Teaching and the Tragic Sense of Education

Published in Teaching and Its Predicaments, Nicholas C. Burbules and David Hansen, eds. (Westview Press, 1997)

Nicholas C. Burbules
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign

Over the past several years, I have written about a perspective toward education, and its possibilities and limits, that I have called "tragic."1 This is, admittedly, an unusual perspective to offer for education, an endeavor which seems to be intrinsically about hope, possibility, and progress. Given the connotations of tragedy as something bitter, miserable, or hopeless, one might argue, "Be constructive. Teachers are under assault already from so many quarters, so overworked and overstressed, underpaid and underappreciated, that they hardly need any new occasion for pathos. Talented teachers quit every day over the frustrations and limits they encounter in their work. They don't need a sense of tragedy. They need a reason to stay." To this I reply, Fair enough - but if we try to persuade teachers of the value of teaching, whether they are just starting out or struggling with the cynicism of "burn-out," on the basis of hopes and possibilities that cannot be sustained, we do them no favors.2

The tragic perspective, I will suggest, argues for a strong sense of hope in education, but one tempered by an awareness of the contradictory character of what we might count as "success"; by an understanding that gains can always also be seen as losses; by an appreciation that certain educational goals or purposes can only be obtained at the cost of others. It argues against a hope that is "utopian" in the sense of believing in personal or social perfectibility; that imagines that our educational endeavor always does good, and never harm; that substitutes a focus on minimal, incremental improvements for an overall reflection on the conflicted aims and values with which any educational activity is confronted. For me, the tragic sense of education provides a positive, constructive sense of thinking about teaching and what it can and cannot accomplish. In this essay, I will try to show how this is so.

I.

When we view or experience events, what gives us the sense of tragedy is not the fact of unhappiness or suffering itself, however strongly these are felt; it is the recognition at the same time that, given other circumstances, things might have transpired differently (if only she had known..., if only the letter had arrived in time..., if only...). The tragic sense is the point of tension between seeing the necessity of things as they are and the persistent imagining of them turning out otherwise. It isn't tragic to want something and not be able to have it. It is tragic to want something, and not be able to have it, and not be able to stop wanting it. The tragic sense depends on this dual perspective; of seeing at the same time the possibilities and limits, the gains and costs, the hopes and disappointments, of any human endeavor. By accepting the inevitability of doubt and disappointment in much of what we do, the tragic sense also frees us to take these moments of failure as occasions for new learning. On the other hand, by stubbornly refusing to abandon hope in the face of cynicism, the tragic sense gives us a reason to care, to persist in our efforts. We could make our view of life simpler by adopting one view to the exclusion of the other (hope over an awareness of failure; cynicism over a sense of possibility), but for reasons I will spell out here, either option makes us a worse educator - indeed, makes us a worse person. In the essay where I first laid out these ideas, I alluded to Hans Muller's call to pass "all the way though tragedy" to a different orientation toward life - but I never explained what that means, and Rene Arcilla rightly asks, "how is tragedy itself an educative force?"3

My starting point, as with other essays in this book, is the idea of a dilemma: not just a difficult choice between two options, not just a balancing act between alternatives, not just second-guessing a decision we might have made differently, but a recognition of a deep, intractable contradiction between competing aims and values.4 What makes dilemmas most disturbing and challenging is that we are not only recognizing at a distance the trade-offs that most complex human activities inevitably entail. No, what makes them tragic is that we see conflict and contradiction in our own hopes and desires; a reflection that throws into doubt some of the very values that inspire our educational endeavor in the first place. What we do not know how to reconcile are dimensions of our own beliefs and motivations; and to recognize conflict in these is to unsettle the very basis of any confidence that such conflicts can be overcome.5

I would suggest five such conflicts surrounding teaching that carry some sense of force and immediacy for me. They are important because they seem to touch upon unavoidable conditions of teaching as a practice. We can question or doubt them, but we cannot continue to teach without continuing to struggle with them.

