Este es el mensaje de Pataruco:

al reunificarse el hombre en la

reconciliación con su origen y

la aceptación de su ser, brota

una nueva vitalidad creativa.

Rafael Tomás Caldera

The pages that follow are beginnings. Their purpose is to find some of the right questions as the necessary prolegomena to the construction of adequate answers. My procedure will be to examine what I take to be certain principles and "facts" (though one always fears using that latter term) and which when joined appear to raise some questions. These questions will be examined in turn for possible clues to more adequate, contextually generated educational answers. It is necessary to add the qualifier "contextually generated" because education and schooling are answers to questions which lie outside themselves: educational ideas and practices are neither self-interpreting nor self-justifying.

In substance, the argument is as follows. If a broad social goal is to achieve peace in an area long characterized by self-destructive conflict, this clearly does not mean simply the absence of conflict in its crude form, but the possibility of a certain quality of life to the achievement of which education is thought to be ancillary. In part, we are agreed, the problems arise from a fundamental conflict between "modern" developments and the remnants of indigenous social structures and their supporting cultural traditions. As traditional education is conceived to be inadequate to the process of "modernization," that process has brought its own new "education." But this imported "education," in turn, has eroded further the cultural base necessary for any coherent education. Consequently, the educational task is no longer the conventional one of constructing an educational regimen adequate to express and sustain the culture, but the radically more difficult one of reconstructing a culture adequate to an educational process -- all this in medias rerum, so to speak. The nature of the "new" education (already grown old in its host socio-cultural environment) makes its importation and application very questionable, since it manifests the same difficulties inherent in "modernization" itself. The roots of both lie in the hegemony of a techno-science which, for example in education, replaces the development of persons in community with the production of skilled functionaries defined by "manpower" models driven by abstract and ahistorical macro-economic principles. To begin the process of reconstruction, it is urged that we: (a) restore philosophical critique as the formal instrument necessary to unmask the difficulties and guide this reconstruction, and (b) re-examine the potential of art (especially literary art) to provide a fundamental element in the historically and existentially grounded substantive content needed for educational renewal.

EDUCATION AND MODERNIZATION:

SOME HISTORICALLY CONDITIONED PRINCIPLES

To begin, then, let us consider certain basic facts and principles.

(1) "Modernizing" countries have without exception committed themselves to programs of education and schooling as instruments of social policy.² As Professor Paul Peachey has pointed out, the conventional definition of modernization includes "appropriate education" as an instrumental mechanism.³ The inclusion of some educational regimen of both theory and practice is necessary to any coherent culture and society. Not surprisingly, then, as Professor, Roberto Hozven has pointed out, much of the long conflict between church and state that characterized Central and South America has been focused on the attempt to wrest from the church not only its vast and ambiguous wealth, but its control over the educational process.⁴ Again, Hannah Arendt argues persuasively that when any society cannot make up its mind, so to speak, about education, that society is in the late stages of decline, if not of extinction.⁵ Surely, the wages of educational confusion is death: a society/culture that cannot envision what to become through the deliberate formation of its young has lost its sense of its future, and hence of itself.

As I have suggested, this educational concern appears to be universal in modernizing countries. My experience, especially through the medium of international students and colleagues, is that whether one is looking at Latin America, Central Africa, or East Asia, educational questions and strategies are being sharply debated, usually in close and conscious connection with a political-economic agenda. In the United States, where education and schooling are omnipresent and enormously wealthy (and therefore often deemed successful), we have traditionally attempted to depoliticize education -- a thing impossible, of course. Consequently, "dialogue" about education and schooling in the United States, ignoring the fundamental levels of educational thought and practice, comprises only superficial spats, largely restricted to technical issues. In developing nations, however, the dialogue is generated by social and philosophical divisions and consequently reaches the level of fundamental issues and policies. Precisely because of its reality and vitality, this dialogue frequently erupts into academic chaos and even violence. The consequence is, one need not deny, often counter-productive; but at least it serves to keep the historical nature of education and schooling in clear view and to emphasize the real issues which are present at least some of the time.

