The Good Life of Teaching E-Book

Chris Higgins

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Journal of Philosophy of Education
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 733

Beschreibung

The Good Life of Teaching extends the recent revival of virtue ethics to professional ethics and the philosophy of teaching. It connects long-standing philosophical questions about work and human growth to questions about teacher motivation, identity, and development. * Makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of teaching and also offers new insights into virtue theory and professional ethics * Offers fresh and detailed readings of major figures in ethics, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams and the practical philosophies of Hannah Arendt, John Dewey and Hans-Georg Gadamer * Provides illustrations to assist the reader in visualizing major points, and integrates sources such as film, literature, and teaching memoirs to exemplify arguments in an engaging and accessible way * Presents a compelling vision of teaching as a reflective practice showing how this requires us to prepare teachers differently

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Why We Need a Virtue Ethics of Teaching

Part I: The Virtues of Vocation: From Moral Professionalism to Practical Ethics

Chapter 1: Work and Flourishing: Williams’ Critique of Morality and its Implications for Professional Ethics

Introduction

Retrieving Socrates’ Question

Modern Moral Myopia

What do Moral Agents Want?

From Moral Professionalism to Professional Ethics

Notes

Chapter 2: Worlds of Practice: MacIntyre’s Challenge to Applied Ethics

Introduction

The Architecture of Macintyre’s Moral Theory

A Closer Look at Internal Goods

The Practicality of Ethical Reflection

What Counts as a Practice: The Proof, the Pudding, and the Recipe

Boundary Conditions: Practitioners, Managers, Interpreters, and Fans

Notes

Chapter 3: Labour, Work, and Action: Arendt’s Phenomenology of Practical Life

Introduction

Arendt’s Singular Project

Defining the Deed

Hierarchy and Interdependence in the Vita Activa

Praxis in the Professions

Notes

Chapter 4: Ritual, Imitation and Education in R. S. Peters

Introduction

Ipeters on Ritual in Education

II R. S. Peters On Ritual and Imitation: An Assessment

Future Directions

References

Part II: A Virtue Ethics for Teachers: Problems and Prospects

Chapter 5: The Hunger Artist: Pedagogy and the Paradox of Self-Interest

A Blind Spot in the Educational Imagination

The Hunger Artist

The Very Idea of a Helping Profession

This Ripeness of Self

Notes

Chapter 6: Working Conditions: The Practice of Teaching and the Institution of School

Introduction

A Prima Facie Case for Teaching as a Practice

Macintyre’s Objection

Schools as Surroundings

Notes

Chapter 7: The Classroom Drama: Teaching as Endless Rehearsal and Cultural Elaboration

Introduction

Education as the Drama of Cultural Renewal

A False Lead

Teaching as Labour, Work, and Action

Education, Shelter, and Mediation

Teaching as Endless Rehearsal

Teaching as Cultural Elaboration

Notes

Chapter 8: Teaching as Experience: Toward a Hermeneutics of Teaching and Teacher Education

Teaching as Vocational Environment

Batch Processing, Kitsch Culture, and Other Obstacles to Teacher Vocation

The Syntax of Educational Claims

The Shape of Humanistic Conversation

Horizons of Educational Inquiry

Teacher Education for Practical Wisdom

Notes

References

Index

The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series

The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series publishes titles that represent a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. Books in this series promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education.

Titles in the series include:

The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice

By Chris Higgins

Reading R. S. Peters Today: Analysis, Ethics, and the Aims of Education

Edited by Stefaan E. Cuypers and Christopher Martin

The Formation of Reason

By David Bakhurst

What do Philosophers of Education do? (And how do they do it?)

Edited by Claudia Ruitenberg

Evidence-Based Education Policy: What Evidence? What Basis? Whose Policy?

Edited by David Bridges, Paul Smeyers and Richard Smith

New Philosophies of Learning

Edited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew Davis

The Common School and the Comprehensive Ideal: A Defence by Richard Pring with Complementary Essays

Edited by Mark Halstead and Graham Haydon

Philosophy, Methodology and Educational Research

Edited by David Bridges and Richard D Smith

Philosophy of the Teacher

By Nigel Tubbs

Conformism and Critique in Liberal Society

Edited by Frieda Heyting and Christopher Winch

Retrieving Nature: Education for a Post-Humanist Age

By Michael Bonnett

Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and Learning

Edited by Joseph Dunne and Pádraig Hogan

Educating Humanity: Bildung in Postmodernity

Edited by Lars Løvlie, Klaus Peter Mortensen and Sven Erik Nordenbo

The Ethics of Educational Research

Edited by Michael McNamee and David Bridges

In Defence of High Culture

Edited by John Gingell and Ed Brandon

Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of On-Line Education

Edited by Paul Standish and Nigel Blake

The Limits of Educational Assessment

Edited by Andrew Davis

Illusory Freedoms: Liberalism, Education and the Market

Edited by Ruth Jonathan

Quality and Education

Edited by Christopher Winch

This edition first published 2011

Originally published as Volume 44, Issues 2 and 3 of The Journal of Philosophy of Education

Chapters © 2011 The Author

Book compilation © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Higgins, Chris, 1967–

The good life of teaching : an ethics of professional practice/Chris Higgins.

p. cm. — (The journal of philosophy of education book series)

“Originally published as volume 44, issues 2 and 3 of The journal of philosophy of education”—T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3930-7 (pbk.)

1. Teaching—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Education—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Teaching—Philosophy. 4. Education—Philosophy. I. Title.

LB1027.H427 2011

371.102—dc23

2011023902

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs (9781444346503); Wiley Online Library (9781444346534); ePub (9781444346510); Kindle (9781444346527).

Dedication:

For my beloved boodles: Jubby, Shea-Shea and Zo-Zo. Writing takes heart and you are my heart.

Foreword

There is a widespread intuition, not peculiar to our own time, that certain forms of work are more than a way of earning a wage: more even than those traditional and respectable ways of doing so that we have dignified with the name of ‘professions’. They seem unusually worthwhile and important, in a sense that is difficult to articulate. In tribute to this mystery we may say that we feel called to them, that we experience a sense of vocation. Something similar seems to lie behind the way that young people leaving college often talk about ‘wanting to make a difference’. An important part of this is captured by the term ‘generativity’, which the psychologist Erik Erikson coined to describe the natural urge to take care of others and contribute to the betterment of society. One profession or vocation which seems to ‘make a difference’ and to exhibit the features of generativity is of course that of the teacher.