First, the ambivalent benefits and costs of authority.6 Authority is inherent in any teaching-learning relation; it cannot be abrogated or denied even when one wishes to minimize its significance. But authority carries certain costs: it can foster dependency; it implies certain privileges of position that interfere with egalitarian social commitments; it becomes too easily taken for granted in the minds of both student and teacher. Encouraging students to question authority, even inviting challenges to one's own authority as a teacher, can foster valuable learning moments - but these are things that only a person in authority can do. In one sense, the very purpose of teaching authority is to make itself ultimately superfluous (because the students themselves become independent learners and knowledge-creators). Balancing such tensions is a skill of good teaching. But the terms of success here are not entirely within one's control: institutional customs continually arrogate dimensions of privilege to teachers that conflict with our attempt to manage authority gracefully; student habits and expectations, or those of their parents or a larger community, place demands upon teachers that are not compatible with the maintenance of a self-questioning authority; at a still deeper level, we who have chosen teaching as a career must acknowledge in ourselves the desires that motivate us - and however modest we might endeavor to be, the influence that comes with authority, the pride of seeing our plans and intentions come to fruition, are seductive pulls back into the temptation to exercise our authority (though only for the "best" of purposes, of course).

Second, a suspicion of the idea of progress. I have been persuaded, by the arguments of Dennis Carlson7 and others, that the idea that human history marks a journey of becoming more and more knowledgeable and humane relies on an oversimple, linear view of history, an unproblematized effort to judge the past in terms of the present's standards, and the tendency to look with blinders at our present failings. I do not doubt that certain specific comparisons of historical advantage "before and after" can be made with some justification; but doing so always abstracts that comparison from a larger web of social contingencies and consequences that - if faced honestly - vastly complicate and ambiguate the judgments at stake.

What is true at the level of human history is also true, I think, at the level of personal development and growth. Is there any way to argue, for example, that it is better, overall, to be an adult than a child? Are we clearly better off with the understandings and burdens, the knowledge and uncertainties, the freedoms and responsibilities, the successes and disappointments that constitute an "educated," "mature" life - and even if some of us feel comfortable deciding that we are better off, is this a decision that would have been made, could have been made, from an alternative point of view (since we are already a product of such learning)?

What does the educational endeavor look like without such a faith in progress? It would mean grounding our investigations in the needs, problems, and questions of the present. It would mean doing less "for the sake of" prospective future attainments. It would mean questioning certain models of developmentalism, especially stage theories that assume normative improvement as well as change over time.8 On a larger scale, it would mean abandoning the link between education and a vision of social perfectionism; a presumed link that has been central to most Western educational theories.

Third, there has been a great deal of criticism in the so-called "multiculturalism debates" about the hegemony of canonical texts, and without revisiting all of those arguments here, I think that these debates raise another intractable dilemma. It is certainly justified, I believe, to argue that the master texts in many areas of the curriculum, at all levels of education, have tended to favor the outlooks and values of a dominant socio-cultural group. Recent trends to diversify those sources, to encourage the exploration by students of other socio-cultural outlooks and experiences as well as their own, has had the effect of broadening the range of perspectives that teachers and students can consider in their exploration of ideas and issues. This seems all to the better. But should this process simply result in a new, albeit more diversified, set of canonical texts - which raises one set of issues - or should it result in a continually changing and contested set of resources, with no claims made to their being better or more reliable or more representative than the alternatives?

The first option, in the long run, recreates all of the problems with canonicity in the first place: for any criteria of inclusion and exclusion, however pluralistic, will leave out someone. The second option is either disingenuous, by tacitly invoking criteria of inclusion and exclusion (along different standards, but by standards nonetheless), which are not themselves opened for reflection or debate; or it is ultimately anti-educational, by allowing any and all sets of standards equal place, or no set of standards at all. It is incoherent to encourage or require the reading of anything in an educational setting, without also being able to explain or justify why one has chosen these items and not others. As soon as one does this, however, the same objections raised against the canon come to bear. The dilemma lies in recognizing and accepting the responsibility of selecting texts for others to read, discuss, and, yes, criticize (or for other kinds of "assignments" involved in teaching), while also recognizing the constraints and prejudices inherent in making any such selection or assignment.

