Leaving aside the university tradition that descends from Humboldt, there are two American “philosophies” of school education, one rooted in Plato and one in Locke. As a matter of recent history, the former dominated the Aquarian ‘sixties and ‘seventies as a “classroom without walls” designed to “e-duce” or draw forth presumably pre-existing knowledge from students through the empowering agencies of participation and creativity. This philosophy of education survives even today in the emphasis the education manuals place on the “socratic seminar.” But in the period since the ‘seventies, in a backlash so pervasive that it’s the one thing the Left and Right can agree on (when it comes to pronouncements on education there’s little difference between Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump)—in this period, our age of Tests, Standards, and Core Curricula, what has come to dominate once again is the notion that a student’s mind is a blank wax tablet on which necessary information must be imprinted. This latter model views teachers the same way: they are constantly tested and subjected to competition, and even their daily lesson plans are—in a tellingly Lockeian expression— “scripted” for them. The main practical reason why both these viewpoints seem so inadequate is that as far as they go one of them best serves half the classroom and the other best serves the other half. In psychoanalytic terms, students for whom
the transference at the heart of all education still entails preserving the fragility of the ego through supportive love and close identification with (disguised) authority, allowing the ego ideal to slide easily, via internalization, into attachment to ideas as thought experiments—such students are best served by Socratic education. As to the other half of the class, however, students for whom the superego shadows transference and may even entail the need for punishment, enabling an attachment to ideas understood as forbiddingly authoritative information—such students are best served by what teachers call “teaching to the test.” Those students are likeliest to find a place in an Information Age devoted to scientific preparation for the new global economy. It goes almost without saying that either one of these philosophies of education serves its own constituency best if it admits within its framework just a touch of the opposite philosophy, as for example when within today’s imprinting approach the occasional socratic seminar is still recommended, or when it is acknowledged that paraphrase and not rote repetition is the best test of understanding. Yet even efforts at compromise do very little to mitigate the inadequacy of either philosophy. The education schools are obscurely aware that what’s really needed is a psychology of education, not a philosophy, and indeed there’s a good deal of talk about psychology when new “classroom strategies” are introduced and
sanctioned by School Districts. Yet “psychology” in these discourses is a very loose term authorized by empirical observation of the sort that dominates Psychology and Sociology departments at the university level: “Clinical observation shows that students learn best when,” etc. It’s tempting to say--to cut through the fog of virtually all publicized pronouncements about education--that a good place to start would be psychoanalysis of philosophy itself. Philosophy is object love projected onto ideas to which the philosopher is attached with unswerving, over determined loyalty and aggressive defensiveness, displaced narcissism shored up with an impressive intellectual scaffolding. The analyst in daily practice sees such ideas repeated less impressively in those bromides that seem to explain all problems—the common currencies of politics, ethics, religion and economics. “Philosophies of education” are just such bromides. Even in the sphere of authentic philosophizing, psychoanalytically distinguishable from bromidic opinion (“a dull ease of the mind,” Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus called it) as the achievement of something like independence in object love, stabilizing the dynamics of transference at a certain distance from the attachment-driven sexual researches of infancy—even within this authentic sphere, antifoundationalist skepticisms, doctrines of indeterminacy, and the deferral of meaning in psychoanalysis itself cannot escape the charge of dogged devotion to an idea, as the positivists are always eager to claim. Deborah Britzman, who has written most in recent times about Freud and education, remarks that we must acknowledge the continuous need for a psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis, or in any case for an interminable analysis of analytic premises. I hope these remarks won’t appear to be a defensive dismissal of philosophy. On the contrary, I’d argue that the only worthwhile goal of a liberal education is to make students as much like philosophers as possible, for the reason I mentioned already: rigorous philosophy differs from quixotic thought--obsessional neurosis and paranoid psychosis-- precisely in achieving an independent and stable plateau within the dynamics of transference, with ideas no longer quite reducible, as perhaps they are in most of us, to idealizations of the mother (our
