University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Existentialism---its meaning for American public education as perceived by selected contemporary educational philosophers

(USC Thesis Other)

Existentialism---its meaning for American public education as perceived by selected contemporary educational philosophers

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content EXISTENTIALISM— ITS MEANING FOR AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION AS PERCEIVED BY SELECTED CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHERS by Henry Alfred Talifer A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Education) January 197 9 Copyright by Henry Alfred Talifer 1979 UMI Number: DP24679 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Pubi shsnq UMI DP24679 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90 0 0 7 £ctu.e> Ph. J). Ed Tf3| This dissertation, written by Henry Alfred Talifer under the direction of Zc.4-.s_._ Dissertation C om mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and accepted by T h e Graduate School, in p a rtial fu lfillm en t of requirements of the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y Dean Date..Qxk%ky*&:Skl*d.. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to express grateful appreciation to Dr. Robert L. Brackenburv, Dr. William F. O'Neill and Dr. Dallas Willard for their guidance through out my academic career as well as for their assis tance in the preparation of this Dissertation. I also wish to extend personal notes of thanks to Dr. Edward N. O'Neil for his continuous encouragement during the course of my studies and especially to my wife, Mary, whose understanding allowed me to engage in this work and without whose devotion, patience and cooperation it would not have been completed. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................ ii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW .................. 1 Nature of the Study— Rationale Therefor and Significance Thereof Statement of the Problem Questions to be Answered Assumptions Limitations Delimitations Research Procedure Organization of Remaining Chapters II. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Overview Existential Implications for Education in General Applicability of the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Education The Teacher-Pupil Relationship in an Existential Orientation Summary III. METHODOLOGY....................................25 Introduction Philosopher of Education Selection Criteria Data Acquisition Analysis of Literature and Determination of Variables Procedure for Organizing and Presenting Results Summary 111 Chapter Page IV. THE FINDINGS: RESULTS OF THE STUDY .... 31 An Analysis of the Writings of David Denton An Analysis of the Writings of Maxine Greene An Analysis of the Writings of George Kneller An Analysis of the Writings of Van Cleve Morris An Analysis of the Writings of Leroy Troutner An Analysis of the Writings of Donald Vandenberg Comparison of Findings Summary V. SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS . .183 Summary Conclusions Recommendations BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 189 IV CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW Nature of the Study— Rationale Therefor and Significance Thereof The philosophy of existentialism has been and continues to be considered by many a most complex, negative and pessimistic world view. This is especially true for those who have given its principles only cursory examina tion. There can be little doubt, however, that chief among the concerns of existentialism is its emphasis on the individual and on the individual’s relationship both to other human beings and to nature,. Because of this, perhaps few other systems of thought potentially offer so much in the way of inspiration and doctrine to American school personnel whose own education, formal and otherwise, has been directed at least in major part toward the objec tive of assisting each learner to develop to his or her maximum potential. The attention and efforts of those educational philosophers whose works are analyzed in this study attest in some measure to this proposition. Among the several preeminent existential thinkers, past and present, theistic as well as secular, few have 1 dealt with any specific application of existentialism to education. Those that have done so have not undertaken this assignment to any great degree. One task of the educational philosopher is to make logical connections, assumptions and inferences regarding the application or the lack thereof of a particular philosophy to the educa tional enterprise. For those among the latter who have undertaken such a mission regarding existentialism, it was important to determine in what ways these philosophers of education have interpreted the philosophy and how they are presenting it to their colleagues, to their students and to the lay public in the hope of providing a useful syn thesis for educational generalists. Statement of the Problem This study was a critical examination of existen tial philosophy and its implications as well as its ap plications for American public educational policy and practice as perceived by selected contemporary philosophers of education. Each of the latter professes either to have a pronounced existential preference with respect to his or her respective philosophic orientation or, in the alterna tive, and perhaps in addition to such a commitment, has produced a sufficient corpus of work concerning existen tialism and education so as to have acquired considerable 2 expertise in this area. Through their writings, including books, journal articles, unpublished manuscripts and documents, papers, in progress, speeches and perhaps personal correspondence with this researcher, how have David Denton, Maxine Greene, George Kneller, Van Cleve Morris, Leroy Troutner and Donald Vandenberg each construed and presented existen tialism and in what ways have they respectively perceived its meaning, significance and application for American public education with special emphasis on teaching and learning? A second aspect of the problem may be phrased as follows: Among the above selected philosophers, what were the common educational areas discussed, if any, and what was the extent of agreement and/or disagreement with in these areas concerning the application of existen tialism to American public education? Questions to be Answered This study addresses itself to a determination of the answers to the following two questions: 1. Do each of the selected educational philoso phers make specific recommendations for certain teacher- counselor conduct, attitudes and dispositions within the public school environment in order to implement therein portions of existential thought with respect to such items 3 as, but not necessarily limited to, purposes and goals of education, the nature of the child with respect to learn ing, curriculum structure and subject matter emphasis and presentation; and 2. To what extent do each of these educational philosophers discuss substantially the same general areas and emphasize similar portions of existential thinking as perhaps having application for American public educational practice? Assumptions It was assumed that the educational philosophers whose writings had been selected for analysis had each first, thoroughly investigated the dimensions of existen tial philosophy and secondly, completely and accurately reflected in their writings their respective positions concerning existentialism and education. Limitations It was recognized that the study was restricted by the availability of resources, particularly regarding un published documents. It was also recognized that the writings themselves were frequently unclear or ambiguous, in whole or in significant part, and that opportunity for clarification through interviews and/or personal corre spondence between any one philosopher the meaning of whose work(s) was in doubt and this researcher was not always possible. Finally, it was recognized that any misinter pretation by this researcher further limited this study. Delimitations The scope of this study was to focus exclusively on the written material produced by the selected educa tional philosophers. No attempt was made to conduct an external analysis based on these writings, that is, assuming agreement exists as to the true meaning and parameters of existential thought, relating what these philosophers have said to such items. There was also no effort made to relate what any of the particular educa tional philosophers had said to any particular mode of existential thinking as articulated by one or more primary existential philosopher. Research Procedure This study was descriptive in nature. The research procedure employed was a semantic and rational internal analysis of all relevant written material on the subject of existentialism and education produced by each of the selected educational philosophers. This analysis, which was in part both a form of content as well as qualitative analysis, focused first on the content, logic, stability and reliability of all presentations by the same author. 5 A second aspect, regarding certain selected variables, was to compare and contrast the ideas of those educational philosophers whose works had been chosen for examination. Organization of Remaining Chapters Chapter II, Review of the Literature, initially presents an overview of the written material that has been done with respect to the topic of existentialism and educa tion, followed by an analysis of several relevant dis sertations. These dissertations have been arranged for presentation and discussion under three broad topic headings. Each one of these three areas is explained and then the selected research that has been accomplished within said areas is analyzed. Finally, a summary at the end of the chapter brings the reader up to date in terms of the research which has been done. Chapter III explains in considerable detail the procedures used to undertake the research for this study. Specifically, how the particular philosophers of education selected for inclusion herein were chosen is minutely documented. It is then shown how the data were acquired, how the literature was analyzed and how the determination of variables was made. The procedure for organizing the results is also spelled out quite clearly. In Chapter IV, the results of the study are set 6 forth in considerable detail. After a brief introduction and explanation of how the findings relate to the research questions, an analysis of the writings of each one of the educational philosophers selected for study is presented. Following this analysis, a comparison of findings is offered and finally there is a summary. Chapter V, Summary, Conclusions and Recommenda tions, completes the study by offering certain conclusions which were supported by the findings and also by making some specific recommendations regarding unresolved matters as well as outlining areas of inquiry for colleagues to pursue with further research. CHAPTER II REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE This chapter initially contains an overview of the written material that has been produced with respect to the general topic of existentialism and education. Fol lowing this, the major conclusions drawn from several dissertations relevant to said topic are presented. These dissertations cover the sixteen year period from 19 56 to 19 72 and have been grouped for review by the nature of the material therein into three main areas, specifically: Existential Implications for Education in General; Ap plicability of the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Education and The Teacher-Pupil Relationship in an Exis tential Orientation. Six of the above studies fall into the first category, three deal with Sartre and four of said dissertations are concerned with the teacher-pupil relationship. Overview Troutner (19 74) summarized the state of existing literature with respect to existential thought and educa tion as follows: 8 When I first became interested in the general topic of "Existential Thought and Education" a number of years ago I am sure that the idea never crossed my mind that twenty years later I would find myself in vestigating the question of how to make sense out of this area of inquiry. But now this kind of investigation not only seems appro priate but necessary; for after twenty years of research on the part of scores of philoso phers of education, research which has produced well over one-hundred articles, over one-hundred dissertations, as well as a number of books, I find the whole area of Existential Thought and Education to be just as confusing and amorphous, if not more so, as it was many years ago when I first started to think about the topic. A cursory investigation into the 109 dissertations (by the last count) written on this topic, . . . clearly illustrates this point. It is the range and variety of the topics that is so striking. We find dissertations focusing on over a dozen different existential philosophers, running all the way from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, to Merleau-Ponty and Abbagnano. We also find a number of comparative studies, some contrasting different existential" philoso phers as they relate to education while others compare one or more existential philosophers,, with another thinker, such as Dewey or Rogers,! and then try to draw educational implications from the comparison. Some dissertations con sider the possible relevance of Existential Thought for certain selected dimensions of the schooling process such as curriculum, teaching, counseling, and teacher-pupil relationships. Others analyze certain selected existential themes, like freedom or authenticity, for possible educational implications. Then there are dissertations applying Existential Thought to certain disciplines like mathematics, literature, the arts, physical education and humanism. . . . finally, we find a number of dissertations dealing with Existential Thought and certain specific levels or kinds of educa tion like higher education, Christian education, education for the mentally retarded, and voca tional education. (2) But nowhere in the literature, with one notable exception, (3) do we find a systematic philosophical analysis that attempts to provide some foundation and structure to the area of inquiry itself. Nowhere do we find the basic philosophical questions being asked: "What is the possi bility of connecting existential philosophy and education?", "What are the parameters of this area of inquiry?", and "How and where is the interface, if any, to be found?" ("Trying to Make Sense Out of 1 Existential Thought and Education,'" p. 13) The exception that Troutner was talking about was the dissertation done in 196 4 by Bruce French Baker at Northwestern University entitled "On the Possibility of the Relation Between Existentialism and Education," the primary findings from which will be discussed shortly in this chapter. Troutner1s analysis then appears to provide the framework from which to investigate research works that have been done in this area both in order to illus trate not only what has taken place in the past but also with hope of showing the necessity for and relevancy of the present study. We shall begin then by an examination of those works grouped under our first category, Existen tial Implications for Education in General. Existential Implications for Education in General Barondes (19 72), basing his work on the writings of Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber, concluded that the existential philosophers have addressed themselves 10 to the dilemma of the free man and the search for authen ticity. Thus, he felt that the goals of existentialism coincide with those of public education and that the individual as well as his fullest actualization is of supreme importance. Barondes also concluded, however, that, at least in his view, education seemed bent never theless on avoiding the existentially human predicament and therefore avoided dealing with such issues as love, death, aloneness, freedom and impotence, among others. In a much earlier study, Rhodes (19 56), tried to draw certain connections between American pragmatism and existentialism. He concluded that both philosophies were situational, relativistic and dynamic, and he felt that educationally both were functional philosophies so that the existential view is on most issues very close to the pragmatic, operational position. Rhodes was quite candid in admitting, however, that no particular existential educational philosophy had b^en worked out, either by the existential philosophers themselves or by educational philosophers. But, he concluded in his study, that existentialism would borrow more from the pragmatic variety of progressive education than from any other viewpoint when an existential philosophy of education was constructed. Commenting on Rhodes' work in his own dissertation, Troutner (1962) provides the following: 11 The dissertation of William Earl Rhodes entitled "An Existential Philosophy of Educa tion, With Special Reference to the Educational Similarities between Christian Existentialism and American Pragmatism," represents one of the first attempts to investigate the relation ship between existentialism and education. . . . The basic thought of Kierkegaard and Tillich, both "Christian" existentialists, pro vides the base for the study. Since existen tialists give formal education little more than a cursory comment^ however, Rhodes decides to look for help in working out Christian exis tentialism in educational terms by searching among contemporary philosophies of education for one with philosophical tenets common to existentialism. He claims to find such a philosophy in the thought of John Dewey. . . . Nowhere is this commonality more evident, according to Rhodes, than in their views of the concrete existent and his place in any philosophical formulation. (pp. 7-8) Approximately five years later, Troutner (1967), again commenting on Rhodes' work, states as follows: . . . Rhodes . . . believes that existen tialism and Dewey's variety of pragmatism are "so similar in mode that they can be brought together in educational theory in a manner integral to each and productive for both." Like Tillich, Rhodes feels that one of the main reasons the two philosophies are similar is because their descriptions of the human are similar. (Summer 1967, p. 282) Another study dealing primarily with the theme of existential implications for education in a general sense is a dissertation by Bedford (1961). In this work, Bedford relies primarily on the writings of S^ren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Jaspers. He states that the purpose of education is primarily the transmission 12 of culture but he also reasons that a vitally important part of any educational endeavor is that children be aided in learning how to make decisions and that they be in structed on how to act upon those decisions. Addressing himself to the curriculum, Bedford feels that the cur riculum is basically a dynamic humanism and that as such, it must deal with real issues rather than attend to the dead issues of the past. He feels the existentialist would emphasize the importance of reason in man's history and that science and the mastery of technology should also be stressed. Bedford further concludes that most important in existential educational theory is the premise that the teacher must be a warm, loving and wholesome personality so that the child's educational experience gives him security as well as faith in himself. He also notes that the existentialists upon whom he relied agree that the criteria for adult existence ought not be applied to children and that no sense of tragedy should be imposed on the child. In response to Bedford, however, Vandenberg (1966), in his. own dissertation, comments as follows: Bedford's fine work, treating Kierkegaard, Buber, Sartre and Jaspers separately and then collating them, is somewhat marred by his treatment of existentialism in general (that is based upon Sartre's Existentialism, a very inadequate book, and Kneller's and Wild's works) and his treatment of Sartre. The chapter that discusses the philosophers one by one in respect to the child and education 13 (IV) uses a questionable procedure. Bedford writes as though Sartre wrote on this subject and cites Being and Nothingness, but Sartre did not. Either mistakes were made as to the sources cited or the chains of inferences were too long, loose, vagUe or subtle for the present writer to follow, for they do not seem to check out. Bedford's chapter on the growing awareness of the movement in the United States is good, but concerning existentialism in general he makes statements such as "existentialists feel that anxiety is a vital motivational source in the learning enterprise" (p. 47) that seem strange. That is, the anxiety that "motivates" has nothing in common with the aspect of exis tence that philosophers of existence refer to by the somewhat unfortunate word anxiety except the name, although existential anxiety may happen to become channeled to the learning process (which is not necessarily good). In other words, Bedford did not grasp the onto logical nature of existential thinking, .... He may have tried to blend the unblendable by his choice of philosophers, which, it is suggested, may have contributed to his slighting of Sartre. (pp. 630-632) We now turn to the work of Kobayashi (19 71). She regarded her effort as a philosophical and logical inquiry involving both an analysis and synthesis to explicate existential implications for educational theory and practice. Relying primarily on the works of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Buber, Kobayashi felt that these existentialists emphasized the significance of the in- dividual, of intuition and immediate experience and *4-1 contended that the priority of existence over essence is unquestionable, for man must exist prior to his definition of his own being. She also concluded that among the 14 : n- existentialists surveyed, intellectualization is not prized as said existentialists prefer subjective, inward experiences of man rather than intellectual, objective analysis which fosters a kind of duality between subject and object. A major part of her study, however, was to draw certain educational implications from existentialism. The first was that the educational intent should be one of creating within each individual a realization of his own autonomy, of his own responsibility, and the creation of his own future and value assessment. Such a student rises above the individual who merely acquires mastery over specified subject matter or simply cultivates the intel lect. She also found, as a second item, that learning must be that which is appropriated by the individual. Third, she noted that the educator must understand pupils as unique persons, as distinct subjects, rather than objects and, fourth, she saw moral education as encouraging students to form their own decisions and to make their own choices. As a fifth implication, Kobayashi wrote that instructors must foster among students a sense of freedom as well as responsibility. Next, the Socratic method was favored over others to be used in a schooling situation and the qualitative dimensions of the teacher as a person were essential. Finally, the learner was to be considered more significant than the subject to be imparted and the 15 teacher must also create a student's awareness of the realities of human existence. Hamblin (19 72) concluded a somewhat similar study, the purpose of which was to derive certain tenets from existentialism which could become the philosophical base for developing a curricular model. As a result of his research, eight such tenets were isolated as follows: 1. Existential philosophy, with respect to education, is consistent in placing primary value on the individual as the origin and function of the curriculum. 2. Learners, first priority of an existen tial curriculum, are individuals with potentials to be actualized within the framework of the educational process. 3. Learning, second priority of an exis tential curriculum, is the actualization of the potentials of the individual to develop authen ticity and autonomous characterization. 4. Learning blocks, third priority of an existential curriculum, are the open structure of the curriculum;.they are divided into two categories: basics and electives. 5. Society, fourth priority of an existen tial curriculum, is fluid and pluralistic; it provides the framework for the learning center to function; it supports its obligations to the learner. 6. Education is the process of awakening 0 the awareness of the ^authentic individual to „ * ^ becoming an autonomous learner* and thinker. 7. System analysis is the process by which the curriculum is prescriptively communicated to the learner with predictability and verifica tion. 8. Curriculum is selected knowledge, experience, and encounters for actualization of an individual's potentials; it is a tool for the realization of subjectivity, the process for an individual's becoming authentic and autonomous. (Abstract) 16 Hamblin also concluded from his research that the learner, in order to develop mastery of communication, observation and self-realization, must participate in a minimally structured curriculum during the initial learning center experience. He identified this learning center experience as the preoperational period of from two to seven years of age. Following this, the elective learning block period occurs during the concrete operational and formal opera tional periods of between seven to fifteen years of age and older. And he reasoned that each learning block should be individually designed so the learner and the instructor have flexibility in structuring the curriculum. Finally, Bassett (1970) raised certain questions concerning socialization as an appropriate educational goal, indoctrination as a method of teaching and ratio- nality as the principle objective of education, and he summarized his findings as follows: In accordance with the preceding analysis, several conclusions were suggested in relation to an existential approach to moral education. While it was considered that adherence to some rules would be necessary within the school situation to facilitate a climate for optimum learning, it was also considered that an equal concern should be shown for avoiding the develop ment of a rigidity which might limit subsequent pupil growth toward moral autonomy. An emphasis upon the process whereby values could be created by the individual student rather than an emphasis upon the formal inculcation of specific value positions was considered in keeping with the existentialist view. It was suggested that the 17 development of moral autonomy and responsibility through authentic moral choice ought to be the proper goal of moral education. The school therefore might appropriately provide increased and expanded opportunity for free choice of values as the student matures and at the same time encourage real involvement in moral issues whereby the student can develop a genuine commit ment to his moral choices. (Abstract) Applicability of the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Education Turning now to the above area, it is interesting initially to note two works which reach entirely different conclusions from one another, the first of which is the study by Overholt (1969). Overholt reasons that Sartre and existentialism are not inimical to the concept of compulsory education and further, that educational objec tives, methods and curriculum based on Sartre's views are not only possible but clearly conceivable. In contrast to this position are the findings reached by Baker (1964). He attempts to show that earlier writings, including the work of Kneller (195 8) as well as others, are founded on a basis that will not allow a meaningful relation between existentialism and education for essentially two reasons. The first of these is the attitude of American society and the second is Sartre's views themselves. With respect to the first aspect, American society, Baker concludes that the existential concern for death and anxiety and the 18 attempts to impose these concerns on the American educa tional system have had difficulty of acceptance with the American people. Regarding Sartre's thoughts, it is interesting to note the comment by Troutner (19 72) as follows: Bruce French Baker, . . . has demonstrated in his very insightful and scholarly disserta tion . . . that the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly his formulation of the relationship of the human existent to the Other, and education as traditionally conceived are, in fact, incompatable. If one accepts the idea that "any notion of education to be meaningful . . . must be 'social' in nature," that is, "it must involve relations between persons . . ." and at the same time accepts Sartre as being representative of existentialism, then any investigation of education and existential thought is destined to flounder; for Sartre's "views on man's relations to 'the Other' as expressed in part III of Being and Nothingness, are based on the inevitable conflict between man and man." (22) In his research Baker not only discusses the inadvisability of using Sartre's philosophy when trying to connect existentialism with education, but he also points up the real difficulties in using many of the existential themes, like being-unto- death, anxiety, and alienation, when discussing what takes place in the classroom, particularly in the lower grades. In many respects, like oil and water, education as schooling and existentialism do not mix. One of Baker's recommendations is that in order to realize a meaningful connection between existential thought and education we need to redefine and broaden our conception of education. ("Contemporary Philosophies of Education: A Search for the Cutting Edge," p. 29 6) Rather than relying on Sartre then, Baker suggests: . . . However, since Buber's existentialism is grounded in authentic relations between 19 persons, it will be the purpose of Chapter III to compare his views with those of Sartre and show that Buber*s I-Thou philosophy, including his views on education, can be placed within the framework of our attempt to relate Existentialism to education and in fact forms the foundation of this attempt. (Abstract) 0*Neill (1958), by comparison, after finding Sartre's concept of freedom a most complex entity con taining several aspects, concludes that existential education is basically derived from Sartre*s fundamental value of "authenticity" which his freedom concept under lies. Thus, 0*Neill writes: . . . In the final resolve, a truly Sartrean program for education would be founded upon the proposition that every man should be "existentially," or in terms of vital awareness, what he is "essen tially," or ontologically— a self-determining freedom in a world without preconceived imperatives. (Abstract) The Teacher-Pupil Relationship in an Existential Orientation Turning now to our last category, four works will be reviewed. Zaret (1967) found the humanist existential frame of reference converging in the concept of personal responsiveness both for the teacher and as far as the learner was concerned. With respect first to the teacher, the element of personal responsiveness was focused in deliberate decision making and in flexible expectations and sanctions? as for the learner, the concept of personal 20 responsiveness was exemplified in creating and extending personal meanings. Morrison (1967), basing her work on Buber's I-Thou dialogue, focused attention on the contri bution an existential orientation could make toward a mutually fulfilling teacher-pupil relationship as it is found in the classroom. She noted that the existential thinkers whose works were analyzed in the study expressed a concern over the anonymity of the individual and of the levelling effects of mass-minded culture. These thinkers found that such a condition mandates that increased attention be given to the person and to his responsible attitude toward group involvement. She also recognized that this humanly-centered encounter would encompass myriad aspects of communication and experience in an encouraging, unstructured and nonsequential setting. In conclusion: No aspect of the school experience would remain untouched by the existentially-influenced relation. Goals, curriculum, tools of learning, and even the physical plant itself would coalesce into one amalgam dedicated to the unstructured but rigorous pursuit of learning based on the individual's needs, interests, and potentialities. Within an encouraging social setting, personal responsibility and concern for others would become living issues rather than moralized maxims. All aspects of the maturing individual would be considered important including the imaginative and irrational elements. (Abstract) Catallozzi (19 71) developed and articulated three basic modal concepts of existential thought: first, man's existence is not contingent upon a notion of a priori essence; second, man, in his consciousness, is both free and condemned to make conscious choices and finally, man thereby assumes full responsibility for both his choices and his actions. Following from this, Catallozzi sees the arts as those expressive moments in which man achieves a new order of selfhood and he suggests/ therefore, that the task of the teacher within the various art activities is that of serving as a guide rather than a "critic." The exact nature of this guidance is fundamentally oriented towards the development of new and original possibilities within the "existential a priori" of the child. The teacher, as a "becoming" being, may. best fulfill his or her role and complete his or her task if she or he is accorded the same freedom and responsibility which she or he has granted to the child in his or her efforts at "becoming." Finally, Hendon (196 7) attempted to isolate the American teacher as a literary character during the period between the two World Wars. The central questions posed in his study were as follows: Do the fictional teachers in recent American literature (1) evidence existential awareness and an acceptance of the responsibilities of human freedom and (2), make existential awareness and the responsibility of human freedom central to their teaching? 22 Hendon's conclusion was that both of the above inquiries had to be answered in the negative. Summary In conclusion, then, it can be seen that practi cally all of the works reviewed above rely almost exclusively on the writings of one or more primary philos- S ophervj_n hopes of uncovering therein certain implications for education. A major problem with this approach, as has been pointed out previously, is the fact that most of these existential philosophers did nothin fact! deal with educa tional concerns. As such, those implications which were found were drawn by the researchers themselves. Differing in intent and emphasis, however, but in no way intended to detract from the usefulness of the research cited above or to minimize the efforts of those responsible for same, it was the purpose of this study to see how certain selected educational philosophers them selves have interpreted existentialism and its meaning, or the lack thereof, for American public education. It was determined that the best~way to undertake such a research project was to directly analyze the literature produced by the educational philosophers who had been chosen for in clusion. Such analysis would provide both a determination of individual areas of emphasis as well as serve to uncover ________________________________________________________2 3., any common areas that these individuals had discussed, including the nature and extent of agreement and disagree ment therein, in order to help the educational generalist become familiar with the topic. In conducting this study, therefore, it was necessary to gather practically all available literature regarding existentialism and educa tion written by the selected educational philosophers, and the general methodology and other procedures used to collate the data derived therefrom is outlined thoroughly in Chapter III. 24 CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY Introduction Again, and by way of review, it is to be emphasized that the nature of this study was a critical examination of existential philosophy and its implications as well as its applications for American public educational policy and practice as perceived by selected contemporary philos ophers of education. In order to undertake this investi gation then, it was first necessary to determine which educational philosophers would be included. Following this, a procedure whereby the applicable works of the selected educational philosophers could be analyzed and the findings presented had to be chosen. The purpose of the present chapter is to explain in considerable detail the methods used to accomplish these tasks and as such, this chapter is organized into various parts in order to show first, the philosopher of education selection cri teria, next, the nature of the data acquisition process, third, how the literature was analyzed and the several variables determined therefrom and finally, how the results of this research were organized for presentation. 