maybe we can just be friends: the unhappy marriage of education and philosophy

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MAYBE WE CAN JUST BE FRIENDS: THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF EDUCATION AND PHILOSOPHY

Audrey Thompson Department of Education, Culture, and Society

University of Utah

In the name of Deweyan pragmatism, Rene Arcilla sets a curious proposal before philosophers of education. Insofar as philosophy has educational currency today, he says, it seems to be because philosophy has joined the ”theoretical wing” of the social sciences - a path, he acknowledges, that “Dewey might have followed.. .himself.”’ From Arcilla’s perspective, the cost of this alignment with the social sciences is that any distinctive function for philosophy is lost. Indeed, “the link to much of philosophy’s tradition becomes more and more of a liability” (PE, 10). Lamenting the degree to which traditional philosophy of education seems to have become irrelevant to educators, he wonders if philosophy and education “would have reason again to cultivate a conversation“ if philosophy were to adopt a less pragmatic set of commitments (PE, 11). To ”save [John] Dewey’s idea of philosophy of education,” Arcilla says, we may need to revise Dewey’s “sense of the central task of philosophy” (PE, 11). Instead of seeing the role of philosophy as ”theoretical comprehension for the purpose of guiding conduct,” we may be better advised to reclaim the Cartesian tradition of doubt (PE, 8).

Although Arcilla endorses Dewey’s description of the marriage relation according to which philosophy and education are necessary for the completion of one another, he believes that philosophy and education are currently locked in an unhappy conjugal relation. In part, he argues, this is because “a third suitor has moved in” (PE, 11). Whereas at one time philosophy could meet education’s needs for guidance, the social sciences have largely usurped that role, wooing education away from philosophy by offering practical and concrete attention to education’s needs. To save the marriage between philosophy and education, Arcilla says, philosophy may have to offer education something that no one else can offer - namely, “skeptical questioning” (PE, 10). In keeping with Arcilla’s marital metaphor, we might call philosophy’s proposed role that of “critical husband.”2 Unfortu-

1. Ren6 Vincente Arcilla, “Why Aren’t Philosophers and Educators Speaking to Each Other?” Educational Theory 52, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 10. This article will be cited as PE in the text for all subsequent references.

2. To be sure, skepticism and dubiousness are not invariably a husbandly conception of how to contribute meaningfully to a marriage; I myself indulge in the philosopher’s habit of skepticism regularly enough that my partner often refers to me as “Doubting Thompson.” But although heterosexual women, lesbians, and gay men also may play the skeptic, in Arcilla’s metaphorical marriage it is specifically the role of critical heterosexual husband that is at issue, rather than that of a generically understood spouse or partner. Arcilla characterizes philosophy as the source of the ideas, attitudes, and purposes that society needs to regenerate itself; philosophy requires education as a partner, he says, in order to “disseminate” these ideas (PE, 6). By reproducing philosophical insights and values in others, education enables the seed of intelligence to takeroot in fertile soil. Although at one point Arcilla acknowledges that communication is a process of

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nately, when professors of education offered themselves to teachers as “critical friends” some years ago, the results were not happy. Teachers did not seem anxious to acquire friends whose main purpose was to be critical. They may prove still less interested in being treated as a fickle, misguided wife who needs to be taken firmly in hand by a benevolent but skeptical husband. If the marriage between education and philosophy is unhappy, surely encouraging philosophy to think that the key to a rich and rewarding relationship is for him to sit around being dubious is not likely to help matters.

CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

In the divorce drama Arcilla describes, neither party in the “marriage of philosophy and education” is speaking to the other. The threat to the marriageis only partly internal; all might still be well were it not for an interfering outsider. “Each discipline’s confidence in the other’s appreciation” has been eroded, according to Arcilla, because education now looks “to the social sciences for guidance” (PE, 11). Implicitly female and heterosexual, education is portrayed as eager for advice and direction from a committed romantic partner who will listen to her and weigh in with the proper degree of authority and sexiness. Given this scenario, we can understand her disenchantment with philosophy. Not only is philosophy too abstract and aloof to serve as a romantic authority figure, but he is too self-involved. Education - bright young spirit that she is, if only in her imagination -wants to be courted, feted, attended to, and listened to as an object of tender interest. Having got caught up with a younger crowd, she is now giving most of her attention to the social sciences. Divorce seems imminent - and it will have consequences for the larger social order.

