Note: This is a chapter from my new book Jobs for Philosophers (Xlibris, 2004) – a book of reviews of books that actually don’t exist – it’s a device that enables me to say a lot without the usual apparatus… So Teaching on the Edge (the book) too is only imaginary… but actually teaching on the edge is quite real…

AW

7.

The New Deweyan Caucus

Teaching on the Edge

Muriel Rukeyser taught poetry in a Harlem Community Center in the 60s.

I took a sheet of good typing paper and showed it to the [students]. “Here it is,” I said, “with whatever properties and possibilities it has.” I took the paper and in one gesture crumpled it small and threw it down in the middle of the table. They sat around looking at it in silence. “Here it is now,” I said, “with whatever properties and possibilities it has. Do something with it.”

One student tore the paper in half. One set it on fire. “All right,” [I] told him, “...[that] says it loud and clear... [But now] we’re headed toward words. What happens when we get to words?” And the student took another piece of paper and wrote in huge staggering letters, “help, HELP, H E L P!” A third student cut out a string of paper dolls and printed across their bodies, “People Need People.”

For Rukeyser, each response “drew ... possibilities out into the open: private, unexpected, sad.” And then... poetry was the natural and necessary next step.

June Jordan, teaching writing to young children during the same years, had them transcribe contemporary black poets, in the process slowly discovering that they wanted – that they needed – to write themselves, that they could use poetry to speak to and from their own crisis-filled lives. “Sling it on the page,” Jordan urged. When the children heard that Martin Luther King had been assassinated, the first things they asked for were pens and paper. Jordan read poems through the night in a packed New York City church, and her students sat backstage and composed their own – one later published in the Village Voice – writing, white-hot, so long into the night that they had to ask the cab drivers ferrying them home to leave on the lights. The weeping cabbies complied, and refused any payment when they arrived.

“Teaching on the edge” is never defined in this book. I believe that part of what is crucial – the most readily accessible part, at least; other parts come later – is this kind of risk, this “edginess,” this abrupt and utter intensity, whether inside something that considers itself “school” or not. Teachers – people – who manage somehow to make their very own being a kind of “dare” (as more than one author in this collection explicitly calls it) to their students, to those around them. Rukeyser believed so utterly in the power of words that at the height of the Harlem riots she was ready to go up to 125th Street and declaim in the streets. That is how you earn the right to demand something more than the habitual silence, even – especially – from those children whose entire mode of survival hitherto is to flatten themselves against the wall when the violence starts. Here is Jordan, throwing herself into words; here is Rukeyser, throwing herself and her words – she makes no distinction – into the fray.

One thing about human beings, young ones especially: we take dares. It would be very much in the spirit of this book to make of our susceptibility to dares a philosophy of education all by itself. At the very least we have to ask: why couldn’t more teaching be like that: a real dare, an offering of something irresistible, electric, spirit-rousing? This is one “edge” approached by this book; and there is a kind of giddiness to it, yes, as if you do stand at the brim of a precipice, every sense aroused and alert. The very opposite of the drudgery and boredom now universally associated with school. A writing teacher requires his students to do something they have never done before, or to try something actually impossible. Walk on water, he says, and bring back proof. A current-events classroom suddenly becomes an impromptu talk-show studio in which the host/teacher is sticking a microphone in students’ faces and drawing them out before they know what’s happening (“They know how to do this!” insist our authors: “In fact it is the usual academic ‘presentation’ that students find unnatural...”). Business classes create and run real businesses out of the classroom. They meet surrounded by their inventory. Theatrically-inclined teachers arrive unannounced in class – sometimes their own, sometimes someone else’s – in costume, maybe as the author of that very day’s reading, or a character in it, and provoke or demand response, once again, before the usual defenses and self-constraints set in.

There’s a lot of this sort of pedagogical exuberance early in this book. The implicit philosophy is not fully articulated. Sometimes “edginess” by itself seems to be the central theme. I am not sure this is a weakness. I suspect the authors – this “Caucus” – felt the need for an immediate kind of radical bona fide, felt it necessary to make very clear right away that this is not merely another of some endless and soulless series of works on teaching a little more actively or with a few more instructional aids. From the start their aim is more impatient and disruptive. Indeed the authors fall over themselves not to get themselves invited by some well-meaning university to spruce up faculty pedagogy. Probably this is why they allow themselves to slide into fantasy (otherwise an inexplicable move, for we all know that how we appear before our students is Serious Business). Real-life teachers do sometimes teach in costume, and maybe a few even slip on different hats for different personae of their own (“‘Stephanie’ versus ‘Professor Sager’ – another persona just takes another two-dollar hat,” it’s team-teaching on the cheap...), but I don’t think too many lecturers arrange for trumpet fanfares heralding the high points of a lecture or sudden intrusions by whirling dervishes or saber-fights between Descartes and Hume (you’ll recall – after this the students will certainly not forget – that Descartes was a somewhat footloose but accomplished duelist, and Modern Philosophy itself was once saved by the button on his greatcoat).