25 Following this, a brief summary of the contents of this chapter will be offered prior to the actual results of the study being presented in Chapter IV. We shall begin by explaining the criteria employed to choose the various educational philosophers whose works were analyzed in the s tudy. Philosopher of Education Selection Criteria In order to be certain that those educational philosophers selected for inclusion within this study constituted a representative sample of those who have dealt in sufficient enough detail with the topic of existentialism and education, certain criteria were established. The first consideration was that the particular educational philosopher, either because of a personal and pronounced existential preference or for some other reason, had produced a sufficient corpus of written material regarding existentialism and its applications to public education so as to have gained expertise in the field. A second criteria for selection was that the particular educational philosopher had produced said work over a sufficiently extensive time period so as to show a sustaining interest through the years in the area of existentialism and its application for education. A third 26 selection criteria was that the writings be significant, both as to scope and having been addressed to a variety of audiences, so that when a comparison $as made of all of the individual's writings on this subject, a meaningful amalgam could be produced. After selecting the six educational philosophers whose names have been mentioned previously as having met these enumerated qualifications, it was then necessary to begin acquiring the data which was to be analyzed. Data Acquisition An original reference list of eighteen sources was subsequently expanded to a final bibliography con sisting of one hundred nineteen separate entries. The enlargement of said original list came about first through checking the footnotes and bibliographies of those writings of which there was knowledge at the beginning of the study for additional citations. This process resulted in a pyramid effect, with one source leading to another and so forth. And, along the way, each writing was secured by either direct purchase or by making a copy of same. After this lengthy gathering process was completed, each "semifinal" list of writings was verified by sending a copy of this list to the appropriate educational philoso pher asking for corrections, additions, comments and 27 whatever other information the particular author cared to submit. Most of the responses received included additions to the lists sent; there were, however, some technical bibliographical changes as well. Several of the educa tional philosophers also submitted unpublished material such as speeches, papers in progress and responses to the presentations of various third parties. After this verification procedure was completed, it was again important to make sure that all reference materials had in fact been obtained prior to the analysis of the literature itself and the determination of the variables. Analysis of Literature and Determination of Variables The analysis of the literature was begun first by taking each educational philosopher in alphabetical order and by reading and underlining all material by that particular individual. The writings themselves were ar ranged from the earliest piece to the most recent for the purpose of gaining some perspective on the progression of the individual's thought over the years. Following this extensive initial reading and underlining process, it was then necessary to go back through the material and make an outline of each individual selection. This outline then was used to make a smaller, composite outline of the 28 particular individual's thought regarding the subject matter herein. This composite outline in turn led to the development of five major areas considered by each philosopher plus the isolation of fifteen variables or areas discussed by more than one philosopher. It then became important to devise a procedure whereby the results of the research could be organized and presented. Procedure for Organizing and Presenting Results Having reduced several thousand pages of material to some workable outline form, further distilled into the five main categories mentioned above, it was then necessary to prioritize said areas discussed by each philosopher into what seemed to be a logical order of presentation in Chap ter IV. Next, the aforementioned variables were arranged in terms of frequency and it was noted that four out of the six philosophers discussed five variables, three out of the six philosophers wrote about six variables and two' ■ out of the six philosophers dealt with four variables. Within each of'these three categories, it was then necessary to arrange the variables themselves in terms of importance for presentation in Chapter IV and it was also essential to organize the order of discussion of said arranged variables so the reader could compare and contrast 29 and uncover relationships more easily. Summary Following the selection of the educational philos ophers whose works were analyzed, it was essential to go through the methodology outlined above in order to answer the questions posed in Chapter I. And the data acquisi tion process, the analysis of the literature itself and the determination of variables and the procedure for organizing and presenting the results were all specifically designed with the hope of answering those questions. The results of the.study are reported in Chapter IV. 30. CHAPTER IV THE FINDINGS: RESULTS OF THE STUDY The purpose of this chapter is to present and explain the results of the study. In order to accomplish this objective, the chapter is organized in such a way so as to present at the beginning an analysis of the composite works of each of the individual educational philosophers in order to answer the first research question in Chapter I. Following this narrative, there is a comparison of the findings which is designed to answer research question number two. For purposes of convenience, an investigation of the works of each of the educational philosophers taken in alphabetical order will be made, starting with an analysis of the writings of David Denton. An Analysis of the Writings of David Denton Educated at the University of Tennessee, David Denton is currently Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Social and Philosophical Studies, College of Education, University of Kentucky, where he has been twice honored for his teaching. Professor Denton has taught previously at the University of Tennessee, Austin 31 Peay State College in Tennessee, Indiana University and West Virginia University. He is a member' of numerous professional organizations and information about him is listed in Who's Who in American Education and other similar volumes. The writings of Dr. Denton which are analyzed herein consist of eighteen selections which span the fourteen year period from 1963 to 1977. Included within these writings are three books, Professor Denton's Doctoral Dissertation, various journal articles and several papers presented to professional societies and organizations. After a careful review of each of these works, it was determined that five major categories could be deduced from his writings: first, existentialism and education in general; second, the language and nature of education; third, moral aims for education based primarily on the philosophy of Albert Camus; fourth, the nature of teaching; and fifth, the existentially real teacher. Having identified these particular areas, it is now pos sible to take each one individually in order to analyze more closely the thought of Dr. Denton. Turning first to the topic of existentialism and education in general, Denton feels that a major factor mitigating against existentialism having a great deal of influence on educational practice is the fact that few 32 guides for action have been propounded by the existen tialists for teachers and administrators. In addition, he also points out in his writings that the existentialists in general show a lack of concern with and for institutions such as the school. Writing in 1968, Dr. Denton notes: The two philosophers of education who have done the most work in attempting to determine the bearings of existentialism on education have been George Kneller and Van Cleve Morris. . . . Although each draws from the works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Buber, and others, both rely primarily on the writings of Sartre. . . . Kneller was attempting to demonstrate that in existen tialism one could find adequate grounds for rejecting the usual concepts with an education which assists us in finding authentic meaning in life, in ourselves, and in our relations with others. If one looks in Kneller for more definitive guidelines for educational practice than an emphasis on authenticity and the quest for personal meaning, he will be disappointed. True, Kneller does discuss the relation between the knower and the known; he does treat of the topics of death, anguish, and commitment and indicates the role of the teacher in bringing about awareness of these; he does point to the need of teachers to be authentic persons; and, he does emphasize the basic moral nature of an existentialist education. With the exception of some discussion of the place of literature and the arts in an existentialist curriculum, however, he does not tell the reader just what a curriculum, a course of study, or a school based on the "principles” of existentialism would look like. Morris, in a text in the philosophy of education, 7) attempts to develop such specific guidelines. He says that the subject matters to be emphasized would be those which require in dividual choosing. He suggests art, ethics, moral philosophy, and religion as such subject 33 matters. Socratic questioning is the teaching technique he suggests, and he points out that the entire process of education will be one of character education, since the primary goal of education will be that of responsible selfhood. In his later work, 8) Morris expands on what he calls the Socratic Paradigm as the teaching method most logically consistent with existen tialism. Although there are empirically veri fiable facts which can be "told," the personal appropriation of these to the life of each student involves the question of meaning which cannot be "told" but must be raised. Morris illustrates from art, literature, history, and religion just how this teaching by questioning must be done. The key feature in all of these is in the use of the "facts" of each. The in formation in each of these disciplines does not constitute the end of the instruction; rather, the information is used as a means of provoking the student to awareness and to making choices in respect to himself, the world, and other persons based on that awareness. ("Existentialism in American Educational Philosophy," p. 9 8) Continuing on with this initial theme, two years later Denton wrote as follows: A major problem, . . . , militates against existentialism's having a great deal of influence on educational practice. Although it does treat of topics generally overlooked in educational thought— subjectivity, self-identification, and metaphysical anxiety, for example— few guides for action have been derived. What would a curriculum based on existentialism consist of? In what ways would the behavior of an "existen tialist teacher" differ from any other teacher? Would an "existentialist administrator" operate in ways different from any other? Is the very existence of the school as an institution of society consistent with existentialism's general lack of concern with and for institutions? These and other similar questions have yet to be answered. True, courses of action have been suggested. . But, thus far, the suggested courses of action have been without sufficient force of argument 34 to convince most professors of educational administration and professors of teacher education. Philosophically, there is yet another major difficulty. ■ Existentialism has been dealt with as though it were another rational system, yielding implications for education. . . . The fallacy is not only in treating of existentialism as though it were but another system offering alternative answers to all the traditional questions, but is also in the looking to general laws, postulates, major premises, etc., for something to transfer over onto, to impose on education, rather than beginning with that which is given in the experience of educa tion itself. Existentialism, therefore, is not the primary question, concern, or focus. Educa tion is. (1970, pp. 130-132) Notwithstanding this specific lack of attention to education, Professor Denton feels that the existentialists, nonetheless, would make certain recommendations for the schooling enterprise. The first of these would be that school subjects must be made relevant to contemporary man; subject matter should no longer be considered an end in itself for learners in some sense to "master" but rather should serve two primary functions: first, to create a sense of dissonance in the students and second, to provide alternative notions— a concept which shall be discussed more fully herein. Another suggestion likely to be offered by existentialists is for school personnel to make students actors rather than mere spectators and this should be done through a process of projection and identi fication which requires decision making on the part of the 35 students. There should also be specific, individual and school projects which encourage actual involvement rather than passive participation. Of particular concern to Dr. Denton, and an issue that is found throughout many of his writings, is how to actually describe the nature of education. What takes place within education and what is the language of educa tion that should be used? This leads into the second topic to be discussed, the actual language and nature of education. Especially important to Denton in this context is the fact that he regards attempts to talk of education with what he terms "steno-language1 1 as being essentially futile since such efforts deny the meaningfulness of first-person sentences. He defines steno-language as that language in which all definitions are standardized by stipulation, formal rule or ordinary usage, with the essential criterion being that they be public, objective and exact, either in reference or usage. Steno-language, he argues, treats speech as if it were a machine, inde pendent of man and without soul. Denton finds it impossible to talk about education in steno-language because for him education is first-person experience. Individual development he says is an intensely egocentric matter and is expressed with I-sentences. In addition, he writes that education is experiential, not 36 theoretical— theoretical statements are, in an educational context, meaningless until they are translated into the I- sentences of particular experiencing bodies. He sees exactness then in the subjective sense of having a certain meaning in common with others, not in its being an objec tive criterion at all, and he labels the parallel ex perience of individuals "isomorphisms-of-experience." Denton contends, therefore, that the primary function of language is descriptive rather than explanatory or de finitive. Language he notes is expansive, participating in the growth of meaning, the emergence of understandings, by the occasioning of choices which create meaning. In making a comparison between schooling and education, Denton considers schooling to be systematic, business-like and reliable. Education, on the other hand, he sees as being personal, protean and episodic, and he speaks of education for celebration which cuts across the domains of both work and leisure. The tone of such education he says is one of vitality, energy, dynamism and affectivity of the moment; the meaning lies in a sense of wholeness and rightness, that' special sense of at-onement, an immediate given which describes those moments when individuals not only obtain glimpses of the possibilities of the future of man and the culture, but also may serve as their connectedness with that future. Finally, in such an 37 education, form will transcend role fragmentation in the coming together as a We-community. Thus, acknowledging his thinking to be in the tradition of the existentialists, Denton wants to ground education in ordinary experience which he says revolves around the perceptual-feeling-becoming world of the individual. And he believes that the language of ordinary experience allows the individual to transcend the moment, not be negating the moment but by creating new meaning in the moment. There are, however, certain presuppositions to such language. The order is simultaneous— the language attempts to account for the protean, idiographic, non linear, multidimensional, non-segmental, all at onceness of lived experience and Denton devises plurisigns and fringe facts to deal with this order. Such constructs use metaphors for their descriptions, with non-verbal metaphors including all body movements and extensions which intend meaning, and refer to the primary as well as subsidiary awareness of the elusive, vague, ^lan of an experience. They are also always ego-engaged (steno- language requires ego-detachment) and are gestalten or wholes, that is they identify the general appearance and less obvious facts of experience, the outline of things, the non-habitual and the linguistically novel. In addition, Denton says, they are internal, not external, 38 private rather than public and are the only means by which to do research on man "from the inside." Another pre supposition is that the motive is to obtain awareness of field relationships. Next, the "logic" is that of meta phorical parallels, the process is organic, determinism is episodic and the goal is to be reasonable. Reason, writes Denton, is useful for developing notions of the world which allow us to live effectively. Finally, the criterion is personal authentication and the language of ordinary experience must be "holistic" in some sense. Turning now to the moral aims for education which, as was mentioned previously, Denton draws primarily from the works of Albert Camus, Denton feels that the primary goal of education and in fact the only way it can justify its existence in its institutional form is to produce the moral (lucid) individual rather than an exclusively rational man or a social animal. Continuing on with this theme, Denton says that man as man's chief concern and the problems of individual men must be the first considera' tion of the school curriculum and moral education, all of which must be placed in a human context. The problems of human existence, he feels, lie in man's hands, not within the hands of gods, a mechanically determined universe or history. And speaking directly to this issue, he writes: . . . A corollary of this is that the school has no existence apart from its human members; the curriculum has no existence apart from its human members; and moral education is nothing more than the palaver of pretty noises if placed in some context other than the immediate human one. Man as man's chief concern must be the first consideration in education. Man may concern himself with metaphysical and historical matters, but the problems of individual men are to remain in the foreground of his thought and activity. The fact that the problems of human existence lie in man's hands rather than within the hands of gods or within a mechanically determined universe or within history will give a sense of pride at the same time that it gives a sense of deep humility. (1963, pp. 50-51) As mentioned above, Denton believes that the thought of Albert Camus provides the philosophical base for the moral dimensions of education from which can be derived several moral aims for education. The first of these is self-identification. Man first finds his own identity in isolation, Denton writes, and then demonstrates his solidarity with all men in active involvement. . . . And although man must find his own identity in isolation, he will demonstrate his solidarity with all men in active involvement. Education must thus be concerned with a develop ment of an intense awareness on the part of each student of his absurd relationship to the world and of his responsibility to other men who are also living in absurdity. (1963, p. 51) Denton feels that the complete isolation from others leads to nihilism, whereas complete involvement leads to a loss of self-identity. Consequently, he says, there must be a balance between the two which is characteristic of the 40 moral man and is a goal of education. A second moral aim for education is the acceptance by the learner of others as they are, followed by pro ficiency in the techniques of moderation. The fourth goal, and an extremely important one, is communication, that is dialogue among isolated persons. Since man cannot communicate with the world or with God, Denton reasons, dialogue prevents conflict and helps man maintain his solidarity with other men. Denton believes that this interplay between and among individuals and groups at all levels should be encouraged and planned for in the educa tional enterprise. He also contends that it is imperative for education to develop within each student an intense awareness of his absurd relationship to the world and of his responsibility to other men who are also living in absurdity, and he asserts that Kneller*s existentialism makes no provision for this social dimension. With respect to thought in general, Denton claims that alienation is the ontological ground of thought and that characteristic of alienation is distance, that is distance from something desired. Distantiation, in other words, Denton sees as being the necessary condition of thought, and thought is brought into being to overcome that distance. The final moral aim for education is the develop ment of values based on the distinctly human variables 41 present in the immediate context. In this regard, Denton writes that the individual's existence or being in the present moment is the only certain knowledge available to him and as such, there are certain implications from this condition. First, there are distinct limits to knowledge claims. Secondly, the dissonances of life regarding motivation must be admitted. And third, the concepts of feeling and notion ought to be analyzed. Denton notes that although feeling has been generally held to be ir relevant to the question of knowledge, coming to know is really to work an integration of the feelings of X and the possible notions of that X. We then move toward higher levels of integration, that is greater degrees of coherence between feeling and notion. Drawing from Camus, Denton sees the progression as one from the feeling to the notion, the latter being always a construction about the feeling and never exhausting fully the "meaning" of the feeling. Denton also sees it as essential that the constructions of thought be rejoined to the experiential roots of that thought and he says: . . . . Existential description, then, does not rest with the depiction of some "out there" reality, but participates in the creation of reality. It functions to open new possibilities for seeing, but, to the extent that the descrip tion is epiphoric, the seeing is always a situated seeing; thus the trap of subjective idealism is avoided. As the description functions to open new possibilities of seeing, 42 another trap, that of substantialist definition, is also avoided, for the terms are not categories of a priori meaning, but linguistic "categories" which open us to create new meaning in our worlds. New descriptive terms, in opening new possibilities of meaning, provide the oppor tunity to raise additional questions regarding the objects of consciousness, aspects of the lived-world. They free us from frozen categories of perception and conception, making possible a return to the richness and variety and anguish of our lives, a richness, variety, and anguish negated whenever the describer attempts to bracket himself out of the description. (19 74, "That Mode of Being Called Teaching," p. 112) Turning now to the fourth major area gleaned from Denton's writings, the nature of teaching, it is noted that Denton is most concerned to determine how we can "see" and talk about teaching acts. In order to accomplish this, he feels, two common notions of seeing must be put aside so as to see the lived-world. The first notion to be discarded is the idea of seeing as a projection either of some subjective selfhood or of learned stereotypes. We also must stop considering seeing as being analogous to a camera's receptivity, that is passive and non-intentional. Existential seeing, writes Denton, is constituted of seeing what is in its experiential givenness as well as what might be. Seeing, in other words, is the perception of that experienced, in attempting to grasp both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of life's expressions, as opposed to that which is observed. 43 With respect to teaching itself, Denton isolates five items from his existential perspective which he feels are characteristic of teaching. First, he sees teaching as a special mode of being-in-the-world which cannot be reduced to anything other than itself. Next, teaching is neither describable nor analyzable with the language of things; to see teaching one must begin in wonder and amazement. Third, Denton notes that an a priori defini tion of teaching constitutes an imposition on that situa tion since the latter must be made to conform to the definition. As a fourth item, he sees teaching as the creation of certain spaces and moments which would include shared authority, improvisation and spontaneity integrated within the form, encouraging all to participate, emphasiz ing feeling over form and Dionysian oneness as the ultimate criterion. The fifth item that Denton discusses is the mutual implication of subject and object. There would be a symbolic plus an actional relationship with dialogue as the primorial given of the implication. Denton views the beginning of understanding as the engagement in dialogue and he identifies six particular characteristics of such dialogue. First, he says, dialogue has begun when one can translate what his partner has said into his own terms. Second, dialogue occurs when one partner contradicts the other, it is evidence of the dialectic of tension which 44 characterizes genuine dialogue— where there is perfect agreement, writes Denton, there can be no dialogue. Dialogue, he continues, usually involves three poles, a minimum of two partners plus the subject matter, although he admits that existentially the subject matter is the dialogue. A fourth attribute noted by Denton is that that which one partner insists on leaving with the other as his last comment is the most important, and all other statements are to be understood in respect to that one. Fifth, dialogue may or may not be linear in its develop ment, and finally, the dialogical method of understanding may include such things as encounters, imaginative projec tions, articulating frames of reference and sharing activities. The last major area discussed by Denton in his works is an analysis of the existentially real teacher and the characteristics of that teacher. An existentially real teacher, he writes, is one with whom students live. This teacher is open, spontaneous, authentic, fosters I-Thou relationships with students and also facilitates rather than tells. Such a teacher creates space for others to be by first creating his or her own space. To share the intimacy of one’s personal space, adds Denton, implies an invitation to come in. Denton also argues that neither teacher nor student can be conceived of separately without 45 destroying the existential interconnectedness, and he contends that the existentially real teacher is to be equated with the guru or charismatic leader. The authority of such a leader comes not by formal sanction but rather from those presently with him, so that such a leader is free to pierce the vanity of conventional wisdom, to attack the morals and customs of one's time as offering only the illusion of certainty and to lay claim to new knowledge and to different modes of expres sion. He is also free to challenge the authority of and the benefits to be gained from sanctioning bodies, and is likewise free from conventional criteria of accountability. Such a leader, in addition, speaks the language of pos sibility, asking not of one's history but of one's present commitments and future projects, and also understands the language of myth and dreams and establishes a new basis for human relationships. Teaching is by indirection, by the use of music, dance, images and allegories, by observing and enriching the student in his or her own world. By way of summary then, it is to be noted that although Dr. Denton admits that the existential philoso phers themselves have been relatively silent with respect to any definitive guides for action for teachers, adminis trators and other school personnel, he himself has, coming from an existential base, grappled with such issues as the 46 moral aims for education, the nature of teaching, the language and nature of education and certain character istics of what he considers to be the existentially real teacher. And within several of these areas he has, quite clearly, broken new ground. Exactly how his thought fits into the total mosaic with the writings of the other educational philosophers, however, will be dealt with later. For now, it seems important to note that his written contributions over the years have provided educators with new dimensions for viewing their own work as well as for aspiring toward more effectiveness in their profession. We shall now turn to an analysis of the writings of Maxine Greene. An Analysis of the Writings of Maxine Greene A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University, Dr. Greene received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University. A multi-disciplinary person in academe, Dr. Greene is currently the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been on the faculty since 1965 and was editor of Teachers College Record for five years. In 1973, she received the "Educator of the Year Award" from the Columbia University chapter of 47 Phi Delta Kappa. She has also taught at Lehigh University, where in 19 75 she was honored with a Doctorate of Humane Letters, the University of Illinois, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, the University of Hawaii, New York University and Montclair State College in New Jersey. A member of several professional organizations, Dr. Greene is a past president of the Philosophy of Educa tion Society and the American Educational Studies Associa tion and has held official positions with the John Dewey Society and the American Educational Research Association. A frequent consultant and widely published author, in 19 74 she received the Delta Gamma Kappa "Educational Book of the Year" award for Teacher as Stranger. In the twenty-six year period between 19 52 and 19 78, Dr. Greene has written or co-authored twenty-four separate pieces having to do with existentialism and its relationship to American public education. These selec tions include journal articles, papers delivered at professional meetings, several individual books and various chapters within books, and she relies for her views about and knowledge of existentialism on practically all of the major existential philosophers. After making a thorough analysis of the above written material then, it was determined that Dr. Greenefs thought could be conveniently placed within five primary categories, the first of which 48 has to do with existentialism itself, its weaknesses as well as its constructive values. The second category is the educational implications of existentialism. Third is Dr. Greene's opposition to behaviorism and her reasons for that position based on an existential viewpoint. The fourth category is the teacher's role and fifth is the importance of literature and "the aesthetic component" in general within the curriculum structure. As was the case with Dr. Denton, and as will be done for each of the remaining educational philosophers considered herein, every one of the foregoing five areas will now be analyzed in detail. Looking first to some aspects of the philosophy itself, Dr. Greene was able to isolate certain weaknesses of existentialism while still a student herself. She feels that these weaknesses are rooted mainly in the philosophy's hyper-individualism. The first weakness which she detects is that existentialism's stress on inwardness or subjectivity may drive the individual to morbid introspection and dubious self-analysis, leading to a kind of self-enclosed existence at the expense of an adequate and wholesome sense of community. Her position is that the individual can neither serve nor survive by withdrawing from the social situation. But she does, how ever, detect a problem in this regard, namely, the extent 49 to which the individual can become subjective and logically still maintain cohesive group relationships. A second shortcoming noted by Dr. Greene is, after making her determination that man is dependent, contingent and social, the existential rejection of all absolutes outside the self. And she also feels that existentialism exaggerates the loneliness or forlbrnness of the individual which inclines the individual toward despair and frustration. Balancing some of these negative effects, though, are several specific constructive values noted by Dr. Greene. The first of these is the philosophy*s stand against complacency and its demand for commitment, emanci pation and "wide-awakeness" on the part of each individ ual— the need, in other words, to transcend passivity. Another strong point of existentialism is its protest \ against sterile abstractions, pure logic and objective absolutes as well as its distrust of arid speculation and intellectualism. Existentialism is not so much concerned with scientific or rational solutions as with solutions deriving from the emotional, aesthetic and moral dimensions of the self. Emphasis is on responsibility and self creation. Also central to existential thought is the fact that above all the individual must not become a thing, must not be submerged in an abstract and stifling mass, for existentialism refuses to conceive man as an abstraction, 50 a category or an essence. In keeping with the pronounced future-centering of existentialism, the philosophy also mandates that each person must make his world intelligible by acting upon it, by using it, by inquiring into it in diverse ways, structuring it by means of language, not withstanding the fact, Greene writes, that even as the individual projects himself forward, he carries with him an awareness of brute existence, of "senselessness," which all arrangements of social life are devised to obscure. From these early thoughts about existentialism, Dr. Greene was able to draw certain educational implica tions from existentialism. And although she agrees with several of the other educational philosophers herein that the existentialists are not really concerned with the mechanics of schooling or education and consequently, have not addressed these issues, she claims nonetheless that all existential thinkers are preoccupied with education as the term refers to the multiple modes of becoming, of con fronting life situations, of engaging with others, of reflecting, forming, choosing, struggling to be. She notes, however, that as long as the traditional confidence of educators prevailed, that is their viewing evil and indifference as remediable, demanding only deliberate and gradual renewal and extended enlightenment rather than rebellion and despair, existentialism was for them 51 — i irrelevant to the educational concern. Isolating then several educational implications from existentialism, Dr. Greene first notes that responsibility for knowledge rests with the individual. The individual, she writes, originates and structures his own knowledge and any validity it possesses is finally due to him. She terms this "generative learning" and says, that it involves both freedom and responsibility by the learner. And although the individual is free to choose whatever memberships he wishes, whichever ones the student does select must not obliterate his sense of his own uniqueness and responsi bility; the human being, she contends, becomes himself by transcending the immediacies of social involvement. A second implication noted by Greene is that values are not apart from nor do they exist before action. We determine values, she says, by our free decisions, but always there is a kind of dread involved, a tendency to pull back and give way to inertia, to what is, to the status quo. As a third implication Dr. Greene finds the learner's "fundamental project" to be achievement of his full, human reality. The student must recognize that he alone is responsible for what he makes of himself ("dread ful freedom") and for creating meanings in a cosmos devoid of objective meanings. She stresses that there is no predetermined reality that dominates and controls. The 52 reality we inhabit, she says, is an interpreted reality, it presents itself to us as it does because we have learnec to understand it in standard ways. Therefore, she cau tions, we need to be wary about exceeding to what is officially defined, interpreted and named. One of the central teachings of existentialism then for education is the fact that man cannot depend on powers outside himself for the solution of his problems or for the fulfillment of his wants. The questioning student and teacher, Dr. Greene notes, must break with the ready made, with conventional wisdom. Learning, she writes,^-to be meaningful, must involve a "going beyond" by a learner, "open to the world," eager, indeed condemned, to give meaning to it. Significant learning begins when a self-aware individual reaches out for meanings in response to certain crucial questions of his own, and it advances as he attempts to articulate and make explicit what is involved in the birth of his own rationality. Highlighting this theme, she writes: . . . "The vital center," as we see it, is the point at which learning is treated as a conscious achievement, involving an engagement of the learner's own judgment and culminating in his own authentic sense-making, his achieved ability to order experience by means of principles he has consciously appropriated and put to work. It is the point at which the learner is seen to be constructing defensible semblances of the world as he knows it, using the conventions and norms made available by a teacher who respects 53 him and^his judgments. It is the point, in sum, at which both teacher and learner are conceived to be free agents: free to create themselves by means of thoughtful, goal-oriented action, and free to choose themselves in time. (1971, "The Aesthetic Component," p. 291) Viewing the watchwords of existentialism for education as doing, acting and choosing, Dr. Greene writes further: . . . Not only must he be aware of the conceptual capacities of individuals within his class, he must always recognize that learning is a mode of individual cognitive action. On a fundamental level, learning is self-directed, whether it culminates in mastery of a principle, reconstruction of some experience, or disclosure of an aspect of the world. It must result in some trans formation of outlook, some clearing up of a clouded horizon, some effecting of relationships. It must be evidenced in the way a student deals with a complexity, an obstacle; in the way he speaks out about what he has been considering; in the way he tackles successive tasks; in the way he is_. (19 73, Teacher as Stranger, p. 171) Another educational implication from existentialism as found by Dr. Greene is to consider the very process of learning to be a rebellion against those forces which abstract and depersonalize. But this does not imply, she warns, rejection of cognitive actions, since cognitive learnings are existentially significant and the teacher must help students learn how to think, discover, probe and clarify what knowing really means, what knowledge is dependable and what is not, what the functions of reason are, what role intuition plays and what credence can be granted to common sense. She does note, however, that the 54 schools themselves are often oppressive and dominating since they can absorb those within them and thereby serve to submerge consciousness. Finally, she writes, it is in the interest of both young people and democracy for the learner to experience early in life concern, mutuality and care, for a learning community must also be a feeling community. Focusing attention at this point on the third major area of Dr. Greene*s thought, and consistent with her existential preferences, it is noted that she is a strong opponent of behaviorism. How do we hold individuals responsible if we cannot assume in particular cases that they did what they did with the sense that they could have done otherwise, she asks? To hold an individual responsi ble, she claims, is to hold high expectations for him, to suggest that he is not responsible, that he is a mere victim of forces which he cannot conceivably control, is to acquiesce in his deprivation and thereby, in her view, to acknowledge defeat. Every time someone addresses himself to other people, she says, and tries to arouse them to make choices, he is dissenting from behaviorism. Now Greene does not deny causation nor the limits which contain individual possibilities, for she acknowledges that causes may well exist, but she says, however, that they do not in every case compel. And she stresses that 55 is. never easy to admit one's/full freedom, to defy either fate or determinism and give up the excuses that each one of these provides. Notwithstanding the above, Greene admits though that the question of freedom within an educational context is not an easy one to answer: The troubling question of how much freedom to grant young people still remains open. For one thing, there is the matter of the age of the students involved. If, indeed, freedom means (as it does in the simplest sense) an absence of restraint, the teacher of preschool children must confront the issue differently than does the teacher of persons old enough to decide for themselves. (19 73, Teacher as Stranger, pp. 287-288) The fourth major^classification deduced from Greene's writings is the teacher's role within an existen tial framework of education. First of all, Greene notes that the existential teacher should encourage students to emphasize their present, individual experience, develop self-reliance within this situation and have their own convictions. Speaking directly to this point, she writes: . . . The teacher's concern must be for the way in which each student chooses his relation ship with the various situations which arise; for if knowing is conceived as a relationship with a variety of concrete situations, the student will not be likely to take refuge in the propositions of "pure" reason and dis embodied intellect. As seeker, as knower, he will be participant. He will construct orders and define meanings as he chooses to do so, as he acts upon and challenges his world. (1967, pp. 162—163) Greene also states that the teacher must assume the potency 56 of questions hopeless of rational solution and endeavor to bring such questions to the surface of consciousness. To recognize that there are no cognitive certainties, no verifiable answers to our most urgent questions, she writes, is to begin shaping a new vision of life. Con sistent with this theme, she says: Neither "disinterested contemplation," in any case, nor scientific investigation can provide a man with the certitude, the permanence he yearns for to relieve'-his doubts and anxieties. Only as he accepts his concrete life situation and works to appropriate the truth of it can he attain some sustaining sense of his own reality. He lives his life in a public world that is "given," tangible, located in time; and he must also come to know that world in its multiple dimensions. He will come to know, however, only if he asks his own questions; and he will only ask his own questions if be becomes aware of his own existence and its temporality, its "historicity." (196 7, p. 73) Greene also cautions that the teacher and student must be present to one another and that the teacher must open himself to students in order to relate to them as free and striving beings. Interest must be focused upon their manifold possibilities rather than what is common to all of them. And the teacher, above all, ought never act on the presumption that man's end is in his beginning. Here Greene writes: The teacher charged with such a responsi bility cannot function adequately if he relies upon precedent, habit, or the dicta of authority. 