Kwame Anthony APpiah

Thinking about education with Washington and Du Bois

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I’ve spent much of the summer not far from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the hometown of one of the great figures of American intellectual history, W.E.B. Du Bois. Born shortly after the end of the Civil War, Du Bois came into his own as another black public intellectual, Booker T. Washington, was reaching the height of his fame.  I turned to Du Bois and Washington because their debate about education seemed so relevant to contemporary discussions of liberal learning and practicality. I was led in this direction by the Princeton philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose article on Du Bois in the New York Review of Books is particularly incisive.

Washington’s fame was as a teacher, institution builder (especially at the Tuskegee Institute), fundraiser and spokesperson for the view that American blacks needed an intensely practical, vocational education. He appealed to ex-slaves and their descendants who were looking for a path out of economic impoverishment, and he appealed to whites who appreciated his decision not to promote political or cultural change.  Washington was an “accomodationist,” willing to work within the structures for legal subordination of blacks in the South as long as he was able to promote black economic advancement. His message resonated with wealthy industrialists, high-toned educators, and even presidents. He was the most famous black man in America at the end of the 19th century. At around that time, the younger Du Bois was a prodigious intellectual with a slew of degrees – bachelors diplomas from Fisk and Harvard, eventually a Ph.D. also from Harvard (he was the first black person to receive one there) with continued graduate work in Berlin. He was a classics professor and a historian who wrote sociology (highly praised by Max Weber), poetry, plays and fiction – to name just some of the genres in which he worked.

Washington recognized the American desire for material success and wanted to build progress for African Americans on their ability to be successful in the economy. Du Bois, on the other hand, emphasized political and civic equality, along with “the education of youth according to ability.” Education was at the core of the differences between these leaders. Du Bois rejected the head of Tuskegee’s anti-intellectualism. “The pushing of mere abstract knowledge into the head means little,” Washington had written. “We want more than the mere performance of mental gymnastics. Our knowledge must be harnessed to the things of real life.” Du Bois agreed, but he wanted to broaden what might count as “the things of real life” so that the pursuit of happiness wouldn’t be reduced to the pursuit of dollars.

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

Du Bois was acutely aware that the “fine adjustment” between life and knowledge was especially problematic in a society of oppressive racial inequality, a society that had denied many blacks the most rudimentary education in the years after emancipation. He was committed to the ideal that education was a path to freedom, but he also acknowledged the fact that different people need different kinds of educational opportunity.

If these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for one or seven or sixty million souls! Shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, –nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.

Education is for human development, human freedom, not the molding of an individual into a being who can perform a particular task. That would be slavery.

As Frederic Douglass had emphasized after he had escaped from slavery, people strive to know just as they strive for freedom. Educational institutions aim to stimulate that hunger for knowledge – not just contain it or channel it into a narrow path destined for yesterday’s job market.  Education should not teach the person to conform to a function, but should provide people with a wider horizon of choices. (That’s one of the reasons excessive student loan debt is so pernicious – it effectively reduces choices.)

The tension between Washington and Du Bois on education reminds us of issues that should be top of mind as we prepare for the academic year. Sure, we have to pay attention to what our graduates will do with their education, and we must give them the skills to translate what they learn in classrooms to their lives after graduation. But we shouldn’t reduce our understanding of “their lives after graduation” to their very first job — which should be the worst job they’ll ever have. We must recommit ourselves to ensuring that a broad, liberal education is one that is “harnessed to the things in real life,” as Washington said. By doing so, we will also achieve what Du Bois championed: the vital link between education and freedom.

cross-posed with huffingtonpost.com

 

Blurry Disciplines, Clear Learning

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In the last week I attended two meetings worth travelling to.  The first (in Washington D.C.) dealt with the intellectual-financial challenges facing American higher education, and the second (in Princeton) examined the role of the humanities in the public sphere. I was in Washington for a meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, on whose board I now serve. We began with a very interesting talk by environmental scientist James P. Collins of Arizona State University. Jim talked about the changing face of scholarly inquiry today, when pressing questions just aren’t fitting into distinct disciplinary borders. His particular interest is in the intersection of biological, geological and social sciences, and we were asked to consider synthetic biology, restoration ecology and how engineering and “big data” analysis could be added to the mix. I thought of how Wesleyan’s College of the Environment is also working in this sphere under Barry Chernoff’s direction, and how Lisa Dierker’s work in the Quantitative Analysis Center also blurs the boundaries among disciplines in powerfully productive ways.

In Princeton I was part of a conference that focused on the “ethics of reading.” Peter Brooks, the organizer of this great gathering, asked speakers to consider how the ways we are taught to read in the humanities might foster modes of attention that have positive impact on the public sphere. To whom or to what are we responsible when we learn to read well? How is the exercise of the imagination in reading a narrative related to empathy, and to the desire to reduce harm to others? Literary critic Elaine Scarry gave a powerful presentation on how increases in literacy might be linked to efforts to reduce violence, and she returned to her theme of how the pleasures of beauty might create “opiated adjacencies.” By this she means that the pleasure we take in beauty might stimulate us to make the world more fair, more just. Yale law Professor Paul Kahn talked about teaching humility when we cultivate wonder in the classroom. The practice of creativity and interpretation give us an experience of freedom. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah noted that when we betray that practice, it is less a betrayal of an author than a betrayal of our community.

I’m more skeptical about the positive “adjacencies” to aesthetic delight than are some of my colleagues, but the conference gave me much to think about. I am convinced that work in the increasingly blurry disciplines of the sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences provides us with an increased ability to navigate within contexts of ambiguity and change. As I noted in a recent blogpost, “liberal learning can help our students unplug from the inputs they have customized to reinforce their own tastes, expectations and identities. We get to introduce them to stories and poems, historical events and paintings, scientific experiments and political debates that they might not have attended to, even googled, on their own. And then we get to learn with them about how these complex cultural artifacts can be understood in relation to our present. In this way, we develop a richer sense than our little devices can give us of who we are. More important, we develop a deeper sense of who we might become.”

A Wesleyan education helps us develop this deeper sense of who we might become. Happily, this occurs in a context of supportive community in which the treasures of continuity find their balance with the pleasures of change.