education, subjectivity and community: towards a democratic pedagogical ideal of symmetrical...

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2003

© 2003 Philosophy of Education Society of AustralasiaPublished by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKEPATEducational Philosophy and Theory0013-1857© 2003 Philosophy of Education Society of AustralasiaOctober 20033541000Original ArticleEducation, Subjectivity and CommunityMarianna Papastephanou

Education, Subjectivity and Community: Towards a democratic pedagogical ideal of symmetrical reciprocity

M

P

University of Cyprus

Pedagogical ideals differ and inform education differently. They do so in many wayssince they draw from a wide spectrum of cultural and interpretive material. Differ-ences in accounts of what a subject is, what constitutes a collectivity, and what theaims of education might be generate diverse and often opposing educational models.Similarly, the construction of ideals or the promotion of existing ones can affect,modify or alter our conceptions of what counts as all-round learning, self-realised,active learner and effective school community.

In this article, I discuss what changes in our philosophical understanding of theself and its relation to the Other and the community can radicalise our construc-tions of school models and orient them to more humane and less antagonisticeducational policy and planning. Since the focus is on idealisations rather thanapplication and measures, the article will debate the theoretical dimension of exist-ing ideals. The interrelation of subjectivity, community and educational theory(regarding pedagogical models)

1

can be examined from many perspectives each ofthem presupposing its own set of particular conceptualisations. From the relevantaspects of the issue (e.g. the cognitive, the normative, the social and so on), I selectthe one that refers to the intersubjective dimension of schooling as specificallyrelational-affective. By the latter term I mean the interpersonal aspect of educationthat is relative to the question of how the identity of the One conditions and isconditioned by that of the Other and the group of others. Thus, although myapproach and suggestions would have a strong bearing on epistemological issuestoo, if thought through to their end, their primary impact would be felt on topicsof curriculum orientation, the instructor/pupil relation, assessment, classroommanagement, and classroom politics of difference. Finally, a discussion of theseissues presupposes also a particular starting point, a kind of a paradigmatic frame,a matrix within which all reconceptualisations acquire their proper space. In mycase, that frame is postmodernism and I begin by explaining why and how.

Philosophy of education has been very receptive to the postmodernist

2

trend ofthought, experiencing its interventions as an invigorating and refreshing spring-board for revisiting some crucial educational matters. The relevant literature isexpanding impressively, as more and more educationalists appeal to postmodernistideas or discuss the very impact of postmodernism on pedagogy. However, there is

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Marianna Papastephanou

© 2003 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

a whole spectrum of important educational issues that by definition resist their‘postmodernisation’. Emancipation and critical thinking constitute enshrinedideals of major educational theories, which, from a general philosophical point ofview, have fallen into disrepute since postmodernism associated them with thetyrannical grand-narratives of modernity. Pedagogical theory is reticent regardingblanket critiques of empowerment, autonomy, and their association and embodimentin subjectivity. Resistance to critiques of this sort and a defensive stance is not onlypredictable but also, and often, justified. If education is to have any positive andprogressive content, its role (actual or potential) in the construction of free andself-realised individuals and communities must remain an open possibility—theoretically at least. Therefore, educationalists cannot side wholeheartedly withpostmodernist detractors of

Ideologiekritik

and emancipatory discourse. Moreover,the impact of postmodernist ideas on pedagogical theory is not as such unprob-lematic. It bears connotations of isolationist jargon, spectatorial ‘armchair’ philos-ophising, and lack of applicability and relevance to practice.

But awareness of this situation should not force us to turn a jaunticed eye on thepotentialities of the postmodernist intervention. Without disregarding these prob-lems then, in this article I presuppose a qualified openness to postmodernist think-ing on the part of educational philosophy, one that will allow us to articulate itscontribution to the topic that concerns us here, i.e. subjectivity and community inthe classroom, and use it accordingly. Thus, I shall defend the relevance of post-modernism to pedagogical discussions of subjectivity and community and showhow this relevance affects in turn the renegotiation of traditional educational ideals.Finally, after exploring the constellation ‘postmodernism, subjectivity vs commu-nity, and educational ideals’, I shall focus on the concept of symmetrical reciprocitywhich I propose as an ontological–relational basis of a democratic educational idealof care.

