The Art of Humane Education

by Verene, Donald Phillip
Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2002
80 pp., Trade
ISBN: 0-8014-4039-4

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

It takes a lot of courage to go against the stream of cognitivist, constructionist and neo-behaviourist reform in education, and it takes a lot of erudition and rhetoric to get a message across that goes completely against the dominant discourse of our time. Educational reform — an ongoing endeavour to pull education into the stranglehold of private companies and to subject it to the logic of the market, against all common sense that says that young people are too important to throw them before the lions — is dominated by neo-conservative goals and their pedagogical representations: "preparing students for their jobs", "making efficient use of human resources", "flexibility and life-long-learning" etc. Teachers don't need to know anymore, they are merely "coaches", "facilitators", or guides standing alongside the track that the student herself has chosen to walk. Beauty, eros, ethics and truth are not what educators or teachers are supposed to teach. They should empower the students to define their own goals and to pursue their own objectives, whether they be good or bad, right or unjustified, idealistic or petty and materialistic.

Donald Verene, the Charles Howard Candler professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, does not confront reformists and supporters of the new pedagogy head on. That would be a suicidal enterprise for even the most eloquent and venerable professors: only administrators and managers seem to have the right to speak up in these matters nowadays — and the large numbers of concerned parents who are carefully protecting their precious offspring from any opportunity to learn how to form ideas or to think by themselves of course. Instead, the eminent professor takes his aim obliquely, casually destroying his enemies as he walks by on the road to a better understanding and practice of "humane" education.

In four letters to "a friend who sought his advice" the author proposes to return to the classical and humanist ideals that he believes should guide education in the liberal arts and sciences. These ideals are lost, he contends, in the corporate atmosphere of colleges and universities, with their emphasis on administration, faculty careerism and student performance. Verene considers the aim of college education to be self-knowledge through study of all fields of thought. Education, in his view, must be based on acquisition of the arts of reading, writing and thinking. The teacher should master the art of speaking. The class lecture — imagine! Verene advocates lecturing in the grand old style — is a form of oratory that should be presented in accordance with the well-known principles of rhetoric.

The arguments in this book are elegant and simple, impossible to resist and difficult to criticise. Moreover, the author supports his argument with well-chosen quotations and references to classic authors on the one hand and an appealing demonstration of the art he is teaching on the other hand. Verene is never nasty but often sharp: "Administration is never simply content to concern itself with the pure business of the university, paying its bills, maintaining its buildings. It sees itself as necessary to the process between teacher and student. But it constantly interrupts that process… "

His criticism of teachers, administrators and the system itself can be summarised in a few words: the real objectives of education have been lost. But he never stops just there. Instead, he goes on to explain how the art of teaching can be (re)mastered and how the relationships between teachers and students and between teachers and the college can be restored so as to make humane education possible.