57 He must engage himself fully in his classroom life so that he can deal with each student as an individual with his own peculiar structure of cognitive capabilities. He must be ready to take the risk of making decisions without support and, frequently, without hope of justifying them in any final sense. At the very least, he must make decisions authenti cally and sincerely; he must take responsibility for every act which he performs. Confronting his own freedom, his own need to choose, he is bound to suffer from dis quietude. Engaged as he must be, he is bound to move into himself from time to time— exploring his own consciousness of what it is to choose, to act, to be. Whether fully aware of it or not, he is bound,to be drawn to some existen tial mode of thinking, if only because of the work he is doing in the indifferent world. (1967, p. 4) Thus, the obligation imposed on the teacher is to be patient enough to permit deliberation and decision by each of those he or she is trying to help. "The way" is never to be prescribed for the student, says Greene. The good teacher becomes an occasion for permitting a child to decide consciously on freedom and becoming. Greene acknowledges, however, that effectiveness and authenticity depend to some degree upon the nature of the teacher's personal commitment, with the crucial question being how can one act on his commitment and at once set others' free to be? She also writes that we can define no implications for behavior in general from an encounter with existen tialism since the very notion of doctrine is excluded by the existential view. 58 Quite specifically, Greene asks teachers simply to take responsibility for what happens in their individual classrooms and to remain in charge, and she opposes treating teaching and learning merely as problems to which there are technological solutions. In this regard, she seeks a certain complimentarity of the "person-centered" perspective and the machine model, and she says that both are required for a sufficient explanation of teaching and learning although they are mutually exclusive if applied simultaneously. With respect to this person-centered perspective, Greene asks that we think of curriculum in terms of open encounters between persons and the subject matters they may consciously appropriate in the course of their initiation into the existing public world, and she adds: What then has changed? What accounts for the rise of interest in existential thinking— for the surprising tendency of many educators to think existentially themselves? It may be that many of those who perceive significance in this point of view are reading in what they themselves have always believed. But it seems also to be the case that numerous teachers in America- have been feeling the ancestral con fidence— in mind, in individual potency— somehow drain away. They have faced apathy and withdrawal in their classrooms; they have felt the disenchantment of children who cannot "believe." They have been asked to govern their curriculum planning with considerations of "national policy" rather than through consulta tion of the requirements of the individual child. They have administered countless tests; they have grouped and classified in ever more elaborate 59 categories. They have become aware of moral ambiguities and the rejection of traditional codes. (1967, p. 6) Within the person-centered perspective,then, the student must recreate or generate the materials of the curriculum in terms of his own consciousness. He must, in other words, lend the curriculum his life. If curriculum' is seen as external to the search for meaning, it becomes both an alien and an alienating force. As Greene declares: . . . Knowing, as we have described it, is participant and principled action undertaken in response either to problematic situations or to an "everyday reality" that must be imaginatively reconceived. Subject matter organized into disciplines is a deliberate selection of materials, which are ordered and systematized for the sake of providing perspectives on what is humanly known. There is nothing sacrosanct about them. They are human devices for clearing up obscurities, for responding to questions urgently posed at certain moments in history. As in the case of physics, economics, and history, the concepts composing them are open to revision as new things are discovered, new questions attended to. (1973, Teacher as Stranger, p. 174) We must, in other words, view curriculum in terms of pos sibility, as a source of transforming what exists: If persons are not to be understood in terms of some common "essence" or in the light of some abstraction like "humanity" or "man," they must be viewed as existent beings in volved in creating themselves. And since nothing external can give continuity to his existence each single person must give himself reality by making critical choices in all the situations of his life, committing himself to what he chooses, and renewing himself by making 60 further choices— in his freedom, without guidance or guarantee. This is the- way he comes to be a full person, an identity. It is the way he authenticates himself as an individual. Education, therefore, must provide opportunities for him to make the decisions which give him continuity as an existing individual. The skills, the subject matters which are taught, must be presented as pos sibilities which each individual can appropriate for himself as he chooses himself, as he creates himself as a reflective being. (1967, p. 96) Curriculum, Greene continues, may be conceived as a series of occasions for the individual to shape new perspectives, constitute new orders and effect relations among the diverse realities in which he lives. There are certain works of art plus certain works in history, philosophy and psychology deliberately created to move people to critical awareness, a sense of moral agency and a conscious engage ment with the world. These, writes Greene, go beyond ordinary notions of "relevance" and ought, under the rubric of the "arts and humanities," to be central to any curriculum. Other characteristics of the person-centered per spective, from Greene1s viewpoint, include the fact that the teacher can take intentions and purposes into account and will be able to confront the significance of selective perception. The teacher, however, will not be able to objectify subject matter nor quantify, validate or even effectively test. Also, a limited ability to predict will 61 result and finally, all sorts of disturbances and distrac tions will stand in the way of the scientific approach. In terms of the usefulness of the machine model, Greene states that such a model should be used only to obtain the specific ends which the teacher consciously and clearly defines himself. Another goal of the existential teacher, writes Greene, is to try and stop thinking of his job as mainly work of socialization or adjustment but rather primarily as a process of enabling students to pursue meanings, to act imaginatively and mindfully according to principles of rules freely and consciously chosen. Here she advises: Somehow each person in a classroom must be enlisted and "stirred up" as a person engaged in an ongoing dialogue. The emphasis must be placed on what happens between those concerned with teaching and learning, on the kind of lesson "which develops in mutual surprises" rather than transmitting what the teacher has already "found." This means an emphasis upon the discoveries which take place through and by means of dialogue and shared endeavor. Only so can isolation be avoided in the busy, even the "ungraded," classroom; only so can the existing person be conceived as prior to the group. (1967, p. 141) Dealing now with a specific example, Greene feels that the English teacher might concentrate on both making works of art available to the young as well as functioning as a good critic. She defines the latter as a person who tries to help you see what he saw, but not so you will see 62 the same way he sees. Our hypothetical English teacher then, she says, should disclose and articulate nuances of expression, turns of phrases, uses of imagery and possi bilities of meaning emerging from unobserved relationships within the work in order to lead the reader into the work but so as to leave its possession and appreciation to him. With reference to some of the problems the exis tential, serious teacher might anticipate, Dr. Greene views such a teacher as being in constant tension, unable to tell students how to invent or choose themselves, while at the same time knowing that he must also take deliberate action to enable diverse students to learn how to learn. In her own words: A kind of heroism is demanded of the principled teacher eager to initiate his students into principled decision making and a rational way of life. What they decide is always in question. There are no guarantees that they will be "good” or humane people. The teacher must acknowledge that he can only deal justly with individuals he hopes will learn how to learn. (1973, Teacher as Stranger, p. 277) Directing her attention again to this point, she- continues: . . . If his commitment is to self disclosure and free choosing, the tension is likely to be greatest. Something like a dialectical struggle will be under way as the teacher attempts to reconcile his commit ments with his desire for his students to • choose themselves. He must guide, stimulate, and challenge intentional ignorance wherever he perceives it; but at the same time, he must feel the most tender regard for each person's 63 being— for each person's privacy, inner time. The existential teacher, "nondirective" as he may appear to be, cannot permit floundering, careless thinking, or flaccidity anymore than can the most "directive" classroom authorities. Curiosity, wonder, the sense of problem: these may be taken as starting points here as in any other teaching situation. There must be a similar awareness of the way rationality con tributes to freedom, of the way freedom of mind and widening perspectives enrich the life-world and expand the scope of choice. The existential teacher is simply more attuned than others to the implicit threat of coersion in a classroom situa tion. He, far more than others, must confront, his freedom along with the alien freedoms of his students; and because he is bound to attend to so much more than performance, speech, and observable instances of mastery, he can never be sure of what he or they achieve. (1973, Teacher as Stranger, p. 2 87) Although Dr. Greene cites research showing that children learn particularly well when older children take leadership in heterogeneous groups, she nevertheless says that said deliberate action may in fact involve engineering or behavior control such as grouping or categorizing in classroom situations. Yet, she is not unmindful of the dangers inherent in such action: . . . Categorizing becomes damaging, however, when the teacher perceives an in dividual only by means of the abstract term selected for categorizing him. It becomes damaging, too, when the teacher bases his expectations on a child's membership in a category instead of on what he has directly observed. This mode of perception is precisely what imposes invisibility on so many persons; .... (1973, Teacher as Stranger, p. 81) Somewhat uncharacteristically, though, Greene asserts that 64 even in the open classroom, the teacher may have to resort to compulsion or to some Skinnerian technique of rein forcing through reward. Looking next to the idea of responsibility, Dr. Greene writes that no matter how committed the teacher is to self-determination and free choice, he must hold him self accountable to his pupils, their parents and the community. She sees accountability, however, in terms of personal responsibility, and asks that those in education freely identify themselves as volunteers against in humanity. In so doing, she requests such volunteers to do several things. First, refuse the managerial construct and the factory metaphor. Second, reject the notion that students are raw material to be processed to meet market demands. And finally, critically question the conception of learning as a "product" and, in many respects, the idea of "performance," especially when behavioristically con ceived. Concern, she stresses, should be for growth, development and reflectiveness, not for outcomes nor for selecting specific skills as evidences of successful learning since only what is measurable is likely to be selected. Applying this latter concept to art, for example, Dr. Greene writes: Nothing teachers do can be counted upon to institute awareness of or experience with a work in a particular individual; there can 65 never be assurance or guarantee. . . . Partly for this reason, teaching in the fields of art can never be reduced to a set of predetermined competencies. Nor can the encounters or ex periences we hope to make possible be finally defined in terms of specified behaviors. There is always a dimension of the problematic; there is always a mode of questioning below the surfaces, in the silences. (1978, p. 200) Considering at this point yet some other aspects of the teacher*s role within an existential framework, Dr. Greene envisions the self-aware, wide-awake teacher as being one who strives for a type of knowing called praxis and who refuses to take the social cultural matrix for granted as a given. She defines praxis as a particular type of cognitive action which involves problem posing, problem solving and the transcending or surpassing of what is. And she writes in this regard: . . . the individual, in our case the student, will only be in a position to learn when he is committed to act upon his world. If he is content to admire it or simply accept it as given, if he is incapable of breaking with egocentrism, he will remain alienated from himself and his own possibilities; he will wander lost and victimized upon the road; he will be unable to learn. He may be conditioned; he may be trained. He may even have some rote memory of certain elements of the curriculum; but no matter how well devised is that curriculum, no matter how well adapted to the stages of his growth, learning (as disclosure, as generating structures, as engendering meanings, as achieving mastery) will not occur. (December 1971, p. 266) Within this idea of praxis then, there is no doubt that the crucial concern is for self-awareness and for critical 66 cognitive action for the sake of gaining perspective on personal life and for remaking the social domain. And Dr. Greene admits that there is this implicitly revolutionary meaning. She writes, however: There must be an unveiling and a gradual disclosure of inner and outer horizons if learners are to be enabled to conceive such projects and take action to carry them out. Working in a dialogical relation with students, the teacher must try to move himself and them to ask the kinds of worthwhile questions that lead to disclosure and engage individuals in praxis. These are the kinds of questions that enable learners to perceive their own realities from many vantage points. They are the kinds of questions that enable them to identify lacks in their life situations and to move toward repair and transcendence. It is out of such perceptions, I believe, that cognitive action arises. It is against the background of such questioning that individuals reach out to constitute meaning in their lives. (1974, "Cognition, Consciousness, and Curriculum," p. 79) Focal to the above approach, Dr. Greene feels, is a conception of human consciousness which thrusts toward and not away from the common world. She therefore dis agrees with those who seem to be saying that the only way to escape manipulation is through retreat into private sensibility or into the silences of the secret self. Carrying on with this theme, she writes: . . . few existentialists have set forth coherent statements on the role of their commitment in the schools. Nevertheless, there are clues in what has been said about the person, truth, and engagement, clues which can be followed in order to discover 67 the prescriptive element in these attitudes. Where there is prescriptiveness, there is always an implicit concern for teaching, for making commitment work in growth. I think we must begin with the notion of existence as emergence, self-transcendence, and assume that the existentialist concern in the classroom can only be with the fulfill ment of the individual in his full reality, of the person in his world. For all his concern for inwardness and his preoccupation with personal isolation, the existentialist recognizes that the living person must be understood in the context of his situation at a particular place and time. The problems he has are problems conditioned by the tensions of his culture and the alternatives offered in occasions of choice. The 20th century teacher must be cognizant of the universal aspects of man's predicament: his longings for support and recognition; his anticipations of transiency, loss, and death; and he must also take into account the fragmentation, multiplicity, and flux within societies today. The chief difference between the existen tialist emphasis in education and that of the modern progressive educator lies, most probably, in the approach to the social dimension of human life. The existentialist, as has been said, sees man-in-his—world; but he places his stress on the individual in his personal commit ment, in his lonely authenticity. The progressive, like many other modern educators, conceives man as a social being who must find his fulfillments through and by means of shared experience. To the existentialist, such fulfillments are finite, limited, and, most significantly, transient. "Situation" means, to him, not solely the social situation, no matter how intense or extensive, but the human situation in the indifferent universe, the situation of man’s freedom in all its pathos, with all its anguished longings. The danger appears to be that such a preoccupa tion may lead to detachment,,isolation, even, in the last analysis, irresponsibility. This would be a contradiction of the existentialist's core belief; but the danger exists and may continue to until the existentialist thinkers come to terms with social psychology and the other 68 sciences of man. (1961, pp. 7-8) Being opposed to fixed time schemes which, she claims, make it impossible to create patterns of meaning in inner time, Greene next raises the issue as to how the teacher should adjust the demands of the clock or schedule to the rhythms of a child's inner time. Professor Greene also feels it is incumbent on the teacher to act as a moral agent. The moral life, she writes, can best be characterized as a life of reflective ness and care, a life of the kind of wide-awakeness associated with full attention to life and to its require ments. Moving forward in this mode, Dr. Greene says that teachers must continue to be personally involved in sense- making efforts. Teachers, she says, who themselves are submerged, who feel in some sense "finished," can hardly move students to critical questioning or to learning how to learn, and she stresses the connection between wide- awakeness, cognitive clarity and existential concern. In this context, she writes: The teacher is frequently addressed as if he had no life of his own, no body, and no inwardness. Lecturers seem to presuppose a "man within man" when they describe a good teacher as infinitely controlled and accom modating, technically efficient, impervious to moods. They are likely to define him by the role he is expected to play in a classroom, with all his loose ends gathered up and all his doubts resolved. The numerous realities in which he exists as a living person are overlooked. 69 His personal biography is overlooked; so are the many ways in which he expresses his private self in language, the horizons he perceives, the perspectives through which he looks on the world. Our concern throughout this book has been to make that person visible to himself. If the teacher agrees to submerge himself into the system, if he consents to being defined by others* views of what he is supposed to be, he gives up his freedom ! , to see, to understand, and to signify" for himself. If he is immersed and impermeable, he can hardly stir others to define themselves as individuals. If, on the other hand, he is willing to take the view of the homecomer and create a new perspective on what he has habitually considered real, his teaching may become the project of a person vitally open to his students and the world. Then he will be in a position to define himself as "admira ble" in Merleau-Ponty1s sense. He will be continuously engaged in interpreting a reality forever new; he will feel more alive than he ever has before. Seeking the communicative gesture and the expressive word, such a teacher will try con sciously to move among and reflect together with his students. Coexisting with them, opening up perspectival possibilities along with them, he and they may journey toward some important truths as the days go on. (1973, Teacher as Stranger, pp. 269-270) In conclusion to this part then, Dr. Greene sees the teaching problem as threefold which involves first, equipping young people with the ability to identify alternatives and to see possibilities in the situations they confront. Specifically: . . . Education, suggests the existen tialist, may make people aware of what the yearning means by helping them name and feel the edge of it. Perhaps only a confrontation of such longing can make existentialist freedom 70 possible, the freedom to choose oneself, to engage oneself with others, to commit oneself to values, to ideals that will make men in some sense "irreplaceable." It would seem that this is also the way of creating meaning in an objectively meaningless world. If a person is helped to understand himself as a living being, to penetrate the conflicts un avoidable in his short and tragic life, he may, at last, be able to construct goals, to pursue them, and to discover significance on the brink, in a universe that does not care. (1961, p. 8) The second item which Dr. Greene identifies in the teaching problem is that of teaching principles, possible perspec tives by means of which those situations referred to above can be assessed and appraised, as well as the norms governing particular human communities. Third, the teacher must also enable students to make decisions of principle, to reflect, articulate and take decisive actions in good faith. Addressing this latter problem, Dr. Greene writes: I believe that the feeling of unrest is warranted in our society, that tension ought to be nurtured, not reduced. I believe that many things are unjust and inhumane in the world we have made, and that rebellion against injustice and inhumanity is justified. For me, the wrongs have mainly to do with the violation of personality and the denial of dignity, with various modes of segregation, with the absence of worthy causes to arouse fidelity and trust. And I think the teacher must confront all this and affirm it-— and go from there to create himself as a teacher, doing a job of work he has defined and understands. What we can do best is to combat nihilism in the way suggested by Camus. We can help young people discover for themselves the principles which may help them order their world. We can help them discover the multiple perspectives on experience offered by the 71 disciplines and introduce them to the pas sionate concern human beings feel when they do it well. We can humanize, if we dare— freeing young people for self-affirmation as persons who are potent after all, potent because they can create form and thereby hold nothingness off. (Winter 1968, p. 16) We shall now turn to the last of the five major themes addressed by Dr. Greene in her writings, namely, the place of literature in the curriculum and the "aesthetic component" in general. The concentration on literature rather than on other arts, writes Dr. Greene, shows the existentialist's predilection for communicating indirectly and for stressing that metaphor and image play a crucial role in man's efforts to come in contact with his full reality. Literature, in other words, may have an emancipatory function for people whose selves have become attenuated, who have forgotten the function of the "I." According to Greene, the existentialist feels he is communicating when he succeeds in doing two things: first, engaging the reader's subjectivity in such a way as to move him to see the world anew and secondly, turning the reader back upon himself in self-confrontation and identi fication, making him aware of his own consciousness and of that which is spontaneous and authentic in his being. The existentialist also wants to evoke an experience of disquietude in the reader, and commenting specifically on this point, Professor Greene writes: 72 The existential teacher recognizes that he cannot tell another person how to live; nor can he demand that his students exercise their will and become, in their own way, volunteers. But he can set up classroom situations that make it difficult to maintain "peace of mind." He may use literature and the arts; he may focus on crisis situations— such as a Peace Moratorium; he may engage students in concrete questioning and con frontation; he may urge them to take stands. The task will not be easy for such a teacher, anymore than it will for his students because they are forever condemned to the freedom that requires them to create themselves over and over without a sense of comforting constraint or a priori norm. (197 3, Teacher as Stranger, pp. 281-282) Literary themes, Greene continues, particularly those of crisis and the kinds of dislocations which cause nausea and despair, are likely to focus on man's present condition and on a revelation of man's present possibil ities in the situations of our day. This itself is beneficial she says in that a person is most fully himself when aware of the limits of possibility. An encounter with a literary work, therefore, can at once liberate and clarify. In addition, Dr. Greene tells us that the artist in the existential view presents rather than represents since a representation is forever linked to that which is copied. Works of literary art then are really open pos sibilities, open questions, and should be treated as such in the classroom. The important thing about them ought not to be the subject or status of the work, but rather 73 its capacity to arouse. And last, we are reminded that an experience with literature must begin and end in private possession. With reference now to the aesthetic component in general, Dr. Greene states: There are works of art, there are certain works in history, philosophy, and psychology, that were deliberately created to move people to critical awareness, to a sense of moral agency, and to a conscious engagement with the world. As I see it, they ought— under the rubric of the "arts and humanities"— to be central to any curriculum that is constructed today. (1978, p. 162) She also notes that all children, even very young ones, are capable of responding to works of art, and she sees a growing realization that early experiences with art are in an important sense foundational to the later development of aesthetic experience. Directing attention to some specific uses for the aesthetic component, Greene notes first that it will confront the human being with the consciousness of his own life situation. Secondly, it will provide occasions for a person to impose order upon the chaotic materials of his experience, will allow the individual to find his own voice in other words. Next, it will disclose present insufficiencies to the conscious ness and it may also enable the individual to perceive personal possibility, the refusal of which produces guilt. But there are, however, certain caveats. First, a belief 74 that the arts humanize by moving men somehow upward, closer to purity, to form or to the ideal. Second, seeing art as merely a mirroring or a reflection. And next, the danger in the teacher confusing what he or she is doing with the artist1s expressive act. Greene also claims that the only way of actual izing the work of art is by engaging with it emotively, sensually and cognitively with one1s whole self, and she writes that "noncognitive" and "affective awareness" alone are not sufficient for effective functioning. It is important, she warns, when we consider integration and wholeness, to break with such notions as those that split the cognitive from the emotional, the rational from the affective capacities. Another point made by Dr. Greene is that the aesthetic component will not be significant in an individual's life or education if "good taste" is simply imposed on him; the student and the teacher must be engaged together in sense making. A painting, play, film or piece of music must be grasped by some individual consciousness, grasped imaginatively if it is to function as art. Finally, notes Dr. Greene, there is widespread agreement that creative activity is a continuation of childhood play, and she would like to see explorations of media taking place under the rubric of play. Having now examined in considerable detail the 75 writings of Maxine Greene, we note her heavy emphasis on the role of the teacher and her delineation of numerous specific characteristics which would be necessary within the existential framework. Also significant is Dr. Greene's reliance on literature and other art forms in order to "turn the student back on himself." More regarding this important area will be considered later in this chapter. At this point, though, we direct our attention to the work of Professor George Kneller. An Analysis of the Writings of George Kneller A graduate in the field of modern languages from Clark University, Dr. Kneller received his M.A. in Educa tion from London University and the Doctor of Philosophy in Education from Yale. Recently retired as Professor of Education, the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Kneller has also held the positions of Assistant Professor of Education at Yale and visiting Professor of Education at London University. The eleven selections of Professor Kneller to be analyzed herein span the thirteen year period between 195 8 and 19 71, and include within their number his early effort, Existentialism and Education (1958), as well as chapters and introductory material in other books plus 76 journal articles. As was done with the other educational philosophers whose works have been examined, Dr. Kneller1s writings on existentialism and education may be divided into five primary areas. First, some broad characteris tics of existentialism, based primarily on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as some problems inherent within the philosophy. Secondly, existentialism and education in general. Third, some considerations regarding the knower and the known. Fourth, curriculum. And fifth, the role of the teacher. What does Dr. Kneller see as some general charac teristics of and problems associated with existentialism? First, he notes, existentialism is not a systematic body of thought which can be approached from the outside since the philosophy denies universals, absolutes and philosoph ical categories. Rather, existentialism is an act of philosophizing from the actor's standpoint in which "exis tence precedes essence" is the sole unifying principle. Commenting directly on this point, he writes: . . . Perhaps the most useful definition of what is meant by "existence precedes essence" is found in Sartre: What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears 'on the scene, and, only afterwards defines himself. If man, as the existentialist sees him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. . . . Not only is man what he conceives himself to 77 be, but he is also what he Wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing other than what he makes himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. It is what is called "subjectivity."4 (1958, p. 3) Existentialism then, according to Kneller, is characterized first by anguished introspection, resonant despair and defiant affirmation. Secondly, he sees it as a dynamic, "open-ended" view of the universe, postulating reality as a process of becoming rather than a state of being. And he also views the existentialists as being among the first to grasp the evil portent of both the reduction of man to a mere item and rejection of any programs that are not able to be tested with "the light of reason" or "the tools of science." The existentialists, according to Kneller, believe it is the task of the philos opher to expose those twentieth century conditions which dehumanize man by undermining his freedom. Some of these conditions include exploitation by the mass media, the subordination of the individual to machines or to an economic system as well as the tyranny of the majority in the democratic process and of the group in social affairs. Dr. Kneller also sees several concerns being rooted deeply within the existential tradition. First, there is the attempt to find a way toward morality and creative living which will have its source in the human ___________________________________________ 78 situation but will reshape it in such a way so as to allow the greatest, freest and most genuine expression of the individual, human personality. Next, the existentialist is concerned to have man learn to cope with the inevitable tragedy and perplexity of life as an autonomous person ality, to have him penetrate the marrow of life and in volve himself directly with reality. Finally, the existentialist desires man to seek an individual and personal "freedom for" self-determination and assertion in place of mass freedoms which only result in mass satisfaction, mass culture and mass forms of social adaptation. With respect now to existence and freedom, Kneller regards the existential position to be that man does not possess existence and freedom, he is^ his existence and freedom. Existence, in other words, is pro-jection, and with every passing moment it becomes more (or less) than it is. While man may join the group, Kneller says, if he ever succeeds in understanding himself or his place in the group, he is no longer free, he can no longer become, he is the victim of his own determinism. Man than is always what he is yet to be. Objects exist, only the individual can become. And this terrible responsibility of freedom is the root of existential "anxiety." Kneller also sees the existentialist rejecting the distinction 79 between subject and object. Existential philosophizing does not lie in intellectual but in experiential knowledge. It is incumbent upon man, Kneller writes, to accept re sponsibility for developing his own being. Values do not exist apart from the freely chosen acts of man. Kneller also claims that by itself, the universe is without meaning or purpose— the purposes we think we detect in the universe are nothing but a projection of our own desire for order. In addition to these general characteristics of existentialism, Professor Kneller also writes about three problems or weaknesses he sees inherent in the philosophy. The first of these is its introversion and its subjec tivism. Secondly, he notes that existentialism flourishes primarily in a cultural milieu where ideologies have fallen apart. He notes as a final problem the negative existen tial attitude toward scientific inquiry. The second major category into which Professor Kneller's works appear to be divided is existentialism and education in general. Dr. Kneller prefaces his many remarks in this area with an acknowledgment that although the existentialists are vitally interested in education as the general foundation of human progress, they do not carry their doctrine into practical theory or policy for school behavior. Thus, he says, it is the educational 80 philosopher who himself must establish the relation between existentialism and formal education. Kneller sees this as a great opportunity, however, but does admit a certain apprehension regarding the practicality of making this connection with respect to America*s vast system of public schooling. Notwithstanding the many difficulties, though, Kneller feels the attempt is well worth the effort because he believes that existentialism contains a refreshingly different approach to education and one which presents a powerful attack against the two most insidious enemies currently facing our educational system and whole society, social conformity and the mechanization and systematiza tion of man by science, philosophy and religion. An existential education, Kneller says, starts as early as the child wants to know himself. And the existentialists delve deep into the unconscious, irrational elements of human nature with which education must be concerned. Next, Kneller addresses the situation of the individual and the group within the school setting, and he writes that the existential view regards educational collectivism to have reached a crisis stage in modern public education. The problem, he says, is intensified by psychological theories which stress freedom of expression as the foundation of stable, emotional development, yet which, at the same time, place a premium on techniques 81 of social adaptation and engineering. He feels it is imperative, therefore, to find ways in which the demands of social conformity may be reconciled with the intrinsic natural diversity in human beings. In school, the student must not be subjected to group processes, in the belief that group learning is superior to individual effort. Nor must he be assigned arbitrarily to team research in the hope of making him more socially acceptable. As Kneller writes in this regard: On the other hand, we should be equally foolish to embrace the kind of "cooperation" that for so many years progressivism has hawked about this land. Here the student cooperates in the name of efficiency, because things "get done" better this way— or so we are told. But in making efficiency the goal of group endeavor, progressivism subordinates the development of the child's possibilities to the attainment of a communal goal. I have no time for groups of this kind, whose capacity for good pales into insignificance beside the harm they do. Their brittle surface familiarity prevents the at tainment of true intimacy, and an insidious "togetherness" conceals the absence of genuine fellowship. (1961, p. 433) In addition, he says, existentialists condemn the lowering of standards brought about by universal education and contemporary existentialists insist that equality of educational opportunity should not be used as an excuse for educating all children at the same rate and in the s ame way. Kneller asserts that the student should recognize 82 the inevitability of periods of intense frustration and loneliness and that he must, therefore, cultivate self- reliance as a key character trait. Kneller also believes that within an existential context, education must wrestle with issues which heretofore have been largely neglected. First, man must face up to the dread of death and the actual negation of human life. In realizing the imminence of death, Kneller argues, man affirms life and the authenticity of existence. As he says: For the teacher in the classroom the implications are delicate indeed. On the one hand he must stress the values of life; on the other, the vital function of death. The problem becomes all the more complicated when we realize that for youth, death is really a paradox in time and place. As a natural phenomenon, it dwells too far in the future to be of serious momentary consideration; as an ever-present lure to live life to its full, it is accepted by many as the price one may have to pay for extracting the last measure of life's delight. Some youth, too, like to flirt with death— to conquer it, so to speak— and hence, laugh in derision at its seeming impotence. To say that the teacher must incorporate these very real but delicate matters into his teachings is to demand that he revise his entire understanding of the life-death re lationship. (1958, p. Ill) Some other issues which Kneller feels education must grapple with include (1) the meaning of guilt to the guilty, (2) how one can realize his authentic personality in freedom without simultaneously depriving another of his freedom and finally, (3) the constructive function of 83 personal anxiety in a world of anxiety. In addition, Kneller sees the existentialist demanding education con centrate on the freedom of the total inner being, includ ing, as Sartre has advised, the acceptance of facts and data only insofar as they have significance for the individual. Turning to another area, Kneller advises that an education for perfectability, happiness and/or adjustment is no education at all, but is really only an irresponsible indulgence in unreality and human deception. To live authentically, he says, is to carve out life for oneself, not to be molded into it. Expanding on this theme, he writes: Life is compounded of growth and collapse, of joy and tragedy. For most men it contains a magnificent element of risk— the invitation to life or the lure to destruction. "Education for happiness" is a dangerous doctrine. Why teach such delusion? There is no happiness without pain, no ecstasy without suffering. Have the great creations of human history arisen from men in happiness? Or from men of uneasy mind— yearning for fulfillment? Educa tion for an age of security? For personal contentment? How illusory! For there always will be crying . . . so long as man needs fulfillment and yearns to comprehend the un known. Thus man must know values, whether religious or moral, on their historic and experimental basis; and education*s moral duty is to ensure that they are known in all their bitter sordidness as well as in their sweetest essence . . . in the student*s own way and on the individual*s own terms. (1958, p. 84) 84 Commenting only briefly about the Socratic approach being favored within the existential context, Kneller