Educator Profile - HERBERT EDWARD READ 1893–1968

Art should be the basis of education.
Herbert Read was one of the most prolific, cosmopolitan and ambitious English intellectuals and men of letters of the twentieth century. During his lifetime he was practically ubiquitous as a critic, scholar, poet, advocate and educator. He left a singular legacy of academic and popular publications—more than sixty books and 1000 articles and reviews—which include his own considerable literary achievements, and his relentless political and cultural advocacy for interpreting and understanding modern art and literature. He was a man who championed such world-class talents as Karl Jung and Henry Moore, while becoming a public antagonist of others such as T.S. Eliot and W.H.Auden. While his passion for individual liberty has led Read to be widely characterized as a ‘philosophical anarchist’ (a description which Read would not disavow),2 the man was personally restrained in speech and at least in public temperament. He was indeed a man of paradox and contradiction.

Herbert Read was born in Yorkshire on 4 December 1893, grew up on a farm, and attended the University of Leeds. During the First World War he served as an infantry officer, an experience which, like others of his generation, found compelling expression in poetry, such as in Read’s Naked Warriors (1919). After the war Read worked for a few years at the Treasury (1919–22) and then became an assistant keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (1922–31). He taught briefly at the University of Edinburgh (1931–33) and edited the Burlington Magazine (1933–39), a fixture of the British cultural establishment. Throughout the 1930s he championed such modernists as the writers Samuel Beckett and Denton Welch, and such artists as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. The magazine editorship provided an open channel to the academic and highbrow community, but Read also proselytized for modernism in a copious series of popular books, magazine and newspaper reviews directed at the general public.

In this ambition Read carried forward the work of John Ruskin and William Morris, nineteenth-century precursors who sought to reduce the distinction between art and life by exploring aesthetic concepts as social value, such as the tradition of craftsmanship, drawn from the visual arts. These might provide remedies for repairing, what they saw as, an increasingly distressed social fabric (imperilled by the Industrial Revolution). Read also emulated Ruskin’s affection for the Romantics, and staunchly defended such English authors as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley at a time when the advanced literary criticism led by T.S.Eliot disavowed the older styles.

Read’s own creative output struggled for time and attention amidst his editorial and interpretive responsibilities. His poems were well received and appeared in several volumes between 1919 and 1966. In ‘Song’, published in 1955, Read identified himself with life’s continuity, and perhaps that of art and tradition:
So long my heart
This little polish’d ball of blood
Has throbb’d in unison
With your immortal flood

In fact, Read appears to have considered it his professional mission to simultaneously but selectively defend the traditional—his own preferences were actually oriented towards the classical—while advocating, educating and preparing society for the new. His role as the proponent of modernism was unparalleled in Britain, where the avant-garde often scrimmaged unsuccessfully to bring the nation into the contemporary world. He took up the cause of new forms of industrial design and other visual arts in particular, promoting movements from cubism to surrealism to abstract expressionism.

Read’s prominent role as an advocate gave him real cultural power. He was, as his biographer James King has written, ‘taste-maker and cultural impresario’, taking all of art and culture as his domain. Read’s sight and insight was lavished on an impressive array of art forms, including painting, sculpture, architecture, design, ceramics, stained glass, prose and poetry. His audience was often the philistine public, who could find in Read a patient teacher that recognized the bewildering variety and incomprehension with which many modern styles burst upon the scene. In such volumes as Art Now (1933), Icon and Idea (1955) and Contemporary British Art (1964), Read examined the motivation (he was one of the first to apply Jungian psychoanalysis to art) and meaning of artists and their works.

Read the writer was reinforced by Read the ‘impresario’. The range of his expertise and scale of his professional contributions was prodigious. In addition to his own literary and critical productivity, Read served as a director of the venerable British publishing house Routledge and Kegan Paul for a quarter of a century; he juried and curated exhibitions, including a major show of the surrealists in 1936 in London and several exhibitions of children’s art in the early 1940s which prefigured his own plans for aesthetic education; he created advocacy organizations, including the Design Research Unit in 1943, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1948, and the UNESCO-sponsored International Society for Education through Art in 1951; and, he appeared widely in Europe and in the United States, where his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard honoured a man who himself had played the role of arts popularizer and cultural entrepreneur while serving as the first professor of fine arts at Harvard in the late nineteenth century.

Ultimately Herbert Read was interested in more than just helping people understand and appreciate innovations in art. He had a fundamental belief in human progress which, like the social aesthetic of Ruskin and Morris, would carry art beyond aesthetics. As Hilton Kramer put it in the New York Times obituary of Herbert Read in 1968, Read conceived of art as ‘perhaps the most essential constituent of an enlightened social fabric…a cornerstone of the attempt to effect a wholesale revision of social values’. And in that attempt ‘education was to play a major role’.

Read’s Education through Art, first published in 1943, was thought by its author to be his most influential book. Although now out of print for three decades, a generation of art and other educators (especially in Britain) from the 1940s into the 1960s was nurtured on the social messages of the book. Written at the height of the Second World War, Read hoped to harness the creative and imaginative energies of art to counter the endless cycles of violence. He saw the artist as an ‘ideal type’ who offers ‘awareness of intrinsic value’.6 In this aspiration Read spoke for art educators and other teachers everywhere who have deeply felt the need to transcend the barriers and encumbrances of nationalism, creed and ethnicity.

The book is instructive without being specific. No programme or curriculum is presented, but the basis for considering art as a framework for general education of the mind and personality is articulated in detailed chapters that examine such topics as ‘perception and imagination’, ‘unconscious modes of integration’, and ‘the aesthetic basis of discipline and morality’. Read saw himself as a philosopher or critic rather than as a pedagogue. His role was to provide the philosophical foundations for an aesthetic education through which the most urgent problem of human society—the unremitting descent into barbarism (the Holocaust was actually underway when Read wrote the book)—could be addressed and a world order based on humane principles attained.

Education through art, Read contended, is ‘education for peace’ (the title of a subsequent volume of essays printed in 1949). It may be true that nations that explore, understand and enjoy one another’s cultural patrimony will be too busy discovering values in common to go to war. But while the hope was noble, the method was not. Read helped develop the frontier between art and psychology, but he put too much faith in behaviourist agendas for transforming human beings, as likely to lead to indoctrination as to emancipation.
Herbert Read had begun his advocacy educating audiences about the artistic and redemptive power of the new modernism. In Education through Art and subsequent writings he turned to ‘the total reorientation of the human personality’.7 The study and practice of art, and the aesthetic education through which it might occur, led inexorably by Read’s calculation to ethical virtue. This alone was not a new idea, but Read brought to the argument the capacities of a polymathic scholar, drawing on sources as diverse as theories of education from Plato’s Republic, principles of gestalt psychology and recent research on children’s drawings.

Education through Art is a compendium of contemporary thinking in art education after the progressive 1920s and 1930s, during which psychology and the power of perceptual faculties began to dominate the field, introducing a twenty-year period of hegemony led principally by Viktor Lowenfeld and Rudolf Arnheim after the Second World War. Read provided philosophical balance.

Herbert Read was unquestionably a productive and sincere scholar. But the contradictions in his character and effort were just as evident. On one hand he was the cosmopolitan who sought to establish Britain’s contributions, especially in art and industrial design, to the emerging international modernist order. But at the same time he was more of a traditionalist when it came to British poetry and he famously embraced the Romantics. Read could simultaneously relish the take-no-hostages role of the ‘philosophical anarchist’ (where, as Kramer put it, ‘the dream of uprooting power persists as a romantic aspiration’),8 while working diligently and comfortably within the establishment as an editor, organizer, or spokesman. Read was, according to his obituary, ‘a familiar presence’ and ‘one of the most celebrated cultural panjandrums of the international cultural bureaucracy’, serving endlessly on juries, boards and symposia. But Sir Herbert Read wasn’t too much of an anarchist to refuse a knighthood when it was conferred in 1953.

