“Excellence,” Meanings, and Multiplicity

MAXINE GREENE Teachers College, Columbia University

Teachers work in multiple contexts, ranging from the immediate contexts of their classrooms to the larger contexts of political and social life. There is the immediacy of the felt encounter, the memo, the workbook, the blackboard, the bell. There is the sense of the surrounding institution with its hierarchy, its demands, its rules. There are the faces appearing, the voices sounding, the calls to accountability. And then there is the community or the inchoate public outside the walls, represented now by a single uncertain or protesting parent, now by a group of parents or a school board or a district office: and, somewhere in the distance, there are the state and federal agencies with their regulations and requirements, their determinations of what is happeningand what ought to happen in the schools.

Now, with all sorts of spotlights abruptly turned on education, with a spate of reports emerging from all sorts of commissions and foundations and centers, teachers are expected to direct their attention to all kinds of articulations of where American education is deficient, of what its goals should be, of what changes ought immediately be made. The token word, the magic word, the one that sums up what the report writers and the investigators wish to be viewed as the central goal is “excellence,” presented (not for the first time in our history) as an antonym for “mediocrity.” Given what has been taken for granted for a decade, it connotes to most people higher achievement levels as reflected in test scores and a higher level of what is called “literacy.” Literacy, sometimes specified as mastery of the English language and/or higher attainment (particularly in mathematics, science, writing, and the use of computers), is presented as a necessity for a “nation at risk.” That means that we are to strive for excellence in the name of productivity, national defense, and technological primacy in the world. It also appears to mean that our priorities are to change: We are asked, in the “national interest,” to set aside our relatively recent concern for equity.

It is interesting to ponder older views: the classical conception of areté;

Erasmus’s notion of the moral virtues and Christian piety; Jefferson’s idea of developing the reasoning faculties of youth, enlarging their minds, cultivat- ing their morals; Cardinal Newman’s description of the person “who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse.”l There is something strange about the report writers’ choosing to evoke the old humanist tradition in their effort to legitimate a certain range of largely technical competencies to promote what is called the national interest.

Volume 86. Number 2, Winter 1984 0161-4681/84/8602/283$1.25/0

284 Teachers College Record

More recent statements having to do with excellence-John Gardner’s Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too?2 the Rockefeller Brothers report of several years ago3 - did not define the term so narrowly, and it is tempting to wonder why.

How are teachers and teachers-to-be to respond to what is being said? How are they to define its relevance for what they do each day? One would hope, at the very least, that some of them have been empowered to conceptualize what is happening against the background of our history, to distinguish between polemic and serious proposals, to understand that values and goals cannot simply be legislated into existence. Surely it is important for them to discern the difference between the perspective of a statesperson or a federal commis- sioner and that of the teacher or the administrator in an actual school. The first is likely to look out on the world strategically, to see it “small’ (as Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull puts it4) like a chessboard or a distant battlefield. The second, the involved person, is more likely to see it “big,” without clear demarcations. Each face, for this person, is likely to be magnified and distinctive; details overlooked by the outside observer-dusty windows, noises in the corridors, dog-eared workbooks, lesson plans-are inescapably clear. Practicing educators would find it very difficult to look over the individuals they are expected to educate and tell them that national security depends on their doing well in their chemistry tests or that the nation’s economic primacy hangs on their exerting themselves in writing or in math. Moreover, those who teach or supervise or administer a school cannot merely look on students as members of an aggregate or cases or instances of some nationwide state of things.

Teaching is a triadic undertaking: It involves someone teaching something to somebody5 -or, I would prefer to say, enabling somebody to learn how to learn. The point, though, is that every term of the triad has to be attended to: the living being who is the teacher, intentionally trying to provoke diverse persons to reach beyond themselves, to become different, to enter a state more desirable than the one they are presently in; the subject matter, conceived as a specific symbol system, a structure of related concepts, a perspective, a set of know-hows; and the learners in their particularity and variety, with different biographies and degrees of interest, different levels of readiness and skill. None of this makes the call to excellence inherently meaningless, but it does suggest that the voices of informed practitioners ought to be heard more frequently than they are. It does suggest the need to test abstract formulations (whether overly optimistic or overly carping) against lived situations, against what is empirically known.

