Reflections on Feinberg

Walter Feinberg: Common schools, uncommon identities - National unity and cultural difference (1999) Chapters 1,3 and 9.

In his book from 1999, Walter Feinberg examines the promotion of both cultural and national identities as parts of the curriculum in “common” schools – which is considered as an important goal of education in the United States. The wider purpose of the book is, according to the author, “to develop a justification for public education that is responsive to changing moral understandings about individual rights and community benefits” (p. 1), which in its turn should lead to the renewal of public education as a progressive force in American society. As an educational philosopher, Feinberg’s aspirations are grand and admirable. In my opinion, he succeeds relatively well in putting forward his argument in Common schools, uncommon identities, but how his philosophic theses are put in practice is hard to say.

In the beginning of the book, Feinberg states clearly that his point of departure is the American society with its commitment to liberal democratic principles and to providing conditions that enable different cultural groups to flourish, commitments that have not been entirely successful in the American educational arena (p. 2). Feinberg has chosen to use the term “common” school to underline the public schools’ role in creating national identity and shared loyalty, vis-à-vis the term “uncommon identities” to illustrate the current situation in the schools with their task of multicultural education. The question that intrigues both the author and the reader is how children from different cultural backgrounds should be treated by the public schools and what kind of identity work is appropriate for public education. Feinberg also defines other key terms such as culture, nation, state, pluralism and multiculturalism. Especially the two latter ones are discussed in depth in the book.

Pluralism, in this context, is explained as a view that people with different cultural backgrounds should be allowed to pursue their own meanings and traditions in their homes and their communities, while the public school’s role is to actively strive to unify all children under nationalism (p.6). The development of a distinct cultural identity belongs to tasks of the homes and communities, whereas the school environment, ideally, should provide the children with “culture-neutral” knowledge (which I will return to later). The society is seen as not having any special obligation to maintain or support cultural structures. Thus, pluralism supports the idea of two different spheres of identity formation; the cultural and the public. (p.20) Feinberg connects pluralism with the idea of assimilationism, that of believing that the role of public education is to erase past national and cultural identities and infuse the students to a common (American) one.

Multiculturalism, in turn, is defined as active recognition of cultural membership as the children in the school are being addressed in terms of their cultural identities (p. 7). Multiculturalism as an idea challenges the pluralist/separatist radical separation between the public and the private “culturalities” and aims at using the school as an arena for establishing respect of cultural variation and for promoting pride in one’s own cultural heritage (p.21). For a multiculturalist, public is cultural and vice versa, cultural identities are encouraged to flourish (in comparison to “only” allowed as within pluralism) and affiliation and cultural recognition serve as important parts of the ideal.

Apart from pluralism and multiculturalism, Feinberg discusses what he calls “principled reasons” for public education. Principled reasons are determined as “general ideas used to advance public education as an individual and common good” (p.7) and they can be considered as universals, applying to everyone regardless of social class, race, sex and religion. As such they are closely tied to the ruling liberal political philosophy and that is, according to Feinberg, what differentiates them from nonpublic schools. Principled reasons can also be seen as ideals to which people appeal to justify and steer public education in general, this for many reasons, not the least because public schools’ tasks include advancing societal development, socializing children into the society and reproducing the society’s basic values across generations. This is of course done under the premise that the citizens allow their tax money to be used for schools’ purposes and that parents give up some of their authority on their children.

The three principled reasons, serving the above mentioned facts, are the following: 1) Equal opportunity – a vocational goal, intended to assure that individuals are rewarded according to their merit. 2) Freedom of association – a social and political ideal that holds the individuals’ rights to bond with other people, groups and interests as long as they don’t hinder the right of others to do the same. 3) Individual growth – a personal goal that includes giving children a right to select their own conception of good and to develop themselves in any chosen direction. (pp. 9-10) Choice-making or the teaching of it is something Feinberg discusses in depth from the schools’ point of view. He opposes himself to the popular argument of schools teaching children how to choose, not what to choose and claims that those in favor of multicultural education are doing more than just giving children a helping hand in understanding how to choose and what good is all about. This is an argument Feinberg develops throughout the chapters examined here, considering the important questions of how to teach values to children and which values one should teach. He is careful about pointing out that the statements he makes and the ideas he puts forward need not be valid for general politics, but have more of an educational perspective.