If we are to understand the good of teaching, then, we need to understand not only the ways it can directly benefit pupils and students but also the way it can bring fulfilment for the teacher and so enhance the lives that he or she touches. Developing the intuition with which we started, we can say that this fulfilment is not of an arbitrary sort, as someone might happen to find fulfilment in collecting antique cars or gardening or all sorts of other activities. The good of teaching lies in its connections to the personal growth and development of the teacher, and to the more profound conceptions of human happiness and wellbeing that have been developed by philosophers since the time of Plato and Aristotle. It stands to be part of the answer to the question, which Plato has Socrates ask in the Republic (352d6), of just how one ought to live a life.

This connection with the nature of the good life explains the title of this book. Chris Higgins offers what he describes as a humane account of the moral psychology of teaching. The moral dimension has its origins in Classical Greek virtue ethics, and Higgins explores and illuminates it through a range of 20th-century texts, such as those by John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. From his discussion there emerges a sophisticated account of professional ethics, which other professions as well as the teaching profession are likely to find thought-provoking and helpful.

The book is all the more important and timely as all around the world, and in the English-speaking world in particular, policy-makers and legislators mistake neo-liberal assumptions for common sense and think of teachers, whether at school, university or any other level, basically as a labour force: to be trained—if at all—and paid as cheaply as is consonant with securing competitive examination results. Their essential role is to manage their classes, to transmit knowledge and to deliver a predetermined curriculum in whose content and style they are to have little or no say. If they demur, it is because they are part of a ‘producer culture’ defending its own interests. Anyone, however, who believes that there is more to teaching than this will find in The Good Life of Teaching rigorously analysed ideas with which to explore a vision of teaching that is richer for those who undertake it and therefore, of course, more rewarding and fulfilling for those whom they teach.

Richard Smith

Acknowledgements

Some of the initial ideas for this book were worked out in journal articles.

Chapter 1 draws on: Higgins, C. (2002) Das Glück des Lehrers (The Flourishing of the Teacher, trans. T. Führ), Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 48.4, pp. 495–513.The first part of Chapter 2 is a revised version of: Higgins, C. (2003) MacIntyre’s Moral Theory and the Possibility of an Aretaic Ethics of Teaching, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37.2, pp. 279-292. Reprinted in: J. Dunne & P. Hogan (eds) (2004) Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and Learning (Malden, Blackwell), pp. 35–47.In the summer of 2008, I completed a long study of Arendt which became the basis both for Chapters 3 and 7 and for: Higgins, C. (2010) Human Conditions for Teaching: The Place of Pedagogy in Arendt’s Vita Activa, Teachers College Record, 112.2, pp. 407–445.The Dewey portions of Chapters 4, 6, and 8 draw on: Higgins, C. (2005) Dewey’s Conception of Vocation: Existential, Aesthetic, and Educational Implications for Teachers, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 37.4, pp. 441–464.Chapter 5 draws on: Higgins, C. (2003) Teaching and the Good Life: A Critique of the Ascetic Ideal in Education, Educational Theory, 53.2, pp. 131–154.The Gadamer portions of Chapters 4 and 8 draw on: Higgins, C. (2002) From Reflective Practice to Practical Wisdom: Three Models of Liberal Teacher Education, in: S. Rice (ed.) Philosophy of Education 2001 (Urbana, Philosophy of Education Society), pp. 92–99.The educational-philosophical triangle, which I discuss in Chapter 8, was first developed in: Higgins, C. (1998) Practical Wisdom: Educational Philosophy as Liberal Teacher Education, Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, chap. 3.

I have been fortunate to discuss the ideas and texts in this book with students and colleagues over many years. Here, rather than repeating the names of all those I thank in the preliminary studies above, I would like simply to mention a few people who were formative of my development as a scholar along with a few who have played a crucial role in the final stages of the book.

First, I want to express my gratitude that I grew up in a family who cared about education and ideas and who supported me to follow my interests.

And I feel lucky to have been introduced to the craft of philosophy by two of the most humane intellectuals I know: Jonathan Lear and René Arcilla. René advised the dissertation in which I first hatched some of the ideas in The Good Life of Teaching. His confidence in me over the years has made a huge difference, as has his friendship.

During one career setback and crisis in confidence, many friends and colleagues helped me regain my footing: Mike Hanson and Ricardo Hornos never doubted that I could write this book nor that I would be fine if I didn’t; Ben Endres and David Blacker were there to remind me which things were worth taking seriously and what to do with the rest; Wendy Kohli, Al Neiman, Fran Schrag, Paul Standish, and others reached out in a way I won’t soon forget; and it seemed like a miracle the way Robbie McClintock and Liora Bresler appeared to take an interest in me and my work when I needed it most.

The College of Education and the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois have been rich and supportive environments. That the humanistic foundations of education continue to flourish at Illinois is largely thanks to the incredible leadership of Jim Anderson. Nick Burbules has been a tremendous mentor, from feedback on work in progress, to help thinking through the structure and framing of this book, to guidance about my overall research program. I have appreciated being able to share my work with Ralph Page (whose legendary reputation as an interlocutor is well deserved) and Bruce Rummenie (whose dual perspective as a middle-school teacher and educational philosopher I greatly value). And I am also grateful for the friendship of Wally Feinberg and Chris Lubienski, who have both made it a point to look after me here.

I also want to say thanks to Richard Smith and Paul Standish for their interest in and support of my work. Richard offered many helpful suggestions on the penultimate draft of the book and Paul has known just when to push. Thanks also to Simon Eckley and all at Wiley-Blackwell who worked on the manuscript.

I don’t think I ever would have found my way to finish this book if not for the support and insight of Alexandra Woods.

And I know I would not have written this book without the love and support, the intelligence and editorial skill of my wife, Jennifer Burns. She freed me up to write and she read every draft of every chapter. The ideas in The Good Life of Teaching grew in dialogue with Jen and it has made all the difference that she has always believed in me as a thinker and a writer.