Thus, when I see a Latin American university barricaded and struck, I often cannot suppress a sigh of regret. On the other hand, when I face a bland and falsely homogeneous class at my own University, I more frequently sigh for a radical or two to disrupt the issueless slumber of many of our students.

(2) Now, if education and schooling are both crucial processes in any culture/society and also very consciously problematical in modernizing or developing nations, how one thinks about education and schooling becomes a vital question. That is because there is, I repeat, no such thing as education in general, except for occasional (and usually dangerous) scholarly purposes. Education and schooling are, to use Professor Peachey's categories, "artificial" not "natural," although we are so thoroughly schooled that we feel the process to be almost second nature.⁶

There also are no modernizing countries in general. Each is a singular nation with its own history, to which its educational ideas and schooling mechanisms are indissolubly related as context. By historical, I mean not the past in general, nor any fixed point or object within it, but the ongoing socio-cultural context -- including, of course, the political and economic. This has roots in our common past experience, but consciously and unconsciously inheres in our present and participates in the determination of our future. The present is, I believe, an arbitrary moment in our human experience seen developmentally. It is made by overlapping past and future: we are the conjunction of what we see ourselves to have been and done and what we see ourselves as doing and becoming. Thus time is neither the measure nor the problem; origin and destiny are. And these are always the fundamental educational categories. Educational content is what we take from the multiple potentialities and experiences we have had (the fields of our knowledge and activity), and then refocus in terms of that transitional moment between a valued origin and a valued destiny in order to illuminate our passage consciously and in terms of some ideal principle. The education process -- dangerously, but increasingly seen in terms only of schooling -- is the manner in which we contrive to effect that conscious passage, which by definition is never still.

(3) Given the truth of the previous proposition, it follows that each society/culture has its unique educational history. But there also may be, I am inclined to believe, some general features of "Latin American" educational history, though there is no Latin American history of education in general. Some of these characteristic features are as follows:

(a) There is a deeply rooted Ibero-American colonial "classical" tradition. This is linked closely to certain categories and ideals characteristic of an elite social group. Presently, it is manifest less obviously in the prevalence of its humane wisdom than in its socially bifurcating credentialism; too frequently, its practical mode is an autocratic didacticism. In a sense, it is a decadent tradition. By that I mean, not that either its content or its values are all materially evil, but that it has come to be formally in contradiction with much of its own traditional content and values. The consequent danger is that what is left of its humane substance will be rejected mindlessly because of its presently defective form. Perhaps some of the difficulty in its career can be attributed to its partial manifestation through particular movements -- e.g., the Germanic idealism of the sort exemplified by Krause, for frequently the inspiration of these schools of educational thought -- e.g., Italian neo-idealism -- were blatantly aristocratic or openly fascist.

Upon the anti-colonial revolution and "liberation" and as a reflection of that history, a secular "liberal" thrust was widely manifest in both culture and education. Though sometimes rhetorically "enlightened," this movement never realized its presuppositions in the liberation of the common people. It contradicted much in the popular culture, especially of course its religious base, without providing an alternative for the folk, let alone a common, indigenous substrate which could undergird and stabilize the conflicts inseparable from the process of change.⁷

(b) Whatever the merits of the previous account of the "classical" and "liberal" social and educational traditions, it is virtually indisputable that few if any contemporary social or cultural leaders view these root traditions as fully compatible with "modernization." Indeed, virtually entailed in the notion of modernization has been the notion that a new "matching" educational system must be provided. In most if not all cases, that has been understood to mean the educational system characteristic of the "advanced" North American and European countries, whence "modernized" industrial-technological society itself has taken its rise.

This "modern education" usually is evangelically proclaimed through a variety of means, one of which is the "multinational" corporations and commercial development agencies of whom it might be said, adapting John Wesley, "the world is their school district." Another is the "multinational universities" that now relish their role of spreading the gospel of modernization, even while they bewail the lack of power to make a "real impact" that they (blindly, I believe) take to be the cause of their limited success. Finally, there are the vast international social-political agencies whose presence is so conspicuous throughout the world: AID, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization of American States, to name only a few major ones. The notion of education these instrumentalities largely share, while extended at great cost and with loud rhetorical flourish, has paid little attention to the historical relevance of their educational policies.

