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EDUCATION AND IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT IN POSTMODERN TIMES

(Robi Kroflič)

Wim Kratsborn writes in the chapter Welcome to the multiple society that past twenty

years form one of three important ‗turning points‘ of history such as the birth of

philosophies of life in the 6th century BC and the renaissance in the 15th century;

and second, that most of developments in contemporary time are chaotic end even

paradoxical, so to understand cultural frames of our life, we have to develop a

systematic thought in two dimensions. The first one is a time dimension in which our

position is viewed as a consequence of influential events/decisions in the past (like

holocaust or the fall of Berlin wall) and our plans for the future or better say - visions

of our desired values and aims. The second dimension connects sphere of ideas and

virtual spaces with real events of contemporary life like migrations, fast climate

changes and globalization. To think about young people and Europe today therefore

demands to be aware of all these dimensions that can be organized in The Field of

View.

PICTURE 1

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Old and new graffiti in Berlin

Photo by Robi Kroflič

And what is so new today that we could speak about important turning point of

contemporary life that has a very strong impact especially to life of youngsters? In

this chapter we will meet different answers to this question that can be combined in

an idea of multiple choice society and identity: about the time in which the only

constant feature is that of fast changes and multiple possibilities/choices. And about

young people which life courses are not strongly socially defined anymore, so they

became the cause of individual reflection, choice and creation. This feature causes

big changes in growing up, socialization and biographical continuity – so important

for building of our identity (Ule 2008).

Multiple changes and choices have a big influence to all dimensions of our life. They

are forcing us to reevaluate our history, but also to be aware of problematic features

of our aims for the future. So it is not just a coincidence that many of most influential

thinkers of contemporary ethical concepts of responsibility and importance of the

personal construction of meaning of life like Emanuel Levinas and Viktor Frankl were

victims of holocaust and this tragic past experience enabled them for searching of

productive ideas for the future. Multiple changes and choices are also causing

constant changes of material basis of our life, but also questioning of great

narratives/stories on which we have built our belief in progress of western societies.

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For individual this means that she or he has to answer to many questions about her

or his life course that were in the near past taken for granted: who am I as a

man/woman? How am I defined with a mother language, parent‘s religion, social

class, birth place, etc.?

In a way young people are enforced to think about different choices and take

decisions about important questions of their identity that were fifty years ago still

socially determined. Culturally prescribed and standardized rituals of life courses in

the past helped young people to transcend life crises, they gave them a sense of

security and helped them to feel connectedness with past and planning of the future.

In modernity sociological explanations of growing up were defined with general ideas

of progress, passing from dependency to independency, from immaturity to maturity,

from not formed identities to structured identities, but today this course is changing.

Life courses are seen as much more ambivalent (not only opening new opportunities,

but also growing of loneliness, anxieties, narcissistic pathologies etc.)! So as we see,

time and space that opens individual choices and possibilities for creation of our own

identity and life style is far away from being a romantic time of fun and pleasure.

Another dimension of multiple choice society and individual identity of young people

is an insight that many of multiple choices are urgent consequences of prolongation

of schooling, continuing living with parents and economical dependency. And

second, that individualization does not mean only growing of individual multiple

choices and decisions, but mostly changes in the society controlling mechanisms.

Wide open opportunities of schooling do not exclude the fact that school is still a

strong controlling mechanism of normalization of our identity. And prolongation of

schooling which enables young people for longer searching of their identity and life

course is also a pretty long period of dependency and therefore vulnerability.

Third dimension of multiple choices that we should be aware of it is closeness of free

market economic ideology and consumerism on one side and free choice as one of

the most important values on the other side. Especially if we analyze economic

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advertizing we can see that values of freedom, autonomy and multiple choices as a

matter of individual responsibility became enforced to young generations in

ideological slogans like: We know you are an independent being and you like

freedom, but if you like to be free you have to buy our products… So emphasizing

multiple choices as societal value has in recent years became a technique of liberal

economics and government. Contemporary individuals are therefore not merely free

to choose, but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of

choice (Rose 1999).

As recent research in the changes of value orientations among young people show,

young generations have passed three periods after Second World War. We can

speak about three generations: skeptical generation (50., 60.ies), narcissistic

generation (80.ies), moralistic generation and ―rebellion of person‖ (today). Typical

statements from 18 year olds in Slovenia today are: I‘m still searching for the

meaning of life; center of my world is between my friends; I‘m not interested in

politics; I have no role models – I live as I live… (Ule 2008) These statements show

that young people do care about meaning of life, they do care about other persons

and search for friends, they are accepting choosing of life courses as personal

responsibility, but they are still skeptical about established (trans)national politics.

What we don‘t know from this research is how well young people are prepared for

this tasks.

To be prepared to take a constructive and creative role in contemporary life, we need

to develop special skills, knowledge, wisdom, psychological security mechanisms

and sense of responsibility. With skills I mean mostly competencies for

communication and learning in real and virtual environment. As we will see later, we

don‘t need communication only to fulfill our social needs, but also for the

development of our self-identity which has a dialogical character. With knowledge I

mean our possibilities to evaluate past decisions and understand basic

characteristics of societal and psychological phenomena: to understand the meaning

of our history, but also contemporary phenomena like manipulation through economic

and political propaganda, causes of psychological threats of contemporary life like

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anxiety and depression etc. With wisdom and psychological security I mean the

development of personal virtues and competencies which enable us to be active in

everlasting process of constructing personal meaning of life. And with new sense of

responsibility I mean to be aware of our duties concerning needs of relative beings,

environment and taking care for the meaning of our own life.

In this chapter we will meet with knowledge that can help us to deal successfully with

questions of identity and constructions of life meaning. A knowledge that is important

for every person living in the contemporary world, but most of all for young people

and persons who work on the broader field of education as teachers, parents, or

facilitators of activities for young people. From a broad field of knowledge I have

selected theoretical ideas that will help us to understand better questions about:

- Self-identity (MCI – who am I?)

- the world we are living in

- basic pedagogical concepts

- the meaning of art in contemporary life and education.

Let‘s introduce the basic ideas of this chapter.

Our self-identity is contained by a sense of our inner (authentic) nature and personal

biography, which is a combination of a sense of difference and uniqueness on one

side, and sense of belonging to authentic relations and activities on the other side.

Building identity is a life-long process, in which our engagement in authentic relations

(love and friendship) and activities (art as one of the most important authentic

activities) is very important if we accept so called dialogical concept of self. This

means our self is always built through different relations and activities in a social

environment according to our basic need of safety and belonging on one hand, and

need for freedom on the other hand. To balance both of these needs (for safety and

free choices) we need a social environment rich with multiple (identity) choices, that

enables at the same time possibilities for us to belong and fulfill social needs for

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safety, otherwise free choices turn to ―anxiety pressures‖ and loose of ―ontological

security‖.

The qualities of public space are of big importance for identity development. When

we speak about basic descriptions of present time, we have to be aware, that all

social processes are connected with political pressures toward assimilation of

otherness (individuality) so recognition of other as different and democratic

negotiation become core values of our time. And when we search for descriptions of

optimal social environment we meet in theory several new terms like glocalization

(―think globally, act locally‖), inclusiveness (care for often marginalized persons to get

an opportunity for optimal personal development and active engagement in decisions

making processes), and third places (like philosophical cafés and squats as places

that offer opportunities to confront personal statements in public space). Without

hope for a better future and trust that public institutions like schools will help young

people to develop consistent and promising life story, our freedom becomes a heavy

burden and threat to our basic sense of security.

A third important question of self-identity development is a question about basic

personal responsibilities. If in the west European history ethical responsibility was for

centuries oriented basically to ethical principles (of justice) and common social rules

of culturally homogeneous society, the social space of cultural differences (with

different comprehension of public values) demands a new pro-social orientation –

where responsibility is primarily understood as respectful attitude toward other

(person), common society values, and natural environment.

So the development of respectful mind prior to an ethical mind should be the

orientation of moral education in public schools and kindergartens. This orientation

can be reached if we understand and apply principles of relational pedagogy,

pedagogy of listening, and inductive pedagogical approach. Important tasks of this

pedagogical approach are: developing of child‘s abilities to step into different

personal relations, reducing fear of differences, developing pro-social emotions like

compassion and emphatic guilt, and finally understanding and acceptance of human

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rights as basic ethical orientation toward justice. This orientation should be the core

of essential learning in realistic pedagogical approach – a new pedagogical concept

we will discuss later.

Another emphasis we have to make is importance of artistic expression for human

development according to the thesis about art as one of the most authentic human

activities. Artistic imagination is of great importance for moral and identity

development because it stimulates our compassion toward the destiny of imaginary

hero of the artistic story, it deliberates us of possible stereotypes, and it gives us

courage to create utopian ―as if‖ worlds of our promising future. That is why art and

specially music can become a sense-opener and a source of knowledge (for better

understanding of existential questions and dilemmas), but also a cross-over – a tool

to build bridges across different cultural patterns and life-styles. Although artistic

expressions are important for people of all developmental phases, it is even more

important in early childhood period when child‘s cognitive competencies are still weak

but she or he is already capable of using hundred languages of artistic expression.

MCI – who am I?

In a very influential study Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Anthony Giddens wrote

a thesis that in the time of late modernity we meet expansion of the possibilities for

individual autonomy and at the same time increasing anxieties and instability of

selfhood and identity development. To understand this odd thesis we have to say

something more about multiple choices and understanding of basic principles of

identity development, but also about basic features of the ‗space and time‘ we are

living in.

Today we speak about self-identity as previous generations have spoken about soul

or spirit. Spirit was a dimension of a person that gave her on the one side a sense of

connectedness to the world/cosmos and on the other side a sense of wholeness

concerning her body and soul (something that binds together our body, mind and

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soul). This double dimension of self-identity was later included in theoretical concepts

of identity. Zygmunt Bauman (2001) claims that identity is a result of the interplay

between individual and community, and a serious game of seeking a balance

between freedom and security. Men and women are always looking for groups to

which they can belong certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and

shifting, in which nothing else is certain. But on the other hand, identity also means

standing out: being different, and through that difference unique – and so the search

for identity cannot but divide and separate. Lack of a sense of insecurity, feelings of

‗disconnection‘ from a concrete community, and enormous impact to multiple choices

causes certain pathological signs of behaviour and consecutive inability to develop

our own individuality. A good example of this kind of insecurity is narcissistic

orientation of personality which acts like an individual as the centre of the world,

insensitive for the needs of others, but still compulsory dependent on the recognition

of their unique and central position in the social environment.

A similar statement about self-identity is proclaimed by Paul Ricoeur (1992), who

speaks about the developing of an authentic self as a knot of two important

dimensions: what separates me from other beings? (the question about sameness),

but also about selfhood that is developing and self-recognising in relations with

different others. To create an image of selfhood means to respond to the face of the

other as different (and not only as our alter-ego, which is usually a form of

communication with another person as a result of projection); and the source of this

otherness is not only a fellow person (and identification with them) – it can also be an

imaginary person (ancestors, heroes from novels etc.) and living/absent God (for the

believers).

