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.