This "matching" educational system brings with it certain general characteristics. Conventionally joined to a "rational planning" approach to all public institutions, education is usually centralized, bureaucratized, and (for that reason, my experience suggests) usually unresponsive both to local differences and local needs. Again, this "matching" notion of schooling is almost always ideologically driven in terms of "manpower-planning policy" or some other variant of the "human capital" theory. Inevitably, this engine produces (quite literally) an "education" in which the person is defined and developed as an extension of the economic machine. But machines have no history, in whole or in part.

Evidence of such tendencies is, of course, everywhere, for "modernization" is not something that happens to some who are less fortunate; it is characteristic of us all without exception. Furthermore, it is not a goal in the sense of an end-state, on which "happy morning" all shall be "modernized." It is a continuous process that is gaining in inertia for us all. Look, for example, at the North American public and private schools and their "relevant" new programs of vocational testing, tracking, and socio-economic indoctrination, which many now propose for early elementary school. Under the guise of personal development and fulfillment, these mechanisms are dangerous instruments of class and role definition, the impact of which, however unnoticed, may well be catastrophic.

Nor does the "developed" pedagogical "West" appear to have much in the way of significant alternatives to provide either for itself or for "export." One set of purported alternatives is categorizable in general terms under the rubric of "romanticism." These are often styled as examples of "humanism" in education, as if they were the successors to the classical humanist tradition. They are, however, nothing of the sort. The romantic educational movement is psychologically defined and driven; it represents little more than an individualistic fugue -- a speciously attractive flight from reality that exists only epiphenomenally and is, by and large, only admired by, and open to, the wealthy. As alternatives, such movements usefully point up our educational discomfort, but, as even their father founder, Jean Jacques Rousseau, would probably admit, they show little promise as the foundation of fundamental educational change.

A contrary alternative, educational radicalism, is both a very complex phenomenon and little if any more sensitive to the singular historicity of the nations and peoples into which it is imported. Whether in its extreme Marxist-Leninist form or in its many softer and less doctrinaire varieties, radicalism also usually is not an indigenous development but an insertion from abroad. Whatever its rhetorical identification with "the people", it is no better than imperialistic technocratic educating, honoring the principle that the roots of educational development must grow from the soil in which they are expected to flourish.

Perhaps most puzzling of all is the fact that there appear to be no effective different and indigenous Christian alternatives. Why this is the case I am at a loss to say, except for the probably too simple explanation that on the part of the various religious bodies economic Erastianism -- now, thankfully, showing some signs of breaking up -- may have borne too well its poisonous fruit. The churches have also, on the one hand, too easily identified their potentially much richer educational tradition with a rather too static Hellenism, or allowed themselves (in a mirror image protest) to be lured down the garden path of individualistic psychologism on the other. In any case, religiously grounded education has surely more obviously manifested the problem than become a clear source for its resolution. My argument, however, is not that these alternatives are unimportant, unsatisfactory though they may be. They are in fact very important in understanding the difficulties in "modern" educational theory and practice in the "developed" west. They are also important to establish the fact that "modern" education is by no means the universal and always successful social mechanism that its pretentious facade may suggest to the uncritical observer.

The Need for a Philosophical Critique of Education

The persistence of the alternatives just discussed suggests that our techno-scientific pedagogy needs a critique far more fundamental than one sketched merely in terms of its dubious origins and problematic effects. I cannot either fully accomplish such a critique here nor point to its having been done elsewhere. I believe, however, that it is now our first order of pedagogical business and that it may be on the horizon, brought into view by the increasing difficulty of patching or repainting our now old "modern" education. What perhaps can be said is that our educational difficulties arise from the peculiar conjunction of educational theory and practice (including the "research" now presumed to direct it) and the "science" that is now taken to found and to legitimize the whole enterprise. While "science" has driven out philosophy -- by reducing it to a species of ideology -- it is, I suggest, philosophy that must rescue us: not philosophy in the sense of a body of received doctrines, but philosophy as the source of the self-critique that neither science nor education can provide for themselves. In particular, philosophy must address such points as may be summarized in the following form:

- Point: "Modern" techno-pedagogy is largely pegged to a methodologically monistic theory of science that is both embarrassingly inadequate even to science itself and compels the reduction or elimination of too much of the traditional humane study central to genuine education.