In Arcilla’s interpretation of Dewey, philosophy and education ”promise to complete each other” (PE, 4). Philosophy’s role is to furnish education with a “bold, broad, long-view sense of purpose”; education’s role is to insure that philosophy’s “work bear[s] fruit (PE, 7).3 “Their divorce threaten[s] society” because it allows them

mutual modification, this recognition is not taken up in his marriage metaphor, which places philosophy in the role of Rousseauian patriarch and education in the role of a subordinate wife who cannot properly fulfill her reproductive role without a husband‘s advice and direction.

3. Arcilla’s interpretation of Dewey seems to me quite misguided in this regard. Far from seeing education as a proving ground for philosophcal ideas or a means of disseminating philosophical ideas, Dewey saw educationas the process through whichsociallifeandsocialmeaningaremadevividandopen topossihility. This process is a matter not of the inert transfer of meanings but of transforming shared experience, as meanings are formed and reformed through communication. “Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.” John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in fohn Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1 924, vol. 9, ed. Patricia R. Baysinger and Barbara Levine (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 7. Significantly, Dewey rejected liberal arts conceptions of the disciplines. He certainly &d not view philosophy as having a particular professional and intellectual identity that needed to be perpetuated. While I disagree with Arcilla’s interpretation of how Dewey views the relationship between education and philosophy, however, I am concerned here not with Dewey’s position but with Arcilla’s own analysis and recommendation

AUDREY THOMPSON is Associate Professor in the Department of Education, Culture, and Society, and adjunct in the Ethnic Studies Program, at the University of Utah, 1705 E. Campus Center Dr., Rm 307, Salt Lake City, UT 841 12-9256. Her primary areas of scholarship are feminist ethics and epistemology, African- American epistemology and whiteness theory, and the craft and politics of academic writing.

THOMPSON The Marriage of Education and Philosophy 329

to forget their fundamental and mutual duty to societal regeneration JPE, 3 ) . Without a commitment to one another, philosophy and education apparently risk falling into dissolute ways, partying rather than reproducing. Before someone shouts, “Block that metaphor!” - Doesn’t anyone want to find out what philosophy looks like when he’s partying? I can already see the polyester shirt open to the navel, the gold necklaces gleaming in the chest hair; never mind, that’s enough of that - let’s consider the assumptions behind the marriage metaphor. Why does this marriage faintly suggest a cross between the Father-Knows-Best brand of heterosexual marriage and Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic”? Why is education in need of guidance but philosophy not? Or perhaps philosophy needs sentimental attachments and moral suasion for completion while education requires disinterested, rational guidance? Why is this marriage being called Deweyan when it sounds more like Jean- Jacques Rousseau?

In the 1970s, one of my mother’s magazines had a column called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” that I sometimes read. In the column, an unhappy woman would describe her problems with her husband to a counselor: her husband never listened to her, he insisted on airing out his dirty socks on the floor, he was rude to her mother, he never stopped criticizing her and the kids, he spent too much time watching television, he lent money to unreliable friends, and every time the couple went out to dinner with friends, he told the same tiresome joke. Although readers might not themselves see any hope for the marriage, the counselor’s answer to the question, “Can this marriage be saved?” was always “yes.” With a little more willingness to compromise, a little more appreciation for her husband’s hard work, anda little more self-sacrifice on her own part, the woman would find she could hang onto her man and make the marriage work. Needless to say, the counselor in this column was never a feminist; there was no question of the husband practicing greater self-sacrifice and patient understanding. As we consider the marital troubles facing philosophy and education, we too will listen to what each of the partners has to say about what went wrong, before turning to a coun~elor.~ Our counselor, however, will not be the Rousseauian marriage counselor featured in supermarket magazines. Our counselor will be a femini~t .~