Lawrence Stedman and Marshall Smith, for example, writing about the recent reform proposals,6 look at such indicators of decline in achievement as those presented by the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It is true, they say, that very high test

scores have dropped, and there has been a steady decline in science achievement scores of seventeen-year-olds. But Stedman and Smith draw attention to the poor treatment of the data and the “abominable nature of national data on school performance.” Their point is not that educators should ignore the call for improved achievement; it is simply that the existing evidence does not warrant some of the sweeping condemnations in the reports. Changing populations have not been taken into account, for instance. Incommensurable samples were used to determine that high school curricula had been diluted; favorable comparisons with other countries were ignored. Similar things might be said about the proposals for longer school days and longer school years. Trying to make sense of it all, educators must at least hold in the mind the likelihood that many of the reports are responding to economic problems in this country and to somewhat questionable predictions of a “high-tech” future affecting everyone. The reports are political docu- ments as much as they are educational in nature. Educators of all kinds ought to keep asking (and be enabled to ask): “What do we want for our children? What does all this mean for the practitioner? What does it actually and operationally mean?”

Whether others read this moment of history as I do, whether they also feel themselves to be living in a highly administered society where power wears a blank and smiling face, where the ordinary individual has little opportunity to communicate to official spokespersons how it is and how it feels to live the kind of life he or she lives and do the kind of work ordinary people do, they must sense the distance between themselves and those informing them of what they ought to do. The words seem to fall about all of us like hailstones very often, and we have no chance to persuade the great communicators of what we believe is good and right-and why. We hear reassuring talk mingled with discussions of megatons and first-strike capability and early warning systems and “peacekeepers”; and many of us cannot but be perplexed by the prescriptions being issued with respect to what we ought to be doing in schools. How do we sort out the laments at presumed test-score declines, the call for sterner discipline and school prayers, the campaigns for voucher systems and tax credits, the insistence on minimum competencies for every child? Worse than that: How do we overcome the fear that we, like the people at large, have become merely spectators of our country’s affairs?

If that fear is justified, it signifies a catastrophe for a democratic citizenry and one to which public education ought somehow to attend. Whether justified or not, however, that is the way many people in education are being made to feel. It becomes extremely important, therefore, for more and more practitioners to find their voices with respect to what is being said and left unsaid. Those actually engaged need to insist that the discussion about schools take place in ordinary rather than cost-benefit or technical or pietistic language. They need to find a way of rediscovering and articulating their

286 Teachers College Record

commitments to the search for meaning, to intelligence, to decency, to the idea of community. Irving Howe said recently that “the very word ‘excellence’ ought to make us cringe a little, so thoroughly has it been assimilated to the prose styles of commission reports, letters of recommendation, and hair spray commercials.” He remarked that the word was being used as a code word for “educational Reaganism,” which he associated with tougher testing, in- creased discipline, and merit pay; and, like others, he described it as anti- humanistic in intent and overtone alike.7 If nothing else, educators and teacher educators are challenged to try to make audible, not only what they care for, but what they understand about injustices and deficiencies in society, as they affect the persons they teach. They may be challenged as well to talk about the consequences of felt powerlessness and about the discrepancies between existing value systems and the technologies that are altering (if not threatening) human lives.

The time has come, it seems to me, for our profession to speak out in the name of reflectiveness and social concern, and on behalf of an endangered common world. Teachers-to-be cannot speak out in this fashion or cope with the confusion and complexity of things if they are not introduced to historical explanation and ways of gaining historical perspective on what is happening today. Nor can they cope if they are not equipped to do philosophy with respect to the language, the prescriptions, the absolutist assertions all around. They need somehow to learn what is required if they are to attend to what they are hearing with any degree of acuity, to break through obfuscations, to reconstruct some of the familiar arguments, to ponder what is worthwhile and what is worth striving for, to think about their own thinking and consciously to create meanings as they live. None of this can happen automatically or naturally. The ability to read or to interpret social and political situations does not come naturally; nor does it derive automatically from involvement with academic subject matter, important as such involvement must be seen to be. The capacities demanded might be developed under rubrics like “policy studies” or “educational foundations” or any other; but, if we ignore the need to attend to them, we will find ourselves training talented functionaries or technical specialists instead of educating teachers. There will be little likelihood of their incarnating the value of excellence or rendering it meaningful in their working lives.