‗The self is a knot in the web of multiple intersecting relations; pull relations out of the

web, and you will find no self. We do not have relations; relations have us.‘ (Bingham

and Sidorkin 2004, p. 7) This statement creates a central thesis of the manifesto of

relational pedagogy which confirms the same concept of relational self-identity we

have chosen as the basis of the European Multiple Choice Identity Project. Let‘s take

a closer look at the processes of self-identity development through described

relational concepts of the self.

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PICTURE 2

Mirroring

Photo by Žiga Kroflič

Let‘s take a look at this photo and ask ourselves:

Who am I as a result of reflection?

What do I see in this reflection? Is this just me or me in a context of concrete

natural and social environment?

Who or what is enabling me a mirroring process?

Is this God, eros, libidinal tribe, accepted values, social rules, ethical

normative standards or principles, a care for a fulfilment of our social needs,

existential care for being in the truth of our essence, emphatic experience of

needs/expectations of the other being, a peak need to define sense of our life?

Alice Miller (1995) describes an important part of identity development in early

childhood with a concept of ‗mirror stadium‘. The first image of our identity is one that

arises from our mother‘s eyes. In this concept it is important to stress that our

mother‘s eyes are not a simple mechanical mirror, but a sense organ which express

an image of her desires about the child and not a realistic picture of a child‘s concrete

personal features. In modern culture we usually look to another person as our alter

ego, as a subject of the same culture and rationality, or as a subject, that is

objectivated in a social role, which is a kind of extension of our deepest unfulfilled

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desires. When a parent or teacher is mirroring a child, they usually look at them

under their concept of childhood (to be a sinful and egocentric being, a tabula rasa or

a lovely being who will develop full capacities for creativity if we let them be what they

are in full spontaneity), an imagined picture of a personality they want their child to

develop into. Parents often want their children to accomplish goals in their life that

parents didn‘t succeed for themselves. So when a child looks for their image in the

eyes of important adults, they are not seeing themselves as they are but as the adult

wants them to be, which causes an unrealistic image of the self that is contaminated

with social expectations of the environment. To avoid this very early social pressure

which can cause serious emotional problems, and the only way for a child to reach a

realistic and authentic self-image, is to enable the child a respectful mirroring through

the other‘s view, that sees them as a unique person and therefore different from us.

The same ethical commandment can be found in the concept of recognition, which

we will discuss later.

As we saw in the last paragraph, the ethical responsibility of adults who enable a

child or a young person processes of mirroring their identity is very important, but we

share as well the same responsibility regarding desirous media representation of

youth and their culture (role models from Hollywood movie productions, fashion

industry, popular music etc.). To enable healthy interrelations that are important for

the development of self-identity, we have to define in detail the core of responsibility

we have as educators, but also the responsibility we need to develop in youngsters

as a core of their self-identity.

Responsibility and ethical consciousness in modernity

Responsibility is a key term in all thinking about development of humanity in spite of

theoretical, political or religious orientation. Any concept of morality or political

concept of respect for human rights has to define circumstances under which person

will accept her/his responsibility to defend basic human interests and needs of fellow

persons. Even more, in philosophy of the twentieth century we find a strong notion on

the need of responsibility for our own authentic being/identity, and if we don‘t respect

this existential task, it inevitably causes dangerous psychical traumas or even mental

diseases. So as Charles Taylor (1989) writes in his extensive study Sources of the

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Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, responsibility for selected good is through

personal subjective resonance strongly connected with processes of identity building.

In the enlightenment period, when the basic ideas of modern humanistic sciences

were born, the idea of ethical responsibility was strongly connected with the notion of

a person as an autonomous subject, who as a rational being is capable of moral

reasoning and acting according to the duty towards rational principle of morality

(Kant‘s categorical imperative). This basic principle of morality was a combination of

two traditional ethical standards: basic principle of justice (known as the golden rule:

‗Treat others only as you consent to being treated in the same situation‘) and the

principle of human respect towards every individual (‗Act in such a way that you

always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other,

never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end‘). Although in

practice for Kant and his followers to be moral simply meant to follow only universal

ethical principles of justice, without being personally engaged in relations with the

fellow person and regardless of concrete social expectations or special subjective

needs of the fellow person. Simply said, the moral person in a conflict situation had to

think what she or he would like from the other person to be done to her or him in a

similar situation, and then act to the other according to this desire.

This concept of ethical agency was possible to achieve by education which

succeeded to end with a child‘s ‗wild freedom‘ as a form of spontaneous acting

according to biological principle of comfort (this part of education was reduced to

discipline practices) and motivated a child for a rational humanity, according to which

they first followed society rules and regulations (Lawrence Kohlberg‘s conventional

stage of moral reasoning), and finally recognised rationality as the only criteria and

motive of ethical behaviour (Kohlberg‘s post-conventional stage of moral reasoning).

To accomplish this task of moral education, enlightenment teachers had to at first be

consistent and just (autonomous) beings as objects of symbolic identification (role

models). Second, they had to motivate children with ethical rational reasoning

according to society norms and ethical principles through educational subjects like

civic education, and later for democratic negotiation in the processes of producing

normative systems of a school. And then when somebody violated normative order,

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they had to sanction problematic behaviour, because they believed that total

subordination of the child towards concrete societal rules is the only path to the

construction of autonomous morality.

Although this view on ethical obligation to limit our egocentric desires according to

our duty to follow the order of recognised moral rules and human rights looks very

logical, the analysis of many historical events showed that this rational morality does

not help us to understand the whole scale of prosocial motives. Even more, it looks

like this orientation to follow humanistic standards is not an efficient way to prevent

people from brutal denial of basic human rights of fellow persons. Among historical

research I would like to present studies about causes of the anti-Semite politics of the

Holocaust during the Second World War, but also about brave people in Nazi

Germany who helped Jewish people to survive Hitler‘s genocide politics.

An analysis of selfless aid given to Jews during World War II convincingly shows that

many simple people were rescuing Jews from the Nazi genocide by means of non-

reflected goodwill without thinking about the rational value of their own altruism. We

can call such a type of moral stand a spontaneous saviour whose moral conduct is

led by substantial engagement or non-reflected faith in the constitutive values which

are not deepened through critical reflection. This simply means that Kantian rational

reflection is not a constitutive virtue without which moral conduct is impossible

(Callan 1998). Or as Noddings and Slote (2003), studying the significance of virtues

and caring attitude for the formation of a moral personality, stress: turning to an

ethical principle when natural (spontaneous) caring is already operating (or could be

operating) is indeed having one thought too many.

This case establishes an important hypothesis that the Enlightenment‘s concept of

autonomy cannot be considered as the only goal of moral education as it does not

establish the personality competence that is fundamental/constitutive for the moral

operation and formation of the human ethos. Even more, the possibility of the split

between ethical consciousness and respectful dialogue that was characteristic for the

Enlightenment concept of morality was one of the main causes that enabled Nazi

technology of the Holocaust.

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In the study Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Zygmunt Bauman convincingly

shows that Nazi crimes against Jews were not done by ‗human monsters‘, but by

ordinary people who hadn‘t any need to change their personal values and ethical

standards to become the executors of mass killing in concentration camps – in

private life they remained loving husbands, wives and loyal friends. The condition to

cause the split between ethical consciousness and respectful human relation towards

the victim in the minds of ordinary people was, for engineers of Nazi propaganda,

connected with the task to separate German citizens from their Jewish neighbours.

During the ‗crystal night‘ when SS detachments started with violence against Jewish

people who lived next door to Germans, ordinary Germans did not approve this

action. After accepting national laws which treated Jews as an abstract category,

deportations to ghettos and ‗dehumanisation processes‘ in concentration camps,

Germans started to support Nazi politics in fearfully big numbers. Bauman finishes

his profound analysis of the politics of the Holocaust with an even more serious

warning: after Stanley Milgram‘s experiments in the seventies in the USA and similar

Philip Zimbardo‘s experiments with human readiness to accept social roles even

when they are obviously in contradiction with our moral standards, we know that

human catastrophes like the Holocaust can happen again regardless of principled

acceptance of human rights orders. And unfortunately this warning became truth in

Srebrenica during the Balkan war in the nineties of the twentieth century in the heart

of civilized Europe!

How to explain this thesis with conceptual tools for analysis of responsibility? When

we prevent people from ‗authentic engaged‘ human relations (face to face), the

other‘s suffering doesn‘t evoke anymore their responsibility to a respectful and caring

attitude! They can still remain bearers of high ethical standards and values, but they

usually use these standards and values a posteriori of bad acting to ‗wash bad

consciousness‘ and not as criteria and motivation for prosocial behaviour. The well

known Slovene psychologist Vid Pečjak (1999, p. 8) described this kind moral

apology with the following sentence, ‗I know that I could act more sensitive and

moral, but I‘m aware of my fault, which proves that I‘m still a good person!‘ To make

our moral consciousness more efficient, he proposed that education should be

focused on developing capabilities for autonomous moral reasoning, but also for

empathy that usually evokes our respectful attitude.

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New theoretical answers to a question of authentic prosocial motives and ethical

responsibility

My personal motivation to search for a new basis of ethical responsibility came from

an insight into an extremely noble reaction of Saša, a six year old girl in kindergarten

Nova Gorica in Slovenia. Let‘s take a closer look at the description of this

extraordinary event:

Ethnographical note: A change of a playing corner

‗Since children no longer play with dolls, we decided that we would change the

―babies corner‖ into a beauty parlour. When I told them that (―motivation to act‖),

Saša reacted, ‖Leave the babies corner as it is, Marija plays there every day. She

loves babies, she loves them so much she‘ll have nine of her own when she grows

up,‖ (Marija is a handicapped child!). We left the nook as it was, and arranged a

beauty parlour elsewhere‘ (Kroflič 2000, p. 117).

From the standpoint of ethical and psychological paradigms that were developed

from the Enlightenment paradigm of deontological ethics (ethics of justice and theory

of development of moral reasoning), we can ask ourselves, what thinking and what

views were the basis for Saša‘s reflection on the moral responsibility to protect the

particular interests of a handicapped girl? A response to this theoretical dilemma is

simple: acting according to pretentious cognitive principles of Rawls’ ‘concept of

justice’ or Kohlberg’s ‘post-conventional morality’ is too ambitious a goal for a six year

old child! So if we want to understand the possibility of even pre-school children to

act evidently prosocial, we have to find other theoretical arguments. The fact that we

cannot only find very competent moral behaviour, even at the pre-school period, but

also the fact that some of the most brave moral acts of adult persons are evidently

not the result of complex moral reasoning, leads us to search for new ethical theories

that could explain described cases.