In chapter 3 Feinberg discusses “strong culturalism”, meaning the belief that there are collective experiences that can only be authentically understood from the inside and that any other attempts to describe them are doomed to fail and distort the group’s experience. This distortion is connected with Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic violence towards the group. Feinberg also examines other authors’ texts, in which, according to him, the tone is “highly suspicious of any claim that public education can enable children from cultural communities to flourish” (p. 63). In the text, he first presents the ideas and then puts forward critical arguments against both strong culturalism and communitarianism. The strong culturalist view includes the belief that it is culture that provides the conditions for learning and makes learning possible and that there is something special about the relations between child, culture and knowledge. Being able to display cultural competence is also considered an important element in strong culturalism.

Chapter 3 discusses in part also the meaning of learning-through-culture. In the strong culturalist view, Feinberg claims, the idea that learning occurs within and through our culture is highlighted. This means a belief that our understanding of the world is build up through the conceptual and emotional frames that are both products and elements of culture, that culture determines the elements of development that are counted as learning, that our perception of the world is dependent on instruments such as languages, norms, and symbols, and that using these different instruments creates differently apprehended worlds. The strong culturalists’ biggest reservation about the role of common school is thus presented as that the standards we use to evaluate the cultures of others are coloured by our own culture, or, that the schools’ usage of symbolic violence is inevitable.

After having presented the strong culturalist view through examples and discussions, Feinberg then moves on to his arguments presenting the problems with this view. Among the problems the claim of the unavoidability of symbolic violence is being highlighted, followed by the claim that cultures are impenetrable and that translation between them is impossible and the way in which the strong culturalists’ conception of culture can be abused to further cultural neglect. Cultural neglect is something Feinberg discusses in depth, placing it on a continuum with symbolic violence, but at the other end of it. As far as I understand it, cultural neglect is defined as failing to provide individuals with the tools that are needed for surviving culturally in the society, both one’s “own” and the public. It is not active violence or misuse of power, but nevertheless, as effective in its passiveness. Both these and other arguments lead Feinberg to the conclusion that the strong culturalist view is incorrect.

Chapter 9 has the title Common schools and the public formation. In my interpretation, the chapter is very much about citizenship education, even though the label itself is hardly mentioned in the text. Feinberg discusses the difficulties in making choices of what to include and teach as public and common knowledge and which components are involved in the education of a public. According to him, identification with the national experience and a will to actively engage in the national life are demanded for public education to succeed. He also points out that being or becoming a true member of a certain public is commonly believed to depend on certain kind of knowledge, e.g. historical, linguistic or geographical facts, and so on and that his belief is wrong. He also points out that there is a difference between being a nationality and identifying oneself with some nationality and that being a part of a public does not require that all people within it hold the same associations in their heads (pp.231-2)

Feinberg refines his thesis further by concluding that in the liberal postmodern sense learning about a nation should mean learning about the different groups that comprise it and to experience their differences within the local contexts. When it comes to schools, children should be taught to recognize these differences, to sensitively address them and to encourage others in the process of national self-formation (p 233). The general aims of public education should thus be helping the children to gain a more questioning attitude when it comes to “truths”, a greater tolerance towards different practices and a more open attitude towards one’s own traditions. The ideas are easy to agree on but in order to examine how they work in reality they should be reinforced with concrete suggestions. In the examined chapters, Feinberg never really enters the common schools’ classrooms he is writing about, but his arguments stay on a rather abstract and philosophical level.

When trying to re-evaluate Feinberg’s theses in other cultural contexts it is important to note that his basic assumption is that the society and the schools are run by people guided by liberal ideals as in the United States. What is meant by liberalism is not obvious in the chapters studied here, but it seems reasonable to assume that the concept in Feinberg’s usage covers more than just political liberalism as it is understood e.g. in Sweden, and that a more philosophical standpoint on liberalism is being taken. At the end of chapter 9 (p.241) Feinberg points out what most readers have probably been thinking about when browsing through the pages of the book; liberal educational practices are not always seen as neutral reminders of other ways of life, and that, liberalism itself is in fact a cultural form.