Perhaps the harshest judgement that some critics and biographers have made about Read is that he may have indiscriminately endorsed everything contemporary, with the exception of the so-called ‘post-modern’ movements whose forms, like pop art, Read despised. He did seem uncritical of modernism’s excesses and failures, and acquired the reputation of being especially parochial about British art. In addition, an unsurprising consequence of the packaging and repackaging of content for the general public was a lamentable dearth of original intellectual substance on some occasions, as in Read’s best-selling ‘concise histories’.

On the plus side, Sir Herbert Read brought a clarifying tendency for explanation and interpretation to the often confused and dynamically changing world of modern art. He enabled thousands of readers and viewers to apprehend what may have been difficult to see and understand, and he considered the awareness for which he was responsible as a social good, leading to an integration of art and life. Perhaps somewhat neglected in some reviews of Read’s contributions, given his ‘impresario’ role in the visual arts, were his literary and autobiographical entries, notably The Contrary Experience (1963). At least one of his books was a novel, The Green Child (1935). Read also made some significant contributions in literary criticism, as when he elucidated the distinction between organic and abstract form, the former of which Read favoured as more responsive to the needs of the individual artist in a particular context.

In fact, Read’s own life was organized to give organic unity to the various parts of his being. As an author, editor and publishing house director, he could help navigate and chart a course through the powerful currents of British literature and criticism. As a lecturer and commentator on modern art, he served the entrepreneurial impulse of drawing people closer to contemporary painting, sculpture and other art forms. Ready with a quip or a philosophical argument, Read laboured to introduce the new to a public that was not always understanding or approving, especially of the avant-garde.

For educators, he left the legacy of ‘Education through Art’, not just the book but the idealism as well; a humane vision which continues to hold value for animating teachers and others of good will. Students today would look at Read more for historical interest than current citation, but the nobility of that vision and the aspiration for a just society built on principles of individual expression make Read’s prose still worth pondering. The spirit of his ideas survive in the social and cultural orientation which draws on works of literature and art as sources for moral encouragement and instruction, and that continues as a priority in the careers of so many writers and artists, teachers, parents and others (an example in American art education would be the ‘Caucus on Social Theory’ within the National Art Education Association). Read represented the ‘English’ ideal, perhaps best expressed by those Romantic poets he admired, of a life lived with a sense of one’s purpose and fulfilment in the grand scheme of things. Herbert Read knew his purpose and he carried it out with dispatch and fervour.
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Educator Profile - MARTIN HEIDEGGER 1889–1976

To learn means to make everything we do answer to those essentials that address themselves to us at any given time. … Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Martin Heidegger for the thinking of the twentieth century. He was without doubt one of the most influential—and controversial—philosophers of his time and commentators credit him with influencing numerous disciplines in addition to philosophy: theology, psychiatry, literary criticism, historiography, theory of language, philosophy of science, and the analysis of technological society.2 Over several generations, prominent thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty have acknowledged their debt to him. In addition to the seminal quality of his writing, there is its sheer mass. It has been estimated that his collected texts, which are in the process of being published, will amount to some hundred volumes. And although he rarely explicitly addressed the topic of education as such, because of the profundity of his insights into the human condition and into the nature of learning, thinking and understanding, the field of education is one in which his ideas have the potential to make a huge impact—which is now beginning to be recognized.

Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Germany on 26 September 1889. He went to the University of Freiburg in 1909 to study theology and philosophy and was appointed to teach philosophy at the University of Marburg in 1922. Here he gained a reputation as an inspirational teacher whose passion for thinking shone through in a way that both startled and communicated itself to his listeners.4 His first major work, the hugely influential Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), was published in 1927, and this both led him to be appointed to the chair of Philosophy at Freiburg in 1928 and propelled him into international prominence. With some disruption during the Second World War and its aftermath, he continued to give lectures until 1967 and to write until his death on 26 May 1976. He was buried in the place of his birth.

This apparently highly academic life should not deceive one into supposing that his ideas are of merely academic interest. In the context of education, his development of the notions of thinking and of personal authenticity, and his radical critique of the essence of modern technology, have the potential to be taken up in ways that have profound consequences for the development of educational practice. As the quotation that heads this essay suggests, Heidegger saw learning as a highly demanding and participatory affair, which required the full engagement of the learner and was certainly not something that could be instilled from without through a heavily didactic process. Nor, indeed, on his account, could it be conceived of in terms of the achievement of a pre-specified set of detailed learning objectives as set out in some national curriculum. The teacher has to let pupils learn, not impose learning upon them. This may make learning sound rather passive in character, but such an interpretation could hardly be farther from the truth. What was crucial for Heidegger was that learners submit themselves to the demands and rigour of thinking—to listen to what calls to be thought from out of the unique learning situation in which they are involved. He was against the mechanization of thinking which attempts to enframe it in pre-specified and often highly instrumental structures, thus closing down its possibilities. For Heidegger, genuine thinking is not the assimilation of a series of gobbets of pre-specified information and ideas, but an exciting and demanding journey into the unknown. It is drawn forward by the pull of that which is somehow incipient in our awareness but has yet to reveal itself.

The power of this view of learning is magnified when we consider Heidegger’s view of the nature of the authentic life and of authentic understanding. Heidegger’s (uncompleted) quest in Being and Time is to understand the nature of ‘Being’—that through which things exist. In order to pursue this understanding he begins a profound analysis of the place where beings show themselves—human life and understanding (‘Dasein’).

And while, for Heidegger, this analysis of human existence is only a precursor to investigating the question of Being, it is, in itself, very suggestive for the enterprise of education. Central to Heidegger’s characterization of human beings in Being and Time is that they are the entities for whom their own being is an issue. We live understandingly, having some conception of ourselves in situations in which there are choices to be made. But for much of the time the personal cogency of this understanding is tranquillized through our submersion in the ‘idle talk’ and ‘hearsay’ of what Heidegger refers to as the ‘they-self’.

This is a frame of mind in which we are carried along by the busyness of immediate practical concern and the ‘common sense’ of the ‘they’—what ‘everybody’ thinks and says. This is an essentially irresponsible ‘averaged off’ understanding of life in which we don’t think things through in terms of their meaning for our own unique existence—an existence ultimately bounded by, and given urgency by, the fact of our own inevitable death—but understand them only in terms of what is current in the fashion and the gossip, which readily passes on to the next thing rather than test the validity of its assumptions in truly personal terms. To live thus is to live ‘inauthentically’—to live in a way which is not true to ourselves.

If we relate these ideas to his view of the nature of genuine thinking previously discussed, we can see that a radical challenge is issued to much that goes on in conventional schools. For example, it raises the following kinds of question. To what extent does the learning that goes on in schools largely have the character of ‘hearsay’—pupils having little opportunity, much less encouragement, to truly relate what they learn to their sense of their own existence? To what extent does the conception of education which motivates school learning derive from instrumental conceptions of life and work which eschew underlying questions of personal meaning and the open quality of engagement with issues described earlier? On a Heideggerian account, education proper is no more about acquiring the skills required to feed the demands of global capitalism than it is about the acquisition of knowledge purely for its own sake. It is pre-eminently concerned with the value and meaning that we derive from learning—how we feel it should affect our outlook and our actions, and our conception of ourselves both as responsible individuals and as participants in the human condition.

For this quality of learning to be achieved there is a need for a qualitatively different conception of the teacher-pupil relationship to that which underlies much current practice. Rather than a teacher-pupil relationship envisaged as the vehicle for conveying (or ‘delivering’) prespecified knowledge and skills (for which both teacher and pupil can subsequently be held accountable), it becomes an open space which constantly takes its start from the quality of the learner’s engagement with the domain in which he or she is operating and arises as a free though not undisciplined response to that engagement. The precise content of learning evolves out of this relationship, not ahead of it, though it is certainly the role of the teacher to stimulate and to provoke further engagement by, for example, helping the learner to identify and to pursue the questions that need to be asked.

