An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America

by Benjamin R. Barber

Overview

In this brilliant, controversial, and profoundly original book, Benjamin R. Barber fundamentally alters the terms of the current debate over the value of opportunity in American education, politics, and culture.
Barber argues that the fashionable rallying cries of cultural literacy and political correctness completely miss the point of what is wrong with our society. While we fret about "the closing of the American mind" we utterly ignore the closing of American schools. While we worry about Japanese technology, we fail to tap the more fundamental ideological resources on which our country was founded. As Barber argues, the future of America lies not in competition but in education. Education in America can and must embrace both democracy and excellence.
Barber demonstrates persuasively that our national story has always comprised an intermingling of diverse, contradictory, often subversive voices. Multiculturalism has, from the very start, defined America. From his gripping portrait of America poised on the brink of unprecedented change, Barber offers a daringly original program for effecting change: for teaching democracy depends not only on the preeminence of education but on a resurgence of true community service.
A ringing challenge to the complacency, cynicism, and muddled thinking of our time that will change the way you feel about being an American citizen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307827289
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/21/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Benjamin Barber was an internationally renowned political theorist, the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York City. He died in 2017.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1
 
TEACHING TEMPORALITY
 
What does it mean for a people to be free? Liberty is a deeply contested idea. Some understand it as a liberation from time, some believe that it requires a historical context. In this chapter, I want to reflect on liberty in time’s context; to confront identity as a product of history and set democracy within “our” story (whoever “we” turn out to be).
 
Does this mean permitting the past to burden the present and hobble the future? Quite the opposite: Liberty can be taken seriously only within the framework of temporality. Not, however, simply as a matter of schooling. Men and women have always gone to school to learn the civic arts of liberty. But the school-house has often been a marketplace or a battlefield, a church or a theater: wherever events unfold and stories are told that help people define themselves. Tribesmen listen to a shaman telling a story of the mystery of their birth as a people. Expectant mothers gather with their mothers and their mothers’ mothers, whose stories tie them to generations of women they cannot know. Men marginalized by the powerful conceive a story of roots that gives them the strength to rebel. Even in the highly formal West, with its rational bureaucracies and written languages, storytelling plays a crucial role in the founding of civilization.
 
Consider ancient Greece. Several times a year, the citizens of Athens gathered together on their hillside amphitheaters to watch dramatic reenactments of stories about the founding of cities and the life and death of the legendary Greek clans: the House of Thebes, the House of Troy, the House of Atreus. These poignant cautionary tales resonated powerfully for a people seeking to understand their origins and destiny in what they proudly regarded as a free and just city. In the epic Oresteia, they relived the story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia for reasons of state (demanded by the gods in return for a breeze that would allow the Argovian fleet to sail against Troy), of Clytemnestra’s betrayal and murder of her husband Agamemnon to avenge her daughter’s martyrdom, and of her children’s reluctant immersion in the sea of vengeance that engulfed the unhappy family. This vivid tale was not simply a family drama, it was a parable. Through it was revealed how Athenian justice came to be uprooted from its antecedents in rustic popular religion and “earth vengeance” (associated with women) and, with the Furies (women!) domesticated and established as household gods, reestablished as a new cosmopolitan fairness (the impartial heavenly fairness of Pallas Athena, which became associated with male justice). It is Athena who ultimately forgives Orestes his matricide, saves him from the Furies’ rage, and thereby brings the new justice to Athens—at least in Aeschylus’ telling.
 
The epic stories were not pointedly Athenian, but each taught Greek parables from which a viewer could draw an Athenian lesson. In the Theban trilogy—the story of Laius, his son Oedipus, and Oedipus’ daughter Antigone—the people of Athens beheld another parable, this one depicting the folly of believing identity could ever be severed from blood origins. Wishing to elude his roots and the dire prophecies that attended his birth (You shall murder your father! Betroth your mother!), Oedipus all the while rushed toward them. Creon, Antigone’s uncle and king, wished to put patriotism above kinship, but in ignoring the claims of blood he lost both kinsmen and kingdom. History was no esoteric diversion for the Greeks; it was prudence’s teacher and wisdom’s most precious resource.
 
