David Gabbard

Professor

Department of Curriculum & Instruction

College of Education

East Carolina University

Greenville, NC 27858

gabbardd@ecu.edu

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January 2006

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1.Mrs. McGrath, Bruce Springsteen
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7.Coma Girl, Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros
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•

Education Matters:
Teacher Education & The Struggle Against Nihilism

Nearly a full millennium of romanticization has emptied the word “heart” of many of its classical associations. I would like to connect the loss of those associations to Cornel West’s discussion of the growing prevalence of nihilism in American society, particularly as that nihilism impacts the lives of students and teachers in our nation’s public schools. In presenting these connections, I hope to demonstrate the revolutionary potential of a language of the heart.

Like many teachers and teacher educators, I situate myself in education in terms of a democratic vision of schools. Also like many other people in education, I see the high stakes testing and accountability movement as antithetical to this vision. In light of its dehumanizing impact on teaching and learning, I frequently find myself frustrated that so few teachers are fighting back. It would appear, given the attrition rates, that many teachers would prefer to turn their backs on education rather than mount any serious resistance to these so-called reforms. They’ve simply lost heart, falling prey to a nihilism defined by Cornel West as the “lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.”

Teacher educators who share a democratic vision of schools confront a severe dilemma of what to say to pre-service teachers, knowing all too well the nihilistic conditions that await them. How can they, in good conscience, claim to be preparing them for rewarding careers in teaching, when the intrinsic rewards of teaching have become as elusive as the extrinsic rewards? Under the impress of high stakes testing and NCLB, teaching in most schools now epitomizes West’s definition of nihilism. Pressures to teach to the test, often coupled with scripted teacher-proof curricular materials and guides, rob teachers of their creative autonomy and their ability to connect their work to broader public purposes, thereby stripping their work of larger meaning. Promises of teaching bonuses for increased test scores from their students, reflective of political nihilism’s appeal to greed, do little to ameliorate the psychic wounds inflicted from this loss of meaning.

On the other side of this appeal to greed, we find another hallmark of political nihilism: the appeal to fear couched in the language of accountability. As an unprincipled abuse of power, the political nihilism of today’s education reforms represents a thinly veiled system of carrots and sticks designed to appeal to what is worst in all of us - greed and fear, leaving teachers’ appeals for a more principled vision of education sunk in a mire of hopelessness. Once teachers are stripped of meaning and hope to fuel their work, what is left to inspire their love for that work? Their love for their subject matters? Their love for their students? This is often discouraged by those who hand out the carrots while wielding the sticks! And if this totalizing nihilism dominates the experiences of teachers, our moral sensitivities can only cringe at the thought of how students experience the prevailing conditions in today’s schools.

Returning to the aforementioned dilemma, and it is our collective dilemma, how can those of us who entered teaching and teacher education to advance a vision of education grounded in strong democratic principles avoid the fallout from this nihilism? How can we preserve the meaning, hope, and love in our own work when we find ourselves situated in a reform environment that denies the power of any principle, but particularly the power of any principle committed to revitalizing the public sphere through democratic empowerment? As West argues “when the lack of belief in the power of principle prevails, the void is filled with the will to power of the market – the drive to succeed at the cost of others rather than the drive to decency and integrity.” How, then, can we maintain our own sense of integrity and decency in our work?

Fueling “Deep Democratic Energies”

To help ourselves respond to this question, we can again turn to Cornel West for guidance. West helps us identify “three crucial traditions” to help us nurture what we calls our “deep democratic energies.” First, we must be persistent in our adherence to the “Socratic commitment to questioning–questioning of ourselves, of authority, of dogma, of parochialism, and of fundamentalism.” Second, we must maintain our commitment to justice – for all peoples. Finally, we need to find the inner strength to sustain our tragicomic commitment to hope. Even in the face of darkest nihilism of despair, we need to retain our ability to laugh and find joy in our lives. Maintaining our commitments to these traditions is crucial for helping us maintain our sense of decency and integrity in our work and in our lives. Because we are and always will be–at heart–teachers, however, I don’t believe that we can truly say that we feel or experience that integrity and decency in our work unless we are able to gain some sense that we are helping our students, future teachers tap into those same “deep democratic energies.” So, the question of how to maintain our own sense of integrity and decency in our work shifts to become a matter of how to cultivate in our students those same commitments to Socratic questioning, justice, and hope.