In my own development of Heidegger’s ideas for teaching, I have described this role as one of ‘empathetic challenging’ (Bonnett 1994) because it requires the teacher to be both receptive and demanding. The teacher is required to enter sympathetically into the engagement of the learner—but not in such a way as to indulge and thereby stultify this engagement—but rather to provoke and to challenge through a sense of what the subject matter has to offer, what is ‘on the move’ within it and what might be the issues at stake for this learner in this engagement. Openness and mutual trust become the defining characteristics, with the teacher concerned both to accept and to challenge the pupil’s thinking—to listen to what calls to be thought in the engagement and to help the pupil to hear this call for himself or herself. This is clearly far removed from an education driven by a demand to raise generalized predetermined standards, and a form of accountability which requires recurrent public testing for tangible gain in these terms. It is also clearly distinguishable from child-centred views of education, portrayed (often erroneously) as being content to leave everything to what might be the whim of ephemeral and undisciplined interest. A Heideggarian account of education preserves the dignity and the integrity of learner, teacher and content. No doubt it is for this reason he describes the role of the teacher as ‘exalted’.6

This brings us up against another strand in Heidegger’s thinking which is rich in its significance for education: his critiques of technology and rationality. As well as being value laden in all sorts of fairly obvious ways—for example, as expressed in the discipline and moral code of the school, in its rituals, practices, and ethos, its public statement of aims and in the relative status given to various curriculum areas—Heidegger’s thinking can sensitize us to the way education conveys values of a more implicit kind which are nonetheless immensely powerful in conditioning our relationship with the world and thus shaping both our view of that world and our view of ourselves. His analysis of modern technology suggests that in its essence it is a way of revealing Being which expresses a drive to mastery and conceives the world as a resource. And, because of its apparent manifest success, this ‘calculative’ way of thinking, which reckons everything up in terms of its potential to serve human purposes, is in the ascendant and increasingly permeates modern rationality as a whole—firing concerns to classify, to assess, to explain and to predict in order to intellectually possess and to materially utilize.

This is a particularly worrying thought in a situation where many of those who resist an overtly instrumental view of education which gears it to economic ends espouse the development of rationality as an alternative educational aim. The intention of such ‘liberal educators’ is to provide a more generous conception of education which asserts the development and enrichment of the mind as its raison d’être and, through the celebration of rationality in education, takes itself to provide a foundation for the full development of the individual as a thinking being. But Heidegger’s analysis suggests that this view is itself in danger of importing into education a version of that aggressive instrumentalism to which it ostensibly stands opposed. If even that arbiter of good thinking—‘impartial’ rationality—is in fact highly partial and expresses a calculative attitude towards the world, surely educationalists need to be alert to the values that are implicit in the kinds of rationality and knowledge that are used to develop students’ thinking and the pictures that they hold up—and legitimize—of ourselves and the world.

This would not simply be a matter of feeling concern that, for example, in the UK ostensibly ‘calculative’ subjects such as numeracy, science and ICT (information and communications technology) have come to dominate the curriculum in state schools. What is at stake is the character of all subjects and of our understanding of the meaning of quality in teaching. Increasingly, it may be that all teaching will be conceived on a very calculative model in which learning objectives are pre-specified independently of individual learners and are systematically pursued in the absence of the kind of full learner engagement previously described. In keeping with this, literature and the arts may be conceived and structured on very rationalist lines which set them up as centring on conventional categories, canons and truths which can be learnt up and objectively applied (and assessed), rather than as opportunities to participate afresh in the non-prespecifiable presencing of things. This contrasts strongly with a curriculum—including maths and science—being taught in a way that celebrates the more open, ‘poetic’ qualities of its content and the rigour and richness of personal engagement in learning. Among many other things, Heidegger’s thinking confronts us with this choice of fundamental orientation and intimates its significance for a conception of education which is truly for ‘life’.
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Educator Profile - A.S.NEILL 1883–1973

A.S.NEILL 1883–1973

I believe that to impose anything by authority is wrong. The child should not do anything until he comes to the opinion—his own opinion—that it should be done.

Alexander Sutherland Neill was born in the small Scottish town of Forfar, fifteen miles north of Dundee in 1883. His father, George Neill, was a schoolmaster who taught in the neighbouring village of Kingsmuir, where Neill received his own schooling. After leaving school at the age of fourteen and taking various jobs for two years, Neill became an apprentice schoolmaster in 1899. He remained an uncertified teacher for four years and was then successful in gaining matriculation to Edinburgh University. He studied Arts and although exhibiting little enthusiasm for university work graduated in 1905 with a major in English literature. He then taught for twelve years in Scottish government schools.

Neill enlisted in the British Army in 1917 and after the war his life began to take on a more positive direction. He first taught in a new experimental school (King Alfred School) and then in 1921 became assistant editor to Mrs Ensor, the founder of the New Education Fellowship. Although this association did not last long, Neill was by now confirmed in his commitment to a new type of education, very different from the traditional form in which he had been raised.

The chance to put his ideas into practice came in 1921 when he was invited to join the staff of a progressive school in Dresden, Germany. He remained there until 1923 when the school moved to an abandoned monastery near Vienna. However, difficulties arose with the local population, prompting Neill to return to England in 1924. He then opened his own school in Lyme Regis in conjunction with Frau Neustatter with whom he had worked in Germany and Austria, and whom he married in 1927. The school was named Summerhill after the name of the property.

There Neill began to implement systematically his revolutionary ideas of pupil freedom and lack of teacher authority. The school became well known and relatively successful although the enrolment in this period averaged only about forty. In 1927 it was moved to Leiston in Suffolk about 100 miles north of London, where it remains to this day as probably the best-known progressive school in the English-speaking world. On Neill’s death in 1973 it was run by his second wife, Ena, until her retirement in 1985 and since then by their daughter, Zoe.

The widespread influence of Neill’s Summerhill is attributable in no small measure to the twenty books Neill wrote between 1915 and 1972 in which he expounds clearly and forthrightly his educational ideas. The most influential of these (with sales of over two million), was Summerhill, a compilation of his writings, which was originally published in America in 1960 and then in England in 1962 with a Penguin paperback edition in 1968. In the very first chapter he states clearly his commitment to the freedom of the child: ‘we set out to make a school in which we should allow children to be themselves. In order to do this we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction. The child should never be forced to learn, indeed a cardinal principle of Summerhill is that attendance at lessons is voluntary whatever the age of the child. Only learning that is voluntarily undertaken has any value, said Neill, and children will know themselves when they are ready to learn.

Children will only achieve happiness if they are free because most unhappiness is due to inner hostility created in the child by external repression. Neill was influenced by Freudian theory here and believed that because this inner hostility cannot be effectively expressed towards parents or others in authority, it is turned inwards and becomes self-hate. This then becomes expressed in anti-social behaviour and in the worst cases leads to so-called ‘problem children’. Many such children were sent to Summerhill and were cured, Neill maintains, by the application for the first time in their lives of freedom.

Happiness for Neill thus meant the state of having minimal repression. In positive terms it consists of ‘an inner feeling of well-being, a sense of balance, a feeling of being contented with life. These can only exist when one feels free.’³ Conventional education makes the mistake of exalting the intellect over the emotions with the result that children may know a lot of facts but lack inner contentment and fulfilment. Neill accordingly advocated ‘Hearts not Heads in the Schools’, the title of one of his books. ‘If the emotions are permitted to be really free, the intellect will look after itself,’ he maintained.

Traditional academic subjects were generally available at Summerhill but were not stressed. One area of this curriculum that was given more weight however was the aesthetic domain (arts, crafts, dancing, drama, etc.) which Neill saw as promoting creativity, imagination and emotional wellbeing. In particular these subjects have a therapeutic function for children with psychological problems and also give the less academically talented children the chance to excel at something.