4. The usual philosophical move for an essay such as this would be to show the limitations of the marriage metaphor explicitly, through a series of debunking arguments andillustrative examples. Insofar as I employ an extended example and problematize the marriage metaphor, my approach participates obliquely in this pattern. Rather than treating the example as an illustration of a philosophical concept, however, I seek to inhabit the metaphor. To some extent, I do this ironically, but I also am trying to give some degree of texture and fullness to the issues and investments, the lived concerns and frustrations that are only apparent if we talk about education and philosophy as something more than professional roles. Because my focus here is on the marriage metaphor as a metaphor, I do not seek to do justice to the complexity of philosophers and teachers as persons. As I am speaking primarily to philosophers, I want to be provocative about the arrogance of OUT discipline - but this is not to suggest that other msciplines and professions are not also arrogant, or that teachers are unproblematic. Some philosophers, for example, are excellent listeners; some teachers are uncaring and even cruel. The point here is not what actual teachers and philosophers are like, but what the marriage metaphor assumes about disciplinary authority and the educational implementation of philosophical ideas. 5. Feminists whose work informs this analysis include Carole Pateman, Nel Noddings, Jane RolandMartin, Nancy Cott, Cheshire Calhoun, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Linda Nicholson, Gerda Lemer, Madeleine Grumet, Jean Anyon, Diane Ehrensaft, Maria Lugones, Elizabeth V. Spelman, and Adrienne Rich, among many others.

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In keeping with the Deweyan tradition, the discussion that follows focuses particularly on progressive philosophy of education, including both liberal and radical antiracist, feminist, queer, and Marxist philosophies of education. Progres- sive philosophers of education might want to ask, ”Should this marriage be saved?” As Heidi Hartmann says of the “unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism.. .the inequalities in this marriage, like most social phenomena, are no accident.”6

THE SITUATION

Philosophy and education agree that they never had any real marital trouble until education began to view the social sciences in a new light. Less candidates for romance than interesting friends, the social sciences have been far more attentive than philosophy to what education sees as her needs and interests. Philosophy has always been inclined to tell education what her needs and interests ought to be. It was the afternoon she came home dazed because someone with a Ph.D. had listened to her that she realized that she was not happy. Education actually has never been particularly at ease with philosophy- they have such different habits and concerns. Originally, however, she assumed that that was how things were supposed to be. She had always accepted that he was wiser than she was, so even though she often disagreed with him and refused to do what he recommended, she listened to him respectfully and with a certain amount of awe. When she stopped deferring to him, philosophy dug in his heels and demanded that she not change the script in the middle of the marriage. She cannot now start asking him to be someone else, he says; he has always been this way. She should love and accept him as he is.

Can this marriage be saved? EDUCATION: HER SIDE OF THE STORY

Education wants to be loved and valued by philosophy, but she also has a lot of kids to take care of, and philosophy does not particularly seem to think of them as his kids. He is happy to give her high-sounding advice about how to deal with the kids, but he seldom wants to listen to anything that she has to say about who they are or what their needs are. He is even a little impatient with them, because they seem so messy and needy and lacking in intellectual seriousness. He likes to clarify things and divide them into neat categories, showing the necessary relations between ideas, but the children keep sliding out of the categories and refusing to be clear and definite. If education tries to get him interested in the specifics of who the children are, he becomes irritable. “Those are just anecdotes,“ he tells her.

When education confounds philosophy’s categories by tallung to him about the children’s diversity, he tells her that she needs more rigorous categories. It is not so bad when she talks about their age differences. Where age differences are involved, he has stage theories to draw on; not only are the stages quite categorical but they all culminate in the most mature and well-adjusted children eventually becoming a lot

6 . Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 2.

THOMPSON The Marriage of Education and Philosophy 33 1

like him. Rarely will he discuss the children’s genders, cultures, races, queerness, or individual funkiness, though. A philosopher cannot be continually distracted from the large picture by cluttery details, he tells her. Perhaps if education were to focus on just one rigorously definedvariable - gender, maybe, or class, but not both - she would be able to get to the bottom of her problems. As it is, he says, it is hard to get interested in her stories about the kids. They’re so messy and murky and sometimes so pointless. But to education, it is not possible to talk about the kids meaningfully without recourse to rich, complex stories.