Pedagogical ideals have revolved around the bipole ‘individual vs community’and defined themselves on the basis of the primacy they grant the one or the otherpole. The individualist model of education privileges the free subject and the socialconstructivist one the loyal citizen prepared to serve an ideal community (

politeia

),whereas the humanist model of German Idealism mediates between the two polesand promotes an all-embracing education for a self-realised ethical member of thenational community. Even the technocratic–pragmatic ideal emphasising perform-ance, productivity and effectiveness does indeed touch upon the subjectivity vscommunity issue. Lately, this ideal has been informed by a technicism that tendsto see the classroom as an organisation in need of effective management and actioncoordination. To consider the classroom a community-as-organisation amounts totreating the bipole ‘subject vs community’ one-sidedly because it adjusts it tomanagerialist terms and objectives. As Michael Smith writes, ‘technicism is prima-rily concerned with procedural effectiveness and the realisation of prescribed andmeasurable outcomes’.

3

Since each of these ideals determines education

qua

Bildung

, via its institutionaland curricular role, it also constructs the form and content of second-order indi-viduation and socialisation. In turn it contributes to the symbolic (re)production

Education, Subjectivity and Community

397


of existing interpretations of the subject and the community. The postmodernistintervention, despite its shortcomings, seems to me indispensable (albeit insuffi-cient on is own), for it provides an unprecedented approach to treating binaryoppositions. Its discussion of the bipole ‘subjectivity vs community’ attempts torelativise any prioritisation of the one pole over the other, whereas past theoriesfailed to remain vigilant enough and reduced subjectivity to community or con-versely privileged the former over the latter.

Hence the idea of symmetrical reciprocity as a basis of the ideal of school asdemocratic and caring I propose

4

finds the ground covered by postmodernismindispensable although not entirely adequate. Such an ideal will preserve, I hope,the benefits of the postmodernist dismantling of the binarism ‘subjectivity vscommunity’ and perform a leap towards a third way beyond the dilemmas of therelevant modernist accounts as well as the undecidability and inoperative distanceof poststructuralism.

Postmodernist philosophy attacks the subjectivism

5

and solipsism of traditionalmetaphysics and epistemology, i.e. the tendency to privilege the idea of a condi-tioning and always identical subject and place it at the centre of philosophicalresearch. Structuralism had already renounced the subject–object model of expla-nation and privileged the epistemic and political significance of anonymous forcesoperating differentially combining into systems and structures. Phenomena thathad been traditionally regarded as outcomes of human action were explained bystructuralism as independent and self-regulated mechanisms that ‘produce’ subjec-tivity rather than being generated by it (linguistic order is just one example of suchphenomena). However, it is with poststructuralism that subjectivity received whatis considered by many a

coup de grace

, by exposing that a hypostatisation of struc-tures that attributes them identity and closure through ahistoricity is nothing morethat a substitute for subjectivity and not a clear break with it. What poststructur-alism accomplishes in its critique of transcendental subjectivity is the latter’sreplacement with a conception of a loose and fluid identity, one that is the illusive

effect

of a semiotic play of differences

6

rather than a constituting and immutablecentre of all human action.

From the postmodernist point of view, any individualism assuming that the selfis autonomous, non-situated, always identical, and unaffected by its context isdoomed to obsolescence. The subject is no longer the chief focus of philosophy.The theoretical concern of our times shifts from the transcendental subject condi-tioning the world to the empirical social actor that is conditioned discursively.Textuality becomes the irreducible fabric of selfhood and (self-)knowledge and insome extreme cases the emphasis on it takes theoretically the form of linguistic/cultural determinism.