Enough, enough – but one understands the wish, and that is surely unsettling enough. Actually, some of it is not even that hard. Costumes are cheap, even sound effects can be rigged up, and play-acting takes only a little stage-setting. Catch students off-guard, shake them up, make it clear without even saying so that they have to stay alert, maybe even actually come to class prepared, for they never know quite what is going to happen.

This much would make a fine book all by itself, and more than a few readers will wish the Caucus had stopped there. In fact, however, the pedagogy “proper” turns out to be only the first layer of this beguiling but vexing volume. It still only represents the book’s outer perimeter. Gradually it grows on the reader that something deeper is afoot, that some further and still more dramatic sort of “edge” is being edged toward.

Certain questions become irresistible. Why, for one thing, is teaching in such a live way actually so rare? Many of us (though it would be useful to ask how many: just some? just the hyper-stimulated few?) would find being a “teacher” in this sense deeply invigorating and engaging, yet few of us even set so much as a toe on this path. So why are teachers so timid – up to and emphatically including the professoriat? Why is even the usual talk of “innovation” basically a bore, or worse, indeed something that sends any teacher with healthy instincts dashing for the exits? Even the most cursory search of the Web quickly confirms the Caucus’s claim that the great bulk of today’s thinking about “innovation” in education is essentially about applied technology: computers in the classroom, simulation games, etc. and therefore “conceived, regularized, and controlled in a deeply conservative way, pedagogically speaking, however ‘modern’ the technology...” Prominent universities even place their Office of Teaching Innovation in their Computer Services Department. How could it come to this?

You could blame timidity on tenure, as some critics do, on lifetime assurance of a good job, but on the face of it you’d think that the greatest incentive to conformism would be job insecurity, which is exactly what tenure eliminates. (Question for research: are other professionals – plumbers, arsonists, psychotherapists – as conformist? Maybe, but do they also have less opportunity for innovation and initiative?) Is it teacher education, then? The nature of graduate schools of education and the political dictates they live under? Or is it a function of low rewards: is it that the field of education doesn’t attract the most self-confident and experimental minds? Or does it set in later, a form of administrative or managerial asphyxiation, bureaucratic suffocation? Is it Professionalism as such – the messages at every turn that tell teachers that they can’t be playful, can’t risk failure, mustn’t open up to students? If so, would it really be inevitable that teaching be professionalized in that kind of way? Some other low-paying and undervalued professions, meanwhile, manage for that very reason to attract people of more flexible minds: think of dance or organic farming or youth hosteling for example – why not teaching?

We can go at it from the student side as well. Why, this book’s long and sometimes plaintive introduction asks,

do students so often look like and act like such zombies – passive, non-participatory, heavy-lidded, resentful, as if half of them or more “have” ADD (as increasing numbers actually do claim)? It’s so typical of us to just medicate them rather than consider underlying causes. Are they really zombies (well, it’s arguable: consider the effects of TV, a lifetime of over-stimulation and attention-span reduction...)? Or is it an adopted disguise that serves certain purposes (self-protection at a time/age of change and vulnerability?)? Or is it perhaps just a jaded perception on the part of people like us, a generation or two older than they are and no longer hip to the music?

Every teacher can immediately call to mind classes that seem like swimming through mud. Yet we can also call to mind, all to often, that remarkable experience of students who seem like mere ciphers in the classroom but who suddenly come alive after class or met on the sidewalk among friends or even on the classroom’s very threshold. Dewey writes of “the intensely distinctive beings that we are acquainted with out of school, in the home, the family, on the playground, and in the neighborhood.” What keeps young people from awakening in that same vital way in the classroom? Why is such an awakening barely even imaginable?

Certain radical critics argue that the real root of schools’ failure is the institutionalization and compulsory nature of teaching/learning itself. Indeed, on their view, this is the very point of schools: they are dedicated to de-animation, unfreedom, social ranking, and “dumbing down” (John Gatto’s phrase), in the name of social conformity and acceptance of one’s lot. Make-work projects, school authoritarianism, disconnection from the real world, prolonged childhood – all of these emerge as something other than unfortunate or puzzling accidents, but actually, scandalously enough, as essential to “education” itself. John Holt points out that even the most enlightened sort of education is still something you are supposed to get, like a disease or a shot (as when we say, “He received his education at...”). It’s no surprise that students are cynical and resistant. They see all too clearly what the rest of us contrive to forget, the fundamental dishonesty and appalling wastefulness of the whole system.

Our Caucus embraces these arguments – in part. The “(re)inscription of this cycle of mutual resentment and rigidity,” as they put it, has primarily to do with “what the classroom inherits”: with the cultural and psychological baggage that students and teachers carry into the classroom. We must not forget, they insist, that

school is a piece of social engineering, a cultural and not somehow a “natural” institution, which you could tell for one thing just by all the marks it bears of its essentially medieval origins, from the merely ornamental like the sheepskin and the cap-and-gown, to the absolutely essential, like lecturing. In many ways it is an utter disaster as a piece of social engineering. Yet in at least one regard school has been a stunning success: it has persuaded and continued to persuade almost all of us of its own naturalness and necessity. Nothing less than this could continue to justify the fantastic resources invested in it. And on top of all that money we even give it our children. The lesson most effectively taught by school is that this is what learning takes.