Priests at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi had always recommended two forms of virtuous conduct: “Know thyself!” and “In all things, be moderate!” These same lessons—self-knowledge as the foundation of truth and moderation as the imperative of good government—were equally palpable in the dramatic legends borrowed from Homer’s oral traditions by the poetic craftsmen of the fifth century B.C. The Greeks were pleased to rehearse and explore their history over and over again (the plots of ancient tragedy in their many variations were known to all, and the point of going to the theater was hardly to discover how things turned out) in order to establish their identity and fortify their civic virtue. Drama afforded an immersion in temporality. One generation engaged in a kind of time travel, visiting their forebears in order to steal a glimpse into the future, patterning their destinies on the template of the past.
 
We have come a ways since Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote their dramatic trilogies for the poetry competitions of the early Athenian republic. Some would even claim that we can measure our progress precisely by the distance we have put between ourselves and tribal peoples imprisoned in their clannish histories and mythic stories. They would see in our capacity to define our identities individually, unburdened by time, the very essence of our modernity. As Cronos once devoured his children, we have devoured Cronos, emancipating ourselves from his stern punctualities. At our postmodern best (or worst), we believe ourselves to be free: as free in general as we are free in particular when we leave our towns and homes to escape from family, from clan, from tribe, from caste, from class, and from religion. And from gender as well: for even gender can now be understood as a product of arbitrary socialization and thus potentially subject to choice—a pliable product of an acculturation process we control, up to and including the radical option of “sex reassignment” by surgical means.
 
Technology spells liberation from the constraints of conventional history and conventional identity. Bizarre forms of parental surrogacy promise offspring to postmenopausal women and encourage infertile couples to borrow other women’s wombs. The power of abstraction lets us conceive ourselves as thinking wills that invent identity. The future is a blank tablet on which we can write stories we make up. Storytelling becomes a matter of prophecy, while memory, once identity’s best source, is traded in for the unchecked imagination. For in the new postmodern critique, memory is a repository only of selected (and selective) images that are left behind by the prejudices of the powerful.
 
Just a hundred years ago, struggling in exile to cross the threshold of liberty’s new age, Henrik Ibsen still found himself locked in combat with the ghosts of ancestors. Hedda Gabler and, in A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer were prisoners of gender, confined by histories they were allowed neither to write nor to overcome. Oswald Alving, the uncomprehending victim of Ghosts, lies dying for the sexual sins of a father from whom the new age should have set him free. All of Ibsen’s compromised heroes yearned for open space but lived behind time’s enclosing walls. Less than a century ago, history still had the feel of the inescapable.
 
No more. When we think about liberty today it is often only as liberation, which we construe as a willful obliviousness to the past. This willfulness is reflected in modern educational curricula that shunt history off to a cul-de-sac to be traversed only by the curious or those in need of diversion. The future is treated less as an exercise in continuity than as an experiment in innovation. Is this really what is required by civic liberty? Does living in a democratic world entail living unencumbered by time?
 
Actually, we are not really so much less embedded in time than our antique progenitors, as the current controversies over multiculturalism and American identity make evident. We think of ourselves as offspring of the Enlightenment, and we do like to mimic the impertinent Voltaire, construing the past as so many crimes, follies, and errors, a dark legacy of superstition that a free people must forget or even annihilate. Yet in our studied forgetfulness, we are prisoners of our heritage, casting ourselves as injured children of an imagined history—whether it is the history of Enlightenment, liberation, and progress, or, as skeptics will argue, of the rationalization of oppression and injustice by Enlightenment, liberation, and progress. Whether the stories are true or not is of little consequence, for, as we shall see, stories and myths overlap with and condition reality. In a peculiar sense, the reality and the myth converge.
 