Dulcinea) or the teacher (our chosen books of chivalry). It’s worthwhile indeed to pause over what “Freudian” education might have in common with the philosophy behind the two philosophies of education I’ve outlined. After all, Platonic and Lockeian thinking are both knowingly grounded in psychologies of understanding, the former premising a priori ideas and the latter the association of ideas, and this may allow us to see that the interest and importance of Freudian thought is precisely that it brings these apparently conflicting premises into alignment. In the well-known scene of education in Plato’s Meno, Socrates “e-duces” the principles of geometry from the mind of a slave boy, showing that all minds from inception are furnished with true Ideas. Yet nobody except Socrates seems to know what these ideas are, as the boy’s master, the Sophist Meno, points out skeptically. The speculative and essentially narrative part of the argument here and in the Phaedo, perhaps not unrelated to the Myth of Er in the Republic, concerns the doctrine of anamnesis. The immortal soul knows the true Ideas, but these are forgotten during the trauma of the soul’s entry into a body through birth and can only be recovered for consciousness through Socratic questioning. Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is the great modern tribute to this myth, and can be read indeed as an ambivalent description of childhood education: Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And, even with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Outside of religion we don’t hear much since Kant (and Wordsworth on that one occasion) about a priori ideas, but the idea of an inherited predisposition to knowledge carries over into the materialist tradition in which Darwin and Freud are the key modern figures. What we inherit, which is what circumstances from infancy through latency and adolescence may inhibit or crush altogether, is not knowledge as such, as in Plato, but rather a brain coded with the disposition to know. This much is commonplace, admittedly; but perhaps in thinking about education it is worth pausing over
the difference between inheriting true ideas and inheriting the possibility of having ideas that enable the survival of self and species. The growing infant, Freud insists, has a desire to learn that is as intense and devoted as a philosopher’s. The child’s researches at this stage are sexual and doomed to frustration, as are these same researches if we rethink them, with Lacan, as ontological questions about identity and estrangement, doomed likewise to frustration as the inaugural prevarication of the Signifier: “Je est un autre.” I am, if I am an I at all, the name of the Father. This child devoted to research hopes to accept no substitutes, like the philosopher, yet is forced to settle for them. Maturity, achieved through the defense mechanisms of repression and rewarded as psychic health, is the acceptance of substitutes. Maturity enters an Imaginary within which there is no glimpse either of reality or of symbolic meaning. We call this the school of life, or hard knocks, but realize in putting it this way that we expect something more from teaching in schools, otherwise we wouldn’t bother with educational institutions at all—as the voice of a certain kind of populist common sense, which sometimes infiltrates politics, tells us we shouldn’t. What then do we expect from teaching in the schools that we can’t get, for example, from “home schooling,” the inadvisability of which from the standpoint of psychoanalysis is pretty obvious, or from online education, during which it is hard to imagine any possibility of transference at all? Perhaps what we expect is to recover in the student the originary devotion to research that has been repressed in part because it was scandalous and in part because it was a failure, and to accomplish this recovery along paths made available by psychoanalysis. Transference and countertransference in both Socratic teaching and Freudian analysis have an irreducibly erotic component, traceable to amor matris and mediated by ego ideals, that needs to be displaced onto to love of the educational object: understood ideas. Turning then to the policy makers’ opposed notion of imprinting: Locke and all his successors were quite aware that within a unicameral mind—there’s only the Understanding for an empiricist--you need somehow to get from sense impressions to
ideas. The general argument, from Locke to David Hartley to Pavlov and the early Freud, confirmed in many ways today by neuroscience, is that ideas are cathected nodes formed along paths created associationally by repeated sense impressions. In Freud, however, the mind isn’t unicameral; it’s not a wax tablet but a mystic writing pad. All his metapsychologies multiply faculties as Kant does, faculties that modify and transform each other’s contents: ucs., pcs. cs.; id, ego, superego, and so on, faculties sometimes even arranged from the inside to the outside of the cerebral cortex. The unconscious functions associatively, as the dreamwork shows, but its associations, banishing contradiction and time, differ radically from the associations of consciousness even as they distort them, preventing consciousness from knowing itself or anything else with as much accuracy as it could wish. In order to imprint knowledge, then, teaching must work with a genealogical palimpsest, not the erasure of everything that is not the inscription of the moment. Teaching must recognize the obstacles to learning posed by Oedipal resistance to and abject identification with the teacher, grasping the primal nature of these obstacles, and attempt to turn them to advantage, like an analyst—though admittedly like an analyst who talks a lot, who of necessity talks probably more than either Socrates or Freud would think advisable. “You think reading is a waste of time? Why?” “You don’t agree with me? Good, explain why in writing.” Or: “Yes, that’s what I said, but can’t you find some other way to put it?” In sum, if teaching is to be authoritative—and it is not at all my point to say that it shouldn’t be—it needs to recognize in its subject position and that of the student the dynamics of the transference at work and make adjustments accordingly, to work steadily at the task of transferring the vagaries of human love to the relatively stable love of understood ideas.
Paul Fry (Professor of English and literature, Yale University)