The Caucus acknowledges as well that these arguments have unsettling consequences for the pedagogical exuberance of which they make so much. As Holt insists, even the most pedagogically inventive and progressive teachers still operate within a functionally compulsory system. Teachers on fire are still in the classroom, with students who are still kept distinct from them and still are mostly there unwillingly. Even college has a more or less compulsory character, as a job ticket if nothing else, and by the time students get out, having “had” English and History and Art and some science or other, again like some kind of disease, they are pretty much immune to all of them (leading Postman and Weingartner, in their Sixties-era book Teaching as a Subversive Activity to label distribution requirements the “Vaccination Theory of Education”). It is devastating to contrast almost any regular classroom to groups in which those in the “student” role actually want and choose to be there. When people are there truly by choice, when they are on fire themselves, you don’t need anything pedagogically fancy. Even an awkward or rigid teacher will be fine. What makes the difference is nothing about teaching at all, says Holt, but lies on the other side: it has to do with under what conditions “students” are there in the first place.

Still, this is not an “edge” that Teaching on the Edge means to quite walk us over. The Caucus shares with the radical critics a vision of learning as open-ended, “enabling,” outward-looking, empowering. But learning so conceived, they insist, is a profoundly social endeavor, and so requires social institutions, learning communities, and, yes, genuine socialization, an “induction into the culture” after all – and so, they explicitly argue, education is not a realm in which what they call “the fundamentally market-based ideology of free choice” should have the last word. We come into autonomy – genuine autonomy, let us say: civilized autonomy, the deeper kind of freedom (yes they do use the word “civilized”) – only slowly, and often enough in settings that are not necessarily freely chosen. The actual story is more complex and less individualistic.

Besides, society has not noticeably “deschooled” in the years since Holt, Ivan Illich, et al. issued their denunciations. Ironically enough, the only ones who have successfully opted out have been the fundamentalists, who make up eighty percent or so of the homeschoolers across the country. But homeschool all too often reproduces an authoritarian and dogmatic agenda on an intimate level, while socially marginalizing children along with (let’s be honest) their mothers. Holt in the end had to satisfy himself in the embrace of the “unschoolers,” who make up a vanishing fraction of homeschoolers, themselves still only a fraction, almost vanishing, of households with children. No, for the most part, the Caucus admits that

teachers and teaching will continue to be institutionalized; large numbers of young people in groups of varying sizes will continue to be put in the charge of a smaller number of specifically trained adults for the purpose of directing their growth; parents, politicians, and self-appointed moral and cultural guardians will continue to try to impose their agendas on that teaching; and all the rest.

The real question, they say, is what we can do with this.

The Caucus’s answer is natural enough, I suppose, though it seems to have surprised and confused most readers all the same.

We will not escape from all of this [institutional school, etc.] anytime soon; nor, perhaps, do most of us really know where we’d want to go anyway. We propose to take up the entire problematic situation in a different key. We propose that the essential question is how to

transform the schools from the inside, and how, so far as possible, to use school’s own energies to do so. We propose, then, that the task is not to escape school, but to find liberation, creativity, imagination, and joy anyway, in school – indeed perhaps even uniquely in school, even schools as we know them right now.

Truly it is hard to know how to take this, and I regret to have to say that many of the Caucus’s critics have missed the point entirely, perhaps do not even have the categories to understand it. If you think that the possibilities for change are exhausted by timid reformism on the one hand and some ill-defined and vain hopes for escape on the other, then this sort of internal transformationism (radical reformism?) will never show up as a coherent possibility at all. Yet it is this sort of pragmatic insouciance, I believe, that is the source of the Caucus’s most fundamental edginess. Here are people who are themselves teachers in traditional institutions but who at the same time pursue radical change-oriented experimentation within those very institutions – and, as it were, as a philosophical program, not just as a sort of desperate adaptation to a bad scene.

For example:

Rather than enormous struggle just to set up a little, fragile, ever-endangered “free” space, suppose that you enthusiastically take the worst of the usual rooms – but then make it an explicit class project to understand and transform that very space. Why do such rooms feel so sterile and uninviting? What can we do about it? Likewise, don’t spend your time and energy trying to get comfortable chairs in place of the usual desks. Take the desks, sit in them, and then deconstruct them. Sit on them, take them apart, rebuild them, pile them in the corners. Ask what is the implicit philosophy of education of a seat that is so uncomfortable. To keep students awake? And why is there such a pressing need to do that? Why are they so small? Why are they all the same? Why do they not fit together to form a larger, shared work surface? Why are they only good for lining up in rows? And then: what else can you do with them?

Seldom again will students be able to sit in those desks without asking such questions, without being reminded of what the desk wants to make them do. And of course it is that very critical consciousness that makes resistance possible – perhaps even necessary. The dialectical next step may be sitting on other things, say, or on the floor, and not, or not just, because it is comfortable but because it is a conscious way of creating a different kind of space and message. Or perhaps using the desks themselves in some ways not intended by the designers...