Introduction

Why We Need a Virtue Ethics of Teaching

I believe the impulse to teach is fundamentally altruistic and represents a desire to share what you value and to empower others. Of course, all teachers are not altruistic. Some people teach in order to dominate others or to support work they’d rather do or simply to earn a living. But I am not talking about the job of teaching so much as the calling to teach. Most teachers I know, even the most demoralized ones, who drag themselves to oppressive and mean schools where their work is not respected and their presence not welcome, have felt that calling at some time in their lives (Kohl, 1984, p. 7).

SAINTS AND SCOUNDRELS

Open any text on teaching and you are likely to find the same formula. It is nicely captured in this passage from Herb Kohl’s well-known work, but there is no shortage of examples. Kohl tells us that teaching is altruistic, fundamentally so. If we find a non-altruist in the classroom then we have discovered an imposter to the role. From the point of view of working teachers, we all know there are days we live up to our ideals, and days that fall depressingly short of those hopes, and days that seem to dwell uncertainly in between. Yet in representations of teaching, we find instead a stark contrast of motivations: teachers are either serving students or using them. In the helping professions, it seems, one must not ‘help oneself’. As one teacher recruitment campaign succinctly put it: ‘You’ve made your own dreams come true. Isn’t it time you started on someone else’s?’1 In the educational imagination—from posters to policies, from monographs to movies—we find more and less restrained versions of the same Noh drama. Enter stage left—the selfless saints, devoted to nothing but the welfare of their students and martyred for the cause. Enter stage right—the selfish scoundrels: narcissists, lechers, and petty dictators of their classroom worlds.

What seems clear is that these two characters and, correspondingly, the two main discourses about teacher motivation—the inspirational and the suspicious—are but two sides of the same coin.2 Inspirational accounts tend to focus on the role of teacher, holding out an image of teaching as a noble service.3 These accounts suggest that teacher’s personal interests and needs more or less harmonise with the demands of their role, and when they do not, that those needs can and should be addressed outside of work. Suspicious accounts turn to the person in the role in an attempt to reveal the hidden springs of self-interest and debunk this idea of the altruistic teacher.4 These accounts aim to show that such a division between personal and professional is impossible to maintain, and that trappings of the role become a cover for teachers who really want to feel smart, revisit their youth, vent their aggression, and so on. What is striking is that neither discourse seems capable of helping us understand how teaching might be the expression of the person who teaches. For in the second sort of story, there is no real teacher; in the first, there is no real person.

What these seeming rivals share is their attachment to the stark opposition between a lofty altruism and a base self-interest; neither lends itself to a believable portrait of teaching. Inspirational accounts ring hollow when they gloss over the immense difficulties and frustrations inherent in the life of a schoolteacher. They portray teachers as having no personal agenda, conveniently wanting only what students need, and needing only to give that. Suspicious narratives do offer a more believable psychology, helpfully acknowledging our human-all-too-human desires, needs, and weaknesses. However, they tend to assume that teachers have only a personal agenda, which they merely disguise with their talk of educational aims and student needs.

In contrast, my study asks how teaching might be the expression of one’s personal ambitions and deepest motivations. It probes the reasons for our dichotomous tendency to imagine teachers as either selfless saints or selfish scoundrels and challenges the very idea of a ‘helping profession’. It sets out instead to imagine the fate of the teacher struggling to be self-ful in the midst of a task that is overwhelming, an environment that can be deadening, and a professional culture that secretly prizes self-abnegation. In showing the resources the practice of teaching offers for self-cultivation, without minimising its very real challenges and constraints, we move closer to a humane, sustainable ethic of teaching.

A BRIEF FOR TEACHERLY SELF-CULTIVATION

Teaching is a helping profession, where caring teachers assist active learners. At the same time, education contains an ineliminable feature that pushes us past such dichotomous thinking. The feature, simply put, is that selfhood is contagious. In order to cultivate selfhood in students, teachers must bring to the table their own achieved self-cultivation, their commitment to ongoing growth, and their various practices, styles, and tricks for combating the many forces that deaden the self and distract us from our task of becoming. In this stubborn refusal to be sorted into a duty or an inclination, an act of altruism or of self-interest, the practice of teaching proves a rich ground for exploring one of the central human dilemmas and oldest ethical problems. How do we reconcile self-regard and concern for others? Can we live with the demands of human self-hood, that each of us exists for ourselves and for others, or will we allow the quest for individuation to collapse? Will we settle for so many semi-selves propping each other up: actors and facilitators, saints and scoundrels, ‘mermaids and minotaurs’? (Dinnerstein, 1991 [1976]).

In teaching and other helping professions, such questions come to a sharp point. Here we encounter a powerful drive to sort ourselves into subject and object, for-oneself and for-others. The flourishing of the teacher sounds like an oxymoron. And yet, the logic of selfhood, emulation, and development pushes back against this tendency. Consider, if you will, the following argument for teacherly self-cultivation as a pressing practical and rich ethical issue (I first state the propositions in bare form and then discuss each further below):

1. Education, no matter what else it involves, involves self-cultivation.

2. Achieved and ongoing self-cultivation on the part of the teacher is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for fostering self-cultivation in students.

3. (from 1 and 2) Teacherly self-cultivation is a necessary condition of education.

4. Poor working conditions and the intense needs of students conspire to make such self-cultivation exceedingly difficult: the life of a teacher, it must be admitted, may be miseducative as often as it is educative.

5. Rather than recognise the teacher’s self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice as a threat to teaching itself, we rationalise them with the rhetoric of service, we hail them as the call of duty and very mark of a teacher.

6. (from 3) But teaching is not a ‘helping profession’, if this is taken to mean that one helps others rather than oneself.

7. (from 4–6) Therefore, teaching should be understood precisely as one of the human practices that most clearly forces us to confront a fundamental existential tension: we exist for ourselves and for others, and while these two dimensions of life rarely fit together easily, neither do they work well alone.