- Point: "Modern" educational theory's positivistic bias renders problematic any serious concern for those values that both underlie and are part of the content for any socially or personally relevant education. This poverty of critical axiological development moves us not into an axiologically neutral position, but into an anti-social individualism and a self-contradictory ethical relativism. No educational system can fulfill its obligations either to persons or to societies on this ephemeral foundation. The reductionist move also produces a social-historical naivete that renders much of our human past (and hence our present and future) unintelligible.

- Point: The arts -- and here I mean the role they have traditionally fulfilled both as an important mode of the educational process and as content in the educational process -- are relegated to a merely recreational status or recast as personally satisfying or therapeutic.

- Point: The final consideration has to do with "rationality." We have noted briefly the meaning and role of rationality as a social and organizational principle in our present crisis.⁸ One crucial aspect of this question has been pointed out by the hermeneutic philosophers and social critics. Underlying much of the new techno-science and (I would add) the new techno-pedagogy is what I prefer to call a "transfer of rationality" from the person to the techno-scientific system. In the long run, technology is not a thing or a particular machine, but a mode of thinking and working -- indeed, of living. Except for the few who create and control it, from genetic engineers to computer designers and master programmers, the role of most of us is to accept it, to fit in, to be determined by a system presumed to be more rational than any one of us taken singularly can be. It may in fact be the case that the consequent educational goal for many no longer is the full development of critical intelligence at all! Both socially and educationally, this opens a chamber of horrors. It is the ultimate contradiction of the very possibility of those crucial normative principles that must shape any educational idea, practice, or act -- namely the achievement of fully humane, morally responsible intelligence, in a conscious community of believers and actors, who together control their corporate and personal lives. That this is particularly relevant to the question of peaceful socio-cultural development is not difficult to see.

It is important to lay a little more foundation for the points -- the accusations -- just made. Before that can be done, however, an important intervening question must be considered. What right and what authority do any of us have who are not in a situation to presume any competence or stake in these matters? Much of this essay itself suggests that adequate resolutions of problems in any of the spheres about which we have been talking can come only out of the socio-historical context in which they arise. While I fully assent to that general proposition, I would offer one or two important qualifications.

All have a right to ask to be included in the dialogue we are calling for and this for two reasons. First, our mutual world -- and there is a mutual world that surrounds our more limited ones -- is now so compressed and interdependent that a threat to peace for anyone is a problem for all. The very notion of "self-interest," upon which so much political and economic policy is still unfortunately based, is both archaic and dangerous. Second, the society and culture -- and therefore the education -- for which those of us in North America share responsibility represent major sources of the fundamental problem which confronts all of us. Insofar as we are able also to share in an open and critical self-examination, it may be possible to alleviate the problem from both ends. Legitimacy for this interaction lies in the principle that, although each community has its unique socio-historical matrix, it is not idiosyncratic. There are continuities in human nature and human experience as well as crucial differences, else we could neither understand nor talk at all.

The Scientific Construction of Educational Theory

To return to the basic argument, we must look further at the contemporary interrelations of science, education, and philosophy. For the most part, in its practical form, "research" means "science" or strictly "empirical" inquiry on the model of some sort of "scientific method." More specifically, educational "research" means some sort of educational science -- some sort of "techno-science" that functions chiefly by applying selected aspects of behavioral science (social and/or individual) to such educational problems as they can illuminate. There are exceptions, and the boundaries are not always perfectly clear, but the programs of our professional educational organizations furnish the evidence necessary to sustain that judgment.

In our understanding of professional research, philosophical activity -- especially that which is historically grounded -- is ignored for two reasons. The first, stemming from what has just been said, is that educational research has been crudely reduced to science or scientific research, while, more importantly, all other sorts of educational analysis or theorizing have been consigned to a limbo of "common sense," "intuition," or mere "speculation," or perhaps swept tidily under the very large rug labeled "ideology." The reason for the ease with which this redefinition of the domain of educational research has been accomplished is the assumption that science needs no critique of itself, because scientific propositions (or scientific "truths" as many like to call them) are implicitly universal and obviously self-justifying. Consequently, any attempt to direct, let alone limit, "science" is both intellectually and morally unacceptable. By the same token, not to ground education virtually exclusively on techno-science would be equally reprehensible.

