Fourteen: Bourne in the USA

Randolph Bourne is long forgotten and so not much missed – well at least by anyone besides me. But, should someone who writes the following about education be forgotten by anyone who has an inkling of an interest in education – now, especially, when we live in these educational dark ages (EDA): “If the school is a place where children live intensively and expressively, it will be a place where they will learn” – should such a person not be missed. Bourne continued, “The ideal educational system would continue with the adult all through his or her active life, sharpening skill, interpreting experience, providing intellectual tools with which to express and enjoy.”(Education and Living, p. vi)  How far is this from the practice in our schools? What school allows kids to live intensively and expressively? Where do people see education as something that is lived beyond the school and “school age”? Are schools not places that merely teach conformity and a few skills (of the narrowest kind)?  Have we not, to quote from Bourne, “clos[ed] off the school and box[ed] up learning,” and in the process, “really smothered education”?(p. vii).

Back in 19whatever, he wondered aloud, or at least in print, “Are we not getting a little restless over the resemblance of our schools to penitentiaries, reformatories, orphan asylums, rather than to free and joyous communities?”(p. 3) Education, at its best, was a prescription for life – as if such things could be prescribed; how much better would it not be if life were a prescription for education? What would that be; what would it look like? “The problem of American education,” indeed, “is now to transform an institution into a life.” It may seem like a cop-out, not answering the question of how this is to be done but, in a way, Bourne, working in the early days of public education, was at a better vantage point to see what education and living might look like.  After about one hundred years of EDA, it is pretty hard to say now what it should look like.

One thing is certain, however, these words of Bourne constitute a prediction of where we have arrived today, and where we need to slam the machinery into reverse and back out from so we can try again: “[T]here is a danger," he wrote, "that we shall create capable administrators faster than we create imaginative educators. It is easy to forget that this tightening of the machinery is only in order that the product may be finer and richer.” Instead of the EDA maxim that education should make us “finer and richer”, we need to promote “the creative life.” As Bourne continued, “Unless it does so result in more creative life [education] will be a detriment rather than a good. For it is too easy,” he concluded, “to make the running of the machine, the juggling with schedules and promotions and curricula and courses and credits, the end.” 

What we have is a system that is on autopilot that really doesn’t do anyone much good. Even if it were supposed to make us finer and richer by making us more competitive, it isn’t doing that. And why would it? In conformity, after all, we have a commitment to past practice. And past practice is merely the recipe for the replication of disasters we have already experienced. Thus, when you think about it, much of what one learns in a business school is how to make profit from prophecy – i.e., in the financial world. Wealth – social wealth – is not created as a result of business schools. Generally speaking the same can be said for any vocational school – it is teaching past practice and becomes, by and large, a recipe for redundancy, and the inability to respond to experience because of trained incapacity.

The pillars of the American educational system are modes of transportation and businesses that are virtual dinosaurs – and when one uses the word dinosaur one is being unfair to these beasts, because while one certainly believes that these modes of transportation should be consigned to the dustbin of history (one could only wish), at least the real dinosaurs weren’t responsible for their own destruction. Oil and the automobile, the products of the combustion engine – human creation – are dragging humanity along a suicidal mission (I write this on an airplane, so one can only marvel at one’s own ability to deny reality, but hey, who’s perfect?). But, instead of really doing something about this, really saying “STOP, STOP, STOP, we need to think about what we are doing," the EDS teaching institutions merely prescribe more (testing) and better (results). C’est la vie, or c’est la mort, as they have the Gaul to say.

We have the death of humanities occurring before our eyes, at almost every humanities-based institution in the United States, and along with it we can predict the end of humanity.  Some of the most forward-looking institutions in the country, some of the most progressive and imaginative – one of which I feel I am lucky enough to be employed at – fight an up-hill battle in the face of the forces aligned against all valuable and significant educational ventures.

In 19whatever, when Bourne was writing, there may have seemed like there was an opportunity to really attempt something different. Then came two world wars (one of which the Americans should not have been involved in, and the other the product of the former), a hot Cold War, and a plethora of other ideological wars that have constrained society in quite fundamental ways. So one is left feeling that that dream is over. Not even the 60s could bring it back; not the end of empire; not the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Arab spring; nothing.  

And nothing shall come of nothing.