ARTE 710 September 14—Schooling
Discussion questions:



Why did Greene use these specific literary references in her work?
How does Greene’s emancipatory education differ from most formal k-12 (and some higher ed) schooling?
How can Greene’s ideas be implemented in schools today? (See Jeffers’ article)
Dialectic of Freedom related artwork (poetry and novels)









Eliot, “Murder in the Cathedral,” pg. 1
Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, pg. 9
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, pg. 14
Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, pg. 30
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, pg. 33
Hawthorne, The Scarlett Letter, pg. 33
Melville, Moby Dick, pg. 38
Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, pg. 41
Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, pg. 48
Greene’s idea of schooling/emancipatory education
Ayers (1998)—
“She was challenging her students to join her in ‘doing philosophy,’” pg. 5
“Students were given access to an active mind, inquiring openly and in full view,” pg. 6
‘”My field of study is lived situations,’ she said one night,” pg. 6
Themes of her teaching pg. 7

“People are […] sentenced to create meaningful lives in the face of disorder.”

Dewey: “mind as verb rather than noun.”

arts= “confronting the blandness of life, imagining a different world, a more humane social order.”

freedom= “refusal of the fixed, reaching for possibility, engagement with obstacles […] an achievement to be sought in a
web of relationships, an intersubjective reality.”

“To be human is to be involved in a quest […] a refusal to accede to the given.”

teaching= possibilities, newness, horizons

the dangers of life= “indifferent, thoughtless, careless.”
‘”Let’s not make a fetish of chairs in a circle,’” pg. 8
“’I must challenge mostly the muffled view, the ways routines and methodical systems allow a life of habit and not of choice,’” pg. 8
“I began teaching at the age of twenty in 1965 […] I absorbed the idea early that that the hope for freedom and the practice of
education could be linked […] I first discovered and invented my teaching in upheaval […],” pg. 9
Kohli (1998)—
Greene’s personal philosophy =existential phenomenology (the study of lived experiences) and the idea of becoming pg. 11
Visual representations: tapestry and cyborgs pg. 12
Greene became involved in the philosophy of education was a “gendered accident;” Kohli introduces the background and historical
context for Greene’s work and career pg. 13-16
“School” [?] needs to unite public and private pg. 16
“Philosophy as a noun is transformed into a verb in the Greene lexicon […] the philosophical act,” pg. 16
Greene (1988)—
Rebuttal of the general definition of freedom, pg. 1
Humane choosing/intelligent choosing, pg. 4
We must believe that the world can be transformed, pg. 4
“Freedom ought to be conceived of as an achievement within the concreteness of lived social situations rather than as a primordial
or original possession,” pg. 5
“Rather than being challenged to attend to the actualities of their lived lives, students are urged to attend to what is ‘given’ in the
outside world,’” pg. 7
“There are ambiguities of various kinds, layers of determinateness. Freedom, like autonomy, is in many ways dependent on
understanding these ambiguities,” pg. 9
About Hannah Arendt’s writing on WWII: “’[…] begun to create that public space between themselves where freedom could
appear,” pg. 15
“Dewey […] did not believe that the self was ready-made or pre-existent; it was, he said, ‘something in continuous formation
through choice of action’” pg. 21-22
“Becoming the ‘author’ of one’s world,” pg. 22
“Here and there, in the open space of a progressive private school, freedom was linked to spontaneity and expressiveness,” pg. 48
“We need to be continually empowered to choose ourselves, to create our identities within a plurality; we need continually to make
new promises and to act in our freedom to fulfill them, something we can never do meaningfully alone,” pg. 51
“Freedom, as we have seen it, is the capacity to take initiatives, to begin,” pg. 55
NOT part of Greene’s view of schooling/emancipatory education (from Greene 1988)

“The idea of freedom as an indulgence of the instinctual and the irrational,” pg. 7

Top of pg. 8: people as objects rather than subjects

Pg. 12: schools seen as places to “process the young,” where “reality” is never questioned or criticized

pg. 13: education as “kitsch,” and the school system as a “channeling colony”

pg. 15: advocacy for a modern life that distracts from the search for freedom

pg. 17: Who benefits from the current concept of American “freedom”? How does this negatively affect schooling?