At first glance, such irreverence to individualism may be said to reflect a priori-tisation of community and collectiveness, and it is no accident that the liberalismversus republicanism debate mirrors precisely the polarising effects of monist treat-ments of either subjectivity or community. It could have been true, similarly, thatthe logical conclusions of the attack on transcendental subjectivism should havebeen the rehabilitation and privilege of a communitarian ethos. But ‘orthodox’

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postmodernism’ (if I may use such a rather oxymoronic term) undoes the binaryopposition of the subject vs the community and criticises both poles with equalforce. Against collective concepts and the identitary bond of a communitarian

ethos

they impose, postmodernists promote the claims of irreducibility and uniquenessof the radical alterity of the person. Against the homogenising and unifying char-acter of the

universalia

pervading the grand narratives of modernity, postmodernistsstress the just claims to particularity of unassimilated otherness. Against the illu-sion of the closure, completeness, freedom and identity of the subject, they empha-sise the subject’s dependence on contexts and their differential intervention in theconstruction of subjectivity. ‘Incredulity towards meta-narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984),the famous dictum signifying the chief feature of postmodernism, also means deepsuspicion of the glorification of both subjectivism and collectivism to the extentthat those represent all-encompassing priorities. This postmodernist suspicion isa useful one which I consider worth preserving.

Now, discourses about the binary opposition ‘individual vs society’ are strickenwith aporias since any treatment of the two poles is bound to have some negativeimplications (except perhaps a deconstructive treatment relying on undecidability.Such treatment may have no negative implications, but what is wrong with it is thatit may have no implications at all!) If we are inclined to prioritise the self and itsrights, we risk falling into a self-absorption that leads to a complacent exclusion ofalterity from our horizon of conscious existential choice. If we opt for a communi-tarian worldview, we may have serious difficulties in justifying the subject’s potentialfor questioning its community.

Especially with regard to postmodernism, by rejecting both, individualism andcommunitarianism, we end up with a blatant contradiction. The idea of the liqui-dation of the subject when the issue is individualism contradicts the defence of thesubject as unassimilated otherness when community is at stake. But this predica-ment can be easily resolved, theoretically at least, if we realise that in both caseswhat is condemned is a universalised and transcendentalised core of subjectivity orcollective entity and what is salvaged is an empirical and contextualised subject. Inany case, even if this solution is not a working one, undecidability between the two,the subject and the community, is itself considered by postmodernists more of amerit of their approach than a weakness.

Overall, within the postmodernist framework, the

idem

of subjective identity andthe

common

of community are inescapably contaminated with violence. (Here iswhere I locate the weakness of postmodernism and the need to go beyond it.) Thedisabling repercussions of this wholesale attack on identity and community will betaken up later on. For the moment, let us examine the positive side of renderingsubjectivism and collectivism suspect. Transferred to the educational context, theindictment of subjectivity and collectiveness entails a radical critique of schoolingas a means for individuation and socialisation. If we consider the fact that schoolsoperate as communities themselves favouring—often simultaneously—the unim-peded course to freedom for the few and the indoctrination to compliance for themany, we realise that such critique is not only radical but also pertinent. Schoolsas communities exert strategies of exclusion by marginalising disadvantaged groups


399


on the grounds of race, class, gender, sexual preference, region and performance.Even when discrimination is not as blunt as that, other, more subtle mechanismstake over the task of separating the wheat from the chaff. Educational formalismestablishing a liberalist equality at school ensures that a gloss of formal equalopportunity will obscure the fundamental injustices and inequalities markingthe different beginnings of individuation and socialisation that correspond to thedifferent origins and social backgrounds of pupils. The vagueness and the concom-itant inadequacies of the curriculum, be it of private or state schools, and the gapbetween theory and practice manifested in the hidden curriculum, also contributeto alienating phenomena of repression and discrimination. Practices such asawards, individual homework and its assessment, ceremonial rewards to the ‘good’pupils, and other means of promoting excellence through competitiveness, functionsimultaneously as strategies for encouraging individual performance and distinctionas well as strategies for sifting what deserves to remain within the community. Forall these reasons, and many more along similar lines, the postmodernist critique ofsubjectivity and community is helpful.