Neill’s strong belief in freedom was linked to another cherished conviction, the innate goodness of children. ‘For over 40 years [says Neill] this belief in the goodness of the child has never wavered; it rather has become a final faith.’⁶ He also believed that the ‘child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.’

These convictions were a strong factor in Neill’s rejection of both moral and religious education. If a child is allowed to develop naturally he will not need the promptings and sanctions of moral or religious lessons, because his natural goodness will be allowed to manifest itself in its own way. Neill even went so far as to assert, ‘I believe that it is moral instruction that makes the child bad. I find that when I smash the moral instruction a bad boy has received, he becomes a good boy.’ Religion he found totally unnecessary: ‘free children who face life eagerly and bravely have no need to make any God at all’.

Naturally there was no place for authority-based punishment in Summerhill. ‘Punishment is always an act of hate’ thought Neill and the self-regulated child never requires it. How then was social control achieved in Summerhill? The school was run as far as possible as a democracy and most important decisions about the running of the school were voted on at the weekly general meeting where everyone (including Neill) had one vote and the majority wish prevailed. Where a child was found guilty of anti-social behaviour such as bullying, an appropriate punishment was decided by the group and it often took the form of a fine or penalty, for example handing over pocket money or missing the cinema. This approach gave the children valuable experience in running their own lives and has generally been regarded by most observers as a successful aspect of Summerhill.

How did Neill come to hold the beliefs he did and be so committed to them that he devoted his whole life to putting them into practice despite continual struggle and criticism? There is no doubt that his own unhappy schooling and university experiences were a major factor and Summerhill can be seen as a total rejection of such a traditional authoritarian approach to education. In terms of other educational theorists who may have influenced him, one thinks first of Rousseau with whom he shared so much: the belief in the natural goodness of the child, in maximum pupil freedom and in the importance of the emotions, among other things. However, Neill did not read Emile until fifty years after opening Summerhill. He also notes that he was somewhat disappointed in reading Rousseau’s Emile and remarks perceptively that ‘Emile was free but only in the set environment prescribed by his tutor. Summerhill is a set environment but it is the community that decides, not the individual tutor.’

Neill was however strongly influenced by more contemporary figures such as Freud in relation to the importance of avoiding sexual repression and guilt, Wilhelm Reich in relation to sexual freedom and the importance of self-regulation, Homer Lane in relation to self government and his idea of rewarding instead of punishing the child for anti-social behaviour (i.e. responding with love instead of hate).¹⁴ Neill knew both Reich and Lane well and devotes a chapter to them and their influence on him in his autobiography ‘Neill, Neill Orange Peel’.


Over the years, Neill has attracted an enormous amount of criticism and praise, some of it quite extreme. For example, in the book Summerhill: For and Against we find one writer saying that he would rather send his children to a brothel than to Summerhill, while another refers to it as a ‘holy place’. Some of the attacks Neill has received may be written off as conservative overreactions to what is admittedly a radical new educational experiment, but there are some areas where Neill does seem to be vulnerable to criticism.
In the first place, he lacks a systematic, considered philosophy of education, especially a coherent theory of knowledge. His ideas are based primarily on his own experiences and observations, supplemented with some study of psychological (especially psychoanalytic) theory. Certainly one’s own experiences are an important part of any educational theory but they need to be supplemented by some more systematic philosophical position on topics such as the nature of knowledge, learning, morality, human nature, society etc. Neill’s writing is very readable because of its practical focus but it consists of many unsupported assertions, exaggerations and a common tendency to generalize from individual cases (e.g. anecdotes about particular pupils) to universal educational principles. He also tends to oversimplify complex philosophical issues such as the crucial distinction between freedom and licence, where he thinks it sufficient to merely distinguish the two conceptually and give some random examples of acts he calls either freedom or licence. What is lacking is a clear principle to decide why thesecases belong to one category or the other and to help decide between conflicts of interests in such situations.

Similarly it could be argued that Neill had a rather simplistic and outdated view of moral and religious education as necessarily authoritarian and didactic. Modern educational notions of moral and religious autonomy in which children are introduced to such areas through open-ended discussion seem not to have been part of his understanding. Admittedly most of what he experienced and observed in this area would have conformed to the traditional model about which he wrote.

Another significant problem with Summerhill is the anti-intellectual bias that Neill brought to it. Is learning as unimportant as he maintains?¹⁷ Are books really ‘the least important apparatus in a school?’ Do children always know what is in their best educational interest? Can one fully utilize one’s freedom without a solid core of knowledge and understanding on the basis of which to make meaningful choices? Why does educational relevance have to be always of an immediate and practical nature? These are the sorts of questions that begin to bother one when reading Neill’s work and for all his conviction and sincerity, they suggest a major dimension of education that he fails to adequately acknowledge.

One good test of an educational theory is to ascertain the views of those who have actually experienced it in practice. Two surveys of ex-Summerhill pupils found very similar reactions. On the whole most appreciated having been to Summerhill saying that it made them more independent, better able to deal with those in authority and more tolerant. Some said it had really helped them through a difficult stage in their life and that they would not have coped nearly as well in a traditional school. However a minority said that Summerhill had not really helped them—these were generally more introverted types who said that Summerhill suited extroverts more. Interestingly, it was found that those who criticized Summerhill tended to come from the pupils who stayed there for a longer period. If there was a generally shared complaint it was to do with the down-playing of the academic side of education and the frequent lack of inspiring teachers.

It seems that Summerhill is not necessarily the answer to all our educational problems and it would not be of benefit to all types of children. However, it does have something valuable to offer for some and is useful in providing a radical alternative to the conventional educational system, which indicates what an education based on freedom of the child really means in practice. One thing that made it work as successfully as it did for so long was Neill’s charismatic personality and his genuine love and understanding of children. (This was something that was also commented upon by ex-Summerhillians.)

What then of the future of Summerhill? An OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) inspection in March 1999 was critical of certain aspects of the school and recommended a number of significant alterations. The school appealed against the inspection arguing that if the recommendations had to be adopted the school’s basic philosophy would be compromised. In March 2000 the school won its battle in the courts and can for the time being, at least, keep its basic principles intact.
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Educator Profile - SUSAN ISAACS 1885–1948

SUSAN ISAACS 1885–1948

The ultimate basis for the sensible practice of the trained educator…provides a settled framework of control and routine, and definite help along social paths yet with ample personal freedoms. …This, too, is the corrective for the idea that the child will never learn unless he is scolded or smacked, no less than for the notion that he need not learn, but need only bring out the good in him. (Susan Isaacs 1933, p.421)

Susan Isaacs brought psychoanalytic ideas to progressive education in Britain; also, she contributed to psychoanalytic theory with her work on ‘unconscious phantasy’ life which was rooted in her understanding of children. She was brought up in Bolton in Lancashire, an energetic, blunt-speaking northerner. Her father, a journalist, was a Methodist lay preacher and opposed to a career for his daughter (his ninth child)—especially opposed to educating her when she announced she had become an agnostic. However she managed to find employment tutoring, and then as a governess abroad. She eventually got to Manchester University and did brilliantly going on to further study of psychology at Cambridge in 1912, where she may well have first developed her interest in Freud.

During the First World War she began to attend courses at the training arm of the Brunswick Square Clinic, which provided treatment for returning shell-shock victims, and also offered the first training programmes in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Britain. There she met James Glover who, after the war, influenced her to go to Otto Rank in Berlin for some psychoanalysis.

The Brunswick Square Clinic closed in 1924, and Susan Isaacs joined the British Psychoanalytical Society, beginning a new analysis with J.C.Flügel. In 1924 she responded to an advertisement in the New Statesman for a graduate to run a school along unconventional lines. This advertisement was placed by Geoffrey Pike, a maverick inventor during the war effort, and his wife Margaret, a pioneer founder of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Geoffrey Pike was himself unhappy at school, and wanted to provide his own children with a different experience. He had the use of a house outside Cambridge, and appointed Susan Isaacs to run the Malting House School.