The first proposition will strike some readers as patent and others as wildly utopian. This is not surprising if Philip Jackson is right that education has long been torn between two fundamentally different outlooks: the mimetic (or transmissive) and the transformative (Jackson, 1986).5 While the educational aim of self-cultivation is the very premise of the transformative outlook on teaching, it has come to seem largely out of place in K-12 schooling with the ‘gradual ascendance of the mimetic tradition’ (Jackson, 1986, p. 133). Two features of the current climate make it much easier to understand education as transmission of detachable skills and discrete knowledge. According to current wisdom, nothing exists that can’t be measured and nothing can be measured that can’t be measured by a standardised test. Since it is quite difficult to measure transformations and self-formation, this constitutes a distinct advantage for the mimetic model. The transformational model also runs up against our faith in liberal neutrality expressed in our belief that government-run schools in a liberal democracy can and should remain neutral on questions of the good life. Personal transformation as an educational aim cannot help but set off the Establishment-Clause alarm system.6 An education based in putatively neutral, transmissible skills and knowledge is a much easier sell.

Still, for thousands of years before this brave new world, the dominant assumption, whatever the specifics, was that education was self-formation. Such an education could be oriented around ideals of civic virtue, aesthetic sensitivity, or intellectual acuity. The educated person could be understood in terms of Cicero’s oratory, Pico’s dignity, or Austen’s amiability. But if an education does not help you at all to answer the question, ‘What sort of person are you going to become?’, you should ask for your money back. I will close this brief defence of the first proposition with the rousing words of one of the relatively late defenders of (one very particular version of) education as self-cultivation, Friedrich Nietzsche:

Your true educators and molders reveal to you the true original meaning and basic stuff of your nature, something absolutely incapable of being educated and molded, but in any case something fettered and paralyzed and difficult of access. Your teachers can be nobody but your liberators. And that is the secret of all education; it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses, or corrective lenses—on the contrary, what might provide such things is merely a parody of education. Education is rather liberation, the clearing away of all weeds, rubble, and vermin that might harm the delicate shoots, a radiance of light and warmth, the kind rustling fall of rain at night; it is imitation and adoration of nature where nature is maternal and mercifully minded; it is perfection of nature when it prevents nature’s fits of cruelty and mercilessness and converts them to good, when it throws a veil over nature’s stepmotherly disposition and sad incomprehension (Nietzsche, 1990 [1874], p. 166).

If the truth of the first proposition has tended to be marginalised or rejected, the truth of the second has tended to be trivialised as much as accepted. The difficulty here lies not so much in proving this premise as in rescuing it from its status as a truism: we learn by example, we teach who we are, and so forth. That something is a commonplace does not mean that we truly affirm it. Truisms are in fact a canny strategy for resisting ideas. After all, if you hide or oppose an idea, someone will dig it up or come to its defence. However, if you embalm a claim in a cliché, its truth can be acknowledged in an empty gesture, one that calls for no action on our part. Thus, the truism seems to fit the logic of disavowal as famously described by the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni: ‘I know very well, but all the same . . .’ (Mannoni, 2003 [1969]).

To rescue a living thought from such a fate requires putting the idea back into play, and this calls for the special kind of seriousness known as irony. It also requires awareness that no truism is an island. In this case, shoring up the clichés that we learn by example and teach who we are is a whole supporting cast of truisms: (1) everyone is a person; (2) everyone is unique; (3) we are grateful for the examples set by others. The ironist is not cowed by these sweet-sounding notions, but is willing to deal with the embarrassing, all-too-human exceptions to these rules, such as: (1′) full-fledged personhood is difficult and rare and most of us get stuck somewhere not very far along the way; (2′) we are often threatened by the influence of others and haunted by the feeling that the influence of others runs so deep that we cannot be sure what if anything in us is truly our own; and, (3′) when we do finally find the way toward ourselves, we may well turn off the road, choosing the comfort of habit and the crowd over freedom, which in fact we fear as much as desire. What is needed, then, is work on influence that does not shy away from such human frailties and paradoxes.7

With at least some of this coating of obviousness now worn away, I would like to call the following witnesses to offer testimony on behalf of premise 2:

Philip Jackson: ‘Of the many attributes associated with transformative teaching, the most crucial ones seem to concern the teacher as a person. For it is essential to success within that tradition that teachers who are trying to bring about transformative changes personify the very qualities they seek to engender in their students. To the best of their abilities, they must be living exemplars of certain virtues or values or attitudes. The fulfillment of that requirement reaches its apex in great historical figures, like Socrates and Christ, who epitomize such a personal model; but most teachers already know that no attitude, interest, or value can be taught except by a teacher who himself or herself believes in, cares for, or cherishes whatever it is that he or she holds out for emulation’ (Jackson, 1986, p. 124).

Maxine Greene: ‘A teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own’ (Greene, 1988, p. 14).

Bob Dylan: ‘He not busy being born is busy dying’ (Dylan, 1965).

William Arrowsmith: ‘And this freedom, this ripeness of self, is the indispensable element in all true teaching, simply because it speaks so compellingly to those who hunger to be free—that is presumably to all’ (Arrowsmith, 1971, p. 12).

The teacher’s achieved self-cultivation is the catalyst in the educative process. But, as these witnesses also testify, educators cannot simply rest on their laurels, producing accomplishments from the past like dusty old trophies. It is the teacher’s present and active search for freedom, Greene says, that communicates to students what freedom might mean. The teacher must be ‘busy being born’ if she is to give students a sense of what living is about. Past insights and growth quickly spoil if self-cultivation is not ongoing. It is the other’s self-in-process, or ‘ripeness’ as Arrowsmith puts it, that moves us.

In their own way, sardonic movies about teachers offer further testimony on this point. Certainly, such movies rely on stock characters and cheap sight gags: teachers whose underwear is showing, whose power lunch is peanut butter, jelly and chalk dust, who can’t operate the rudimentary technology in their classrooms, who drive up to school in battered second-hand cars, who have no love life or social skills (for a wonderful distillation of this motif, see the opening montage in Pressman, 1994).8 Ultimately, though, what these movies intend is more than comic effect. There is a pathos here, one that echoes the testimony above. Whether or not one finds such images funny, they express, I contend, a powerful and understandable thirst on the part of young people for examples of why it is worth ‘growing up’.

As the third proposition indicates, the conclusion we must draw on the basis of this testimony about the importance of the teacher’s own existential exemplarity—given our earlier conclusion that education fundamentally involves self-cultivation—is that the achieved and ongoing self-cultivation of teachers is a necessary condition of education.