How, removing the term from its current frameworks, can it be reconceived so as to refer to what teachers believe to be significant and valuable? As I view it, excellence refers to a quality of mind; and when I say “mind” I think, as John Dewey did, of something other than an immaterial substance and something quite different from a mere computational device. Dewey described mind as a verb, not a noun, a verb denoting the ways in which “we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which we find ourselves.“8 Mind signifies attention, he wrote, and purpose. “Mind is care in the sense of

solicitude-as well as active looking after things that need to be tended.“9 Conceived in that fashion, mind is involved with experience and lived situations. It has to do with the funding of meanings, or the sedimentation of meanings, all sorts of meanings. These become part of and indeed constitute the self; they compose the background against which new encounters and experiences are projected. To educate someone is, in a very fundamental sense, to empower someone to add continually to the richness and multiplicity of such meanings. It is important to remember (as Dewey also said) that the realm of meanings is wider than that of true-false meanings.10 It includes moral meanings, poetic meanings. It includes, I would add, the kinds of meanings some people achieve when they realize that they are capable, along with others, of repairing what is deficient and painful, solving social problems, altering the order of things. It must be said as well that, although we are all individually “condemned to meaning,”11 to making our own sense of things and finding some reason for living our lives, the ways of knowing that we must undertake, the questioning, the wondering, are not of the sort we can wholly invent for ourselves. Not only do we conduct our quests in a socially constructed world,12 the modes of knowing how with which we learn to work (and those most of us teach), the patterns, the symbol systems to which we are introduced (and to which we introduce our students), are social and cultural in origin. Some of them come down to us from our predecessors; some are communicated by our contemporaries; all are to some degree provisional, to some degree functions of certain orientations of which we need to be aware.13 And all, at some point, take on the personal stamp of the one who “dwells within them,” as Michael Polanyi would say, if even for a time.14

Thinking of mind in the active sense, of meanings in the social sense, thinking of individual vantage point and perspective as well, we might also think of what Howard Gardner calls “frames of mind,” signifying multiple intelligences, the types of know-how potential in the plurality of human beings.15 Among these, according to Gardner, are logical-mathematical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, musical intelligence, a great variety of personal intelligences, all of which might be viewed in relation to mind in the active sense. We might then think of the varieties of mindfulness with which persons may direct their attention or make use of their intelligences as they strive to make sense of their worlds.

The recent reports say little of such variety. In fact, the general implication is that there ought to be a narrowing, a channeling of human abilities. If stress is placed on a prescribed range of literacies, if human beings are thought of primarily as “resources” to promote the national interest, opportunities for differential growth and development may be severely limited in the name of relevance and efficiency. We need but think of those whose strengths and talents are not of the sort especially prized today: Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, James Baldwin, Gregory Bateson, Helen Caldecott, any

number of others. We might think of persons peculiarly qualified to start storefront schools in inhospitable neighborhoods, those out to save the rivers, those who engage in civil disobedience to stop nuclear war. Of course there has always been a tension in this country between thecommitment to a single standard of achievement and bearing and being-and a sense of the richness of multiplicity. As I see it, that tension ought always to be maintained. In “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about “the literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of a household life,” which he said were the “topics of the time.“16 There have always been strangers and newcomers coming into the American stream, and each incoming wave has been greeted with ambivalence. The strange, the unfamiliar, have repeatedly been experienced as an attack on the respectable or on what is truly “American.” Writers like Emerson tried continually to present the values of difference, of distinctiveness, even as they yearned for harmony and communion. The voice of Walt Whitman makes itself heard in this connection. Whitman, who wrote of himself as a “kosmos,” who wrote: “Whoever degrades another degrades me,/ And whatever is done or said returns at last to me./ Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.“17 It is not surprising that Dewey wrote, in The Public and Its Problems, “Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is the name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman.“18 Reading this, reading those who came before, we cannot but he given pause by commissions that prescribe for those who have no voice and at once feel bound to comply.

