assume societal roles and to maintain the democratic way of life. And he believed that democracy—particularly important for him—could be realized through education. Education would continually reconstruct and reorganize society. In line with the progressive political atmosphere of the turn of the century, Dewey viewed the role of the school within the larger societal conditions of which it was a part. While Dewey was certainly concerned with the social dimensions of schooling, he also was acutely aware of the school’s effects on the individual. Thus, his philosophy of education made a conscious attempt to balance the social role of the school with its effects on the social, intellectual and personal development of individuals. In other words, Dewey believed that the schools should balance the needs of society and community on the one hand, and of the individual, on the other. This tension, or what the philosopher of education Maxine Greene (1988) terms the ‘dialectic of freedom’, is central to understanding Dewey’s work. Writing at the turn of the century, Dewey, like Durkheim, saw the effects of modernization and urbanization on the social fabric of Western society. The rapid transformation in the nineteenth century from a traditional, agrarian world to a modern industrial one shattered the traditional bonds of solidarity and cohesion that held people together. As this was combined with the mass immigration to the US in the late nineteenth century, the urban worlds of Chicago and New York City, where Dewey spent his adult life, were often fragmented and in Durkheim’s words anomic (without norms). For both Durkheim and Dewey, the schools had to play a key role in creating a modern form of cohesion by socializing diverse groups into a cohesive democratic community. However, the major difference between Durkheim and Dewey is their different emphasis

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on individualism and community. Although Dewey consistently emphasized the importance of democratic community, his major concern was the individual within this community. Thus, progressive education for Dewey had to ensure the sancity of individual expression and freedom. For Durkheim, although individualism was an important feature of organic solidarity, the role of education was precisely to ensure that excessive individualism did not destroy the social bonds necessary for social order. In this respect, Durkheim was more concerned for the community. Durkheim and Dewey provide significant insight for understanding the tensions between individualism and community in modern education. For Durkheim, the role of education is to negate the negative consequences of organic solidarity in order to ensure social order. For Dewey, the role of education is to balance these tensions in order to provide a mechanism for allowing individual freedom to flourish within a democratic community. The tensions between individualism and community central to both Durkheim and Dewey have been important features of twentieth-century educational history in the United States. Contemporary progressive educational reforms Writing in the 1990s, one is encouraged by the increased interest in progressive education, especially as it relates to attempts to balance individualism and community. After a decade or more of conservative domination of educational discourse, and during a period where school choice, tuition vouchers and wide-spread loss of faith in public education have been the foundation for Goals 2000, it is heartening to see educators who are looking to more progressive models. For example, in May 1992, at a two-day conference of educators sponsored by the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teachers (NCREST) at Teachers College, Columbia University, time and again educators echoed the need to restructure schools along the line of the democratic and egalitarian community envisioned by Dewey almost a century earlier. There was a stark contrast between the rhetoric of Washington-based reform with its emphasis on assessment, accountability and excellence, and the conference’s concern with progressive principles and practices such as equity, democracy, integrated curriculum, authentic assessment and cooperative learning. Although the NCREST Conference articulated many of the progressive ideas that have become a part of recent educational reforms, it was somewhat ironic that many conference participants had little awareness of the historical roots of the practices that they advocated. That this conference was aimed primarily at public school3 educators and that the majority of the sessions dealt with public schools, raises two important issues. First, in the 1920s and 1930s many progressive experiments were generated in the private sector. Progressive education in the public schools was more often than not a distorted version of Dewey, representing the triumph of what historian David Tyack (Tyack and Hansot 1981) has termed administrative progressivism. In the 1990s, when interest in progressive education comes from educators in the public schools as well as the private schools, many of the progressive practices supported by public educators have their origins in independent progressive schools that began in the early twentieth century, such as the City and Country School and the Dalton School. Second, the progressive issue of

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equity expressed both in Dewey’s work and in contemporary progressive reform raises a significant issue concerning progressive education at such independent schools. That is, can schools that from their inception catered to an economically elite population (scholarships not with-standing), really be taken seriously as progressive schools and held up as models for contemporary reform? It has been noted elsewhere, that Deweyan progressive education by the 1920s more often than not was found in independent schools, such as Dalton and City and Country. That their populations were often composed of children of the affluent upper-middle classes, while posing a political problem for progressives, is none the less a reality. Thus, any discussion of the history of most independent progressive schools must take into account this progressive paradox. Can schools that have educated affluent children, however ‘artsy’ and intellectual their parents, truly educate for democracy? This is a question that many of these schools have long grappled with. What this paradox indicates is that a discussion of the lessons to be learned from these schools must recognize that they were not public schools. They must be examined for what they were, independent schools that provided progressive education for the children of the mostly affluent. Contemporary concerns with equity, although exceedingly important, should not be used to render the discussion invalid. Despite the paradox, the history of these schools provides much insight for contemporary educational reform. The question for contemporary educational policy is how to translate these lessons into more democratic and inclusive settings. An examination of contemporary progressive educational reform shows the attempts of schools to balance the tensions between individualism and community. For example, the statement of principles of the steering committee of the Network of Progressive Educators drafted on 10 November 1990,5 reflects contemporary attempts to re-introduce progressive ideas into public school reform. According to the Network’s statement (parentheses not in original but added to emphasize the concern for balancing individualism and community). Fundamental principles and assumptions include: • Education is best accomplished where relationships are personal and teachers design programmes which honor the linguistic and cultural diversity of the local community [individualism and community]. • Teachers, as respected professionals, are crucial sources of knowledge about teaching and learning. • Curriculum balance is maintained by commitment to children’s individual interests and developmental needs, as well as a commitment to community within and beyond the school’s walls [individualism and community]. • Schools embrace the home cultures of children and their families. Classroom practices reflect these values and bring multiple cultural perspectives to bear {community}. • Students are active constructors of knowledge and learn through direct experience and primary sources [individualism]. • All disciplines—the arts, sciences, humanities, and physical development—are valued equally in an interdisciplinary curriculum. • Decision-making within schools is inclusive of children, parents, and staff [individualism and community]. • The school is a model of democracy and humane relationships confronting issues of racism, classism, and sexism [community].

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• Schools actively support critical inquiry into the complexities of global issues. Children can thus assume the powerful responsibilities of world citizenship [community]. (Network of Progressive Educators 1991:3) These principles can be seen in action at a number of public schools, as progressive educators in the United States have re-emphasized the need for progressive education for children from diverse class, race and ethnic backgrounds (Network of Progressive Educators 1991:3). One such school, Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS), founded in 1985 by Deborah Meier, is a progressive public school in District 4, in East Harlem in New York City. The school is guided by the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools, founded by Theodore Sizer. In many respects, it mirrors the pedagogic practices of the early Dalton School and the City and Country School. It has an integrated curriculum, child-centred teaching methods, an advisory system, and attempts to integrate students into a cohesive community of learners. Although it is not the purpose of this chapter to go into a detailed description and analysis of CPESS, the important point is that unlike the schools discussed in this chapter, it is a public school with a predominantly working-class African-American and Latino student population. The school’s success suggests that the type of progressive education, that has been the province of the middle and upper-middle classes, can work effectively with students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Thus, it behoves us to examine how lessons from the past can inform present practice. The next section of the chapter will examine two schools representative of this type of historical progressivism and analyze how they attempted to balance individualism and community. These schools, the City and Country School and the Dalton School were founded in 1914 and 1919, respectively. Independent progressive schools: two historical case studies During the first part of the twentieth century ‘progressive private day schools began to emerge in growing numbers’ (Kraushaar 1972:81). These schools, often the creation of parent cooperatives or talented practitioners, held the common practice that, ‘each individual has uniquely creative potentialities and that a school in which children are encouraged freely to develop their potential is the best guarantee of a larger society truly devoted to human worth and excellence’ (Cremin 1961:202). These schools, commonly referred to by educators as ‘child-centred’ were often founded by female practitioners ‘spurred by the revolt against “the harsh pedagogy” of the existing schools and by the ferment of change and new thought of the first two decades of the twentieth century’ (Kraushaar 1972:81). Whereas the child-centred schools often emphasized the individualism of the Deweyan ‘dialectic of freedom’, a second branch of progressivism, social reconstructionism, emphasized the community side of the equation, especially with regard to the development of a more just, humane and egalitarian society. Based upon the work of Kenneth Benne (see James 1995) and George Counts (1932), social reconstructionists viewed schools as the key to building a new social order (James 1995). Although the child-centred and social reconstructionist strands of progressive education

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often represented distinctive and separate movements, the child-centred schools mentioned above none the less incorporated many of the community-centred aspects of social reconstructionism. They attempted to meet the individual needs of children and simultaneously integrate them into a democratic community. For the purpose of this study, we have selected two schools representing very different community configurations. They are City and Country School, founded in 1914 by Caroline Pratt in New York City, which focused on early childhood education and was basically an elementary school; the Dalton School, founded in 1919, by Helen Parkhurst, also in New York City, which accommodated both elementary and secondary school students. City and Country School Caroline Pratt, a former practitioner from Fayetteville, New York, began her school, which would eventually become City and Country, in a three-room apartment in Greenwich Village in the fall of 1914. Influenced by current pedagogical thinking, she attempted ‘to try to fit the school to the child, rather than as we were doing with indifferent success—fitting the child to the school’ (Pratt 1948:8). However, as it will become apparent, Pratt also created alongside of her child-centred pedagogy, an embryonic community within the school, which attempted to mirror a democratic society. Interestingly, Pratt began her school as a ‘play school’—a pre-kindergarten school— based on the notion that children learn by play and that for children, play was really hard work (Pratt 1948:9). In particular, Pratt emphasized the use of wooden blocks to help children ‘sort out and make sense of the world around them’ (Murray 1950). Pratt explicitly stated that the programme for the younger children, and the one for the older children as well, was formulated through: work with blocks and kindred materials. Play with these materials is an organizing experience. At three or four, children come to block-building, for example, after a good deal of experiencing with their bodies. They themselves have been every thing…cows, animals of all kinds, engines…every thing that moves…. Now they become interested in the details. What part of the engine makes the whistle? What makes the movement? Who pulls the throttle? Children are interested in these not as mere facts, but as facts to be used in play; or it would be more correct to say that what the information does to the play is to keep it going and help it to organize as a whole, to raise new inquiries and above all to offer new opportunities relationships…this is what block-building means to us. (Pratt 1927:105) However, for Pratt, play was not static: rather she believed that the play experience leads to new opportunities for further experiences and therefore, growth. Although Pratt began her school with six children from working-class families whose tuitions were funded by outside benefactors, she had difficulty attracting and retaining working-class families from the neighbourhood. As she expanded both her pre-school

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and elementary school programmes, in a new building that she rented on West 13th Street, she observed: We did not get as many children as we had hoped. It was one thing for parents to send their children to play school before they were six, but quite another to keep them out of public school and send them to us. They were afraid the children would not be ready for public school later, and they were not far wrong. We had no intention of pushing three R’s on the children until we felt they were ready. (Pratt 1948:48–9) However, if working-class families were unwilling to participate in Caroline Pratt’s pedagogical experiment, artists and writers in the neighbourhood were not. Rather, this group was far more willing to embrace unconventional methods and thus the composition of the student body changed dramatically during the school’s initial years to include mostly Greenwich Village bohemians, along with some upper-class WASPS, and German Jews (Pratt 1948: Chapter 4). Although Caroline Pratt began City and Country with a focus upon the early years of the child, she eventually began to add more classes concerned with academic content, until the school eventually accommodated children to age 13. The pedagogic practice was frankly Deweyan in nature, based on the needs and interests of children at various ages and heavily slanted towards inquiry and experimentation, book learning and experience. Pratt believed that young children should initially learn experimentally and experientially from their immediate environments. Then, as they mature and as their horizons expand, they should be introduced to more sophisticated tasks and materials: As the children grow older, they carry their inherent experimental method into other fields with the help of a teacher and a loosely but positively organized programme. Jobs require trips to stores to purchase things. A school store requires extended buying at wholesale and selling again at retail. Wholesalers need warehouses for supplies and the children visit there. Finally they begin to require books as sources of information; and through these, with the teacher’s help, they extend their inquiries beyond the confines of their own city. They make maps instead of floor schemes. They are pushing back their own horizons. (Pratt 1933:70) As the curriculum of the school began to evolve, so did the practice of assigning specific jobs ‘of actual service’ to the different age groups, so that the school eventually functioned as a self-sufficient community. For example, the Eights (8-year-olds) ran the school store; the Nines, the post office. The Tens produced all of the hand-printed materials for the Sevens, such as flash cards and reading charts while the Elevens ran the print shop and attended to all of the school’s printed needs: attendance lists, library cards, stationery, etc. The Twelves first made toys; then weaving, until they finally settled upon the publication of a monthly publication called The Bookworm’s Digest, which reviewed new children’s books, sent to the group by publishers, in addition to ‘Old Favourites’, a

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particularly popular column in the journal (Pratt 1948:101). As students performed jobs they also learned basic academic skills as well as more sophisticated principles of economics, for example. What emerged from this model was a community of independent young children who were actively engaged in learning, while concurrently contributing to the life of their school community.6 In sum, these students were, to return to Dewey, ‘saturated with the spirit of service’, while learning to be self-directed in the context of the school community—‘the best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious’ (Dworkin 1959:49). While Pratt’s leadership was often less than democratic, nevertheless, her creation of an educational community in which students contribute cooperatively toward its maintenance while learning experientially as well as through traditional means exemplifies Dewey’s idea of a school as a ‘democratic workshop’ (Westbrook 1992:7). For Pratt believed that ‘a school’s greatest value must be to turn out human beings who could think effectively and work constructively, who could in time make a better world than this for living in (Pratt 1948:15). Clearly she attempted to do just that at City and Country. Her school remains today at West 13th Street in Greenwich Village, a small progressive school, struggling to remain true to the vision of its founder, while at the same time meeting the needs of its students at a dramatically different point in time. City and Country provides an important example for contemporary educational reform. It has remained true to the vision of its founder and today is an exemplar of the type of education advocated by the Network of Progressive Educators and the Center for Collaborative Education. Its child-centred, democratic community with its emphasis on freedom and responsibility should serve as a model for contemporary reformers. Throughout its history it has attempted to provide a balance between the individual and community by paying close attention to the developmental needs of individual children and at the same time explicitly connecting children to a democratic school community. The Dalton School Helen Parkhurst, a practitioner from Durand, Wisconsin, founded the Dalton School in New York City in 1919.7 Influenced by Maria Montessori, John Dewey and Carleton Washburne,8 she created the Dalton Plan, which attempted to provide students with a better way to learn; a plan which would permit them to organize and pursue their studies individually, while doing so within an environment which would be conducive to maximum cooperation and interaction between the members of the school community. In essence, Parkhurst, like Pratt, attempted to balance individualism and group life within the school, understanding full well that her students must ultimately be prepared to live in a democratic society. In founding the Dalton School, Helen Parkhurst was aided and encouraged by her benefactress Mrs W.Murray Crane, of Crane Paper in Dalton, Massachusetts. Intrigued by what she had read about Parkhurst, Mrs Crane invited her to Dalton around 1916 to start a school in her home for her young daughter, Louise, and three of her friends. Again, encouraged by Mrs Crane, Helen Parkhurst managed to introduce the Dalton Plan in the local public high school, where it enjoyed a very brief life. In 1919, funded by Mrs Crane, Helen Parkhurst opened the Dalton School on West 72nd Street in New York

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City. In 1929 the school moved to its present location on 89th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. Helen Parkhurst’s early educational efforts attracted a great deal of attention. Her book, Education on the Dalton Plan, was published in 1922 and within six months of its publication, it was translated into fourteen languages. Essentially, Parkhurst was concerned with creating: a community environment to supply experiences to free the native impulses and interests of each individual of the group. Any impediments in the way of native impulses prevent the release of pupil energy. It is not the creation of pupil energy but it is release and use that is the problem of education. (Parkhurst as quoted in E.Dewey 1922:136) The guiding principles of the Dalton Plan were freedom and cooperation. By freedom, Parkhurst intended the student to work free from ‘interruption…upon any subject in which he/she is absorbed, because when interested he/she is mentally keener, more alert, and more capable of mastering any difficulty that may arise in the course of study’ (Parkhurst 1922:16). To this end she abolished bells for she was thoroughly cognizant of the fact that students learn at their own rate and she wished to create a learning environment conducive to their needs. As she dramatically suggests in her book, ‘Freedom is taking one’s time. To take someone else’s time is slavery’ (Parkhurst 1922:16). By cooperation, Parkhurst’s second principle, she meant like Dewey, ‘the interaction of group life’ (Parkhurst 1922:16). Concerned with preparing students to live in a democracy, she attempted to create a school in which maximum cooperation and interaction would occur between students and students, students and teachers. To this end she implemented her principle through the work problem: Under the Dalton Laboratory Plan we place the work problem squarely before him (the student), indicating the standard which has to be attained. After that he is allowed to tackle it as he thinks fit in his own way and at his own speed. Responsibility for the result will develop not only his latent intellectual powers, but also his judgment and character. (Parkhurst 1922:18) The students, at the beginning of the academic year, would be apprised of the year’s work in each subject. They would be required to discuss their plan of action with each teacher, since Parkhurst believed it was essential that both student and faculty members perceive their tasks. Later, the students might discuss their action with other students and, on their recommendations, they might modify their chosen course of study; they might even abandon it and start another. This process, while time-consuming, nevertheless allows students to participate in planning their studies with both faculty and students, interacting with the community in the spirit of cooperation. In addition to planning, cooperation could be achieved through student activities, such as clubs or committees, and the house system, which is an important component of the

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Dalton Plan. The notion of the house, particularly in the high school, was conceived by Parkhurst as an arrangement of the student population into small, mixed-aged clusters meeting with teacher-advisors four times per week for a total period of ninety minutes. The content of the house meeting was varied. It might consist of students planning and executing their work, planning an assembly for the entire school community as a group, thus discharging their responsibility to the school community; or it might deal with such mundane annoyances as students’ difficulties scheduling appointments with faculty members. House discussions might include personal concerns of individual students as well, since Parkhurst believed that students’ attitudes, habits and experiences had a definite bearing on community life within the school. In sum, the house would serve as the institution which would both foster the spirit of cooperation among students while, simultaneously, encouraging the development of the qualities of independence and social awareness among its constituents (Parkhurst 1937:5). Other components of the Dalton Plan consisted of the contract system, the assignment, and lab. Regarding the former, the curriculum was divided into ‘jobs’ usually encompassing twenty-day time periods. Each student would contract for a specific ‘job’ and would sign a contract to that effect.9 Students’ tasks appeared on the assignment: ‘an outline of the contract-job with all its parts’ (Parkhurst 1922:50). Lab, conceived of as a means of assisting the student to grow in independence and responsibility, consisted of large blocks of time in the daily schedule (usually each morning from nine o’clock to noon) which were set aside for students and teachers to work together to fulfil contract obligations. Lab could be either a group or individual experience; students could meet with teachers or not; however, each teacher had a lab room and each student was expected to utilize the resources of teachers. Above all, flexibility was the key to the success of Parkhurst’s particular vision of progressive education. Conferences (classes) were called only as needed; classes (grade meetings) too, were called on a need basis and were usually convened to discuss problems common to a particular age group. Parkhurst’s Dalton exuded a quality of informality, enormous energy, situational decision-making and a high level of engagement on both the part of its faculty and students. In the early years, Dalton’s student population was similar to City and Country’s. It consisted primarily of the children of upper-middle-class and upper-class WASPs, German Jews, artists, intellectuals, writers and musicians. Over the years, the population has changed with increasing numbers of newly monied professionals, including Eastern European Jews, Wall Street investment bankers, and high profile performers, including Diana Ross, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Brokaw, Robert Redford and Woody Allen. Today, Dalton School is a large, thriving institution with three sites and a student body more than three times as large as that during Parkhurst’s time. It has accommodated itself to the educational marketplace and is less progressive, more traditional and more concerned with achievement and college placement.10 The history of the Dalton School is sobering for those committed to democratic, progressive education. Dalton has survived and thrives by catering to the vicissitudes of the market. In doing so, it has sacrificed many of its early progressive principles and become an elite, college preparatory school. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from its curriculum and pedagogic practices. House has become the model for the advisory system at CPESS, although ironically Deborah Meier has never acknowledged

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the influence of Dalton or Parkhurst. Lab may be used as a model for a successful tutorial system. Assignment is in fact the model for the IEP in special education. Additionally, the assignment lends itself to the type of alternative and portfolio assessment currently in vogue. Although the Dalton School now more closely mirrors competitive market capitalism than it does a Deweyan conception of democratic society, throughout its history it has attempted to balance individualism and community. Even today, it struggles with how to instill community values in a student body, often more interested in status and economic success than issues of social justice. In large measure, the transformation of the Dalton School from its early progressive roots to its competitive, elite status today indicates the difficulty that schools have in creating communitarian values within a highly individualistic and competitive society. Discussion Earlier in this chapter, we outlined the principles of the Network of Progressive Educators as an example of the types of reforms that have been called for to improve public education. Further, we suggested that these principles attempt to balance individualism and community. It is unfortunate that contemporary reformers often reinvent the wheel rather than look to the past for guidance. There is much to be learned from the histories of City and Country and Dalton. Because they are independent schools, they are rarely viewed as models for public school improvement. An examination of some of the principles outlined above, however, indicates that both schools practised some of these principles during their histories: • Education is best accomplished where relationships are personal and teachers design programmes which honor the linguistic and cultural diversity of the local community. Both schools had a history of close personal relationships between students, parents, faculty and administration. The creation of community was central to their philosophies and each school attempted to create such a community. Although both schools had conflicts that created political and organizational problems, the creation of a close-knit community for students was always a hallmark of these schools. In terms of honouring the linguistic and cultural diversity of the local community, this is one of the principles ill suited to the Dalton School. It does mirror its local community. The problem is that the community is not truly diverse. To be fair, the Dalton School has attempted to create a more diverse and multicultural population, but this has been less successful in the lower grades where children must rely on their parents for transportation to school. As an independent school with a high tuition, even with significant scholarship aid, the school cannot mirror the diversity of society at large. As we mentioned above, if this disqualifies such a school from consideration as progressive, then most, if not all, independent progressive schools could not be considered progressive. This is to a large degree also true of City and Country, which never was able to attract the diverse students Pratt initially started out with. It too, has made significant efforts to attract a more diverse student body, but fiscal constraints make this difficult.