The walls, meanwhile, usually so blank and sterile, could use some paint – and we could paint something so beautiful, or so stirring or fitting, that the powers that be, even not consulted in advance, will have trouble painting them over. There are stories here of such projects – even pictures – though it is the critical awakening, once again, that is the most essential thing. Students (all of us!) learn that the spaces we perforce inhabit also have agendas, implicit philosophies, but that we have the power to understand and change those spaces too. It turns out that students (and teachers) have a great many things to say about classroom space, once they’re invited to actually think about it, for once without the usual grumpiness or passive and unconscious acceptance. The paintbrush is only the natural next step. And after all why do we tolerate the artlessness of all the space around us?

Or again:

Don’t refuse or limit bad textbooks. Instead, seek them out. Then critique and parody them. Kids will be bombarded with similar pap all their lives. Critical vision comes from knowing how to see through it, not from avoiding it.

Again, real teachers do this: making a class project of creating the dullest possible textbook about imaginary countries, for example, using the ubiquitous boring section headings (“Climate,” “The Land and Its People,” and so on and on) from the regular books; writing breezy how-to books about the stupidest possible things; making “educational films” that imperceptibly turn into slapstick (“The playful parodying process [is] at work. Instead of trying to squelch it, acknowledge it and create a channel for it...”). “Yes!!” say so many student hearts – so why wouldn’t this be an enormously engaging as well as empowering way to learn?

This is pedagogical exuberance too, but it now has a further and very different kind of “edge.” It is not the method of the Dare – or rather, it is daring in a rather different way, more calculating and subtle, resourceful in unexpected directions, subversive and yet transformative too, a kind of “philosophical jujitsu” (the Caucus’s term, once again dropped in without much explanation, a kind of clue or key for those in search of it and willing to use it). Revolution from within the schools themselves, you may remember, was a theme of the 60s too – just think of the book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, already cited. Postman and Weingartner propose an entire pedagogy built upon questioning, and demand teachers who can demonstrably build knowledge and meaning out of students’ own questions and responses – in fact they demand an approach so single-mindedly “student-centered,” as the lingo now goes, that teachers are deliberately and systematically disempowered at every turn.

Our Caucus has (it seems) a somewhat more tactical and pedagogically flexible kind of “subversion” in mind. The “jujitsu” allusion is interesting partly because it re-empowers teachers in an unexpected kind of way. It opens up ways to energize a classroom merely by taking advantage of certain dynamics that school itself inadvertently sets up. Anything unusual in school, for example, just for that very reason commands attention, opens questions, and creates some useful leverage. Those of us who are college teachers might imagine bringing young children, or animals or insects (but emphatically not as exhibits, show-and-tell – no, as visitors, sharing the space), or even just times of silence, into our classrooms. Such things, utterly ordinary in themselves, have an outsized effect in school precisely because they are usually so rigorously excluded. Likewise, murals on the walls work because normally the walls are so relentlessly blank. In a school done with any kind of attention to harmony and color, they wouldn’t be possible, wouldn’t have any kind of power at all, but in schools as we know them, the act of painting a wall – being even the slightest bit artful in an utterly artless setting – is revolutionary, and not, again, merely or even mainly by making art, but by pointing up the “normal” artlessness: making it conscious, making it a subject for analysis, making it a possible point of experimentation and resistance.

Zelda Prosser, reviewing Teaching on the Edge in the new catrionic journal The Polycentrist, objects that this kind of “liberative pedagogy” (her term – once more, though unintentionally, you get a lovely whiff of the Sixties) is “basically just a disruptive mode of practice, not a curriculum.” Perhaps she is right: at any rate, she’s right enough that “it is not so clear how to imagine ‘subversively’ teaching, say, chemistry (safely!)” Though perhaps not impossible, either: certainly one can draw chemical questions out of daily experience and captivating puzzles, rather than treating chemistry as an independent body of knowledge to be assimilated for its own sake and on its own terms. But Prosser misses a great deal, too. It turns out that there can be such a thing as a subversive curriculum after all.

Take the Caucus’s model Philosophy of Education course: a course that explores different philosophies of education by essentially enacting them in the very class sessions devoted to them. Educational conservatives are taught in a conservative way. Behaviorism is taught behavioristically. Dewey is taught in labs and impromptu talk-shows. The course ends with the “deschoolers,” and for one of its styles the teacher, scandalously enough, simply doesn’t show up at all (and what the class does then becomes the challenge, and the next class’s subject-matter). The aim in part is to “silhouette” the underlying philosophies of different teaching methods by acting them out in contrast to each other, and especially in contrast to less familiar methods working on different assumptions. The message is that every single way of setting things up, even the most familiar and second-nature, has an underlying philosophy; that “philosophy of education” consists precisely in becoming conscious of these; and that, having become conscious of them, teachers are in a position to deliberately choose and experiment with pedagogies rather than simply mimic how they themselves were taught.

