Nel Noddings has written an appealing and
accessible book that focuses on what might seem a tremendously important
question: how can we restructure schooling so that our students come to lead
more satisfying, happier lives?  Noddings is perhaps best known among
philosophers as an advocate of the centrality of care in our restructured moral
thinking.  It is not then difficult to see why she has turned to the concerns
of the volume under consideration.  I said the topic might seem important —
our practice, however, betrays very different priorities, just as one might
think our unrevised moral thinking fails to give care its due. 

Noddings takes schooling to be in fact centrally
concerned with providing opportunities for children to become economically
successful.  Good grades lead on to college and a degree or two, and thereby to
much higher overall earnings than can be got through legally tolerated manual
labor. If there is a thought of happiness or some related notion, it is only as
something that economic success makes possible, not something that should be
cultivated along the way.  She observes (p. 37) the almost tragic irony of
schools offering students poetry, recognizing that it is mainly a source of
delight rather than a means to greater wealth, and then crushing the very
possibility of enjoyment by starting with making people learn it by heart,
remember the intricacies of analytic scansion, and write essays on the workings
of metaphor.  These things may deepen initial appreciation, but if they become
virtually the only point of contact, how can one expect children to be
transported out of themselves by the magic of verse or song?

Of course, for most subjects, schools do not
assume that the main point is intrinsic delight: algebra is not fun, nor
physics or history or whatever else gets on to the curriculum.  They are there
to be used as a stepping-stone to something else that is most probably equally
joyless.  For those who have the knack of doing well what the school wants done
there may be some satisfaction to be had, but Noddings recognizes, as I think the
sociologists of education have told us for some time, that for the many who do
not, for whatever reason, come up to scratch, life at school, or at least the
official curricular life at school, is unrelieved boredom and negation.  This
is a recognition that is long overdue in educational thinking, not least, I
suspect, because those who indulge in such thinking have typically been among
the comparative few who did succeed at doing the things the school wanted done.

If economic success did lead to greater
happiness, then perhaps our practice could be defended.  But Noddings reminds
us that such evidence as there is about ‘subjective well-being’ suggests that
neither greater wealth, nor better health, nor even higher IQ scores have
correlated with greater happiness (though she does, of course, observe that
there is a threshold, and one might add, a moveable one, below which misery is
pretty certain).  So, if we were really concerned with making people’s lives
happier, it seems that we should make radical changes to what goes on in our
major institution for the production of mature citizens.  The greater part of Noddings
book is in fact devoted to ways in which we might restructure and revise the
contents of schooling in order to achieve this end.  In a section on educating
for personal life, she has chapters on:

• Making
  a home (here she suggests that having a home should count as a basic human
  need and that students should explore varying conceptions of what a home
  and its accompaniments are; she also discusses domestic science and warns
  of placing too much reliance on what the experts think everyone ought to
  know, when we should attend rather to what successful exemplars do know.)
• Places
  and nature (here she starts from the association of home not with a house
  but with a geographical region, and leads into questions of ecology, our
  treatment of animals, and the degradation of the environment.)
• Parenting
  (Noddings here looks at birth, the growth of children — with another
  warning about the tendency to rely on "experts" on how to feed
  babies –  and the role of parents as informal educators, again seeking to
  expand the amount of informal learning within formal schools.)
• Character
  and spirituality (character and the virtues are her main concern here; a
  good deal of the chapter argues that military courage is rarely virtuous
  and that we need much more critical discussion of the psychology of war;
  another issue here is the damage inflicted by our routine grading of
  almost everything that is done in school.  Noddings’ approach to
  ‘spirituality’ is deliberately non-religious, a reminder of the importance
  of sunsets, gardens, and solitary meditation for our well-being.)
• Interpersonal
  growth (this chapter starts with another of the frequent appeals to Hume,
  on agreeable qualities; Noddings emphasizes the importance of self-esteem
  and friendships for a happy life.) 

The section on educating for public life has
chapters on:

• Preparing
  for work (Noddings looks here at what we should get children to understand
  about the world of work; she cautions against uncritically supposing that
  only high-level skills will be necessary in a high-tech future, and
  advocates a rich and diverse curriculum for all.)
• Community,
  democracy, and service (here she considers the role of critical thinking
  and its place in the educational system of a liberal democratic polity,
  arguing against Galston and Rawls that "a good educational system
  will help students to reflect upon and understand the processes of
  socialization" (p. 238), even if this is likely to make them reject
  their own communities’ norms.)
• Happiness
  in schools and classrooms (a variety of disparate things crop up here —
  school meals (not in my experience a way to spread much happiness, but
  perhaps the quality has improved since my day), vouchers, map reading,
  homework — but perhaps the main lesson is Noddings’ commitment to much of
  the critique of the educational iconclasts of the ’60s.) 

What she has to say on these various issues is
sensible, nuanced, and deserves very careful consideration; at least it does if
we decide to take seriously the goal of increasing human happiness.

Notoriously, theorists who explicitly espouse
the increase of human happiness have tended to work with surrogates, ‘pleasure
and the absence of pain’ for Mill and many utilitarians, ‘subjective
well-being’ for some contemporary social scientists, ‘desire satisfaction’ for
others.  Although the complexities of happiness surfaced for Mill in his
attempt to put pleasures in a hierarchy, in general these surrogates fail to
reflect the intricacies of human happiness.  Noddings’ introductory chapters
survey the ground, and give a good feel for the complexity, but without
attempting to resolve them in a simple analysis.  She is also good on the
badness of suffering, and argues that there is never justification for the
infliction of pain as such (chapter 2) — despite what some advertisers seem to
suggest, there is no virtue in cough medicine tasting horrible.

This last point is made briefly (pp. 45-6), and Noddings
notes the relevance of her ‘bold’ position to capital punishment in her
society, and corporal punishment in homes and schools.  Yet she seems to
underestimate its provocation.  Arguably, the retributive emotions are at the
core of our moral thinking; revising morality with a focus on care may well
expunge them, but we ought not to underestimate the difficulties of sticking
with such a revision.  I suspect that similar underestimates of how radical her
position is occur elsewhere.  As she says, a caring community would ensure a
living wage for all, and would not despise necessary occupations, or indeed
many unnecessary ones.   A concern for critical thought should lead students to
question the assumptions by means of which advertisers get them to part with
hard-earned money — Noddings does wonder at one point whether her
recommendations might contradict the economy’s imperative to continually expand
apparent options, but she just hopes that things can be patched up.  Much
should be offered in schools as free gifts, not tested, graded, and demanded. 
These are all attractive propositions.  Taken together, and to the extent Noddings
wishes, they look perhaps utopian.  But then she is an optimist.  As another
child of the ’60s, let me hope her book moves the world at least some way
towards its goal.

 

©
2005 Ed Brandon

 

 

Ed Brandon is, by training, a
philosopher, and now is working in a policy position in the University of the West Indies at its Cave
Hill Campus in Barbados.

Categories: Philosophical