We turn now to the fourth premise. That teaching centrally involves helping students prepare for, launch, and enrich their own life projects often distracts teachers from the fact that teaching is their project. Even those teachers determined to make their practice into a vehicle for their own ongoing growth will find this difficult given typical working conditions. Indeed, the very term ‘teacher’ suggests such deprivations. Consider the social distinction we make between ‘teachers’ and ‘professors’. The distinction does not seem to be fully explainable by the age of the students each educates, the amount of knowledge each possesses, or even by the fact that professors engage in both teaching and scholarship. Ultimately, this distinction seems to serve as a rationalisation for the fact that society does not have, or is not willing to commit, enough resources for all of its teachers to work, as professors do, in conditions compatible with self-renewal, conditions such as: teaching fewer courses (on topics and via methods of their own choosing) with fewer students (who are genuinely interested in taking the class), leaving time for reading, writing, and open-ended discussion with colleagues (not to mention the chance to take a sabbatical). Where is the high school or middle-school or kindergarten teacher who would not choose these terms instead, and flourish under them?9

What is at stake here is precisely whether an occupation is able to pass John Dewey’s cardinal test, of ‘balancing the distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 308). Occupations with this quality are often marked by a characteristic rhythm between withdrawal and engagement, and characteristic patterns of planning, pursuit, and completion followed by intervals of rest and reflection. Such rhythms are not some optional perk. They speak to the basic link between work and flourishing. G. W. F. Hegel brings this out with his concept of practical Bildung. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reading of Hegel, Bildung is a process of development or self-formation whose ‘basic movement . . . consists . . . in returning to itself from what is other’ (Gadamer, 2004 [1960], p. 13).10 The essence of Bildung, Gadamer explains, ‘is clearly not alienation as such, but the return to oneself—which presupposes alienation, to be sure’ (ibid.). How is such a process of alienation and return educative and what does it have to do with work?

When we work we subordinate our private whims and fancies to a public discipline and an objective set of materials. To make a table, for example, the carpenter must undergo a process of alienation, or, if you will, ‘unselfing’.11 He cannot merely stay rooted in his consciousness, dreaming up how the table could or should be. He must leave this cosy, subjective place for the rigors of technique and the realities of wood, grain, and gravity. If he has successfully transcended his particularity to make something universal, a table, and allowed himself to become alienated from his subjectivity into the objective realm of chestnut and chisel, then he will stand before the finished work. It will be an independently existing thing, with its legs on the ground of the objective world. And yet, it will also be his table, with him in it. As the carpenter takes in the completed work, he takes in the structure, the complexity, the culture of the made thing. He returns to himself, but he returns with more, and as more, than when he set out.12 In this way, work is a basic modality of Bildung.

What do we find when we return to the practice of teaching with such thoughts in mind? First, if Bildung requires a dialectic of solitude and relation, a rhythm of withdrawal and engagement, then teachers have a problem. For, as Maxine Greene nicely puts it:

The problems are inescapable, wherever the teacher is assigned to teach, because he is asked to function as a self-conscious, autonomous, and authentic person in a public space where the pressures multiply. Unlike an artist or a scholar or a research scientist, he cannot withdraw to studio, study, or laboratory and still remain a practitioner. He is involved with students, colleagues, school board members, and parents whenever and wherever he pursues his fundamental project; he cannot work alone (Greene, 1973, p. 290).

Most teachers do not even have an office, let alone a true studio space and the time to explore and renew their craft. Add to this the fact, noted by many, that teaching currently lacks a true career path, so that ‘moving up’ typically means moving out of teaching into administration or research.13 The continuity of the teacher’s work is also threatened on the day-to-day level: fractured by the rapid change of classes, compressed (Jackson, 1966, p. 14, reports that ‘the teacher typically changes the focus of his concern about 1000 times daily’), and complicated by the fact the teacher hesitates to say of the well-educated pupil what the carpenter says of his completed table: look what I have made. Teachers instead want to say to their students: look what you have done, what you have made. And yet, teachers must not forget that launching students on their quests and helping them find their projects is their own quest, their own project.

If after a thorough consideration of the teacher’s world and work—and here I merely foreshadow the themes I explore in detail in Part II—our conclusion is that teachers are prone to self-forgetfulness and even self-sacrifice, that their bid to make their practice nourish them is often squelched by the harsh conditions of their labour, then we should be quite alarmed.14 But as I suggest above, the alarming conclusion of proposition 4 is typically met with the rationalisation of proposition 5, that self-sacrifice is the mark of a true teacher. However, the argument of premises 1–3 should now help us to see through this rationalisation. When we hear of someone sacrificing their self in order to teach this should sound something like: the soccer game will proceed as planned even though we have not been able to locate a ball; the lead singer has lost her voice, but the show must go on; or, go ahead and show me your tango routine, we don’t have time to wait for your partner. That is, while collapses of the delicate balance between self-regard and care for students may be inevitable, they are worrisome. And this is where the rhetoric of service comes in. In the so-called helping professions, deprivation can become a badge of honour.15

Actually the rhetoric of service is only the second line of defence, cleaning up any mess left over after education’s pervasive kitsch has done its job.16 Rather than confront the reality that many teachers grow old even as they tend to the young, educational discourse offers here as elsewhere a simplified and sweetened version of reality. Then, insofar as we even acknowledge our failures to support self-ful (as opposed to both selfish and selfless) teaching, education’s nagging asceticism is there to redeem such failures as moral victories.

But as point 6 makes clear, the implication of point 3 is that teaching is not a helping profession, at least not if this means, as it typically does in implication if not inspiration, that one helps others rather than helping oneself. After all, architects and lawyers and veterinarians all help their clients too, and all experience so-called ‘intrinsic rewards’. And yet in these cases this does not exclude their receiving ample ‘extrinsic’ rewards of money, autonomy, and recognition; nor are we tempted to call them ‘helping professions’. Thus, what leads us to label teaching, nursing, and social work as ‘helping professions’ does not seem to be that they offer help to others but that they refuse to help themselves in the process.