What is the solution offered by postmodernism, then? Let us see first what ittargets. The individualist model emphasises the ideal of autonomous self-creation,the development of the pupils into self-actualised adults.

7

The social-constructivistmodel aims to ‘shape people into good citizens, aware of how they influence eachother and how social institutions influence them’.

8

Both are exhausted as well asinherently problematic. Individualism, by being based on an achievement orienta-tion favours the private sphere of life and is egocentric, while the social-constructivistmodel can be too integrative and unreflective. Now, at first sight, they seem to beopposites but the way in which they both understand education is compatible andshows both to belong to the same paradigm. If education by definition concernsprocesses of shaping subjectivity via community or forming communities via freeand insular subjectivities, then both alternatives operate in analogous ways. If weplay one off against the other to end up trapped in either, the battle is lost fromthe start. By their monist theorising of the bipole subject vs community, the indi-vidualist model of educating the young and the social-constructivist one appear tobe secret accomplices rather than conflicting and mutually exclusive pedagogicalideals. And the mediatory approaches, the technocratic and the humanist–idealistcan only stifle the problem, far from solving it. The pragmatic–technocratic idealputs down the pretensions of subjectivity but only to transform the individual intoa conformist achiever of performativity. It does not over-emphasise community ina totalitarian way but orients it to a one-dimensional and truncating direction of anarrow conception of progress. The subject within such a model feels suffocateddue to specialisation, enforced adaptability and lack of originality—all these beingside-effects of the primacy of the goals of technique and productivity.

The repercussions of this model for the self were described magnificently bycontinental philosophical trends from German Idealism (Humboldt) down toNietzsche. They were also diagnosed and exemplified in a literary fashion byHerman Hesse in many of his novels in which he counterposes to technocraticpragmatism a self-creation as an ‘initiation’ process (the subject’s passage to

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self-recognition through many tormenting stages of questioning everyday normalityrelentlessly). Then again, the humanist–idealist model is also problematic. In itsHumboldtian–Fichtean version, it universalised and transcendentalised the selfwhile localising and regionalising community in a nationalist fashion (and as areaction to the inadequacies of Rousseauist educational cosmopolitanism). Also,Hegel’s conception of

Bildung

as externalised

qua

socialised subjectivity, viewingthe school as the medium between the particularity of selfhood and its familialbonds with the universality of society, exemplifies successfully the futility of theventure to bridge the gap within the binary opposition when its frame remainsunaffected. What is required is a paradigm shift capable of altering our conceptionsof the individual and society along postmodernist lines but critical to their relativistexcesses.

This is the path Barbara Thayer-Bacon follows in order to formulate a theoryof the classroom community as one of democratic care. She first considers somepostmodernist suggestions about a new conception of collectiveness and thenshe moves to contrast the notion of democratic community she propounds withthose traditional educational ideals advancing either individualism or socialconstructivism.

Thayer-Bacon & Bacon (1998) discuss Linda Stone’s rejection of the notion ofcommunity and replacement with the notion of ‘heteromity’ and Young’s suggestionthat we shape communities on the model of the ‘unoppressive city’. Stone arguesin agreement with Young that ‘community bounds in a way that simultaneouslyincludes and excludes, including on the basis of sameness and excluding on thebasis of difference’.

9

She proposes the term ‘heteromity’ instead and defines it as‘a human association on the basis of difference’. Young expects city-life as ‘thebeing-together of strangers’ to undermine the emphasis on sameness and privilegedifference.

