Societal thinking about education in the United States reached a pinnacle of cloudy superficiality with the assumptions underlying the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001."   Corresponding to this, the treatment of education in Jane Martin's Educational Metamorphoses represents a pinnacle of insight.  The book should be widely read by the public, by policy makers and by students and faculties in schools of education.  Jane Martin is a one of America's most distinguished philosophers of education.  She has been based for many years at the University of Massachusetts at Boston where she is now Professor Emerita.  She is the author of seven books including the wonderful and accessible Cultural Miseducation (Teachers College Press, 2002).  For anyone interested in thinking seriously and deeply about American education, Martin's work is the place to go. 

A persistent feature of her thought has been the warning not to equate education with schooling.  The education of children and others is a cultural project.  In the best of conditions it is accomplished by a multitude of cultural institutions of which schools are but one.  This conviction is present in full force in Educational Metamorphoses.

Martin is interested in the phenomenon of "whole person identity transformations".  These are changes within a person where it is true to say that he has become a "new person".   It is tempting to think about this in terms of a distinction between traits that are "essential" to a person and those that are not.  To get a haircut or master trigonometry does not change who one is, to emerge from a life crippled by addiction or to transform oneself from a street hood to a respected leader does.  Some believe (wrongly I think) that traits of birth such as race, ethnicity, sex, national origin, sexual preference, physical characteristics (deafness, blindness, tallness) form part of who one is, that they provide us an immutable identity and a set of specific obligations to accompany it.  It is this idea that leads to anger at those who "pass" (as straight or white or gentile), charges that a successful person has deserted her kind and claims of what a woman's or Irishman's "place" is.

Martin chooses to think of identity transformations as cultural passages.  This idea was likely influenced by her years of teaching first generation students, men and women who receive their degrees as members of a different social class from which they came and from that of relatives and old friends.  How many times did I hear my immigrant father declare, "Is that what I sent you to college to learn?"  In the case of adult students, illustrated by the film Educating Rita, which Martin beautifully discusses, the years of study have moved one spouse out of the culture of his or her partner.  Martin cleverly illustrates her points with familiar cases including those of Malcolm X, Eliza Doolittle, the Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez, the South African author of Kaffir Boy Mark Mathabane (whom it was my pleasure to teach), Victor – the "wild boy of Aveyron", and others.   Each of these discussions is subtle and interesting.  Among the types of transformations Martin illustrates and analyzes are metamorphoses of mothering, coming of age, schooling, soldiering and politics.   

  Martin's thoughts on cultural passage have direct relevance to immigration, a persistent topic in today's news.  Perhaps the most interesting section of the work is her discussion of the pains of assimilation and whether a transformed person can "go home again".  She quotes the Inuit boy Minik who was thrust into the American metropolis, "It would have been better for me … had I never been brought to civilization." (127)   I am reminded of the coming-of-age refrain from Bob Seger's "Against the Wind", "I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then."  What's interesting about Martin's discussion is that every cultural passage should be both an acceptance and a giving.  The person facing transformation (immigrant, recovered alcoholic or newly minted graduate) must accept a host of new forms of living from the receiving group, but should arrive with gifts from her past that will enrich her new neighbors.  In the ideal, this relationship would be reciprocal where the receiving culture schools a newcomer, an individual or a group, but is also open to being changed by the process.  This is part of what Martin means by "circulating the gift of education".  Another part is that when the transformed person returns to his past with gifts of new ideas and attitudes to be shared.  How different is this ideal of circulating education from the xenophobe's insistence that the immigrant group "act like Americans", or a parent's insistence that his college graduate child remain unchanged by her experiences of schooling.  These narrowing attitudes belie the fact that the immigrant's experiences or the college graduate's new outlook have the potential to enrich those they are coming to and those they have left behind.

There is much more that is interesting in this book.  After all, it is not only the devil who resides in the details; the angels are there as well. 

© 2009 John Mullen

 John Mullen is professor of philosophy emeritus at Dowling College.  He has written a logic text Hard Thinking (1995) and co-authored Decision Making (1991) with Byron M. Roth.  His Kierkegaard's Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in the Present Age (1995) is perhaps the most widely read introduction in English to the Dane's work.  His recent story "The War on Terror" appeared recently in Diddledog: A Journal of Flash Fiction, his story "The Coprological Visions of Judy Dallas: A Retrospective" in The Cynic Online Magazine and "Gone Dad" in The Boston Literary Review.   He lives and writes in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Keywords: philosophy