Amongst philosophers who have tried to strengthen our sensibility for ethical

dilemmas behind Kant‘s concept of autonomous moral reasoning, we have to

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emphasise the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Surviving politics of the Holocaust,

Levinas developed one of the most original explanations of the source of human

morality. According to him, human morality can be described as authentic subjectivity

that is evoked by the face of the other and responsibility as respect for the other and

the whole world, this is not the result (of accepting ethical standards), but the

condition of ethics. Origin of our moral response to the needs of the other is

engagement in a relationship and is constituted by a relationship that is older than

the ego and prior to moral principles. This means that we come into presence

through responding to fellow persons, which can be proved by observing very young

children‘s sensitivity to emotional expressions of their parents. If morality is evoked

with the face of the other being in a dialogue, Levinas (2006) emphasises that this

kind of a dialogue is not enabled by knowing the other and constructing common

language which presupposes common understanding of the meaning of moral norms

and values. For Levinas, other as Other is not only our alter ego; the Other is what I

myself am not. He is ‗infinitely unknowable‘, but anyway respect to absolute

difference defines how we relate to each other.

Although it looks strange to plead for a dialogue/conversation about ethical dilemmas

without having established a common understanding of ethical norms and values,

let‘s explain this possibility by examples of ethical and political conflicts that arose

from cultural conflicts between Muslims and representatives of moral and political

standards of secular Europe about the prohibition of wearing a head scarf in public

schools in France, and about publishing caricatures of Mohammed in a Danish

newspaper. Both symbols in Europe are usually described as an attack on basic

human rights. The wearing of head scarves has been seen as a symbol of the

subordinate status of women in Islamic cultures and the denial of equal rights

between the sexes. And the protest against caricatures of Mohammed in a Danish

newspaper has been seen as a symbol of the denial of the right of free speech or the

expression of personal opinions. Defenders of these kinds of judgments usually

forget that in at least some Islamic cultures many women deliberately wear the head

scarf as a way to protect themselves from being viewed as mere sexual objects. And

profound analysis of the first expulsions of Muslim girls from secondary schools

(Benhabib 2008) showed that girls which have not come from traditional Islamic

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families have decided to wear head scarves deliberately to express their Islamic

identity, but their voices were not heard during the trial.

Concerning protests of the proponents of Islamic culture against caricatures of

Mohammed we usually forget that even in European cultures we condemn hate

speech as an example of verbal attack. This follows Locke‘s argument of limiting the

principle of tolerance when an intolerant person attacks a tolerant one in spite of the

tolerant person‘s willingness to be open to different arguments. However, in the

West, we don‘t usually consider comical caricatures of the Christian God as an

assault on Western religion, so through Eurocentric views comical caricatures of

Mohammed were not seen as an example of the assault (or hate speech) which

could be accused.

The analysis of both cases shows that cultural conflicts arise from different

understandings of the meanings of basic values, and what is more important, from

the denial of Levinasean ‗pre-ethical principle‘ of being respectful towards the

difference of the other person. Possible gaps between concrete understanding of

profound meaning of ethical standards and prescribed respectful attitude shows the

importance of Howard Gardner‘s (2008) notion on the importance of two separate

sets of competencies; respectful and ethical mind for the future of mankind. But when

we follow Levinas‘ concepts we have to admit the priority of respectful attitude before

negotiation about the meaning of ethical standards. This is the core of Levinas‘ thesis

about respect for the other which is not the result, but the condition of ethics. If

respectful attitudes toward the other opens the possibility of a sensible and engaged

dialogue between people with different cultural habits and value orientations,

Alexander Sidorkin (2002) shows how Levinas‘ notion of a dialogue, with the other as

different and infinitely unknowable, should be used in educational settings of

multicultural environments enabling the development of students‘ cultural identities.

Teachers should not be in awe of differences and afraid to misunderstand,

misinterpret, or corrupt someone else‘s culture. They have to develop a respectful but

inquisitive stance towards it. Education is only possible as dialogue, where different

voices intensely interact, change, but never merge. A teacher should keep in mind

that his or her task is neither to reduce diversity, nor to stand still watching diversity

grow. Students obviously do not discover their diverse identities on their own. We

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need to be a part of the dialogue about who the students are. An Asian student, for

instance, cannot figure out what it means to be an Asian in America without their

White, Black and Hispanic teachers. The point is not to know about someone else‘s

culture, but to help construct an individual understanding of it. An Asian student may

have all the important conversations about their identity at home or in church, or with

friends. Yet if they do not discuss that identity at school, the identity does not exist at

school. When teachers only listen and do not talk back on the issues of identity, they

deny the student an important part of their identity. Diversity makes sense when it

involves engagement. Knowing about other cultures is an impossible task and a

culture can never explain a person, but a person can explain a culture. When your

student is explaining their culture to you, you must talk back, emphasising your

cultural standpoint and trying to be open to the arguments of their different cultural

position.

If we want to summarise new insights into Levinasean concepts of responsibility as a

part of our identity, firstly we can see that responsibility grows from engaged relations

and not from cold objective moral reasoning from an impersonal distance; and

second, that the ultimate source of moral reasoning is not an ethical code but the

face of the other person as a sort of pre-ethical condition that is best described with a

principle of respectful relation, or as Gardner denoted it in his book Five Minds for the

Future (2007), with respectful mind. This quality of relation is of crucial importance for

teachers to help to develop a sense of personal identity of the student – especially if

they are from a different culture than we are – but recognition of the other as different

is also becoming one of the most important values of the time and space we are

living in now – in a postmodern Europe.

As we will explain later in more detail, recognition of the other as different does not

mean primarily to understand the other but to listen to them carefully and to respond

to their thoughts or acts with cheer (Saša‘s generous act) or with full disapproval

(mass murders in Nazi concentration camps or in Srebrenica), although we will never

fully understand the ultimate causes of this kind of extreme (anti)moral acting.

The world we are living in . . .

18

Today we are living in a world where absolute truth, aesthetics criteria of beauty, or

criteria of moral obligation (‗great narratives of modernity‘, Lyotard 1984) does not

exist; a world that is disconnected with enlightenment optimism on the possibility of

educating responsibility of autonomous subject (Kant); living in a social space that

tends to be rich in absolute knowledge (Hegel); and a world where security of a

stable self-identity is vanishing. In a way it seems that this thesis is tightly connected

with Beck‘s thesis about contemporary society as a risk society and Giddens‘ thesis

about the necessity of every individual for everlasting reflection on the choices I am

making and the self I am creating. But the reason why Beck and Giddens reject the

term ‗postmodernity‘ is that all these processes have already begun in early

modernity and are now – in late modernity – just more fastening, because traditional

sources of security like family, church and institutions of the state are not stable

anymore, and modernisation with increasing individualism has produced erosion of

institutional authority and social anomie. With the fall of feudalistic privileges, choices

of the individual became wide open, and together with these choices, also our

possibility and responsibility for building sensible, respectful and responsible attitudes

towards ourselves, relative persons, the wider society and the natural environment.

There are at least three ideas on how to debate postmodern conditions in the field of

humanities (Burbules and Rice 1991). First, is the rejection of all absolutes, so there

can be no single rationality, no single morality, and no ruling theoretical framework for

the analysis of social and political events. Or as Bauman (2001) writes, there is ‗no

firm soil and secure home‘. Second, is perceived saturation of all social and political

discourses with power and dominance, so any metanarrative is just a synonymous

for social and political hegemony. The third idea connects postmodern thinking with

the turn in value orientation that begins to celebrate differences in a society and

otherness of every person not only as a fact or even as a problem that should be

solved in communication, but as core values of contemporary time. Burbules and

Rice conclude that while first position declares an ‗antimodern statement‘, which

seems to deny any value to classical modern knowledge, the other two positions

emphasise more productive ways of solving problems of contemporary being:

A deconstruction of meaning of humanistic concepts in European tradition

and dismantling unjust concepts of power, dominance, and hegemony;

19

A recognition of differences in a society and the otherness of a subject as

core values of our time.

Deconstruction of hegemonic social concepts of modernity – the case of insanity

Both ways of postmodern reflection are tightly connected. If we want to really

celebrate differences and otherness as core values, we have to make a serious

reflection/deconstruction of several key concepts of modernity. One good example of

this kind of deconstruction is Foucault‘s (1973) approach on the history of insanity in

Western European civilization. If we can find a kind of ambivalent attitude towards

persons that are bearers of reasoning which is not part of common sense since the

Enlightenment period, it was Descartes‘ faith in the universal rational method that

definitively excluded the contingent otherness. In the same spotlight we can analyse

Kant‘s conviction that the laws legitimated by the autonomous person for themselves

are those that are common to all rational beings as such – they are therefore the

universal laws of reason. Indeed, a model of ethics which is based on the faith in

uniform rationality of the autonomous subject is particularly prone to the exclusion of

those individuals or groups which for any personal or culturally-specific reason

develop an alternative meaning of life, lifestyle or communicative code.

Let‘s look at some historical examples through the eyes of artistic imagination. Art

(especially literature and music) was from antiquity and for centuries recognised as a

core of humanistic education (septem artes liberales), but also as one of the modest

tools for understanding reality of life with its dilemmas and contradictions. One of the

best examples of recognising the clash between the authority of state and the

individual with their opponent moral reasoning is Sophocles‘ Antigone. Antigone is

refusing Creon‘s legitimate order that her brother should not be buried as the enemy

of the state. While Sophocles could not provide a decisive answer to the question of

whether Antigone‘s autonomous stance was founded in the name of eternal moral

rule of the sacredness of life and death (i.e. moral rationality) or on the Dionysian

dimension of eros, it is nevertheless certain that, despite their faith in man‘s

dispassionate and rational nature as embodied in the Apollinarian cult, the Greeks

still acknowledged the positive role of the hybris and the Dionysian cult, and

considered both important for the further development of civilization. Simply said,

20

Antigone is one of the modest examples of the person that is denoted with double

alterity (or otherness), first as a woman that takes over an active social role, and

second as a person that persists in alternative moral reasoning, but sympathies of

the writer and audience are clearly on her side.

PICTURE 3

A postmodern Medusa

Photo by Žiga Kroflič

In the period of modern conviction on universal rationality we can find three leading

metaphors of exclusive relation towards persons that are, because of alternative

convictions and reasoning, described as insane or mad. The motif that best describes

the Renaissance attitude towards the otherness (otherness as unreason) is the Ship

of Fools, which can be seen in both literary and visual artistic forms ever since the

end of the fifteenth century. Two characteristic European metaphors of otherness

combine in it, those of The Leper and The Court Fool.

The court fool is the person who is permitted to speak the truth, but for the price that

people who are listening to him do not take him seriously – so he is in a subtle way

excluded from the community of reasonable people. It is not surprising that in the first

edition of Brant‘s satire Narrenschiff (1497), an engraving depicts the author as a

scholar surrounded by books and dressed as a university professor, whose cap from

behind has the typical shape of the court jester‘s cockscomb.

