The Disenchantment of Education and the Re-enchantment of the World

Abstract

The Disenchantment of Education and the Re-enchantment of the World Paul StandishThe macaque washes a potato in a stream.It does this because it has seen the dirt come off as another macaque washed its potato, and it knows that clean potatoes taste better.The small child washes a plastic potato from a plastic vegetable set in a bowl of pretendwater.The child has seen the grownups doing this at the sink.He knows it is the kind of thing that grownups do.At the end of the washing, the macaque will eat the potato.Its action is the same as that of the macaque it has observed, but it has no sense that it is doing the same thing as that macaque.The child will not eat his potato for he knows it is plastic and not for eating: it is for pretending to do what the grownups do.Both macaque and child are engaged in a particular action; it is only for the child, however, that this is also understood under a general rule, only for the child that this is understood as something shared: this is what grownups do, this is what we do.Without the understanding of such a rule, plastic vegetables would make no sense.And toys have their fascination partly because of their disagreement with the general concept.In fact, it need not have been toy vegetables at all: some rounded stones from the beach and a bucket or who-knows-what would have done, and in fact that would have extended the joke-like pretending a pencil is a toothbrush.It is the significance of these partly Aristotelian insights-of the relation of the particular to the general concept, and of the fact that the human being is to be understood in terms of its form, its causa formalis-that Sebastian Rödl draws out so richly in 'Education and Autonomy', the preceding paper in the present discussion.The sharpness of his response here is provoked especially by the suggestion, in David Bakhurst and John McDowell, that baby human beings are 'mere animals', and that they are transformed from this state through a process of education or Bildung such that they become fully-fledged human beings.This constitutes an acquisition of second nature, our first nature being what we share with the brutes.Rödl tries to show, in response, that the baby is quite unlike the animal, whatever their relative abilities, in that the former has within it a potential that is actualised through education.The capacity for reason is there already in the child.It is not instilled by the teacher but actualised through the habits and

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