pg. 19: A shift from the public domain to an “intimate vision” (i.e., television, the internet)

“Isolat[ion] from a world where people coming together might bring change,” pg. 25

“’scientific management’ and ‘efficiency’ in education,” pg. 48

“They said they felt obliterated as living persons, reduced to statistical formulations, to ‘IBM cards.’” U of Michigan
students’ “sense of being manipulated by unknown forces, the powerlessness they had experienced under their apparent
complacency,” pg. 51

“Schools could not and did not intend to ‘free’ children from automatism or ignorance so that they could become
participating citizens and, at once, pursue success. Rather, the schools were meant to impose certain value systems and
constraints so that energies would be appropriately channeled to suit the requirements of the society,” pg. 53

Bottom of pg. 54, dangers of technology
Visual depiction of author’s POV:
“Originally, I imagined a weaving. The sturdy warp, constituted by eh persistent themes of freedom, justice, community, democracy
and imagination, meets the colorful woof threads spun out of the multiple realities from/to which she speaks […] On second
thought, I realized this weaving might have to take the shape of a three-dimensional tapestry, a form open to improvisation, to
complexity, to singularity” (Kohli, 1998, p. 12).
(Image from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tapestry_weaving.jpg)
Schooling Annotated Bibliography
Apple, M. W. (2008). Can schooling contribute to a more just society? Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice, 3 (3),
239-261. doi: 10.1177/1746197908095134
Apple’s article focused on the non-Greene style schooling that is typical in public schools after NCLB. He
observed that it’s important for teachers to remember the localized context of their schools and the needs of their real
children in their actual schools. Policies and required curriculum often do not match up with the realities of most
classrooms (especially classrooms in less privileged areas). Apple warned that progressive/emancipatory educators need
to keep their eyes open for neo-liberal school reforms that purport to bring freedom to education, but in reality are
detached from the needs of students and the reality of students’ daily lives.
Collin, R. (2011). Dress rehearsal: A Bourdieusian analysis of body work in career portfolio programs. British Journal of S
Sociology of Education, 32(5). doi: 10.1080/01425692.2011.596378
Collin’s article offered a more specific example of a non-Greene style schooling initiative that, on the surface,
sounds beneficial to students: a required program in high schools in which students prepare portfolios to “sell”
themselves to employers and colleges. While the premise of the portfolio program states that students can use the
portfolios to express themselves creatively and with a certain degree of freedom, in reality, only a strict type of portfolio
is considered acceptable. Collin noted that students of higher social economic classes seemed more comfortable with
this “limited freedom”/negative freedom than students from lower SES backgrounds.
Eisner, E. W. (2003). Artistry in education. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 47(3). doi:
0031383032000079317
In contrast to the first two articles, Eisner’s article advocated a view of schooling in line with Greene’s
philosophy of schooling. Eisner claimed that artistry and creativity run parallel with education, and that formalized
education should embrace the arts and eliminate policies that stifle student creativity.
Jeffers, C.S. (1993). Teacher education: A context for art education. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 27(3). Retrieved from
JSTOR.org.
In this article about student teaching for art educators, Jeffers cited Philip Jackson’s work on the management of
students in schools. Jackson wrote that the group, rather than the individual, is the focus in schools. This creates a
challenge for encouraging the individual exploration of the arts and the sense of freedom that Greene discussed. Jeffers
asked how art fits into the “managed” institution of schools, with a focus on teacher education.
Sleeter, C. & Stillman, J. (2005). Standardizing knowledge in a multicultural society. Curriculum Inquiry, 35(1). Retrieved
from JSTOR.org.
The authors of this study used Basil Bernstein’s theory of “codes of power” to analyze standardized curriculum
from California. They asserted that the state mandated curriculum, created mainly by educators of European-American
backgrounds, isolated students of color, bilingual students, and others while building up the existing power of those
already in control. Though this article did not address art education, it reflected the issues Greene discussed about
schools not offering students the opportunity to “question reality.” Instead, the required California curriculum inflicted a
view of reality on students that did not match up with their lived experiences.