21

PICTURE 4

The described ambivalence of folly remained in place even after they began to expel

the fools from townships with ships; in this practice, folly was connected with yet

another metaphor, that of The Leper.

PICTURE 5

The author of Narresschiff (The Ship of

Fools, 1497), wise man or court fool?

Hieronymus Bosch: The Ship of

Fools, painted between 1490 and

1500, kept in Louvre, Paris

22

The most interesting depiction of the access to truth which is reserved for the

expelled fool is certainly the tree placed by Hieronymus Bosch on The Ship of Fools

in place of the mast, which can be interpreted as the symbol of the biblical tree of

knowledge of good and evil. Foucault is convinced that after leprosy had been

eradicated in Europe, the role of The Leper was assumed by poor vagabonds,

criminals, and ‗deranged minds‘, and that the metaphor of The Leper combined the

care for healing with the care for exclusion. The combination of the care for healing

and the care for exclusion became an empirical fact in seventeenth century Europe,

when the ‗Hôpital‘ began to emerge, as well as psychiatry as one among so called

normative sciences in the nineteenth century.

The European culture of the modern age established yet another metaphor of

otherness, that of The Noble Savage. Although Christian Europe maintained the

negative image of the barbarian as an uncivilised wild being, the Crusades brought

about not only the stories of conquest and civilisation of barbarian lands, but also of a

quest for one‘s own roots; what is more, a quest for the lost wonderful, primeval and

innocent world. The fascination with the uncivilised yet innocent natural state

emerged as early as the Enlightenment when, for example, Rousseau in his

Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men attributed moral

deprivation to the negative influences of the human world; but the vision was

strengthened at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the awareness of the

negative side effects of civilisation and enculturation grew, and The Noble Savage

became the image of human liberation from the ‗ballast of culture‘. In the nineteenth

and twentieth century, the interest in the world of The Noble Savage entered

everyday life (the ‗empathic‘ fascination with a physically deformed and therefore

‗uncivilised‘ individual in Victorian England was brilliantly illustrated in Lynch‘s film

The Elephant Man (1980) and scientific discourse (Grosrichard‘s Structure of the

Seraglio describes fascination with the oriental forms of government, Levi-Strauss‘

Savage Mind breaks down the myth of the unintelligent nature of the totemic man).

Of course, the topic also appeared in art:

23

PICTURE 6

Gauguin‘s Vairaumati certainly expresses his deep conviction of civilisation beyond

the European notion of it; notions and of the equality of mythological and religious

views of the origins of man. But although Gauguin had spend a lot of time in Tahiti

and also died there, we cannot help but have the impression that the figure of The

Noble Savage remained the figure of otherness beyond our own world: the figure of

the native as an ideal object of tourist attraction in which the civilised man of the

twentieth century seeks the remains of the ‗unspoiled nature‘ in both physical and

cultural senses of the word.

What do the prevailing metaphors of otherness in the European tradition tell us? The

Leper became an undesirable metaphor in the twentieth century, because its mode

of exclusion is too obvious; but at the same time, the acknowledgement that

madness may establish an ‗alternative field of rationality‘ was lost, as postulated most

clearly by the anti-psychiatric movement. The Court Fool survived in the roles of the

local eccentric and the clown, who are allowed to speak about the unspeakable

truths of existence at the price of exclusion from the normalised community. The

metaphor of The Native, however, experienced a boom not only in the form of the

tourist attraction based on the suppressed myth of the noble savage and the original

natural existence, but also in the attitude to people with certain special needs

(epilepsy, for example, is in Slavonic folk speech is still recognised as a Good‘s

disease) and to members of certain minority cultures (the Romany in Europe, for

Paul Gauguin: Vairaumati

Painted in 1896

Kept in Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Vairaumati is the Eve of the Tahitian

mythology

24

example). The fact that the discourse of medicine readily recognises Romany

children as children with special needs is masked by the cliché of a romantic,

indigenous culture of music and dance. Even more, the true Romany musician

should be, according to this illusion, incapable of reading musical scores (supposedly

the basis of civilised achievement in musical art), which makes them an example of

natural musicianship coming directly ‗from the heart‘.

PICTURE 7

After this short presentation of deconstruction methods on the topics of the

relationship toward madness we can see how tightly unjust concepts of power,

dominance and hegemony are connected with exclusion of representatives of

otherness and differences concerning rational thinking and other cultural symbols;

and how urgent ‗striping‘ of hegemonic concepts of modernity is if we want to create

an interconnected, multicultural society.

Searching for a just and respectful society in late modernity

The second philosophical question is connected with the postmodern understanding

of a society. This is a concept that we have most frequently in mind when we think

about social space of contemporary time in globalisation. Globalisation today is

A Gypsy dancer

Photo by Robi Kroflič

25

recognised not only as a fact of living which was enabled by technological and

especially informational progress, but also as a typically ambivalent concept. On one

side we meet beautiful opportunities to be easily connected with all parts of the world

by information and new communicative tools, and at least for researchers these new

opportunities are really helpful. But on the other side globalisation means ‗coca-

colonization‘ of the world and a real threat to saving cultural differences around the

globe. In its economical and political dimension we have to emphasise that

globalisation is a paradoxical phenomenon of postmodernity, with typical modern

ideology that includes cultural assimilation under the influence of economical and law

ideologies of an ‗advanced West‘ and an attempt on domestication of diversity into

monocultural identity.

To save the positive aspects of global connections and migrations and on the other

hand to reject its negative influence on assimilation, several theorists have already

tried to emphasise alternative dimensions of these processes. For example, Seyla

Benhabib speaks about so called ‗reverse globalisation‘, a migration process that

brings elements of different cultures in metropolis of the ‗advanced‘ Western world,

and of course about a need to accept this diversity as a sign of the possible higher

quality of life.

Another alternative concept is the concept of ‗glocalisation‘. The idea was developed

in Japan and in the nineties adopted by Roland Robertson as counterweight to

globalisation. Glocalisation focuses on the simultaneity – the co-presence of the

particular and the universal and refers to the social process of interaction between

the local and the global and vice-versa. It is very important that at the concrete

project level we assure that an emphasis on global dimensions is not accepted as a

threat to national, ethnic, religious, cultural, and social identities, we have to

strengthen empowerment of local subjects to cooperate in global cultural, political,

and economic exchanges on the principles of fairness and justice.

If we try to summarise, we can say that glocalisation is a concept that accepts

necessity of global integrations and rejects assimilation; it tries to ground ideology of

global bounds on key values of postmodernity: diversity and difference is not only

seen as fact and obstacle, but a new quality. To be successful and not only another

26

ideological slogan, glocalisation should be grounded on a new set of values that are

important for politics, economy, and also education. Among many lists of so called

postmodern values I would like to emphasise four of them: a deeper meaning of

democracy; recognition of otherness as a way of accepting the other person in their

authentic identity; responsibility as primarily a mode of respectful relation towards the

face of the other; and building an inclusive community that enables optimal

development and participation in community decision making processes especially to

(groups of) persons that are frequently excluded or belong to the society margins.

PICTURE 8

Whilst we have already spoken about the importance of recognition and responsibility

towards the face of the other as different, let‘s explain here some brief notions on

democracy and inclusiveness of contemporary social spaces. Both concepts are

today amongst the most important value orientations of political philosophy. As Gert

Biesta (2006) has emphasised, we should not think about democracy only as a form

of political government but primarily as a form of interconnected living in a common

social space that could not become necessary value orientation until we accepted

thesis about plurality and differences. In a world of common belief in universal values

and truths, aristocracy which can be led by a wise monarch is a much more proper

form of government, as we have noticed in Antiquity Greek political philosophy.

Democracy is itself therefore a commitment to a world of plurality and difference, a

commitment to a world where freedom of all citizens can appear, a freedom to

express every individual opinion and a responsibility of society that especially voices

the opinions of persons or the members of social groups that were in history several

times marginalised, or even excluded, are now heard and considered.

Globalisation as coca-colonisation

Photo by Robi Kroflič

27

In the educational environment the creation of inclusive communities enables optimal

development and participation in community decision making processes, especially

to (groups of) students that are frequently excluded or belong to the society margins.

So inclusive school is enabled by a proper legal frame (a notion on public school as

an institution for all children and youngsters), cultural frame (interrelations of

respectful acceptance of persons from different cultural, language, social, racial

origin, and also persons with different learning styles and capabilities for academic

success), and school practice (reconciliation of different learning and teaching styles

and organizing support to learners with less capabilities or special needs).

During the running of the European Multiple Choice Identity Project we emphasised

its democratic and inclusive orientation. Wim Kratsborn once noticed that with work

on the project the differences between children/pupils/students were not smaller. On

the contrary, they are growing bigger, but we could see increased awareness and

tolerant acceptance (recognition) of them. Even more illustrative is a thought by

Maria Peňa, a fifteen year old student and member of the project from Lisbon who

said, ‗The MCI project links the tiny things inside myself with the other and the great

stuff.‘ This is a thought that emphasises one of the basic notions on successful

education as support to identity development of children and youngsters: only

democratic and inclusive education can bind private ‗student emotions‘ with common

values and hopes – ‗a great stuff‘ and with personal moral awareness and

responsibility of every individual person for common rights and values.

Let‘s close this section with one of the most important notions about characteristics of

the society of late modernity. Whilst speaking about open possibilities for identity

development in modern societies, Anthony Giddens (1991) warns us about one

specific feature of the society in late modernity: ‗On the level of the self, a

fundamental component of day-to-day activity is simply that of choice. Modernity

confronts the individual with a complex diversity of choices and, because it is non-

foundational, at the same time offers little help as to which options should be

selected’. If a pre-modern society was based on strong foundational concepts of

family and church (institutions of common faith) which offered to the individual a

strong sense of belonging (and at the same time limited her or his possibilities of free

28

choices), today we can find much more weak and unstable social spaces where an

individual is searching for a support. This is the main reason why the idea of

inclusiveness stresses the importance of participation in community decision making

processes. So without strengthening a sense of foundational importance of common

value of human rights we cannot strengthen a sense of ontological security of a

person of late modernity and help them to defend against the pressures on anxiety

which becomes one of the most broadening diseases of the time and space we are

living in.

PICTURE 9

Is postmodernity a new chance or obstacle for authentic self-identity development?

One of the basic paradoxes of a time (postmodernity) and space (Europe Union) we

are living in is the lack of ontological security amongst younger generations. When

people are scared (and free choice always includes fear, not from what we could get,

but from what we can lose) we are often searching for somebody that could make

decisions instead of us. We can accept religious leaders, new-age gurus or even

somebody that constructs personal horoscopes for the authorities that could, as we

hope, reduce our fear. This is why it is not so contradictory that developed capitalism

on one side proclaims free choices and on the other side encourages people to

identify with different new leaders. Beside these processes of rejection of freedom we

can trace an anxiety that is connected with the threat of losing a basic sense of

A self portrait

Photo by Žiga Kroflič

29

security (Salecl 2004). We can define ontological security as a feeling of belonging to

stable relations and sensible constructions of life. Ontological security is therefore a

sense of order and continuity in regard to an individual‘s experiences. It is a stable

mental state derived from a sense of continuity in regard to the events in one‘s life.