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• Curriculum balance is maintained by commitment to children’s individual interests and developmental needs, as well as a commitment to community within and beyond the school’s walls. Historically, the Dalton School always had an explicit commitment to the needs and interests of its students, as well as to the community within and beyond its walls. Founded in the spirit of child-centred pedagogy and Dewey’s notion of an embryonic community, Dalton was, and to some extent, still is this kind of school. In terms of commitment to the community within and outside, Dalton has a rich tradition in both areas; a tradition that has waned, but not disappeared. City and Country has always been committed to the needs of its students. Founded as a child-centred school, it continually stressed the developmental and emotional needs of its students in formulating curriculum and pedagogy. In terms of community service, City and Country defined service to the community as service to the school. Both schools actively encouraged students to look to the school as a democratic community and to be active participants in the maintenance of that community. • Schools embrace the home cultures of children and their families. Classroom practices reflect these values and bring multiple cultural perspectives to bear. Perhaps one of the problems at Dalton is that it has too closely mirrored the affluent community in which it is located, rather than successfully challenging the values of materialism and affluence. Throughout its history, Dalton has attempted to instil in its students a social conscience. City and Country is similar to Dalton in this respect, although it has always attempted to create a multicultural curriculum. Additionally, it has made a significant effort to award scholarships to minority students who have had difficulty functioning in traditional settings. • Students are active constructors of knowledge and learn through direct experience and primary sources. Historically, this was true at all levels of the Dalton School. Students were always actively engaged in their own learning and progressive experiments such as the Otis Farm trip exemplified experiential education. Today, this is less true, although students at Dalton are probably more involved in their own learning than students at most traditional schools. Students at City and Country have always used New York City as a laboratory for learning. The use of blocks has always allowed students to be active constructors of knowledge. Both schools relied almost exclusively on primary and literary sources for teaching and learning. • The school is a model of democracy and humane relationships confronting issues of racism, classism, and sexism. Although Dalton has always philosophically confronted issues of racism, classism, and sexism, it is difficult to argue that a school that serves primarily advantaged white

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children can be held up as a paradigm for progressive concerns of this type. Again, it may be unfair to judge the school in this manner given its population, none the less, it cannot be termed a model of democracy in action. City and Country has been similar to Dalton in these respects. • Schools actively support critical inquiry into the complexities of global issues. Children can thus assume the powerful responsibilities of world citizenship. Historically, this has been a hallmark of a Dalton education and continues to be so. Students actively participate in political, environmental, social and community activities and the curriculum is concerned with social problems. In many respects, a Dalton education has always attempted to prepare its students for assuming responsibility along the line envisioned by Dewey in his writings on democracy and education. Although City and Country attempted to do these things until level 8, the absence of a high school made educating for global responsibility somewhat limited. Nevertheless, both schools attempted to prepare students for democratic participation. Conclusion With respect to the tensions between individualism and community so central to contemporary political and educational debates, the history of these schools provides significant evidence of how progressive schools have struggled with these tensions. Throughout its history, the Dalton School has attempted to balance the needs of individuals with the needs of community. In fact, the Dalton Plan itself was a pedagogical attempt to do just that, with house a mechanism for integrating students into the community; lab, a place for individuals to receive individualized instruction and guidance; and assignment, a mechanism for individualizing common assignments and allowing for individual differences in pacing. Likewise, City and Country has always emphasized the idea of democratic community central to Dewey an progressivism. Through its community service and jobs component, students become part of a microcosmic democratic society. At the same time, instruction has always been childcentred and linked to the individual needs of children. A forthcoming book on the history of progressive schools in the United States (Semel 1998) argues that the fundamental paradox of progressive education has been that despite Dewey’s commitment to democracy, most progressive schools, especially independent ones such as Dalton and City and Country, have served advantaged populations. Although many of the contemporary progressive schools such as CPESS have demonstrated that Deweyan progressive education can work for students from less advantaged backgrounds, none the less progressive education in the United States has mirrored the patterns discussed by Bernstein (1990) in England as education for the upper middle classes. In this respect, American education in the twentieth century has resolved the tensions between individualism and community in a class-determined manner. The Durkheimian emphasis on social order has for the most part been accomplished in the public schools where the majority of working-class and minority students have been

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socialized to their place in the dominant social order. The Deweyan balance between democratic community and individualism has been accomplished more so in schools such as Dalton and City and Country that serve a primarily advantaged population. It remains to be seen to what extent public, progressive schools such as CPESS provide a more democratic alternative for less advantaged students. This history suggests that although a Durkheimian analysis is important for understanding education, its functionalist approach is insufficient to analyze the role of education in reproducing social inequalities. Sociological work that incorporates conflict approaches to understanding educational systems is more helpful in understanding how the tensions between individualism and community are played out within schools to ultimately advantage the advantaged (Bernstein 1977, 1990, 1996). Notes 1 Sections of this chapter are adapted from the following with permission: Susan F.Semel and Alan R.Sadovnik, ‘Lessons from the past: individualism and community in three progressive schools’, Peabody Journal of Education, 70, 4:56–85, Summer, 1995; on Dewey and progressive education are adapted from Alan R.Sadovnik, Peter W.Cookson, Jr and Susan F.Semel, Exploring Education (Boston: Allyn and Bacon 1994); the section on the Dalton School is adapted from Susan F.Semel, The Dalton School: The Transformation of a Progressive School (New York: Peter Lang Publishing 1992); the section on the City and Country School is adapted from Susan F.Semel, ‘Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic practice and the history of American progressive education: three case studies’, pp. 337–58 in A.R.Sadovnik, Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation 1995). The research on the City and Country School was supported with a grant from the Spencer Foundation Small Research Grants Program. 2 See Sadovnik et al. 1994: Chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of conservative, liberal, and radical political perspectives on society and education. 3 The use of public school in this chapter refers to the United States, where public refers to state schools. The use of independent school in this chapter refers to private schools in the United States. 4 Semel (1992, 1995, 1998) provides an analysis of the social class origins of progressive education and of three progressive schools. 5 It is important to note that such use of contemporary principles is historically problematic in judging the history of a school, as they impose a contemporary view of progressive education, which may not be appropriate for a given period in the school’s history. Thus, while it is used to examine the school’s history, as well as its current status as a progressive school, it is important to note the limitations of these contemporary definitions of progressive education. Second, as they are written to include both the public and private sectors, and may indeed reflect an emphasis on public education, some of the principles may not easily apply to schools such as the Dalton School and City and Country, especially those related to diverse cultures. None the less, as a heuristic device it is helpful in providing a framework for understanding the transformation of the Dalton School. 6 While we tend to believe that many of these child-centred schools did create important communities, the historian Lawrence A.Cremin takes a less sanguine view in The Transformation of the School, which we have cited earlier. Readers should entertain both points of view; therefore, for a different perspective of Caroline Pratt’s school, see Cremin 1961:201–7. 7 Originally called The Children’s University School.

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8 Throughout her career, Helen Parkhurst maintained that ‘her teachers’ figuratively speaking, were John Dewey and Maria Montessori. Significantly, she omits the work of Carleton Washburne, the architect of the individual system not unlike the Dalton Plan of Parkhurst. It is my contention that she probably was far more aware of Washburne’s work than she was willing to acknowledge and that her work, far from being original, represents a synthesis of the ideas of all three individuals. For a more detailed discussion see Semel 1992: Chapters 1 and 2. 9 The younger children, usually in The Middle School, signed contracts. Students in the high school were monitored through progress charts, which required obtaining faculty signatures as their tasks were completed. 10 For a detailed discussion of the transformation of the school’s population and pedagogic practices see Semel 1992.

References Bellah, R., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W., Swidler, A., and Tipton, S. (1985) Habits of the Heart, Berkeley: University of California Press. ——(1991) The Good Society, New York: Knopf. Bernstein, B. (1977) Class, Codes and Control, Volume 3, London: Routledge. ——(1990) The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse, Volume 4 of Class, Codes and Control, London: Routledge. ——(1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique, London: Taylor and Francis. Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America, New York: Basic.

Counts, G. (1932) Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?, New York: John Day. Cremin, L.A. (1961) The Transformation of the School, New York: Vintage Books. ——(1988) American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, New York: Harper and Row.

Dewey, E. (1922) The Dalton Laboratory Plan, New York: E.P.Dutton and Co. Dewey, J. (1897) ‘My pedagogic creed’, in Martin S.Dworkin, (ed.) Dewey on Education, New York: Teachers College Press. ——(1899) ‘The school and society’, in Martin S.Dworkin (ed.) Dewey on Education, New York: Teachers College Press. ——(1902) ‘The child and the curriculum’, in Martin S.Dworkin (ed.) Dewey on Education, New York: Teachers College Press. ——(1916) Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, New York: Macmillan. ——(1938) Experience and Education, New York: MacMillan. Durkheim, E. (1893b) De la division du travail social, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1933b) by G.Simpson, The Division of Labor in Society, New York: Macmillan. ——(1897a) Le suicide: étude de sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1951a) by J.A.Spaulding and G.Simpson, Suicide, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

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——(1912a) Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1913d) by J.W.Swain, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: Macmillan. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education, New York: Free Press. ——(1938a) L’Evolution pédagogique en France [2 volumes], Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1977a) by Peter Collins, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dworkin, M., ed. (1959) Dewey on Education, New York: Teachers College Press.

Ehrenreich, B. (1983) The Hearts of Men, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Etzioni, A. (1993) Spirit of Community, New York: Crown.

Greene, M. (1988) The Dialectic of Freedom, New York: Teachers College Press.

Hurn, C.J. (1993) The Limits and Possibilities of Schooling (3rd edn), Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

James, M. ed. (1995) Social Reconstruction Through Education: The Philosophy, History, and Curricula of a Radical Ideal, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.

Kraushaar, O.F. (1972) American Nonpublic Schools: Patterns of Diversity, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lasch, C. (1979) The Culture of Narcissism, New York: Norton.

Mills, C.W. (1959) White Collar, New York: Oxford. Murray, J.W. (1950) ‘Philosophy and practice at City and Country’, City and Country, unpublished materials prepared for student teachers.

Network of Progressive Educators (1991) ‘Statement of principles’, Pathways, 7, 2: 3.

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Parkhurst, H. (1922) Education on the Dalton Plan, New York: E.P.Dutton and Co. ——(1937) ‘Report of the Dalton School to the Commission on the relation of school and college’, New York: Dalton School Archives (mimeographed). Pratt, C. (1924) Experimental Practice in the City and Country School, New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. ——(1927) ‘Making environment meaningful,’ Progressive Education, Progressive Education Association, IV:1, April–May–June. ——(1933) ‘Learning by experience’, Child Study, 11:3. ——(1948) I Learn From Children, New York: Simon and Schuster.

Sadovnik, A.R. (1991) ‘Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic practice: a structuralist approach’, Sociology of Education, 48:1, 48–64. ——(ed.) (1995) Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Sadovnik, A.R., Cookson, P.W. Jr and Semel, S.F. (1994) Exploring Education, Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Semel, S.F. (1992) The Dalton School: The Transformation of a Progressive School, New York: Peter Lang. ——(1995) ‘Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic practice and the history of American progressive education: three case studies’, in A.R.Sadovnik, Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation. ——(1998, forthcoming) ‘Schools of Tomorrow’, Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education, New York: Peter Lang. Semel, S.F. and Sadovnik, A.R. (1995) ‘Lessons from the past: individualism and community in three progressive schools’, Peabody Journal of Education, 70, 4: 56–85.

Tönnies, F. (1957) Community and Society, New York: Harper. (Originally published 1887.) Tyack, D. and Hansot, E. (1981) Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1920–1980, New York: Basic Books.

Westbrook, R. (1991) John Dewey and American Democracy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ——(1992) ‘The Dewey School and workplace democracy’, Pathways, 8, 3.

11 EMILE DURKHEIM IN THE CONTEXT OF THE AMERICAN MORAL EDUCATION PARADIGM Arthur K.Ellis The emergence and evolution of moral education in America From the very beginning, education for public and personal morality was a centrepiece of the American school curriculum. In the New England towns of colonial America where tax-supported schools were established in the first half of the seventeenth century, it was clear to all concerned that the school experience was designed to fit children for a contributing role in spiritual, civic and family life. Learning to read, write and cipher served the pragmatic purposes of preparation for work and domestic science, for participation in the commonweal and for deeper involvement in public and private worship. Home, workplace, church and town hall were agreed on the goal structure. Citizenship, too, was implied as an educational goal. Of course, the inhabitants of British North America were not technically citizens, but subjects of the Crown. Nevertheless, the sheer distance separating daily life in New England from the mother country was such that a distinctly different society emerged, one that was less class conscious and which encouraged a greater sense of individual responsibility and freedom, as well as a sensibility of one’s duty to participate in the commonweal. These ideas were clearly reflected in the purpose and execution of the school curriculum. New England’s Puritans were at the leading edge of the literacy movement, largely because they were convinced that each person must search the Scriptures for the keys to his or her salvation, but also because they saw the practical, civic and moral applications of being able to keep accounts, read bills and stay generally informed. Thus sacred and secular purposes were basically of one accord. Academics and morality were cut from the same cloth. The curriculum of horn books, spellers and readers of the time would appear to latetwentieth-century Americans to more closely resemble Sunday School literature than a public school curriculum. But to the colonials, what was preached about on Sunday must logically also be taught at school, reinforced at home and made manifest in public life. Discontinuities of civic, school, church and family life were neither encouraged nor often found. The idea taken for granted by present-day Americans, that church and state should be kept separate, did not occur to them any more than did the idea that differences and pluralism were to be ‘celebrated’ above unity and commonality. In fact, throughout New England of the seventeenth century various civil and legislative bodies took formal legal steps to ensure the learning of the church catechism by youth. As the historian Lawrence Cremin noted, ‘for most 17th-century Americans the church was the most significant

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community in which they participated outside the family: it served as a forum for the exchange of views, a market place for the transaction of business and a rostrum for the communication of news’ (Cremin 1970:157). As a result, the goals of church, state, school and home were unified in a way that is difficult for people today to imagine. If one were to view these various elements of colonial New England society as the integral parts of a complex interrelated social system, one thing stands out in sharp relief: namely, the largely agreed upon set of assumptions on which spiritual, educational, familial and civic goals were founded. It is a commonplace of complex systems theory that a productive system must be somehow anchored in an underlying agreement on basic issues. Without this, the system tends to be weakened because members spend an inordinate proportion of their time and energy attempting to revisit or define purpose, maintain order and promote harmony. No doubt the success of colonial New England in achieving what was then the world’s highest literacy rates coupled with low crime rates was a function of a well-regulated, clearly defined system. In contrast, today’s communities, schools and classrooms are examples of complex heterodox systems that must spend vast amounts of energy in searching for some sort of orthodoxy that will encompass great diversities of belief and senses of propriety, a nearly impossible task in its own right, but one that diminishes the schools’ academic mission. Comparisons of America today with colonial America of nearly four centuries ago are useful only to a point. The moral/social consensus achieved in the New England towns lasted only a little more than a century and a half, by which time the society had become far more variegated, eroding the unanimity of propriety and purpose which had previously pertained. And while much can be said in favour of the essentially closed system of early New England, it can also be fairly noted that it was a repressive place for those who were at odds with prevailing opinion. Those who doubt this should come to know the stories of Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson and the fictional Hester Prynne. But a far more open system was in the offing, largely because of the heterodoxy which predictably would occur when so many could read and therefore gain access to a wide range of ideas. In this sense, the goal of universal literacy, well achieved, was the undoing of the foundations of the earlier system. In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century, Unitarianism, free thinking and scepticism had become pervasive intellectual forces in civic, literary and religious circles, as exemplified in school life by the work of Horace Mann, who throughout the first half of the nineteenth century expended much effort to shape the schools as places of Christian values but not of Christian doctrine. Mann’s Twelfth Annual Report to the Board of Education of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, delivered in 1848, was a summing up of the themes of his previous annual reports. In it he quoted the Massachusetts school law that: explicitly and solemnly enjoins it upon all teachers…to exert their best endeavours, to impress upon the minds of children and youth committed to their care and instruction, the principles of piety, justice and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity, moderation, and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society, and the basis upon which a republican constitution is founded. (Cremin 1957)

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Thus the initial separation of public school education from the direct religious influence which had previously been the cornerstone of the curriculum of morals and ethics was effected. The Bible may be a source of morality, even ultimate truth, and a valued teaching tool at school, Mann reasoned, but no sectarian doctrine was to be taught in its name, only its values, virtues and precepts. Mann’s ideas, though controversial at the time, gradually took hold, especially in schools where heterodox populations were to be found. In most cases, the principle of ‘whatever the traffic will bear’ actually became the norm. In rural communities, small towns and areas of ethnic/religious homogeneity, or where one persuasion held hegemony, the teaching of morality continued to be linked directly to the prevailing doctrine. Where complete agreement was not possible, a vaguely liberal brand of Protestant/patriotic orthodoxy, pretty much what Mann had in mind, generally prevailed. Catholics, the one group often large enough to challenge such orthodoxy, typically formed their own private parish schools where sufficient numbers were present. Moral education in the twentieth century In the twentieth century, coincident with immigration patterns to the US of increased ethnic and religious diversity, this informal solution to the foundation of moral teaching in the public schools became increasingly tenuous. Finally, with a series of Supreme Court decisions from 1947 to 1962, in which former year the Court ruled in the case of Everson vs. Board of Education that an ‘impregnable wall’ exists between church and state, and in which latter year the Court ruled in the case of Engle vs. Vitale that prayer in school is unconstitutional, it was legally interpreted that religion was to play no role in the attempt by teachers to teach morality. Of course, as President Andrew Jackson once said in another context, ‘the Supreme Court has made its decision, now let the Supreme Court enforce its decision’. The principle of ‘whatever the traffic will bear’ continued to prevail. Secularized moral instruction, the replacement for Bible-based teaching, has had no less difficulty finding acceptance, however. The term ‘character education’ had already become the term of choice of progressives (see, e.g., Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education 1918) as a way of avoiding the conflicts inherent in a religiously based curriculum of moral education. Thus religious precepts, such as honesty, respect for elders, etc., could continue to be taught because they are generally agreed on by most religions and are also fundamental to most civil moral codes. As many have noted, the difference between teaching and learning a given principle of morality founded on a religious belief and that same principle without a religious foundation can be found in the nature of the sanctions themselves. Thus, while it is useful to note that disparate constituencies might well agree on certain principles, it is also necessary to keep in mind that the different reasons why people come to seemingly similar conclusions have not been a trifling matter in the annals of attempts to teach virtue. The studies of Hartshorne and May (1928–1932) raised serious questions about the efficacy of attempts to teach morality in institutional settings. They set out to determine to what extent participation in organizations whose purpose is expressly that of moulding character (e.g., Sunday school, Scouts, etc.) yielded evidence of efficacious results.