Thayer-Bacon & Bacon (1998) acknowledge the significance of the feministcritique of community but criticise in turn, and rightly so, the shortcomings of thenew suggestions. However, they confine their criticisms to the fact that Stone andYoung have not successfully avoided ‘community’ whereas I believe that the shiftfrom sameness to difference does not solve the most important problem withregard to community. The problem is that exclusion does not occur only out of‘anthropophagic’ assimilation of alterity by sameness but also by ‘anthropoemic’(to use Levi-Strauss’s well-known terms) indifference and disengagement. Accord-ing to Levi-Strauss, anthropophagic is a society that tends to appropriate what isalien to it and turn it into its own. This kind of domestication is positive to theextent that it entails engagement with and interest in the Other but negative whenit ends up in the Other’s suffocation under the societal expectations for complianceand integration. Anthropoemic is a society that grants freedom and independenceto otherness, but only out of lack of interest and engagement. This lack is oftendue to that society’s self-absorption or to its insecurity as to the role of an‘included’ Other within its premises. It is obvious that both kinds of society are notfair to alterity. This problem disarms not only Stone’s ‘heteromity’ and Young’s‘unoppressive city’—the notions the Bacons consider—but also Young’s most recent


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replacement of the notion of collectiveness with that of seriality.

10

I will illustratethe problem with the following quotation from Engels describing the London ofthe 1840s.

They crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common,nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one,that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay theopposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honouranother with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, and unfeelingisolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent andoffensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within alimited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolationof the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principleof our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city.

11

The city is indeed unoppressive, but it is often so not out of respect and care forthe different but out of indifference and ‘carelessness’. What is important here isthat in the alternatives to community offered by both Lynda Stone and Iris Youngthe dangerous implication of indifference and egocentrism is lurking. Both alterna-tives carry along with liberalist freedom the ideological baggage of liberalist indi-vidualism, and it is especially when transferred to the educational frame that theyshow their negative sides. For, despite their crucial differences from the modernistnarrative of a competitive and self-oriented vision of individuality and their attack-ing it, they are more compatible with liberal individualism than with a new idealof learning

with

and

for

the Other within and without. Forming a pedagogical idealsolely out of an emphasis on difference, one will definitely improve the existingideals and open their conceptual horizons but she will not create theoretical spacewithin them for the promotion of actual engagement with and care for the Other.What can really be achieved is a radicalisation of liberalist tolerance, which is no smallfeat, but an ideal must be, precisely due to its being ideal, more encompassing andambitious. It must not be blind to the Other within, the forces that disrupt theunity of the subject and render it a subject-in-process, always displaced and ‘reshuffled’.It must not be prejudiced against the Other outside the self canalising its differencein set streams of categorisations belonging to the lifeworld of the community. Onthe contrary, it must be

for

those Others, ready to give them voice and learn fromthem. As an educational ideal, this stance towards otherness must encourage andcultivate a democratic symmetrical reciprocity among students and teachers.

Let us discuss how we could be led to this. Already with Dewey,

12

educationaltheory realised the limits confronting the individualist, the social and the humanistideal, and attempted to sidestep them in favour of a democratic one, which is nowbecoming all the more attractive and desirable. Within such an ideal, the legitima-tion of pedagogical institutions, principles and practices rests with those affectedand no one is excluded from educational discourse on ‘differential’ grounds.Thayer-Bacon & Bacon review briefly some postmodernist feminist criticisms ofDewey’s conception of the democratic model and reformulate it along those lines.

13

402



Then they supplement it with the notion of care because they believe that thefailures of existing democratic schools (e.g. Summerhill and Montessori) and thepotential problems of democratic classroom communities can be remedied only byaffirming, inclusive and loving interactions. Re-examining ‘our schools to find waysto help create caring democratic communities within them may go a long way toalleviate the loss of community or the harmful, destructive forms of communitythat many people experience today. Our children and their families are strugglingin conditions that are not very reasonable or caring, where they feel excluded,made to be “the other” ’.

14

I agree with their approach but I believe that it needsto be backed up with a theory of reciprocity that enhances care and allows equalityand justice to flourish. For reasons of space, I leave the issues of democracy andcare aside as if they were not problematic, in order to thematise the issue ofsymmetry in classrooms. A democratic classroom community of care, to be demo-cratic

and

caring, presupposes empathy and reciprocal responsibility. ‘Trying tounderstand another requires attempting to see the world through the other’s eyes,suspending one’s own beliefs and trying to believe what the other is attempting tocommunicate, before critiquing or dismissing the other’.