Every people in their self-conception give proof to the proposition that there is still no identity, no community, above all, no liberty, without a journey through time. There is always an encounter with origins, if only in the name of their denial. America’s history of liberty imagines a founding in which the American story of emancipation (as we would it were) can be grounded. In such popular traditional school texts as Henry W. Bragdon and Samuel McCutchen’s History of a Free People, Henry F. Graff’s The Free and the Brave, and Gertrude Hartman’s America: Land of Freedom, we celebrate our liberty by writing our history.2 And so it turns out that imagination has not really displaced memory after all, for it is memory that is driving imagination. As we make war on history, we reinforce its hold over us. To imagine even the most novel futures is to deconstruct and then reconstruct the past. Even the past turns out to be the product of an act of imagination.
 
Thus all useful education begins with and circles back to historical understanding. Since time gives knowledge a narrative structure, self-knowledge means storytelling. And when the self-knowledge is collective, the storytelling is shared.
 
Education is systematic storytelling. No wonder there is such tumult surrounding the attempt to identify the right stories! As storytelling, education discloses temporal connections and compels an encounter between unreflected present, reconstructed past, and contrived future. History is not some specialized subject in technical education, it is liberal education: it is an account in the narrative mode of our being as a people, as a “public.” “Defined and understood, the “I” entails a “We,” and “We” is always a story whose end points back to beginnings and whose outcome is conditioned (though not necessarily limited) by history.
 
Living as moderns under circumstances the successful among us associate with liberation, it is easy to forget that even liberation is implicated in a story. To be progeny of the Enlightenment, to live in an America which, in Henry Steele Commager’s phrase, is reason’s empire, has consequences, if only the consequence of feeling relatively immune to causes. For even where it entails the denial of history, meaning, and fixed significance (the deconstructionist version), the story anchors us in the past. Postmodernism, with its deconstructing strategies, is tethered to the meanings it challenges. What exactly is the “modern” to which it stands as “post”? And to which “ancient” does “modern” itself refer? The anarchist mood is always conditioned by the rational orderliness against which it rebels. All relativisms are not equal; each is branded by the specific mode of certainty it negates.
 

Table of Contents

	Prologue	3
Chapter 1	Teaching Temporality	17
Chapter 2	To Be an American	40
Chapter 3	Loose Canons	78
Chapter 4	Radical Excesses and Post-Modernism	107
Chapter 5	Conservative Excesses and Allan Bloom	151
Chapter 6	What Our Forty-Seven-Year-Olds Know	192
Chapter 7	Teaching Democracy Through Community Service	230
	Epilogue	262
	Notes	269
	Bibliography	287
	Index	293

Editorial Reviews

Barber (The Conquest of Politics), a professor of political science at Rutgers, asserts that education and democracy are inextricably linked in this wide-ranging examination of American schools and their place in our society. He cites the usable past of the American story and current advocacy of multicultural curricula as paradoxical aspects of democracy in action, and argues persuasively that public education is education for citizenship, a crucial goal for people in a pluralistic society. In his view, education for citizenship and self-governance coexist with excellence; his critique of conservative educator Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind is an arresting polemic. Barber's liberal views are thought-provoking and persuasive. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Barber (political science, Rutgers Univ.) claims that teaching liberty is the fundamental task of education in a democracy, and to lose sight of this basic principle is to imperil our society. Societal attitudes are equally important in sustaining democracy, and Barber maintains that they are currently at risk. We reward greediness, applaud acquisitiveness, and denigrate teaching as a profession. The author calls for a transformation as far-reaching as that which demolished the former Soviet Union. He analyzes what he sees as the essence of true democracy, from its roots in classical Greece through the visionary ideas of the founding fathers. He lashes out at conservative ``excesses,'' especially Allan Bloom's ( The Closing of the American Mind , LJ 5/1/87), as antidemocratic and basically hostile toward women and minorities. However, multiculturalists and politically correct activists fare no better. Barber offers a model for development pedagogy where responsible citizenship is learned in a community setting with multiculturalism as a developmental phase. His views are exciting, controversial, but intellectually stimulating and presented in eloquently acrimonious language. This truly remarkable book should be in every library.-- Arla Lindgren, St. John's Univ., New York

Library Journal