As a reaction to threats of losing ontological security, people are today trying to

create a kind of protective cocoon or bubbles that will protect them from continuous

threats of their previous choices. When we carefully observe these processes serious

questions arise:

What does the syntagm ‗multiple choice identity‘ really mean?

Is it right to speak about free choices (freedom to choose directions of my life

and constructions of the meaning of living) or it would be more proper to speak

about situations in which we are forced to reopen questions about past

choices?

If we are right to speak about free/open choices, what kind of knowledge,

skills, and value orientations do we need to make continuous processes of

reflection successful?

Can public school help children and youngsters to build their identity with

providing knowledge, skills and value orientations, and with enabling social

space for successful identity building?

According to Anthony Giddens (1991) trust and hope are the millstones of ontological

security. Trust is a kind of emotional shield that protects us from existential anxieties

and helps us to sustain positive orientation towards the future and not focusing that

much on threats and dangers. Trust is the main emotional support, a kind of

‗protective cocoon‘, but also an ability to face the possibility of loss, which is so

urgent in the creative processes of building identity. Especially in postmodern

conditions, our feelings of self-identity are both robust and fragile. Fragile, because

the biography the individual reflexively holds in mind is only one ‗story‘ among many

other potential stories. So whatever I have chosen as a meaningful part of my identity

(like enjoying punk music, being engaged in a heterosexual relationship, deciding to

30

study humanities etc.), it can be opened again and again as a serious existential

choice. And robust, because a sense of self-identity is often securely enough held to

whether major tensions of transitions in the social environments within which the

person moves. In a time and space that is shifting very fast, we have to emphasise

that trust in others is at the origin of the experience of a stable external world and a

coherent sense of self-identity. It is ‗faith‘ in the reliability and integrity of others which

is at stake here.

If we have opened a discussion on the question why the syntagm ‗multiple choice

identity‘ can cause a threat to the feeling of ontological security, let‘s remember again

Zygmunt Bauman‘s thesis about identity development as a result of the interplay

between individual and community, and a serious game of seeking a balance

between freedom and security. Today we are more and more aware that identity

choices cannot be seen as free market goods, we can experiment with them by

trading/exchanging. The basic limits of identity development as a process of

searching for our authenticity are today primarily not technical but social and

psychological ones (we cannot only change our self-image very frequently according

to fashion codes but also gender orientations). To ensure our need for security we

have to create again ‗social stabilizers‘ with strengthening possibilities for sense of

belonging to individual relations (of friendship and love) and communities like family,

school and other social services for free time activities (so called third places). But to

be successful in this task we have to rethink basic theoretical concepts under which

we could enable such communities that would ensure productive equilibrium between

freedom and security, and identity structure – open enough for everlasting social

changes and stable enough to avoid the pressures of modern anxieties.

31

PICTURE 10

Basic pedagogical concepts

There were two ideas that influenced new approaches in the field of pedagogy and

teachers education to adopt to the challenges of contemporary time, firstly a turn of

normativity in pedagogy – a change in the way we think about basic aims of

education – the turn away from deductive aims and absolute values/virtues to

inductive search for responsible coexistence; and secondly a realistic concept of

teacher education which tries to bridge the gap between theory and practice, to

promote the development of responsible and reflective people who can build on self-

awareness and develop their own identities, facing the challenges that they will

encounter in their personal lives and in society at large. These two concepts are

strongly interconnected and – paradoxically – as typical postmodern concepts rooted

in the same old antiquity question; how to draw the eternal values from the sky to the

ground, from abstract societal norms and ethical principles to the responsibility for

human interrelations, which was brilliantly visualised in Raphael‘s painting School of

Athens (Vatican 1510-1511).

Kaleidoscope

Photo by Robi Kroflič

32

PICTURE 11

Shift in normative ideas and inductive educational approach

Pedagogy as a normative (goal oriented science) science was constituted on the

basis of Enlightenment philosophical anthropology and political theory, especially on

Kant‘s concepts of autonomy and on Rousseau‘s notion that the study of human

psychological development should form the basis of education. This thesis becomes

interesting in the spotlight of Lyotard‘s postmodern philosophy, because his thesis

about the death of the great narratives of modern philosophy and science points to

the question of the legitimacy of the milestones of pedagogy as a science. And one

of the most important questions concerns the legitimacy of its main deductive

pedagogical goals, focused on the creation of the autonomous person with

competencies for critical reasoning.

My general thesis is that even postmodern pedagogy (like ethics and developmental

psychology) remains a normative science but the turn of normativity is not only a

political question of the participation of pupils/students and their parents to become

more active in negotiation about the content of pedagogical goals (basic principle of

democratic education). It is also the question of a new understanding of normative

agency in the field of moral acting and of ethical responsibility that arises from the

turn of responsibility we have discussed in the section MCI – who am I?: from

following societal norms and ethical principles of justice to the concept of

responsibility to treat fellow persons in a respectful manner, which in the terms of

Raphael - School of

Athens

(Vatican 1510-1511)

33

postmodern philosophy enables acceptance of otherness and differences as central

values of the present time.

This is the same shift that we have already described as a turn of concept of moral

responsibility in Emmanuel Levinas‘ ethics and confirmed with Howard Gardner‘s

concept of respectful and ethical mind. But if we want to build educational practices

on these new orientations we have to find further anthropological bases for the

possibilities of stimulating prosocial orientation towards the fellow person, and also

new methods of moral education.

In the late sixties of the twentieth century during his empirical approaches Martin

Hoffman found a new pattern of parental discipline practices, which he called

‗inductive approach‘. This way of parental discipline was clearly different from the

most common educational concepts of that time. Let‘s try to illustrate these

differences in an example of typical discipline problem from the kindergarten practice.

Ethnographical note: Children‘s play with Lego constructor

Peter and Matija are playing with Lego constructor. Matija is constructing a ship, while

Peter is making a plane. When Matija becomes short of Lego constructors, he smashes

Peter‘s plane. A conflict and then crying occurs, so Peter asks the teacher for the help.

Reaction of the teacher no. 1: ‗Matija, you know we have a rule that taking other‘s toys

is forbidden.‘

Reaction of the teacher no. 2: ‗Matija, I am very disappointed because of your

behaviour.‘

Reaction of the teacher no. 3: ‗Matija, look how you‘ve made Peter sad.‘

The above possible reactions by the teacher illustrate three discipline practices. The

first one was described by Martin Hoffman (2000) as the authoritative-assertive type,

the second one as emotional conditioning (which is usually used in the permissive

type), and the third reaction was described as the inductive type of discipline practice.

For most common classifications of educational approaches it is important to

recognise that as a concept, the inductive approach is in opposition to the

34

authoritative-assertive type of education on one side and emotional conditioning

(permissive type of education) on the other. According to Hoffman, with inductive

discipline, we:

Express our disapproval of the child‘s act and indicate implicitly or explicitly

that the act is wrong and that the child has committed an infraction (this

dimension is present also in the other two concepts of discipline).

Call attention to the victim‘s distress and make it salient to the child.

Point up the role of the child‘s action in causing that distress, which creates

the condition for feeling empathy-based guilt, which is a feeling of intense

disesteem for oneself for wrongfully harming another.

Give the chance to the offender to improve the situation which was caused by

his act.

What is new in inductive discipline approach? As we saw in the description, a teacher

is no longer pointing their finger to a moral rule that was not considered by the

offender, nor are they expressing their disappointment with the offender‘s behaviour.

The teacher is expressing disapproval of the child‘s act and making a pressure

towards the offender by calling attention to the victim‘s distress, showing him that this

distress was caused by his act. The underlying condition for fostering the offender‘s

prosocial emotions and activities (giving a chance to improve the situation) lies on the

belief that the inductive discipline act will provoke the offender‘s emphatic distress on

the basis of emphatic guilt and intense disesteem.

Hoffman‘s approach of empathy as a source of prosocial emotions enabled him to

restore a thesis that empathy is the first source of moral competencies of the child in

the very early developmental period, which can influence successfully to further

development of emotional, motivational and cognitive capacities for moral decision

making and acting. Moral education in early childhood should therefore focus on the

fostering of the development of empathy and prosocial emotions, which are tightly

connected with emphatic guilt. With this basic statement Hoffman confirmed Levinas‘

35

thesis about the responsibility towards the face of the other as a pre-ethical condition

of moral acting and opened the opportunity for the building of new, postmodern

conceptions of moral development as the central part of identity development in

pedagogical approaches. However, if we want to defend the thesis about the

possibility of building a new educational concept on the basis of the inductive

approach which would be acceptable for different educational settings and age

groups of pupils/students, we have to widen Hoffman‘s approaches on several

theoretical and methodical questions, as per the following:

What could be the profound anthropological basis of the inductive educational

approach?

How can we define basic educational goals (and therefore a new concept of

pedagogical normativity)?

Which are the principles of new educational methods?

How can we define the active role of the educator in an inductive educational

approach?

As many theorists of so-called liberal pedagogy (like Richard Peters and Keneth

Strike) have already stressed, one of the basic anthropological ideas of inductive

approach is the thesis that prosocial emotions (personal virtues) and cognitive

competencies (rational tools for ethical reasoning) are equally important for morality.

Amongst prosocial emotions Kristian Kristiansson (2004) also emphasises especially

the importance of compassion, indignation and empathic guilt. Let‘s now see how

prosocial emotions influence the person‘s moral orientation.

Two discoveries confirm the thesis that we have many more possibilities to foster

moral development in the developmental period when a child is not yet capable of

understanding the meaning of social and moral obligations than only pure disciplinary

practices which help young children to act responsibly according to a set of social

and moral rules. First is the discovery of so-called empathic guilt in very early

childhood by Melanie Klein and Sharon Todd, and second is the discovery of the

36

early development of empathy as a source of prosocial emotions by Martin Hoffman.

Although we cannot prove that a child is sensitive for his friend‘s distress on the basis

of his authentic altruistic or egoistic motives (as we showed his fellows distress

causes his distress too, so the child wants to get rid of this disrupting emotion), for

identity development it is crucial to recognise that orientation towards the wellbeing of

a fellow person grows from engaged relationships of a child with important adult

persons and friends. Therefore, disciplinary practices that are based on rewards and

punishment of the child‘s behaviour and on our efforts to enable the child‘s

internalisation of social and moral rules—such as were the basis of moral education

in pedagogy of modernity (Freud‘s, Piaget‘s and Kohlberg‘s concepts of moral

development)—are simply not the only answer for these areas of development.

