I was putting some books of a bookshelf that sticks out in a little corridor and upon which I have stubbed my toe frequently, and I reach out and for no apparent reason pull a couple of books from the shelf. One turned out to be: After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning. I don’t remember the name of the other book. But I opened After-Education and looking here and there read passages like the following:
Patient and analyst are faced with the problem of passing (from the wish to 'know thyself accept thyself, be thyself' to becoming the reality such words suggest. There is a gap between knowing about x and being x" (213). And in some sense education as a method should not and indeed cannot fill that gap. The field of education takes a different view: there shall be a meeting of theory and practice, and it shall be experienced as one learns to teach and as one teaches others. From an analytic vantage, the very conflict that inaugurates knowledge—that is, the difference of theory and practice--is foreclosed in the idealized coupling of theory and practice and the wish for a practice without conflict.
I wish more people thought about education in these sorts of ways. Some very few do of course. But I don’t run across them every day, and this sort of view of education would appear about the furthest thing imginable from the average college professors views on education, if he or she has in fact bothered to articulate any.
Because they have not bothered to articulate a view and because, in their devotion to a certain limited conception of reason, trying to convince the average professor that deeper things are going on in the classroom is nearly impossible. I don’t even know where to start, and frankly I do wish these things could be written about with greater clarity than I find in the above passage. Additionally, the author does not appear to be talking about education more generally but about the training and education that goes along with psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis is murky stuff. Still I can’t quite grasp the connection between “education as a method should not and indeed cannot fill that gap” and “field of education takes a different view: there shall be a meeting of theory and practice, and it shall be experienced as one learns to teach and as one teaches others.” I understand the first part as saying that education (as a method?) shouldn’t fill the gap. The student should; he or she must fill it. But I don’t see how one fills it with a “method.” And how is education as a method different from “education as a field that takes a different view: “there shall be a meeting of theory and practice.”
Still I find this a bit helpful. Lately I have experience my own educational efforts as hopeless; another way to put it might be: filled with conflict. Perhaps I yearn for that “idealized” coupling of theory and practice.
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