Pedagogy and the Truly Human – Carl Rogers vs Hannah Arendt
Torn Halves, Greece
Torn Halves taught EFL in Greece before leaving the profession, and now posts sporadic articles about education on the Digital Counter-Revolution blog.
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A little realness by way of an introduction
A truly narrow conception of the human
Humanising as a historical and political project
Forgetting the other half of education
Conclusion: A rather private humanity
References
You will forgive us – we hope – if we begin with a little attempt to humanise our writing. Surely the project of humanising things is not just for teachers, but for all of us, including writers. And it is because we want to be truly human that we feel it is more appropriate to address you directly, throwing off the dead hand of the old formality dictating that the writer adopts an impersonal tone. That formality belongs to an inhuman past that should not be allowed to dictate to the liberated humanity of the present.
If you are familiar with the ideas of Carl Rogers (one of the 20th century advocates of humanisation), you will see that we have fallen under the influence. We have been trying to understand what the original idea was behind the project of humanisation, and have turned (rightly or wrongly) to the work of Rogers. He says we can only be truly human if we get in touch with our feelings and express them candidly. So, let us be candid and make the following confession: Something doesn’t feel right about the project of humanising education.
Of course, if left vague enough, the idea of humanising some part of our life is unobjectionable. Who could not want things to be more human? But in the work of Carl Rogers the idea is not at all vague. There is an imperative to become truly human. No one since the dawn of a tribal humanity has ever been truly human, and because the ideal of a truly human life is so much at variance with the character of all human life hitherto, we still have a terribly long way to go before we achieve it, assuming it might actually be possible for human beings to become truly human. Is it not clear that there might be room here to raise an objection?
Some time ago Philip Kerr wrote an article in this magazine and ended by suggesting that ‘humanising’ can now be taken to be synonymous with ‘improving’. We all want to improve education, so there can be nothing controversial about trying to humanise it. But why continue using the verb ‘humanise’ in that case? Does the term not have some content of its own? In the work of Carl Rogers it certainly did. In what follows we will assume that it might still make some sense to go back and look at that content and bring out how controversial it is (and we will not tire the reader any longer with the ruse of pretending to be truly human by addressing the said reader directly- we are, in truth, perfectly at ease with an inhuman formality).
Some may see the humanising approach to education merely as one that puts the learner or learning at the centre, as if the only concern was with whatever might boost learning. In the work of Carl Rogers, at least, there is a conviction that if education is humanised, learning will accelerate, but it is clear that there is an imperative for teachers and students to become truly human which is quite independent of those concerns about learning outcomes. Even if the lovingly facilitated learners don’t manage to score as highly on some scale of mechanised assessment as less human ones, we must still push towards the ideal of the truly human.
So what does it mean to be truly human? Rogers tells us that the teacher takes the first step towards this goal by learning how to be real. Near the beginning of the last edition of “Freedom to Learn” Rogers holds up the example of a teacher who “is clearly being a person in the classroom, not a mask or façade”. To be a real human being the teacher must express her feelings openly rather than play a role that requires hiding some of them behind, for instance, a false smile.
If the students are making a racket in the classroom, this must not be seen as a problem relative to some traditional idea of order and decorum. No judgement of the sort: “Such behaviour is unacceptable,” must be made. Instead, if the teacher is unhappy with the level of noise, she should express this quite candidly to the students. In this way the teacher achieves the first truly human virtue: realness.
But realness must be accompanied by another virtue: empathy. The teacher must appreciate the feelings of her students and weigh those against hers. She might find the noise level irritating, but realise that the students enjoy it and are able to carry on learning, in which case it is to be hoped that the irritation of the teacher subsides as she sees that what she really cares about (the students’ activity of learning) is not suffering or is not suffering to a degree that worries the truly human teacher.
To try to put this as concisely as possible: To humanise the classroom involves allowing it to become a place for the uninhibited play of feeling – feelings uninhibited by any of the old normative ideas about what is or is not acceptable. The teacher must throw off all the old ideas about the role of the teacher as an authority figure in the classroom. Out must go the traditional idea of the adult teacher as an authority that can, for instance, say to boys who are caught bullying: “Thou shalt not bully,” without having to get into long psychoanalytic conversations about the feelings of the bullies (because in bullying they are presumably doing something they want to do, and as a rule a truly human learning situation is one in which people are free to do what they want to do).