They begin with the usual methods, lecturing for example. Fine – good – necessary. The kick comes in the next step. Here lecturing, like every other method, is not only employed but analyzed. Suddenly it is not somehow “just natural.” Indeed the implicit philosophy is all too familiar, just seldom fully articulated. Spell it out, the teacher insists. Students readily arrive at the (in)famous Freirean “banking” model:

Knowledge is facts; learning is acquiring these facts (which is why a “good” course is one that you leave with a full notebook); and teaching is conveying those facts. Or: Knowledge is information; learning is acquiring that information; teaching is “depositing” it into your “account,” and testing to “check your balance”...

But now this very analysis confronts you directly with the recognition that there are other ways – other ways even to convey “information,” as well as other ways to conceive the point of education itself. On a later day students invent their own developmental schemas, using each other’s input. On another they walk silently and as slowly as possible around campus; or learn to sing a madrigal or do Aikido...

And what does all of this in turn mean? Walking meditation is certainly not about acquiring more information – but it might be about wisdom: self-knowledge and self-possession, as well as recovering a sense of the larger encompassing world, the larger flow of life and time. Singing a madrigal, especially for these students who don’t believe they can sing at all – what does it valorize? Listening: actually, really listening (for here what the “teacher” offers are instructions that you will have to put to work immediately, and then remember through the whole rehearsal cycle – it’s as far as you can get from “lecture”); working together (here we only succeed by working as precisely as possible as a single whole – how many classrooms are like that?); and venturing something (you have to open your mouths, take risks, stick with it – how many classroom set-ups valorize that??).

So all of this takes place within school, but it systematically sets up school itself for analysis and criticism and then transformation – for most of its students are themselves heading into teaching. The course does not dissuade them from that (we are told) – quite the contrary – but rather makes them sharply aware of the philosophical dimension of every classroom and pedagogical choice, and also self-conscious agents of change.

Prosser is right that this course would be much less transformative if it took place in a setting in which many alternative methods were already widely enough used that they would no longer seem to be so “alternative.” It is less clear why this would be thought an objection to it. Perversely, ironically, but in a lovely way too, the very power of this course does come from its “silhouetting” of the ordinary and taken-for-granted, and then its exploration of unfamiliar methods. But we are not designing a pedagogy for the ages. It is enough (it is truly wonderful, for once) to have a pedagogy adequate to the present. School itself – school as we know it – ought to be a (central) subject for analysis, precisely, but unexpectedly, in school.

You are wondering, perhaps, who these people are, this Caucus of teachers who could teach such a course or have their classes paint classroom walls without permission and all the rest when they after all have (one must imagine) administrators looking over their shoulders, or perhaps even are administrators of a sort themselves. Some of them, to judge by the occasional dropped name or side comment, are actually honored faculty members at traditional institutions (because almost all colleges and universities these days are “traditional,” aren’t they?) But I mean the question in more than a biographical sense: the real question is how anyone in such settings avoids being captured and subdued (co-opted? cannibalized?) by school. “Keep school out of your soul,” they say – but how? How do you manage to function in the very belly of the beast as something other than an outcast or a (mere) saboteur?

Indirectly, at least, their book suggests various answers. One is that these teachers think of their work as much bigger than teaching in school. They have one foot firmly in the classroom, to be sure, but they also appear to be not just engaging and intriguing teachers but also engaging and intriguing human beings. I am reminded of something John Holt wrote about Ny Lilleskole (New Little School) in Copenhagen – one of the few schools anywhere in the world that he liked. About the staff he remarked that

they are competent in many ways, not just in teaching. Most of them come to teaching after having done many other kinds of work, and having had other kinds of experience, and they bring their competence and experience to the school. They can do things, make things, fix things. Children are enormously interested in and attracted to adults who can do things.

The contrast to the typical teacher type is sharp, Holt says (“large surveys of American teachers show that most of them are not very informed or curious... they read very little...”), as well as to some atypical teacher types, especially the sort of alternative-school teacher who believes that love and good will should be enough, whereas Holt insists it is not (“most kids, most of the time, will swap a pound of love for an ounce of competence”).

Holt’s ideal teachers are also optimists, certainly not alienated, like many of the teachers both in regular and alternative schools with whom Holt had to deal, often cynical and pessimistic in different ways.

Kids have no quarrel with the world. It is there, and they want to get out in it. They do not want to hear how awful it is, or that there is nothing worth doing in it, or that the only sensible thing worth doing is to destroy it or escape from it...

You begin to understand that such flaming optimists as this Caucus, however unappealing to “realists” like Prosser, carry something enormously appealing in their very persons and into their classrooms – precisely their sense that things can be different, and their willingness to make things different, so far as is within their power, right here and now.

This Caucus also turns out to be dramatically more heterogeneous than one imagines at first. A large collection of people, from a wide range of life-ways and lifetimes, show up in this book as “teachers”: carpenters, preachers, children, the very old, storytellers, naturalists, homeless people, CEOs. The book is eloquent and persuasive on the merits of learning from the very old and the very young, as well as learning from teaching the very old and the very young. Once again too a profusion of practical ideas follow, for example switching teachers from level to level, college teachers teaching kindergarten, for instance, and vice versa; or deliberately not forcing retirement on teaching faculty at 65 or 70 but, on the contrary, creating new kinds of teaching positions precisely for such “elders” (as well as people who have become elders in other walks of life – they can “retire” to teach).