Philosophy genuinely wants to solve the problems of the world and education admires his idealism. But all his arguing and theorizing never seem to get anyone anywhere. It is almost as if arguing were an end in itself. Sometimes she gets tired of the endless clarification of ideas. “Just yesterday,” education tells the counselor, ”I said to philosophy over what was supposed to be a quiet, romantic dinner, ’Hey, I read something interesting today. It said in this book I‘m reading that conversation is food for the soul. What do you think about that?’ And do you know what he said? He said, ‘Define “soul.”’ We ended up having an argument over whether there was such a thing as ‘The Soul,’ when all I really wanted was to have an interesting conversation. ”’

In education’s view, anthropology and sociology have a stronger understanding of the situations facing her children than philosophy does. It is not that anthropology and sociology aren’t arrogant in their own ways -heaven knows it’s hard to find a good date- but they do seem interested in some of the specifics of who the kids are. Rather than dscuss the kids’ needs in generic terms, they consider what it is like to be brown and lesbian and bilingual, for example. They also talk about when and how teaching works or does not work, rather than talking mostly about what, in principle, should work. It is not that education has no interest in thinking about the assumptions that inform her teaching, but she really could use some ideas as to what to do. Talking with other parents and teachers who can give her advice based on actual experience seems to her more useful than talking with academic authorities, but at least sociology and anthropology enjoy talking about details.

From education’s perspective, her marriage with philosophy is too often one- sided and joyless. The last thing she is looking for is more skepticism or more criticism. Philosophy often asks interesting questions, but he doesn’t so much listen to her answers as evaluate them. It’s like being interviewed - you couldn’t call it a conversation. Making the marriage work would take more effort than she is sure she wants to put into a relationship that is so much on his terms. PHILOSOPHY: Hrs SIDE OF THE STORY

Philosophy views himself as a world critic, a guide for others who do not specialize in thinking deeply and carefully about things. His role, as he sees it, is clarifying ideas, problematizing assumptions and conclusions, critiquing the ration- ales offered for particular courses of action, introducing doubt, and demonstrating

7. If you are tlunking to yourself, “I don’t get it; that is an interesting dmner conversation,” you are obviously a philosopher.

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the incoherence of particular analyses. He tries to help people think and act in ways that a disinterested observer such as himself would approve of.

From philosophy’s perspective, the root of the problem in his otherwise happy marriage with education is that education never listens to him. ”When we first started going out, she used to hang on my every word. She thought I was inspiring. But now she barely pays any attention to me. She says that I’m behind the times and she calls me a chauvinist. But I can’t help who I am. She should love me for myself.” He admits that most people do not listen to him, but even if no one else can be brought to listen to him, he says, at least education should want to listen. It’s not as if she couldn’t use the advice. She’s a sweet girl, he says, but she is not exactly worldly and she gets so wrapped up in those kids that she loses sight of the really big issues like existence and the nature of reality. “I can’t remember the last time I heard her ask aserious question like, ‘How do I know that Iexist?”’ he tells the counselor. “She just doesn’t seem to care about anything unless it has some utilitarian payoff.” If only education would lean on philosophy for guidance, he would happily support and advise her. “But for the marriage to work, she has to remember that her place is at my side and stop flirting with the social sciences. ‘The unfaithful woman.. .dissolves the family and breaks all the bonds of nature,’ as Rousseau said. Like Rousseau, frankly, ‘I have difficulty seeing what disorders and what crimes do not flow from this one.’118

In failing to respect his authority, education is upsetting progress, philosophy believes. Social control and coherence - democracy itself - depend on education using her intuition to guide the young, while always taking her own direction from philosophy. “I’m not saying that I can’t also learn from her; pillow talk is important. But emotion and sympathy can only take you so far before you get trapped by them.” From philosophy’s perspective, education is too immersed in minutiae and fails to pay adequate attention to the large picture. Inclined to lose sight of questions of truth and justice when confronted with pressing, immediate problems, she falls back on the unexamined theories, “unencumbered by skeptical doubts,” that the empiricists in her crowd continually thrust upon her (PE, 91.

