Starting With Whitehead: Raising Children to Thrive in Treacherous Times

Abstract

This book gives novel, vivid, rich, and profound expression to Whitehead's cyclical phases of Romance, Precision, and Generalization, belonging to the rhythm of learning, as he asserted in Aims of Education. As De Jonghe writes, Whitehead “described positive educational growth as an ongoing process involving three intertwined phases: the Romance of discovery, the development of Precision and mastery, and the emergence of Generalization when the realization of connectedness allows to take purposeful action and to raise new questions” (3). According to De Jonghe, for Whitehead, these interrelated and interweaving cycles represented “phases of the emergence of understanding as individuals experience educational events” (3).One main focus in the book is to apply many of the principles that are found in Whitehead's educational philosophy to the practice of schooling in order to assist children to be able to adapt to and “embrace change” (229) as well as “to learn and thrive, even in difficult times” (1). This includes not only the maintenance of one's well-being (and that of others), but the capability of persisting in crisis situations (e.g., geological, biomedical, ecological) that seem characteristic of our age, as well as being resilient in the face of the “challenging social conditions” (1) of the contemporary American context where there is much divisiveness surrounding education and educational policies. To these ends, De Jonghe examines “exemplary educational events characteristic of each of the three phases of learning,” and, from an analysis of them, draws conclusions and makes recommendations that provide “clarity on how to provide the best education for our children” (3).At the beginning of each chapter, De Jonghe relates interesting portraits, vignettes, or narratives of events of student learning. These are fictionalized simulacra inspired by real-life educational experiences that she and others have had with students. She examines them in depth with reference especially to Whitehead's educational philosophy but also to those of Dewey, Piaget, Noddings, Bruner, and so forth. Each case exhibits some important component of one or more of Whitehead's cyclical phases or stages of learning, the cases being arranged according to the general flow from the stage of Romance, to Precision, and on to Generalization, which help to form “the organizing structure of the book” (228). Roughly, the cases and their analyses in chapters 1 through 4 are chiefly about Romance (e.g., feeling, emotion, curiosity, imagination, art, and play), those in chapters 5 through 9 exhibit Precision (e.g., measurement, analysis, critical thinking, problem-solving, depth of learning, and mastery), and those in chapters 10 through 14 concern Generalization (e.g., restoration of the health of relationships, community, ecological interdependence, harmony, humor, and wisdom). Then De Jonghe shows how the educators in question, after some perplexity, obstruction, or unidentified stifling of the learning process, were ultimately able to unlock the puzzle that is each child, discovering some key aspect of their own intrinsic motivation or purposiveness in the context of learning, namely, how “each child stands out as an individual . . . remarkable in some way” (4).On this note, Whitehead wrote that a learner is “a living organism which grows by its own impulse towards self-development. This impulse can be stimulated and guided from outside the organism, and it can also be killed. But for all your stimulation and guidance the creative impulse towards growth comes from within, and is intensely characteristic of the individual” (AE 39; emphasis added). As connected with the exigencies of one's own life-process in the context of a changing world, wherein crises and tragedies occur, it is the creative impulse within that is the greatest source of personal self-reliance or resiliency. Educators ought to support, engage, and harness this creative impulse toward inquiry that is inside each of their students, rather than block it by imposing too many irrelevant, extrinsic demands on students (e.g., inert knowledge, overly complex methodologies, and/or curricula and objectives that students have no say in selecting). For De Jonghe, such an orientation requires educators “to start with children themselves, rather than with society's goals for [them]” (16).Stemming from the concrete realizations about education and learning that are sparked through the analysis of each of the exemplary cases that she takes up, De Jonghe provides realistic and practical insights to teachers and parents for responding in ways that foster curiosity, analysis, and wisdom in the young. In so doing, reading this volume enhances the abilities of educators, parents, and administrators to get through to youths of all different stripes, namely, of diverse interests, mind-wirings, behavioral particularities, stages of growth, and dispositional idiosyncracies, so as to be able to assist them on the basis of where they are at in the context of their own explorations of, and adventures in, life. As Whitehead suggested, the topic of education is “life in all of its manifestations” (AE 7).In De Jonghe's view, teachers and administrators need to remove or diminish obstacles that may issue from the formalization, organization, and management of education in the context of a modern institutional setting, which may be in the way of the individual student's expression of their own intrinsic motivation toward learning in the context of their own autopoietic life-process. Teachers further ought to cultivate a “caring” (i.e., in Noddings's dual sense of selective attention, empathy, or engrossment plus an authentic motivation to help the other flourish [51–52]) educational environment in which the intrinsic motivations of the individual student in their own process of intellectual self-production are supported and engaged and may be freely expressed. This educational environment is ideally one in which they can