This point shows how the current "canonicity" debates are merely the latest version of a perennial, intrinsic dilemma in teaching: the tension between making choices, by whatever criteria one favors, that prioritize and mandate what learners must study; and the recognition that their needs, interests, and long-term preferences might have been better served by other choices, including matters of which one might personally be ignorant. This is not an argument against making such choices - as noted, they are unavoidable - but against settling complacently for these as unproblematic "essential," "expert," or "institutionally mandated" materials.

Fourth, current views of education and society have stressed the centrality of diversity and tolerance. But any educational practice, however fluid and multifaceted, has the inevitable effect of making people more alike, in at least some respects. One can label this, favorably, as the "melting pot," or one can label it, critically, as Foucauldian "normalization."9 Either way, diversity is lessened to the very extent that a common syllabus, a common set of evaluation criteria, a common classroom culture, take effect. This effect may be felt especially strongly, and poignantly, by learners who feel increasingly alienated from their own culture, traditions, families, or communities as a result. To be sure, there may be specific ways in which learning makes people different as well: but intentionally or not, the overall effect of any common system of education must be to draw students gradually away from their personal and cultural differences into a common culture. There are beneficial aspects of this, for the individual as well as for society, and there are detriments as well. My point is: we cannot have one without the other.

Putting this point more generally, education requires diversity: the value of conversation or debate in schools depends upon the mutual enrichment and challenge of alternative perspectives. And to an extent education promotes diversity, when the mandates of a "canon" or other centripetal forces, discussed previously, are not enforced in ways that override cultural or other kinds of difference. Yet at the same time education threatens diversity, through the normalizing effects of practices that by their very nature bring students under the sway of common, similar, homogenizing influences.

Fifth, there is the uncertainty of assessing outcomes, of knowing what constitutes "success" as a teacher. Every human action has multiple outcomes, most of which are unintended and unanticipatible; at least some of these, for any action, will result in some degree of unhappiness or harm to someone. We act in a complex web of contingencies (increasingly, with ramifications on a global scale) that frustrate the simple, linear cause/effect sense of responsibility entailed by moral consequentialism. In the context of teaching, there are several results of this insight. We might say, roughly, "good teaching results in learning," but this will not do: learning what? Teaching tends to focus on the knowledge and skills that are fostered in the teaching-learning relation (and the dominant trend in school reform is to focus narrowly, even obsessively, on such outcomes, as defined and measured by standardized tests - a very truncated sense of outcomes, indeed). But that focus is self-deceptive, by artificially excluding all those other outcomes that may be more ambivalent, uncertain, and difficult to reconcile: what kinds of people are students becoming; what do they value; how do they treat one another? The teacher at ground level is often quite aware of these considerations, but has less and less room to operate in addressing them. Certain outcomes, only the learner will know; others, the learner may never recognize or attribute to the teacher; often such changes will be apparent only long after the teacher's influence has been felt. Some beneficial effects are apparent only subtly, indirectly, in future accomplishments that they make possible. There is a Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" in teaching; not one of religious belief, but of persistent effort in the face of uncertainty. For Kierkegaard, we do not only leap once, and for all; we leap and we keep leaping, never knowing for sure what awaits us on the other side.

In all of these instances, the effects of teaching are too varied, too mixed between the beneficial and the harmful, too delayed, too indirect, to be the subject of any simple utilitarian balancing of costs and benefits or any simple abstracting of intended from unintended effects. One does the best one can; but how does one maintain a commitment to teaching in awareness of such profound ambivalences?

These five dilemmas, I am suggesting, are at one level or another intrinsic to the teaching endeavor. One response to such dilemmas, of course, is to abandon teaching or to reject the value of education entirely. Yet education, in some form, seems an integral aspect of human culture. We can go about it differently, but we cannot refuse to do it at all. We must educate, and we must take responsibility for the choices and priorities that represents. Even where we want students to question or challenge us, this is an educational goal too, with the values (and the limitations) implied by that; certain givens will need to be taken for granted so that others might be questioned. This suggests, among other things, a serious limit to what any critical or reflective approach to pedagogy can achieve. Moreover, although we can obviously, as individual persons, choose to do something else besides teach, here too we must recognize that one consequence of doing so is to turn over the conduct of education to others who do not feel the force of these dilemmas.

II.