There is a warrant, then, for thinking of excellence in a plural sense. We might want to look adjectivally at such excellences as consisting in the development of particular capacities like critico-creative thinking, integrity, autonomy, fidelity, imaginativeness, adventurousness, self-reflectiveness, cooperativeness, moral sensitivity, and even strength of will or persistence or stubbornness.19 Now it is clear enough that it means little to speak of a capacity like critico-creative thinking without taking into account the ways in which such a capacity is displayed or finds expression in some recognizable form of activity. The activity might be that of solving problems in mathematics, of decoding and achieving meaning in a short story, of interpreting media messages, of responding to threats to the environment, of reading lived situations in order to discover what needs to be repaired. Or, as WC are more likely to do, we might consider how such capacities are displayed or might be displayed in one or another of the subject matter areas, in and through the academic disciplines, or in crafts, or in games. Any one of these activities may offer evidence of a particular kind of intelligence or the use of several intelligences; and it seems clear enough that the capacities spoken of cut across the various “frames.” That ought to be where we focus our attention if WC choose to view excellence as a quality of mind.

Let me offer two analogies: any reader can think of more. The first is drawn from experience with an aesthetic education institute where I teach in July. Often, when I arrive at the Juilliard School at 8:00 A.M. on a hot morning, I meet a young Balanchine dancer who tells me she has been at the barre or perhaps in a class since 6:30 or 7:00 A.M. She has not been at the barre or in class because she has been instructed to do so or because doing so is a prerequisite for her institute job. She has spent her early morning hours that way because that is part of what being a Balanchine dancer means, and she has chosen to be a member of that particular community. It happens, not incidentally, to be a normative community, governed as it is by certain standards having to do with effort and shape and muscular control and flexibility. It seems self-evident that she possesses bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, involving a sense of timing, an ability to use her body in skillful ways and to control her own movements in a manner most of us cannot. Simply to assert that she possesses that kind of nonverbal intelligence, that she can speak the language of the body, would be meaningless if she had no opportunity to learn to dance or to mime or to act. But there is more. She may be taken to be a model of excellence because she continues striving, on her own initiative, in accord with the norms governing her particular dance company, and because the striving and the choosing of herself will never end. so long as she is in that world. For me, this means that she is expressing such capacities as integrity, autonomy of choice, imagina- tiveness, and fidelity, if not necessarily critical thinking or analytic skills. If she had not developed such capacities, or if she had had no opportunity to display them, it is difficult to think of her realizing her potential or actually becoming intelligent in a bodily-kinesthetic way. Also, it would be hard to speak of excellence. I would emphasize that what is important is her quality of mind, the manner in which she addresses herself to her project, the ways in which she deals with the situations in which she finds herself when she is doing her work.

Another analogy is to be found in the work two students did in establishing a storefront day-care center in a New York City neighborhood. In this case, too, the norms governing a particular community were named and attended to, not simply those governing the people who establish and teach in day-care centers, but those relevant to the people on the blocks concerned. This meant coming to know the regulations: making the requisite preparations to satisfy the health department; securing contributions of toys and paints and plastic cups; visiting-day after day, night after night-working mothers, grand- mothers, teen-age sisters or brothers; talking, talking with little children. It meant freely working, honing a variety of intelligences: linguistic, logical. personal. It meant making distinctions, effecting relations with others, understanding cultural idiosyncracies. At once, these students were express- ing capacities like integrity, concern, fidelity, imaginativeness, critico- creative thinking, and the rest. I would apply the word excellent to what they

290 Teachers College Record

were doing; but I am afraid that, according to present-day definitions, their prowess and proficiency would seem insignificant, if they were to become visible at all.

It must be granted that the dancer and the two students had already mastered the basics or the skills fundamental to what they are doing before coming on stage or on the street. What the dancer does today on her own initiative would be inconceivable if she had not mastered, through stringent and repetitive effort, through what can only be called training, the foundations: the positions, the extensions, and the rest. She might say that, rigorously drilled as she was, she actually began learning when she began teaching herself: going en pointe before her mirror at home, trying out contractions in new combinations, going beyond what she was drilled to do in ballet school. The training for the day-care people was not so specific or specialized; but clearly they had to learn the ropes where dealing with state agencies was concerned, and even where ethnic minorities and their children were concerned. And it was only when they began walking up and down the blocks, ringing bells, talking to people, going back to check that the windows were secure at the center, that there were fire extinguishers and other such equipment, that they began teaching themselves. Once they began teaching themselves, they might be said to be actually learning what they had to learn. Many people recall going beyond what they were taught like that: practicing with syllables and words, making up rhymes, saying the alphabet backward, spelling out unlearned words on building walls and street signs. The really fortunate among us managed, like the student dancer, to grasp ways of doing things.20 When we did, we may have begun playing around with what we were mastering: diagramming sentences, keeping logs, taking apart alarm clocks, reading books our mothers took out of libraries for themselves. If that is what happened, we learned in such a way as to make certain modes of procedure our own.