Although the first step is for the teacher to unlearn all the traditional ideas about teaching and to become truly human, the point is ultimately for the students to achieve their true humanity. Hence the imperative that there must be no imperatives in the learning situation. There must be no imposition of an old normativity that might be at variance with the spontaneous emotional lives of the pupils, with all their natural passion and their ample empathy for the suffering of others.
Rogers has this to say about the aim for the students: “the best education would produce a person very similar to the one produced by the best therapy,” and in the therapeutic situation (if the therapist follows the right commandments) the patient is to be treated as the sole authority, with the therapist merely facilitating the patient’s attempts to define what the problem is and what the way forward might be. In the same way, the student must feel that he or she is the ultimate authority. Nothing can be valid in the classroom if it does not “gel” with the feelings of the students. And in this “truly human climate” students are supposed to see that in life generally they are right to trust their immediate feelings as guides to behaviour. Nothing must contradict the ideal of always being able to do what feels right and never having to sacrifice our feelings for the sake of something external to them.
At one point in “Freedom to Learn” Rogers asks himself this question: “Suppose I had a magic wand that could produce only one change in our educational systems. What would that change be?” In answer to this he says he would have every teacher forget that they are a teacher and forget their teaching skills so that they found themselves unable to teach. Having stripped away all the inhuman inherited normative baggage, they would be left with nothing more than the three virtues of the (non)teacher: realness, empathy and prizing (valuing the presence of each pupil). They would have nothing to teach, so they would devote all their energies to helping the students learn whatever they want to learn in whichever way they prefer to learn (as long as it is not the old way). The teacher would stop teaching and accept that her true vocation is merely to facilitate learning.
It is possible to see this promotion of the truly human as a process of abolishing an old and redundant normativity in order in order to liberate a natural substrate of human life. When we are in touch with our feelings – when we are real – and when we are doing what we really want to do (not what teachers and other representatives of some prior normative order tell us to do) we are natural. How lovely it is to get back to nature!
The project of humanising could equally well be called a project of naturalising. The question we want to ask here is: In equating the truly human life with a supposedly natural life of feeling are we not forgetting something essential to a distinctively human life?
There is an entire dimension here of the human condition which the idea of the truly human doesn’t just forget, but rejects. It involves trying to uphold a very dubious “as if”. As a general attitude to life it says: Let’s act as if the only thing that matters is the world of feeling. And the corresponding pedagogy says: Let’s act as if the world of the learner is the only world that matters – as if the learner does not belong to a wider world not of his or her choosing – a world independent of his or her feelings. Let’s make the experience of education so light that the weight of that other, wider, older world is never felt, and never compromises the sovereign personal worlds of the learners, whose busy, self-motivated constructive activity promises to create something radically new and wonderful.
The radical intention here might be summed up in the following way. Man has handed down misery to man since time immemorial. We must stop this vicious cycle by breaking the influence of the past on the present, of the older generation on the members of the younger generation, each of whom must be given a completely free rein to create a world that is perfectly in tune with their natural passions and interests and likes and feels.
Is it not clear that in becoming truly human something is being drawn in and narrowed somewhat?
It is tempting to say that here is a theory which does not fit the facts. But we hesitate to say this because there is a sense in which the theory fits the facts all too well. The theory is perfectly in line with a dominant social trend: the waning of all formality. The latter took a further leap with the arrival of digital communication, where suddenly there was no call any longer to address strangers as Dear Mr Worthington or Dear Miss Higgins; one is on first name terms with everyone from the word go. In this way and others, the world does actually seem to be moving towards the Rogerian ideal of a “perfectly human climate,” which would surely be one in which we are all on first name terms and there is no longer any distinction between a private sphere of friendship and a public sphere marked by the requirement to behave in a more formal way – the latter would have been engulfed by the former in a wonderful tidal wave of global friendliness.