Indeed, we can offer a fairly precise sociological definition of the ‘helping’ professions: they are those forms of work, historically associated with women, combining difficult working conditions and a caring attention to the client’s whole person. As such, the helping professions admit of Jessica Benjamin’s paradox that precisely here where the essence of the work is a kind of inter-subjectivity, we find the most intense desire to split the participants into subjects and objects, agents and helpers, self-interest and altruism.17

Thus, in point 7, I conclude that teaching forces us to confront the inevitable tensions arising when subjects meet and each retains his or her agency. The question of the flourishing of the teacher turns out to test our mettle as to whether we really care about self-cultivation at all. The stakes go far beyond the fate of individual teachers. For education is one of the primary cultural sites where we wrestle with the fundamental challenge of personhood. Subjectivity emerges in the matrix of intersubjectivity, in relationships where we successfully maintain the complex tensions between self-assertion and recognition, independence and dependence, separation and connection. This task is extremely difficult, however, and we are constantly on the lookout for ways to ease this tension. Indeed, we are prone to act out on a cultural scale our wishful fantasies that pure agency might be met by pure facilitation. Everywhere we look we find masters and servants, talkers and listeners, doers and facilitators. We find divisions of a labour that cannot be divided, attempts to escape the fundamental burden of personhood: that each of us must work out, for ourselves and with others, how we can exist for ourselves and for others.

FROM THE TERRAIN OF TEACHING TO THE DEFINITION OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

My project, then, concerns the interplay of altruism and self-interest in the practice of teaching; it is a philosophical exploration of teacher motivation, identity, and development. To see that such questions are not the exclusive province of psychologists and sociologists, we need simply rephrase the familiar question ‘Why teach?’ as ‘Why is the practice of teaching worth putting at the centre of one’s life?’ It then turns out that we are dealing with one of the central questions of professional ethics, or so I argue, building on Bernard Williams’ distinction between ethics and morality.

Along with Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and others, Williams has led the charge in showing the limits of modern morality and in recovering an older, broader tradition of ethical reflection.18 Such reflection will often touch on moral considerations—impartial deliberations about duty, right action, and the needs of others—but it begins and ends with first-personal questioning, in thick evaluative terms, about the shape of one’s life as a whole. Ethics is rooted in the perpetual practical question ‘What should I do next?’ and flowers, in our more contemplative moments, into questions like ‘what do I want to become?’, ‘what does it mean to be fully human?’, and ‘what would make my life meaningful, excellent, or rich?’

Professional ethics, then, should be distinguished from what I call ‘moral professionalism’, which deals with codes of professional conduct and our role-specific obligations to others.19 In contrast, the ethics of teaching, as I propose it here, will probe the relation between the teaching life and the good life, connecting the question ‘why teach?’ with the question ‘how should I live?’ It considers what draws us to the practice of teaching and what sustains us there in the face of difficulty. The ethics of teaching involves questions like these: What constitutes human flourishing, and how does tending to the growth of others nourish my own growth? What do I prize most, and how does teaching put me in touch with such goods?

Restoring to its central place the question of the flourishing of the practitioner is the first step in constructing a virtue ethics of teaching. However, I argue that we must go even farther if we want a truly virtue-theoretic professional ethics. Following MacIntyre, I show that virtue ethics implies not only that different types of normative considerations will be applied to practice, but also that the very notion of application must be rethought. What MacIntyre reveals is that ethics is practical in a much more fundamental way. Practices are in fact our ethical sources: they are the sites where aspects of the good are disclosed to us as well as the primary scenes of our ethical education. Thus, if applied ethics carries findings worked out in the philosophy seminar to the various practices, practical ethics turns to practices themselves to learn about goods and virtues, in their variety, as they are disclosed through the particular terms and problematics of each practice. Virtue ethics therefore needs teaching as much as teaching needs virtue ethics.

Thus, I pursue long-standing philosophical problems—about self-interest and altruism, personal freedom and social roles, and practical wisdom and personhood—on the terrain of teaching. The aim is not only, as I said at the outset, to provide a more realistic and liveable account of the moral psychology of teaching, but also through this process to shed light on these basic philosophical problems. Put another way, my project:

Advances discussions of teacher motivation, identity, and development, using the resources of virtue ethics to avoid the dichotomisation of duty and interest that has plagued many treatments of teaching.Sheds light on fundamental questions in ethics and philosophical anthropology, considering the particular form these questions take in the context of the practice of teaching.Contributes to the development of a more substantive professional ethics, showing the full implications of the contemporary retrieval of aretē (excellence, virtue) and eudaimonia (flourishing, happiness, well-being) for a philosophy of work.

OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT

The design of the monograph is as follows. In Part I, I develop the conceptual framework needed for an aretaic professional ethics. I have already introduced the first steps in this process. In Chapter 1, I show via Williams and Taylor why self-cultivation and self-regard are a proper concern of ethics, and the flourishing of the practitioner a proper concern of professional ethics. In Chapter 2, I show via MacIntyre how practices offer their practitioners intimations of internal goods and practice-specific virtues and thus should be thought of as ethical sources rather than as targets of application.

Once we have rethought the nature of professional ethics with the help of Williams, Taylor, and MacIntyre, new theoretical resources become available for professional ethics. For example, in Chapter 3, I turn to Hannah Arendt, whose hierarchical phenomenology of practical life now appears as clear example of and contribution to professional ethics. In The Human Condition, Arendt shows us how we might think of different modes of practical activity as more and less able to provide their participants with opportunities for self-enactment. In Arendt’s concept of action or the deed, we find a conception of practical life in which we are in touch with our ‘natality’ or capacity to initiate fresh beginnings and disclose our uniqueness (Arendt, 1998 [1958]).

In Chapter 4, I consider another phenomenology of vocational experience, that of John Dewey. Dewey shows why vocations are themselves best understood as learning environments, thus upending the traditional meaning of professional education as preparation for practice. Still, the question persists how one learns how to learn through one’s work. Why does the circle of experience sometimes widen outward in purposive continuity and at other times collapse into deadening monotony or shatter into random excursions? To answer, this I turn from Dewey to Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004 [1960]) and in particular to his theory of the open question. I show how Dewey’s theory of vocation and Gadamer’s philosophy of the question come together to articulate an important dimension of the key virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom: receptivity to the newness in new situations. In this way, the discussion of Dewey and Gadamer builds on the discussion of natality in Arendt even as it reaches back to Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis.