Development of empathy and emphatic emotions as one of the ultimate sources of

our morality has to begin in the very early developmental period and inductive

discipline as well as other elements of wider inductive educational approach can form

a successful basis for it.

The second necessary element of the inductive educational paradigm is the question

about possible changes in basic educational goals. Although historically, educational

goals were usually described in terms of basic values or ethical norms, to describe a

facet of a specific example of the inductive educational paradigm I will ask the

question; in what terms can we describe the core of moral responsibility?

According to shifts in the ethics from Kant to Levinas, we can distinguish between

responsibility in modern and postmodern pedagogy. If the former concept defined

ethical responsibility as the demand to follow societal norms (in the so-called

conventional phase of morality) and ethical principles (in the so-called post-

conventional phase of autonomous morality), today we can define ethical

responsibility as a primarily respectful ethical response to an existential call of the

other, as personal commitment to respectful being and acting and as care for our life

mission and consistent identity.

The anthropological thesis about the priority of a respectful relationship before an

ethical principle of justice contains two dimensions. We can speak about the priority

of a respectful relationship before the ethical principle in an epistemological sense (of

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‗competing‘ ethical criteria for moral reasoning), and also about the priority of a

respectful relationship before the ethical principle in the developmental sense. The

last thesis simply means that personal qualities for a respectful attitude can be

developed before the child‘s capabilities for ethical reasoning. Ethical and

anthropological ideas lead us to the basic structure of inductive educational

approach, which can be described in three phases:

The child is in his or her first years capable of relations of love and friendship

(even if ethical consciousness demands complex cognitive capacities);

therefore pedagogy supporting these relationships enables the child to

develop relational response-ability and normative agency for prosocial

activities in a most authentic way.

The next important focus is to develop the sense of respect towards concrete

persons or activities because personal engaged relations may be as well

harmful, in case they lead to empathic over-arousal, empathic bias, pity and

paternalism, the next important focus is to develop the sense of respect

towards concrete persons or activities.

The last step of moral education is to become aware of ethical principles and

humanistic demands, especially concerning human rights and ecological

values, and to learn how to use them as a basis for democratic negotiation in

cases of interpersonal conflicts.

What is important to add to this short description is that the proposed model should

not be understood as a step model of classical linear developmental (like Kohlberg‘s

model of the development of moral reasoning) because every phase of the model

remains important for morality even when the next developmental step is reached. As

we have already seen through the short analysis of conflicts about the meaning of

Muslim cultural symbols (keeping in mind the principle of respect while we are trying

to apply logic of justice in a public space) is especially important in multicultural

societies. And the second notion is that the best way of using the inductive model of

moral development is within an inclusive school environment and not only as an

abstract learning of solving moral dilemmas in the classroom.

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We have finally reached the last question that is important for the development of the

inductive approach of prosocial and moral education; how to define an active role for

educators? In the usual disciplinary practices it is obvious that a teacher has a very

active role which is connected with a specific normative idea of how to stop a child‘s

unacceptable behaviour. Also in inductive discipline a teacher should not allow the

child to ‗look away‘ and avoid the recognition of the damage his or her behaviour has

produced. But with careful observation we can notice an important shift in the

normative position towards the child. A teacher is no longer in a position of ultimate

criteria of morality in terms of calling attention to the ethical value, norm or principle.

The ultimate normative criteria demands from the child to look at the face of the

victim, which we have already recognised as the pre-ethical criteria of morality in

Levinas‘ philosophy. Although an educator‘s role in the inductive approach remains

active, the described shift in relation to the ultimate criteria of morality changes the

character of the educator‘s authority. While describing the basic structure of

pedagogical authority, I propose two important features:

Authority is a dialogical and not a substantial concept that could be described

in terms of a set of personal (or formal) features of an educator, a pupil and/or

educational setting (Bingham 2006).

Authority is a concept that enables educational effects but on the other hand it

is a main obstacle to reach the ultimate goal of moral education—development

of personal responsibility and critical moral reasoning (Kroflič 2000).

The solution of this last paradox can be described in terms of creating a type of

educational authority that is constructed through the relationship between teacher

and pupil with the following maxim, ‗The good teacher is therefore a person who is

always working himself out of a job‘. A maxim that was developed from a similar

principle of Aristotle Amicus Plato, magis amica veritas (Plato is my friend, but truth is

a better friend). It is a type of authority that I define as self-limiting authority (ibid.),

similar to the hypothesis of Charles Bingham (2006) on the possible liberating

dimension of authority, ‗Students need to think of teachers and schools as centres of

authority, authority they can use to increase their own agency.‘

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A traditional concept of authority as substance leads us to an educational (or better

say disciplinary) situation that is similar to Kafka‘s novels, where the teacher as the

doorkeeper does not allow students to step behind the wall where the ultimate source

of the moral truth is supposed to lie. And possible liberation lies in the changing role

of a teacher in an educational relationship. The inductive teacher is no longer

pointing a finger to an imaginary ultimate source of moral law and describing him or

herself as a guard at the gates of wisdom. They are stressing the importance of the

face of a person who was a victim of conflict and this person is a witness that

somebody has crossed the line of a respectful relationship. In an epistemological

sense, self-limitation of the teacher‘s authority opens the possibility of activating

moral sentiments and reasoning which leads to a possibility to repair damage.

Combining elements of emotional distress, of prosocial emotions, moral reasoning

and moral acting is how we draw moral education near to the principles of

experiential learning and realistic educational approach, which will be discussed in

the next section.

Inductive educational paradigm and the importance of inclusive education, relational

pedagogy, pedagogy of listening and essential learning

I have already stressed the idea of the possibility for widening inductive approaches

from merely disciplinary practice to the wider set of educational actions that have the

potential for developing multiple choice identity, avoiding growth of personal anxieties

and conflicts about deeper meaning of common ethical values among participants of

different cultural identities. Let‘s face with some other contemporary pedagogical

ideas that are compatible with our approach.

The first pedagogical idea we have already confirmed is the importance of creating

inclusive environments which motivate children and young people to step into

engaged and respectful interrelations. As we saw, the first prosocial motives arise

from engaged relationships towards important Others, and they can be enabled only

in concrete social spaces. In the section on social environments of contemporary

time we have already emphasised values of inclusion and democracy, but also a

postmodern threat to the individual which is connected with the fact that traditional

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social institutions do not play any more a role of social stabilisers of identity

development. Amongst descriptions of new models of engaged social spaces we also

find the concept of so called third spaces. This concept was first described by Ray

Oldenburg and Christopher Lasch in the early nineties of the twentieth century as a

place of open and intimate communication that was developed in between public

space of institutions and private space of the family. Materialisation of such third

places can be recognised in cafés and bars in the period of student rebellions in the

late sixties and early seventies of the twentieth century, and later in squats (buildings

which young proponents of alternative cultures occupied mostly in urban big cities).

The basic purpose of third places is a creation of alternative utopist realities to take

people‘s lives out of singularity of their jobs, families and politics, and into world of

fantasies, loitering and blathering. It just makes people happier, and happy people

eventually make better citizens. Searching for possibilities for a dialogue is also one

of the basic expectations of young people that motivate them for school activities.

And such personal dialogue as the meeting of existential questions and possible

answers with the same uncertainties of fellow persons is also the core of identity

development that should be enabled in schools (Sidorkin 1997).

What creates the basic feature of third places despite engaged relations is the

celebration of differences and respectful attitude towards the face of the Other in their

radical alterity. Amongst new pedagogical conceptions, the proponents of relational

pedagogy have emphasised the importance of engaged relationships for the identity

development in the most profound way. In their Manifesto of Relational Pedagogy

(Bingham and Sidorkin 2004, pp. 6-7) we can find further basic thesis:

A relation is more real than the things it brings together. Human beings and

non-human things (like art objects of performances; note by R. K.) acquire

reality only in relation to other beings and things.

The self is a knot in the web of multiple intersecting relations; pull relations out

of the web, and find no self. We do not have relations; relations have us.

Authority and knowledge are not something one has, but relations, which

require others to enact.

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Human relations exist in and through shared practices.

Relations are complex; they may not be described in single utterances. To

describe a relation is to produce a multi-voiced text.

Relations are primary; actions are secondary. Human words and actions have

no authentic meaning; they acquire meaning only in a context of specific

relations.

Teaching is building educational relations. Aims of teaching and outcomes of

learning can both be defined as specific forms of relations to oneself, people

around the students, and the larger world.

Educational relations are different from any other; their nature is transitional.

Educational relations exist to include the student in a wider web of relations

beyond the limits of educational relation.

Relations are not necessarily good; human relationality is not an ethical value.

Domination is as relational as love.

If we accept a thesis about the fragility of pedagogical relations that can tend to the

domination towards the pupil/student, we can recognise the importance of respectful

and personally engaged teachers (both concepts are from the project GoodWork®

and Gardner‘s Five Minds for the Future). But from the same thesis another important

pedagogical activity of inductive approach appears. Fear from radical otherness is

tightly connected with real or possible domination practices which represent

pressures towards our identity choices. We have presented methods of

deconstruction in the section Deconstruction of hegemonic social concepts of

modernity – the case of insanity, which can be, together with clear depictions of

oppressive acts through inductive disciplinary practices and building ethical

consciousness of human rights, used to reduce children‘s anxieties and concrete

fears from possible offensive relations.

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The next postmodern concept that can deepen inductive educational paradigms is

the concept of recognition of the other as different and the pedagogy of listening.

These ideas were developed in the most profound form in the Italian early childhood

concept of Reggio Emilia.

What exactly is recognition? And what kind of educational approach does the

concept of recognition demand?

First of all, recognition is much more than our intention to understand the other

person. If we accept Emanuel Levinas‘ ethics, when we think we know and

understand the Other, we are exercising our knowledge over the Other, shrouding

the Other in our own totality. The Other becomes an object of our comprehension,

our world, our narrative, reducing the Other to us. What is at stake is our ego. But if

we are exposed to the Other, we can listen, attend, and be surprised; the Other can

affect me, bring me more than I contain. And insofar as I can be receptive and

susceptible I can learn from the Other as one who is absolutely different from myself

(Todd 2001, p. 73).

Recognition is also much more than tolerance or passive empathy, when we only feel

sorry about the bad fortune of the other person. It is an active relationship. When we

recognise another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking

for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we

were constituted prior to the encounter itself. Instead, in the asking we have already

become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need

and desire for the Other. It is also to stake one‘s own being and one‘s own

persistence in one‘s own being, in the struggle for recognition (Buttler 2004).