Obviously, ways of doing things are more or less specific to every field. Learning the ropes when it comes to decoding sentences is different from learning the ropes when it comes to multiplication tables. The principle is the same, however. Enabling someone to master the basics in any field involves making available a method, a mode of procedure-and, I would hope, somehow explaining that it represents something that works for others and is worth trying out. It might also be pointed out that there are always other ways that might be tried or even invented, depending on where the person begins. What has been learned in free writing, for instance, may be practiced on one’s own, tried out in new formats, with all the risk of error it entails. The risk can be taken thoughtfully and with a degree of care; the errors can be corrected before going on. Or, having experimented with the free-writing model, a student may decide that it is better to plan what to say, to shape it somehow in advance. A better way of proceeding may appear as the person continues self-

“Excellence,” Meanings, and Multiplicity 291

teaching-correcting errors, taking new risks. The point is that such a person could not do these things without having learned the rudiments, having grasped a mode of procedure that could be tried out on one’s own. This is quite different from being required to master and to demonstrate a range of discrete competencies or skills. In this approach to learning, there is an awareness of process. The learner is conscious of exploring, of becoming different, of moving beyond.

Much the same applies to learning the cognitive styles that identify what Alfred Schutz called the “provinces of meaning”21 where the various disciplines are found. To move from the commonsense world in which a person lives everyday life into the domain of the natural sciences demands a recognizable mode of knowing how. Not only are there specific protocols to be mastered, ways of theorizing to be learned; there is a distinctive language into which to move, a symbol system with which to engage. And there is a way of directing attention to those aspects of the world selected for study that is different from the way of directing attention to, let us say, the social or the human world, populated with fellow human beings. In the province of the natural sciences, as in the province of the social sciences or criticism or the arts, there are favored cognitive styles, compatible modes of procedure or sense-making. In the gaining of perspective each province makes possible, however, there is room for some personal interpretation and selective attending. Each person enters into a particular province, no matter how demanding, with some consciousness of his or her own biography and life- project, some awareness of his or her location in the intersubjective world. Here, too, the idea is to become increasingly mindful of theactually lived, the shared, the everyday, even as the symbol system being mastered enables the learner to structure wider and wider ranges of experience, to impose conceptual order on what has been heretofore unknown.

I would want to lay particular stress on taking into account the actually lived world, where the search for meaning originates and where it finds its consummations. What we call our knowledge constructs (or the sets of know- how that make them possible) are layered on our perceived landscapes, the world as patterned by childhood explorations. There is a perspectival. partial way of seeing, hearing, and knowing that is associated with childhood. Children are aware of the horizons of their understanding: they are aware of wanting to move beyond the limits, to discover what is waiting “outside.” For me, educating in any sphere ought to involve a recognition of those origins, not an overwhelming of them or a substitution for them by micro-worlds of fixed definitions or one-dimensional prescriptions. Yes, we want tointroduce the young to the forms of knowledge, the languages that constitute sense- making in our culture and make the cultural “conversation” possible.22 Most of us hope to do that in increasingly complex and challenging ways. At once, we hope to keep alive the young people’s own stories, their consciousness of

being embedded in particular landscapes, in lived worlds to which the natural and social sciences, like the arts and humanities, refer. Such attentiveness to lived situations ought to continue, if we are concerned with empowering persons to name their worlds, to look through widening and diversifying perspectives. And we want them not only to look at the everyday but at what surrounds and grounds the everyday, what reaches back in time, and what extends forward into the undiscovered, what is not yet.