Another typical response to dilemmas is seeking a way to resolve or reconcile them; I would like to consider a few of the more common ways of attempting to do so. The simplest and least abstract is simply to allow one perspective to dominate one's understanding, and to try to ignore the other or rationalize it away. There is no dilemma because one views the issue with one eye covered. Another is to seek some sort of "compromise" or middle ground, which assumes that the terms of the dilemma fall upon a single continuum. Yet another resolution is through a synthesis, Hegelian or otherwise, in which the apparent opposites can be viewed as aspects of a common interactive relation, their tensions reconciled in the genesis of some new form that combines elements of both in a new mix. Still another approach can be called Deweyan, denying the apparent terms of the dilemma by adopting a third point of view, in terms of which the two opposing alternatives are both rejected. And a final approach: to assume an incommensurability between the alternatives, so that they do not engage one another; this approach does not dissolve or reconcile the dilemma, but elides it.

Each of these perspectives, in particular cases, can cast illumination on our conceptual and practical problems. They can provide understanding, a sense of possibility, and a way out of the difficulty. Different dilemmas are susceptible of different approaches. But here I am suggesting another way of viewing certain dilemmas: not to seek a way of making them disappear, but of keeping the tension alive - a dialectic that does not move toward resolution, but that yields creativity out of the sustained movement back and forth between the two (or more) alternatives.10 In part this creativity arises from respecting the distinct advantages of each perspective and learning to look both ways. In part, too, it arises from the state of uneasiness that accompanies such a stance; never quite being settled into a comfortable, singular point of view. In part, finally, it arises from the essentially open-ended outlook that such an attitude forces upon us - not simply in the sense that any belief should be open to new information, challenge, and modification, but in the sense of open boundaries, of unfinished business.

I do not mean to minimize the difficulty, the unsettled state of uncertainty, that accompanies such an orientation to the world. But as I have discussed elsewhere, certain narrative tropes - including tragedy, irony, and parody - can lend to this sense of dilemma a certain attitude or tone that makes it livable.11 A narrative trope, speaking generally, helps us to formulate a version of events that grants them some coherence and meaning. Each of these tropes (and perhaps others as well) regards the world through a dual lens, without reconciling the different perspectives; and each affords a distinctive mood to that tension. In the case of tragedy, irony, and parody, this mood may be one of dramatic urgency; or of wry regret; or of arch comedy. There is nothing more true or more fundamental about the tragic trope, which is my focus here; and there is no reason why different tropes or moods might not be overlaid on different issues. The educational endeavor, in other words, could be regarded just as fruitfully as ironic or parodic - and perhaps that is a project for another day.

But through tragedy, we see an aspect of urgency to our educational successes and failures; we carry the full weight of disappointment, at the same time that we try to move forward with the lightness of hope. This perspective speaks directly to the five dilemmas discussed at the start of this essay. Through tragedy, we wear our authority uneasily, neither denying it, nor taking it for granted. Through tragedy, we hope for progress, but acknowledge that the path is neither straight nor smooth; indeed, it is not even one path, but many - and progress along one path can always be viewed as a detour or retrogression from the perspective of another. Through tragedy, we take on the responsibility of identifying more and less worthy subjects of study, but always with a sense of doubt - a doubt we should share with our partners in teaching and learning - that these are the best, or most worthy, or most true subjects of study. Through tragedy, we believe that we are doing well by our students, trying to represent to them a perspective on events that will respect contrasting points of view, but recognizing also that this very process tends to normalize, to converge views - that with everything we give, we take something away. Because the tragic perspective does not seek a convergence of all differences (not even around the merits of a uniquely tragic perspective), it should draw our tendencies as teachers into more provisional, tentative postures. Through tragedy, we accept the uncertainty of short-term and long-term consequences, from the varied perspectives from which any teaching-learning encounter might be viewed as a success or as a failure.