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Hartshorne and May concluded that the evidence was lacking. They found no support for the typical didactic instruction given by teachers, scout leaders, etc., designed to lift children’s morals and character. The research was deficient by today’s standards, but that did little to diminish its dampening effect in the years following publication of the results. The practical result of this by the 1940s was a redirected attempt to teach school children something called ‘citizenship education.’ Citizenship education seemed to fit reasonably within the parameters of the school subject called social studies, thus giving moral/character/citizenship education a niche within an already existing component of the school curriculum. Citizenship education seems to have found a home at school—witness the attempts to explicate its virtues over the years, including the Citizenship Education Project of the 1950s, developed at Teachers College, Columbia University and Civitas: a Framework for Civic Education (1991), developed by the Center for Civic Education and the Council for the Advancement of Citizenship. To be a good citizen meant many things, among them respect for people of different races and religions, respect for country and property, and involvement in school government. Two works serve as bookends, encompassing the qualities of the character and moral education movement in American education during the half century from the end of the Second World War to the present. Henry Lester Smith’s Character Education: A Survey of Practice in the Public Schools of the United States (1949) and Philip Jackson, Life in Classrooms (1968) represent in different ways attempts to capture the sense of the social/moral fabric of school life. Each of the two works, Jackson’s more so than Smith’s, is an effort to portray the day-to-day aspects of the social/moral fabric of classroom and school life apart from what might be advocated by experts or touted by professional organizations. Smith’s approach is that of the surveyor, Jackson’s that of the ethnographer. Despite the differences in time and design, the results they report are far more alike than different. Curiously, nowhere in Jackson’s book does the reader find any reference to Smith’s earlier work. One supposes this omission is either because of ignorance of the historical record on Jackson’s part, a typical condition of educational studies, or because he and his coauthors felt Smith’s work need not for some reason be acknowledged. If Jackson and colleagues thought, for instance, that Smith’s study was lacking technical merit, why not acknowledge its existence and say so? One can only guess, but the reader is left with the disquieting thought that Jackson’s contribution is something less than it could have been had the backcloth to his own work been more thoroughly explored. Smith, then emeritus dean of the school of education at Indiana University, had been commissioned by the Palmer Foundation in cooperation with the Hugh Birch-Horace Mann fund of the National Education Association, ‘to ascertain the present status of character education in the different states…’ (Smith 1949:3). To accomplish this daunting task, he sent letters of inquiry to all forty-eight state superintendents of public instruction, all executive secretaries of state teacher associations, all state organizations of the Parent—Teachers Association (PTA) and to every fifth county or city superintendent of schools in the United States. He particularly sought concrete examples of practice to which his respondents might point, thereby affording him some glimpse beyond the official statements that often mask school-based realities. Smith’s research gives us a compelling, if slightly idealized portrait of character education in American schools in the late 1940s. It was, after all, an exercise in self-

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reporting. Smith himself concluded that the ‘generous response’ he received ‘may be taken as an indication of the deep and widespread interest in the development of character in the youth of America’ (Smith 1949:4). Parsing the information found in the many responses, Smith noted a divide between those who advocated what he called the ‘direct’ approach to character education and those who advocated the ‘indirect’ approach, an issue that remains on the table to this day. Direct approaches mainly include planned, overt attempts to instruct students in the elements of good character, while indirect approaches are contextual in that they happen along the way, and they rely on the old maxim that character is better caught than taught. Jackson and colleagues observed much the same thing, leaving little room for doubt concerning their own sense of priority, however, when they write that: We believe that the unintentional outcomes of schooling, the ones teachers and administrators seldom plan in advance, are of greater moral significance—that is, more likely to have enduring effects—than those that are intended and consciously sought. (Jackson et al. 1993:44) Smith, preferring not to make such a choice, temporized over the dualism when he wrote that ‘those who believe in and use both the direct and the indirect methods probably have the best of the argument’ (Smith 1949:10). So, if Smith and Jackson found the moral realities of school life to be much the same fifty years apart, what are they? Smith suggested twenty patterns of activity; Jackson et al., eight. Of Jackson’s eight categories, seven were found as well by Smith. One, which Jackson titled, ‘the morality of the curricular substructure’, is not directly addressed by Smith, and it represents an important but easily overlooked moral dimension. Smith included certain categories not found by Jackson, but this is understandable in light of Smith’s all-encompassing view of school life compared with Jackson’s near complete focus on life in classrooms. Smith, for example, describes the elements of character education found in extracurricular activities which take place after school (athletics, drama, etc.). Jackson defends his more restricted mapping quite reasonably when he writes that classrooms ‘form the heart of every school. They are where the action is, as the saying goes. (Jackson et al. 1993:xix). Because the eight categories described by Jackson give us a contemporary view of the moral aspects of school life, I will briefly outline them here. 1 Moral instruction as a formal part of the curriculum. Only in parochial schools did Jackson find formal courses in moral and/or character education. Those courses were typically dedicated to religious instruction and to the moral behaviours which represent the applications of biblical principles. In public schools no secularized equivalents were observed. 2 Moral instruction within the regular curriculum. This category includes attempts by teachers to explicate moral precepts by teaching specific lessons which illustrate exemplary behaviours, for example, heroism, dedication, patriotism, etc., or social justice issues such as the plight of the homeless, slavery, etc. Such lessons were found most commonly in English and social studies classes. 3 Rituals and ceremonies. This category includes such school or classroom routines as

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pledge of allegiance, pep rallies, assemblies, guest speakers, holiday celebrations, birthdays, etc. Jackson describes these activities as filled with ‘symbolic richness’. Visual displays with moral content. In every classroom and school visited by Jackson and his colleagues, they found posters, pictures, slogans and other reminders of positive values and good behaviours. Spontaneous interjection of moral commentary into ongoing activity. Jackson et al. 1993 cited numerous instances of situations in which some untoward behaviour had occurred (stealing, lying, tattling, etc.) and in which the teacher had addressed the issue in order to make a moral point. They saw as well instances in which teachers offered spontaneous praise for ‘good’ or productive behaviours by students. Classroom rules and regulations. Jackson notes that ‘rules are often the surface manifestations of broader moral principles that reflect the individual teacher’s vision of his or her role in the classroom’ (Jackson et al. 1993:14). The rules of conduct which govern classrooms, whether arrived at democratically or otherwise, set the agenda of routine behaviours that allow the system to function. The morality of the curricular substructure. As noted above, this category did not appear in Smith’s survey. It has to do with everything from the sequencing of curriculum (for example, chronological sequencing of history courses, simple to complex in mathematics) to assumptions of truthfulness and honesty on the part of teacher and students to assumptions of worthwhileness of material studied. Expressive morality within the classroom. This category encompasses the gestures, expressions, body language, nonverbal communications, etc., practised by teachers toward students as well as the ambience of the classroom landscape itself.

Smith’s categorization includes nearly everything found by Jackson et al., and a number of things not found by them, but it is in some ways rather more rich, not merely because it acknowledges the ethos of the school at large as a character-building enterprise, but also because it focuses on training and habit formation, a phenomenon that seems to have eluded Jackson’s grasp. On the other hand, Smith’s findings may be more idealized simply because schools and teachers self-reported while Jackson et al. chronicled events as they transpired. A theory of moral development based in Kantian liberalism was proposed in the 1950s by Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg’s theory of moral development is an adaptation of Jean Piaget’s stage theory of intellectual development, and it suggests that a hierarchy of stages exists through which people progress developmentally. Although John Dewey’s work certainly presages it, Kohlberg’s effort represents the first serious attempt to create a theory-to-practice model of moral reasoning that could be used in school settings. By the late 1960s it had come into use in teacher training and in the two decades to follow it was to become one of the most researched moral education theories in American educational history. Based primarily on the principle of justice and the just society, and later tempered by the thinking of Carol Gilligan (1982) to include principles of relationship and caring, the model relies mainly on the use of moral dilemmas which serve as the vehicle for dialogue into appropriate behaviours. The 1970s saw the rise of a competing model which was values clarification. Values clarification, based on the work of Simon et al. 1971 (although a case can be made that the ideas of Carl Rogers (1964) represent its foundation), emphasizes the process of

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deciding above the content of a decision itself. According to its proponents, values clarification is a process of choosing freely from a range of alternatives and publicly affirming one’s choice. The guiding premise is that students, who are rarely given an opportunity by moralizing teachers to say what they think, especially if what they think is at odds with teacher opinion, should be encouraged to speak their mind in a free and open marketplace of ideas. The many criticisms of values clarification, especially its relativistic perspective taking, ultimately brought about its demise. However, at its pinnacle it had become one of the most widespread and commercially successful educational innovations ever known. The succeeding movement, known as character education, began its rise to popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Citing Aristotle’s dictum that moral behaviour is of greater importance than moral reasoning, proponents of character education place great emphasis on what the sociologist Robert Bellah (1985) has called, ‘habits of the heart’. Habitual behaviours based on traditional values are the sought-after outcome. The key is to reach the young through stories, examples and precept. Advocates such as Thomas Lickona (1991), William Bennett (1991) and Kevin Ryan (Ryan and Lickona 1992) cite the need for training in virtues in light of the alarming statistics on drug use, suicide, antisocial activities, etc., by the young. At this point, the support for character education on the part of parents and many teachers has been warm indeed. In summary, it can be said that these movements mirrored the times in which they appeared. The 1940s were ultimately a time of triumph over dreaded enemies, and were marked by America’s emergence as a serious player on the world stage. Citizenship had new meaning to a people wrested from isolation and eager to extol the virtues of democracy. The rise of cognitive psychology as a discipline in the 1950s was no doubt much of the reason for the popularity of Kohlberg’s subsequent cognitive approach to moral development. The turbulent times of the 1960s and 1970s provided the matrix for the values clarification movement to emerge. And the reaction to the relativistic thought so prevalent in those decades set the stage for the emergence, or re-emergence, of the more traditional character education movement. The history of the American school curriculum shows us that there is, for better or worse, a cumulative effect to innovations. Thus while it is somewhat useful to peg this or that decade as the time in which certain ideas prevailed, it is also instructive to note that any given trend leaves some residue in the wake of its crest. At its best, the system operates in such fashion as to achieve meaningful syntheses of the old and the new. At its worst it functions ahistorically, claiming only the new and ignorant of past contributions. Of the four major efforts mentioned above, three seem to have begun to move to the level of synthesis. The values clarification movement, easily the most pervasive of the four at its height, appears to have lost substantial backing to the point of general demise. However, citizenship education, moral education and character education remain topics of great concern. That some synthesis seems to have been achieved is documentable in such articles as Marilyn Keat’s ‘Beyond the virtues—principles debate’, which appeared in the Fall 1992 issue of Educational Theory. She writes insightfully that ‘hermeneutic ethics suggests that moral education is about both character and autonomy, about acting rightly and thinking carefully, about cultivating virtue and a sense of duty’ (Keats 1992:456). The clear implication is that efforts by teachers to reach students must focus

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not merely upon admonitions to personal and civic duties but upon thoughtful, reflective reasons of engagement. Building on this integrative theme, Thomas Lickona (1991) suggests four broad strategies or classroom processes, including the building of self-esteem and such communal virtues as respect, trust, friendship and equality; learning to cooperate and care for one another; the practice of moral discourse and reflection on right and wrong; and participation in decision-making and rule-making. Lickona’s idea is that all of these processes must be in place in order to ensure adequate progress toward achieving the goal of an improved social fabric. Basically, Lickona’s idea is one of community and democracy, long-familiar themes in character and moral education. His argument comports rather well with Spady and Bell’s (1996) thesis that all decisions in an organization should be made at the lowest possible level. This significant contribution to group process is based on two premises: first that an adequate flow of information and ideas is present throughout the system, and secondly, that adequate resources are available to implement the decisions that are reached. Durkheim and modern American education It is with the social system of the classroom in mind that we turn to an analysis of Durkheim’s ideas about moral education. To ask how relevant they are for American education at the turn of a new millennium is to pose a reasonable question. I leave it to the reader to decide whether his thoughts remain penetrating to this day. John Dewey wrote, that ‘it is a commonplace of educational theory that the establishing of character is a comprehensive aim of school instruction and discipline’. He wrote further that although ‘the school cannot immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social conditions…it should contribute through the type of intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the improvement of those conditions’. Dewey’s sense of school was that of a ‘miniature democracy’ where young people would engage in school government, real-world projects and reflective thinking, in the presence of the ‘standardized conventional factor’ of school life found ‘in the question of manners’…especially…in the ‘manifestations of politeness and courtesy’ (Dewey 1916, 1938). That the schools ought to be there to help children learn ‘one of the most important lessons of life, that of mutual accommodation and adaptation’, was, to Dewey’s way of thinking, at the heart of the educational enterprise. For Dewey, freedom was ‘identical with self-control’. Emile Durkheim’s ideas, like Dewey’s, about the nature of discipline and morality as educational goals, emanate from his considered perceptions, rather than from empirical study, of the realities of school life, particularly with respect to what it could offer as a mediating force and productive linkage between the nurturing and sentimental effects of home and family life on the one hand and the more formal, contractual nature of civic life on the other. His concern that moral education be based on reason rather than on revelation represents an argument for the incorporation of dispassionate intellectual concepts accompanied by training in socially redeeming habits in the shaping of young citizens. The problem though, as he noted, is the ‘distance between this very general

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receptivity of the child to habit and suggestion, on the one hand, and the clear conception of moral law, on the other’. Stage theorists such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, as well as the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, have argued convincingly that younger school children, especially, are simply not capable of bridging the distance. Such advocates of character education for children as William Bennett, Thomas Lickona and Kevin Ryan prefer to place emphasis on training in virtuous habits through precept, stories and object lessons. As Durkheim pointed out, ‘one can enlist the dominance of habit, so readily established in the child, to give him a preference for an ordered life’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:145). It is probably true that the starting point for either a community or a classroom is found in the ‘spirit of discipline’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a: 208), which brings into concert authority and regularity. Durkheim’s observation that ‘an undisciplined class lacks morality’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:150) is a reasonable point of consideration for anyone who has spent time in classrooms. But to say that a class lacks morality, or has morality for that matter, is to focus on the collective or prevailing moral level of the group, something that many American teachers have been reluctant to do, preferring as they so often do to single out the behaviours of individuals or certain combinations of individuals for merit or condemnation. The moral function of discipline, that is, the achievement of self-control and self-restraint by children, is best developed by the effective teacher, who is ‘responsible for the spirit and moral unity of the class’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:248). And, of course, teachers ought to recognize and cultivate both the individual and collective morality. Thus if the school and the classroom are to be considered as learning communities, then the authority must be legitimate, order must be maintained and justice must prevail. Durkheim addressed with great clarity the need for children to acquire rule-governed habits under the leadership of teachers, whose ‘binding advice’ comes not from their own comfort-level-seeking notions of propriety but who possess and act at a higher level of consciousness than society’s concept of discipline, attachment and autonomy. Whereas Aristotle might have been satisfied with training and indoctrinating the young in upright moral habits, Durkheim seems to suggest that education, which implies reflection and understanding, must also be added to the equation. Of course, it should be, but this presents two problems of some significance. First of all, there is little evidence to support the idea that schools are indeed places of education. Even the most casual observer should realize that American schools, and the institutions that prepare teachers, with their emphasis on the technical interests so evident in the form of crowd control, behavioural objectives, disconnected skills, scripted lessons, dumbed-down textbooks and standardized tests, are far more interested in how than in why, whether the subject is reading, mathematics or the enhancing of self-esteem. The other factor which comes into play is that of the ability of the young to understand the subtleties and complexities of moral choice. If one is to believe such stage theorists as Piaget and Kohlberg, then moral rules among students of the early to middle school years would have the same valence as tonal predicates in the Valley of the Deaf, learnable but at what level? Recent brain research indicates that the double bind one encounters is that the brain is fluid during the early years and is capable of internalizing foreign language, do’s and don’t’s, and other later-on more difficult tasks without much reflection on meaning. But it becomes ‘hard wired’ at about age 11 at which time it is extremely difficult to change a person’s moral

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perspective, much less to speak a foreign language without an accent and without continuous internal translation of what something ‘really’ means. Durkheim advocates a secularized form of school/community, without the informed consent, disapproval and sanctions of the divine. His challenge is to convince us that allegiance to community or society can cause individuals to maintain not only a public sense of discipline and morality, but an interior compass as well, not an easy task when even children can understand that God always knows what we think and feel, but teacher and classmates may not. As Hobbes pointed out, Leviathan will punish, but only if he knows. Attempts to make a Leviathan God, and to know everything, have generally been disastrous. Dostoevsky had written that if God does not exist, all things are permissible, but Durkheim’s argument of an essentially secular religion in which God exists in the form of society invokes the sacred nature of public policy. He writes that ‘we have committed ourselves to provide in our schools a completely rational moral education, that is to say, excluding all principles derived from revealed religion’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:19), where the obligation to authority and to the common good derives from a belief in the ‘task and the greatness of that task’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:155). At the classroom level, ‘children, must share the belief, and they must believe in the teacher’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:174). This argument based on faith seems to answer the problem arising from the incomplete development of children’s logical and analytical capabilities. Using the analogy of teacher as priest, Durkheim calls the teacher ‘the interpreter of the great moral ideas of his time and country’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:155). Durkheim’s position of a secular moral foundation originating in the fabric of the social structure was hardly a new idea. It was noted some time ago that man is the measure of all things. As stated previously, Horace Mann’s mid-nineteenth-century vision was for common school training in a set of moral precepts to be taught to students based on biblical teachings, on the traditions of Protestant Christianity and on an implicit general belief in God, but without any specific doctrine or overt attempts to convert students to any religious belief beyond a kind of generic cultural Christianity. Mann, a Unitarian, was convinced that Judaeo-Christian principles but not Christianity were the most practical answer. Durkheim points out the danger of such an approach, noting that the predictable outcome is an impoverished version (what, for example, is the source of authority?) of the old method. The problem persists to this day, and character education curriculum builders would do well to pay heed to Durkheim’s cautionary note. Of course, in 1840s America, the main divisions were not over whether moral teachings should be based on the Bible and Christianity in particular, as they were in Durkheim’s France some decades later, but over specific doctrinal differences, especially in light of the growing numbers of Catholics in a previously Protestant world. Durkheim’s work, although he developed it with a different place and time in mind, accommodates not merely the increasing religious diversity of American life, but the growing secularization of the society in general. Currently, the religious affiliations of American citizens bear little resemblance to that of seventeenth-century British North America or even of the nineteenth-century United States. The rise of evangelical denominations, the shift to a Roman Catholic plurality, the decline of Protestant mainline churches, the increasingly widespread lack of formal religious affiliation, interest in so-called New Age, Eastern religions and the increased

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numbers of followers of Islam, are representative of the changing religious matrix of latetwentieth-century America. And the interest in teaching school children a set of values that can be believed in and held in common has intensified in recent times in spite of the fact that finding common ground has become increasingly difficult. Certain important Supreme Court decisions, beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1970s, made it clear that the majority Court opinion was that a ‘permanent and impregnable wall’ had been erected between church and state. Prominent among those decisions were Engle vs. Vitale in 1962 which disallowed school-sponsored scripture reading, Abington vs. Shempp in 1963, which disallowed school-sponsored prayer, and Lemon vs. Kurtzman in 1971 which established the so-called Lemon Test, namely that any treatment of religion must have a clearly secular purpose. In more recent times the impregnable wall has come to resemble a semi-permeable membrane as a Court of different composition and inclination has made concessions back toward the previously held doctrine of limited interaction between church and school. Nevertheless, Durkheim’s vision of a secular influence in moral education has been realized for all practical purposes, though at a less theoretical and more superficial level than he might have wished. A phenomenon accompanying this realization can be seen in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s (1995) opinion of a loss of ‘the vocabulary needed to distinguish truth from falsehood and good from evil’. It is a largely untestable hypothesis whether this loss, if actual, is owing to an impoverished vocabulary which bespeaks an impoverished experience. Wilson argues in his introduction to Durkheim’s work, Moral Education (1925a/t.1961a), that Durkheim’s theoretical discussion of moral education bears little resemblance to the applications of moral education in American school life and that his influence has been therefore slight. Wilson notes that American education ‘is much more child-centred, an individual matter, an enterprise dedicated…to the maximum development of the individual personality’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:xii). There is something to Wilson’s argument. This is especially so if one were to construct an image of American schools based on official goal statements and the prescriptions found in school district guides. Self-realization, self-reliance and self-concept are all part of the goal structure of American public education. But the routines and rhythms of classroom life, as we know them on the basis of systematic observation, suggest a rather different reality. Critics of the schools point to them as places where neither Durkheim’s vision nor Wilson’s perception of reality prevails. It is debatable whether Durkheim’s conception of the public school as the seedbed for germinating morality has come to fruition in most American public schools, but not for the reasons Wilson cites. Durkheim’s sense of the potential of the public school as the matrix in which moral ideas and habits could most reasonably be engendered was neither new nor certainly his alone. Much of Durkheim’s brief echoes Quintilian who argued the necessity of a just and caring teacher who modelled positive character traits in a public setting where daily opportunity for moral growth occurs quite naturally when people spend time together. And it was an idea that enjoyed considerable support among school theorists in America, including John Dewey (1916:358), who wrote that: The school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all

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those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his powers for social ends. Durkheim and Dewey appear to be in agreement that school as community involves the intended blurring of ends and means so that the processes of socialization are as important, if not more so, than the more familiarly hoped-for outcomes of schooling. Durkheim wrote that ‘the domain of the moral begins when the domain of the social begins’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:64), because it is in such settings that discipline, affiliation and autonomy can emerge. However, it can quite readily be argued from the evidence that most present-day American public schools are hardly centres of social activity. The curriculum researcher John Goodlad (1984) has observed that school students mainly learn alone in groups. He recorded, further, that the typical student initiates about seven minutes of conversation per day, and that teachers tend to out-talk their students by about three to one. It doesn’t take a mathematics major to calculate that if students outnumber teachers about thirty to one, then classrooms are probably not hotbeds of conversation. It would appear that the ‘domain of the social’ has yet to emerge in schools, most of which are so large as to encourage alienation and discourage participation for many children. Durkheim wrote that ‘to act morally is to act in terms of the collective interest’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:59). This second aspect of morality, that is, attachment to and identification with the group, is the basic attribute of the concept of society. If discipline represents limits, then society represents belonging and commitment, the former concept a sense of modesty and constraint, the latter the matrix of responsible opportunity. Echoes of Durkheim’s ‘collective interest’ are found quite readily in those attempts to create ‘just societies’ in schools and classrooms, in teachers’ attempts to model and explicate fairness in the name of character education, and in the presently popular emphasis on citizenship education in American schools. The so-called ‘project method’, a curricular staple of the progressive educational movement, and popular today as an integral part of the interdisciplinary approach to curriculum, is defended in part because it creates situations that are above all social in nature, and those social situations provide ample opportunity for students, under the guidance of a caring teacher, to practise obligation and to experience directly the ‘collective interest’. To credit Durkheim as the source, for better or worse, of these attempts to teach morality to the young is to venture beyond the evidence, but the ethos he helped to create is often cited as a driving force in these curricular innovations. School life is public and congregational, so it would seem to be a place where social cohesion might naturally occur. And so it does for some. But it appears to happen around the edges of the school day and to a select few rather than at the core. A genuine sense of belonging is easy to find among students who participate in school athletics, student government, service clubs, drama and theatre presentations, newspaper and yearbook productions, debate teams, choirs and bands, etc., in other words, the extra curriculum. Robert Maynard Hutchins observed some years ago that the students who resort to the extra curriculum do so because the curriculum is so stupid. Unfortunately, participants in the extra curriculum represent a very small portion of a student body, and those who participate in one area of extracurricular activity tend to be the same persons who

