I : Traditional expectations regarding literature :
For some of you the term “traditional” might sound awkward. I chose it in opposition with some other uses of the term – and the concept- of literature, aspects that we will approach when we examine the second category. Traditional literature is best represented by the novel, or at least, the novel as many people define it. The novel is often perceived by the reader as an entity having one or more characters, a plot with a beginning and an end, a time line to which we are accustomed and a signification meeting our cultural criteria. Finally, there is a narrator, whom the reader often agrees on being the author of the novel.
The author is expected to manipulate the characters. The latter ones can be active or passive, alive or dead. It is true that Eva Brann does not have a character like David Copperfield or Huckleberry; neither can we find the soliloquy of Quentin, nor the wondering of Ulysses. Instead, the reader meets with Aristotle, Jefferson, Adam, Tocqueville, Saint Augustine… these philosophers are not simply quoted, or referred to, but they are also presented as men. Indeed, they are offered to us with their context, their background, their thickness. Taken out of history, they are manipulated by Brann and speak to us. They tell us what they think about education as well as dialogue among each other. For example, Tocqueville answers Montesquieu on pp 52-53. This effect is the consequence of Brann’s writing who links, connects each other in the following manner:
“Montesquieu’s republic is a small, close-knit directly governed city state, not a large, heterogeneous, modern federation…
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In a modern commercial republic the character of virtue is altered to accommodate the notion of the coincidence of private and public utility…”
And follows a long quote from Tocqueville.
A meeting of lively minds…
But if we have characters, do we have a plot? Or a complot? In a novel – I exclude here the novels pertaining to metaliterature – the plot obeys certain structural rules, as naming and stating the problem, or presenting the situation (psychological as well as physical), as development toward the crisis and its consequences, the end. In social sciences we could describe this pattern as follows: data, experimental design, instrumental conclusions. As in a tragedy from the Calssical period, Brann states first the problem as she perceives it (Introduction), then she presents the problem facing, and being, education: its nature and its causes (Chapters I and II). Indeed, she examines the question of usefulness, that is to say, if education has to be useful, can it also be an instrument for understanding, thus a permanent mean and object of wonder?
“Finally, the question will be asked: Can the Republic afford such an education, an education beyond utility? (p. 62)
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In brief, it is a near-essential preparation not for any life but for a good life. But a chance at a good life is not a mere desideratum in this republic – it is indeed a right.” (p. 63)
Within the part called “Tradition” the writer analyses the very causes of the conflict. She links Socrates and Jefferson through the building up of a tradition which goes from theory to practice. From there she proposes avenues of thought and she orientates her essay toward a denouement, as Sophocles does when he brings the messenger face to face with Oedipus. As he does, she refers to history, to the past, in order to explain the present and the future. We can feel the gods flaring in each knot of events.
Within the last part, “Rationality”, Eva Brann attempts to resolve the paradoxes she brought to light along the previous chapters, if not episodes. As all good literary work, it leaves the reader with some good material upon which to think. Food for the mind. Her argument in favor of inquiry opens up the text to further analyses and consequences.
The third element of traditional literary texts is time. A tragedy or a novel should develop along a linear feeling of time, a chronological unfolding of events and thoughts. This schema fits our conception of History, our concepts regarding causes and consequences and our expectations regarding our own trajectory. We live and think along a rather a straight line, be it vertical or horizontal. From this point of view, this book is well “timed”. The author digs in the past, in our literary and theorical memory, in order to understand the present and plan the future. A smooth logical explanation for education as it is today and a smooth transition for education as it could be tomorrow.
For all these characteristics -character, plot, timing- Paradoxes of education in a Republic belongs to the realm of literature. However, literature is not this type od structure only.
Indeed, the limitation of literature to this pattern would greatly limit its perception by the reader, then its usefulness to either the thinker or the teacher. Therefore, we have to address now the second category mentioned at the beginning of this essay. This category deals with the other element of literature, and not the least: the text. The text being written and read.