Others writing with this Caucus seem to be one level removed from actual teaching, those whose real contribution is to enable a radical paradigm-shift in the concept and contexts of teaching itself. Certain rare but wonderful college administrators, for instance, who deal with a shortage of campus classroom space by teaming up with the staffs of local non-profits and businesses to move whole classes and even departments “off campus.” No new buildings. Ethics classes move to homeless shelters, and help out by way of compensation. Sociology classes move to Wal-Marts, talking to local housewives and retirees all day, doing fieldwork among their neighbors in the “new commons.” Prelaw students work in Dispute Resolution Centers. You could call all of this “service learning,” I suppose, but here the innovation (genuine innovation for once) is ratcheted up several steps: our entire conception of a “class” and even of a “campus” become more plastic.

Imagine... What would college be like if students took a ten-day wilderness trip, including three days solo, before even showing up on campus? Others might be essentially correspondence schools on the road, which students cannot even enter unless they are already somewhere abroad, living on their own. One discussion in this book proposes to the staff of a Recreational Vehicle leasing company that they reincorporate themselves as an educational-experience specialists and lease campers to groups of young people who plan their own routes around the country, to retrace the Lewis and Clark expedition or the history of the TVA or what have you, stopping periodically at the local leasing affiliate for an oil change and a day of history lessons. Another proposes an apartment complex designed for college-age people, offering cafeteria food, counseling and other supervisory and support staff, a Health Service, and even athletic teams – essentially recreating the on-campus collegiate experience except without classes (the residents have outside work). You might think this the very antithesis of “education” in even the broadest sense, but the Caucus at least flirts with the utterly heretical suggestion that as much real learning takes place here as in college:

Overwhelmingly young people report that they go to college for the freedom – social, expressive, sexual. Overwhelmingly the maturation that takes place in the college years is of the same sort – social, expressive, sexual. Because this sort of maturation typically takes place at the same time as young people are taking classes, we almost always mis-attribute it to the academic experience, or even more commonly (because of certain other prejudices we have acquired from school) overlook it entirely in favor of academic learning. But there it is, nonetheless. These are the years that make us adults. Is it just possible that the main maturation stems primarily from the living experience?

We are invited to ask: is not this maturation itself a deep kind of “learning” after all? And if so, in some sense or other, why mightn’t one deliberately create a learning institution dedicated to it – an institution, moreover, that may nor may not look anything like college as we traditionally envisage it, for after all we are surely better able to design an institution or living arrangement for such maturation if we honestly acknowledge it to be our goal rather than just a sidelight to something else.

With all of this, I believe, we are brought up to a third and still more dramatic “edge,” although an edge whose conceptualization this reviewer, at least, finds more troubling and uncertain. You could call it the hyper-extension of school, a stretching of our very category of “learning” to the point that, ultimately, it encompasses everything. A “school” is, in the broadest sense, any learning environment. “Learning” is, in the broadest sense, any kind of growth in knowledge, skill, sensitivity. “School” as we know it, then – the separate buildings, special staff, the massive claims on young people’s time, the monopoly on certification for many jobs and even in a sense for life itself – is only one small aspect of learning and teaching as they actually exist in the world, and certainly as they could exist.

The thought is not unfamiliar, though its implications are surely far more dramatic than we yet realize. Most crucially, learning might have to be conceived as primarily a function of environments – so that the teacher’s (and the philosopher’s!) role in turn, broadly conceived, is to create the right contexts and occasions, settings that mediate growth on their own. Kids solo in the desert fastnesses, or living alone on some back street in Triberg or Timbuktu or in some college-without-classes in San Francisco, “learn” from and in their natural daily work and travels and relationships, augmented if necessary by an occasional “push” from someone helpfully situated alongside. Think of those ingenious camper-leasers again, or of the new apprenticeship movements springing up all over the world. Young people should be encouraged to apprentice themselves to those whose work speaks to them, or to camp their way around the country learning its political or natural history, or to learn art by painting their town (literally, for once). Teaching as we know it, on the Caucus’s view, should fade into the background, should be primarily a form of stage-setting and guidance.

There is a lovely kind of precedent for this in Friedrich Froebel’s invention of kindergarten – not so hoary an idea, actually (Froebel opened his “garden for children” only in 01837), though it was too radical for his native Prussia (it was subsequently banned, and did not catch on in America for nearly a century). The children’s garden was intended very much as a place where children would be “nourished,” so to speak, and enabled to grow on their own, like plants. The crucial thing is not the teachers or their pedagogies, but the settings and even materials: the kinds of building blocks, for example, that invite distinctive uses and pose distinctive challenges. Froebel is also famous for inventing certain kinds of building blocks for very young children, to which Frank Lloyd Wright, for one, credited his architectural genius. One could say, perhaps, that these Caucusers only take the next, or last, conceptual step. All school, surely, should be kindergarten – that is, all school should work in the same way, should “teach” without the need of someone simply “telling,” For a twenty-year-old, Timbuktu or the desert could be the equivalent of a “garden.” “Could it not be, then, that the usual sorts of classroom instruction are only a kind of residue, the lowest common denominator, even a strange kind of reductio ad absurdum, of ‘education’ so understood?”