Because of the concern for a new social order after the First World War, the ‘new education’ movement had come together in 1920 as the New Education Fellowship. The Malting House School contributed to this progressive education movement. The schools in this movement often had founders whose aim was to improve on their own educational experiences. Usually the basis was a freedom for children in their learning.

The New Education Fellowship published New Era until the 1940s; and spawned a number of parallel experiments including the Elmhirst’s Dartington Hall (1925), Dora Russell’s Beacon Hill School (1927) and A.S.Neill’s Summerhill (1927). These were heavily influenced by Froebel in Germany and Dewey in the United States. Susan Isaacs experiment in teaching lasted two and a half years, and is reported in two books: The Intellectual Growth in Young Children (London: Routledge, 1930); and Social Development in Young Children (London: Routledge, 1933).

Isaacs educational work at the Malting House School finished in 1927. Pike’s business had begun to fail then, and Isaacs may have left partly because of the increasing pinch in the resources. There was also some disagreement with Pike over the importance of words and language in the life of the young child, which contributed to her leaving. The school closed soon after. At that time Flügel was then professor of psychology at University College, London (UCL). In 1927, on the basis of her work at the Malting House School he appointed her to teach child development at UCL. Flügel also had contacts with Sir Percy Nunn, an early associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society and professor at the Institute of Education in London. In 1932, Nunn appointed Isaacs to start up a department of Child Development at the Institute of Education.

Susan Isaacs started from the position that the intellectual development of the child was intimately connected with emotional development, and she disagreed somewhat with Piaget. Though she brought psychoanalytic ideas to the educational setting, she was not the first to do so. In Britain, Homer Lane established the Little Commonwealth (1913–17) where he offered psychoanalytic treatment to individual adolescent delinquents, mixed boys and girls; at the same time he attempted to understand those political processes advocated by Dewey, as group processes in psychoanalytic terms.⁶ On the Continent, Freud’s daughter, Anna who had been a teacher, developed a pedagogic form of psychoanalysis for children. And with others in Vienna, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth,⁷ August Aichorn⁸ and Sigmund Bernfeld, applied the theory of instinctual development to education. They stressed the importance of sublimation in childhood, and its role in learning.

Anna Freud’s lectures for teachers, in 1930, summarized this research. The key factor, they decided, was the super-ego. The super-ego inhibits the child’s libido and requires it to be turned to the task of intellectual learning and the acquisition of skills. The role of education is a process by which the repressed instincts could learn to be channelled into socially acceptable activities. The latter is called sublimation.

Isaacs, like others in progressive education in Britain, started with the view that freedom in the classroom will dispel learning inhibition or distortions of character development. She established a culture of freedom and encouraged play as a method of expressing the instinctual life, and of discovery about mastering the world and developing sublimated skills. Because psychoanalysis expounds the theory that neurosis is caused by repression, it was used in arguments to support permissive approaches in progressive schools. However Isaacs soon modified her approach. Simply to provide freedom of expression resulted in extreme rivalry and aggression between children, once liberated. Although education is the sublimation of instincts, freed instincts could also inhibit the natural development of sublimation in learning and self-expression. If instinctual wishes become too powerful then children seem to be overcome and then inhibited, restricted in their formation and use of symbols and words and severely incapacitated in learning. Thus she differed from the way psychoanalysis was used in Vienna to support the super-ego of the child. She turned to Melanie Klein’s ideas to understand this.

As soon as Melanie Klein moved to London and joined the British Psychoanalytical Society, in 1926, Isaacs took an increasing interest in the form of child analysis which Klein developed which was somewhat different from Anna Freud’s. Klein had pioneered a method for young children in 1918 in Budapest with Sandor Ferenczi and subsequently in Berlin with Karl Abraham. Klein’s method¹⁰ gained access to the unconscious life of young children—as young as two years and nine months—by using the child’s natural form of self-expression, play. Klein displayed aspects of the super-ego, not known to the Vienna group. She noticed that very young children demonstrated in their play a torturing concern about their own aggression.

So, children don’t necessarily play more freely just from encouragement—though many do. Too much freedom can lead to the worrying freedom of aggressive urges. The super-ego appeared to be active within the earliest years of life, and in those early forms it is particularly harsh. Klein showed that guilt arising from a harsh super-ego, leads to the child becoming very fearful and then retaliatory against others. Aggression could feed on itself. And the intensity of such a cycle of guilt, fear and retaliation could lead to severe inhibition in learning.¹¹
Klein and Isaacs agreed that a regime of tolerance can go some way to mitigating the harshness of the super-ego strictures within. However too much tolerance leads to the child feeling guilt (a comment Klein made after visiting the Malting House School soon after her move to London). Isaacs found the need for a balance between freedom of expression and the curtailment of it.

Under Klein’s influence, Isaacs showed that the role of play was not just about mastery of the world and learning sublimated skills. It was also an actual expression of those agonized fantasies which can hold up development. The central role of fantasy, not just in play, but as an expression of the child’s difficulties in learning led to her sophisticated view of intellectual development and social relations. The emphasis on free play turned the attention from biological instincts to the expressive capacities. This was the field of research in which Isaacs made her most significant contribution to psychoanalysis and gave her greatest support for Melanie Klein.

Klein pursued a line of practice and thinking relatively independent from Freud and from classical psychoanalysis as it had developed in Vienna. This dispute was quite vituperative, but was significantly heightened when, in 1938, Freud and his family fled as refugees to London. Particularly after Freud’s death in 1939, those loyal to Klein and those loyal to Anna Freud began to form separate organized groups, which culminated in the so-called ‘controversial discussion’, in 1943–44, centring around 18 months of formal meetings of the Society to discuss Klein’s innovations.

During this time, Isaacs served as Klein’s most trusted lieutenant. She took the lead as the defender of Klein’s ideas, and with her sharp mind bore the brunt of the debate. She gave the paper that started off the formal discussions, ‘The Nature and Function of Phantasy’ (Isaacs 1948)—and this has remained a classic founding text of Kleinian psychoanalysis in which she asserted that fantasy is ‘the primary content of unconscious mental processes’.¹⁴ In the debates, Isaacs’ much more subtle style out-manoeuvred the arguments of Anna Freud and her group on many occasions. She did not convert the Viennese analysts, but she established the rigour of Kleinian psychoanalytic thinking.

The blending of psychoanalysis with education is one of the most important developments in education in the twentieth century. At UCL, and then at the Institute of Education in London, Isaacs taught and researched the importance of early emotional development for the intellectual and social life of the young child. She was very active in writing short pieces (sometimes under the name ‘Ursula Wise’) on child development and education for young children for popular magazines. As a psychologist turned educationalist, Isaacs contributed the most up-to-date ideas on child development to teachers; and during the 1930s, she was chair of the Education Section of the British Psychological Society. During the Second World War years, while she was evacuated from London with her Department to Cambridge, she headed a group of Cambridge psychologists who produced the ‘Cambridge Evacuation Survey’ of evacuated children and families. The emphasis of this work was on the child’s point of view.

Isaacs’ educational work derived its inspiration from psychoanalysis and the particular notions of repression, sublimation, the importance of play, and the evolving idea of unconscious phantasy; her classic paper on the last of these has become, in turn, her lasting contribution to psychoanalysis.
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Educator Profile - HAROLD RUGG 1886–1960

HAROLD RUGG 1886–1960 
There is no royal road into the new epoch, at the crossroads before which we now stand; there is only the hard way of education and especially of the building of consent among the people. In this process the school can and must provide leadership. Through the study of society and its problems the school must devote itself to the development of sensitive, clearheaded, fearless and confident young men and women who understand American life as it is actually lived and determined to make it a magnificent civilization for themselves and their children. To this end the life and program of the school must be designed directly from the culture of the people, not from a classics-intrenched curriculum. Now is the time to build not a subject-centered school but a truly society-centered as well as a child-centered one.