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participate in other areas of it. A varsity basketball team with twelve players who represent a high school of 1,500 students is not at all unusual. Such disproportionality gives an exaggerated sense of importance to the involvement of the few while the experience of the many ranges from tactical support (student managers, etc.), to vicarious support (student fans), to nil (the vast majority). These conditions can be ameliorated by attention to such variables as school size and strategic leadership, but both of those are easier to write about than to change. Students spend most of their school day in classes where, one supposes, Durkheim imagined that attachment to the group would take place. In my experience, where schools are successful in promoting attachment to the group, it is almost never in connection with classroom life or with the rational, academic curriculum. In Russian schools, students are assigned to a class of twenty-five or so who enter first grade together and who stay together, as far as is possible, throughout primary and secondary school. No doubt some group attachment takes place as a result. But for American schools, the geographic mobility factor alone would make this difficult to achieve. More than that, a typical secondary student finds him/herself in five or six different class configurations per day, often strategically separated from those of supposedly different abilities or interests. All this is compounded with experiments in social engineering such as busing and racial balancing, leaving little opportunity for group affiliation connected with academic experience to emerge. The academic curriculum, unlike the extra curriculum, rarely sets the conditions for the need for transcendent experiences of childhood and youth such as one finds in a socially constructed learning environment. Autonomy is the most problematic aspect of Durkheim’s notion of moral excellence. It may bear some considerable resemblance to Aristotle’s concept of happiness. I am certain that it is different from, say, Carl Rogers’ ideas of self-realization where far more attention is paid to the soaring heights of individual aspiration, at least in school-based interpretations, than to the individual’s obligations to the collective. Durkheim rejects the familiar argument that ‘since society consists only of individuals, it cannot have a character different from that of the individuals who compose it’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:61). He envisions a society transformed by the ‘sheer fact of their [individuals] combination’ into ‘something other than the sum of its parts’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:61). The work of Vygotsky (1986), so influential in present-day attempts to reform American education, addresses this same socio-cultural phenomenon as potentially transformative of classroom life, both intellectually and socially. As Vygotsky’s focus on the collective nature of classroom life under the direction of an interventionist teacher eclipses Piaget’s (1970) more naturalistic, individualistic, idiosyncratic sense of child development in the application of educational psychology to school teaching and learning, one might make the case for the ascendancy of Durkheim’s plea that a collective consciousness must be instilled in the child by something more than the autonomous play of human relations. It is, he wrote, the business of the school to organize it methodically, that is, ‘the function of linking the child to society’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:79). The teacher must support the child’s quest for autonomy as a quest to achieve a more complete understanding of the relationship between self-fulfilment and obligation. The source of moral authority is perhaps where Durkheim’s theory is most problematic, at least in light of the school’s ability to be convincing about it, given the

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contentious and adversarial nature of present-day American society. The mystic chords of memory, kinship and congregation which bind people to home and church and community were duly present in school settings in past times because school was so closely affiliated with, and in fact often an extension, of all three. Durkheim wrote that the moral life of the class depends on the teacher’s authority. Such authority, he claimed, is the sine qua non of the teacher. But the doctrine of in loco parentis is scarcely acknowledged and only grudgingly accorded to school personnel today. In our rightsconscious and obligations-impaired society, parents are more apt than not, especially those of middle and upper classes, to threaten and even carry out legal actions against teachers and administrators who attempt to enforce important rules. One has little trouble finding many such examples of this phenomenon. The church is separate territory from the school, and neighbourhood or community of today is often little more than geographic space where people live lives of increasing privatization (Habermas 1990). The sobornost tradition of ingathering, community and cathedral, for all the attempts to revive it, seems hardly a viable alternative in today’s world. Such critics of the schools as the economist Peter Drucker (1993) have pointed out that schools have become so preoccupied with teaching that they have virtually abandoned learning, and until they recapture their original purpose, there is little reason to look to them and to the personnel who operate them as places of either intellectual or moral authority. Drucker’s advice is to look to the communities themselves, not to the metaphorical communities called schools, for improvements in the social fabric. He documents the extraordinarily high incidence (compared to other countries) of volunteerism by people of all ages, in neighbourhood guilds, teams, self-help groups, clubs, churches and social and civic organizations among Americans, as the place to find character development and moral growth alive and well. Others have questioned the right of an institution, having failed at its academic mission, even to dare to consider taking on the high calling of moral training. Conclusion Durkheim’s sense of the true weight of moral authority as the reality beyond us finds its linchpin in the force of opinion. Consequently what lends authority to the rule in school is the feeling that the children have for it. To achieve this tonic effect on the child, the class must really share in a collective life…. Such phrases as the class, the spirit of the class and the honor of the class must become something more than abstract expressions in the student’s mind’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:241). Durkheims choice of such words as ‘spirit’, and ‘honour’ seem to transcend mere rationality as a guide to public behaviour. If so, we find him in the good company of John Dewey who argued, more or less convincingly, for a ‘common faith’, based on his version of democracy and secular humanism. Like Dewey, Durkheim was convinced that democracy has a moral superiority, thereby making it worthy of being considered sacred, because, Durkheim noted, the superior moral power of public conscience is the very foundation of democracy (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:156). And if school is to be the bridge between home and society, it must be a citadel of democracy and education, a promise it has yet to fulfil in the course of nearly four hundred years of American public schooling.

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References Bao, L. (1996) Different Paradigms of Value Formation: China and America, Hangzhou, China: Hangzhou University Press. Bellah, R. (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, W. (1991) The Book of Virtues, New York: Simon and Schuster.

Callahan, R. (1962) Education and the Cult of Efficiency, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Center for Civic Education (1991) Civitas: A Framework for Civic Education, Calabasas, California. Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (1918) Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, Washington: U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin 35. Cremin, L. (1970) American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783, New York: Harper and Row. ——(1988) American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980, New York: Harper and Row. ——(1957) (ed.) The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men, New York: Teachers College Press.

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education, New York: The Macmillan Company. ——(1938) Experience and Education, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Drucker, P. (1993) Post-Capitalist Society, New York: Harper Collins. Durkheim, E. (1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education, New York: Free Press. ——(1973a) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society: Selected Writings, edited by R. B.Bellah, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——(1950a) Leçons de sociologie: physique des moeurs et du droit, Paris: PUR ——(t.1957a) by Cornelia Brookfield, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Ellis, A. (1998) Teaching and Learning Elementary Social Studies, 6th edn, Boston: Allyn and Bacon Division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Ellis, A. and Fouts, J. (1997) Research on Educational Innovations, 2nd edn, Princeton: Eye on Education, Inc.

Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Goodlad, J. (1984) A Place Called School, New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.

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Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Boston: MIT Press. Hartshorne, H. and May, M. (1928–1930) Studies in the Nature of Character, Vols. I, II and III, New York: Macmillan. Himmelfarb, G. (1995) The De-Moralization of Society: from Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, New York: A.A.Knopf.

Jackson, P.W. (1968) Life in Classrooms, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. James, W. (1907, 1995) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York: Longman.

Keats, M. (1992) ‘Beyond the virtues-principles debate’, Educational Theory, 42, 4. Kohlberg, L. (1981) The Philosophy of Moral Development, vol. 1, San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Lickona, T. (1991) Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility, New York: Bantam.

Piaget, J. (1970) Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child, New York: Viking Press.

Rogers, C. (1964) Freedom to Learn, New York: Macmillan. Ryan, K. and Lickona, T. (1992) (eds) Character Development in the Schools and Beyond, Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy.

Simon, S., Harmin, M. and Kirschenbaum, H. (1971) Values Clarification, New York: Hart Publishing. Smith, H.L. (1949) Character Education: A Survey of Practice in the Public Schools of the United States, Texarkana, TX: The Palmer Foundation. Spady, R.J. and Bell, C.H. (1996) The Search for Enlightened Leadership: Applying New Administrative Theory, volume 1, Olympia, WA: Pan Press.

Vygotsky, L. (1986) Thought and Language, Cambridge: MIT Press.

12 CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AS MORAL EDUCATION A Durkheimian perspective David Rigoni The frame Durkheim depicted schools as the product of a complex society. In simpler societies, individuals learn what is needed when they are ready for such learning. In more complex societies, learning needs to be accelerated to fulfil the needs of society; this acceleration means that individuals are asked to learn things before their life experiences prepare them for such learning. Schools evolved as a solution to this problem and they are thus by definition social institutions where members of society are compelled to learn before they are prepared for such learning. when man’s culture had attained a certain level of development the methods aimed at transmitting it must have been marked with a greater severity. Because it had become more complex, it was no longer possible to entrust its transmission to chance encounter and circumstance; it was necessary to gain time, to move quickly; and human intervention became indispensable. This procedure necessarily resulted in forcing nature since the objective was to accelerate maturation. (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:191) This foundation establishes the need for what has come to be called classroom management. Since schools attempt to inculcate knowledge in young members of society before they see any need for such knowledge, they naturally resist such attempts. As society after the Second World War became more complex, this resistance intensified. In American education prior to the War, education was less universal because children with moderate behaviour problems were often punished severely; incorrigible students were simply expelled from school, and many students who did not fit in the system opted to ‘drop out’. After the War there was an influx of students into schools as well as subsequent laws regulating physical punishment, and limiting student expulsion forced an examination of effective ways to ‘manage’ student classroom behaviour. Classroom management techniques thus evolved as a method of dealing with students’ resistance to forced schooling. Within the United States, the importance of ‘classroom management’ has been increasingly emphasized in university teacher preparation programmes. Even with the contemporary emphasis on the topic, however, classroom management has continued to be viewed as a way of subduing students for the purpose of creating a ‘suitable learning environment’. The assumption continues that quiet, orderly classrooms are a prerequisite

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to learning. Teachers’ effectiveness is often decisively judged on this single criterion. As such, classroom management is viewed primarily as a tool to make education possible rather than being viewed as a vital education in itself. A Durkheimian perspective places this basic premise in question. The Canter Corporation and assertive discipline This chapter will examine, from this Durkheimian perspective, the popular classroom management approach, Assertive Discipline. Such a classroom management model is usually associated with its public spokesperson and co-developer, Lee Canter. Canter’s Assertive Discipline model is very widely used in American schools (Charles 1996) and utilized increasingly in British schools (Tytler 1995). Through workshops and graduate courses, Canter has brought Assertive Discipline to over 1 million teachers and administrators, making his program not only the most popular of all such systems but also the most discussed and, possibly, the most controversial. (Charles 1996:106) The corporate myth One of the immediate distinguishing characteristics of Assertive Discipline (henceforth abbreviated as AD) is its commercial rather than academic foundation. Lee Canter and Associates is a multi-million dollar business, whose corporate presence in the academic marketplace constitutes one of the few successful capitalistic forays into the contemporary American education system, apart from classroom textbooks. The corporate myth surrounding Lee and Marlene Canter’s incursion into the field is told in the introduction to their text and is fluently repeated in personal contacts. Lee-thesocial-worker and Marlene-the-special-education-teacher became aware that while educators were well trained in teaching techniques, there was a real need to train them in ‘the extra skills necessary to deal with the daily behaviour challenges they faced’. According to Marlene Canter, they researched ‘the problems of discipline in the classroom and the methods that successful teachers were using in dealing with these problems,’ and they augmented this with their own experience to form the ‘core’ of AD. Their goal, she states, was ‘to help teachers learn to ‘take charge’ of the classroom in a ‘firm and positive manner’ (Canter and Canter 1992:xviii). The corporate mythology highlights the fact that AD is not a new model of classroom management. It is, instead, primarily a compilation of existing techniques, stripped from their theoretical roots and systematized for easy application by teachers. This means that while over a million teachers may have been trained by Canter in AD, many more teachers, not trained by Canter, use portions of these techniques less systematically in their daily classroom management practice. Thus, while this chapter may critique AD in particular, the programme itself is simply a commercial rendition of common management practices and beliefs, and the critique is meant to cover the entire range of such practice and its underlying assumptions. This chapter, in its criticism of AD,

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attempts to provide a preliminary examination of two main points: (1) that contemporary classroom management rituals in schools communicate a secular social morality, and (2) that classroom management practices, rather than something which makes education possible, are themselves powerful aspects of education. Reinforcing popular perceptions There seem to be several reasons why the Canter AD model is so popular with teachers. It is popular in part because it provides teachers with an easy, concrete set of steps to follow: classroom teachers who are having trouble with student behaviour embrace these practical techniques like the mythic drowning person to a floatation device. Its popularity is due, in part, to other reasons as well. The accessibility of the approach, via video courses bearing graduate credit, provides teachers with a ‘cookbook’ disciplinary approach while advancing, their positions on the district salary schedule as well. The Canter approach is also very pro-teacher. It invests heavily in teachers’ perceptions of themselves as under-appreciated victims of social trends, and it bestows certain ‘rights’ on teachers, placing them in control in an environment where they have grown to feel increasingly powerless. The model is also popular because it is advanced by a wellfinanced, professionally marketed, commercial operation. Increasingly, American teachers view themselves as victims of growing violence in society. Early in their text, the Canters (1992) support this view by establishing several pro-teacher stances as indisputable truth: (1) teachers no longer experience the respect they formerly received from society; (2) today’s students come to school with more behaviour problems than in the past; (3) teachers are insufficiently trained to deal with these contemporary behaviour problems; (4) teachers are basically on their own, discouraged from asking for help with discipline problems. They add a curious postmodern lament that teachers’ exposure to so many different philosophies has resulted in the fact that there is no longer ‘one way’ to run a classroom and teach students. One is left with the message that AD has the answer and the existence of other ideas on discipline simply confuses teachers. The truth of these assertions is largely unexamined. Are school problems worse and more extensive today than in the past? Coontz (1992, 1995) indicates that our perceptions of contemporary social reality are clouded by a distorted view of an idyllic past that, in fact, never did exist. During my childhood, I recognized a certain lack of respect, even a resentment, for teachers from children and adults alike. I also remember a great deal of school violence. I personally witnessed student violence against both teachers and administrators and teacher violence against students. Then, as now, school violence corresponded to socio-economic conditions. I knew teachers in the 1970s who taught in larger inner-city schools who were not allowed to remain in the building after students left because to do so was simply too dangerous. The Canter recitation of how much more difficult it is for contemporary teachers simply may not be based on fact. This is not, of course, to say that some teachers in some schools do not face daily violence or that all teachers do not face daily challenges. When has a teaching career ever been easy? While the Canter depiction of the woes of the contemporary educator is easily understandable as modern marketing pandering to the perceptions of the client, the notion of educators being confused by too many philosophies is strangely condescending. It

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denotes that teachers need simple solutions distilled for their use, that the theories behind those solutions are unnecessary and incomprehensible, and that the existence of potentially superior, albeit more complex, solutions should be overlooked for the sake of a single, formulaic approach. Durkheim might shudder at such thinking. The model The Canter model emphasizes very concrete steps and examples (see table 12.1). The approach, replete with negative and positive reinforcements, is based on a neoSkinnerian, behaviour-modification model. The AD approach (Canter and Canter 1992) aims at a base simplicity: 1 All students are capable of good behaviour; to behave or not is simply a choice. Students have the right to have teachers who set firm, consistent limits and who teach students to manage their own behaviour. The base assumption is, ‘you must believe that if students don’t behave, it’s

Table 12.1 Assertive Discipline Taxonomy I. Students A. students choose to ‘behave’ or ‘misbehave’ B. students are capable of ‘good’ behaviour C. students ‘misbehave’ out of choice or ignorance D. students have the right to assertive teachers II. Assertive teachers A. set firm, consistent limits B. need to develop discipline plan C. need to ‘teach’ discipline plan III. Discipline plan A. plan contains teacher’s rules B. develop rewards for following rules C. develop punishments for not following rules 1. establish offense-frequency hierarchy 2. tally individual rule infractions D. develop plan for 5–10% difficult students Source: Canter and Canter 1992 because they’ve chosen not to, or don’t know how’ (Canter and Canter 1992:20). 2 An assertive teacher response style is described as having: clear, confident and consistent statements of expectations; with preparation to back up words with actions; and an explanation to students of what to expect as a result of their behaviour choices. 3 Teachers need to develop a discipline plan which sets out (1) the teacher’s rules, (2) the positive recognition to be gained for adhering to the rules, and (3) the consequences resulting from not following the rules. Positive recognition, the key

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motivational element, must be the most active part of the plan. 4 The consequences of the plan involve a discipline hierarchy for the number of times the offence takes place. A sample hierarchy of 5–6 steps is identified as (1) warning, (2) consequence, (3) additional consequence, (4) contact parents, (5) send to principal, (6) remove student. Canter suggests that an offence tally be kept on a clipboard. 5 Teachers are then directed not simply to post or read their plans, but to ‘teach’ the plans to their students. 6 This discipline plan, once formulated, taught, and established, reaches 90–5 per cent of the students. The remaining 5–10 per cent are the difficult students. ‘You know who these students are. They are the ones who may ignore your rules, may not care about the consequences of their misbehaviour, and may disrupt the entire class’ (Canter and Canter 1992:205). A special plan needs to be developed for these students. In short, ‘the highly structured system, a mixture of common sense and behaviourmodification techniques, stresses rewards and punishments as a way for teachers to “take charge” of their classrooms’ (Hill 1990:72). The essential criticism The criticism of AD has come from many sources, but a flurry of journal articles starting with Curwin and Mendler’s article, ‘Packaged discipline programs: let the buyer beware’ (1988b), captures the essence of this debate. Curwin and Mendler argue that packaged programmes typically resort to power-based methods which tell students what to do and require the least work and the least change on the part of the teacher. The goal of powerbased programmes is simply to have students follow orders with few rule violations. Curwin and Mendler also observe that packaged programmes offer limited opportunity for teacher judgment and discretion and suppress teachers’ ability to examine rule violations in their larger context. Curwin and Mendler’s essential point is that it is difficult to ‘package’ a discipline programme which cultivates responsibility rather than obedience. The former will not achieve the same quick results as the latter, and the former requires more change, flexibility and risk-taking on the part of the teacher. They argue that power-based, packaged discipline programmes teach obedience rather than responsibility. ‘Students cannot learn responsibility without choices and without opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them’ (1988b:70). Curwin and Mendler’s 80–15–5 Principle contends that: 80 per cent of students rarely, if ever break the rules or violate principles; 15 per cent break rules on a regular basis; and 5 per cent break rules chronically and are usually out of control. They assert that a discipline plan aimed at controlling the rule-breaking 15 per cent can cause most compliant students to wilt and the 5 per cent out-of-control students to explode. They believe that the rigidity of AD is simply unnecessary for most students. Agreement with this observation is echoed by Columbia University Teachers College professor and former RAND corporation educational researcher, Linda Darling-Hammond, who has become an outspoken critic of AD since her daughter’s kindergarten experience with it.

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She was so terrified by the prospect of having her name placed on the board, being held in from recess or being excluded from class activities that she stopped participating in class [said Darling-Hammond]. (Hill 1990:72) Darling-Hammond removed her daughter from that school and placed her in one that does not use AD. Curwin and Mendler conclude their article sounding very Durkheimian. Effective discipline comes from the heart and soul of the teacher. It comes from the belief that teaching students to take responsibility for their behaviour is as much the job of the teacher as is teaching history or math…. Only within the framework of the teacher’s internal strength and the development of a caring classroom environment can a discipline plan yield responsible and self-disciplined school citizens. (1988b:71) Canter responded to this article with the same curiously anti-academic approach noted earlier. This time, he begins: The majority of their points are vague and theoretical. Assertive Discipline, on the other hand, is based on experience and research…. Opinions are easy to come by; facts are hard to dispute. (Canter 1988:71) Canter apparently feels we must not mystify teachers with theoretical considerations. He argues that teachers utilizing AD are able to reduce inappropriate behaviour and increase on-task behaviour; he adds that AD does teach responsibility because students must choose to behave or not behave. He asks what teachers are expected to do in their classrooms while the Curwin and Mendler long-term discipline plan is in process. Canter is clearly untroubled by either the narrowness of available student choice, or the absolute power handed to teachers. He concludes: ‘Theories such as those of Curwin and Mendler make interesting reading, but teachers don’t need more educational literature. They need answers, and they need them now’ (ibid.: 73). For Canter, there are no moral considerations, no concepts of right or wrong. The only Canter criterion is that the practice must ‘work.’ This debate fostered a flurry of articles which took various sides in the debate. Render et al. (1989b) highlight the small database and limited evidence available to support Canter’s claims that the programme is ‘proven’ effective. They add that no reputable scholar would consider stating that ‘the research proves’ any educational approach. McCormack (1989) responded to this article with the Canter argument that ‘Practitioners say it works!’ She observes that while traditional research techniques might be inconclusive, a network of professional contacts validates Canter’s assertions. Curwin and Mendler, no doubt seeing the off-the-mark rebuttals and fearing that no one understood their earlier argument, repeated it. They describe AD as ‘little more than an attractive, well-marketed behaviour programme’ (Curwin and Mendler 1989:83). They conclude:

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Except in extreme cases, a truly effective discipline plan must include, but go beyond, rules, rewards, consequences, and punishments. It must send a message of respect, dignity, belief, and hope to those most directly affected. (Curwin and Mendler 1989:83) The remainder of this chapter will approach this debate from a Durkheimian perspective in which classroom discipline techniques can be viewed as an essential part of a student’s education into a larger society. Theory and practice We cannot usefully treat any teaching problem, whatever it may be, except by starting where we are in time and space, i.e., with the conditions confronting the children with whom we are concerned (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:17). Canter values practice over theory; Durkheim valued both. Never satisfied to leave ideas at a theoretical level, Durkheim believed that theory should always be based on empirical observation and result in practical application. For Durkheim, ‘all knowledge had practical consequences for society, and knowledge for its own sake was of little or no value’ (Pickering 1995a:23). As a group, American educators have maintained a characteristic interest in practical application (i.e., something I can use in my classroom tomorrow) while maintaining an abhorrence and avoidance of the theory beneath that application. As cited earlier, Canter panders to this aspect of the teaching culture with practical cookbook methodologies and anti-theoretical, anti-academic jabs. Traditional higher education has in some cases ignored and in other cases reinforced this predominant teacher culture. Traditional professors have tended to discuss education in strictly theoretical terms. In contrast, more contemporary professors have tended to reinforce the practice-over-theory culture in deference to their students’ overt wishes. Both approaches are problematic. Theory, from a Durkheimian perspective, ought to emerge from practice and return to it. To teach theory without considering its practical implications is arrogant; to teach practice without considering its theoretical underpinnings is negligent. This isolation of practice from its theoretical roots appears to be a major factor in viewing classroom management as somehow separate from education. Durkheim and moral education Moral acts and moral authority For Durkheim, society was not merely a collection of individuals; it is something new and transcendent created from the collectivity of individuals. With society measured in centuries rather than the years or decades of an individual, ‘the individual is but a dot in the social infinity’ (Durkheim 1995:31). Society is present when the individual arrives and is present when she leaves. The moral power of this transcendent society has traditionally been cloaked within its religious traditions.