15

The members of theclassroom community must try to develop mutual understanding and acknowledgesymmetrically the rights to freedom and equality of all.

However, empathy is problematic because it has so far relied on an ontology ofthought experiment, and by this I mean that philosophy so far has assumed thatit is possible ideally to take the place of somebody else and do justice to them inrepresenting them. Iris Young has a very cogent critique of empathy along similarlines and suggests an asymmetrical reciprocity, one that respects the difference inexistential conditions of others and lets them speak for themselves without pretend-ing to be able to take their role ideally. Against Habermas, who would defendempathy and symmetry, she would argue that reciprocal responsibility has beenbranded with a liberalist contractuality that ignores issues of fundamental inequal-ity, inability to play the language game of the dominant culture, and power rela-tions overarching the pragmatics of symmetrical dialogue. Habermas’s symmetriesare ‘linguistic conceptions of truth (unconstrained consensus), freedom (unim-paired self-representation), and justice (universal norms)’.

16

For Seyla Benhabib,the problem with such symmetries is that they ‘abstract from concrete individuals’specific abilities and needs, to establish relations of “formal reciprocity” between“generalized Others” ’.

17

I agree with these criticisms because Habermas’s symmetries, by being locatedat a linguistic–pragmatic level of communication do have some kind of externalityand superficiality. They do appear to sidestep issues of existential asymmetry ofconditions of life. To avoid disregarding social inequalities in the classroom or inthe cultural capital with which each pupil is equipped already prior to her/his primaryeducation, democratic community of care must be grounded on concepts aboutrelational–affective bonds that are more refined than empathy. Empathy as definedso far is coupled with the kind of symmetry that Habermas promotes and which isdesirable as well as effective in cases of some sort of existential homogeneity buthardly reliable or even applicable in cases of overt or subtle social inequality.


403


But I would detect a necessary

symmetrical reciprocity

at work every time wecommunicate with another person with the intention not only to understand eachother but also to respect each other’s heterogeneity. I locate this reciprocity atan ontological level that lies in a deeper layer of the human relationship and,if properly understood, affects existential asymmetries one-way, that is, it has orshould have an impact on them without being affected by them. Before engagingwith the Other as an entity whose place and role in life I cannot legitimatelyassume and whose idiosyncrasy and unique way of self-presentation and expressionI respect, I first acknowledge her or him as an

entity

that encounters me. Byencountering me, s/he is symmetrical with me and in reciprocal responsibility

to

me and

with

me in a way that a stone or a tool would never be. (I may feelresponsible for the safety of a precious or an ancient stone, but the stone is notexpected to feel the same way.) There is, admittedly, a generalisation of human (or,more generally and less pedagogically, sentient–biotic) otherness here but not ofthe kind of transcendental and epistemic subjectivity presupposed by the notion ofa ‘generalized other’. For no essentialism of properties and ‘nature’ grounds it—otherthan the minimal and contextualised one always present and felt in any encounterwith another human being. If I begin with this admission, i.e. the one concerningsymmetrical reciprocity as recognition of each other being unique ‘bodies’ prior tobeing ‘role incarnations’, the recognition and respect of her or his existential con-dition, the care for her unique position will not be obstructed. On the contrary, itwill even be facilitated. Unlike this idea of symmetrical reciprocity, asymmetricalresponsibility over-emphasises contingent existential asymmetries at the expenseof that ontological reciprocity that grounds the impetus for engagement with theother. To acknowledge that the voice of the other is idiosyncratic and hauntedby her/his ineluctable situatedness is one thing, to consider it still significant andworth harkening to is quite another. Simply acknowledging asymmetries in existen-tial conditions and feeling responsible for the one who is shaped by them may leadto the unbearable condescension of pity and mercy so often manifest in Christianethics.

18

Or it may even lead to a sadomasochist one-way dependence that isdeleterious especially when it occurs in relations of rearing or educating.

