Introduction to the Lesson
The purpose of
this ninth lesson in the unit is to introduce the education student to the
role of Seventeenth Century European Thought in influencing the mental models,
concepts, constructs and methods of teaching and learning in the western
world. The student will be exposed to the ideas of the Enlightenment and their history and power in shaping educational
practices. Richard Hooker summarizes the important ideas of seventeeth
century European Thought:
As a historical category, the term "Enlightenment" refers to a series of changes in European thought
and letters. It is one of the few historical categories that was coined by the
people who lived through the era (most historical categories, such as
"Renaissance," "early modern," "Reformation,"
"Tokugawa Enlightenment," etc., are made up by historians after the
fact). When the writers, philosophers and scientists of the eighteenth century
referred to their activities as the "Enlightenment," they meant that
they were breaking from the past and replacing the obscurity, darkness, and
ignorance of European thought with the "light" of truth.
Although the Enlightenment is one of the few self-named historical categories,
determining the beginning of the Enlightenment is a difficult affair, as we
noted earlier in this module. Not only can we not easily find a beginning to
the Enlightenment, we can't really identify an end point either. For we still
more or less live in an Enlightenment world; while philosophers and cultural
historians have dubbed the late nineteenth and all of the twentieth century as "post-Enlightenment," we still walk around with a world view largely
based on Enlightenment thought.
So in the spirit of not dating the Enlightenment, we will simply refer to the
changes in European thought in the seventeenth century as "Seventeenth
Century Enlightenment Thought," with the understanding that our use of
the term may invite criticism.
The main components of Enlightenment thought are as follows:
There are two distinct developments in Enlightenment thought:
the scientific
revolution
which resulted in new systems of understanding the physical world, and the redeployment of the human
sciences that apply scientific thinking to what were normally interpretive
sciences. In the first, the two great innovations were the development of
empirical thought and the mechanistic world view. Empiricism is based on the
notion that human observation is a reliable indicator of the nature of
phenomena; repeated human observation can produce reasonable expectations
about future natural events. In the second, the universe is regarded as a
machine. It functions by natural and predictable rules; although God created
the universe, he does not interfere in its day to day runnings. Once the world
is understood as a machine, then it can be manipulated and engineered for the
benefit of humanity in the same way as machines are.
The Human Sciences
These ideas were steadily exported to the human sciences as well. In theories
of personality, human development, and social mechanics, seventeenth century
thinkers moved away from religious and moral explanations of human behavior
and interactions and towards an empirical analysis and mechanistic explanation
of the laws of human behavior and interaction.
Thomas Hobbes
The first major thinker of the seventeenth century to
apply new methods to the human sciences was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) whose
book Leviathan is one of the most revolutionary and influential works
on political theory in European history. Hobbes was greatly interested in the
new sciences; he spent some time in Italy with Galileo and eagerly read the
work of William Harvey, who was applying the new physical science methods to
human physiology. After the English Civil War, Hobbes determined that
political philosophy had to be seriously revised. The old political
philosophy, which relied on religion, ethics, and interpretation, had produced
what he felt was a singular disaster in English history. He proposed that
political philosophy should be based on the same methods of exposition and
explanation as were being applied to the physical sciences.
When he applied these explanatory principles to politics and
states, he arrived at two radical and far-reaching conclusions:
- All human law derives from natural law; when human
law departed from natural law, disaster followed;
- All monarchs ruled not by the consent of heaven,
but by the consent of the people.
These were radical ideas. In the
first, Hobbes believed that human beings were material, physical objects that
were ruled by material, physical laws. Everything that human beings feel,
think, and judge, are simply physical reactions to external stimuli. Sensation
produces feeling, and feeling produces decision, and decision produces action.
We are all, then, machines. The fundamental motivation that spurs human beings
on is selfishness: all human beings wish to maximize their pleasure and
minimize their pain. As long as political philosophy is built on some other
principle, such as morality, the human inclination to selfishness will always
result in tragedy.
