Book review: Campbell F. Scribner and Bryan R. Warnick, Spare the Rod: Punishment and the Moral Community of Schools

Abstract

In fact, Lewis’s book is built around examples (paradigms), in this latter sense, to yield new forms of knowledge and applications to teaching. Thus, the ‘riddle’ is a paradigm for what Lewis calls ‘noncommunicative communication’; the ‘collection’ for ‘antifascist educational form[s]’; the ‘radio broadcast’ as a paradigm for ‘instructional practice[s] that . . . . produce historical awakenings’ (p. 64); ‘children’s theater’ as a paradigm for ‘the mimetic faculty’s unique ability to touch the most remote things through two complementary forms of swelling: innervation and extension’ (p. 99). Understanding Lewis’s (and Benjamin’s) use of paradigms, in Agamben’s sense of the term, can be helpful in interpreting the book’s many examples. Lewis makes explicit reference to ‘money’, ‘as the paradigm of all commodities’ (p. 183). Yet, instead of using the concept of paradigm to make a larger set of analogous concepts intelligible, he, perhaps unwittingly, demonstrates how money is an exception. Agamben, building on Benjamin, uses the concept of the ‘exception’ to connote that which is included by being excluded. Lewis says as much: ‘[Money] is a commodity that is included only insofar as it is excluded from the rank and file of all other commodities’ (p. 183). However, rather than serving as an example to make the broader set of commodities intelligible, Lewis instead shows how money is radically different in its being excluded from being just another commodity. Lewis, then, following Marx and Benjamin, is using money as an exception, rather than as an example. It is clear that Lewis has succeeded in providing thoughtful and compelling answers to his central questions on a liberating educational philosophy. Drawing on his own extensive scholarship in educational philosophy and his meticulous reading of Benjamin, Lewis provides provocative lessons on what it can mean to foster free expression of students’ potentialities and to unravel binaries (such as means and ends), that have stunted the progressive development of educational forms in the context of growing educational authoritarianism.