19

I suggest intersubjectivity as

symmetrical

reciprocity not because I think that thereis an essential liberal contractuality among people but on the contrary because Idefend the potentialities of a responsibility that goes beyond liberalism. It is aresponsibility that disconnects reciprocal care from law-abiding or reward-expecta-tions and cultivates a reciprocal concernful dealing with students and teachers andvice versa. Not because the positions of people are interchangeable as old empathyclaims, but because symmetry as a mode of being-with-and-for the other shouldbe dissociated from the asymmetries of existential and contingent aspects of theother’s being. It should also precede them, so that the contrast between the onto-logical symmetry regulating our rapprochement with otherness and the existential–social asymmetries that hinder such rapprochement will be striking enough to urgeus to confront them.

In this way it can create the frame for unconditional care as an

ontologicalpossibility

owing to an initial recognition of the Other as an Other co-subject and

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not as an object. Non-liberalist symmetry comes from an ontological–epistemologicalrecognition of the other as other and myself as the other’s other on his/her part andnot from an expectation of reward in terms of action taken. What Habermas viewsas dialogical symmetries are nothing but conditional and relative manifestations ofthis primordial symmetry that is constitutive of the human relation.

To exemplify the role my notion of symmetry can play in contradistinction to theone Young’s and Habermas’s may play, I interpolate here an illustration comingfrom assessment and marking. Suppose that a pupil has failed to meet the deadlinefor her coursework, and suppose further that urgent demands for marking set bythe school authorities render the deadline absolute so that no extension can begranted. Suppose also that her reasons can be thoroughly explained as emanatingfrom social inequality shaping her particular conditions of life. In the wake of amild liberalist approach to symmetry (which, admittedly, is far more flexible thanrigid contractarian liberal notions of symmetrical justice) such as Habermas’s, thespecific reasons why the pupil has not prepared the coursework will be treatedseriously. They will be taken into account in a long-term planning of offsettingmechanisms and remedial intervention along communicative action lines. But, outof support for the idea of symmetrical treatment of the whole classroom, the pupilwill be denied a pass mark and therefore the pupil’s existential asymmetries will bepractically put aside, with all the negative implications for the pupil herself. Young’sasymmetrical responsibility assuming that we do not take an empathetic or a crit-ical stance towards the other’s unique conditions of life seems logically more com-patible with a rejection of any intervention in the pupil’s existential situation unlessperhaps the pupil feels the necessity for it and asks for it. However, a teacherpractising Young’s asymmetrical responsibility will take these conditions intoaccount and in virtue of them will grant the pass mark that is needed in order thatthe pupil’s promotion will not be stopped. A teacher motivated by symmetricalreciprocity as I have defined it will also grant a pass mark, which will be obtainedby means of alternative ways of assessment. But s/he will go further than that,initiate a long-term project of remedial intervention and encourage the pupil toconsider her existential conditions of life. The pupil will ponder potential lifechoices not in order to alter the existing ones for the sake of mobility and adapta-bility to the dominant societal system. On the contrary, she will do so in order toreach a level of action that will secure more freedom for her. Within such level ofaction, the enabling effects of her ontological symmetry with her peers will overridethe disabling effects of the social asymmetries so that her life choices will be inthe utmost possible proximity to those made in conditions of freedom. From thisperspective a concession of the pass mark will cause neither embarrassment norarrogance, and the pupil will not be disposed to regard her particular conditionsof life as a good excuse and a way out of responsibilities and duties, hence acci-dentally enabling rather than disabling. Nor will she receive the concession as anact of benevolence that degrades her. If we encourage such a basis for our educa-tional ideals, the other pupils will not feel threatened or wronged by the conces-sions or the remedial measures, because they will be accustomed to seeing pupilsin such positions not as poor relations but as different albeit equal members of the


405


classroom community. They will see them as others whose ontological symmetrywith them, obscured due to random factors, must be redeemed. They will learn toencounter them as friends and not as competitors.