summarizes his feelings concerning existentialism and education by noting that the uncompromising affirmation of authentic freedom and individual uniqueness is the strong message of existentialism for the philosophy of education today. And although the school must encourage free and creative individuality, not "adjustment" or the insidious pressure to conform, it is really in the home that the child finds the proper soil for cultivation of the au thentic, independent self. He urges, consequently, that the home be a greater educational force than it is at present. In fact, he sees the school of today as being all too often at best a benevolent, well-meaning concen tration camp. Capsulizing his views with respect to this latter point, he writes: Like Marcel, I believe that, in its present form, the school should be abolished. I would preserve a few of the facilities of the school— the library, the assembly hall, the gymnasium, the playing field— but as facilities only. Young people could use these for studying and for group activities, such as games, play acting, and musical performances. Instead of going to school for an education, the young person would go to a teacher. Student and teacher would meet in the teacher’s home, or in the student’s, or, if appropriate, on location. Sometimes the student would come alone, and sometimes with friends. I believe that under this arrangement the student would accomplish much more and in much shorter time than he does now. For the 85 teacher would meet the student where he individually i£. (1971, Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, p. 84) Having now focused attention on Kneller1s views regarding existentialism and education in general, we turn to more specialized concerns, namely, the knower and the known, curriculum and the role of the teacher. Under the first heading, Professor Kneller tells us that objective, systematized knowledge can only be hypothetical, never decisive, for there is no pretense by the existentialist to disinterested knowledge. Instead, Kneller says, the existential position is for personal appropriation of knowledge whereby the integrity of the subject matter is actually destroyed; the human being is seen to be above knowledge, above reason and above the school itself. Specifically, he writes: The existentialist epistemology (if such it may be termed!) assumes that the individual is responsible for his own knowledge. Existen tialist knowledge is "intuitive." It is "human." It originates in, and is composed of, what exists in the individual's consciousness and feelings as a result of his experiences and the projects he adopts in the course of his life. Likewise, the validity of knowledge is determined by its value to the individual. The teacher therefore should not limit himself to rational generaliza tions but should cultivate in himself the awareness that all human situations are different? these situations should be analyzed in terms of their irrational as well as rational components. (1958, p. 59) And in amplifying this position, Kneller continues: 86 But the teacher*s task is not simply to stimulate latent originality. He must also encourage the student to commit himself to his work, to reflect on each item of knowledge until it is of importance to him personally. This is not an assertion about the nature of truth but about the nature of learning. The validity and importance of a geometric theorem or an event in history are not affected by the attitude of schools toward them, _ What are affected are their truth and importance for him. Knowledge is not more important than man, but less so, serving his foremost end, which is the search for authenticity. (1962, p. 300) Dr. Kneller also notes that scientific inquiry seeks to eliminate as many variables and as much subjectivity as possible, and in so doing it cannot help but depersonalize the individual and disregard his precious uniqueness. The existential way, on the other hand, is one of appropria tion within the depths of the individual's subjective processes, since, he says, the existentialists prefer solutions originating in the aesthetic, moral and emotional self, the affective side of man. Here there are no norms and science is considered a tool, not a determinant. Finally, Dr. Kneller adds, the student is not conditioned by his past but rather is oriented to the future into which he thrusts his every choice. As such, the student should be urged to involve himself intellectually and emotionally in whatever he studies. Regarding the nature of the curriculum within an existential framework, Dr. Kneller believes that the 87 curriculum is not valuable in its own right and that no subject is more important in itself than any other. The humanities would, however, he says, be given a central place, not simply for purposes of analysis or appreciation, but also as visible evidence of the agony, suffering and delight which go into real creativity and genuine exis^ tence. Problem solving will be acceptable only if the problem, rather than being socially oriented, originates in the life of the one who must appropriate the solution. But play assumes a central role in the existential cur riculum since it is, important for personal liberation and release and as a valuable means of self-expression. The existentialists also advocate, Kneller finds, the study of comparative religion as an academic matter, and would allow a religious attitude to develop freely within each student if it were authentic. Personal commit ment though would be vital, and the existentialists point out that man does not cease to be free when he commences to believe. Although, according to Kneller, the existen tial school will emphasize individual study, personal interpretation and creative work rather than group ac tivity, factual study and absorption of specified subject matter, he says the existentialists nevertheless insist that there is a considerable body of traditional subject matter which must be mastered since it is necessary for 88 the student to realize the "givenness" of the world in which his freedom must be exercised. Notwithstanding this fact, he continues, the existentialists deplore the un critical capitulation of contemporary schools to pro fessional and vocational preparation. They see little value to the person in an education limited to training, and recommend instead increased attention to subject matter and methods which appeal to feeling, emotion, creativity and the deeper aspects of life. Overspecializa tion, they maintain, stunts the growth of the pupil’s total inner life. Rather than encouraging the student to become a free individual, vocational preparation trains him to be a particular kind of person. And all too often, they say, the specialist is the creature of his knowledge, not the master of it. Professor Kneller also directs much of his thought to the role of the teacher, and under this heading he discusses initially the fact that the teacher must bring the student to realize the implications of his decisions. The student must not be shielded from the consequences of his choices and should not be allowed to blame his weak nesses or mistakes on the infirmity of his environment, his family, bad advice or human nature, for although these may explain our mistakes, Kneller says, they do not exon erate them. While the student must accept the consequences 89 of his choices, he must not at the same time submit to them as unalterable, Kneller cautions, for this would be to assume that freedom is exhausted in a single act. But, as he reminds us, freedom says the existentialist is never exhausted! A second important point is that the cherished values of the teacher should never be foisted on students. The teacher must also avoid officiousness. With respect to the uses of group instruction, Kneller writes that the teacher is expected to utilize such a teaching method not for the development of the class as a whole, but rather as a way by which each in dividual within the group will count for more than the group and certainly for more than the content and tools of the instruction. What is needed above all, Kneller says, is an intimacy and communion between teacher and student, an I-Thou relationship in which two people meet as independent selves through the medium of knowledge to share a single experience. The teacher must himself be a free personality actively engaging in relations and projects with individual students so as to leave no doubt in their minds that they too are free personalities and are being treated that way. In this regard, he prescribes: . . . The good teacher urges his students to challenge and criticize his own views; he advises them not to be daunted by the fear of error, provided the approach they use is genuine. He exhorts them never to take the opinions of 90 others, whether read or heard, for granted, and to scorn mere imitation and the repro duction of ideas second-hand. By virtue of the force of his own commitment to freedom and individuality the teacher can generate a similar enthusiasm for these ideals among his students. (1962, p. 300) Several important considerations then follow for Kneller from the aforementioned I-Thou relationship. First, the teacher must not simply impose discipline but should ask each student to accept the discipline that he sees as worthwhile for some end, such as his own intellectual development or the harmony of the class. Next, according to Buber, knowledge is not to be transmitted at all, rather, it is to be offered. The teacher should make the subject he teaches part of his inner experience so that he can present it as something issuing from himself. Finally, it ought not be the teacher's intention to let the student choose whatever view of the subject matter he wishes. Instead, after full discussion, the teacher should offer the pupil what he believes to be the best view and ask him whether he will accept it. For as Kneller says, the existentialists insist not that the teacher be "success ful," but that he be honest. As Kneller sees it then, the teacher should seek the following goals: first, treatment of subject matter in such a way as to discover its truth in free association; second, achievement of what Ralph Harper calls the 91 "autonomous functioning of the mind" so as to produce in students a type of character that is "free, charitable and self-moving" and third, evidence that students hold some thing to be true because they have convinced themselves that it is true. In order to accomplish these goals Kneller says, the teacher must rule out three conventional notions about education: that education is primarily an agency of society set up to perpetuate a cultural heri tage; that education is a pipeline of perennial truths; that education is a means for adjusting the young to life in a democratic community. And finally, Kneller scorns any system requiring the teacher to mold pupils to a particular image of man. We can see therefore in Dr. Kneller’s thought reliance not only on Sartre’s views but on the ideas of Martin Buber as well. And as was noted above, Kneller1s pessimism over too much group activity as opposed to individual effort is a theme which is woven throughout much of his writings concerning existentialism and educa tion. Another educational philosopher who shares this particular concern and who also bases much of his thinking about existentialism on Sartre’s philosophy is the in- dividual to whom we now turn, Dr. Van Cleve Morris. 92 An Analysis of the Writings of Van Cleve Morris Dr. Morris is currently Professor of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, where he was Dean of the College of Education for seven years. He has also taught at Rutgers University where he was Coordinator of Teacher Education and at the University of Georgia. Recently, Professor Morris was a Visiting Scholar, the Center for the Teaching Professions, at Northwestern University. In the twenty-two year period between 1954 and 1976, Dr. Morris has either individually or jointly authored twenty-one selections, including two major text books plus a separate book, Existentialism in Education, bearing on the subject of inquiry herein, and his thoughts, for purposes of analysis, may be generally classified within the following five major areas: first, an examina tion of existentialism in general; next, his rather major change of position regarding existentialism’s application to education as traditionally conceived; third, an expli cation of the "Existential Moment" and its educational significance; fourth, various characteristics of an existential education and school; and finally, some views on the existential educator and counselor. In regard to existentialism generally, Morris 93 writes that the message of existentialism is not to man in general, but rather is always addressed to one person at a time. In this sense, existentialism is not a program but rather a summons. In addition, Morris goes on, existentialism leaves man more exposed and alone than he has ever been to the pains and agonies of existence with out any shield, be it the grace of a supernatural God or the comforting company of men. This fact, however, Morris writes, may turn out to be beneficial: In a sense existentialism may become man’s bulwark. Absolutistic doctrines, promising safety and security, have revealed a nasty habit of disintegrating just when men needed them most. When these card houses collapse men find themselves with nothing left on which to build. Existentialism refuses to erect these marvelous but fragile edifices and therefore avoids deluding men into what can only be false security. Existentialists therefore consider their point of view an improvement if only because it is more trustworthy, because it is so radically realistic in describing the world men live in. In life without pretense, even if difficult and hazardous, is to be preferred to a life full of confident hopes for security and salvation which turn out to be mere illu sions. (1954, p. 248) Morris notes that some think by installing God in the cosmos they can make nothingness go away. Not only is this impossible, he says, but it is also insulting to man, for such a position declares that man cannot stand before nothingness on his own. But, writes Morris, man is the being to whom the privilege has been given of testing 94 whether he can live with the haunt of nothingness in the very act of his existing. Professor Morris also sees as a central principle in existentialism the necessity for individual responsi bility in making moral decisions. If man has an essence, he writes, it is literally his freedom from essence and his freedom to choose and to become what he will. The moment we define man, he adds, we destroy his freedom to become something else. Awareness of this freedom, there fore, is the main project of every life which hopes to be existential, and such awareness requires the individual to take on the burden of care. Transcendence is the existen tial name for this unique mode of human existence. It is a process of becoming, a dynamic self-consciousness. But far from being carefree and irresponsible, Morris says, existential man lives continually with doubt and anguish regarding what he should do for he knows that when he chooses, he chooses for Man. Thus, existential existence is an existence of responsibility. Morris next directs his attention to the central predicament or paradox of human existence which he says is the contradiction of the individual's absolute worth and at the same time his absolute worthlessness. Instead of looking to other people to provide the sustenance we need to be certain we count for something he says, man must 93 establish his value to the cosmos through the life he himself chooses to lead. The project of living one’s life in such a way as to be deserving of something better than nothingness and obliteration then is the overpowering theme of existentialism according to Morris. He also cautions that in looking for recognition in human relations and organizational affiliations, man has been seduced into a kind of recognition which eventually takes away as much as it offers for he says it is precisely in modern corpo rate human relations and the impersonal organization complex that we become convinced that we are indeed re placeable. In the last analysis, existentialism retains the final responsibility for man to decide for himself who and what he is and by extension what his reality is. Morris also believes that the existential position is one wherein human values are regarded as ultimately arbitrary and unjustifiable, and where rationality is not a neces sity but must itself be chosen since he says it is always possible to choose non-rationality. The value-creating agent in the world in other words is the free subjectivity of man; man encounters a world that is morally blank and he is the baseless base of all values. Morris sees no other alternative to this position since he views it as a contradiction in terms to speak of choosing that which is already imposed. 96 Morris also looks at the conception of the absurd. By way of introduction, however, it would appear worth while to note Albert Camus’ understanding of this term. For Camus, man has always asked the cosmos certain basic questions the answers to which he desperately wants in order to infuse his life with meaning and purpose. The cosmos, however, stands mute and will not reply. Not that the cosmos is anti-man, it is simply indifferent. It is this situation then, not man alone nor the universe alone but rather a combination of the two, that is man's quest for knowledge and certainty in the face of an indifferent universe, which produces the absurd relationship. In contrast to this, however, the absurd for Morris means that man's personal existing makes no sense and that it is only when his existing is seen as completely without reason that he can start assigning his own reasons to it. Absur dity, therefore, is the ground of human freedom. A rather important change of position by Morris regarding existentialism and its application to public education should be examined. In one of the earliest journal articles authored by him on this subject he wrote: . . . indeed, if education means the selection and acquisition of certain modes of response over others, it seems most pre posterous to believe that Existentialists could have schools at all. If, in short, education, as Childs and other Experimentalists have so forcibly stated, is primarily a social 97 undertaking perpetuating and interpreting a social system to succeeding generations; and if, on the other hand, Existentialists view society only as a new mode of tyranny over the minds of men, then we might even conclude that Existentialism would have no traffic with education in any shape or form. Indeed, the case might even be developed that Existentialism is the very denial of education as we understand it today. (1954, p. 258) But some seven years later, Morris says: The best policy for the school on this particular matter, says the Existentialist, is to awaken individual boys and girls to the need to know themselves, to the need not to be steam-rollered into social choices, and, ultimately, to the need to assert their own unique selves in a genuine way. Since no one should claim to be exempt from this obligation to be genuinely himself, all youngsters should go to school. They will have to learn how to read and write and figure? they will have to learn their history and science and mathematics. But the real reason they are there is not to perpetuate some tradition, Western or otherwise; it is not to learn how to think about contempo rary problems so as better to solve them? it is not to learn how to reconstruct the social order or reform the human race. Children go to school, ultimately, to find out who they are and what a human life is for. If the school in America— with its subjects, its extracurricular activities, its guidance programs— were to turn more resolutely in the direction of this aim, we could say it had taken on a decidedly Existentialist character. (1961, p. 395) Thus, it appears that over a period of time, Morris has at a minimum at least softened his original stance by con cluding that "an existential character” is possible within the school and that the latter need not be abolished alto gether . 98 Consideration will focus next on the third sig^ nificant area in Morris' writings, specifically, a defini tion and analysis of the "Existential Moment." The Existential Moment, says Morris, occurs around the sixth or seventh grade and it is that time when the individual first discovers himself as existing. It is, in other words, the beginning of the sense of being responsible. Morris notes that the teacher must show young people that they must take charge of their own lives. There should be no moral imperative either to be different or to blend into the social landscape, he says, only the ultimate imperative to know who one is, to know what one is choosing and to take final responsibility for those choices. And there can be no escape, Morris cautions, back to moral infancy after passing the Existential Moment. Since the lower grades necessarily deal with individuals before they are awake then, at least existentially awake, existentialism can, according to Morris, afford to be officially indifferent toward and disinterested in elementary educational theory and to focus instead pri marily upon the secondary phases of learning. With this latter in mind, we can direct our atten tion at this point to Morris' discussion of the charac teristics of an existential education and the existential school. Initially, he concedes: 99 Although there is no dearth of writings on humanistic education and the possibilities that Existentialism has for education, there does not appear to be clear-cut agreement as to the nature of the Existentialism-education relationship. Some argue that the ends and means of humanistic education have been de rived from Existential philosophy, .... There are still others who insist that no educational implications can come from Existentialism. But even among those who believe that Existentialism has an important- educational message, there is little consensus as to which version or aspects of Existentialism should be related to education. The question regarding the validity and the usefulness of developing a systematic philosophy of education based on Existentialism is more complex and technical than our purpose warrants. However, it is worth noting that the more systematic we become in building an existential philosophy and philosophy of education, the farther we get from the central message of Existentialism, namely a concern for the individual's relationship with personal beliefs and commitments. So when Existentialists ask, "What does it mean to me that this particular thing is a reality, or truth?" they are not asking a metaphysical or epistemological question. They are raising personal and ethico-religious queries, whose answers are not available in systems of philosophy, theology, or science. The answer must come from the individual. (1976, pp. 392-393) Notwithstanding these difficulties in connecting existential thought with educational practice, Morris does, however, glean certain principles and uncover a preference for some specific types of conduct from the existential writings which he offers for consideration. First among these is the fact that man's non-rational, that is his aesthetic, moral and emotional self will be 100 much more in evidence in the existential school than his scientific, rational self since existentialism is more interested in developing the affective side of man, his capacity to love, to appreciate, to respond emotionally to his world. Next, an existential education will become more individually centered, the goal being for a respon sible individualism. The "group method," writes Morris, will be discarded as existentialism does not value gregariousness, and it is likely that all forms of cooperative endeavor will atrophy, at least all those in which decisions are sought as distinguished from those in which factual information is to be shared. He continues by asserting that education has forgotten what it means for a human being to be an individual. Those who insist on communicabiiity for all that transpires in school exclude such things as inspiration, feeling, hunch and inner agitation by which men have a chance of escaping the heavy overlay of mass culture under which they now live. Modern education, he says, has fallen in love with the social and cultural aspects of the human personality and has concluded that this is all there is to man. But after the individual has passed the Existential Moment, Morris writes that the school must direct its attention to the release of the human self, to involvement of the child in personal decision and moral judgment to a far greater 101 degree than at present. Thus, the school must separate at least a part of the youngster’s school life from the tyranny of middle class society and from the moral tyranny of the community. Directing attention to the curriculum, Morris says that wherever in the school program the individual, private judgments of the child come most actively into play is the likely center of greatest existential interest— primarily the arts, such as music, painting, creative writing and drama. The school then, in Morris' view, is the instru ment by which the individual learns how to use his freedom. Existentialism, he reasons, is not concerned with problems of cultural change and social reconstruction since the only adequate socio-political order is one which recognizes and values the absolute freedom of the person. The child’s environment then, Morris says, should be one of complete and absolute freedom, a freedom where his selfhood can operate without hindrance since the prearranged environment tends, just be its presence, to favor certain choices over others. Expanding on this particular theme, he writes: The policy of freedom has certain conse quences we had better be prepared for. It means no hierarchy of authority in the school, no dominion of teacher over pupil, no external standards of achievement or success visited upon the young. It means that the students shall have not only a freedom from such standards but a coordinate freedom to establish their own standards in terms of which they choose 102 to learn. But let them be mindful of the fact that they are, indeed, doing the choosing. The choices are theirs to be responsible for. When the full impact of their responsibility comes home to them, in that moment the need for tests and grades and report cards will have disappeared. Finally, the teacher comes to realize that successful teaching in the Existentialist mode ends, as it began, in paradox: Such teaching succeeds by doing itself out of a job. It succeeds by becoming unnecessary, by producing an individual who no longer needs to be taught, who breaks loose and swings free of the teacher and becomes self-moving. (19 66, Existentialism in Education; What it Means, p. 153) But notwithstanding the concept of responsibility of which Morris speaks, Leroy Troutner questions the advisability of such a free environment: . . . the child should be faced with limits, both situational and personal (peer groups as well as adult), that he can confront and appropriate in himself as an individual existent. But these limits should be human limits as much as possible, not organizational or moral limits. The younger the child the more care need be exercised regarding the character and force of the opposition. But limits and tensions are constituent elements of existence, and to deprive the child of these limits is to instruct him In a certain brand of inhumanity. Morris is wrong in claiming that according to the existential perspective ”The environment of the child should be one of complete and absolute freedom, a freedom where his selfhood can operate without hindrance."43 A resolute, purposeful will needs opposition and limits in order to exist just as a knife needs a whetstone in order to sharpen. (1962, pp. 328-329) Pedagogy, continues Morris, must be grounded in a commitment to the transcendent possibilities of man which 103 are accessible through his freedom, choice and responsi bility. The existentialist, therefore, is looking for a teaching procedure or pedagogy which will apply to children in physical groups, since this is the way they are found in school, without treating them simultaneously as psycho logical or social groups. The entire schooling situation in other words must rise above the physical sociality of the typical classroom in order to affirm the psychic identity of the several humans located there. In addition, Dr. Morris writes, adventuresomeness in the ideals of private conscience should be employed as an educational instrument for motivating young people. It is better, he says, for boys and girls to be inducted into an open- ended world rather than the ready-built, card-house worlds our traditional education programs would have them know. Such a world, he adds, presents possibilities without exacting human compliance and is the most exciting kind of world one can hope to live in. Thus, an existential educational program need not be overbearing and depressing and, as Morris sees it, the awakening of the existential, self-transcending self is the urgent and primary task of the public school in America today. With reference to the concept of knowing, Dr. Morris writes that there is an element of personal appro priation in all knowing. Learning begins, he says, with 104 the self, not with knowledge, and he agrees with Professor Kneller that the individual is responsible for his own knowledge. Morris also shares Kneller's view regarding the appropriateness of the Socratic method. Expanding the aforementioned theme of appropriation, Morris writes that the curriculum is not there to be mastered or experienced, but is there to be chosen. The subject matters and experiences in a curriculum should merely be available. As he says: . . . To choose in ignorance of any alter native is to choose unfreely; therefore the individual must be given— in the classroom and outside— every conceivable latitude to find for himself all the possibilities open to him. This means that any subject matter is "fair game" for the school, and that boys and girls must be perfectly free to follow their own inclinations in learning. To hem them in with required assignments, to codify and channel their growth along narrow lines, to suppress their individual reactions to life and learning on the grounds of some preconceived notion of propriety, is to insulate them from the truly real world of choice. And since choice in the Existential setting is fundamentally moral choice, the learner must be given opportunities for genuine moral choice in the learning process. (1961, pp. 204-205) Subject matter then, Morris adds, is really object matter, that is it represents the objective world and as such is always subordinate to the true "subject matter" which is the subjectivity of the child. Following from Sartre's views, Morris next states 105 that meanings come into existence when being-for-itself projects forward in the sphere of being-in-itself. In the process of assigning meaning to his existence, man assigns meaning to the in-itself, to the world, since the in-itself, by itself, has no meaning. From this, Morris sees several implications for education. First, education is the process of participating in the creating of meanings in the world. Second, the teacher's role is to quicken the child's awareness of his own consciousness as a pure intentiality, to start him out on the project of defining his own meaning in the world and hence of creating meanings in the world. Third, the learner is the only agent in the educational process who is in a position to convert knowledge into meaning. And finally, education must turn from the tradition of detached scholarship and abstract truth to a quest for personal significance. The intellectual acceptance of knowledge and beliefs is no longer enough, significant education must make a difference in the learner's life. Since Morris concludes that the emotive content is unmistakable in existentialism and suffuses the entire educational process, he believes that the learner should be given several opportunities. For example, he should be given more scope for "in-here" subjective knowing. He should be given assignments in reacting to the world 106 through creative writing and drama and also by responding to literature. The learner also should be more often asked to respond to the other "selves" around him, not in a social but in a subjective, individual way. And, he must become involved in the world, involved in the value questions of life. Speaking directly to these points, Morris writes: I should suppose from all this that the school in the Existentialist frame would become a more metaphysical kind of place than it is at present. This should not frighten you. I am only suggesting that the ultimate questions of life and destiny should have some place in the educative program along with all the penultimate and lower-order questions which currently claim the student's entire attention. In this connection, it may be possible to reintroduce religion into the school in the form in which it rightly belongs for the consumption of young people, i.e., in the form of recognizing the religious need rather than learning all of the answers, dogmatic and otherwise, that sects and religions and cults have given to this need. Ralph Harper, in discussing Existentialism and education, provides a very able insight into this problem: "The religious need is not necessarily a need to which there is a religious answer. It is simply the human need of ultimate recogni tion. The individual who knows he must die, who suffers, who does not measure up to his own ideal, who cannot find the home and the over-all meaning that his being requires, wants above everything, some evidence that at least his need is recognized by others as the most important thing about him. He wants the universe itself to give some evidence, if possible, that it, too, recognizes this need as legitimate and appeasable. But there is no logical necessity which says that if there is a need for the 107 universe to recognize an appease, the universe will oblige." (i960, p. 41) And, he continues: No logical necessity, indeed. It is just because man has historically insisted that his universe appease him in this way that he has concocted so many competing religions. And the basic difficulty with the religion-in- education issue, in its customary formulation, lies in the notion that the need for appeasement cannot be separated from the variety of answers that organized religions have, through the centuries, given to this need. Operating on this notion, we have felt in America that to confound the schools curriculum with sectarian "answers" to the need would serve only to promote division and contention. And so we have secu larized the school by driving sectarianism out of it. But secularizing the school has unthinkingly been interpreted to mean wholly eliminating consideration of this need we all experience. And if there is one thing that boys and girls desperately require somewhere— if not constantly-— in their maturing process, it is a reflective concern for the types of questions that the "need for recognition" provokes— questions concerning who they are, what they are doing around here in existence, and why. This set of questions simply cannot be brought under study outside the scope of the so-called religious need. But to study the need, the Existentialist reminds us, does not require specifying any answers. Merely to state the religious need of man in the classroom is not the same thing as "appeasing"--to use Harper’s word— the child with this or that comfortable religious solution to his need; it is, on the contrary, to awaken him to the problem of ultimate recognition and to what this problem signifies in our lonely search for ourselves. Existentialists complain that experimentalists have so thoroughly secularized the school that they have not only eliminated from it all sec tarianism, and even any mention of God, but have been guilty of the complete expungement of any ultimate questions whatsoever from the child's 108 experience. But the ultimate questions of life— quite unlike their answers-— belong to all men. This is not because they are religious or metaphysical? it is because they are existen tial. That is, they reside at the very base of Our being. Hence, every child in the school has a right to be assisted in viewing these questions and in considering what they mean for a human self. The Existentialist educator can be expected to put these questions back into the school’s program. (1961, p. 30 8) Concluding here Morris says: How, then, does the Existentialist teacher instruct in this most existential of subject matters? Our solution turns out to be decep tively simple. If we refuse to ignore the need, and also refuse to offer answers to the need, what is left? The obvious alternative is to address ourselves and our students to the need itself! And here the Socratic paradigm comes to culminating relevance. The teacher's questions are absolutely without final answer: Just why do we have this need? What is the significance of this need in our lives? What importance, for you and for me, are we to attach to the quest for meaning, to the quest itself? In questing differently, do we there fore live differently, i.e., does it make a practical difference how one goes about the quest for meaning? Instead of pondering the existence of God, let us ponder the need for a God. Why do we feel we need him? This kind of discussion can effectively awaken the American youngster to that dimension of re ligious experience which is genuinely existential. Nor does this procedure violate the secular ethic; quite the contrary, the consideration of such questions completes the ethic by bringing that which is experienced by all men into the arena of open discourse. It fulfills, in an astonishingly apt way, the real meaning of a. pluralistic society. (1966, Existentia1ism in Education: What it Means, pp. 146-147) Focusing now on the aspect of discipline, Morris believes that the child is taught to control himself by 109 actually controlling himself, that self-discipline, in other words, comes from practice in disciplining oneself. He condemns modern Freudian psychology with its belief that "all behavior is caused" and other Freudian concep tions which he says legislate existential man out of existence by relieving him of the responsibility for his own actions. Noting in passing that the existentialists have given little thought to testing, Morris concludes that the real task of education is to provide those occasions and circumstances for the awakening and in tensification of awareness, and he urges that education be the discovery of responsibility. In this regard, and contrary to the feelings of Dr. Greene, he suggests that the Summerhill school would be a possible paradigm school because of the freedom there to develop personal responsi bility. As a final enterprise. Dr. Morris directs his attention to certain characteristics and attributes of the existential educator and counselor, and notes initially that he considers the personal effort of the individual instructor to be central to the entire educational under taking. He writes that the existential educator and counselor is committed to developing the individuals decision making capacity and in so doing, will probably move away in the curriculum from the sciences, including 11Q the social sciences, and turn to the humanities and the arts, primarily for three reasons. First, the contribution of the humanities is to awaken sensibilities, awaken the intensification of feelings in the individual. Next, art is preeminently man’s way of interpreting and expressing ideas and emotions. And finally, art tries to awaken the sensibilities, to quicken the awareness of being alive and existent. In so doing, however, the educator will insist on two things regarding aesthetic productions: that these works be authentic, that they emanate directly from the existential consciousness of the individual child; and that the learner take responsibility for what he has produced. In conclusion then, Dr. Morris finds that the existential educator and counselor should do several things. First, he would pose moral as well as intellectual questions, without ever prescribing the moral decisions the child must make, so as to awaken the child to the moral dimension of his life. Second, he should jar and stir maturing youngsters into a recognition of their moral selfhood via the Socratic model and thereby set the in dividual in the very center of moral and ethical commit ment. Third, the educator must arouse the learner intel lectually, spiritually and emotionally, and make a real effort in every subject to involve the learner directly. Next, the teacher must act as provocateur of the self. Ill There should be an I-Thou relationship between teacher and learner? teaching and learning, notes Morris, is above all else a personal encounter, a dialogue not of cognition between minds but of feeling between subjectivities. Finally, the teacher's imperative is to arrange the learning situation in such a way as to bring home the truth of the following propositions to every individual: I am a choosing agent, unable to avoid choosing my way through life; I am a