In Part II, I then begin to fill in and complicate this general framework for eudaimonistic professional ethics by turning to the specific practice of teaching. Each of the chapters in Part II picks up the thread from its corresponding chapter in Part I, exploring how the preliminary analyses based on Williams (and Taylor), MacIntyre, Arendt, and Dewey (and Gadamer) entail both problems and prospects for the ethics of teaching. Thus, in Chapter 5, I return to the question broached in Chapter 1 concerning the place of self-interest in the professions, extending and complicating the initial analysis in light of the special requirements of a helping profession such as teaching. I counter the notion that teaching could or should be solely altruistic with an exploration of how altruism can devolve into asceticism and lead to such a problems as teacher burnout.

In Chapter 6, I pick up the thread of Chapter 2, asking whether teaching is indeed a practice (when MacIntyre himself denies it), and if so how it relates to the primary institution which houses it, the school. Here, I also take up one aspect of Chapter 4, namely Dewey’s distinction between literal surroundings and effective environment, asking what constrains what teachers may notice (and thus impoverishes their environment) within the surroundings of schools.

Chapter 7 returns to Arendt’s phenomenology of practical life, asking where Arendt herself would place teaching among her categories of labour, work, and action. Through a reading of ‘The Crisis in Education’ I show that Arendt’s (1977b [1958]) own conception of teaching is impossible to locate in any one of the categories of her vita activa. Within Arendt’s own system, however, we find the resources for developing a revised account of teaching as an activity containing elements of labour, work, and action, an activity affording contact with one’s natality and a space for self-enactment. I close with a discussion of how teaching might be an expression of the teacher’s natality and a space for self-enactment.

Chapter 8 returns to Dewey and Gadamer to ask: what do teachers (as teachers) notice and what sort of vocational environment does this afford? How might we think of teaching as itself an ongoing conversation with the world? What threatens the purpose and continuity of teachers, and thus the openness of this conversation? Is there a distinctive form of pedagogical practical wisdom? If so, what types of questions constitute its structure of openness? In this concluding chapter, I offer a vision of education as a space of humanistic questions—and our putative answers to those questions in theory and practice—and outline elements of a teacher education that is not only about learning how to teach, but about learning how to learn through teaching; a teacher education for practical wisdom that helps teachers enter the practice of teaching, sustain a vocational conversation, and further their own self-cultivation.

In closing, let me note two things about this way of structuring the argument: one methodological, one practical. The methodological point concerns why I have put this particular set of thinkers in dialogue. What, if anything, do thinkers such as MacIntyre, Arendt, Dewey, and Gadamer have in common? The answer is: much more than it might at first appear. Though dispersed across time and space, we might identify them as comprising a single school, a school of neo-praxis philosophy. All of these thinkers acknowledge the importance of practice-community-tradition: emphasising, after Hegel, Sittlichkeit (concrete, communal ethical life) over Moralität (abstract, formal moral obligation); and, reaching back towards Aristotle for a conception of praxis (action, especially ethico-political conduct) and phronesis (the intellectual excellence conducive to living well). Certainly there are differences in the way Aristotle and Hegel come down to each: e.g. for Gadamer they come through Heidegger; for Arendt they come by way of Heidegger and Marx; MacIntyre’s Hegel comes via Marx while his Aristotle comes through Aquinas; Dewey joins this tradition by way of Marsh, Torrey, and the St Louis Hegelians.20 Despite these differences, all of these neo-praxis philosophers were critical to some degree of aspects of enlightenment rationality, late capitalism, and liberal-individualism; in short, of modernity. Each in this group sought to reconnect the present with tradition (which they saw in dynamic, not static terms) and to reconnect philosophy with the particulars of time, place, practice, and text. And if this group is sometimes called conservative, theirs is a strangely radical brand of conservatism, inspiring as many on the left as on the right.

The practical point is that the book is designed to be read in several different ways. As I have noted, Part I concerns general issues about the relation of work and human flourishing while Part II revisits each of these issues on the terrain of teaching. Thus, while the argument is certainly designed to build chapter by chapter, one need not necessarily read the chapters in order. For example, one might choose to read the book crosswise rather than lengthwise, following all or some of the threads through directly. Thus, after reading Chapter 1 on the first-personal dimension of ethics and professional ethics, one would turn directly to Chapter 5 to read about self-interest in teaching and the helping professions. Then one would follow the discussion of MacIntyre straight through from Chapter 2 to Chapter 6, and so on. Indeed, one could follow either of these patterns in reverse: some may decide to read all of Part II, followed by all of Part I; others may want to be introduced to each topic in the context of teaching and then go back for its more general treatment in practical philosophy. Each of these variations has its advantages. Some readers may prefer to stick with one thinker; others may appreciate moving across theoretical paradigms. Some readers may prefer beginning with a thinker’s general project; others may prefer to see how the theory bears on teaching, going back as needed for background.21

NOTES

1. NYC Teaching Fellows advertisement, posted in New York City subway, 2002.

2. There are, of course, several happy exceptions to this rule: the idea of teaching as an existential project has been a consistent theme in the work of Maxine Greene (see, for example, Greene, 1973; 1978b; 1987). Margaret Buchmann (1988) describes teaching as a ‘given form of the good life’. David Blacker (1997) explores teaching as a bid for immortality. For a rich portrait of how one high school art teacher shaped himself and others through his teaching, see Barone, 2001.

3. There are countless examples of works in what I am calling the inspirational mode. Indeed, we can identify three genres here: self-help books on reflection and renewal; literature on teaching as a noble calling; and first-personal narratives of trial and triumph. And indeed, teaching may be reflective, noble, even triumphant; but, such celebrations of the teaching life ultimately demean it when they fall prey to simplification and sentimentality. Too many works in this mode substitute bullet points for argument and analysis, clichés and jargon for thinking through something in a fresh way. Meanwhile, rhapsodies on the rewards of teaching ring hollow when they fail to acknowledge how difficult it is for teachers to make their practice a vehicle for their own self-cultivation. The self-help genre does acknowledge the problem but then typically treats the symptoms in a superficial way. One book offers teachers tips on: alternatives to antibiotics, calming the inner critic, headlice, meditation, snacking, and on ‘taking time to: breathe, celebrate success, collaborate, communicate, declutter, drink water, eat, exercise . . .’ (Holmes, 2005, p. 194, bulleted in original). Another counters with this list of ‘anti-depressants’: Sunlight/Conversations about good books and films/Cheerful students/A baby’s face/Dark chocolate and excellent coffee/Ocean views . . . ’ (Casanave and Sosa, 2007, p. 47).