Harold Ordway Rugg was a leader of the progressive education movement in the United States. Progressive educators shared, in John Dewey’s words, belief in ‘the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress’. Although Rugg’s educational thought fails to fit readily into any one strain of progressivism, he is chiefly remembered for his social reconstruction perspective and the controversy it engendered.

Rugg’s early life gave scant indication that he would become a world-renowned educator. Born in Massachusetts, Rugg studied civil engineering in college and briefly practised and taught it. Teaching awakened his curiosity about how people learn and he enrolled in the University of Illinois doctoral programme in education. In 1915 he received his Ph.D. and accepted a teaching position at the University of Chicago. At Chicago, Rugg worked with a faculty, most notably Charles Judd, who epitomized the ‘scientific’ strain of progressive education. Both Chicago and wartime testing work for the government in Washington, DC, meshed comfortably with Rugg’s methodical engineering ways.

During his time in Washington, however, Rugg became acquainted with artists and cultural critics who strongly influenced him. After a brief return to Chicago, in 1920 he moved to Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. He became a professor and director of research for the Lincoln School, an experimental school affiliated with Teachers College. In New York he reinvigorated his wartime ties to creative thinkers in the bohemian neighbourhood of Greenwich Village. As Lawrence Cremin later put it, Rugg joined ‘the group of artists and literati that clustered around Alfred Stieglitz…drinking the heady wine against puritanism, Babbitry, and machine culture’.

Thus, without ever surrendering scientific method in education, Rugg added to it a profound commitment to individual creativity. His admiration for creative self-expression contrasted with the amplified commercialism—‘The chief business of the American people is business,’ President Coolidge pronounced—of America in the 1920s. In progressive education, commitment to individual creativity manifested itself as child-centred education. Rugg found much to admire in ‘activity’ aimed at developing each child’s creativity and intuition rather than marching the whole class through a prearranged standard curriculum. But he also questioned if child activity was too limited an educational goal. In the name of self-expression, Rugg wrote in 1928, child-centred educators ‘have tended to minimize the other, equally important goal of education: Tolerant understanding of themselves and of the outstanding characteristics of modern civilization.’

Rugg’s ambivalence about child-centred education is emblematic of why his brand of progressive education is not easily classified. A comparison of Rugg and Dewey is instructive on the idiosyncrasy of Rugg’s position. While Rugg and Dewey, for instance, shared misgivings about the neglect of substantive subject matter in child-centred methods, Rugg believed Dewey’s experimentalism ‘as the sole method of knowing’ was restrictive,5 devaluing the intuitive and imaginative modes utilized by artists. While Dewey and Rugg agreed that the school should be an agency of social reform, Dewey had reservations about social reconstruction. Dewey doubted the school by itself could, as Rugg’s fellow social reconstructionist George Counts famously put it, ‘build a new social order’.6 Moreover, the overtones of indoctrination in social reconstruction offended Dewey’s sense of intellectual freedom. Nonetheless, when censors attacked Rugg, the characteristically principled Dewey sprang to Rugg’s defence.

Like many other progressive educators, Rugg evinced great concern for the relevance of popular schooling in an industrial society. Unlike many other progressive educators, we do not have to guess what Rugg’s educational theory might look like in practice. During the interwar decades, Rugg developed his ideas into an instructional programme. Rugg saw an urgent need for a programme centred on the rise and consequences of industrial society: that is, a programme based on the demands of modern living.

Rugg declared existing school programmes hopelessly ill-equipped for the task before them: ‘nothing short of genius on the part of a student could create an ordered understanding of modern life from such a compartmentalized arrangement of materials’.8 Rugg’s ideal school programme incorporated the breadth of his educational vision including special attention to ‘body education’ and ‘creative work’. Mathematics ‘and other techniques’ (what, today, would be called ‘skills’) were the only parts of the curriculum not organized in the form of projects or units-of-study.

The true test of Rugg’s ideas, however, is his experimentation and programme development in the social studies (i.e., history, geography, civics, economics, and related subjects). Here Rugg’s scientific approach to curriculum development and belief in ‘the new social science’ coincided, resulting in his most remarkable achievement: an integrated educational programme focused on the problems of modern living. Rugg’s impatience with ‘armchair’ (versus ‘scientific’) curriculum making convinced him that the otherwise healthy reaction against a dusty, prespecified curriculum had led progressive educators to unrealistic expectations of what could be accomplished by spontaneous curriculum making in the classroom. ‘The inevitable result of trying to carry out these precepts with a broad curriculum and thirty to fifty young people’, Rugg lamented, ‘has been educational chaos.’10 Rugg was convinced that a defensible programme which would actually be implemented must be planned in advanced (with, of course, due regard for adaptation to special circumstances by users). Developing, field-testing, and refining such a programme in the social studies constituted his major activity in the 1920s and 1930s.

Both friends and foes have recognized that Rugg’s carefully crafted programme is an uncommon instantiation of what a progressive conception of curriculum can look like in practice. Rather than traditional subjects such as history and geography, Rugg’s materials were built on ‘understanding units’ that dealt with current problems such as the corporate economy, agricultural depression, unequal distribution of wealth, the need for economic planning, intercultural relations and international cooperation. Full attention was given the resources needed to implement the programme’s goals and the sequencing, planned repetition and variety of learning activities necessary for optimal learning. Rugg wished youngsters to learn concepts and generalizations rather than the disconnected factual information he saw as the outcome of traditional methods and materials. For example, in the study of civilizations outside the United States he selected nations representative of particular salient features of the modern world rather than become consumed in a superficial, fact-dominated coverage of more nations than youngsters could make sense of.

Arguably Rugg’s very success was, eventually, his downfall. His first materials were for the junior high school, where no other nationally available materials existed for this new set of courses.11 From 1929 to 1939 over 1.3 million copies of Rugg’s textbooks were sold to over four thousand school districts across the United States.12 Although more liberal than radical in tone, Rugg’s materials fitted comfortably with the ideological upheavals of Depression America, especially the spirit of the New Deal. Moreover, evaluations suggested that learning outcomes from Rugg’s materials in traditional subjects such as history, geography and civics compared favourably with subject-centred methods.

Even in the early 1930s some of Rugg’s books were altered because elements of them were considered too radical. By the late 1930s public attacks began on the books. Business groups and self-appointed ‘patriotic’ societies charged that Rugg’s ideas were anti-capitalist and subversive of American traditions and the existing social order. By the beginning of the 1940s, the attacks increased and within several years Rugg’s books were removed from most districts and ceased publication. In retrospect, the demonstrated effectiveness of Rugg’s brand of progressive education may have made it all the more threatening to conservatives and reactionaries. Although flexible to how his view of modern living was conveyed, Rugg was convinced it was an accurate distillation of ‘frontier’ thinking and in time took for granted that educators need to ‘boldly…accept the clear, self-stated truth’14 derived from these clearly liberal-leaning thinkers.

Rugg responded vigorously to the attacks on his textbooks’ focus on modern problems. The problem method, he objected, ‘does not imply, as the self-appointed censors say, that we propose a ‘‘plan for a new social order,” with which to “indoctrinate American youth”.’ Rugg enjoined that ‘young people…must confront the alternatives set out clearly before them. How else can human beings practice decision making than by confronting issues?’15 Nonetheless, the attacks proved decisive in the growing conservatism of the 1940s.
Although Rugg was never to be so influential again, he remained an active scholar—even extending his work to explicit treatment of teacher education and imagination—until his death. Moreover, although beyond the scope of this essay on Rugg’s educational thought, Rugg continued to contribute to progressive social and political thought, writing during the Second World War, for instance, a spirited brief for a liberal, postwar society.