What of the newcomers23 and the strangers? What of those who feel that the cultural “conversation” is carried on in terms alien to their own experience? If we acknowledge their presence and their diversity, we have also to acknowl- edge the existence of tensions or dissonances between the cultures of many students and the culture deriving from the “provinces of meaning” that provide the sources of our dominant perspectives. It is evident to many of us that what is in many senses “given” to certain educated, well-socialized groups in our society does not come easily to people from other backgrounds. These are people whose lived lives and family lives aredifferent in many, often overlooked ways. There are styles of thinking, ways of talking, funds of meaning transmitted by families who are newcomers to the mainstream. These inevitably mediate what is taught in school, including the symbol systems we often take for granted as the only ways of thematizing a complex world. Not only is there a danger of further alienating such students by a lack of attention to what they live and know. There is a danger in the tendency to disconfirm their experiences and responses, because they do not participate in what we conceive to be “literate” discourse and because they often do not value what WC take for granted as valuable. Teacher educators have the responsi- bility, especially in times like these, of acquainting teachers-to-be with sociological and demographic realities, with what has been called the “ecology of education”24 or the multiple overlapping systems in which different people live their lives.

This, too, has to be articulated in response to those who call for a one- dimensional excellence. To appreciate multiplicity and diversity is to make available the range of cognitive perspectives to all sorts of people, so that they will have equal opportunities to interpret their experiences. Moreover, it is to provide them with a clear sense of the standards or norms that help define them. This in no way suggests that predetermined “truths” be imposed or that newcomers be initiated into official versions of reality. To speak of interpreta- tion is to acknowledge the significance of vantage point, of biography; it is to recognize that what comes to be known will always to some degree be contingent on the knower’s particular relation to the world. When WC add to that an acknowledgment, not only of the multiplicity of intelligences, but of the part to be played by imagination and perception in interpretive thinking, we ought to be able to anticipate continuing enrichment anddifferentiation of the “conversation” and, at once, of the common world.25

“Excellence,” Meanings, and Multiplicity 293

It is a matter, yes, of nurturing mindfulness; it is a matter of opening perspectives; it is a matter of empowering diverse persons to become critically conscious of the lives they live together. Also, it is a matter of enabling them to resist manipulation, mystification, and coercion from without. Educators generally have not yet learned enough to meet the challenge of the so-called information society. We have not come to terms with the overabundance of fragmented information, with the intense product orientation that obscures process and interpretation, or with the onslaught of slogans and images and pieties. We have not even learned enough to enable people consciously to create knowledge out of information. We do little to help them recognize television programs as artifacts or to deal with them as artifacts; we pay insufficient heed to the popular culture as overlay and distraction and fulfillment of desire.

If we are to educate for mindfulness and critical understanding in its manifold forms, we need somehow to enable the young to recover themselves, to recover what might be called a lost spontaneity. By that I mean to help them regain contact with their original landscape, their original sense of horizon, of the not yet. Of course we cannot sweep away the symbolisms and extrava- gances of popular culture. Nor can we blandly try to substitute for it what we believe to be a more desirable, more liberating, more humanizing system of meanings. But we can do more to create the kinds of situations that release spontaneous preferences. We can create situations, in fact, in which people begin once again to speak to one another in their own voices, to find out what they think by expressing themselves. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has written about speech as a genuine gesture, a kind of action that carries meaning to another. Expression, he said, brings meaning into being. Meaning and thought appear as a certain kind of silence is transformed. Our view of human beings, he believed, remains superficial when we neglect that origin, when we do not try to find “beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence” and do not try to describe “the action that breaks this silence.” The spoken word, he said, “is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.“26

To think that way, for me, is to think about enabling the young to come back in touch with what may have been drowned out by the noises of the culture, by the false languages of entertainment, the cost-benefit language of official explanations, the taken-for-grantedness and passivity to which both give rise. It is to empower our students to experience incompleteness- incompleteness and the sense of possibility. Only then are people likely to reach beyond themselves toward the horizons of their lives. Only then are they likely to pose their own questions, to choose in their various ways to learn to learn.