free agent, absolutely free to set the goals of my own life? I am a responsible agent, personally accountable for my free choices as they are revealed in how I live my life. It is to be noted that woven throughout Professor Morris' writings is the recurring theme that the individual learner must be helped to develop a sense of personal responsibility in all that he or she undertakes. In order to provide such assistance, he says, the existential educator must be committed without reservation to this task. Now, Dr. Leroy Troutner, our next educational philosopher, will add some additional insights and new dimensions to our inquiry. An Analysis of the Writings of Leroy Troutner Dr. Troutner received his Doctorate from Stanford 112 University and is currently Professor of Education at the University of California, Davis. He has also taught at the University of Alberta. Devoting much of his profes sional effort to an explication of the philosophies of John Dewey and Martin Heidegger, Dr. Troutner has written nineteen selections in the thirteen year period between 1962 and 19 75 regarding existentialism and education. As has been done with the works of the other educational philosophers considered herein, an analysis of Professor Troutner*s writings reflects five primary areas with which he is concerned. First, is a consideration of existential ism in general. Next, Dr. Troutner delineates some impli cations of existentialism for education. Third, is a discussion about and an analysis of clock versus existen tial time. Fourth, Troutner compares the philosophies of John Dewey and Martin Heidegger with his own thinking, leading to his conclusion that both of the former are needed for an adequate philosophy of education. And finally, Troutner offers some reasons why, in his view, an existential philosophy of education has not as yet taken hold. Dr. Troutner begins his examination of existen tialism in general by noting that existentialism is more a philosophical tendency or attitude than a philosophical school. It is not only an attempt to philosophize about 113 existence, but it is also "a way of life." Existen tialists, he says, protest against highly structured, inclusive philosophical formulations wherein the individual suffers from dehumanization and depersonalization. The existentialists are struggling for preservation of the person and for preservation of self-affirmation. Thus, the philosophy becomes a form of projecting or striving rather than understanding. Troutner also writes that the existentialist is committed to the concrete particularity of existence of which he himself forms a part. Conse quently, he finds it very difficult to separate himself from the object of his thought. All existential thinkers, therefore, are pointing up the absolute particularity of each individual existent as a being-in-the-world. In other words, they are concerned with the "who of man." As a what, man is readily explainable, for this implies that man is an object. As a who, man is both mystery and surprise. The existentialists then, Troutner says, are not talking about generic man in nature but rather about a particular existing person in history. Next, Troutner isolates six specific characteris tics which he believes characterize existence. First/ existence is immediate; it is always here and now and one1s own, concrete, self-conscious and thoroughly sub jective. Existence is revealed primarily through moods 114 such as anxiety, alienation, despair and guilt. A third characteristic of existence is the fact that it is a perspective of each man in his "lived reality." At this point. Dr. Troutner specifies a major problem of all existential thinkers, which is, they say, if ”i am existence," how can I construct a "philosophy of exis tence?" All existential philosophers, he says, are making a fresh attempt to connect thinking about man with the existence of man. Existence, Troutner continues, undercuts the subject-object split and pertains to one of the key existential categories— only man exists; existence, therefore, should not be confused with the larger category, life. As a fifth characteristic, Professor Troutner notes that existence never is, nor is it a thing that changes, it is, rather, always a becoming. Finally, Troutner sees existence as involving a consciousness of self and the ability to become through choice. It also involves, he says, a consciousness which intends that which is other than the self, namely the world of other people and things. Troutner also believes that existentialism is generally indifferent to epistemology as this subject is traditionally conceived and that it insists that science cannot help the individual clarify and articulate the meaning of his life. Since the existentialist is trying to elucidate the meaning of life for any man through a 115 clarification of the meaning of his own life in particular, Troutner adds, the categorical imperative for the existen tialist becomes "donft follow me, follow you.” Finally, Troutner notes that the authentic existent looks straight down the line to his death and in appropriating it affirms both his life and his death. Turning now to our second area of inquiry, impli cations of existentialism for education, Troutner begins by writing: . . . The job of joining these two areas of inquiry into some meaningful and reciprocally enriching union, was left up to the educational philosophers since the existential philosophers were, for the most part, completely indifferent to the topic of education. . . . We have amassed a sizeable corpus of literature on seemingly every conceivable aspect of this still to be defined area of inquiry; but what we do not have is any careful philosophical analysis of such basic questions as: (1) "What is the possibility of connecting existential thought and education?," (2) "If it is possible, how is it possible?," "What method and language- should we use to realize the connection?," and (3) "Where is the interface to be located and how is it to be formulated?" Until we have wrestled with these basic questions explaining and justifying at least the possibility of a connection and, hopefully, demonstrating the connection itself, and, moreover, until we have done this in such a careful, logical, and cogent manner as to persuade our colleagues, I do not think that we can claim to call existential thought and education a legitimate area of inquiry. From a cursory review of the literature almost all of the researchers in the field seem to assume that a viable connection between existential thought and education as schooling not only can be made but already has been made; 116 and all that needs to be done is to extend and elaborate on it. It is this basic assump tion that we need to investigate first of all. What about the possibility or the impossibility of a connection? It does not have to exist; nor will it exist just because we want it to exist? (1975, pp. 186-187) Following from these thoughts, Troutner claims that Pro fessor Kneller*s and Dr. Morris* attempts to connect existentialism, primarily the Sartrian variety, with education have been less than successful. He believes that the efforts of those attempting to discuss education within an existential-phenomenological framework look more promising. Thus, Dr. Troutner claims, any contempo rary educational philosophy should include the "existential I." And he believes that education must cast off all educational theories and constructions and "let education be," allowing it to reveal itself rather than having us impose our own conceptual design upon it. Troutner is also critical of the empirical and rational approaches to education. The former, he notes, can only test a part of education which has been reformulated into a representation of that which is. And he sees as the great weakness of the latter the fact that the thought tends to be cut off from the sight of education which is the world of the human existent. In this regard, he writes: . . . The Lebenswelt which is the central concern of all existentialists is not amenable to treatment by the scientific method; however, 117 according to the existentialist perspective it is within this dimension of life that the most significant education occurs. The Lebenswelt is the site of education. It does not occur in an environment, nor in a relation ship between an organism and his environment, nor in the exercise of a mental faculty; but education occurs in the "world" of lived reality of each individual existent. Further more, this individual "world horizon" cannot be "de-subjectified" and turned into an objec tive event. It is discrete, unique, and subject to no law excepting that of its own choosing. (1962, pp. 264-265) Continuing in this area, Dr. Troutner next cites some characteristics of an existential education. First, he writes, an existential education represents an "educa tion in Being" and a sense of meaning in life rather than education for adjustment and behavioral change or as preparation for a vocation or for citizenship. The teacher, he says, can educate for being by standing as a person, by being an "authentic individual." Next, an existential education will be privately owned, not publicly shared, and hence not amenable to testing. Here, Troutner adds, speed, achievement and IQ tests are, in his opinion, based directly on objective time and have no relevance for an existential education since they each attempt to treat the individual existent as a natural object or thing. Another characteristic according to Professor Troutner is that an existential education will be largely nonverbal with the accent being on heightened awareness, imagination 118 and intuition. The radical subjectivity of the concrete existent, he feels, points to an existential education which is discrete, unique and, to a large extent, precon- ceptual— the basic language is the language of silence. Finally, Troutner concludes, an existential education is not only education in time but also education in death, not education for death as Professor Kneller assumes. Troutner also believes that the study of existen tialism can help the individual teacher gain a better understanding of students, become aware of the difference between responding to students as natural objects and as existing subjects, better understand himself and his relationship with his students and give overall direction to education. He also says that the teacher must nurture and instruct the child in such a way as to help him transcend the culture in order for him to criticize and help improve it, although he does admit in this context the close connection between the radical individualism of the existentialist and his seeing society as the tempting "crowd" or "they" which must be resisted. Concluding his thoughts in this area, Dr. Troutner proposes that, using an existential perspective, it is no longer necessary to view purposes of education in purely social and/or in formational terms. First, he says, existentialism provides the rationale for the claim that a possible educational 119 goal of individual growth when formulated in terms of "being-in-the-world” is logically, ontologically and phenomenally more basic than cognitive knowledge. And second, the existential position mandates that public, cognitive knowledge is not the primary but is really only a secondary and derived way of relating to the world. The primary way is through each man!s precognitive under standing of himself and his world. The knowlege problem atic, in other words, can never provide the starting point, only Being can. Addressing Dr. Troutner’s examination of the differences between clock and existential time, a matter touched upon briefly by Maxine Greene, it is significant that even in his own dissertation he was concerned enough about this issue to write: Existentialism and formal education, like oil and water, do not mix. There appears to be a basic opposition between the two. Educa tion necessitates objectification while exis tentialism concerns itself with the affirmation of the existing self. Education involves an adaptation to and transmission of the culture while existentialism points toward rebellion against society and the crowd. To a great extent existentialism is a protest, a state of mind where "only revolt is pure.” Education involves Organization which in turn depends upon the use of objective Time for the purposes of order and control. (1962, p. 311) Vandenberg, however, in his dissertation, disagrees: . . . His educational program, by over emphasizing lived-time at the expense of 120 clock-time, would result in chaos and produce inauthentic people, people, that is, who could not accept their facticity, because lived-time is unrelated to clock-time for the authentic person, who can choose to live within clock time and remain authentic so long as he does not allow it to determine his being, so long as he remains in control, that is, according to Heidegger. In other words, Troutner had no sure grasp of Heidegger. (1966, p. 636) Notwithstanding the above criticism, Troutner"s thoughts on this subject are useful nevertheless and contribute significantly to his views regarding existen tialism and education. Clock time, adherence to which Troutner says produces an inauthentic mode of existence, he sees as an infinite succession of , f now moments’ ' which follow each other in a definite order of coming to be and passing away where the focus is always on the present. He also views clock time as being objective and associated with organization and formal education. Next, Troutner notes several consequences of abiding by clock time. First, it is intimately connected with the increasing atomization and fragmentation of life. Also, he feels, clock time depreciates the past. Third, instead of choosing in anticipatory resolve, the individual living in clock time waits for the future to happen just as a clock waits for the next minute. With clock time, time pas sively passes as if the individual were not in a time of his own making. And last, the individual who lives in the 121 inauthentic mode of clock time generally forfeits re sponsibility for his becoming to the They. Living in existential time or in the authentic temporal mode, on the other hand, Troutner writes, such as is done at the Summerhill School, is really the basis for learning and creativity. Existential time, he says, is not amenable to precise measurement for it refers to ^i'nite time of immediate experience. It is always found in an ecstatic unity in which the past, the present and the future are lived simultaneously as inseparable phases of human existence and are related dynamically, each interpenetrating the other. Existential time, Troutner adds, is primarily future oriented; the co existence and integration of the above three moments, however, does not exclude the idea of succession for these three times are not lived simultaneously even though they are all at the same time conjointly present. The past, therefore, "has been" but has not "gone by" because the past continues to invade the present and play an essential part in the individual’s everyday decisions. The teacher within this context then, Dr. Troutner writes, should help students understand the importance of the past since it is important for identity and continuity that the child realize he has a heritage, a history. This, however, must be done quite skillfully since it is not the intention for 122 students to become slaves to their past, either through hatred or adulation. Troutner concludes here by saying that man chooses to become himself through appropriating his own future in the process of having been, by decisive choice— a temporality of openness and resoluteness. Thus, from the existential perspective, man exists not so much in as as time. We shall now focus attention on an area of central concern to Professor Troutner throughout his writings, namely a comparison of the experimentalism of John Dewey with the existential, existential-phenomenological posi tions of Martin Heidegger. Turning first to the thinking of John Dewey, Troutner notes that the starting point of Dewey's philosophy is the "unanalyzed totality" called experience (a continuum of events and occasions) which is the primary datum and ultimate reality. Dewey's descrip tion is not of lived experience as the person is typing the word but is, theoretically, of "having an experience" where the experiencing has been neutralized and objecti fied, that is made ready for mediation by the methods of science. Here Troutner writes: It is not the man who experiences, who thinks, who possesses a mind, the knower, or the inquirer, who is the focus of Dewey's concern; but it is the processes of experiencing, thinking, minding, knowing, and inquiring, which engage his attention. That an analysis of these processes is important to any educational 123 theorizing no one will deny. But so also is an analysis of that entity that does the experiencing, thinking, inquiring, and knowing. In fact it seems clear, at least logically, that such an analysis should take precedence over any analysis of process. Without an analysis of man in his wholeness, that "unique condition" without which no experiencing, thinking, or knowing is possible, how can we get an accurate picture of the process? Without analyzing man as such, that is the knower with all his psychic depth and ambiguity, how can we understand what knowing is all about. (1967, "John Dewey, the Individual Existent, and Education," p. 94) Expanding this theme, Professor Troutner notes that Dewey * s philosophy tends toward the "doing-knowing" dimension rather than the "being" dimension of life. And this tendency has resulted in a definition of man that can be handled within the perspective of the empirical sciences. Dewey's problem solving organism is, therefore, more a "knowing-directed" organism than a "being-directed" existent. Dewey, Troutner continues, sees man as a natural object, part of and continuous with nature, who is pri marily objective and public. He is trying to connect thinking about man with that which is public and shareable among men. Consequently, it is almost impossible, Troutner says, to describe Dewey's human in the mode of an "exis tential I." The "I" is recast in the mold of a natural object irrevocably tied to experience. For Dewey then, man is nothing except the ties that bind him to others, a matrix of relationships. As Troutner says: 124 . . . Dewey's conception of the human can never be depicted in itself but only as a matrix of relationships in the problem solving setting. The description of the human in Dewey is not in terms of a unique, separate, feeling self as is the case in the existentialist perspective, but rather it is in terms of the activities of an organism which is never to be found in the context of a separate self but always in relationships with other natural objects. (1962, p. 219) Thus, Dewey asks that the methods of science be applied not only to material things but also to the desires and functioning of the self and its relation with other selves. And since man can be out of adjustment with his environment, Dewey*s "human predicament" turns out to be a social problem which, in principle, is capable of being solved by the extension of the scientific method to the total flow of experience. The frame of reference for all Dewey*s thinking is not individual but rather problem centered. His philosophy thus represents a framework within which one cannot delineate out discrete entities but only organisms interacting with an environment in a problematic context, with the accent not so much on deci sive choice as it is on making an intelligent appraisal of consequences. Here Troutner comments; Dewey's human realizes "temporary particu larity" through the internal relationships of an organism and its environment, i.e. when "organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears"; 2 3 while Heidegger's human, conceived originally as a 125 particular with a distinctive self-relation, realizes authentic or inauthentic Mself- being" by being the self-relation that he is, by risking the self in the contingent future and thereby affirming the self. The principle of individuation which is operative in each case is different. In Dewey it is a certain way of interacting, whereas in Heidegger it is a certain way of being which necessitates a choice of oneself or the crowd. In Dewey it involves a special kind of consummate adjustment between organism and environment. In Heidegger it involves a special kind of resolve to live, responsibly and singly, the tension which is existence. (1962, pp. 259-260) Without minimizing Dewey*s vast contributions to educa tional thought, however, Troutner notes that today*s students are asking questions regarding such issues as identity, meaning and purpose for which Dewey has no answers. In contrast to the thinking of Dewey, Troutner stresses that Heidegger*s Dasein is essentially "mine" and hence it is private and incapable of being reduced to the status of an object; man, claims Heidegger, is not a natural object like other objects. And his work reflects an effort to connect thinking about man with existential man in all his singularity and uniqueness. Similar to Dewey, however, Heidegger attempts to abandon the primacy of cognitive knowledge by focusing on human experience. But, while Dewey is focusing upon the process of ex periencing, not on the person who is experiencing, Heidegger is concerned with describing human existence as 126 lived, and says that human existence as "being-in-the- world" consists of three primary horizons (none of which is prior to the other) which continually interpenetrate and disclose themselves simultaneously in lived ex perience. The nature of these horizons is a context of relationships which constitute a surrounding environment, a world of other people?and finally, the individual’s own inner world of possibilities. In claiming that both Dewey’s and Heidegger’s perspectives are necessary for a complete philosophy of education, Troutner first asserts that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see and incorporate the environmental factors which influence our lives, those factors which we do not consciously experience in lived reality. The effect of this social-cultural environment, he continues, upon the individual’s becoming is cumulative, it occurs over a long period of time and is imperceptible to im mediate, conscious experience. Since this effect can only be "seen" through reflection then, that is through inference and explanation, Dewey’s organism-environment transaction perspective, which is one step removed from immediate experience, is tailored to reveal these environ mental influences. Including the above, Troutner is thus able to identify three areas of possible partnership for the two 127 philosophies. First, regarding choice, the intelligent inquiry and weighing of consequences advocated by Dewey plus the existentialist "leap of faith." Next, since education includes both the transmission of culture as well as the becoming of an individual, it will be benefi cial to blend Dewey's social emphasis with the existen tialist's individual emphasis. Finally, from the existen tial position, the ability to reveal the student's lived reality, and drawing from Dewey's thought, the ability to accommodate the influences of the natural and social environment on man's becoming. Focusing now on the final area where Dr. Troutner directs much of his effort, he lists several possible reasons why, in his view, an existential philosophy of education has never really taken hold in America. First, he says, there has been an inadequate preparation by philosophers of education. Most early researchers, Troutner claims, tried to draw educational implications from existentialism by first "working it over" in terms of their own American perspective. Another reason is the use of Sartre's philosophy as a base. Next is the jarring incongruity between many of the major existential themes such as anxiety, alienation and being-unto-death and the education of children. Dr. Troutner also recognizes the sense of elusiveness in the philosophy itself. And he 12 8 sees as still another reason the near complete neglect of phenomenology. Elaborating on this latter point, Troutner says that there seems little reason to doubt that the in dividual experience of being educated qualifies as a phenomenon. We are speaking, he writes, of a special kind of "learning experience" where the revealment manifests itself directly to consciousness rather than being induced at will by such things as remembering, reflecting and studying. The primary mode in which the phenomenon of being educated reveals itself, he says, is in meaning. The basic structure of the process that promotes this meaning consists of three equiprimordial items which are supported and characterized by moods, interpretation, imagination and temporality. The first of these items is pre-understanding; a new increment of meaning can only appear says Dr. Troutner within and through the larger matrix of meanings that already exist as the student's world of significance and intelligibility. The second item is existentiality. In order for potentially "new meanings" to realize intelligibility, Troutner advises, they also need to be revealed in the first place as existential possibilities. The final item is that of discourse. This, writes Professor Troutner, is the medium through which the newly appropriated increment of meaning is raised to intelligibility; we can only see 129 meaning through the word. Here, he says, we are not talking about language as words and grammar but language as lived, that is discourse or speech. A final reason noted by Professor Troutner as to why, in his opinion, an existential philosophy of educa tion has not taken hold is that there is a certain incom patibility between existential thought and schooling. He says that there is little common ground between the traditional-conservative education with its focus on transmitting the cultural heritage of the past through the teaching of subject matter by society's agent, the teacher, and existential thought with its focus on human existence as lived. And it is likely that the former will act as a deterrent to the achievement of the "sense of life" about which the existentialist is concerned. While education is caught up with teaching, measurement and reason, existentialism, says Professor Troutner, involves being, ambiguity and the spirit. Speaking directly to these latter points, he writes: This extreme sensitivity to the possibility of objectification through words also points up a basic difference between existential education and formal education as the educator traditionally conceives of it. Objectification through language is the very essence of education as generally viewed. The traditional perspective of education where knowledge is transmitted from teacher to pupil assumes objectification. That knowledge which is to be transmitted must be objectified through conceptualization and symbolization 130 before it can be transmitted to the student. (1962, p. 298) continues by saying: Whether or not there exists a meaningful connection between Existential Thought and Education will depend, at least in part, upon what kind of education we are talking about. If we are talking about traditional-conservative education where the accent is upon the trans mission of the funded capital of civilization, i.e., the knowledge and values of a society enshrined in public language, to the upcoming generation, then there seems to be little or no common ground between Existential Thought and education. The major concern and emphasis that is to be found in most traditional-con servative education is upon teaching a body of knowledge, laid out in various subject matter fields, in an organized, systematic fashion. The focus is primarily, if not exclusively, on the cognitive. The purpose of this kind of education is to stimulate, train, and develop the student's intellectual endowment so that upon becoming an adult he can take his proper place in society. Most traditional education is seen from the per spective of society— whose agent is the teacher. The primary emphasis of the existential thinker, on the other hand, is directed towards analyzing and describing the basic structure of human existence as lived. This emphasis necessarily results in a singular, individual (not societal) focus. Moreover, the existentialist finds moods and feelings to be more significant in human existence than the theoretical-intellectual dimension of life, the latter visualized as a mode of being which is derived from and secondary to the more primordial life-world. One of the first questions we need to investigate, and investigate very thoroughly, is whether or not the primary thrust of these two phenomenon, i.e., Existential Thought and Education as schooling, which means teaching, is so diver gent as to make any viable connection impossible. If, on the other hand, we look at some of the major ideas underlying the "open classroom", where teaching in the traditional sense is noticeably absent and instead the focus shifts to learning and the conscious, purposeful de velopment of a confident, and trusting person, we will find a considerable area of common ground between Existential Thought and Educa tion, (1974, "Trying to Make Sense Out of 'Existential Thought and Education,1" p. 16) Concluding here, Troutner writes: . . . The primary emphasis of the existen tial thinker, on the other hand, is directed towards analyzing and describing the basic structure of human existence as lived, an existence that is lived conjointly in both a common and individual world prior to the thematization of man and society. The exis- ' tential thinker starts with man as a being-in- the-world of average everydayness not with society and its needs. Moreover, the existen tialist as he keys on the whole phenomenal content of live reality often finds moods and feelings to be more significant in human existence than the theoretical-intellectual dimension of life that the traditional educator emphasizes. Also in his attempt to capture human existence in its wholeness the existentialist makes no sharp distinction between knowing, feeling, and willing. As a result, the tradi tional philosophical category of epistemology, which is so important to much of traditional philosophy of education, receives scant atten tion from the existential thinker; and when it is discussed we find a very different slant on knowing than in traditional philosophy. Where as the traditional educator, for the most part, stresses the kind of knowing that is charac terized by detachment and objectivity, the existential thinker claims paradigmatic status for a very different kind of knowing, a knowing that requires participation and involvement. It can be seen as the difference between knowing an "it" in an objective way and knowing a "thou" in a personal way. This kind of personal or existential knowing is always associated with passion and striving. (1975, pp. 187-188) Even in spite of the many difficulties involved, 132 Dr. Troutner nevertheless concludes on an optimistic note by stating that, in his view, it is possible to make sense out of existential thought and education by doing two things: first, bracketing out the conflation of education and schooling and reformulating the concept to mean the existential process of "being educated;" and secondly, going to and through the language and content of existen tial thought for possible insights, analyses and implica tions of an "educational nature." Specifically, he says: . . . I, for one, believe that the vast majority of the evidence suggests that Exis tential Thought and Education as schooling, like oil and water, do not mix. But, to my mind, this does not mean necessarily that Existential Thought and Education cannot be synthesized into some meaningful relation. After all, maybe this is part of our problem, i.e., that in defining education as schooling we have been unnecessarily restrictive. I would suggest that in order to demonstrate the connection we bracket out any specific meaning in the second term, particularly the conflation between education and schooling, and then investigate what existential philos ophy has to say about "education" in the broader sense. Here the accent would fall on the philosophy rather than schooling. After all, Existential Thought purports to describe the various modes of being human. Surely "being educated" can be seen to be one of those modes. This technique will force us to think in terms of existential language rather than educational language, thus affording us the opportunity to take advantage of the unique insights and style of the philos ophy itself. (19 74, "Trying to Make Sense Out of "Existential Thought and Education,"" p. 19) Having now concluded an analysis of Dr. Troutnerfs 133 writings, his heavy reliance on the thought of Martin Heidegger is to be noted as well as his conclusion that there is a definite need for both Dewey’s experimentalism and Heidegger’s existentialism in formulating a compre hensive philosophy of education. Our last educational philosopher to be considered herein, Professor Donald Vandenberg, also has been heavily influenced by Heidegger’s thought, and Vandenberg too sees benefits to be gained from the union of experimentalism and existentialism. We turn now to Dr. Vandenberg. An Analysis of the Writings of Donald Vandenberg Educated at Maryville College, Dr. Vandenberg received his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He is now Professor of Education, the University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia. Professor Vandenberg has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Calgary. In the fourteen year period between 1962 and 1976, Dr. Vandenberg has authored twenty'-six selections bearing directly on existentialism and education, included within which is his very highly regarded book Being and Education (1971). To further the purposes of this study, however, 134 Professor Vandenberg1s views within these numerous works may conveniently be summarized within the following five major areas: first, an explication of existentialism in general based primarily on Vandenberg * s; interpretation of Heidegger; next, some existential implications for educa tion; third, Vandenberg*s arguments as to why he feels both experimentalism and existentialism are necessary In formulating a comprehensive philosophy of education; fourth, the teacher’s role within an existential frame work; and finally, Professor Vandenberg*s thoughts re garding moral education. We turn initially then to Vandenberg*s analysis of existentialism in general. To begin with, Dr. Vandenberg notes that existen tialism is a protest against pseudo-conventionality and its divorce of thought and action, its alienation. In addition, he writes, existentialism insists that scientific knowledge assumes that man is a physical object. The scientific outlook of the laity is concerned with: what a thing is, its nature, its essence. The existentialists, on the other hand, turn around and try to determine that a thing is, its being, its existence. By his choices, Vandenberg says, the authentic person not only creates himself, he creates values. Directing his attention now to another aspect of existentialism, Dr. Vandenberg says that the existentialists 135 are not anti-social, society is part of man's facticity. It merely happens, he adds, that social problems by and large are not problems of existence and, therefore, are subordinate to the problems of existence. Thus, he concludes, existentialists do indeed have a deep sense of community even though the contents of their philosophizing tends to exclude doctrines of sociality. And he sees no necessary conflict between individual and collective liberation; it may be, he says, that each is a necessary condition of the other. Professor Vandenberg also comments that one must always deny that he is what might be called an existentialist in order to be an existentialist. For to be an existentialist, he writes, is self-contradictory; existential philosophy is the task of knowing oneself, of elucidating one's own existence. And it is the pseudo existentialist who tries to reject the role of reason in the promotion of human existence. Dr. Vandenberg has also drawn heavily on the writings and teachings of Martin Heidegger in formulating his own conceptions about existentialism. Pursuant to Heidegger then, Vandenberg notes several propositions characteristic of existential thought. First, non^human entities have being, he says, but not existence. Next, Vandenberg notes, historicizing (authentically existing) is a movement between birth and death in which "being-there is 136 stretched along and stretches itself along" thus connecting birth and death, both of which are for the whole distance. Commenting here, Vandenberg says that Kneller's "Death is an anguish-producing fact" represents an inauthentic understanding of Heidegger since for the latter, authentic being towards death frees one and is actually accompanied by a serenity. Being-there, Dr. Vandenberg continues, "is primarily being-possible," it always already is what it can be in projection. But, he admits, possibilities available are in fact limited by disclosure, the world and others. Inauthentic being-there, Vandenberg says, does what it wants, authentic being-there does what the situa tion demands, thereby actualizing itself. The means for attaining the aim of education as authentically histori- cizing then is "transmission" of the heritage in such a way that it functions as a panorama of possibilities in the pupil's existence. And the authentic person is not restricted by circumstances because they do not determine his being, he does. Finally, in apparent agreement with Sartre, Vandenberg adds, to be authentically human is to exist one's freedom, not demand the conditions for it from others which is to lose it. Turning now to the second major category in which Professor Vandenberg1s thinking on the subject herein may be classified, namely, existential implications for 137 education, he begins by saying: Existential thought and education have great affinity for each other. (1) Both are primarily concerned with the simple matter of becoming human. Because existential philosophers focus attention upon adult existence, however, an equation of philosophy of existence and philoso phy of education would omit the differences between childlike and adult existence, including education. If existential thought is to have significance for education, someone has to utilize the resources of existential thought to build a theory of education. This theory should (a) delineate the conditions of child like existence that make education possible, (b) characterize processes of education and curriculum within the limitations and possi bilities of human existence, and (c) guide these formulations by the aim of education as adult existence. (1974, "Making Sense Out of 'Existential Thought and Education,'" p. 25) But, Vandenberg contends, schooling can exist as public only if it is free, compulsory and universal. It appears, therefore, he says, that a preliminary step in the reduc tion of the alienation of men from each other is the establishment of a common schooling system with a common curriculum on a world-wide basis. Specifically, he writes: . . . Although this effort, based on Sartre's "being responsible for all men" (the interdependence of men), may seem to be prompted by "delusions of grandeur" or unholy ambition, anything less comprehensive runs the risk of constituting "oppression." The major step respecting the very possibility of the being of moral education under democratic ideals is the extension of schooling in its sheerly cognition and curricular aspects so that it is in fact universal, compulsory, free and common. (1966, "The Ontological Foundation of Moral Education," p. 245) 138 Vandenberg argues further that the "mass" aspects of schooling cannot be avoided, the average everydayness of schooling is its facticity, its that-it-is. He also claims, without explanation and contrary to the position of some other educational philosophers cited herein, that the Socratic method is highly impractical for application in most public schools. Next, Dr. Vandenberg lists three presuppositions of the work of educating as well as two aims of educating. As to the former, he notes first, helplessness, second, room for development and third, the pupil's striving to be someone himself or acceptance of personal responsi bility. Imitation, claims Vandenberg, is alienating because it means that the pupil has given up wanting to be someone himself. The first aim of educating which Vandenberg isolates is to let the pupil live his life as an independent being who accepts responsibility for his own being and his being with others. As the pupil re covers responsibility for being who he is, Vandenberg says, he no longer equates the achievement of his own being with the fulfillment of the goals of schooling. As a second aim of educating, Vandenberg lists liberating the teacher from having to be of help. Becoming oneself then, says Vandenberg, is "education" for the existentialist, and one becomes himself by choosing his response to 139 immediate situations. Looking now at the curriculum, Vandenberg agrees with Dr. Morris that the humanities and the arts will receive emphasis from the existential educator, and that a de-emphasis of science and the social sciences will