I said that we are “brought” to this edge by this book – but the Caucus’s actual stance toward it, in the end, is not so clear. There seems to be some ambivalence here. “Learning” and “teaching” and “school” are, for all that, specific concepts: perhaps they do not (or ought not) apply to just anything. Some degree of structure or guidance normally seems to be implied. And how quickly the notion of “guidance” then starts to glide over into oversight or control! Hyper-extending concepts like “learning” or “school” thus tends to promote certain less beneficent forms of intervention too. Though Holt is surely right that in a sense we “learn all the time,” for example, the last thing he would want is an extension of schools’ certification power over all of that so-called “learning.” Once we are willing to stretch the term, though, we find that precisely this starts happening: witness the continuing effort to get and give school “credit” for “life experiences,” or even that widespread hybrid notion of “service-learning.” This is not “deschooling society” at all, but tends toward the opposite: turning the whole of life and the whole of the world into one big schoolroom, with professional educators (for surely we would not want nonprofessionals, would we?) passing judgment not just on classroom performances (which however unpleasant, at least has its limits) but on the whole of our lives – on everything that we are or do.

It is high time, says the Caucus, to “break the monopoly of school [as we know it] over learning,” and of school personnel with their didactic pedagogies over everyone’s coming of age; high time to honor the manifold ways in which people actually grow and in which others can help them. And so a countermove suggests itself, still in the spirit of the critical or even (if you like) jaundiced view of schools-as-we-know-them with which the Caucus’s move to this particular edge began, but heading in just the opposite direction. Would it not be much wiser to narrow down the scope and claims of “school” (and correspondingly of “learning,” “teaching,” etc.) while at the same time supporting and enriching all of the actual “growing” activities, much more broadly described, for which we really are trying to speak. We need to be careful with our words, consciously choose different terms: instead of “learning,” for starters, why not “enablement,” “skill,” “celebration”? Is it not, maybe, time to just give the whole bag of school-concepts a rest? Let us speak instead of the really basic things: of changing the world, of creating environments more conducive to expression, human development, service, maturation, growth.

Take “service-learning” again: could we be so heretical as to suggest keeping the “service” but dropping the “learning”? Nothing against service – quite the contrary. Nothing even against the expectation that young people (indeed, all people) will learn something (will deepen their sense of the world and their own possibilities within it) through service of all sorts – or even against the expectation that this deepening would be a fit subject for discussion in school. Service is something that school should support and make room for. The problem is that schools have felt obliged to apply to it the usual apparatus of credits and grades and to “integrate it into the curriculum,” which tends to work out awkwardly at best and at worst (and more commonly) casts a sort of pall over it, makes it a mere means to graduation or an application of some theory rather than an end in its own right, perhaps even a citizenship obligation or a part of growing up. Better to let it be its own thing. No one thinks that traveling, or sex, or military service, are matters over which schools should extend their systems of control, evaluation, and “credit,” even though these too are often profound and life-changing experiences. “Sex-learning”? School should get its hands off service, too.

So there are two sides here, and the Caucus seems to be on both of them. It’s understandable enough, for in this they reflect much contemporary progressive thinking, which often does just the same: mistrusts the “hyper-extension of school” while often enough resorting to the very same extension in the name of making school-as-we-know-it at least a little more humane. A risky strategy, my friends! The forces of regularization and control tend to get the better of the new openings in the end. In the first heat of our response to environmental crisis, for just one example, we had all manner of people in the streets, voluntary simplicity in the communes, and Black Elk Speaks. Now we have “environmental education” – that is, another subject in school. No wonder we have a generation of young people who are better informed than ever before about environmental issues but who also, generally speaking, do not care.

In another context the Caucus makes an intriguing point about Driver Education:

Drivers Ed is one of the few classes in American high schools now that students are truly eager to take, because driving manifestly enables them to take their place in a larger personal and social practice, shared by parents and peers, already familiar in all manner of ways, and a practice that further enables their own growing independence and adulthood.

Mightn’t this (of all things) suggest an analogue to “environmental education”? That is, roughly, that the real challenge is not to figure out how to teach “love of the Earth” in the schools, but rather to begin to revalue nature for all of us, in the culture and the society at large, so that specific kinds of environmental learning – the sorts of thing school actually is good at – become compelling and attractive for the sake of joining the culture. Imagine a society that celebrates the passing of the first warblers, say – or hawks or salmon or whales – or that, like the Audubon Society, holds an annual bird count, everyone out listening and looking, or maybe turned out all the lights once a month to watch the stars or the latest comet. Such a society, for one thing, would engage “nature” first in the mode of celebration and connectedness rather than in unease or fear or distance. Moreover, and crucially for school, such a society invites “environmental education” almost as a rite of passage, a way of taking part in the great flow of life and its associated festivals. That is where the love comes from – it is not the schools’ job, or capacity. School cannot create environmental consciousness out of whole cloth: that is a matter of remaking the whole society, and it is then within this that school finds a role – a limited role, but correspondingly a role that it can effectively fulfill.