Openings are what are needed, openings and a consciousness of multiple realities. In the quest for a heightened quality of attending to situations, for a diversity of excellences, we need to think of the role of the imagination as an

opening to what is not yet. Imagination enables human beings to look at things as if they could be otherwise, to envisage alternative realities. At once, as Virginia Woolf said, it enables them to “bring the severed parts together,“27 to effect unexpected connections in experience, to create new orders, new spares in which to move. Wallace Stevens’s poem “Six Significant Land- scapes” suggests in its last stanza what this might mean:

Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving ellipses- As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon- Rationalists would wear sombreros.28

Pondering those words, I go back to the reports and think of the confined spares the new prescriptions seem to legislate. The poet in this poem is not saying that square rooms ought to be locked or that rational thinking ought to be forbidden. He is, after all, a poet, discovering and setting forth resem- blances between a certain kind of linear thinking and what might be called one-dimensionality. When he says “rationalists,” he is inventing a metaphor that links a type of formalism and academicism to closed-in spaces, to predefined limits, to boundaries. The square hats respond to the square rooms, in the sense that human reason was once thought of as a microcosm of the ordered, law-governed universe. As we move through the lines, we may find ourselves moving outward beyond the boundaries to other sorts of spares. Or we may feel the triangles themselves involved in transformations, becoming rhomboids and cones. Then, suddenly, we are released to go further, beyond diagram and abstraction to the actuality of the half-moon. If the rationalists have chosen to go with us, they themselves will have been transformed. Their hard hats will have become pliable, dashing, shading the eyes, yet allowing glances at the moon.

As in the case of other art experiences, an encounter with such a poem may offer us a sense of enlargement and heightened intelligibility. Having read it with a consciousness of ourselves as educators, we may return to our teaching lives and find them subtly changed. Stevens has not taught us new truths, but he may have made us see what we already knew somehow differently. We may have been moved to reflect again on the place of reason in sense-making: the unquestionably significant place of logic, mathematics, of cognitive acts like drawing inferences, defining, categorizing, generalizing. We may have been moved to ponder the meanings of conceptualization: making connections in

“Excellence.” Meanings. and Multiplicity 295

experience, schematizing, ordering with the help of concepts like figurative language, economic causation, simulation, organism, each derived from a particular subject matter field, each governed by a particular set of criteria. And we may have gone-on to recall how important it is to ground such conceptual activities in a perceived landscape, a landscape of appearances, of shapes and sounds and colors apprehended from the standpoint of a living being enmeshed in an intersubjective world. Surely, we need on occasion to draw reflective attention to that perceived world now and then, the world where conceptualized objects exist as presences, reminding us of why we work with the disciplines in a continuing effort to unify and understand our world.

I cannot but recall a passage from Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell,

which makes this particularly clear. Thomas was talking about the phenom- enon of the transformation of random matter into the “ordered dance of living forms,” how that transformation has been thermodynamically explained as a flow of energy from the sun to outer space by way of earth-energy mathematically destined to cause the organization of matter into an increas- ingly ordered state. He wrote of constantly changing conditions of rearrange- ments and of “a chancy kind of order, always on the verge of descending into chaos.” And then:

If there were to be sounds to represent this process, they would have the arrangement of the Brandenburg Concertos for my ear, but I am open to wonder whether the same events are recalled by the rhythms of insects, the long, pulsing runs of birdsong, the descants of whales, the modulated vibrations of a million locusts in migration, the tympani of gorilla breasts, termite heads, drumfish bladders. A “grand canonical ensemble” is, oddly enough, the proper term for a quantitative model system in thermodynamics, borrowed from music by way of mathematics. Bor- rowed back again, provided with notation, it would do for what I have in mind.29

It is this sort of thinking that draws rationalists from the single vision of the square room and makes them no less mathematicians or logicians or theoretical physicists. It is this sort of thinking that allows for the expression of more than one capacity in a chosen mode of activity. In a highly technical period like the present, many educators are concerned about the seductions of the purely linear, the depersonalized, the morally neutral. Thinking of excellences in relation to the range of capacities and the multiple intelligences mentioned earlier, I would argue for enhanced attentiveness to ellipses and to Bach and birdsong in whatever guise or order is appropriate for learners whose attention is directed to their worlds.

