Freedom and Discipline

When I was a young lad of 20 I first read Alfred North Whitehead. I read Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; and The Aims of Education, a collection of Whitehead's lectures to Cambridge and Harvard students between the years 1912 and 1928. At the time I adored Science and the Modern World for its clarity and the sense of a new kind of history, one that integrated science and technology into that other history of wars, great men, and empires. And I loved the essay from Aims entitled "The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline." If I were to skip the complicated and abstract way Whitehead gets from his philosophy of reality...wait let's just try out one idea. Whitehead is trying to speak of value. He says that "'Value' is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event." (Science in the Modern World, 93). And for White head an event is the fundamental datum of reality (Mellert). Mellert goes on to say:

Actual entities can best be understood as "drops of experience" (PR, 23) in space-time. They are both the subject that grasps other experiences and the new reality constituted by those experiences. Whitehead introduces the term "prehension" to illustrate this dual idea. The word "prehension" is related to the more traditional word "apprehension." Both are from the Latin "to take." But whereas the latter implies a subject taking hold of an object, Whitehead's term attempts to transcend this subject-object distinction. It implies a subject taking account of an object in a way that makes the latter a constitutive element of the subject as subject. It is a way of suggesting a real relatedness of subject to object, not just a relation of reason.

This is a complex way of saying that education, or the "real" education most professors and some students idealize and quest for, must somehow incorporate older notions of wisdom, notions of integrating the drops of experience into the making, literally, of oneself and the way one perceives the world. Thus, freedom is the positive term for bringing new ideas and senses of things in, prehending the drops of experience and allowing a new term or structure in. And Discipline is the negative term; it allows us to make de-cisions, from the root for cutting (cision, as in incision). Thus we are always cutting (though Whitehead said we can hold this cutting as a reminder of what has been not included) and always including, and these two processes need each other in order for us to learn anything, but especially to learn to learn.

One last thing. Whitehead said that all learning must begin with a stage of Romance. We are excited by what we are learning, we find pleasure in what we are finding out. (In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the eponymous teacher distinguised e-ducation, out of I take with in-struction, into I thrust). Education involves a romance that what we are learning may be said to be already inside us, in our capacity for learning. Yet the freedom of Romance also includes the de-cision to focus on this and not those areas of learning.

After Romance comes the stage of Precision. And yet this stage also depends on Freedom: the discipline we seek is in some ways self-discipline,and the way we learn self discipline is to exercise it in a condition of freedom, to see why it is valuable and where.

Finally we move from Precision to the stage of Generalization. Here we move from knowing one or two things more or less precisely, to applying our e-ducation to a wider world that includes our everyday actions and speech acts:

"After all," Whitehead writes, "the whole affair is merely a preparation for battling with the immediate experiences of life, a preparation by which to qualify each immediate moment with relevant ideas and appropriate actions. An education which does not begin by evoking initiative and end by encouraging it must be wrong." (Aims of Education, 37).

If I think about it, this rubric works nicely for the teaching of writing. At the beginning is both a Romance of freedom (as the student brainstorms, casts about for likely topics, examples, stories, arguments). But this Freedom is limited by the need for de-cision of a specific topic and specific points. Next we begin to learn precision with writing (and this is what gets lost so much when students make only so much progress and then write no more in college) and to make stronger arguments and write stronger, more coherent and varied types of essays. Finally we imagine that the habits of thought, of critical ability and the need for examples and support of points and imagination, all can and hopefully are generalized to nonwriting events, to the Big World out there beyond the writing classroom.

I began this thinking I would write about the way Whitehead's claims for freedom and discipline along a process of education mirror my own sense that our lives right now are more centrifugal than centripedal. And that these categories mirror those of reading theory, Wolfgang Iser's claim that reading moves back and forth for comprehension between a "wandering viewpoint" that moves off the page to bring in content from outside the text (extreme reactions, connections with other texts or events, emotional responses, associations) and "consistency building" (the way a reader keeps comparing what she is reading now with what has gone before, to continually recreate a consistent version of what one is reading,whether a narrative or an argument).

The results of educations that veer too far from the rhythmic claims of freedom and discipline, and that neglect an initial sense of Romance or pathos (why should I care about this?) are likely to be the kind of education provided by No Child Left Untested. Whitehead's aim was to attack "dead knowledge," and I believe that in his complex philosophical term-heavy way, he was trying to imagine what live knowledge, knowledge held by the living for the purposes of living, would look like.

I'm just getting to the point in my teaching sabbatical where this question becomes interesting to me again. Romantic, even.

See Mellert, Robert B. "Searching for the Foundations of Whitehead's Philosophy of Education."http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Educ/EducMell.htm