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we are bound, not only by our contemporaries, but those who came before us; and we have the feeling that there is an impersonal force beyond us, one which took shape before we were born, which will outlast us, and which dominates us; and that force is society. (Durkheim, 1925a/t.1961a:246) Durkheim worked to separate living social rules from out-of-date religious pronouncements. Needing to define that which is moral, Durkheim (1925a/t.1961a, 1995a) distinguished society’s general rules from its moral rules: we follow the general rules of society because we benefit in some way from adhering to them, either in avoiding punishment or in reaping rewards; we follow moral rules simply out of respect for their authority, without regard to possible punishment or reward. Moral rules ask individuals to restrain their own actions and instincts for the benefit of other people. for the rule to be obeyed as it ought to be, it is necessary for us to yield, not in order to avoid disagreeable results or material punishment, but very simply because we ought to, regardless of the consequences our conduct may have for us. One must obey a moral precept out of respect for it and for this reason alone. (1925a/t.1961a:30) The moral act needs to move from a social expectation to an internal expectation. Social expectations require external policing; moral expectations require internal enforcement. For Durkheim, if moral rules are to be internalized and selfish expectations are to curbed, morality must appeal to our emotions and must be viewed as an important ingredient in the stability of society rather than as a set of negative prohibitions. Individuals sacrifice their natural desires only for the benefit of a higher good. If a moral act is performed only with a view toward avoiding some type of punishment or reaping some sort of reward, it ceases to be a moral act. It might still be the correct action to do in a particular situation, but it becomes inherently amoral since it was done for selfish reasons. An individual learns the moral rules of society through contact with many social groupings, including family, school, religion, and voluntary groups (Pickering 1995a). Durkheim (1925a/t.1961a) describes the family and the school as two of the more significant social institutions from which children learn moral rules, and, of the two, the school is the more important since it more accurately reflects to the child the society from which it springs. He argues that schools morally educate children by teaching them discipline, by helping them form attachments to social groups, and by helping them to situate the social order in which they live. Schools must create situations in which children can internalize this learning so their actions do not become selfishly anti-social. One of the first problems with AD is that the teacher is set up to be the rule-setter. Individual rules run the risk of being arbitrary and petty: even if they are not, they carry only the authority of the individual teacher. Ironically, teachers could easily refer to social rules to support many of the classroom rules they might wish to implement. Many common classroom rules are derived from wider social values. Many are reducible to the basic value of respect for other individuals. This simple value is the basis of most classroom rules, and it reflects the morality and authority of society. If a teacher were to

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establish classroom rules within and in reference to the larger social framework, those rules would have a natural authority which they presently lack. Any rules not supported by such social authority should be examined for their social legitimacy. Discipline For Durkheim, morality is the foundation of society, and discipline is the building block of morality (see table 12.2). Since human nature causes individuals to be unbounded and insatiate, no social function would be possible without moral discipline. Discipline is a means of laying down a code of rules which protects the collective interest against our individual human natures. This discipline cannot be maintained externally; it must be internalized to form a moral force upon which the individual relies for regularity and determinate goals. This discipline is based on the social authority which emanates from outside the individual. Morality…is basically a discipline. All discipline has a double objective: to promote a certain regularity in people’s conduct, and to provide them with determinate goals that at the same time limit their horizons. Discipline promotes a preference for the customary, and it imposes restrictions. (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:47) Durkheim (1919a/t.1979a) draws upon Rousseau’s views on the natural education of children. He believed that a child needs to grow with ‘some degree of initiative, freedom and movement’, but subsequently needs to learn to regulate his actions (Durkheim 1911c(2)/t.1979a:152). For very young children, Durkheim advocates teaching morality through example and the use of specific rules without explanations since they cannot yet understand the relationship between the rule and its rational explanation. He indicates that totally undisciplined young minds naturally embrace self-limiting discipline because nature has instilled in children a paradoxical desire for stability: ‘Whilst the child is a sort of anarchist, ignorant of all rules, restraints and consequences, he is also a little traditionalist, even a stick-in-the-mud’ (Durkheim 1911c(2)/t.1979a:153). This yearning for stability is the basis for the internalization of discipline in children.

Table 12.2 Durkheimian discipline I. Discipline must derive from authority beyond the individual II. Teachers must project and demonstrate enthusiasm for morality III. Morality must become internalized A. must exist in absence of external enforcement B. must exist in absence of frequent rewards C. must exist in absence frequent punishments D. must appeal to our emotions IV. Punishment: A. purpose is to right the temporary imbalance caused by a moral violation

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B. ought to exist on a continuum of severity C. should not be used unless absolutely necessary D. initially use non-verbals, etc. if possible E. once technique used, no longer as effective V. Rewards are intrinsically amoral In older children, schools need to draw more rational connections to the moral education they have already received and to develop children’s attachments to social groups. It is the attachment to social groups that prepares the child for full participation in adult society. The group serves to reinforce the internalized moral codes. The final step, autonomy, is designed to place the individual within the morality of the larger society and to show how every society has had the distinct morality it required. For Durkheim, classroom discipline is something more than eliciting desired behaviour through a system of rewards and punishments. Not just a device to secure a level of order that allows work to continue in tranquillity, discipline forms the morality of the classroom. The discipline of the classroom serves the crucial role of helping a student situate herself in society and teaching her that she has rights and responsibilities in that society. This then is the true function of discipline. It is not a simple procedure aimed at making the child work, stimulating his desire for instruction, or husbanding the energies of the teacher. It is essentially an instrument— difficult to duplicate—of moral education. The teacher to whom it is entrusted cannot guard it too conscientiously. (Durkheim, 1925a/t.1961a:149) In a moral sense, the AD idea of rewarding ‘good’ behaviour is problematic. This method of behaviour modification risks the creation of long-term social problems. If students expect to be rewarded for virtuous actions, they will surely be disappointed once they leave the school society and enter the larger society where moral actions are simply expected and seldom rewarded. What will AD students do when their ‘good’ deeds go unrewarded and unnoticed? Classroom rules, once connected to larger social rules involving respect for other individuals, need to be internalized and followed simply because human beings follow such rules. This approach builds from rules which stem from human needs and concerns, emphasizing the rights and responsibilities of individuals while holding the individual sacred within a group context. This approach also offers the greatest likelihood that the behaviour a teacher works towards in the classroom will continue in the teacher’s absence, as well as in non-school settings. The single, greatest short-coming of a power-based system, such as AD, is its dependence on policing. Without an AD teacher overseeing children’s behaviour, assessing violations and handing out rewards and punishments, the system breaks down. When the teacher is absent, the classroom civilization disintegrates into barbarian chaos. Internalized discipline has a better chance of working in the absence of external authority.

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The teacher and authority No discipline is possible, no punishment effective, if the teacher does not demonstrate the kind of authority which elicits respect from students. This is a key point that AD ignores; effective discipline is as much a state of being as it is a technique. A teacher with autocratic authority may be able to make students bend to his or her wishes, but the only lesson learned will be one of power and accompanied by anger and resentment. A teacher who lives within the same moral rule of respect for others will likely gain the respect of her or his students. This authority establishes a type of ministry deriving not from the individual but from society itself. The teacher must demonstrate this authority by word, gesture, and example, not allowing his ‘professional sensitivity to be dulled by habituation’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:202). Without such support from his class, the disciplinary rules that a teacher enforces will be perceived as arbitrary. a class in which justice is dispensed by the teacher alone, without securing the support of the group, would be like a society in which the judges render sentence against actions that the public does not condemn. Such judgments would lack both influence and authority. (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:243) Punishment Through physical coercion, we can require the child to perform in certain ways; but the wellsprings of his inner life escape us. There would be drilling and training, but not education. (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:134) Not a naïve ivory-tower theorist, he was aware of the necessity of punishment in the teaching of discipline. However, the reasons for the punishment influence how, when and why the punishment is administered. Prior to punishment, there must be rules. The rules must be extensions of social values involving the rights of others. They must emanate from society rather than from the teacher because it is society that confers authority upon them; a teacher as a mere individual has no right to establish moral rules. A violation of classroom rules in this perspective is a violation of another’s rights. This perspective insures that rules will not demonstrate the repressive type of control that Linda DarlingHammond’s daughter experienced because their purpose is clearly different. They are intended not to make the teacher’s job easier or the school’s classrooms quieter. Their main purpose is to teach real moral values. Durkheim taught that the punishment of children for violation of rules should, as much as possible, fit the offence. If, then, schoolroom punishment has no reason for being other than to spare us some misbehaviour, the outcomes certainly do not correspond to the position it now and always has occupied in all educational systems— especially when one thinks about all that it costs: wasted energy, the squandering of time, and, still more, the risk of eliciting bad feelings in the child.

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(Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:163) Also, the punishment should be administered reluctantly. First, a teacher should subtly indicate disapproval to a student. Before disapproval itself, what a host of ways to warn the child, making him feel that he is at fault and stopping him! A glance, a gesture, silence—these, when one knows how to use them, are very meaningful procedures, and the child knows what they mean. Even before coming to genuine punishments, there are a thousand ways for the teacher to act, which he can shade and vary infinitely. (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:200) A teacher needs to have a long scale of punishments at her disposal. The value of a punishment is retained in its potential use. Once used, the power of the punishment diminishes quickly. A short scale of punishments may leave a teacher with no options left if the first options were not successful. The actual levying of punishments on students also opens the door for further misbehaviour; punishment survived is punishment scorned and behaviour revisited. Punishment is assessed not in retribution for violating rules but in order to remedy the wrong. it is a matter of reaffirming the obligation at the moment when it is violated, in order to strengthen the sense of duty, both for the guilty party and for those witnessing the offense—those whom the offense tends to demoralize. Every element of the penalty that does not promote this end, all severity that does not contribute to this end, is bad and should be prohibited. (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:182) Durkheim would view AD’s short scale of punishments as a shortcoming. Students become quickly numbed to the first check and the second check. After the first parent— teacher meeting fails to make an impact on the student behaviour, the teacher has typically exhausted her discipline plan. The AD policing relies on keeping a tally of offences. The offence tally when examined from another perspective also becomes problematic. Teachers I know who dislike AD complain that the common three-check system prior to substantive action leads students to view the two initial checks as ‘free’ misbehaviours. Even very young children know how to count to three. The AD system also has the potential of making teachers prisoners of their own systems. The discipline plan takes on a life of its own. The only choice for the student and the teacher is to follow or ignore the discipline plan. The teacher is denied the opportunity of being mindful of disciplinary tactics appropriate only to the immediate classroom situation. With AD, the only choice a teacher has in choosing not to punish an infraction is to pretend he or she did not witness it. This takes away any spontaneity in handling the uniqueness of the situation. Without the discipline plan, a cornerstone of AD, both teachers and students can make real choices, beyond the punishment-reward

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alternatives. A real choice involves a situation where the outcome will be a more natural result of the action. The job of the teacher is to seize intelligently the moment and decide what tactic will work best for the situation rather than be a mere tally-keeper. AD advocates exactly the opposite of this practice. The plan should be short and definite. Students should know exactly what will happen if they ‘misbehave’. Their rule violations should be tallied. The practice itself belies the truth that repeat violations are expected. Students are then handled in a lockstep, legalistic manner. The approach that sounds so pro-teacher thus makes the teacher a prisoner of her own plan. Group attachment The discipline internalized by an individual expands into social consciousness when schools and teachers set up situations in which students can form attachments to social groups. According to Durkheim, a child must be given a very clear idea of the social groups of which the child is a member. It is important that the individual be taught that each of these groups has a history and that the symbolism of the group has to be internalized to strengthen the attachment to the group. This helps the child to comprehend that the group is greater than the individual. In order to commit ourselves to collective ends, we must have above all a feeling and affection for the collectivity. Before one gives one’s self to a group, he must be fond of life in a group setting. (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:238) Student participation in school social groups presages their citizen participation in a broader social context. While society is essentially the interaction of individuals in groups, the AD approach does not mention groups except in the context of group rewards and punishments. Everything revolves around the classroom and the teacher. There is no apparent intention in AD of helping students to develop an understanding of their membership, rights and responsibilities in society. Conclusion Part of the popularity of Assertive Discipline lies in its reduction of complex issues into simplistic maxims and techniques. As such, it formalizes the common classroom practice of many teachers who view classroom management simply as a means to make learning possible. From a Durkheimian perspective, which considers the role of schools as being important in the moral education of a society, such a perspective is simply shortsighted. In social terms, classroom management practices must work to internalize morality in students. A student has to learn to act in response to an inner model of discipline, without fear of punishment or hope for reward. Contrary to AD pronouncements, choice does not consist merely in choosing to avoid punishment. If a thug were to hold a pistol to Mr Canters head and demand his wallet, there is little doubt that Mr Canter would not feel that he had a real choice. Choice and responsibility are apparent only in the decisions we make and the actions we take when no one else is present to judge us, when there is no

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promise of punishment or reward. It is not enough that a student is ‘moral’ in the presence of a teacher with the power to reward or punish. It is necessary to recognize that teachers are moral agents imbued with social authority. Students must see authority as coming from beyond the individual teacher. The teacher is part of a larger context; that context should be used to support teacher’s rules and actions and to guard against the minority of teachers who wield arbitrary power and use it to bully their students. Teachers must themselves demonstrate adherence to the same rules used in their classrooms. Authority is reciprocally earned by teachers who demonstrate respect for their students. It is also necessary to promote an individual’s attachment to social groups. Working to make students see themselves as members of larger social units is an important part of being fully participating members of an industrial, democratic society. It is not enough to talk about democracy and civic responsibility in Civics class; they must be lived in the classroom. Students have to come to view the classroom in terms of their social rights and responsibilities. The Durkheimian approach is about building social responsibility and relationships that can survive beyond the classroom. It is about moving beyond students sitting quietly ‘on task’ in their seats, irrespective of their larger learning. It is about community. This does not imply a weak, vacillating discipline: it means placing discipline in a larger perspective and adopting techniques that will support it. It means trading a lockstep, cookbook approach for a mindful, purposeful approach that treats students as individuals moving toward full social membership. This approach views classroom management as an important source of moral education. References Canter, L. (1988) ‘Let the educator beware: a response to Curwin and Mendler’, Educational Leadership, 46, 2:71–3. ——(1989) ‘Assertive discipline: a response’, Teachers College Record, 90, 4:631–40. ——(1989) ‘Assertive discipline—more than names on the board and marbles in a jar’, Phi Delta Kappan, 71, 1:57–61. Canter, L. and Canter, M. (1992) Assertive Discipline: Positive Behavior Management for Today’s Classroom, Santa Monica, CA: Lee Canter and Associates. Charles, C.M. (1996) Building Classroom Discipline: From Models to Practice, 5th edn, New York: Longman. Coontz, S. (1992) The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, New York: Basic Books. ——(1995) ‘The American family and the nostalgia trap’, Phi Delta Kappan, 76, 7: K1– K20. Curwin, R.L. (1995) ‘A humane approach to reducing violence’, Educational Leadership, 52, 5:72–5. ——(1992) Rediscovering Hope: Our Greatest Teaching Strategy, Bloomington, IN: National Education Service. ——(1980) ‘Are your students addicted to praise?’, Instructor, 90:61–2.

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Curwin, R.L. and Mendler, A.N. (1984) ‘High standards for effective discipline’, Educational Leadership, 41, 8:75–6. ——(1988a) Discipline with Dignity, Alexandra, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. ——(1988b) ‘Packaged discipline programs: let the buyer beware’, Educational Leadership, 46, 2:68–71. ——(1989) ‘We repeat, let the buyer beware: a response to Canter’, Educational Leadership, 46, 6:83.

Durkheim, E. (1912a) Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1915d) by J.W.Swain, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: Macmillan. ——(1922a) Education et sociologie, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1956a) by S.D.Fox, Education and Sociology, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ——(1911c(2)) ‘Enfance’ (with F.Buisson). First pubished in Nouveau Dictionnaire de pédagogogie et d’instruction primaire publié, Paris: Hachette. ——(t.1979a) by H.L.Sutcliffe, ‘Childhood.’ In W.S.F.Pickering (ed.), Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1919a) ‘La “pédagogie” de Rousseau’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, XXVI, 153–80. ——(t.1979a) by H.L.Sutcliffe, ‘Rousseau on educational theory.’ In W.S.F. Pickering (ed.), Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1925a) L’Education morale, Paris: Alcan. ——(t.1961a) by E.K.Wilson and H.Schnurer, Moral Education, New York: Free Press. ——(1995a) ‘The teaching of morality in primary schools.’ In W.S.F.Pickering, ‘Durkheim and moral education for children: A recently discovered lecture’, Journal of Moral Education, 24, 1:19–36.

Elam, S.M. and Rose, L.C. (1995) ‘The 27th annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools’, Phi Delta Kappan, 77, 1: 41–56.

Hill, D. (1990) ‘Order in the classroom’, Teacher Magazine, 1, 7:70–7.

McCormack, S. (1989) ‘Response to Render, Padilla, and Krank: But practitioners say it works!’ Educational Leadership, 46, 6:77–9. McDaniel, T.R. (1989) ‘The discipline debate: a road through the thicket’, Educational Leadership, 46, 6:81–2.

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Pickering, W.S.F. (1979a) Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1995a) ‘Durkheim and moral education for children: a recently discovered lecture’, Journal of Moral Education, 24, 1:19–36.

Render, G.F., Padilla, J.M., and Krank, H.M. (1989a) ‘What research really shows about assertive discipline’, Educational Leadership, 46, 6:72–5. ——(1989b) ‘Assertive discipline: a critical review and analysis’, Teachers College Record, 90, 4:607–30.

Tytler, D. (1995) ‘Discipline brings results: David Tytler on how a system of rewards can change classroom behavior for good’, The Times, November 10:39.