In educational practices, the concept of recognition is also warning us to reject

traditional prejudices about a child as an infirm, incompetent, egocentric and

narcissistic being that is impossible to step into relationships and mutual activities

with fellow persons on the basis of respect. The founder of the Reggio Emilia concept

of pre-school education, Loris Malaguzzi was one of the first authors who affirmed

the thesis that a child is a cognitive, emotional and social competent being, who has

a right to be accepted as an active partner in educational activities. As Malaguzzi

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(1998) mentioned in one of his interviews, among the goals of their approach is to

reinforce each child‘s sense of identity through a recognition that comes from peers

and adults, so much that each would feel enough sense of belonging and self-

confidence to participate in the activities of the school. They seek to support those

social exchanges that better ensure flow of expectations, conflicts, cooperations and

choices. Children are apt to explore, make discoveries, change their points of view,

and fall in love with forms and meanings that transform themselves. But to really

foster these creative and susceptive capacities of even pre-school children, we have

to recognise ‗one hundred languages of a child‘, or as Sharon Todd (2003) writes,

attentiveness to the creative capacity for making meaning has to become part of the

ethical project of listening. Recognition of the other as different from us and a unique

person, therefore form together with just distribution of society goods to all citizens

(where we are especially concerned for theparticularly most vulnerable persons) one

of the basic features of justice.

To accept concepts of recognition, listening becomes one of the basic features of this

new educational approach. Carlina Rinaldi (2006) writes in her new book In Dialogue

with Reggio Emilia with the subtitle Listening, researching and learning that listening

is a metaphor for openness to others, therefore it means giving value to the other.

She is convinced that the search for the meaning of life and of the self is born with

the child and is desired by the child, and to construct it the child is using ‗one

hundred languages‘ from the very early childhood. This is why we have to talk about

a child who is competent and strong, the child, whom we view as an active subject

that is constructing theories of life from the very early childhood. But it is important to

also know that our theory needs to be listened to by others. This makes it possible to

transform a world that is intrinsically personal into something shared, which is urgent

when we understand that our knowledge and our identities are also constructed by

the other. Sharing theories is a response to uncertainty and solitude that become

alive from our social needs as well as our needs to develop individual self-identities.

Let‘s close this section with ideas about the real transformational form of education

which can be called essential learning.

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Essential learning can be defined as learning that touches the deepest levels of our

personality and because of its intensity, a feeling of self-fulfilment occurs as a side

effect of our learning activities. Amongst theoretical concepts that enabled us to

better understand transformational educational experiences we have to mention

Abraham Maslow‘s research on peak experiences, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept

of flow, and Fred Korthagen‘s concept of the onion model and core reflection – a

method that can help a teacher to become dedicated to essential learning.

All the concepts mentioned above have something in common – they try to describe

educational experiences that have a deep influence on the development of our self-

identity. The most profound examples of peak experiences Maslow found in the field

of religious transformations like Savel‘s meeting with the truth of Christianity that

have changed him to Paul – one of the first founders of Christian theology. But

Maslow also emphasised that peak experiences can be found in the other fields of

profound human activity which enable our ultimate need for self-actualisation,

especially in admiring unspoiled natural environments and in artistic events.

Csikszentmihalyi's (1991) concept of flow is more experimentally proved description

of such profound experiences. It is described as a state of being completely in the

here-and-now, optimally connecting the demands of the situation with one‘s inner

capacities and enabling optimal creative competences of the individual, concerning

our cognitive and also motivational capabilities. Simply said, in a state of flow we are

capable of optimal achievements at the same time as optimal enjoyment in the

activity, and this is when our learning and creating becomes hard fun.

In searching for the explanation of how to become aware of possible activities that

give us a feeling of self-fulfilment, Korthagen created the onion model – an

explanation model of the levels of our personality that are engaged in educational

experiences, but also a special concept of self-reflection that helps us to become

aware of our deeper values, identity determinations and life missions as personal

strengths for successful learning activities and professional practices. Because

Korthagen‘s concepts will be discussed in the final chapter of this book, I would only

like to emphasise again here that his ideal of realistic pedagogical approach was built

on the same idea of the change of normativity as inductive approach and on

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emphasising the importance of engaged interrelations as relational pedagogy.

Together with the seven step didactical model of citizenship education and identity

development created by Wim Kratsborn, principles of inductive approach, relational

pedagogy and realistic education form are the core educational activities in the

European Multiple Choice Identity Project.

Essential learning in a state of flow has some similar characteristics as those which

were discussed when we spoke about authentic relationships. So like authentic

relations we can also speak about authentic activities that enable us a sense of

fulfilment and self-realisation, of ‗full time‘, of creativity and flow. Amongst them art is

one of the most traditional areas of authentic activity. Being engaged in authentic

activities opens the possibility of peak experiences and the development of our self-

identity. In his famous book Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer describes

aesthetic experience as the essence of experience per se. The work of art tears the

person experiencing it out of the context of their life, and yet relates them back to the

whole of their existence. In the experience of art there is present a fullness of

meaning that belongs not only to the particular content or object but which rather

stands for the meaningful whole of life. In the following section I would like to present

the idea of art as the core of humanistic education and an excellent tool for identity

development.

Art as the core of humanistic education and identity development

The main purpose of this section is to show why the debate about the worth of art as

a core of humanistic education is today more important than ever. As we will see

from a brief historical analysis, core values of the postmodern era open more

opportunities to defend a thesis about intrinsic value of educational experience and

its role in developing personal identity, or as in Constantijn Koopman‘s (2005) words,

about art as personal fulfilment. This of course does not mean that lectures about art

are sufficient a tool for achieving this pedagogical goal, although they are important

to educate pupils/students to be more open to concrete artistic experiences as an

artist or as an admirer of fine arts. What we will focus on in this section will therefore

not be a discussion on education about arts but the discussion about education

through art experiences.

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As we have already seen in the section about deconstruction of hegemonic social

concepts of modernity, art (especially literature and music) was from antiquity and for

centuries recognised as a core of humanistic education, but its ‗pedagogical role‘ was

usually reduced to the media of transmitting existing cultural patterns and ideological

standpoints, or to say in another way – from utilitarian criteria. Already Plato had

demanded a selection of myths/stories for different bodies of society, when the

message of an art object was not appropriate for the wider public and we can trace

the same intention in Christian schools in medieval period. The same criteria was

central in the period from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, when growth of

interest for folk tales occurred and author‘s fairytales became an important

pedagogical tool (Charles Perrault, Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen). In

the nineteenth century utilitarian criteria of worth of an art as the core of humanistic

education begun to prevail according to Spencer‘s statement that ‗as arts occupy the

leisure part of life, so should they occupy the leisure part of education‘ (Reimer

1998, str. 145),. And at the end of the twentieth century we can find a desperate

search for proof that art experiences have positive impacts on the development of

different intelligences and school achievements, but unfortunately a serious meta-

analysis of many research studies does not confirm most of these expectations.

Changes of basic educational aims in postmodern pedagogy from the cultural-

transmission model (education as transmission of core values and truths from great

narratives of modern philosophy and science) to process oriented education (that

foster personal development in the direction of auto-regulative competencies and

respectful relations towards the other as different) demand new efforts to find

reasons for the inner value of aesthetics experience. When we accept this thesis

about affirmation of specific postmodern values and deconstruction of meanings of

modern scientific orientations, we find the basis for reaffirmation of intrinsic value of

art experience – it is worth for our self-fulfilment together with respectful attitude and

continuous identity development.

Intrinsic value of educational experience

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Let‘s now look at some contemporary ideas about art as one of most authentic

expressions of humanity that has an important educational value, not only because of

its ideological message, but also because of its inner structure. If art experience is a

kind of embodiment of knowledge (or embodied knowledge) about myself and the

Other, then we have to find something in its inner structure that confirms its value

beyond a utilitarian criteria. In the RAND study Gifts of the Muse (Reframing the

Debate About the Benefits of the Arts (McCarthy et al. 2004) we find a further

explanation of art as a communicative process:

Figure 1: Art as a Communicative Process

People who bring meaningful forms into existence are generally called artists and

anyone so engaged is, at the time of engagement, being an artist (Reimer 1998). In

the field of philosophy of education this simply means that anyone who is engaged in

the experience of art – to be a creator, or co-creator (musician playing a piece of

music that was written by another artist) of artistic expression, or just a person

enjoying the piece of art – exists in the field of aesthetic experience. This statement

of course does not mean that art classes which offer lectures about (the history of) art

to students automatically offers artistic experiences. If we want to ensure student

appreciation of the art object, they have to be faced with the presentation of a real art

object and motivated to enjoy in it, express their feelings, and interpret the message

of the artistic event as their personal experience. There are several reasons and

concepts that confirm communicative understanding of art. First of all, the insight into

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the thesis that a piece of art is a kind of bridge between the mind of the artist and the

public is crucial for understanding the inner value of the art experience.

The artistic process is one of the most complex, mysterious and only partly conscious

human activities that includes intuition and expression (see top oval on figure 1).

Intuition can be described as a highly developed capacity for vivid experiencing of the

world, including one‘s inner, private world. It is a cultivated sensitivity for observing

life, a capacity for receiving its impressions which enables the artist to present this

impression and vision of pieces of subjective reality to the public (which is not

capable of such deep observing and contemplating of life). And artistic expression is,

in the opinion of the Irish novelist Joyce Cary, ‗a kind of translation, not from one

language into another, but one state of existence into another, from the receptive into

creative, from the purely sensuous impression into the purely reflective and critical

act‘, or as the same thought was expressed by Charles Taylor in his monumental

work Sources of the Self, artistic expression is ‗a bit of ―frozen‖ potential

communication‘ (McCarthy et al. 2004).

The process of appreciation (see bottom oval on figure 1) is parallel to the artistic

process because individual experience is an inner one, intensely personal and

private, and the interpretative experience is the attempt to express to others what that

direct experience is like. Unlike most human communication, art communicates

through direct experience, and the core of our response to the piece of art is a kind of

intense feeling that is enriched by critical reflection. This means that aesthetic

experience is not limited to passive spectatorship, but it stimulates curiosity,

questioning and the search for explanation.

The key question of aesthetics, whether the art is a representation of reality or an

expression of a subjective view, emotions and visions, remain, in the opinion of the

authors of the RAND study, still open: they declare art as ‗objectivation of subjective

life‘ or ‗an outward showing of inward nature‘. This means that art can fill the gap left

by scientific and technological discourse of Western European culture. Rather than

describing the world in impersonal, abstract or mathematical terms, it presents a

created reality based on personal perspective (often surprising and original) that

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includes the whole uncensored human being with all its feelings, imaginings and

yearnings.