In the end, philosophy believes, there is still hope if education can be brought back to her senses and remember that she needs his guidance. Maybe part of the trouble is that he himself has become too touchy-feely. In the early days, he offered education benevolent but stern guidance; she loved his tweedy wisdom, his intellectual sophistication, and even his eccentricity. Perhaps he should try to regain that certain enigmatic appeal he used to have. If they can go back to the way they were, he thinks, things might yet work out. THE COUNSELOR SPEAKS

Although philosophy and education both talk about the social sciences as if they were at the heart of the problems in the marriage, blame for the threatened divorce cannot be laid at the door of outside suitors. The trouble in this marriage is intrinsic.

8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 01 On Education, trans. Allan Bloom 11 762; reprint, New York Basic Books, 19791, 361.


Locked into conventionally gendered and sexed roles that frame their relationship as hierarchically ordered complementarity, education and philosophy almost inevita- bly find themselves unhappy with each other’s lack of support and appreciation. On the one hand, education’s defensiveness about measuring up to academic standards when she already has to deal with parental and administrative pressures, legislative oversight, and permanently bad press means that bracing intellectual conversations are rarely what she is in the mood for; on the other hand, philosophy’s paternalistic stance toward education undermines the possibility of a healthy or equitable partnership. Education does not seem particularly interested in saving the marriage. Philosophy wants to save the marriage, but his critical-husband seduction project indicates that he has not yet grasped that his paternalism is part of the trouble. Unless philosophy and education revisit their investments in their existing professional identities, trying to save the marriage appears to be a forlorn project.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Nominally a companionate marriage, the relationship between philosophy and education has been held together more by habit, duty, and long-held assumptions regarding the proper division of labor between husband and wife than by the partners’ vital appreciation for one another. Philosophy takes care of the big ideas; education takes care of the day-to-day doings. Like many other heterosexual married couples whose lifeworlds are basically separate, they are not so much intimate partners as co- workers with gendered job assignments. As a result, when things go wrong, they do not have many resources to fall back on, other than to practice more diligently than ever what they regard as the virtues necessary to the relationship, Yet these virtues may themselves be part of the trouble.

Indeed, even intimate cross-gender relations may suffer from the partners’ tendency to treat particular cultural and gendered interaction patterns as shared values. In You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Deborah Tannen noted that men and women frequently work from conflicting communica- ti on premise^.^ In an interview in connection with the book, Tannen pointed out that women and men who are having trouble communicating may inadvertently exacer- bate the situation by still more resolutely and virtuously clinging to the tendencies that gave rise to the conflict in the first place.’O The marriage of education and philosophy is a case in point. Education resists abstraction-which she sees as mere, out-of-touch Ivory-Tower intellectualizing - and insists on bringing the discussion back to concrete tasks and actual children, while philosophy tends to take for granted that he knows all he needs to know about education’s situation; he therefore moves quickly to the skeptical questions and carefully thought-out advice that he is sure she needs.

In effect, each engages in what my mother-in-law used to call “yebbiting” - responding with “yeah, but” as a way to acknowledge but quickly move past a valid

9 . Deborah Tannen, You lust Don‘t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990).

10. Radio interview with Deborah Tannen, late 1990.

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point in order to reassert one‘s original position. Thus, if philosophy says, “HOW do you know that what you are calling knowledge is really knowledge? You need to examine your assumptions about what it means for whites to know anything about African Americans,” education might respond with, ”Yeah, but in the interests of a balanced curriculum there has to be some representation of African Americans in the textbooki this is the best textbook I’ve found that balances coverage with representation.” Similarly, when education says, “You want me to consult you about what it means to address the needs of a &verse population democratically - but the problem is that you don’t know anything about the needs of my students or their communities,” philosophy is likely to respond with “Yeah, but you’re confusing the issue. All you’re talking about is empirical information. I’m talking about principles. The point is not what the specific needs of the individuals or groups might be, but whether we are addressing them in accordance with the disinterested principles of justice.”” Because philosophy and education both see themselves as already doing their part to make the marriage work, the solution to the problem, from their perspective, is for the other to come around to their way of seeing things.