The humanising theory is in synch with the spirit of the age. And it may be that a fair number of children prefer teachers to be less teacherly and more real in the way Rogers describes. To this extent, the theory fits the facts.
And these are facts that go a long way back. Although the theory makes a show of rejecting traditional ideas, it actually belongs to a historical project that is now very, very old. Jacob Burkhardt’s account of the Renaissance in Italy has this to say of Dante:
“With unflinching frankness and sincerity he lays bare every shade of his joy and his sorrow…Reading attentively his sonnets and canzoni we fancy that throughout the Middle Ages the poets have been purposely fleeing from themselves, and that he was the first to seek his own soul…Subjective feeling here has full objective truth…” (p202)
Here are the true roots of a humanising project which has us fleeing towards souls that are to be found in the realm of subjective feeling. Of course, Dante merely took the first step. He was happy working hard to make those subjective feelings fit the traditional and still rather strict form of the sonnet. We know better. To be truly human we must completely liberate the realm of feeling from the constraints of all such formality. The process that began with Dante has reached the stage at which subjective feeling is all we can rely on, and all talk of objective truth is, at turns, incomprehensible, suspect or ridiculous. We now find ourselves in a society where each of us knows what we like, but few of us can talk intelligently about what is good and true and beautiful.
Question: If we look at this long liberation of the subjective, do we see a new, confident adult agency? Surely we ought to be able to judge a process of liberation by the confidence with which the liberated are able to act in the world. Yes, we are still a long, long way from realising the Rogerian ideal, but moves towards a greater humanisation have been made. The old formality has waned. The old moralising has declined and is widely seen as laughable. How is this more truly human being faring as an agent in a public world where, of necessity, people have to find a way of working together in concert to change the world for the better? In the public sphere do we see a newly confident agency or do we not rather see a sort of paralysis and an inability to act in concert? Yes, the streets overflow with demonstrators from time to time and online there are political hashtags that briefly become popular, but rather than signs of a robust public life, are these not further signs of its demise?
There is a serious problem with the narrowness of the humanising ideal (one that corresponds to our increasingly narrow lives), and this is linked to a rather narrow view of education. The argument that needs to be made here is one made in 1954 by a contemporary of Carl Rogers: Hannah Arendt. In an essay entitled “The Crisis in Education” she took issue with the broad sweep of progressive pedagogies – something that might be collectively referred to as the CLM – the child liberation movement (not a term that Arendt used).
Arendt argues that the attempt to reform education in line with this idea of liberation (an idea that refers originally to adults, but is then wrongly projected onto children) involves forgetting half of the vocation of the teacher, and it involves forgetting the way in which education cannot be reduced to the facilitation of learning.
A crucial concept in this line of critique is that of the world – the old public world of adults that children are born into and which, if they have any radical intentions, they will have to get to grips with in order to change it for the better (and, of course, all ideas of what is better are relative to established standards constitutive of that old world). A key problem with the CLM generally, and a Rogerian humanisation in particular, is its attempt to treat the world of the child learner as the only one that ought to matter.
The humanising pedagogy is an example of what might be called a refusal of the world. And it is only on the basis of this refusal that the supposedly truly human equation between education and learning can be made.
Arendt is adamant about the falsity of that equation: Education does not equal learning; “one can go on learning to the end of one’s days without for that reason becoming educated.”
Learning is something that can indeed occur at any age, but education is first and foremost something that involves adult teachers working with child students. The situation of the child pupil is very different from that of an adult learner. Children find themselves in an adult world which is not theirs. It is a very old world standing over and against the child in all his or her youth and newness. Education is the process of introducing children to that world so that they can act responsibly in it as adults, able to talk intelligently about what they are doing, and able to find enough common ground to allow for action in concert. As such, it is a process that must come to an end in early adulthood, when the young person is ready to take up a responsible position within that public world, helping to revitalise what is best in it. Therefore, the primary end of education cannot be lifelong learning, even though that may also be a desirable outcome.