If effect on educational practice is a valid basis for judgement, then surely Rugg was a giant among progressive educators. Few subsequent progressive educators have exhibited Rugg’s enterprise and patience in moving beyond exhortation and distal social critique to construct an educational programme embodying their rationales. Rugg’s work should also continue to inspire teacher educators as a model of the distinction between ‘subjects’ and ‘subject matters’. For those of us who admire and approve Rugg’s educational thought, what he demonstrated about sound, creative pedagogy and curriculum directed at a more caring and socially responsible society still have much to teach in a time of narrowly instrumental educational policies.
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Educator Profile - LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN 1889–1951

In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London…a rather bad guide.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born to an aristocratic family in Vienna, 26 April 1889. He was the youngest of eight very precocious children, and was preoccupied all his life with questions of genius, artistic creativity and suicide (three of his brothers died that way). In 1911, on the advice of Gottlob Frege, he went to meet Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, after which he was admitted to Trinity College. Russell was impressed by Wittgenstein, and urged him to study mathematical logic. They worked as colleagues, even though Wittgenstein was technically an undergraduate. Over time, however, the relations between Wittgenstein and Russell became strained, and in 1913 Wittgenstein left Cambridge. He enrolled in the Austrian army just a few days after the First World War was declared; he was eventually taken prisoner in Italy, but during these years he managed to write the one philosophical book published during his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The manuscript was sent to Russell while Wittgenstein was still a prisoner, and with Russell’s (somewhat equivocal) support and Introduction it was eventually published in 1922, exerting an enormous philosophical influence, particularly on the positivists of the Vienna Circle, which included Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann, with whom Wittgenstein became acquainted.
Wittgenstein, on the death of his father in 1913, had inherited a substantial part of his family’s fortune. In 1919 he gave it all away and went to work as a teacher in the small Austrian villages of Trattenbach, Hassbach, Puchberg and Otterthal during the years of 1920–26. Following a series of short stints, he resigned his post in Otterthal under a cloud of suspicion over allegedly striking a female student (not the first student he had struck during his teaching years, apparently). After working as a gardener and helping to design and build a house for one of his sisters, he returned to Cambridge in 1929. His Ph.D. was granted based on the Tractatus as his thesis, he was given a five year fellowship, and he taught at Trinity College until 1935, when he left again, spending time in Russia, Norway, Austria and Ireland. By 1935 Wittgenstein was having serious doubts about the value of philosophy, and was actively counselling his students to find a more ‘useful’ line of work. Yet in 1938 he returned to Cambridge, becoming a professor in 1939.

During the 1930s and 1940s he wrote a great deal in the form of remarks, aphorisms and fragments; but none of this work was published during his lifetime. A large part of what was to become his second major work, the Philosophical Investigations, was compiled by 1945, but was not published until 1953, two years after his death. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein criticized, and to a large extent rejected, the views developed in the Tractatus, specifically in developing a more ‘anthropological’ and pragmatic view of language—and so we have the remarkable phenomenon of someone giving impetus to two major, and opposed, philosophical movements during his lifetime. Wittgenstein resigned his professorship in 1947, continuing to work on the Investigations and other projects until his death from prostate cancer in April 1951. Throughout his career, Wittgenstein struggled with self-doubt about his worth as a philosopher and the value of philosophy itself; about his identity and moral character; and about his sexual and amorous relationships.

Wittgenstein is rarely considered an educational thinker per se. Except for a few comments and aphorisms, he wrote very little about the topic. But it is also clear that he thought very seriously about education. It is well known, for example, that he taught in a highly idiosyncratic manner, and that for years after young philosophers at Cambridge mimicked his habits and style. It is less well known that he taught in rural Austria during the ‘wilderness years’ of the 1920s, during which time he wrote a school textbook. We have been struck by Wittgenstein’s frequent use of pedagogical examples and analogies to make philosophical points in his writing. Indeed, we have argued elsewhere that Wittgenstein’s style of writing and philosophy is fundamentally pedagogical: that is, premised on teaching a way of thinking about philosophical problems or—in certain instances—on unlearning certain bad philosophical habits.

There are at least three ways, then, to explore Wittgenstein’s educational thought and practice: first, through his university teaching; second, through the accounts of his experiences as a primary- and secondary-school teacher in Austria; third, through his style of writing and composing his philosophical ideas, particularly in his later work.

First, much of what we have from Wittgenstein relies upon recollections or reconstructions of his teaching by his university students. Many of his posthumous ‘works’ are actually transcriptions, discussions, course notes, or lectures recorded by his students and colleagues. His styles of teaching and thinking in performance, therefore, constitute a significant proportion of his extant works. These accounts of his teaching confirm his intensity of thinking and his honesty as a thinker and teacher. If he was unforgiving in his treatment of his students, it is because he was unforgiving with himself. The long painful silences that interspersed his classes, his disregard for institutional conventions in pedagogy, and his relentless criticism (and self-criticism) were an essential part of his teaching style.

Accounts of Wittgenstein as a teacher of philosophy are legendary. D.A.T.Gasking and A.C.Jackson report the following description Wittgenstein gave of his own teaching:
In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times—each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a Londoner. Of course, a good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide.

This passage indicates Wittgenstein’s penchant for comparing doing philosophy with making a journey.
Gasking and Jackson focus on the ‘technique of oral discussion’ Wittgenstein used, a technique they describe as, at first, bewildering:
Example was piled up on example. Sometimes the examples were fantastic, as when one was invited to consider the very odd linguistic or other behavior of an imaginary tribe. …Sometimes the example was just a reminder of some well-known homely fact. Always the case was given in concrete detail, described in down-to-earth everyday language. Nearly every single thing said was easy to follow and was usually not the sort of thing anyone would wish to dispute.

The difficulty came from seeing where this ‘repetitive concrete’ talk was leading. Sometimes he ‘would break off, saying, “Just a minute, let me think!” …or he would exclaim, “This is as difficult as hell.”’⁵ Sometimes the point of the many examples became suddenly clear as though the solution was obvious and simple. Gasking and Jackson report Wittgenstein as saying that he wanted to show his students that they had confusions that they never thought they could have and admonished them by saying, ‘You must say what you really think as though no one, not even you, could overhear it.’

Karl Britton reports that Wittgenstein thought there was no test one could apply to discover whether a philosopher was teaching properly: ‘He said that many of his pupils merely put forward his own ideas: and that many of them imitated his voice and manner; but that he could easily distinguish those who really understood.’⁷ Indeed, this degree of influence made Wittgenstein wonder whether he was a good teacher at all:
A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Perhaps this is how it is with me.⁸
G.H.Von Wright, a far from unsympathetic observer, thought that Wittgenstein’s concern was well-founded:
He thought his influence as a teacher was, on the whole, harmful to the development of independent minds in his disciples. …The magic of his personality and style was most inviting and persuasive. To learn from Wittgenstein without coming to adopt his forms of expression and catchwords and even his tone of voice, his mien and gestures, was almost impossible.

Doing philosophy always took priority for Wittgenstein, whether this was in oral or written form: it was important to show the deep puzzles in our language (and our culture and thinking) as well as dissolving them. Doing philosophy let the fly out of the fly-bottle: it cured our buzzing confusion and allowed us to lead useful and practical lives. Wittgenstein said ‘a philosophical problem has the form ‘‘I don’t know my way about.”’¹⁰ His style of teaching philosophy was designed to enable listeners to shift their thinking, to think differently about a problem, which was often in his view the only way to ‘solve’ it. In this respect, one can teach only as a ‘guide’.

Second, Ray Monk, one of Wittgenstein’s primary biographers, devotes a chapter (‘An Entirely Rural Affair’) to Wittgenstein’s years as a school teacher during the 1920s. His account of Wittgenstein’s teaching service in the village schools of rural Austria paints Wittgenstein as a teacher with exacting standards and little patience, one who was given to violent outbursts against his students.