In the counselor’s view, the two main obstacles to this couple achieving a close, flourishing, and egalitarian union are the gendered division of labor that each partner takes for granted and the professional identity to which each clings. The hierarchical division of labor insures that neither partner fully grasps or appreciates the other’s contributions to the marriage; the institutionalization of roles means that neither is prepared to reconceive her or his contribution. While philosophy privileges his disciplinary integrity over other considerations, education insists on the authority of her ”personal” (meaning teacherly, and therefore also institutionally framed) experience.

GENDERED INEQUALITY The conventionally gendered relation between education and philosophy is the

most immediate and obvious problem facing the marriage. As the family patriarch, philosophy holds himself responsible for the principles, values, ideas, and attitudes to be transmitted to the children. Education’s responsibility, he believes, is to provide the supportive environment and intercessionary work to make these ideas and values stick. Despite sentimental acknowledgments of mutual influence in the

11. The astute reader will have noticed that philosophy is a trifle erratic, possibly even schizophrenic, in his waffling between political and philosophical positions - sometimes sounding like John Rawls, at other times like Charles Mills or Charles S. Peirce or Charles Taylor, sometimes like me, perhaps occasionally like you, and probably like a couple of other people you know. This inconsistency - or rather, multiplicity - is due to the constraints of the marriage metaphor, which treats philosophy and education in essentialized terms, as if each represented a single professional and intellectual identity. In order to avoid reducing philosophy to any particular philosophical tradition or political position, I have sought to include a number of recognizable philosophical inclinations. As I think that most of us, in our various ways, participate in the patterns that I am alluding to here, I hope to be understood to be talking about philosophy more or less inclusively, although not absolutely inclusively. Belonging to a particular intellectual or political tradition - say, pragmatism, phenomenology, critical pedagogy, or feminism - does not render one exempt from these patterns, but particular individuals certainly might not fit the pattern all that well. For example, the philosophy-as-critical-husband character in this essay never sounds much like Maria Lugones or, for that matter, John Dewey.


marriage, philosophy’s standing assumption is that education needs his guidance. When she falls backs on intuition or looks to the social sciences for advice, he feels that she is jeopardizing not merely his own role as head of the family but the social order itself. It is by continually re-examining its assumptions and values that a democratic society regenerates, says philosophy. Neither empirical research nor personal experience can give education the leverage she needs to rethink social and pedagogical practices that, however valuable they appear, may be rooted in problem- atic assumptions and commitments. Only philosophy can fulfill that function.

By raising questions about the values and assumptions that currently shape educational practice - beliefs about teacher-student relations, knowledge, or inclu- sion, for example, that marginalize or oppress particular groups - progressive philosophy indeed performs a vital function. But this problematizing role is hardly exclusive to philosophy. Historians and social scientists working with disability studies, Marxism, queer theory, whiteness theory, LatCrit and TribalCrit, Critical Race Theory, womanism, and feminism, for example, have all troubled mainstream frameworks of value, including supposedly universal norms of fairness, neutrality, and objectivity. Experience, too, may induce skepticism about mainstream social and educational values. An African-American parent whose kindergartner is told by his colorblind teacher, “You can’t color your angel brown; angels are white,” does not need a philosopher to explain that the teacher is normalizing whiteness. Nor, upon learning that the high school Gay/Straight Alliance is objectionable because it might serve as a gay recruitment tool, does a bisexual student need a theorist to point out that heterosexual recruitment tools such as Homecoming and Senior Prom are not subject to legislative interference.

The question of whether raising doubts is a role unique to philosophy has implications for the quality (and equality) of philosophy’s partnership with education. If no one else can perform this function, and if it is an important function, then perhaps it makes sense for philosophy to cling to his identity as critical husband. But i f this is not a unique - or perhaps not an always-desirable - function, then for philosophy to insist on it as his distinctive role precludes the possibility of his working together with education to explore more generative and mutually engaging ways of thinking about the values and goals that they share. However useful philosophy’s executive questioning role might be, his assumption that education is dependent upon him for guidance institutes a patriarchal relation according to which the husband is in charge of clarifying and determining shared purposes, while his wife is in charge of implementing his decisions. Education’s contributions are indispens- able -but largely invisible and taken for granted.