Since all human beings are selfish, this means that no
person is really safe from the predations of his or her fellow beings. In its
natural state, humanity is at war with itself. Individuals battle other
individuals in a perpetual struggle for advantage, power, and gain. Hobbes
argued that the society was a group of selfish individuals that united into a
single body in order to maximize their safety-- to protect themselves from one
another. The primary purpose of society is to maximize the happiness of its
individuals. At some early point, individuals gathered into a society and
agreed to a "social contract" that stipulated the laws and rules
they would all live by.
Human beings, however, could not be trusted simply to
live by their agreements. For this reason, authority was created in order to
enforce the terms of the social contract. The creation of authority, by which
Hobbes meant a monarch, transformed society into a state . For Hobbes,
humanity is better off living under the circumscribed freedoms of a monarchy
rather than the violent anarchy of a completely equal and free life.
Using this reasoning, Hobbes argued for unquestioning obedience of authority.
In a twist of fate, however, both his methods of inquiry and his basic
assumptions would form the basis of arguments against absolute authority.
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Jewish philosopher
living in the Netherlands who applied the new sciences to questions of ethics
and philosophy. His most famous work, the Ethics , attempts to use a
system of demonstration first outlined by Francis Bacon and fully theorized by
René Descartes that begins with certain definitions and draws from these
consequent axioms and corollaries. His basic definition of good ("The
highest good of the mind is knowledge of God and the highest virtue of the
mind is to know God") formed the foundation of all of his ethical
statements, including some highly controversial statements ("Pity is not
a virtue"). The work was extraordinarily controversial, for from his base
definitions he derived the notion that God and nature were essentially
identical. He argued the same thing that the Greek philosopher Parmenides did
almost two thousand years earlier: there is one and only one thing in the
universe and that one thing is God. Everything else is simply a part of God.
Any proposition concerning the physical is, then, a proposition about the
nature of God. For Spinoza the new physical sciences were, by and large,
coterminous with theology. This position would be reiterated by Isaac Newton
and the deists, who argued that understanding the rational workings of the
universe would also mean understanding the rational workings of its creator,
God.
Like Hobbes, Spinoza believed that human action was fundamentally mechanistic.
Human actions resulted from two things: the external environment and internal
passions. The relationship between the environment, passions, and human action
was a mechanistic relationship; all human actions, then, could be explained in
terms of laws. The fundamental drive that animates all human beings is the
effort to preserve themselves and their own autonomy in relation to external
things. However, the one area of human activity that is free from the
influence of the external environment and human passions is rational thought;
the more that thought is disengaged from the external world and human passsion,
that is, the more abstract that thought is, the more free the individual.
Human freedom, for Spinoza, existed only in abstract thinking.
In political theory, Spinoza argued
that human beings fundamentally act in accordance with natural law. Like
Hobbes, Spinoza believed that human beings pursue their own self-preseveration.
In a natural state, the only "wrong" that a human being can commit
is an action that results in his or her destruction or downfall. Since human
beings cannot preserve themselves in isolation, they form societies by which
individual "right" is subsumed under "common right," a
notion very similar to Hobbes' social contract. The means by which a society
enforces its common right on the individual is "dominion" (in Latin,
"imperium"). Dominion takes three forms: dominion by the multitude
(democracy), by a select few (aristocracy), or by a single individual
(monarchy). The concepts of right and wrong, justice and injustice are only
established when the common right is articulated through dominion; that is,
when a ruler asserts something as right or wrong, it is then right or wrong
(in nature there is no right or wrong, justice or injustice). The relationship
between the right (power) of the individual and the right of the dominion is
an inverse relationship: the more power that accrues to individuals, the less
is available to the dominion; the more power that accrues to authorities, the
less is available to individuals. Surprisingly, Spinoza implies that democracy
is the best way to balance individual and common right since it more closely
guarantees that the beliefs of the multitude will correspond with the beliefs
and actions of the dominion.