2. Language/ text; writing/ reading.
Language in literature… A chain of signs upon which there is a general consensus. A strict gathering of symbols meant to carry a message. Therefore, the latter should be clear for any reader who knows the code. Moreover, the message carried by the story should inspire the reader, should suggest him/her some other meanings to be brought to the surface by the explication de texte. Hence, the expectation is geared toward clarity, internal wealth of the text. What is less perceived by the reader of the literary text is the private life of language, when language becomes text, when it folds into itself to unfold again and fold again, decentering itself, unveiling itself to hide itself better within its center, within our center. From this process of ceaseless folding and unfolding, spreading and retracting springs the wealth of the text. In this process, language escapes both the writer and the reader, and comes back to them, comes back to itself, forever changed. The text takes off on its own life, that is to say, the text will live a different life with different readers. Each mind reading the text will give a different meaning to this chain of words. Your intellectual and cultural background, your interest, your expectations, your quest will transform the text which will become, then, your own discourse. Each interpretation of the text names a level of reading. We may agree on one or more level(s) of reading and be alone on some other. In the case which interests us today, we may agree that Eva Brann exposes the different paradoxes of an educational system in a particular Republic, and that she presents us with some possible paths which could lead to the resolution of these paradoxes. But the question one can legitimately ask after this remark is: “But what does she ask beyond that? Does she solve any paradox for us, educators, teachers, readers? Does she bring us any denouement when she proposes an inquiry? Is this inquiry, an organized analysis, a result of the book?” But if the book itself is, if we trust the text, a metaphor to be explored as object and instrument of our analysis: “ a republic of incomparable equals”, this metaphor expresses not only the need for individuality, but also the necessity of equality which are in many ways contradictory or at least difficult to combine together. These implicit contradictions make the metaphor powerful, suggestive, fascinating. But this metaphor expresses also the limit of language, the escaping of the text, on the one hand. On the other and because of the traits just mentioned, it does open possibilities for thoughts which could pertain to the empirical domain of education and/or to the significance of the written text through its limits. We are already journeying through the words, among them, within the labyrinth of their association. We are apparently jailed within them, although actually freed by this mesh. Indeed, the handicap of the narrowness of language becomes a generator of thoughts. The difficulty of exactly expressing what we perceive through words draws us into a vertigo in the quest for meaning. This meaning which will escape us when we come closer when we finally perceive it with all the power of our mind. This escape of the text, as well as its potential, can be seen within the last paragraph of the book:
“When I began by calling certain paradoxes of education in a republic tragic, I meant only that, like the heroic flaws of ancient tragedy, they are as exhilarating as modernity itself. Each such paradox is an incitement to an inquiry and to a resolution intended not to collapse the paradox, but to recover its roots. All the resolutions together circumscribe an education that is uncompromisingly liberal, reasonably learned, and radically reflective. It seems to me also to be that education most apt to foster what is of the essence to this best of all practicable polities: that it be a republic of “incomparable equals””. (p. 148)
Along this paragraph, Eva Brann shows that if she cannot precisely resolve the paradoxes pf education within the comfort of a functional terminology it is because language needs words to express a truth which can only be intuitively perceived as nesting within the heart of these very paradoxes. The text shrinks and expands within the clash of “incomparable” and “equals”. At this point we are aware that we have to start all over, again, again, and again… The text leaves the writer. It leaves her as hermetic and unsolved as its users: the readers. From this paragraph emerge the necessity and the vanity of the structure: thought, choice, action that the writer tends to develop along the book. Necessity because the quest for truth requires articulation; vanity because we do not seem to be able to functionally assume it. Indeed, the metaphor “incomparable equals” sends us back to the text, sends us back to ourselves. But is it not the true sense of education? ‘incomparable equals’, the text sends the writer back to herself, back to her thoughts, now that she has the question, her question, coiled within the blank space separating the two words. The metaphor is the arrival and the departure: now starts the book. When it is closed. Now we may start thinking. And now starts the book, the next one, the one that the readers will write and which will encompass the book closed and the book open, the book printed and the book re-created, and so on, until one book contains all of them, within a plural text. We have now to study the pedagogical inferences of this analysis.
