The Therapy of Education: Philosophy, Happiness and Personal Growth PDF
Preview The Therapy of Education: Philosophy, Happiness and Personal Growth
The Therapy of Education The Therapy of Education Philosophy, Happiness and Personal Growth Paul Srneyers, Richard Smith and Paul Standish © Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith and Paul Standish 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edtion 2007 978-1-4039-9250-5 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 978-1-349-54362-5 ISBN 978-0-230-62502-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230625020 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 I Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith & Paul Standish. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Education-Philosophy. 2. Psychotherapy. I. Smith, Richard. II. Standish, Paul, 1949-111. 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 Transferred to Digital Printing 2011 For Nigel Blake 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 2 The Therapy of Education as the patients or clients on whom the psychotherapist or counsellor will exercise her kindly manipulative techniques. To assimilate educa- tion to therapy, or to exaggerate the degree to which they overlap, is to fail to recognize the extent to which people may reasonably hold dif- ferent ideals and preferences. It is to neglect the fact of legitimate value diversity. These points are made by, for example, David Carr (2000); they have their recent ancestry in familiar distinctions drawn by earlier analytical philosophers of education such as Richard Peters. Two responses suggest themselves. The first is to observe that an over-sharp distinction here tends to rest on a misunderstanding, or perhaps a parody (maybe even a fantasy) of therapy. It is far from true that all therapy consists in doing things to people, as if every therapist is essentially engaged in behaviour modification from a position of complacent superior assumed understanding. (Macintyre's well-known anathematizing of therapy in After Virtue has done much damage.) Many therapists in fact are concerned precisely to distinguish therapy as a relationship between autonomous human beings from therapy as a set of techniques. James Hillman, for example, connects therapy with the ideas of attending and serving found in the Greek word therapeia: 'a therapeutes was one who attended, was a servant of, and thereby could heal' (Hillman, 1995, p. 80). David Smail writes: Psychological help, then, is gained by those who seek it first and foremost in the context of a relationship in which they are undeceived about the nature and significance of a real, often complex and poss- ibly insolubly difficult, painful predicament or set of circumstances, and encouraged to confront bodily those aspects of the predicament which admit of any possibility of change. In essence this procedure is a moral, not a technical understanding, since at every point it necessitates judgements being made by both therapist and patient about what is right and what is good for either or both to do ... (original emphases) (Smail, 1984, pp. 139-140) Unsurprisingly, our technicist age- obsessed, as we noted above, with the question of 'what works' - tends to reconceive the qualities of a relationship as skills to be acquired and exercised (the chapter from which the quotation above is taken is entitled, with proper irony, 'The Experts'). It is not difficult to find counsellors and therapists who have, as Smail puts it (ibid.) 'scurried behind the ramparts of objectivity', from which position they like to talk of the 'simple but effective tech- niques' which can put the distressed and the neurotic to rights. Smail
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