My concern here is with a certain complacency to which teachers can fall prey; a struggle I feel personally as well. The authority and privilege that institutions grant to teachers (yes, even though underpaid and underappreciated in many contexts, especially public school contexts), the fact that one is typically older and more experienced than one's students, the fact that in most classroom settings we are likely to be among the most articulate and well-informed participants, all can lead to a certain settling into the teaching role and taking for granted that what one knows is best. Any teacher reading this will understand such moments; and will understand as well the moments of real doubt one feels that one is up to all of the challenges of this vocation.12 Complacency is not the only danger of the teaching role; a paradoxical doubt that one is expert enough to deserve the position arises in us as well. But I want to suggest that these twin concerns are offspring of the same underlying attitude. Complacency assumes a certain givenness to one's status as a teacher; the search for legitimacy as an "expert" desires the same result. Instead, I am suggesting the benefits of a conception of teaching, and an attitude toward one's self as a teacher, that is more unsettled, and hence more difficult to sustain as a steady state; we can't be always tragic, or ironic, or parodic. These are not new metanarratives. I see the tragic sense not as a constant orientation toward life, but as a corrective that comes upon us, if we are open to it, when we acknowledge the irreconcilable tensions between different aspects of who we are trying to be and what we are trying to accomplish as educators.

III.

The "benefits" of the tragic sense (such as they are) are not limited to effects on our own attitudes and motivations as a teacher. I believe that it helps to approach teaching in a different manner:

First, by abandoning the expectation to be expert in all matters pertaining to our subject, we are more open to new opportunities for discovery. We are less likely to insist upon our conclusions as the best or only ones, and more able to adopt an inquiry orientation with our students. We expect to learn with and from them (whatever age they happen to be), and feel less threatened by occasions in which we need to admit to them that we do not know or understand something. It is educationally important to model for learners what it is not to know, and what to do next. Yet how often do we actually say to students, "I don't know?"

Second, an openness to the unexpected creates a real dynamism in the teaching-learning encounter; it fosters the type of dialogue, for example, that I have elsewhere called nonteleological - exploratory, without a preconceived (preconceived by the teacher, that is) endpoint or conclusion.13 On a related point, this attitude respects deep complexity, not only in the sense of a complicated puzzle to be worked out or solved, but in the sense of a perpetually open question, always susceptible of new perspectives, new pathways, new discoveries. This suggests a much more transient and provisional sense of knowledge or understanding. Questions for which we feel that a "true" answer has been established are dead questions - educationally less useful questions.

Third, the attitude and approach I describe here accepts as a condition of such exploration and discovery the occasional state of being lost, confused, and unsettled. I believe, in fact, that this state of aporia is an underexplored educational moment. Too often, we regard such puzzlement or uncertainty as a merely transitional state between ignorance or misconception and their eventual replacement with a more complete or "truer" understanding. This is the sense of aporia in Plato's dialogue The Meno, for example. But what if aporia is not simply a transitional state, but a rich fertile moment of educational potential itself? Exploring this topic is a separate project; but my point here is that we need to prepare learners for such an experience, not as a moment of frustration or failure, but as a moment of possibility - and we can do so, authentically, only when we make clear to them that this difficult state is one we experience and struggle through ourselves. I believe that a great deal of insight can be gained by reflecting on the educational centrality of making mistakes, of being wrong, of feeling doubt or puzzlement; we seek to settle or satisfy these, but in doing so we only create the conditions for new mistakes, errors, doubts, puzzlements. The tragic sense maintains a humble respect for such experiences, and accepts them as a condition of life rather than as something to be transcended, avoided, or explained away.

Fourth, a major educational challenge, especially for teachers who value critical thought, is to help students think differently.14 What does this mean? It does not mean replacing wrong answers with different, correct ones. It does not even mean, or mean only, helping students to explore or consider alternative perspectives or hypotheses on some problem, with the intent of comparing them in order to find the best of them. At a deeper level, learning to think differently means standing outside a particular set of assumptions, categories, or values to consider the possibility of how the world is, given a different set of these. It is a disproof at the level of practice of radical "incommensurability," to the extent that we and our students can entertain the possibility that the paradigms we happen to take for granted do not define the horizons of the universe. Sometimes cross-cultural study can play a role in this, as can certain works of literature; but this places a great weight on our talents of imagination. Other times, actual dialogue with others not like us, undertaken in a spirit of curiosity and respect, can do more for us because the engagement itself supports the possibility of understanding across that difference - there can be explanations and examples provided that directly respond to our questions.15 There will be limits to our capacity to imagine a way of life utterly foreign to us - but the tragic sense prepares us for such limits, even as we push against them.