3. Pedagogical implications:
From this reading, very arbitrary I reckon, we may draw the first remark related to pedagogy: although you will be often asked to define what you intend when speaking of education, there is not one simple definition of the term, except, maybe, within the dictionary and within naïve minds. Stretched between Socrates and Jefferson, Eva Brann could only underline the historical reasons of the development of our present attitude regarding the primary elements of our development. What she could not express are the jumps, the changes of direction or, more importantly, the unsatisfaction each new trend seems to bring. Her incapacity in that matter is not intellectual, is not hers, but rather language’s, which seems to betray us. It attracts the user within its glamour, like butterflies within the light, and it blinds him/her. It leaves him/her face with a metaphor, the origin… This is due to the fact that the concept and the text come at the same moment, within a spiraling movement. One is consequence of the other but the words, finite data, have not the expandability and the flexibility of our brain. Inside and outside of us the text does not obey our intellectual and/or psychoanalytical needs. Consequently, the truth of the text, our question, will be a struggle with the words. Therefore, to learn how to read is to learn how to master, lead, direct or at least accept this idea of torturing the word in order for each one of us to extract a meaning, our meaning, our question. All this, of course, presupposes also that the text does not exist before the reader, although it could be printed and kept tightly fastened between two covers. Let us not imagine that it could dance around us through the title… The recognition of the limits of language, the recognition of the text’s ability to transform itself as a consequence of this limitation and our individual differences, leads us to consider the act of reading as being the discovery of the multiplicity of the very text. Therefore, learning reading requires the acceptance of, from the teacher, of the existence of several texts contained in the target one. But this attitude presupposes also that reading is a quest for the essential, the substance which hides itself within the core of Brann’s last metaphor. This substance is the Text, the receptacle of all the interpretations. This essence is the text we will never reach but we will forever try to reach. Therefore, learning how to read is not, either a deciphering, or a consequence of deciphering signs agreed upon. Teaching reading is asking questions which penetrate the text, as water penetrates the soil. These questions have to be true questions, that is to say, the answers do not belong to the teacher but to the student. The teacher’s quest for meaning should generate the student’s quest. Maybe it this the only way to reach the roots of the paradoxes, maybe is this the content of the inquiry proposed by Brann: reading, a plural activity for a plural text…
Another element of pedagogy much in favor in our culture is the concept of linearity, the perfect trajectory of the development of our thinking. We showed, in part one, that Brann’s book could be read within this framework. The text, going from the Greeks to our modern time, is in agreement with linearity, the continuum which appears to be so important for our perception of our universe. Moreover, Brann uses the schema of “thought, choice, action”, with which, I am sure, you are all familiar. First is thought, from it develops an array of options, then springs the solution. A perfectly well adapted pattern for empirical educational research. But is this the only possible pattern? From the reading I quickly gave of the book, the latter ends on thought. As I hope I showed, the last paragraph, the “conclusion”, opens the book, or starts the book. The whole book you have in your hands , this assemble of papers and carboard is an attempt to formulate a question. On the accuracy of this formulation -the truth- will depend further thoughts. Choice and action are a false statement because they are everywhere, they constitute your biological make up and the essential formulation of your thoughts. They are, practically, secondary to thought, therefore they do not nest within a superficial, linear reading but rather depend on the question, on the quest brought about by the text per se. The plurality of readings, the plurality of texts are the plurality of your own writing, when you write the text your are reading. This plurality of attitudes can be successfully achieved only if one accepts to stop, turns around, postpones the action in order to the efficient question to come to the shore, from which you will be able to set sail for your own quest. Definitely incomparable, but “equals”? Equals in our desire to go beyond, to understand further, to grow together, to become aware of our complexity – and language is one of our inner elements. We will be equal in our freedom to think independently and to be allowed to listened to when expressing thinking. Equal within the freedom to visit unexplored intellectual areas, incomparable in the consequences of such visits. The question brought up by the text – whatever it be – should decenter and disseminate in order to recenter and go deeper within the essential vertigo. The written text? A pretext for re-writing while reading, a pretext for intelligence and creativity to join each other and nurture reflection… Book st