Educational value of artistic imagination

One of the most important characteristics of artistic expression for the development

of humanity is artistic imagination. It is the concept that is clearly separated from pure

fantasy, and contains selective and evaluative functions. In artistic imagination we

are focusing on the meaningful life events separating them from unimportant

routines, and valuating them according to the destiny of imaginary character. We can

say even more so, that artistic imagination is a cognitive capacity, which enables us

to reach a coherent image of the world with the use of empathy. Artistic imagination

is the means to reach the world of the Other in a way that we become accustomed to

‗as if‘ worlds which were created by writers, painters, sculptors, movie directors,

choreographers and composers, and enabled us to gain new perspectives on life –

so important for the postmodern conception of humanity and ethical consciousness

(Greene 1995). It motivates us to become accustomed to the artistic created person

or event, empathic with its destiny, to restrict our ego fantasies about ourselves as

centres of the universe, to reflect on life events we would never experience, and to

create visions about possible worlds that abolish selfishness and injustice. So it is not

a coincidence that in the last few decades we can find more and more proof that

human moral understanding is fundamentally imaginative and that metaphor is one of

the principal mechanisms of imaginative cognition.

Martha Nussbaum in her influential work Cultivating Humanity (1997) identifies three

important dimensions of the artistic imagination: narrative imagination, deliberative

imagination and compassionate imagination. Cultivating humanity by art was what

form Socrates, stoics and Seneca held as the central part of basic education,

because;

. . . habits of empathy and community conduce to a certain type of citizenship

and a certain form of community: one that cultivates a sympathetic

responsiveness to another's needs, and understands the way circumstances

shape those needs, while respecting separateness and privacy. This is so

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because of the way in which literary imagining both inspires intense concern

with the fate of characters and defines those characters as containing a rich

inner life, not all of which is open to view; in the process, the reader learns to

have respect for the hidden contents of that inner world, seeing its importance

in defining a creature as fully human. (ibid., p. 90)

This description of penetrating into the soul of a literal hero liberates the reader‘s

stereotypical perception (what can be called deliberative imagination) and enables

empathy and compassion. Compassion involves the recognition that another person,

in some ways similar to oneself, has suffered some significant pain or misfortune in a

way for which that person is not, or not fully, to blame. Compassion includes one

more important dimension that is the sense of my own vulnerability, which tells me

that I could experience a similar destiny to the literal hero in my future, which causes

my readiness to generously help, ‗That might have been me, and that is how I should

want to be treated.‘ This last dimension of imagination Nussbaum describes as

compassionate imagination, and its value is connected with our readiness to have an

empathic recognition of the social position of different, marginalised, invisible persons

in a global world of differences.

Educational value of narration

Another key concept of art expression that indicates its importance for the

development of humanity is narration. After the fall of rationalistic conviction that

ethical dilemmas can be reduced to abstract events, which are separate from the

individual destiny of subjects and from the contingent nature of social circumstances,

Carol Gilligan (2001) stresses the importance of the reconstruction of ethical dilemma

in its contextual particularity which enables understanding of causes and

consequences. Telling the story in a narrative way can be seen as a new way of

understanding and truth. Shaping our own stories and, at the same time, opening

ourselves to other stories in all their variety and their different degrees of

articulateness is also of great importance for the growth of identity. Especially stories

with ‗open narrative fable‘ will act to enable aesthetic transgression on

institutionalised moral chains (deductive moral norms) and can motivate critical

reflection and inductive learning. As we have already shown, the inductive approach

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starts morally and identity development from the analysis of concrete conflict

situations (which demand an emphatic relation towards narrative and metaphor of a

concrete situation) and not from the notion on the importance of social rule/norm,

which was the starting point of social learning in the classical culture-transmission

model of education. So the ultimate value of the story told by an artist is not the moral

meaning, but opening the possibilities for a reader, listener or spectator to step into

the narration, to recognise existential dilemmas of main characters of the story and to

receive new experiences of life events which will probably never happen to

themselves.

Educational value of metaphor

A short, but very convincing argument about the importance of metaphor can be

found in the famous study The Sovereignty of Good, written by Murdoch (1970),

where she claims that we can catch sight of good only in an indirect way through

metaphor, so admiring the beauty in art or nature is the most accessible way for a

spiritual experience and a proper way to a good life, because it masters our

selfishness with an aim to see the truth. This argument about the importance of

metaphor arises from the analysis of the role of metaphorical thinking in Platonic

philosophy, and especially his famous metaphor of the cave, where he presents the

idea about the incapacity to picture and describe Good in a direct way. So where

analytical language fails to describe truth, art can – with the help of imagination,

narration, and metaphor – create ‘embodied meaning’, which replaces invisible

secrets of life into visible spheres, and so enables transformative experiences and

personal fulfilment.

Art as a sense-opener, as a source of knowledge, and as a cross-over

In the European Multiple Choice Identity project, we are using art as a special tool for

the development of personal and collective (European) identity of children and young

people according to Gardner‘s theory of multiple intelligences. In the seven step

didactical model, constructed by Wim Kratsborn, different kinds of arts (we are

especially using music, visual arts and design, literature, drama and dancing) have

an important role as a:

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Sense-opener and motivational tool for becoming familiar with different topics

of educational activities (such as identity, family and friends, good work,

migrations and mobility, and the otherness);

Source of knowledge about selected topics;

Cross-over or to say simply, a tool for breaking cultural barriers (by preventing

children from fear about the radical otherness and finding common ground for

intercultural dialogue in a respectful way).

Artistic activities can be an excellent introduction to lessons on different topics, like

history lessons, presentations of ethical and political struggles and dilemmas etc. In

inductive approaches to prosocial and moral development, opening senses for

different relationships has an even deeper meaning. For children in very early years,

rhythmic singing and declamation of a simple child song together with using fingers,

‗walking‘ through different parts of a child‘s body, can become the activity that

enables a child‘s response-ability to make physical contact with another person. In

the European Multiple Choice Identity project on the topics of identity we use such

musical games as Bibarije for one to three year old children as a source of the

development of a child‘s response-ability to the presence of the other person (a

teacher or peer) which strengthens their sense of otherness of another person. This

experiment confirmed our thesis that using declamation and ‗finger walking‘ can

stimulate different directions of relationships between a child and teacher or peer;

and in an inclusive environment where children with special needs are integrated in

the heterogeneous group with children without specific handicaps. These activities

enabled possibilities for reducing fear from radical differences and for new forms of

personal contacts.

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PICTURES 12

Bibarije

Photo by Robi kroflič

Art can be also an excellent media for reaching new knowledge on selected topics.

Even Aristotle has already claimed that artistic expression of an event from the past

can tell us about the meaning of it more than an objective historical report. It is even

clearer today that we can learn a lot about the specific event from a poem, drama,

song or painting. I have already emphasised the possibility to understand historical

practices of exclusion of people with mental handicaps in European modernity with

metaphorical descriptions of paintings, graphics and literature. It is the same method

we use in the course about special educational needs for students of Pedagogy at

university level.

Perhaps the most important function of artistic activities in a globalised world of

cultural and individual differences is cross-over. Despite the fact that art is rooted in a

specific cultural frame, it is obvious that artistic expressions can break cultural

barriers and make intersecting worlds of differences visible and acceptable to us.

54

Perhaps the best example is so called world music which was developed from ethno

music from all parts of the globe and became very popular over the last two decades.

Listening to sunny fado music of Portugal in cold lands of Frisland, dancing to techno

beats connected with tango music of Argentina in Western Europe are just a few

examples of glocalisation (or ‗reverse-globalisation‘) processes of contemporary

cross-over where music is especially creating new inter-connected social spaces and

practices of respectful cohabitation.

Art as fulfilment in the postmodern world

I would like to conclude this chapter with the idea that art can be seen as a practice

of transformative experiences and personal fulfilment, because it has a power to

express the basic secrets of life and allows us to begin a dialogue with the otherness

of fellow-persons, and also with the otherness in the core of our personality. Let's

show some of the most famous arguments for this hypothesis.

Let‘s start with Wittgenstein‘s theory about closeness and the transcendental nature

of the languages of ethics, of religious experiences, and of art that rests on the

recognition of the different language of art which can reach some extensions of truth

better than the analytical language of science. When we follow the thesis about art

experience as one of the most authentic forms of human activities of personal

fulfilment we should not forget Gadamer‘s thesis about ‗fulfilled time‘, exemplified by

the feast or celebration, where the feast is a paradigm for the arts. Just like the feast,

the work of art presents an episode of fulfilled time. Fulfilment is effected by the

organic unity of work. Every detail is united with the whole. As an internally structured

unity, the art work has its own fulfilled time. Fulfilment is also central to the John

Dewey concept of art as experience, which means ‗to have an experience in a strong

sense‘, to experience wholeness and self-sufficiency because art acts to clarify and

intensify events of every day experiences. So Gadamer and Dewey have offered us

two different perspectives on the idea of fulfilment in the arts, the first one with the

concept of fulfilled time, and the second one with the concept of completed

experience. These two perspectives are supplementing, because the value of the

arts resides in our complete involvement from moment to moment when receiving,

creating or performing an art work (Koopman 2005).

55

The idea of art fulfilment also coincides with Maslow‘s concept of peak experience

and Csikszentmihalyi‘s concept of flow. Flow comes from the feeling of total fulfilment

in an artistic process that causes a peak experience of pleasure and happiness,

which is brilliantly described by the testimony of the poet Mark Strand:

Well, you‘re right in the work, you lose your sense of time, you‘re completely

enraptured, you‘re completely caught up in what you‘re doing, and you‘re sort

of swayed by the possibilities you see in this work. If that becomes too

powerful, then you get up, because the excitement is too great. You can‘t

continue to work or continue to see the end of the work because you‘re

jumping ahead of yourself all the time. The idea is to be so . . . so saturated

with it that there‘s no future or past, it‘s just an extended present in which

you‘re . . . making meaning.

(McCarthy et al. 2004, p. 46)

If we turn our analysis again to the characteristics of life in the postmodern era and

the role of art for a fulfilled life in this liquid and risky time of multiple choices and

continuous need for reflection, I would like to conclude with the two most frequently

emphasised positive roles of art. The first one is the fact that the world we live in is

composed of an uncountable number of simultaneously existing perspectives and

viewpoints, so our personal growth has to include searching for our personal voice

and playing participatory and well articulated roles in the communities. Or as the

same thought was expressed by Martha Nussbaum in her book Love’s Knowledge:

Essays on Philosophy and Literature:

Art provides an extension of life not only horizontally, bringing the reader into

contact with events of locations or persons or problems he or she has not

otherwise met, but also, so to speak, vertically, giving the reader experience

that is deeper, sharper, and more precise than much of what takes place in

life.

(McCarthy et al. 2004, p. 47)

56

This ‗deep, sharp, and precise‘ self-understanding and self-fulfilment is also strongly

connected with the otherness around me that warns me about otherness in the core

of my personality (especially non-reflected fears, stereotypes, but also admirations

and joys). To defeat fear of otherness so common to human beings, we need

activities that have strong motivational character and emotional engagement in our

too objectified world. Or, as the same thought was expressed by two giants of art in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which

the heart should have warmed itself (Schiller), so a book must be an ice-axe to break

the sea frozen inside us (Kafka).

57

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