Now, to avoid the intellectual chauvinism implicit in such views, more discerning scientists (educational and otherwise) will sometimes distinguish between "pure" and "applied" science. "Pure" science is exactly that: "pure," unalloyed by base motives and uncontaminated by time, place and purpose. It is the application of science by those less pure folk who must accommodate its clean abstractions to a dirty world that results in compromise. Such persons, often crudely economic in their motives, do need watching.

Here, however, the argument needs to become historical and practical rather than pristinely deductive: In a world that cared little for science, science could be largely disinterested and thankfully amateur. Though few such individuals may still exist, no such world any longer exists. Given the contemporary nationalized and institutionalized forms of science, it is scientists (pure and otherwise) who first apply science. Science now is an application. If we consider the scientists who cheerfully participated and continue to participate in institutionalized and nationalized science indifferently in democracies or dictatorships, it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish their work qua science. As moral agents it is possible, of course, but their science says nothing about that. A recent example would be those scientists who did their work for John Manville and Union Carbide or those academic scientists who, neatly dividing the truths they will learn from the outcomes of their activity, have hastened to pocket attractive research contracts for "Star Wars." No, science (as Bacon told us it would) is now principally valued not for its truth but for its effect in "producing new works." Its mystical authority may derive from its presumed truth value, but its desirability issues from its promised effects.

Far from being "pure," then, science (including educational science) can easily become a socially and historically conditioned weapon, especially in Third World settings. But science itself does not consider that possibility -- philosophy can and must.The word "weapon" has the sound of a very unphilosophical accusation. But I believe that philosophers must, from time to time, say "J'accuse!" Whatever intellectual life was like in some scientific Eden, at present science is institutionalized in concrete socio-historical settings. These settings do not provide it with some ideal freedom, but in fact, even in academia, usually drive it into captivity to certain nationally and economically defined goals.

Again, as the previously mentioned "hermeneutic" philosophers and historians have pointed out, the power of science has been transmuted into a potential threat to liberty and democracy. We all argue that in the modern world knowledge is power. When that knowledge becomes available only to political and economic elites, and is used for their purposes, the consequences to human life can be catastrophic. Increasingly, we watch a succession of prestigious scientists "advise" our political leaders -- usually with what they want to hear; soon we are told that we cannot be told because we cannot understand, and therefore we cannot judge and choose. The presuppositions of liberty and democracy are, however, that the people can understand and can choose regarding those actions which affect their lives.

Science does not make this situation clear: As an establishment (which it has become), science does not want to; as a mode of inquiry, science does not have the tools to do so. In practice, present-day science is captive to certain aspects of its socio-historical context and therefore inimical to the process of liberating and democratizing human social life. This is possible because science, qua science, is not self-reflective unless accompanied by philosophical activity. Such philosophic activity is not contradictory to science, nor is the recommendation of its inclusion a form of cultural antagonism. It is simply to assert that science does not represent a new absolute metaphysic. It is one form of human activity which, as part of the totality of human thought and action, must come under the comprehensive scrutiny for which the name philosophy stands.

The Visible Hand of the Dismal Science

In much of the Third World, then, techno-science is in fact the new intellectual colonialism, introduced as the handmaiden of the new form of political colonialism, economic colonialism. In the chaotic post-war period "reconstruction" was undertaken by the "victors" on the most benign of platforms: We needed to avoid destroying our enemies lest they again fall victim to fascist solutions. At the same time, Western nations were divesting themselves of their imperial colonies. For these struggling entities, in an admission of previous failure, the need was diagnosed to be something called "development." Other less directly colonized countries struggling for stability were seen to have similar needs. All needed aid for development -- a development that soon was determined by international economic structures, rather than by their own indigenous criteria. These structures and the development plans created in correspondence with them were, of course, created by applied economic science with the aid of social engineering. Thus, educational reform came to mean, not an indigenous activity, but a systematic revision of pedagogical practice, largely if not exclusively through the application of those pedagogical models and their supporting research paradigms which ostensibly had brought about the superior development being transferred to the struggling nations.⁹

