Hirsch: how schools fail democracy

essay by ED Hirsch in the Chronicle.

A familiar argument: that works by disregarding counter-argument. I also note that Horace Mann shows up–the patron saint of the ‘common’ in school. But no mention of Emerson–who is also thinking about a democratic education, but with a different view of the ‘common’ and familiar–one that is also invested with spirit and individuality and enthusiasm. Hirsch sounds here like Emerson’s formalist, forgetting the soul that informs. Or his Swedenborg, who makes the mistake of trying to get everything into the book. I presume Hirsch doesn’t cite Emerson for these reasons.

edmundson using emerson

The critic Mark Edmundson, in a recent article from the Chronicle, once again turning to Emerson (cf. his book Why Read?)–and notice also the appearance of Whitman, in relation to Emerson. This idea of a literary education, of a way to read a writer in the manner of the writer, I think does get Emerson right. To a point. But then, of course, one must resist the influence of the writer being read. In any case, I suggest we see here evidence of how Emerson and Whitman live on into questions of how we should read, of the need for a literary education; but also, of a desire to have that not be narrowly defined. A kind of literary against itself. Like Whitman on Emersonianism: breeding self-slaying giants.

Mark Edmundson, Against Readings.

So, the notion of literary education: Emerson brings it back to mind (this is, after all, what he is about with his various lectures on the scholar and its avatars); but brings back to mind with a need to revision it. The point Edmundson, seems to me, could make even stronger. All those folks teaching Emerson (or Whitman) with their ‘readings’ seem not to be doing much in terms of how that author wants us to conceive reading, or even be read.

On the other hand–or is it the same? Consider this book found on Amazon, 7 Secrets for Successful Wisdom: Tapping the Wisdom of Emerson. Is this just part of the tradition of reading Emerson too easily?

Philosophy Americana

Douglas R. Anderson, Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (Fordham UP, 2006)

argues that the experiential and experimental language of American pragmatism (James, Dewey; informed by Emerson and transcendentalism) is a home for philosophy–a philosophy at home in the everyday. Emerson’s ‘everything good is on the highway’ as phrase for what he means to invoke by Americana

I am interested not only in the attention he gives to pragmatism/dewey and the Emersonian roots (routes?), but the way in which he focuses on teaching (his introduction). Seems to me that the point he makes about American philosophy being neglected or having a mistaken identity (and teaching being part of this, the ‘meliorative’ impusle of American philosophy; as well as its interest in the popular, its resistance to the acaemic/popular split, its revival explicitly of the Emersonian view of a scholar in the world)–similar dynamics, I would suggest, with American literary study, and perhaps education more generally. The issue of the theory/practice split (also taken up in Reason to Believe).

16: philosophy is never ‘just talk’ [might also add: literature or literary study is never mere words]: talk viewed as a crucial medium of transformation. like Dewey and James: “practicing theoreticians”; the tradition of ‘Emersonian insane angels’

see this applying to Emerson’s notion of the ‘capital secret of the profession’;

Key Dewey references thus far (his emphasis on the everyday, and experience/experiment tied to that)

MW 9:116–teacher must ‘let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind’;

MW 10: 123–’Experiment in Education: key of an experimental school ‘is precisely the idea of experiment itself, the ideal of experimental method.’ [might i tie this interest in the experimental and experience to a version of emersonian metonymy?] experiment tied to risk and loss

LW 1:18. test for philosophy: ‘Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful?’

vivid echo of Emerson’s phrase and premise (speulchres of fathers). MW 4:142 “Does Reality Possess Practical Character”

‘Under such circumstances there is danger that the philosophy which tries to escape the form of generation by taking refuge under the form of eternity will only come under the form of a bygone generation…rather than let the dead bury their own dead. Better it is for philosophy to err in active participation in the living struggles and issues of its own age…’   [Anderson comments that pragmatism as a philosophical school must be willing to lose. Refers to 'this Emersonian self-aversion.' See this in terms of the problem of the Emersonian school as well for education: but this provides a philosophical, even systematic grounding for it (in the system of pragmatism)--recognize that as philosophy--and a philosophy concerned with the fixity of belief, and for the importance of risk and experiment) we can 'bring this pragmatic attitude to bear on considerations" of teaching, education.[31] way to take this aspect of Emerson seriously, self-aversion, and not dismiss it as mere metaphor–as we might take Whtiman’s notion of the  giant that slays itself