In effect, Arendt is reminding us that education has two centres: the young child and the old adult world. To do justice to the latter involves challenging the affective life of children, helping them to appreciate that what really matters is something external to them and independent of them.
Education cannot involve teachers standing back and letting the worlds of the children expand from their own centres unimpeded. And yet this is exactly what Rogers insists on. In “Freedom To Learn” he draws a telling analogy:
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be…When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner’…I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
But, Arendt is at pains to point out, this misconstrues the task of education, which is to help the child gradually find a way of recentring his or her life – centring it now on established adult concerns external to it. If the child were a celestial body, it would be a planet that has to come under the influence of an external force to find its proper orbit.
To achieve that recentring children need adults skilled in the craft of introducing the wider world and enabling them to begin feeling its gravitational pull. And here we have the logic behind a rather traditional and supposedly inhuman teacherly role. Teachers must represent the public adult world which will unsettle the domestic, private worlds that the children have hitherto been used to. To play this role the teacher has to appear as an authoritative spokesperson for that independent realm of value, history and tradition.
Arendt describes the authority of the teacher in the following terms: “The teacher’s qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-a-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world.” And here: “the educators here stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is.”
Instead of an authoritative guide, the facilitators following Rogers’ imperatives would have to limit themselves to listening to the children as they described their many and various nascent worlds, and to prompting the children to enrich those worlds by going out on information-gathering activities, but leaving it entirely up to the children to make whatever sense they can of the world.
Perhaps the issue of evaluation is an especially good one for bringing out the difference here. The traditional role of the teacher that Arendt defends is one with the authority to impose certain standards by which both the behaviour and the work of the students is to be judged. The justification for those is that they are integral to the public adult world which the teacher represents, provided the pupils have reached a stage where it can be deemed appropriate to insist on those standards.
For Rogers, the ideal is that the pupils evaluate their own behaviour and work. Their developing worlds ought to be free from the perverting influence of the old norms and standards, unless the pupils spontaneously feel like adopting them.
There is a refusal here of the claims of the adult world and an attempt to insulate children from those claims. Arendt’s argument is that this forgets half of what education is all about. Education is a delicate balancing act of trying to respect both the claims of the young students and the claims of the old world which is, ultimately, the object of study.
She describes this balancing act as an attempt to conserve two things: it must conserve the vitality of the children who carry the hope that the old world can be revitalised, and it must conserve an old world that is at risk either of being overrun or of fading into a quiet extinction. As Arendt puts it: “conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of the educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something of the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new.”
Insofar as the humanising pedagogy is interested in children it recognises only one responsibility: for the development of the child (and here it has only a partial grasp of what that development consists in). It acknowledges no responsibility for the world, which facilitators are instructed to leave as mere material for the self-motivated constructive activities of learners.
Arendt is not arguing that we need to sacrifice the development of the child in order to save the authority and integrity of the public world. This is not the knee-jerk reaction of a cultural conservative insisting that teachers teach and students sit quietly while they are taught. No, she is arguing that the child will not be able to mature into someone able to act responsibly in a distinctively public arena if the authority of that arena and the standards constitutive of it are not accepted, and how can that authority ever be accepted if the idea of teachers having the authority to insist on those standards is banned?
Again, it is not a matter of saying that here is a pedagogy that does not fit the facts. Arendt’s critical gaze is turned not only on the theory but also on the facts of a regrettable trend towards a rather irresponsible attitude in some sectors of the teaching profession. It is at this point that she almost loses her temper, insisting that “Anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not be allowed to take part in educating children.”
This trend was part of general shift that Arendt observed back in the 1950s: “modern man finds no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his refusal to assume, in respect to his children, responsibility for all this. It is as though parents daily said: ‘In this world even we are not very securely at home; how to move about in it, what to know, what skills to master, are mysteries to us too. "You must try to make out as best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent; we wash our hands of you.’” And here: “Authority has been discarded by the adults, and this can mean only one thing: that the adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they have brought the children.”
Within education one half of the role of the teacher (the more teacherly aspect of it) is either refused (in one way or another) or, where more traditionally-minded teachers want to retain it, it becomes harder to retain, as one of the eternal demands of education receives less and less support from the wider culture.