The work of the World Bank is an instructive example. At first concerned exclusively with reconstruction, then with development, the Bank initially paid no attention to education until it discovered that without a population engineered to fit them its programs would not work. The educational interest that resulted, however, was tailored to its prior mission: development as measured by increased economic "productivity." Once having changed its posture, the Bank's impact quickly became massive. From 1963-1985 the Bank sponsored 304 educational projects in 90 countries, involving about five billion dollars. By 1985, the Bank's "educational" lending represented 6.4 percent of its activity. In five Latin American countries alone its current projects represent a total "investment" of some 454 million dollars.¹⁰

The form of educational "development" and "reform" fostered by this sort of educational "investment" is, then, determined in the first instance by economic policy and defined by the techno-scientific preoccupation we have been discussing. Thus, while programs may talk of "equity" and "access" for the "poor," the destiny of the disenfranchised is predetermined by the demands of a "modernization" essentially divorced from social-historical conditions and cultural content. At least two serious results follow: (1) The "target" populations are forced to choose between a colonialist traditional education which is patently supportive of traditional elites and structures and an imported techno-pedagogy and research which pays little or no attention to their unique history and culture. (2) This imported techno-pedagogy is superimposed upon a culture in which philosophy, literature, art and music have previously formed the warp and woof of personal identity and social meaning and value. Yet, these deeply rooted carriers of meaning and identity, of heritage and purpose, now have no function.

Impaled on the horns of this dilemma, no genuinely indigenous educational reform can be built up. The choice is now between two colonialisms, one dead and one very much alive. The net effect is not only that "educational reform" comes only with great difficulty and that "research" seems to have little impact, but, far worse, that the necessary cultural base is seriously eroded in the process. This effect is aided, of course, by such other forms of cultural importation as the "media," advertising, and popular music. Only a socially and historically sensitive philosophical activity, I would insist, can bring us into a productive consciousness of this situation.

Artful Intelligence and the Creation of Educational Alternatives

I will conclude this section with one or two more specific proposals for what philosophy can usefully accomplish. First, philosophical activity can lead us in a return to a broader, less intellectually imperialistic notion of educational research itself. The beginning of this, it seems to me, is to see educational research generically as the critical application of human intelligence in all its modes to the problems of educational theory and practice, including schooling, in all their dimensions and contexts. This proposed definition raises rather than settles many questions, of course, but it raises the right questions. Second, philosophical activity can help us to comprehend and incorporate into our educational research and reform a consciousness of the limitations of science and of its interface with moral and ethical issues which it cannot single-handedly resolve. Third, philosophical activity can help us build educational theories which are not merely formal, as most have been in recent decades, but substantive, integrating the modes and contents of human experience (i.e., lived culture) into morally responsible and historically sensitive patterns for the mutual development of societies and persons.

My modest first-hand experience in developing countries persuades me also that their contribution to resolving these difficulties could have meaning in the so-called developed world as well. As noted from the conflicts they experience, there arises a sense of engagement with genuine educational issues and consequences which could produce the first new educational theory and policy in the West since the turn of the century. Inasmuch as the apparent success in developed countries, coupled with its commitment to techno-pedagogy and a very profitable business called educational research, has nevertheless produced not solutions to its own educational quandaries, but an inability to conceive of, let alone construct, alternatives, there may be need of the fruits of those who labor elsewhere.

In closing, I will turn finally to the fundamental questions which I initially suggested could be raised at this point. From a conventional perspective, the educational questions arising would be largely technical. But the fundamental question is, I think, not how we can educate, but whether we can educate at all. I have argued an obvious and intimate connection between culture and education. But, that surely is not news! The conventional move is then to ask, "Is our pedagogy adequate to our culture? Is it an effective means for bringing the young into the human community we share?" But, there may be no culture and little community at our disposal, only a "wasteland" left by generations of disintegration through exploitation. If that be the case, the question takes a very different turn: Is there any longer a pedagogically adequate culture? If there is not, can there be one? In other words, given the situation we have been exploring, educational theory must now begin, I think, with historically grounded sociocultural critique, and rebuild: it must, so to speak, make itself possible!