Part Three

13 DURKHEIM, SOCIAL REVITALIZATION, EDUCATION AND RELIGION Philip Wexler and Paul Stein From culture to being The prevailing culturalist ethos in the social sciences may be coming to an end by a return to the problematic of the social. The intersection of social structure and culture is full of signification and the traffic of commodities but emptied of social life. Such frenetic vacancy suggests that Durkheim’s curative of effervescence, restorative of the ‘parcel of divinity in us’, will be the social ideal (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:267). It is this emphasis on revitalized culture as topic and analytical resource that best explains the rebounding interest in Durkheim. Surely, Fields’ American translation (1912a/t.1995a) of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life will contribute to the revival, but a culturalist interest in Durkheim and particularly in Durkheim’s canonical work in the sociology of religion, antedates the new translation. The Elementary Forms is the epistemology of Durkheim’s theory of education as a moral discipline, an emancipatory, ‘centrifugal’ altruism that recognizes ‘society (as) something other than a simple appearance…that it is a being worthy of love and service…’ (1925a/t.1961a:214, 260). Education is transformed religion and, just as religion ‘adds the sacred to the real’ in order to create the social ideal, education adds a higher, universal consciousness, the ‘chief object of moral conduct’. ‘(T)his is social reality’ (1925a/t.1961a:274). ‘Society is above all a consciousness of the whole. It is, therefore, this collective consciousness that we must instill in the child’ (1925a/t.1961a:277). Durkheim proposes education as ‘above all the means by which society perpetually recreates the conditions of its very existence’ (1922a/t.1956a: 123; 1925a/t.1961a:277). The elementary form of such perpetuation is religion; the modern form is education that establishes the social elements of moral life—discipline, duty and knowledge (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a: 17–128). The project is ‘creating a new being in man. It is the social being’ (1922a/t.1956a:126, emphasis added). Educational culture periodically is transmuted into religious culture as the edification and regeneration of social life becomes both the existential and theoretic problematic. For Durkheim, revitalization has contours, both as a historical problem, evidenced in the ‘cult of the individual’, and as an evolutionary, human problem of the ‘vital energies’ of ‘collective representations that express collective realities’ (1912a/t.1995a:9, 57). The child and the child’s education is synecdochic of the social phylogeny of the species— ‘the child starting in life is very much like a man entering upon the stage of history’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:208)—and of the social evolution of the elementary forms of

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social energy that simultaneously create the moral individual and the moral society. Durkheim wrote: [t]o bind the child to the social group of which he is a part, it is not enough to make him feel the reality of it. He must be attached to it with his whole being. There is only one effective way of doing this, and that is by making his society an integral part of him, so that he can no more separate himself from it than from himself. (1925a/t.1961a:277) The revivalistic stream is the fluid communion of reality—an excited permeation— contained by, yet cutting out the banks of history. Bellah (1970) was a precursor and leader in this trend of civic, cultural revitalization, showing the generality of Durkheim’s sociology of religion. Alexander (1988, 1996) showed Durkheim as an anti-Marxist by asserting cultural and hermeneutical approaches in sociology as, for example, presented The Elementary Forms as ‘the mythological charter for culturalist inquiry’ (1912a/t.1995a:588). In this ‘new reading of Durkheim’s work’, sacredness becomes especially important, and is understood as ‘natural outgrowth of the human anxiety about meaning and order [emphasis added] and, simultaneously, as a focal point for the institutionalization of power and social control’ (Alexander 1988:11). Fields’ close textual representation type of introduction gently suggests Durkheim’s sociology of religion as an ancestor of culturalist approaches, albeit of the post-modern persuasion: ‘American postmodernist theorizers of discursive practices and representations will recognize through The Elementary Forms the Durkheimian pedigree of Michel Foucault’ (1995:xxiii). Of course, Durkheim’s indisputable commitment to the concept of collective representations and its formative centrality in social life seems to warrant such a view. From this ‘continuous history’ (Foucault 1972:12) of Durkheim whereby ‘the founding function of the subject [is] the guarantee that everything that eluded him may be restored’, Durkheim is returned to the present as a prodigal parent—once positivist, then functionalist, now forgiven by his children as pre-postmodernist (Alexander 1988, 1995:83). However, this appearance of a post-modern Durkheim is a deceptive reflection on the surface; Durkheim’s social energism is deeper than discursive reflections. Durkheim’s interest in the religious current of social energy concerns the ‘hyperexcitation of intellectual forces’ that are characterized by ‘unrestrained assimilations’ and by the ‘clashing contrasts’ of post-modern positionality (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:239, 241; 1924a/t.1953b:94). Purification, not division—and communion, not opposition—are ‘the essence of relations to be accounted for. It is true with a truth that is eternal that there exists outside us something greater than we and with which we commune’ (1924a/t.1953b:227). Communion is the fused ecstasy of social solidarity, fused originally by the heat of the ideal in the totem and, in modernity, by the fires of the ideal of humanity (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:105–106). The significance of communion, as the primary regenerative ceremony of social life, carries Durkheim’s theory of social energy through religion to education. Revitalizing communion is the ‘natural supernaturalism’ (Abrams 1971) of social life that realizes the original social nature of humanity within the self as the self is

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fused with the animated ideals of social being, ‘the source of life…a concrete living reality’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:230–66). The social logic of the truth of communion is consistent, despite the historically different appearances: ‘there is no gulf between the logic of religious thought and the logic of scientific thought’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:240). The primitive initiation ceremony achieves a symbolic second birth ‘imagining that a spiritual principle, a sort of new soul, has come to be incarnated…but if we separate from this belief the mythical forms in which it is enveloped, do we not find under the symbol this idea, obscurely glimpsed, that education has had the effect of creating a new being in man? It is a social being’ (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:240). The evolution, the ‘continuous development’ of religion/education from clan to the ‘idea of humanity’ is ‘the main task today’—‘to create a morality’ premised on ‘the fundamental axiom…that the human being is the sacred thing par excellence’ (Durkheim 1925a/t.1961a:106–7). Durkheim (1893b/t.1984a:411–35; 1925a/t.1961a) noted his appreciation of Kant’s moral philosophy but differed in respect to the Kantian ahistoricalism of moral knowledge, indicating that such an ‘eternal law of morality, written by some transcendental power, or perhaps immanent in the nature of things’…‘is a metaphysical hypothesis that we do not have to discuss’ (1893b/t.1984a:423). Durkheim (1893b/t.1984a:423) proposes ‘morality is relative to a certain state of humanity’ and develops sensitive to the evolution of social ideals. This is what religion/education is about—‘It creates in man a new being…and this man is made up of all the best in us, of all that gives value and dignity to life. This creative quality is, moreover, a special prerogative of human education’ (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:125). The problems of Durkheim’s secular politics of education are well noted (KaufmanOsborn 1988). Tiryakian (1978:211) refers to the Kantian basis of Durkheim’s moral education: In brief, Kantian moral philosophy, rationalistic to the core, must be seen as the guiding philosophical orientation for much of Durkheim’s concerns as a sociologist and as an educator. Among these concerns were the form and emphases of secular education. Tiryakian (1981:128) also suggests that Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms is like the biblical Revelation in ‘opening the seals of the fundamental factors of social existence’: social change, knowledge, power and ludic celebration. Durkheim presents a social epistemology characterized by the change of stability. The liberal moderance of the Durkheim of education and the revitalist Durkheim of religion are fused by the idealist metaphysics of the communion of subject and object and the impersonality of both revelation and education. This is Durkheim’s revivalist solution of the communal truth of social ideals. Existing in historical time and place social ideas ‘are not abstractions, cold intellectual concepts lacking efficient power. They are essentially dynamic…’ (Durkheim 1924/t.1953b:94). ‘Changing everything that is touched, throwing down the barriers of nature’…‘society substitutes for the world revealed to us by our senses a different world that is the projection of the ideals created by society itself’ (Durkheim 1924a/t.1953b:95). What is forever becoming is an ‘ideal morality which is situated in a region above the realm of human actions’, the collective

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mind above ‘the deformations that its embodiment in everyday practice impose upon it and which can only express it imperfectly’ (1920a/t.1979a:92; 1925a/t.1961a:268). Hence, the task of the religious practitioner and the teacher is not to ‘create moral rules, but to show what they are and to make them understood’ (1909a(2)/t.1979:136). Pickering notes Durkheim’s position: the agent is not the creator of social being but the instrument: ‘(T)he starting point is always that society dictates what shall be taught…. (T)he teacher is inevitably the instrument of some “higher” authority’ (1979:106). Kant remains upstream of Durkheim with regard to the convergence of religion and education (Kant 1963:248, 249, 252). Kant’s (1960) ‘pure religion of reason’ within the populace of the ‘invisible church’ cultivates and disciplines the mind and heart for ‘the beautiful ideal of the moral worldepoch, brought about the introduction of true universal religion’. Kantian idealism flows into Durkheim’s endogenous development of social forms of religious life, from religion into education. The sensual social materialism of relational experience becomes flotsam (Schott 1988; Horkheimer 1992). The development of energy is from the local to the universal, from the thing to symbol to concept, from the occasional or spontaneous to the constant and deliberate, from the clan to ‘the common holding of all humanity’. The elevation of ideals, the form of communion, is logically in accord with the morphological conditions of existence and the historical synthesis of collective ideals into common consciousness (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:426, 418–48). Development is socio-logical, a spiral to the universal: The fact which perhaps best represents this increasing tendency of the common conscience is the parallel transcendence of the most essential of its elements, I mean the idea of the divine…. (T)he concept of divinity becomes more general and more abstract, for it is formed, not of sensations, as originally, but of ideas…. It has often been remarked that civilization has a tendency to become more rational and more logical. The cause is now evident. That alone is rational which is universal. (Durkheim 1893b/t.1984a:288–9) Impersonal, selfless Durkheimian love—‘collective consciousness...the highest form of psychic life, for it is a consciousness of consciousness’—is the meaning of Durkheim’s hope of social deliverance by ‘logical development’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:445; 1950a/t.1957a:220). This is Durkheim’s confidence in education: ‘Not only does a purely rational education seem logically possible, it seems to be determined by our entire historical development’ (1925a/t.1961a:5). What is the nature of this extraordinary ‘logical development’? Representational forms, or the classificatory appearances of categorical differences, are ‘subdued’ and ‘relaxed’ logics that originate in the ‘revivification’ or idealization of social being. The ordinary logic of ideas has an ‘extra-logical origin’ (1903a(1)/t.1963b:8) in an extra-ordinary reality that permits knowledge itself and reveals the possibilities of ‘man’.1 Social man, as other to amoral natural man, is coextensive with the consciousness of humanity as a societal ideal: ‘man began to conceive things by relating them to himself…anthropocentrism, which might be better called sociocentrism…[original emphasis]. The centre of the first schemes of nature is not the individual; it is society. It is this that is objectified not man.’ The extension of collective

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consciousness towards social ideality is towards the impersonality of communal consciousness, a ‘unity of knowledge [that] is nothing else than the very unity of the collectivity, extended to the universe’ (Durkheim 1922a/t.1956a:72; 1924a/t.1953b:95; 1903a(1)/t.1963b:84, 86–7). Parsons anticipated the seemingly post-modern logic of Durkheim : ‘In fact, Durkheim in escaping from the toils of positivism has overshot the mark and gone clean over to idealism’ (1968:445). Whatever the ‘mark’, Durkheim’s account of the social efficacy of ideals is an accounting of the verisimilitude of representational objectivity, not of the textual doubling of power/knowledge. Durkheim’s account concerns the transformative power of truth (‘a system of active forces’) in revitalizing social reality (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:448). Durkheim fulfilled his positivism about the objectivity of social facts by translating objectivity into the impersonality of transformative communion whereby enlivened ideals transport social reality to an identity of the subject and object, a bliss of reunion that evolves humanity. Perhaps that project is ironically near to Foucault’s ‘third “counter-science” ’, which would ‘traverse, animate, and disturb the whole constituted field of the human sciences’…‘by spinning backwards the destiny of man as known by the Western episteme to the forms of its birth’ (Foucault 1973:381). But such proximity is that of bookends. Between Foucault and Durkheim, there is a common duality of historical appearances and mysterious, noumenal, formless being (Yeatman 1990:292; Turner 1994). Foucault envisions a dark, aesthetic, transgressive antithetic pleasure. Durkheim’s vision, however, is of extra-logical rapture, of participation in ‘the grand ideals that are the soul of collectivity’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a: 267). The advancing, millennial holographic vision of Durkheim is an ‘idealizing’ ecstasy: collective experience in the form of collective thought, revealing immortal social being. One of the mistakes in translating Durkheim into post-modernism is the conflation of his sociology of knowledge with his social epistemology.2 Pickering (1979:3–27) correctly indicates that Durkheim’s sociology of morals intends a descriptive project that neither invents ideals nor instigates social transformation. In contrast, the ‘rational moral art’ (Durkheim 1904a(5)/t.1979a:32) of science—‘an art that imitates nature ever more perfectly’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:17)—is a ‘fuller and higher consciousness’ of society. The rational moral arts, by being part of the motor of ‘civilization…the congregation of the highest human values’ are part of ‘what incites new forms’ and ‘rouses scientific thought and its extension to a new order of things’ (Durkheim 1924a/t.1953b:66, 54). The rational moral arts of science are aspects of the idealization that ‘consecrate[s] equally the material and the spiritual, the physical and the intellectual…conforming to the fundamental principle of unity and harmony’ (1924a/t.1953b:271). Social energy is not reflective but begets life: ‘form does not precede substance, but derives from it and expresses it’ (1912a/t.1995a:426). Educational and religious ideals emanate from the dynamic of social becoming, indigenous laws of ‘moral mechanics’—‘the projection of ideals created by society itself’.3 Durkheim’s moral science may, itself, be an advance of the idealization of humanity— ‘the ideal destiny of humanity’ (Durkheim 1993:112) because ‘advancing knowledge of morality itself [is] an element sui generis of morality’. Religion ‘enlarges, transforms, idealizes and perfects’ its nature by altering its form into science. Consistent with the

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nature of ‘religion to transform itself rather than disappear’ and to ‘enlarge, transform and idealize’, Durkheim identifies ‘scientific thought’ as ‘only a more perfected form of religious thought’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:432, 423, 431; 1925a/t.1961a:122). The extra-ordinary logic of ‘adding the sacred to the real’ is the idealized substance of Durkheim’s descriptive ethnography. Such real idealization is not an idolization of the signifier (man), but transformation of the real by the sacred (social energy). This transformation is a synthetic dynamic, ‘a luxurious activity’, a ‘collective ferment’, that transubstantiates ideas into the vital originality of an immanent social supernature (Durkheim 1924a/t.1953b:91; 1912a/t.1995a: esp. 13–18, 418–48). This ‘natural supernaturalism’ (Abrams 1971) is an aspect of Durkheim’s sui generis social vitalism in portrayal of social life as an anthromorphic/andromorphic subject replete with body and soul, corps and esprit (Lehmann 1993:2, 230). The kinetic field of social power transubstantiates the natural/ordinary/profane while simultaneously transfiguring the symbolic into supernatural reality. Elementary forms reveal real ideals: ‘the ideal is not a “cloud-cuckoo land”; it is of and in nature’ (Durkheim 1924a/t.1953b:94). The ideal is, in consciousness, the hold of conceptual spirit: ‘The concept is, in essence, an impersonal representation. By means of it, human intelligences communicate…. Concepts are not abstract things that have reality only in particular circumstances…for they correspond to the way in which the special being that is society thinks about the things of its own experience’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:435, 436).4 Deliverance is twice-done in civilization: transubstantiation of the natural/profane to the sacred and transfiguration of the symbolic from the fetish to the revelation of humanity.5 Durkheim’s reconciliatory social revitalism is closer to such millennial prospectivism, an ascent to destiny, than to post-modernity’s positionality and eternity of now. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is about the ‘becoming’ of social being, about a future history of a recombination of elements of social life. Reading Durkheim’s revitalism Having described the complementary essence of religion and education for Durkheim, we may note our orientation. Our attention to Durkheim’s revitalism emerges from three vantage points. First, appropriations of classical texts change along with alterations in professional discourses: the culturalist and post-modernist readings belong to the wider ascendance of various cultural models. This cultural interest is now challenged by a move with an emphasis on ‘being’ and ‘embodied consciousness’, from within no less a bastion of the core concept of culture than anthropology. Cohen and Rapport (1995:3) write against an overdetermined and reified cultural approach: [I]t now seems inadequate to write as if the outer life of symbolic forms, institutions and norms is all there is, or as if an outer life of overt behaviours somehow speaks for itself or is intrinsically meaningful, a social fact somehow independent of the creative consciousness of the individual.

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To this individual consciousness interest, Csordas (1994:6) adds a bodiliness that is not simply cultural studies’ body-as-social text object of inscription by social discourse. ‘Culture is grounded in the human body’, and ‘bodiliness’ and ‘embodiment’ are ‘not the passive object of abstract culture’. More pointedly, Turner (1994:44) argues against the post-modern culturalist way of: treating bodies, bodily functions, and powers as products or projections of cultural discourses or symbols rather than as pragmatic individual and social activities of production and appropriation. Second, beyond the changing professional discourse, recognition of the historical, social context—both Durkheim’s and our own—inevitably creates a vantage point for reading. A great deal has been written about the context of Durkheim’s work generally, and particularly regarding his sociology of religion (see notably Pickering 1984). Fundamental to what is the broadly agreed reform interest of Durkheim’s sociology, we see a commitment to a deeper, transformative revitalization and renewal of society: a ‘revival of the profound collective experience’ (Bellah 1973:xlvi). This interest in social revitalization characterizes the contemporary context within which we read Durkheim. As one of us (Wexler: 1996) has argued, this context is one of incipient ‘resacralization’ and shifting cultural premises that are expressed through a variety of New Age movements against the prevailing instrumental, petrifying commodification of everyday life and toward a revivifying resacralized form of social existence: a transformation in the ‘depths of social existence’, as Bellah described the intent of Durkheim’s analysis. Third, the central vantage point is the text of The Elementary Forms itself. In this text, Durkheim asserts, we believe, a coherent and consistent theory of religion and society, of the sacred and the social: a theory of social life as continuous revitalization with educational relevance. This ‘dynamogenic’ model reflects Durkheim’s desire for a ‘new day’ in which we will know hours of ‘collective effervescence’ and leave the ‘current period of transition and moral mediocrity’ to again be ‘electrified’ (1912a/t.1995a:429). We share the desire, if not Durkheim’s form. Social energy Religion, for Durkheim, is the basic social phenomenon ‘from which all others—or at least almost all others are derived’ (Durkheim 1960c:350). The religious process, and thus, the social process, is primarily an alternating wave of concentration and dispersion of social energy. This energy is created in the oscillation of a two-phased social being or system. The two phases are two different and separate types of existence; one (the sacred) expressing a ‘higher life’ than the other (the profane) pole of social being. While ‘intensity’ and ‘energy’ may ‘charge’ the other phase of profane, economic everyday life, the source of that ‘strength’, and, indeed, of the collective representations which organize it, remains in the first, higher phase of group life exemplified by the collective assembly of the ‘corroboree’ of the totemic religion of the Australian tribes.

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In this higher phase, the everyday is cast off, and in conventionalized shared practices, the assembled individuals lose self-control, intoxicated by their shared presence and the absence of everyday constraint. It is to these periodic feasts of social being that any new revitalized social existence will have to return for energy, and it is to these unstructured, or as Tiryakian (1978) puts it, ‘dedifferentiated’ (or in Alberoni’s (1984) term, ‘nascent’) states that the social being regularly returns to recharge ideals of the social whole that shape socially structured action. This primary and primal state is an orgiastic, ecstatic condition, where collective effervescence describes not only the scene of action, but also the process and source of energy without which societies are de-moralized, die, and without which, there is no individual strength of being or affirmation of life force. Durkheim’s text offers abundant instances by which a de-structured, orgiastic assembly of a shared ecstasy of being creates energy that is incarnated both in collective representations and in the formation of individual persons. This energy, or ‘wakan’, is the reason for the subsequent sacralization of objects, and at the centre of the separated times and places which demarcate a separate social zone as the sacred. The specific objects and images depend on social energy for power and meaning. Durkheim’s theory of the social is a theory of social energy. The dynamic dualism of the sacred and the profane which organizes social existence ‘is always and everywhere conceived by the human intellect as separate genera, as two worlds with nothing in common. The energies at play in one are not merely those encountered in the other, but are raised to a higher degree; they are different in kind’ (1912a/t.1995a:36; all Durkheim citations following are this edition unless otherwise noted). Durkheim (38) continues; ‘In that case, one must ask what led man to see the world as two heterogeneous and incomparable worlds [emphasis added], even though nothing in sense experience seems likely to have suggested the idea of such a radical duality.’ Durkheim (119) explains, in terms of concentration, periodicity, and communion, what the nature and operation of social energy is: ‘The religiousness of the place…radiates beyond and is transfused into all that surrounds it…’ Within that space, part of the creative process is understood by observing initiation rites in which (124): ‘With this kiss, he enters into relations with the religious principle that is held to reside in it [the totemic object]; it is a genuine communion [emphasis added] that is to give the young man the strength he must have to endure.’ Of the cultural, symbolic core object— the totem, he writes (191): ‘It is the tangible form in which that intangible substance is represented in the imagination, diffused through all sorts of disparate being, that energy alone is the real object of the cult’ [emphasis added]. Lest it is thought that the language of energy and force is our own retrospective projection, Durkheim cautions otherwise (192): When I speak of these principles as forces, I do not use the word in a metaphorical sense; they behave like real forces. In a sense, they are even physical forces that bring about physical effects mechanically. Does an individual come into contact with them without having taken proper precautions? he receives a shock that has been compared with the effect of an electrical charge. They sometimes appear to be conceived of more or

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less as fluids that escape via the extremities…they play the role of lifeprinciple [emphasis added]…. All life is based on them. What is that ‘life principle’? For Durkheim (197): ‘The common life principle is wakan. The totem is the means by which the individual is put in touch with that source of energy. If the totem has powers, it has them because it incarnates wakan.’ He stresses (201): ‘The spirits, demons, genies and gods of every degree are only the concrete forms taken by this energy [this ‘potentiality’ as Hewitt calls it] as it became individualized...and condensed…wakan goes and comes throughout the world, and the sacred things are the places where it has alighted.’ Not only by materialization in objects, but also in the ‘communion’ of ‘a man who is speaking to a crowd’ (212), we can see that ‘this extraordinary surplus of forces [emphasis added] is quite real’. Durkheim (213) notes the fluctuations of surplus energy in historical as well as situational circumstances: Under the influence of some great collective shock in certain historical periods, social interactions become much more frequent and active. Individuals seek one another out and come together more. The result is the general effervescence that is characteristic of revolutionary or creative epochs. The result of that heightened activity is a general stimulation of individual energies. People live differently and more intensely than in normal times. Yet, there is virtually no instant in our lives in which a certain rush of energy fails to come to us from outside ourselves. Durkheim reiterates an alternating two-phase theory of social energy throughout the text (217): The two phases stand in the sharpest possible contrast. The first phase, in which economic activity predominates, is generally of rather low intensity…. This dispersed state in which the society finds itself makes life monotonous, slack, and humdrum. Everything changes when a corroborate takes place. Since the emotional and passionate faculties of the primitive are not fully subordinated to his reason and will, he easily loses self control…. There are transports of enthusiasm…. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness…. In the regenerative phase, social life is elevated to ‘a communion—that is in a fusion [emphasis added] of all the individual feelings into a common one…a mystical [emphasis added] sort of germinative plasma that is transmitted from generation to generation’ (231, 273). The socially creative states are cyclical, ‘reanimating’ ‘orgies of collective and religious life’ that (384) ‘make men forget the real world so as to transport them into another where their imagination is more at home…’ and which is (386–7) ‘sometimes even delirium…and is carried outside [emphasis added] himself’. Emergent man is the ‘object’ (417) of these practices ‘to lift man above himself and to make him live a higher