Teachers know that their vocation requires them to look in two opposite directions: towards the past (at the body of aging knowledge they feel needs to be taught, assuming they have not come under the spell of Rogers’ magic wand), and towards the future glimpsed latent and lambent in the vitality of the young students. In a culture obsessed with the new, the young and the future, it becomes so much harder to remain true to that more teacherly aspect of the vocation.
Arendt draws a comparison with ancient Rome. She recalls that to educate, in the words of Polybius, was simply “to let you see that you are altogether worthy of your ancestors,” and this idea could appear self-evident in a culture that turned to the past to find models for the future. There was a broader reverence for the old that supported the authority of the teacher, respected as a conveyor of the wisdom of the past. The antipathy now to the teacher as a ridiculous sage on a stage belongs to a broader culture which dismisses that old reverence. The young still have ancestors, and teachers can still wonder in idle moments whether the young are worthy of those ancestors, but the broader culture makes it extremely difficult to ask that question.
In Arendt’s opinion, there is no easy solution here – there is little teachers can do to make up for the lack of support they are getting from the wider culture. For those who want to humanise education, on the other hand, there is an easy solution: throw away the tattered remains of a respect for the past; forget the idea of a body of tired, old knowledge you feel obliged to teach; just enjoy the fact that children still have a passion for learning; look, for instance, at how they love to play games, and notice how all gaming involves learning. Why worry about how students are going to comport themselves in the world beyond gaming when the entire process of learning might be made one uninterrupted time of play?
If we follow Arendt’s path of thinking and are not appalled by its sheer inhumanity, we might see how problematic the humanisers’ normative idea of the truly human is, especially in the way it brushes aside the world, a responsibility for the unchosen and the authority of those teachers who are prepared to accept that responsibility.
In line with current economic trends, the ideal of the supposedly truly human helps to advance the privatisation of life – a sort of ultra-Danteism. Lip service is paid to the idea of the student as a whole person, but, in practice, the project affirms the splitting of life into a private realm where some semblance of meaning is to be found, but action is impossible, and a public realm where the possibility for action is ignored because of the conviction that nothing of meaning is to be found there. The ultimate ends of life are to be found only in the private realm of feeling, even though each and every one of us is also obliged (if only to earn the money to fund our private, domestic satisfactions) to participate in some sort of public life (albeit the mute, actionless life of labour).
Arendt’s thought is guided by a normative idea of the truly human as involving, at its best, a distinctively public form of action. When we think of things that need saving, the chances are that we think first of things like whales and turtles, not the public sphere, which, in any case, has been reduced to a mere means of protecting the private. If we agree that there is something truly human about a form of action that is distinctively public and that pushes forward values and standards sustained by a particular tradition, then we have a reason to object to the narrowness of the ideal advocated by Rogers, which collapses the public into the private. Rogers ignores the demands of the public world of action, which can never be understood in terms of an analogy with the setting of a billion suns, each oblivious of the other save for some bursts of solar empathy here and there. The consequence is a pedagogy that is at war with itself – a pedagogy (a Greek word that literally means: the leading of children) at war with the idea of leading children towards an adult world that is not of their own making, but is the only sphere of action available to them.
In short: Yes, let’s be truly human - let’s be true to an ideal of humanity, but let’s not forget the demands - distinctively human demands - of a public sphere where such ideals and convictions might actually count for something, instead of releasing a billion atomised life-long learners into an inhuman world that they must adapt to as best they can while worrying about how on earth they are going to pay off their student debt, and where, in striving for a privatised view of their true humanity, they will merely consolidate the growing inhumanity.
Arendt, H., (1954) The Crisis in Education, retrieved from
www.digitalcounterrevolution.co.uk/2016/hannah-arendt-the-crisis-in-education-full-text/
Burckhardt, J., (1990) The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Penguin
Kerr, P., (2007), 'Humanising' - what's in a word?, retrieved from
old.hltmag.co.uk/may07/mart04.htm
Rogers, C., Freiberg, H. J., (1994) Freedom to Learn, Pearson
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.
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