follow. The content within the arts and humanities, Vandenberg says, will appear to center in literature for two reasons. First, in literature, he notes, more than in life itself, except certain ultimate situations, there is the opportunity for the individual to authenticate himself. And secondly, in literature, subjectively appropriated, the pupil can find out what he is and what he can become. Next, Vandenberg writes, the attempt to transcend the child's consciousness by structuring it as an ideology not freely chosen, instead of assisting in the structuring of the child's world that will promote subsequent authentic action on the pre-reflective plane, attempts to structure his reflective consciousness by forced learnings. Future liberty is thereby made onto- logically impossible through the alienation and bad faith "caused" by the articulation of reflective consciousness without concommitant articulation of pre-reflective con sciousness. Schooling, Vandenberg says, as the acquisition of geography (mediated experience), and as the intentional "transmission" of geography, becomes alienating only when 140 it is not grounded in the pupil's landscape (immediate experience); the authentically human world, he adds, lies "between" landscape and geography. Thus, the student is alienated from the world when he counts truth as a property of propositions about the world and scope for originality is of the greatest pedagogic significance. But, Vandenberg cautions, this room for the youth's doing things his own way requires breaks from the continuous process of school ing, from what he has learned, from mechanical routines. In concluding this second area, Vandenberg next discusses authentic praxis which he defines as action, reflection, action. And he recommends within this con text a positive neutrality regarding controversial issues and/or political matters requiring a positive support of the various genuine perspectives and of each alike. The object, he says, is to eliminate all "sectarianism" by raising consciousness, wherever possible, from the naive to the critical level so as to engage in dialogue and authentic praxis. Focusing now on the third major topic of inquiry, Vandenberg agrees with Troutner in claiming that a union of experimentalism and existentialism is needed for an adequate philosophy of education. Initially, Vandenberg writes, the corruption of experimentalism occurs when education becomes "intellectual" and divorced from the 141 pupil*s immediate experience. For he opposes the reduc tion of education to teaching, schooling or cognitive "processes." Next, Vandenberg*s position regarding the compatibility of experimentalism with existentialism in a meaningful relationship is as follows. First, according to Dewey, he says, the humdrum of everyday life, drifting with conventions, yielding to pressure, compromising and everything else that passes for morality, particularly the superficial cliches and proverbs of common sense, prevent an individual*^ full interaction with the environ ment and, therefore, hinder the development of experience, that is, render an experience anesthetic. Yet these are the identical forces, he notes, which produce self-aliena tion for the existentialist. Second, if life is growth for Dewey, it is becoming for the existentialist. And finally, if interaction with the environment results in temporary fallings out, fallings back in, resulting in growth for Dewey, facticity in a definite situation results in crisis or ultimate situations, resulting in becoming oneself for the existentialist. But authentic man, Vandenberg says, achieves esthetic consummatory experiences in life*s ultimate situations— death, suffering, anguish, chance, sickness, failure, guilt, uncertainty. Therefore, he concludes, there is no reason to suppose that the problematic situations which constitute 142 experience for Dewey, the fallings out with the environ ment, cannot be enlarged to include the existentialist's ultimate situations. Examining at this point the teacher's role, Vandenberg says that the teacher must be an exemplar of an authentic, committed person. Continuing on, he notes that the authentic teacher will have very few discipline problems even though the child has to be free to disobey in order to genuinely obey since, in his view, room for disobedience maintains the tension between pedagogic authority and the pupil's freedom. In addition, the authentic teacher will accidentally jar students' prejudices and absolutes occasionally and therefore, Vandenberg adds, class crises are almost certain to arise. Also, the authentic teacher, by refusing to objectify the pupil, is always where the pupil is, exactly and in every instance. Here he writes: Freedom is restricted when the teacher "objectifies” the pupil, that Is, when he considers him as an object rather than as a subject* Objectifying is an active process one chooses in order to eliminate parts of the immediate situation that threaten to objectify one's own self. Objectification of the pupil ignores the fact that he is a potential esthetic percipient of the universe and prevents existential communication by making the pupil self conscious. (1962, p. 176) Meeting the pupil where he is, Vandenberg continues, 143 consists of meeting the immediate problematic situation with the pupil in existential communication, not "empathy" which, from the existential viewpoint, is a form of self induced inauthenticity, nor "acceptance," which would be to objectify the pupil and his "needs" or "interests." The teacher*s duty then is to help the student*s respect for his own consciousness, in indeterminite situations, grow. This is more important than what is taught. With reference now to the teacher*s authority, Dr. Vandenberg argues that because help is fully accepted only when it is truly asked for, the child constitutes the authority of the teacher. And pedagogical authority originates in the child-parent relation when the parent helps the child to be someone himself. Vandenberg thus objects to the various forms of commanding and obeying or coercive force often used in the teacher-pupil relation ship. Elaborating on this concept that the child con stitutes the authority of the teacher, Vandenberg says that the child is cut off from his world unless he is helped. Rather than letting him alone, therefore, such help from adults liberates the child, lets him be. Through participation in his being, adults can help the child free himself for his authentic possibilities. At this point Vandenberg notes the importance of play for the child. To superimpose the values appropriate to adult existence on 144 childhood, he says, is to contribute to the alienation of the child from the world, himself and others, and is to defeat the realization of the values imposed. The child must live each moment in its irreplaceability by realizing its values. He has to do this as a child to be able to exist fully as an adult. The teacher then has authority in the child's eyes to the extent that he co-discloses possibilities of being. Here, Vandenberg writes: . . . Educating action, however, can occur only when the "pupil" implicitly understands that he requires help in the disclosure of possibilities of being, for only then does he project into the disclosure with his whole being and only then is he able to coexist with the "teacher" in the possibility opened up. This coexistence, that is, occurs only when both "teacher" and "pupil" are authentically there in the classroom, i.e., only when both are aware of their gratuitous choices to be there and are living up to the conditions of those choices by being authentically as a teacher and being authentically as a pupil. (Winter 1969, p. 53) What occurs within authentic pedagogic authority, there fore, is authentic corporate action, or authentic co- historicizing. Pedagogic authority finally rests upon the teacher as a guardian of being. As Vandenberg explains: . . . A nonviolent and authentically human power emerges to govern the pedagogic relation when there are genuine disclosures: When the teacher is in the truth of being, she is a guardian of being, and when she establishes the being of truth by means of the word, she establishes being. She can be a guardian of being only insofar as she lets being be her guardian and refuses to surrender her being 145 to the anonymous power objectified in the schooling role of the teacher? i.e., when she has the courage to be, is able to disclose herself, and is someone herself. (1971, p. 142) And it is hope, he continues, that makes it possible for the teacher and pupil to have a common atunement and to dwell together in a sustaining affective medium. Dr. Vandenberg also believes that when the pupil1s choosings are held to be of central importance to the educative process, all basis for educating disappear. He concludes in this regard that when the child does not enter into the pedagogic relation freely and freely acknowledge the authoritativeness of the teacher, there is no educating, there may be schooling, training and even learning, but not educating. The child acknowledges the authoritativeness of the teacher when he perceives that he requires help and that the teacher is able to help him. Thus, under optimal circumstances, the cessation of the youth's need for help and his perception of the termination of this need coincide at the end of educating. In con trast to Dewey, therefore, for whom the aim of education was more education, the aim of educating is "no more" educating. Finally, Dr. Vandenberg turns his attention to some aspects of the founding of the pedagogic relation, which he says include first leading the pupil back to himself in a 146 return to the origin of his being to enable him to want to be someone himself so he can be authentically there as a student. And secondly, guiding the learner to an encounter with "subject matter" within his explorations of the world that constitute his being as a student. Here, Vandenberg favors the admonition, which is midway between the command and appeal, as an attempt to get the student to respond to the objective demands of his situa tion in being-obligated. It is to the negligence as such, he says, that attention is drawn: . . . Because the admonition is not an admonishment for not having done the neglected task, and because it is not an exhortation to complete it, because it is merely the reminder that receives its enhancement from the prior commitment of the pupil to doing what was neg lected, the teacher ignores noticing whether or not the neglected task is subsequently completed. This allows room for "disobedience." In the authentic admonition she ignores the actual completion because she recognizes that this is none of her concern. The concern is to waken the pupil to responsibility for his own being, not to complete a task that is inconsequential to the pupil. (19 71, p. 154) Also included is the task of leading the pupil to an encounter with the teacher because the pupil requires help in his explorations of the world in the regions thereof constituted by so called subject matter. Concluding this area then, Vandenberg writes that the proper Use of "en counter" is not in the affective but rather in the cogni tive domain to promote humanistic understanding through 147 appropriate curriculum content. In this respect, he says, it would appear to be existentially self-defeating to turn a classroom into the site of an "encounter group." To finalize the analysis of Dr. Vandenberg*s writings, we shall now examine his ideas regarding moral education within each of the following four sub-areas: first, moral education in general; second, moral education and homogeneous or "ability" grouping; third, moral educa tion and use of objective psychology within the pedagogic relation; and fourth, moral education and choice of voca tion . Concerning moral education in general, Vandenberg notes initially that all education has moral bearings. But the aim of moral education, he writes, is to promote moral conduct after the pupil leaves school. The first step, he continues, in moral education is dedicated teachers who guide all practice for the pupil's improve ment. The school, Dr. Vandenberg says, can make demands on the pupil regarding moral education in: proportion to its responding to the pupil's demand for liberation, which is in proportion to the being authentically there of the schooling staff. Next, he claims, deficient solicitude lies behind attempts to promote democracy in the school and classroom by "practicing" it, or by forming "character" or 148 "personality" for democratic living, instead of letting the pupil free himself by letting him be himself. Genuine solicitude, on the other hand, "leaps ahead" of the other by disclosing with the student possibilities of being such that he can take over his project of being for himself. Talk about developing the pupil's character as such, therefore, participates in the forgetfulness of being writes Vandenberg. Helping him establish responsibility for his own being makes the existence of "character" possible. Conventional morality and enacted laws, according to 'Vandenberg, constitute the moral facticity of a society because they stand for the minimal conditions of coexis tence. Moral education then, within citizenship ideals, has only to enable pupils to see what coexistence is. It is insufficient, he says, to teach the pupil the words of morals and laws and to have the pupil reflect on moral "problems." The pupil must, instead, "practice" authentic coexistence. He can do this in school, Vandenberg writes, because the school's rules and regulations are the legal order. And any "violation of laws in force is both destructive of the other's and one's own being and arrogant in that it allots more of the life-space of coexistence to oneself than is granted to others. Violations of con ventional morality, Professor Vandenberg continues, stem 149 directly from alienation from oneself and others. Thus, he says, a program of moral education that serves to reduce alienation is not only consonant with the content of con ventional morality, but is the only program that can be. Finally, with respect to student discipline, Vandenberg claims that the lack of punishment is, in existential perspective, an evasion of pedagogic responsibility. The teacher, he says, has an obligation to the pupil to punish him for rule violations in order to initiate moral growth. Directing attention now to the topic of moral education and homogeneous or "ability" grouping, Vandenberg writes that single track, so-called heterogeneous grouping is the only arrangement whereby moral education is possi ble. "Ability" grouping, he says, contributes to the alienation of men from each other and from themselves because it institutionalizes differences and qualities that are unrealizable in personal experience and suggests to pupils that the differences are inside the skin as properties one already has. Such grouping then, he continues, promotes alienation because first, it considers human being with categories appropriate to non-human entities. Secondly, it places "societal expectations" on pupils not with respect to who they are but with respect to what they are. Third, such grouping structures the worlds of-pupils in a way which makes subsequent authentic 150 coexistence impossible— later remembrance of ability- grouping prohibits authentically human relations because of the "earlier" inauthentic relations. Commenting further here, Vandenberg warns: . . . the life of the school is structured such that the having-been in school under "ability" grouping affects the "world" of its pupils in school and ever afterwards because the temporality of being-there is not a continuous linear pro gression. A remembrance of school days years later brings the social structure of the school right into the present. If vividly enough, it can be closer and more relevant to the "present" than incidents of a week past and may thereby prohibit being there authentically with others because of the "earlier" institutionalized inauthentic being-with others. (1966, "The Ontological Foundation of Moral Education," p. 257) Ability grouping also promotes alienation, Vandenberg reasons, because it is the institutionalization of the desires of dominant social groups who collectively con stitute an oppressing class. Another argument advanced by Dr. Vandenberg. against ability grouping is that schooling achievements may be irrelevant to future achievement. Advocating schooling policy then on the basis of a future promise may overestimate the importance of schooling to authentic development. Predicting future achievement, moreover, may be irrelevant to the tasks of schooling. Finally, Vandenberg concludes, advocating the discovery and motivation of "talented" children is arrogant, defi cient solicitude for it presupposes that "gifted" children 151 and youth can be helped by schooling without waiting until the help is asked for. In this regard he writes: . . . the overt suggestion is that the "talented" child or youth has no right to solve the problem of existing for himself as best as he can, that he has no right to dirt farm, paint, write poetry or novels, wash dishes, or any number of things to which schooling is not necessarily a help. It might not be tragic if a "gifted" youth, say, drops out of school: it could only seem to be when viewed through some one else's "values" when those "values" are projected on to him trying to dominate him, as if someone else knew what the youth's future should be, or what his best future could be. Advocating the discovering and motivating of "talented" children, in other words, is arrogant, deficient solicitude. It presupposes that "gifted" children can and should be "helped" by schooling. (1967, "Ideology and Educational Policy," p. 47) Turning now to Vandenberg*s thoughts about moral education and the use of objective psychology within the pedagogic relation, he writes that in no case is the teacher an objective observer of the pupils, and where this is attempted, he continues, it is identical with alienating oneself from the pupils and the pupils from oneself in the deficient mode of solicitude. The teacher, he says, cannot see the pupil in his futuring, in his temporality, that is in his project of being, with ob- jectivistic constructs. Freudian constructs then as found in the culture can only result in unnecessary reifi cations and increased alienation by "explaining away," that is debunking the conscious purposing of oneself and 152 others. Vandenberg also lists several objections to the use of psychological tests in school. First, such tests, he says, transcend the transcendences of pupils making moral education impossible. Secondly, they put the worker in second place to the task. They also contribute to alienation because they promote the acceptance of being what one already is, which Vandenberg says is only one1s facticity. And finally, such tests, specifically the tests of so-called personality factors, assume that the person is the same before and after testing as he was during testing. With reference to the last sub-area, moral educa tion, and choice of vocation, Dr. Vandenberg believes that the prostitution of selling oneself for compensation can be avoided only if an occupation is chosen as part of the self, as part of the having to be oneself. Vocation then has to be selected on the worth of the service and the nature of the task alone. Explaining further, he comments: Under democratic ideals, it was suggested that the possibility of moral education derived from the authentic solicitude of the schooling staff. If authentic solicitude leaps forth and liberates the other for his authentic possi bilities, then any suggestion, hint, advocacy, urging, counseling, etc., by schooling staff in respect to vocational choices on the basis of prestige or compensation would be alienating because it would promote choices for the wrong reasons: teachers would be intruding and dominating the pupil"s authentic choice, his choice of himself across concrete possibilities, 153 essentially (i.e., existentielly) choosing for him rather than freeing him for his possibilities. (1966, "The Ontological Foundation of Moral Education," p. 46 3) Concluding then, Vandenberg says that we must find a common curriculum or form of general education that helps pupils make themselves available to the "system" of services but does not limit future possibilities prematurely. Having now completed an analysis of the writings of the six educational philosophers, a comparison of the findings will next be made so that the reader may more easily compare and contrast the thinking of said philoso phers and uncover certain relationships within their various works. Comparison of Findings From an analysis of all the relevant writings of the six selected educational philosophers, it was possible to isolate fifteen variables for comparison. These variables actually consist of those areas of inquiry re garding aspects of existentialism and education which were discussed by more than one author, and they were selected for examination herein because of their presumed importance for the reader’s total, overall understanding about this area. The variables are arranged in terms of frequency of discussion, that is, it was found that the following five variables were discussed by four of the 154 — 1 educational philosophers: first, the purposes and goals of education; secondly, abstract knowledge; third, the arts and humanities, especially literature, in the cur riculum; fourth, praxis and fifth, dialogue and the Socratic approach. Three of the educational philosophers dealt with the following six variables: the teacher's authority; student grouping and universal education; student discipline; appropriation of knowledge; involve ment with others; death. Finally, the below listed four variables were analyzed by two writers: first, the group; next, existentialism and experimentalism; third, cognitive and affective domains and last, existential time. Within each of the above three categories, the variables them selves were then arranged in order of importance, and an order of presentation regarding each variable was selected to ensure the most meaningful discussion sequence in terms of the reader's ability to compare and contrast varying positions and attitudes. We shall commence the comparison of findings then with an analysis of positions about the purposes and goals of education. Kneller asserts here that although the existen tialists insist that there is a considerable body of traditional subject matter which must be mastered since it is necessary that the student realize the "givenness" of the world in which his freedom must be exercised, they 155 nevertheless deplore the uncritical capitulation of con temporary schools to professional and vocational prepara tion. The existentialists, he says, see little value to the person in an education limited to training, and they recommend instead increased attention to subject matter and methods which appeal to feeling, emotion, creativity and the deeper aspects of life. Over-specialization, Kneller continues, stunts the growth of the pupil's total, inner life. Instead of encouraging the student to become a free individual, vocational preparation trains him to be a particular kind of person; the specialist too often is the creature of his knowledge, not the master of it. Dr. Vandenberg, taking a somewhat more pragmatic position than Kneller, argues that we must find a common curriculum or form of general education that helps pupils make themselves available to the "system" of services but one which does not limit future possibilities prematurely. Articulating this same thought, Troutner says that an existential education represents an education in being and the search for a sense of meaning in life rather than an education for behavioral change or for vocation, citizen ship or adjustment. For as Kneller adds, an education for perfectability, happiness or adjustment is no education at all, but is, rather, an irresponsible indulgence in un reality and human deception. To live authentically, he 156 says, is to carve out life for oneself, not to be molded into it. Professor Denton seems to agree here in writing about an education for celebration which cuts across the domains of work and leisure, wherein the tone is one of vitality, energy, dynamism and affectivity of the moment, where meaning is a sense of wholeness and rightness, that special sense of at-onement (an immediate given which describes those moments when man not only can obtain glimpses of the possibilities of future man and culture, but can sense his connectedness with that future), and where form transcends role fragmentation in the coming together as a We-conununity. Among the educational philosophers who discuss the second variable, namely abstract knowledge, there likewise seems to be a considerable amount of agreement. Kneller, for example, says the existentialists reject the distinc tion between subject and object. As such, existential philosophizing does not lie in intellectual but rather in experiential knowledge. Morris agrees by saying that learning begins with the self, not with knowledge. And he is in accord with Kneller too, by saying that the indivi dual is responsible for his own knowledge. Since the individuals existence or being in the present moment is the only certain knowledge available to him, Dr. Denton 157 writes, there are distinct limits to knowledge claims. Professor Greene also concludes that responsibility for knowledge rests with the individual who must originate and structure his own knowledge so that any validity it possesses is finally due to him. She speaks in this regard of generative learning, which involves both freedom and responsibility by the learner. And Dr. Kneller adds that objective, systemitized knowledge can only be hypo thetical, never decisive. There is no pretense by the existentialists, he says, to disinterested knowledge. Thus, as Denton writes, school subjects must be made relevant to contemporary man. Subject matter should no longer be considered an end in itself for students to "master" in some sense but should really serve two primary functions: first, to create dissonance and second, to provide alternative notions. The third variable, the arts and humanities, especially literature, in the curriculum, within the first category, receives considerable attention. As Dr. Greene states: There are works of art, there are certain works in history, philosophy, and psychology, that were deliberately created to move people to critical awareness, to a sense of moral agency, and to a conscious engagement with the world. As I see it, they ought— under the rubric of the "arts and humanities"— to be central to any curriculum that is constructed today. (19 78, p. 162) 15 8 Morris, in this regard, after noting that the emotive content in existentialism suffuses the entire educational process, focuses attention on the student’s input. Here, he says, the learner should be given assignments in reacting to the world through creative writing, drama and responding to literature. Greene, on the other hand, sees literature as the vehicle through which the individual can get in touch with himself, and she notes that the concen tration on literature rather than on other arts shows the existentialist's predilection for communicating indirectly. Image and metaphor, she continues, play a crucial role in man's efforts to come in contact with his full reality. Professor Greene also claims that literature may have an emancipatory function for people whose selves have become attenuated, who have, in other words, forgotten the function of the "I." For the existentialist feels he is communicating when he succeeds in both engaging the reader's subjectivity in such a way as to move him to see the world anew and in turning the reader back upon himself, in self—confrontation and identification, making him aware of his own consciousness and of that which is spontaneous and authentic in his being. The existentialist, quite frankly, wants to evoke the experience of disquietude. Literary themes, she continues, particularly those of crisis and the kinds of dislocations which cause nausea and 159 despair, are likely to focus on man's present condition and on revelations of man's present possibilities in the situ ations of our day. And the person is most fully himself when aware of the limits of possibility. An encounter with a literary work then can, in her opinion, at once liberate and clarify. The artist though, she says, in the existential view, presents rather than represents since a representation is forever linked to that which is copied. Works of literary art, Greene says, are open possibilities, open questions, and should be treated this way in the classroom. The important thing she adds ought not be the subject or status of the work, but rather its capacity to arouse. Finally, she cautions, experience with literature must begin and end in private possession. Vandenberg too agrees that the humanities and the arts will receive emphasis from the existential educator and that a de-emphasis of science and the social sciences will follow. Consistent with Dr. Greene's position, Vandenberg also believes that the content of such an arts and humanities curriculum will appear to center in litera ture. For as he sees it, in literature more than in life itself, except in the ultimate situations he discusses, there is the opportunity for one to authenticate himself. And further, in literature subjectively appropriated, one can find out what he is and what he can become. Professor 160 Kneller concludes as well that the humanities in the exis tential view will be given a central place in the curricu lum. His reasoning, however, differs from that already discussed above. His position is that the humanities should be utilized not simply for analysis or apprecia tion, nor to expose the student to his own possibilities, but rather as visible evidence of the agony, suffering and delight which go into real creativity and genuine exis tence. Dr. Morris notes that wherever in the school pro gram the individual, private judgments of the child come most actively into play is the likely center of greatest existential interest. For example, the arts, music, painting, creative writing and drama. And, he says, since the existential educator and counselor is committed to developing the individuals decision making capacity, in so doing such personnel will probably move away from the sciences including the social sciences and turn to the humanities and the arts, the contributions of which are to awaken sensibilities and heighten the intensification of feelings in the individual. Art, Morris stresses, is pre-eminently man's way of interpreting and expressing ideas and emotions and thus tries to awaken man's sensi bilities, to quicken his awareness of being alive and existent. 161 ---1 Turning now to the concept of praxis, Dr. Greene notes that the self-aware, wide-awake teacher strives for a type of knowing called praxis, which she says is a particular type of cognitive action which involves problem posing, problem solving and the transcending or surpassing of what is, including a refusal to take the social cultural matrix for granted as a given. The crucial concern, how ever, she writes, is for self-awareness and critical cog nitive action for the sake of gaining perspective on personal life and remaking the social domain. And although admitting the implicitly revolutionary meaning in the con cept of praxis, Greene nevertheless claims that focal to this approach is a conception of human consciousness which thrusts toward and not away from the common world. She disagrees, therefore, with those who seem to be saying that the only way to escape manipulation is through retreat into private sensibility or the silences of the secret self. Without using the specific term, praxis, Professor Troutner agrees with Greene. He says the teacher must nurture and instruct the child in such a way as to help him transcend the culture in order to criticize and help improve it. Differing somewhat from Dr. Greene's analysis, Professor Vandenberg defines authentic praxis as action, reflection and action, and he recommends a positive neutrality regarding controversial issues and/or political 162 matters requiring a positive support of various perspec tives. His object is to eliminate all "sectarianism" by raising consciousness wherever possible from the naive to the critical level so as to engage in dialogue and authentic praxis. Disagreeing quite markedly with his colleagues, however, Dr. Morris writes that existentialism is not concerned with the problems of cultural change and social reconstruction. He says the only adequate socio political order is that one which recognizes and values the absolute freedom of the person. Directing attention at this point to the concept of dialogue and the Socratic approach, Dr. Denton advises that, in his view, teaching involves a mutual implication of subject and object. It is a symbolic plus an actional relationship with dialogue as the primordial given of the implication; the beginning of understanding is the engage ment in dialogue. Dialogue, he says, has begun when one can translate what his partner has said into his own terms. Next, when one partner contradicts the other, it is evidence of the dialectic of tension which character izes genuine dialogue. And where there is perfect agree ment, Denton adds, there can be no dialogue. Dialogue, he continues, usually involves three poles, a minimum of two partners plus the subject matter. Existentially, however, the subject matter .is the dialogue. Also, that which one 163 partner insists on leaving with the other as his last comment is the most important, and all other statements are to be understood *in respect to that one. Dialogue, he concludes, may or may not be linear in its development and the dialogical method of understanding may include encounters, imaginative projections, articulating frames of reference and sharing activities. Morris appears to agree with much of Denton*s thought in noting that teaching and learning is above all else a personal encounter, a dialogue not of cognition between minds, but of feeling between subjectivities. Professors Kneller and Morris each agree that in any education calling itself existential, the Socratic method of instruction would be the favored approach. But Dr. Vandenberg, in contrast, without explanation, claims that the Socratic method is highly impractical for utiliza tion in most public schools. With reference to the second category noted above, and to the first variable therein, the teacher*s authority, Dr. Vandenberg writes that because help is fully accepted only when it is truly asked for, the child constitutes the authority of the teacher. Pedagogical authority, he claims, originates in the child-parent relation when the parent helps the child to be someone himself. The child, Vandenberg continues, is cut off from his world unless he 164 is helped. Help from adults then liberates the child, lets him be. Through participation in his being, adults can help the child free himself for his authentic possibili ties. The teacher, therefore, according to Professor Vandenberg, has authority in the child's eyes to the extent that he co-discloses possibilities of being. What occurs within authentic pedagogic authority, Vandenberg says, is authentic corporate action, or authentic co-historicizing. Pedagogic authority finally rests upon the teacher as a guardian of being. Thus, Vandenberg concludes, when the child does not enter into the pedagogic relation freely and freely acknowledge the authoritativeness of the teacher, there is no educating, there may be schooling, training and even learning, but not educating. Dr. Denton reaches a similar conclusion to that of Professor Vandenberg but for a somewhat slightly different reason. Denton equates the existentially real teacher with a guru or charismatic leader whose authority comes not by formal sanction but from those presently with him. Such a teacher, he says, is free to pierce the vanity of conventional wisdom, attack the morals and customs of his time as offering only the illusion of certainty, lay claim to new knowledge and to different modes of expression and challenge the authority and benefits to be gained from sanctioning bodies. This educator is also free from 165 conventional criteria of accountability. Dr. Kneller, in comparison, equates the authority of the teacher with a certain amount of personal responsibility. He says it should not be the teacher's intention to let the student choose whatever view of the subject matter the student wishes. Instead, he notes, after full discussion, the teacher must offer the pupil what he believes to be the best view and ask the pupil whether he will accept it. The existentialist, Kneller notes, insists not that the teacher be "successful," but that the teacher be honest. Some widely divergent positions may now be ob served in a discussion of the next variable, student grouping and universal education. Within this context, Dr. Vandenberg believes that schooling can exist as public only if it is free, compulsory and universal. And, he adds, it appears that the preliminary step in the reduc tion of the alienation of men from each other is the establishment of a common schooling system with a common curriculum on a world-wide basis. Vandenberg also notes that the "mass" aspects of schooling cannot be avoided since the average everydayness of schooling is its facticity, its that-it-is. Professor Kneller, on the other hand, appears to consider the establishment of such a common schooling system as the very factor producing alienation. For he 166 notes that the existentialists condemn the lowering of standards brought about by universal education and that contemporary existentialists insist that equality of educational opportunity should not be made an excuse for educating all children at the same rate and in the same way. Dr. Kneller is assuming, of course, that the universal education he refers to has in fact lowered standards, an hypothesis to be tested by means of empirical research and, therefore, beyond the scope of this paper. Professor Greene, in her writings, notes that the serious teacher often must take deliberate action to enable diverse students to learn how to learn. This ac tion, she says, may involve engineering or behavior control such as grouping or categorizing in classroom situations. And she cites research showing that children learn par ticularly well when older children assume leadership in heterogeneous groups. If Dr. Greene1s conclusions are applicable only to such heterogeneous groups, it would appear then that her views and those of Dr. Vandenberg are consistent with one another. If, however, in re ferring to grouping or categorizing in classroom situa-^ tions, she has reference to homogeneous or ability grouping, her position will be in direct conflict with the opinions of Dr. Vandenberg for whom single track, so-called heterogeneous grouping is the only arrangement whereby 167 moral education is possible. "Ability" grouping, he says, contributes to the alienation of men from each other and from themselves because it institutionalizes differences and qualities that are unrealizable in personal experience and suggests to pupils that the differences are inside the skin as properties one already has. This, Vandenberg notes, promotes alienation because it considers human being with categories appropriate to non-human entities, places "societal expectations" on pupils not with respect to who they are but with respect to what they are and structures the worlds of pupils in such a way that it makes subsequent authentic coexistence impossible. Later remembrance of "ability" grouping, he says, prohibits authentically human relations because of the "earlier" inauthentic relations. Finally, Professor Vandenberg writes, ability grouping promotes alienation because it represents the institutionalization of the desires of dominant social groups who collectively constitute an oppressing class. In addition, Vandenberg continues, schooling achievements may be irrelevant to future achievement. Advocating schooling policy then on the basis of a future promise may overestimate the importance of schooling to authentic development. Predicting future achievement, moreover, may be irrelevant to the tasks of schooling. 