By reframing the question in this way, we enter some of the same territory crossed into by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) when its standards began emphasizing the importance of impacting, not only the knowledge and performance of future teachers, but also their dispositions. In fact, many of the NCATE standards frame desired dispositions as commitments. After all, do not our commitments flow out of our dispositions? Mustn’t we be disposed toward certain commitments? I’m not certain that everyone in teacher education recognizes what a radical departure this represents from standard practice in teacher education! Even the NCATE standards themselves fail to substantively address its new emphasis on dispositions as a radical departure from the accrediting agency’s norms. Neither, and this is truly unfortunate in my opinion, does NCATE offer an assistance to teacher education programs in how to begin significantly impacting students’ dispositions.

Perhaps what we need is a sort of map, because we first need to identify where to locate our students’ dispositions. Once we do, I think we’ll better appreciate the radical nature (potentially, at least) of NCATE’s departure from standard practice. Traditionally, like all forms of schooling, teacher education courses treat students as if they were dead from the neck down. That is, teacher education traditionally focuses only on impacting what is inside the heads of students. The dominant view has held that increasing the knowledge of future teachers will improve their performance once they begin working in schools. While the issue of what types of knowledge will best improve teachers’ performance has always been contested (i.e., more knowledge of content or more knowledge of methods), the focus has remained on students’ heads, their brains. That, however, is not where we would locate either their dispositions or their commitments. We need to look elsewhere. We need to turn to their hearts.

Again, as educators who share a democratic vision of schools, our concern here is with helping our students tap into three crucial traditions to fuel their “deep democratic energies.” In the struggle against nihilism, we seek to cultivate three primary dispositions in our students:

DISPOSITION #1: Commitment to Socratic Questioning;

DISPOSITION #2: Commitment to Justice; and

DISPOSITION #3 Tragicomic Commitment to Hope.

Achieving these ends requires us to advance the work of critical pedagogy advocated by Paulo Freire by carrying the process of conscientization into the inner world of the heart, where our interior struggle for identity and integrity precedes and stimulates the formation of our political commitments in the external world. Just as Freire maintained that critical pedagogy must always be conducted with the oppressed and not for the oppressed, the work that we conduct with teachers in the struggle against nihilism is genuinely collaborative. In helping them with their struggle against meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness, we (and they) help ourselves with our own struggle against the same forces.

While Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed focuses on the material and political dimensions of oppression, our work to impact students’ dispositions and commitments must recognize and operate at a prior and more fundamental layer of oppression – what might be called the spiritual or psychic dimension of oppression. We might refer to this work as a pedagogy of the soul or, alternatively, a pedagogy of the heart.

Physiologically, the heart functions as the central organ of our bodies. Though we may be otherwise “brain-dead,” our bodies can live as long as the heart continues to pump blood through our veins. The integral nature of the heart in relation to the totality of our organism, allows us to say that the heart gives us life. If, with Parker Palmer, we understand the heart as the metaphorical intersection of our intellect, our spirit, and our emotions, we can also say that the condition of our hearts determines the condition of our being or our existence. In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire made the same distinction between life and existence in formulating his ontological position that humanization is our vocation, our calling. The integrity of our physical life depends most wholly on the heart. “I cannot understand human beings,” Freire wrote,

as simply living. I can understand them only as historically, culturally, and socially existing. I can understand them only as beings who are makers of their “way,” in the making of which they lay themselves open to or commit themselves to the “way” that they make and that therefore remakes them as well… It is because we are this being – a being of ongoing, curious search, which ‘steps back’ from itself and from the life it leads – it is because we are this being, given to adventure and the ‘passion to know,’ for which that freedom becomes indispensable constituted in the very struggle for itself, is possible only because, though we are programmed, we are nevertheless not determined. It is because this is “the way we are” that we live the life of a vocation, a calling, to humanization, and that in dehumanization, which is a concrete fact in history, we live the life of a distortion of the call – never another calling. Neither one, humanization nor dehumanization, is sure destiny, given datum, lot, or fate. This is precisely why one is a calling, and the other, a distortion of the calling.

Freire correctly identified, the call to humanization as an interactive dialogue between what is innate within us and what we acquire in becoming us from the external world. Throughout nearly all of his writings, however, he framed that call exclusively as a political project carried out in the external world. While it would be unfair to say that he ignored any discussion of the internal dimensions of humanization as a calling, he left that discussion sorely underdeveloped. Consequently, he limited his discussion of conscientization as a process focused on revealing what the world is, revealing, in his words, the external world’s “limit situations.” What Freire failed to offer was a satisfactory account of conscientization as an internal conversation through which individuals reveal themselves to themselves. In our view, this internal conversation constitutes a prerequisite to the formation of political commitments insofar as those commitments, like all other commitments – if they are genuine – always stem from a person’s heart.