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life [emphasis added]…a life and ‘aptitude for living outside the real’ which makes him stronger and adds (425) ‘vital energies’ which offer a ‘new life,’ a ‘higher life’. This ‘social energy’ reading of Durkheim’s classic text is supported in the observations of other contemporary readers. Hunt, for example, in an application of the analysis of The Elementary Forms to her study of the French Revolution, observed (1988:27): ‘The sacred therefore has its origins in a surplus of energy created by an extraordinarily high level of social interaction. The energy trapped by this intense social exchange is then invested in some object which is taken to represent collective ideals.’ Similarly, Tiryakian (1978, 1981) sees in The Elementary Forms a theory of both social renewal and social revolution, in a sacralizing process of ‘de-differentiation’. This process is one of ‘transformation’, characterized by a high level of energy (Tiryakian 1978:45, 49). For a number of recent historical instances of social revolution, Tiryakian writes that (1978:52) ‘the religious factor was important in launching the process of dedifferentiation as a process of societal renewal’. Collins (1988:111) sustains the same perspective: ‘For Durkheim, the social gathering is a kind of machinery for charging such objects with sacredness…they become “batteries” (my expression, of course, not Durkheim’s) for carrying over this moral energy into subsequent situations.’ Pickering (1984), perhaps the pre-eminent analyst of Durkheim’s sociology of religion, also supports the social energy interpretation in his concept of ‘effervescent assembly’. Quoting Durkheim (Pickering 1984:387), he writes of ‘a source of social energy superior to that which is at the disposal of the individual and which, nevertheless, can be communicated to him’. Lastly, Gane (1992:87) suggests Durkheim’s vitalism replaces the charisma of the Romantic hero with the figure of the charismatic social.6 Beyond dualism Durkheim is a proud dualist. ‘The duality of our nature’, he wrote (1973a: 159), ‘is thus only a particular case of that division of things into the sacred and the profane that is the foundation of all religions, and it must be explained on the basis of the same principles’. His model of religion, and therefore of society, is based on the creative power of this fundamental dualism. The duality of the sacred and the profane, of the places, times, objects and states of being that must be separated, is the source of the social energy that animates all of social life. The sacred is naturally supernaturally Other. Paradoxically, it is not iconically social nor normatively social, though ecstatic assembly is the locus of the social. The social spirit/substance precedes the sign and rule. The object that serves as a prop for the idea does not amount to much as compared to the ideal superstructure under which it disappears and, furthermore, it has nothing to do with that superstructure’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:230). ‘It is in the form of collective thought that impersonal thought revealed itself to humanity for the first time’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:438). This emergent logos, the wordless becoming of the natural supernatural that transubstantiates the profane and transfigures representation, heralds the ‘impersonality and stability’ of collective immortality (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:437, 440):

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To think logically, in fact, is always, in some measure, to think impersonally; it is also to think sub specie aeternitatis. Impersonality and stability: Such are the two characteristics of truth…. To say that concepts express the manner in which society conceives of things is also to say that conceptual thought is contemporaneous with humanity…. [L]ogic evolves as societies themselves evolve. The ecstatic ‘fusion of all the individual feelings into a common one—the signs that express these feelings must come together in one single resultant’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:231–2) and teaches ‘the mind to dominate it and join together what the senses put asunder’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:239). Religious communion initiates, historically and transcendentally, the millennial logos. As soon as man became aware of the internal connections between things, science and philosophy became possible. Religion made a way for them. It is because religion is a social thing that it could play this role. To make men take control of sense impressions and replace them with a new way of imagining the real, a new kind of thought had to be created: collective thought. If collective thought alone had the power to achieve this, here is the reason: Creating a whole world of ideals, though which the world of sensed realities seemed transfigured, would require a hyperexcitation of intellectual forces that is possible only in society. (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995a:239) Social energy has supralogical life in accord with ‘the spiritual principle’: ‘that singularly creative and fertile psychic operation—which is scientifically analyzable—by which a plurality of individual consciousnesses enter into communion and are fused into a common consciousness’ (Durkheim 1973a: 160). The feasts of the festival are epiphanies of the collective soul, gatherings in synthesis of ‘bits of divinity’ (Durkheim 1973a:159; 1912a/t.1995a: 267) that idealize collective consciousness in ‘freedom consist[ing] in deliverance from blind, unthinking physical forces’ (Durkheim 1924a/t.1953b: 72). Participation in the life of spirit is an ‘accession made by the grace of society’: ‘If collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousnesses must occur. The product of this synthesis is a whole world of feelings, ideas, and images that follow their own laws once they are born’ (Durkheim 1924a/t.1953b:72; 1912a/t.1995a:426). Durkheim’s sacred, and thus, his social, is other to all profane: other to the embodiment of existence; to intersubjectivity only possible by difference; other to feminine religious; activity; to the presence of the magic of social healing originating in organic sensibilities of everyday praxis (Marcuse 1969; McGuire 1996). Finally, not simply derived from his Jewishness, Durkheim’s sacred is the other of rabbinic, rational talmudism of the Litvak Jewishness that historically opposed Jewish pietistic religions of the heart, known as Hasidism. Durkheim’s social energy, motivated by these others of his dualism, moves from experience—away from the ordinariness of life in order to transform life by communion with ideals.

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We suggest that the dualistic infrastructure is mistaken. Durkheim’s social energism presupposes a monological collective consciousness, identical with its knowledge and known in the removal of difference via communion.7 To the contrary, we propose that the social space is between, existing between differences as embodied practices of social energy and as the sensual, dialogic forms of education. These ‘other sides’ of Durkheim constitute the ‘alter-grounds’ of Durkheim’s theory of the sacred. The sides that are diminished, refused or repressed, ‘return’ as constituting the energic core of his theory of the sacred and of society. Vitalism, mysticism, feminine religion, magic and Hasidism are, at once expressed in his theory, and in their elaboration, an alternative to it. In these other sides of his dualities can be found the bases for a nondualistic approach to religion and society. The otherness of the sacred is not only in its vital substance, dispersing (‘like fluids’) to animate and revitalize, but, as Tiryakian described it, in its ‘undifferentiated’ state. This is the ‘other’ of the two phases, which, though it is ‘higher’, is at once a depersonalization or de-culturation simultaneous as it is the source of person and culture. This is the ‘heart’ that Meštrović (1992) sees as Durkheim’s other side of compassion and will, based (Meštrović suggests) on the life-force philosophy of Schopenhauer. For Meštrović, Durkheim’s sacred is feminine (1992:95): ‘Feminine aspects of Durkheim’s sociology—especially his claim that religion is the womb from which all the other social institutions originate—have never been the centrepiece of the social scientific study of religion.’ In one of a growing number of exceptions to that pattern, Erickson notes, in her feminist sociology of religion: ‘Durkheim’s analysis of religion reveals religion’s sacralization process as a tool used by particular men to create and sustain society from which women, and the rest of the profane collectivity, are excluded’ (Erickson 1993:46). She goes on to observe: ‘Durkheim selected the rationality of religious thought over the profane, magical, erotic world view’ (47). Yet, if the sacred is the place of return of the regressed ego, the undifferentiated origin of creation, is it not also an eternal return to the Mother who gives life, in Durkheim’s unnamed polarity to the male religion of rites and beliefs? Similarly, Pickering (1984:183), following Richard, describes Durkheim’s antimysticism: ‘Durkheim was expressing an innate fear of mysticism which seized him at the beginning of his life and remained with him to the end.’ Yet, Durkheim names the process of collective energy creation in the sacred as a ‘mystic mechanics’ and the social transmission of that energy across generations as one of a ‘mystical plasma’. The dualist theory of society is premised on a nondualistic experience. Magic too is refused centrality by Durkheim. In magic, he notes early in The Elementary Forms, ‘beliefs do not bind men…. There is no Church of Magic’ (Durkheim 1912a/t.1995:42; original emphasis). Durkheim’s monotheistic social god attempts to dispel the spirits and the agency of mediums and shape-shifters as dreamers, travellers and world-vagrants that transversely alter reality as ‘living sites’ of and between interpenetrating existences (Jackson 1989, 1995; Stoller 1995). In the illogics of magic, there is a divination in the everyday of felt absences and tacit recognitions, an insurgent, sensuously social and commensal imagination of the real. For Durkheim, the purgation of magic cleanses the social body and soul and represents revitalization as a vigorous hygiene of social experience.

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Magic and spirits are experientially possessed, voiced and performed sensu-ally social ways of knowing the places between differences in contrast to transparency of ‘communion’ to the conceptually impersonal and universal. The senses and the flesh, as ways of sacred sociality, are not ciphers nor abominations, but permeations of awareness to living relationality (Levy et al. 1996; Csordas 1994; Stoller 1989; Seremetakis 1994; Jackson 1983). Affirmation in the ordinariness of the everyday by the practical poesis of magical sensibility reverses the Durkheimian elevatory trajectory of ritual toward impersonal truth. Pickering has raised Durkheim’s last muted pole of duality, his Jewishness (1994:11): ‘The subject of Durkheim’s Jewishness, however, has never been dealt with systematically.’ Pickering underlines Durkheim’s understated and unreflected Jewishness by positing his desire to conceal his roots (1994:19): ‘Durkheim’s wish for hiddenness might also be seen in the fact that he, who was named David Emile, chose always to be known as Emile rather than by the more Jewish name of David.’ Pickering (following Derczansky) goes still further along this speculative line by linking Durkheim’s particular Jewish lineage to his putative anti-mysticism: ‘Derczansky maintains that Durkheim’s father stood in the tradition of Lithuanian Judaism which had come from Eastern Europe. It was strongly juridical and stood aggressively opposed to every form of messianism and mysticism’ (Pickering 1994:29). Integration The source of social energy is, for Durkheim, in the Otherness. In psychoanalytic terms, such energy comes from a ‘regression of the ego’ to an undivided, de-regulated primal state of ecstatic fusion with the social, which, Durkheim tells us, is God. In this sense, Durkheim’s model is ‘Other’ in that his descriptions of the sacred contain the Other, refused polarities in his dualism, and ‘other’ also in the important sense that it is otherworldly. Mana and wakan become concentrated in social aggregation so that pantheism, and even the polytheism of James, which Durkheim rejected, is condensed to one, social, unified God. Durkheim’s social, vitalistic monotheism is, at once, divided (two worlds, two beings, two phases) and, to use Weber’s (1991) term, an ‘otherworldly’ mysticism—an empowering of the worldly only by a fusion with the primal flow. Such a resacralization is precisely the dynamic, not simply of revolution, as Tiryakian argued, nor of a discovery of ‘will’, as Meštrović imputed, by a ‘gnosis’ of body/mind that lives by surrender of the ego’s will. The reliance on otherworldly fusion as the final source of social energy—in a depleted, ‘mediocre’ age—leads (not only, as Durkheim prophesied, to a cult of hyperindividualism) but to cults of collective immolation—to ritual forms of collective self-abnegation to the point of destruction. The contemporary ‘forms’ are not the sacralizing prefaces of social revolutions, but the informational, gnostic mass suicides of Rancho Santa Fe, California. That is the endpoint of an otherworldly generative source of social energy that relies on collective rites of self-denial, of fusion. Is a this-worldly, narcissistic, nihilist hedonism the best social alternative? Or the individualist mysticism, which Durkheim castigated James for unscientifically advocating? The alternative, of course, is to find

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social energy within the world, in social life that does not require and posit everyday life as inevitably ‘utilitarian’, ‘cold’ and ‘dying’—as Durkheim posited. This is Buber’s aim: to bring contact with the summons of the transcendental to the enlivening of the self in the mutuality of validating, creative human interrelation—in locating the sacred energy (‘the spark that leaps the gap’, as Buber wrote) in the ‘inbetween’ people. Not dualism, but integration, or, as Buber puts it, ‘unification’ is the solution to the vitalization and renewal (‘incessant renewal’, he wrote) that works against the unfettered chaos and decay of the modern era. The sacred is returned to the world: not to strengthen the ordinary for further utilitarian economic and social reproduction, but to transform it relationally: to vitalize, not by surrendered fusion and ego regression communion rites of merger, but by instigating the freedom of response—and responsibility—as an articulate voice. The sacred, and thus, the life force, is engendered by the response to the Other. But, for that, the call must be heard. This Other is both transcendental and worldly, the eternal, but historical Thou of the Bible, but also the Thou of the humanly different, e-stranger-ed Other. Social energy that enlivens the individual and the collective comes through social interaction that depends on a free choice of an autonomous being who chooses relation as the answer; not a surrender or merger or return to the primordial flow. ‘Here,’ writes Buber (1963:141), ‘dualism is fought with the utmost vigour’. ‘Hallow the earthly’, Buber (1963:163) proclaims, and ‘affirm the covenant with God in everyday life’. This ‘love’, which is the social bond aimed at in the communion of fusion and self-surrender, becomes generative itself, because it is an answer, and a simultaneous affirmation of both self and other in responsibility. Social energy is in the in-between, and against the model of an orgiastic beginning is proposed social revitalization in a life of ‘dialogue’. The love that binds is not dedifferentiated return, but a creative interaction (Buber 1958:131): ‘Wherever genuine human society has developed it has always been on this same basis of functional autonomy, mutual recognition and mutual responsibility, whether individual or collective.’ Beyond integration In his formative interpretation of Hasidism, Buber replaces dualism with integration. In a more recent reading of Hasidism, Idel (1995) offers a more mediated version of Hasidism, which, he argues is not only ecstatic in its mystical, Kabbalistic roots, but also magical, in its historically heterogeneous influences. It is a reconstitutive process that involves a ‘drawing down’ of divine influx and its subsequent distribution through practices of ‘elevation’. Not a two-phased, but twotiered, more vertical model of distribution is offered. And, what is distributed is the divine influx, or social energy that binds both the zaddiq to the divine source, and in turn, to the human community. The vessel of this energy is not collective representation (though the letters of the Torah carry this energy and, by proper practices, can be ‘called’ forth), but, instead, the experiential body (Idel 1995:59): ‘The human body was thereby conceived as the locus where the divine influx is received and as a vessel to hold the descending influx’. It is the

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zaddiq who draws down this divine energy, which Idel refers to as ‘a kind of spiritual electricity’. For Idel, these are basically astrological terms, and the magical practices of Hasidism include also talismans, which are powerful and where (Idel 1995:74) ‘the strongest talisman is the divine name’. Idel’s version of Hasidism, like Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, is both one of social energy and social binding (Idel 1995:107): The quintessence of the mystico-magical model can be defined as the sequence of an inner, mystical experience that consists of a cleaving to God, often preceded by a self-induced feeling of ‘nothingness’—that is an expansion of consciousness, and the subsequent return to this world and drawing down into it the divine energy by performing the ritual and then distributing the energy to others. In the mediated sacral energy process, the saint or zaddiq—or shaman—expresses ‘his capacity to bring down and distribute divine power, or influx, to the community he serves as spiritual mentor’ (Idel 1995:204).8 Such return does not dissolve existential contradictions by abstract transformation but, instead, sacralizes the embodied, relational structure of experience. Education as embodied mediation The difference that a mediated and embodied rather than a direct, undifferentiated and ideational sacred theory of social energy makes for social life is exemplified by comparing Durkheim’s application to education with a view that education is embodied mediation, a practice of presence (Wexler 1996:133–52). For Durkheim, education is an immersion in collective representation that replicates the collective practices of totemism in a secular, reformist and socially revitalizing modality. Social immortality via continual collective rebirth is the very goal of education for Durkheim: [E]ducation consists of a methodical socialization of the younger generation. In each of us…there exists two beings, which inseparable except by abstraction, remain distinct. One is made up of all the mental states that apply only to ourselves and to the events of our personal lives: this is what might be called the individual being. The other is a system of ideas, sentiments and practices which express in us, not our personality, but the group or different groups of which we are a part; these are religious beliefs, moral beliefs and practices, national or professional traditions, collective opinions of every kind. Their totality forms the social being. To constitute this being in each of us is the end of education. (1922a/t.1956a:123–124, also 71–2) But a mediated education places the embodied relationship of educator and student, not ideals, in the pivotal position and turns the work of education to the social suffering of existence and the possibilities of revitalized living. If we secularize and educe the magico-mystical model, the educators’ precursor is the shaman, not the totem. And,

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before the shaman, stands the practice of presence that feels, thinks, listens and converses in a relational covenant, that replaces totemism as the ‘elementary’ form of religious, and thereby, social life. Cultural resacralization offers a truly post-modern critical social theory of education a vitalization of social being-in-presence, an unspeakable, sensual animation of theory/practice as transformational material practices between learners in ‘the light of an infinitude that is not separated from this world’ (Wexler 1996:154). Not fusion, but interactive presence, and, not ‘progressive’ informational exchange, but the intermediation of the ‘spiritual mentor’ creating a vital social space of difference, is the religious and educational formation. The two trees of knowledge and life, that Durkheim grafted in communion only to transplant the roots in transcendent ideals, are joined at the root by the resacralization of expansive presence in the soil of education. Coda As for Durkheim, Pickering (1994:35) reports on his visit to Durkheim’s grave (in the custom of Jewish Animistic revitalization, ordinarily on the New Year): ‘In the righthand corner, there are some Hebrew words which have been so weathered as to be indecipherable.’ Notes 1 Durkheim’s use of the term has the analogue of ‘man’ to civilization and the counterpose of ‘female’ to nature. (See Erickson 1993; Gane 1992; Jay 1992; Lehmann 1993; Lemert 1995; Ortner 1974; Yeatman 1990.) 2 An issue well explored by Rawls (1996) and Tole (1993). Alexander (1988:188) provides insight into the ‘liquid character of sacredness’ relative to social structure. Maffesoli (1993:63) gives a valuable analysis of Durkheim’s sacred epistemology in terms of the idealizing process as ‘the interpenetration of consciences’, the ultima ratio of all sociality’. 3 ‘Clearly, this ultimate goal of all our efforts can contain nothing particular; it can have as its object only the universal spirit of humanity…. To raise oneself to consciousness of the ideal is to separate the object of ethics from all conditions of time and space that make it particular and to embrace it in all its universality and infinity. Only a few exceptional minds have ever attained this lofty concept’ (1993:75, 110–11). 4 Durkheim reconciles the disparity of representation and truth by asserting the social coevolution of both the ‘copy’ and the ‘model’ [reality] (1960c:415, 419). ‘His [man’s] thought is not a copy of the real: it is a true creation’ (1960c: 415). In The Elementary Forms, this social synthetic is directly put: ‘Hence, there is a realm of nature in which the formula of idealism is almost literally applicable; that is the social realm. There, far more than anywhere else, the idea creates the reality…. It is superimposed on nature’ (1912a/t.l995a:229, 230). This is the epistemological basis of Durkheim’s terms, his ‘ethnographic holism’ (Thornton 1992:24), his ‘retro-relativism’ and his modern progressivism and his sociological rational moral art. 5 Abrams (1971:169–95) interpreted the secular romantic reformulation of Renaissance themes of Judaeo-Christian relations of creator with creature and creation as a ‘natural supernaturalism’ consisting of: self-generative organism; immanent teleology; unity lost/regained; spiralled progress by reversion and redemption by self-education. 6 Gane (1992:88) suggests: ‘Durkheim’s specific vitalism and its paradoxical nature arise out of

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the fact that…for him, the 1789 revolution was only half-born…. [I]ts completion had to await a genuine creative effervescence…. Durkheim’s position here seemed to lead him to conceive of social evolution as moving at its own natural (i.e. inevitably slow) pace.’ 7 Durkheim’s dualism divides the self into the binary of the profane and sacred, eliminating the sensual and liminal places between by collapse: ‘These two [body and soul] aspects of our psychic life are, therefore opposed to each other as are the personal and the impersonal. There is in us a being that represents everything in relation to itself and from its own point of view; in everything that it does, this being has no object but itself. There is another being in us, however, which knows things sub specie aeternitatis, as if it were participating in some thought other than its own, and which, in its acts, tends to accomplish ends that surpass its own’ (1973a:152). 8 To summarize the process of receptivity and dispersal: ‘as including three decisive moments: the opening toward the divine and the cleaving to God; the attracting of the divine influx by means of religious activities; and last, but not least, its distribution to the community’ (Idel 1995:204).

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Bellah, R.B. (1970) Beyond Belief, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——(ed.) (1973) ‘Introduction’, xi–xxi’ in Emile Durkheim: on Morality and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Buber, M. (1948) Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis, New York: Schocken Books. ——(1949) Paths in Utopia, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ——(1958) I and Thou, New York: Macmillan. ——(1965) Between Man and Man, New York: Macmillan. ——(1967) On Judaism, New York: Schocken Books.

Cohen, A.P. and Rapport, N. (1995) (eds) Questions of Consciousness, London and New York: Routledge. Collins, Randall (1988) ‘The Durkheimian tradition in conflict sociology’, in Jeffrey Alexander (ed.) Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Csordas, T.J. (1994) ‘Introduction: the body as representation and being-in-the world’, in T.J.Csordas (ed.) Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Eliade, M. (1987) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace and Company. Erickson, Victoria (1993) Where Silence Speaks: Feminism, Social Theory and Religion, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

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Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books. ——(1973) The Order of Things, New York: Random House. ——(1978) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House. Friedman, M.S. (ed.) Pointing the Way: Collected Essay by Martin Buber, pp. 31–58, New York: Schocken Books.