168 Dr. Vandenberg also says that advocating the discovery and motivation of "talented" children is arrogant, de ficient solicitude for it presupposes that "gifted" children and youth can be helped by schooling without waiting until the help is asked for. Isolating some thoughts now concerning the next variable, student discipline, Morris contends that the child is taught to control himself by controlling himself, that self-discipline, in other words, comes from practice in disciplining oneself. Consequently, he condemns the position of modern Freudian psychology that "all behavior is caused" as well as other Freudian conceptions which, he says, legislate existential man out of existence by re lieving him of the responsibility for his own actions. In Dr. Vandenberg*s view, however, the authentic teacher will have very few discipline problems although, he cautions, the child nevertheless has to be free to disobey in order to genuinely obey since room for disobedience maintains the tension between pedagogic authority and the pupil*s freedom. According to Professor Kneller, the teacher must both impose discipline and also ask the student to accept the discipline that the student sees as worthwhile for some end, such as his own intellectual development or the harmony of the class. And Dr. Vandenberg agrees in part with Kneller by claiming that lack of punishment, in an 169 existential perspective, is an evasion of pedagogic re sponsibility since the teacher has the obligation to the pupil to punish him for rule violations in order to initiate moral growth. Those educational philosophers who discuss the next variable, appropriation of knowledge, agree with Dr. Greene when she says that learning, to be meaningful, must involve a "going beyond" by a learner who is "open to the world," eager, indeed condemned, to give meaning to it. Significant learning, she writes, begins<when; a self-aware individual reaches out for meanings in response to certain crucial questions of his own. It advances as he attempts to articulate and make explicit what is involved in the birth of his own rationality. Responsibility for know ledge, she continues, rests with the individual; the individual originates and structures his own knowledge and any validity it possesses is finally due to him. Generative learning then, Greene says, involves both freedom and responsibility by the learner. According to Kneller, education must concentrate on the freedom of the total inner being. This includes, he says, based on his view of Sartre, the acceptance of facts and data only insofar as they have significance for the individual. He also cites as one of the goals of the existential teacher evidence that students hold something 170 to be true because they have convinced themselves that it is true. For Kneller then, the aim is personal appropria tion of knowledge whereby the integrity of subject matter is actually destroyed since he sees the human being as above knowledge, reason and the school.* Dr. Morris too views learning as beginning with the self, not with knowledge. And he agrees with Kneller that the individual is responsible for his own knowledge. The next variable, involvement with others, brings forth some rather noteworthy attitudes by the various educational philosophers, particularly since the existen tialist is often characterized as one who has removed himself from social affairs, preferring instead to dwell in self-imposed isolation. But Dr. Greene talks about an adequate and wholesome sense of community, and writes that the individual can neither serve nor survive by withdrawing from the social situation. Man, she says, is dependent, contingent and social. She thus posits a conception of human consciousness which thrusts toward and not away from the common world. And she disagrees with those who seem to be saying that the only way to escape manipulation is through retreat into private sensibility or the silences of the secret self. Professor Vandenberg appears to be in agreement here. He notes that the existentialists are not 171 anti-social since society is part of man's facticity. It merely happens, he writes, that social problems by and large are not problems of existence and are subordinate to the problems of existence. Nevertheless, he adds, the existentialists have a deep sense of community even though the contents of their philosophizing tends to exclude doctrines of sociality. He also feels that there is no necessary conflict between individual and collective liberation. It may be, Vandenberg says, that each is a necessary condition of the other. Consistent with his reliance on Camus' philosophy, Professor Denton is seeking a balance between isolation and involvement. He notes that man first finds his own identity in isolation and then demonstrates his solidarity with all men in active involvement. Complete isolation from others, he writes, leads to nihilism. Complete involvement, on the other hand, leads to loss of self- identity. A balance between the two then is a charac teristic of the moral man and a goal of education. Com menting further, Dr. Denton adds that education must develop within each student an intense awareness of his absurd relationship to the world and of his responsibility to other men who are also living in absurdity. Denton claims that Kneller's "existentialism" makes no provision for this social dimension. 172 The sixth and final variable within the second category, the topic of death, is a matter which has oc cupied the attention of practically all the primary exis tential philosophers. Some of the educational philosophers herein also discuss this subject in varying degrees of agreement. Dr. Kneller, for example, says that education must wrestle with the issue of the meaning of death. Man, he says, must face up to the dread of death and the actual negation of human life. In realizing the imminence of death, he continues, man affirms life and the authenticity of existence. But, for Dr. Troutner, an existential education is not only education in time, but also education in death. Not, he says, education for death, as he claims Kneller assumes. Professor Vandenberg adds, pursuant to Heidegger, that historicizing (authentically existing) is a movement between birth and death in which "being there is stretched along and stretches itself along" thus connecting birth and death, both of which are for the whole distance. And he criticizes Kneller1s "death is an anguish-producing fact" as representing an inauthentic understanding of Heidegger since for the latter, he says, authentic being towards death frees one and is accompanied by a serenity. Professor Troutner appears to agree with Vandenberg here noting that the authentic existent looks straight down the 173 line to his death and in appropriating it, affirms both his life and his death. Looking next the the third and final category, it should be underscored that perhaps few other subjects have drawn as much attention in existential theory as the individual's relation to the group. The first variable herein then deals with the group and, among the educa tional philosophers included in this study, Professors Kneller and Morris have been the most vocal in denouncing a policy of group functioning often at the expense of individual development. Kneller, for example, in noting some of the twentieth century conditions which dehumanize man by undermining his freedom lists both the tyranny of the majority in the democratic process and of the group in social affairs. And he writes that while man may join the group, if he ever succeeds in understanding himself or his place in the group he is no longer free, he can no longer become, he is the victim of his own determinism. Man, Kneller adds, is always what he is yet to be. An existential curriculum then within the school, he con tinues, will emphasize individual study, personal inter pretation and creative work rather than group activity, factual study and absorption of specified subject matter. For, as Kneller writes, the existentialists regard educa tional collectivism to have reached a crisis stage in 174 modern public education. Ways, therefore, must be found in which demands of social conformity may be reconciled with the intrinsic natural diversity in human beings. This problem, Kneller says, is intensified by psychological theories which stress freedom of expression as the formula tion of stable emotional development and yet, at the same time, place a premium on techniques of social adapta tion and engineering. Finally, Kneller writes, the student must not be subjected to group processes in the belief that group learning is superior to individual effort. And the student must not be assigned arbitrarily to team research in the hope of making him more socially acceptable. Dr. Morris agrees with much of Kneller1s thought in this area. He believes the existential school will become more individual centered in hopes of developing a responsible individualism. Morris also sees the "group method" being discarded since he states that the exis- ‘ tentialists do not value gregariousness. And it is likely, he says, that within the existential framework, all forms of cooperative endeavor will atrophy, at least all those in which decisions are sought as distinguished from those in which factual information is shared. Kneller, on the other hand, not going so far as to discard the group altogether, argues that the teacher will be 175 expected to use group instruction not for the development of the class as a whole, but rather as a way by which each individual within the group will count for more than the group, and certainly for more than the content and tools of instruction. Moving now to another area, both Drs. Troutner and Vandenberg claim that a merger of experimentalism and existentialism, our second variable, is necessary for a complete philosophy of education— Troutner, primarily because a part of Dewey's experimentalism fills a void which the individual cannot "see" in lived experience; Vandenberg, because he notes a similarity between the experimentalist problematic and the existentialist's ultimate situations. Specifically, Troutner notes that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see and incorporate the environ mental factors which influence men's lives, those which they do not consciously experience in lived reality. The effect of the social-cultural environment upon the in dividual's becoming, he continues, is cumulative, it occurs over a long period of time and is, therefore, imperceptible to immediate, conscious experience. Since it can only be "seen" through reflection, that is through inference and explanation, Troutner believes that Dewey's organism-environment transaction perspective, which is one 176 step removed from immediate experience, is tailored to reveal this environmental influence. Thus, while the existential perspective will reveal the student*s lived reality, Dewey's experimentalism will afford an opportunity to accommodate the influences of the natural and social environment on man's becoming. Troutner also mentions two other areas of possible partnership for existentialism and experimentalism. The first, experimentalists' choice, intelligent inquiry and the weighing of consequences is compatible with the exis tentialist's "leap of faith." And next, since education includes both the transmission of culture and the becoming of an individual, Troutner feels that a marriage between Dewey's social emphasis and the existentialist's individual emphasis is warranted. Dr. Vandenberg writes that the corruption of experimentalism occurs when education becomes "intellec tual" and divorced from the pupil's immediate experience. Thus, he opposes the reduction of education to teaching, schooling or cognitive "processes." According to Dewey, he continues, the humdrum of everyday life, drifting with conventions, yielding to pressure, compromising and every thing that passes for morality, particularly the super ficial cliches and proverbs of common sense, prevent an individual's full interaction with the environment and, 177 therefore, hinder the development of experience, that is render an experience anesthetic. These, however, Vanden berg continues, are the identical forces that produce alienation for the existentialist. Now, he says, if life is growth for Dewey, it is becoming for the existentialist. If interaction with the environment results in temporary fallings out, fallings back in, resulting in growth for Dewey, facticity in a definite situation leads to crisis or ultimate situations, resulting in becoming oneself for the existentialist. Authentic man, Dr. Vandenberg writes, achieves esthetic consummatory experiences in life’s ultimate situations— death, suffering, anguish, chance, sickness, failure, guilt, uncertainty. He concludes, therefore, that, in his view, there is no reason to suppose that the problematic situations which constitute experience for Dewey, the fallings out with the environment, cannot be enlarged to include the existentialist's ultimate situations. Another very important area is the one contained within the next variable, the cognitive and affective domains. Professor Morris articulates the more traditional view found in the literature in stating that one of the characteristics of an existential education and school will be that man's non-rational, that is his aesthetic, moral and emotional self will be much more in evidence than his 178 scientific, rational self. This will be the case, Morris believes, because the existentialists are more interested in developing the affective side of man, his capacity to love, appreciate, respond emotionally to the world. Dr. Greene, however, takes exception to this posi tion. She writes that the only way of actualizing a work of art is for the student to engage with it emotively, sensually and cognitively with his whole self. "Non- cognitive" and "affective awareness" alone are not suffi cient, she says, for effective functioning. Beyond this, and in general terms, Greene adds that it is important when considering integration and wholeness to break with such notions as those that split the cognitive from the emo tional, the rational from the affective capacities. Focusing now on the last variable to be considered herein, existential time, Troutner in this regard compares clock with existential time. For him, clock time, or the inauthentic mode of existing, is objective and is asso ciated with organization and with formal education. And he believes that speed, achievement and IQ tests are based directly on objective time and have no relevance for existential education since they attempt to treat the individual existent as a natural object or thing. Clock time, Troutner continues, is seen as an infinite succession of "now moments" which follow each other in a definite 179 order of coming to be and passing away. The focus, he notes, is always on the present. Dr. Troutner also writes that there are certain consequences of living in clock time. First, it is intimately connected with the increasing atomization and fragmentation of life. It also depreciates the past. Third, instead of choosing in anticipatory resolve, man waits for the future to happen just as a clock waits for the next minute. Fifth, time passively passes as if the individual were not in a time of his own making. And finally, those living in clock time generally forfeit responsibility for their becoming to the They. Existential time, or the authentic temporal mode, on the other hand, according to Troutner, exists at A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, for example, and is the basis for learning and creativity. This time, Troutner writes, is not amenable to precise measurement; it refers to the finite time of immediate experience. It is always found in an ecstatic unity in which the past, present and future are lived simultaneously as inseparable phases of human existence and are related dynamically, each inter penetrating the other, and is primarily future oriented. This coexistence and integration of the three moments, however, Troutner notes, does not exclude the idea of succession for the three times are not lived simultaneously, 180 although they are all at the same time conjointly present. Thus, the past "has been" but has not "gone by" because the past continues to invade the present and play an essential part in the individual's everyday decisions. The teacher, therefore, says Troutner, should help students understand the importance of the past which is important for identity and continuity so that the child realizes that he has a heritage, a history. This objective, how ever, he warns, does not envision that students will be come slaves to their past, either through hatred or adula tion. Man, in other words, chooses to become himself through appropriating his own future in the process of having been, by decisive choice— a temporality of openness and resoluteness. From the existential perspective, Troutner concludes, man exists not so much in as as time. Dr. Greene recognizes this to be a significant issue as well. For in discussing the role of the teacher, she asks that thought be given to how the teacher is to adjust the demands of the clock or schedule to the rhythms of a child's inner time. And she too opposes fixed time schemes which make it impossible to create patterns of meaning in inner time. Summary In conclusion then, this Chapter IV has consisted 181 of two primary parts. First, an analysis of the totality of the writings of each of the six selected contemporary philosophers of education bearing on the subject of exis tentialism and education, with the contents of the writings of each educational philosopher placed under five major headings arranged in logical progression. Next, a comparison of findings, organized around a total of fifteen variables which were abstracted from the writings and placed in three categories based upon a frequency distribution. The variables within each category were then set up in order of importance and the format for presentation of material arranged by author so that the reader could easily compare and contrast the views of said authors and determine relationships therein. The final chapter summarizes this study and presents certain conclusions and recommendations. 182 CHAPTER V SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Summary Although there have been several studies, the subject of which has been to draw various implications for education based upon the thinking of numerous exis tential philosophers, a review of the literature reveals that there had not been an effort to systematically organize the thinking of contemporary educational philoso phers regarding existentialism and public education. It is to be hoped, therefore, that this effort has contributed to the knowledge about this subject and that it will also serve as a convenient reference work by having placed within one context the essential features regarding exis tentialism and education drawn from one hundred nineteen individual, carefully selected sources. Conclusions Initially, it is to be noted that the findings as reported herein show that each of the selected educational philosophers do indeed, in varying degrees, make specific recommendations for certain teacher-counselor conduct, attitudes and dispositions within the public school 183 environment in order to implement therein portions of existential thought. Not all of the educational philoso phers, however, offer such recommendations specifically for each of the items enumerated in Chapter I, namely: (1) the purposes and goals of education; (2) the nature of the child with respect to learning; (3) curriculum structure; and (4) subject matter emphasis and presenta tion. The evidence shows, rather, that such clear-cut divisions are not in keeping with the treatment of this area by the selected authors. Nevertheless, the Comparison of Findings above does indicate that two-thirds of the educational philosophers discussed one-half of the above topics, specifically, topics (1) and (4). Professor Vandenberg's analysis of item (2) is perhaps the most complete, even though Dr. Kneller too discusses this area in "The Knower and the Known." Kneller also deals specif ically with the curriculum. Said Comparison of Findings may likewise be utilized to answer the second research question, the extent to which each of the selected educational philosophers discusses substantially the same general areas and, to a lesser degree, emphasizes similar portions of existential thinking as perhaps having application for American public educational practice. Here, it is important to point out that among those who address such major topics as the 184 purposes and goals of education, the place of the arts and humanities, especially literature, in the curriculum and personal appropriation of knowledge, there is significant agreement. All regard education as requiring more than "preparation for," would give the arts and humanities, especially literature, a prominent place in the curriculum and stress the fact that the student is primarily responsi ble for his own knowledge, his own sense-making. Also significant are the positions taken by Greene, Vandenberg and Denton regarding man's involvement with others. Contrary to "pop" existentialism's apparent mandate that man remove himself as completely as possible from the social fabric, these educational philosophers conclude just the opposite, and their rationale therefor should have great impact on educators who have heretofore ne glected this topic' because of a supposed "isolationist" posture. Notwithstanding the above, it still seems quite clear that the application of much of existential thinking to the vast systems of public, bureaucratic "schooling" found today in the United States seems tenuous at best. It is Troutner who articulates this most forcefully, and in noting both the jarring incongruity between many of the major existential themes such as anxiety, alienation and being-unto-death and the education of children as well as 185 the inappropriateness of relying on Sartre's philosophy as a base, he too echoes the caviats which Bruce Baker wrote about. Perhaps this is one reason why he and Dr. Vandenberg advocate combining existentialism with experi mentalism in order to produce a complete philosophy of education. Professor Morris, however, maintains that because of the open-ended structure of existentialism, an existential educational program need not be overbearing and depressing. Both Denton and Kneller though offer as another factor mitigating against existentialism having a great deal of influence on educational practice the fact that few guides for teachers and administrators have been ad vanced by the existentialists. Also, according to Denton, there is the existentialists* general lack of concern with and for institutions such as the school. In spite of these insightful criticisms, however, most of the educa tional philosophers see existentialism as having implica tions for education in its larger, more basic sense rather than for schooling per se. This topic, in fact, Greene and Kneller maintain, continues to occupy the attention of all existential thinkers. Re c ommendations In light of both the results of this study as set 186 forth in Chapter IV and the aforementioned Conclusions, it would thus seem that one would not be justified, at this juncture in any event, in dismissing any relation between existentialism and American public education as being without merit since a sufficient connection has been found to exist according to practically all the educational philosophers who have examined this area. Such connection, however, too often has been vague and appears, conse quently, insufficient to enable school personnel to chart a course of conduct therefrom. It is recommended, there fore, that additional research be undertaken in this area to see in what specific ways an "existential posture" might profitably be implemented within American public educational practice. Those interested in such an enter prise might find themselves handsomely rewarded if for no other reason than by helping to reverse what appears to be an on-going trend toward mechanistic learning and continued personal alienation within the nation's schools. It is also recommended that (1) the classroom environment be structured in such a way so as to offer each pupil a balance between group participation and in dividual development, (2) each student be encouraged to appropriate his own knowledge as much as possible, (3) within the school setting and at the appropriate time, considering the learners' age and level of maturity, 187 genuine dialogue be undertaken concerning substantive issues in order to help students both form and take responsibility for their own positions, and (4) ample opportunity be given students to practice and strengthen self-discipline. In addition, the public schools should object to becoming simply training centers whose mission is little more than to offer specialized preparation for entry into current occupations. Finally, it is recommended that Boards of Education as well as other educational policy makers, when contemplating budget reductions, place a premium on the arts and humanities and resist, as long as possible, curriculum restrictions in these areas. 188 189 BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, Bruce F. "On the Possibility of the Relation Between Existentialism and Education." Doctoral Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1964. Barondes, Stanley. "Existentialism and Education: Toward Participation, Mystery and Dialogue." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1972. Bassett, Graeme R. "Existentialist Ethics and the Teaching of Values." Doctoral Dissertation, Washington State University, 197Q. Bedford, Charles M. "The Concept of the Authentic Individual and Its Implications for Building a Framework for an Existential Philosophy of Education." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Southern California, 1961. Catallozzi, John J. "Existentialism and the School Arts." Doctoral Dissertation, Boston University, 1970. Denton, David E. "Albert Camus and the Moral Dimensions of Education." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1963. "Albert Camus: Philosopher of Moral Concern." Educational Theory 14 (April 1964):99-102,127. The Philosophy of Albert Camus. Boston: Prime Publishers, 1967. "Existentialism in American Educational Philosophy." International Review of Education 14 (1968):97-102. "The Feeling/Notion Epistemological Paradigm." Educational Theory 18 (Spring 1968):125-132. "Education *s Egocentric Predicament." In Philosophy of Education. Edited by D. Arnstine. Illinois: Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1969. 190 The Language of Ordinary Experience. New York: Philosophical Library, 19 70. "On the Existential Understanding of Teaching- Acts." Philosophy of Education Society. Pro- ceedings of Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting. Dallas, TX, 1971. Existential Reflections on Teaching. Massachusetts: Christopher Publishing House, 1972. "Philosophy of Education and Guru-ism." Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of 19 71 Annual Meeting. Dayton, OH, 1972. "Review Article - 1 Being and Education1." Educational Theory 23 (Winter 1973):100-106. "The Image - - Gaston BachelardVs Language of Space." International Journal of Symbology 5 (July 1974):14-21. "That Mode of Being Called Teaching." In Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education. Edited by David Denton. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974. ed. and contributor. Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education: Collected Essays. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 19 74. and Rice, Irvin K. "Finding Oneself Knowing: An Essay in Existential Phemomenology." Paideia (December 1974):8-14. "Open Education: Search for a New Myth.f ! Educational Theory 25 (Fall 1975):397-406. "Alienation and Thought." Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of 1975 Annual Meeting. Cincinnati, OH, 1976. "Work, Leisure, and Celebration." South Atlantic Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of 19 76 Annual Meeting. Baltimore, MD, 1977. 191 Greene, Maxine, et al. "Existentialism and Education." Educational Theory 2 (April 1952):80-91. Greene, Maxine. "Philosophy of Education and the Pseudo- Question." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Sixteenth' Annual Meeting. Columbus, OH, 1960. __________ "Existentialism and Education." Education Synopsis (1961):6-9. __________ Response to "Values Without Base: The Existential Encounter with Ethical Judgment." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Nineteenth Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA, 1963. __________ "Art and the Existential Moment." Teachers College Record 67 (April 1966):503-507. Existential Encounters for Teachers. New York: Random House, 196 7. __________ "Technology and the Human Person." In Technology and the Curriculum. Edited by Paul W. F. Witt. New York: Teachers College Press, 1968. __________ "The Philosopher and the Rebel." Perspectives on Education 1 (Winter 1968):7-16. "Against Invisibility." College English 30 (March 1969):430-436. "The Aesthetic Component." In Foundations of Education. 3rd ed. Edited by George Kneller. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971. "Curriculum and Consciousness." Teachers College Record 73 (December 1971):253-269. __ "Towards a Reciprocity of Perspectives." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA, 1972. 192 ---1 "Defying Determinism." Teachers College Record 74 (December 1972):147-154. Teacher as Stranger. California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 19 73. "An Existential Philosopher Looks at Accountability." In Philosophers Speak On Accountability in Education. Edited by Robert L. Leight. Illinois: The Interstate Printers and Publishers, Inc., 1973. "Literature, Existentialism and Education." In Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education. Edited by David Denton. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974. "Cognition, Consciousness, and Curriculum." In Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution, and Curriculum Theory. Edited by William Pinar. California: McCutchan Publishing Corp., 1974. "An Existentialist Look at A. S. Neill." McGill Journal of Education 9 (Spring 19 74): 11-14. "Countering Privatism." Educational Theory 24 (Summer 1974):209-218. Response to "Education and the American Dream." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Thirty-First Annual Meeting. Kansas City, MO, 1975. "Administrators in Troubled Times." TC Topics 2 (Spring/Summer 1976):l-4. "Toward Wide-Awakeness: An Argument for the Arts and Humanities in Education." Teachers College Record 79 (September 1977):119-125. "The Artistic-Aesthetic and Curriculum." Curriculum Inquiry 6 (1977):283-309. Landscapes of Learning. New York: Teachers College Press, 19 78. Hamblin, Richard L. "Existential Implications to Curriculum: For Theory and Model." Doctoral Dissertation, Kansas State University, 19 72. Hendon, Robert P. "The Existential Portrait of the Teacher in Recent American Literature." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1967. Kneller, George F. Existentialism and Education. New York: Philosophical Library, 195 8. ________ "Education, Knowledge, and the Problem of Existence." Harvard Educational Review 31 (Fall 1961) -.427-436. __________ "Existentialism and Education." In Philosophy of Education - Essays and Commentaries. Edited by Hobert Burns and Charles Brauner. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1962. __________ "Contemporary Educational Theories." In Foundations of Education. Edited by George Kneller. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963. __________ "Existentialism." In The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Education. Edited by Kendig Brubaker Cully. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963. __________ and MacMillan, C. J. B. "Philosophy of Education: Existentialism as Educational Philosophy." Review of Educational Research 34 (February 1964):32-33. __________ Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 19 64. __________ "Contemporary Educational Theories." In Foundations of Education. 2nd ed. Edited by George Kneller. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967. __________ "Existentialism and Education." In Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Education. 3rd ed. Edited by Joe Park. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968. 194 _______ Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971. __________ "The Challenge of Existentialism." In Foundations of Education. 3rd ed. Edited by George Kneller. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971. Kobayashi, Maizie S. "The Educational Implications of Existentialism and Buddhism." Doctoral Disserta tion, Ohio State University, 1971. Morris, Van Cleve. "Existentialism and Education.” Educational Theory 4 (October 1954):247-258. __________ and de Francesco, I. L. "Modern Art and the Modern School." The Clearing House 32 (October 1957) : 67-71. __________ "Freedom and Choice in the Educative Process." Educational Theory 8 (October 1958):231-238. __________ "Male, Female, and the Higher Learning." Journal of Higher Education 30 (February 1959): 67-72. __________ "Conformity, Rebellion, and the Authentic Life." Teachers College Record 61 (October 1959): 46-50. __________ "Existentialism and the Education of Twentieth Century Man." In Quality and Quantity in American Education. Edited by F. C. Gruber. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. __________ Philosophy and the American School: An Intro duction to the Philosophy of Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961. __________ "The Religious Meaning of Nothingness." Unpublished Speech Delivered to the Unitarian Church. New Brunswick, NJ, ND. "Values Without Base: The Existential Encounter with Ethical Judgment." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Nineteenth Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA, 1963. __________ ed. and co-author. Becoming an Educator. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963. 195 "The Presidential Address: Detente in Educational Philosophy." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-First Annual Meeting. New York, NY, 19 65. Existentialism in Education: What it Means. New York: Harper & Row, 196 6. __________ "Reply to E. F. Kaelin." Studies in Philosophy and Education 1 (Winter 1966-67):119-123. __________ and Troutner, Leroy F. "On Existentialism and Education." Teachers College Record 6 8 (November 1966):155-170. __________ "Is There a Metaphysics of Education?" Educational Theory 17 (April 1967):141-146. _______ "Recent Literature on Existentialism and Education - A Review." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-Third Annual Meeting. New Orleans, LA, 196 7. __________ "An Overview: Existentialism and Education." In Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Education. 3rd ed. Edited by Joe Park. New York: The Macmillan Company, 196 8. __________ Modern Movements in Educational Philosophy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969. _________ and Tesconi, Charles A., Jr., The Anti-Man Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972. __________ "Phenomenology and Urban Teacher Education." In Rethinking Urban Education. Edited by Herbert Walberg and Andrew Kopan. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 1972. __________ and Pai, Young. Philosophy and the American School: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 19 76. Morrison, Harriet B. "Existentialism and the Teacher- Pupil Relationship." Doctoral Dissertation, Boston University, 196 7. 196 O'Neill, William F. "Jean-Paul Sartre '.s Concept of Freedom and Its Implications for American Education." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Southern California, 195 8. Overholt, George E. "Freedom, Facticity, and Education: The Educational Implications of Sartrean Existentialism." Doctoral Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1969. Rhodes, William E. "An Existential Philosophy of Education, With Special Reference to the Educational Similarities Between Christian Existentialism and American Pragmatism." Doctoral Dissertation, Yale University, 1956. Troutner, Leroy F. "Educational Implications of Existentialism: An Analysis and Comparison of Martin Heidegger and John Dewey." Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University, 1962. __________ "Existentialism, Phenomenology, and the Philosophy of Education." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twentieth Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL, 1964. __________ "What can the Educator Learn from the Existential Philosopher?" Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty- Second Annual Meeting. St. Louis, MO, 1966. __ "Philosophy and Teacher Education." The Journal of General Education 18 (April 196 6): 21-30. and Morris, Van Cleve. "On Existentialism and Education." Teachers College Record 6 8 (November 1966):155-170. "John Dewey, the Individual Existent, and Education." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-Third Annual Meeting. New Orleans, LA, 1967. "Dewey and the Individual Existent." The Personalist 48 (Summer 1967):281-296. 197 "The Confrontation Between Experimentalism and Existentialism: From Dewey Through Heidegger and Beyond." Harvard Educational Review 39 (Winter 1969):124-154. "Temporality and Education." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty- Seventh Annual Meeting. Dallas, TX, 1971. "Review of 1 Being and Education: An Essay in Existential Phenomenology1, by Donald Vandenberg." Educational Studies: A Journal of Book Reviews \ in the Foundations of Education 2 (1971):93. 7 "The Dewey-Heidegger Comparison Re-visited: A Reply and Clarification." Educational Theory 22 (Spring 1972):212-220. "The Dewey-Heidegger Comparison Revisited: A Perspectival Partnership for Education." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA, 1972. "Contemporary Philosophies of Education: A Search for the Cutting Edge." Far Western Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-First Annual Meeting. Pomona, CA, 1972. "Response to 1 Hirst, Hermeneutics, and Fundamental Educational Theory.1" Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty- Ninth Annual Meeting. New Orleans, LA, 1973. "Time and Education." Ibid. "John Dewey and the Existential Phenomenologist.1 1 In Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education. Edited by David Denton. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974. "Toward a Phenomenology of Education: An Exercise in the Foundations." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Thirtieth Annual Meeting. Boston, MA, 1974. 198 __________ "Trying to Make Sense Out of "Existential Thought and Education."" Far Western Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty- Third Annual Meeting. Long Beach, CA, 1974. __________ "Making Sense Out of "Existential Thought and Education": A Search for the Interface." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Thirty-First Annual Meeting. Kansas City, , x MO, 1975. Vandenberg, Donald. "Experimentalism in the Anesthetic Society Existential Education." Harvard Educational Review 32 (Spring 1962):155-187. "Kneller, Heidegger, and Death." Educational Theory 15 (July 1965):217-221ff. __________ "Existential Educating and Pedagogic Authority." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-Second Annual Meeting. St. Louis, MO, 1966. __________ "The Ontological Foundation of Moral Education." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 196 6. __________ "Condemned to Meaning What? Review of "Con demned to Meaning" by H. Smith." Educational Theory 16 (October 1966):370-378. __________ "Student Values?" Alberta Journal of Educational Research 12 (December 1966):275-2 80. __________ "On the Ground of Education." Educational Theory 17 (January 1967):60-66. "Kneller, Heidegger, And Death." Educational Theory 17 (April 1967):176-177. __________ "Ideology and Educational Policy." Journal of Educational Thought 1 (April 1967):38-50. _____ "An Existential Perspective - Philosophy of Education in a Research-Oriented Environment." The University of Idaho College of Education Record 7 (Fall-Winter 1967, Spring 1968):22-30. 199 "Life-Phases and Values." Educational Forum 32 (March 1968):293-302. "The Pedagogical Admonition in Existential Perspective." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting. Denver, CO, 196 9. "Non-Violent Power in Education." Educational Theory 19 (Winter 1969):49-57. Being and Education. New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, 1971. Introduction to "Encounter and Education" by Otto F. Bollnow. The Educational Forum 36 (March 1972) :30 3. "School Rules and Their Enforcement in Analytic/ Existential Perspective." Educational Theory 22 (Spring 1972):192-207. "Hirst, Hermeneutics, and Fundamental Educational Theory." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting. New Orleans, LA, 1973. Unpublished Response to C. J. Brauner's "The Dogmarine," from The Pipers of Wax Fork. North Western Philosophy of Education Society Meeting. Calgary, Canada, 1973. "Who is ‘Pseudo’?" Educational Theory 24 (Spring 1974):183-193. "The Pedagogic Atmosphere." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Thirtieth Annual Meeting. Boston, MA, 19 74. "Phenomenology and Educational Research." In Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education. Edited by David Denton. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974. "Making Sense Out of ’Existential Thought and Education.*" Far Western Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Twenty-Third Annual Meeting. Long Beach, CA, 19 74. 200 __________ "Education and the American Dream." Philosophy of Education Society. Proceedings of Thirty- First Annual Meeting. Kansas City, MO, 19 75. __________ "Reply to Wingerter." Educational Theory 25 (Spring 1975):202. __________ "Openness: The Pedagogic Atmosphere." In The Philosophy of Open Education. Edited by David Nyberg. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 19 75. '."N\ __________and Gordon, Richard. "Educational Justice." UCLA Educator 19 (December 1976):51-57. ,Zaret, Esther. "Differentiating Teaching Behavior from "x , a Humanist Existential Perspective." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1967. 201