Questions about the possibility of education now are not merely technically difficult, but radically problematical because it is by no means clear that the very notion of educating makes any sense under present conditions. Education is perhaps a notion left over from the time of principled societies and cultures that could furnish norms -- i.e., stable meanings and values -- for guiding development both social and personal. Where are they in the wasteland? While, as we have noted Peter Berger to argue, "development" should entail governance by ethical principles, the "ethic" characteristic of both the "developed" and the "developing" now seems little more than a radically private and relativistic hedonism.

Our formal procedural principles, here in the wasteland, are reductionist. Our political and economic thought has become a set of bloodless abstractions. Thus, both in our thought and in our pursuit of goods, we have lost sight not only of others but of ourselves as well. Modernization, we have said, is the process in which we are all caught up. According to its canons, we are to consume ourselves into perfection: but we consume ourselves in the process. For some three thousand years, wise men in every culture have told us that appetite cannot be satisfied; but now we have tried to make it the legislative principle of our lives and institutions. In theological terms, a generation that laughs at the notion of original sin has managed to mass-produce it. We have -- some of us -- everything to live with, but nothing to live for.

Of course, this quite objective immorality cannot continue. The machine is not producing more and more for more and more; it is producing more and more for relatively fewer and fewer. The imbalance between the haves and the have-nots grows, rather than declines. When the images of becoming one's desires (of desiring as the only form of becoming), mediated through our "advanced" culture and its media, finally spark the Armageddon, what, who, will be left to desire? The refugee camps of Africa and Asia and the ranches of Latin America are, unfortunately, not curious accidents. Poverty with T.V., impotence and desire conjoined, are the potential nuclear elements of a future cataclysm.

What then of education? Can we repair the ruins and recreate education simultaneously under these conditions? Customarily we have regarded certain studies or disciplines as the fundamental building blocks of any educational regimen. These studies have had their educational role because they have represented fundamental forms of human experience and understanding. But we are in shambles ourselves. Much of our science (at least as it is taught in schools) is still crudely positivistic and reductionist, feeding us only abstractions. Our history, being thoroughly disemboweled, would have to be "thickened up," as William James put it, were it to function pedagogically with any effectiveness. Philosophy has repented of its flight into analysis, but where is it heading? Religion has been cast out and substituted by religious "thought" and psychologized spirituality. What is left?

It has been suggested in this volume that art -- particularly in the form of literature, poetry, and drama -- is not merely a reflection of culture but an instrument for building it, making it.¹¹ That is why, in fact, until recent generations it was the heart of the educational process. Real art is inescapably about human life. It works through myths and images, and perhaps it is the case that only myths and images can rebuild and populate the barren landscape. Perhaps through a restoration of art to its proper place we can return to an educationally adequate context, though it may be only in a sub-community and through the creation of a sub-culture -- a real counter-culture, a real leavening if you will.

Art has not been guiltless, of course, and has its own potential besetting sins. The aim here is not some mindless notion of expunging science or replacing it with art, but for art to provide once again a crucial integrative focus. Art ideally could function together with a more humane history, with a science educationally understood as a humane activity, and with other "subjects" similarly reconceived. So defined, art can make good myths, images and stories, in and through which we can live together rather than apart. If we can once again embody the truth rather than reduce and abstract it, perhaps there is still hope. If we cannot, hope will probably be unnecessary.

The Pennsylvania State University U.S.A.

1. Some portions of this chapter were explored in another paper, "The Utility of Traditional Philosophy in Educational Research and Reform," delivered in a symposium on "Educational Research in the Global Community," 1986 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (San Francisco.)