These are significant biographical details. Indeed, it is suggested by Fania Pascal that it was an episode in Wittgenstein’s career as a teacher that involved hitting one of his girl pupils (and which he later denied to the principal), that ‘stood out as a crisis of his early manhood’ and caused him to give up teaching. Rhees, commenting upon this same episode, quotes from a letter from Wittgenstein to Russell: ‘how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!

Monk describes Wittgenstein’s misgivings about Glöckel’s school reforms and the publication of Wittgenstein’s Wörterbuch für Volksschullen—a spelling dictionary—in 1925, and yet does not recognize the significance of Wittgenstein’s experiences as a school teacher for his later philosophy. William Bartley is one of the few scholars to devote any space to Wittgenstein’s development during the 1920s. His major historical claim is that there are ‘Certain similarities between some themes of Glöckel’s program and Bühler’s theories on the one hand, and ideas which infuse the later work of Wittgenstein. Otto Glöckel was administrative head of the socialist school reform, which had attacked the old ‘drill’ schools of the Hapsburgs based on passive rote learning and memorization, to argue for the establishment of the Arbeitsschule or ‘working school’ based on the active participation of pupils and a doctrine of learning by doing. Bartley conjectures that the themes of the school-reform movement and, in particular, the views of Karl Bühler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and at the Vienna Pedagogical Institute, who was invited to Vienna by Glöckel and his colleagues in 1922, in large measure accounted for the profound change in Wittgenstein’s philosophizing in the late 1920s. He bases this claim upon the ‘striking similarities’ between their ideas and some historical circumstantial evidence. Bartley also provides some textual evidence; he quotes Wittgenstein in Zettel: ‘Am I doing child psychology? …I am making a connection between the concept of teaching and the concept of meaning. He recounts a story that Wittgenstein used to tell his pupils in Trattenbach from 1921 concerning an experiment to determine whether children who had not yet learned to speak, locked away with a woman who could not speak, could learn a primitive language or invent a new language of their own. Bartley asks us, by way of corroboration, to consider that the Investigations begins with a critique of Saint Augustine’s account of how a child learns a language.

Yet Bartley’s work has also been criticized. Eugene Hargrove, for instance, argues, with Paul Englemann, that it was the direct effect of Wittgenstein’s contact with children rather than the school-reform movement or Bühler’s ideas that influenced Wittgenstein’s views about language:
I believe we can see the influence of Wittgenstein’s time as a teacher on almost every page of the Investigations, for there are very few pages in a row that do not make some reference to children. Throughout his later philosophy, Wittgenstein often supported the points he was making by citing personal observations about children. It is these observations, which he made as a school teacher and used as a pool of data later, that, as I see it, are the true influence on Wittgenstein’s work, and not principles taught at the teachers college or waved in his face by the school reformers.

C.J.B.Macmillan terms this Wittgenstein’s ‘pedagogical turn’: ‘we often find him turning from a consideration of the meanings of a term or concept to ask, “How was this learned?” or “How would you teach it?”’¹⁷
Third, Wittgenstein’s way of ‘doing philosophy’, as we have noted, differed from traditional attempts to do philosophy: it is aporetic but not Socratic; it is dialogical but not in the traditional philosophical sense. Wittgenstein writes, ‘Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling; what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing.’¹⁸ Moreover, Wittgenstein expresses his impatience with the game of eristics:
Socrates keeps reducing the sophist to silence,—but does he have right on his side when he does this? Well, it is true that the sophist does not know what he thinks he knows; but that is no triumph for Socrates. It can’t be a case of ‘You see! You don’t know it!’—nor yet, triumphantly, of ‘So none of us knows anything!’

Hence it should be no surprise that Wittgenstein says that his approach is the opposite of Socrates’. Where Socrates, professing his ignorance, sought to disabuse others of their mistaken beliefs, Wittgenstein, through his dialogical forms of teaching and writing, sought to externalize his own doubts and questions, showing the nature of certain problems as he tried to work them through in his own mind: ‘Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tête-à-tête. (Much the same might be said of his teaching, as we have tried to show.)

The Philosophical Investigations is Wittgenstein’s primary example of a dialogical work; yet clearly it is not dialogical in the sense established by Socrates. And judging by Wittgenstein’s comments on Socrates it is evident why the Investigations does not follow or try to emulate the Socratic form or method. While the Investigations is not written in the form of a dialogue, it draws upon a repertoire of dialogical strategies and gestures. Terry Eagleton recognizes this when he calls the Investigations:
a thoroughly dialogical work, in which the author wonders out loud, imagines an interlocutor, asks us questions which may or may not be on the level…forcing the reader into the work of self-demystification, genially engaging our participation by his deliberately undaunting style.

The Investigations self-reflectively mirrors and models the multiplicity of language-games and gestures it attempts to describe. It functions as an exemplary pedagogical text the aim of which is for Wittgenstein’s students to think these problems through for themselves (an aim, it must be said, which he did not feel had always been successful, as we have seen). Wittgenstein’s adoption of a dialogical mode of inquiry, along with his innovations with form and composition in writing, were part of his deliberate experimentation designed to shift our thinking. He certainly did not want his readers or audience to imitate him in either the forms or the contents of his thought. Nor did he think that there is only one way to ‘do’ philosophy.

He agonized over the form of his work and he developed very complex methods of composition: ‘Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment for me. …I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making an arrangement of my thoughts which may have no value at all. He wrote philosophical remarks or fragments, and sometimes referred to his procedure of composition as one of assemblage—philosophy ‘consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose’.

Hence we see that the Investigations and later works are interspersed with frequent remarks that begin with asking us to ‘imagine’, as in ‘Let us imagine a language…’ and elsewhere. At other times he constructs this as ‘Suppose…’ or ‘Think…’ or ‘Ask yourself…’ and so on. These thought experiments play a crucial substantive and stylistic role in the Investigations, and they are characteristic of a way of writing about philosophy that is more oriented to triggering a shift in thought than in demonstrating a proof; more to showing than to saying; more to pointing than to leading (note the frequent references in Wittgenstein’s later work to signposts, wandering through a city, being lost, needing a guide, finding one’s way about, and knowing how to go on). This is a conception of teaching, and teaching through writing, far different from the classic Socratic engagement of the Meno, which is based on instruction along a specific path of reasoning to a definite conclusion.

Another recurring element in the Investigations is a question Wittgenstein asks to himself, posed by an imaginary interlocutor, with multiple possible answers or a hypothetical response, followed by his typical dissatisfied reply, ‘But…’. Fann notes that Wittgenstein asks on the order of 800 questions in the Investigations, yet he only answers 100 of them and of these the majority (some seventy) are answers that he pointedly rejects. Wittgenstein wants to stop us from asking certain kinds of questions: the sort of ‘philosophical’ questions which require that we provide a theoretical answer abstracted from the context of use and social practice. Instead, his questions and replies serve as reminders, bringing us back to familiar aspects of human language and experience; the significance of the fact that we can identify the related members of a family, for example, even when they do not all share the same features in common.

This mode of dialogue, then, is not one of demonstration but of investigation. Wittgenstein’s use of imagined interchanges, thought experiments, diagrams, pictures, examples, aphorisms, or parables is meant to engage the reader in a process that was, in Wittgenstein’s teaching as well as in his writing, the externalization of his own doubts, his own questions, his own thought processes. His philosophical purpose was manifested, shown, in how he pursued a question; his style was his method, and his writings sought to exemplify how it worked. His concern with matters of form and composition were not only about the presentation of an argument, but about the juxtaposition that would best draw the reader into the very state of puzzlement he himself felt. An appreciation of Wittgenstein’s philosophical style leads us directly to an understanding of the fundamentally pedagogical nature of his endeavour.
Read More : Educator Profile - LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN 1889–1951