Therapy of Education: Philosophy, Happiness and Personal Growth PDF
Preview Therapy of Education: Philosophy, Happiness and Personal Growth
The Therapy of Education The Therapy of Education Philosophy, Happiness and Personal Growth Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith and Paul Standish © Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith and Paul Standish 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–1–4039–9250–5 hardback ISBN 10: 1–4039–9250–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smeyers, Paul The therapy of education : philosophy, happiness and personal growth / Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith & Paul Standish. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–9250–9 (cloth) 1. Education–Philosophy. 2. Psychotherapy. I. Smith, Richard. II. Standish, Paul, 1949– III. Title. LB14.7.S64 2007 370.1–dc22 2006049480 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne For Nigel Blake This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Part I The Kindly Apocalypse 7 1 Self-Esteem: The Inward Turn 9 2 Diffidence, Confidence and Self-belief 25 3 What Can be Said, What Can be Shown 38 4 Reading Narrative 51 5 Learning to Change 72 Part II Coming to Terms 87 6 Practising Dying 89 7 Room for Thought 109 8 The Thoreau Strategy 124 9 A State of Abstraction: Knowledge and Contingency 139 10 Unfinished Business: Education Without Necessity 153 Part III Redeeming Philosophy, Redeeming Therapy 169 11 Beyond Cure 171 12 Narrative and Number: What Really Counts 185 13 Learning from Psychoanalysis 203 14 Enlarging the Enigma 218 15 Expectation of Return 234 Notes 241 References 248 Index 256 vii Acknowledgements This book is the latest in a series of collaborations, the most salient of which are Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism (1998), Education in an Age of Nihilism (2000) and The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (2003). Nigel Blake contributed to all of these, as he did to our early discussions of the present project, and we record here the extent to which we have benefited from working with him. The Therapy of Education might not have taken shape without him, and it is to him that we dedicate the book. We thank the following: the many colleagues and conference partic- ipants – in particular at Leuven, Madrid, Oxford, Oslo and Sheffield – who have responded to earlier presentations of our work; Jenny Laws, of Durham University, for many helpful discussions; Naoko Saito, of Kyoto University, for the research work in which she has shared; Cassie Higgins, who provided invaluable support in the preparation of the final manuscript. Some of the chapters rework or substantially reprint material that has appeared before, in whole or part, and we thank the various editors and publishers for giving permission for their appearance here. Ch. 1 appeared as Self-esteem: the kindly apocalypse, Journal of Philosophy of Education 36.1, 2002, 87–100. Ch. 2 appeared as On diffidence: the moral psychology of self-belief, Journal of Philosophy of Education 40.1, 2006, 51–62. Ch. 9 is a revised version of Abstraction and finitude: education, chance and democracy, Studies in Philosophy and Education 25.1–2, 2006, 19–35. Ch.10 is a revised version of Unfinished business: education without necessity, Teaching in Higher Education 8.4, 2003, 477–91. Finally, Daniel Bunyard, our Commissioning Editor at Palgrave Macmillan, has been patient and encouraging beyond anything we had a right to expect. viii Introduction Any consideration of therapy, and its relationship with education today, takes place against a background of three prevailing climates of thought. First, there is the conception of therapy as an obvious good, a practice that helps people lead more fulfilled and less unhappy lives. The prevalence of this assumption, and the fact of the proliferation of therapy in its various forms, hardly needs illustration. Second, and partly in reaction to the first, there is increasing scepticism, even host- ility, towards therapy and its influence (see, for example, from the last few years, Frank Furedi’s Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, and Christina Hoff Sommers’ and Sally Satel’s One Nation under Therapy). Therapy is charged with encouraging a debilitating climate of dependence to which it then presents itself as the solution, and eroding our natural capacity for coping with the various obstacles we find in our path in the course of life. Third, it may seem to some that the only essential and important questions concerning therapy are whether or not it can be proved to be effective and if so how to do it. Here as in many areas of life our pragmatic age is principally interested in ‘what works’. We return below to the limits of such instrumental thinking. In this book we attempt a more balanced and nuanced treatment of therapy and its connections with education, one that eschews carica- ture and is sensitive to what therapeutic practice involves. In doing so we reject the idea that a sharp conceptual division can be made between education and therapy. That division has often been drawn along the following lines. Education has intrinsic aims, while therapy seeks to restore mental health and so its aims are extrinsic. Therapy involves ‘doing things to people’ while education respects and tries to enhance their autonomy: it treats them as responsible agents and not 1
The list of books you might like