Put in these terms, we are really not “on” but over a different kind of “edge,” not just trying to extend and reconceptualize school but more like put it into a safe box and meanwhile get on with the task, yet again, of remaking the world. I think of Calypso St James as the Caucus’s true patron saint, their obligatory invocation of John Dewey notwithstanding. Their Dewey, in any case, must be the “reconstructive” thinker, and not just of school.

The book ends in a parable, which seems – though I am not sure of this – to dance around this very sort of point.

For the final exam in a self-defense course for women, the students are warned that sometime in the next month they will be attacked. They will not know where or when – of course – but they will be judged by how alert and prepared they are, and how well they fight off the attacker. This is all the warning they get. Now go, they are told, prepare, be ready.

To be as realistic as possible, to evaluate the real acquisition of the skill or knowledge being tested, and to signify its actual importance in life, a “test” must recede back into life, must become as indistinguishable as possible from the challenges that life itself throws up to us. Sometime in the next month you will be attacked. Every trace of artificiality is gone.

Now if testing, and then education in general, were to set off down this road, just where might we end up? Mustn’t there always be better disguise, more elements of uncertainty, for the sake of more accurate “tests”? Let the story spin itself farther...

Perhaps then in the self-defense class the students are only told that they may be attacked, or maybe not, or perhaps this decision is to be left up to someone else, or perhaps the agents of the tester only encourage you to venture out into riskier situations. Or perhaps then you will (only?) be watched to see how prepared you are, how poised, how alert, regardless of what happens.

In any case what begins to blur – and this is yet another rather delirious “edge” that is truly worth the whole book – is the very distinction between testing and life.

What would the world look like if this model of testing were generalized? What if it were always the unexpected challenge, at an unpredictable time, in a shape not fixed in advance – the challenge being in part to make one’s learning connect, like any “real world” situation?

Students of political science are buttonholed by a compelling State Senate or school board aspirant, or e-mailed with an urgent appeal to organize a local demonstration. Someone accidentally spills ten gallons of hydrochloric acid all over the floor, and you are the only one with a chemistry book and a calculator: what immediately-available substance, and how much of it, could neutralize it? An economics student finds herself challenged by a stranger, some Saturday night in a bar, to justify electricity deregulation. An art student is left alone in a friend’s house for the weekend with a hurried and unclear but desperate request to paint a mural on the wall. Students on their way to an environmental ethics class walk by litter, or litterers. Medical students walk out of their classroom to discover a traffic accident, or someone has an asthma attack or epileptic fit right in class.

At first one imagines this to be somewhat forced. Students whip out their course notes or textbook with a knowing smile and “do their test.” They do CPR, they pick up the trash, they find the nitrogen fertilizer (fortuitously right there in the Agricultural Studies room) to neutralize the acid. But imagine now that as time goes on teachers and testers learn to cover their tracks better.

Methods get more subtle. The maladies that might challenge a medical student become more uncertain, less conspicuous. Perhaps some of them are even one’s own. The environmental ethics students encounter the litterers on some other day or, in some other form – or maybe find themselves the litterer, in some sense, for someone else – say for a class studying the ecological ripple effects of different kinds of packaging, and here they are buying non-recyclable items when better alternatives are right next to them on the shelf, or maybe in some other store.

The logic is so impeccable that it becomes increasingly hard to tell what is going on. Of course it can also get lethal sometimes (these tests, if that’s what they are, are really real, after all: it’s stunning and yet entirely understandable that this needs to be insisted upon), just like in the self-defense “test” where some people might really get beaten up. Believe it or not, that’s a risk of real learning, you’re playing for high stakes. This is life, you know. First-year medical students now encounter people who genuinely are injured, or perhaps suffer some trauma themselves, and their decisions make change lives (perhaps even their own) or save or end them. Philosophers encounter genuinely suicidal or megalomaniacal people – once again, perhaps even themselves – and have to deal with them.

The parable thus leaves us with the uncanny suggestion that we could just barely imagine the eventual world of “real testing” as basically the world we’ve got. And so everything is either exactly the same or totally different from life as we thought we knew it. Is the actual everyday world a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the whole idea of testing, then? Or is the argument that testing might as well be utterly contrived – since otherwise it is, ultimately, intellectually indistinguishable from life itself? Or is it that we have hardly even begun to adequately conceptualize the relationship between education and what our students and often enough we ourselves still call, without a trace of irony, “the real world”? I must, like the book, leave these questions for the reader, for I hardly know the answers myself. At least you get a bit of this book’s flavor, paradoxical and edgy to the end. It leaves you teetering right on the brink.

Who is this book for? Those whose life, day in and day out, is the classroom? Yes, in part. A teacher friend of mine says, also without a trace of irony, that this is the book she always wanted. The philosopher? Yes, for sure: its sort of Deweyan insouciance (though the Caucus would not use this word; their language is more sober, possibly because their practice is so far over the usual sort of “edge”) is surely one of the essential “jobs for philosophers.” And, as the Caucus not so gently reminds us, the actual “job” of most philosophers is to teach. But what teaching could be! What teaching could be! As with so many other things, we still have only the barest idea.