Hence I propose symmetrical reciprocity as the outcome of a phenomenology ofintersubjectivity minus essentialism. Along these lines, I suggest that we elaboratean educational model that will prioritise neither the individual nor the community.It will explain intersubjectivity along the ontological frame of symmetrical reciproc-ity of human relations, detect a concomitant social action that is neither strategicnor simply communicative, and justify democracy and care through this newunderstanding of intersubjectivity. Dialogue and communication might be lesseffective and complete but more constructive and genuine. Its impact on educationwill be felt in the construction of a subject that is less self-centred or centredaround her/his achievement and position in her/his community and more orientedto post-conventional bonds with her/his others. For, to encourage the connectionsbetween knowledge on the one hand and emancipation, justice, democracy andcare on the other, one must first believe in their ontological possibility.

Notes

1. See for instance Nel Noddings, 1996, and Aaron Schutz, 1998.2. For analysis of the term and a clarification of the way I use it here see Marianna

Papastephanou, 1999.3. Michael Smith, 1999, p. 317.4. I propose it as a modification of the ideal promoted by Barbara Thayer-Bacon & Charles

Bacon (1998), as will become clearer later on. The model I propose can also be contrastedto Noddings’s (1996) treatment of the notion of community through her conception of care,but this point will not be taken up here for reasons of space.

5. For a discussion of the postmodern ideas on subjectivity, see Eduardo Cadava

et al.

(eds),1991.

6. For a detailed explanation of this, see Jacques Derrida, 1982.7. Thayer-Bacon & Bacon, 1998, p. 9. On the problems of the individualist model, see ibid,

pp. 11–13.8. Ibid, p. 13. On the Bacons’ critique of this model see pp. 15–20. For an earlier critique on

both models and a third one, the humanist–nationalist, see Dewey, 1993, pp. 110–118.9. See Lynda Stone, 1992, p. 96.

10. See Young, 1997, pp. 12–37. There she argues for a reconceptualisation of social collectivityalong the lines of Sartrean serial collectivity, the binding force of which is random anddivested of all emphasis on similarity or unity/commonality.

11. Friedrich Engels,

The Condition of the Working Class in England

, quoted by VincentGeoghegan, in Robert Eccleshall

et al.

, 1992, p. 116.12. See John Dewey’s criticisms of these models in his ‘The Democratic Conception in

Education’, in Dewey, 1993, pp. 110–121.13. She adds Amy Gutmann’s principles of non-discrimination and non-repression as

presuppositions of the existence of a democratic community. See Thayer-Bacon & Bacon,1998, p. 26.

14. Thayer-Bacon & Bacon, 1998, p. 32.15. Thayer-Bacon & Bacon, 1998, p. 26.16. Nancy S. Love, 1995, p. 54.17. Seyla Benhabib, 1986, p. 341. This passage is also quoted by Love (1995, p. 59).

406



18. Many instructors are familiar with students’ protests concerning the humiliating impactotherwise well-intended allowances have on them, as they make them feel that they aregranted these allowances only on the basis of their special needs or conditions of life.

19.

Rocco and his Brothers

, an old film by the Italian director Luchino Visconti, offers some goodexamples of the negative results (concerning the empowerment of the self ) of asymmetricalreciprocity.

References

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Critique, Norm, and Utopia

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Who Comes After the Subject?

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Derrida, J. (1982)

Positions

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Love, N. (1995) What’s Left of Marx?, in: S. K. White (ed.),

The Cambridge Companion ofHabermas

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).Lyotard, J.-F. (1984)

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Educational Theory

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ernism minus the quote-marks,

Cultural Values

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alterity,

Educational Theory

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community,

Journal of Philosophy of Education

, 33:3, pp. 317–336.Stone, L. (1992) ‘Disavowing Community’, in: H. A. Alexander (ed.),

Philosophy of Education1991

(Urbana, IL, Philosophy of Education Society).Thayer-Bacon, B. & Bacon, C. (1998)

Philosophy Applied to Education

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I. M. Young,

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education, subjectivity and community: towards a democratic pedagogical ideal of symmetrical...

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