We need spaces for this, spaces for expression, spaces for freedom, yes, and a public space. By that I mean, as Hannah Arendt did,30 a space where living persons can come together in speech and action, each one free to articulate a

296 Teachers College Record

distinctive perspective, all of them granted equal worth. It must be a space of dialogue, a space where a web of relationships can be woven, and where a common world can be brought into being and continually renewed. Arendt was always interested in what she called the fact of natality, the idea that we have all come into the world by being born and the corresponding idea that the world is constantly being renewed through birth.31 So she was always concerned about newcomers and new beginnings, as she was concerned about what it means to art in concert, to resist both violence and passivity.

Yes, and one-dimensionality and the channeling of vision. There must be a teachable capacity to bring into being what Arendt called a “public spare,” to bring together what Dewey called an “articulate public,“32 It must be a public composed of persons with many voices and many perspectives, out of whose multiple intelligences may still emerge a durable and worthwhile common world. If educators can renew their hopes and speak out once again, if they can empower more persons in the multiple domains of possibility, we shall not have to fear a lack of productivity, a lack of dignity or standing in the world. We will be in pursuit of the crucial values: we will be creating our own purposes as we move. And move we must, in our multiple contexts, toward an untraveled world (to paraphrase Alfred Lord Tennyson) whose margin cannot but fade forever and forever as we move. “How dull it is,” the poet said, “to pause, to make an end.” We are educators. The point is to begin.

Notes 1 John Henry (Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a Universtiy (New York: Holt, Rinehart &

Winston, 1960), p. 135. 2 John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (New York: Harper &

Row, 1961). 3 Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Pursuit of Excellence (New York: Rockefeller Brothers

Fund, 1958). 4 Thomas Mann, Felix Krull, Confidence Man (New York: Signet Books, 1957). 5 John Passmore. The Philosophy of Teaching (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1980), pp. 18-83. 6 Lawrence C. Stedman and Marshall Smith, “Recent Reform Proposals for American

Education,” Contemporary Education Review 2 (Fall 1983): 85-86. 7 Quoted in Walter Goodman, “Some Intellectuals See Conservatism as a Dark Cloud,” The

New York Times, January 30, 1984, p. B12. 8 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1934), p. 263. 9 Ibid.

10 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), p. 411. 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1967), p. xix 12 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City:

Anchor Books. 1967). 13 Alfred Schutz. “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences,” in his The

Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers, vol. I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1967). pp. 48-65.

14 Michael Polanyi, “Tacit Knowing,” in his The Tacit Dimension (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1967). pp. 16-25.

15 Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: A Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

16 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Emerson and Education, ed. Howard Mumford Jones (New York: Teachers College Press. 1966). p. 97.

17 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in The Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York: Oxford University Press. 1952), p. 309.

18 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: The Swallow Press, 1954), p. 184.

19 R. S. Peters. “Education and Human Development,” in Education and Reason. rd. R. F. Dearden. P. H. Hirst, and R. S. Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). pp. 122-24.

20 See Gilbert Ryle, “Teaching and Training,” in The Concept of Education, ed. R. S. Peters (New York: The Humanities Press, 1967), pp. 105-19.

21 Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities.” in The Problem of Social Reality, pp. 207-59. 22 See Michael Oakeshott. “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mindkind.” in his

Rationalism of Politics (London: Methuen Press, 1962). 23 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

1958), p. 178. 24 Urie Bronfenbrenner, “ The Experimental Ecology of Education,” Teachers College

Record 78, no. 2 (December 1976): 158-201. 25 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 50-58. 26 Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 184. 27 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). p. 72. 28 Wallace Stevens. “Six Significant Landscapes,” in The Collected Poems (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. 1964), p. 75. 29 Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (New York: The Viking Press, 1974). p. 25. 30 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 28-30. 31 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), pp.

193-96. 32 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, p. 184.

Educational Studies

A JOURNAL IN THE FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION

Since 1970. Educational Studies has reviewed over 2,000 books, more than any other educational journal in the same time period.

Educational Studies publishes critical reviews and articles in the foundations of education:

l History of Education

l Philosophy of Education

l Comparative and International Education

l Education and the Social Sciences

l Educational Policy Studies

l Educational Issues

Educational Studies is a journal of the American Educational Studies Association, edited by Wayne Urban, Georgia State University.

Subscription rates for Educational Studies are $12 annually for individuals, $21 for institutions or libraries. For subscription information, write Robert R. Sherman, Managing Editor, Norman Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611.