John Locke
The last important philosopher, besides Pascal and
Descartes, of human sciences in the seventeenth century was John Locke
(1632-1704). Locke was steeped in the new physical sciences; he was an avid
reader of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and he was a close friend of Robert
Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry. He also read Pascal and
Descartes avidly. He wrote two far-reaching and massively influential works on
human sciences, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two
Treatises on Government (1690).
The Essay takes as its subject human psychology and
cognition; it is, undoubtedly, the first European work on human cognition.
Locke applied the new science to explaining the human mind itself and all its
operations; he started with a radical definition of the human mind. For Locke,
the human mind enters the world with no pre-formed ideas whatsoever. The human
mind at birth is a blank, a tabula rasa (erased board). Human
sensation: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and especially vision filled the
empty mind with objects of sensation. From these sensations, humans eventually
derive a sense of order and rationality. All human thought, then, and all
human passion is ultimately derived from sensation and sensation alone. In
Locke's view, the human mind is completely empirical. Not only is he
arguing that the best knowledge is empirical knowledge, he was arguing that
the only knowledge is empirical knowledge; there is no other kind.
One of the consequences of this empirical view of humans
means that every human being enters the world with all the same capacities. No
one is by virtue of birth more moral or knowledgeable than anyone else. Since
all moral behavior arises from one's empirical experiences, that means that
immoral behavior is primarily a product of the environment rather than the
individual. If you accept that line of reasoning, that means that you can
change moral and intellectual outcomes in human development by changing the
environment. Locke proposed that education above everything else was
responsible for forging the moral and intellectual character of individuals;
he proposed in part an extension of education to every member of society. This
view of education still dominates Western culture to this day.
In the Two Treatises , Locke argued that government and authority was
based on natural law. Unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that natural law dictated
that all human beings were fundamentally equal; he derived this argument from
his theories of human development. Since every human being walked into the
world with the same capacities as every other human being, that meant that
inequality was an unnatural result of the environments that individuals are
forced to live in, a belief that still underlies the Western notion of human
development. Human beings have a natural inclination to preserve their
equality and independence, since these are natural aspects of humanness. For
Locke, humans enter into social contracts only to help adjudicate disputes
between individuals or groups. Absolute power, then, is an unnatural
development in human history.
For Locke, the purpose of authority is to protect human equality and freedom;
this is why social groups agree to a "social contract" that places
an authority over them. When that authority ceases to care for the welfare,
independence, and equality of individual humans, the social contract is broken
and it is the duty of the members of society to overthrow that ruler. This
work was published shortly after the Glorious Revolution and clearly reflects
the political fallout from that event. It would also serve as one of the
central influences in the formation of the American government.
This lesson was developed to address elements
of competency # 3, #4 and #10 on the functions of the educational process
(teaching and learning) and schooling for education majors who are taking EDF
1005
in partial fulfillment of the graduation
requirements for an Associate of Arts degree in Teaching (Elementary), Teaching
(Secondary), Early Childhood and Exceptional Education.
Competency #3 reads (in part) as follows:
The student will demonstrate knowledge of
the significant ideas, events, and people that have shaped American education
by
Describing trends from antiquity to the
present in terms of educational opportunity of various groups, compulsory
attendance, curricular emphasis and teacher training.
Competency #4 reads (in part) as follows:
The
student will examine the various functions of the educational process and
schooling by
Explaining the difference between
enculturation, education and schooling.
Describing how schools function as
transmitters and re-creators of culture.
Analyzing schooling in terms of various
models. (e.g. social escalator, developer of human potential, acculturator
and social panacea).
Competency #10 reads (in part) as follows:
The student will demonstrate knowledge of
the teaching and learning process by
Identifying such prominent learning
theories as mental discipline, natural unfoldment, apperception,
behaviorism, neo-behaviorism, cognitive field interactionism, and
constructivism
(A complete list of all the competencies
for EDF 1005 is provided below by clicking on the link titled competencies)
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