Just as the literal heart is integral to our life as organisms, the metaphorical heart – again, understood as the intersection of our intellect, our spirit, and our emotions – is integral to our being in the world. The call to humanization described by Freire, though it may be triggered by a catalyst – some event or set of circumstances, begins as an internal struggle to integrate our intellect, our spirit, and our emotions as a process of identity formation. Insofar as that process of identity formation entails an act of integration, we can also understand it as a struggle to achieve integrity in our lives, defined as the ability to live our inner truth in the external world. It is a quest for connectedness with the world and wholeness in the world that begins with a quest for connectedness with our inner self and a wholeness of our inner self or our heart. It is this same quest that Freire refers to as the call to humanization. Conversely, the denial of that connectedness and sense of wholeness constitutes what Freire describes as the distortion of that call or dehumanization.

The nihilism described by West represents the most dehumanizing force at work in our society today. As the “lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness,” we should view it as the ultimate heart disease. In collapsing meaning, nihilism incapacitates the intellect. In collapsing hope, nihilism crushes the human spirit. In collapsing love, nihilism deadens our emotions. In collapsing these things, nihilism deprives us of the conditions under which we might establish our own identities. In depriving us of those conditions, it further deprives us of our integrity. Nihilism condemns us to live divided lives, cut off from our inner truths and our greater sense of connectedness and responsibility to one another.

No one suffers the sting of nihilism more than our nation’s teachers. Despite all pretenses, our dominant social paradigm does not value education or the cultivation of intellect. Teachers get this message each and every time they open their paychecks, every time they see themselves negatively portrayed in children’s programming, and every time they read the latest blue ribbon report unfairly pronouncing their ineptitude.

Before we can hope for large numbers of teachers to begin actively resisting the contemporary campaign of false reforms, before we can hope for them to struggle against the external political and social structures responsible for the pervasive spread of nihilism within their ranks and throughout the larger society, those us, any of us who have already heard our own inner call to humanization must invite teachers to join us on the inner path toward healing. Hopefully, they will receive the mere invitation as a sign that someone genuinely values them as human beings and values the impulse that led them to teach. We need to create opportunities for teachers to re-mind themselves as individuals and re-membering themselves as a community whose work is vital to a larger struggle to restore our society’s commitment to bringing meaning, hope, and love into all of our lives. In our roles as teacher educators, we need to support teachers in generating respect for their own intellects and the intellects of their colleagues through collaborative and communal reflection on “teaching and learning – the form and content of our concepts of how people know and learn, of the nature of our students and our subjects.” At the same time, we must recognize that our work with educators must address more than their heads; we must also address their hearts, remaining ever mindful that the intellect is as connected to the heart as it is to the brain. Toward this end, we need to work with teachers in reconnecting with the emotional dimensions of teaching, reflecting on “the way we and our students feel as we teach and learn.” And we also need to address their spiritual need to “answer the heart’s longing to be connected with the largeness of life – a longing that animates love and work, especially the work called teaching.” Through these and other means, we need to work with teachers in strengthening their identities as teachers, thus helping them to restore their integrity in their work.

When asked whether he saw much hope for the future of humankind, Carl Jung said that any hope for our future rests with enough of us doing our inner work. We can add that any hope for the future of education and the future of our democracy rests with teachers, as well as the rest of us, also doing our inner work. Through this work, we strengthen our identities – our sense of who we are as unique yet intimately connected beings that provides the basis of our integrity. Once we strengthen our identities as educators, once we restore our integrity as educator, we may find that succumbing to the nihilism that infects the culture of too many schools and the culture of the larger society is no more an option for us as moving to the back of the bus was for Rosa Parks. No longer will we attempt to resolve our inner conflict within schools by retreating from teaching. Reestablishing the integrity of our identity as teachers will renew our courage and conviction, leaving us with no other choice but to vigorously confront the powerful, though not all-powerful, forces of nihilism that have dis-couraged and dis-heartened too many of us for too long. Perhaps then, when we re-encounter the feelings of dividedness pressed upon us by contemporary reforms, they will find the strength to proclaim to the world that “I will live divided no more. I have heard the call to my own humanization, and I refuse to return to the distorted call of a divided life.” Only then, sufficiently whole within ourselves and among ourselves will be able to find meaning, hope, and love in our work and to give meaning, hope, and love through our work.