In her analysis of the intellectual relationship between genetics and embryology, Evelyn Fox Keller illustrates how gender- and sex-coded disciplinary assumptions may work against the recognition of contributions by a female-coded field.12 Describ- ing the emergence of genetics as a male-coded discipline, Keller explains that, with

12. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Rethinking the Meaning of Genetic Determinism,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 15, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994). This article will be cited as RM in the text for all subsequent references.

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the onset of the twentieth century, the study of heredity was dividedinto two distinct fields: “the study of transmission would become the province of genetics, while that of development remained the province of embryology” [RM, 116). Geneticists took it for granted that the authorship of heredity lay entirely within the gene and that the organism, while furnishing a supportive environment, did not play an active role. Assigning agency to the gene positioned the field of genetics as concerned with genetic intelligence and “executive power.” By contrast, embryology’s concerns came to be “seen as too complex, too messy” to admit of cutting-edge scientific inquiry (RM, 125). Only toward the end of the twentieth century did new metaphors - “with the locus of control shifting from genes themselves to the complex biochemical dynamics.. .of cells in constant communication” -enable scientists to set aside assumptions about genetic determinism to “learn more about how genes actually work in complex organisms” (RM, 130).

Given that there were no technical obstacles to this shift in understanding, Keller says, it is worth asking why it was so long in coming. Part of the answer lies with institutional and political factors, but an important role seems to have been played by the implicit appeal to the metaphor of “sexual reproduction,” according to which the nucleus was equated with an active, authorial sperm and the cytoplasm with the receptive, nurturing egg (RM, 135). Not surprisingly, “many of the debates about the relative importance of nucleus and cytoplasm in inheritance,’ reflect “the overwhelming historical tendency.. . to attribute activity and motive force to the male contribution, while relegating the female contribution to the role of passive, facilitating environment” (RM, 136).

In the marriage of philosophy and education, education sees her reproductive work as unrecognized or undervalued, while philosophy feels that his seminal role is jeopardized. Neither feels appreciated. Philosophy’s role - big-picture thinking- encourages him to problematize or simply to remain aloof to the personal details in which education delights. Thus, he finds his attention wandering when she tells stories that he considers pointless or excessively detailed. What he cares about are cases that bring up big, interesting questions; he is not really concerned about minute-to-minute details. Frustrated by education’s always personal and too often sentimental narratives, philosophy tries to get her to trouble the assumptions that her narratives reify. When she uses a successful relationship with a particular child of color to defend her commitment to colorblindness, for example, he tries to get her to think about what colorblindness means in terms larger than what it means to her personally. Whereas she sees colorblindness as a synonym for unconditional caring, he points out that she has ignored the degree to which her virtuous colorblindness is caught up with suppressed deficit assumptions about race and color.

For her part, education finds it hard to get interested in abstract theorizing that seems either to ignore what she finds important or to actively dismiss it. Far from being incidental, the details that preoccupy her (and admittedly sometimes threaten to consume her) are the lifeblood of her work with the kids. Philosophy’s lack of interest in those details seems to her to reveal an inability to grasp the richness and range of the ways in which students flourish. It is as if philosophy mostly just cares


about problems. When philosophy complains that she doesn’t listen to him, she thinks what he really means is that she doesn’t defer to him. By contrast, what she means, when she says that he does not listen to her, is that he is just waiting for her to finish so that he can help her draw a lesson from the story or can maneuver the conversation back to a topic he considers more interesting.

Because of the head-and-heart hierarchy in their relationship, education and philosophy occupy largely separate spheres. As a result, the particulars of everyday classroom concerns usually seem to philosophy to bemerely details, while talk about ideals and philosophical premises seems to education to be merely abstract. Each partner may need the other, but neither understands or wholeheartedly values what the other contributes to the relationship.