experience the personal joy, the feeling of success or satisfaction, and the senses of personal capability and resiliency in the context of a community of learners that are rewards of such individualized learning in the context of a changing world.One tension in the book is how De Jonghe reconciles her stated emphasis on direct experience as the source of “our most certain knowledge” (1) vis-à-vis Whitehead's suggestion, in the theory of prehensions (which comprises the core of his process-relational metaphysics), that so-called “direct experience” was just the starting point of the creative process—providing the initial data for it. Furthermore, one might ask De Jonghe how her emphasis on direct experience in the introduction of the book jives with her analysis of imaginative simulacra of particular experiences with learners that she carries out in the book. Her responses to these queries are quite strong. She suggests that as corollaries to direct experience in rhythmic fashion, “metaphor helps us to explore the reach of our experience; quantitative research empowers us to refine our understanding; and theoretical analysis allows us to question our assumptions and project possible outcomes” (1). However, she warns that “if we lose grasp of the experience itself that gave life to our understanding [then] we lose the very moorings of our knowledge” (1). This is similar to Whitehead's warning against committing “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” whereby one conflates the models of phenomena that one has constructed for the sake of one's own understanding for the actual occasions in question themselves, potentially doing violence to them in the process. Here, one might also remember that Whitehead's overall epistemic stance is that of a “provisional realism” (SMW 68), a position that, at the same time, does justice to idealistic or metaphorical construction in his descriptions of the creative process.De Jonghe asserts that some of the main problems within the current American educational system (e.g., “failing educational institutions and dubious academic accountability” [1]) is that “we have too many theories, too many critiques, and too many statistics supporting too many facile prescriptions for programmatic change . . . often such pronouncements come from well-intentioned professorial experts in education who lack, or have lost touch with, extensive direct experience with children” (2). Cutting through both the overly facile, politically charged, antiprogressive discourses, on the one hand, and the overly complex, progressivist theories surrounding learning and education, on the other, that are “at war” in America today, De Jonghe's exemplary cases and her analysis of them enable teachers, educational theorists, and prospective educators to refocus their attention on the foundation, which is their real, tangible experience in their interaction with students. The insights drawn from them impel educators to reorient their focus of interest to be the intrinsic interests of students. De Jonghe emphasizes that educators taking students in the fullness of where they are at, so as to address their individual needs based on their own particular motivations and learning styles, can be the basis for consensus-building that can help to heal present divides in relation to pedagogy, curriculum, and policy. Questions of pedagogy, curriculum, and policy should be made (largely) to follow actual teacher-learner-class interaction, albeit closely behind it, rather than to dictate a priori what the teacher-learner experience should be, how it should unfold, who or what students are supposed to be, and/or how they are supposed to learn. In contrast with “learning which is extrinsically motivated to serve particular social, political, or economic ends” (e.g., extrinsic ideological goals), De Jonghe adds that while the approach to teaching that is oriented toward the intrinsic motivations of students “may be put to positive (or even to negative) social, political, or economic ends,” it is “not subservient to those ends” (15–16). As such, this pedagogical approach can be said to assist learners to cultivate critical thinking capabilities in relation to, as well as independence from, the powerful, yet often detrimental, social, political, and economic discourses of our present age that are constantly bombarding them. By focusing on the intrinsic motivations of students in the context of their learning, educators can help to “support children's maturing imagination, build the cognitive skills [in them that are] necessary for sophisticated inquiry, and [assist students to] develop the social wisdom to live rich lives as global citizens in a pluralistic society” (22). As the fact of intrinsic purposiveness is the basis for the notion of an entity having intrinsic worth, in turn, a pedagogy that is zeroed in on the intrinsic motivations within students can be said to best respect their intrinsic worth and help to develop in students their own capabilities in defending that intrinsic worth.At the end of the volume, in an appendix, De Jonghe identifies some of the main tenets of process-relational philosophy. She also briefly identifies some key sources that may assist us to explore the influence of process-relational philosophy on recent scientific theory. Not only is this helpful for those just “getting their feet wet” in terms of Whitehead's process-relational philosophy, but it insinuates that learning is not merely something that is attributable to the young in the context of schooling. Rather, it is a continuous life-process of inquiry that every one of us, even mature adults, the scientist, or even the elderly, is engaged in, as we, in the context of our lives, all stand to face, “in awe at the magic of the web of nature” (228), the sheer wonder that is the world. Overall, with its practical relating and examination of concrete learning events and its insightful recommendations, De Jonghe's Whitehead-inspired volume is a welcome “breath of fresh air” in the highly important field of Philosophy of Education.