2. I follow here Peter Berger's important distinction between "growth," "modernization," and "development," a distinction with both formal and substantive content. "Growth," he argues, is virtually universally defined in economic terms, as concerned with the wealth of goods. "Modernization" is conceived as describing the process by which we seek to stimulate growth and seek to increase the supply of goods without regard for the implications of that process. "Development," Berger argues, at least should mean placing growth and modernization under the authority of ethically conditioned political principles. See Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976), pp. vii, 8-36, et passim. Clearly, I am indebted to Berger for far more than a definition or two, and anyone concerned with these problems must at least listen to what he has said, for example, in his Facing Up To Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1977); or his and Michael Novak's more recent Speaking to the Third World (Washington, D.C., American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1985).

3. See Prof. Paul Peachey on "Appropriate Education" in George F. McLean and Henry Johnson, eds., The Moral Imagination (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, in preparation).

4. See Prof. Roberto Hozven on "The Church and Educational Control" in The Moral Imagination.

5. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). See Chapter 5, pp. 173-96, esp. pp. 185-93.

6. See Prof. Peachey on education as "artificial," The Moral Imagination.

7. It is perhaps useful to keep in mind that the "state" as the actual "supplier" of services such as education is a relatively recent invention. The churches have always served as a transnational institutional means for providing both educational content and the necessary basis for support for the development and extension of schooling. When secularly oriented movements (understandably, from their socio-philosophical perspective) chose to remove education from the control of the churches, it was not immediately clear what other agency could take their place in an effective manner.

8. The literature reflecting the "hermeneutic" perspective is now vast and complex. However, I am particularly indebted here to Josef Bleicher's The Hermeneutic Imagination: Outline of a Positive Critique of Scientism and Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), Chapters 1 and 2.

9. Here again the relevant literature is very extensive. For another critique, see Denis Goulet and Michael Hudson, The Myth of Aid: The Hidden Agenda of the Development Reports (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1971). The following are some of the sources that have particularly provoked my thinking and guided my observations.

See Robert G. Meyers, Connecting Worlds: A Survey of Developments in Educational Research in Latin America (Ottawa: Educational Research and Advisory Group, 1981). Meyers calls frequently for the growth of a "research mentality" (e.g., p. 18), although he admits that the universality (my term) of the enterprise can be questioned (e.g., p. 11). He regrets the fact that researchers do not keep in touch, but he fails to see that conflicting modes of thought may make that contact difficult. "Politics," he insists, provides "constraints" on research, which should (it appears) transcend all that sort of thing. His review also suggests that the impetus for research comes from "outsiders" and that it is regrettably lower in "education" than in agriculture and industry -- the latter differing, apparently, from the former largely in degree rather than kind. See also R. G. Davis and N. F. McGinn, "Education and Regional Development" in Lloyd Rodwin and Associates, Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). Educational Planning in the Context of Current Development Problems: Proceedings of the 1983 I.I.E.P. Seminar, Paris (published by the Institute), esp., the articles by Reiffers and Silvestre, and by Ernesto Schiefelbien -- the latter fixing attention on the need for causal models for research.

The current state of affairs in Latin America is partly visible through La Educación, a review published by the Departamiento de Assuntos Educativos of the O.E.A., Washington, D.C. The Department also issues periodic reprints of particular articles as "Estados del Arte de la Investigación Educativa en America Latina." Regional publications differ considerably in mood and content. See, for example, the publications of the Centro de Reflexión y Planificación Educativa (CERPE), Caracas, Venezuela, esp. their Investigaciones Educativas Venezuelanas, which reflects much more politically and culturally oriented work. The "multinations" (if I may apply that term) are essentially neutralist, trying to avoid the political as dangerous and the cultural as unrigorous and unscientific. For another, but not incompatible view, see Joseph S. Tulchin, "Eversins Patterns of Research in the Study of Latin America," Latin American Research Review 18, (1983), 85-94.

10. Annual Report of the World Bank, 1985 (and other years), published in Washington, D.C. by the Bank. Also extremely important are the Educational Sector Policy Papers. In the third edition (Washington, D.C., 1980) for example, the argument given is that education "should be effectively related to work and environment," embracing the "knowledge and skills necessary for performing economic, social and other developmental functions" (p. 86). The chief need is for "capacities to design, analyze, manage, and evaluate programs for education and training" (p. 87). The foundation for this work are primarily economic formulae.

11. See Prof. Hozven regarding literature and building culture in The Moral Imagination.