Fifth, this orientation to teaching suspects method, especially the search for any single method. I believe that conservative and progressive, mainstream and radical educators all have been tempted by this quest. From Direct Instruction to Whole Learning, from Dewey's progressive classroom to Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy, the modern history of education can be studied as a succession of new prescriptions about the one right way to teach: the most effective, the most humane, the most politically correct. Yet, if there is anything that the practical experience of teaching shows us, it is that there is no single approach that works with every student, every subject matter - or (for that matter) that works for us every single day. How many have had the experience of trying an activity with a group of students, with disastrous consequences, when we had wonderful results with the same activity and another group, sometimes even earlier within the same day?

To me, such experiences yield two "tragic" insights. The first is that the search for one right way to teach must be supplanted by a deep pluralism of approaches and perspectives; one becomes an experienced teacher not by mastering a single method, but by gaining the good judgment and sense of security to adopt alternative approaches, and to change midstream where necessary, as circumstances and student reactions warrant. But such pluralism implies choice, and choice implies errors - our errors, not the shortcomings of some "method." The second is that the very metaphor of "method" is a trap; drawing from Heidegger, I think it is better to think not of a method of teaching, but of a way of teaching - not a technique, but a path, a direction. Of course we need to have purposes and expectations as we plan a teaching-learning situation; but our relation to these is not one of means-ends efficacy, but of providing us with an orientation, a reference point against which we can judge our present position and course. And if we are lost - when we are lost - we need to find a new way, and not be hampered by the habit of simply persisting with "what works." (I am reminded here of the old joke that when a child is given a hammer, everything needs hammering. Some educators are like this.)

Sixth is that the tragic sense undermines our sense of self-sufficiency and independence; it makes clear our need to seek out with others (our colleagues, our friends, our students, and others) alternative ideas and different problem-solving approaches, as well as seeking from them a sense of common purpose and possibility. Nothing is as good a remedy for complacency as the recognition that one has erred, fundamentally and without recourse. I do not mean to romanticize the discouragement and unhappiness caused by such failures - or to treat lightly the crises of confidence that can result. Like most teachers, I have felt such crises. But letting their effect sink in teaches us something as well; that we are not the only ones to have experienced them, that they are something intrinsic to the teaching endeavor itself, so that the most debilitating consequence of such experiences - the sense of isolation - need not paralyze us, since we have recourse to others who have experienced these crises as well. And, in case it needs to be emphasized, this uncertainty is something we need to be willing to share with our students also. How can we expect them to admit their questions and uncertainties to us, if we are unwilling to admit any of our own? Here, too, I believe, the tragic sense has a constructive, enabling potential, as we pass "all the way through" a sense of disappointment and loss, to the recognition of different possibilities on the other side.

IV.

Why teach? If we adopt the tragic view, what is to sustain us as educators? How do we maintain a sense of purpose and hope - a sense of courage, I would say - in full recognition of the occasions of difficulty, uncertainty, error, and failure that we will encounter? As Arcilla asks, what can support one's sense of decency and integrity as a teacher?16

In finding provisional answers to such questions, there are tempting false paths to avoid, I believe. If we base our hopes on unrealistic, utopian dreams, what we might gain in the short term in terms of a feeling of momentary inspiration can lead, in the end, to greater frustrations and disappointments. For me, this is not the way to go: not in what I seek for myself, not in what I try to offer students.

The core of an alternative attitude is grounded in a sense of what Foucault calls "the care of the self."17 This refers not to selfishness or self-centeredness, but to appreciating the conditions that allow us to maintain an identity and sense of efficacy. We must act out of and respect our own sense of dignity and integrity, not because these are ethical absolutes, but because not to do so is to undermine our capability as ethical agents at all. For teachers, I believe, this means more than just the platitude, "you need to take care of yourself before you can take care of anybody else"; it asks us to ground our sense of teaching and our motivation for it in the things that we can influence and determine ourselves, in our relations to others, not in the transcendent or the altruistic.