There are also books that invite teachers to attend to themselves in a deeper way (from Waller, 1932, especially Part Five; through Jersild, 1955; to Palmer, 1998). In Letters to a Young Teacher, Jonathan Kozol (2007) creates a discursive space (in his literary recreation of his actual correspondence with a teacher) that is anything but simplistic or sentimental. And yet there is always the risk that even a work like this will be swallowed up by the pervasive kitsch that plagues education. For example, the cover of the Kozol volume describes it in this way: ‘the author . . . gently guides a first-year teacher into “the joys and challenges and passionate rewards of a beautiful profession”’ (it is not clear who or what the jacket is quoting, but it does not seem to be Kozol himself). A work like Kozol’s is genuinely inspiring because it resists at every turn the urge to inflate and sweeten, modelling how someone combines deep ideals with a keen eye for the real. On the whole, though, the inspirational mode too often gives in to the urge to buoy up the spirits of teachers with literal or rhetorical anti-depressants. Whether it is chocolate or a sweet narrative about how a teacher beat all the odds to change her students’ lives forever, there is always a crash after a sugar rush, triggering a craving for an even sweeter confection.

There are, of course, works on teacher calling whose idealism is more than cheerleading and narratives by teachers whose hopefulness is more than Pollyanna optimism. In his portrait of a transformational teacher Franklin Lears (who, it is worth remarking, left teaching after one year), Mark Edmundson makes a point of noting:

Frank Lears was a remarkably good man, though it took me some time to see it. Lears’ goodness was of a peculiar sort. He was always doing something for himself as well as for you. In the process of working his best deeds, he didn’t mind affronting what you might call his spiritual enemies. Lears’ goodness, like that of almost all great teachers, always had an edge to it (Edmundson, 2003, p. 7).

Two teacher autobiographies that also get at this ‘peculiar’ sort of goodness are Rose, 2005 [1990]; and Inchausti, 1993; for a typology and sympathetic discussion of this genre, see Preskill, 1998).

4. It is difficult to illustrate a pervasive, informal discourse concisely. Suspicion of teacher motives seems to be the default assumption of many in educational circles. Here are three (constructed) examples of the kind of debunking of idealistic takes on teacher motivation one hears. Readers may judge for themselves whether the italicised lines below, those of the cynical character B, are familiar.

Exchange 1

A: ‘Teachers have a calling’.

B: ‘You mean they feel called to have summers off’.

A: ‘That’s too cynical.’

B: ‘Perhaps, but this talk of personal calling is still mystification. What we have here is social striving. Given the class position of certain families, teaching is an acceptable compromise between trades and out-of-reach, high-status professions’.

Exchange 2

A: ‘Teachers want to help their students gain the knowledge to succeed’.

B: ‘Hogwash! Teachers construct students as ignorant in order to feel smart themselves. And we can go further and say that maintaining this gap helps teachers maintain their authority, feeding what is ultimately a kind of power trip’.

Exchange 3

A: ‘Teachers need to master techniques of classroom management in order to maintain an orderly learning environment’.

B. ‘I’m afraid you have it backwards: the supposed need for order to teach the official curriculum is the very enactment of the true, if hidden, curriculum. Schools are designed to breed docile citizens and compliant workers’.

A. ‘But, on that theory, teachers are pawns in a larger social agenda rather than driven by a hidden personal agenda’.

B. ‘True, but consider that those who choose to teach, and thus to make young people sit still and fill in worksheets, are themselves survivors of this very process. So we could see teaching as a selection process for those who have a high tolerance for the kind of boredom and compliance built into schooling.

A. ‘If schooling is really as bleak as you suggest, I don’t think anyone would naturally thrive in that world’.

B. ‘Ok, maybe no one naturally likes seeing the world divided into multiple choice, short answers. So perhaps the best explanation for teacher motivation is what Freud called “fort-da”: one way to deal with suffering something unpleasant is to turn around and do the same thing to someone else. So teaching is a kind of educational “Stockholm syndrome”’.

We can find examples of suspicion of the teacher’s motives as early as Willard Waller (1932) who, for example, speculates at one point that teachers may be drawn to the profession out of a desire to control others, ‘an inherent need of the personality for being in some sort of managerial position’ (p. 379), adding sympathetically that educators may become autocratic because they are working in a low status profession and feel threatened by the constant encroachment of parents, politicians and other groups who on their autonomy (pp. 10–11). (Thanks to Darryl DeMarzio for pointing me to these two passages, and reminding me of the Delpit passage I quote below.)

To pick one strand of a more recent literature, that of critical pedagogy, we observe two stages of suspicion of the teacher’s agenda. First, there is the idea that traditional teachers secretly want to perpetuate an unjust society, taking delight in the sonority of their own speech and construction of themselves as rich in knowledge ready to be banked into students. I refer of course to Paulo Freire who taught us that and how educational ‘generosity’ can be ‘malefic’ (see, for example, Freire, 2000 [1973], pp. 44–45, 60, and passim). Even as this inspired a generation of critical pedagogues, it also inspired a second wave of suspicion of these supposedly liberatory intentions. The most famous of these is Elizabeth Ellsworth’s critique of the notion of dialogue in critical pedagogy (Ellsworth, 1989). Or consider Lisa Delpit’s equally famous intervention, calling the ‘good intentions’ of progressive educators (specifically white educators who dogmatically insist that students of colour need to be protected from direct instruction in hegemonic Anglo culture) ‘conscious delusions about their unconscious motives’, suggesting (second hand but seemingly with approval) that white teachers must really be wanting to ensure for their own children ‘sole access to the dwindling pool of American jobs’ and that at least ‘black folks know