INSTITUTIONAL INEQUALITY

Closely intertwined with the gendered patterns in the relationship are the differences in education’s and philosophy’s institutional identities. Education is a profession; philosophy is an academic discipline. Whereas educational practitioners pride themselves on being “on the front lines” and “in the trenches, ” competent in understanding and meeting the needs of twenty-five or thirty students at a time, philosophers pride themselves on their intellectual rigor and independence from merely practical considerations. As the offspring of the marriage of philosophy and education, educational philosophers are in the unenviable position of claiming only the luck of competency or prestige in each field. To introduce oneself as a “philosopher” is to elicit a certain number of oohs and ahs; to complete the description with “of education” is to encounter embarrassed and sympathetic expressions as one‘s interlocutors wonder how to respond to a description roughly equivalent to the “physics of shoelace tying” or the “mathematics of crayon counting” in its preten- sions to either academic authority or everyday usefulness.

Just as educational psychologists and anthropologists of education tend to see themselves primarily as psychologists and anthropologists, educational philosophers tend to think of themselves as “philosophers of education.” (In Arcilla’s discussion, for example, it is his disciplinary identity that is actually at stake; there is no mention of education’s distinctive identity. J This means that we keep traditional philosophical tools and concerns at the center of inquiry - focusing on educational topics or issues, to be sure, but only in the way that we might focus on any other topic of philosophical interest, such as medical ethics, literature, friend- ship, or animal rights. Rarely are educational projects so central, so distinctive, so much at the heart of what it means to do philosophy of education that philosophy itself is reconfigured. In their different ways, Rousseau and Dewey made education central to their philosophical work; some more recent philosophers of education, most notably feminists, have also done so, but for the most part we assume that our task is to upply existing philosophical methods to a problem already fully knowable under the terms of a master language.

Educational philosophers’ failure to put the emphasis on education surely accounts for much of education’s frustration. It is hardly a relationship of equals if

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education must love and accept philosophy as he is, while his own contribution is to provide her with constant criticism. However constructive in intent, the barrage of criticism seems to imply that he does not need to change, but that she does. Yet education is not much more flexible about her identity than philosophy is about his. Taking pride in the authority of her “on the front lines” experience, she tends to dismiss knowledge, perspectives, and concerns that are not grounded in immediate personal experience. While she recognizes that social prejudices and the school bureaucracy sometimes limit what she can do, she does not see institutional powers and privileges as meaningful in terms of her identity. Thus, she is not inclined to see questions about the whiteness of her caring practices or the heterosexism in her terms of address as relevant to who she is or to the successes she claims. Like philosophy, education clings to the pride and prestige conferred by her professional identity, resisting any challenges to the forms of authority and responsibility that she claims as her own.

CONCLUSION

The problem that sets Arcilla’s discussion in motion is that of his (and our) “suddenly. ..insecure” identity as philosophers of education (PE, 11. Although he indicates that this is just a way to get things started, he also apparently takes this disciplinary identity as pivotal andnon-negotiable. Yet for apragmatist, the question of identity is only useful or interesting in terms of what it does or does not enable and encourage us to do. If the only work that the term ”identity” does is to reify the way we have always done things as an identity-way-of-doing-things, it locks us into institutionalized roles, misdirecting our attention away from the work that needs to be done.

To recognize that philosophy and education do not have the relationship that Dewey envisioned should not lead us to look backwards, enlisting a pre-Deweyan model of philosophy with which to ”guide“ education. Instead, in keeping with the emergent praxis of a Dewey or a Carter G. Woodson, it should lead us to explore new, perhaps as-yet-unimagined possibilities. Ironically, though, even those of us who take our cue from Dewey or Woodson tend simply to apply their methods to contemporary educational questions, rather than engaging the possibility that newer political, cultural, and educational insights have implications for how we do philosophy.

As for the question as to whether the marriage of education and philosophy can be saved, or whether i t should be saved - these questions are premature. The rumors of their nuptials were unfounded. Before we assume that the best or only possible relationship between philosophy and education is heterosexual marriage, we might first wish to explore what it would mean for them to be partners or friends. And we haven’t even mentioned what the philosophy/education slash relation might look like.

MANY THANKS TO Ivan Van Laningham, Kris Fassio, and Bryan Brayboy for their helpful comments and critiques.

maybe we can just be friends: the unhappy marriage of education and philosophy

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