What I want to say is something more like this: "Teach for the pleasure of doing something you are good at, not out of a sense of duty. Teach for the satisfaction you feel at seeing others succeed, not out of a desire to 'help' them. Teach for the joy of the subject matter you are discussing, not to attain 'standards' defined by others. Teach out of the love you feel for students, not out of some larger mission of social transformation."

Well, I do not know if such a vision is robust enough to sustain any one else's commitment to teaching. But what this vision of teaching comes to, for me, is grounding our sense of purpose in what we can do, and do well, what gives us a sense a satisfaction and joy. Of course we mean for this to benefit students, to help them, to make society better. But those sorts of aims, I am afraid, are not only exaggerated in their aspirations; they are ephemeral in their ability to move us. There are too many occasions where we must (if we are honest with ourselves) doubt whether those larger aims are attainable without just as many effects that counterbalance them. The tragic sense keeps us honest and modest; it forces us to ground our commitment to teaching in what our ability and will can sustain. We often ask students to love learning for the sake of learning; we never consider what it might mean to love teaching for the sake of teaching.*

1 Nicholas C. Burbules, "The tragic sense of education," Teachers College Record, Vol. 91 No. 4 (1990): 469-479; Nicholas C. Burbules, "Authority and the tragic dimension of teaching." The Educational Conversation: Closing the Gap, James Garrison and A.G. Rud, eds. (New York: S.U.N.Y. Press, 1995), 29-40. See the thoughtful analysis of this essay by Rene Arcilla, from which I have learned much: "Tragic absolutism in education," Educational Theory, Vol. 42 No. 4 (1992), 473-481.

2 See also Robert W. Floden and Christopher M. Clark, "Preparing teachers for uncertainty," Teachers College Record, Vol. 89 No. 4 (1988): 505-524 and Philip W. Jackson, The Practice of Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986), 53-74.

3 Arcilla, "Tragic absolutism in education," 480; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 8.

4 For a helpful discussion of a range of dilemmas in education, see Ann and Harold Berlak, Dilemmas of Schooling: Teaching and Social Change (New York: Methuen, 1981), chapter 7. Unfortunately, this book, having laid out these sixteen dilemmas, then proceeds to try to find a resolution in each and every case.

5 Nicholas C. Burbules, "Postmodern doubt and philosophy of education," Philosophy of Education 1995, Alven Neiman, ed., (Urbana, Ill.: Philosophy of Education Society, 1996), 39-48.

6 See also Burbules, "Authority and the tragic dimension of teaching."

7 Dennis Carlson, "Progress, progressivism, and postmodernism in education," in Dennis Carlson, Making Progress: Education and Culture in New Times (New York: Teachers College Press, forthcoming).

8 See, for example, Erica Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (New York: Routledge, 1994), 18. Thanks to John Morss for this reference.

9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) 177-184, and elsewhere.

10 A slightly similar idea is explored in Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Yet for Elbow, contraries are embraced within the context of a "larger, more inclusive view" (240), which is of course a way of reconciling them.

11 See also Burbules, "Postmodern doubt and philosophy of education."

12 See also David T. Hansen, "Teaching and the sense of vocation," Educational Theory Vol. 44 No. 3 (1994), 259-275; David T. Hansen, The Call to Teach (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995).

13 Nicholas C. Burbules, Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 5-7, 17-18.

14 Nicholas C. Burbules and Rupert Berk, "Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, differences, and limits," Thomas S. Popkewitz and Philip Higgs, eds., Critical Theory in Educational Discourse (Butterworth's, forthcoming).

15 Nicholas C. Burbules and Suzanne Rice, "Dialogue across differences: Continuing the conversation," Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 61 No. 4 (1991): 393-416. Republished in Teaching for Change: Addressing Issues of Difference in the College Classroom, Kathryn Geismar and Guitele Nicoleau, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 1993): 1-25.

16 Arcilla, "Tragic absolutism in education," 477.

17 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).

* Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Auckland and the University of Otago, New Zealand, and at the University of Sydney, in Australia. I want to thank the participants in all of those sessions for their constructive comments. Thanks especially to David Hansen for suggesting improvements to this essay.