Gane, M. (1992) ‘Durkheim: woman as outsider’, in Mike Gane (ed.), The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, New York: Routledge.

Happold, F.C. (1970) Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology, London: Penguin Books. Horkheimer, M. (1992) Critical Theory: Selected Essays, New York: Continuum. Hunt, Lynn (1988) ‘The sacred and the French Revolution’, in Jeffrey Alexander (ed.) Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Idel, M. (1995) Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Jackson, M. (1989) Paths Toward a Clearing, Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press. ——(1995) At Home in the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——(1983) ‘Knowledge of the body’, Man, 18:327–45. Jay, N. (1992) Throughout Your Generations Forever, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Kant, I. (1960) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, New York: Harper. ——(1963) Lectures on Ethics, New York: Harper. Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy (1988) ‘Emile Durkheim and the politics of knowledge’, Theory and Society, 17:121–45.

Lehmann, J. (1993) Deconstructing Durkheim: A Post-poststructuralist Critique, New York: Routledge. Lemert, C. (1995) Sociology After the Crisis, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Levy, R., Mageo, J.M. and Howard, A. (1996) ‘Gods, spirits and history: a theoretical perspective’, in Alan Howard and Jeannette Marie Mageo (eds), Spirits in Culture, History and Mind, New York: Routledge. Loewenthal, N. (1990) Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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Maffesoli, M. (1993) ‘The imaginary and the sacred in Durkheim’s sociology’, Current Sociology, 41, 2:59–67. Marcuse, H. (1969) An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press. McGuire, Meredith (1996) ‘Religion and healing the mind/body/self’, Social Compass, 43, 1:101–16. Meštrović, S.G. (1992) Durkheim and Postmodern Culture, New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Ortner, S. (1974) ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture’, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lampere (eds) Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Parsons, T. (1968) The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 1, New York: The Free Press. Pickering, W.S.F. (1979) ‘Introductions’, Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1984) Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1994) ‘The enigma of Durkheim’s Jewishness’, in W.S.F.Pickering and H. Martins (eds) Debating Durkheim, London and New York: Routledge.

Rawls, A.W. (1996) ‘Durkheim’s epistemology: the neglected argument’, American Journal of Sociology, 102, 2:430–82.

Schott, R.M. (1988) Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Seremetakis, N.C. (1994) The Senses Still, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, P. and Alexander, J.C. (1996) ‘Review essay: Durkheim’s religious revival’, American Journal of Sociology, 102, 2:585–92. Stoller, Paul (1989) The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. ——(1995) Embodying Colonial Memories, New York: Routledge.

Thornton, R. (1992) ‘The rhetoric of ethnographic holism’, in George Marcus (ed.) Rereading Cultural Anthropology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tiryakian, E.A. (1962) Sociologism and Existentialism: Two Perspectives on the Individual and Society, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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——(1978) ‘Emile Durkheim’, in Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (eds) A History of Sociological Analysis, New York: Basic Books. ——(1981) ‘Durkheim’s “Elementary Forms” as “Revelation”’, in Buford Rhea (ed.) The Future of the Sociological Classics, London: George Allen and Unwin. Tole, L.A. (1993) ‘Durkheim on religion and moral community in modernity’, Sociological Inquiry, 63, 1:1–29. Turner, T. (1994) ‘Bodies and anti-bodies: flesh and fetish in contemporary social theory’, in Thomas J.Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Weber, M. (1991) The Sociology of Religion, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Wexler, P. (1996) Holy Sparks: Social Theory, Education and Religion, New York: St Martin’s Press.

Yeatman, A. (1990) ‘A feminist theory of social differentiation’, in Linda J. Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge.

NAME INDEX Abrams, M.H. 205, 209 Alberoni, F. 211 Alexander, J. 204 Ariés, P. 63 Aristotle 7, 171, 174 Arnold, T. 63 Atsumi, R. 100 Beck, J. 138 Bell, C.H. 172 Bellah, R. 143, 144, 171, 204, 210 Benjamin, G. 103 Benne, K. 150 Bennett, W. 171, 173 Bentham, J. 21–2 Bernstein, B. 105, 145, 159, 160 Berting, J. 111 Besnard, P. 72 Bettelheim, B. 173 Bloom, H. 24 Boli, J. 42 Bourdieu, P. 8, 102, 105 Boutroux, E. 75 Bowles, S. 142 Brassé, J. 112 Braster, J.F.A. 108–124 Bronfenbrenner, U. 49 Buber, M. 218 Buisson, F. 3 Canter, L. and Canter, M. 184–90 Charles, C.M. 184 Cladis, M.S. 19–32 Cohen, A.P. 209–10 Collins, R. 213 Comte, A. 3, 86 Coontz, S. 186 Counts, G. 150 Crane, Mrs W.M. 153, 154 Cremin, L. 150, 165, 166 Csordas, T.J. 210, 217

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Cummings, W. 99 Curwin, R.L. 188, 189, 190 Dahrendorf, R. 42 Dale, P. 104 Darling-Hammond, L. 188–9, 195 Dewey, E. 154 Dewey, J. 6, 52, 142, 145–7, 148, 159, 171, 173, 177, 180 Donald, J. 135 Dore, R. 97 Dostoevsky, F. 175 Drucker, P. 180 Dworkin, R. 53, 142, 146, 153 Edwards, R. 135 Edwards, T. 131 Ellis, A.K. 164–182 Ehrenreich, B. 143 Erickson,V. 216 Etzioni, A. 143, 144 Fauconnet, P. 1, 72 Ferry, J. 2, 3 Fitz, J. 130 Foucault, M. 204, 208 Gane, M. 214 Garland, D. 69 Gewirtz, S. 131 Giddens, A. 96, 127 Gilligan, C. 46, 52–7, 171 Gintis, H. 142 Gluck, C. 104 Goodlad, J. 177 Goodman, R. 95–107 Gordon, M. 112 Green, A. 37, 135, 136, 139 Greene, M. 146 Habermas, J. 180 Halpin, D. 130 Halsey, A.H. 9–10, 95 Hargreaves, D. 9 Hartshorne, H. 47, 167 Heater, D. 37, 42 Hegel, G.W.F. 21 Hendry, J. 100 Hewitt, D. 138 Hill, D. 188 Himmelfarb, G. 176

Name index Hinkson, J. 136 Hobbes, T. 48, 175 Hobsbawm, E.J. 136 Holmes, B. 96 Horkheimer, M. 206 Howard, A. 217 Hunt, L. 213 Hurn, C.J. 145 Hurst, G.C. 98 Hutchins, R.M. 178 Idel, M. 218–19 Ienaga, S. 98 Ishida, H. 97 Jackson, A. 167 Jackson, M. 216, 217 Jackson, P. 168, 169, 170 James, E. 103 James, M. 150 Jansen, M.B. 98 Jesus 24 Jong, M-J.de 108–124 Judge, H. 2 Kant, I. 7, 21–2, 25, 50, 72, 74–81 passim, 205, 206 Karabel, J. 9–10, 95 Kaufman-Osborn, T. 205 Keats, M. 172 Klaassen, C.A.C. 36, 38, 43 Kohlberg, L. 46–57, 170, 171, 173, 174 Kohn, M. 118 Krank, H.M. 189 Kraushaar, O.F. 150 Larmore, C. 77 Lasch, C. 143 Lemosse, M. 2 Levy, R. 217 Lickona, T. 171, 172, 173 Lijphart, A. 109 Lindo, F. 111 Lucassen, J. 112 Lukes, S. 35, 37, 98, 104–5, 115–16, 117, 122, 127 McCormack, S. 189 MacDonald, A. 138 McGuire, M. 215 MacIntyre, A. 29 Mageo, J.M. 217

204

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Major, J. 125 Mann, H. 166, 175 Mannheim, K. 33 Marcuse, H. 215 Marshall, T.H. 38 Martens, E.P. 110 Mauss, M. 8 May, M. 47, 167 Meier, D. 149 Meijers, F. 43 Mendler, A.N. 188, 189, 190 Meštrović, S.G. 216, 217 Miller, H. 131 Miller, W.W. 72–91 Mills, C.W. 143 Mills, J. 21–2 Moeran, B. 100 Montaigne, M.de 35–6 Montesquieu, C.de S. 79 Mouer, R. 104 Murray, J.W. 151 Nietzsche, F. 24 Padilla, J.M. 189 Parkhurst, H. 150, 153–6 Parkin, F. 104 Parsons, T. 207 Patten, J. 132–3 Peak, L. 100 Pécaut, F. 4 Penninx, R. 112 Piaget, J. 77, 83, 170, 173, 174, 179 Pickering, W.S.F. 1–16, 59–71, 190, 192, 206, 208, 210, 214, 216, 217, 220 Plato 7 Power, S. 130 Poyntz, C. 132, 137 Pratt, C. 150–3, 157 Putnam, H. 49 Pyle, K. 98 Quintilian 177 Ramirez, F. 42 Rapport, N. 209–10 Rawls, J. 19, 20, 27 Render, G.F. 189 Rigoni, D. 183–200 Rogers, C. 171, 179 Rohlen, T.P. 103

Name index Rorty, R. 22 Rousseau, J-J. 20–1, 30, 48, 65, 66, 193 Rupp, J.C.C. 40 Ryan, K. 171, 173 Sadovnik, A. 142–163 Saunders, L. 138 Schelven, W.van 112 Schopenhauer, A. 216 Schoppa, L. 97 Schott, R.M. 206 Sedlak, M. 2 Sedlak, L.P. 2 Semel, S.F. 142–163, 159 Seremetakis, N.C. 217 Seward, J. 101 Sizer, T. 149 Smith, H.L. 168, 169 Socrates 24 Soviak, E. 98 Spady, R.J. 172 Spencer, H. 21–2 Stedman-Jones, S. 80 Stein, P. 203–225 Stoller, P. 216, 217 Sugimoto, Y. 104 Takeuchi, Y. 103 Tiryakian, E.A. 205–6, 211, 213, 217 Tocqueville, A.de 28 Tomomi, Prince Iwakura 98 Tönnies, F. 144 Tsukada, M. 103 Turner, S.P. 46–58 Turner, T. 208, 210 Tyack, D. 147 Tytler, D. 184 Usher, R. 135 Veenam, J. 110, 112 Vis, J. 40 Vygotsky, L. 179 Walford, G. 1–16, 125–141 Weber, W. 217 Weiner, M.A. 97 Wesselingh, A.A. 33–45, 114 Westbrook, R. 153 Wexler, P. 40, 42, 203–225

206

Name index Whitty, G. 131 Wilson, E.K. 99, 176, 177 Wittebrood, K. 40 Yeatman, A. 208 Zijderveld, A.C. 109

207

SUBJECT INDEX abortion: rituals and 55–6; women’s moral reasoning and 52–7 administrative progressivism 147; see also progressive education Anabaptists 6, 69n Année Sociologique group 1 arts: teaching of 85, 86 assertive discipline 184–98; attachment and 197, 198; authority of teacher 194–5, 198; corporate myth 184–5; criticism of 188–90; the model 186–8; pro-teacher stance of 185–6; reinforcement of popular perceptions 185–6; reward and punishment 186, 193–4, 195–7; teacher as rule-setter 186–8, 192, 194; theory and practice 190 atonement: punishment as 67 attachment 35, 36, 121, 204; assertive discipline and 197, 198; autonomy and 83–4; citizenship and 35, 36, 84; morality and 55–7, 177–9; rituals and 55–7, 145; see also social cohesion authority 35–6, 50–1; autonomy and 77–8; justice and 51, 195; moral authority 67, 178–9, 191–2; moral education and 7; the sacred and 77–8; society and 77; of teacher 194–5, 198; see also discipline; punishment autonomy 24–5; attachment and 83–4;

Subject index

209

authority and 77–8; citizenship and 35, 36, 39, 43; the curriculum and 85–6; dutifulness and 82–3; education for 72–3, 81–90; Enlightenment and Romantic view 25; freedom of the will and 78–81; history and 73, 85; individuals and persons 73–6, 84; Kantian 25, 74–5; loyalty and 84; mechanical enlightenment, role of 88–9; moral education and 179; the moral judge 76–7; national identity and 84–5; the reflective will 72–3, 82–3; science and 86–90; virtues and 81–5; see also moral education Canter Corporation see assertive discipline Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) 149, 156, 159 child-centred schools see progressive education Christian Schools Campaign (CSC) 131–2, 137 Christian Schools Trust (CST) 132 citizenship: attachment and 35, 36, 84; autonomy and 35, 36, 39, 43; civilian rights 38; class and 42; concept of 38; cross-curricular competencies (CCCs) 40–1; democracy and 37, 40; discipline and 35; education system and 34–7; moral dimension 35, 39; moral education and 35, 39, 41–2; national curriculum and 38–41, 42; national identity and 34, 37–8, 42; Netherlands 39, 40, 41, 43; self-responsible learning 39; the state and 37–8; United States 167–8; see also moral education City and Country School 148, 149, 150–3, 156–60; see also progressive education City Technology Colleges 130–1 class: citizenship and 42; in Japan 102–3; schools and 8;

Subject index underclass 42 classroom management: as moral education 183–98; see also assertive discipline Coalition of Essential Schools 149 collective consciousness 207, 215; morality and 48–9, 56 community: communitarianism 143–4; discipline and 173–4; education and 145–7; effects of modernity on 144; individualism and 142, 143, 144–7; moral education and 172, 173–4; progressive education and 150, 152, 157–8; school and 5; social-centred education 5–6; social reconstructionism 150 competition in school 9, 10; Japanese schools 100 core curriculum: Netherlands 39, 40, 41, 43; see also national curriculum corporal punishment see punishment critical skills: development of 25–7 cross-curricular competencies (CCCs) 40–1 Dalton School 148, 149, 153–60; see also progressive education democracy 127; citizenship and 37, 40; education and 23, 37, 146, 148; moral education and 172, 180; occupational associations 127–8; progressive education and 150, 153, 157–8, 159 denominational schools: England and Wales 125, 131–4, 136, 140; grant-maintained 125, 131–4, 136, 140; national curriculum and 137–8; Netherlands 108, 117 deprivation: as punishment 63–4 discipline 7, 9, 23–4, 192–4; assertive see assertive discipline; citizenship and 35; community and 173–4; internalization of 193, 194, 198; moral education and 173–5, 192–4; moral innovators and 24; self-mastery 24;

210

Subject index theory and practice 190; see also authority; moral education; punishment diversity 8–9, 127, 128; cultural 110–13; in England and Wales 130–5; multi-cultural education 116–17; in the Netherlands 110–13; see also pluralism dualism 214–17, 218 dutifulness: autonomy and 82–3 Ecoles Normales Primaires 2 Ecoles Normales Supérieures 2 emotions 6; punishment and 65 equality of opportunities 113–16 essentialism 22 examination system 9 freedom of expression 9 freedom of the will 78–81; see also autonomy functionalist theory of education 144–5 function of education 4–5, 113–17, 145 grant-maintained schools 131–9; denominational 125, 131–4, 136, 140; National Curriculum 137–9 group solidarity see attachment Hasidism 215, 218–19 historicism 22 history 26, 73, 85; in Japanese education 98 humanism 6, 7; punishment and 60–1; see also secular morality immigration 109–13; integration and 111–12, 114, 122; marginalization and 112, 113; racism and 115 individualism 19; community and 142, 143, 144–7; individual-centred education 5–6; moral 23; progressive education 150;

211

Subject index as social ideal 21 intuitionism 48, 50 isolation: as punishment 69n Japanese education: boundaries 99; class interests and 102–3; competition 100; egalitarianism 97–8; group education 100; history teaching 98; industry and 96–7; meritocracy 97–8; moral education 98; multiple-choice testing 99; national identity and 104; parents and 96; private 102–3; punishment 101; religion and 96; scientific model of teaching 98–9; socialization 95–6, 99; the state and 96–7; supplementary education 102–3; teachers as role models 101; uniformity 98 Judaism 6, 217; Hasidism 215, 218–19; punishment and 61 justice: authority and 51, 195 justificationism 46–8; Kohlbergian stages 47–8, 52, 54, 170–1; science and 52 literature: study of 27, 86 loyalty: autonomy and 84 magic 216–17 market forces: education and 6, 130 meritocracy 9; in Japan 97–8 moral education 6–7, 9–10, 35–6, 46–57; authority and 7; autonomy and 179; citizenship and 35, 39, 41–2; classroom management as 183–98;

212

Subject index

213

community and 172, 173–4; democracy and 172, 180; discipline and 173–5, 192–4; group solidarity 36; history and 27; in Japan 96; Kohlbergian stages of moral development 47–8, 52, 54, 170–1; literature and 27; moral acts 191–2; moral authority 67, 178–9, 191–2; nature of 21–2; pluralism and 19–31; relativism 7, 43; science and 27; secular 51, 175–6, 205–6; technique 49–52; in United States 164–80; see also autonomy; citizenship; discipline moral individualism 23, 29–30, 50 moral innovators: discipline and 24 morality: abortion 53–7; attachment and 55–7, 177–9; collective consciousness 48–9, 56; contract theory and 48; as a force 48–9; internationalization of 197–8; intuitionism 48, 50; justificationism 46–8, 52; rational 50, 51; rituals and 55–7; secular 7, 51, 175–6, 191; women’s moral reasoning 52–7 moral pluralism 23, 30–1 multi-cultural education 116–17 multiple-choice testing: in Japanese education 99 mysticism 216, 217, 218, 219 national curriculum 37–8; citizenship and 38–41, 42; denominational schools and 137–8; England and Wales 137–9; see also core curriculum national identity: autonomy and 84–5; citizenship and 34, 37–8, 42; Japanese education and 104

Subject index Netherlands: citizenship 39, 40, 41, 43; core curriculum 39, 40, 41, 43; cultural diversity 110–13; cultural pluralism in 108–13; denominational schools 108, 117; immigration 109–13; integration of immigrants 111–12, 114, 122; marginalization of immigrants 112, 113; multi-cultural education 116–17; religion 117, 118; self-reliance 118–19; teachers 117–21; tolerance 116, 118–19, 121–2 Network of Progressive Educators 148–9, 153, 156 occupational associations 127–8 parents 6, 19, 179–80; in Japan 96; punishment and 59, 60 pluralism 8–9; cultural 108–13; moral 23; moral education and 19–31; moral pluralism 30–1; see also diversity political education 128 post-modernism 7, 204–5, 208 prayers in schools 167, 176 primary schools: in France 2; in Soviet Union 49, 50; see also schools progressive education 142, 147–9; administrative progressivism 147; City and Country School 148, 149, 150–3, 156–60; community and 150, 152, 157–8; Dalton School 148, 149, 153–60; democracy and 150, 153, 157–8, 159; individualism 150; project method 178; social reconstructionism 150 psychology 6 punishment 24, 35, 59–70, 195–7; Anabaptists and 69n; assertive discipline and 186, 193–4, 195–7; as atonement 67; Christianity and 62–3; continual 64;

214

Subject index dehumanizing nature of 59–60; deprivation as 63–4; desirable practice 63–6; emotion and 65; explanations for use of 62–3; as expurgation or expiation 67–8; graduated scale of 64; group punishment 64; humanism and 60–1; Hutterites 69n; isolation as 69n; in Japanese schools 101; Judaism and 61; medieval schools 62–3; moral authority 67; moral legitimacy and 24; parents and 59, 60; physical punishment 59–60; prevention 66–7; in ‘primitive’ societies 62; rewards and 65–6, 186, 193–4, 195–7; theories of 66–9; timing 64–5; undesirable practice 59–63; of very young children 60, 66; see also authority; discipline; rewards purpose of education 4–5, 22 racism: immigration and 115 rational morality 50, 51 reflective will, the 72–3, 82–3 relativism 7, 43, 88, 89 religion: education and 203–9; Japanese education and 96; in the Netherlands 117, 118; secular morality and 51, 175–6, 191; social energy and 205, 210–14; see also denominational schools représentations collectives 5 resacralization 210, 217, 220 rewards: assertive discipline and 186, 193–4, 195–7; role in education 65–6; see also punishment rituals: attachment and 55–7, 145; morality and 55–7

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Subject index

sacred, the 204–5, 211; authority and 77–8; duality of the sacred and the profane 214–17; otherness of 214, 216; resacralization 210, 217, 220 schools: authority in 35–6, 50–1; autonomy of 6; class system and 8; community and 5; competition in 9, 10, 100; prayers in 167, 176; purpose of 5; see also primary schools; teachers science: autonomy and 86–90; justificationism and 52; study of 27 secular education 23 secular morality 7, 51, 175–6, 191; see also humanism self, the 24 self-determination see autonomy self-mastery 24 self-responsible learning 39 social-centred education 5–6 social cohesion: education and 113–16; see also attachment social energy 205, 210–14; dualism 214–17; integration 217–19 socialization 20, 104–5; inequality and 115–16; in Japan 95–6, 99 social realism 5 social reconstructionism 142, 150; see also progressive education social revitalization 203–20 Soviet Union: education in 49, 50 state and education 9, 28–9, 126–30; citizenship and 37–8; in Japan 96–7 syllabus 5 teachers: assertive discipline and 185–8, 192, 194–5, 198; authority of 194–5, 198;

216

Subject index in Japan 101; in the Netherlands 117–21; role of 4–5; as role models 10, 101, 177; as rule-setters 186–8, 192, 194; syllabus and 5; see also schools teacher training: in Britain 2; in France 2 tolerance 116, 118–19, 121–2 underclass 42 United States: church and state 167, 176; citizenship 167–8; moral education 164–80; prayers in schools 167, 176; see also assertive discipline; progressive education utilitarian theories of education 21–2, 43 vocational education 6, 126, 128

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