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

An identification of some philosophical beliefs held by influential professional leaders in American physical education

PDF

Project for a phenomenological psychology: An investigation into the philosophic bases of contemporary American psychology and the proposal of a phenomenological method as a foundation for psycho...

PDF

The concept of individual freedom in the writings of Maslow and Rogers and its implications for education

PDF

Constructive personality change in relation to a new class of contextual variables in the general linear eqation called paratherapeutic praxis for university students involved in group counseling

PDF

An exploratory study of educational and philosophical differences between conventional and open education teachers at the elementary level

PDF

The role of the Iranian secondary school principal and projected plan for principal training, as viewed by prospective professors from Iran and selected educational specialists in Iran and California

PDF

The humanistic-existential approach to child therapy: A methodology for practice and research

PDF

A philosophical analysis of early childhood education in the State of California

PDF

The ideological foundations of JosÃ© Ortega y Gasset's educational thought: a study of Ortega's educational philosophy and of its relationship to the ideology of modern secularism

PDF

A critical investigation of the broad conception of art in American art education

PDF

An analysis of the Buhler School Maturity Test as it relates to intelligence and projective test data

PDF

The relationship of placement of community college students on a measure of philosophical orientation to their standing on selected school-related variables

PDF

A critical analysis of John Dewey's concept of growth as the aim of education

PDF

Educational planning, supply of and demand for engineers: A mismatch in Iran

PDF

A proposed plan for establishing an educational television station for the Open Admission University in Thailand

PDF

Relationship of trigonometry achievement to selected characteristics of California public community college students

PDF

The middle class educator and minority-poverty youth: An analysis of the reactions of educators to selected experiences in the cultural milieu of disadvantaged youth

PDF

The readability of geometry and algebra/trigonometry textbooks as it relates to scholastic aptitude, sex, and book position

PDF

Concept acquisition as a function of differing schedules and delays of reinforcement

PDF

An experimental study of teacher reinforcement patterns as expressions of differential expectancies induced by bogus labels

Asset Metadata

Creator Talifer, Henry Alfred (author)

Core Title Existentialism---its meaning for American public education as perceived by selected contemporary educational philosophers

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Education

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag education, philosophy of,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c26-481917

Unique identifier UC11244993

Identifier usctheses-c26-481917 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP24679.pdf

Dmrecord 481917

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Talifer, Henry Alfred

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA